Basil of Baker Street

So I applied and was accepted to Animation Mentor. So, cool.

I've been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes lately, and thinking about character animation. I was thinking all day at work about The Great Mouse Detective. For those of you who missed out, it's Sherlock Holmes, but with mice, basically. Also there are robots.

And of course Basil didn't have a cocaine addiction. Although I believe that he did smoke a pipe.

Basil of Baker Street had to be so much fun to animate. He's such a kinetic, over the top character. Expressive and hyper, and he does crazy things like blast throw pillows with his pistol and then gasp in despair when he fails to gain evidence against the Eeeville Professor Rattigan.

I did love that movie as a child. Especially the Big Ben scene with all the CGI gears that threaten to crush the main characters.

Dreamworks Dragon Review

Another movie review! But I will have actual art news probably tomorrow. I just don't have time to upload the images tonight and it's silly to talk about them without having them on hand to, ya know, look at.

Anyway. How To Train Your Dragon was really really good. The visuals were stunning. The ads all claimed the 3D was more breathtaking than Avatar and it totally was. Of course there was almost nothing to Avatar besides the pretty phosphorescent veneer.

This movie was visually a lot of fun and the story was sweet. One of the reviews I read on Rotten Tomatoes praised it for being a film that advocated learning rather than violence.

I loved this movie right up until the end. But then... the end. It was the only problem I had with the whole movie and the more I think about it, the bigger it gets.

Fair warning, there will be Massive Spoilers Ahead!

See, the main character is a plucky little viking named Hiccup. Like all young vikings he aspires to be a great Dragon Killer. Until he actually has the opportunity to kill one and finds that he doesn't want to. Through the friendship he strikes up he learns that everything the vikings think they know about dragons is wrong. He learns how to handle them in a completely non violent way and uses that knowledge to do well in his dragon fighting class. As he does better in the class though, he gets more concerned that he'll be "rewarded" by being the first in the class to get to murder a dragon.

At the finale of the second act he tries to show everyone that the killing isn't necessary and that they have nothing to fear from the dragons. This goes predictably wrong and it all builds up to Hiccup showing his friends what he has learned about dragons so that they can save all the dragons and all the vikings.

All well and good, until, as I say, the end. The entire movie thus far has dedicated itself to showing us that dragons are intelligent and if treated properly, peaceful creatures. Not killing dragons is the entire thrust of the film. Hiccup has twice refused to kill dragons when presented with the opportunity and has tried to prevent others from killing them as well. In the end they have to fight a really really big dragon. Like, way bigger than all the other ones put together. And Hiccup uses his special skills that he has learned by being open minded and non violent to...kill it. The whole movie is about not killing dragons, but I guess that one has to die because it's too big? It's different from the other dragons? What?

You tell me Dreamworks. It was just so disappointing. I really enjoyed the entire film up to that moment. The message was so appropriate and timely. Except the end of the movie completely undoes that message.

It's still a good movie. It merits a second viewing even, and the 3D was gorgeous. I cannot emphasize that enough. But you'll walk away with a much more satisfying impression if you skip the last 10 minutes or so.

Alice in Wonderland

I just saw Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D. It was interesting. Going into it I was expecting it to be a bit like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where he was making a movie of a well known story that was already a well known film, but not doing a remake of the film. If that run-on sentence makes sense.

This wasn't quite Burton's take on a classic tale though. It was more like a sequel.

Oh, this post will be full of spoilers BTW.

I expected it to be dark. Tim Burton is dark and Alice in Wonderland is pretty twisted subject matter. And it does make you wince. Quite a few creatures get stabbed in the eye, and at one point Alice has to enter the Red Queen's castle. A tiny Alice must cross the moat by jumping across the gray and bloated severed heads of the Queen's victims. But for all that there's nothing really subversive about the film. It's hard for me to even properly articulate.

I guess it was that the plot rolled along so straightforwardly (I hate that I just used that word). But with Alice you expect wandering and twists and turns and absurdities and tangents. And this movie put forward a standard Hollywood rescue mission/quest plot line right off the bat and then from that point on you know exactly how the story will play out.

Then there's the Hatter/Alice thing. They play them up like a romantic subplot and it's really really uncomfortable. It doesn't matter that it's Johnny Depp, it's still squicky, and not what I came to see. Fortunately at the end they ease off and kind of let you decide whether you want the story to go there or not.

I kind of liked Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, although she was so eerie I kept waiting for her to out to be evil. I don't really remember the book clearly, it's been years since I read it (except for Jabberwocky) but I vaguely recall the White and Red Queens (and their entire courts with the exception of the White Knight) being fairly equally self-absorbed and crazy.

I liked Alice in armor at the end. She made an excellent champion. I really liked the exchange of dialogue between the Jabberwock and the Vorpal Sword.

The very end I thought was sort of pat and goofy and anachronistic. Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie, but as an interpretation of the source material (which is obviously difficult to transpose into film) I was disappointed. I thought if anybody could do it Tim Burton could, but to me it left a bit to be desired.

Still though, if I ever have a 9 year old daughter, this would be a movie I would be comfortable having her obsess over. I think that Alice is a good female character. She was nervous and brave and intelligent (and mad). She was a typical misfit Burton hero but the moral at the end was that she could blaze her own path, rather than that she would have to be forever separate from the world (Edward Scissorhands anyone?). So I liked it. I just would have liked it better when I was 9.