civil war re-enactment poodles
Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show).
One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.
So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night.
This was not quite the experience I expected, for some reason. The film has been pretty universally lauded, and it's damned good - a layered and rather ambitious plot for its essentially cutesy animated format. I was blown away both by the uncompromisingly bleak vision of the setting, and by the animation itself - textured, sweeping and in the case of WALL-E, incredibly laden with character for what is essentially an angled, blocky, mechanical bucket of bolts. His every movement contributes towards making him incredibly endearing and innocently likeable, and in many ways the opening half hour or so, in which he's wombling about the landscape doing not much, was my favourite part of the film.
The spaceship full of human survivors is possibly where it all went a bit wrong for me - not because the political point wasn't valid, because it was nastily apposite, but because, I think, the animation style changed so dramatically. The bleak piles and wastes of Earth were simply so different to the gleaming whites and bulbous bodies of the spaceship, and the comedy changed from the simple, beautifully understated characterisation of WALL-E himself to something more obviously slapstick and at times rather cruel. The chaotic, hyperactive gang of malfunctioning robots was simply unnecessary, I thought, as were the bits with beached-whale human bodies sliding helplessly all over the shiny floors. Give an animator a shiny round shape to play with and they lose all restraint.
That being said, I loved the story itself, for strangely similar reasons to why I love Doctor Who - its joyous abandonment of actual scientific plausibility to write unashamed science fiction fable. The narrative worked on the emotional and symbolic level even if it didn't make sense for one iconic plant to regenerate the planet, or for obese foot-atrophied humans to totter to their feet and start farming, just like that. As a combination of dire warning with feel-good, it was pretty damned virtuoso. Also, any robot obsessed with classic musicals gets my vote. The sound-track was wonderful, and "humanising" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!
One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.
So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night.
This was not quite the experience I expected, for some reason. The film has been pretty universally lauded, and it's damned good - a layered and rather ambitious plot for its essentially cutesy animated format. I was blown away both by the uncompromisingly bleak vision of the setting, and by the animation itself - textured, sweeping and in the case of WALL-E, incredibly laden with character for what is essentially an angled, blocky, mechanical bucket of bolts. His every movement contributes towards making him incredibly endearing and innocently likeable, and in many ways the opening half hour or so, in which he's wombling about the landscape doing not much, was my favourite part of the film.
The spaceship full of human survivors is possibly where it all went a bit wrong for me - not because the political point wasn't valid, because it was nastily apposite, but because, I think, the animation style changed so dramatically. The bleak piles and wastes of Earth were simply so different to the gleaming whites and bulbous bodies of the spaceship, and the comedy changed from the simple, beautifully understated characterisation of WALL-E himself to something more obviously slapstick and at times rather cruel. The chaotic, hyperactive gang of malfunctioning robots was simply unnecessary, I thought, as were the bits with beached-whale human bodies sliding helplessly all over the shiny floors. Give an animator a shiny round shape to play with and they lose all restraint.
That being said, I loved the story itself, for strangely similar reasons to why I love Doctor Who - its joyous abandonment of actual scientific plausibility to write unashamed science fiction fable. The narrative worked on the emotional and symbolic level even if it didn't make sense for one iconic plant to regenerate the planet, or for obese foot-atrophied humans to totter to their feet and start farming, just like that. As a combination of dire warning with feel-good, it was pretty damned virtuoso. Also, any robot obsessed with classic musicals gets my vote. The sound-track was wonderful, and "humanising" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!