Category: Movies

Grown up and animated

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There was a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s when writers and directors started making animated features for grown-ups. My guess is their thinking was that the generation of baby-boomers who’d gown up on Looney Tunes, Disney animated features and Jonny Quest was now adults and were ready for animated films that were directed towards gown-ups and had adult themes.

Lord of the Rings
Lord of the Rings

Unfortunately, the boomers weren’t ready and none of the animated movies for grown-ups released during this period caught on and only a few films ever ended up getting made. But it doesn’t mean that these movies weren’t hugely influential. That would just take time.

In 1978 animator Ralph Bakshi created his version of Lord of the Rings. This Lord of the Rings featured wholly animated characters as well as actors filmed on a stage where the film was processed in such a way to make them look animated as well. In some scenes completely drawn characters do battle with masses of actors dressed as orcs and goblins who kind’a sort’a look animated.

I’d say the 1978 Lord of the Rings isn’t completely successful, but it’s an interesting piece of work none-the-less.

Watership Down
Watership Down

Also in 1978 the movie Watership Down was released. About a warren of rabbits, yes, rabbits, in Watership Down the rabbits are characters with their own voices and world-view who’s place in the countryside is tenuous between their natural predators and mankind.

I mostly remember seeing this movie when I was way too young. Part of Watership Down deals with the warren of the rabbits being bulldozed under when “man” goes to build something on the their land. And the descriptions one of the rabbit survivors tells the others of what happened — of the rabbits being buried alive — gave me nightmares then and still scars me today!

My favorite of the animated bunch is the movie Heavy Metal from 1981. Based on the comics magazine of the same name, Heavy Metal features several interconnected sci-fi/horror stories that take place from the past to the future including things like a cab driver in a run-down futuristic NYC to the crew of a B–17 during WW2 fighting zombies and even a barbarian warrior on some far-off distant planet too.

Heavy Metal
Heavy Metal

Both Watership Down and Lord of the Rings are rated “G” while Heavy Metal is rated “R”, deservedly so, and is such an odd/unique/wonderful movie because of it. In fact, while I don’t like every story in Heavy Metal, the segment “So Beautiful and So Dangerous” is a little bit slow and “Taarna” is such a drag, but the stories that do work like “B–17” and “Captain Sternn” and “Den” more than make up for whatever might be lacking in other parts of the film. I’ll still watch Heavy Metal today if I happen to catch it on TV.

But still, even though 2d hand drawn animated movies for grown-ups never quite caught on, that’s not to say that the idea didn’t catch on. In fact, most big budget movies today are live action with extensive animated elements added in. Except now those elements can be hidden/photorealistic whereas in those movies from the 1970s and 1980s they could not.

Don’t believe me? Just look at the three biggest movies of 2015: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World and The Avengers: Age of Ultron. All of these movies look like traditional films with real actors in all the main roles. But looking closer, all actually use massive amounts of 3D computer generated animated elements, scenes and even whole animated characters too.

From the Millennium Falcon chase in Episode VII which was totally computer animated, the character of Ultron in Age of Ultron which was based on the same kind of performance capture used in the 1978 Lord of the Rings to the dinosaurs of Jurassic World… the list of animated things in these movies goes on and on. I guess the dream of making animated movies for grown-ups wasn’t as much abandoned as deferred for a later time when the animation could be seamless blended and hidden in live action elements.

Direct Beam Comms #25

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Liquid Television

Aeon Flux
Aeon Flux

The MTV series Liquid Television aired its first episode 25 years ago this week, but if you’re under the age of 35 you’ve probably never heard of Liquid Television. I take that back — if you’re under the age of 35 AND you weren’t interested in things like animation back then you’ve probably never heard of this show.

Liquid Television was an anthology half-hour animated series that featured several different animated shorts in each episode. Some of these shorts were traditionally animated and others used puppets with some live action thrown in for good measure. Liquid Television was highly experimental and felt very much of its time of the early 1990s.

Now that I think about it, I didn’t care for most of the shorts that aired on Liquid Television. But at the time to get to the good stuff you had to watch a lot of episodes of Dog Boy.

When I say “good stuff” I mean shorts like ones for Beavis and Butt-Head and Aeon Flux.

Beavis and Butt-Head, one of the defining series for a generation that came of age in the 1990s, began “life” on Liquid Television as one of these shorts. I remember seeing “Frog Baseball” for the first time and not quite getting it. Looking at Beavis and Butt-head now it’s so crudely done and so gross and so over-the-top…on the one hand it seemed to be glorifying the stupidity of teens, but on the other hand it was so funny it was hard to not turn away.

After Liquid Television Beavis and Butt-Head was spun-off to its own series that ran for a whopping eight seasons, 222 episodes and a feature film. I remember teachers complaining about students doing the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh in class and for a while it seemed like everyone was replacing their The Simpsons t-shirts with Beavis and Butt-Head ones.

And Aeon Flux. I remember the first time I saw this show about a woman wearing dominatrix gear armed to the teeth in a futuristic setting with a seemingly unlimited supply of ammo (that so perfectly captured the aesthetic of The Matrix but was created nearly a decade before that movie) I was enthralled right from the start of the animated intro of Aeon’s eyelashes catching a fly ala a venus fly trap.

Aeon Flux was so good it made watching Liquid Television worthwhile on its own.

The story of Aeon Flux is hard to describe. It may take place in the future — on some far off planet. Or it may take place on the Earth. Aeon is trying to get something and is willing to shoot as many people who get in her way as it takes to get it. There’s not much dialog so the story is told through action.

Oh, and at one point Aeon is killed and goes to heaven where she gets her feet licked.

Aeon Flux did find some success after Liquid Television with a feature film version of the same name in 2005 that starred Charlize Theron, though honestly I could never bring myself to watch that.

Preacher

Dominic Cooper as the Preacher
Dominic Cooper as the Preacher

The first episode of Preacher on AMC aired last Sunday and it was…interesting. I think. I read the comic book just before I watched the show so I went into it knowing certain things about the Preacher story. But even after having read the comic I wasn’t totally sure on what was going on in the TV show.

Now that I think about it I’m not sure there was a coherent story in the first episode at all.

There’s this preacher named Jesse (Dominic Cooper) who’s having a crisis of identity and a guy named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) that sure seems to be a vampire and a woman named “Tulip” (Ruth Negga) who’s good at killing people. And all these characters have interesting “moments” from Jesse trying to lead his flock and failing to Tulip preparing for a big fight with two prepubescent helpers and Cassidy battling, what I’m assuming are, vampire hunters at 30,000 feet.

But as to an actual story to hang these interesting scenes off of — there simply wasn’t one here.

Maybe in future episodes there will be. But after having watched the first super-sized episode of Preacher with all it’s weird heightened reality glory — I’d have to say if it doesn’t develop some story quick I’m going to be done with Preacher in a few weeks.

Grade: D+

Movies

The Hateful Eight

Hateful-EightIt took me quite a while to catch up with Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie The Hateful Eight but last week I was finally able to do so. And after watching it, I’m glad I saw it at home and not in the theater, though maybe not for the reason you’d think.

The Hateful Eight follows eight stranded stage coach travelers snowed in by a blizzard at a rest stop in the mountains that’s equal parts classic western with bits of a snowy outpost where you’re never sure just who’s who ala The Thing (1982) and bloody projectile vomiting and something’s in the basement ala The Evil Dead (1981) thrown in for good measure. One of the travelers, John Ruth (Kurt Russell doing his best impersonation of John Wayne since Big Trouble in Little China) is transporting Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the leader of a vicious gang who Ruth’s delivering for a $10,000 reward to the authorities. But at the stop he becomes suspicious of the other six travelers also stranded there when things seem amiss and becomes convinced that someone at the stop is part of Domergue’s gang and is there to free her and kill everyone else.

Much of The Hateful Eight follows Ruth along with another bounty hunter Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) trying to figure out just who’s who.

I really enjoyed The Hateful Eight. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in quite sometime and yet another great film by Tarantino. It was great to see Kurt Russell back in action in a snowed in outpost like in The Thing, Russell even looks a bit like his character MacReady did in that movie with shaggy hair and a mustache and beard, and the movie kept me guessing right up until the end as to who’s who.

That being said, I’m not sure I would have liked The Hateful Eight as much as I did if I saw it in the theater. It’s nearly three hours in length and like much of Tarantino’s films features characters in rooms talking to one and other without a lot of action. And with how Tarantino shot the film in lots of medium shots without a lot of camera movement meant that it felt like I was watching a stage play.

And while The Hateful Eight does feature some time-jumps that Tarantino’s known for, it doesn’t have that many. So the great bulk of the movie takes place with these eight characters interacting within the rest stop/haberdashery. Which at home being able to pause the movie at certain points so I could get up and stretch my legs and even splitting the movie over two nights made what I would have assumed something that would’ve had me squirming in my seat ready to bolt to the exit by the start of the final credits in the theater to something much more enjoyable.

Grade: A

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1982: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan premiers
  • 1985: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock opens in theaters
  • 1990: Total Recall premiers
  • 1991: The TV series Liquid Television debuts on MTV 25 years ago
  • 1996: The last episode of Space: Above and Beyond airs 20 years ago