#(and of course by live action I mean like the weird realistic cgi)

[gilliebee]

New month, same listening patterns😂 Receiptify

Tagging: @danhalen @an-ivy-covered-summer @mortirolo @annphorism @andreethier

If you're up for it of course🫶🏼

[shinygoku]

thoughts on cgi episodes of ttte? I'm curious to hear whatever praises or criticisms you have for that era of the series

Apologies for the delay, I started this but felt it was too Stream-of-Consciousness to be worth publishing. After a virtual pair of scissors it's much better but it's not one of my best metas. Still, I sure have Thoughts! So if you happen upon this month late answer, enjoy~

I think, much like the model series, it's quite the mixed bag... but even at its best None of the CGI episodes or specials reach the early pinnacle set by Seasons 1 and 2.

I'm famously[?] s3 Critical but I'm much more likely to wanna watch one'a the episodes where David Mitton was director than anything CGI (...depending on the episode lmao, some are nuclear waste as early as 3 and a lot in 6 lmaooo) -- that's in part due to my immense fondness and respect for the scale models and practical effects.

This ain't me ragging on CGI, but it is me saying that for Thomas the live action Supermarionation style works best for it. The CGI itself allows for things that wouldn't be possible [or finacially sensible], and that's good! But I feel like it became a crutch for the series to continue spinning wheels without covering new track, y'see?

Like, the Engines as models are still limited in some of the same ways irl Steam Locos are - they have to have track to run on, there's an upper limit for the rakes they pull, you can't bash them into walls without heavy damage, things like that. This also helped inform the post-Awdry stories they ran, it's the kind of limitation that makes writing more robust.

This doesn't make it immune to running out of ideas, of course, but it's a reliable guideline. The model series very much running out of plots is why I don't watch any post season 7!

With CGI there's an "all bets are off" aspect where they could use it for more complex settings, scenarios and characters. But a rot still started to creep in and hit the nadir with BWBA, where they just do whatever a weird ass mandate insists upon.

There's also the moving faces debate, I suppose. CGI letting them lip sync and giving them individual voices was another big game changer. But was it needed? The books lend themselves so well to the Narrator style (when it's someone like Ringo, even better hahaha), but the more distinct voices there are, the more room there is for something to sound ...off.

So let's sum up some CGI pros:

Increased possibility of complex designs, mechanisms and scenery

Episodes should be easier to produce and more effort could go into other areas

If lucky, the voice acting will be good

And some cons:

The majority of the CGI is still pretty daggy looking, and bad CGI ages it much more than seeing the edge of a physical set

The episodes either don't do much interesting with the freedom, or go too far and do stupid shit like an action movie bridge jump or the whole engine rocking back and forth like a kiddie ride when they talk

The voice acting isn't well suited to the stories... or it ain't good at all!

I mean it genuinely when I say not only is 2D Animation better for a less-realistic version of Thomas, but AEG actually going as balls to the wall is an improvement over the dying thrashes of BWBA. The CGI shoulda held itself to more realism, but didn't, but at least Very Cartoony Trains having extendable spider limbs is more consistant with itself.

...In summation, I am Not A Fan of CGI Thomas. Which is why I limit my input of CGI eps, honestly! I ain't saying everything about it sucks, but the collective whole of it isn't good enough to keep me watching.

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Much Ado About MOANA

Say it ain't so!

Walt Disney Pictures is working on a live-action "reimagining" of MOANA that will involve Dwayne Johnson himself, who of course voiced Maui in the original animated feature directed by Ron Clements and John Musker for Walt Disney Animation Studios and released in 2016.

As of now, the movie has three forthcoming extensions: This project, a land at Epcot in Walt Disney World, and an animated series being produced at WDAS (namely its recently-opened Vancouver unit) for Disney+.

I used to grouse to the moon and back about how much I detested much of these particular remakes and reimaginings of Disney's animated features and characters. You know, the ones made in the aftermath of Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND throughout the 2010s, and even into now. I used to see them as something of a threat to animation's reputation, and they all came at us fast! MALEFICENT in 2014, CINDERELLA in 2015, THE JUNGLE BOOK (a largely CGI movie with one live actor and maybe like, 5 real-life plants) and ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS in 2016, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST in 2017, and a five-finger-punch of DUMBO, ALADDIN, THE LION KING, a MALEFICENT sequel, and LADY AND THE TRAMP in 2019... And then MULAN in 2020, CRUELLA in 2021, and PINOCCHIO this past year. Mixed in with these movies were a genuine new take on hybrid film PETE'S DRAGON and a legacy sequel to MARY POPPINS, MARY POPPINS RETURNS. Even Burton's ALICE, which got this whole ball rolling, was pretty much its own thing, ditto the 2016 sequel.

On the horizon? PETER PAN & WENDY, THE LITTLE MERMAID, SNOW WHITE, MUFASA: THE LION KING, BAMBI, THE SWORD IN THE STONE, a JUNGLE BOOK sequel, THE ARISTOCATS, ROBIN HOOD, THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN (which the 1985 animated feature THE BLACK CAULDRON was adapted from), THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, HERCULES, and LILO & STITCH. Now MOANA joins the ranks, the first all-CG animated Disney film to get the "live-action" treatment.

That's a ton of remakes in the span of almost 10 years, if we peg the actual start of this trend with 2014's MALEFICENT.

I think I've only seen... ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and THE JUNGLE BOOK, in full. I refused to watch the others. Back then it was out of protest and me just genuinely not being interested, nowadays? It's just the latter. These things aren't for me, and that's okay I guess. They haven't erased animation, nor did other recent "realistic" takes on animated classics, such as the 2017 GHOST IN THE SHELL movie with Scarlett Johansson. It hit me one day at my cinema job when THE LION KING was released. The Cinemark that I work at used to have a cart for movie merchandise, including things like T-shirts and Funko Pops and such. Most of the merchandise for the remakes that came out that year? Were for the animated originals... (I use the word loosely, but... You know what I mean!) I'd say it was an 85/15 ratio. Some stuff for the new remake, but mostly stuff for the classic animated movies that inspired them... It hit me... These are just over-glorified theatrical re-releases of the animated classics, made to move some merch and stuff at your local Hot Topic. It's kind of a weird transition from the way Disney used to keep their films in the public eye, whether it was a re-release cycle from the 1940s up until the mid-1990s, or their video releases being available for a limited time before being retired to the infamous "Disney Vault" (a ruthless marketing strategy thankfully put to rest with the arrival of Disney+ in 2019).

But in 2017-ish, I remember just being so goddamn grumpy about these things. Made worse by various directors, actors, and producers involved with the remakes making disparaging remarks about the classic movies for being... Well... **Animated**. Imagine that! The director of live-action BEAUTY AND THE BEAST declared that filming that story with real people gave it layers of psychological depth and nuance or some such bullshit. An actor on ALADDIN said almost verbatim the same exact thing. Disney stressed that their LION KING remake wasn't animated, even though the entire thing except a single shot was computer generated and "animated"! Then of course, several folks involved with the remakes making up nonsense about the princesses and heroines in the originals. We're seeing that now, even, with THE LITTLE MERMAID. Though these particular remarks about classic Disney heroines are nothing new, they remain nonetheless a bit irritating and proof that media literacy is lacking in many people. Then again, we do live in a world where people constantly parrot nonsense like "Batman is a rich guy who beats up poor people" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is about being bullied until you're useful to your bullies."

Some people just don't pay attention to what they watch, do they?

But really, the remakes come, make a lot of noise, often times make a crapton of money at the box office... And then they just... Disappear. Like, it was insisted that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 2017 fixed the plot holes of the 1991 movie and was "darker", more "adult", whatever- Uhhh, I don't really feel its presence anymore, whereas the 1991 animated movie directed by Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale? Still here, still beloved, still holds up. I guess you could not outmode the dumb ol' kiddie cartoon, now could you? All that "darker" and "more psychology" talk is gimmicks at best, and most folks just kinda watch 'em because they saw the originals... and then that's it. It's a movie, it's a thing, it exists. You got what was on the tin: It's [insert Disney movie here], all over again!

This all being said... Now the CG movies are fair game, and possibly Pixar's some time in the future. It ain't just the 2D movies they're going after anymore. Look at Universal, they're readying a HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON live-action movie for 2025 with Dean DeBlois himself - director of all three of the animated DreamWorks HTTYD movies - at the helm! It's either going to be a straight-up live-action version of the DreamWorks adaptation released back in 2010, or it's going to be a whole new take on Cressida Cowell's book series. I hope it's the latter, honestly, then I might give it my attention.

To this day, many rightfully concerned folks still feel that these live-action/photorealistic remakes insult pure animation. Pure animation as in, animation that KNOWS it's animated. Straight-up cartoon or abstract. That Hollywood sees animated movies as but a "stepping stone" to superior live-action, but really... What I see is this... Money. People love an animated movie or show? Money. How many different coats of paint can we put on the car?

Some are asking... Why not just a MOANA sequel?

The weird thing about that is, Ron Clements and John Musker left Disney Animation. They were last seen developing a METAL MEN movie for Warner Animation Group. Of course, the directors being off on a new adventure doesn't mean anything in capitalism, Disney could plow ahead with a MOANA sequel if they wanted to. But they choose not to at the moment, only this and a D+ series. Kind of keeping in line with a history of not really making sequels in-house, and the days of outsourced direct-to-video fare has been loooooong over. (The remakes are often compared to the DTV sequels of the '90s and '00s, and for good reason. They're little more than brand extensions, and you can ex 'em out of the equation if you so choose to do so. Disney EU or Disney "Elseworlds" if you will...)

But what's actually seemingly upsetting is that... In the past few months, on the year of Disney's 100th anniversary... Most of the movie announcements have been nothing but continuations and brand extensions. They also serve as a nice distraction from needless layoffs, but yes... The big announcements have been things like TOY STORY 5, FROZEN III, ZOOTOPIA 2, Live-Action MOANA, etc. etc.

However, one ought to look closer. In-between all the franchisey stuff and synergetic things, there's still original movies being made... Like, there's not only 20th Century Studios continuing to make new live-action movies that aren't remakes or re-dos or new adaptations of books (y'all seen THE MENU and BARBARIAN last year? Great stuff! Highly recommended.), but you still have Pixar. From March 2020 to March 2022? Four straight original animated movies: ONWARD, SOUL, LUCA, TURNING RED. After spin-off LIGHTYEAR, we're getting ELEMENTAL in two months, ELIO in spring 2024, and presumably many more on the horizon.

Oh, but ELEMENTAL looks "mid", you say? "A parody of Pixar"? Or whatever else is being mindlessly parroted at the moment? Whatever, I don't know what to say to that, but like it or not, a movie like ELEMENTAL is the rare original movie from Disney, a small island in a sea of remakes, Marvel, and Star Wars. Ditto ELIO, and again, whatever is in the works after that that isn't a sequel.

And of course, Walt Disney Animation Studios, who have all but abandoned literary adaptations outside of public domain fairy tales, keeps up with original stuff, too. After releasing no new movies in 2017, two back-to-back sequels from 2018-2019 and taking 2020 off due to COVID-19 complications, they hit us with RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON, ENCANTO, and STRANGE WORLD. Next up is WISH, also an original story, despite the weird way it was presented and reported on at D23. Whatever releases after that, I do not know, but FROZEN III and ZOOTOPIA 2 aren't the only things in development there. Plus, they have partnered with Nigerian upstart studio Kugali to make an original show for Disney+ called IWAJU.

Much like the reception ELEMENTAL is getting online, a movie that isn't even out yet, a lot of the recent WDAS output and what's next is just being written off... But it's all there, it's original, it's a mere morsel of something coming out of the company that seems to be all about them brands. I'm not blaming audiences specifically for, say, STRANGE WORLD's epic floppage this past holiday season, buuuuut- Those numbers are looked at, and they possibly bring about consequences.

I do get the worries, though. Under former CEO Bob Chapek, we saw Pixar's originals post-ONWARD all go straight to streaming while franchise entry LIGHTYEAR hit the big screen... and lost money. WDAS movies had a hard time, too. RAYA did a day-and-date thing with Disney+ before most of the vaccine rollout, ENCANTO dealt with Delta and Omicron before being a huge hit at home, STRANGE WORLD was straight up left for dead after testing very poorly.

With Bob Iger back in charge, Chapek's strong pivot to streaming is being reversed, as it's being realized that streaming is not the be-all end-all of the movie world. And sharp eyes knew it never would be, either, but you know how things go in capitalism: New thing shows up, abandon everything for the new thing! Disaster! Hey, that's how hand-drawn animated features prematurely got the boot circa 2001. Anyways- Yes, Iger rearranged a lot of things, and now the release strategies and marketing campaigns are back in the hands of the studios and creatives, and I'm pretty sure that there's an effort, a commitment to make ELEMENTAL the first Pixar box office success in four years. That's right, the last Pixar movie to make its money back at the box office was... TOY STORY 4... Back in 2019... And you wonder why a fifth one was greenlit?

I'd imagine Iger saw how Chapek and co mandated Pixar to send TURNING RED straight to streaming, and knew what to do from there. Ditto how, on the WDAS front, STRANGE WORLD was just straight up abandoned. TURNING RED probably would've made ENCANTO or BAD GUYS numbers at best, which wouldn't have been enough for its hefty budget (Pixar needs to stop overspending on these things), but I wonder what's in store for ELEMENTAL. Few animated movies post-2020 have passed the $100m threshold domestically, and I feel that is due to how many trips to the movies families can afford a year. (Say the line, Kyle: In 2014, statistics showed that the average American family goes to the movies four times a y-) It's opening amidst a ton of blockbusters and other animated family movies, including Disney's own LITTLE MERMAID, and the fifth INDIANA JONES movie. Maybe movies should just be more affordable? And theaters, better places to sit down and see a movie? I can see why many just don't go anymore, again, having worked at a theater for 7 1/2 years (and ready to move on to something better).

Or better yet, Pixar and WDAS need not spend more than $150m on the movies that they make. DreamWorks, Illumination, Sony, et al. put out dynamic-looking movies that are rewriting the CG animation book for way less, WDAS and Pixar should probably consider that. Leave the tech-flexing to things like that LION KING remake and prequel, let their animated movies experiment and have fun again. But even movies they don't seem to be flexing tech cost so much. Why, though? I know in California, these things are expensive, but DreamWorks is based out of California, too. I guess that Moonray software they themselves created and other solutions have gotten their movies to cost less than $100m each time out. Well, WDAS opened their Vancouver unit, so maybe they can up them to feature status? Like they did with the defunct Florida unit way back when? Split the effort with Vancouver, lower the cost? I dunno, just spit-balling here.

Basically, I don't want ELEMENTAL and WISH to come up short at the box office. Or any of the original stuff coming out, period. Again, WDAS, Pixar, and 20th Century/Searchlight are like Disney's last outlets for that kind of stuff on the movie end of things. 20th is fine and good, because in small-scale live-action, most of the time the studios know how to be smart with budgets. $150m budgets make the average WDAS and Pixar movie a risk, that they have to get on the stage and essentially perform like a Marvel movie just to break even! That's a lot to ask of an original animated movie! And not even the WDAS name nor the Pixar name can guarantee people will show up, both have had their fair share of flops. And now, judging by how ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA is doing, the Marvel name ain't a guarantee anymore either. Ditto Star Wars, remember how SOLO just sorta existed at the box office and lost a lot of money? TV and elsewhere is a different story, of course, there's plenty of original stuff to choose from there.

MOANA Live-Action is likely being made to fund the fun cool stuff, much in the same way sequels help fund originals. They... Pay the bills, shall we say.

In other words, I'm just indifferent. Whatever. Tell me more about the original stuff coming out, and you'll have my ear.

[bisluthq]

I was wondering if your partner has any insight on this, I know he doesn’t work on vfx but maybe he has more knowledge of the subject if he works in post production.

I have seen some actors say they’re going to vote no to the deal based on some stuff Justine Bateman has been saying. But I have seen people say that the issues she has brought up are either things that are already done (filling a stadium with copies of the same person) or things that we won’t possibly have the technology for in the next 3 years. I know she said scenes should only use real people and I saw someone say you can’t hire thousands of extras for a battle scene because it wouldn’t be safe. That’s one of the reasons why we use cgi in those situations now, but that’s different from AI. I’ve also seen actors say that bigger actors are going to be able to say no to AI but smaller actors will lose jobs if they say no. I have also seen people say that the full body scan actors are worried about costs 10k per person to do and they would never spend that much on background actors, when they already make fake crowds with cgi.

I’m conflicted because it does sound like actors are overreacting and I can’t really see a full AI movie doing well anytime in the near future (and by that I mean a “live action”). I think we would get realistic games before a film, and while you can play a game and say the graphics are really good, I wouldn’t enjoy that in a movie. But at the same time, vfx people sound like they’re into AI so I’m not sure if I can trust them.

What are your thoughts?

So my bf is really into AI lol and thinks it's awesome. I think post people are generally just crazy into technology (based on him and other people I know in the industry) and because they're geeks like they geek out over new shit and rn they're geeking out over AI. He uses it a fair amount. He's not completely au fait with it yet because there's like a LOT to know but he's done a course and he's like suuuuper into it. His whole thing is like it makes things faster and easier and it's dope tech and he's like "people thought shooting on digital was 'cheating' at one point" and I'm like "that's true they really did." He also makes the point of like CGI can do most of what AI is doing but it takes far longer and you have to deal with the CGI people lol and they're all a bit weird.

Personally, I think AI is gonna affect jobs for a lot of BTS people unless you're getting on board and like using it and it's gonna affect jobs for mid level actors because yes 10K is a lot but it's cheap like longterm. I don't think it's gonna be used for crowds really but like yk Gunther from Friends? He could be AI generated now. Like that's the kind of role that could go to AI and cut production costs down. Random bitty part actors, especially on shows, could go to AI rather. There won't be full AI movies for a long time imo because 1) AI looks a bit weird lol like you absolutely can tell if it's fully AI 2) AI is not that smart rn like it needs to be spoken to a lot and in very particular ways and like creatives aren't into that it and geeks can't generate a film based on prompts imo.

Fwiw like I like AI lol - I did part of my bf's course with him because I found it interesting and again I'm teaching atm so there isn't a reason for me to stress about AI but I've used it for lessons also like Twinkl has an AI bot that lets you generate stories and comprehensions and I've done that live with kids and they get SO into it lmao like they think it's the coolest thing they've ever seen.

[blackshvck]

I’ll be the first to admit my taste in movies is all over the place and I enjoy a lot of things that are objectively bad but The Good Dinosaur is one of, if not the only, movie that is so bad that it makes me angry. Never have I seen a movie that is so shit in every possible way. The plot is boring and dragged out, there isn’t a single likable character, and the designs. Holy shit the designs. Admittedly I’m very into palaeontology and get kinda passionate about accurate dinosaurs in media, so on that level the characters being more anatomically incorrect than fucking Jurassic Park makes me see red, but even if you ignore the outdated-as-all-fuck anatomy their designs are just. Bad. Arlo looks like one of those weird rubbery gummy toys you’d buy and throw against a wall to watch the it ripple before it sticks there. His dad’s head looks like a car. The chicken thing is the worst, they gave the pteranodon teeth despite pteranodon literally meaning toothless wing, and the ‘feathered’ raptors look like someone put a current through a feather duster. The rexes had a halfway decent design but their galloping looks terrible. This of course combined with these janky toy designs being slapped onto a hyper-realistic background. Watching Arlo’s gummy bear body being bruised and bloodied is so tonally dissonant it makes me feel like I’m dreaming. I once watched this movie with Jay in discord and I complained for the entire runtime. They fell asleep abt half an hour from the end and said it was really funny waking up to 100+ messages as I’d just kept going. Disney’s Dinosaur movie combined live action backgrounds with 2000s era CGI and still manages to look better than this piss experience

[myriahkamm]

I live-blogged watching BvS and Justice League on FB earlier; here are my unedited thoughts. :P

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

I'm watching Batman V. Superman (because bad movie night I guess idk), and during the opening scene rehashing the Waynes' deaths (for what feels like the millionth time in cinematic history--seriously, y'all, we can be done with that for a while and definitely don't need a 5 minute slow-motion scene about it), when Thomas says Martha's name as they're dying, I burst out laughing because (i) I didn't remember that he said her name during this scene and (ii) is this supposed to be some kind of foreshadowing for the really dumb crux of the movie where Batman and Superman stop fighting because omg their moms have the same name? I literally can't stop laughing. This movie is such a joke. 🤣

Having the Robin costume in this film with absolutely no context is just stupidly pointless fanboy pandering. Anyone who actually gives a crap about Batman lore should realistically hate that.

Lex Luthor, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, bitching about not having power is definitely on brand, but I am just super *not* a fan of the quirky, kind-of-nerdy-and-awkward Lex Luthor this film decided to go with. The hardcore businessman Lex Luthor from the 90s and 00s will always be the Lithor I like best. Y'know, the one based at least in part on Donald Trump. That one.

This Jesse Eisenberg version is way too much of a Mary Sue. Businessman *and* scientist *and* awkward nerd? Yeah, Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg, but I'm not sure Lex Luthor should be Mark Zuckerberg.

Ugh, I totally forgot about the Darkseid-foreshadowing dream that's never going to go anywhere because, let's be real, DC is never going to do a live-action film with Darkseid (and it would be awful even if they did). Also, Batman using guns in that dream is a thing I'll never be cool with. I don't care what kind of world he thinks he's living in in that dream; Batman has established principles and pretty much only goes against them in alternate universes.

Jesus, I forgot about the whole Flash-from-the-future scene, too. DC wrote a lot of checks we're never going to be able to cash in this film. Promising an Injustice-esque Superman-is-evil kind of storyline that they're never going to do anything with...why would they do that?

So in the dream, Darkseid-related stuff is going on (which, in Justice League, does sort of happen with Steppenwolf) and Superman says "she was everything to me, and you took her away from me." Then future-Flash says that "Lois is the key". Are they implying Batman has premonitions? Are they giving him a superpower? 🤣

Oh, that's right, they blew up the U.S. Capitol in this movie. 🤣 These scenes that are supposed to be really serious and filled with tension just keep making me laugh.

Why did they decide Batman needed to make a kryptonite spear? I mean, other than plot reasons so they could use it later against Doomsday. Batman uses projectiles and his fists; he rarely uses swords or spears or whatever.

Why did they decide Doomsday had to be created using a mixture of Kryptonian and Luthor's DNA? In the comics, Doomsday is an experimental clone based on ancient Kryptonian DNA. Why (in my opinion) make Doomsday so much more pathetic by adding human DNA into the mix? Freaking weird decision.

"Mm." What a weird quirk to add to Luthor's character. "Mm" every other sentence. What's that all about?

Luthor manipulating Batman into fighting Superman is...so unbelievable. Luthor manipulating Superman to hate Batman, waaaaay more believable. But no, that's not what they went with. They went with Luthor manipulating Batman for two years into wanting to fight Superman. Superman just randomly came to hate Batman on his own and only got manipulated into fighting him at the end. They could have just gone with hey, Batman's suspicious of everyone and would naturally be suspicious of a superpowered alien, especially with the whole setup they did at the beginning that coincided with stuff from Man of Steel. But nope. Nope, they went with the dumber plot.

Doesn't Luthor have way too much info about all these heroes' secret identities? Are we just pretending secret identities don't matter anymore? That's too 90s or something?

Why does the kryptonite spear make an "omg I'm a glowy thing" sound? 🤣

And now we're at the stupid Martha part that makes no sense because if you were about to die, you wouldn't say "save [mom's name]"; you would just say "save my mom!" 🤣

Batman would totally save Superman's mom even if their moms didn't have the same name. It's just such a stupid, stupid plot point and lends itself to endless mockery. 🤣

I *do* like this fight scene where Batman is making his way through the goons to get to Martha. The choreography is really good. Reminds me a lot of the Arkham video games.

Man, this Doomsday just...doesn't really work on a fundamental level. What makes comic Doomsday so powerful and terrifying is (i) it's not just a mindless monster, but is actually intelligent and can plan and strategize; (ii) iwas created through such extreme experimentation that it was repeatedly destroyed and then remade again over and over and over to give it endurance and formidably; (iii) and it's pretty much unstoppable from all that experimentation and uncontrollable because of its intelligence.

Also, what's with this explody thing Doomsday does in this film? A monster can be terrifying without being able to blow up a bunch of stuff. I'm not sure what the point of explody Doomsday is other than lazy writing.

The military hit it once and came to the conclusion that not only does it get more powerful "every time we hit it," but also that it's unkillable? Okay. More lazy writing.

And we're back to one of my biggest issues with Man of Steel: Superman just not giving a shit about collateral damage. Even if the island they're on is uninhabited, that doesn't exactly mean he should just be fine with blowing a bunch of shit up in the course of this fight. Sheesh.

How did Lois know they needed the spear again? She had no reason to go underwater to try to get it. This whole "let's make Lois useless time and again so Superman can save her" thing is really annoying.

Superman's "death" scene carries so little weight if you know (like pretty much everyone should have known, let's be real) that he's not really dead. Like, sure, for the characters it means something because they don't know he'll be back, but for the audience? At least for me, it doesn't make me feel a whole lot.

So all the soldiers at Superman's funeral--do they know they're carrying an empty casket? Just curious.

The dirt rising off the casket at the end for a split second is soooooo dumb. For anyone naive enough to think he *is* really dead, just let them think it. Just let that be a thing. Come on. (Also considering that he doesn’t just come back on his own; it takes a charge from a Mother Box in Justice League for him to come back. That makes this end scene a lie, too.)

Ok, BvS is done. Need another drink and a snack, then I'll move on to Justice League. 😅

Justice League:

Haha, obvious Superman facial CGI right off the bat, omg, I forgot how horribly obvious it is. 🤣

Also forgot that we're starting off with parademons right away. Sheesh.

Do all of Snyder's films have to have gratuitous slow-motion scenes at the beginning? Ugh, dude.

Everyone just throwing Bruce Wayne's name around in relation to Batman all the time. Secret identities are dead, y'all. No superhero can have a real life, I guess.

Ugh, I forgot this film pushes Batman/Wonder Woman pretty hard. 🙄

"It's cool if I show a bunch of Amazons with their midriffs showing as long as they have visible ab muscles, right?" Idk, Snyder, is that how armor realistically works? 🙄 Also, is it necessary for them to have lipstick on? That doesn't even exist on Themyscira, ffs.

The multiple (as I remember; only one so far) innuendo-based jokes really bring this film down, imo. "Clark said you were the thirstier woman he'd ever met." Really? Ugh. 🙄

The plot of this film is so LOTR. Amazons, Atlanteans, and Men all get Mother Boxes, sort of like the various rings of power. There's plenty you can pull from comics, y'all. You don't need to pull from other stuff.

Flash as comic relief I'm okay with. I'm not sure how I feel about *this* Flash's comic relief. I'm not a huge fan of the writing.

Break time because Je'von wants to go out on the balcony lol. 😅

And we're back. So can Steppenwolf breathe underwater? Is that a thing? 

I guess it's supposed to be super funny that everyone disappears except the fastest one of them? Sigh. The writing in this film is just so awful.

Cyborg's CGI also isn't great. I really wanted more for Cyborg because he's awesome. Sigh.

Snyder must have loved being able to do stuff with Flash. All the slo-mo he could want.

I'm not a fan of neurotic Flash, afraid of pretty much everything. He can be funny in so many better ways, but instead let's just have him be afraid of everything and make sexual jokes every now and then. 🙄

"Let's keep having Cyborg wear sweatpants and a hoodie so we don't have to spend so much on CGI. It totally won't look ridiculous." 🤣

Batman making the argument to use technology he doesn't understand to try to bring Superman back from the dead is just so out of character it's not even funny. First of all, Superman didn't need technology to come back in the comics (whether or not his "resurrection" was silly is irrelevant). Secondly, Batman literally has an enemy (Ra's al Ghul) who resurrects himself on the regular, and Batman (i) knows it's a bad idea because it messes with Ra's's sanity and (b) would never consider using the Lazarus Pit even though he has a relative understanding of how it works. This film just literally disregards established character traits in favor of it's stupid-as-hell plot. Ugh.

Superman is vulnerable to magic, idiot writers. He shouldn't be able to fight Wonder Woman's lasso. Uuughhh. Have any of the writers of this movie ever actually read any Justice League comics? 🤦‍♀️

Well, those cops definitely know Superman's name now. Since you all keep saying it in front of them.

Superman hasn't even been gone for that long (seemingly; I mean, it's hard to tell, but S.T.A.R. Labs is still doing research on the Kryptonian ship in the same genersl area as in BvS, so idk), so all this talk about what he does or doesn't remember seems...weird.

Why not wait until you defeat Steppenwolf to let your mom know you're back, Superman? For all you know, you could die again. Wouldn't that just be harder on her after seeing you back?

Why was the lasso just sitting on the Batmobile instead of with Wonder Woman? Plot so that Aquaman could say some *super funny things*. 🙄 That's not even how the lasso works, you dumb writers. Someone has to direct another bound by it to speak the truth. Seriously, do some research. Ugh. It's not that hard.

"So your plan is dying? You really are out of your mind." "I'm not the one who brought a pitchfork." See, the writers prove that they can be actually funny if they try. *If* they try.

The "everyone trying their best to hold off the big bad until Goku gets there" vibe is super strong in this movie. 😑

Part of the reason the Justice League is a thing is because no one hero can do it alone. That means it all shouldn't be riding on Superman's shoulders. If you actually know how to write the Justice League, that is.

Don't know how I feel about everyone getting perks due to nepotism now that they know Bruce Wayne...must be nice to be buddies with the richest man in the world. 😒

The Flash vs Superman race at the end is more pandering. Ugh. It would be better if Flash was less pathetic as a character in this film. Super awkward is just not very funny, y'all. Write actual jokes instead.

Okay, that's over. What a trip. Both those movies are still pretty much garbage. 🤣 The question is, will I ever watch Man of Steel again? Probably not; I hated Man of Steel more than both those movies, actually. Wrote a 3-page rant about how awful it was after seeing it in theaters originally. $3 was still way too much money to spend on that crap. 😅

Oh, side note for the after credits scene: will they ever actually go anywhere with that? They might do an okay job with a Justice League vs. Legion of Doom (or Injustice Society or whatever villain team incarnation they would decide to go with) film. That might not suck.

[intersex-ionality]

I read your post on your other blog complaining understandably or you mention the photorealistic animals on his dark materials and the lion king. I am not sure I like over- I do not mind hyperrealistic paintings but- I think you mentioned its harder for photorealistic animals to emote and they kind of look freaky. Pikachu looked more expressive in Detective Pikachu. Though I guess he is photorealistic in those trailers? Havent seen the movie. I wish the lions had more expressive faces

There’s a set of terms for describing this visual trend, and I don’t actually know it. So I’m using my best approximations, because I lack the technical terminology. In fact, I so thoroughly lack it that when I try to look it up, I end up being given weird unrelated resources because search engines aren’t telepathic.

But, there’s different kinds of realism. Which, I mean, that sounds so fuckign stupid when I say it like that?

But there’s realism in the sense of, “this is live action stuff that can and does exist in real life, albeit sometimes touched up in effects to make it more visually coherent.” That’s stuff like the sheep herds in Brokeback Mountain, which were at the time considered a breakthrough achievement in CGI. They’re visual re-creations of real things that really exist in the real world. So, realism.

Photorealism, as I use it in that post, refers to making versions of fantasy things that don’t actually exist (such as talking lions, or pikachu), but which have physics and designs that are approximately compatible with our perception of the real world. Much like taking a photo of a sculpture of something that doesn’t actually exist. In the picture, it makes sense. It looks like it fits. It matches our sense of realism as it applies to visual media, even if there’s no equivalent thing in actual reality.

This degree of... I guess fictional realism?

This degree of fictional realism doesn’t necessarily have to conform to anything about actual reality, however. It’s lions that can make human-like vowel shapes with their lips, it’s a robotic suit of armor that a normal ass man climbs into and becomes deific, it’s whole ass pokemon. It’s clearly a fantasy element, but it blends well with our expectations of reality within the medium. Much like the physics of Captain America’s shield tosses don’t actually match real world physics. They just look normal enough that the average audience member doesn’t question their presence in the art piece itself.

Hyperrealism goes one step further. It doesn’t merely concern itself with looking good enough not to disrupt the average viewer’s focus. It wants to make these fantastical elements as close to indiscernible from the real world as possible.

That’s where we start running into trouble.

Because, they’re fantasy elements. They’re not real. They can’t behave realistically, because there’s no real for them to approximate.

So, someone decides on what the “realness” they’re trying to achieve “should” look like.

And those someone’s are often not concerned with how well these effects integrate into the actual story being told, the emotions trying to be evoked. They’re often concerned more with pushing the boundaries of technical achievement. 

And, let me be clear: pushing the boundaries of technology is a good thing. It’s how we develop better tech!

But, if you push those boundaries based only on making an even better version of the thing you did 5 years ago, then stagnation is inevitable because you aren’t pushing the boundaries in the direction of what you need to do now, but what you needed to do in the past. Likewise, eventually, you move out beyond what is actually useful.

Using the lion kind as an example, because it’s just so very rife with good examples.

Ten years ago rendering a full coat of multiple-hair-colors and multiple-hair-lengths fur was an ungodly process. It was expensive, it was difficult, and the results were often clunky.

However, the resurgence of film franchises like Star Wars and the MCU have spent the last decade doubling down on hair-and-fur techniques in CGI, to the point that they’re.... basically solved? I mean there are obvious failures, but the techniques and tools now exist, where they didn’t before.

Compare the modern Lion King big cats to the at-the-time groundbreaking big cat in Life of Pi. The difference is staggering, right? It almost makes you think, holy shit, the Lion King remake actually did open the medium up to a whole new level.

Except... did it?

Compare the modern Lion King now to a modern peer, say Rocket Raccoon in Avengers, and you can see that the “great technical strides” aren’t actually that significant in terms of the utility they bring to story telling.

By focusing on making the animals as realistic as they possibly could, they sacrificed a lot of the empathy-building expressiveness needed to make an audience connect with their characters.

It’s not bad, but it works more as a tech demo than it does as a story.

And then, because of the deep conflict between the fantasy elements and the intense sense of “real world” physics and limitations that they’re going for, flaws that wouldn’t even be noticeable in a less obsessively engineered product become so obvious as to be jarring.

For example, the dance sequence in Hakuna Matata. Because we have these animals that are designed to be so realistic that even actual footage of actual lions doesn’t look as crisp and integrated into the environment, the fact that they’re singing and dancing is really jarring. And then the singing and dancing is also, necessarily, limited by the heavily restricted ranges of motion that the models are allowed to perform...

It’s an attempt to make something too real, to bring into reality something that cannot exist in reality, and it often comes at the expense of basic storytelling techniques.

Now, this is not to suggest that hyperrealism cannot be used for artistic and storytelling purposes in its own right. Of course, it can!

But shoving it where it was neither warranted nor wanted creates a conflicted, muddied end product that doesn’t express what it needs to express.

In short, let fantastical elements be fantasy. Accept that they’re not going to look like the stepped out of the real world, and then take advantage of that necessary disconnect to create something that really expresses and emotes.

Now, again, I don’t think these are necessarily the best words to describe the phenomena I’m trying to describe. But I don’t know what those words are, so I’m doing what I can with what I have.

If you happen to be more involved in visual media and the technical aspects thereof, and you can help me out here by telling me the actual right words, I would appreciate that a lot.

[dzamie]

I watched the live action Jungle Book! I’d say it was disappointing, but I set appropriate expectations going in. So, imma get into it:

So, the good parts first, in no particular order:

I really like Kaa’s hypnosis effect. The Disney animated movie’s swirling colors always looked really, really goofy to me, but the live-action’s waves of light and dark were very well done and legit alluring.

There are a lot of little jokes here and there that I feel were written in case they wanted to use them in a commercial. “You have never been a more endangered species than you are at this moment” is actually pretty darn funny.

The bodies moved well. King Louie was really the only animal I thought was straining realism too far; the positioning of limbs and torsos and stuff was pretty spot-on. Tails were a bit wonky, but you have to be looking for something like that, as someone with a slight tail fetish might.

This is definitely unintentional, but Mowgli makes an “oof” sound whenever something bowls into him or he leaps roughly against something. It sounds like the Roblox hurt noise. Tone-breaking, but HILARIOUS.

Having Mowgli seem to fear the bonfire was a nice touch.

As was having the final fight seem to take place at the watering hole, this time during wet season. Far from dry, the exact opposite of the Water Truce occurs - everything is in conflict.

Now, the less pleasant bits.

I mentioned the Water Truce callback was neat? Yeah. What a shame they took multiple minutes to repeat over and over that the Water Truce was that there was a truce around the watering hole. I’m glad they used all that time to explain why it was that Shere Khan wouldn’t attack anyone so he could conveniently see the man-cub. Also to set up the schtick where Mowgli has been Inventing Things because he is a Man.

Elephants are now a religion. I don’t like it, especially because it’s used to set up Mowgli rescuing a baby elephant from a hole, so that Baloo and Bagheera can see that Man Is More Powerful Than God.

The wildebeest herd exists only for shakycam purposes. There really isn’t much reason for Mowgli to not go directly into the river and escape Shere Khan on a log that way.

Oh how they ruined Kaa. I do rather like how she has a more cloying, sweet personality (it’s not better or worse than the animation’s rather goofy fellow, just different), but they whole-ass saw a snake character and thought “hey wouldn’t it be cool if she never wove around him or approached him from different angles? Let’s make sure to never show her for more than 8 seconds at a time, too; we MUST cut between her and Mowgli. There’s simply no way to shoot a scene where they’re both in the shot, talking.”

I hope you like snakeless ScarJo voiceover, because that’s literally half of Kaa’s appearance, from first line to last. It’s great that the man who hurt Shere Khan with fire just happened to be Mowgli’s dad, because I guess it’s not enough that Shere Khan wants to kill all humans in the jungle; he must have a Deep Personal Connection with the man-cub.

I can sort of understand coming out of the hypnotic vision to see Mowgli entirely in her coils, from a “this is Mowgli’s perspective” point of view, but wow it’s really unsatisfying. Look, the animated version had Mowgli slide into pre-coiled snek body, but at least we saw them interact. Kaa is pretty much a static prop here. What a waste of a serpentine character.

For someone who is afraid of heights and doesn’t know Mowgli, Baloo sure is eager to climb a big, tall tree and risk his own life against a giant, hypnotic snake.

Minor note: with all the focus on seeing Kaa from Mowgli’s point of view, Disney sure chickens the fuck out when it’s time to be snake chow. C’mon, you stupid mouse, show us what Kaa looks like inside.

It’s kinda weird that Bagheera and Baloo are so familiar with each other, considering that Mowgli has been in close contact with Bagheera all his life and neither met nor heard of the bear.

Shere Khan is almost comically evil to the wolves. Makes it hard to take his “I’m actually justified in my desire to kill you” thing seriously.

I feel like Disney hasn’t grown out of its “haha imagine SONGS in a CHILDREN’S MOVIE. What a stupid fucking idea” phase. Baloo and Mowgli sing off-tempo and off-key, and King Louie does a weird half-speaking thing that lets you know they want to do a song, but haven’t the slightest clue how to transition into one, and they still want to pretend to be a gritty serious realistic movie with no singing because that’s too silly.

King Louie Is Twenty Five Goddamn Feet Tall Because We Watched King Kong The Other Day

They set Louie up to be a mob boss, calm and composed for like a minute or two, and that goes out the window in no time flat. They try to bring back that structured “I help you you help me bada bing bada boom" thing back in the chase scene, but literally nobody cares what the chaser says in the chase scene. If they did, it wouldn’t be a chase scene.

“No, they don’t fear me, they fear you.” Except clearly they fear you because your MO this entire time has been “let’s kill and threaten animals and see if Mowgli comes back faster.”

Baloo, the laziest bear you ever did see who heard the wolf pledge exactly one (1) time and immediately dismissed it as propaganda, can recite it from heart because Shere Khan needs to be directly confronted with The Power Of Friendship

Can’t be a climax without fire. It’s a good thing that Mowgli can always find a safe path through this raging inferno that’s been burning steadily through the forest for the last few minutes or more.

Mowgli’s entire strategy hinges on many things that could go wrong at any moment:

a) the vines don’t catch on fire as he’s running through the burning forest

b) the vines and branch don’t catch on fire after he suspends them in the air in the middle of a huge forest fire

c) the dead tree, notably made of dead wood, which some may know to be extremely flammable, is not on fire nor does it catch on fire as he’s climbing it

d) Shere Khan follows him onto the branch

e) Shere Khan leaps at him on the fragile branch that Shere Khan seems to notice is weak

f) the vines and branch don’t catch on fire while he’s climbing them in the middle of a huge forest fire

g) he finds a way back out of the woods literally filled with fire

h) Shere Khan even follows him all the way in rather than going “nah the little bitch is gonna burn. Let him.”

i) the animals forgive him for setting the trees ablaze

They let ScarJo sing Trust In Me during the credits. Minor suggestion: don’t.

I choose to interpret Mowgli not seeing what happened with Kaa and Baloo to mean Kaa is still alive, and the monkeys trying to dig Louie out of the ruins to mean that he’s dead. This is entirely because of favoritism.

Compared to the animated version, this movie is much more based around Shere Khan, compared to around Mowgli and the jungle. Rather than “Mowgli won’t be safe here; send him to the Man Village so Shere Khan won’t kill him,” it’s “Mowgli won’t be safe here, but Shere Khan is going to threaten and probably kill us until Mowgli returns anyway, which he surely will because Shere Khan said so.”

They tried to do a grey-morality sort of thing by justifying Shere Khan’s fear of fire and hatred towards Men. But it kind of backfires because Shere Khan keeps being incredibly evil for no particular purpose aside from making his death be a good thing for everyone, and the one crime Mowgli commits (big fire) would not have happened if Shere Khan hadn’t announced his plan to kill the man-cub.

I really miss the allegories to different kinds of philosophies towards society from the animated version. The live-action replaces them with examples of different abusive relationships (Baloo is a manipulative fast-talker, Louie is supposed to be a mob boss, Kaa’s comfort is genuine but overshadowed by a desire to do harm), which is... nice, but not really my cup of tea.

Holy shit there is SO MUCH SHAKYCAM. You can barely see some of the scenes from all the shaking around. “Did we inspire adrenaline in you? Don’t you wanna go fast?” Yes, of course, but what am I doing this about? “...SHAKYCAM!! LOUD NOISES!!” It’s overstayed its welcome.

Realistic CGI animals are actually terrible at emoting.

This felt like yet another action film. Every opportunity they had, they threw in another fight scene or chase scene. You could take most of them out, cut off about 15 minutes from the movie, and still not have removed anything important.

All in all, I’m glad I now have 22 seconds of Kaa saying things. They really shouldn’t have given ScarJo so much coverage in the commercials, though. She’s in the movie for about 4 minutes, and she’s a visible snake for much less. I don’t think I’d pay to see this, and really this just gives me more reason to not watch other Disney live-action remakes.

Shakycam should have died eight years ago. Bring back shot composition.

[makdynasty]

Thoughts on the Future of the TF Movie Franchise.

I have to say, after watching BumbleBee and closely examining the status of the franchise, I must say... I don't really have much confidence for the franchise moving forward. These are just my thoughts on the matter though. I"ll briefly do a review of some sorts for the movie as I segway into my main topic of discussion.

Now, I'm not saying that I think the movie is bad or anything, but it was very dry and lukewarm for me. Unpopular opinion, I know. The thing is though, for a movie that is supposedly going to be a "reboot" to a movie franchise that has been standing the test of time for over a decade, it wasn't a very strong start. Pretty much the main thing that it has going for it is the whole G1 appeal that they feel the need to constantly stress along with the fact that this is not a movie directed by Micheal Bay.

Now, unlike some people who I've discussed the movie with, I'm not going to give the movie a ruff time for it's lack of action in comparison to the original 5. I understand that they wanted to tell a more calmer and down to Earth story and I like small number of Decepticons that BumbleBee faced on Earth as well as the battle back on Cybertron was sufficient enough. I also liked how the action was cleaner without too many explosions going on as well as being mostly one-take without the weird jump cuts in movies like TF 4 and TF 5. I am however going to talk about the movies large cast of dry and one note characters.

For a movie that takes pride in how it's story is supposed to be deeper then the past few movies, and how it has a substantial amount of "heart" that the previous movies lacked, apparently, it all feels pretty artificial at times. Most of the characters that are showcased in this movie (Not including the characters that made cameo appearances.) are very one note without much of anything defining them aside from: Charlie, BumbleBee, Dropkick and Shatter, and maybe Optimus. I didn't include John Cena because the dude pretty much played himself, so I'm not exactly sure how to critique his performance. This movie shouldn't even really be called BumbleBee seeing as how most of the movie is spent focusing on her struggles above the struggles of the actual main character that the movie is named after. A common complaint from people who watched the other movies that is conveniently swept under the rug this time around like most of the films flaws.

Next is the how the movie handles emotion. For a movie of it's nature, it handles the subject pretty well. Charlie is by far the best character in the movie with great development and progression making her easily one of the most developed human characters in the movieverse. However, this of course has it's fair share of flaws as well. Most of the emotional appeal is focused on her and her solely to the point where other emotional moments in the film don't feel at all important like Cliffjumper's death for instance. That along with BumbleBee's supposed death midway through. Not only that, but the movie at times feels like it's trying too hard to get a reaction out of you with how it constantly brings up Charlies dead father. I can understand the movie constantly reminding us of his death in order to emphasis that she's constantly thinking about him, but it could've been handled much better if the movie didn't feel the need to have her emotions feel so exaggerated. 

It follows in line with how many modern day t.v. shows nowadays try appeal to audiences by making them feel heavily for the characters. It may be charming at first, but over time it starts to feel disingenuous with how much the characters struggles are constantly shoved in front of our faces as if we don't realize that these characters are going through hard times. This issue is especially prevalent in the later seasons of shows like Steven Universe where the feeling has noticeably dipped down for some people because the over-exaggerated emotions eventually leave people out and end up making the characters seem whinny above all else. 

BumbleBee is a low budget live action movie and it shows in several cases. Clearly a lot of the design work went into BumbleBee and maybe even Dropkick and Shatter. The CGI while nice enough with G1 designs and realistic looking enough, is noticeably toned down, a little too fluid to the point where every movement made by the Transformers feels oddly floaty and not very grounded, and a lot less detailed than the previous films. For ancient sentient alien robots that have been fighting in a war that has been ravaging their entire planet, they look a little too clean in comparison to how they looked in some of the previous films. Aside from some casual rustware and scratches on all other Transformers that aren't BumbleBee, which you may not even notice unless you were looking hard for these details like I was, there isn't much battle damage or carnage displayed afterwards. 

The CGI effects in general seem lackluster at times. It's clear that a majority of the budget went into the Cybertron war scene, though it feels as though that's where the CGI begins to look the most cartoony. In fact, many elements of the Cybertron war scene look suspiciously animated to the point where it feels almost like an odd design choice as a homage to the G1 show and movie. Wouldn't put it past them and it would admittedly make for in interesting design choice if that were the case, yet I feel as though that sacrifices a lot of the believability of the movie for that particular scene. Prime example (No pun intended.), the scene where Ravage was ejected out of Soundwave's chest. That whole transition always look off to me. It was smooth, but very noticeably off in terms of movement. This is just a personal complaint however as I am more used to the realistic movements as well as designs and atmosphere of the previous films.

As I conclude this brief overview of the BumbleBee movie and transition into my main thoughts and feelings towards the future of the Transformers movies, I want to talk about the biggest issue I have with the direction of these new movies. Aside from the people behind these movies not at all knowing whether or not they want these movies to be a fully reboot or not, BumbleBee felt like it was meant to appeal to nobody, but G1ers, people who didn't like the previous films, or just casuals in general really. I feel like this is a big step backwards personally. What made the previous films so special was that they were a thorough rejection of all of the things that defined how Transformers are "supposed" to be. In a time where the franchise was dying out and people where constantly saying that nothing outside of G1 works, these movies came along and proved those statements wrong. In return, the changed the mythology and way we all perceived the Transformers forever. The movies were able to appeal to all forms of Transformers fans because they didn't stand for one single mythology and acted as an amalgamation of many different forms of the franchise. Had they gone with there original plans for The Last Knight, they would have even incorporated Optimus Primal somehow, and that would've in turn appealed to the Beast Wars fans. G1, as good as it is, on it's own does not appeal to everyone which is something that Hasbro doesn't seem to understand. I'm not a G1er, so aside from some semblance of odd nostalgia as well as making it easier to spot out some fan favorites, these designs just don't do much of anything for me personally.

BumbleBee was a good movie, not a great movie imo. It doesn't do anything to try and shake up the formula and feels mainly like it was just meant to cater to fanfare without any proper intentions of being the start of a new generation of Transformers movies. Budget issues aside, the movie plays itself far to safe even for what they had intended for their story to be. It isn't at all perfect and yet it could have been so much more.  

...

So with all that said and done, how exactly does this translate into me worrying about the future of this movie franchise???

This personally makes me feel a tad bit worried for the future of the franchise. The franchise now lacks a sense of direction because it's being seemingly forced to transition into this new form without a proper plan of action. As much as I liked what Travis Knight did with BumbleBee, I would prefer if a more experienced director took the wheel from here on out. 

As far as money goes, the franchise is also on a step decline with BumbleBee being the lowest performing movie yet. You may say that money doesn't matter in this case seeing as how the movie made back a significant amount of money, it's still considered a financial flop in comparison to the other films, and rightfully so. Transformers is a multi-billion dollar franchise and as such should be expected to make as much money with it's big projects like these. BumbleBee was expected to bring in huge numbers regardless of it's low budget, but didn't. However, because it was well received, it's getting a sequel, but the numbers have to start rising or else.

They also don't seem to know what they want to do with the sequel aside from making it a buddy movie of some sorts with Optimus Prime. At least the director recognizes the importance of staying true to the previous movies to a certain degree to go as far as to include "Bayhem" into the movies going forward. 

All in all, the future of the franchise while promising, is by no means going to be guaranteed success. It's very easy to see how they can potentially mess this up without proper direction and focus. That's all for now.

[askcherrypie]

JOKER: It’s a Mental Illness Movie, Not an Incel Movie, and It’s AMAZING.

Just came from the Joker flick. Amazingly well-written, acted, filmed, directed. Bloody well spotless. Joachim Phoenix is even better than Heath Ledger. One thing it's not, is an "incel" flick. Nothing like that happens in it. It's a film about mental illness, and anyone who says otherwise can't possibly have seen it. Ten outta ten, easy.

***SPOILERS: IF YOU READ BELOW THIS LINE, YOU DESERVE TO***

I’m not going to get TOO far into the deets, but given the idiotic manufactured controversy about this movie to date, something needs to be clarified beyond question... the fact that from the get-go, Joker is clinically insane.

He is in therapy. He is on seven different medications. He is on government assistance programs, being unable to afford any of these himself. He is constantly told by his mother that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne (which would make him the older brother of Bruce Wayne), and that Wayne is “a good man” who will eventually take them out of poverty because of these familial blood ties, but of course that never happens.

It takes being curbstomped by groups of thugs - one poor, one rich - before he ever acts out violently. Before he gives up on becoming a better person and simply accepts himself for what he is, slowly adopting a more and more nihilistic outlook on life.

The reason any of this is important is because it shoots the “incel movie” nonsense right in the gonads from the start. There is a love interest, yes... but Joker isn’t spurned. He’s not rejected at all, and the love interest - such as she is - is actually somewhat sympathetic to him, something which he appreciates. It’s the fact that he’s already insane which destroys what could have been a good relationship, not a bad relationship which drives him insane. In short, he’s never an “involuntary celibate” at any time during the film, nor is there any indication he ever was.

As the movie proceeds, we find out more and more about Joker’s mental history, and that of his mother. We discover things he endured as a child, and which he has forgotten (or suppressed). We learn what happened to his mother and what her relationship to Thomas Wayne was. This movie is a tragedy where the central figure embraces comedy, first as a coping mechanism and then as a means of remaking himself into what he feels he has always been.

It is also the best prequel movie I’ve ever seen. Even if it winds up being a stand-alone film due to DC’s more disastrous outings, this should be on your mantle in Blu-Ray format just as an example of how well-crafted a movie can be. Everything is realistic, gritty, lived-in; it all has the depth of real life. Nothing is so over-the-top that it couldn’t have been a news item decades ago, let alone today. What CGI there might be is virtually unnoticeable, the focus is very much on practical effects and quality acting.

Nor do I exaggerate when I say Joachim Phoenix’s performance exceeds that of Heath Ledger’s work on The Dark Knight. Ledger was phenomenal, but Phoenix here is not only phenomenal but also more believable, more human, and for that reason, all the more chilling. Joker is someone who could easily be your neighbor, that “funny-sounding guy with the weird laugh just down the hallway”. There is not a single over-the-top moment in the film... instead, each action and movement flows into another. There is a reason for everything here. This is not Ledger’s Joker, who starts out wanting to watch the world burn, but a Joker who slowly notices that it is already burning in front of him.

I consider Joker to be the Star Wars: A New Hope of the Batman mythos.

See it.

[pierrotdameron]

On the set of His Dark Materials, Dafne Keen is about to see a bear.

With battle raging around her, snowflakes flying and alarms ringing, the young actor – who plays lead character Lyra in the BBC’s new adaptation of Philip Pullman’s acclaimed novel – sprints down a corridor, dodging enemies and fighting for freedom. And just when all seems lost, she looks up, seeing her saviour. A broad smile breaks out as she sees who’s standing above and ready to save her… a man wearing a white, faux-bearskin rug on his head.

OK, on set Pullman’s trademark armoured bears (or panserbjørn) aren’t much to look at – but over a year later, when they finally arrive on-screen, they’re an incredibly impressive achievement, realistic and filled with character, a triumph of puppetry and visual effects. If anything, they’re even more impressive than the animal dæmons that have appeared in every other episode so far. But how were they brought to life? What did the actors film with on set, and what were the biggest challenges?

Happily, after we’d suitably calmed down from all the excitement, the behind-the-scenes team were happy to fill us in…

Pre-production

While the 2007 movie adaptation of His Dark Materials (titled The Golden Compass) wasn’t exactly beloved by fans, it did win plaudits for its VFX, with the work of independent company Framestore winning the film its only Oscar. Now, over a decade later, the new adaptation would have to surpass even that achievement – which is why Framestore were brought on board again to work on the TV series, marking them out as the only common element between both adaptations.

“Framestore did the original bears in the original film, which we won the Oscar for, and we’re doing the bears again, now,” VFX supervisor Russell Wilson told us. “And what’s really interesting about that is certain things we computationally couldn’t do then, we can do now – but obviously it’s harder work.”

And the digital work on the bears didn’t begin after the shoot had already concluded, as many might expect. In fact, before a single scene of the panserbjørn storyline had been committed to film, Framestore and Bad Wolf’s in-house VFX gurus were working hard on previsualizations for the bears – in other words, plotting out scripted scenes in basic computer animation in specially-rendered environments, so they could work out how the bears would look before the directors started work.

“That was a combination of Framestore’s bear animation and our [interactive set] environment,” VFX artist and pre-vis supervisor Dan May told RadioTimes.com. “We blocked out the sequence with Russell and the stunt guys downstairs. “They animated the bears to quite a high level in pre-vis, that that pre-vis was then brought to our [digital] set with all its textures.”

In other words, basic digital bears were added onto a specially-mapped digital set, blocking out the scene before anyone had even turned on a camera and creating a “virtual shoot.” And when it came to actually filming the sequence IRL, this preparation meant that the bears could (sort of) be on set as well, with specially-prepared screens and virtual “cameras” allowing the production team to check where the animated, moving bears were at all times.

“When they shot the sequence, they were able to bring that animation and the virtual camera angles, and see them live on set,” May explained. “They were able to line up a digital bear with a real set. And that is not a first, because they’re doing that sort of thing on Jungle Book and Avatar. But we’re doing it on a more affordable, sustainable way.”

Though of course, it wasn’t just digital bears lurking on set…

Puppeteers

As with the dæmons, the bears on set were built and puppeteered by Brian Fisher and his eight-person team, with various different rigs and outfits utilised by the team for different purposes.

“There’s about seven to 10 different bear rigs,” VFX supervisor Wilson told us. “There’s one for smashing into stuntmen, there’s one for representing his face, there’s one where there’s literally a guy with a glove on putting it on his face.

For example, sometimes the bear was just represented by actor Joe Tandberg (who also provides Iorek’s voice onscreen) wearing (functionally) a bearskin costume, while other times he wore a special rig (pictured exclusively above) that allowed Iorek’s bear head to hang in front of his own.

Other times, he just wore a plain boiler suit with a light rig over his face, or stepped away in favour of a static model (pictured) to help the crew include Iorek’s scale, or was replaced by a large grey cushion for scenes where Iorek was less mobile or in a confined space. “You’re basically in a green room, with a weird grey thing which is supposed to be a bear, and with Lin singing? It’s just all very weird,” Dafne Keen, who plays Lyra in the series, told us.

And of course, a lot of the time the full-time puppeteers took over. For example, while on set RadioTimes.com was shown a large puppet version of Iorek operated by two people to impressive effect. Within the rig, one puppeteer wears an ordinary large hiking backpack, leans forward to face the ground and hoists two long poles forward, with a mesh bear head that he can control and turn at the end of the poles.

Another man behind holds two strings to control the front legs. Together they can rear the bear to his full height, stalk him around an area and generally bring him to life. In His Dark Materials episode four, another bear head – one with Iorek’s snarling teeth – was used for a scene where he attacks a foe, and generally speaking the team tried hard to keep things simple instead of using complicated mechanical rigs or creations.

“When the bear attacks – that was much more stuntman, him, us throwing him around on a mat until we worked out something that we liked,” Wilson says. “We take a very human, organic, what I call a man-tronic approach to things that you might take or do in a technical perspective. “When he’s getting dragged around by the bear it is just a guy in a boiler suit and [the victim’s] on a wire, and that’s it.”

Riding Iorek

But the fighting wasn’t the only filming challenge. In fact, a key action shot that everyone was even more keen to get right comes later in the series, when Lyra rides on Iorek’s back as the pair travel into a dangerous new area. On set, the human portion of the shot was achieved by creating a special rig for Dafne Keen to ride (pictured above) – but unlike similar ridable CGI animals like the dragons of Game of Thrones, it wasn’t mechanical, instead requiring the puppeteers to move it themselves.

“When Lyra’s riding a bear, it’s all operated by a human in a backpack,” Wilson said. “You know, we don’t bring in rigs and mechanically programme them because it’s quite slow to do, and it means you get less takes at it.” “To get the specifics, the biomechanics behind how a polar bear’s gait runs, we had to go through and, with the animators, actually break it down into segments, figure out how we can translate that into something that has movement and life but is not purely mechanical,” puppeteer Brian Fisher told us.

“The second you go into a mechanical movement, you can speed it up, you can slow it down, but it is always rhythmic, whereas we don’t work in binary movements.” As you can see in the above video, RadioTimes.com actually got the chance to try out the bear rig while on set, and can confirm it’s definitely man-powered – and surprisingly bouncy. “I loved the bear rig,” Keen herself us. “Though I was too light for it. “It was very funny. They made this rig, and they didn’t calculate my weight. So they had to then harness me, because I bounced too much off the bear. So that was really fun.” “Although I felt kind of bad because I had two human beings bouncing up and down underneath me…”

The final touches

Obviously, the lion’s share of the work done by the VFX team comes after the filming as they gradually work on creating and animating CGI shots right up until broadcast. And for Wilson and his team, no detail was too small when it came to the armoured bears. “In our version of Iorek now he has the muscles underneath [his fur] that flex as he moves, and that also drives the fat on him to jiggle as he runs,” Wilson told us. “But then the skin actually slides over the bones and the ribs, which makes the fur that’s attached to the skin slide over that as well. All of that together gives you something that feels really realistic. “So again,” he concluded “the appetite and the ability is higher – therefore the workload is higher.” Oh well – hopefully, the time and trouble wasn’t too unbear-able.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #389

Top Ten Things I Want from The Batman

So last week I celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Tim Burton’s Batman by listing the things I thought he got “right” about the character (“right” being, I acknowledge, arbitrary). This time around, sticking with a similar theme, I’m going to flip the switch and look to the future. Matt Reeves’ long-gestating Bat-pic The Batman is finally gearing up, having recently cast its Dark Knight in the shape of erstwhile vampire Robert Pattinson. The saga of The Batman, its Affleck-ness and its connectedness with the DCEU as-was, is almost worth a movie on its own (I really hope there’s a book written about it at some point, or at least a long-form essay; the ins and outs of what became of the DCEU and the de-Snyder-fication of their film slate is potentially fascinating). At any rate, we’re going to get another Batman film and that’s quite exciting. Especially as it is – potentially – a chance to course-correct issues that I had over the previous incarnation of the Caped Crusader. Ben Affleck was very good, but he looked a bit sad and hefty in the suit (the silly cowl essentially removed his neck), and he killed a lot of people. Like, tons. What’s up with that?

So with all that in mind, and given everything that’s come before, here’s a list of places where I hope Reeves and Pattinson go with their Bat-epic. Or even don’t go! You’ll see what I mean, as we get into a list of things I want from the new Batman, The Batman.

No Guns, No Killing: this is a big one for me. The Batman I love in the comics – most of the incarnations, anyway – is very strict about this. For him, murder is the worst crime, and his whole deal is being Anti-Crime. Therefore he would never, ever kill. Also he views guns as, literally, the “weapon of the enemy”. Even Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy – which is probably the closest to the comics in terms of his “one rule” – had him bedecking his equipment with guns and “not saving” people. Here, I’d like a very strict code.

White Eyes: okay, I’m not asking for an MCU Spider-Man here; I know comics characters have whited-out eyes in costume and that doesn’t usually translate to live-action. But Batman would/could/should wear some kind of eye-piece. Even if it’s goggles that he removes/retract into his cowl. What I want to avoid is the blacked-out “panda eyes” look of seeing his real eyes within his cowl. I just find it a bit daft for Batman.

A Working Batsuit: whilst I’m on the subject of Batman’s Bat-duds, one thing that I loved about the Nolan-verse was that his outfit was sensible. Obviously not too sensible, as he’s, y’know, dressed as a bat, but it looked like a suit designed to fight crime in. The Burton/Schumacher suits looked like sculpted pieces of rubber, no good for movement; the Snyder suit looked like fancy dress with “cosmetic damage” and rubbery wrinkles. The MCU, on the other hand, is great at making superhero suits that look iconic and super-y but also workable; Captain America wears some kind of oversuit with, presumably, armour on the inside, and also a cowl of sorts, but one which allows him to move his head and which looks functional despite also having a dirty great “A” on it.

Sweet Wheels: similarly, I’d like a Batmobile that’s more “car” than “tank”. The Burton/Schumacher films, as was their want, gave Bats a car that was more form than function; going the other way, Nolan and Snyder had heavily-armoured war machines that owed a big debt to The Dark Knight Returns. I’d rather lean towards the former, but really, can’t he just have some souped-up Knight Rider thing that’s fast and stealthy? He’s more Black Widow than War Machine don’t forget.

Heh: Batman has, by his own admission, “a sense of humour that nobody gets”. I don’t want a relentlessly dour grimdark Batman. Give me a Batman who can crack a wry smile or a sardonic one-liner, even if he’s being bitterly ironic. To be fair most screen incarnations of Batman have had some sense of humour, but Batman v Superman in particular was almost relentless in its miserableness so I’m hoping The Batman has a funny bone, pitch black as it may be.

A Real Gotham: although I praised to the heavens last week the Anton Furst-ified Gotham of Batman and Batman Returns, I’d like it if the new film hewed closer to Nolan’s vision of the city as a “real” place. Sure, give it stylised embellishments; make it “New York at night” or some twisted version of New Jersey or Chicago or whatever. But I don’t think we need the ridiculous mile-high statues of the Schumacher films, and the less said about the frankly terrible CGI cityscape from the opening minutes of Justice League the better. Shoot on location, or use really good CGI. Make it 10% weirder than normal and I think we’re onto a winner.

Make Batman John Wick: I love how John Wick fights. He’s all business. Boom, boom, the guy’s down, blam, blam, he’s dead. It’s all about minimalising risk, fighting as efficiently as possible. He gets the guys down because, well, the longer they’re up the more chance that they’ll kill him. Batman should fight like that. As few moves as possible, but target them precisely; nothing flashy or extravagant, just get the guys down. Obviously he doesn’t kill or use a gun (see point number 1) but I want a Batman who looks cool when fighting, looks like he trained with monks and ninjas and assassins and wizards. Basically, let’s have some genuinely impressive-looking fight scenes for once.

Make Batman Sherlock: I have high hopes for this one, as the word round the internet campfire is The Batman will be much more detective-focused than previous films (to this date, the two Batmen who are the most sleuth-y are Adam West and Kevin Conroy). But Batman is supposed to be the World’s Greatest Detective so, y’know, let’s see him detect. Greatly. Er, around the world. Make it a proper crime film, a whodunnit. That’d be good.

Make Batman Weird: not necessarily “Tim Burton weird”, but just give us a sense that this is a Batman who has a sci-fi closet. A Batman who, maybe, has fought Monster Men, Killer Crocs, sentient mud and murderous flora. Nolan’s Batman was super-serious and Snyder’s Batman was super-miserable so whilst I applaud a more street-level focus and a noir-ish tone, I hope the possibility exists for a world full of Man-Bats, immortal warlords, dollotrons, and more.

A Wider World: I really hope this one is viable. The plan was for the Justice League-centred movies to form a spine, telling a story arc over multiple films, with the stand-alone tales functioning as spin-offs. As it turned out, the “spin-offs” were the successful ones, and with Batman being rebooted from Batfleck to Battinson, it looks like the “Extended” part of “DC Extended Universe” is up in the air (so is the “Universe” part too, I guess). I don’t know if Justice League or the preceding films are still in continuity even, or if continuity is still a thing, but all the same what I want from a DC Comics adaptation is a shared universe. I’m not a big fan of Zack Snyder’s incarnation of that universe (too dark, miserable, and po-faced), but I still want to see Bruce hanging out with Clark, teaming up with Diana, arguing with Arthur… I want that feeling you get from the MCU (and the comics, for that matter), that Wakanda going public or SHIELD being disbanded or Tony Stark dying is going to have repercussions in other films. I think The Batman is going to be pretty much self-contained in the same way as Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam, but all the same, I hope the potential is still there. In much the same way as I’m very happy for the film to be a street-level noir with the potential to one day have a sequel featuring Batman and Robin fighting off Mister Freeze in a Bat-UFO, I hope it focuses on Bruce and Gotham with the potential to segue into a Justice League movie or have a sequel set in Themyscira or something. Don’t close off the universe, is what I’m saying.

So there we are. I’m aware that this is, essentially, a fanboy wishlist of My Ideal Batman, coming from a straight white bloke in his thirties who graduated from Year One through Knightfall then “New Gotham” and found his Batman apogee in the works of Grant Morrison. Matt Reeves has his vision and it’s good that he sticks to that (for better or worse, I still would have liked to have seen how Snyder’s proposed Justice League arc had played out – although I am emphatically not a “Snyder Cut” devotee). But I feel there’s a sweet spot between stylised and realistic, between comics-accurate and designed-for-film, that hasn’t quite been reached with Batman yet (The Animated Series came closest). Nolan’s films are obviously the best, but I do think that the more realistic you make Batman’s world, the less realistic he himself becomes, and you make the central conceit (trust fund orphan did a lot of push-ups then dressed as a Dracula to Fight Crime) all the more silly. I’m still a bit sad that we lost Affleck, but I’m very excited by where we’re going to go. I just hope it doesn’t preclude a World’s Finest, Justice League Unlimited, or – heck – even a Robin movie somewhere down the line.

[sophieakatz]

Thursday Thoughts: The Right Medium For The Right Story

I’m a bit obsessed with the topic of adaptation – and by “a bit obsessed” I mean “I wrote my undergrad thesis about it.” Adaptation is a kind of re-telling; you take a story that was told before, and you change some things when you tell it again.

For example, West Side Story is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s the same basic story, but it’s set in 1950s New York instead of 1300s Verona, and the warring “families” are rival gangs instead of members of the nobility.

But there’s another kind of adaptation here that’s perhaps even more important than the change of setting – the medium. While Romeo and Juliet was originally a stage play, West Side Story was a musical, and later adapted again into a film. Adapting a story across mediums changes the work just as much, if not more, than anything else – or, at least, it ought to.

Minor spoilers for The Hunger Games books and movies as well as Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King ahead.

[Image: The Hunger Games movie poster]

A Rose By Any Other Name Is Different

As a writer, I firmly believe that you must find the right medium to tell a story in. If you later change the medium, then something about the story is going to need to change as well. As much as a reader might want the film of a book to be completely loyal to the original text, a story originally designed as a novel is not going to work if you simply transfer it page-for-page onto the screen. This is because there are fundamental differences between books, a textual medium, and films, a visual medium.

My favorite example of a book-to-film adaptation that shows a clear understanding of the necessity of change is the Hunger Games franchise. Suzanne Collins’s books are told from a first-person perspective, giving the reader insight into Katniss’s thoughts the whole way through. Because we are hitchhiking along in Katniss’s mind, we get a lot of exposition about the world through her memories, and we know exactly what she thinks and feels about everything that’s going on. Importantly, this includes her confusion about how much of her affection for Peeta is real or just for the Capitol audience.

The Hunger Games film, on the other hand, is shot in a traditional third-person manner. Consequently, in the adaptation process, we lose Katniss’s point of view. We don’t get so many of her memories, aside from a brief dream sequence. We also lose her inner conflict about the performed romance (though the sequel, Catching Fire, plays catch-up on that point).

The filmmakers could have tried to make the film more like the book by adding a voiceover to explain what Katniss is thinking throughout the film, to sidestep the limitation of not actually being inside Katniss’s head anymore. Plenty of films do that. But The Hunger Games does not.

Instead, the film leans into the differences between the two mediums, seizing the opportunity to explore things that the book could not. While we lose Katniss’s inner voice, we gain everything that Katniss could not see. We get scenes of President Snow talking politics with Seneca Crane, making the viewer aware of the greater stakes of Katniss’s behavior in the Games much earlier than Katniss herself is. We also see the riots in District Eleven as they happen, instead of learning about them much later. In the third film, Mockingjay, scenes of Katniss’s work creating promotional videos with the rebellion are paired with the actual acts of rebellion that her words have inspired (I particularly love the “hanging tree” sequence at the hydroelectric dam). The effect is haunting, and it all truly drives home the magnitude of what’s going on.

As a result, the Hunger Games films remain true to the heart of the story without trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. A rose you read about in a novel might smell just as sweet as one seen on film, but only if you acknowledge that you can’t depict the rose in the exact same way in a book as you would in a movie.

[Image: The 2019 Aladdin movie poster]

Anything Is Possible… But Not Always

The current trend of live-action Disney film adaptations provides us with a fascinating case study in the power of adaptation, and of how well the adaptors succeed in transitioning a story from one medium to another. The original animated films (which themselves are mostly adaptations of oral fairy tales – but that’s a whole other blog post) and the new live-action and/or photorealistic CGI films are, of course, both films. But the kind of story you can tell in traditional animation is different than the story you can tell in a more realistic “live action” style.

(Not to mention that the kind of story you can tell in a mainstream media production today is different than the stories told twenty-plus years ago, representation-wise… but again, that’s a whole other blog post.)

Animation is a medium of imagination. That’s why animated fairy tale movies have always done so well. The un-reality of the medium lends itself to depicting the kinds of fantastical transformations typically told of in fairy tales. The viewer can suspend their disbelief and forget about the rules of the real world while watching an animated film. It’s much harder to forget those rules when the people on the screen are human actors.

The live-action Aladdin hits all the same story beats as the animated Aladdin, but it makes several brief but notable changes along the way. There are just some things that the animated film could get away with that the live-action film could not.

For example, the Genie spends a lot more time in a “human” disguise than he does in his natural blue form. If you were on the internet at all when the first images of Will Smith as the Genie were released, then you likely saw the backlash – for a lot of people, it just felt weird. A blue character with cartoony proportions who is constantly shifting into different shapes and sizes works very well in traditional animation, but less well when it’s an otherwise normal-looking human guy who is just… blue. You can smush and stretch the 2-D animated Genie and nobody will bat an eye, but if you tried to do the same to Will Smith – ouch! It conflicts with our idea of what is possible in the real world, and a live-action film is always going to feel more like the real world than a 2-D animated film.

This is likely why Jafar does not transform into a snake in this movie. Jafar-as-snake is arguably one of the best parts of the original Aladdin film – it’s certainly one of the best parts of the Fantasmic show at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s awesome, it’s terrifying, and it does not happen in the live-action adaptation of Aladdin. Jafar does a lot of other magic – mostly levitation, paralysis, and creating a storm – but he does not turn into a giant snake. The world of Agrabah established in this film is many things, but it is not established that this is a world where people can turn into animals. We do see some animals turning into other animals – Abu becomes an elephant, and Iago a monstrously huge bird – but neither of them remain transformed for very long. The audience’s suspension of disbelief will only go so far in a live-action film, and the filmmakers probably guessed, and I think correctly, that Jafar turning into a snake would not have gone over well in this medium.

Another thing that would not have gone over so well in live-action is the scene in the marketplace where a shopkeeper threatens to chop off Jasmine’s arm for stealing an apple. Just picture it – a man grabbing a young woman and threatening her with a sword, and they are both real people with real-people proportions, and it is a real sword instead of a cartoony dinged-up scimitar. In the animated film, the moment is quickly played off as funny, but here it would have been scary, much too scary for the first act of an otherwise cheerful film.

A savvy adapter sees and accepts what won’t work as well in their chosen medium, and so makes the appropriate changes.

[Image: The 2019 The Lion King movie poster]

Rules? What Rules?

Which brings me to the new “live-action” Lion King. Now, if you enjoyed this film, then I’m happy for you, and I neither expect nor want to change your mind.

However, this film does not successfully adapt its story from one medium to another. It keeps almost everything about the story, the music, and the dialogue exactly the same as before – but now, the world and animals are photorealistic. Throughout the film, I kept wanting to close my eyes and just listen to it, because the film that I was hearing and the film that I was seeing just plain did not match up with each other.

When Mufasa dies, Simba’s voice actor is obviously crying – you can hear the tears in his voice. But Simba himself is not crying, because real lions do not cry. The disconnect between what the viewer hears and what the viewer sees reminds us that what we are watching is not real, consequently breaking the suspension of disbelief and robbing the scene of vital emotion.

A musical and a nature documentary are two very different things which we watch for very different reasons. Put bluntly, this new Lion King imposes the rules of a nature documentary onto a musical. In a nature documentary, the animals must look and move a certain way which does not line up with human emotional behavior, and the world must look and behave in a certain way which features muted colors and subtle movements. A musical, on the other hand, is all about heightened human emotion – that’s why characters sing, because their emotions are so big that they can only be expressed in song! Musicals are also about visual spectacle over strict realism (with some exceptions – compare the elaborate stage effects of The Phantom of the Opera or the intensive choreography of Hamilton with the much more subdued The Spitfire Grill).

There are a few moments where the rules of the animal world line up with the rules of the Lion King story, to wonderful effect. For example, when Nala is telling Simba to return to Pride Rock and confront Scar, Simba paces back and forth in a real form of lion body language which reads to a human eye as frustration. The slouched-to-the-side way that lions sit looks a lot like the casual lean of a confident villain, giving Scar a marvelous aura of attitude. Also, the frantic, bouncy, here-and-there movement of a meerkat lines up well with Timon’s jumpy, shifty personality and dialogue, adding humor at key moments.

But for most of the film, there is little to no bridge between the story that they are trying to tell and the medium that they have shoved this story into. The Lion King is not a realistic story. Audiences did not go see The Lion King in theatres in 1996 because they wanted to see a realistic story. They went to see a colorful, fantastical musical about talking animals with human emotions. Photorealistic CGI is simply not the right medium for that kind of story, and the story was not changed nearly enough to fit the new medium.

[Image: Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World]

What Comes Next?

I see nothing wrong with telling a story again. As I said before, I love adaptation. It’s clear that today’s filmmakers, especially the filmmakers at Disney, are eager to try their hand at recreating the stories that they watched and loved when they were younger. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is a wrong way to do it, and I hope that future adaption films move away from that way.

One of the biggest things that Walt Disney loved about Disneyland was that, unlike the films, he could change things in the theme park if they no longer worked for the audience or if they could now be done better than before. I think he would be intrigued by the current culture of adaptation, and curious why today’s filmmakers aren’t doing more to explore the differences between mediums and the different kinds of stories that you can tell in different mediums.

Adaptation does not have to mean being stuck saying the same thing over and over. It could, and should, lead to us telling more stories, different stories, and better stories, because when it comes to adaptation, change is a good thing.

[the-desolated-quill]

Okay, Enough With The Live Action/CGI Hybrids - Quill’s Scribbles

So the trailer for the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog movie came out...

Do I really need to say it? Everyone and their mums have already said it. Hell, you’re probably saying it right now.

Sigh. Okay. Fuck it. I’ll say it.

Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?!?!

The trailer itself is shockingly bad. It looks bland and generic with almost nothing in common with the games. The jokes are forced and painfully unfunny (why are the people in the airport more concerned that the ‘child’ in the bag isn’t James Marsden’s rather than that there’s a fucking child in the bag in the first place?!), Jim Carrey is being his usual obnoxious self and is plain and simply a terrible choice for Doctor Eggman (isn’t the whole point of Doctor Eggman that he’s supposed to, you know, look like an egg?), and the soundtrack is utterly cringeworthy (Gangsta’s Paradise? Really?!?!). But that all pales in comparison to by far and away the biggest problem with the trailer. And I think you can all guess what that is. 

Yes I’m of course referring to the noticeable absence of Team Chaotix. An artistic decision so despicable, it’s practically a hate crime. For shame! Everyone knows that Charmy Bee is the best character in the franchise and yet they don’t have the guts to put him in the movie! Fucking philistines!

...

Oh yeah, and Sonic the Hedgehog looks like a monstrous abomination concocted from the fever dreams of Doctor Frankenstein and Walt Disney.

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about just how grotesque and disgusting this CGI Sonic is. He looks like what your computer would produce if it caught pneumonia. What I especially don’t understand is why they veered away so heavily from the original, iconic design. I mean...

I don’t know about you, but I’d honestly have no problem if the movie just kept this look from the games. Hell, I think even giving him realistic fur would be pushing it. This is perfectly fine. I could totally see this design working in a movie. Instead we get the secret love child of Gollum and Papa Smurf.

He just looks so weird with human proportions. The leg muscles, the two eyes, the human looking teeth. Apparently the filmmakers wanted this Sonic to look as realistic as possible. Because when I pay to see a movie about an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog that can run at supersonic speeds, that’s my first thought. ‘Is it realistic?’

... Jesus Christ.

But of course the main problem with this live action Sonic movie is that it exists in the first place. When it was first announced, I assumed in my naivety that it would be an animated movie. Because that would make sense, right? There have been movie and TV adaptations before and they were all animated. Imagine a big budget computer animated Sonic movie. That would be really cool. But it was not to be. In Hollywood’s infinite wisdom, they decided to go the live action route because... Actually why did they choose to go the live action route? Well that’s what I hope to address in this very Scribble.

Live action adaptations and remakes are nothing new of course. Disney had tried it a few times in the past with movies like 101 Dalmations, there have been other live action versions of animated or illustrated characters such as the Grinch and the Cat In The Hat, Garfield, the Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks, and there was of course the infamous Super Mario Bros movie, which answered the question of what it would be like if the Mushroom Kingdom took place in the same universe as Judge Dredd. But this is the first time live action/CGI hybrids have been huge money spinners. Disney struck gold back in 2010 when Tim Burton’s version of Alice In Wonderland made a billion dollars at the box office and now the company is mining through their back catalogue of Disney classics and giving all their movies the live action treatment. Initially I was okay with this because in the case of Alice In Wonderland and Maleficent they were at least trying to reinterpret the original films and put a new spin on them, but now they just seem to be copying the movies verbatim. Making live action remakes just for the sake of making live action remakes.

Now other studios are trying their hand at, the most notable being Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. Here’s a picture of the original Pikachu:

Cute, right?

Now here’s a picture of the live action Pikachu:

Can you see the problem here?

(also why the hell is Ryan Reynolds the voice of Pikachu? I honestly can’t think of anyone more inappropriate for the role. It’s like casting Samuel L. Jackson as a Powerpuff Girl)

The fact of the matter is some things just don’t work in live action. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon work in their respective universes because they’re animated creatures in an animated world, and their anatomy and design fit that world. In the real world, it just doesn’t work. Pikachu looks strange and kind of creepy in the real world. The same is true of the other Pokemon. Jigglypuff looks utterly adorable in the games and animated show with its spherical body and cartoon eyes and you just want to take one to bed with you and cuddle them like a teddy bear, but in the real world it looks fucking scary!

I wouldn’t want to cuddle that thing! It looks like it would go for my throat given the opportunity!

The same is true of Sonic. Paramount’s attempts to make him look more ‘realistic’ just makes him look incredibly alien and out of place.

Another example I like to bring up is the film Christopher Robin. Now we all know Winnie the Pooh. Silly ol’ bear. Charming, cuddly and endearing, right? Just look at him.

How can you not fall in love with him?

Now here’s the live action version:

When I first saw the trailer, I was utterly creeped out. He looks like something out of a horror movie. Add to that that they got the original voice actor from the Disney cartoons to reprise the role, and Winnie the Pooh pretty much became the source of all my nightmares for the next couple of weeks. That lovable voice should not be coming out of that... thing.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Look:

Charming and lovable.

Weird and unsettling.

Creative and fun.

Photoshop disaster.

Sweet and likeable.

Fetch my crucifix and holy water.

Emotional and expressive.

So ‘realistic’ to the point where he looks like he has the emotional range of a teaspoon.

Now I recognise this largely comes down to subjective opinion. If you like these CGI redesigns, that’s great. More power to you. But I know for a fact I’m not the only one getting increasingly weirded out by these computer generated demons from Hell.

So why does Hollywood keep making these films. Well obviously in the case of Disney it’s because they’ve ran out of original ideas and want to make a quick buck by exploiting their audience’s nostalgia. (the same can be said of the Star Wars sequel trilogy). But what about other studios? Yes they’re financially motivated too, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

I think it’s largely down to the stigma of animated movies. Animation has become synonymous with children. When you hear the term ‘animated movie’, you automatically associate it with ‘kid’s film’. And ‘kid’s film’ is often used in a negative context. Like it’s somehow lesser than quote/unquote ‘proper’ movies. Live action suggests a certain pedigree. A sense of prestige. But that’s obviously bollocks. The quality of a film isn’t dictated by whether it’s live action or animated. It’s determined by the writing, directing and acting. There have been live action films made for kids and animated films made for adults. And I’m not talking about Sausage Party. I’m talking about Finding Nemo.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Finding Nemo? Isn’t that a kid’s film? No. It’s a family film. And that right there is the problem. You heard me say Finding Nemo, an animated film about talking fish, and you automatically associated it with a kids film. But the thing is Finding Nemo deals with some very dark and adult themes and its moral message of not being overprotective and allowing children to take risks is intended for the parents, not the kids. Obviously kids can still watch and enjoy Finding Nemo, but it’s the parents who are clearly the target here. The same is true of Toy Story 3. Children can still watch and enjoy it, but the film is clearly intended for people who watched the original Toy Story when they were a kid and are now grown up. When you stop and think about it, it’s really sad that family movies are associated with kids movies. Not that there’s anything wrong with kids movies obviously. But why do people assume that family movies are meant for kids? Why can’t they be adult stories that are also accessible to children? Books have done it. The Artemis Fowl series is kid friendly, but its tone, themes and style suggest the author has an older and more sophisticated target audience in mind. A Series Of Unfortunate Events is popular with kids, but it’s adults that get the full experience because of the way Lemony Snicket uses postmodern and meta-textual elements in the books, which would sail clean over the head of a kid reading it. The idea that a live action remake is somehow more ‘grown-up’ than an animated movie is just absurd. The original Lion King was very grown up, thank you very much. There are lots of bright colours and fun songs for the kids, but it also doesn’t sugarcoat the darker themes such as death, betrayal, corruption and abuse of power. Mufaser’s death isn’t going to be made any more impactful in live action. The animated version was more than heartbreaking.

Shifting the conversation back to Sonic, this is also intrinsically linked with another problem with Hollywood at the moment. Movie adaptations of video games. And again, it’s a similar problem. People, especially critics, view video games as being lesser than movies. Roger Ebert famously said that video games will never be considered art. But that’s nonsense. There have been loads of video games that could be and have been considered art. BioShock, for instance, which scrutinises and criticises both objectivism and capitalism. There’s the Mass Effect trilogy, which is often described as this generation’s Star Wars. The Last Of Us is widely considered to be a masterpiece by gamers and literacy scholars alike. Hell, the fact that Hollywood wants to make movie adaptations of video games at all suggests that games do in fact have some inherent artistic value after all. And it’s not as if I’m wholly against making movies based on video games. There are some games that could translate really well to films, Sonic being one of them. (I personally loved the Ratchet & Clank movie, for example. It’s just a shame nobody else fucking watched it due to the almost non-existent marketing). However there’s an inherent problem with translating video games to movies as opposed to, say, translating books to movies. In book to movies adaptations, studios are adding something. Visuals, sound, performance, etc. In video game to movie adaptations, they have to take things away. The most obvious is interactivity. Unlike movies where nothing is required of the audience other than to just dumbly stare at the screen, video games require the audience to actively control the story. Move the character, kill baddies, solve problems and stay alive. You are an active participant in the narrative. As a result, the emotional connection you feel with both the plot and the characters is often stronger than that in a movie because you have direct influence over what happens. 

Also video games have the luxury of being able to tell their stories over the course of eight to thirty to even a hundred hours of gameplay. There’s no way you could condense something like The Last Of Us down to a two and a half hour movie. There would just be too much lost. Important character moments and plot points that would have to be chucked in the bin. Yes things get lost in book to movie adaptations, but nowhere near at the scale of a game to movie adaptation. A possible workaround would be to make game to TV adaptations instead, but then we’re back to the interactivity problem again. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that movies are better than books or that video games are better than movies. I’m just saying they’re each individually suited to tell their own kinds of stories in their own unique ways, therefore translating from one medium to the other is often difficult. The Last Of Us would never make a good movie, and that’s okay. The game is still amazing and the story is still amazing. Its artistic merit isn’t lessened because it can’t be translated to films, in the same way the merits of a bike aren’t lessened because it can’t fly. It’s just not designed to do that.

I guess the point I’m making is there’s no one way to tell a good story. There are an infinite number of ways it can be done. So lets stop Hollywood’s obsession with pigeonholing everything into one format and actually explore the possibilities, shall we?

[paulisweeabootrash]

Series Review: Read or Die (R.O.D. the OVA)

Welcome to another episode of Paul is Weeaboo Trash! Today’s topic is a show I’ve previously seen one episode of, so long ago that I’m almost going in fresh: the OVA (what we in the US would call a “direct to video release”) of Read or Die (2001–2002)! I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where education and fun were not portrayed as opposites, and we had the means to find plenty of fun educational things to do.  My parents searched for all kinds of potentially interesting activities, and living in southern New Hampshire, the Boston area was not prohibitively far to go for them.  And so I was signed up for Splash, a program one weekend per fall in which MIT students teach middle- and high-school-age kids seminars on a wide variety of topics.

What counted as topics worthy of education was quite broad, however.  I ended up in a "class" that consisted of watching one episode each of several anime that the student running the class was a fan of.  This was back in the days where anime fandom spread person-to-person by recommendations and there was more emphasis on developing a background knowledge of "classics" among the more informed and/or snootier fans.  (I still feel this way a bit because certain tropes and references are so common or influential that being familiar with the original sources can make newer shows suddenly make a lot more sense, but I disapprove of the gatekeeper tendency to look down on people who don't yet know the things "everyone knows".)

I don't remember how many shows we sampled there, but the two that made an impact were Hellsing, which in retrospect was at best questionable for the age of the audience, and was very much not my thing because I have a low tolerance for gore, and the topic of this post, Read or Die, which was very much the kind of thing I wanted to see: a nerd being a badass in a fantastical way.  Especially since I was also really into James Bond at the time, so I was probably primed to eat up other media involving a British spy fighting a mysterious secret organization.  Since I'm incredibly averse to media piracy and had no clue where to buy anime, though, I never followed up to finish watching it, and eventually it faded from my mind.  Until I stumbled across the first volume of the manga for super-cheap at Saboten Con last year, and it flicked some nostalgia switch that reminded me how much I'd enjoyed it at the time, although I barely remember any actual details, so I am practically going in fresh here.

Read or Die follows Yomiko Readman, a teacher, obsessive book collector and reader, and superpowered secret agent who can manipulate paper in nearly any way.  Any paper available, from money to ribbons to a briefcase full of blank looseleaf she apparently just brings with her.  She uses this power in the course of her service as a secret agent, codename The Paper, working for the British Library?!  Along with Miss Deep, who can selectively phase shift, and Drake Anderson, a gruff and dismissive military type (and apparently potter in his cover job), she is assigned to a plan to save the world in a way that vaguely involves collecting books.  Saved from whom?  The I-jin, clones of historical geniuses with superpowers related to their areas of expertise, such as... knowing stuff about insects, or... uh... spreading Buddhism to Japan... who are going to flashy and violent lengths to steal books the British Library is trying to acquire legitimately.  Trust me, it eventually gets explained, and the Big Reveal, although pretty goddamn weird, fits in with the rest of what has been established.  Suspend your disbelief enough to accept the I-jin at all, and it’s fine, although still a bit ludicrous.

And I submit that all that is still less weird and ridiculous than your typical superhero or spy movie, and this show does after all have elements of both genres in one.  Or, well, more and more superhero and military action as it goes on.  Although the theme music uses 60s guitar sounds, chromatic chord changes, and blaring brass hits that are virtually guaranteed to evoke the James Bond theme, and our main cast do work for a secret intelligence agency, they are in quite open military-style conflict with the I-jin -- with the approval of the UN -- and very little that’s actually covert occurs, with the notable exception of something I can’t spoil that happens at the end of ep. 2.  And because of the superpower angle, some of the instances of weirdness are not flaws at all but pretty creative implementations of the characters’ powers (using a paper airplane as a lethal weapon?!).

This last point didn’t really fit in organically, but I'd also like to mention a couple of things about the art that I love but don't see often.  The very first shot of the series uses multiple flat backgrounds at different distances moving in relation to each other to convey the camera moving across the scene, which I have seen in other animated works (at the moment, I can only think of examples from very old Disney movies off the top of my head), but not in recent ones.  I don't know whether it's simply out-of-fashion or this is a result of the shift to CGI so animators figure "why would we do this when we can actually render a city with realistic perspective?"  This show also has a particular kind of fluid motion in characters that I’ve seen in many reasonably-high-production-value shows from the 90s and 00s, but rarely in newer shows (Space Dandy being a notable exception).  Maybe I'm watching the wrong recent shows, maybe it's just a stylistic choice that's out of fashion, maybe it's harder to pull off convincingly when you're not animating by hand.

I’m glad I finally got to watch this.  It’s even better than I remember.  Now to get to work on the rest of the manga and the other series.  Oh yeah, haha.  The abbreviation "R.O.D." stands for both "Read or Die" and "Read or Dream", which are different parts of the same larger series.  The Read or Die manga (4 volumes), this OVA series, the Read or Dream manga (also 4 volumes), and a 26-episode TV series all take place in the same narrative universe, rather than the usual model of the anime being an adaptation/retelling of the manga.  There is also a light novel series I know nothing about, but it sounds from the Wikipedia article like that is the single ongoing series that is the source for the two manga and two anime.  (There is also apparently a barely-related future side story manga.)

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W/A/S: 1/3/3

Weeb: I don’t think there’s much, if anything, in here that would require explanation to a typical Western audience and which isn’t also explained in the dialogue.

Ass: There is a single implied nipple in the opening sequence.  Gasp!  And Miss Deep's costume design is pretty fanservicey, but only barely more explicitly so than you're likely to get in American media deemed suitable for older children.

Shit: Until the Big Reveal, it's just unclear why anyone involved other than Yomiko should be this interested in acquiring the specific books that serve as the show’s MacGuffin, nor is it clear that the I-jin’s plans extend further than searching for them in a very destructive way, leaving me baffled that the Library immediately makes the connection that the books are key to saving the world.  There are a few minor errors in the subtitles and a visual glitch (Blu Ray remaster, please?), and a couple of places where faces just... don’t... look right.  Oh, and if you’re watching the dubbed version, add another half point of Shit for Crispin Freeman’s British accent.

And for the first time I feel the need to add a CONTENT WARNING.  Usually, I think the review is sufficient to give you the idea whether there is anything likely to be disturbing in a show, but this is different, because the first two episodes have the sort of over-the-top stylized combat you might expect from other action anime or Western superhero media, where even a death comes off as un-shocking.  But in ep. 3 of this, there is a shocking pivot.  There are several short instances of graphic and sudden violence of kinds that are quite a bit more disturbing and distressing (even when they involve the use of powers) than anything that occurred previously.

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Stray Observations:

- Yes, those of you who know a little Japanese caught that joke: "Yomiko" could be loosely translated as "read girl".  Her name is "Read Girl Read Man".  Because she likes to read.  Get it?  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!

- In the manga, Yomiko is also established to be a literal bibliophile.  As in "books, regardless of content, turn her on".  I'm kind of glad this is not a plot point in the anime.

- The “secret” operation in the last episode, which is conducted with UN approval and involves an actual military attack with an actual goddamn naval fleet (and collaborating with North Korea to keep the US too distracted to notice it, even though this is a British operation against an organization that literally burned down the White House in the first scene of the first episode) might actually beat the first few episodes of Full Metal Panic! for “worst undercover operation ever”.

[miss-m-winks]

(Image description)

On the left is Evard Munch's "the scream", a surrealist painting in mostly warm colors with an abstract screaming figure on a bridge. On the right is the painting recreated as a photo of a bald dude on a bridge, in the same screaming pose, with a sunset in the background. The photo is not nearly as interesting to look at as the iconic painting, in fact the photo version looks like a meme image.

(End description)

I mean, especially when a love action version is literally just the animated version's script but now "live action", and admittedly the movie I’m thinking of is the realistic lion king, which is in fact not live action at all which makes this whole thing even more convoluted. I liked the live action cinderella, because that’s a timeless story that’s been adapted in a million different ways already and they took the story from a different angle than their previous cartoon version. So it felt fresh and new, and there’s nothing weird about seeing a live action cinderella because that’s been done before too. Maleficent likewise was a new angle on an old tale that worked out pretty well and not having it be in cartoon form was fine. Jungle book, I can see where people were bothered by the live action animals, but from the trailers alone I think the jungle book animals had more expression to them than the lion king ones. It’s a stretch to call a movie of mainly animated animals "live action" but there was a human protagonist and, again, they didn’t just do the animated movie over again but realism. They went back to the source material on this one to change the movie and it worked.

Beauty and the beast didn’t work out as well because it felt like they were working too hard to tie up "plot holes" and spoon feed us the story, which totally removed all the mystery of the animated version. Really in-your-face explanations of exactly how the prince got cursed, a sad daddy issues backstory to explain his rudeness, a more princely backstory (but for some reason despite all of this he still didn’t know how to eat porridge??) which removed some of the best parts of the relationship dynamics. Suddenly the power dynamic shift of the cartoon is gone, because the beast knows how to read and doesn’t need to humble himself to be taught. He even has a magic hook that can just take him places! Because clearly that’s the only way we could find out what happened to belle's mom. Not like it couldn’t just be a brief mention between her and her father, no, her father didn’t tell her (she was old enough to know when it happened) she had to be guided to the truth by the beast so we could have this mysterious plot hole spoonfed to us. Not to mention the cgi all being so over the top realistic that the beast hardly looks beastly and the talking objects just look weird.

I haven’t seen the lion king or dumbo remakes aside from the trailers of course, but dumbo looks like it’s trying to be partway between a horse girl movie and the greatest showman. And of course the lion king remake just looks like a realistic cgi version of the old cartoon, with the exact same script and absolutely nothing new to justify a total remake like this. Taking the story and the Broadway version of it and changing it all up to have a live action lion king with humans instead of animals would have been a great idea but they decided to be boring instead.

The thing abouth all these Disney remakes is that most of them, it feels like if someone once said, “I’m going to make a live action remake of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and then he just took a photo of some random bald guy screaming on a bridge. I mean all the elements are there but he changes all the expressionist elements in favor of “realism” loosing most of the things that made the scream one of the most important, if not the most important pieces of the Norwegian expressionism, maybe just keeping the general comossition and maybe making some little changes, just enough to make it feel kind of different, but not enough to be relevant. Change the long sleeves for shorter ones, or maybe even add a new character in the back who will be there, but, at the end of the won’t be really important. But loosing the colors, the shapes, the brush strokes, the style.

IT’s just a bland looking photo of a guy screaming, that is only really relevant mostly because of the audience being already familiar with the original artwork.