Forgettable

I went to see the hunger games film tonight. I've had some issues about the adaptation, because I always have issues about adaptations of books I enjoy.  I am not an obsessive, rabid Hunger Games fan; I quite like the books, I find them fantastically useful for generating class discussion on all kinds of topics, I love the way Suzanne Collins ultimately depicts the costs and consequences of war.  But the series isn't dear to my heart in any particular fashion, so my level of investment is moderate - frankly, I'm more concerned with the effectiveness of the film in conveying the messages about power, violence, war, and spectacle.

The movie was, for me, strangely forgettable. I've been home from the theatre for about two hours, and already it's fading. Admittedly, I have a terrible memory for movies; unless I've seen it multiple times, or it really hits hard, I just do not retain films.

Some notes:
Though I still wish they'd cast a less-fair actor to play Katniss, I was satisfied with Jennifer Lawrence in the role. She's a very beautiful girl in an interesting way, and she's a good actor.  Oddly - and this didn't occur to me until just now - the amount of interacting she does is semi-limited; once in the arena, there's not a lot of dialogue for Katniss. It's all action shot after action shot, much grimacing and crying and moments of pensiveness. But when called upon, Lawrence pulls it out; good enough.

I didn't like the way they open the film; I think it should start with Katniss, and it should start in the woods. In my mind's eye, I think the way I'd have done it would be to open with a shot of Katniss hunting - bow drawn, possibly even aimed out at the audience - then the successful takedown of some animal. Alas, no one consulted me before they wrote the script.

District 12 looks just about right, though I realized that I've always imagined the Distric 12 scenes in my mind as if they were in black&white film - lots and lots of greys. The District scenes were filmed in an abandoned mill town in North Carolina, which strangely enough is up for sale; you can look at images of the "set" here.

Peeta. Oh dear me. When we first see Peeta on the screen, there was a wave of laughter through the theater, which was reasonably full (though small). It should be noted that we first see Peeta moments after Katniss and Prim have had an emotional, shrieking struggle with the Stormtroopers Peacekeepers, and seconds after Peeta's name has been drawn as tribute. It is not a lighthearted moment.
The audience laughed at Peeta a few more times; I laughed at him even more. I don't think Josh Hutcherson is a particularly good actor, and he simply looked odd - strange, gape-mouthed facial expressions. He just seemed goopy and uninteresting to me, and at times laughably so.  Liam Hemsworth as Gale is startlingly attractive (sort of like a very blue-eyed Darren Criss), and it's exceedingly hard to see him and wonder why anyone would be interested in a drip like Peeta.

One thing that I found unsettling is that the film falls back on a very Nazi Germany/concentration camp aesthetic. The drab shabby clothing of District 12, with all the kids and townfolk lined up in a yard, instantly recalled similar images from, say, schindler's list, of Jewish people being rounded up and sent off to camps. When the train arrives to take Katniss and Peeta to the Capitol, there's a very brief moment where it seems that Katniss is looking into a shadowy silver boxcar. I may have mis-seen - it's very brief - but whatever I did see registered in my mind as boxcar.
Once we get to the Digitally Animated Capitol, the architecture is all Albert Speer triumphalism: enormous, blocky white buildings with the VERY Nazi-esque seal of the Capitol.
[I think there were one or two more instances of this Nazi/holocaust kind of imagery, but as I said: I'm already forgetting the specifics of the film].
Collins has said, and it's pretty obvious in the books, that the Capitol is inspired by the Roman Empire. I would have much preferred an aesthetic for the Capitol that either harkened back to the Roman aesthetic, OR one that was sleekly futuristic - which is how I always pictured it myself.
The unease I feel about the Nazi aesthetic is that it's a very cheap way to point out that the Capitol Is Bad! It's become way too easy to use the Holocaust as shorthand for evil, terrible things - because it's become a shorthand, we don't think about what it means so much. I also object because the comparison is wrong; Nazi germany was terrible, and Panem is terrible, but not in identical ways. Panem doesn't do genocide (well, not anymore, not since they put down District 13); the power structure is difference, the coercive force is different, it's all different.

Which leads me to politics: the movie strips a lot of the political significance from the story. Gale, at the beginning, talks briefly about how everyone should stop watching the Games; Peeta has his spiel about not wanting to be changed by the Games. We see the machinations behind the scenes of the Games - Seneca Crane and the control room (a very freakish set that's a cross between Star Trek and a dentist's office), and President Snow, get a reasonable amount of air time. But the consequences of those machinations aren't made clear. Katniss looks far too healthy and clean, despite the drabness of District 12. The hunger she and her family experience isn't made enough of an issue. The scene when Peeta gives Katniss the bread outside the bakery is revealed in silent flashbacks; unless you know, you don't know that Katniss is starving and at the end of her tether.  For me, the consequences of the Capitol's policies are a hugely central part of the trilogy, but the movie elects instead to focus on the Games; it actually operates rather like an underdog sports movie.

Woody Harrelson as Haymitch was fine, though I have always imagined Haymitch as older. I did like the few brief moments during the Games when we see Haymitch watching, or working the crowds for sponsors. It's a very nice opportunity for us to see what Haymitch is giving for his tribute-mentees; we already know he's a cross, drunken bastard, so to see him laughing, schmoozing, turning on the charm demonstrates, to me anyway, that he's really putting himself wholeheartedly into supporting his tributes.

Lenny Kravitz as Cinna. NO. NO. NO.  I've mentioned before that I have found the perfect Cinna to match my mental image, and it's Raja from RuPaul's Drag Race Season 3. Old Lenny is too...tough, somehow, for Cinna. We never get to see the truly kind relationship that develops between Katniss and Cinna; all we get is Lenny Kravitz offering encouraging words in a rather rumbly, grimly serious, tone, and then a scene that read as creepy, when Lenny leans back, arm slung across the red plush settee he's on, watching Katniss right before she appears onstage in her girl on fire dress. Lenny tells her she looks gorgeous, and there's an uncomfortably long moment of tension that feels way too sexual. He looks like a hetero man sitting back and appraising/appreciating a high-class hooker he's paid for.

Amandla Stenberg as Rue is perfect. She looks just right for the part - small, cute without being cutesy, she just looks like a little girl. Which is precisely what she is, and is precisely why she's important in both book and movie. The friend I went to the theater with leaned over and said: "She looks like Prim!" and it's true: we can see why Katniss is drawn to this little-sister substitute.  Her death, and Katniss's grief and anger afterward, are one of the most affecting moments in the film (though frankly, I found very few truly affecting moments; one of the other major ones is when Katniss volunteers. Prim and Katniss both have just the right note of panic, hysteria, anxiety, fear in their voices).

There's not as much grittiness to the movie - obviously, in the book, we have to "hear" Katniss narrate every detail, which I think makes for a more intense experience. Onscreen, we can just see that she's been wounded, or stung by a trackerjacker; she grimaces in pain, and that's it. A lot of the violence happens offscreen - there are quick cuts away from the worst of anything that happens. The book doesn't linger over the violence, but it does make it present in a different way. And because Katniss is relentless in her hatred of the Capitol, her sense of the anxieties and fears of the people in her District, and so on, we're given a context for the violence that's very different than the film.

And that, maybe, is the thing that most felt lacking and made the movie forgettable: there was no context to give any of the actions of any of the characters real meaning. In the way that one gets involved in cheering for a sports team during a match, we're pulling for Katniss and Peeta; because we want them to win, not because there's any larger issue at stake. The Hunger Games happen almost in a vacuum - we see some of the grotesquerie surrounding the games, but not a lot of the real oppression and misery of the District people. That's what is conveyed so well through Katniss as first-person narrator; there's never a moment when she or we can step outside of a life of grinding poverty, fear, work, and hunger. But that life is all but invisible in the film.

The lack of emotional context also feels absent in most of the relationships in the film. We get so little of Gale, and none of Katniss's reflecting on him in the arena. We get even less of her mother's breakdown after her father's death, and Katniss's need to become the family's breadwinner. Peeta is so awkwardly acted that every scene with Katniss where he speaks is either a cliche or simply emotionally void. We get none of Haymitch's story, and not enough of his sullen, bitter, sorrowful attitude. Cinna and Katniss's interactions are stripped of all meaning and weight as well. The most successful interactions are Katniss and Rue, and Seneca Crane and President Snow. We see people in those characters and interactions, people with complexity and emotion and interest and motivation beyond an extremely basic drive for survival. The movie is one long example of telling, not showing (weirdly enough) and so we have, as an audience, very little skin in the game, so to speak.

I realized, as I watched the movie and afterward, that most of my emotional reactions were anticipatory: I knew the scene when Rue dies was coming up, and I started feeling teary. I knew Katniss was about to make the love & farewell gesture, and got choked up. I knew Katniss and Peeta would stand there staring at each other by the lake, and I leaned forward tensely. I think, as I watched the entire movie, I was more engaged with the book than with what I was seeing on the screen. I don't mean in a critical sense, either; I wasn't checking for flaws and failures (though I definitely noticed them), I was somehow trying to merge book and film in my mind. And I was reacting to the book, not the movie; when the film broke with my sense of the novel, it became flat and - at worst - laughable to me. When it meshed reasonably well, it was just a confirmation of the images I already had in my mind. I've never had quite that experience in watching an adaptation, and it's rather odd.

Ultimately, the movie doesn't do some of the things I was afraid it would do (namely, turn us into eager spectators), but then it doesn't really do much at all, other than tearjerk during Rue's death. What I was most anxious about in the adaptation was losing, or watering down, the politics at work in the text, and that's precisely what happened - but it also watered down everything else.
No doubt I'll go to see the sequels, once they're filmed, but I'll go with low expectations, and hope to be at least a little bit pleasantly surprised with what I get.

In the meantime, we can all contemplate purchasing the town where District 12 is set, or we can watch this absolutely delightful and funny video of the Hunger Games as performed by Beanie Babies (it really is entertaining. I especially like the way they represent Peeta disguising himself in the creekbed, a moment which, in the film, again provoked laughter from our audience).

Congratulations!!!

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore won the Academy Award for best animated short film!!!!

Many, many congratulations to William Joyce and everyone else who worked on the film - it's beautiful and clever and gorgeous and true. It absolutely deserves the Oscar (and any other awards that can be given, and maybe even some that can't).

The movie can be downloaded on iTunes FOR FREE! right now; the ebook/app is $4.99, but if you just want to watch 15 glorious minutes of exquisite bibliophilic animated film, you can do so for free. I cannot recommend this little movie enough.

I've been a huge fan of William Joyce's work for years and years, and I'm SO pleased that he's receiving recognition and prizes. His visual style is so wonderfully appealing to me - a kind of soft, round retro look that's loaded with curiosity and whimsy without ever, ever coming close to being twee. And he tells incredible stories; A Day with Wilbur Robinson is still one of my most favorite picture books. For a completely different tone from Wilbur Robinson, try The Leaf Men and Bentley & Egg. These are books that celebrate art and imagination and love and beauty and work and emotion - just as the short film does.

This is the second year in a row that a children's book author/illustrator has won Best Animated Short at the Oscars; last year's winner was Shaun Tan's equally glorious The Lost Thing .
Both films are thoroughly magical and inventive and are like looking inside a particularly fantastic imagination.

This is also a good year for Louisiana authors - William Joyce, and John Corey Whaley, who won the Printz for Where Things Come Back, are both Louisianans.

Go download the movie from iTunes now, for free, or go watch it on youtube or anywhere else you can find it.

A Question of Perspective

For once I was somewhat ahead of the craze over The Hunger Games; I got hooked when Catching Fire was still just an ARC. This means I've had several chances to teach The Hunger Games, and each time has been - as teaching any book often is - revelatory.

Now, just a few weeks away from the opening of the movie - which I will go see, though I am nervous - I'm thinking again of some of the adaptational issues that worry me.

There's the obvious critique of reality television, of course, embedded throughout the series, but especially prominent in the first book. The betting, the voyeurism, the enforced spectatorship in the Districts, the pre-Games television circuit, the Gamemakers' work to create the most riveting Games - for the audience - all of that is, I think, important to the politics of the series, though not necessarily to the plot. But what happens when the critiques of that culture of spectacle has been transmediated by nearly an identical culture of spectacle?

The homepage for the film announces that the 74th Hunger Games are about to start. But they aren't; we're about to watch a film adaptation of a book published four or five years ago. Everyone knows that, of course, and it's almost painfully literal - after all, isn't it more compelling for the viewer to be drawn into the Secondary World of the books?

Actually, NO.

It shouldn't be.
Panem is an appalling place, filled with appalling people - either appallingly oppressed or appallingly oppressive and oblivious. We don't - we shouldn't - want to align ourselves with the people of that world at all.

And here's the thing that teaching the book made crystal-clear to me: it is ESSENTIAL that Katniss narrates. It may even be essential that she narrates in the present tense. The only way we as readers can avoid complicity in the horrific spectacle of the Hunger Games is to be inside that Arena, to be looking at everything through Katniss's eyes. Otherwise, we are voyeurs - maybe reluctant, unwilling ones, but we are watching the spectacle, we are guided by the media's editing, we are caught up in the excitement and the dazzle and the suspense. If we're out in the Capitol, or even the Districts, we are not innocent bystanders. If we're in the Arena, locked inside the head of a tribute, then we are not reveling in the spectacle of the Games; we're aware of, alive with, the fear and horror and difficulties and pain of the Games. And that's the part that's important.

And how do you translate, transmediate, re-present, first-person, present-tense narration in a film?
Since you can't replicate it exactly, how do you counter the effects of losing that perspective, the perspective that guides your affective response to everything that happens in the story?

This is what has been worrying me since before I knew there'd be a movie. In class, we talked about the narrative perspective, and how important it is that we see things from Katniss's perspective. A few people thought it would have been cool for Collins to split up the narrative amongst a few of the tributes - Peeta, maybe, Rue, perhaps?  It may have been a student - I honestly don't remember - or it could have been me who brought up the problem of being a spectator versus participant in the Games. And they agreed; virtually everyone agreed that locating the narrative perspective outside of the Arena would NOT be good.

So when I came across this tonight, I was horrified. Capitol Couture. "Whether you're a Capitol fashionista seeking inspiration for your latest look or a District citizen tracking rumors about the Tributes and other celebs, Capitol Couture is the only place to turn for pictures and news reports on the fashion, trends and lifestyle that make Capitol living so grand."

No. No. No NO NO NO NO.

We aren't meant to be Capitol fashionistas. We aren't supposed to want to know the rumors or the trends. To use an unfair analogy, this is like setting up a page about the latest trends and rumors in the Nazi capital Berlin. We aren't supposed to sympathize with the oppressive, privileged class. They're shallow, oblivious, voyeuristic people who excitedly watch children kill each other on television, cheering and betting and getting emotionally involved in the forced plotlines.

We don't want to live in the world Collins has created. It's a miserable place full of want and hunger and sadness and instability and violence. It's a place where children are selected at random to fight each other to the death on live, national television. Where these Games are celebrated, memorialized, commemorated; there is Games-tourism to past Arenas, there are products and styles and trends, there's a huge economy around the Games, entirely aside from the enormous political and social power of it. You don't even need to read Foucault's Discipline and Punish to see the way power and discipline are being enacted here.

This isn't Harry Potter, or Middle Earth, or Narnia; this is a broken, post-apocalyptic world. There is no subject position in that world that we can successfully inhabit; at best, we can want to see things through the filter of Katniss's selfish, stubborn mind. We don't want to be her. We don't want to hold a 12-year-old in our arms while that child dies. We don't want to kill anyone. We don't want to have to care for Peeta, always worrying that he'll die, that we'll die, that the final moment of crisis has arrived. We don't want to have to hunt to scrape together food for our families, hunt and sell the meat and still be hungry at night. We don't want to be pawns in anyone's Games.

But the studio (Lionsgate) evidently wants just that. They want us in the audience of the Games, laughing and gasping and gripping the arms of our chairs and betting and reminiscing.
They want us to be complicit.

And by doing this, by creating a spectacle that draws us in irresistably, they become, like the Capitol, wielders of power. And we become the Capitol people, we become the District people.

They give us bread and circus, and we buy advance tickets for the midnight opening.

I'm worried about this movie.

Flying Books and Academy Awards

An animated short film created by wondrous author/illustrator William Joyce is nominated for best short animated film at this year's Academy Awards.  "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore" is utterly gorgeous; it's got Joyce's clear stamp all over it, in the way whimsy appears (an illustration of Humpty Dumpty becomes a character, animated like a flip book) and in the round, retro style of the visuals. It, along with at least one other animation from Moonbot Studios (Joyce's company), were created as iPad applications, and thus are interactive narratives. Since I don't have an iPad (can't afford one, doing okay without), I don't know what, exactly, the app can do that the film doesn't, but it's there to be purchased for $4.99, well worth the price. the iTunes store listing is accompanied by truly glowing reviews of the app/film.

William Joyce has been a favorite of mine for years and years, ever since A Day With Wilbur Robinson. I've been collecting his books since at least my early college years, I've watched George Shrinks and the unspeakably adorable Rollie Poly Ollie (I also may or may not have stuffed versions of Ollie and his sister Zoe). I was - and still am - delighted that this short film exists at all, and that it's been nominated. It would make an amazing winner, especially following last year's equally glorious (and author/illustrator of children's books-based) The Lost Thing, a filmic version of Shaun Tan's book of the same name.

The Fantastic Flying Books needs to be watched, and I won't oversummarize - suffice it to say it is "about" Hurricane Katrina and storms, literal and metaphorical, and creation and creativity, imagination and art, loss and grief, happiness and joy, and above all, books. This is the kind of book-built world that bibliophiles and, I think, those of us who love  children's literature in particular, dream of.  The animated Humpty Dumpty in his book of nursery rhymes is especially resonant for those of us who live in and among children's books, particularly older, worn editions.

It's a silent film - the score is reprise after reprise of "Pop goes the weasel," a tune which takes on, incredibly, sad, mournful, griefstricken tones (along with richer, more hopeful notes). There's not much text in this, despite being about books; everything we need we see in lovely shapes and colors and expressions. The unbelievably emotive Humpty Dumpty is worth the watch just for himself; the life that's created in him, in his book-ness, is spectacular. Humpty Dumpty makes visible the truth that all readers know, that books are friends; we see, through him, how his human reader is truly Humpty's friend as well.

Joyce lives in Louisiana, and the film was made entirely in-state; it is dedicated to Coleen Salley and Bill Morris, both very important figures in the world of children's books, storytelling, publishing, and literacy. It is also, as the final "page" of the film tells us, in memory of Mary Katherine Joyce. This last bit of information, when I encountered it, was crushing; I immediately remembered my William Joyce Scrapbook, which includes mention of Joyce's children - Jackson and Mary Katherine. A tiny bit of googling reveals that Mary Katherine died of a brain tumor in May 2010, at age 18. Though the film is moving enough as it is - no, really, keep your tissues handy - knowing this makes the presence in the film of two girls - one a young woman, one a child - a little more meaningful.

I don't place much importance on the Academy Awards, as a rule, but I would be overjoyed to see this win an Oscar; it's an amazing accomplishment, a love-letter to books and reading in the form of a film.

fantasy casting agent

One of the more enjoyable book-to-film adaptation games is Fantasy Casting. Inevitably, when any book I like is made into a film, I'm disappointed. No one ever looks totally right, important plot elements get changed, Hermione Granger suddenly says things like "I didn't know my hair looked like that from the back!"
But Fantasy Casting Agent allows me to have total control over who appears in my mental version of books I love. Usually, Fantasy Casting happens by chance; I'll see someone and think: {gasp!!!!} "there goes Katniss/Deeba/Count Olaf!"

I have two entries in the Fantasy Casting category, both discovered by chance.

First up, from China Miéville's  extraordinary, wonderful UN LUN DUN:

Explorer and adventurer Yorick Cavea!  This is a taveta golden weaver, and I think he's perfect for the role.


Next up, from The Hunger Games:

Cinna. Played by makeup artist and drag queen nonpareil RAJA (also known as Sutan Amrull), currently in season three of the incomparably great RuPaul's Drag Race.
This is an inadequate screencap of Raja, but she looks JUST. LIKE. CINNA. When I first saw Raja out of full drag, in the workroom on the show, I actually kind of gasped and jaw-dropped with the sense of recognition of Cinna. This is precisely, absolutely, completely how I have always pictured Cinna.

I have always loved Cinna; I always pictured him as being dark and incredibly attractive, obviously fashionable, and with that touch of gold eyeliner. Raja - Sutan, really, because Cinna has to be coded male - fits this to a a particularly gorgeous calligraphic T. I would really and truly LOVE to see Sutan be cast in this role; I don't know how great her acting chops are, but she's definitely got presence, and she loves performing. Cinna's role is small enough - and frankly, close enough to what Raja does in "real life" - that I think she could pull it off. And they simply are never going to be able to find anyone who looks more like Cinna. Ever.

Finally, I have discovered the home of Count Olaf, legendary villain from Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events. Turns out Count Olaf keeps a place in the southside of Pittsburgh - who knew?

After zooming in to this detail on the door of the house, anyone acquainted with the books will be unable to deny that this house is marked, distinctly and unmistakably, as Count Olaf's.

Academy-award winning short film The Lost Thing

The children's lit/Australian pride worlds are abuzz today over Shaun Tan's win at the Academy Awards on Sunday, in  the Best Short Animated Film category for "The Lost Thing," which is based on Tan's picture book of the same name.

The film is just under 15 minutes in length, and can be viewed online here. Oddly, it has subtitles in French, which I found distracting, since I have a solid picture-book-level vocabulary in French and thus could actually read the subtitles pretty easily.

Tan's work is incredible; his illustrations, his style, are beyond gorgeous. Perhaps his best-known (most readily available?) book in the States is his collaboration with John Marsden, The Rabbits, which is actually quite a devastating read.

"The Lost Thing" is a wonderful, wondrous film, more than tinged with a kind of surrealist melancholy. I'm tempted to search out its symbolic and allegorical "meanings" - the number of potential meanings is rather large, I think - but part of me just wants, for now, to enjoy it as a gorgeous, strange, strangely touching, short film. 

Go watch it. Enjoy. You will be very glad that you did.

foxes fantastic, encore & films of the future

I think I need to see FANTASTIC MISTER FOX again.

I'm going to try to give it a little more time, so I'm not seeing it in back-to-back weeks, but I really want to see that film again.

I'm also planning to see THE PRINCESS & THE FROG, when it's released on 11 December. I don't have any strong feelings toward it - princesses, even jazz-age black princesses from new orleans, aren't really my cup of tea, and frogs certainly are not (unless, of course, it is Frog of Frog and Toad fame).  But - like it or not - Disney is a cultural touchstone, and when a cultural touchstone produces an intentional, self-proclaimed milestone film (first African-American Princess!) - well, for academic and cultural reasons I need to see this one. I'm cringing already, since the First African-American Princess spends part of her movie in the form of a frog (why, Disney? why couldn't you have just gone with a straight human princess plot? there are hundreds of fairytales, thousands of stories, lurking in forgotten collections of folktales - many of which feature *only* human princesses).

It's rare for me to have so many movies lined up that I plan to see: THE PRINCESS & THE FROG, and then in February, THE LIGHTNING THIEF, and in March, Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

I go to about three or four movies a year in theatres if it's a good year. I think there have been years when I haven't seen a single film in a theatre. But I have three coming up in the next four months - and with the very fantastic MISTER FOX, that makes four in four months.

But an encore screening of FANTASTIC MISTER FOX is an absolute requirement for the near future. I can't get those characters out of my mind - and that's not a bad thing.

the fox fantastic

I saw Fantastic Mister Fox last night - opening night, no less! - and was delighted. BEYOND delighted.

 A brief history: Fantastic Mr Fox is one of the few children's books I remember receiving and reading in my own actual childhood. It turned up in my Easter basket one year, probably when I was seven or thereabouts, and I remember being thrilled with it. My edition (like the one at left) has these wonderful, gorgeous illustrations by Donald Chaffin, which I think made me see the book in a very different way; as a softer, more tragic (and thus ultimately more joyful) book than if I had first encountered it with Quentin Blake's illustrations.
After plucking the book from my Easter basket, I sat down and read the whole thing in one sitting, no really great feat since it's only about 50 pages long (possibly fewer). But I've re-read it countless times since then, and it's always lurked in the back of my mind as my favorite Dahl book.

Which is why I was both nervous and excited when I first heard, years ago, that Wes Anderson planned to make a movie adaptation of Mister Fox. This was probably around the time that The Life Aquatic came out - 2004? I had seen The Life Aquatic and loved it, and have since seen most of Anderson's films - enough to know that he makes wondrous movies. He has a touch of magic in all his movies, a touch of the wonder-full, that is somehow exactly what I want out of a movie.

Fantastic Mister Fox has the best of both worlds: Dahl's and Anderson's. It's beautiful to look at; the aesthetic of the film is perfect to its content. The effect of the stop-motion animation is to give a very joyful, very whimsical tone to the movie, especially when the animals break into dance (which they do rather often). In particular, a scene in Ash's room, at night, featuring a toy train and then a real train, is heartbreakingly beautiful. The plot of the novel has been developed and carefully added on to - the spirit and sense of the novel is absolutely present, even in the new additions - like the Foxes nephew, Kristofferson (who is adorable) and the development of the youngest member of the Fox family, Ash, whose rivalry with Kristofferson and his desire to be seen as an athlete (and not as a little....odd) form a thoroughly Andersonian sideplot that somehow meshes perfectly with Dahl's original tone.

Ash is, by far, my favorite character. He's quirky and odd and growls and wears a cape - he first appears clad only in underwear, trying to avoid going to school. Denied a bandit mask, he fashions one of his own from a tube sock, resulting in a mask with a bobbling, periscope-like sockfoot above his head. He's strange and unaware of his own strangeness, which makes him even more endearing; he truly sees himself as an athlete, a capewearing hero.

What the movie does best - and what I love Anderson for - is to add more story, more heart, to Dahl's already outstanding story without ever stepping over the bounds of Dahl's resolutely unsentimental, funny aesthetic. Scenes between Mr & Mrs Fox, between Ash and Kristofferson, between Mr Fox and Ash, approach moments of sentimentality, of learning valuable lessons about life and love and what really matters -- but the beauty of the film is that these cliched, syrupy moments never actually come off. A gesture, an approach, is the closest we get, before the quotidian (or hilarious) intervenes and saves us from sappiness. A particularly fantastic example of this comes at the film's end and features a wolf.

The soundtrack for the movie is inspired. Though the opening 10 minutes of WALL-E will always be the best opening of any movie ever, the first few minutes of Mr Fox rates very highly in comparison. The soundtrack has lots of jazzy, swingy mid-century instrumentals, and songs by the Rolling Stones, the beach boys and Burl Ives, who is very heavily represented in the soundtrack. It's dead right for this movie, somehow - the gesture to sentimentality without ever actually lapsing into it.

After taking a class on Adaptation in my first year at Pitt, I've spent an inordinate amount of time puzzling over the problem of transmediating book to film, and how to "judge" the resulting movie. The standard assessment, which our class rapidly dismissed (perhaps hastily, very probably a bit scornfully) is fidelity to the original text. But the course also evolved a more complicated way of determining success, and that ended up being - for me, at least - a kind of fidelity to the spirit of the original text. The truly brilliant adaptations maintain the spirit of the original source - the meaning of the original text - but also add on new embellishments and flourishes that extend that original spirit and meaning, additions that make the viewer reflect on the original text in new and interesting ways. The two works become kind of like mirrors facing each other, but mirrors that manage to reflect and capture new angles. Once you have viewed the book through the prism of the successful film, the book is never the same again - in a good way. Likewise, watching the film after knowing the book alters the film - for the better, as well. They become both thoroughly independent and thoroughly complementary, intertwined works of art.

And that is what Fantastic Mister Fox does - it offers up the glorious original story while simultaneously making that original story more glorious through its own new additions.

in other words, and to paraphrase Mrs Fox "This movie is a fantastic film."

notes on disney/pixar

Last night, I watched an advance promotional trailer, announcing the release date for Toy Story 3. That, plus this weekend's release of UP, Pixar's tenth full length feature film, got me thinking about how Pixar is changing the face of disney filmmaking.

Disney has been criticized (often rightly) for its conservative animated films. Critics point to a kind of overall hegemonic or normative quality in the films: primarily white protagonists; reinforcement of the heteronormative love plot; nonfeminist heroines (if not outright antifeminist heroines); stereotypes of all kinds of people.

Pixar changes all of this, and it seems to me that they have been overlooked in critiques of Disney coming from the world of children's literature. I'm late coming to the film party - most of my knowledge of my field is with books. But there is a substantial body of work on Disney films that crops up in ChLA publications and conferences, and that is what I'm primarily thinking of here.

It occurred to me this morning that, of the nine Pixar films I've seen [going to see UP next weekend, in 3-D), only a few feature a romance plot at the center (or near the center) of the film's plot. A Bug's Life, Ratatouille, Cars, and Wall-E each have a love story as part of their plot - for WALL-E, the romance plot between wall-e and eve is absolutely central to the film. For the other three, however, the romance is a secondary feature. For Ratatouille, the romance doesn't even concern Remy, the rat protagonist. And in all four films, the romance plot hinges on a semi-hapless male seeking approval and affection from a powerful, sometimes scornful, female. The males, generally, change for the better in their quest for affection from their fair ladies, rather than the females changing or compromising in some way for the men.

The remaining Pixar films barely mention romantic love at all. Woody and Bo-Peep clearly have a relationship of some kind, but it's so bracketed as to be barely visible. The primary relationships in Toy Story are between Buzz and Woody, and Woody and his owner Andy, and with internal conflicts that have nothing to do with romance. Toy Story 2 sidelines romance even more; it isn't until the last few minutes of the film that Bo-Peep and Woody re-emerge as a couple, and Jessie, the cowgirl, dazzles Buzz with her derring-do.
Finding Nemo has virtually no romance at all, once Nemo's mom has died (which happens in the opening sequence). The Incredibles likewise opens with a chase scene-cum-wedding, but the plot turns on the family dynamic, not so much the traditional romance plot. Monsters Inc gives Mike Wazowski a girlfriend, but Celia is not a main character, and their relationship is not central.

Pixar has made vast amounts of money for Disney, and has achieved enormous critical success as well. The way Pixar is discussed now in the press is remarkably similar to the early days of Disney's studio, when Walt Disney was pathbreaking in animation and cinematic technology. The Disney studios are continuing to work on traditionally animated features, but Pixar has really assumed place of pride in the company's stable. This shift in importance and popularity signals a change in Disney and in the viewing public, and needs to be recognized as such. The "rights" of Pixar don't correct the wrongs of Disney's previous releases, but I do think that, as critics, we need to give credit where credit is due. When a studio gets it right, we need to be supporting that, if we're going to call, publicly in our work, for new kinds of stories and departures from the old romance plot.