FunBlog

I’m not sure that Bolt qualifies as a “classic” but it may well prove to be the best family film of this holiday season.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a dog who stars in a TV show about a dog with super powers. Being ignorant about how special effects work, he thinks that he actually does have super powers. Due to a series of unfortunate events he gets loose and ends up being shipped in a box across the country to New York City. If he is to be reunited with his beloved Penny (Miley Cyrus) he must make his way back across the continent, aided by a street-wise alley cat (Susie Essman) and a deluded hamster (Mark Walton).

This is lightweight material with a predictable ending, but it’s funny and charming. The animation is also pretty good–and I say that as one who is not a great fan of 3-D computer-generated animation.
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My last post seems to have struck a nerve.

First, I want to emphasize that when I said “writing is more important than art in animation” I did not mean that the artwork is of no importance. High quality drawing and animation, when combined with good writing, can improve the viewer’s experience enormously. If you want to scale the peaks of the art form and achieve true artistic immortality (as opposed to mere commercial success), you must show excellence in both areas.

On the other hand, if you have good artwork without good writing you will probably end up with something like Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings; technically impressive but a commercial and artistic failure. (And no, I’m not blaming Tolkien for the incoherent screenplay.)
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“I wouldn’t say that writing is more important than art in animation…” says Ogiue Maniax.

Personally WOULD say that. In fact, I’ll say it right now. Writing IS more important than art in animation. If the writing is good enough you can get away with artwork that’s pretty bad. (It will probably be hailed as edgy, unconventional artwork that defies conventional notions of beauty.) On the other hand, if the writing is bad, the most beautiful artwork in the world won’t save it.

Consider: what’s the most successful American animated TV series ever? Obviously The Simpsons. Why do people watch it? For the witty, satirical writing. Let’s face it, the artwork is pretty crude. In fact, to call the character designs “crude” would be flattery.

What’s the second most popular American animated TV series currently on the air? Probably South Park. In this case the artwork isn’t too bad, considering that it’s obviously done by a bunch of sixth graders with a budget of $16.56 per episode. Nevertheless I’m pretty sure that most people tune in for the vulgar but hilarious writing.

I approached this series with a certain amount of apprehension. On the one hand, it’s widely regarded as a great classic. On the other hand, many people will tell you that it has a terrible ending–in fact it’s the series that inspired the term “Gainax ending” .

It actually wasn’t all that bad, and I’m prepared to give it a qualified recommendation. If you have watched lots of anime and consider yourself something of an expert, you really need to watch this, if only so as to know what the other fans are talking about. If you have only watched a few series you should watch this only if the description below really appeals to you–otherwise there are plenty of other series that you will enjoy more. If you have never watched any anime but you are curious about it, and somebody told you that this is the greatest series ever made, you should stay far away from it. If this is the first anime series that you watch, you will probably never watch another.
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I guess that after writing movies like Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch Charlie Kaufman decided that he wanted to do something really weird and surreal. The sort of movie where a character might decide to buy a house that happens to be on fire, then live in it for many years. Still on fire. (OK, I get it. It’s a metaphor for…something or other.)

Synecdoche, New York is extremely weird, sometimes hilarious and often confusing and disturbing. It tells the story of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a hypochondriac theater director in Schenectady, NY. He receives a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and decides to use the money to produce a play that will reveal some sort of universal truth about life, based of course on his own life. He rents a huge warehouse in New York City, hires a bunch of actors and begins the construction of a giant set that gradually seems to become a duplicate of the city outside. As the actors strive to portray Caden and the people he knows, the characters become more real than the real people they are based on and seem to take over their lives.

This doesn’t really do justice to it. The movie is actually much stranger and more surreal than my description suggests. This is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Still there may be a logical explanation for everything that happens, something that is hinted at but never confirmed.
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In any case there are many other possible interpretations and you are free to pick the one you like.

The standard formula for a movie comedy these days seems to involve thirty-something men who haven’t yet grown up. There is nothing particularly original about Role Models but it manages to be one of the funnier examples of the genre, with a satisfying balance of off-color humor and sentimentality.

At least in this case the heroes have jobs and don’t live with their parents. Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) work for a soft drink company, traveling from school to school lecturing the kids about drugs. “Remember, if somebody offers you drugs, just say ‘No thanks, I’m having a Minotaur!’”. (Minotaur is a powerful energy drink. It’s made from caffeine and ginseng, and it can turn your urine bright green.)

Wheeler is perfectly content with this life, but Danny is fed up. He’s disillusioned, depressed and angry, and he’s drunk enough Minotaur to anesthetize a bull. He ends up assaulting a cop and driving the Minotaurmobile into a statue.
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oni light novelNozomi Entertainment seems to have adopted a unique but sensible business model for importing anime. They look for a series of decent quality that has gone for several years without being licensed. Generally this will be a series with specialized appeal, not a blockbuster hit, but with a devoted following. Having licensed it (presumably at a bargain price) they release the entire season at once as an inexpensive thinpak box set. Generally they do this with subtitles only, since an English dub is by far the greatest expense in preparing an anime for U.S. distribution.

This is one of their latest offerings: a well-known series, beloved by some, snickered at by others, even the inspiration of a notorious parody. Naturally I couldn’t resist checking it out. I found it weirdly entertaining. I suppose the same could be said of many anime series, but this one is weirdly entertaining in its own very special way.
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ef–a tale of melodies provides a neat answer to one of the main objections that I raised to it’s predecessor ef–a tale of memories. Unfortunately it strikes me as the sort of answer that creates more problems than it solves.

oni visual novelApparently there are two identical-looking Japanese cities called “Otowa”, one in Japan and one in Australia. No explanation is provided as to how this came about; even the characters sound a bit disbelieving as they explain it. Did the Japanese, perhaps, decide to build duplicate cities when they colonized Australia in 1945?

This does indeed solve one major problem: we now learn that Kei lives in Japan while Chihiro lives in Australia. But the more I think about this the more problems I see. For example, both cities must have been devastated by earthquakes at about the same time, and rebuilt in the same way. How likely is that?

Furthermore Yuu Himura and his church have to exist in both cities simultaneously. Is he a supernatural being? Or does he have an identical twin brother?

Maybe this is all part of a brilliant master plan by the writers. On the other hand, maybe the writers just realized what a monstrous plot hole they had created when they first combined two separate visual novels into a single anime, and are now engaged in the wildest backfilling operation in history in an attempt to cover it up.

Happy-Go-Lucky is a mostly-cheerful, mostly-upbeat slice-of-life film featuring a character who is so perky that she at first seems rather annoying. After a while it becomes clear that she is deeper than that; the forced perkiness is one way she reacts when she is ill-at-ease.

‘Poppy’ (Sally Hawkins), a London elementary school teacher, has her bike stolen, but instead of getting upset about it she cheerfully decides to learn to drive. This leads to a series of slightly out-of-control lessons with a tightly-wound angry driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). In between we have interactions with her roommate and her sister, an over-the-top flamenco teacher, an angry young student, a babbling homeless man and a tall, handsome social worker.

That’s about it. There’s no real plot, just a portrait of an upbeat, unflappable young woman. For those who like this sort of thing it’s pretty good.

Rachel Getting Married turned out to be quite a bit darker than I expected. I’m not saying it’s bad–it’s actually a pretty good psychological drama, but you shouldn’t go in expecting to see some witty verbal sparring leading up to a warm feel-good ending.

Kym (Anne Hathaway) an affluent girl with a prescription drug problem, checks herself out of rehab and returns to the family home to participate in the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Everyone greets her with guarded warmth, half expecting her to find a way to ruin the ceremony. These suspicions are justified. Kym may be clean and sober now, but she obviously hasn’t mastered the personal demons that led her to abuse drugs in the first place.
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The original poster didn’t include any information, but from internal evidence I conclude that this is located in the shopping district called Canal City Hakata in Fukuoka, Japan (a city in northern Kyushu).