Animated

dirs: Nick Bruno & Troy Quane

2023

I have been on a bit of an animated kick lately, and seeing this was an absolutely utterly enjoyable blast.

I think it came out on streaming several months ago, and though I was curious, I held off because there were so many other important things to see, sometimes in black and white, with adult people doing important adult things like murder the indigenous or invent the atom bomb or conduct some orchestra and have sex with hot young guys.

So, with all that important homework / eat yer vegetables out of the way, it means I’m free to watch some enjoyable, actually enjoyable movies for a change.

I tell a lie. This too has been nominated for an Academy award, presumably in the Best Animated category, so I thought I’d watch it now before the stupid awards that don’t mean anything.

I shouldn’t have waited this long. I think my major beef against it was having heard it was significantly different story-wise from the graphic novel by ND Stephenson that it’s based on.

It is different, but it’s not to its detriment, which is not to say that it’s better than the book, but maybe just as good as the book. The main characters are pretty much the same, with the overall premise altered a lot to tell a similar but maybe a more 90 minute movie friendly story?

Unlike the other animated flick I saw recently which probably would have sunk without a trace had it been released in cinemas with a wide release, this here flick Nimona would probably also have sunk without trace, but it would have at least looked fantastic on the big screen. It’s superbly animated and belts along at a cracking pace. Nimona (Chloe Grace Moritz) is a phenomenal character who is or can look like whatever she wants – a whale, a mouse or a people person like person. The world in which this story transpires is kinda like our contemporary world technology wise, if not futuristic, but the aesthetic is knights and lords and ladies and armour and swords and shit like that, but the swords shoot lasers if they want. What even is this setting?

dirs: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson

2023

There is so much going on here.

Visually, this film, like its predecessor, pushes the possibilities of the medium (animation) by not just trying to replicate the aesthetics of the comic book format, but creating entirely new ways of displaying images, action, and the fluid transitions between them for the purposes of telling this story. And, yes, we are all completely getting sick of the multiverse stuff, but this flick manages to be extra-dimensional beyond that as well, having Miles and his mates fight in more than just four dimensions.

It's visually intense but on point, maybe a lot of it is for its own sake but there’s just so much going on, with a kind of go for broke energy, an almost terror of not getting every single brilliant idea represented, that it really asks a lot of the viewer. I’m not sure what the ideal state of mind or being is for watching this. It demands your attention, filling every frame with dense detail, and if you’re not in the right frame of mind I could see why this would be baffling / overwhelming.

And that beginning, my gods.

Miles Morales isn’t even in it for the first twenty minutes. It’s Gwen’s story up till that point. And what a story it tells, as she’s narrating to us, but alternating drumming with a band she quits and fighting an Italian Renaissance version of The Vulture, as well as finding out about some other Spider-Persons who travel through the dimensions trying to fix anomalies.

And there’s the fact that her Peter Parker died on her watch, after trying to get revenge on their version of Flash Thompson, after turning himself into The Lizard, and how her dad thinks she killed him.

Not “she” Gwen Stacy (Hailie Steinfield), but “she” Spider-Woman, the one with the white/pink hood and the ballet flats/Converse sneakers.

That intro is so good, both excellently written and delivered. And yet it’s just a part of a mosaic, one which is perhaps too complicated even for abject fans of the first film or the comic books.

Miles (Shameik Moore) is still only fifteen, and still having to keep his parents happy while he tries to balance school and his superheroics. His parents are all parent-y, so it’s the not unusual shenanigans of having to get to parent / teacher meetings, get celebratory cakes and battle the villain of the week, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who makes holes appear everywhere, and maintain his secret identity.

And he has to pine after Gwen, apparently.

dir: Phil Tippet

2022

I’ll be honest with you – sometimes I have no fucking idea what’s going on in life or in movies.

Watching Mad God, allegedly a labour of love or a magnum opus or something that this stop motion animator has been working on for 30 years, I honestly had not the faintest idea as to what I was watching.

I know I was watching stop motion animation, which is a trip in and of itself. And I guess it’s ‘good’ stop motion animation? I don’t really know. When I watch something with stop motion, like Henry Selick’s stuff or the stuff put out by Laika Studios, I don’t judge whether I like the movie or not based on whether the stop motion animation is “good” or not.

It just “is”. It’s more the story I’m concerned with. As in, I love Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s not because it’s stop motion animation, anymore that I love certain Pixar flicks just for being digitally animated.

The medium versus the message. Phil Tippet’s deep love of stop motion animation I guess is meant to be the one and only attraction here, because it’s definitely not the dialogue. Just to be clear, there’s no fucking dialogue.

Not a word. There is only two things maybe that give an inkling as to what (maybe?) the story is kind-of about. It starts with an image I’m pretty sure is the Tower of Babel being destroyed, or at least covered in dark smoke clouds, and then a quote from Leviticus saying someone pissed off Old Testament God, so he was going to destroy them and everyone in their tribe.

And then a whole bunch of other things happen. I think they follow some kind of concept or whatever, as if it’s a series of film clips from someone’s concept album – some horrid prog rock band from the 80s or 90s, something with a portentous and pretentious name like Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.

dir: Domee Shi

2022

I may be about the furthest thing away from a teenaged Chinese-Canadian girl on the cusp of maturity who finds herself turning into a giant red panda whenever she’s emotional or overwhelmed, but I still found a lot to enjoy and relate to in Pixar’s latest foray into the minds and hearts of confused kids and patient, slightly baffled adults.

It feels like such a cop out to say “it’s no Inside Out”, but Inside Out was so great, and this flick is trying to tell a different kind of story in a different kind of way, though no less entertaining, and that’s great too.

It’s working in a different emotional register, and yet it’s also something of a period piece. I didn’t realise the triple meaning of what I just wrote in the last sentence, but I’m not deleting it, not just yet.

Mei (Rosalie Chieng) is a thirteen year old dork living in Toronto, I guess(?) She’s a high achiever academically, has a group of friends, but her first and only loyalty seems to be to her parents, specifically her mother (Sandra Oh). The mum is very much the “tiger mom” stereotype popularised by Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and has been a well-worn cliché in American and even Australian comedy and drama for decades.

In the depiction of multicultural societies and cities, it’s really easy (and lazy) to single out families from Asian backgrounds as exemplifying this idea that migrant parents torment their children into becoming violin prodigies or maths geniuses, because without the threats of violence or the withholding of love / approval / affection, then no kid would ever succeed at anything.

What these stories often leave out in these narratives, whether they’re personal ones or not, is that all sorts of families, migrant or otherwise, have parents with expectations, who range from over-involved and threatening to barely there if at all, and that the kids (who survive) end up as normal people, or geniuses who become fuckups, or fuckups who still go on to live meaningful lives, because not everyone ends up first chair in the orchestra or the Head of Complicated Surgery at Most Expensive Hospital. There’s lots of us in between, and that’s okay.