3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Nosferatu

2024, Robert Eggers (The Northman) -- download

We've seen all Eggers features but for The Northman. Yes, I know, it's not that many but I can safely say we like all the work we've seen, and its nice to see someone doing distinctive work, stylish work that appeals to me. If you have seen our Halloween posting, you will know we are fans of vampires, and therefore have seen both predecessors (the original we saw with live musicians, including throat singers -- it was quite the experience) but to be honest, nothing sticks out to me, but for it being a homage rip-off of Dracula (there is history as to that) and the more horrible, more vourdalak-like, more monstrous depiction of a vampire. Of course, this image became a template to many depictions after.

The plot, the Dracula plot structure, wherein Thomas Hutter (Keanu Reeves Nicholas Hoult, Warm Bodies), a real estate agent / lawyer is sent to an ancient castle in Transylvania to secure signatures from Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, The Crow), a reclusive nobleman seeking a house in the city, is intact --- the names and places have changed from the Stoker novel but the story hasn't. And his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, Wolf), the goth-ish waif who suffers a connection to an unseen evil and becomes distraught at her husband's failure to quickly return. While he is away she stays with friends Friederick (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Nocturnal Animals) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin, A Murder at the End of the World), who become increasingly disturbed by her emotional outbursts and "fits". 

The arrival of Hutter at the ruined castle in Transylvania is almost a series of vignettes, beautiful gothic imagery, scene cuts and almost always black & white, a nod to the shadows that made the original silent film so stark. In fact so much of the movie fades from colour, except when bright sunlight or fire come into play -- only they let in the colour. And then there is Orlok himself, strangely enough, no a lithe sexual being as one would expect from 21st century vampires, despite my opening about the monstrous nature of "nosferatu", but with Bill Skarsgård playing the role, I expected his emaciated figure to play some sort of sexual role. But no, this is even more monstrous than the pointy ears and bald pate -- he is almost a giant, shrouded in mouldering garb, his Vlad Tepes moustache still somehow intact, his skin taught and corpse-like, sores and grave rot. He taunts and draws blood from Hutter until the man escapes, barely, awakening in a monastery whose monks explain the plot to him. A meagerly alive Hutter hurriedly returns to Wisburg to save his wife, and maybe the city.

Meanwhile Orlok has secured his passage, killed all the crew (as per The Last Voyage of the Demeter) and brought a plague to the German city. Ellen gets worse, which is made terribly so much more tragic by Orlok visiting the children and wife of the Hardings. A barely alive Hutter returns armed with knowledge that he must save his wife and the city, and seeks out a disgraced Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), a man known for his knowledge of the darkness.

I never understood the true need for land ownership and real estate deals in these movies. At least in the original text, Dracula comes as a nobleman, sets up and lives a bit of nightlife in London. But here, it is but a walking corpse, hiding his depredations amidst the plague he brings with him. All he ends up doing is providing his address to his hunters.

The visuals are stunning -- the set dressing, the costuming, the winding narrow streets of the German city, and, of course, the shadows. But what dominates the movie in my memory is the tale between Ellen and Orlok. They are drawn together, seemingly since her childhood, and despite the horrific nature she is well aware of, it is sexual. Despite Orlok's very deathly appearance, it is sexual. A very disturbing aspect of sexuality, of desire and ownership at any cost. In the end, neither can deny what has drawn them together, and only in death can it be truly.... consummated. I was not titillated by Ellen's waifish sexuality, quite clearly the obvious, made uncomfortable by the unnatural act. This movie has succeeded in replacing the 21st century's desire to make all vampire stories about (sparkly?) desire by not only embracing the monstrous nature of the strigoi, but also tainting the act of seduction. The final image of a naked, now very dead, rotting Orlok laying upon Ellen was terribly unsettling.

I do wish I had seen this in the cinema, like Kent.

ReWatch: Beetlejuice

1988, Tim Burton (Dumbo) -- download

Betelgeuse?

Bay-tull-Gay-Ooos? 

I wonder what the audiences would have thought the movie was about if they had just stuck with the planet name as the title...

Anywayz...

So, surprisingly even with my current state of mind (a constant battle between nostalgic fondness and a disengagement with the past), the movie really stood up to the test of time. Everything remains charming, witty and entirely engaging.

As is my way with ReWatches, I don't feel compelled to relay the usual recap of plot, just muse on whatever crossed my mind as watching.

So, the Maitlands. I recall thinking, when I originally saw the movie, that they had only just moved to Winter River, given they were spending vacation time redecorating the house; I don't think I ever caught that the hardware store was theirs. That said, I still think they are also city folks who moved to The Country but unlike the Deetz family to follow, they embraced country life. It was not lost on me in the original viewing that the Maitlands owned the embodiment of "the haunted house on the top of the hill" but had turned it around with charming, folksy design aesthetic.

Their death isn't convincing; its rather slow and the river doesn't look that deep. I was always convinced the plot was going to reveal they were killed by some sub-plot(ter) from the afterlife.

The Afterlife, hereafter capitalized, is one of the stars of this movie. The World Builder in my head picks apart everything about it, but I still delight in its depiction. Of course death would be dominated by bureaucracy, but its kind of weird we end up in a pseudo-Hell before we actually go somewhere... nice, or... worse. Though, was there any binary definition of Moving On in the movie? I guess I will have to see what the sequel says about the status of the Maitlands, as they are not present in the new movie, AFAIK.

Lydia Deetz. In 1988 I was already too old to have a crush on a teen goth girl, but boy, did I love Winona Ryder in this role. This was the beginning of Tim Burton becoming a goth culture icon and nothing said it more than Lydia's black massively wide brimmed sunhat. She's morose, death obsessed, until the end of the movie when the Deetz family and the Maitlands have found a happy balance, and then she is dancing to calypso music cheerfully. My headcanon is that this scene created the sub-sub-culture of goths who are rather happy go lucky.

When Harry Belafonte passed last year, a bunch of stories popped up about the use of his music in the movie. Apparently the original script, and music choices, were to be more sombre, darker toned, especially the dinner scene, but Catherine O'Hara suggested livening up the scene with the "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" --- aren't we glad she did? Its also rather great that the New England homey Maitlands would love calypso music, which is not altogether impossible -- even my mom had a couple of Belfonte's in her collection; he was pop music for "adults" at the time.

Beetlejuice himself. At least Barbara Maitland acknowledges he is a pervert, but having not seen the new movie yet, I wonder how "problematic" his *cough* antics will be. I mean, on one hand, he is supposed to be an utterly terrible being, but he's also an anti-hero, even in this movie. That said, every time I rewatch this movie, I am surprised how small his role is in the bigger play of the movie, and reminded that he becomes the real villain at the end.

In watching with my less rose coloured eyes (brown, actually) I notice things I never really paid attention to, such as the reasons Charles Deetz is moving to The Country (his boss and friends are assholes) and how much he adores his daughter; I always thought of him as a secondary villain, but really, he's just very capitalism driven mundane. We will ignore the actor being a true villain.

Yep, still love the movie, love the quirky characters, and the whole look & feel of everything. 

Yeah, that was all rather disjointed, even for you, more notes taken/thought than contiguous writing.

Director Set: Select Selick

Perhaps my favourite podcast over the past few years is Blank Check with Griffin and David, which finds actor Griffin Newman (The Tick) and critic David Sims (The Atlantic) covering the entire filmography of a director (one film per episode) specifically those who were given a blank check at some point in their career to make whatever passion project they want.  It's an entertaining, inviting, insightful, thoughtful and incredibly well researched podcast which goes into deep (and sometimes juvenile) conversations about the director and actors and productions of the films they cover, frequently to the point where the podcast episodes are longer than the films. They just ended their review of the films of Henry Selick.

For those who don't know, Selick is the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I should clarify, if there's any confusion, he is the director of "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas".  So heavy is the Burton influence, and imposition of his name over the title that it's a film easily mistaken as a Burton film.

It's true that the film owes so much to its association with Burton, it's really Selick's direction, his sense of style, and his innovations in the world of filming stop motion animation, that make it stand out so boldy.  The things we ascribe almost exclusively with Burton - the morbid humour, the gothic sensibilities, the fascination with the ugly, gross, freakish and abnormal, the just plain weird -- those are traits that Selick shares with Burton, and maybe perhaps trumps Burton in his fascination with them.

In all of Selick's films (well, I can't speak to the live-action/animation debacle of Monkeybone, which I didn't watch) there is an underworld, or at least an alternate world, for the protagonists to venture through.  They seem perhaps a darker place of existence that may at first appear to be something brighter because of their sheer difference.  In Nightmare, there are many alternate worlds operating outside of the "real world", and through Jack Skellington, we inhabit probably the darkest of them all (and yet it's still full of joy and glee).  In James and the Giant Peach, James goes from a live action world to an animated one, where he befriends clothed bugs as they travel across the Atlantic in a gigantic piece of fruit. In Coraline there's the other realm, one that mirrors Coraline's own familiar, tiny world, only where everything is just as she (thinks she) wants it - happier, more attentive parents, more fun/less annoying neighbours, joys and delights meant for her.  In Wendell and Wild, the titular demon brothers live in an underworld realm that's largely inhabited by their father, a giant with an amusement park built on his belly.

In each of Selick's four stop-motion animated films, there is a character longing for a different reality, a different existence and then it finds its way to them.  In Nightmare, Jack wants something more than what he has, more than scares and frights, he wants joys and delights, even though they are sometimes two sides of the same coin so he takes the joyous of them all as if he is entitled to it.  In James..., James' orphaned existence with his sadistic aunts is even a few notches below that of Harry Potter on the misery index. Coraline in Coraline is lonely, sad and angry, and her parents can't bother to even look at her when she's talking to them...so when another realm presents itself, even with creepier undertones presenting, she's eager to be there.  In Wendell & Wild, we have two demons who are subjugated by their father, and long to be above ground, and they're willing to manipulate a traumatized 13-year-old longing for her own escape to get it.

Each stop-motion picture finds Selick dealing with a particular challenge.  For Nightmare, he's making a full-blown musical, and it really pushed the envelope in terms of complex camera work to get a really sweeping cinematic feel.  With James... Selick has an extended, 20-minute, live-action set piece that has real-life James (Paul Terry), experiencing every misery in the gross environment of his aunties Spiker and Sponge's (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes) ramshackle cliffside manor.  It's a very contained set, but also finds Selick using his tricks of design and forced perspective on a live-action scale.  Coraline found Selick working with 3D during the brief window of 3D-mania, and (having seen it on the big screen in 3D, I can attest) may be the only great 3D movie of the era.  Watching it in 2D recently, you can see there are moments that would have popped so much more in 3D... it's something even digital animation couldn't do that perhaps only stop-motion could, taking advantage of that extra dimension.  With Wendell & Wild, Selick wanted to step outside of telling a kid's story, securing a PG-13 commitment from Netflix before getting started, and so the question is, what can (and what should) he do with that increased latitude?

In every instance, Selick had either a collaborator, or some guiding point.  The discourse on Blank Check was that Selick is a bit of a difficult personality, and can get pretty heated with studios and interference in his work, so obviously it would take a special kind of relationship to get a project off the ground, and then completed.  With Nightmare he had Burton and Danny Elfman (not to diminish the contributions of Caroline Thompson who reworked the screenplay and songs and was dating Elfman at the time).  With James... he had the guidance of Roal Dahl's book, and Neil Gaiman's book for Coraline. For Wendell & Wild, he found an enthusiastic partner in Jordan Peele, who helped rewrite and refocus the script as well as produce and co-star in.  There is the stamp of all these collaborators on these projects, and there aren't huge leaps going from the works of Burton to Dahl to Gaiman to Peele.  They're not direct parallels, but they don't skew too far from one another stylistically.

So few and far between were major stop-motion pictures, and so potent was Burton's name associated with Nightmare, that most major, non-Aardman Studios (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) stop releases, were probably attributed to Burton by the public at large for decades.  I know I thought James... was Burton-affiliated somehow (I guess he was producer).  The next big stop-motion release after James was called "Tim Burton's" Corpse Bride" which Burton is actually credited as co-directing, further solidifying the confusion around Nightmare.  As such, most Laika studios productions -  Coraline, Parnorman, Boxtrolls - were perceived as being Burton-related by the masses, which, if not to the detriment of the film itself likely was detrimental to the directors and studio.  At the same time, Nightmare unfortunately created a sort of template for what an American stop-motion animation film should be - for kids, but a little creepy and weird.  That's the milieu that Selick operates in anyway, but it has hindered productions that aren't that, like Laika's Missing Link (which took in $26 million in box office, compared to the similarly themed, CGI Smallfoot, which was a massive $214 million success).

Nightmare has become such a cultural juggernaut over the past 25 years, spanning Hallowe'en to Christmas, it resurrects itself every year as a double-dipping holiday staple.  It's so visually striking it's inspired all manner of wardrobes, and dammit if it's not one of the best musicals of the past 30 years.  There are songs in James... but nothing remotely as earwormy as even the least of Nightmare's tracks.  In fact, watching James... for the first time recently, I kind of resented that they would even try including songs at all.  It's not a musical, and so they feel a bit half-assed in their insertion.

I dig Nightmare for the scale of the production...it spans multiple realities and intones so many more (I would love a sequel that visited some of the other holiday lands).  It's a visual feast in an exceptionally playful reality with so much to look at in its surreal designs that it can't help but inspire, delight and awe.  James... feels like a pitiable younger brother in comparison.  It's extended drudgery of an opening live action sequence is at once curious and off putting.  It doesn't feel natural at all and it's not friendly or welcoming to the viewer in the slightest.  Once James escapes into clay-mation land, hanging with the bug people, one has to wonder if the poor boy has hit his head and is bleeding out on a rock somewhere, dreaming all this.  In the end it proves it's not a dream and it's all the more confounding for it.  It's a much smaller reality than Selick's other works, though still full of invention and creative design, but it's more tedious than exciting as a story.

Coraline takes Gaiman's pre-teen reader and brings it popping to life, taking whatever liberties it sees fit to be as movement oriented as it can be.  As a character I find Coraline more striking than any of Selick's other designs.  The blue hair, yellow raincoat and mudders are just a wonderfully iconic visual combination (to the point that a doll with blue hair, and yellow raincoat is quickly identified as Coraline).  There's a cleverness to Coraline, in the characters, in the story, in the realities, that is hard to turn away from.  The individual pieces are all so eccentric, in performance, personality and visual design, and Selick doesn't shy away from being cheeky at all (with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders playing a pair of aged, reclusive former burlesque performer) which makes the production so much livelier that it feels like anything could happen.  Even in the creepy factor, most animation of the past 30 years doesn't have anything as startling as people with buttons for eyes...the opening sequence where a doll is unstitched, restuffed, and resewn, is mildly upsetting (the stitch ripper on the mouth is only a few seconds in!).

Wendell & Wild has a lot going on. It starts with parental death and childhood trauma in its first five minutes, but also has a cracking "afro-punk" soundtrack including X-Ray Spex, Death, the Specials and TV on the Radio. The film is dealing a LOT with demons (metaphorical ones, yes, but I mean here literal demons), but they’re not very nefarious, nor are they very bright or all that threatening, but it’s amazing that all this underworld talk is paired up with the setting of a Catholic school, complete with James Hong’s delightfully scheming headmaster, Father Level Bests, and his old biddy servant nuns (“the penguins” he calls them). That our protagonist, Kat (Lyric Ross), has “the mark”, and develops powers as a “Hellmaiden” as also does the kindly nun, Sister Helly (Angela Bassett) is just mind boggling in the who Catholic context. In almost any other film, we’d be sitting with that dichotomy, but there’s no time to think too much about it here. The Hellmaiden thing is sort of a spoof of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, but again, the film doesn’t have enough time to linger on it. There’s a whole warning about the nefariousness and rot on society that is the prison-industrial complex to get through… and murder, and Kat learning to trust other people (including her new trans friend Raul), and herself again.  It's quite a bit diffrent aesthetically, with Selick messing around more with flatter, more 2-dimensional visual constructs, and scaling back the cleanliness of animation to try and escape any uncanny CGI valley comparisons.

I would love Peele and Selick to team up again, maybe on something even more adult, more in Peele's wheelhouse.  Maybe a proper stop-motion 3D horror film (still need to see Mad God), as it seems like Selick's interests are evolving to wanting to do something more adult in the format he's dedicated his life to.  

If I were to rank these, the difficulty comes in the top two for me, which is whether Coraline is the better film than Nightmare.  I don't even know which I enjoy more.  I've seen Nightmare enough times now that the familiarity doesn't hold my attention as strongly, which I find Coraline has maybe one or two small 3-5 minute sags in it.  I would like it to be just a little tighter.  Nightmare is kind of a phenomenon for a reason, and it's still an incredible viewing experience in spite of the phenomenon, and I think that may be why it gets the edge at top spot, but I don't feel good about it.

Next is easily Wendell & Wild.  It doesn't quite hold up as solidly as a story as Nightmare or Coraline but it's never dull either. Only seeing it the once so far, I wonder how it will withstand multiple viewings, whether it appreciates with knowing where it all goes, or if part of the initial charm is watching it work to sew all its disparate threads together.  James and the Giant Peach is not terrible, but easily the weakest of Selick's work (outside of Monkeybone).  It had its charms but it seems more spartan than the rich worlds Selick otherwise provides.

10 for 10: Kidstuffs, tufts for kids

10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? (Edit... maybe not so much, I started writing this at the end of March, got to A Series of Unfortunate Events and couldn't contain myself, and finished that extensive section in April.  I'm only now, in July, getting around to adding pictures and publishing),

This time, some programming and movies intended for younger audiences:
Big Hero 6 (blu-ray) 2014, d. Don Hall, Chris Williams
Zootopia (VOD) 2016, d. Byron Howard, Rich Moore
Babe (DVD) 1995, d. Chris Noonan
My Neighbor Totoro (Netflix) 1988, d. Hayao Miyazaki
Babe: Pig in the City (DVD) 1998, d. George Miller
JLA: Trapped In Time (Netflix) 2014, d. Giancarlo Volpe
Jumanji (TV) 1995, d. Joe Johnston
Jungle Book (Netflix) 2016, d. Jon Favreau
The Lego Batman Movie (in theatre) 2017, d. Chris McKay
A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix, 8 episodes) 2017, d. Barry Sonnenfeld, Mark Palansky and Bo Welch

aaand....go
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In live action, Baymax in this poster would
be portrayed by Jack Black

Oh man, I don't remember much about Big Hero 6 at this point.  Mainly disappointment.  After missing it in the theatre and then waiting well over a year for the price to go down to buy it on disc (the price never did go down in stores, it was joining the Disney Movie Club that got it to me for free) once I finally got to see it, it didn't live up to expectations.  Not only that, my kid got kind of bored while watching it.

Science, yeah!  That's what I remember.  It's about science.  And of course, orphans.  Two genius-level boys, living with their aunt...or grandma... I don't recall.  And then to make their life so much worse, one of them dies.  The other finds a surrogate brother in Baymax, an inflatable helper medical droid, who he weaponizes because superheroes and stuff, and additional family in his brother's friends at science school. Based of a very unknown Marvel comic this movie has some inspired bits, particularly the San Frantokyo city and its mash-up of American and Japanese cultures.  But the dead brother thing weighs so heavy, it doesn't feel like much fun.

Honestly, I don't even really remember the full story to this.  I don't remember the bad guy.  That's not good.  It's not a tremendously memorable film, and after watching it I had little desire to revisit it any time soon.  Even now, with memory of it fading, I have little desire to refresh myself.

(8:22)

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Like Big Hero 6, this is another not-Pixar but basically Pixar (now that John Lasseter runs everything Disney Animated) feature from Disney that, hey, just won an Oscar.  Hey, I actually saw an Oscar contender from last year.  Yay me.

There's a stand-out gag in Zootopia, one that took it from "enh, whatever" to "must see".  I don't remember which film it was I was going to see but prior to the film they played the entirety of Nick and Judy's visit to the DMV and their interactions with Flash, the sloth.  This is an instant classic comedy bit, one that will forever lift Zootopia up high in the ranks of incredible children's entertainment.  Even the Oscar couldn't really do that.

The movie has a moral, basically being don't let anyone tell you what you can or can't be in life. If your will is strong and your desire is there you can be anything you want.  It's an inspiring message, not wholly correct, but definitely inspiring.  Kids movies can be a bit simplified like that.

This movie has a mystery to it, as well as a conspiracy.  It's not quite as good as Rango (which was basically an animated version of Chinatown) was about treating the conspiracy with real weight and consequences for the people of Zootopia, but it's simplified version is also effective.

The best part of Zootopia is its introduction to the city itself.  The ride Judy takes into town that traverses it's unrivaled biodiversity is astounding.  I could get lost taking in those details.  Sadly the film doesn't explore the city's fantastical setting with any real awe or wonder.  It's just the environment the story is told in, which is kind of disappointing in an otherwise enjoyable film.

(20:01)

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I've had zero desire to see Babe from day one.  From the first commercial I saw about the precious talking pig and the precocious farm animals he comes to live with and the singing mice, the whole cloying affair just screamed for me to stay away.

So why, over 20 years later, would I buy the damn movie?
Mad Max: Fury Road.  That's why.
Director George Miller's modern masterpiece (and potential dethroner of Die Hard as #1 action movie of all-time) made me curious about Miller's rather scant list of other directorial efforts.  Plus, someone once mentioned how Babe: Pig in the City was their favourite movie ever (I'm thinking it was Comedy Bang Bang's Scott Aukerman...sounds like something he'd say).

Upon watching it, it's still a pretty cloying movie, at times utterly precious, and yet, it's not unpalatable.  It's got its charm for sure.  It's certainly a much different piece of entertainment.  It's slow, and erratic.  It plays out in chapters that are largely compartmentalized and don't necessarily combine to form a whole, meaningful story.  And those singing mice are the friggin' Minions of their day.  Small doses, man, small doses.

It's a bit of a wonder on its own, though, wrangling all these animals into on screen performances with limited CGI technology at the time.  I'd be much more fascinated by a behind-the-scenes documentary than the film itself.  Plus, it's just now I realize that George Miller only directed the follow-up, and not this one.  Moops.

(29:57)

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Totoro is one of those pop-culture figures I didn't understand because I had no frame of reference for.  A gigantic cat like thing from a Japanese cartoon?  I mean, I knew of Totoro as early as 20 or 25 years ago, and yet I never got around to seeing the film which launched him as an icon, the inspiration for a bazillion stuffed animals of all different sizes around the world.

My Neighbour Totoro is considered a classic, for good reason.  It's sweet, charming, and innocent.  It has a host of moments where it puts its young characters in harms' way, including a particularly harrowing moment where their father fears them missing.  It's dangers are kind of naive threats and existential fears rather than big scary villains.

There's gentle fantasy throughout, so gentle it's almost as if it doesn't exist at all.  One kind of wonders if they're the delusions of children or honest spiritual phenomena (at least in the context of the film).  It's a product of a different time of filmmaking so the pacing is quite deliberate, and curiously it underuses its titular character to a shocking degree.  Totoro is barely in the film at all.  But when he is there, he makes an impact.  It's like the xenomorph in Alien but in reverse.  He bring calm and peace instead of fear and anxiety.

(39:26)

Now this is what I was after.  Babe: Pig in the City, by George Miller, is an utterly insane movie.  Utterly insane.  I don't even know how to describe it beyond saying it's insane.  Because it is.  It's insane.

Miller constructed an crazily elaborate studio set for Babe and the other animals to inhabit as the titular city.  It's like Gotham from Tim Burton's Batman, but fully animal accessible.  The plot finds Babe and his owner's wife flying out to a Sheepdog competition in hopes of saving the farm from debt collectors.  Through curious circumstances they wind up missing their connecting flight and have to venture into the city to stay, where the farmer's wife has her luggage stolen.  A strange hotel for animals, nosy neighbours across the streed, a chimp mafioso, and god...so much more.

I mean what is this movie?  It's whimsical and dangerous, it's bizarre and amusing.  There are elaborate physics-defying physical gags that seem straight out of the 1930s but there aren't any straight up jokes.  This is meant to be a old timey comedy adventure, but with animals and puppets instead of the Little Tramp or Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy.  It's whackadoo and kind of ingenious.  Definitely different and visionary, in its own weird way.  It's a sequel that's nothing like its predecessor, despite following the first film's formula.  It's the Fury Road of the Babe movies.

(49:59)
[-break-]

DC Comics and Warner Brothers have been producing direct-to-video animated movies for over a decade.  These efforts were fully independent of other animation ventures on Cartoon Network such as Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans Go, and Young Justice, and usually they were adaptations of popular stories, such as Superman: Doomsday or Darwyn Cooke's 1950's inspired New Frontiers.  In recent years most of their efforts have been in supporting the New DC Universe after it was completely relaunched and rebooted in 2011 with most releases being adaptations or interpretations of Justice League or Batman stories.  These stories have a connective thread though, building a larger universe of animated features and have branched out to telling their own original stories in this world.  Alternatively there have been animated efforts to support the Batman Unlimited line of toys, which is a natural fit (even though both the animated series and toys are now kind of kaput).

JLA: Trapped In Time, however fit neither with the Batman Unlimited toys nor the New 52.  It's a curious project which starts with a "present day" action sequence in which Lex Luthor appears to die in the Arctic only to jump a thousand years into the future of the Legion of Super-Heroes where he's being kept in stasis. Dawnstar and Karate Kid roam a museum after being rejected by the Legion.  Karate Kid accidentally frees Luthor from his stasis and Luthor gains the power of the Time Trapper, and seeks to destroy the Justice League before they're even started, with the help of the Legion of Doom.

This is old school comic book superheroes, but with a modern eye towards multiculturalism and inclusiveness.  It's rather entertaining, surprisingly so...wish it were more than a one-shot.

(1:00:01)

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Another reach-back into kids movies I never saw.  There's a new Jumanji sequel being filmed starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillen, and I know I'm going to want to see that, so I figured I should start with the original.  Again, like most kids movies which popped up in the 90's I was kind of dismissive of it, mainly because I was a teenager and these things weren't meant to appeal to me and my sour teen attitude.

But Jumanji is actually quite fun and exciting children's entertainment.  A mystical board game that brings to life the dangers that should only be imaginary, in today's current board game resurgence, this is such a fun idea, well ahead of its time.  Unfortunately, though, if you don't finish the game bad things continue to occur.  That's what happened when young Alan got sucked into the game, and his friend, poor Judy ran and didn't complete her turn.  Alan disappeared and Judy went kind of mad.

Decades later a couple of kids (including Kirsten Dunst) discover the game and start playing themselves, freeing a now adult Alan who has to convince a troubled Judy of his return and of the need to finish the game they started.  The dangers exacerbate as they play and their town becomes more and more menaced by the creatures they unleash.

It's actually typical Joe Johnston fare...the man is tremendously consistent.  Jumanji fits quite adeptly between The Rocketeer, Jurassic Park III and Captain America The First Avenger in his storytelling repertoire.

[1:09:49]

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I didn't think there was a need to see this Jon Favreau directed live-action adaptation of the Jungle Book, I wondered what it could possibly have to offer as an almost literal translation of the animated Jungle Book film (minus most of the musical numbers).  And yet, it was surprising in many different ways.

It's not a direct, shot-for-shot adaptation of the Disney cartoon, but it is more based of it than Rudyard Kipling's original story.  I think by doing all these live action adaptations of their adaptations of public domain stories Disney's hoping to supplant the original stories and make their interpretations of them the story of record.

Anyway, I had to appreciate the exquisite craft put into this movie.  The set design is immersive, you truly believe Mowgli lives in this jungle, and you believe his relationships with the various animals he meets.  The visual effects (another Oscar award winner this year, beating out Rogue One and Doctor Strange) are superb.  The voice cast, including Idris Elba, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Kingsley and (best of all) Christopher Walken (as King Louie), are all superb, but young Neel Sethi holds the picture, a rare child acting talent that can feel at home in such a made up world (much kudos to Favreau's direction as well).  The King Louie sequence excited all my giant gorilla feels, better than the last King Kong movie (but maybe not the next one?).  After watching it I found myself wanting to watch it again.

[1:20:17]

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Phil Lord and Chris Miller's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is maybe my all-time favourite animated movie at this point.  It's a comedic masterpiece as well as an absurd one.  Their Lego Movie, by equal measure, is a stroke of genius, making something such as a movie about a non-descript toy product be about something so much more, while also being completely about the toy product.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs had a sequel, not directed by Lord and Miller, which tried to replicate the success of the earlier, but failed pretty spectacularly.  Lord and Miller are so aware of convention and cliche that they can exploit, play with and play into them for comedic, dramatic and action purposes.  Few others are so capable of doing so (Dan Harmon of Community and Rick and Morty is another) without going full fledged into satire, lampoon or parody mode.

Similarly, this Lego Batman Movie feels like Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2.  It's a sequel (indirectly, but still a sequel) to The Lego Movie but most of its predecessor's cleverness remains.  The Batman of The Lego Movie worked because he was delivered in such small doses.  That egotistical, metal screaming Dark Knight plays itself out pretty quickly in The Lego Batman Movie.  The forced concept of the loner most afraid of being alone so he stays alone could work, but it's hard to really feel for this character through the veneer of braying ass that he kind of is in the film.

The film also tries, with limited success, to touch upon The Lego Movie's fourth-wall busting aspect, but here it does so in the service of gags, while in the Miller-Lord production it was all in service of story.  Even breaking down the walls of different genres of Lego had logic in the first movie, while here it's just sort of accepted.

Okay, killing my 10-minutes-and-out policy with this one because I need to rant about how poorly executed this film was from a storytelling standpoint.  Part of the film's story thread is about how Joker and Batman need each other, they are compliments, they are their greatest enemies, and yet the callous Will Arnett Batman dismisses the Zack Galifianakis  Joker as meaningless to him.  The wounded Joker plans his revenge to destroy everything that Batman cares about (eg. Gotham City) by freeing all the villains of the Phantom Zone (set up by showing news footage of Superman placing General Zod into it).  Later Batman's tense relationship with the other superheroes is shown when he goes to the Fortress of Solitude to steal the Phantom Zone projector, only to find that the Justice League is having a party without him.

There's two things set up here: one, that Zod is in the Phantom Zone, and two, that Batman has a strained relationship with his teammates primarily because he's decided he's a loner.  In the film's climax Joker does manage to free all the villains, which inexplicably includes a host of bad guys from other Warner Brothers and Lego properties like Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Doctor Who.  It's cute to see all these things crop up on screen but there's no real rationale as to why they would be there or as to why Superman would have put them in the Phantom Zone.  Anyway, with all the villains that escape, who do we never see?
Zod.
And when Batman's at his most dire moment, when he's most in need of help, who shows up?
Not the Justice League.
This movie is confounding.

I didn't buy into it at all. This film does a complete disservice to Batman, Robin, Joker, their relationships... pretty much everything Batman is thrown under the bus for cheap gags and a cliche lesson for Batman to learn about trusting and loving others (including the Joker, in a way).  There are moments of inspiration in vehicle design and character use, and good moments that call back to the world the Lego Movie set up (Batman referencing that he is a master builder) but overall it's a film that gets lost in the shadow of its predecessor and a film that loses itself in its legacy.

[1:42:03]

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(weeks later, breaking the formula...hard...) Number 10...here we go. 

I haven't read all of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and what I have read was so long ago it's faded from memory (as most books do in my brain).  I did enjoy the previous Jim Carrey-starring adaptation but I could certainly acknowledge there was room for improvement.  The intent of that film was to run through the whole series of thirteen books in a trilogy of movies, but it didn't do well enough to carry on.

Thankfully Netflix saw the potential in the book series to be done right, with director Barry Sonnenfeld leading the charge and Lemony Snicket himself, Daniel Handler, handling the scripting chores for much of the adaptation.

The first season of A Series of Unfortunate Events plays out in four 2-part episodes, each covering one book.  Essentially each book gets its own movie-length story told in an episodic fashion.  It's a brilliant structure which makes consumption quite easy.

Sonnenfeld is known for his rather whimsical visual style which he's brought to television before with Pushing Daisies and the (first) live action adaptation of The Tick.  He typically likes bright colours with heavy contrast and those are definitely at play throughout the series, not just the four chapters he directed.  The show has a fastidiousness to it, a meticulous attention to detail that comes close to Wes Anderson in its anal retentiveness.  It's at its peak in the second story, The Reptile Room, but it's prevalent throughout.  The production quality of the show is enormously high, with sets, costuming, practical effects and CGI all creating a decidedly unique and charming world of bleakness.

As I talked about before with Riverdale and Emerald City, there seems to be a current of blackness invading programming based on materials for younger readers.  But there's a difference with A Series of Unfortunate Events, this a series designed from its inception to be very American-style tragedy, with a dust-bowl sensibility. But it's also a dark comedy, underlining the heightened surreality of the show with more extreme melodrama to the point of buffoonery. tapping into both melancholy and resilience in the face of adversity rare for kids literature and kids programming;  it's a place few shows, stories or networks are brave enough to go but A Series of Unfortunate Events just keeps going there again and again.  The despair one feels for the Beaudelaire children is palpable, but in a sick sense of schadenfreude (hinted at in the wonderful Stephin Merritt-inspired theme song in which Handler warns to "look away") is what makes the show so enjoyable.  Whenever validation, illumination or happiness is potentially in reach for the Beaudelaires, it's snatched away.  Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket, the narrator of the story, outright foretells the fate of the children in stages throughout the show, but in spite of his foreshadowing the show still provides glimmers of hope that he's wrong...but he never is.



While each book/movie/set of episodes is stand alone, there's a larger story of discovery as a mysterious secret society begins to unveil itself.  It's not simply the tale of nefarious Count Olaf scheming to steal the Beaudelaire children's inheritance, but what ties Olaf has to the Beaudelaires, how their unfortunate guardians tie in, and what Lemony Snicket's role in it all is.  It's an immersive through-line.

The show's regular cast is tremendous, with Neil Patrick Harris once again redefining his career as a genuinely evil villain who is equal parts ridiculous, stupid, and scary.  His schemes are sometimes violent, sometimes funny, and sometimes so outlandish even Olaf has a hard time fully committing to them. One of the great undercurrents of the show is that all adults in some form are really stupid.  They may be smart about certain topics, like lizards or the law, but they have irrational blinders to many stupid things.  The point being that adults are too quick to dismiss the concerns of children.  But the show is also tremendous at showing the children doing for themselves.  Violet is crafty, a tinkerer, maker of fantastic inventions.  Klaus is studious, a fast and avid reader absorbing knowledge like a sponge. Sunny is a baby with an incredibly strong jaw and tough front teeth who can chew through anything.

If there is a weak point, it's the uncanny valley that is Sunny.  As a baby performer, the show has little patience for trying to capture a scene with the wee performers playing her, and as such Sunny is almost entirely digitally inserted or altered.  Sunny is a true character, speaking baby gibberish, but subtitled to imply she's actually speaking intelligent thoughts that only Violet and Klaus can understand (my least favourite trope of the show, I would have preferred if she were like R2-D2 and only certain characters understand her, but we as the audience only somewhat get the gist of what she's saying) .  And yet, Sunny has her purpose in the show as much as Violet and Klaus do, some plot threads hinge around her, so it's not even like I wouldn't want her in the story, I just don't like the creepiness of the animation at times.

Second and third seasons, rounding out the baker's dozen of books, have been confirmed by Netflix, which is awesome.

Kid Flicks

The Nightmare Before Christmas - 1993, Henry Selick - DVD
Frankenweenie (Short) - 1984, Tim Burton - DVD
Hotel Transylvania - 2012, Genndy Tartakovsky - in theatre
Wreck-It Ralph - 2012, Rich Moore - in theatre
How To Train Your Dragon - 2010, Dean DeBlois, Chris Saunders - tv

The bane of many parents' existence is the prevalence of obnoxious children's programming in the household.  In Canada, the dedicated children's programming channel, Treehouse, is equally a parent's saviour (for times when you need to get stuff done, and need the kids out of the way) and nightmare (pretty much any other time you're exposed to it).  Some of the kids programming, like Yo Gabba Gabba, Octonauts and, even still, Sesame Street, is actually quite surprising, and casually engaging for even adults.

My household is a little more complicated, though.  With one television and two kids -- of different genders and seven years age difference -- it can pose a little more challenging to entertain both kids at once (or it should, but for some reason the 10-year-old still has no problem watching banal kiddie pap like Mike the Knight or Bubble Guppies).  As parents, we have to take a little ownership over what the kids watch and try to guide them towards quality entertainment, and in our situation, find something that will stimulate a 10-year-old boy that will also not be too advanced, frightening, violent, or challenging for a 3-year-old girl.

With the boy, he's always been cool with watching anything, so long as its a cartoon.  Live action stuff like Star Wars was never his thing.  As geeks, the wife and I have long had DVDs of cartoons we liked for him to watch: Batman The Animated Series, Justice League, Looney Toons, the Tick, Samurai Jack, as well he took a shining to the more mainstay Nickelodeon animated comedies, the children of Ren & Stimpy, like Spongebob and Fairly Odd Parents (the more palatable of the genre, the knock offs are atrocious and annoying).  As a result, though we've tried to reign our daughter into more age appropriate fare, we learned quickly that she could no only handle, but liked her brother's programming.

Both kids thankfully enjoy and can sit through movies.  The Pixar films are a particular hit with everyone in the house, but most other kid-centric films don't appeal as broadly.  So, it can truly be a crapshoot, a roll of the dice to find the winners that are not only worth watching, but worth watching again and again.  Outside of the mostly reliable Pixar, I've only found a handful of other movies that I like as much as the kids do.  Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is ridiculous but tremendously funny with a great voice cast.  The Muppets, including the latest Jason Segal effort, Muppets From Space and the early films all hold a nostalgic potency that the kids seem to tap into as well.  I haven't test run The Fantastic Mr. Fox on my daughter yet, but the boy said, after watching it in the theatre, that it was probably the best movie he ever saw (I wonder if that would hold up).

Sitting on our shelf for years, untouched and unloved, was The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I've had this movie in my collection since it first came out on DVD in 2000, and if I've watched it more than once (until recently) I would be surprised.  I was, in the 90's, a Tim Burton devotee, and as a result I was committed to loving Nightmare even though I'm not all that certain I was as enamored with it as others became.  It wasn't a flop, but at the time it seemed a disappointment at the box office.  However, within a few short years it became a monster cult hit, spawning an endless barrage of collectibles still found in record stores, comic shops and novelty boutiques.

I recall trying to expose my step-son to Nightmare a few years back but he was creeped out almost instantly, and I don't think we made it ten minutes into the picture.  To be honest, I don't think I'd watched it in over half a decade and at that point couldn't recall any details beyond the chorus to a few of the songs.  Recently, it the pursuit to diversify my 3-year-old's viewing regimen, I asked her if she wanted to watch it, and I sat, hesitantly watching her in the opening minutes, waiting for her to cringe and tell me she didn't want to watch any more.

It would seem I have a little goth in training, as she adored it instantly.  It's beautifully creepy in its design, with cheerfully morbid songs and an ominous joie de vivre that my little girl obviously keyed into immediately.  With this, his feature directorial debut, Henry Selik proved himself a stop-motion animation wizard, rapidly earning prestige and clout within the industry and with fans alike.  Working from Tim Burton's poem and with his lanky and lean character designs, the figures give wonderfully expressive physical performances, while an unprecedented number of head sculpts (about 400) gives lead Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon with Danny Elfman subbing in for the songs) a richly emotive face, while other characters had some subtle traditional animation overlaid for lip synching.

Almost two decades later, Nightmare still feels very fresh and unique.  Stop motion animation is such a heady commitment and time consuming endeavor that Nightmare's modest initial returns didn't spawn the spate of imitators it would have were it a blockbuster.  Combined with it's gothic sensibility, it's borderline creepy aesthetic and its unusual holiday connection, as well as a soundtrack that was far more sinister than the usual Disney fare (although they paid for it, Disney scuttled it under their Touchstone Pictures masthead, when it could have used the Disney push... but then the traditional animation brand was still riding its Lion King/Little Mermaid/Beauty and the Beast high, so they weren't willing to risk the brand on this unusual offering).

The film holds up as a holiday classic for two holidays, meaning parents can get a lot more mileage out of it.  It maintains a holiday movie sensibility but by splitting the difference between Halloween and Christmas it actually separates itself somewhat from both, meaning it can be enjoyed outside of any festive spirit.  It's soundtrack has maintained a classic sensibility, the songs having a compounding infectiousness that may not appear so catchy at first but certainly digging into the ear after multiple exposures.

It's obviously not going to catch every kid's interest, but those that do key into it will love it deeply.  If there's any negative to The Nightmare Before Christmas, it's that it is not long enough.   At a meager (but wonderful) 75 minutes, it seems over as soon as it starts if you're trying to occupy your kids while you go off and do something else.

The 2000 release of the DVD (and subsequent Blu-Ray releases) for The Nightmare Before Christmas contains Tim Burton's 1984 live-action short film (roughly 30 minutes) Frankenweenie, naturally the source for the 2012 animated feature of the same name.

Using black and white film, shooting with a low-budget, delightfully retro 50's sensibility and a style reflective of a hybrid Twilight Zone and Leave It To Beaver, Burton tells the story of a boy, Victor, whose dog, Sparky, is unceremoniously killed.  Though wallowing in grief, he learns of the wondrously restorative capabilities of electricity in science class, and spares no effort in attempting to revive his best friend from his mortal slumber, an effort which does not go unnoticed by a suspicious neighbour.

When Sparky is fully revived in a grade-school interpretation of the science lab from the classic Frankenstein movie, he unintentionally gets up to no good, riling up the neighbourhood and causing a panic.  This leads to another homage to the classic Frankenstein, with the neighbours taking up arms and chasing after the dog, only to unwittingly trap Victor and Sparky in a mini-putt windmill set alight.

It's a charming short with quality performances from child star Barrett Oliver (D.A.R.Y.L., Cocoon, The Twilight Zone The Movie) as Victor, Daniel Stern and Shelly Duvall as his parents and characters actors like Joseph Maher and Roz Braverman as the neighbours, and even kid supporting actors like Jason Hervey and Sophia Coppola in the mix.  Burton's natural flare for off-beat children's stories shines through, but filtering it through the peachy-keen 50's aesthetic lessens most of the darker edges.  It's that same retro-50's filter that gives this nearly 30-year-old production a timeless feel, as it adopts the vibe wholeheartedly rather than doing so through an 1980's filter.

If anything, it's overlong for a short feature, which makes me wonder exactly how padded out "Tim Burton's Frankenweenie", the new animated feature, must be.  (I believe David has a review in the pipeline).

This year has seen a curious trend in spooky children's entertainment, as if Hollywood has only recently caught on to the fact that kids like creepy things too.  David covered Paranorman recently, though it was released in August.  Frankenweenie came out in time for Halloween, preceded by Hotel Transylvania, a monster mash of a film, meant to be more of a comedy than fright fest.

The titular hotel in the picture was started by Count Dracula as a refuge for all monsters to come, to be free from the oppression of human society and to relax in the assurances of both security and camaraderie of fellow monsters.  Upon the celebration of his daughter, Mavis' 118th birthday, all of his monster friends have arrived at the hotel, but amidst the joyous occasion Dracula frets as his daughter seeks to establish her independence and venture out into the human world for the first time.

Dracula does manage to trick her into staying home, but the human world comes knocking on their door in the form of a young backpacker, Jonathan, who is both completely freaked out and equally enamored with the hotel and its denizens.  Disguised as a distant relative of Frankenstein by Dracula so as not to freak out his patrons and friends, Jonathan becomes the hit of the festivities and the object of Mavis' affections.

It's a cute plot that's equal parts parental anxiety and teenaged romantic comedy, but it's hindered by a painfully high number of puns and obvious gags involving the various monsters traits.  Featuring a script from British sketch comedy wizard Peter Baynham and Saturday Night Live/Late Night With Conan O'Brien alum Robert Smigel,  and featuring the voice talents of a largely ex-SNL cast, including Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Molly Shannon, David Spade, Jon Lovitz, and Chris Parnell, the film should have been far more amusing.  It is pretty sharp at times from a storytelling standpoint, but the overall tone of the humour and proceedings seems dumbed-down to juvenile levels.  Given how successful Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was at being absurd but hilarious and romantic and sentimental, there's no reason Hotel Transylvania, with all its talents, couldn't have replicated that same sensibility.  Sandler, for his part, commits to one of his less annoying voices in his cinematic career, doing a hybrid of cliche Dracula and Triumph The Insult Comic Dog (actually it was mostly the latter... I wonder if there's a "for me to poop on" outtake or ten somewhere).

In a valiant but unsuccessful effort the film features a half dozen original songs.  It's definitely a preferable route than plugging in the kid-approved hits of the day, but also futile as they all sought to replicate those very same hits, to largely painful degrees.

The name that initially sold the picture for me, however, was director Genndy Tartakovski.  Tartakovski's brilliant resume, including the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab and the first (and best) animated stab at Star Wars: The Clone Wars, was the main draw.  My daughter has discovered Tartakovski's Samurai Jack, a favourite of my step-son's as well, and I hold that show as the epitome of animation at the point where art crosses entertainment.  I was hoping some of Tartakovski's more unconventional influences and inspirations would come out in Hotel Transylvania, like they did in most of his previous work, but it's a fairly straightforward directorial effort.  The only scene that had any particular impact was a sweetly framed sequence of Dracula walking down the steeply-pitched roof to join a moping Mavis.  One stand-out composition was far less than I was expecting out of this (from what I've heard, however, Tartakovski was a late arrival on the project, its sixth director).

Given that I had really no preconceptions and no expectations from the film, I was neither disappointed nor pleased.  It was moderately entertaining, well animated, but overall a forgettable experience.

Getting away from all the creepiness, yet, still focussing on supposed bad-guys, Wreck-It Ralph is a kid-flick in the vein of Toy Story, wherein it builds a world for our playthings unknowingly in our midst.  In this case it's the shared world in the arcade, where video game characters can interact not only in their own game, but with any game.  Like Toy Story, the characters "come to life" after the arcade has shut down and there's no people to notice them.

But Wreck-It Ralph isn't so much about the world it inhabits, but the characters that inhabit it, which would actually be disappointing if the story and characters weren't so involving.  The titular Ralph is the bad guy in a vintage Donkey Kong/Rampage hybrid  arcade game called "Fix-It Felix Jr.", but after 30 years, Ralph is sick of being the bad guy and sets out in search of a gold medallion of his own, if not to be the hero, then at least be seen as less of a bad guy.  Of course, by abandoning his game, in the real world, they think the machine needs to be put out to pasture, so Fix-It Felix Jr. has one night to find Ralph and bring him back before they're unplugged.

Ralph, however, is a catastrophe waiting to happen and, true to his name, he kind of wrecks everything he touches, whether it's his intention or not.  When he winds up in the cutesy "Sugar Rush" racing game, he meets Vanellope Von Sweet, a glitchy character within the game who is similarly deemed an outcast by the other game characters.  The two characters naturally forge an uneasy friendship, Vanellope's playful, precocious, sarcastic nature continually sitting uneasily with Ralph's surly, patience-free, singularly focused demeanor.

To continue explaining the ins and outs of the film would take some time, as it's not so easily summarized.  For what's ostensibly a family movie, it's surprisingly dense in its structure, with moments building upon moments, and keeping virtually everything relevant.  Though it may seem like it at the time, there's truly no fluff in the film.

Wreck-It Ralph features a seemingly endless array of sight gags and gamer in-jokes, many of which I -- a very minor dabbler in video games -- picked up on, but I'm sure there were even more that I didn't.  Thankfully these types of jokes, unlike Hotel Transylvania, were laregely unobtrusive, and mostly set deep in the background.  They certainly weren't key to enjoying the film, which I think is its brilliance, that it could make a movie about video games, fill it with nuances that only gamers could appreciate, and yet make it accessible to almost every viewer.

The central story is about what it means for Ralph to be a bad guy, and the film very, very quickly takes the black and white of good and bad and plays with its shades of grey.  A formidable moment that kickstarts the third act finds Sugar Rush's monarch, King Candy (voiced with gleeful, lispy aplomb by Alan Tudyk) having the unfortunate job of convincing Ralph that in being a good guy and helping his friend Vanellope, he's actually going to do her more harm.  Then, upon returning to his own game, Ralph sees the effect of his quest for heroic redemption, the end of his own game.

The main voice talent is perfectly cast.  John C. Reilley provides the precise awkward voice for a gigantic, disheveled ape-man, while Sarah Silverman is the only person who can make being an incessant annoyance endearing and cute (well, perhaps Kristen Schall).  Jane Lynch playing the tough as nails sergeant from a Halo-esque shoot-em-up provided the perfect amount of edge and balls, but also just the right hint of fragility, while Jack McBrayer's puritan, high pitched, mid-western drawl is perfect for a beloved 80's video game handyman hero in the Mario vein.  That the cast largely recorded together as well makes for a noticeable impact on the repartee between characters, particularly Ralph, Vanellope and King Candy (though I don't know how anyone kept from giggling when Tudyk did his thing).

The animation, quite frankly, is some of the best I've seen with regards to attention to detail, and I'm not talking in the design of the worlds (although the central hub is brilliantly conceived, while the landscape of Sugar Rush is a thorough delight) but in the nuance of movements and the shifts in pixellation between games, and those moments where we see what's happening in-game from an outside perspective.  The animators, and the director, obviously know their gaming history and put their knowledge to good use.

And then there's the soundtrack, which blends video game sound effects from across the ages and old 8-bit style compositions with modern composition techniques to wondrous effect.  It's hard to pull one's self away from the visual stimulation of the images on screen, and even more difficult to remove one's self from the story to notice, but at times I found myself smiling only to realize that it was the score that was triggering it.

I'm more impressed with Wreck-It Ralph in hindsight than I was after first viewing.  Not to say that I disliked it, far from it, but I wasn't as enamored with it as early reviews seemed to imply I should be.  Yet, in thinking about the film, and writing about it now, I find myself flat out impressed by it.  Where Pixar let us down with the tepid mommy-issues story in Brave, Wreck-It Ralph (though a Disney proper film and not a Pixar effort) truly is the heir to the Pixar throne.  All that John Lasseter, Brad Bird, and Andrew Stanton built, designing wholly unique worlds amidst our own and populating them with characters worth investing in and seeding their movies with the broadest range of emotions and excitement, from empathy and humour to suspense and even mild horror, Wreck-It Ralph truly carries that torch.

Speaking of Brave (and to a lesser extent, Hotel Transylvania) and the whole "parental issues" subgenre of kid-flicks, How To Train Your Dragon is ostensibly of this ilk, and yet transcends it in ways Brave just couldn't see fit to do, by actually giving the main character a journey that wasn't so much about their parents but about them.

In HTTYD, Hiccup is the scrawny, wimpy son of the leader of a Viking clan, and though he's been given the role of apprentice to the weapons smith, he's aware how big of a disappointment he is.  The town they live in is occasionally attacked by dragons, and the culture takes great pride in the hunting and killing of dragons, as well as dying by them too.  During one such attack Hiccup manages to injure a fabled Night Fury in flight, and the next day, upon coming face-to-face with the wounded creature, finds that the killing spirit is not within him.

Naturally the two bond, as Hiccup studies the Night Fury, "Toothless", and learns more about their nature than any viking past.  Simultaneously, Hiccup is forced to participate in dragon-fighting training, but using his newfound knowledge of dragon whispering, Hiccup soon bests every captive dragon his trainer has, without ever having to use a weapon or harm the creature.  By the time his father returns from a hunting party, he's a celebrity, but naturally it's completely misunderstood.

The film develops the characters and their relationships nicely, including the kids, who are quite apparently born and raised amongst a warrior community.  The dragons equally have a mix of different races, each with their own nuances, and individual dragons with their own personalities.  There's a lot of emotion (a surprising amount for warriors, I would assume) throughout, all of it well earned.  Hiccup's path to hero, not just amidst his people, but amongst the dragons as well, is a wonderful tale with plenty of depth, humor and heart, as a well as a surprising amount of intensity and a respectable amount (for a kids picture) of the viking brutality in tact.

(Side note: I did find it odd that this Norse-god loving clan spoke with Scottish accents, save for the kids who spoke with conventionally North America accents, and yet, it kind of worked for the film.)


Of all of these, my 3-year-old is most enthused with The Nightmare Before Christmas.  She was about as enthused with Hotel Transylvania as I was, and while she liked Wreck-It Ralph, I'm not sure that it resonated with her like Iron Giant or Monsters, Inc. has.  I don't even think she stayed and watched all of Frankenweenie, while How To Train Your Dragon, she watched somewhat passively (though she mirrored my wife's comments that Toothless looks and acts very much like our black cat).

The 10-year-old, well, he's harder to read.  He tends to avoid Nightmare when it's on, and I think he really enjoyed Hotel Transylvania in that it seemed targeted specifically to his age group.  He seemed to assume that because Frankenweenie looked old (ie. 1950's old) that it was old (which it is) and seemed to dismiss it, only somewhat retaining interest because he knows there's a cartoon of it out there.  Wreck-It Ralph, well, he stayed through to the end credits, so I imagine he liked it, but he's not always the most forthcoming with his response to seeing a movie (I think the biggest responses I have seen out of him were the aforementioned Fantastic Mr. Fox and an arms-up-high, "AWESOME!" for John Carter).  He saw How To Train Your Dragon in theatres two years ago, and seemed to enjoy it, but he poo-pooed reading the novel series when suggested to him, so I guess he wasn't that enamored with it.