Vroooooom

RUIN from OddBall Animation on Vimeo.

Via Twitch, naturally.

Battery Ignition

Portland Cello Project - 'Denmark' from Two Penguins on Vimeo.

Holy crap, those eyes.

A Rusty Friend

Rain Town, by Hiroyasu Ishida.

Make sure to keep watching after the credits.

Hat tip Twitch.

Monday Movie: The Illusionist

As the music hall gives way to the music concert, a French magician winds up doing a small gig on a remote Scottish island. There he meets a young woman who doesn't seem to realise that he's not the worldly star she takes him for. When she follows him back to London, the conjurer struggles to make ends meet, and keep a smile on her face.

While Sylvain Chomet's earlier Belleville Rendez-vous was a raucous adventure with an undercurrent of bitter realism, The Illusionist takes the opposite tack, telling a melancholy, ordinary story tinged with cartoonish magic. The focus is on emotion over plot, effectively aided by the beautifully detailed animation, but the film perhaps feels a little undernourished as a result.

Strange Creatures in Snow

Joanna Lurie's Oscar shortlisted and rather beautiful animated short The Silence Beneath The Bark is available to watch on Vimeo. Ten minutes of your time that you'll find very well spent.

Via Twitch.

Monday Movie: A Town Called Panic

Somewhere in the serene papier mache countryside, a toy cowboy and Indian live with a horse, forever getting up to mischief. When their latest hijinks see horse's house completely obliterated, the trio knuckle down to rebuild it, only for each set of walls they build to be stolen by unseen criminals.

Chasing after the thieves, Cowboy, Indian and Horse blunder to the centre of the Earth, the bottom of the sea and the bowels of a terrible, terrible war machine. Will they recover their home, clear the name of their impossibly macho neighbour and get horse to his piano lessons on time? Well, if anyone can do it... it's probably not these three idiots.

A Town Called Panic (a.k.a. Panique au Village) blends rock-bottom crude animation with an epic, child-sized imagination to create an infectious, anarchic and bizarrely charming film where pretty much anything can happen.

Monday Movie: Millennium Actress

Somehow, small-time documentary-maker Genya Tachibana has managed to arrange an interview with his idol, the legendary - now reclusive - actress Chiyoko Fujiwara. As Chiyoko tells the story of how she fell in love with a dissident artist and first became involved in film, Tachibana and his reluctant cameraman are drawn literally into her story - past and present, real events and acting roles, all merging seamlessly.

Millennium Actress could probably have been a live action film, but hand-drawn animation allows writer/director Satoshi Kon to blend disparate scenes into one another with ease, to portray images that are perfect and impossible, and yet exude deep emotional veracity. This is a film that tells a story on a personal scale while allowing incredible flights of fancy, that's moving and profound without ever losing its sense of humour and fun, that toys expertly with pacing and viewer expectations.

I always struggle to decide which of Satoshi Kon's films is my favourite, but in the way it weaves an unexpectedly subtle story into an imaginative and vibrant animation, I'd say this is the one to demonstrate his true potential as a filmmaker. A potential which is now, of course, sadly and abruptly fulfilled.

Monday Movies: Futurama's Fifth Season

The fifth season of Futurama was released as a series of direct-to-DVD features, which is good enough to qualify for a Monday Movie or four in my books. The first two movies - Bender's Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs form a consistent story arc in which amoral android Bender busts open the entire Universe and enables its invasion by an enormous tentacled monster. The third instalment, Bender's Game is billed as a straight-up parody of epic fantasy tropes, but actually does quite a bit more besides, and, finally, Into the Wild Green Yonder pits the regular cast of characters against one another in a bid to provide some emotional resolution for what was expected to be the series finale.

What's interesting about Futurama is that while many people might be inclined to call it a parody, I think it's actually one of the best examples of science fiction you'll find in movies and television. Okay, yeah, there's pretty much nothing they won't throw out the window for a cheap gag, but a cheap gag on Futurama goes a long way. In contrast to a certain other Matt Groening cartoon, perhaps the fact this one has forever been circling the bowl of cancellation has lead to a brutal comic efficiency. Also, perhaps completely the opposite from that other franchise, although the cast of Futurama may all seem like mere parodies and tropes, there's a real effort made to give them depth, likeability and some measure of development.

As is often the case with shows unfairly threatened with cancellation, the team are definitely pulling out all the stops for what they thought might be their last gasp. While that may leave me wondering what they'll do with the new season they got, there's no doubt that Into the Wild Green Yonder provides a satisfying (but far from final) conclusion, and the other three films demonstrate nerd comedy at its finest - epic and irreverent, but ultimately with a smidgen of heart.

Monday Movie: Evangelion 1.0

Half the world's population have been wiped out in a single cataclysm, and mysterious entities known as "Angels" are now trying to finish off the rest. Conventional weapons are useless against them, but an organisation called NERV has created a number of giant, armoured synthetic humans which can be piloted by a select few teenagers. Teenagers such as Shinji Ikari, who's already withdrawn and troubled before he's forced into violent confrontations with otherworldly monsters that leave him near death.

Conceived as a deconstruction of cartoon shows about kids saving the world in giant robots, Neon Genesis Evangelion acquired praise and cult status in the face of budget constraints and (at least according to legend) its creator turning on his fans. The first in this new series of four films, then, which aims to give Evangelion the visuals it deserves and a definitive version of its fragmented story, seemed like the perfect place for me to jump on the bandwagon.

Having said that, I can definitely see that this is a story perhaps better told in a more episodic format. This ninety minute film is dominated by a series of apocalyptic, edge-of-the-seat battles between Shinji and the angels, each one risking everything and bringing humanity to the brink. They're all extremely well done, but there's not that much space for a breather between them, and the human, deeply psychological story at the film's heart would definitely benefit from more low-key, everyday scenes to ground it.

Still, colour me impressed by what is deservedly a renowned classic of animation - an imaginative blend of biomechanical science fiction, pubescent angst and what looks set to be a Philip Pullman-style perversion of Christian mythology. Roll on Evangelion 2.0.

Friday Clangers Blogging

Monday Movie: Ghost in the Shell

In a future in which brains are connected directly to the Internet, the notorious hacker 'Puppet Master' manipulates memories and motives in the service of his shadowy aims. When Motoko Kusanagi, a military cyborg working for Public Security Section 9, is brought onto the case, the Puppet Master turns out to be strangely entangled with her life - and her doubts.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell draws inspiration from William Gibson and Ridley Scott to present a city where gleaming skyscrapers tower over flooded, advertisement-strewn streets. There's an evocative, measured atmosphere throughout, with largely ambient scenes flowing seamlessly into flourishes of explosive ultraviolence. If Oshii is occasionally heavy-handed with his dialogue, it only makes it all the more remarkable to see the deliberate way in which he builds mood.

Episode 24

Cowboy Bebop, Session 24.

This episode...

...always...

...gives me...

...a lump in my throat.

'Scuse me,

there's something...

...in my eye. :-(

Monday Movie: Coraline

Separated from her friends, ignored by her parents and wary of her bizarre neighbours, Coraline Jones stumbles into an alternate reality where everything revolves around her - and the people all have buttons for eyes. Compared to her drab and boring everyday life, this vibrant and colourful microcosm is extremely seductive - but it's also got to have a catch...

Henry Selick's been mentioned a few times in my Monday Movie posts. You can always trust him to animate vibrant and imaginative characters. Until Coraline came along, he was unfortunately probably best known as the guy few people realised had directed Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. But with this film, Selick brought us one of the darkest, richest, scariest and above all delightful animated films to come out of the US in a good few years.

Friday Jazz Cowboys in Space Blogging

Tank!

DVD Review: Ergo Proxy (The Complete Series)

In the domed city of Romdo, strong emotions are frowned upon, waste is encouraged and everyone is accompanied - and monitored - by android 'autoreivs'. Simmering beneath the surface are countless threats to the pervading peace - the Cogito virus is spreading free will among the autoreivs, and the powers that be are keen to blame these rogues for a spate of mysterious killings.  

Re-L, an inspector in the Intelligence bureau and granddaughter of the city's regent, is not so sure that Cogito is responsible. Neither is Vincent, an immigrant hoping to become a Model Citizen as he works to hunt down infected autoreivs. Their attempts to investigate see them thrown together - much to Re-L's displeasure - eventually pushing them beyond the city and outside its dome.


On the way, they encounter Pino, a childlike autoreiv designed for those citizens who can't get a permit for a human child - now orphaned, infected with Cogito and following Vincent like a lost lamb. Pino's so impossibly cute that she should be annoying, but there's also a creepy edge to her character - in part actually due to her irrepressible good nature in the face of any event, however terrible.

And while these three journey through the ruins and failed societies of an eerie wasteland - a deserted dome where robots keep everything meticulously clean for their absent masters, a city where generations of cloned soldiers fight endlessly against an implacable enemy - intrigue continues in their wake back at Romdo. Daedalus - a perpetually pre-pubescent scientist with an unhealthy crush on Re-L - and Raul Creed - the increasingly unbalanced director of the Security Bureau - vie with and against one another to advance their aims, trying to subvert and further the society of Romdo while always under the watchful eye of the autoreivs created to maintain it.


Two words that I think perfectly describe Ergo Proxy are 'atmospheric' and 'thoughtful'. The unique art design, gentle pace and ambient music drew me into a world inhabited by ambiguous and compelling characters, and stalked by haunting, post-apocalyptic mysteries. The plotting is perhaps rather weak, but I think the best thing about Ergo Proxy is that it isn't really trying to be too weighty and meaningful. Certainly there are big themes and references to philosophy, but these are an embellishment to - rather than a distraction from or perversion of - the depiction of these characters in their carefully realised world.

In that sense I suppose the show is arguably admirably restrained, but it's also prepared to be quite bold in terms of where it takes the story. This extends as far as changing the entire format of the show - one episode begins as a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style game show where Vincent is bombarded with questions and answers whose relevance he doesn't yet understand. Another episode even mixes in a separate style of animation, when Pino finds herself lost in a bizarre amusement park where the staff look and behave exactly like characters from an old Disney cartoon.


The show has a nice knack for sketching out its minor characters, and pretty much everyone manages to seem likeable, flawed, admirable or sinister at some point in the series. One of my favourite characters was Raul's entourage autoreiv, Kristeva. At first she's little more than an elegant sounding-board for her master, but she goes on to show a noble investment in maintaining the society of Romdo, while always threatening to lean towards either malevolent loyalty to Raul or disobedient compassion.

The characters in Ergo Proxy definitely change and grow as events progress - and not always in a positive direction. By the end I definitely felt as though, even if the story could have been tied together and parcelled out better, I had been on a journey with characters I cared about, through a world that felt both very real and very strange.

Monday Movie: James and the Giant Peach

James has been living with his two horrible aunts ever since his parents were eaten by a rhinoceros. He's lonely, mistreated and miserable. All that changes when he grows an enormous peach using magical crocodile tongues, and sails away with the transformed invertebrates who live inside it. He'll have to face up to a mechanical shark and a crew of drowned pirates (among other dangers) along the way, but it seems he may finally get the chance to fulfil his parents' dream of reaching New York.

Director Henry Selick adaptated Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach into a mostly animated, part live-action fantasy full of magic and adventure. Stepping out from Tim Burton's shadow, Selick created an eerie, visually rich dreamscape suffused with the most fantastic dreams - and darkest fears - of childhood. It's marred only by that usual blight of American animation: gratuitous singing.

Monday Movie: Tokyo Godfathers

When three homeless people - a teenage runaway, a ruined gambler and a washed up drag queen - find a baby abandoned in the trash at Christmas, they decide to investigate themselves rather than contact the authorities. But their attempts to find the delinquent parents lead them from one unlikely encounter to another, and everything surrounding this strange child seems prone to small, often unnoticed miracles.

In Tokyo Godfathers, director Satoshi Kon takes his knack for weaving psychedelic surreality into everyday scenes and applies it to a layer of society that most of us prefer to overlook. The result is a film with a perfect, grimy urban ambience that still manages to convey a sense of magical Christmas spirit. It's also a film that, with very few direct references to Christianity, nevertheless embodies the real, non-mystical significance of the holiday: humanising those outside 'normal' culture and arguing for forgiveness, respect and understanding.

DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir has one of cinema's more memorable openings, as we follow a ferocious pack of dogs tearing through a city at night-time. Although they terrify everyone they pass, they're single-minded in their objective: seeking out one window to gather beneath and bark.

This is Boaz's dream: that the twenty-six dogs he killed in the 1982 Lebanon war seek him out for revenge. He's relating it to Ari Folman, the director and main 'character' of this animated documentary, a film that perhaps takes a leaf from Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Folman, it transpires, twenty years after serving in the war, had difficulty remembering any of his experiences from that time, and Waltz with Bashir depicts his attempts to discern why.


I generally have a real issue with dramatised documentaries. The drama all too often results in the sacrifice of factual content by depicting events inaccurately and taking up too much time. But in animating Waltz with Bashir, Folman has made a bold statement: both an acknowledgement that, as we're told early on in the film, memories are highly interpretative, and a way of depicting the physical and emotional experiences of the people he interviews with equal weighting.

The style of animation - though gorgeous and very much inspired by modern graphic novels - can be quite stilted in places, with something of the appearance of shadow puppets. And yet, this strangely dream-like motion is entirely appropriate. Coupled with an intense musical score, the strong images, while as inaccurate as any live-action re-enactment, manage to inspire perhaps the shadowed, empathic equivalents of the life-changing emotions that Folman and these other soldiers experienced at the time.


The one part of the war that Folman experienced but is ultimately unable to recollect is the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Christian Philangists, an event that seems to be deeply tied to why Folman experienced amnesia in the first place. This necessarily becomes the focus of the film's last act, as Folman shows us the experiences of an Israeli soldier on the periphery of the camps, and a reporter who ventured within to see the aftermath. Considering the film as a whole, I found this to be the tiniest of missteps.

The strength of the earlier parts of the film lies in their personal and emotional nature. At this point, however, things become broader and more factual. But it is largely unavoidable, I think, and the main body of the movie could be seen as fostering the necessary engagement to make us really care about an atrocity that will typically be depicted as dry numbers and impersonal facts.


Waltz with Bashir is quite simply a striking film, documenting a more personal side of history - often ignored or sensationalised - with bold, affecting artistry. Seek it out at your first opportunity.

DVD Review: Resident Evil Degeneration

Well, this turned out pretty much as I expected it to. Resident Evil Degeneration is the canonical animated feature by Capcom, the makers of the Resident Evil video games themselves - an Advent Children style attempt to expand on the directorial skills that they've acquired while crafting cinematics for their games. Yep, Degeneration is basically a ninety minute Resident Evil cut-scene. I'm sure some of you have left the building already.

Rather bravely, Degeneration makes no bones about being completely for the fans. Those of us familiar with the series don't need to hear any exposition about the nature of the G and T viruses, and those unfamiliar are unlikely to particularly enjoy being subjected to it. Similarly, there's no attempt to rehash the background behind Leon and Claire's friendship, their experiences in Raccoon City during Resident Evil 2 (though there's a nice little flashback), or their adventures since. It's difficult to tell just how obscure this makes things for the uninitiated, but you can't fault the decision. The decision to still throw in a few cringe-worthy bits of emotional exposition from two new characters: tough girl Angela and Sherry Birkin substitute Rani, is a little more difficult to sympathise with.


If I ask myself what I like most about the Resident Evil games, it's their atmosphere: tense, desolate, eerie. But this atmosphere is cultivated primarily through participation - ruined environments that you explore yourself, spine-tingling vistas that you take in at your own pace, dark doorways that you enter only when you've plucked up enough courage. Necessarily, this aspect is drastically reduced in Degeneration, and instead we're left with all the other aspects of Resident Evil: the haphazard plotting, the impressive but slightly imperfect action sequences, the melodramatic moments of character.

Not that any of that is too disagreeable, or at all unexpected. If you're already engaged with this world, you'll be used to it, and consider it more than outweighed by the chance to see these strong yet paper-thin characters (who we've struggled alongside through such ordeals) battling against weird, inconsistent conspiracies once again. It's also nice that there's some attempt at creating stylish character designs beyond just making them look 'realistic' - in particular I liked the fat, rubbery senator and the nicely elfin depiction of Claire. The strangely flat-faced Leon and strong-jawed Angela, though, might be said to dip a toe or two into the uncanny valley.


Naturally, this release is tied into the upcoming arrival of Resident Evil 5. On the one hand, I think this works quite well. At first glance you might think that the idea of Leon and Claire stumbling into yet another zombie outbreak seems a bit much, but this is our introduction to a world where the collapse of Umbrella has made monster-making viruses the weapon du jour for terrorists around the world. Having two of the franchise's most popular characters experience such an incident first hand provides a nice window into this alternate history.

But on the other hand, the film inevitably leads up to an 'it's not all over yet, folks!' ending that falls rather flat. Merely referencing something not obviously sinister that will appear in RE5 is no kind of teaser or cliffhanger, and anyone who's not yet seen the trailers for the new game will probably be completely baffled.


As a fan of the Resident Evil series of games, I'm glad to own this movie, and I'll probably wind up watching it more times than are healthy. But if I ask myself honestly why any non-fan would be interested in this, I can't come up with anything. While a new game has the space to flesh out backstory and character history at a leisurely pace, a ninety minute film can only avoid it altogether or try and cram it down your throat by the fistful. Degeneration makes the right choice in that regard, but it means that if you're not sure if this movie is for you, it probably isn't.

2008: A Bunch of Lists

So it's been a year since I last asked myself what cool stuff I found during the past year, and I guess I should set about doing it again. As before, this list is entirely personal - not just in being about what I personally liked this year, but also with regards to what qualifies as belonging to the relevant period. If I saw it, read it, or played it this year, it's eligible - regardless what year you might actually be inclined to attribute it to. Hey, they make a lot of cool stuff in a year, and it takes me a lot longer than that to find it all.

Okay, let's go.

---Of the movies I saw:

La Antena
A perfect evocation of everything great about the era of silent film, and a vibrant fantasy in its own right. I reviewed it here.

Paprika
Another animated masterpiece from Satoshi Kon, by turns fantastically whimsical and deeply disturbing.

The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan returns to Gotham City for this sprawling comicbook epic, full of compelling, larger than life characters.

---Of the books I read:

Gods Behaving Badly - Marie Phillips
An understated and touching love story - at least until those pesky Greek Gods start meddling with mortal affairs. Since the rise of Christianity, the denizens of Mount Olympus have relocated to a run-down house in London, but they're no less keen on grand acts of selfish omnipotence.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick
A typical mind-fuck from the king of psychedelia. After narrowly escaping death, a group of superhuman psychics find that the world seems to be decaying at a terrifying rate - and one by one, each of them is turning into a dessicated husk.

Aces Falling - Peter Hart
An engrossing book about air warfare throughout 1918. Hart gives readers what they want, in the form of stories about the famous aces, but also sets them into the context of a new combined theatre of war where lone wolf hunters were being subsumed into a larger, more tactically-minded war machine.

---Of the comics and manga I read:

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Last year I lamented only having read the first volume. This year I read volumes 2-12, concluding the story. The combination of Obata's flawless artwork and Ohba's intense plotting results in something that should be read by anyone with an interest in fantasy or mystery comics - as a teenager who's resolved to rid the world of undesirables by writing their names in a death god's notebook is pursued by a legendary (and anonymous) detective.

Chiggers - Hope Larson
Although Larson's keenly observed tale of summer camp friendship and preternatural intrigue is aimed at teenage girls, it deserves to be (and probably has been) read by all and sundry. Undoubtedly one of the best western comic artist-writers you'll find.

Batman: Harley and Ivy - Paul Dini, Bruce Timm et al.
Cute beyond words, something about the bright artwork, colourful characters and psychotic cheerfulness of this book reminded me of watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and coming to the realisation that I wanted to tell stories as well as experience them.

---Of the TV shows I watched:

Batman: The Animated Series
Well, while we're on the subject, I've been rewatching a lot of this nineties cartoon show. Some of the episodes don't hold up too well now that I'm all grown up, but frequently the snappy dialogue and noir-ish art deco stylings produce quite striking pieces of television.

Ugly Betty
The only show I actually watched live and gave a damn about this year, Ugly Betty has the perfect mixture of melodrama and comedy, and an entire cast of memorable and lovable characters.

Mission: Impossible
Something else I revisited this year. Despite being about an all-American team of luminaries toppling dictatorships and preventing alliances with dirty communists, Mission: Impossible was for the most part a genial puzzle-box of a show, with a first-rate cast steadily unravelling devilish plans of deception each episode.

---Of the games I played:

Fallout 3
A huge, sprawling, engrossing game. The narrative and character interaction are over-simplistic, but I found the allure of exploring this impossibly detailed post-nuclear landscape and making a name for myself as a hero or monster to be quite irresistible.

Resident Evil 4 - Wii Edition
So it took me a few years to get around to it, but this atmospheric, grimly realised action horror game, with its memorably over-the-top characters, has easily become one of my all time favourite games (although I think I still prefer RE2, if only because Ada is more sensibly dressed). I've played it from start to finish three times this year, and got a good way into it for a fourth go on 'professional' difficulty (so far it is very hard).

Iji
Often indie games tread new ground, brave new forms of gameplay, tackle storylines that no mainstream studio would ever touch. Iji, a freeware game you can download from here, isn't like that. If you could give it a multi-million budget and the latest state-of-the-art graphics engine, you'd end up with a game that was a lot like the games already out there - only much, much better. Iji is a perfect demonstration of why gaming needs auteurs who want to tell stories and explore characters - rather than shareholders who want to play it safe and get a percentage. Melancholy, evocative, and uncompromising.

---Of the Happy New Years I wished you:

I've got to pick the one just coming up, now haven't I? I hope this new orbit brings you happiness and fulfilment, and your resolutions are both feasible and level-headed. In short: Happy New Year!