The Cartoon Geeks' Blog

Save Our Old Cartoon Animals!

2012-01-17T08:33:00.000-08:00

This is the first video I've ever embedded, anywhere, so I hope it works. It's a wonderful choral song, a plaintive plea for sanity in the animation business.

Michelle, Martin and I have always been vocal about how lousy the CGI animated movies have been and continue to be. Well, we were vocal while doing our podcasts, which I hope we'll be able to revive soon. No matter how badly the features turned out - did anyone really go to see Yogi Bear? - the mutant messes continue to roll off the assembly lines. We three have been protesting it forever. But none of us has been able to make our protests sound as beautiful as this.

It's composed and performed by Chris Mezzolesta, lead man of the band Power Salad. It will be appearing on his forthcoming new album. Chris is a voice artist whose main living is recording instructional audio and occasional radio commercials for major firms. But being a creative guy, he does a whole lot of other things..And I'd be amiss if I didn't plug some of his other stuff and maybe make him a few bucks..

* Every Tuesday night at 9 PM - 11 PM Eastern, or 6 PM - 8 PM Pacific, he has a two-hour radio show on Dementia Radio called The Cream Cheese Library. Of all the live DJ shows on Dementia Radio, his is the most scholarly. After all, he has a degree in music, and he has an immense library of wacky, weird and unusual songs. And in the breaks between the song sets, he'll tell you about the artists and their history.

To listen, plug this address into your Winamp, iTunes, VLC or other streaming audio source: http://dementiaradio.org:8027 Check the above link to Dementia Radio for other hints about listening. And during the live show, you can chat with Chris with your IRC client on the EFnet servers, at channel #dementia. If you don't have an IRC client, there's a web chat client on the Dementia Radio web site.

* Chris is a member of Cirque du So What? It's a sketch comedy troupe including other Dementia artists, The Great Luke Ski, Devo Spice and ShoEboX. They've revived the idea of audio sketch comedy. While Firesign Theater, Burns and Schreiber and The Credibility Gap have retired or died, these guys are still making current and funny comedy. After their first album, Procrastinators of the Apocalypse, they've just released Stupid Cowboy Thing - Volume 1: Grandmother! On this album is a recorded cut called "Elevator" that is probably the funniest and most bizarre thing said about American racism and its source - and that source is Otis.

* I'd be amiss if I didn't plug a couple of Chris's other songs with Power Salad. These are his homemade, non-animated, low-tech YouTube videos for his songs: My Cat is Afraid of the Vacuum Cleaner, Charlie Sheen and a live performance of The Table Near The Band. (The lyric he forgot in this last song is: "Yes, you are sitting at the table near the band / We'd have you sit inside the speaker, if we can!"

Thank you, Mr. Mezzolesta! I've never met you at a con, but I'm certain we will, and I owe you a meal. And not from the chickens you're raising in your back yard! (Yes, he does that too!)

Have a very cartoony holiday season!

2011-12-24T09:47:00.000-08:00

Enjoy whatever holiday you celebrate!
Michelle

"Zat you, Santa Claus?" Louis Armstrong vs. Disney classic shorts

The Star-Spangled Man With A Plan

2011-08-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

I wasn't feeling well when I saw Captain America. It didn't cure me; I went to the bathroom several times during the film, and I'll have to wait to see the whole thing again some time. Although the film doesn't surpass other superhero movies in its effect on audiences, it's a good film, and better than what I expected.

Through CGI, Chris Evans is made into the wimpy, thin, frail Steve Rogers. He's a sickly kid who wants to do anything to serve his country. But he is not a jingoistic jerk. When Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) interviews him, he asks him "Do you want to kill Nazis?" he replies, "I don't want to kill anybody. I don't like bullies, wherever they're from."

When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created Cap in 1940, of course there was racist talk about the Germans and Japanese in the comics and movies. More against the Japanese, since there were always "good Germans" who often died in sacrifice to save the American hero. Here, the racism does not exist...and, to a large extent, the Nazis don't, either.

The villain, The Red Skull, a.k.a. Johann Schmidt, is a scientific genius who was the first (undesired) recipient of Dr. Erskine's formula. He has discovered a form of energy (known in comics as The Cosmic Cube) which he uses to create incredible weapons and vehicles. But not for the Third Reich. To sell this film in Germany, every Swastika has been deleted. The Skull is ambitious enough to want to destroy both the Allies and Hitler. His organization, Hydra (developed in the 60's as substitutes for Nazis)

After Steve Rogers becomes Captain America, and his creator is murdered, he works for the Allies...in cheesy War Bond fundraising shows where he punches out a bad actor playing Hitler, to the delight of miniskirted star-spangled girls. But it doesn't play on actual battlefields. "Nice boobs, Tinkerbell!" the GI's heckle him. Rogers (who, like his 1980's version, was an artist) draws himself in a notebook as a monkey on a unicycle carrying a shield.

Against the wishes of the military, Cap goes to rescue a group of captured soldiers. He gets the aid of Howard Stark (yep, Tony Stark's dad) and rescues them. Although the story doesn't specifically mention it, the soldiers who accompany him on his mission are the Howlin' Commandos, the international group of soldiers from Marvel's war comics. (In the comics, the Commandos were led by Nick Fury...who back then was white and had both eyes.)

It all comes up to the climax where Cap crashes the Red Skull's massive "flying wing" into the Arctic, is defrosted in the present day, and stares in wonder at Times Square circa 2011. And the inevitable, very short trailer for The Avengers.

Okay, all the major fanboy plot points are hit. Cap is a man out of time. He can barely understand the present day. He will note how many things have changed, but how some things still need to be changed. And he will represent the spirit of America as the good liberal writers of Marvel Comics always presented him.

And unlike the two TV-movies that screwed up Captain America, unlike the bad cartoons done by Grantray-Lawrence Animaton and Marvel Productions, this Captain is worthy of the legend. But...well, I was hoping for something more. Something inspiring. Maybe something that would comment, even if only obliquely, on our present day.

I wish I felt better about this film. Maybe it was my illness. Maybe it was that this film hit at the end of a drab summer. But Captain America doesn't completely work in an era of Wal-Mart and corporate corruption. There could have been something more than the magic awakening in Times Square; Cap's reaction to our modern world might have made this film significant. Instead we'll have to wait and see if he says anything in The Avengers.

Why They Dipped Wonder Woman in Latex

2011-05-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

And there she was. In this photo from Entertainment Weekly, we saw the way that producer David E. Kelley intended his version of Wonder Woman to appear. The show was rejected by NBC and will not be made.

There were, of course, numerous comments that another show based on a powerful woman failed. Yes, just like the original Bionic Woman, like British TV's The Avengers with Diana Rigg, and just like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Despite my problems with horror in general and vampires specifically, I've begun to watch the season DVD's of this show. It's remarkably human and vital, unlike the gorier and more sadistic vampires so popular today.)

It occurred to me that this picture explains the real reason why this series failed, and it has little to do with women being unable to carry a show.

All right, this may take some effort on the part of a lot of guys, but get beyond the skin-tight latex. Get away from the fact that this stuff hugs her body like she was naked. (In my opinion, that shouldn't matter. Nudity shouldn't matter any more. You can see stuff on the Internet for free that weren't available except in sleazy stores when I was a kid.)

Fans of the Amazon princess's other adventures should also forget, for the moment, that this outfit is impractical for a fighting woman. There's a little bit of that in superheroinedom. DC's Power Girl has huge breasts and a white outfit with a cutout to show cleavage...and if I were a super-powered foe, I'd grab ahold of that convenient handle and whale on her face for a long time. But most artists that aren't drawing pure porn understand this. In her TV adventures, Buffy Summers mostly wore conventional teen clothes with little exposed, which actually worked for her in combat.

No, try viewing this photo through this filter: this Wonder Woman looks like a plastic doll. All surface. Nothing inside. Shiny and glossy and without context.

It suddenly occurred to me, thinking back about my long life in watching genre TV shows, that this is what most Hollywood types produce when they "do a superhero." There is nothing beneath the surface for them. There's nothing beyond shiny plastic, to hypnotize the rubes.

Or maybe, that's what the Hollywood producers of these abortions believe life should be like. Because they see themselves as exactly that type of superhero. They see themselves as being shiny surface, and they deny there's anything beneath the surface. They think that's what life is all about, and that this is the way to succeed in life.

David E. Kelley has been famous for that kind of surface stuff. The show of his that I'm most familiar with is Boston Legal, which had William Shatner as an insane right-wing defense lawyer, Betty White as a homicidal legal secretary, and one lawyer who openly crossdressed. All surface. There was no there there. So naturally, that was his approach to a Wonder Woman series.

There are people who could have done a much better job. Joss Whedon proved he could make a dynamic but vulnerable female character with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which he has continued as a comic book because Rupert Murdoch's Fox networks would rather attack that Evil Black President than put on decent TV series. Whedon must be a codependent victim of Fox; he took his series Firefly and Dollhouse there, and they got screwed over by Murdoch.

Another good choice would have been J. Michael Straczynski. Joe, as he likes to be called, created many great female characters in Babylon 5. His graphic novel Midnight Nation featured a female angel, who despite being created without a soul, had a lot of soul. And the recent movie he co-scripted, Thor, featured two amazing female characters. Thor's human girlfriend Jane Foster, for once, was not a bimbo or a moon-eyed chick but a scientist and a heroine. And Thor's Asgardian friend the warrior Sif had a bright, shiny outfit that was NOT like a latex fetish thing, but remarkably practical for a warrior.

But, sadly, superhero shows tend to go towards the guys who put women in latex, even though one good blow would rip the outfit to shreds, and in hot weather, would make the women sweat to death and get skin fungus. And they do it to guys too; the Joel Schumacher Batman movies gave him rubber suits with molded-in nipples. Those nipples served no function, as nipples serve no function on me. When Schumacher had the same suit made for Batgirl, someone whose nipples DO serve a function, there were no nipples on the suit. It's been suggested that Schumacher didn't really care that much for women in any capacity anyway, including their nipples.

As long as movie producers, studios, networks and financiers see superheroes as glossy surfaces, with no possible meaning for people, series like this abandoned Wonder Woman thing will be made. Sadly, too often, they won't be cancelled before they go into production, and we'll have to actually see the blasted things.

Rango: the Chameleon with No Name.

2011-03-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

I saw this film by accident. Two friends and I wanted some fun, after a particularly grueling work week. Their first choice of film was Mars Needs Moms, but because of show times, they decided to choose Rango. It was fortunate that we did.

The ad campaign for Rango was fairly opaque. All you saw was this bug eyed lizard -- one of the most weird and uncomfortable animated characters in a long time -- fighting a hawk in the desert. You saw nothing of this main setting for the story, the Old West town of Dirt. I guess the reason why you didn't see it was because, in the mythology of Hollywood, the Western film is dead.

As a child growing up in the 50s, about two thirds of the programs I saw on TV were Westerns. In that conservative time, people couldn't get enough of the solitary hero, someone unconnected to a town or civilization, fighting bad guys. In fact, most of the backlots of Hollywood studios were Western sets. Dress the buildings slightly differently, shoot them from a different angle, and you had a completely different town for next week's episode.

In the 1960s, Bonanza performed the same function for Westerns as The Love Boat would perform for romantic plots, to recycle all the scripts written over the past two decades. And make everybody sick of them. Every single element that appeared in every half hour western in the 1950s was turned into an episode of Bonanza. As a result, Americans got burnt out on westerns. Very few western series survived, unless they had weird or satirical takes on the genre, like The Wild Wild West or Alias Smith and Jones.

But Rango is a genuine western. And of all the reviews I've read of the film, none of them even thought about the Western film that most closely resembles it. That film is Fancy Pants. That was the 1950 comedy with Bob Hope impersonating an English butler who winds up in the old West, working for Lucille Ball. Hope made a lot of comedy Westerns, including Paleface and Son of Paleface, but Fancy Pants was specifically theatrical. And Rango is especially theatrical.

When we first see the nameless chameleon, he's in a glass aquarium, which he has turned into a stage. He performs little skits about being a romantic hero, using only the headless torso of a Barbie doll and a windup plastic fish as his fellow actors. He has never related to another living being. That changes when his aquarium falls out of the car carrying it, through some desert state, and Rango goes wandering through the desert.

As I said before, the character design of this story can only be described as weird. The desert animals that make up the citizens of Dirt are almost like creatures out of a Beatrix Potter story -- that is, if Beatrix Potter had suddenly developed a taste for grunge. The one that impressed/disgusted me the most was the small mole child Priscilla. I think that's her name, but I'm not certain because the photo wasn't captioned and was hard to find. (They didn't want to scare off the customers.) She wears a little schoolgirl dress over her body of black, greasy fur, and peers out under her hat with glowing yellow eyes. And yet, she is a little girl, precocious and charming, even if she happens to have a pair of revolvers with her.

The character design is wild and woolly all the way across the board. One character walks around with his head pierced by an arrow -- through the right ear and coming out the left eye socket. Yes, it sounds disgusting, but in context it works. And that context is important, because if you looked strictly at the plot of the story, it's obviously a standard Western.

Director Gore Verbinski is no stranger to odd projects, since he became famous for Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Upon which he worked with Johnny Depp, who voices Rango. The real stranger on this film is Industrial Light and Magic, the effects house of George Lucas, who did the majority of the animation. To put it simply, it looks good, even if the creatures look weirder than Jar Jar Binks. I can see a bright future for ILM in the animation field, as long as they keep George Lucas from the story, script and dialogue.

This is a Spoiler Alert -- do not read any further in this paragraph if you want to preserve a surprise. The film talks about "The Spirit of the West," and as you would expect, the film eventually shows the spirit. In South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Stan Marsh went looking throughout the film for the Clitoris, and discovered it near the end of the movie. Of course, Rango meets the Spirit of the West. Of all the beings to personify the spirit -- James Stewart, John Wayne, Randolph Scott -- they chose Clint Eastwood, or rather a very exacting CGI version of Eastwood as The Man with No Name. Or rather, the actor dressed as The Man with No Name, in a golf cart, holding a nine iron. It might have been more appropriate if they had actually used Clint Eastwood, but the voice of the character was done by Timothy Olyphant. But there was nothing appropriate about using Eastwood's character from the cynical, Sergio Leone revisionist Westerns, when this film resembled more serious, optimistic Westerns of an earlier time. Heck, Bob Hope as The Lemon Drop Kid would have been more appropriate.

Rango is a very worthy animated film, and the enthusiasm with which it's been reviewed should make it the animated film to beat. The sequel to Cars doesn't feel right to me. Mars Needs Moms has received bad reviews, and its opening weekend was one of Disney's lowest for an animated film. And no matter how many times they run the trailer, does anybody really want to see Smurfs? Although I am no longer a member of ASIFA, if Rango doesn't win at least the Annie award for Best Animated Feature, what Michele and I have said about the rules change in the Academy will be proven true. Especially if Disney buys the Best Picture Annie for Cars 2.

The Oscars: Why do you care?

2011-02-27T18:44:00.000-08:00

How it all wound up on TV
First, a bit of history. Although the Oscars were first awarded in 1929, it was not until 1960 that they were telecast, and that was due to economic necessity. Because Hollywood studios didn't want to financially support their own awards.

In 1958, the winner for Best Picture was The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was not an American film; it was released by 20th Century-Fox, but it was done by a British production company. The studios realized that their support of AMPAS, the Oscar academy, was funding awards for their foreign competitors. The studios, which I believe were led by the struggling MGM, cut their financial support for AMPAS.

That was bad. AMPAS, as they occasionally mention on their own telecast, do more than hand out gold statuettes. The "Academy Leader" of countdown numbers is their best-known technical contribution to film, but they've done much more. Although film seems to be an extinct medium in this digital age, they are still working with it and learning new ways it can still be used. They also run an internship program to get talented students working on actual productions, so they can gather experience and reputation and eventually get jobs.

All of that, not just the gold-plated bald men, was at risk. So AMPAS took a daring step. They sold the broadcast rights for the ceremony to network television. It put the studios in a bad place. They didn't want anything to do with television, which they saw (properly) as stealing their audiences. The studios banned their actors from appearing on TV. But they wanted the prestige of the Oscars. So they were forced to put their stars on television, in the ceremony, and watch as AMPAS found a new income stream.

Novelty turns to boredom.
I think the first Oscar telecast I saw was in 1962. It was a big show for whatever network ran it (I forget; perhaps it was ABC). Bob Hope hosted it. Hope was "America's favorite comedian," and although he was later to be revealed as a grouch, a mechanical comic and a cold man, at that time he met the standard of "America's favorite comedian."

It was amazing to see the greatest stars of the movies (many of whose movies I couldn't and didn't see) appearing on that little black and white screen in my own home. It was glamor unknown to a middle-class family in a small Saint Louis suburb. They were also unscripted. One year, when a hydraulic podium accidentally sank into the stage, making the microphones unavailable, Hope broke out into a soft-shoe dance. He, at least, could ad-lib.

That unscripted nature of the awards were also precious, because they showed that these famous people were human. They could make mistakes. Sally Field could yell out "You love me! You really love me!" and look like your uncle or aunt in their dumber moments. They were human...and yet something more than human.

The cracks show...and start to widen.
Year after year, there were great moments, but they began to decrease. For some reason, every time the Academy tries to present real entertainment, they fail. The presentation of the "Best Song" nominees is always, always clunky. The staging, the settings, the backup dancers, the performers who seem like they've never been in front of a live audience...it's always awful.

More and more, the actors who read the nominations act awkward while reading their scripted jokes. I think they know they're dying in front of the live audience and before the entire nation, and they look like first graders reading before an audience of their parents.

The only great moment I have seen in the last decade or so, the only one that made me cheer, was when Michael Moore received the Best Documentary Oscar for Bowling for Columbine. He stumbled and mis-spoke, but he dared to say something real on stage. Not the pretentious, fake Indian girl who ranted while picking up Marlon Brando's unwanted Oscar, but something from a working-class man bringing a little reality into the phony black-tie world of the Oscars. And he really meant that "it was a great honor to be nominated" by bringing his fellow nominees up on stage with him. That was class, that was meaning that the show biz world would never do.

Who cares about these particular movies?
Each year, the pictures nominated for the major awards are films that I and my friends don't normally watch. Even after the Oscar awards, we don't go out to catch up on "this film that was so great it got an Oscar."

Most of the films treasured by film lovers and the mass audience, the films that encourage us to get out and go to the movies, the films we quote from and do fanfic and stupid parodies of, are not even nominated in anything but the Special Effects categories. Yes, an honest award should not be given on simple popularity but by intrinsic artistic merit. But that merit has always been judged by people who are not involved in the real world - not simply the real world of motion picture production or marketing, but the real world where we agonize over how much a gallon of milk costs.

Finally, who cares about Joan Rivers?
Open disclosure: I paid to see Joan Rivers in Las Vegas many years ago. About halfway through her performance, I realized what I had suspected for years was true; she was a cruel, backbiting woman without a touch of humor or humanity. Her own movies, like her script for The Girl Most Likely To... (an early slasher film marketed as a comedy) are little more than bile.

In the last decade, she has stood out on the red carpet to criticize the clothing and attitudes of every female walking into the Oscar ceremony. That this is cruel and pointless is besides the point; she is grandfathered (grandmothered?) into the position, and when she dies, no one else, not even a flaming gay male like Mr. Blackwell, will be able to do it again.

Okay, having read that, we should ask, why do we care what the women wear or what Joan Rivers says? Isn't the Oscars supposed to be about the movies?

Obviously not, because watching the couture is more interesting than watching the ceremonies or the movies the ceremonies are supposed to be celebrating. The sideshow is more interesting than the circus. The supported purpose for tuning in, losing sleep and watching this cheesy spectacle is no longer there.

If you wish to catalog this as a rant by a bitter old man who is yelling at clouds - in other words, a John McCain speech - so be it. But think about why you're bothering to watch the Oscars again this year. Is this what you call glamor? Intellect? Humor? Or is this what someone tells you you're supposed to like?

Were the Annie Award results ever in doubt?

2011-02-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

It's Kung Fu Panda all over again. And I could have -- and did -- predict this would happen when ASIFA-Hollywood purged the Annies voting rolls of student and fan voters. The fact that Disney finally spoke out about the controversy and pulled their support from the show only solidified the end result.

Here are the winners of the Annie Awards, brought to you by Dreamworks Animation, where getting an ASIFA-Hollywood membership is allegedly just another perk of the job.

PRODUCTION CATEGORIES

Best Animated Feature

* How to Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Best Animated Short Subject

* Day & Night – Pixar

Best Animated Television Commercial

* "Children's Medical Center" – DUCK Studios

Best Animated Television Production

* Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

Best Animated Television Production for Children

* SpongeBob SquarePants – Nickelodeon

Best Animated Video Game

* Limbo – Playdead

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT CATEGORIES

Animated Effects in an Animated Production

* Brett Miller How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Television Production

* David Pate Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Feature Production

* Gabe Hordos How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Live Action Production

* Ryan Page – Alice in Wonderland – Sony Pictures

Character Design in a Television Production

* Ernie Gilbert T.U.F.F. Puppy – Nickelodeon

Character Design in a Feature Production

* Nico Marlet How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Directing in a Television Production

* Tim Johnson Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

Directing in a Feature Production

* Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois How To Train Your Dragon DreamWorks Animation

Music in a Television Production

* Jeremy Wakefield, Sage Guyton, Nick Carr, Tuck Tucker SpongeBob SquarePants – Nickelodeon

Music in a Feature Production

* John Powell How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Production Design in a Television Production

* Richie Sacilioc Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

Production Design in a Feature Production

* Pierre Olivier Vincent How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Storyboarding in a Television Production

* Fred Gonzales T.U.F.F. Puppy – Nickelodeon

Storyboarding in a Feature Production

* Tom Owens How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Television Production

* James Hong as Mr. Ping Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Feature Production

* Jay Baruchel as Hiccup How To Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

Writing in a Television Production

* Geoff Johns, Matthew Beans, Zeb Wells, Hugh Sterbakov, Matthew Senreich, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Mike Fasolo, Douglas Goldstein, Tom Root, Dan Milano, Kevin Shinick & Hugh Davidson Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III – ShadowMachine

Writing in a Feature Production

* William Davies, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders How to Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

JURIED AWARDS

Winsor McCay Award — Brad Bird, Eric Goldberg, Matt Groening

June Foray Award — Ross Iwamoto

Ub Iwerks Award — Autodesk

Special Achievement — Waking Sleeping Beauty

Until ASIFA-Hollywood seriously looks into the issue of whether or not membership in its organization is given out as a perk of employment at Dreamworks as some have alleged, and until the independent and potentially balancing voices that are student and fan voters are restored to the voting pool of Annie voters, this will be the last time The Cartoon Geeks covers anything having to do with this allegedly and apparently tainted award.

They're BAAAACK....

2011-02-04T10:30:00.000-08:00

MTV made it official: Beavis and Butt-Head are back in production. From what I can piece together, Starz Animation, formerly Film Roman, is doing this with Mike Judge's Judgmental Productions.

I hope that they go for nostalgia instead of the urge to modernize. B&B were a creature of a more innocent era, the Clinton era. 9/11 hadn't happened. Presidential scandals were something we could "Huh huh huh" laugh at instead of mourn because they caused bloodshed overseas or destroy our economy. When Clinton lied, it was just about his ability to keep "Junior" in his pants. I want to see Quinn Morgendorffer and the Morgendorffer parents have to deal with Beavis and Butt-Head, rather than have the Morgendorffer family living far, far away from Highland, TX in Lawndale, (mumblemumble). I want to see Highland High again. Heck, I have a freaking fanfic that would have made an awesome B&B episode, where Daria becomes the "consumer reporter" for the Highland Howdy, and sets B&B to work testing infomercial products. Testing in their inimitable destructive way, of course. :-)

Seriously, guys. If you take B&B out of the '90s and out of High School, they'll wind up being Jay and Not-So-Silent-Bob work at Burger World. That is, if they still have that Burger World job...bleah. "Present day...Present time" is just too depressing. Leave B&B in the Clinton Era where they belong.

Margaret Cho's superhero alter-ego (NSFW)

2011-02-03T10:15:00.000-08:00

Just mildly NSFW though. The Notorious C.H.O. teams up with Ani DeFranco as "Captain Cameltoe."

Flash video by Roberutsu.

Surprise! Repo Chick is a dizzy, funny, likeable romp!

2011-01-22T00:30:00.000-08:00

When I started hearing about Repo Chick, the non-sequel to Alex Cox's 1984 madcap classic movie Repo Man, it sounded promising. At first.

Then came this trailer. That's when something inside me said..."uh-oh..."

I should not have doubted that Cox had a couple of aces up his sleeve, in that the pacing of the movie is totally unlike the trailer, and obviously a lot of the shots were given major tweaks before picture lock, but after the trailer was made. The finished movie looks a bit better than the shots you see in the trailer. Lots of refinements, finished animation (yes, this is why I'm writing about it here at Cartoon Geeks) and better composites make a big difference.

But even more importantly, the trailer gives you zero clue about the sheer exuberance that is palpable from the screen. In the official behind-the-scenes doc for the movie, Better Than Money, what you hear again and again is how fun making the movie was. And this was in spite of equipment heists, long days, break-neck shooting schedules and frustrations with overheating Red One cameras.

It's a silly movie. But then again, Repo Man was silly too...sausage shaped aliens in the trunk of a '62 Chevy Malibu, a delirious atomic scientist, punk rockers, an oversexed UFO cultist, running gags about generic grocery products and "Little Tree" car air fresheners, and lots of punk rock.

The only level Repo Chick is serious on is the same level Repo Man was. Repo Man was the product of the Reagan era, the militarism, the corporatism, and the endless interventions in Central and South America which felt like they could boil over into endless war. Likewise, Repo Chick is the product of the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney Administration, the insanity of the Global War On Terra, the rise and fall of the housing bubble and house-as-piggy-bank-to-break, and the consequences of the Reagan Administration coming home to roost.

When Reagan finally shuffled off the mortal coil, the one thing I wanted to do was rewatch Repo Man, it's that much of a document of the time and place I grew up in. I imagine when I need to be reminded of the train wreck (and yes, trains factor into this plot) that was Bush/Cheney, I'll grab this DVD from the files and watch it. And laugh my silly ass off.

If you want a really awesome window into exactly what went on in production, including the use of both drawn and dimensional stop-motion animation and entirely virtual sets, take a look at Better Than Money and see what went on. Then check this out on DVD or Netflix. Unfortunately the short run at te IFC theatre in New York and the Downtown Independent in LA was it for a theatrical run.

Set the WABAC Machine to...somewhere else.

2011-01-18T05:52:00.000-08:00

According to Entertainment Weekly...and I still can't believe I followed this link to their site... Morton Downey Jr. is going to do the voice of Mr. Peabody, in a new CGI cartoon based on the old Jay Ward cartoon segment, Peabody's Improbable History.

Okay, lots of issues here. First of all, the voice in the original cartoons was an impression of Clifton Webb, the character actor of the 1940's. He was most famous for playing the gay murderer in the film noir classic Laura. He was more popular for playing Mr. Belvedere, the gay butler to a middle-class American family. (Remember when Americans used to be middle class?) Not a voice that you'd attach to either Tony Stark or Sherlock Holmes.

The effeminate and glasses-wearing white dog, Mr. Peabody, took his "boy" Sherman back into time. Yes, he had a "boy." That suggestion of pedophilia, slavery and the rest will undoubtedly be a big part of this "modern" version of the story. But let's move on.

Peabody's Improbable History was typical wiseguy jokes by Jay Ward, the creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle, Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale and many other old beloved cartoons. People who loved those cartoons have tried to revive them many times, always will ill effect. Remember the awful live-action Boris and Natasha? Here's a link to the IMDB page for that movie. And worse, there was The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (and here is that IMDB link), which attempted to do a CGI moose and squirrel with live action villains.

Jay Ward is dead. And like it or not, his world is dead with him. He was a pioneer of wiseguy dialog in cartoons, and innocent heroes against stupid villains, and his cartoons will probably be remembered a long time (I won't say forever). But a lot of people have done wiseguy animation, from Trey Parker and Matt Stone to Seth McFarlane. And nobody has ever been able to duplicate Ward's unique combination of cynicism and optimism.

There was only one honest attempt to revive Jay Ward, and it worked...but nobody paid attention to Cartoon Network's George of the Jungle series. It was cute and charming, and George was more an emotional naif than a moron fighting Jay Ward villains.

Ward saw his heroes as innocent, but they weren't fools; fate always made sure they won in the end. Rocky, George of the Jungle, Hoppity Hooper, all of them succeeded because they were the good guys. That was his faith, the faith of the American generation that won World War II, and few people have that kind of faith any more.

In Peabody's Improbable History, that optimism was applied to history. Peabody would tell Sherman to "set the WABAC Machine to..." and they'd go to visit some famous historical figure...who was always an incompetent and a moron. Peabody would help the famous old guy fulfill his destiny, from helping the Wright Brothers make their first flight to helping Lucretia Borgia's husband survive all her poisoning attempts.

Again, you see the Jay Ward faith aspect? There is a right way for history to be, Americans know what it is, and they can set it right. Even if the Americans happen to be a gay dog and his sidekick boy. This aspect won't fly, not in a culture where time travel has been examined by everyone from Doctor Who to Bill and Ted. We aren't that innocent any more.

It's easy to see why this is being made, and it's all in a single paragraph from the EW article:

A script has been penned by Jeffrey Ventimilia and Joshua Sternin, who wrote for the The Simpsons, That ’70s Show, and adapted the recent feature version of Yogi Bear. Minkoff won’t divulge which historical figures Peabody and Sherman will meet, but said the movie will focus not only on their time traveling, but also their origin story.

It's another attempt to mine animation history for something quick and cheap, and which might have some slight smell of success. That smell won't be Yogi Bear, which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 15 percent. And it's another attempt for some current-day creators to redefine classic characters by adding an "origin story."

Believe it or not, the first episode of Peabody's Improbable History was an origin story. Jay Ward didn't need an extensive backstory. Peabody was a genius dog who could speak, and apparently delude people into thinking he was a human being. He came across a "stray boy" named Sherman and adopted him. With that out of the way Ward started slinging the historical gags, and puns, puns, puns.

But by "re-imagining" Peabody and Sherman, Ventamilia ans Sternin are making these classic characters their characters. It's so much easier to appropriate someone else's success - old and outdated as it may be - than to risk creating something original. And it's easy to get your remake financed if you can convince someone like Downey to voice the main character.

What's amazing and laughable is that executives at DreamWorks, who should know better, have fallen for this. The true measure of their stupidity will be if they continue with this project, even after the team's Yogi Bear took a poop in the woods.

Avengers: Earth's Nerdy-est Heroes

2010-12-18T03:51:00.000-08:00

I apologize for not getting to Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes earlier, but there’s been little fan interest in it, and I don’t regularly watch its network, Disney XD. However, it’s turned out to be one of the first things Disney has originated since its purchase of Marvel Comics, and it does not bode well for the future of that ownership.

The Good

Unlike a lot of superhero stories, this one begins its origin stories in the middle of things. SHIELD, the military/spy organization, has four prisons, each holding various supervillains. One day, all four prisons break down and all the inmates escape. It’s up to a ragtag group of superheroes, mostly led by Iron Man, to capture them all.

The Avengers has some fifty years of comic book history behind it, and as one of the nice touches, this show features the main characters that started out the book. Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Ant-Man and The Wasp are the central characters. The characters are done in a clean, simple style that owes a lot to anime; there’s no heavy shadow, rounded shading or other dark effects.

The characters are pretty much what you might expect. This version of Iron Man is clearly based on the recent movies, and voice actor Eric Loomis tries to sound as casual and slick as Morton Downey Jr. Rick D. Wasserman doesn’t have a live-action model for Thor (the movie isn’t out yet) but gives him that noble-warrior pseudo-Shakesperian feel. Fred Tatasciore does The Hulk in one of his smarter incarnations, avoiding the “Hulk Smash!” primitivism. As the only female in the starting lineup, Colleen O'Shaughnessey gives The Wasp a cute, sarcastic voice; she’s a girl thrilled to mix it up in battle with the big boys.

Besides the fifty years of comics, The Avengers have had a spotty history in animation. In the 1960’s the ugly Grantray-Lawrence animated series (done for local syndication) were basically Jack Kirby’s comic book panels given minimal animation. In 1999, the series Avengers: United They Stand (done for Fox) used only the second-string characters like Tigra, Hawkeye and Ant-Man. There were two direct-to-video movies made of Ultimate Avengers that, like other Marvel video movies, were unenthusiastic.

Given that history, I was surprised and pleased by this new series. The characters look, sound and think like those comic book characters I saw as a kid. Well, smarter than those characters, and for a curious reason.

Stan Lee is listed as “co-Executive Producer” along with current Marvel Comics editor Joe Quesada, but his bombastic voice doesn’t appear in this show. I’m not a hater of Lee, but in all honesty, his heavy hand and insistence on putting his stamp on everything Marvel has dragged down many projects. Writing styles in comics and cartoons have changed since Stan wrote all those stories by himself, and the dialog in this series sounds fresh and interesting.

The Bad

With fifty years of backstory, the producers at Film Roman and Marvel Animation decided to feature as much of that history as they could. In the two-part pilot episode, it’s mentioned that seventy-odd superpowered villains are loose, and it seems as if every one of them was shown in the episode. You don’t get to know them as characters, only as names and vague powers. “That’s Crusher Creel, The Absorbing Man. He absorbs the properties of everything he touches! Here’s The Leader, a gamma powered genius as smart as The Hulk is strong! Here’s…” You get the point.

Look, that might please comic book nerds. Perhaps the writers and producers are nerds themselves, eager to show off their favorites. Or more likely, Marvel Animation and their parent corporation Disney wanted to get the likenesses of all these villains established and copyrighted at once. But if I were a kid and happened upon this series, I’d get confused by all these characters and I’d give up on it.

The same deluge happens with the heroes, although slower. It is true that Captain America was re-introduced in the fourth issue of The Avengers comics, and by putting him in Episode 6 they’re taking things…slowly. But they’re involving other heroes like Black Widow, Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye peripherally and quickly. We’ll soon have a flood of heroes we barely know and barely care about.

The Unhistorical

By the way, speaking of Captain America, the series shows his foes in World War II to be Hydra, not the Nazis. In the comics, Hydra was an all-purpose fascist organization that grew out of the ashes of the Third Reich. In this series, Hitler and the Third Reich didn’t exist, only Hydra. There is an economic reason behind this; Germany still does not allow the use of the swastika, Hitler or Nazi iconography in its entertainment media. By using Hydra, this series can run in Germany without any problems. But it cheapens many things, including the real-world evil of the Nazis and the origin of comic books themselves.

Most of the writers, artists and editors of comic books were Jews. The heroes they created were a response to the Holocaust in Europe, and the prejudice they faced in America. Although comics were considered horrid, evil works by people in their own time, in recent years comic books have become accepted and even lauded as one of the great contributions of Jews to American culture. By eliminating the Nazis, the producers have cheapened these creations.

While The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes is probably the best adaptation of this particular super-group ever made, its flaws are serious. The kid audience, who mostly aren’t comic book nerds and who don’t know all these characters, will find it hard to care about these heroes and their battles. And that means they won’t likely care much about the live-action Avengers movie Disney is planning to make. We old nerds can’t float your boat for you, Disney; you need to get young nerds, too.

Annie noms 2010...not that they matter much to me anymore...

2010-12-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

2010 ANNIE AWARD NOMINATIONS BY CATEGORY

PRODUCTION CATEGORIES

Best Animated Feature

• Despicable Me – Illumination Entertainment

• How to Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation

• Tangled – Disney

• The Illusionist – Django Films

• Toy Story 3 – Disney/Pixar

Best Animated Short Subject

• Coyote Falls – Warner Bros. Animation

• Day & Night – Pixar

• Enrique Wrecks the World – House of Chai

• The Cow Who Wanted To Be A Hamburger – Plymptoons Studio

• The Renter – Jason Carpenter

Best Animated Television Commercial

• Children’s Medical Center – DUCK Studios

• Frito Lay Dips “And Then There Was Salsa” – LAIKA/house

• ‘How To Train Your Dragon’ Winter Olympic Interstitial “Speed Skating” – DreamWorks Animation

• McDonald’s “Spaceman Stu” – DUCK Studios

• Pop Secret “When Harry Met Sally” – Nathan Love

Best Animated Television Production

• Futurama – The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox Television

• Kung Fu Panda Holiday – DreamWorks Animation

• Scared Shrekless – DreamWorks Animation

• Star Wars: The Clone Wars “Arc Troopers” – Lucasfilm Animation, Ltd.

• The Simpsons – Gracie Films

Best Animated Television Production for Children

• Adventure Time – Cartoon Network Studios

• Cloudbread – GIMC

• Fanboy & Chum Chum – Nickelodeon, Frederator

• Regular Show – Cartoon Network Studios

• SpongeBob SquarePants – Nickelodeon

Best Animated Video Game

• Heavy Rain – Quantic Dream

• Kirby’s Epic Yarn – Good-Feel & HAL Laboratory

• Limbo – Playdead

• Shank – Klei Entertainment Inc.

INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT CATEGORIES

Animated Effects in an Animated Production

• Andrew Young Kim “Shrek Forever After” – DreamWorks Animation

• Jason Mayer “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Brett Miller “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Sebastian Quessy “Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” – Warner Bros. Pictures

Kryzstof Rost “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Television Production

• Nicolas A. Chauvelot “Scared Shrekless” – DreamWorks Animation

• Savelon Forrest “Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III” – ShadowMachine

• Elizabeth Havetine “Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III” – ShadowMachine

• David Pate “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

• Nideep Varghese “Scared Shrekless” – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Feature Production

• Mark Donald “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

• Anthony Hodgson “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

• Gabe Hordos “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Jakob Hjort Jensen “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• David Torres “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Live Action Production

• Quentin Miles – Clash of the Titans

• Ryan Page – Alice in Wonderland

Character Design in a Television Production

• Andy Bialk “The Ricky Gervais Show” – W!LDBRAIN Entertainment

• Stephan DeStefano “Sym-Bionic Titan” – Cartoon Network

• Ernie Gilbert “T.U.F.F. Puppy” – Nickelodeon

• Gordon Hammond “T.U.F.F. Puppy” – Nickelodeon

• Steve Lam “Fanboy & Chum Chum” – Nickelodeon, Frederator

Character Design in a Feature Production

• Sylvain Chomet “The Illusionist” – Django Films

• Carter Goodrich “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

• Timothy Lamb “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

• Nico Marlet “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

Directing in a Television Production

• Bob Anderson “The Simpsons” – Gracie Films

• Peter Chung “Firebreather” – Cartoon Network Studios

• Duke Johnson “Frankenhole: Humanitas” – ShadowMachine

• Tim Johnson “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

• Gary Trousdale “Scared Shrekless” – DreamWorks Animation

Directing in a Feature Production

• Sylvain Chomet “The Illusionist” – Django Films

• Pierre Coffin “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

• Mamoru Hosoda “Summer Wars” – Madhouse/Funimation

• Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Lee Unkrich “Toy Story 3” – Disney/Pixar

Music in a Television Production

• J. Walter Hawkes “The Wonder Pets!” – Nickelodeon Production & Little Airplane Productions

• Henry Jackman, Hans Zimmer and John Powell “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

• Tim Long, Alf Clausen, Bret McKenzie, Jemaine Clement “The Simpsons: Elementary School Musical” – Gracie Films

• Shawn Patterson “Robot Chicken’s DP Christmas Special” – ShadowMachine

• Jeremy Wakefield, Sage Guyton, Nick Carr, Tuck Tucker “SpongeBob SquarePants” – Nickelodeon

Music in a Feature Production

• Sylvain Chomet “The Illusionist” – Django Films

• David Hirschfelder “Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” – Warner Bros. Pictures

• John Powell “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Harry Gregson Williams “Shrek Forever After” – DreamWorks Animation

• Pharrell Williams, Heitor Pereira “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

Production Design in a Television Production

• Alan Bodner “Neighbors From Hell” – 20th Century Fox Television

• Barry Jackson “Firebreather” – Cartoon Network Studios

• Pete Oswald “Doubtsourcing” – Badmash Animation Studios

• Richie Sacilioc “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

• Scott Wills “Sym-Bionic Titan” – Cartoon Network Studios

Production Design in a Feature Production

• Yarrow Cheney “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

• Eric Guillon “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

• Dan Hee Ryu “Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” – Warner Bros. Pictures

• Pierre Olivier Vincent “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Peter Zaslav “Shrek Forever After” – DreamWorks Animation

Storyboarding in a Television Production

• Sean Bishop “Scared Shrekless” – DreamWorks Animation

• Fred Gonzales “T.U.F.F. Puppy” – Nickelodeon

• Tom Owens “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

• Dave Thomas “Fairly OddParents” – Nickelodeon

Storyboarding in a Feature Production

• Alessandro Carloni “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Paul Fisher “Shrek Forever After” – DreamWorks Animation

• Tom Owens “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Catherine Yuh Rader “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Television Production

• Jeff Bennett as The Necronomicon “Fanboy & Chum Chum” – Nickelodeon & Frederator

• Corey Burton as Baron Papanoida “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” – Cartoon Network

• Nika Futterman as Asajj Ventress “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” – Cartoon Network

• Mike Henry as Cleveland Brown “The Cleveland Show” – Fox Television Animation

• James Hong as Mr. Ping “Kung Fu Panda Holiday” – DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Feature Production

• Jay Baruchel as Hiccup “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Gerard Butler as Stoick “How To Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Steve Carrell as Gru “Despicable Me” – Illumination Entertainment

• Cameron Diaz as Fiona “Shrek Forever After” – DreamWorks Animation

• Geoffrey Rush as Ezylryb “Legend Of The Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” – Warner Bros. Pictures

Writing in a Television Production

• Daniel Arkin “Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Heroes on Both Sides” – Lucasfilm Animation Ltd.

• Jon Colton Barry & Piero Piluso “Phineas & Ferb: Nerds of a Feather” – Disney Channel

• Geoff Johns, Matthew Beans, Zeb Wells, Hugh Sterbakov, Matthew Senreich, Breckin Meyer, Seth Green, Mike Fasolo, Douglas Goldstein, Tom Root, Dan Milano, Kevin Shinick & Hugh Davidson “Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode III” – ShadowMachine

• Billy Kimball & Ian Maxtone-Graham “The Simpsons: Stealing First Base” – Gracie Films

• Michael Rowe “Futurama” – The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox Television

Writing in a Feature Production

• Michael Arndt “Toy Story 3” – Disney/Pixar

• Sylvain Chomet “The Illusionist” – Django Films

• William Davies, Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders “How to Train Your Dragon” – DreamWorks Animation

• Dan Fogelman “Tangled” – Disney

• Alan J. Schoolcraft, Brent Simons “Megamind” – DreamWorks Animation

JURIED AWARDS

Winsor McCay Award – Brad Bird, Eric Goldberg, Matt Groening

June Foray – Ross Iwamoto.

Ub Iwerks Award – Autodesk

Special Achievement – “Waking Sleeping Beauty”

Potter Animation, and why ASIFA Won't Celebrate It.

2010-12-05T19:57:00.001-08:00

I'm not going to review Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in full. There's enough about that from other critics. But I wanted to talk about one little bit of it.

During the latter part of this story, our three protagonists - Harry, Ron and Hermione - wind up at the house of Xenophilius Lovegood. For those who need a refresher - you have read all the Potter books, of course - he's the father of the somewhat spacy Luna Lovegood, and the publisher of The Quibbler, the Weekly World News of the wizarding world.

Lovegood publishes all the outrageous rumors about magical creatures and political intrigues. Unfortunately, he is dead right about supporting Harry Potter and the late Albus Dumbledore. Right now, Harry and his friends are being hunted by Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, who have taken over the Ministry of Magic. Having someone like Lovegood on your side is like having the support of The Amazing Criswell.

Harry and company ask about a peculiar mark they've seen. It turns out to be the mark of the Deathly Hallows, three magical items that legend says were bestowed by Death itself. This is all recounted in the wizarding world's version of Grimm's Fairy Tales, called The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

J.K. Rowling wrote that book as a sideline Harry Potter project, and contributed the proceeds to charities for British children. In the movie, Xenophilius Lovegood starts reading the book, for the benefit of Harry, who never read the book. As he reads it, the camera pans out to a pond outside his house...and the story becomes animated.

I can't reproduce the picture of the animation. I didn't see it in 3-D, since this first part is not in 3-D. But it was hypnotic. It made everyone in our half-filled theater gasp. If I had to describe it, it would be animated paper cutouts, shot in silhouette, the cutouts converted to solid colors, and given wisps of animated smoke that moved through them. All of it was in different shades of white, tan, brown and black.

It is the most abstract piece of animation I've seen in commercial release since the work of UPA in the late 1950's and early 1960's. There may be wilder things in the world of independent animation, but nothing like it has been given popular release. And abstract as it was, it perfectly illustrates the grim story of three wizards who each gained a gift from Death, and how it affected each of their lives...and deaths.

In retrospect, it is absolutely appropriate for the film, which is darker in tone and more dramatic than anything in the previous Harry Potter movies. Unlike most of the graphic and illustration design we've seen in the movies and books - and that I've seen in Universal's The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - it is not done in an antique, turn-of-the-1900's graphic style.

It deserves some kind of notice from ASIFA Hollywood. But it probably won't get it. As you know, ASIFA has voided the voting rights of ordinary civilian members like myself and Michelle. We are ending our memberships with great regret, because we believed that the participation of people like us kept ASIFA honest.

Since this movie's animated segment is perhaps less than one percent of the film, ASIFA will probably ignore it. And since we ordinary civilians don't have a voice in ASIFA any more, we can't suggest even an honorary commendation.

All I can say right now is this: Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers have provided animation lovers something to love. Maybe she might see fit to animate some other tales from Beedle the Bard in the same, or even more experimental, visual styles.

Don't mind the nega-minds on Megamind.

2010-11-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

From the trailers, you would expect Megamind to be a simplistic superhero parody. Something like Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles, but much more dumb and cartoonish. The voice cast of Will Ferrell (Megamind), Tina Fey (Roxanne Ritchi) and Brad Pitt (Metro Man) didn't make me confident. However, I had to take friends to the theater, and make them happy, and they didn't want to see the action thriller/comedy RED. So it was Megamind or nothing.

It wasn't nothing. It was better than nothing. Far better. It isn't the best film animated this year, but it's a lot of fun. It had actual heart at the center of the film, which took me and my friends by surprise.

You know the basic plot from the trailers. Two extraterrestrials, Megamind and the future Metro Man, arrive from two neighboring planets. Metro Man is Caucasian, sleek, with perfect hair and perfect social skills. Megamind...not so much. And from childhood on, Megamind decides to become a villain. Right now, you're expecting traditional stuff; bad guy gets pummeled by good guy, amusingly. The kind of thing you saw in Despicable Me. This film had to be derivative, didn't it, because Megamind looks so much like Galaxar from Monsters vs. Aliens, doesn't he?

The film plays to these expectations. For what must be the millionth time, Megamind kidnaps Roxanne Ritchi. The predictable death traps bore her. Megamind lures Metro Man to his lair. And then...to all appearances...Metro Man dies. Megamind triumphs.

What does the villain do when he beats the hero? That's Megamind's new dilemma. He realizes that, having won it all, he no longer has a goal or an obstacle to struggle against. He is, in other words, more sensible than most standard supervillains. In fact, he's in precisely the same dilemma as the petty crook in the Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place to Visit." Getting everything you want...is Hell.

So, Megamind decides to duplicate Metro Man's powers and give them to someone, make them a hero, and he'll have another nemesis. He chooses Roxanne's nerdish, socially incompetent cameraman (voice by Jonah Hill), appears to him in the guise of his "alien father" (a voice impression which is hilarious and which I won't spoil) and christens the new hero Titan. Of course, the guy is illiterate, so he spells his name "Tighten."

Instead of fighting Megamind, Tighten goes nuts. He has power now. He has revenge on his mind for a life of lowly work. He wants to blow up stuff, real good. And he wants Roxanne Ritchi, bad. Oddly enough, due to a disguise he assumed out of necessity, Megamind has fallen in love with Roxanne. Love has forced the stereotypical villain to become a different kind of hero.

As I say, this is not revolutionary stuff. The CGI is quite adequate. (I did not see it in 3-D, because that would have added nothing to the story. You shouldn't, either.) The best part of Megamind is that the actors went to the trouble of getting inside their characters. You believe that Megamind could actually fall in love, and you see the process happening throughout the film. You believe that the cynical Roxanne could also come to love Megamind.

When stars do voice acting in animated movies, it's usually just their regular personalities. You would expect Tina Fey to do something like her 30 Rock character, or maybe a version of her Sarah Palin impression. But she dug into the part. So did Will Ferrell and the others.

I doubt severely that we'll see a sequel to Megamind or a TV series. After one Halloween special, Monsters vs. Aliens has disappeared. Despicable Me came and went. DreamWorks has trouble making sequels outside of Shrek and Madagascar. And the conclusion of Megamind doesn't leave much room for any follow-ups. That may be best. As it is, Megamind is a solid animated movie with good entertainment value. It's worth a DVD purchase - and I don't make that kind of recommendation quickly these days.

Right Wing Radio Duck...right on!

2010-10-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

A gent named Jonathan McIntosh, working from his web site Rebellious Pixels, produced what some would call a "mashup," but is really an ingenious re-editing of various Donald Duck cartoons. It shows Donald losing his job and falling under the sway of Glenn Beck.

Yes, Beck replied to it. Of course, it's the Government paying this artist to attack Beck, because Beck is telling the truth about the Evil Negro President. And another animator/editor put Beck's reply into a Mickey Mouse cartoon...

Not enough people are mocking Beck, or Limbaugh, or Palin, or any of the Teabaggers. And isn't it interesting that Beck couldn't find anyone sophisticated enough to use computers to do his own mockery? Probably because Beck's listeners are in parts of the country where the only computers are TRS-80's.

K-On! The final scene...done with Figmas.

2010-10-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

Figmas are itty bitty doll-like figures that are fully articulated in spite of their ultra-chibi size. They are known for being uber breakable because of their teeny tiny joints...no Obitsus or Volks Dollfie Dreams these. This is just wonderfully done. Next time, the person who did this should invest in continuous video lights or flash systems to keep lighting uniform. The lighting variation and the flicker introduced are just a wee bit distracting. It's just picking nits though...this is wonderful. Robot Chicken, anyone?

I'm involved with a podcast other than this one...

2010-09-28T22:16:00.001-07:00

Otaku no Podcast episode 14: what's all this about dolliehs?

Free ice cream from Murdoch won't erase facts...

2010-09-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

...Fox TV hasn't fielded a truly interesting TV show in their Animation Domination bloc for years.

I mean, let's get real here. The Simpsons is just plain played out, and has been for about a decade and a half. Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show? Three aspects of another played-out series by Seth McFarlane, which as anyone who's watched South Park has seen, is basically written at random. King Of The Hill is over, and Mike Judge is busy resuscitating Beavis and Butt-Head. (Please let it be a retro show, please, please, I want to see Daria Morgendorffer abuse B&B for her twisted psychological experiments again, and I'd like to see Quinn have to deal with B&B!)

The Fox PR girls who were there dropped hints of something new that might show up as a mid-season replacement, but they told me News Corp ninjas would drop in to my home and kill me in my sleep in the dead of night if I mentioned anything more so I'll leave it at that.

So even with that known, I accepted their "Death By Stewie" sundae creation (basically a hot fudge sundae with sprinkles) and it tasted that much better knowing it was free, I was being treated to it on Murdoch's dime, and that I was going to find the nearest hot spot and give the entire bloc a deserved razzing. I suppose that posting my phone pics of their truck gives them free publicity. But hey, that's entertainment.

Tower Prep: High School Hell

2010-09-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

This will be another brief post. However, it is an exciting one.

At Dragon*Con 2010, I was just an attendee; I did not have guest status, did not get in free, did not run Pre-Sweetened Playhouse or any other panels. However, I did help out with the existing animation panels, and there's a chance I might be back to run panels next year. And I did attend a last-minute panel scheduled by animation great Paul Dini...about a non-animated show.

Tower Prep is a one-hour series, thirteen episodes in the first season, which will be airing on Cartoon Network. It's still discomforting to see more non-animated programming on CN. However, from the footage shown, and the details given by Dini, Tower Prep justifies live-action programming - at least as far as Tower Prep.

Spoiler Alert: This is advance information about the series. It is incomplete. Mr. Dini understandably didn't want to spoil surprises, but had to reveal something about the show to get us interested. If you are really, really afraid of spoilers, skip down to the bold-type line saying "End of Spoiler Alert."

The place in question is an exclusive preparatory school. Exclusive...and exclusionary. Once a student enters, the outside world is cut off. No internet, no news, no visits to the outside world. Guards with scary green-light goggles, laser beam detectors and high-tech traps keep the students inside. In the style of 1984, there are cameras, monitors and screens everywhere, and proctors among the students spy on the larger student body and report to the faculty.

The head of the school is named Headmaster. The history teacher is named History. None of the faculty has human names, only the name of their specialties; a future episode will have a substitute teacher named Substitute.

The students are all brilliant, but they also have...well, not exactly "superpowers," but exceptional abilities that could exist in the real world. For example, the show's focus character, Gabe Forrest (Ryan Pinkston), the "new kid in school," has a kind of danger sense. He can tell when someone or something is about to threaten him a few seconds before it happens. One of the girls can mimic the motions, posture and gait of another person; she doesn't physically change into the person, but she can "fool" people with sufficient preparation.

These students are forced by the teachers to control and improve their abilities. For what? The students aren't sure, and the teachers are deliberately not telling. Could they be used to help humanity, hurt humanity, or control humanity?

Gabe discovers the traps and tricks of Tower Prep...but not all. For example, in a regular kind of physical education game, students are formed into three teams. Each team is supposed to defeat the other two teams...but individual team members are encouraged to sabotage or betray their team so they come out on top. And in the larger game of Tower Prep, students who seem friendly may betray others, and enemies may provide assistance to each other.

In the first season, Gabe will gradually become the leader of a secret group of students, who seek to discover the secrets of Tower Prep, and seek to escape.

End of Spoiler Alert.

Although I didn't tape the interview, Dini said that this series is very dark, and especially in its final episode of the first season, upsetting things will happen. He mentioned the other teen/tween shows built around high schools that Disney and Nickelodeon run. Shows such as That's So Raven, iCarly, Hannah Montana and others, high school is all about supportive teachers, good friends and moral lessons. Tower Prep deals with what Dini called "the dark side...the betrayals, the insecurity, the powerlessness of teenage life."

Just like Harry Potter's school Hogwarts, Tower Prep is a British-style prep school, isolated from parents and the outside world. But it combines the totalitarianism and fear of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan's paranoid spy fantasy. I have never seen any show intended for a teenage audience involve this material. It's darker than the "Maximum Ride" novels ghostwritten under the James Patterson house name. It doesn't get lost in fantasy, like the Twilight novels or the related teen-vampire young adult novels.

Sadly...I didn't have the trailer Dini brought. Many of the links that Cartoon Network have put up are blind promotion ideas, or "cheery fun adventure" promos that make the show look like every other tween science-fiction adventure. Here is a link to a brief promo from YouTube that givss the feel, if not all the information, about the new show.

In fact, there are two things that were upsetting. This panel was arranged at the last minute; it did not appear in the program, only in the "Daily Dragon" update sheet. And Dini had some PR photos of the cast (which I will upload here later) but no patches, goodies, or much more than a three minute video to show. It's his show, CN is investing a lot of money in it, but they preferred to make a big deal out of it at San Diego Comic-Con instead of in their own back yard in Atlanta. They should support Dini when he promotes projects, especially his own, and they should support the growing animation fandom in Atlanta.

A (currently pictureless) review of Batman: Under the Red Hood.

2010-08-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of stills, but I've been very busy and occupied.

When Warner Brothers Animation and DC Comics began producing direct-to-video movies, it was obvious why. For example, if they wanted to do a Wonder Woman TV series, they had to sell a network, sponsors and the general public on it. By doing it direct to animation, they saved a lot of angst...except for the angst inside the competing divisions of AOL Time Warner. (They're still AOL and they always will be.)

To get to the fans who loved these animated characters, DC went direct-to-video. They also occasionally run these movies on Cartoon Network, just once, to get people interested.

The results have been...mixed, as you can see from these reviews from this site (click to read):

Batman/Superman: Public Enemies

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths

Batman: Gotham Knight was interesting, but mostly to dedicated Bat-fans. Wonder Woman and Superman: Doomsday blended a lot of the existing mythology of those characters to try to make them palatable to the general public. Green Lantern didn't make the character popular.

This current production is another synthesis of existing DC Comics mythology. In the history of the Batman character in direct-to-video productions, it's one of the best. That may seem like damning with faint praise, but it set the bar higher for the character than anything previously done for home video. If you were to compare it with the recent TV show The Batman or the current Batman: The Brave and the Bold, it would surpass both.

The controversy behind the story

It starts with one of the most traumatic incidents in Batman's past, the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd. The Joker captured Jason, beat him nearly to death with a crowbar, then blew him up. Batman arrived too late to save him.

The story behind that death, in comic book history, is even darker. Jason was considered an egotistical little jerk, wearing the short pants of the original Robin, and disdainful of his boss. He decided to go after The Joker alone, resulting in his capture, torture and death. (The person who first came up with the idea, Frank Miller, intended to have Jason raped by The Joker, in his graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. DC wouldn't allow that.)

At the end of that issue of the comic, on the last page, DC asked the readers to vote whether Jason Todd lived or died. It was a way to make money off the 1-900 numbers that had just started. Many people were upset that readers were asked to vote for the death of a child, and that DC would make money off the votes. Even worse, some people inside DC have admitted that the vote to kill Jason was very, very close, possibly slightly for his survival.

Although DC has been silent about the situation, there was guilt involved. Guilt, and one of those peculiarities of comic book copyright: you have to publish the character every three years or you lose copyright. But undoubtedly some of DC's writers and editors felt bad about this situation. And that was the reason behind the Red Hood situation.

The original Red Hood was the man who became The Joker. At least, in one current bit of comic book mythology; they always screw around with history. A new Red Hood shows up and starts acting as a vigilante, one who is quite willing to kill criminals, and seems to be going for The Joker.

Okay, what about this particular video, you gabbing nerd?

I was getting to that. The death of Jason Todd is monitored, but not prevented, by Batman's near-immortal enemy Ras Al Ghul. Perhaps out of his own guilt, Ras obtains Jason Todd's corpse and throws it into his resurrection pool, the Lazarus Pit. Jason Todd returns to life, but insane and vengeful.

Red Hood is primarily assaulting another recent Batman villain, Black Mask. (Who himself is interesting; his black skull mask was carved from the onyx lid of his mother, whom he killed.) It's all a plan to convince Black Mask to spring The Joker from his asylum, to make him killable.

The crowning glory of this story is Batman's emotional agony over this situation. At one point he calls Jason's death "my greatest and most tragic failure." As voiced by Bruce Greenwood, Batman adds emotional vulnerability to the character's traditional toughness. When his first Robin shows up, Nightwing/Dick Greyson (voice by Neil Patrick Harris), they are so chummy and complementary to each other that it brightens the generally grim proceedings.

The Killing Joke, The Killer Joker

But the surprise is the voice provided for Joker by John DiMaggio. Think of all the people who've played the part in the past: Burgess Meredith, Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger in live action, Mark Hamill in animation. Then discard them.

DiMaggio's Joker is more serious than Ledger's Joker. He takes no joy in his "jokes," which are particularly brutal. He laughs only to seem more terrifying. He is intelligent, driven and aware. This is the first Joker I've seen for which I could never, ever feel a moment of sympathy.

Joker kills in this story. Red Hood kills. The violence is sometimes pretty disguised or out of direct sight, but sometimes it is very visible. A man burning to death, by the Molotov cocktail he was about to throw on another man, is pretty grim. This is most certainly not a story for children to watch.

On the double DVD set, the extras are pretty odd. There is a bonus animated short involving DC's scarred, murderous Western bounty hunter, Jonah Hex. It involves a murderous whore and Hex's particularly Tales from the Crypt vengeance against her. I suspect this was intended to be a "big thing" if the live-action Jonah Hex movie had attracted an audience.

There's also a number of comic book creators talking about Dick Greyson and his transition from Robin to the independent hero Nightwing. Much as I might like comic book creators talking with semi-animated stills, this was pretty boring. Perhaps because the real story behind the movie - the death of Jason Todd outlined above - was being avoided by everyone concerned.

And there's also two episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, the two-parter which told (in remarkably honest detail) the murder of Dick Greyson's acrobat parents, and how he was almost tempted to vengeance against their murderer - but restrained himself. It is a wonderful story, and deserves to be remembered - but as something already released in several formats, it didn't cost DC a lot.

Finally, they announced their next project, with practically nothing from animation but a few animatics and a lot of comic book stills; Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. It does involve Darkseid and Apokalyps, of course, but its central story is the introduction of Supergirl. Apparently based on recent DC comics stories, it has Kara Zor-El arriving on Earth, suspected by Batman, taken under Wonder Woman's wing to be tutored as a warrior woman and released as a new heroine. After the darkness of Under the Red Hood, a bit of cheery teenage superheroine action will be a relief.

Spam whack-a-mole tiem is OVER.

2010-08-14T08:30:00.001-07:00

That's it: sorry guys, but comments are being turned off because we're getting hit constantly by Chinese spambots. :P

Oh well, this makes my ASIFA-Hollywood membership officially useless...

2010-07-31T23:16:00.000-07:00

Nice, ASIFA-Hollywood. Real nice.

International Animated Film Society
ASIFA-Hollywood

Dear ASIFA-Hollywood Member,

From the time the Annie Awards were created, every year the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood reviews the awards in order to improve them.

Over the years, these annual evaluations have resulted in such major changes including changing the Annie Awards from a lifetime honor to an award which recognizes current achievements and excellence in the field of animation, and conducting the Annie Award voting online to ensure that voters have reviewed all of the nominees work before casting their ballot.

Following the creation of the Oscar for Best Animated Feature by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science almost a decade ago, the Annie Award is now recognized by the entertainment industry as the highest honor given by the animation community, and ASIFA-Hollywood is regarded with the same kind of prestige as the Motion Picture and Television academies.

In order to maintain the integrity of the award the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood has decided to limit voting for the Annie Awards to only qualified members of ASIFA-Hollywood who are animation professionals. Non-professional and Student members of ASIFA-Hollywood shall not be eligible to participate in the Annie Award voting.

Therefore to participate in Annie award voting you must register to qualify to vote. This application process must be completed by August 31st, 2010. This is your only opportunity to qualify to vote this year! Your qualifications will then be vetted by a panel representing many studios and job classifications and you will be informed by email of acceptance or denial. If denied, you will be given an additional 30 days to appeal and provide sufficient proof of eligibility. Your eligibility status will also be available on your on-line profile page.

All professional members should apply for the Production categories (Best Feature, Best Short, Best Television Program, etc.). We also encourage you to apply for any of the individual categories in which you have credits or other verifiable recognition of your experience or expertise. If you are not sure if you qualify in a particular category, please apply and clearly explain your experience.

Each year, upon renewal of your membership, you will be given another opportunity to update your qualification categories. New members will also be given 30 days to qualify to vote upon acceptance of their membership.

To begin the process, please log onto the updated website for ASIFA-Hollywood at www.asifa-hollywood.org. Your login name is your email address. Your password should be listed on your membership card. If it is not listed, or you have misplaced your membership card, please select Forgot your password? and it will be emailed to you.

Once logged in, select Membership-Annie Voter Application. Then check the box for Production and any other category in which you believe you qualify to vote. Add your qualification evidence in the box next to the selected categories. When complete, select Update at the bottom of the page. Your status will be emailed to you after the qualification committee reviews your application.

Your application and your vote will help recognize excellence amongst your fellow artists and bring greater recognition to our art form. Thank you.

(facepalm)

Good news on the AX front...

2010-06-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

Maybe the new management of AX is actually THINKING THROUGH some of the things about AX that wallow in a sweaty mass of lameness.

Last year, AX charged $20 for a pass for the shuttle buses. Unless you booked a hotel through the con, which can be sketchy.

This year, however, AX is GIVING people who buy a 4 day pass a shuttle bus pass! Holy moly! They are doing the right thing, for once! This could be a trend! Stay tuned.

OK, this actually creeps ME out. In a good way.

2010-05-30T23:36:00.000-07:00

Kawaii Kitteny used a piece of software called "Crazy Talk" (unfortunately only out on Windows) to imitate the Clutch Cargo "SynchroVox" technique on a video featuring her Asian ball joint dolls. This is eerie and spooky, altogether ookie, and just totally awesome. Don't watch if you have nightmares about Chucky, though. You have been warned.

More info on Crazy Talk here: http://www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/

The Big, Green Goodbye.

2010-05-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I work at Universal Studios Florida, at the Shrek 4-D attraction. The opinions expressed here are my own, and are not those of my employer Universal Studios/NBC Universal, or their licensee DreamWorks Animation SKG. Okay?

The original movie Shrek was a lot of fun. Most fun of all was the amount of fun poked at Disney. It was inevitable; one of the DreamWorks partners, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was treated badly by Disney's CEO at the time, Michael Eisner. Katzenberg could have made the film a lot nastier, and a lot less funny, but the satire was restrained enough to remain funny.

Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third were...well, sequels. They coasted on the goodwill and good times of the first movie. They also established some cliches for DreamWorks animated features which are troubling. Many animated productions from DreamWorks and other studios were full of pop music to appeal to parents, pop-culture references to other movies, and famous actors performing animated voices. Many DreamWorks movies became as formulaic and cliched as the Disney tradition of the Disney Princess and the "I Want" song.

And perhaps that was the reason that Shrek Forever After was announced as the final chapter; for a while it was promoted under that title. Rather than string out the characters and the story forever, eventually with other voice actors taking the place of the originals, they decided to put an end to it.

If it is the end, it is very satisfactory. As mentioned elsewhere, it is based on It's a Wonderful Life. Shrek (Mike Meyers) is feeling domesticated and ineffectual and bored. He is no longer feared; he is a celebrity fawned over by adults and children alike. This makes him blow up at his babies' first birthday party, and makes him bitter at his wife Fiona (Cameron Diaz).

Which opens the door for Rumplestilskin (Walt Dohm), a magical deal-maker who is detested by everyone in Far Far Away. The result of the deal he works: Shrek was never born. He never saved Fiona. He never became friends with Donkey (Eddie Murphy). He has only one day to turn about his deal by getting Fiona to fall in love with him.

What makes this movie for me is the treatment of Fiona. Throughout the films, she has been far too much the Disney Princess that she originally satirized. Even when in her natural, hefty and green state, she was always wise, sweet and supportive. (I liked the ogress Fiona far better than the human Fiona.) She was, like so many women in tepid fantasies, an accessory to the male lead.

In this film, in the "Potterstown" version of Shrek's world, Fiona did not get rescued. She rescued herself. Her curse of a half-human, half-ogre existence made her tough and dedicated. She becomes the leader of an ogre army, fighting for survival against Rumplestilskin and his army of witches. Perhaps it's personal, but to me, Warrior Princess Fiona is hot.

The end of the film is as predictable as a fairy tale, of course. There is the suggestion that things have changed for Shrek and everyone, that the universe of Far Far Away has been changed for the better by this experience. And one thing has. For the first time, I actually accept the tenderness and sweetness of Shrek under his grouchy exterior. In the first movie, Shrek said that "ogres are like onions; we have layers." It took four movies for the filmmakers to reach that layer.

But I still miss Warrior Fiona. I hate seeing her as a housewife only. She can be much more, and in defense of her children, her man and her species, I wish I could see her become something more.

The elaborate end credits feature scenes and characters re-imagined from throughout the Shrek films. They remind us of the good times and fun from those movies. (Note that scenes from Shrek the Third are barely glimpsed; it's admittedly the weakest of the four.) The credits also offer thanks to the creative people who worked on the Shrek films for the last decade. If that isn't closing the door, I don't know what is.

In one of the last scenes, the book "Shrek Forever After" is put on a bookshelf. Up there, I glimpsed other titles like "Shrek and the Beanstalk" and "Princess Fiona and the Pea." With the good box office this movie achieved, there will be the strong temptation to make those movies.

I hope DreamWorks resists. The Shrek Saga was good, but it's time to move on. The trailers for two new DreamWorks productions that accompanied Shrek Forever After are entirely different, although they rely on previous movies. Despicable Me takes the premise of the evil mastermind who is saddled with three mischevious kids. And MegaMind clashes two cliches, the superhero and the supervillain (although MegaMind looks a little too much like Galaxar of Monsters vs. Aliens).

Let Shrek stand on his swampy laurels, guys. Make him your corporate mascot if you want. But do other, newer, more original animated stories.

Screwing up the brand, take 2,000...

2010-05-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

Time-Warner is STILL trying to monetize the Looney Tunes. The next steps in the total Lucas-like immolation of the greatest American cartoon legacy are being readied. Ph33r.

I am soothed, finally: Daria finally out on DVD.

2010-05-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

Here it is. The whole thing. From "Sealed With A Kick" to "Is It College Yet?"

It's a beautiful package, all things considered. Including the omitted songs and the fact that "Is It Fall Yet?" is still the shortened version and not the original version that aired. In the latter case, I wouldn't be surprised if the only version of the TV movie that MTV had still hung onto was the short version. In the case of the DVD of the original Spumco Ren & Stimpy episodes (Season 1 plus the first half of Season 2) Paramount Home Video actually had to use archival material kept by John Kricfalusi to get the best possible release. MTV Networks is notorious for these sort of things.

One other nit to pick: they didn't release all the goodies in the vault. There was a 30 minute "the making of" special, plus Garbage premiered a video during the initial "Is It College Yet?" airing, "Breaking Up The Girl." Later, Garbage released a "movie clips" version of the video...I've got it for you right here:

Thing was, there was a whole animated intro for the song that only aired once. I remember that they did an "anything can happen in a cartoon" gag where the band's animated counterparts took off into the air. Of course, that all could be buried in a filing cabinet in a locked room at 1515 Broadway, with a sign reading "Beware of the Leopard" on the door.

At least the "Freakin' Friends" Mystik Spiral video is included...plus a .PDF of a spec script for a Mystik Spiral spinoff series that never made it even to the animatic stage.

Again, all this is nits picked by an unashamed Daria fangirl. I'm delighted it's finally out, I'm doubly delighted it's out at a more-than-fair price: it's "streeting" for less than $50. Well done.

RIP Michael Pataki...

2010-04-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

Alas, George Liquor won't be able to taste the Double Down meat sandwich, because his voice and his soul, Michael Pataki, passed away yesterday. I didn't get a chance to meet him but he was a really excellent voice actor. With Carl Macek and voice actor Allen Swift, that makes the three losses for the animation world. Because they always go in threes, don't they?

R&S character Kowalski would love this...

2010-04-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

Meat between two pieces of fried meat. George Liquor would call it a "manly" meal. And the Ripping Friends would have seconds.

KFC Double Down...they need to hire John K. to do their ads. Srsly.

Loss of a pioneer: RIP Carl Macek

2010-04-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

The bad news came to me via Cartoon Brew: Jerry Beck broke the news that his former partner in Streamline Video, Carl Macek, had died of a sudden heart attack. This occurred Saturday, April 17th.

Carl Macek was one of the first people in Hollywood who realized that the cartoons Japan made for their domestic consumption had great potential for American audiences. He took several Japanese series, wrote new stories, and redubbed them to create Robotech. Scoff if you must, but Robotech was the first taste of anime for some people. He also brought seminal classics Akira and Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) to America, with little compromise. I still think the Streamline dub of Totoro is wonderful, perhaps better than the Disney/Pixar dub.

Macek didn't restrict his involvement in the animation industry to creating America-friendly versions of anime, he also helped the four original "Big Shots" of Spumco sell Ren and Stimpy to Nickelodeon. True, there were unintended consequences to that as well. But Macek's role in the initial big splash of R&S was apparently crucial.

Macek was a rarity: a geek making a living from being geeky. Something we all aspire to. And he died too soon. 58 years is too young.

Belated review: A Non-Crisis on DC Animated Earth.

2010-03-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

It’s been out for about a month, but this is the first time I had a chance to see the latest DC Comics direct-to-video movie, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. In all honesty, it wasn’t a high priority. It is a nice project, but it’s not a major advance in either animation or superhero movies.

In fact, it came from scripts written for the Justice League Unlimited series by Dwayne McDuffie. He, in turn, took the idea from one of the older ideas in DC Comics – swiped by Star Trek for the “Mirror, Mirror” episode. The first time I became aware of it was in my childhood, when the modern Flash of the 1960’s discovered a parallel world with the Flash of the 1940’s. Alternate universes are an old story at DC, and in fact appeared in at least one of the Super Friends shows.

In this particular alternate universe, the most powerful metahumans have organized as the Crime Syndicate. Underneath their chairman Ultraman, characters like Owlman and Superwoman run crime families of super-powered thugs. And of course, the DC Universe’s bad guys are their good guys; in the pre-credits sequence, their version of the Joker dies heroically so that Lex Luthor can escape to our universe. And of course, he enlists the Justice League to bring the Crime Syndicate down.

There’s very little plot, but a lot of action. There are well-choreographed fight scenes; because this isn’t intended for kids, you can see Superman actually throwing punches at Superwoman. But, aside from two characters, there’s very little to intrigue us. Superwoman is a Wonder Woman gone completely bad; her black outfit and black ponytail (suggesting whips and S-and-M?) and her sultry admission that she’s a sociopathic killer makes her a standout villain. I don’t like making sexist statements, but she is hawt.

Owlman is something else, though. Not only is he an evil Batman, he’s informed by Ayn Rand’s philosophy, as was Rorschach in Watchmen. He takes the Big Bad Weapon that could wipe out a single Earth, and decides to use it to wipe out all of existence. “Human life is a cancer,” he grimly intones, as he fights Batman to a near-standstill.

Some fans have quibbled about the choices of voice actors; none of them are from the classic DC animated series. But the choices work, and are good, as with the aforementioned Superwoman (Gina Torres) and Owlman (James Woods).

It’s good to have McDuffie writing for the DC Universe again, after all his work on Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 series. My only complaint is that the final production of Crisis on Two Earths is aimed at action rather than character. This will appeal to the long-time DC Comics fan, but it won’t make any converts. It’s smarter than the similar Marvel Comics animated movies and series like Super Hero Squad, but that’s not surprising. For all the work and expense Warner put into it, it’s still a rental, not a must-buy.

New song: Anime Fan

2010-03-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

This last weekend at MarsCon (don't ask where it is, I don't know, except it's up North and I didn't go there) Luke Ski and Carrie Dahlby finally gave that nauseating Christina Aguilera song "Candyman" the lyrics that make it worth listening to. Their version is called "Anime Fan" and as far as I can tell, it references every popular anime ever made. (At the end it even references hentae - it includes bits from one of Luke's spoken bits about the Japanese schoolgirl with the too-short skirt and Scrotor, the Sex Demon from the Fifth Dimension.)

Here's the link on The FuMP web site to the song. For the next week and a half, you can download a 128K version of the song for free - after that, a 192k CD quality version will cost you 99 cents to download.

And here's the poster Luke drew for the song...

LOGORAMA WINS! LOGORAMA WINS!!!

2010-03-07T21:38:00.000-08:00

The animation Oscars went to Up for best feature and Logorama for best short. I am totally stoked!!! Also happy to see Kathryn Bigelow win for best director, the first woman to get that distinction, ever; Christoph Waltz for his incredible performance in Inglourious Basterds.

Comic-Con leaving San Diego?

2010-02-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

2012 might be the end of San Diego Comic-Con...perhaps we need to prepare for Anaheim Comic-Con?

Personally I think the only solution that can contain San Diego is Vegas, Baby, Vegas.

OMG awesome-sauce...if this doesn't get the Oscar for best animated short there is no justice...

2010-02-11T12:03:00.000-08:00

And how the HELL did they get around all the Intellectual Property issues? Canal+ backed this so it's gotta be legit.

Hilarious freaking short.

Annie Awards presented...

2010-02-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

Best Animated Feature
Up - Pixar Animation Studios

Best Home Entertainment Production
Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder - The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Best Animated Short Subject
Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5 - ShadowMachine

Best Animated Television Commercial
Spanish Lottery "Deportees" - Acme Filmworks, Inc.

Best Animated Television Production
Prep and Landing - ABC Family/Walt Disney Animation Studios

Best Animated Television Production for Children
The Penguins of Madagascar - Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation

Animated Effects
James Mansfield "The Princess and the Frog" - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Character Animation in a Television Production
Phillip To "Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space" - DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Feature Production
Eric Goldberg "The Princess and the Frog" - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Character Design in a Television Production
Bill Schwab "Prep and Landing" - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Character Design in a Feature Production
Shane Prigmore "Coraline" - Laika

Directing in a Television Production
Bret Haaland "The Penguins of Madagascar - Launchtime" - Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation

Directing in a Feature Production
Pete Docter "Up" - Pixar Animation Studios

Music in a Television Production
Guy Moon The Fairly OddParents: "Wishology-The Big Beginning" - Nickelodeon

Music in a Feature Production
Bruno Coulais "Coraline" - Laika

Production Design in a Television Production
Andy Harkness "Prep and Landing" - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Production Design in a Feature Production
Tadahiro Uesugi "Coraline" - Laika

Storyboarding in a Television Production
Robert Koo "Merry Madagascar" - DreamWorks Animation

Storyboarding in a Feature Production
Tom Owens "Monsters vs. Aliens" — DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Television Production
Tom Kenny - Voice of SpongeBob - "SpongeBob SquarePants - Truth or Square" - Nickelodeon

Voice Acting in a Feature Production
Jen Cody - Voice of Charlotte - "The Princess and the Frog" - Walt Disney Animation Studios

Writing in a Television Production
Daniel Chun - "The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XX" - Gracie Films

Writing in a Feature Production
Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach - "Fantastic Mr. Fox" - 20th Century Fox

Oscar Nom Nom time...

2010-02-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

Animated Feature Film
• Coraline Henry Selick
• Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson
• The Princess and the Frog John Musker and Ron Clements
• The Secret of Kells Tomm Moore
• Up Pete Docter

Again, Ponyo gets shut out. The Secret of Kells is a surprise, although the small distribution company, Cartoon Saloon, that did a small release of the movie in December pushed it and pushed it hard. Kells is already a winner if it wins or not for the nomination.

My pick is Up, though. I mean Princess and the Frog is a sentimental favorite because it's the return to form of Disney traditional animation and also the first 2D Pixar film. But Up is just masterful, affecting, effective and powerful. Up also was nominated for BEST PICTURE, and it deserves it. This is one freaking POWERFUL movie. The game-changing possibility of Ed Asner being nominated as Best Actor for his voice performance in Up did not materialize, sadly.

Short Film (Animated)
• French Roast Fabrice O. Joubert
• Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty Nicky Phelan and Darragh O’Connell
• The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte) Javier Recio Garcia
• Logorama Nicolas Schmerkin
• A Matter of Loaf and Death Nick Park

Another example of the disconnect between Annie Awards and Academy Awards short-subject nominations. If you did a Venn diagram of the nominations for the same category in each horse race, there would be no intersection. It is shocking that Nick Park didn't get nominated by the Annie nominators. Aardman Animation is usually an Annie favorite, and would have easily trounced those in the field for the Short Subject Annie, especially considering the weakness of the field. Pups Of Liberty WTF???

Music (Original Score)
• Avatar James Horner
• Fantastic Mr. Fox Alexandre Desplat
• The Hurt Locker Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
• Sherlock Holmes Hans Zimmer
• Up Michael Giacchino

Randy Newman's song-oriented score for Princess and the Frog was disqualified about a month ago, so the lack of score nom was not a surprise. Joe Hishaishi's brilliant score for Ponyo, however, was shut out. :P

Music (Original Song)
• “Almost There” from The Princess and the Frog Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
• “Down in New Orleans” from The Princess and the Frog Music and Lyric by Randy Newman
• “Loin de Paname” from Paris 36 Music by Reinhardt Wagner Lyric by Frank Thomas
• “Take It All” from Nine Music and Lyric by Maury Yeston
• “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” from Crazy Heart Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Love that song "Almost There." But "The Weary Kind" is the favorite. Too bad, Randy Newman deserves some love for his authentic take on the musics of New Orleans.

Just finished Annie voting...

2010-01-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

...and this time I wasn't given any technical categories, just best features, best tv show, best tv show for kids, best commercial, best home video release and best short. Too bad, because I had definite ideas about some of the technical categories and who did and did not deserve Annie love. And as far as the kidvid category...I couldn't find anything to vote affirmatively for so I just didn't vote at all in that category. Then again, this meant that voting the Annie ballot wasn't the endurance contest it had been last time. I am still unhappy that Ed Asner is not up for best voice actor, because his was an example of real acting that you normally don't see in American animation. I still wish Ponyo had been up for best picture. But I voted for what I considered the best of what was there. I did my duty. I earned my screeners for the year. Hoo-yah.

UP for the win at Golden Globes!!!

2010-01-17T19:49:00.001-08:00

The miraculously wonderful Pixar movie Up won Best Animated Feature, and Michael Giacchino won Best Score for his score for Up as well. That's it for now.

Best animation of the Decade From Hell...

2009-12-30T21:41:00.001-08:00

(in no particular order)

Lilo and Stitch
Just the most beautifully animated and beautifully staged 2D animated feature of the decade. You can't lose setting a movie in Hawaii, and the hand-painted watercolor background paintings are just to die for. The struggles of a barely-out-of-her-teens older sister caring for a feisty, troubled younger sister register as REAL even though the inclusion of the alien hexapodal genetics experiment Stitch adds a fantasy touch. I would even give this the edge over The Princess and the Frog even though that was a visual feast too.

Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence
This movie only gets more and more important to me with every viewing. You don't quite register it to begin with, the movie is so OMG spectacular visually, (see it on Blu-ray on a good 1020p HD setup) but this movie is an important criticism of the "moe" (mo-EH) subculture that is unfortunately ripping the guts out of the Japanese animation industry right now. The pretty, spooky, barely-pubescent Hadaly-type "sexoroids" that are malfunctioning all over Japan in the movie are a metaphor for the pre-pubescent sex objects that are all the rage in series and OAVs among male pop culture consumers. The reason why good anime is hard to find right now is because there is such a concentration on this very narrow category to the detriment of everything else. Heck, the best series I've seen in a while is Chii's Sweet Home, which is an Azumanga Daioh-style slice-of-life series centering not around humans, but A CAT. When feline stories trump human stories, something is wrong.

Wall-E
And here we have a story almost totally about robots that is one of the most touching and most human stories this decade. The first half of this movie has hardly any dialogue but it's incredibly acted. It was awesome that Ben Burtt, the genius sound designer who gave voices to the non-human side of the Star Wars galaxy, was persuaded out of retirement to work on this movie. And yes, Wall-E's a PC, and EVE is a Mac. Yay for Jon Ives also being persuaded to work out of the box on EVE's character design. And this has done more for ecological awareness than a thousand thousand showings of An Inconvenient Truth.

Waltz With Bashir
A documentary about an Israeli generation coming to terms with the brutality of the Lebanese War. It just so happens to be animated. The graphic novel look, which was all hand drawn, and the surrealism of the movie is 100% reality based. Slowly the truth is teased out, just like the protagonist (based on Ari Folman, the man who directed this movie) teases out the horrifying reality he experienced on the battlefield in 1982 but suppressed afterward.

Up
If Wall-E is about the spark of "young" love, then Up is about the richness of love between a couple who spent a lifetime together. It also is about a man moving on to a whole new set of adventures in his golden years. I can't believe that Ed Asner, who brings the protagonist character of Carl Fredricksen to life with a strong and nuanced vocal performance, is not nominated for a Voice Acting Annie Award. The Casting Society of America has already awarded the casting directors for the movie with their highest honor for an animated feature. Heck, I hope the Academy shakes everyone up and nominates Asner for best actor. Asner's is one of the best voice acting performances of the decade, hands down.

An Up bonus: here's a remix by an Aussie DJ that is a nice spoiler-free intro to the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2yt1ooLQGo

Sita Sings The Blues
Film is an ensemble art form, and animated film is doubly so. A small army of artisans usually works on an animated feature. The myth of the Auteur, of the Director as "author" of a given movie, is usually only a reality in documentary film, where it's not unusual for a single person to do everything on a documentary. But Nina Paley spent 5 long years with several iterations of Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash on one lone Macintosh to create a feature of her own.

This is a mindblower of a movie. The elaborate artwork of India and Southeast Asia tells not only the grand cosmic story of the the love of the Hindu god Vishnu and the goddess Laxmi, but the heroic legend of Vishnu's incarnation as King Rama and Laxmi's incarnation as the beautiful and faithful heroine Sita, and the earthbound story of Paley's long-distance breakup with her ex-husband, who gets a gig animating at a studio in India.

These three tales are woven together with an attempt by three Indian friends of Paley trying to retell the Ramayana in front of a live mic, and the the torch songs of Jazz-age diva Annette Hanshaw. It was the very latter that got this movie in trouble, because Warner/Chappell Publishing held up distribution of the movie because they owned the publishing rights to Hanshaw's otherwise public domain recordings. Warner/Chappell eventually settled things with Paley, but added a twist worthy of a villain in a heroic legend: she could only give the movie away and show it on the festival circuit unless they got beaucoups more bucks. So Sita is now the first Creative Commons licensed animated feature, and can be downloaded for free from various sources, including Archive.Org. However, if some farsighted major would pay the ransom to Warner/Chappell, or if Time-Warner themselves decided "Hey! let's distribute this awesome movie for a feature run and put it out on DVD and Blu-Ray!" I guarantee it would be worth their while. Heck, I'm not alone in this: no less than Roger Ebert agrees with me. Jai Sita!

Persepolis
The upheaval in Iran has been one of the most compelling stories of 2009. The long-suffering citizenry has lived under autocrats for most of their history, from kings to dictators to Supreme Religious Leaders. In 1951, the Iranian people elected a reformist, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as their Prime Minister. However, one of the reforms the otherwise pro-Western and non-Communist PM was considering was the nationalization of the British oil concession, a relic of Iran's status as a protectorate of the British Empire post WWI. The UK and its US ally decided that this wasn't going to happen, so they participated in a rightist coup which toppled the Mosaddegh government and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, formerly a figurehead head of state, as dictatorial ruler of Iran.

As the Shah's autocracy became more and more stifling, resistance simmered under the surface. It was in this pressure cooker that a woman named Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969. Her life under the Shah and later under the Islamic Republic made it into 4 graphic novels, collectively called Persepolis. In exile in France, Ms. Satrapi was able to take her graphic novels, which became worldwide sensations, and make an animated film based on them. The result is a powerful document, a personal testament of a life lived under two different despotisms, and the liberating power of art.

If you want to understand the roots of the current uprising, and understand why most Iranians who don't have a royalist axe to grind would rather the US stay out of the current conflict, watch this excellent animated feature.

Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone
Yes, we've been here before. This is Gainax's tale of the End of the World, which first blazed forth on Japanese television in 1995, then hit theatres with the two movies "Death and Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion." In some respects, this is Director Hideaki Anno's attempt to create a definitive retelling of the story of Angel attacks, a sinister cabal of scientists bent on metamorphosing Humankind into Godhood, and the designs of a renegade scientist, Ikari Gendou, to bend this process of metamorphosis, "Instrumentality," to his own ends. But in other respects, it is a totally new iteration, which is now starting to veer from the original story arc with the second movie, Evangelion 2.0, You Can (Not) Advance, which has already screened in Japan and is awaiting a Funimation release in the US.

Yes, folks, from a visual point of view, this is quite definitive. The CGI revolution has allowed some of the Angel attacks to look absolutely mindbogglingly beautiful, especially the last one they encounter which is like a living crystal that is able to morph into geometric shapes. Tokyo 3, the fortress city that UN NERV defends, is more detailed and impressive than ever. And the technology of the movie, the giant robot-like, armored Eva units, are more fully realized than in the original series and the older movies.

The story accelerates almost too much for people not familiar with it to follow. However, the Japanese audiences that this release was initially intended for are pretty much up to speed with the particulars, so it's understandable that we sort of "cut to the chase" from the beginning. Still, there is enough there so that even if you're an Evangelion virgin you'll be fine. It's a great thrill ride of a movie. Strap in and enjoy.

The Triplets of Belleville
One of the great trends going on in animation right now is that it is becoming more internationalized. It is notable that three of these movies on this list are from somewhere other than either the US or Japan. The Triplets of Belleville was made in Canada by a French and French-Canadian team, and the city of Belleville where the climax of this movie occurs is as much based on the city of Quebec as it is Manhattan.

This is another movie that, like Wall-E, has little dialogue, but which tells its story with the universal language of images. It also shares, with Up, a focus on a group of people rarely seen in animation: old people. The eponymous Triplets are a singing group who were in their prime in either the '20s or the '30s, and the main character, Madame Souza, is an older lady whose grandson, Champion, is a bicycle racer training for the Tour de France. Even the dog, Bruno, is an oldtimer, whose overstuffed contours make for much humor.

You'd think that a movie about old people, a bicycle racer, and a fat dog that chases trains would be a bore. But no, this is a visual feast. It is hard to describe, you just have to experience it.

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, aka Spirited Away
Ghibli at its most surreal. A little girl and her yuppie parents are moving to a new town, and they get sidetracked by a tourist village centered around a Sento, a Japanese bathhouse. Little do they know, but this tourist village serves the myriad of Kami, the godlike beings of Japanese mythology, and mere mortals are not necessarily welcome.

In spite of the cultural resonances being so alien to American audiences, this has turned out to be the Studio Ghibli feature most honored by American critics. And rightly so, it's a trip and a half. While I think I'm still more impressed with Mononoke Hime, this movie is brilliant and needs to be on any best of list.

So there you go: 10 films for this misbegotten decade, plus links to the DVDs. I chose to link to Barnes & Noble because Amazon's labor practices are just unacceptable now considering how big and dominant the company is. However, I'm sure there are better deals out there. And one last comment about Sita Sings The Blues: yes, it's available for free, but please consider buying a copy of the DVD to support Nina Paley. She's worth it.

What is WRONG with you people???

2009-12-28T14:54:00.000-08:00

Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel over The Princess And The Frog?

Kiss that frog...

2009-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

OK, Disney's put out their first hand-drawn animated movie in five years and the first also under the leadership of Pixar's John Lasseter. The Princess And The Frog. A lot is riding on this movie, and it looks like Avatar might have taken a little wind out of its sails. But overall it is one beautiful confection, the most physically beautiful drawn domestic animated movie I've seen since Lilo and Stitch, and it has nothing to apologize for in its depiction of post-Plessy v. Ferguson race relations in New Orleans.

Let's get the racial issue out of the way right up front. New Orleans has had a far more nuanced race relations situation than any other place in the Southern United States. For example, Faubourg Treme is a historically integrated community in NOLA where in the 19th Century CE a gumbo pot of ethnicities, including free Blacks, lived shoulder to shoulder. This racial mixing annoyed the more racist population of the rest of the state of Louisiana, and eventually climaxed in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which held that "separate but equal" facilities for Blacks and Whites were AOK. This stood until Brown v. Board of Education, the decision that desegregated the public schools in the US.

The depiction of a Caribbean prince wooing both an aristocratic White woman and a working-class Black woman, the latter being our protagonist Tiana, in 1920s New Orleans, is not out of line. Even after Plessy the traditional (for New Orleans) blurred color line was constant. However blurred the color line was, it was still present. And The Princess And The Frog portrays the truth about it without making a huge deal over it.

In one of the early scenes of the movie, you see Tiana and her mother leaving the home of a wealthy White family where the mother worked as a seamstress. They leave out the back "servant's entrance." They board a streetcar and find their place in the back of the streetcar, and the ride takes them to their working class Black neighborhood. I am not sure, but Tiana's neighborhood looks like it's based on the Ninth Ward before the 1927 Mississippi Flood. You see Black families living in small, crowded houses, and Tiana's dad sharing a huge pot of gumbo with the neighbors. It's an instant party. These are people living in bleak circumstances, but true to the spirit of the city that gave birth to Jazz they eke whatever happiness they can from simple things like food and music. The scene is brief in terms of screen time, but it's very, very true. It's light-years from the racial myopia of Song Of The South.

Tiana loses her genius chef dad to World War I, and supports her family as a waitress. She still carries a "dream from (her) father"...a desire to open up her own restaurant in a vacant building formerly a sugar mill. This dream is so ingrained in her she, unlike most Disney Princess characters, doesn't care a whit about handsome princes, not even Prince Naveen, the light-skinned Caribbean Creole Prince of a fictitious island kingdom. Invited to a party by her childhood friend, the spoiled rich white girl her mom sewed for, she is not entirely impressed by the handsome playboy who was looking for a rich girl to marry because his parents cut him off from his wealth.

The sinister Dr. Facilier rewards Naveen's desire for riches by turning him into the eponymous Frog. And of course, the only way of breaking the spell is the kiss of a princess...or a sufficiently wealthy heiress. Naveen mistakes Tiana for a princess, and asks her for a kiss. She's grossed out, but does it anyway. The kiss backfires, and as the official trailer makes evident, she's now a frog as well.

The whole movie is full of affectionate homages to elements of animation history. When Tiana dreams of her restaurant, the sequence becomes a homage to Tex Avery's classic '30s streamline moderne cartoon, "Page Miss Glory."

And the sinister Dr. Facilier? He's very very Cab Calloway in Fleischer-land. If you've already seen the movie, the animation of Calloway as Koko The Clown in the Fleischer masterpiece "Snow White" will be very familiar.

But what's not traditional here is that Tiana is no passive figure. She is a true "Self-rescuing Princess" who actually is way more active in finding her way out of her predicament than her "Handsome Prince" Naveen. She has a dream, a plan and is strong enough to see that dream through regardless of any help she might get along the way. For her, love is a distraction. It takes being turned into a frog and being disappointed initially by the good Voudoun shamaness Mama Odie to send her looking for comfort in the green slimy arms of Naveen.

This is the first time in a long time in any animated musical where the "showstopper" numbers don't literally stop the show, but push the storytelling forward. It helps that Randy Newman, who lived in New Orleans from shortly after his birth to age 11 and splits his time between there and Los Angeles ever since, is the one writing the words and the music. The original choice was Alan Mencken, who probably doesn't know what it means to miss New Orleans. Instead of faux-Jazz, faux-Zydeco and faux-Dixieland, you get Newman's take on the real music of the region. Newman is perhaps the best composer regularly doing animation scores, along with his cousin Thomas Newman, and he seems to have a real love of the medium and a flair for telling stories through words and music.

In a lot of respects, this is the first 2D Pixar movie. John Lasseter's hands are all over this, even though he only gets producer credit here. This is a glorious return to form that bodes well for the future of 2D at Disney/Pixar. The blockbuster Avatar has unfortunately made Princess' box-office sledding kind of rough. But Disney has already said they have green-lit two more 2D movies and is developing more. My dream is that they reach across the Pacific and do a co-production with a top-tier Japanese studio like Production IG. Anime, and independent animators in Europe, has kept the torch burning for hand-drawn animation. It's good to see Disney (or more accurately Disney/Pixar) back in the game.

Apparently "Princess" won't be the last drawn animated feature at Disney

2009-12-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Right now, The Princess and the Frog is in extremely limited release, showing at the Ziegfield Theatre in New York City and at the biggest screening room at The Walt Disney Company Studio in Burbank. The latter is history-making: the first time the studio has been opened to a public event. However, this Friday is the big day for the movie, the first hand-drawn animated feature for Disney since the ill-fated Home On The Range.

Thankfully it looks like it won't be the last. Disney has committed to at least two more drawn features, and hints are that more will be on the way.

The first one does not sound promising: yet another go-round with Winnie The Pooh. Disney has had more luck than they're entitled to with their bastardization of AA Milne's gentle classics, and the residents of the Hundred-Acre Wood are a bunch of tame characters, albeit tame characters with neuroses.

But the second announced feature is more promising. It is The Snow Queen, the first traditional fairy tale the Disney Animation people have taken on in years. No "attitude," no modernization, no Jazzing it up, this will be a fairy tale taken straight out of the Eastern European classic tale.

A character that elegant and with that much realism would fail horribly in CGI because inevitably it would fall right down into the Uncanny Valley. Animators have found that in order to make an appealing CGI character you have to go the opposite direction from realism into cartooniness. This is why Up's humans succeeded. This is why The Incredibles' humans succeeded. This is why every freaking Zemeckis CGI opus has failed miserably. Even Jim Carrey's rubber-faced brilliance could not save the Zemeckis A Christmas Carol from being a zombie puppet show. It is why I don't hold much hope for Avatar in spite of all the hype and the admittedly beautiful visuals. I was not a fan of the feature-length Blue Sky Pictures version of Horton Hears A Who, but the Dr. Seuss derived character designs were definitely on the cartoony side and worked.

However, drawn animation abstracts us enough from flesh and blood reality to make character designs like that work. One need only look to Japan to see the realistic design of many of their action-adventure characters working brilliantly. I'm thinking of Batou and Kusanagi in Ghost In The Shell and the officers at NERV in Evangelion 1.0. If you remade Eva and Ghost in CGI and kept the same kind of drawing style you'd wind up where Squaresoft took the Final Fantasy movies...right down into the Uncanny Valley.

The Japanese have shown us that drawn animation definitely has a place, no matter what Jeffery Katzenberg says. It's good that Disney is not placing all their traditional animation chips on Princess and the Frog no matter what the speculation up to now has been. It seems like Lasseter and Iger believe 2D has a place in this 3D obsessive world of American animation. And that makes me feel real good about the future of American animation.

Annie time! Annie time!

2009-12-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

Here's the noms. Om nom nom.

Best Animated Feature
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs – Sony Pictures Animation
Coraline – Laika
Fantastic Mr. Fox – 20th Century Fox
The Princess and the Frog – Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Secret of Kells – Cartoon Saloon
Up – Pixar Animation Studios
Note: looks like DreamWorks won't be able to repeat its total domination of last year's awards. I always thought that was a bit fishy. Speaking of fishy, where the frak is PONYO in this list???

Best Home Entertainment Production
Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas – Universal Animation Studios
Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder – The Curiosity Company in association with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Green Lantern: First Flight – Warner Bros. Animation
Open Season 2 – Sony Pictures Animation
SpongeBob vs. The Big One – Nickelodeon

Best Animated Short Subject
Pups of Liberty – Picnic Pictures
Robot Chicken: Star Wars 2.5 – ShadowMachine
Santa, The Fascist Years – Plymptoons
The Rooster, The Crocodile and The Night Sky – Barley Films
The Story of Walls – Badmash Animation Studios

Best Animated Television Commercial
Goldfish: In The Dark – Blur Studios, Inc.
Idaho Lottery “Twiceland” – Acme Filmworks, Inc.
Nutty Tales – Blue Sky Studios
Spanish Lottery “Deportees” – Acme Filmworks, Inc.
The Spooning – Screen Novelties /Acne Media

Best Animated Television Production
Glenn Martin, DDS – Torante, Cuppa Coffee Studios & Rogers Communications
Merry Madagascar – DreamWorks Animation
Prep and Landing – ABC Family/Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Simpsons – Gracie Films

Best Animated Television Production for Children
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse – Disney Television Animation
SpongeBob SquarePants – Nickelodeon
The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack – Cartoon Network Studios
The Mighty B! – Nickelodeon/Polka Dot Pictures/Paper Kite Productions
The Penguins of Madagascar – Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation

Animated Effects
Scott Cegielski “Monsters vs. Aliens” – DreamWorks Animation
Alexander Feigin “9” – 9 L.L.C.
Eric Froemling “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Tom Kluyskens “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” – Sony Pictures Animation
James Mansfield “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Character Animation in a Television Production
Mark Donald “B.O.B.’s Big Break” – DreamWorks Animation
Mark Mitchell “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Kevan Shorey “Merry Madagascar” – DreamWorks Animation
Tony Smeed “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Phillip To “Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space” – DreamWorks Animation

Character Animation in a Feature Production
Andreas Deja “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Eric Goldberg “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Travis Knight “Coraline” – Laika
Daniel Nguyen “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Bruce Smith “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Character Design in a Television Production
Bryan Arnett “The Mighty B! – Catatonic” – Nickelodeon/Polka Dot Pictures/Paper Kite Productions
Ben Balistreri “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” – Cartoon Network Studios
Craig Kellman “Merry Madagascar” – DreamWorks Animation
Bill Schwab “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Character Design in a Feature Production
Daniel Lopez Munoz “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Shane Prigmore “Coraline” – Laika
Shannon Tindle “Coraline” – Laika

Directing in a Television Production
Pam Cooke & Jansen Yee “American Dad: Brains, Brains & Automobiles” – 20th Century Fox/Fuzzy Door/Underdog
Rob Fendler “Popzilla” – Animax
John Infantino, J.G. Quintel “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: Candy Casanova” – Cartoon Network Studios
Bret Haaland “The Penguins of Madagascar – Launchtime” – Nickelodeon and DreamWorks Animation
Jennifer Oxley “The Wonder Pets: Help The Monster” – Nickelodeon/Little Airplane Productions

Directing in a Feature Production
Wes Anderson “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – 20th Century Fox
Pete Docter “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Christopher Miller, Phil Lord “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” – Sony Pictures Animation
Hayao Miyazaki “Ponyo” – Studio Ghibli
Henry Selick “Coraline” – Laika

Music in a Television Production
Michael Giacchino “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Kevin Kiner “Star Wars: The Clone Wars “Weapons Factory” – Lucasfilm Animation Ltd.
Guy Moon “The Fairly OddParents: “Wishology- The Big Beginning” – Nickelodeon

Music in a Feature Production
Bruno Coulais “Coraline” – Laika
Michael Giacchino “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Joe Hisaishi “Ponyo” – Studio Ghibli
John Powell “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” – Blue Sky Studios

Production Design in a Television Production
Mac George “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Andy Harkness “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Janice Kubo “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” – Cartoon Network Studios
Production Design in a Feature Production
Christopher Appelhans “Coraline” – Laika
Ian Gooding “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Tadahiro Uesugi “Coraline – Laika
Christopher Vacher “9” – 9 L.L.C.

Storyboarding in a Television Production
Sunil Hall “The Mighty B!: Catatonic” – Nickelodeon/Polka Dot Pictures/Paper
Brandon Kruse “The Fairly OddParents: Fly Boy” – Nickelodeon
Robert Koo “Merry Madagascar” – DreamWorks Animation
Joe Mateo “Prep and Landing” – ABC Family/Walt Disney Animation Studios
Kite Productions
Adam Van Wyk “The Spectacular Spider-Man: Final Curtain” – Culver Entertainment

Storyboarding in a Feature Production
Sharon Bridgeman “Astro Boy” – Imagi Studios
Chris Butler “Coraline” – Laika
Ronnie Del Carmen “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Tom Owens “Monsters vs. Aliens” – DreamWorks Animation
Peter Sohn “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios

Voice Acting in a Television Production
Danny Jacobs - Voice of King Julien - “Merry Madagascar” – DreamWorks Animation
Nicky Jones - Voice of Chowder - “Chowder: The Dinner Theatre’” – Cartoon Network Studios
Tom Kenny - Voice of SpongeBob - “SpongeBob SquarePants – Truth or Square” – Nickelodeon
Dwight Schultz - Voice of Mung Daal - “Chowder:The Party Cruise” – Cartoon Network Studios
Willow Smith - Voice of Abby - “Merry Madagascar” – DreamWorks Animation

Voice Acting in a Feature Production
Jen Cody - Voice of Charlotte - “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Dawn French - Voice of Miss Forcible – “Coraline” – Laika
Hugh Laurie - Voice of Dr. Cockroach Ph.D. – “Monsters vs. Aliens” – DreamWorks Animation
John Leguizamo - Voice of Sid – “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur” – Blue Sky Studios
Jennifer Lewis - Voice of Mama Odie – “The Princess and the Frog” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
And WHERE is Ed Asner? He did a tour-de-force performance in Up. Some of the best voice work done by a person not normally a voice actor. This is a REAL oversight. Too bad the ballot isn't set up for write-in candidates. This is the big surprise of the nomination pack.

Writing in a Television Production
Daniel Chun – “The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XX” – Gracie Films
Kevin Deters, Stevie Wermers-Skelton – “Prep and Landing” – Walt Disney Animation Studios
Valentina L. Garza – “The Simpsons: Four Great Women and a Manicure” – Gracie Films
Billy Kimball and Ian Maxtone-Graham - “The Simpsons: Gone Maggie Gone” – Gracie Films
Billy Lopez – The Wonder Pets – Save the Honey Bears” – Nickelodeon Productions/Little Airplane Productions

Writing in a Feature Production
Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach – “Fantastic Mr. Fox” – 20th Century Fox
Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy – “Up” – Pixar Animation Studios
Timothy Hyde Harris and David Bowers – “Astro Boy” – Imagi Studios
Christopher Miller and Phil Lord – “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” – Sony Pictures Animation
Up deserves the nod here. I've also seen AstroBoy and Cloudy, haven't seen Mr. Fox yet, but Up is just...awesome. And Ponyo should have gotten a chance to play in this category too.
End of list...

Anyway, it's going to be Up's game to lose, and Coraline might be the likely challenger. 9 got shut out of everything but relatively minor nominations, which means that Fred Stuhr's laughing up there in the Great Beyond.

Monsters Vs. Aliens also got short shrift, which might actually be blowback from the Kung Fu Panda pwnage of last year. And Ponyo...good god, didn't anyone SEE Ponyo??? Way to go, Disney. Nominating Miyazaki as director without nominating Ponyo as best picture is a tremendous oversight.

Another shutout that I can't understand: no honors for Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone. That was absolutely spectacular. Perhaps it's the long lag time between Japanese and US releases that did Eva in. They've already seen 2.0, and 1.0 was barely released here.

Oh well, warts and all, those are the Annie noms. Bring on the endless online ballot....oy....

Disturbing...

2009-11-23T09:19:00.000-08:00

...but super cool. Not for the kiddies. A really good short by one of 4 Degrees Celsius Studio's hotshots.

Extra [Ken Ishii] from Xix on Vimeo.

Looks like there will be 5 nominees for the Animated Feature Oscar

2009-11-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

Here we go...they're under starter's orders...the 20 qualified films that will be winnowed down into 5 nominees for the Animated Feature Oscar.

* “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”
* “Astro Boy”
* “Battle for Terra”
* “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
* “Coraline”
* “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”
* “The Dolphin – Story of a Dreamer”
* “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
* “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”
* “Mary and Max”
* “The Missing Lynx”
* “Monsters vs. Aliens”
* “9”
* “Planet 51”
* “Ponyo”
* “The Princess and the Frog”
* “The Secret of Kells”
* “Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure”
* “A Town Called Panic”
* “Up”

You haven't heard of many of these? You will. The Oscar rush will probably bring all the movies that haven't been in theatres locally here in LA to theatres between now and December 31st. I'm sure many of these aren't worthy. However, with Up and Ponyo likely nominees, it's likely that something good will wind up winning.

Quick reviews: Astro Boy and Ponyo...

2009-11-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know, this is awfully late, and these are going to be really cursory reviews. Still, I thought both of them had their really good points, and one of them is a must-get when it comes out on DVD. The other one? Well, let's get to the really stand-out one first.

Ponyo
The dub wasn't sick-making, first off. I wish I could have heard the Japanese performance and read subtitles throughout, but this wasn't too bad. This is Miyazaki in his Totoro mode, with winsome magical creatures, and a benevolent nature guided by the Kami vs. malevolent human destruction of the natural world.

I also like what he did to the Little Mermaid myth. In the original a love-struck mermaid gives up being immortal and a sea creature to be the human bride of a handsome prince, always tortured by her forever aching feet but glad to be with the man of her dreams. Instead of love, Ponyo is motivated by a need for friendship and for belonging to a family. Isn't that something everyone wants, anyway?

As always with Ghibli films Ponyo is a visual feast, and exists in that Ghibli universe where Modern Japan and Old Europe meld and mingle into a single beautiful place. Even the flotsam and jetsam in the ocean is gorgeous. This is coming out on DVD in March 2010, although there is another DVD I've seen in some places in Little Tokyo that actually has English (British English) language subtitles. I'm thinking it has its origins in Hong Kong. If you are impatient I'm sure the latter is available online. But for crying out loud buy the R1 Disney release if you do. I recommend this one highly.

Astro Boy
I can't say the same for Astro Boy. The director of Aardman's Flushed Away has turned his attention to the founding myth of Japanese animation: the legend of Tetsuwan Atomu, the robot who wants to be a Real Boy. I don't think Tezuka Osamu would entirely recognize this version of his creation, but it's got enough of it to be sensible.

It is interesting that this was made by Hong Kong-based Imagi Studios and had a Brit at the helm, because much of the added elements in the movie were very British in their origin. Once you get off of the floating island of Metro City and onto the surface of Planet Earth, you wind up in a broken-down world run by the Fagin-esque Hamegg and his horde of scavenger children who look for usable parts in the ocean of junk cast off from Metro City. And in the midst of the Dickens-in-the-future life on Earth, a rag-tag band of revolutionary robots bicker Pythonesque between direct acts for robot liberation.

There are so many direct quotes from other animated movies and TV shows it's not funny. It's yet another attempt to try to arrive at the same success as Shrek with referential humor. (Or Humour in this case!) Visual quotes from everything from Wall-E to The Iron Giant are everywhere.

Nevertheless I was entertained for an hour and a half by this. I have searched in vain for a DVD release date on this, but I suspect that since it hasn't exactly been a barn-burner in the theatres it will likely go out on DVD and Blu-Ray quite soon. I would characterize this as a rental and not a buy, though.

More fun from Japan: welcome the Hotaru-san!

2009-11-02T00:59:00.000-08:00

The same crazy guys who brought you Vending Machine Red and friends, and later the Limon guy from Sprite and his journey across Japan, are now invading unsuspecting communities in Tokyo with a horde of dancers with yellow lights on their butts. It looks like a silly flash mob but they're FIREFLIES (Hotaru-san) and they are advertising a new service from Japanese Internet Service Provider So-Net. Very cute, very Cirque du Soleil. This is going to go viral worldwide.

Que viva Dali, Que viva surrealismo, Que viva animacion!

2009-10-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

I know this has been out for a few years now, but it's only recently shown up on YouTube. This is freaking incredible.

Two Nostalgic Capes

2009-10-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest heroic team-ups in comic history has always been Batman and Superman. Simply by reading stories where they appear together, you can see the history of comic book characterization.

At the beginning, of course, they were always best buds. Never a moment of conflict. DC's World's Finest Comics was a monthly celebration of friendship. Then, characterization became more complex, and writers with distinct ideas turned their personalities against each other. (You could also say they were "writers with something to prove to their peers" or "writers show-boating angst and conflict.")

The high point of that conflict was the fourth and final issue of Frank Miller's graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, in which Bats fights Big Blue in a literal battle to the death. Bruce Wayne snarls angrily about the stable, conservative, patriotic, obedient parents that Clark Kent had - parents he didn't have. The result was Superman working for a Ronald Reagan-looking warmongering President, and Batman a wanted criminal that Supes was ordered to break.

Since that histrionic excess, regular comics have toned it down, but the two heroes still note each other's differences - and worry about them. The current team-up book, Superman/Batman, has thrown the heroes into random alien circumstances, against odd villains and alternate universes. All the time, their thought balloons provide a running commentary on their thoughts. Supes thinks Bats is too paranoid, Bats thinks Supes is too trusting. And so on.

The made-for-video animated movie, Public Enemies, is loosely based on the most coherent story line that ever ran in Superman/Batman. Thanks to domestic problems and a failing economy (interesting coincidence it's released now), Lex Luthor becomes President. And, of course, he arranges to have his two most hated enemies hunted down with a billion-dollar bounty. All at a time when a gigantic meteor made of Kryptonite is hurtling towards Earth, threatening not only Kal-El but everyone.

The movie's main visual interest is seeing a lot of minor DC characters get a few seconds of animation. The most attractive appearance is a fully-grown young-adult Starfire - not the cutesy child from the Teen Titans series, but the hot, stacked, underdressed orange-skinned alien woman who sexed-up DC comics two decades ago. The other "big stars" of the DC Universe didn't even get cameo appearances, to provide more time for Captain Atom, Major Force, Giganta and other second-stringers.

One of the best factors in this movie is the return of the voice actors who did wonders for the Superman and Batman animated series. Tim Daly as Superman, Kevin Conroy as Batman and Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor are welcome presences. They are good reminders of the animation past of those characters, and necessary, because the animation style isn't the art-deco of the TV series. It looks uncomfortably like Fox's old X-Men series, with thick black lines and a blocky look.

The two-disk version of the movie provides one of weirdest DVD extras I've seen. It's an imitation of the Dinner For Five celebrity show. Voice director Andrea Romano, the aforementioned Kevin Conroy, producer Bruce Timm and DC Comics editor Gregory Noveeck all sit around and gobble an expensive restaurant meal while talking about...well, old times. The great animated series they made when WB was willing to produce mature animation for kids. Besides two episodes of the Superman series with team-ups, there's not much to recommend the more expensive two-disk version.

And frankly, I can only recommend this movie for comic fanatics and completists. There's nothing here that expands the history of Batman and Superman, or their history together. The subsidiary DC characters are just cannon fodder, thrown in to make the battle more elaborate.

I have to add something else. Apparently Warner Animation is intent on producing a lot of these. It wasn't too long before we had Green Lantern: First Flight. The DVD promotes their next feature, and one of the comic book lines (thanks for making us pay for your advertising, guys).

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is a story written by Dwayne McDuffie, creator of Static Shock and producer of the Justice League Unlimited series. It was supposed to be the last episode of the series, cut for budget and resurrected for this movie. It's the story where the heroes face their mirror-universe criminal versions: Ultraman, Owl Man, Super Woman and the like. And their only supporter on the mirror world is a "good" Lex Luthor.

The comics promotion is for "Blackest Night," DC's answer to the Marvel event that turned a bunch of heroes into undead zombies. In the DC Universe, a bunch of "black power rings" bring several dead heroes back to life. Death has always been a "revolving door" for comic book characters, especially at DC. This is heavily hyped among comic fans, and now they're trying to hook the animation fans on it as well.

Pardon my lack of enthusiasm, but this is schlock. It's pulling stuff out of the comics and animating it - without regard to whether it works as a story or not. The New Frontier worked, especially since its art style was outstanding and its story was set in a great part of history. Superman: Doomsday set up the Superman-Lois Lane love affair and sealed it, bringing it up to date for the animated world.

Public Enemies isn't that special or specific. It's almost all combat with almost no humanity stuck in. The few bits of humanity are incidental, such as Power Girl (with the most prominent cleavage of all DC herones) being ogled by Toyman (the new one, a 13-year-old Japanese inventor with typical anime lecherousness). They don't involve the main characters at all.

I would love to see vital stories with these characters brought out in animation form. I don't want to see animated projects simply slapped together, or adapted willy-nilly from the comics. I hope that Crisis on Two Earths is worth the money. It had better be.

Funny with a Chance of Deeper Meaning.

2009-09-26T10:22:00.001-07:00

Theorists can talk all they want about what makes a good movie. But in the end, it all comes down to one thing; does it work? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs works.

What is remarkable is how stories from a simple kid's story book managed to gain both comic clout and a little relevance in its transition to a movie. You don't have to be serious or obsessed with social problems to insert them into a movie. The cute idea of scientist Flint Lockwood (Bill Hadler) developing a machine that turns atmospheric moisture into food means more than a simple gimmick to make kids giggle.

The island town of Sardine Falls is suffering a depression. It's not as grim as our real American depression; there are no closed stores, just people looking unhappy and moping around the grey buildings. No one can think outside the limited worldview of sardines; when Mayor Shelbourne (Bruce Campbell) creates a theme park, it's all sardine based, and his big fat son Brent (Andy Samburg) still likes to play "Baby Brent", the sardine icon, into young adulthood.

Flint's machine starts raining down food products - and note that they're nearly all fast food products. Only rarely does a salad or a vegetable drop down. And, just like real-world Americans, the Mayor starts gorging on those food products, becoming unbelievably obese, even for a cartoon character. (Why isn't everyone else packing on the fat? That's what Americans are doing, thanks to the corn sugar in nearly everything we eat.)

This becomes the new ticket for the Mayor, who modifies his theme park idea to use the free food falling from the skies. I live in Orlando, Florida, which was once a sleepy little mid-state town that was a stop-off point between Jacksonville and Miami. Walt Disney put my town on the map, and irrevocably filled it with tourist stuff. And in the same way our economy has crashed because the tourists can't afford to come here any more, the food from the skies becomes gigantic and starts destroying buildings and threatening lives.

All of the above is based, of course, on greed. Greed in overbuilding tourist businesses that are now closing up quickly; greed in assuming that the housing bubble would never pop; greed in wanting more and different kinds of food. And not coincidentally, greed at a time when many places around the world face killing shortages of food.

Okay, social significance aside, this film is one of the least pretentious animated features I've seen in some time. It has the requisite moral about believing in yourself, but when that gets out of the way there's a lot of joy in the film. For once the voice cast consists of people who are genuinely funny and are unashamed to act silly. Neil Patrick Harris - Dr. Horrible himself! - plays the synthesized voice of Flint's monkey Steve. Mr. T voices the blustering cop, with a strong dedication to his family. James Caan plays Flint's big, verbally-challenged father who can only speak in fishing metaphors. (Speaking of which, if you want to understand Dad's funniest moment, listen to Tom Smith's song "Tech Support for Dad." Deep in the voice credits are famous voice actors like Bob Bergen, Jess Harnell and even Laraine Newman. It sounds like they had fun doing this movie.

There is only one slight problem I have, and it's not uncommon. All the pictures of Sam show her in her "TV weatherperson" mode, bright-eyed and somewhat dumb-sounding. One of the plot points is that she is secretly a nerd, needs glasses and likes her hair in a scrunchie. That is how she ends the film, being true to herself. Unfortunately, little girls are still attracted to "princesses" and "pretty ladies" and that's how she looks in the film PR and available photos. Once again, truth is trumped by surface appearance.

Aside from that quibble, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a nice surprise after a summer of nearly nothing. And take a look at the credit sequence. Like Pixar's films, they animated the characters in the credits, providing a sort of "where are they now" look. Except I like these more than recent Pixar credits. They hint - hint only - that this would work as a 2-D television series.

Marvel pwn3d by Disney.

2009-08-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Well, Pixar did make the definitive Fantastic Four movie in The Incredibles, and Spidey and X-Men will remain at other studios due to contractual obligations, but the idea of the House of Mouse becoming the new owner of the Mighty Marvel Marching Society kind of gives me some pause.

This is the same studio which has been failing Miyazaki-sensei with their half-hearted support of Ponyo. This is a studio with a track record of neutering just about everything they touch. The angst-filled, violent world of the Marvel Superheroes is best done with an adult sensibility...this is why Sam Raimi is so effective with his Spidey movies. Would Disney sugarcoat their Marvel-based movies too much? Will Marvel superheroes start dying Disney Deaths?

There actually is some reason for hope that Disney will let Marvel be Marvel. Ain't It Cool News quotes Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada: "If you're familiar with the Disney/Pixar relationship, then you'll understand why this is a new dawn for Marvel and the comics industry." Will Quesada get the same kind of autonomy Lasseter gets at Disney/Pixar? This remains to be seen.

Sackcloth and Ashes, Camo Pattern.

2009-08-30T14:55:00.000-07:00

First, let me say that I did this as unintentional penance. I irritated a person whose talent I respect, the Dementia Radio DJ known as The All-Powerful Nateboi. As it turned out, Karma took a large chunk out of my ass. Nateboi, I am truly and sincerely sorry. I have paid for my inadvertant irritation.

I took three people, and myself, to see GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

The very talented people at SpielBay produced three videos that told exactly what was wrong with this film. However, one of the people I know - a fangirl who often gets depressed and giggles incessantly at the stupidest lines - needed a lift, and said "we don't care about the reviews." So I made the sacrifice.

At the time I wrote this I suffered a mild case of Swine Flu (H1N1). That felt better than this movie.

SpielBay talked about how the movie betrayed the heritage of the GI Joe cartoons. Fangirl giggled when she saw an animated logo for Hasbro, the copyright owner of the GI Joe franchise. It was going to be a toy movie? It was going to be fun? No.

It was a plain betrayal, not only of a toy franchise with its own backstory, but a betrayal of basic filmmaking and storytelling.

It was noisy. It was an attempt to burst the eardrums that a movie like Transformers only bruised. Explosions, beam weapons, cars crashing; it was as if someone was taking a tally of all these effects, and the more that were used, the better the movie would be.

It avoided logical sense. One of the things SpielBay mentioned was the pointless love affair between Duke, the protagonist of the Joes, and Countess, the leather dominatrix villainess of the enemy organization. It was a more pointless plot complication than I could describe. Many times, when Duke could have stopped the evil plans of the movie by killing the bitch (an insult I do not use lightly) he faltered or refused to fire, and innocents died. This is heroic action?

In the original cartoon series, nobody died; there were lots of laser weapons, no bullets, nothing like that. Boy, did they correct that. A relatively innocent blonde soldier is killed by being impaled, from behind, by a katana, with the blade piercing the notepad computer she's carrying. People are murdered throughout the film, usually in pretty ugly fashion for pretty pointless reasons. I repeat, Murdered. Not killed tragically in combat: murdered.

It makes little logical sense. In the middle of many scenes, the action stops to enter flashbacks to explain who the characters were and why they were acting this way. I complained about Speed Racer doing this. That was crystal clarity compared to the pointless, story-stopping flashbacks in GI Joe.

You'll notice I did not mention the word COBRA. That's because for most of the movie, COBRA did not exist. The enemy organization, M.A.R.S., was an international arms maker whose CEO (with a Scottish accent even worse than mine!) decided to destroy the world's three major capitals to assume dictatorial power. It is only in the last five minutes of this overlong film, when the CEO becomes the chrome-faced Destro and his mad doc assistant becomes Cobra Commander, that we finally see the COBRA logo on the side of his submarine - a logo that never appeared anywhere else in the film! It was as if someone at Hasbro suddenly woke up and said, "Hey, our villains look nothing like our action figures! Fix it, schmucks!"

The most grevious fault, I leave for last. I did not care. I did not care about the cartoonish weapons, used to produce non-cartoonish gore. I did not care about the fate of any of the characters. I did not care whether the Joes lived or died. I didn't care that the Eiffel Tower collapsed. All I care about is that this film had its box office beaten in the second week by District 9, whose budget wouldn't have bought lunch for the GI Joe crew, and this week by Inglourious Basterds.

My only occupation during this skinny-dip in a cesspool was counting the product placements hidden within the film. I found Cisco Systems logos hidden on all the spastic video screens and 3-D "holograms" in the film. Twice, the Joes pop Double Bubble bubble gum before entering battle. When the action of the finale showed a CGI polar bear, I kept trying to find the Coca-Cola bottle I was sure the bear was holding. I hope the advertisers realize their product placements in this cinematic sludge heap will do them no honor.

As SpielBay's "Shipwreck" character said, "And now you know. But...it's too late." Paramount and Hasbro got $27 of my money, at a time I can scarely afford it, to entertain my fangirl friend (who really loved this film; she loves fantasy, even bad ones). Plus $20 for four $5 sodas in the till of the theater. If I'd been alone, and had not been enervated by this disaster, I might have tried to sneak into Basterds to wash the bad taste out of my system. That film is typical Quentin Tarantino, it's bloody, it's violent, and mostly it's Tarantino stealing bits from older, better films. But it would be heaven compared to the Hell I actually attended.

Remember these names. If they are on any movie posters in the near future, DO NOT SEE THOSE FILMS. Do not reward these people for their betrayal of the young muse Cinema, who makes the impossible possible and the unreal real. GI Joe raped the young muse Cinema, peed on her unconscious body and left her for dead in an alley.

Producer: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Bob Ducsay
Executive Producers: Brian Goldner, Erik Howsam
Director: Stephen Sommers
Screenplay: Stuart Beattie, David Elliot & Paul Lovett
Story: Michael Gordon (as Michael B. Gordon), Stuart Beattie & Stephen Sommers

Of all the people, especially beware of di Bonaventura. He has a slew of projects that, if there is a God, will never be made: movies based on the Asteroids video game, the Alfred Bester novel The Stars My Destination, Beverly Hills Cop IV...I can't go on.

Another pointless remake...in Zemekis Zombie-vision.

2009-08-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yellow Submarine? You have GOT to be shitting me!

Sadly, no.

More info from the NY Daily News...it's scary, boys and girls.

District 9: When Pigs Fly

2009-08-17T06:31:00.001-07:00

The title of this review won’t make sense until you see District 9 all the way through. And if you have any kind of soul or love for science fiction, you will see it all the way through, without even bathroom breaks.

The basic story has been adequately described by other reviewers. In the present day, aliens from an abandoned and apparently dysfunctional spacecraft have been living in a ghetto in Johannesburg, South Africa for twenty years. They have been living in abject poverty, eating what seems to be their favorite food on this planet, cat food.

From the start, a lot of science fiction clichés disappear, and more disappear as the movie goes on. The aliens can’t trade their tech, because most of them can’t translate it into human terms. The aliens don’t speak our languages and we can’t speak theirs, robbing us of the crappy weird-sounding English aliens have been speaking in movies for years. And yet, we can understand them and they can understand us. Their weapons, far more powerful than Earth’s regular weapons, can’t be used by humans because it only works with the aliens’ unique physiology.

You might guess that the Johannesburg location is important, and that apartheid and racial prejudice plays a big part. But early in the film, it’s clear that America’s current Middle Eastern war is involved as well. It isn’t a world government that’s policing District 9; it’s an international corporation with more than a passing resemblance to both Halliburton and OCP from RoboCop.

The plot centers on Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who in the start of the film is a middle-management suck-up, the boss’s son-in-law and a very incompetent glad-hander. He is made head of an operation to move all the aliens, called “prawn” for their resemblance to shellfish, to a new encampment. Something happens during this process, which of course is being broadcast by corporate cameras, that gets the plot going.

More than that, I will not spoil for you. I will simply observe that the RoboCop comparison hints at the story arc for the movie. A character that starts off as a comic relief incompetent becomes a lot more. A story that is shot chaotically, with many cuts between different sources (ground camera, surveillance camera, helicopter shot) still manages to make sense. And a science fiction film that shows the most intelligence of anything made in five years still has dynamic action sequences that make logical and spatial sense.

It would be too easy to say that District 9 mixes science fiction with contemporary politics. Stories like this tend to make their characters into clichés. But here, you understand and care for the characters – even though none of the actors are known here in America at this time.

It may be too much to hope for. A few weeks ago I talked about Moon as a thoughtful science fiction film with some of the feel of Silent Running and 2001. Now here comes District 9. And although hardcore fans are still angry and muttering that “Sylar” has ruined Star Trek, the J.J. Abrams remake is more exciting than the last several Paramount “official” productions.

It may be too much to hope for, but it might be possible…that a generation of people raised on good science fiction films may be making something besides imitative, superficial tripe. We’ve had three good examples this summer.

Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope appeared in 1977. After decades where the main mode of film entertainment was despair and failure, Bonnie and Clyde being a typical film of the time, it was a breath of fresh air. But Lucas, Spielberg and many other filmmakers have been stomping over the same territory for over a quarter of a century, while other kinds of stories have gone hurting. Science fiction that referred even a little to our current world and its problems were ignored in place of flat-out fantasy.

The three recent films are all much more conscious of our world. District 9 talks about racial politics, and along with Moon talks about corporate abuse of human beings. And Abrams’s Star Trek criticizes all those Trek episodes where James Kirk cut a swath across a galaxy of females with a swing of his “captain’s log,” and treated political and military problems the same way.

It may be that we’re in for a new era of exciting science fiction. And it may be that such a thing will happen only when pigs fly…but watch District 9 and you’ll see that can happen…and in a different way than you expected.

SyFy shows the wrong kind of "Moon."

2009-08-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

Along with the reviewers who were lucky enough to see the film Moon in advance, I will not spoil the big secret in the movie. That's because it's familiar to people who saw the great science fiction movies of the 1960's and 1970's. This is, in a way, a tribute to those films.

To cover the basics: Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a working stiff who is the only human in a mining operation on the moon. He is not in live communication with his wife and child back on Earth, since his communications apparently must be routed the long way, from Jupiter. And as his three year shift ends, he's anxious and worried. And as an accident occurs, things start getting complicated.

I will mention that, compared to the classic thoughtful science fiction films, this one is willing to show the corporation Lunar Industries as manipulative and evil. In Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation operates oddly but is not sinister. The drug-running conspiracy in Outland is not corporate policy of ConAm 27, just misbehavior of some of its highly placed local operatives. Things are different this time.

Director and co-writer Duncan Jones (the son of David Bowie) made the homage almost completely perfect. Instead of CGI he shot the lunar surface scenes with models on a soundstage. The interior set could have been from 2001, down to the uncomfortable and stupid blast doors in the middle of the living space. And Sam Bell's robot assistant is very HAL 2000-like, although in the end a lot less psychopathic and not at all murderous.

Aside from that one extension of philosophy, Moon is a good film, but not a great film. I enjoyed it, but I won't own it on DVD. But while watching it in the theater, I kept thinking. "This should have been a movie on SyFy. But it's too smart for them."

The renamed Sci Fi Channel has made its own TV movies. None of them have a tenth of the thought of Moon. Most are cheap horror films with men in rubber suits and depressing, we're-all-gonna-die endings. In essence, they are all the same story, remade to excess.

Moon, on the other hand, is similar to the clever short stories that used to be published in the 1960's in science fiction magazines like Analog and and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Galaxy and Astounding. Those short stories were primarily built on one exceptionally clever idea or plot twist.

The inability of other entities, including SyFy, to think like this is why their ratings are dropping and people are looking elsewhere. It isn't a problem of their name, it's what lies behind the name that counts. I would love to see many more movies like Moon, but it'll have to be from indie directors, not networks.

Don't take the littlest kids.

2009-07-17T22:57:00.001-07:00

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the darkest film in the series. That does not make it bad. But it should make parents pause and think before they let little kids watch it.

Those who read the book know the critical event in the story, the sad conclusion to it. I will not spoil that here, but that enough is sufficient to make parents of children under, say, 13, to watch it. But there are other things I can talk about.

For most of the Potter films, the character of Draco Malfoy (Tom Fenton) has been a stock, cliched antagonist. He's done the kind of "villainous" things that The Misfits did against Jem and the Holograms, that Tom did to Jerry, that Snidely Whiplash did against the Wacky Racers. Not this time.

While everyone was ooh-ing and ahh-ing over how the three principal characters were growing into young adults and starting to have genuine romances, Malfoy has a genuine conflict. He's only been playing evil up to this point. In Half Blood Prince he has been ordered to fulfill the duty of a Death Eater and perform a truly evil act. And for the first time in the series, he has a conflict of conscience, one so powerful you can see him torn apart by it.

More than anything, Fenton has the look of a Hitler Youth. Not one of the smiling, confident creatures in Nazi propaganda films, cheerful and supportive of the Fatherland. He looks like one of those youth in the last days of the war, thrown into uniform, handed a rifle and told to kill the invading Allied armies.

This is the main reason why I would not allow a young child to see the film, holding him back. Death and violence are everywhere in the film, video and videogame world. But this violence has something worse than stage blood or prop gore. It's violence of the spirit, of the soul, and young children simply can't comprehend or digest it.

For those who have read the book, a lot has been cut and trimmed. It had to be. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, has been split into two feature movies, because J.K. Rowling wants it to be filmed intact. Most of the cuts will be missed only by completists. There is only one area of skimping that affects the drama of the story; given his importance in the film's denouement, the scarcity of Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) makes the film suffer.

The principal reason for film ratings is to protect children, so they say. In practice, they're usually used to keep controversial material off the screen that the rich and powerful would rather hide from us adults. But take my word for it, this film has material that I would not show to a young child, and anyone twelve or older would have to be a very mature and sophisticated kid before I'd take them to Half Blood Prince.

The Last Look in the Mirror

2009-07-05T22:16:00.000-07:00

I was originally going to talk about Michael Jackson and his place in music history. That really doesn’t matter now. What people will remember ten years from now are a handful of songs, primarily from the albums Thriller and Off the Wall.

Everything else that was reported and drooled over in the last week will be trivia on some future version of Jeopardy. Yes, Jackson made the most important and widely-seen music videos ever. Music videos, once seen as a way to bring songs alive (while being free ads to sell those songs) are dead. Few performers had any kind of physical presence, acting ability, or the desire to become interesting on video. Music videos were mostly egotistical directors running wild, creating spectacular frames for passive and unappealing performers. No matter how well they sang, most didn’t have it in them to play werewolves, suicidal lovers or post-apocalyptic warriors. Jackson did. Nobody else does.

Jackson’s scandals were a product of his sad, warped childhood. Without sensationalism, without the later child abuse claims that took over the Michael Jackson Story, it was all covered in the neglected book by music critic Dave Marsh, Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream. Find it if you can and read it. It’s critical and severe, but Marsh cared about Jackson and wanted him to fulfill his potential. Jackson never did.

Not the King, but the Bing
Don’t look to Elvis Presley as an example of the role Jackson will achieve in American cultural history. Presley did a lot more, and was a lot closer to his fans than Jackson cared to become. There are dozens of Elvis movies that established a comfortable identity for Presley; the simple country boy who could sing and charm women. Jackson made only one theatrical film I can think of, The Wiz, where he played a simple dancin’ boy. His music videos usually cast him as a demigod. Neither persona was loveable.

He won't be remembered like Elvis. Look, instead, to Bing Crosby.

Crosby’s biggest cultural mark, the only thing people remember him for, is his song “White Christmas,” and the two movies in which he sang them. The original was Holiday Inn, and the song had tremendous meaning; it was sung during World War II, when most Christmas dinners had fathers and brothers missing. The remake, White Christmas, is cute and in color but less meaningful.

Crosby did a lot more films, but he didn’t play a dynamic character. He was a casual partner with Bob Hope in the Road pictures. He made dozens of other films without much impact. Do you remember High Time (1960) where he played a millionaire who went back to college at age 50, and showed young people like Fabian and Tuesday Weld how crooning was better than that silly rock ‘n’ roll? How about Dr. Cook’s Garden (1971), his last film, playing a country doctor who killed off people he didn’t like?

Crosby, like Jackson, had scandal in his life, although in those days the studios squashed scandals better. Crosby abandoned his first wife when she was dying of cancer, to play golf in Europe. Two of his sons committed suicide. He told Barbara Walters, in a TV interview, that he’d disown his daughter if she had an abortion and betrayed his strict conservative Catholic views. The best biography of the man defined Crosby’s persona in its title: The Hollow Man.

From the Hollow Man to the Man in the Mirror isn’t much of a leap. Jackson’s sweet, simple calls for change and hope and love may not have been hypocrisy, exactly. But they didn’t sync with someone who priced his “Victory Tour” tickets deliberately high, so that “troublemakers” – code words for blacks – couldn’t easily attend the shows and bother the white suburbanites who could afford $100 for four tickets. Brotherhood and friendship didn’t mesh with a guy who, no matter how much he gave to charity, spent a fortune on his child-trap Wonderland. He blew through a personal fortune and went into poverty at a rate surpassed only by George Bush. He mutilated his body to such an extent that, in a famous “secret” meeting with Howard Stern, Jackson’s face seemed to be melting.

But that won’t be remembered. It’ll just be Thriller, Billy Jean and maybe We Are the World that will be remembered in a few years. All the personal crap that the gossip TV shows are drooling over now will recede into the vaults to be forgotten.

Give The People What They Want And They’ll Turn Out

I mentioned that months ago, when I was standing in a queue to see Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, the guy in front of me was only there because of obligation. “I want to see it and get it out of the way, so I never have to deal with Star Wars again.”

You might consider this cynical of me, but I think that’s why 1.2 million people wanted to attend the Michael Jackson memorial.

From where I sat, Jackson was desperately trying to build some sense of excitement about his career in his last years of life. That excitement did not result from his music, which hadn't been exciting or interesting in years. It wasn’t about his personal appearance. He tried to generate audience enthusiasm with a new, unfortunate slogan – “This Is It.” He had mobs of backup dancers in his planned London show to distract from whatever deficiencies in dance his aging body had.

It was Jackson trying to attract attention again. And no matter how many tickets were sold in advance for the London shows, the overwhelming impression I got was “who cares?”

I think the many people interested in mourning Jackson were simply giving him what he wanted. He got one last audience to gather in awe of him. And having given him his last ego boost, that audience will put him out of their minds. If they think of him any more in the future, it will be accidental, and probably all they’ll think of is Thriller, Billy Jean and maybe We Are the World.

Not all the way UP, but a change in altitude.

2009-05-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

Warning: there is a SPOILER in the third paragraph. If you are troubled by spoilers, don't read the area within the red SPOILER lines below. Thank you.

To begin with, don't expect anything really new or spectacular in the realm of animation in Disney/Pixar's Up. There are the kind of increments of technology that you'd suspect, if you've watched the progress of CGI animation. To my eyes, they've gotten a lot more comfortable at rendering of fur on animals - at least some of the animals.

There is something unexpected in the first six minutes of the film. Everyone expected to see Ed Asner's character Carl Frederickson as a grouchy old man. But we first encounter him as a boy, someone who fell in love with adventure - but who only began seriously considering it when he met the love of his life, Ellie (Elie Docter).

SPOILER AREA STARTS HERE

I'm going to spoil the surprise of this part, because it must be discussed. We see Carl and Ellie growing up, finding a house, and keeping a dream - of going to South America to visit a mysterious place. Things keep getting in the way of their departure. And the biggest obstacle comes when an aged Ellie gets sick and dies.

As a man, I have biological obstacles that keep me from crying much. This scene got me to cry. And I sensed, in the packed theater of all kinds of ages, that everyone felt the same.

This event shadows much of the rest of the film. It gives Carl a depth and a meaning he wouldn't have posessed otherwise. It makes his grudging friendship with the young impetuous scout Russell (Jordan Nagai) critical to us.

SPOILER AREA ENDS HERE

But take it away...and you have a standard-plotted adventure. You have a stock villain in the disgraced adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) and his army of raised-intelligence, voice-box-equipped dogs. You have predictable but well-planned fight and action sequences. You have a happy ending with "where are they now?" stills running throughout the credits.

This is a well-constructed story, even in minor details. The things that happens to Carl's helium-hoisted house are logical and important in the plots. Witness what happens to the simple hose on a reel mounted to his porch. There is more character humor - and slightly rougher character humor - with the characters, earning the film a PG rating. And although Christopher Plummer does the voice of Muntz, the character's appearance is a kind of combination of Kirk Douglas and Charlton Heston. That's a pretty devious character design.

But what I didn't perceive was the desire to tell a different kind of story. There are so many echoes of previous Pixar and Disney CGI films that I could almost predict some of the events.

Upon thinking about Up, I couldn't help but compare it to Disney's classic Sleeping Beauty. It was one of the last of the "Disney Princess" films supervised by Walt Disney. It wasn't profitable on its initial release. Its art style was more stylized than previous Disney animated features, in an attempt to make it look more mature than previous Disney films, but its story and characters were anything but original. Does anyone but a Disney completist even remember Aurora from that film?

Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson (Peterson also wrote the screenplay) are Pixar alumni with films like Wall-E, Ratatouille and Monsters, Inc. to their credit. And maybe that's the problem. Maybe there needs to be a new vision of what Pixar and Disney can do with animation. It might be too much to ask for something completely dramatic from them; that's never been successful in American animation.

Up has been hailed by critics, and it will probably be Disney's most solid hit for the summer. Disney's The Princess and the Frog shows up later, and its innovation will be Disney animators unafraid to show a broad spectrum of black characters, not just the Muses from Hercules. (We didn't get the trailer for Toy Story 3 in my theater.)

I enjoyed Up, and so did the rest of the theater. And maybe it's unfair of me to be asked to launch from my seat and do a midair flip for every new film. But I sense Pixar settling into a rut, no matter how profitable, and I think they've got to break new ground. Or inflate a bunch of balloons and fly above the ground.

A mangy, flea-bitten Wolverine.

2009-05-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

Like many other people, I managed to see the "leaked" version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Despite that, I went to see it in a theater with some friends. Instead of a full-fledged movie, it looks like the Lifetime Women's Movie of the Month. Call it Poor Little Logan: Happy at Last.

Basically, the movie tells us little about Wolverine that we didn't know. One item that's hardly a spoiler; his full name is James Logan. Not too surprising for a Canadian. Most comic fans also know he's incredibly long-lived, and the long title sequence showing him fighting in the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam don't do much. Although the costume and prop department must have had a field day working on that sequence.

The reason I call it a Lifetime movie is that it's full of romantic heartbreak. Logan loses nearly every normal human that approaches him, through the baddy-baddy's that are chasing him. About the only point of all the bloodshed and action sequences is to find out who organized this fatwah. Anyone who saw X-Men 2: X-Men United can guess it's an evil military person.

Note: in the comic book origin, the evil military person was with a Canadian program. That had at least some real-world significance. Canada has always felt threatened by the Lower 48, and it made great sense for a paranoid military strategist to capture and utilize mutants in order for Canada to feel safe. Putting an American in charge of the operation - that is set at Alkali Lake, clearly in Canada - was utterly stupid.

In fact, "utterly stupid" is the best description for the plot. About the only good things in the movie are little snippets of various mutants from the comics. The movie did a good job on The Blob, the impossibly fat and unmovable mutant, which I guess was a combination of costume and CGI. And the long-time Cajun character Gambit conducted himself well, with the cockiness and sleazy charm of the comics.

And, of course, Hugh Jackman looks great with his shirt off, and copes well with the stupidities of the plot. The biggest stupidity being that, whenever he and his brother Sabertooth face off, they charge directly at each other at high speed, claws and fingernails out. It looks like something that would be done in bad comedy anime. If anything in this film would be worth parodying, it would be that.

But in all honesty, this film will not do very well. It doesn't deserve to do well. It was a lame attempt of Marvel to squeeze out a quick film for the summer, without the kind of forethought and care that Iron Man or Fantastic Four received. If there are to be any more X-Men Origins films, which I kind of doubt now, they had better do some honest work. Especially, they should find a reason we should care about whoever they are featuring.

The most drama this film will produce is whether senior executives at Fox will be canned for the bad handling of the bootleg situation. Not just letting the bootleg leak, but their bad attempt to provide positive spin afterwards.

Star Trek - The Real Motion Picture.

2009-05-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

I have to start this review with a personal note, but it's pertinent to the new film Star Trek.

As many of you know, I've had a terrible week. Tuesday morning I was laid off from a job I've had for 33 years. I will not be hurting financially for a while, but I will find another job that will serve me better and let me serve humanity better. It's bleak out there on the employment front, as most of you probably know, but I shall persevere.

More than that, working for many years on an overnight-only shift, without seeing the sun and interacting with humanity, has warped me in ways I'm only beginning to understand. I will have to change much about my life, including things like exercise, diet, spending and other things I took for granted. So this week has been a very strange time for me.

When some friends invited me to a sneak preview of Star Trek, it was a blessing. And provided me with some insight. Producer J.J. Abrams (famous for the TV shows Alias and Lost, and the movie Cloverfield) was given an ailing, worn-out wreck of a concept and was told to make it new. Trek had to change, just as I am having to change.

The world of Star Trek has been put through the wringer. The last series, Star Trek: Enterprise, proved to be horribly unpopular. Even hard-core Trek fans couldn't take it. Abrams had to remake the show anew, without completely alienating the old fan base.

I can't say that all the Trek fans will be satisfied. Trying to please them has been a losing battle. But from the viewpoint of someone who does not own any Trek action figures and reads very few Trek novels, the movie Star Trek is a breath of spring air.

It alters the facts of the known Star Trek history. But the movie has a very simple explanation for that, that any real science fiction fan can accept. And I mean people who read and view more than just Trek or Star Wars or other genre movies, who read novels and novellas and other movies. And - the only clue I will give you - it will be familiar to comic book fans who've seen the various ways that the DC and Marvel universes have been rebooted. In fact, this "rebooting" makes up the central plot element of this movie.

Chris Pine doesn't play James Tiberius Kirk like Shatner. No one can. And he doesn't have to. His Kirk is a troublemaker, and a troubled kid. His rebelliousness is challenged by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and he is told he could become an officer in four years if he works hard. Kirk says "I'll do it in three."

That brings him up against Spock (Zachary Quinto), a relatively young Vulcan who is challenged by his half-human heritage. He is certainly not the head-slicing villain Sylar of Heroes here. Even playing a being whose emotions are screwed down tight, he is one of the best acting surprises in the movie. And that's saying a lot, since there are lots of surprises and worthy laughter in the film.

In this film, Spock designed the famous Kobayashi Maru scenario, the unbeatable training exercise that Kirk beats - by cheating. But before Starfleet Academy can boot the offender out, an emergency comes - a strange starship, with advanced weaponry and technology, is attacking Vulcan.

The villain is Nero, played by Eric Bana, whom you remember from the first miserable Hulk movie and the much better Munich. This Trek antagonist doesn't speak like Ming the Merciless or Count Dooku or in any other stilted "foreign" accent. His smooth, almost comfortable voice is scarier because it isn't "foreign."

You'll notice I'm talking about characters here. This film's great virtue is characters. This Kirk is brash and impetuous, but he doesn't always come out ahead. He damn near gets killed several times. And it takes the wisdom of Spock - this time, the original Spock, played by an incredibly old Leonard Nimoy - for Kirk to understand his destiny. And, frankly, for us to figure out the film's central riddle.

Simon Pegg, the protagonist of the horror comedy Shawn of the Dead, is fantastic as Scotty. Imagine, instead of James Doohan, the original Montgomery Scott had been played by Billy Connolly. I could talk forever about the others, but not now.

Because I must emphasize that this film also has strong action, that starts from the very beginning of the film. There is tension and violence that clearly indicates this isn't the staid world of Trek, where a starship always sits right-side-up when travelling. We are told early that anything can change, and it does.

You probably know that the sequel to this film has already been approved and the cast signed. The preview reaction was that positive. And it was positive among the audience I saw it with - with the exception of two hardcore Trek fans who bitched about changed details. I don't care, and the casual mass audience who will flock to this film won't care either. This is fully the spirit of Trek, and it is good.

I will spoil a surprise that comes at the end of the credits. It's no Easter egg or blooper. It's a simple text message remembering Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry (her computer voice recordings are her last performance before her death). A lot of hardcore fans didn't stay for that. I did. And the remaining people applauded. And I think, wherever their souls are, the Roddenberrys are applauding this film, which will make Trek live for a new generation.

Notes from a "crank": on the demise of the moviegoing experience.

2009-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:00

(By way of explanation: this was a post I made on Slashdot about why I have largely stopped going to movie theatres. It's not all about being broke and unemployed. It's about a very degraded experience. This is why whenever we have a podcast recording I hem and haw about not seeing the movie yet. It's just not WORTH IT in most cases to see the movie in theatres anymore for me. And here's why...)

OK, I'm one of those "cranks" who remembers how moviegoing USED to be, and considers the current "experience" extremely inferior.

It used to be, you'd go to a big, beautiful PALACE with thousands of seats and a gorgeous environment. Even if you lived in a small town, the local movie theatre was a glamorous, special place.

This was before mobile phones. And there would be a special room for mothers to take squalling babies or toddlers having a tantrum, called the "women's lounge."

In the 1960s, theatre owners, in an industry maybe didn't DIE because of TV but took a big, big hit, came up with the concept of the "cinemaplex." More choice! More people can go see movies suiting THEIR taste, not the programmer at the local movie palace. I live near where one of the first American multiplex theatres, The Americana 5 in Panorama City, CA, was built in 1964. It had one "big room" for what was then known as "road show" releases, the big movie expected to be the blockbuster of the moment. It also had four smaller rooms...and I really mean smaller. 200 seat shoeboxes as opposed to the 1,000 seat "big room." People went anyway, and the theatre chains realized they could make more money because they'd go to the movies regardless of the amenities or lack of them. They didn't really have a choice in the pre-home video and pre-HBO/Showtime days. You either saw the movie in the theatre or you waited for it to come on TV, and that wait would be literally years.

Eventually the "big room" was subdivided in two in the mid '70s, and the Americana 5 became, for a time, the Americana 6. It was only due to the decline of the neighborhood and the competition of cable and home video that the Pacific Theatres knocked down the thin subdivision barrier and turned the two theatres back into "the big room" again. Amazingly enough, the Pacific Americana underwent a bit of a renaissance for a while. They would have events, geared towards the local predominantly Latino populace, where Spanish-language movies, free concerts after the movie and appearances by local Spanish-language radio personalities would be part of the fun. Selena did one event and the immediate area surrounding the Americana was mobbed. The LAPD had to be called in to do crowd control.

Eventually the Mann Theatres chain put in the Mann's Plant 16 a couple of miles down the road at the big-box mall that replaced the long shuttered GM assembly plant. This was what killed the Americana. The Pacific Theatre Group unloaded it on a couple of locals who went indie. It got more and more run down, started playing second-run movies in both English and Spanish for bargain prices, and when things broke, they stayed broke. The last movie I saw in the "big room" there was Prince of Egypt. The movie theatre that every year around Easter would play "The Ten Commandments" had its swan-song with another retelling of the Moses myth. It was sad to see the place go. The area where the four small theatres stood is now a school of cosmetology. The old "big room" was once an indoor futbol arena where people would play pickup soccer games, and is now a banquet hall which, ironically, boasts a nice big movie screen. It is also more ornate than the "big room" at the Americana ever was.

Anyway, huge digression. The multiplex movie theatre encouraged a degradation of movie theatre etiquette. Going to a little shoebox theatre was less special than going to the community movie palace. People didn't have the same sense of "occasion" going to the movies. In a lot of respects, the experience of going to one of these theatres was like the drive-in experience. Often a theatre chain would knock down a drive-in and replace it with a mega multiplex. They could show more movies to more people and it was a more intelligent use of land. And with the competition of cable, home video, "sell-through" home video, and finally the DVD, there were now real choices about how to see a movie.

So yeah, theatres are not exactly rolling in the dough now. There has been a surge of moviegoing instead of other "family vacation" kinds of things to do, as people opt more for "staycations." But it will not and never will be the same.

Me? I just prefer to wait a little while, get the DVD, and enjoy it at my leisure. No assholes yakking on the mobile phone next to me, no crying babies or tantrumming toddlers whose moms haven't the decency to take outside to calm, no people doing their own, unfunny MST3K treatment of the movie. I don't have an awesome super-cool home theatre system here, but it's decent. Good size 4:3 CRT tube TV, 2.1 sound. And the popcorn is cheap and ungreasy. Go ahead and "enjoy" the current theatre-going experience. I'll just be an old crank and enjoy a more civilized experience right here at home. Oh yeah, get off my lawn, punk. ;-)

This is hawesome.

2009-04-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

Wil Wheaton voices a gaming geek named Kyle, who falls in love with a goth chick named Rosemary. No, this is not "MTV's Downtown: The Next Generation." This is something really special. Enjoy. And if ASIFA-Hollywood doesn't give this short some Annie love next year it would be a crying shame.

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW

The cartoon series that will never be...

2009-04-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

In honor of the show's twentieth anniversary, a person did this wallpaper in honor of a spectacular comedy show from the last two decades. Click on this sentence to go to the original web page where the full size wallpaper is located.

A couple of observations were triggered from this beautiful picture. This is perhaps the first time all the characters have been on stage together. Joel Hodgson and Michael J. Nelson never appeared as their characters together. (Mike did subsidiary characters during Joel's time, such as The Amazing Colossal Man and a pianist playing the "Gamera" theme song. I think this is also the first time anyone has drawn the lower parts of Crow T. Robot's body.

Like all passed TV series, it's sad to contemplate the fates of some of these people. J. Elvis Weinstein (the dark-haired guy who played Dr. Forrester's assistant in early shows) wound up working with his "boss" Trace Beaulieu on the earliest and lamest of the "reality" shows, America's So-Called Funniest Home Videos. Each week, they have to find witty things to put in the mouth of plasticized human Tom Bergeron. In other words, the mad scientist and his assistant are the same hellish employment trap into which they inserted Joel and Mike.

And the saddest is Joel Hodgson, the shy comedian who created the show for local TV after dropping out of the stand-up comedy circuit. He hated the pressure of performing his act across the country, and although I have never heard him admit to it, I think he was afraid of all those people. I believe he quit MST3K because it was bringing him precisely the kind of fame he was trying to avoid.

After he left MST3K he was "creative consultant" for The Paula Poundstone Show. That show was ABC's attempt to produce a comedy variety show, and unfortunately based it on an alcoholic comedienne who preferred to speak in non-sequiturs than actually do humor. If you never saw this show, it's not your fault; it lasted one episode. Peaks of its humor were an "ecology expert" that spoke from inside a crummy-looking space pod, and actual economists who had to deliver their explanations of economics while riding a carnival whip ride.

Then Hodgson attempted to do a TV show that seemed to be based on his "invention exchange." At great expense, he set up a studio with a camera in a 360-degree blind, with curtains, so he could have live performers appear in short blackout sketches in a circle around a camera. It was called The TV Wheel, after it was dumped by HBO I think the pilot aired a few times on Comedy Central, and then the whole mess was forgotten.

Currently, Hodgson has gone back home, sort of. With some of the MST3K alumni he's doing Cinematic Titanic, where he and his companions play themselves for a change, making fun of movies like The Oozing Skull and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Problem is, he's not only competing against his past (his original parody of Santa Claus was hiliarious) but against Mike Nelson's video version, Rifftrax, which sells low-cost MP3's you play in sync with current movies. And against Nelson's own imitation of MST3K called The Film Crew. And against my friends Luke Ski, Carrie Dahlby and a few others, who do an affectionate fan-tribute called Mystery Spatula Theater 11.

What saddens me is that Hodgson , apparently driven by personal traumas, has fled from two careers - stand-up comedy and involved parody - that I and many others have been striving to achieve and probably never will. When God gives you talent and the fortune to achieve such things, you don't throw them away. He did, twice. But if he insists on sabotaging himself, he has established a good tradition, and we'll remember him fondly as he runs for the shadows to hide.

A Peabody (without the Mister)

2009-04-02T04:42:00.000-07:00

Scan down the list of the 2008 Peabody Awards on their web site.

See anything interesting?

I am not familiar with the Peabody's, but I'm pretty sure there are very few animated series that have won this coveted award. I also notice that this award is being tended after Nickelodeon completed the series, and abandoned it to odd-hour fill-in programming and their subsidiary channel. They didn't spend a dime on merchandising for this show, preferring to rake in the Spongebob Squarebucks. They won't even spend the nickel it would cost to slap a little "Peabody Award Winner" on their existing DVD's.

I can pretty much assure you that Saturday Night Live, Breaking Bad and even YouTube will not keep their Peabodys silent. I think Nickelodeon might do one promo mentioning it, but nothing more.

This....is....awesome....

2009-03-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

Don't let the name fool you. This is immensely cool. Paging Adult Swim...Comedy Central...pick up the white courtesy phone.

Maurice LaMarche says: It's Talk Like Shatner day!

2009-03-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

There is only one other

2009-03-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

Identify these quotes. Tell me what they have in common.

1) I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life - anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.

2) I heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says Life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world. Doctor says "Treatment is simple. The Great Clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor... I am Pagliaci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll On snare drum. Curtains.

The first quote, I expect many science fiction fans to get. The second, only recent movie viewers may get.

Their common factor is that, according to the biggest fans, both quotes are non-canonical. The first quote is the voiceover narration from Decker (Harrison Ford) in Blade Runner. That narration, in the original release of the film, has been discarded in the subsequent versions of the movie, especially the "Final Cut" edition. The second quote is from the insane vigilante Walter Kovacs a.k.a. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) in Watchmen. That quote was made for the movie; it is not in the graphic novel written by Alan Moore.

I, for one, liked both quotes. I thought the narration placed Blade Runner solidly in the world of film noir, and made that future world comprehensible to people unfamiliar with science fiction and cyberpunk. (Like my girlfriend at the time, an English teacher with no imagination and little literacy.) And the quote from Rorschach nails down the philosophy of this movie, which is not the bitter cynicism of The Dark Knight nor the campiness of Batman and Robin.

What I'm saying in a roundabout way is this: Watchmen is in the same class as Blade Runner. It's not "as good as" or "like" or any simple comparison. But like Blade Runner, it takes time out of action sequences and histrionic emotion to think about ideas. That is rare in Hollywood movies of any kind, especially in this megacorporate world. (Warner Brothers and Paramount had to share "ownership" of this movie; very interesting in regards to the corporate villains shown in the movie.)

I don't have to tell you about the story of Watchmen. A thousand reviews are out there already. What I do have to say is that this movie spends a great deal of time inside the minds of the characters. They aren't simply reacting; they are thinking as they react. They are people you come to understand, even the ones you don't wish to sympathize with, even the ones who shock and disgust you.

I saw the film with two friends of mine, both very heavy science fiction fans, but with very little understanding of the comic. They were as mesmerized as I was. One, who leans towards Limbaugh, was absorbed by the most repellent character in the story, The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan,) who as he blasts a crowd of college protesters with a shotgun, says "God damn! I love working on American soil, Dan. Ain't had this much fun since Woodward and Bernstein." And yet...who ends up sobbing about his life and his bad choices to his worst enemy.

The other friend was mesmerized by the characters. She watched with awe as the latex-clad and sexy Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman) calmly shoved a knife into the neck of a murderous thug and did John Woo martial arts stunts, but still was a vulnerable, troubled woman. And amazingly, my friend never noticed that in many scenes the blue-glowing Dr. Manhattan (voice by Billy Crudup) had his penis unashamedly in view. "I was looking at his face," she insisted.

The film is as sobering as the graphic novel upon which it was based. Yes, many things were changed and simplified, but nothing essential was lost. Especially not the climax, and especially not the last scene, which gave the original story its impact.

Alan Moore has his reasons for not signing his name to this movie, or the other movies made about his creations. I just don't think they are good reasons. And for those who keep complaining about Moore not getting the credit, it's obvious he doesn't want it. He doesn't even seem to want the attention he has gotten for disavowing Watchmen. But then, you have to wonder what he's done since that could even hold a candle to it.

Just like Blade Runner, I don't expect Watchmen will get its due at the box office. Amazingly, Disney's pale, limp remake Race to Witch Mountain has surpassed the box office of Watchmen in its second weekend. Its success and its fame will belong to history. This is a film I expect to own and treasure when it comes out on DVD. There aren't five theatrical films in the last year about which I can say the same.

What, you mean that the Watchmen movie isn't going to be like THIS???

2009-03-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

And for the record, what I found disturbing about The Dark Knight had nothing to do with the action, it had everything to do with the political point of view (pro Bush, pro police-state tactics, etc...turning Batman into 24, you know the deal) being pushed in the movie. Knowing what I know about Alan Moore's work, and having read The Watchmen, I know precisely what to expect. Really, Tom, you ought to know me better, seeing as we've been working together for about 10 years now.

The Watchmen Motion Comic: Nostalgia of a sort

2009-03-02T15:28:00.000-08:00

Watchmen: The Motion Comic

Produced by Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Devin

Directed by Jake S. Hughes

When writer Harlan Ellison wrote a book of dark, disturbing and violent short stories entitled Deathbird Stories, he warned in the preface that no one should read the stories all at once. He said that the effect would be devastating. Now, Ellison is an egotist, and a self-promoter, and he likes to get angry in public, so this warning seemed to be a cheap way to make his book notorious. But Ellison was right. Those stories, involving the Kitty Genovese murder, assisted suicide and an atheist discovering an afterlife without any kind of God, are enough to bring nightmares and to depress sensitive souls.

Alan Moore, the writer of the original Watchmen miniseries, is not self-promoting and rarely appears in public at all. He has had his name taken off everything he's ever done, including the Watchmen movie. But he was an egotist, and perhaps even greater than the legendary Ellison. At least Ellison knew there were sensitive souls who might not be able to tolerate his works. Alan Moore never put a disclaimer on Watchmen.

The new movie is going to be disturbing to a lot of people. It's been "tamed" from the graphic novel a bit, but not much. And I'm afraid a lot of people are going to be traumatized by the film, especially those who never read the graphic novel - or who never read anything, not even the labels on the food they eat.

While the movie is still a week away, DC Comics managed to do something on the cheap. They took the panels from the Watchman graphic novel and animated it. This is "nostalgic" in several ways.

Nostalgia for Cheap Kid TV

In the early 1960's. Marvel got a cheap animation outfit named Grantray Lawrence Animation to produce "animated" episodes of Marvel heroes for local TV stations. Even their own Spider-Man series had more animation than these. They were still panels of Jack Kirby's drawings of Thor, the Hulk, the Avengers, Iron Man and the Sub-Mariner, where the camera panned into the panels, minimal mouth movement was done, and the sound effect balloons of "Zap!" and "Pow!" were the only real animation.

The Watchman animation does this. It's done far better, of course. Watchmen is honored among comic fans, and a Clutch Cargo treatment would bring instant hatred. So, they tried to make it as attractive as their budget allowed. Dave Gibbons, the artist for the graphic novel, was involved in this production. (Moore, of course, refused to do anything.)

Some examples of the pseudo-animation; In the apocalypse that ends the story, pieces of trash in the foreground were detached and made to “blow around.” Word balloons, taken from the original, are animated. (In one sequence the little pointer on a dialog balloon moves along with the character. Cute.) They didn’t censor anything; Dr. Manhattan still displays full-frontal male nudity. It is what it is, but I give them credit for trying to put as much animation into this as possible.

Nostalgia: Ripping off the creators

Moore wasn’t paid for this. He signed a "work made for hire" contract with DC for the original book, meaning DC owns everything about Watchmen, including derivative works like movies or this project. Moore could probably sue to get money for this, but he wants to forget and "move beyond Watchmen,” even though it’s his best known work. It is the copyright owners ripping off the creators, a tradition in comics as old as dialog balloons. AOL Time Warner, which owns DC Comics, is fully within their rights to do this. But legal doesn't automatically mean moral.

Nostalgia: It Doesn’t Improve a Thing

The pseudo-animation doesn't add anything to the original graphic novel. Moore was known for telling his artists what to do. His legendary script for Watchmen detailed everything in every panel. His visual transitions from panel to panel, page to page, made the book famous for art lovers. On a TV screen, with panning and scanning of panels (what Apple calls "Ken Burns transitions" in its iMovie program) this is lost.

Nostalgia: Making You Pay For Extras

DC has also made a separate animated production of "Tales of the Black Freighter." This was a "comic book within the comic book." Moore decided that in a world where superheroes were real, comic books would be about pirates. So as part of Watchmen, he included stories of a pirate ship from Hell, in which ordinary people would try to fight the evil of the ship, and find themselves turned evil, and finally join the damned crew of the Black Freighter. It was a story about the inevitability of evil, and the futility of fighting for good. Which (surprise, surprise) is the main theme of Watchmen.

The graphic novel contained many other extras. At the end of all the chapters except the last, there were “inserts.” Conrad Veidt/Oyzmandius, the main villain of the story and a wealthy magnate, describes his ad campaign for a new perfume, noting that its gender-blending visual look should help sell the stuff to gays and lesbians. The psychiatrist that interviews Rorschach hand-writes a report (this is before Rorschach’s madness starts affecting the shrink). This would be hard to put into animated form, so they didn’t try; they want you to buy the graphic novel, too.

A Caution: This Can Be Upsetting.

Some people, including Michelle, were troubled by the live-action movie The Dark Knight. Although it’s been altered, the live-action Watchmen movie will make it look like the Care Bears by comparison, if the preview reports are true.

I will give the warning that Alan Moore and AOL Time Warner won't give you. And I say this as a person who has his own psychological sensitivies, who knows how certain kinds of entertainment can hurt you.

If you are a sensitive soul, do not see the live-action Watchman movie unless you feel you can tolerate the content of the graphic novel, or this “motion comic” version.

Borrow the novel from a friend or sneak a look at it in a bookstore. Rent the animated version when it comes to video stores; don't buy it, even if you're an animation fan.

Do not spend money on it unless you are sure of yourselves; to buy it and hate it means you've given the bad guys money. See if you can watch or read one of these products in the privacy of your home, before you try the full sense immersion of the motion picture.

Before anyone accuses me of being an "Alan Moore hater," let me say I recognize the artistry of the original work. But art is not automatically entertainment. Art is like philosophy; it describes the world as viewed by the artist.

Moore was a very depressed, cynical soul, working in the ugliness of Margaret Thatcher's England. Moore was one with Sid Vicious and the other destructive punks. His disdain of Watchmen in its present form is partially due to his realization that he brought overwhelming darkness and anger to comics. (Some would also say he brought sexism; his female hero, Silk Specter, has no self-esteem and falls in love with a man who attempted to rape her.)

I will watch the live-action Watchmen. It is the geek event of the summer. But I’ll be watching it to sniff the winds of geekdom (awkward metaphor, but there it is) to see what happens. And as for Watchmen: The Action Comic, thanks, but I have the paper version and it's just fine.

Fanboys: forget the critics, this is fun.

2009-02-07T16:20:00.000-08:00

I saw Fanboys last night, finally. I must be the only geek on Earth who hadn't seen this movie in some stage of unfinishedness. Every time I was at Comic Con when they sneak-previewed it in one form or another something was going on I wanted to see more. I went there with a scruffy band of 501st Legion and Rebel Legion fanboys and fangirls who were invited to troop around a little in costume in the lobby of the Mann's Chinese 6 theatre. (This is of course not to be confused with the main screen at the complex, the legendary Grauman's Chinese, where I saw Star Wars 30 ahem ahem years ago during its first run.)

The critics seem to have a real need to pan this movie. I can't understand why. Nobody was expecting Citizen frakkin' Kane out of this movie. It's a silly comedy about three fanboys and one fangirl who never grew up, and their friend who is pondering whether or not to grow up.

Yes, the cancer sub-plot is back, handled with a surprisingly light and sensitive touch. It's there, it provides the impetus and the "why" for the road trip, and yeah, it got my heartstrings a couple of times. If the subplot was taken out of the movie, as was the danger for a while, the story becomes one of a bunch of self-centered lamers wanting to be the first geeks to see Episode I. It would have ruined it completely, and whatever affection you feel for these characters would have been gone. Thankfully the Weinsteins listened to the fans and put the plot back in.

The movie that is the real paen to the wonder of blockbuster Sci-Fi movies of the '70s is still not out yet: that's Patrick Read Johnson's 77 (formerly 5-25-77) which seems to be constantly beset with disappointments and deals falling through constantly. I saw that at Celebration IV (on 5-25-07, no less!) and even in its rough state it was a charming, engrossing and thoroughly heartfelt coming of age story that might be more the droid the critics were looking for.

Oh yeah, one other thing about Fanboys. The subplot about rivalry between Star Wars fandom and Star Trek fandom is just not rooted in reality. As we all hung out in the lobby, some in costume, some not, we were talking about how the JJ Abrams reboot of Star Trek was something we all were looking forward to. It makes for some funny scenes, but the biggest cheap shots were also part of this subplot. It was unnecessary to move the plot forward and only served to inject a few chase scenes and fight scenes too many.

Aside from that, Fanboys will only disappoint if you are expecting something more than a silly movie about geeky people. It helps if you are a fannish type yourself.

Conditional Santa Captive: Delivered Partial Podcast

2009-02-01T16:56:00.001-08:00

We apologize for the delay, but unexpected events occurred. In the last days of the Bush Presidency, or given its importance it should be a lower case "presidency," our regular guest Conditional Santa was captured. See document at left.

However, we believe that he scattered pieces of the Cartoon Geeks podcast that was planned for December of this year. We have recovered part one of the podcast and are actively searching for the other parts. Apparently Tom and Michelle recorded this part, with Martin unavailable at this time. We believe Martin may appear in the later pieces. Here are the topics under discussion:

Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated film, and how Lucas really needs not to be so involved with his own films.

The South Park Indiana Jones incident. Did it "hate Hollywood" the same way that legitimate protest of the War in Iraq "hates America"?

Michelle's upset with The Dark Knight. Perhaps it belongs more to the Bush approach to dissent than anything else.

A sample of Tom's appearance in the Pendant Audio series Catwoman: The Queen of Thieves.

Cutback at NBC's Heroes: is the series in trouble?

The Iron Man deluxe DVD set.

Seta Sings the Blues and how it is improperly being ignored by Hollywood.

New feature: Michelle's technology review, and how the Macintosh is ending the FireWire interface in many of its lines; betraying the interface standard that Apple popularized.

Tom's talk about Dragon*Con, the commercial firm that took precedence over fan material, and the controversy that erupted in this blog over it.

To download the podcast, with a Windows computer, right-click on this line or the Homeland Security document above, and select "Save As..." from the pop-up menu. For Mac, option-click this line and choose "Save as..."