starlady | Entries tagged with sequential art: animation

Only ~~three~~ ~~two~~ none left, hooray. ~~My motivation to write these up is dying by inches.~~

( Why do we always end up like this? )

So, in order, the TAS episodes you really should watch:

1x02, "Yesteryear"
1x04, "The Lorelei Signal"
1x05, "More Tribbles, More Trouble"
1x07, "The Infinite Vulcan"

Checking things against Memory Alpha, it appears my files are misnumbered. Let's just get through this, shall we?

( Space whales, evil eagles, and mermen, oh my! )

So I really, really liked the first two Toy Story movies, and I really like Pixar movies. This is not the post in which I compare and contrast Ghibli and Pixar and talk about the problematic aspects of both; but that's coming! And I'm not going to give this movie a free pass by any means, but upfront, I have to say, I loved this movie.

So, yes. Toy owner Andy is all grown up and heading off to college, and his toys are faced with a dilemma: should they be hoping to go to Sunnyside Daycare, or to be put up in a box in the attic? The issue is forced when they are nearly accidentally thrown out and then are donated to Sunnyside anyway, despite Andy wanting to put them up into the attic. ( slight spoilers )

I loved this movie. Why can't the Hollywood studios make movies like Ghilbi and Pixar do, that are so effortlessly thrilling and involving? There's nothing like being in a packed theater full of people wearing the same 3D glasses and all having the same thrilled, terrified, and excited reactions to what's happening up on the big screen--and for a change the 3D in this movie was well done and tastefully integrated into the movie itself, which is always great. Too, what the toys go through is a real rollercoaster ride, with a lot of homages to great movies past along the way, and I really liked what the movie did with the characters.

Pixar doesn't really know what to do with girls and women, though now that computer animation has advanced enough to animate humans we pretty much have definitive confirmation that Andy's mom is a single mom, which is awesome, and some of the female characters really shine here, particularly Barbie and Bonnie. Barbie in particular is great; she chooses her friends when it matters and declaims about the rights of the governed not to be terrorized (I may or may not have shouted "Barbie I love you!" at that point) and in general is just awesome. If Barbie had been that awesome as an actual toy I would have loved Barbie. Also, Ken is great too, eventually. (All of his outfits in the movie have at one point actually been sold by Mattel, FYI.) And Bonnie is great as well, in a non-stereotypically gendered way; she doesn't have a bedroom coated in pink like Andy's sister and acts out stories that don't conform to clichés about what girls like and do. So yay!

( Vocal stereotyping in animation )

( Elegiac toy meta )

These reservations aside, awesome movie. If all movies were this good I would be broke from going to see them.

P.S. All the scenes with the octopus made the fandom part of my brain go some strange, wrong places. Where is the off switch for my fandom brain? Oh wait there is none.

I have been watching these with

sparrow_hawk (I say this like we didn't have a 12-month break between sessions, but I think we have momentum to finish now). The last two sets of episodes were awesome semi-canonical crack, but we have definitely gotten into the "not bad enough to be awesomely bad semi-serious Trek" doldrums in the middle with these. That said, they are still pretty hilarious. Onward!

Onward to spoilers, that is.

( Blast it, Spock, work harder! They're in the terminal stage! )

Hoshi no koe | Voices of a Distant Star. Dir. Shinkai Makoto, 2002.

It's fitting that the first line of the first anime done in the sekai-kei style questions in its very first words what world (sekai) actually means.

I love Makoto Shinkai's skyscapes; they outshine even his landscapes, which are breathtakingly beautiful. I read a paper about Shinkai's anime, I think it was in Mechademia vol. 1, that argued that Shinkai's anime, and the anime of the sekai-kei school, consistently present worlds (plural very much intended) in which characters are separate but connected--they transcend distance, first by technology and then simply by affect, which persists across distance and time even after the characters themselves have lost all actual connection. It's like that line in the Ashberry poem: "We are together at last,/but far apart."

I think Hoshi no koe encapsulates a lot of Shinkai's themes handily; in some ways the chronological gap Mikako and Noboru endure is just a literalization of the process of growing apart as part of growing up that characters in his other anime like Kumo no mukou, yakusoku no basho and 5cm per second experience (and in space travel time literally becomes distance; they are the same). And despite the fact that Shinkai's anime are completely digital I really do think that his anime, and the sekai-kei school in general, really are the apotheosis of Tom Lamarre's anime-as-layers theory: the entire anime is a process of moving through and across layers: in the first sequence Mikako and Noboru, on his bike (girl on the back of the boy's bike! hello Ghibli films!) look up through the sky to space beyond it, through all of which layers Mikako begins to move, while the train in the foreground separates Noboru from his terrestrial destination (much the same way as rain, snow, cherry blossom petals separate the characters from the viewer). It's no accident that Lamarre in The Anime Machine focuses almost exclusively on Castle in the Sky, and that the same movie is Shinkai's favorite anime.

Tonari no Yamada-kun | My Neighbors the Yamadas. Dir. Takahata Isao: Studio Ghibli, 1999.

So it turns out that there was one other minor Ghibli film I hadn't seen, because I didn't even realize it existed. Tonari no Yamada-kun is a meandering, slice-of-life drama about a typical Japanese family's quotidian trials and tribulations. The most notable thing about it is the animation style, which is extremely flattened and cartoon-like. I find it notable that Miyazaki Hayao talks about making "manga movies" but that this is the Ghibli film that comes closest to looking like a comic strip (I liked the permanently unimpressed dog particularly). The movie is charming, and also really funny; I was laughing out loud at multiple points, which is something that rarely happens to me with anime. Definitely worth a watch, particularly for people interested in conversational Japanese.

"I have seen many things...I have seen Ireland ravished by invaders in search of gold. But I have seen the book, the book that turned the darkness into light. I have seen the Book of Kells."

On the one hand I really liked this movie quite a lot, and on the other I had one significant problem with it.

Awesome parts first! This movie is produced by the same people who did The Triplets of Belleville, which is one of the best animated movies ever in my humble opinion precisely for all the things that make it such an outlier (silence! Frenchness! wine-drinking! bicycles! I could go on) and was a co-production of France, Belgium and Ireland. It tells the story of the very young monk Brendan of Kells, whose uncle the Abbot has very strict ideas about how best to protect Kells and its community from the invading Northmen aka Vikings, and whose authority is challenged by the arrival of the master illuminator Aidan of Iona, at whose behest Brendan eventually meets and befriends Aisling, the spirit of the forest that surrounds Kells. The question quickly becomes--will Aidan and Brendan survive both the Vikings and the Abbot's disapproval and the ill will of the Dark One, Crom Cruach, to finish the Book of Iona, and in particular the Chi-Rho page?

I have seen the Book of Kells with my own eyes, and I don't think it's possible for me to understate the beauty of the Book, and the absolute awe which the achievement of its illuminators inspires in the beholder. Wisely, the movie doesn't attempt to recreate the Book directly; instead it relies on its impact on its viewers for its emotional impact, which is more than enough; at the end I was nearly in tears (yes, I do like books rather a lot). If you couldn't tell, this movie is very much of the How the Irish Saved Civilization school of thinking, with which I have few quibbles per se but which I was led to question in the course of the movie. More on that below.

( Kells' greatest treasure )

I don't have much to say about this movie, except that it's awesome.

Well, okay, I do. Suffice it to say, I think that the movie is a triumph both of design and of animation, and a vindication not only of non-computer but of specifically handmade animation (though it's also radically innovative; the full-face close-ups are something I don't think I've seen before in this style of animation, and they're quite effective). The color palette of the movie alone, to say nothing of the painstaking care taken with the characters' outfits, and the sets, and scaling each to the other, is humbling. I also think that it's probably Wes Anderson's best movie since The Royal Tenenbaums, and may even be his best of all--I think in this movie he comes closer to acknowledging and truly grappling with the ambiguities, both ethical and familial, of his protagonist(s) than in any other film. It's Fox's unwillingness to be contented with what he has, and simultaneously to find things to be contented with in what he's got, that makes him so attractive (the three toasts in the film are each brilliant. The dialogue in general is brilliant), and that nearly destroys him and his family, friends and neighbors. I also think that Anderson does brilliant credit to Roald Dahl without adhewing to him slavishly, which comes off flatteringly to both of them. I couldn't pick a favorite moment, because there were so many that were awesome, in multiple ways.

If I have one complaint about Anderson's movies in general, and this movie in particular, it's that (despite the awesomeness of Felicity Fox) it's mostly a boys' club. I suppose the trade-off to having female characters in active roles is that Anderson's older women characters are so strong, and usually the rock of their movies' universes, but you know, like Fox, I want it all, right now.

I started out watching Star Trek: The Animated Series out of a sort of "why the hell not?" spirit, but there are actually quite a lot of things about this series that are pretty damn awesome. I really think everyone--or at least TOS fans--should watch it; it definitely deserves to be better known.

Still not spoiler-free--just the opposite, in fact.

( I'd hate to resort to clubs and knives. )

My friend

sparowhawk and I commenced our epic Fourth of July by watching four episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series. It exists. It may or may not burn out your eyeballs and/or cause you to choke from laughter. But it does have all the original actors providing voice talent (with the notable exception of Walter Koenig, so that Chekov has been replaced by an alien named Arix with a deep helium voice) and classic TOS scriptwriters slumming, so it is quasi-canon. And a hoot.

Please note: absolutely not spoiler-free.

( Where no one has gone before. For a reason. )

I saw the new Pixar film Up last night. What a wonderful movie.

( Up, up, and away! )

I saw "Coraline" with

sparowhawk today (after many restaurant misadventures, we wound up at a really tasty Thai place. score! south jersey is not the culinary wasteland one might think from my rants, I admit). It's been rather a while since I read the book, though I do remember the book being creepier (and I think Wybie is an invention?), but I thought it was an excellent movie that doesn't condescend to children or to adults. And it certainly is creepy. The 3D was very cool (and not hugely obnoxious) too, and the stop-motion animation was excellent. Though I would gladly fling the glasses in the face of whomever thought another freaking "Ice Age" movie was a good idea. Schlock I say, schlock. (Item: it would be cool to write a story about a town where people spoke only in Shakespeare quotations.)

I also finished, at long last, Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, the final volume of his Baroque Cycle, the other day. I suspect that if I had read Cryptonomicon beforehand I would get some of the jokes about the future descendants of Waterhouse and the Shaftoes, and I have horrible suspicions about the Leibniz/Waterhouse logic mill, but I particularly enjoyed Eliza's pontificating on the nature of investing in intellecutal endeavors (yeah copyleft!), and the poignant touches in the end, particularly in the Newton/Leibniz philosophick showdown. Princess Caroline's nightmare has stuck with me too, and I wonder whether Stevenson would say that we are living in the era in which the System is breaking down, and if his book Anathem is set in the aftermath of its collapse. It's certainly dispiriting, in a way, that so many citizens of our time, at least in America, are unable to reconcile religion and Natural Philosphy as the founders of the latter did so passionately. Perhaps that's the flaw in the System that Caroline feared.

At any rate, I have quite a few more damned, thick, square books to get through before I'll be at leisure to tackle Stephenson's other tomes, but I can't recommend him highly enough.

Except, of course, it was the dogs who were shot first. I just saw Ari Folman's animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" with my friend Stacey and it was as excellent as I've heard. The animation is gorgeous, first of all, but the story itself (about the filmmaker trying to piece together what he did as an Israeli soldier in the first Lebanon War) is incredible. Folman doesn't pull any punches, and he doesn't particularly spare anyone; I for one agreed with his choice to end the film with documentary video footage as opposed to animation, since I think that too many people still think animation = fantasy, and what happened in Lebanon (including the massacres in the refugee camps) is all too real, if all too familiar.

I just read two books each by Sarah Monette (aka

truepenny ) and Robin McKinley. By Monette I read Mélusine and The Virtu, and by McKinley I read Chalice and Sunshine. Monette first, since I have more of a bone to pick with her (yes, and not just because of that whole race/privelege/non-white characters brouhaha that went down last week, which is extremely interesting [some people would rightly filet me for using that adjective] and dare I say important for everyone to read; I'd recommend

metafandom ). To summarize bare-bones, the books are set in and around the eponymous city of the first book's title (every city in fantasy after China Miéville owes so much to New Crobuzon) and follow the travails of the gay wizard Felix Harrowgate and his half-brother Mildmay (the) Foxe. Monette has said that she wrote the books to explore the figure of the Byronic hero (Felix); well, as a reader of Byron (and a lover of Manfred in all its obsessive silly despair), I find it extremely interesting that Monette's Byronic hero is a) gay and b) a victim of severe childhood trauma and abuse in just about every form. And a mostly former drug addict. I find it very interesting, and perhaps a bit disturbing, that this is how Monette feels she can wrestle with the Byronic type, by giving him this sort of absoultely wretched past. Manfred by contrast has had the world on a plate, and I can't help but feel that Felix's black rages are just a bit odd given everything. That said, Mildmay is amazing; his parts of the story literally had me in tears at times. I would read about Mildmay forever. A final thing that gave me pause in these books was Monette saying that she wanted to gesture towards American-izing fantasy; well, I think that takes more than mentioning buffalo and alligators in passing, particularly since all the worldbuilding is bits of Greek and Roman and ancient Near Eastern whatnot. I'm a classicist too; I can track what she's doing, and while Monette is fairly inventive up to a point, I don't buy it as anything more than a gesture. That said, the character of Mehitabel Parr is pretty awesome, and I hope she features more in The Mirador and Corambis, which come next.

As I said, by McKinley I read Chalice and Sunshine. I realized after finishing Sunshine that they're essentially the same story--a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" in which the female hero uses her affinity with an unusual element (honey in Chalice, sunlight in Sunshine) to win her Other-ish lover and the day. Sunshine involves vampires, while Chalice is set in a completely other world; I would say Sunshine is the better book, but Chalice is perhaps more intriguing. I recommend both of them highly.

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It's a magical world

The days are just packed

Star Trek: TAS 2x01-03, 2x05-06 (aka The End)

Star Trek: TAS 1x13-16

Toy Story 3.

Who thought of those pterodactyls? (Star Trek: TAS 1x08-12, 2x04)

Hoshi no Koe & Tonari no Yamada-kun

The Secret of Kells

The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Look Jim, I'm a starfish! (Star Trek: TAS 1x04, 06-07)

Star Trek: The Animated Series 1x01-03 + 05

The spirit of adventure.

For those in the know: Jerk wad

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war

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