CONTORTED PASTA

My niece is now two an a half, and, while her parents are working from home, she is finding a host of entertainment to get fixated on – some things run in the family, it would seem. I am regularly updated on what her new 'thing' is, and it's been making me think about when I was that age, and older, and what I latched onto.

I grew up in the 80s, and while there was a lot that was unconventional about my childhood (quite a lot of Victorian literature, for example) I got the same dose of kids' movies that most of my generation did. It was the best of times and worst of times in animation – Disney was slogging through its worst crisis on the way to a renaissance, but Don Bluth's studio was providing stronger competition than had ever existed before, and with the advent of outsourcing there was a lot more animation on TV than previous generations had enjoyed.

80s kids' movies are quite something to look back on: The Secret of NIMH, about artificially enhanced lab rats and the eradication of a family from their home, was probably my favourite; there was also Land Before Time about climate refugees separated from their parents; An American Tail about pogroms and the New York underclass; Oliver and Company, also about the New York underclass, albeit several decades later; and of course that most beloved of live-action children's movies, Amadeus, which starts with the attempted suicide of a classical composer and ends with the death and burial in a mass grave of another classical composer. (No, it's not a kids' movie. But I grew up on it anyway.)

So far, so generational-touchstoney. Somehow, though, I crossed paths with some unusual stuff. My very favourite cartoon when I was my niece's age was David the Gnome, about a family of tiny forest-dwelling humanoids living in harmony with nature, based on a pseudo naturalist's notebook for grown-ups by a Dutch writer and illustrator.

Another anomalous childhood influence was Danger Mouse, a British cartoon about a James Bond-like mouse with an eyepatch and a bumbling sidekick, who lives in a pillarbox in Westminster. This probably gave me a taste for British comedy and surrealism.

Both of these were completely unknown to any of my peers – in fact, it wasn't until animation school that I got corroboration that Danger Mouse even existed – but I had strong enough memories of them to know what I saw and to be able to look it up later. There was one film, though, which I remember remembering more than in itself, about a painter who fell asleep under a magic tree in a magic forest and there was an evil king and the evil king's assistant was going to be executed by a big scary machine. I thought the title was 'Under the Enchanted Oak Tree' but that never turned up anything. Well, thanks to the power of the modern internet, I have found it at last, and it's on YouTube:

The Elm-Chanted Forest

Out of duty to my younger self, and curiosity about my subconscious, I have been watching it again, but can only manage a couple of sequences at a time because it is horrible. Not only is the animation awful, but the storytelling is so scattershot as to be almost nonexistent. It's pretty much an example of How Not To Make An Animated Film, but at the same time it casts light on some off-key pitches I've seen in my day, from seasoned pros I'd expect to know better: they were embarking on their careers when this sort of thing was actually getting produced.

I'm not even halfway through the movie but it feels like it's been about three hours long already. I am determined to watch it to the end, though. Will I make it? What shape will I be in when I get there? Will I unlock some arcane subconscious secrets along the way? We can only suffer along and see.

22:15
I made it. Somehow. There was a scene with blackface mushrooms doing what I can only guess was a 'rap'. I was expecting to be surprised but not by that. Wow. Please don't bother to watch it, that is an hour and a half you will never get back ...

It started with Magnitsky the Musical, a story about Russian tax fraud and government corruption, property markets, and the elections of 2016, rendered in indie folk ballads; incongruous, and yet somehow successful. Shortly afterwards, The Death of Stalin – simultaneous bumbling and horror at the top of Soviet power – finally turned up on Netflix, so I gave that another spin. Then I caught up with Chernobyl, last year's harrowing HBO series about nuclear disaster and the tension between an effective response and Soviet political ideology.

I've decided to embrace the theme and just make this a Dark Russian Springtime – turns out there's been a film adaptation of the Kursk tragedy (submarine disaster vs post-Soviet pride), which unlike the other two I distinctly, viscerally remember being in the news. There is also a new film about the journalist who uncovered the Holodomor (Soviet government, this time being very effective, engineering a famine/genocide in Ukraine).


This one is particularly interesting because I learned, later in life, that one of my most influential childhood movies was directed by someone who was already famous for rather gritty Eastern European art films: Agnieszka Holland. Mr Jones is hers, too! It was supposed to come out this year, but either The Virus or some cold-footed distributors have forced it online; I intend to get it off Google Play as soon as possible.

It seems appropriate, here, to remind you of my favourite music video of all time:



... Aside from plain entertainment, finding it while in a situation not unlike the one at 3:50 also twigged me to parallels between the internal workings of the Walt Disney Company and those of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a conceptual link which is validated more as I learn about the USSR. That the pinnacle of American capitalist corporate success should resemble the pinnacle of the Marxist communist state is a surprising and revelatory example of Horseshoe Theory, but it all comes down to human psychology in the end, and humans are humans everywhere. I can't claim priority on this observation: Terry Pratchett hit the nail on the head in Witches Abroad, and he didn't even have to work at Disney to see into its soul.

Does anyone know if there are any good film adaptations of Dostoevsky? I saw an excellent one-man show of Notes From Underground and have a much-beloved radio adaptation of The Idiot (the radio Brothers Karamazov is good too) but I have not heard of any films or TV series. Too dark?

I was going to celebrate Dark Russian Springtime with some (vaguely) Russian black bread, but I lost track of time and so made it appropriately Darker than it ought to be (as in, carbonised). I am a good peasant worker who doesn't pass up a calorie when it crosses my path, so I will eat it all the same. Wasn't charcoal the new superfood, before we started caring about matters of actual life and death? It's probably only black on the outside.

UPDATE: The bread is FINE!

It's been a while since I did a movie review, but then it's been a while since I've been to see a movie, so that may explain it.

Last night I went to see Peter Jackson's endeavour for the WWI centenary, a collection of film clips from the time with reminiscences of veterans, recorded many decades later. The gimmick for this one was that the film was restored and colourised, which you can see very nicely in the trailer:

"They Shall Not Grow Old - Official Trailer (2018)" (Watch on YouTube)

Overall it was a decently well put-together film – I liked that there was nothing intruding on the primary sources, just straight film clips and the voices of people who were there. There were a few "artsy" bits of compositing early on that looked like someone had spent a weekend in AfterEffects, but the intent was sound and subtle enough not to grate. The only new stuff seemed to be the foley and voices added to the silent footage, which was done with great prudence and craft, I thought. I've seen and heard a fair amount of WWI stuff over the last five years – including a very impressive exhibit at Te Papa in Wellington which appeared to have had several Weta people involved with it – and this probably communicated best what it was like to be there, and to know the people involved.

That it was sympathetic to the period and its people shouldn't be a great surprise: I've spent a lot of time with Edwardians in the last ten years, and rewatching Fellowship of the Ring recently, it felt so profoundly in accordance with the feeling of that time – not a modern filming of a book written by an Edwardian, but what an Edwardian might have filmed if he had the ability. There is a slight 'garage project' feeling to They Shall Not Grow Old, but that works in its favour, I think. It's got faults, but seems to have been made with love, which counts for more.

The colourisation, for the most part, was surprisingly successful. It felt more like early colour footage than like something coloured after-the-fact, and made the clips seem surprisingly current. What didn't work so well was the process used to bring the 16 frames-per-second film up to a modern standard of smoothness. There were some very successful clips (most of which are in the trailer), but for the most part it felt kind of swimmy, and the film grain tracked with people's faces which was a bit distracting. I'm glad I saw it in 2D, as a 3D process on top of all of that would have been difficult to watch. Animators figured out early on that most people perceive 12 frames per second just as smoothly as 24 (saving us a lot of work!) so I'd much rather have seen some sort of process which gave us the original 16fps footage playing at the correct speed. Almost no one would have noticed the lower frame rate, you'd avoid the jerky sped-up feeling of early film which happens when you play 16fps at 24fps, and it would have saved them time and money. But this is Peter Jackson and it's a shiny new piece of technology, so I suppose we should just be grateful he didn't try for 48fps.

Would I recommend you see it? I don't know. It's certainly not for the faint of stomach: there are some pretty vivid injuries, and one particularly memorable shot of Trench Feet (and hands), not to mention, you know, realities of war and stuff. If you're interested in history, and especially in that time period and the psychology of its people, it's really very interesting and worth your time. If you are particularly visually attuned, you may want to wait and see it on Netflix or whatever, as the smaller image would probably flatter the process more. But if you don't notice the smoothing on a modern TV, then you may not especially care about these effects.

One last comment: the trench songs as performed by Plan 9 were really quite engaging; raw but charismatic, in the best way of folk music. The credits listed about five songs and I only caught three; I hope they're available somewhere as music in its own right because I could definitely bear to listen to them again. Currently the only trench songs I have are in Charles Chilton's 1960s radio documentary The Long Long Trail (which loosely got turned into Oh What A Lovely War), but they're sanitized and with the 60s orchestration sound rather like Mary Poppins. So well done, Plan 9. I'd have liked more of that flavour to the footage, but it was nice to see anyway.

The 'vintage' Disney season continues at Picturehouse, now onto films which came out during my childhood. I missed Little Mermaid last week, which I have mixed feelings about – on one hand, I don't think I've seen it in the cinema since I was seven, but on the other, I have seen it on DVD and as such I am not overflowing with regret that I missed seeing it in enormous crystal-clear detail. It's a good film, entertainment-wise, but only just coming out of Disney's 1980s slump in technical and artistic standards.

Despite having seen it on the big screen fairly recently, however, I knew I had to make an effort to go see Beauty and the Beast this week. I cannot overstate the impact it made on my childhood – Hunchback made me want to become an animator (20th anniversary and still no sign of that being rereleased, alas), but purely on the receiving end, a peculiar, bookish, independent 5th Grader getting a Disney movie about a peculiar, bookish, independent young lady was a Big Thing. I probably would have ended up much the same without it, but to have that sort of affirmation at a formative time of life meant a lot. It's experiences like that that make me symathise with the push for representation of minorities in the media – if such a small thing meant so much to me, how much more would an analogous thing mean to someone far further from what's currently considered media-mainstream?

Having watched the video to the point of memorization, seeing this movie again was almost an opposite experience to Jungle Book. I could write about surprising details or things I know now about the production that colour my viewing, but the latter you can find in Dream On Silly Dreamer and the former via an attentive eye and a Blu-Ray player. I'm coming to the end of a short lunch break so I will keep it to this: As much as Beauty and the Beast was a trip down childhood's memory lane, it was also a re-acquaintance with people who were role models and then colleagues. People love to point out how characters are designed and animated to reflect the actors providing the voices, but when I watched this film I was seeing the animators. Anyone who's worked with Ruben Aquino would find him in Maurice, and there is an undeniable Nik Rainieri-ness in Lumiere; somehow Philippe is Russ Edmonds despite being a horse (Russ also animated Phoebus in Hunchback, you may note the similarity), and Glen Keane is all over the Beast if you know what to look for. Most bittersweet of the reacquaintances was James Baxter, though – he supervised Belle when he was quite young, but his scenes stand out by a mile, and it was so good to see his 'handwriting' again. He animates in CG for Dreamworks now and does a very good job of it, but CG smooths everyone out, so that joy of finding the really special sweet in the candy bowl is a thing of the past. It made me a bit wistful to experience it again, but at the same time, there are so many really excellent up-and-coming 2d animators that I hope it will be a future joy as well. It's become clear to me in teaching and animating here in Europe that the sky is the limit and there are dozens if not hundreds of keen and talented people out there raising the bar every day – it's a little personally dispiriting to see it pulled so quickly and so far out of my reach, but fantastically inspiring all the same, and I'd rather be inspired than smug any day.

In 1948, Ealing Studios produced a film about Scott's Last Expedition. There were still quite a few survivors kicking around, and despite initial misgivings, most eventually came around to the idea of supporting it. Frank Debenham, who founded SPRI and was more or less the official keeper of the Terra Nova flame, did a fair amount of consultation on the film, and got a credit of thanks. Cherry, on the other hand, "was asked to sign a form permitting the film-makers to change his character into anything they liked, and he replied by giving the studio bosses a good telling-off."¹ He never saw it.

The film was popular when it came out, and my impression is that it has been a staple of British television since the latter went mainstream, often getting shown around Christmas. I believe it's largely because of this film that the majority of people here will recognise the line "I am just going outside and may be some time," and all you need to do to set up a Scott-based comedy sketch is start out with the sound of howling wind and a flapping tent.

Nevertheless, despite all my obsession, I had never seen the film. It wasn't easy to find Stateside, and after I moved here there were so many other things clamoring for my attention. But, as always, the BBC loves me and wants me to be happy, so it aired the film a few days ago, and I finally got to see.

I'm afraid I have to side with Cherry on this one, but it was very interesting to see it at last, and it made me think ... ( A Very Partial Review, as a Twofold Insider )

¹Sara Wheeler, Cherry, p. 288

The UK's arthouse cinema chain has been running matinees of The Iron Giant this week, as it's a school holiday and someone out there has high standards. Even though it's crunch time, and every hour of my day ought to be spoken for, I had to make the exception – the last time I had the chance to see it on the big screen was in 2000, and who knows when I'll ever get another one. Iron Giant has mythic status in animation: an awesome film with adult depth and integrity, which got scuppered by the studio on its release, robbing it of its just acclaim (and box office) and rendering it The Greatest Film Nobody Saw. Watching it with animation people is almost a religious experience; being a studio of one here, attending a screening felt like connecting with that community in a funny sort of way, and that was even before the credits rolled and I saw how many of those people I've now met, worked with, and moved on from. It made me think ...

( Self-indulgent navel-gazing within )

Anyway, in the sixteen years since I last saw The Iron Giant on the big screen, I have learned a few things:

1. A deep and heartfelt appreciation for a kickass cleanup team (and the crew on this film were superhuman)
2. How to make espresso in a percolator, and hence that a) Dean is not making instant, and b) he's doing it wrong. You don't pour it in the top, Dean!
3. How underappreciated, and in some cases underutilised, some of the talent in those credits is
4. That the compositing software used on this film – and in the 2D films from Dreamworks and James Baxter's studio – was developed here in Cambridge!!
5. That there is always, always more to learn ... when this crunch time ends, I'll be going back to Iron Giant and soaking up a lot of art direction and cinematography that I had respected but not properly appreciated before.  I'm sure I don't really fully appreciate it even now, but I hope my appreciation will appreciate.  Here's to the future ...

In 2012, while I was working on Paperman, I checked my email one morning and it seemed everyone I knew had sent me the link to this trailer:

... For obvious reasons I was VERY EXCITED about this film, and stayed excited about it for the next three years – in fact it's been the only animated film I've been excited for in the whole of that time. Being acquainted with disappointment I tried not to get my hopes up, but when I found out I'd be in Viborg during the animation festival, and that as a teacher at The Animation Workshop I was invited to attend the Danish premiere, the adrenaline surged.

And, dear reader, it was better than I dared hope.

Anyone in the business will tell you it gets harder to enjoy movies, and animated movies in particular, as you gain experience. The same goes for anything polar – the more you know about it, the more apparent others' lack of knowledge is, and you want to take them aside and say 'it's great you're interested, now let me show you how much more amazing it gets the more you dig.' Well, I am happy to report that Tout en Haut du Monde delivers resoundingly on all fronts: gorgeous animation, gorgeous art, solid storytelling (with continuous pleasant surprises, for someone so used to the Hollywood paradigm), and an oblique reference to some expedition or another every ten minutes or so, which made this polar animation nerd very happy indeed.

The film has a January release in France; I don't know about other distribution plans but I expect most of Europe will see it at some point or another, and depending what their strategy is there may be an Oscar-qualifying screening in LA either this year or next. Definitely keep an eye out for it! It is worth your time!

I'm overdue for a photo post, but I'm intimidated by the number of photos to be gone through, so here is something even more overdue:

TEALIN'S CAPSULE REVIEWS FOR EVERY FILM* SINCE ... I DUNNO, WINTERISH.

I am structuring these reviews in a simple, succinct, and highly personal way, giving a simple overview then describing a)my favourite bit and b)something that bothered me. It seems as good a formula as any other, and also results in mostly non-spoilery reviews, so ... let's go!

( Captain America II: The Winter Soldier )

( Grand Budapest Hotel )

( X-Men: Days of Future Past )

( How to Train Your Dragon 2 )

*Okay, not every film that came out, just the ones I managed to see while up to my eyeballs in work. Special mention must be given to The Lego Movie and The Wind Rises which I would have loved to have seen in the theatre, but fate did not allow, alas.

I just saw Skyfall ...

... Was Assassins actually playing in the West End when they were shooting it, or was that a little personal joke of the set decorator? If the latter: I got your joke, set decorator, and I salute you.

Action Heisenberg, Richard II, and Henry Bolingbroke all in one film was a good trick, too. I kind of wanted it to be about M, Q, and Mallory, though ... there's an idea for a Bond film, have Bond's adventure be a sort of B plot, seen from the perspective of the people back in MI6 – that would be interesting, no? You could pair it with the 'actual' Bond movie, it would be like the action-adventure espionage thriller version of Noises Off.

... And this is why I am not in charge of greenlighting films.

Some beautiful soul has put the whole of Copenhagen up on YouTube:

I love it more than words can say, and the more I learn about filmmaking the more I admire its translation from the stage to the screen. The image quality isn't perfect here but it's the whole thing and at the right aspect ratio so have at it. I only recommend you don't watch if you're tired – it's very talky and takes a certain amount of concentration, so while it returns on its investment, if you're on the edge of sleep it may push you over.

Well I know what I'll be listening to all day, today ...

Oh hey look, someone else has put the KCET version up, which has a crisper image and also the Prerequisite Physics and Historical Epilogue bits if you want that. YouTube has been busy.