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

...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.

Best animation of the Decade From Hell...

(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.

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

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.

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

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

This is hawesome.

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

Wall-E, Bashir strike Globes Gold...

Wall-E has rolled out in front of the competition for the Best Animated Picture Oscar by winning the Golden Globe for the same category. Waltz With Bashir also waltzed home to Israel with the Golden Globe for best foreign language film...sort of an ironic gift considering current events. [sigh]

Voting for the Annies starts tomorrow, and I have a general idea where my vote is going. I'll let y'all know how that goes. It will prolly be a multi-day affair for me if they allow me to put a bookmark in my ballot like they did last time.

A Bolt from the Blue that leaves me blue...

First of all, I apologize for not posting more recently. I have had a very busy life and have had to put a lot of things on hold, including personal hygiene and personal creations. Hopefully I'll make up for that soon. Anyway, here's my first post in a while...about my pecuilar feelings about a very good movie.

I was pleasantly surprised, but later upset, by Bolt. The later upset came after thinking about the story.

As Michelle reminded me, this film was in development for a long time under the title American Dog. It was apparently quickly rewritten under the orders of Mr. Eisinger (after the original creative team was fired) and rushed to completion in 18 months, rather than the two or three years a CGI feature normally take.

The story's a fairly standard comedy about a deluded soul. In this case, the deluded soul is Bolt (voice by John Travolta), a pup rescued from a shelter by a young girl named Penny (voice by Miley Cyrus). Five years later, Penny is an actress in an elaborate spy/thriller TV show, and Bolt is the star.

The show "Bolt" in which Bolt appears is clearly a riff on the original Inspector Gadget cartoons; Penny tries to rescue her captured scientist father from a mad scientist, and Bolt is a superdog that rescues her time after time. (Inspector Gadget's niece was named Penny too...is this Disney ripping off another animated cartoon, a la Simba/Kimba?) And another couple of borrowed riffs exist in this film, partially from The Truman Show, but more realistically from the production legend of The Blair Witch Project.

As in The Truman Show, the only way to get Bolt to "act" is a variation of the Stanislavksy Method. He is treated to believe that he truly is a dog with laser-beam eyes and a devastating super-bark, and that the show's adventures are "real." As in Blair Witch, where the actors were deprived of sleep and understanding of the story and made to "live" their adventures, the show's producers are unwilling to trust Bolt to be an actor.

Through various plot incidents, Bolt escapes the studio and is shipped to New York. He fights his way across country with the reluctant aid of cynical alley cat Mittens (Susie Essman) and a hamster in an exercise ball who's a fanboy, Rhino (Mark Walton). Most of the way Bolt believes he has the powers of his TV character, and is mystified when he bleeds, or can't break through a chain link fence.

Okay, unless you're under eight years old I don't have to tell you how the story plays out. And it plays out fairly well. In the world of this movie, animals can talk to each other, even cross-species, but not to humans. Bolt believes that Mittens is an associate of the TV show's master villain (voiced briefly by Malcolm McDowell). It takes a cross-country journey for them to eventually like one another, like in a lot of other road pictures.

The movie is also very pretty. Walt Disney Animation has borrowed a lot of Pixar's technology. And while the visuals aren't up to Pixar's best, they work in context. The film doesn't even mind going to iconography. As the trio travels across country, they are shown on a placemat map stolen from a Waffle House-like chain. (Unlike the real Waffle House, Waffle Hut stretches past the South into the North and West.) The characters appear as cutouts riding along in various vehicles across the map.

The problems I had with Bolt occurred afterwards. The film portrays the real "villains" as the Hollywood establishment, including a sleazy agent (voice by Greg Germann) who enforces Bolt's separation from Penny, tries to substitute another dog for Bolt, and is just freaking creepy. Penny goes along with the whole mess, because she is a trouper, but she would like a life for herself and Bolt, and is devastated when Bolt goes missing.

This is my problem. Penny the CGI character is not much younger than Miley Cyrus, the real person and heavily-exploited Disney star.

There's already been controversy about Cyrus, with her father Billy Ray Cyrus allowing her to appear in a naked-back photo shot for a magazine. Celebrity clock-watchers also know that the Hannah Montana craze is about to enter its third year, the time when kids get bored with their idols and move on to someone new. Disney knows this too, which is why the Hannah Montana hype and live concerts were so heavily pushed in this year of the Bush Depression.

I'm not spoiling much by saying that, in the film's denouement, Penny leaves Hollywood for a happy life with Bolt, Mittens, Rhino and her single mother. They are apparently living in the old Kent Farm in Smallville, Kansas, from the looks of the house-with-barn in the film's closing shot. (I hope they don't go digging in the basement and find leftover "meteor rocks" or Kryptonian devices.)

I hated that so-called happy ending. Penny was an actress, and apparently a good one. Bolt apparently learned enough about life that he could be a real actor himself, working consciously without all that delusion. You don't simply throw talent like that away and live in retirement, going to school like a normal kid and the like. At least you wouldn't in a fair world.

And that's where my real discomfort begins.

Sadly, in the real world, performing children like Miley Cyrus get used up and discarded by Hollywood on a regular basis. Very few kid actors make it through to adulthood as active performers; Melissa Joan Hart and Bill Mumy are among the few that have. Danny Bonnaduce and Gary Coleman are far more typical, with their lives in rehab and shambles. Disney has a schoolroom full of kid actors currently on the air, who will go nowhere after their Disney Channel series disappear into obscurity. And they won't have the loot to move into the Kent Farm's old turf like Penny, despite the "Jackie Coogan laws" about child actors.

Cyrus got the part of voicing Penny largely because of her fame, and Disney's continuing exploitation of that fame. Raven Symone didn't, because she is one of those aging-and-disappearing kid stars Disney employs. (Her show, That's So Raven, is pretty close to disappearing off ABC's kid show block.) It almost makes me wonder if being cast in this movie was a deliberate warning for Cyrus about what is to come.

Bolt is a fun film, and probably the best product Walt Disney Animation has put out in the last few years. But the shadow of real-world kid entertainment, and the film's dark view of Hollywood and the entertainment business, will keep me from buying it on DVD. And if something happens to Miley Cyrus in the meantime - if she does something adult that isn't compatible with being a Disney star and she suddenly disappears - that may make things even darker.

MTV rebirthed the video star: now how about mtvanimation.com?

The Buggles |MTV Music

OK, MTV has finally gone back to its roots, albeit on the Web instead of on your cable box. I suppose this may have been the reason why MTV Networks' parent company Viacom went on its seek-and-destroy mission on YouTube: they were getting ready to launch mtvmusic.com.

Now that MTV has done this, maybe the next step is to allow people to watch their original animated TV shows online too. When MTV was still making animation, they made some pretty forward-thinking series. Liquid Television, Aeon Flux, MTV's Downtown, MTV Oddities: The Maxx, Daria and even the show that spawned Daria, Beavis & Butthead was light-years ahead of anything outside of the festival circuit. Even their flameouts, like The Brothers Grunt and Spy Groove, had some unique elements and were certainly more imaginative than major network attempts at animation for adults.

Please, MTV. Now that you have mtvmusic.com up and running, please consider mtvanimation.com too. You'll have an audience, I guarantee it.

Mo' Bakshi: Ralph lays down the gauntlet.

Courtesy of the wonderful ASIFA-Hollywood, here's a bit from Bakshi's panel at Comic-Con this year. He's talking like The Last Days Of Coney Island might actually see the light of day, which was heartening because as recently as the Bakshi gallery opening at Meltdown Comics the word was it was not going to be completed. Scroll down a bit to see my video of the gallery opening.



And yeah: technology is making it possible for a little group of animators to make cartoons...and in one case, one solo animator can take 5 years out of her life and make a feature. If you can draw, the possibilities are endless.

A little food for thought about the age of drawn animation...

I think this is kinda neat, although very Disney-centric. And hey there...you wouldn't have been able to DO this short had it not been for your friendly plastic pal who's fun to be with, aka your computer. I am willing to wager that either ToonBoom or Flash was used in the production of this short. One need only see the trailer for the recently released Sita Sings The Blues to see just how computer tools have made it possible for one sufficiently motivated auteur -- Nina Paley -- to animate a whole movie solo. It took her five years to do it, but damn that looks awesome.

I also think the dis of Bakshi was totally undeserved. Raunch was not the only thing he pioneered in cartoons. One need only look at "Wizards" to see how far he raised the bar technically. Also Miyazaki got a tip of the hat, but not the rest of the Japanese animation industry. People like Anno Hideaki, Oshii Mamoru and Watanabe Shinichiro are taking drawn animation into the future. And that's only a few names. The scene is struggling there, make no mistake. I was at Anime Expo and it's clear that Japan and also the American companies who distribute Japanese animation are in trouble. The global economy is in trouble, what else is new?

Still, this is a great short. I hope this gets in theatres so it can go into competition for the Academy Award best animated short race.

OK, this was definitely Oscar-worthy...

One of my favorite animators of all time was Fred Stuhr. Fred was this jumpy adrenaline junkie of a guy, a former competitive skateboarder, who liked fast cars and fast drugs and fast life. Yet somehow or another his attention was held by the infinitely slow process of doing dimensional animation: manipulating puppets in infinitely small increments, frame by frame by frame. His favorite part of the whole process was building things: the puppets, the sets, the vehicles, the props. He literally lived in his studio, surrounded by a miniature back lot of sets for projects he had finished, and projects yet to be finished.

Somehow or another he would blow through these projects fast. He primarily did music videos...Adam from Tool still claims that he directed those two breakthrough videos, Sober and Prison Sex, but a few of us knew better. Alas, this genius wasn't here to last. Fred died way too young in a car crash, before he got a chance to do anything long-form. I showed him a video of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, the mid-'90s being a time when animated features had to be musicals, and that was a musical that might be in sync with his dark visions. He never made it to that or any other feature. I can't complain about Tim Burton's take on the musical, with Johnny Depp as the perfect live-action choice for the haunted, revenge-obsessed barber. But I wonder what Fred would have done with it had he got the backing and the go-ahead.

But this is not an article about my friend Fred, who met his demise a little more than 10 years ago. It's about another masterful group of dimensional animators, and their creation: Peter and the Wolf, which won for Best Animated Short at the Academy Awards this year. The fact that this was passed up for the Annies is beyond me. As much as I enjoyed Your Friend, The Rat and How To Hook Up Your Home Theatre, I think that this is indeed the finest short I have seen of all screened in 2007.

Unlike Fred's gonzo approach to dimensional animation, the artisans at Se-Ma-For Pictures in Poland and British dimensional animator Suzie Templeton took 5 years to complete the short. Most of the film was done the old fashioned way: hands manipulating handmade puppets. However, CGI was used to create effects that were hard to create by hand in stop-motion time, like fog and floating balloons.

I suspect that this will be re-run on PBS Great Performances. Perhaps, maybe, it could be run as a yearly tradition? It's certainly gorgeous enough and strong enough to stand up to re-running.

One other thing before I wrap this post up: Cartoon Geeks favorite Persepolis will be coming back into theatres in April. This time you will have a choice of languages: the original French and a new English dub where original French voice actors Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni will be joined by Iggy Pop, Gena Rowlands, and Sean Penn. It will be initially going into 100 theatres...not a huge release, but 50 times bigger than its initial release in Los Angeles and New York City. Hopefully it will go wider as people get drawn into the little animated movie that could. The DVD will have both versions on it when it is released. When it comes out, people: GO SEE IT. You won't be disappointed.

Gonna try and get a CG podcast done from SDCCI

It's almost time for San Diego Comic Con. Will we be able to get a podcast out from the wilds of steamy, sleazy SD? Like they used to tell me to say when I did my time working at Fry's Electronics..."I don't know, let's find out!"

Keep checking the site. Not making any promises. However, I do have my MacBook this time. A Mac with GarageBand is the ultimate podcasting machine. Hawesome.

Tekkonkinkreet: yet another classic Japanese mindf**k anime

On July 1st, I went to see not one, but two movies. One was SiCKO, of which I will only say two words: SEE IT. (This does not apply to people who live in rational countries with single-payer health care.)

The other was Tekkonkinkreet. Based on the manga "Kuro to Shiro" (Black and White), the curious name of the movie is three Japanese words mashed together: in English, those words are IronConcreteMuscles. Perhaps not in that order.

Two feral children, Kuro, the older and fiercer of the two, and Shiro, the younger and more childlike/childish, live in the decay of Treasure City. Is the city in Japan, or somewhere else in the world? It is left very much up in the air, as you see verbiage in English, Thai and Hindi on buildings alongside the Japanese Kana and Kanji. There are some references that are very Japanese, however: the city is being carved up by rival Yakuza gangsters, some of which might actually be Yakuza from another planet. After the Yakuza chew through some of the lesser young toughs of the city, they find that dealing with Kuro and Shiro is much harder than it seemed it would.

The movie shifts between the world as it is, and the inner lives of the two feral boys. They are linked together telepathically, and you are not sure at times from whose point of view you are looking at the story. You wonder how much of the story is going on in real time, and how much of it is actually going on within their minds. This is not new: movies have been playing around with this for decades, and so have artists like Dali and Rene Magritte. At times things get so surreal and hard to follow it will probably take several viewings to untangle, and I have yet to only get the benefit of one. You get the feeling, however, that the effort is worth it.

This movie marks the first time an American working in the Japanese animation industry has directed an anime feature. Director Michael Arias was born in Southern California, and through a circuitous chain of events learned animation and computer programming at NYU, then returned to California to work in computer special effects at places like Digital Domain. He then went to Japan to work alongside the artists of Studio Ghibli as their digital effects programmer, beginning with Mononoke Hime. Before Tekkonkinkreet, Arias is best known for his involvement in The Animatrix, an assemblage of 9 Matrix-universe animated shorts which arguably is the best of the sequels to The Matrix.

It is in the best interest of the animation industries of both America and Japan to come together in these kind of hands-across-the-Pacific collaborative efforts. Considering the state of the industry in both countries (the US is almost dead, Japan is struggling) it is likely that collaboration will not make matters worse, and will likely help both to revitalize.

Tekkonkinkreet is going to be coming to theatres this weekend. It is likely to be released to DVD quite soon after this, but seeing the movie in a theatre with a huge screen and excellent sound is well worth it.

It's a movie about Penguins...and it's good. Wow.

I love Penguins.

Let me say it again: I love Penguins. They are adorable critters. Flightless birds that nevertheless "fly" underwater. Even though Berkeley Breathed has been pounding poor Opus into the ground, during the original run of Bloom County I thought he was great. And of course, gotta love that Tux. Wheeze, Pudge, Tennesee Tuxedo, penguins have been beloved characters in animation.

However: I did not love Madagascar. I thought the gangsta penguins were trite and tiresome. And I certainly did not love Happy Feet. March Of The Penguins worked only because you were seeing real penguins in their real life and their real environment.

Surf's Up could have been trite and cutesy if they didn't watch out. But it isn't.

Here are six reasons why Surf's Up doesn't suck:

1.) The ensemble cast was allowed to record the track as an ensemble, ala Bullwinkle and Rocky. Modern mics allow for total audio separation of tracks, without "leakage." This afforded the ensemble the means to improv a good portion of the dialogue.

2.) "The Big Lebowski" with feathers. The pivotal character is not the "hero" (Cody Maverick, played by Shia LeBoeuf) but Geek, portrayed by Jeff Bridges. Geek abides, dude. Excellent vocal performance. Great character. Easily the most engaging character since Mr. Incredible.

3.) The character design creates distinctions between what could be monotonous characters ala Happy Feet and allows for real acting. I would have liked a little more looseness and a little more ability for facial squash-and-stretch but there was enough to make it work. The "loosest" and "most cartoony" character of the bunch, Chicken Joe, was able to do the best "acting."

4.) Animation was done by humans rather than mo-cap. This extended not only to the characters but also to the waves, which transcended traditional notions of "effects animation" and entered the realm of being true character animation. The waves were characters in and of themselves. And some of them got the best lines of all.

5.) No musical numbers. This was done as a "mockumentary" so there are no temptations to do showstopper numbers like with Happy Feet. The music is there as seasoning, punctuation. Not as raison d'etre. This worked.

6.) This is a movie like Pixar used to do. It is 100% "story driven" as opposed to set-piece driven. The movie compares favorably with the two Toy Story movies for good story.

Other good points: there are no ham-handed attempts to send pro-social "messages" in this movie. The only "message" here is that surfing is fun, and you get into a sport for the fun of it, not to win. The fun is its own reward. It helps if you have seen surfing documentaries to "get" some of the in-jokes in the movie. There is a riff on a crucial bit of footage in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys which is nothing short of spectacular. The soundtrack is great, with one song missing: "My Wave" by Soundgarden. Maybe they couldn't get clearance on that particular track. Too bad, there is a character in the movie which could have used it as a "theme song."

This is a worthwhile film, particularly since Summer is almost here. Catch this wave before it gets blown out, dudes.

Warner Bros. Animation shutters facilities

On Thursday, the day after we recorded the latest Cartoon Geeks podcast, Warner Bros. Animation closed its Sherman Oaks facility. We know of this thanks to Paul Dini, aka "The King of Breakfast," who blogged about it last night. Go read his LJ entry, it's very instructive.

I really feel bad for the people who are currently trying to make a living in animation in LA. People are so desperate now, that many folks who are on staff with the Lucasfilm Animation CGI Clone Wars series have actually relocated to Singapore... SINGAPORE, WTF!... for the duration of the 100 episodes Lucasfilm intends to produce. It was common practice to send a bilingual employee as the representative to the Japanese or Korean studio back during the go-go years of American animation, to keep an eye on the overseas production, but actually having artists relocate overseas? That is brand new. Except for a few artists who are also Otaku, speak fluent Japanese, and who now are a part of the Japanese animation scene, this sort of thing never happened much.

This doesn't bode well for American animation, folks. I wouldn't be surprised if, a few years into the future, animation returns to the US. However, what may return would not be recognizable: basically non-union "overseas" Flash animation work for Japanese and European producers. The tables would be turned completely. Is this what people are still paying $30,000 a year to go to Cal Arts and study animation for? I didn't think so.

Cold Iron

(Obviously, images © Marvel Productions.)

Readers of our old blog (and yes, I will rebuild it...things are just bad right now) remember how unsatisfied I was with Ultimate Avengers 2. Which is why I didn't buyThe Invincible Iron Man on DVD, but rented it. (See, Blockbuster does have some uses. You can look at movies about which you have little interest, and that includes most of their stock.)

For those of you not into comics, or Marvel comics, understand that Iron Man is one of the most right-wing of Marvel's characters. The original origin story (that sounds redundant!) had millionaire weapons maker Tony Stark visiting Vietnam to see his weapons in use. He was kidnapped by a Communist general, after he had a near-fatal wound to his heart. Being a genius, Stark built a chest plate to keep his heart beating. Then he added stuff to make it a complete suit of armor, with jet boots and force-field repellers in the gauntlets.

Marvel's writers have done things throughout the years to try to make Iron Man interesting, and they were only partially successful. They fixed his heart so he could start dating women again, and not worry about taking off his shirt to reveal his Iron Man chestplate. They gave him numerous kinds of armor for special missions. Tony Stark became an alcoholic, and during rehab, had one of his assistants wear the armor. An enemy stole his armor's secrets, and Iron Man hunted down and destroyed the duplicates - even though some of them were bought by the military, making Iron Man a traitor to the USA.

None of this changed the idea that, if Dick Cheney read comic books, Iron Man would be his favorite hero. Wealthy, unrestrained in his use of force, protecting his wealth and power no matter what. And in Marvel's recent "Civil War" story line he promoted the registration of superheroes with the government, hunting down some of his old friends - including Captain America, who was American enough to see it as an exercise in facism.

Downplaying "Old Shell-Head's" comic book past in this animated film didn't make it any better. The story line takes place in China, where "rebels" are the bad guys who capture Stark, not Communist officials. And the main contention is the raising of a long-lost temple, which happens to be the center of a cult. The cult succeeds, and obtains the rings of an ancient figure called the Mandarin.

In the comics, the Mandarin was a cliched Yellow Peril villain. Here, he becomes a ghostly supernatural force (not the best foe for a technological hero) who takes over the hot Chinese chick, Li Mei (voice by Gwendoline Yeo, the Asian housekeeper from last year's Desperate Housewives).

The animation, mixing cel and CGI, works fairly well. But it's in service to a story where you can't gain any sympathy for any of the participants. Gee, I guess it's nice that Iron Man saved China from an ancient undead sorcerer, and that the hot Chinese chick got de-posessed, but I still kept the fast-forward button pressed through most of this movie.

The blandness of the plot, despite numerous off-screen deaths, made me focus on something peculiar to these Marvel productions, quasi-nudity. The show starts with Tony Stark (Marc Worden) in a hot tub with a well-built bit player. Their "naughty bits" were well hidden by mysterious clouds of steam. Later, when Li Mei is posessed by the spirit of the Mandarin, her nude form is carefully covered by mysterious streams of silk that hide her details but reveal her curves.

Y'know, guys, you're not selling that many of these things to kids; why not make it R-rated and show some nipples? At this point, it might be your only selling point. That way, perhaps you'd find some pressure to actually give the characters some depth to differentiate nude cartoon characters from pure porn. (I wouldn't call the character "the hot Chinese chick" if she didn't have less personality than Wendi Whoppers. And if you know who Wendi Whoppers is, shame on you.)

The only positive thing I can say about this DVD is that they avoided the terrible "blooper" section from the Ultimate Avengers DVD's, especially the "Tony Stark's House of Ribs" jokes that not even the most hardcore True Believer would laugh at.

Marvel was hoping to hitch their wagon to the rising star of Spider-Man's live-action movies. It hasn't worked. Come to think of it, if they had a working knowledge of what made a good cartoon, they could have made a good Spider-Man animated TV series - or kept alive the interesting CGI Spidey series they did with Sony a few years ago. Instead, they tried these lackluster DVD releases, failing to intrigue comic fans and non-comic fans alike.

There's still one more Marvel animated DVD in the pipeline, but if the trailer from Doctor Strange included in this disc's extras is an example of that movie, Marvel should cut its losses and end production. They couldn't pull off this militaristic, power-mongering military hero. What makes them think they can pull off the dimension-tripping, hippie-dippy, philosophically complex Master of the Mystic Arts in animated form?