Chicken with Plums

2011 movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Renowned violinist Nasser Ali Khan is distraught after his violin is destroyed. Since he's unable to satisfactorily replace the instrument, he decides to retire to his death bed. His wife is unhappy with the decision.

This is a beautiful story, whimsically and imaginatively told. It toys with your emotions a little bit, starting out as a fantasy of sorts before transforming through flashbacks and flash-forwards into something that is borderline devastating. The main character is imperfect, but he's imperfect like most men, especially the artistic ones, and I had no trouble at all connecting with him. Mathieu Amalric is just about perfect in the role and reminds me of a character who belongs in an Aki Kaurismaki movie. Maria de Medeiros plays his wife, juxtaposing mousey with bitchy very well. I thought the name was familiar, and it turns out she was the beauty in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. I also liked Golshifteh Farahani. She's got a great face and an even better name. The real star of this show, however, is its flavor. The source material is an Iranian graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, and it's directed by her and Vincent Paronnaud, the same team that put together Persepolis. Unlike that, this is mostly live action, but it's about as close to animation as live action can be. I don't know if it's the graphic novelist's visual sense or what, but there's a style to this that I just loved. An exotic and fantastical world is created from what is really a simple story. There's some magical realism with a shopkeeper's magic wand, a visit from a twenty-foot-tall Sophia Loren, and a visit from the Grim Reaper are more out-there sequences, but even everyday things like the way a bus curves through mountainous roads is displayed in a way that makes this seem like it comes from a fairy tale. There are some cartoonish special effects that don't come close to adding to any realism but still manage to fit. There's also some stylistic variety in a hilarious black and white flashback where a teacher compares the main character to his brother and encourages his classmates to boo him and a flash-forward where an animated version of the protagonist's son shoots a buffalo out of the sky before the story morphs into a sitcom that might poke fun at the United States a little bit. There's a variety with the animation styles used, too. And there are puppets, and as my regular 4 1/2 readers could tell you, I'm a sucker for puppets. Again, this isn't all whimsy and surreal vignettes. There's a heart to this movie--"The love you lost will be in each note you play."--and it hit me just right.

I think fans of Amelie might like this.

Wreck-It Ralph

2012 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Jennifer: 16/20; Dylan: 12/20; Emma: 13/20; Abbey: 20/20; Buster: 19/20)

Plot: The titular video game baddie--a bulbous-fisted bully who destroys buildings--is tired of living the life of a villain and covets the popularity of his counterpart Fix-It Felix, a guy with a hammer who scrambles around fixing Ralph's messes. Ralph decides to bolt and find a game in which he can be the hero and win both a medal and the admiration of other video game characters. Things don't go well at all.

I really wanted to like this, but it was just too much. There's some humor, and it was good seeing Q-Bert again. There are more than a few nods to video games from my childhood as well as people younger than me, an obvious attempt by the Disney people to grab everybody. There's a bunch of action, and the whole thing is animated really well. The voice work--especially Alan Tudyk as the really unlikable King Candy, but also Reilly, Silverman, the almost too-recognizable McBrayer, and Jane Lynch, the latter who might have the funniest lines--is really good. Is Jack McBrayer going to be in every animated movie from now on? That seems like the kind of thing that could happen.

Studio Executives: Ok, and we need the voice for this little pipsqueak of a character. Who should we use?
Other Studio Executive: Duh! Jack McBrayer? Heard of him?
Studio Executive: Great choice! He's right next door finishing up work on another animated movie. Let's fetch him!

That's right. Jack McBrayer is the kind of actor who is fetched. I can only recall one other animated feature film with his voice (not that I've seen them all), but I have a feeling I'm about to get really sick of the guy. Sarah Silverman stretches things a bit. I didn't recognize her voice, but Jennifer did. Anyway, the voice work is fine. The characters, however, aren't all that likable. There's really nobody to latch onto here. Ralph's not a bad character, but he just doesn't work as the emotional center for this thing. For one, we're supposed to buy that he's forced into this bad guy life but is really a hero at heart, but he acts so selfishly in this movie that I had trouble seeing that heart. He's also not very bright. Secondly, about midway through the movie, the audience is jerked from his story into Vanellope's (am I missing a pun here?) world and the conflict in that game. Like the colors, camera swoops, and barrages of sound thrown from my television screen, the clashing stories was just a little too much to take. I didn't like Vanellope's character either, and the limited amount of feeling that I could spare for these characters was stretched really thin. I liked a lot of what I saw and I really thought it was a creative idea with loads of potential. I just wish the story wasn't driven by too many modern animated movie cliches and had better characters.

This got me thinking about modern animated films that are very visually busy compared with the older, much simpler animated treats such as, say, Bambi. How do you think somebody in the 40's would react to seeing something like this? Would they vomit? Froth? Convulse? Flee in terror? A combination of those? I wonder what effect modern entertainment--especially visually with a definite shift from very simple ideas to very complex ones and the sonic barrage we get nowadays--has on children and their minds?

Dead Leaves

2004 anime mayhem

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Your guess is as good as mine, even if you've never seen or heard of this movie. A guy with a television for a head and a a feisty gal wind up imprisoned on the moon where they befriend a guy with a golden penis drill. They try to bust out.

You've probably heard somebody, probably while watching a classic like It's a Wonderful Life, say, "Well, they don't make 'em like this anymore." I almost got the exact opposite feeling while watching this and actually said out loud, "They didn't make 'em like this ever." Nobody was around or I would have been made fun of. This is hyper-frenetic nutsiness, the kind that can only come from the Land of the Rising Acid Flashback. It's loud and seizure-inducing (not that I experienced any) and includes, as I mentioned, a guy with a television for a head and a guy with a penis drill. It's a comic book, complete with harsh lines and onomatopoeia, splashing out of its pages and getting all over your pants and walls. If your imagination isn't broken, go ahead and look at that poster up there. Then, imagine it all coming to life and moving really really fast. No, faster than that. Add a crazy assortment of odd-looking characters, several broken laws of physics and/or comic sense, a very strange sense of humor, and a golden penis drill. There you go. Wait, make it all move a little bit faster. Now, there you go. You've pretty much seen the movie. The storytelling's a mess, and if it was any longer than the 50 or so minutes that it was, I'm not sure I would have gone to sleep that night and woke up the same sane man that all my readers know and love. And, I have to confess that I felt a little tense while watching the whole thing. My nutsack shriveled, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. But you know what? I really enjoyed almost every second of this thing. It's creatively fervent, unapologetically wacky, and unquestionably unique. Absolute insanity! Penis drill!

Kung Fu Panda 2

2011 sequel

Rating: 14/20 (Abbey: 16/20)

Plot: The titular panda and his pals return to stop an evil peacock from using a modern explosive weapon to destroy kung-fu and take over the world.

I'd suspect that if you saw and liked the first of these movies, you would enjoy this one, too. It's really more of the same with a great use of colors, the same interesting if a bit underutilized characters, a few new additions including Gary Oldman as the villain, and a lot of action sequences. The fight scenes, if my memory's any good, are better than the ones in the first movie. The animators have these kung-fu fightin' animals clash in some very creative ways, and the screen's filled with all this complex movement. I really liked how the peacock fought, the animators--folks who have obviously seen their share of classic kung-fu flicks--cleverly using his tail feathers like one of those fighting fans. As with the first movie, there's a mix of animation styles, and the 2-D stuff used to give some backstory or for dream sequences is really neat. The music is very good, and even better is the use of sound effects. The humor doesn't work for me at all, and the attempt to inject a little emotional depth into the story of a goofy panda trying to save the world with his kung-fu skills feels forced although I wouldn't want any less of Seinfeld alum James Hong's voice. I threw up all over my lap with the "My son is alive" ending. I also had to penalize this a whole point for a "Skadoosh"that reminded me that I was just watching a sequel. By the way, I don't see how a third one of these could work even though the ending seems to set us all up for one with a shot of a lost panda village or something. A third movie might just be 90 minutes of Jack Black saying "Skadoosh" actually. Actually, now that I think about it, that could work. Throw in an interesting bad guy--I'm thinking an evil walrus--and you might have something.

You know what could also work? An animated Bruce Lee movie. Think about it. That would be bitchin'!

I just noticed that this is directed by a woman, Jennifer Yuh, who is also directing the third installment. There's a delicate flamboyance here that just might be the result of having a female at the helm. I hope that doesn't offend any of my female readers because I meant it as a compliment.

Extreme Animation: Films by Phil Mulloy

2009 collection

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Shorts about perverse and violent cowboys, the invention of writing and language, the ten commandments, head-crotch aliens, and the sex life of chairs.

I didn't have this long enough to enjoy it like I should have--in short installments. Over two hours of these crudely-drawn, almost entirely black and white animations turns out to be too much. Don't get me wrong. I did like the animation. Mulloy does a lot with stick figures, and his characters often move in surprising ways. I like Mulloy's humor, and there's a raw creativity with these shorts. At times though, the humor gets as juvenile as me with artsy references to sex and genitalia and all sorts of slapstick violence. All in all, I liked these things, just not in bulk.

Blood Tea and Red String

2006 stop-motion fairy tale

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Some bird-headed bipods and some upright white mice battle over the fluffy heart of a crudely-made doll. I can see why they're fighting though. That is one hot doll!

Matt knows how much I dig grotesque puppetry and recommended this one to me. It's not very long, and not-very-long is just about the right length since this one wore on me a little bit. I liked the characters and the entirely voiceless storytelling approach, and like most stop-motion geniuses, Christiane Cegavske's got a clever way about her, creatively but in an almost old-school way showing the movement of water or other non-character movement. This really does look like an old-school puppet production for children, only it's a bit too surreal and bloody and just plain weird. They do have the feel of those more kid-friendly Jiri Trnka films though with a fairy tale ambiance. And not unlike a Svankmajer movie, this utilizes sound effects really well. Cegavske does a terrific job creating this imaginative little world of hers, and she makes technical brilliance look so easy. I'd love to see more, but it seems that she's not in a situation where she's going to be prolific.

Shrek 2

2004 sequel

Rating: 12/20

Plot: The lovably flatulent ogre is back, fresh from his honeymoon with the fat chick. There's no time to just sit around and enjoy his swamp and his new married life though because the poor guy's got problems with his donkey, his in-laws, and an intrusive fairy godmother. And there's a cat in this one.

Dreamworks didn't really take advantage of their chance to make a half dozen or so Puss jokes, did they? I believe somebody at Dreamworks must be related to somebody in the Eels because they're in this movie and the first one. And I heard them in the third one, the Shrek movie I couldn't even finish, a few days ago. Speaking of music, here's the main question I have about this movie--the first time we meet the Captain Hook character singing at a piano in an inn, he's got Tom Waits' voice. But the second time, he's Nick Cave. What gives? I don't really like the more meandering story in this one, and the new characters, with the exception of the cat voiced by none other than Ricardo Montalban (well, he should have been), do nothing for me. The humor's flat, and I think the makers of this make a huge mistake with the kiddies when they give the characters they're used to completely different appearances for a lengthy amount of time. It was probably to sell action figures or something. Too many loud pop songs, too many pop culture references, and yes, too many fart jokes.

Hoodwinked!

2005 Shrek rip-off

Rating: 11/20

Plot: There's a Goody Bandit on the loose somewhere in a fairy tale forest (Psst! It's more than likely Andy Dick.) and after a disturbance involving Little Red Riding, her granny, Puddy from Seinfeld, and a portly lumberjack, a police bear gets their stories and attempts to get to the bottom of things.

I swear that I saw this on a plane and sort of enjoyed it. Maybe it's just the rare movie that is better seen several thousand feet in the air. I do like the Rashomon structure as well as a few of the copious film references. More than a few of those (Matrix again?) were tired. The animation has an unfortunate ugliness with plasticky characters and a backdrop that looks like it's straight from an early 2000 video game. Additionally, the characters just don't move right, and their faces lack any personality whatsoever. The voice work, although the cast seems to be doing its very best (Andy Dick sounds like a transvestite), just doesn't work either. I don't like the movie's style, and the humor is really all over the place. It's almost like they threw in snowboarding grandmothers and every sort of quirky character they could think of in order to appeal to everybody, the throwing-darts-and-hope-some-stick strategy of comedy writing. Unfortunately, the movie just isn't very funny at all. My least favorite character was that annoying singing goat until Twitchy was introduced about ten minutes later. Add some yucky songs to, I'm guessing, pad the length so that it's movie sized. My biggest question: Would most children even be able to figure out what was going on in this movie?

My Dog Tulip

2009 dog porn cartoon

Rating: 12/20

Plot: And old guy talks endlessly about his dog and his attempts to get said dog laid.

Lots and lots of animated dog sex here, so what's not to like? I expected to like this one, and I did kind of like the animation style. At times, it would appear unfinished, and the simple backgrounds and sketchy feel actually did enhance the story. And I suppose if I really dug deep, the tale of the lonely old man (voiced by Christopher Plummer who really seems to get a kick out of the amount of times he gets to say "bitch" throughout this thing) and his best friend (a bitch) is touching without being overly sentimental and clobbering you on the head with how touching it is. But it's just so boring, a ninety minute movie that felt like it was nine hours long. Plummer's narration is constant and grew tiresome pretty quickly, and I just couldn't find enough reason to care about every little minutia of the man/dog relationship. If you really really like dogs, there's all kinds of allusions to Tulip's genitals that will likely turn your crank (so to speak), but I don't think this is the type of thing that would interest anybody else. Well, I take that back. It might be interesting to people who really really like lonely old men. Bland.

The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka (with The Emperor's Nightingale)

1951 Czech animation that none of my 4 1/2 readers will care about

Rating: n/r

Plot: Contains five short films and one feature-length film based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The Emperor's Nightingale, narrated by none other than Boris Karloff, was boring. I watched it last, and maybe by that time, I had had enough of the puppet films of Jiri Trnka, a guy who needs to buy a vowel. The shorts though? Well, it's Czech animation, so it's up one of my favorite alleys. The first, "Bass Cello," is from the same Chekhov story that John Cleese used in Romance with a Double Bass, a cute little skinny-dipping tale. The puppets, like in most of these movies, are simple in a charming way, but Trnka still manages to make the characters expressive. I also like his backgrounds, how he simulates cloud movement and water reflection. With the wizardry of Henry Selick and other modern animators, there's not much in this that's going to drop your jaw, but Trnka's work does show off a technical genius. The wild west romance adventure parody called "Song of the Prairie" used sparse backdrops and more of those expressive but simple puppets for some funny moments. Nice touch with a playing card at the end during the villain's death. "Merry Circus" was more cut-outs than puppet stop-motion, little paper talented seals, mischievous clowns, a monkey, trapeze mayhem, a performing bear, a one-man band, a woman on a horse. Cirque So-Bear! Abbey watched this one with me and really seemed to enjoy it. These are less experimental/surreal than Svankmajer/Barta (although "The Hand" was sort of an existential nightmare), more in the vein of Mr. Roger's puppet friends than copulating animated meat. The weirdest one might have been "A Drop Too Much," a short about drunk-drivin' Bill that was like a creepy public service announcement. Worth watching if you're into this sort of business, but trust me--you don't really need to watch The Emperor's Nightingale no matter how much you like puppets or Boris Karloff. Maybe it needed a puppet Boris Karloff?

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes

2005 Quay Brothers fun

Rating: 12/20

Plot: An evil doctor kidnaps an opera diva. He hires the titular piano tuner (of earthquakes) to perfect his seven automatons so that he can stage an opera he wrote for himself featuring the kidnapped opera diva, also turned into an automaton.

Reading a plot like that, you'd think this is awesome! Unfortunately, that's not the case. This movie crawls, moving so slowly that it barely qualifies as a moving picture at times. I've liked the Quay Brothers in the past; their only other full-length Institute Benjamenta is artsy-fartsy fun and you can read a bit about their short puppet/stop-animation films here. This doesn't have nearly enough puppet action. The mini-lumberjack on the poster makes a few short appearances, and the animation for the guy's automatons, when it's shown off, is beautiful. There's also some mysterious backward filming shenanigans where the Quays "animate" some real people. Without a doubt, you get some beautiful imagery in Piano Tuner, but it's all so sluggishly displayed that I wonder if it was made as a cure for insomnia or something. Stilted dialogue doesn't help. Neither does the fact that, especially early in the film, I couldn't really see or hear what the hell was going on. It makes putting the pieces to this little puzzle of a movie especially tiresome, and after a while, my mind dropped out and I just waited for the little doll lumberjack to pop in again. After all, that's why I bothered to watch this in the first place. Speaking of that, this might have the current record for the number of times I started this and had to give up and start again later for whatever reason (general boredom, sleepiness, too much noise in the room). I had it recorded on the t.v. about two years ago and never got through it, and I made at least two other attempts to watch it on Netflix.

Here's a question for my readers, by the way: Have you ever heard a person, during the time preceding sexual intercourse, ever heard your woman (or guy, I suppose) say the words "Take me"? I have my doubts that anybody ever says that, but you hear it in movies all the time. Kiss, kiss kiss, fondle, rub, rub, kiss, nibble, kiss, rub. . ."Take me!"

And now, here's the first ever shane-movies contest! Successful blogs have contests and giveaways, and I sure would like to have a successful blog. So, here it goes: If you can watch The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes uninterrupted, send me video evidence plus letters from at least two eyewitnesses, and I will make you a grotesque puppet out of food. It must be your first attempt to watch the movie, however. Offer not valid in Oklahoma because people from Oklahoma are creepy.

The Illusionist

2010 French cartoon

Rating: 18/20

Plot: The titular magician's getting old, and with the emerging popularity of rock 'n' roll musicians, so is his act involving a squirrely rabbit and various objects stuffed up his sleeve. He travels to Scotland where he befriends a young maid named Alice. She travels with him to England where he struggles with his art and uses his meager funds to buy her shoes and dresses.

Ventriloquist, by the way, is a "belly talker" as ventri means belly and loqu means talk. Latin roots. Engastrimyth is from the Greek and means "stomach talker." I figured you'd find that interesting.

I love Tati, I love French whimsy, I loved Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville, and I was pretty sure I would love this movie. I might not be right about a lot of things, but I was about that. There's a wonderful texture to Chomet's 2D animation. A scene near the end with a shadow makes me tear up just thinking about it, but there are all kinds of tiny details that I just loved in this--the radiance of a jukebox, shadows over golden grasslands, a twist of a coat in front of a mirror, window reflections, the clown nose of the downtrodden. The style and the settings make me nostalgic, and I'm not even sure why. I've never been to Scotland, France, or England. But there's just something about the way the places and backgrounds are drawn. I loved the way this film looked. And like Triplets, I love the way Chomet has his characters move. Again, he exaggerates the grotesqueness of human beings, putting the needle on the old quirk-meter well into red. The hup-hup-hupping acrobats. The melancholy clown (a scene where he listens to calliope music alone in his room is just beautiful). The little fellows who run the hotel. The ventriloquist and his dummy (loved that first appearance of the dummy!). The way the rock band sashays off the stage. They all interact in a nearly dialogue-free little world because words just aren't that necessary. All you need to do is watch a handful of silent films to find that out. This has that silent film funk but with a slightly more complex range of human emotions. Inferences need to be made, and there's definitely some wiggle room here, allowing for a variety of hunches about what's going on with these characters. I'm definitely the type of movie watcher who's moved more by imagery than words, and it's great how Chomet tells so much story without having to explain things with any superfluous language. And then you've got the Tati influence. It's Tati's story, personal and heartbreaking, and this medium is perfect for capturing the Hulot mannerisms, the Tati-type sight gags, and the overall flavor. Chomet does capture Tati's movements very well, from the way he chases after his rabbit to his careful maneuvering over an extension cord. It felt good seeing Tati again even if it was just an animated version of him. Maybe that's where the feelings of nostalgia come from. This might have a little more sentimentality than Tati's live action films, but it's that sentimentality of the aforementioned silents and therefore feels very comfortable to me. Comfortable is a good word for this maybe. The French have this way of making movies that you inhale instead of just watch. They're movies that are like old shoes, and this is a real old shoe of a movie, one that feels like it's just always been there, more beautiful because of its dust and scratches and the fact that it smells just like my old foot.

Alice

1988 animated classic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

My favorite retelling of Carroll's book, Svankmajer's Alice is, in my opinion, represents the master animator at the peak of his grotesque powers. The story's essentially the same, and most of the characters from the novel find their way into Svankmajer's Wonderland. Svankmajer's vision and leftfield creativity breathes unique life into them, making the White Rabbit a sawdust-leaking stuffed buck-toothed thing, the March Hare a wind-up toy, the Mad Hatter a wooden marionnette, the Caterpillar a sock puppet, and, most disturbingly, Bill and the White Rabbit's other pals a perverse menagerie of skeletal reptilian things. The pace is quick, and there's plenty to see, especially for lovers of quirky nightmares. The narration kind of annoys me, probably more so because of some terrible dubbing, but I can put up with that because it's such a treat visually. I definitely could have done without half the lip close-ups though. Nevertheless, bitchin'!

Little Otik

2000 horror comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Bozena and Karel want a child more than anything else in the world. They receive some upsetting news when a doctor tells them they'll never have a child. To cheer his wife up, Bozena unearths a tree root that's kind of in the shape of a human baby and presents it to his wife. They pretend it's real and play parent at their weekend house, and nine months later, with the aid of some faux stomachs, fool their neighbors and friends into thinking they have had a child. Problems arise when the wooden baby develops an impossible appetite.

This doesn't have as much animation as Jan Svankmajer's Alice or Faust. When you finally get to see the root baby come to life, it's truly horrifying and very realistic. The breast-feeding and temper tantrum scenes manage to be even more terrifying than watching a real-life baby. Otik is based on a Czech folk tale, a story learned when a neighbor girl reads from a picture book, and like the best folk tales, this has its share of gruesome moments. It's particularly gruesome when the titular child eats, of course, but watching the other characters eat isn't much better. And they certainly enjoy an interesting array of soups. But Otik isn't all horror. It's also very humorous. A scene where a guy on the street fishes babies out of a tub with a net and wraps them in newspaper is very funny, and as disturbing as it is, a scene featuring a pedophile's crotch hand made me laugh. That pedophile's crotch is the first animation you see in this movie, by the way. The funniest bit is when the husband brings the root to his wife and says, "Guess what I've got for you." It just seems like such a cruel thing to do to a woman who can't have a child, but I laughed and laughed anyway. I really enjoy this movie, but I wonder if Svankmajer had trouble with funding. There are parts of the movie that seem incomplete, especially the ending, and I really wish there could have been more animation, even if was just surreal vignettes that had nothing to do with the main conflicts. Like crotch hand! I imagine the film's theme has to do with human greed, especially since an alternate title is Greedy Guts.

The Happiness of the Katakuris

2001 black comic musical (with claymation!)

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular family lives in the middle of nowhere, operating a bed-and-breakfast that nobody visits because the dad heard that a new road was going to be constructed that would be great for business. The family's far from happy. The son's got a criminal background, and the daughter is recently divorced. But their luck changes when they actually get a customer. Then their luck changes again when the customer commits suicide. They decide to cover it up. Soon, more customers arrive and wind up dead. Apparently, that's a problem. They sing about it!

This one starts with a woman in a restaurant eating soup. She finds a demon thing in the soup ("Waiter, there's a demon in my soup!") and the whole scene morphs into claymation. The demon steals her uvula and flies off. Eventually, a bird gets involved and the grandfather of the family throws some firewood at it from an absurd distance and hits it. Then, we get to meet the Katakuris. I've got no idea what the demon or the woman's uvula had to do with anything. This is the second Takashi Miike movie I've seen in the last couple weeks. He's the type of director who needs to calm down, have somebody gift him a funnel, or hire an assistant to throw cold water in his face every twenty-three minutes or so. This is a wild ride, not really letting up after the scene with the uvula-thieving demon, and the mashing together of genres (the Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead description on the poster is appropriate) is almost unnerving. But in a delightful way! You can go into this movie expecting the unexpected, but Miike will be a step ahead of you. It's like he's discovered the 3-D equivalent to "unexpected," and uses it to attack the viewer as he also assaults with tacky color, gross imagery, gross sound effects, and tacky musical numbers. You know how you sometimes come across a video clip of footage from a Japanese game show and you watch it and think, "Everybody in Japan must be nuts!"? This is the movie equivalent to that. Nothing's right about The Happiness of the Katakuris. It's unapologetically dopey and covered in a few thick and raunchy layers of cheese. The music really is terrible, dated Japanese pop with embarrassingly terrible lyrics. You really have to sort of endure the musically numbers. The onslaught of that with the gross-out imagery and the seemingly random metamorphosis into claymation is enough to make you dizzy. But again, it's in a delightful way! The humor's black, absurdly black, and if you can't laugh at death, this probably isn't the movie for you. As unhinged as this is, it all manages to keep things together for an (expected?) feel-good ending. This definitely isn't for everybody. In fact, it's probably not for very many people at all, but if you think you might be the type of person who would like a movie where one of the first five words in the script is "uvula," you might want to give it a shot.

The Ossuary and Other Tales

Svankmajer shorts from 1964-1988

Rating: n/r

This collection has some great stuff but might not be as consistently great as the other collection. "The Last Trick" features a pair of dueling wooden-headed magicians and their surreal acts. "Don Juan" is marionettes, sometimes sans strings, in elaborate stage settings. "The Garden" has no animation at all; it's an absurdest gag about a fence made out of people. "Historia Naturae" is visually interesting with its rapid shots of the kibbles and bits of eight different species, but after a while, I was glad it was a short short. "Johann Sebastian Bach" is rock music. Well, it's Bach set to images of animated stones. Oft-beautiful, but not exactly memorable. The one in the title ("The Ossuary") isn't a tale at all but a commissioned glimpse at an ossuary in the Czech Republic, a church/mass-grave with art and architecture constructed from tens of thousands skeletons of Black Plague victims. That one is exactly memorable, not because of anything Svank's doing but because it just might be the most beautifully depressing place I've ever seen. Svank doesn't animate (some of those rapid fire shots and weird camera movements are there though), but this place is as Svankmajer as a place can be. I might have liked it more if the female tour guide voice wasn't in it. She's entertaining as she repeatedly begs field-tripping children not to touch the bones and eventually threatens them, but it kind of takes away from the experience a little. "The Otrants Castle" was a dull pseudo-documentary. There's some cut-out animation that isn't very interesting. "Darkness Light Darkness" is an extra on Alice. It's creative, risque, and bizarre fun with clay and is great from a technical standpoint (watching clay hands mold with clay is just cool) and for anybody looking for some avant-garde slapstick. Finally, "Manly Games" is a hilarious look at soccer. You can't accuse Svank of being pretentious after watching that one, a mish-mash of animation styles (some cut-out stuff, some clay) that looks at the sport in a grotesquely humorous way.

I'd say three-and-a-half of these are vital. For fans, the others are worth checking out once.

Toy Story 3

2010 cartoon

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: 17/20; Dylan: 15/20; Emma: 20/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: The mouse is getting behind on his payments to keep Walt Disney's head cryogenically frozen, and after a failed attempt at a bakesale--failed because of pre-sale rumors abounding involving Goofy and perverse activity and cupcakes--they decide it's time to wheel out Woody and Buzz and the other toys and make another Toy Story movie. They struggle to find a plot and eventually decide to just redo the one from Toy Story 2 with a few twists and a whole bunch of new characters because then they can make a lot more money with action figures, etc. "Because kids," the mouse said, "will even want toys based on characters who were only in the movie for a few seconds."

Don't get me wrong though. I loved seeing a brand new Toy Story movie, and this has to be considered one of the most successful and maybe even the best trilogy of all time. Most of the success comes from the audience already knowing and loving all these characters. Parents and their children have seen the other two Toy Stories dozens of times, so you go into this third one with Woody, Buzz, et. al. already feeling like you grew up with these toys or that they're your best friends. If they are your best friends, however, you really should go out and meet some actual people. So there's no wasted time or need for a lengthy exposition, and the previously-developed characters just slide right into the newish story. Newish instead of new, by the way, because there are quite a few parallels between this and its predecessor. The story is a little tidier than number two, and the animation is a lot better than either of the others although the toys thankfully haven't been given any kind of technological upgrade to make them look better than the very first installment of their story. But the human characters look a lot better and move a lot more naturally than in the other movies. The parts of Toy Story 3 with humans (good to see Sid again!) really couldn't have been done when the first movie came out. And the atmosphere and backgrounds are also vastly improved, creating a ton more depth than we had the first time we met these guys. When the characters are in peril in this movie, like in a genuinely frightening and intense scene where they are about to die, the background textures add to the mood. Compare that with the most frightening scene in Toy Story when Woody and Buzz are trapped in Sid's scary room, and the atmospheres in this new one blow the old stuff away. There were a lot of allusions to the first two movies, including a lot of repeated lines which sort of annoyed me, and there was also a continuation of the references to the original Star Wars trilogy. I also appreciated the references to prison escape movies with the toys' busting out of a daycare center. There was also something going on in that scene that I couldn't stop laughing at, so much that I really started feeling like a fool after a while. There are a ton of funny moments in this, but there are some pop culture references that seemed a little too easy, and I got to the point where I'd cringe whenever Barbie and Ken were on the screen. With over three hundred characters, including a nod to the wonderful My Neighbor Totoro, the screen is just filled with stuff to look at. It's a feast for the eyes. As a parent, this was a strangely emotional experience for me, but a lot of the tears seemed a little more forced in this one than in other Pixar features like Up. Very good movie, and like most Pixar movies, I look forward to seeing it again.

The Man Who Planted Trees--A Tribute to the Extraordinary Animator Frederic Back

1970-1993

Rating: n/r

Plot: Eight animated shorts by German-Canadian animator Frederic Back.

"The Man Who Planted Trees," as the title might indicate, is the real showcase here. Like about half of these pieces, it's haunting, almost impressionistic animated artistry with muted colors and an emphasis on movement, sometimes abstract movement. Swirling animal morphing. And as with most of Back's work, this has environmental themes. It's a good story, but I probably could have done without Christopher Plummer's narration even though there's really not anything wrong with it. I just think the visuals were good enough to tell the story.

"All Nothing" was nominated for an Oscar, but unlike "The Man Who Planted Trees,' it didn't win. It's a creation story but one where Adam and Eve transform into fish people at one point. It's also got an environmental theme, this time about man's destructive relationship with nature. In a way, this stuff reminds me of Fantasia with the movement perfectly complimenting the music or vice versa.

"Crac," violent industrialization as seen from the perspective of a rocking chair, won an animated short Oscar. The animation here is a little more crude than the last two, but it's effective in telling this beautifully nostalgic and ironically very human story in this short rocking chair biopic.

"The Mighty River," the last film chronologically in this collection, bored me. Like "Crac," it's a biography of a non-human, this time the St. Lawrence River. The animation is beautiful--lots of swimming colors and dancing shapes--but the narration made this like something you'd see at Epcot Center while waiting to do something else that's more fun.

"Inon" and "The Creation of Birds" both have Canadian-Indian motifs and characters and both, as you could probably expect by now, deal with environmental themes. Neither absolutely thrilled me although both were different visually or stylistically than the other stuff in the collection. "Inon" is a really bad day described with abstract imagery, and "Birds," I think, used cut-outs.

"Illusion" was a great story, a tale of a magician/one-man band frolicking into a childlike paradise and transforming all the beauty into modern artificiliaties. Birds and flowers were turned to wind-up toys. Buildings and billboards eventually dominated the landscape. Again, Back's animating that conflict between nature and modernizing man. And like the last short, "Taratata," it also deals with the differences in the minds of children and adults. "Taratata" is a compare-contrast of two parades, the first filled with bombast and giant mechanical floats, one featuring animatronic lumberjacks chopping down endless trees. The second parade is the imagined parade of a group of children, and of course, is more pure and innocent.

Back's animation is great, but I wanted to mention how impressed I was with the music, too. I believe the same guy, Normand Roger, did the music for all but one of these. The versatility alone is impressive as the music goes from orchestral stuff to throat singing accompanied by Jew's harps and everything in between. And more often than not, the music is helping the animated figures move.

Recommended for fans of animation, especially if you're not the type who'll be annoyed by all the hippie environmental stuff.

Wool 100%

2006 Japanese weirdness

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Two sisters live in a cluttered house. They don't do much other than go on daily treks to dig through people's trash in order to add to the clutter. One day, they bring home a musical doll and several balls of red yarn. That night, a girl appears and begins to disrupt their lives, using the yarn to make an oversized sweater before screaming, unraveling, and beginning again. The past starts to bleed into the present.

More evidence that the Japanese are nutty. This is a movie with a different tone, a pace that would likely frustrate Westerners, and a surprising bit of mindblowing visual flair in the middle. The latter, a startling animated sequence, is too good for words and such a contrast to the subdued tone of everything that sets it up. It's brilliant. Minutes later, the audience is treated to a kind of low budget puppet show, tiny hands manipulating wooden dolls in a doll house. There's a wonderful simplicity to the whole thing. I do think this movie has some problems when it attempts to get a narrative going. But the characters are intriguing. The setting, before they de-clutter anyway, is one of those that gives your eyes a reason to wander over every inch of the screen. And the quirkiness is refreshingly original. This is not for many, but a handful of freak magnets will find this rewarding.

Gumby Dharma

2006 documentary

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The life and work of Gumby-creator Art Clokey.

What I learned from Gumby Dharma:

1. Why Gumby is green. Aside avoiding race stuff, green is "a product of life" and life, as we all know, equals love. Yeah, Art Clokey had hippie tendencies.

2. The origin of his name. It's not terribly interesting.

3. How Clokey's purpose for working with claymation had to do with the imagery being just below a level that creates nausea and seasickness, a level of excitement.

4. Why Gumby has a bump on his head. It's based on Clokey's father's cowlick and, as you'd probably expect, was to avoid the problem of Gumby being a phallic symbol.

5. What the voice of Gumby (the only voice for Gumby as far as I know) looks like. Yep, he's a large bearded individual, a guy who looks like he either just stomped out of the woods or rolled down a mountain.

6. That Prickles and Goo were named after something Clokey heard from Alan Watts about how there are two types of people in the world--prickly and gooey.

7. How Flying Burrito Brother and fellow Hoosier Sneaky Pete Kleinow got exactly one hundred dollars for the Gumby theme song.

8. That Art Clokey invented a bitchin' toy called Moody Rudy and enjoyed harassing women from his automobile with it.

9. That Art Clokey left his wife and family for sixties counterculture, experimenting with hallucinogenics, being a Buddhist, and getting his picture taken with Frank Zappa.

10. That Clokey produced a beautiful 70s short called "Mandala" that looks like something pretty special.

11. That Gumby was taken to India to be blessed by a holy man.

I can't say I really liked the cutesy Gumby and Pokey narration/interviews, and there's a ridiculous Gumby/Art Clokey dance number at the end of the documentary. Other than that, this is good stuff. Well, there's the troubling period for Clokey in the 60s when he apparently loses his mind. That was sad. Henry Selick and Harryhausen make appearances. I really liked hearing Clokey (and his son) talking about how Gumby and his friends represent different parts of their creator's personality. "They're all me," Clokey said.

R.I.P. Art. Thanks for the Gumby. And somebody buy me a Moody Rudy!