tealin | Entries tagged with review

As stated in the Darkwood review, I am friends with the author, so that may have coloured my reading slightly. And I read it within 48 hours of finishing the first book, so I can't comment on its standalone qualities, as it was for me essentially a continuation of the same story.

The action is divided between two parties: Gretel Mudd and the witches (and ghost, and spider) of Darkwood, who go North to try to make an alliance with the witches there. These consist of a lady werewolf, a man who can shapeshift into a man-sized raven but has no other intrinsic powers, and the Bear Witch, who lives in a house with three bears and is named Gilde, but is a horrible old woman who has the werewolf and raven man locked in a coercive thrall. Quite a lot of that thread is (relatively) normal, (relatively) well-adjusted adults trying to talk to a selfish, stubborn, passive-aggressive control freak, which might get tedious for some, but is for me what might be called a Recurring Theme so it was perversely intriguing to see it play out on the page.

The other party is Gretel's brother Hansel and her best friend Daisy, who go to the capital city to investigate why Hansel is getting terrifying visions of an attacking hydra. Because the lead Huntsman got offed at the end of Book 1, there is an election being held for a new one. As one would expect, one of the candidates is your typical hard-line populist, promising a tougher crackdown on witches and abominations, to further and indeed intensify the policies of the previous administration, which if anything failed because didn't go far enough – you've heard it before. Hansel and Daisy happen to get caught up with a different candidate, one who sees how radical reform is necessary, and also has a really cute dog. I don't want to spoil too much of this plotline but this is definitely a clear-eyed post-2016 book; seeing current political forces transposed into speculative fiction is uncomfortable, but oh so nourishing, like a rainstorm after a drought.

What I liked best about Such Big Teeth transcends the actual story: it was so much more confident than the first book, and the missteps that made first occasionally awkward had completely disappeared. It was just a joy to sail through from beginning to end. Really my only misgiving was that some of the more intimate* relationships – a couple of which were established (or at least hinted) in the first book but never really developed – felt imposed rather than organic: 'they love each other because I said so' rather than evident in their words and actions. I was glad that one of the ones I'd suspected in Book 1 was brought into the light in Book 2 and was one of the successful ones. I may have been more sensitive to the ones that didn't work as well because of how very very well the blossoming of love was treated in The Crown of Dalemark; looking back on a lot of the YA books I read in my early 20s, this flat-footedness is typical, so maybe not that worth commenting on.

So, as with my Dalemark reviews, here I'm going to say 'forgive whatever difficulties you find with the first because it's worth it to get to the second' – Darkwood is much less of a slog than The Spellcoats, but Such Big Teeth is both a rollicking story and a valuable observation of politics and difficult humans (who so often go together ...) that I'm tempted to call it an important read.

*rather than romantic, because they include Mudd family relationships as well as pairings

Having finished Dalemark, my next bit of catch-up reading was to add to the 'books by friends' pile. I had actually met Gabby Hutchinson Crouch through a friend back when I was living in London. We became Twitter friends several months later, and even though I've never seen her in person since, she's one of my online besties. So when she published her first book last year, a fractured fairy tale with a satirical bent, I felt rather guilty that I didn't have mental or temporal space to tackle it, being at the time more than taken up with juggling my own book and preparations for my Antarctic trip. This year, things have settled down, and given my YA fantasy groove and the imminence of Book 2 in the trilogy, it seemed the ideal moment to step into Darkwood.

The setup is as follows: Hansel and Gretel Mudd live in the village of Nearby, in the land of Myrsina, which thirteen years ago saw the deposition of its monarchy by the Huntsmen, a sort of grassroots vigilante group dedicated to rooting out witches and other abominations, the list of which gets added to regularly. Girls Doing Maths is on the list, which is bad news for Gretel, who has a keen scientific mind. One manifestation of this is a defence system to protect the village from creatures of Darkwood, a wild place just across the river where witches and magical beings have fled to escape persecution. Well, one thing leads to another and Gretel ends up fleeing to the Darkwood herself, where – surprise! – the witches are rather lovely (well, two of them are, anyway) and even the talking spider is nothing to be afraid of (Bin Men, on the other hand, are).

Overall it's the sort of witty, well-observed, and creative storytelling one would expect from a writer who regularly provides material for Radio 4 topical comedy. Working in animation I have seen my fair share of fresh takes on fairy tales, but this book is full of genuinely unexpected re-imaginings and I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to be surprised. It's not just the fairy tales that feel fresh, though: the moral universe is updated from the one I remember from my childhood, where the maverick has to strike out on their own from a society that doesn't appreciate them (Gretel's family and village all love and support her) and where understanding the other's point of view will solve everyone's problems. It is a world where a harsh and reactionary minority are laughed off until they slip into power and set up a system to keep them there. The commentary on the present day slips in under the radar for most of the book, but sometimes comes right out and practically breaks the fourth wall. Stories are how we programme the consciences of the young; this is a timely and desperately needed update to the operating system, given how the world has changed since the 1990s.

The benefits of a radio comedy background are strong characters, excellent dialogue, snappy pacing, and, of course, a fair few laughs. The weak point of Darkwood, in my opinion, might be the fault of sketch-writing as well: there is a sort of orchestration one has to impose on a long-format narrative to give it shape and help the reader feel the ups and downs. In a macro sense Darkwood does this just fine – the narrative structure and character arcs are solid – but a few levels down, it's a little shaky in what I am tempted to call 'cinematography'. Not that it is lacking in visual presentation, but rather the sort of thing that makes or breaks a film in the editing suite: the rhythm of the shots, the placement of focus and POV, the perceptual experience of the viewer as the film flows by. (This is almost completely different from the literary sense of 'editing,' which is why I don't want to use that word, even though that's really what I mean.) There were a number of times I missed something important because it had not been 'shot' clearly enough to pick it up without thinking. Luckily it was re-established well enough that I didn't need to go back and find it, but I stumbled a bit when it happened. It's the sort of thing you don't really notice in writing until it doesn't quite work right, and to be honest is something I've never thought of before, so in that respect was kind of appreciated! It's certainly not something that would impede anyone's enjoyment of the book, only something that I am particularly attuned to on my constant quest to understand storycraft.

Minor craftsmanship nitpicking aside, it is definitely a book that I would give to an 8-14 year old in my life, if not to my own friends, especially the ones who have embarked on parenthood, as it would make very good bedtime reading and invite some productive discussion. If it's any sign of how I enjoyed it, I had pre-ordered the second volume and was annoyed that it hadn't arrived in time to start right after I finished the first. Luckily it did turn up within 48 hours so I wasn't bereft too long, and it turned out to be better than the first, so worth the wait!

Last in the Dalemark Quartet is The Crown of Dalemark. There's an interesting fact about this series that was always front of my mind when reading the last book: the first three were written in the 1970s, each two years apart. The Spellcoats did not end in anything like a definitive way, and, being a prequel, left the threads of the previous two hanging – all the North/South business, turbulent Earls, destinies of the two main characters, all waiting to be resolved. The Crown of Dalemark was finally published fifteen years later, in 1993. Imagine being a teenage fan of the first three and being so excited to find out how she was going to wrap it all up (especially after the weird tangent of The Spellcoats) and not getting to find out until you were married with kids! I, a cynic, would expect whatever came out to be something of a letdown, but while reading this I kept thinking, 'Dang, this would have been worth the wait.' I did not wait fifteen years – the book was sitting there waiting for me – so I cannot guess if the fans' reactions were the same, but as far as payoffs go, it certainly delivers.

The story starts a few months after the second book ends, with its protagonist, the revolutionary. He has been taken in by one of the northern Earls, who is not a million times better than the southern ones, and what's more, is feeling threatened by a sort of Joan-of-Arc figure who's claiming the throne that will unify the country and take power away from the feuding earldoms. So, being on the edgy side, this lad is sent off to assassinate her. As you do. On the way he meets up with the musician from the first book, and, accidentally, his target, who is really charming and gives him more than the usual misgivings about murder. So far, so rolling along like you'd expect a YA fantasy to unwind.

BUT THEN.

If you've read Howl's Moving Castle and not just seen the film, you will remember The Twist. You know, the one that's like, 'how could you make this into a movie and leave out The Twist, The Twist is what it is all about': that twist. There's one of those here. I do not want to spoil it, obviously, but that makes reviewing the book really hard because it happens about 1/4 of the way in, instead of 1/4 from the end as in Howl. It is really cool. It will make you go '??!?' and then 'wow, OK' and then the plot really gets going. But it largely revolves around The Twist, so I can't talk about it.

Instead, I can say that for all the series seems to take a bizarre left turn with The Spellcoats, it is very important that it went there, because The Crown of Dalemark relies heavily on the worldbuilding that happened in the previous book – and also there are some little references that will make you smile if you've just read it, but that's a treat on the side. Anyway, if Crown had to carry all that worldbuilding on its own, it would be topheavy with awkward exposition. It still has so much exposition of its own that there were times I felt like I'd been plunged amongst native speakers a month after I'd started learning a language, but they were later in the book and just comprehensible enough that I was only slowed down a little, not thrown. So, if you were tempted to skip The Spellcoats, or develop a yen to skip it fifty pages in, I must advise you to stick with it and see it through, because it is definitely a prerequisite for Crown and Crown is definitely worth your while. It might help, also, if you read the series straight through instead of taking a couple years off between the first and last two books, as names and places will be fresher in your memory. But even with my gap, I enjoyed Crown very much.

Part of this was down to a particular feature of The Twist enabling the author to bring the lived experience of the world more vividly to life than if she were telling it as if taken for granted. Fantasy of this ilk tends to be very rose-tinted about pre-industrial society and everyday life, but that is not a problem here. As in previous books, there's also no flinching from the yuckiness of war and, indeed, politics; e.g. when someone is murdered, it's not just a plot device, there's a body left over which will start to rot if not dealt with in time. it is both a ripping yarn, and a self-reflective ripping yarn that consciously contradicts the easiness of ripping yarns. And that is worth reading, too.

The icing on the cake is a surprisingly convincing love story. As stated above I am an old cynic, and I have never been much attracted to romance in literature, largely for personal reasons but probably a little because it's usually undertaken for plot reasons and doesn't actually feel romantic. One exception to this was Going Postal, where the illogical certainty of attraction was surprisingly well executed. The Crown of Dalemark does it too – it's not what the story is about, but it is not an unwelcome or extraneous subplot either, just a minor thread in the tapestry that grows in prominence until it pays off jubilantly at the end. (So much I can't give away!)

So yes: grossly underappreciated YA fantasy, extremely cheap used copies are available online; buy them and read them and then donate them to your local library or school so that others can share the joy. We will all be happier people.

Before I go into this book in particular, a little background on the Dalemark series:

'Dalemark' is the name of a land which, in the first two books, is controlled by a patchwork of Earls and split into North and South – the South being rather authoritarian and the North touted as 'free' – and there is tension between the two though not outright war, however much the South may be building itself up to such a thing. Northerners and Southerners also differ in appearance, enough that someone can tell at first glance whether you're Northern or Southern, though this isn't played up overmuch. It is, as per fantasy tropes, a vaguely medieval, vaguely British country (though placenames often follow Scandinavian patterns), with subtle but effective magic – in the first book, there is a magical instrument, and in the second, some entities like minor gods which are commemorated in folk ritual but actually turn up towards the end, to everyone's surprise. In the first book, the musician who owns the magical instrument makes an adventurous escape to the North overland; in the second, an Angry Young Man joins a secret insurrection plotting in a port town that is definitely not King's Lynn, then has to flee North by boat via an enchanted archipelago that is definitely not Lindisfarne. They are light and fun yarns with a savoury folkish feel to the magic, but they don't shy away from the darker side of politics, either – they are clearly written by someone who has read a lot of history, and been through a war herself.

The Spellcoats is the third in the series. While the first two are freestanding stories they share enough references to show they are taking place at roughly the same time; The Spellcoats however feels very different and, aside from being in approximately the same country, has no apparent connection to the other two. There is a war going on here, too, of sorts – settlers arriving from over the sea, who claim the land as their ancestral home, while the people already living there would really rather they not.

The story follows one family as they are driven out of their village and drift down the flooded river which has always been the centre of their lives, meeting a band of these settlers, discovering who the real villain is, then going back and confronting the evil. The gods and magic play a bigger role in this book, at first in the role of idols which the family carry with them, and later in person; the quantity of magic was a little high for my preference, but it's handled in such an otherworldly way that it kind of slips under the skin instead of dazzling you. A clearer way of describing that aspect may be thus: by about 2/3 through, I began to get rather resentful that Miyazaki had adapted Howl's Moving Castle instead of The Spellcoats, because this felt like SUCH a Miyazaki movie. A little dreamlike, more than a little weird, and a strong political statement about shades of grey.

Now, this may sound like a positive review. And it is, because I have finished the book. But boy oh boy did I have a hard time with it. For one thing, it is written in first person by one of the family, and she is very internal-monologuey, in a strange style that somehow renders the internal monologue distancing rather than intimate. On top of this, the conceit is that she is writing this in the pattern she is weaving; having done a tiny bit of weaving myself I cannot imagine a textile-based writing system inviting anything but the sparsest prose, but that is definitely not what we get here. It might not have been so annoying if so much of the book hadn't been given over to worldbuilding, which made this small but significant logic gap glare. I fact, I can't say I really enjoyed the book until the last fifty pages or so: it's not my sort of fantasy, there seemed to be too many characters occupying the same tier of importance, and none of them grabbed me enough to care what happened to them.

But then I finished it, and then finished the series, and weirdly it's The Spellcoats that has stuck with me most. It's the least entertaining book but the one I would most like to see made into a movie. Its dreamlike tone and powerful imagery give it an almost mystic feeling. While it excited almost no emotions in me, narratively, the narrator's strong emotional connection to her landscape did communicate. I am all about character being the most important thing in a story, but here I thought it got in the way – the world and the weird can stand on their own. Was the whole book saved by its awesome closing image? Was it the 'scholar's note' at the end, from a historian in 'modern' Dalemark, about the discovery of the cloth that told the story? Was it just a book I couldn't appreciate in parts but could as a whole? I don't know. I keep trying to figure it out. Maybe that's part of its magic.

Anyway, if you read it, listen to Johnny Flynn's 'The Water' after you finish, and let me know if you think it could have been written for anything other than The Spellcoats.

Watch on YouTube

Once it became clear I wasn't going to get any substantive work done yesterday, I decided to sit down finally and watch Mr Jones, which I'd bought off Google Play a couple weeks ago and not yet got round to.

It was a good enough movie that I've been thinking about it all day, though mostly, I have to admit, about how the script could have been better. It wasn't bad at all, it just could have done what it was aiming to do a little more effectively. Trying to figure out where it fell short has been occupying a fair amount of mental RAM, which I confess is a bit of a relief after everything that's been going on.

I should start with what the film does well. From the opening scene, where Mr Jones warns a room of politicians about the rise of Hitler, only to be laughed off and assured the cartoon firebrand will come to his senses when he has to get down to the business of governing, it does not even make the polite pretense of being about anything other than Now. The director is Polish with first-hand experience of communism, and she very urgently wants us to know that communism is Not OK. In fact the whole undertaking of the film seems to be her trying to convince armchair socialists in Western countries that their idealism of revolutionary Russia is severely misplaced. There were so many people in the 1930s who were so desperate for communism to be a success that, voluntarily or involuntarily, they allowed horrible things to happen For the Cause. Perhaps the greatest success of the film is communicating this side of things.

( More Blather )

All in all, a well-made and diverting film with an important message, but a bit too exclusively cerebral for the subject matter, for my tastes. Still better than a lot of films I've seen recently, though, so if you're in the mood for something bleak and haven't just eaten, give it a spin. If nothing else, it is a good reminder of how much worse everything could be.

I have finally caught up with Chernobyl, which aired on HBO last year around this time and elicited rapture from everyone everywhere. I don't know when it came out on DVD but I finally checked for it last week, and have been enjoying(?) the escape(?) from an atmosphere of apocalyptic gloom, to a time and place of even more apocalyptic gloom.

And it was good! It was good. Excellently made, mind-bogglingly researched, clearly presented, capably acted, suitably horrific. There were sequences that were literally heart-pounding. Utterly transporting filmmaking, which is what it is supposed to do. It deserves its famous full marks on IMDb.

But overall, it just kept reminding me of The Terror, and not in a way that necessarily flattered the more prestigious production. For all the expensive craft HBO threw at Chernobyl, The Terror surpasses it in one very important way: it's about the characters. Chernobyl used the characters to tell the story of a disaster, but they were essentially shadow-puppets gesturing to the bigger picture. The Terror is about the characters, how relationships grow and change through hardship, how people find better or worse sides of themselves, how pack bonding leads to care leads to love and what that looks like in extremity. The Terror uses horror to tell a human story; Chernobyl uses humans to tell a horror story. There is a lot of spectacle in Chernobyl, as it presents to us the scope of a nuclear disaster, and it comes around to some Big Ideas about truth and sacrifice, but I never cared for the characters half as intensely as I did in The Terror, and it's that pathos that raises the latter to the next level, in my opinion.

So, if you haven't seen it, please give The Terror a spin, especially if you liked Chernobyl. It's about a circle and a rectangle who start out hating each other but become friends over the course of trying to save as many people as possible from a hostile environment that they got themselves into, so it will be familiar territory. But this time, with feeling!

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.

I've got halfway through the new Snicket series on Netflix, and several people (a phrase which here means "more than two") are curious what I think of it.

The problem is that I was supposed to be spending this week plotting out setups and payoffs, character development landmarks, and thematic threads, over the tragic arc of the Terra Nova Expedition. I have not done this, instead I've been applying those poor brain cells to retroactively "fixing" exactly those things in a television show that has already aired. This is poor time and resource management, but I couldn't shut it off.

Well, today I woke with a clear head at last, so I'm going to put a pin in the series and come back when I've made some headway on my own stuff. Once upon a time I'd have excused a bit of a deconstructive rant for the reason that it taught me stuff about story; this is no less true here, but I need to make progress on my own stuff, so I'm going to do that on the foundation that 14 years' worth of deconstructive rants has given me, and take this one instead as affirmation that my storycraft is fully functional and I ought to, you know, use it to construct something at last.

So for those several who are waiting for my review, I leave you with a decoy.

The phrase "over-egging the pudding" is an idiom in British English that means "going too far in embellishing, exaggerating, or doing something" or "spoiling something by trying to improve it excessively." It is a pity this phrase is not in more common use in America, where puddings are of the custard variety so concerns about egginess are less structural in nature, because having it in one's repertoire may have an unconscious effect on the creative person's aesthetic boundaries. If I could sum up the second series in one phrase, it would be "over-egging the pudding," but if you want to know how I would apply it to specific over-embellished improvements to the matter at hand, you're going to have to wait.

For a few minutes, let's escape to a completely fictional universe where kind, noble, intelligent people are pressed by conviction and circumstance to make a stand against violent, greedy, ignorant ones.

I've been a fan of Lemony Snicket most of my adult life, but never imagined his books would help me parse current events. How lucky we are the Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events should come along just when it should be so bafflingly relevant.

( A Little Background )

I wasn't immediately excited when I heard Netflix was going to do a serial adaptation of the books. The 2004 movie got some things right, but some more important things wrong, and having worked in high-profile mainstream entertainment in the meantime, I didn't believe they'd be allowed to film the books in a manner faithful to both story and tone. Too indefinable! Too idiosyncratic! Too intelligentsia! But when the first promotional material for the show came out, they seemed to know exactly what they were doing – more came out and I lost hope again – then at last I semi-reluctantly gave the first episode a try, and within ten minutes was completely sold on it and reverted to the giddy early-twenty-something who ran around Vancouver taking blurry black-and-white photos and cracking up at apparently random things.

I'm not going to go into a point-by-point of likes and dislikes, as that will take all afternoon, and the only person interested in it is me. Instead, here are some general statements from an avowed fan and someone far more familiar with the audiobooks than any adult ought to be: ( Items. )

If this series has been your introduction to Lemony Snicket, then sleep easy – it's been a good one. If you like it, you'll probably like the books. Might I also heartily recommend the audiobooks, for long car journeys, or non-word-related workdays, or just a bit of company as you unwind from a day of fighting injustice and bad taste in your off-the-grid safehouse far up in the mountains. You can probably find a few of them at a local public library. Support your library!

Well, why not make it a thing this series.

I'm going to try to be short, because I have to get back to work. (Hah! Short.)

( Immediate Impressions of the Just-Aired Episode of Sherlock, Series 4 )

Back to francophone radio for me now; have fun out there, fandom.

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.

This afternoon, thanks to Picturehouse's current 'Vintage Sundays' series of animated film screenings, I got to see Disney's 1967 Jungle Book on the big screen for the first time.*

I remember watching it on video a fair bit as a kid, though I don't remember particularly liking it. There was something unsatisfying about it; in retrospect I think it may have been how it was just a loosely assembled collection of episodes strung along a 'must return Mowgli to the Man Village' throughline rather than anything that builds drama or character. I liked the tune of the girl's song at the end, but I didn't like her or her unsettling coquettishness (she's what, eight? even as a small child I knew that was wrong) and I didn't understand why Mowgli had to go live with the humans when anyone would be better off with animals. I also didn't understand why there was jazz in the jungle, or the Beatles, or why the animals had English accents and Mowgli sounded like Beaver Cleaver. And I thought the art style rather too anaemic for depicting a jungle. I think the last time I watched the film all the way through was in high school, but it stuck with me so little I'm not sure.

In the intervening years, I've learned a lot about animation, worked at Disney and learned about its history, and picked up the requisite historical pop-culture background knowledge, as well as some awareness of uncomfortable racial undertones, the British presence in India, and Kipling's motivation for writing the stories. On watching the film again, this did help – though I also wondered if perhaps I knew more about the latter two than the people who made it did.

I knew that coming in with this adult perspective was going to change the film for me; I also knew that seeing it in the cinema would make a big difference, though I didn't know what to expect from that. ( Here is how it went )

Luckily the emotional side, which had left me so cold as a child, has been saved by an external force: not to deliver any spoilers, but the finale of Cabin Pressure makes allusion to Jungle Book, and because the former handles character arcs and emotional lives so much better than the latter, all I had to do was graft in the feelings as instructed and voilà! Some semblance of depth. Pure pixie dust.

Next week is The Little Mermaid ... I actually know people who worked on that one, should be interesting in an entirely different way ...

*Perhaps not strictly true: I was born at the end of the era in which Disney periodically re-released classic films, and I know my parents took me to a few of those, though I don't particularly remember Jungle Book being one of them.

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

I haven't seen many films since leaving LA. In part that may be because I knew too much of how they were made and they were more transparent than I wanted them to be; in part it was frustration that basic film grammar, artful cinematography, and sophisticated writing seemed to have gone out of fashion. For the most part, those I have seen, I've seen more as a social occasion than because I was interested in the film on its own merits.

Since moving to the UK, fed up with some sense of obligation being my sole reason to see things, I've experimented with only going to the films I am genuinely interested in seeing. These have been ... remarkably few. Vanishingly few, by some standards. I did want to see Shaun the Sheep – more out of a desire to celebrate being somewhere where Aardman still had theatrical distribution – but didn't get to the cinema in time. When I found out there was going to be a film of Dad's Army, a famous BBC sitcom from the 70s about a bumbling division of the Home Guard during WWII, I made up my mind not to repeat the Shaun mistake and get to it while I could.

I am not familiar with the original show – or rather, I am, but in the sort of way you pick things up second-hand, because it's referenced in radio comedy in that 'everyone knows this reference' kind of way, so I knew the catch phrases, a couple of the characters, and the premise. It's my policy that when a book I'm interested in is being made into a film, I'll put off reading the book until after I've seen it, on the basis that a)the book is always better than the film so I may as well work my way up, and b)I don't want to spend the entire movie distracted by noticing what's been changed. So I didn't look up the original TV show, or the radio adaptation, wanting to give the movie the benefit of the doubt and appreciate it (or not) on its own merits.

And ... it's not a bad movie. ( Review )

While it wasn't quite the film I wanted it to be, I'm still glad I went to see it. Moviemaking is an expensive hobby and it's good that there are pockets of it around the world that are not controlled from the deep pockets in LA; like any other art form, local cinema tells us who we are and offers different perspectives on storytelling and the human experience. It seems odd to tie a goofy TV spinoff about old men in with something as lofty as 'the human experience,' but you wouldn't see a big American movie studio making a WWII film from their point of view, certainly not without a lot more Nazis, and probably less comfortable lived-in familiarity with a quaint seaside town and the sort of characters you get there.

So there you go – local films for local people, support niche productions that interest you and let's all make the movies we want to make.

And have fun.

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:

A deep and heartfelt appreciation for a kickass cleanup team (and the crew on this film were superhuman)
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!
How underappreciated, and in some cases underutilised, some of the talent in those credits is
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!!
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 ...

When I moved into my own place in 2006, I took my TV but didn't sign up for cable, and was surprised how I hardly even noticed not having television programming in my life anymore. Since then it's only the occasional programme I make time for, usually on DVD, and never a series that demands more than a day's worth of my time to watch from start to finish.

Moving to the UK has, unexpectedly, challenged this status quo, because darn it if the BBC doesn't keep putting out exactly the sort of quality entertainment I actually want to see, and which rewards the watching. I missed the Christmas programming this year on account of actually doing stuff, and am only just now catching up on And Then There Were None, which has been highly recommended by people whose opinion I respect. The promotional material sent up a Pretty People Casting red flag, so I'd had my reservations, but the first seven minutes proved the filmmakers knew what they were doing, and once again I found myself enjoying the small-screen output of a small nation's public broadcaster far more than any big-budget mainstream movie in recent memory. While watching Hollywood films I keep getting inordinately distracted by stupid little things – casting choices, logic gaps, makeup, what have you – which crash my suspension of disbelief. This new crop of dramatic series is happy to engage enough of the grey matter that these distractions can be easily shushed, and satisfies my desire for cinematic craftsmanship enough that I can enjoy them on all levels. Establishing shots! What a novelty! Communicating information through means other than on-the-nose dialogue! What will they think of next? That annoying dissociated corner of my brain can think things like this:

... and instead of derailing my train of thought I can carry on enjoying myself. What a relief!

With Wolf Hall and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell last year, it's small wonder I hardly managed to drag myself to the actual cinema; And Then There Were None is getting 2016 off to a promising start, and I haven't even started War and Peace yet...

Current Music: And Then There Were None

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!

A few years ago, when Occupy was doing their thing and their grievances and agenda were in the news, I had this thought:

These are clever, resourceful, idealistic, fit young people in their prime, who evidently don't mind a bit of discomfort to prove a point. If they want to reject the system, why don't they pool their resources, launch a Kickstarter to cover the shortfall, buy some big property somewhere in the back of beyond, and start a self-sufficient cashless community independent of corporations and unfair government?

Then I realised the utopia I was imagining was essentially Redwall.

Before Harry Potter had crested the horizon, Redwall was my obsession. It went beyond an obsession, in fact; at a time when I was a fish miles from water, struggling in an unfriendly school, and otherwise alienated from everyday reality, the Redwall books were my refuge and salvation. I read them over and over, read almost nothing else aside from the books assigned in class, and more or less looked out at the world through Redwall's windows. They gave me somewhere to go that wasn't my own head, and I don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had that.

Most of my childhood was spent in places that could not have been further, visually, from the verdant pastoral quasi-medieval world described in the books, so when I moved to the UK I decided I needed to reread them, now I've become more familiar with the architecture and biome described. I was also curious to find out how my perspective on them might have changed in the fifteen years or so since I cracked one open. I can't say I was necessarily expecting anything, but it was curious what I noticed ...

( Having just finished 'Redwall' ... )

Sadly the re-reading experience was not as blissful a trip down memory lane as I was kind of hoping it would be ... Redwall itself is a tricky book because the author doesn't really find his groove until a third of the way through, and the worldbuilding that gives the other books in the series such a nice integrity is still a little shaky in this one – it's the only book with any suggestion of a human presence, the relative sizes of the animals are all over the place, and the history of Mossflower Country is a great big unknown. The adventure was grand and it was still pleasingly cinematic (and the set designer has improved a lot since I was 13), but I've been spoiled by an education in screenwriting and more grownup literature that has ideas and stuff in it; Redwall is sweet in its simplicity but it does kind of make me want more out of aspects of the story and characters which are probably not intended for that purpose. I am all in favour of just enjoying a good yarn sometimes so I will let it be, but it did slightly diminish my enjoyment of it on an adult level. But mainly, I think, it's that I don't really need it anymore – I no longer need to hide from the world, in fact I quite enjoy the world I'm living in now, not least because I can get to Mossflower Woods on the Tube.

I have a copy of Mossflower waiting for me, which I'm looking forward to because it's got Martin the Warrior in it and he's a good 'un, but I don't know when I'll get to it because I've got a giant stack of homework that I'm about to get started on ... It'll be good to visit for brain candy on a dark winter night, though. Boy am I ever excited for it to be winter again.

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.

All right, it's Saturday night, I've got a glass of wine and no homework, let's see what we can do about some movie reviews two weeks after the fact.

I went up to my sister's for a weekend, which we kicked off with Thor 2: The Dark World and followed up with Captain America (which I had not yet seen) and Megamind (which she had not yet seen), chased down with Avengers because the trailer was on Captain America and we were reminded how great that movie was and how much we wanted to watch the Blu-Ray which was conveniently right at hand. Thanks for the suggestion, Marketing Department!

( Thor: The Dark World )

( Captain America )

Avengers I've already reviewed and Megamind ... ahhh Megamind ... someday I will do a comprehensive list of What I Love About Megamind (or, The Love That [at Disney] Dare Not Speak Its Name) but it's my bedtime, so not tonight.

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~ Random Thoughts and Scribblings ~

Entries tagged with review

Darkwood II: Such Big Teeth

Darkwood

The Crown of Dalemark

The Spellcoats

Dark Russian Springtime: Mr. Jones

Chernobyl

They Shall Not Grow Old

Vocabulary for Deconstruction

Visualisation in Filmed Drama

Sherlock 4.2

Beauty and the Beast

Jungle Book

Scott of the Antarctic: The Movie

Dad's Army

Iron Giant

Catching up on TV

Longway North

Socialism, Female Characters in YA, and Redwall

Review-a-palooza

Marvel Movie Mayhem

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December 2023

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