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Every year around this time I blog about... Wait, is "blog" a verb? (Checks...) Okay. It is. Every year around this time, I write a blog entry about the annual student film screenings at the college where I work (CalArts). I'd been editing those shows for almost 30 years. Or rather, I edited the shows for each year, and had been doing that once a year for almost 30 years. I hadn't been editing the same shows over and over again for 30 years. That would be silly. Here are links to the previous years' blog entries, including some links that are broken and will just bounce you back the forum index, thanks to Invision's last blog software "upgrade". It's a little bit like playing "Wheel of Fortune" except instead of hitting "Bankrupt" you get re-directed into the abyss of the forums. That, and there's no Vanna White. Sorry. I can't afford celebrity guest appearances. Although I wonder what it would cost to have Pat Sajak read this blog entry? I could turn it into a podcast! Or blogcast. Or something. Anyway, links: 2022 2021 (Producers' Show) online due to the pandemic 2021 (Open Show) online due to the pandemic 2020 (Open Show only) online due to the pandemic 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 The scary thing about that list, is it doesn't include all of the other years I edited the shows, from '95 - '06 (and '93 when I was still a student - which is another story altogether). But I wasn't blogging back then. Unless muttering to yourself counts as "blogging". Kinda the same thing, really. So... a year ago, I fully expected 2022 to be my last time putting these shows together. I hadn't made it known at the time, but I was planning to quit my job and move back to Seattle. This was less about quitting the job, and more about moving back to the Pacific Northwest, since most of my family is up here. Whoops. Should've said "up there" to avoid spoilers. Play along, and forget I said "up here" and pretend you still don't know if I moved or not. Oooo... mystery! Without going into excruciating detail (that I've probably detailed before), editing the shows is a lot of work. Typically, I put in 80-90 hours in one week just for the Open Show alone. And while I always enjoyed seeing the students as they watched each others' films at the end of a school year, putting the show together was something I was looking forward to *not* doing again. So I took in both events last year with this in mind, made peace with them, and internally said my good-byes to the whole thing. As the summer progressed, and I got closer to submitting my resignation, something unforeseen happened. I didn't quit. Well... not exactly. Rather, I reached an agreement with CalArts where I'd continue to work for them remotely. Now the problem with that, is that probably 90% of my job up until that point had been hands-on. Even during the pandemic, I was one of the handful of staff that was still on campus almost every day (supporting remote learning, shipping out computers to students and faculty, reconfiguring spaces for social distancing, etc), and prior to that much of my job was, well, plugging in cables. Lots and lots of cables. Sometimes a whole computer lab full of cables. Sometimes just one cable (usually the one that makes an entire AV system suddenly work, because someone didn't read the directions ). But as with all jobs, there had always been work that needed to be done that never got done, because there was never enough time to do it. So now I'd focus more on that stuff, plus I'd be reduced to part-time, which was perfectly fine with me. It meant I didn't have to find a whole new job, I could work from home (and being home was the whole point of moving), and I'd have more time to do other things. Win, win, win! So with the work situation sorted out, I set myself a target date and began getting ready to move. After learning the hard way that I should've started sorting, tossing and packing up everything months earlier than I actually did, I eventually moved back up to Seattle at the end of October. I resumed working remotely about a month later, and while I have no guarantee how long the job will last (at some point, they'll have to refill the on-campus position), I'm still at it. Still working for CalArts. And... still editing the shows. Hence this blog entry, which otherwise, would have no reason to exist. Yay - full circle! They shipped my editing system up to me, and we did the whole film submission process using Google Drive. Since I don't have the upload speeds to send finished renders back down to CalArts, they set up a remote Mac Studio on campus that I could log into and render with. I re-download the student films from Google Drive to the Mac Studio, re-linked them to the main Premiere Project (which is just a few hundred K and easy to upload), and remotely rendered the whole show out on campus. It had to play down there anyway, so someone could just grab the finished playback files straight from the Mac. Job done. It all worked a treat, too! (Yes... I watch a lot of British TV/YouTubers.) This year, the Open Show (every film made by a Character Animation student) had 181 films, and ran 8 hours and 5 minutes. And while it still took about 80 hours to put together, because we backed up the deadline a few days this year (which should've happened years ago), I was able to split that over two weeks. Still, between that and the Producers' Show, I was back working full-time and then some for a few weeks. And while not every film is online, you can watch some of them on our YouTube channel or Vimeo channel. The Mac Studio I rendered to is impressively fast. To render the eight hours of the Open Show from Adobe Premiere, plus an hour's worth of intermissions from After Effects, took just 25 minutes. In its entirety. For nine hours of HD video. Usually rendering just one intermission would take longer than that. The Producers' Show rendered so fast, I literally missed it. I had to double-check the queue to make sure I had actually sent the job, but it was already done. Creating the DCP for the Producers' Show (a separate process, using different software), is extremely processor-intensive and normally takes at least three hours to render, but on the Studio took just over one. Faster-than-realtime DCP encoding. Without using a render farm. Welcome to the future! I've actually been using a Mac Studio of my own since November, when I finally replaced my much-despised Intel Mac Mini. I won't recount all of the endless problems I had with the Mini from day-one, but the biggest headaches with it were absolutely anemic graphics performance, and unbelievably unreliable USB. Good riddance to the worst Mac I've ever used. Not just owned - but used at all, during my 35 years of using Macs. We had about a dozen of them at work as well, with no better results. Even our Apple rep (who will remain anonymous) agreed it was terrible, since he'd owned one too, and said at the time Apple was throwing all off their efforts behind Apple Silicon, so the last Intel Mini was basically a stopgap until the M1 Macs shipped. Conversely, the Mac Studio has been absolutely rock-solid and wicked fast. It totally stomps any previous Mac I've ever used, performance-wise. I haven't fully benchmarked it with Geekbench (there are results online here), but the SSD speed alone is... crazy: The only Mac desktop currently faster than the Studio? The new M2 Mac Mini. Which started shipping two months after I bought the Studio. No regrets though. I'm completely happy with the Studio, since it has more ports than the Mini (plus an SD card slot), and isn't limited to 32GB RAM, so it's more functional for my needs than the Mini would be. My only gripes with the Studio are more related to installing them at work than using one at home: 1) Apple made it 1/4" too tall to fit into a 2RU equipment rack space (really Apple?), and 2) they put the Kensington lock slot in a place that's inaccessible without an overpriced adapter, and they didn't even ship an adapter for it when they released it. It took months before third-party ones were available. But that's typical Apple. I'll happily take speed and reliability again, if it means putting up with Apple's other stupid ecosystem quirks. Got a little sidetracked there... Anyway, as I was saying, the shows all went off just fine. The remote rendering worked, and the Open Show was finally back in person and indoors again, for the first time since 2019. Because it's so long though, we kept the split-over-two-nights format from last year, which makes for a much more tolerable show. The same company we used for our outdoor screening last year (Rent For Event LA) handled the projection, sound and playback this year, which was a good thing - because usually I manage that stuff, and well, I wasn't there. Admittedly, that was a little weird - not seeing how things were actually going in person - but I had coworkers on campus sending me pics and keeping me informed. My work was already done by then, so I just kicked back for the evening and watched TV. So it was weird, but something I could definitely get used to. About 320-350 people showed up, which is back to our pre-pandemic level, and everything went off without a hitch! Well, except that apparently nobody in Facilities knew where all the light switches were... so they couldn't get the room completely dark: But Rent For Event had brought dual projectors, so they had plenty of brightness on tap to compensate for it (at the far right, below): The Producers' Show was back at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Theater in L.A. for the second year in a row. Not sure the final numbers, but somewhere around 600 people showed up: And while I wasn't there in person... I was immortalized in the opening titles, created by our students: I'm the guy plugging in the cable. Very appropriate. Anyway, the shows are done, graduation was last night, and another school year has come to an end. Now that the shows are out of the way and I'm back to working part-time, I'm hoping to get back to some Atari-related projects again. All of the console repairs I was working on are done and returned to their owner, so I'm going to turn my attention to another (much briefer) hardware project, finish up some label artwork for several games, create graphics for a few more homebrews (including at least one that's never been announced), and start catching up on some blog stuff - including the long-awaited return of Artie the Atari! If I can remember where I packed him... Published 5/13/23, 12:35PM

There are probably many titles using soft sprites in mode E when P/Ms are not enough. Considering that we have multiple pixels per byte, though, the logic needs shifting and masking, so it's not as simple to draw in assembly in this mode as with more modern hardware with 1+ bytes per pixel. One example is Prince of Persia 8-bit which combines both for wide animations (especially when jumping) with nice coloring. But I can't find any library available for doing this or even plotting dots or lines efficiently. I would rather avoid slow OS routines. Do folks really re-invent the wheel for their own games? Or are implementations too optimized for specific needs to be reusable? At least in PoP it seems that it's a classic case of animating images on top of the background with transparency. I don't see special cases at play there, so that code would be usable in general. I wanted to check before I go ahead and write my own 6502 implementation or try to reverse engineer the code from PoP 8-bit (or maybe from the Apple II code if it's close enough).

For the past two years, our annual student film screenings for the Character Animation Program at CalArts haven't happened. At least not in person. (For those reading this in the inevitable, distant, dystopian FUTURE and may have no knowledge of what happened in 2020 - this was due to a worldwide outbreak of e-coli brought about by some undercooked Chicken McNuggets at McDonald's. For those who don't know what Chicken McNuggets were, they were "extra parts" genetically engineered and grafted onto chickens that could be repeatedly harvested for foodstuffs without killing the host chickens (although the process itself was horrible and needlessly cruel, but not nearly as bad as their "Cow McNuggets" or "Rhesus Monkey McNuggets". For reference, search the historical archives for: "pink slime"). For those who have no knowledge of what McDonald's was, it was a global, dictatorial empire that ruled the entire planet. Everyone worked at McDonald's, lived at McDonald's, were educated by McDonald's (search historical archives for: "Hamburger University"), ate at McDonald's, and were ultimately "served" by McDonald's (search archives for the historical documentary: "Soylent Green"). The empire ultimately met its demise when they stopped putting "toys" in their "Happy Meals". And yes, that's a euphemism. And no, you do not want to search the archives for what that actually means.) It's hard work preserving history for future generations, but somebody has to do it. Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to... something or other. I forget what. Look it up on Wikipedia, I suppose. Anyway... In 2020, our shows were cancelled outright. We had an online screening in the fall that year, but it was kind of a stop-gap. In April and May of 2021, we had online-only versions of our two shows, but it felt weirdly disconnected without live audiences. Our Open Show had a live chat, so there was some sense of people watching it... but there was no such chat for the Producers' Show. I sat at my computer, keeping an eye on the live stream... but there could've been 100 other people watching, or 1000, or one. But this year... we were back. Not 100% back-to-normal, but back-in-person anyway. The Open Show (comprised of all of our student films for the year) is usually held indoors in the Main Gallery on campus. Typically, this runs in one day, with around 320 people watching it. Not exactly COVID-compliant. Or perhaps, pandemic-prudent. Even though mask requirements had become optional in LA County, our college still required them whenever in the building. That close to the end of the academic year, we kind-of didn't want to have an outbreak right before graduation. So with that in mind, we made the decision to move the show outside. Hey - it's Southern California! So weather shouldn't be an issue. Right? But too much sunshine, however, was. We usually use a video projector for the films, starting at 11 AM to fit it all reasonably into one day, which works fine inside where you can control the light. But outside, you can't really use a projector unless the sun is down. So we did three things to address this: First, we ran the show at night, starting at 6:00PM after the sun had gone far enough over the main building to put the courtyard into full shade (although the sun wouldn't set for at least another 90 minutes). Second, because we usually have 7 or 8 hours of films (before adding intermissions), we split it over two nights (Friday, April 22 and Saturday, April 23), so the show wouldn't be running until 3 AM. This year we had 186 films, running 8 hours and 13 minutes - so we definitely needed both nights. Third, and the biggest change, was we hired a company to set up an 11'h x 20'w LED wall, plus a sound system, and run the show for us. The LED wall is visible in full daylight (and incredibly bright at night), and hiring a crew to handle all of the setup, teardown, and the screening itself was a huge relief, and saved us a ton of work. Well... I should say it was a huge relief after they finished setting it up and we knew it was going to work. We'd never worked with this company before, nor seen their LED wall in person. Plus the work it saved was offset this year because the show started on Friday - not Saturday - which meant I had an entire day less to edit the entire thing together. So it was still a highly compressed and stressful week. But for once we didn't have to build an impromptu movie theater in the Main Gallery. Here's the 11' x 20' LED wall (with enough subwoofers to make your ears bleed from 30 yards away): The panels do have some variation, but generally it evens out when they're all on (although there was one noticeably more-blue panel than the rest, but it's something most people likely wouldn't pick up on). The back of it: We chose 11' x 20' for two reasons: 1) This is the same size of the projection screen we used indoors and we didn't want to step down from what we previously had, and 2) to go any larger requires that a custom support truss be engineered which dramatically increases the cost. This is their largest standard size. It was plenty large enough. A close-up of the LED matrix (once you're about 20 feet away, you don't see the individual pixels anymore): And as for the weather? Well, 24 hours before the show - it rained. Not just a little either, but a torrential downpour. But it cleared out and the day of the show it was bright and sunny! But windy. And cold. That night got down into the low 50's. Maybe even the upper 40's. But everyone just bundled up, brought blankets, and we handed out foam floor tiles for people to sit on, so they wouldn't be on wet grass. Saturday night was better - the wind had died down and it was a good 10 degrees warmer. (For those wanting to know it in Celsius - subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9. I ain't gonna do it for ya'.) Cold weather aside, the show went really well. The LED wall is pretty cool technology, although it doesn't have the same kind of dynamic range we're used to on typical computer monitors, so some films suffered a bit, and there were the aforementioned color inconsistencies between panels. But it was still impressive. When it's turned on, the image almost looks Photoshopped during the daylight because you don't pick up any reflections or shadows (the moire pattern was caused by my phone, and isn't visible in person): At the most, they ran the wall at only 60% brightness. When the show started, they were down to around 40%, and 12% after the sun went down. They also brought more sound gear than we usually use (four subwoofers plus six powered 12" speakers, vs. our normal two subs and four speakers), so there was plenty of volume available. I estimated around 200 people were there each night, which is pretty good considering the cool temperatures and it being outside at the back-end of the building (instead of just inside the main entrance in a high-traffic area). My iPhone absolutely refused to take a picture of the audience without the video completely blowing out: In reality, the video looked more like this: Splitting it over two nights certainly cost more for the rental, but I think it was worth doing. With 30 minute intermissions at the two-hour mark, it made each night's runtime pretty reasonable (although it's still like watching two feature films back-to-back, two nights in a row). Any downsides? Well, the temperature for sure. Bathrooms were also a bit further away. Plus we had no concession stand this year since the Theater School wasn't doing their usual fundraising, and for some reason, we weren't allowed to have food trucks (although another event just the other evening had them... so what's up with that?). Will we do it outside again next year? Beats me. The cost was significant, and there were certainly some compromises made in terms of comfort and presentation. But splitting it over two days is something I definitely think we need to keep. Sitting through eight hours straight of anything is painful. I still haven't watched The Batman yet for that very reason. Right. So that's one show done with. The Producers' Show for this year was held on May the 4th (which as every fan of pop culture knows, is Dave Brubeck Day) and this year we were at a new theater again. But not just a new theater for us, but a brand-new theater period! In previous years, we were originally at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theater at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. But when they decided to renovate it and it was shut down for construction, we ended up moving to the main theater at the Director's Guild of America. When they decided to renovate that one (I don't think we were doing anything to cause this...), we ended up moving to the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Fortunately, they'd already just been renovated, so we felt safe for awhile. And then we had a pandemic. Which really could've been completely avoided, if people had just gotten their chicken nuggets from Burger King instead. They're way better. Or better still: Chick Fil-A. Love those. Especially with their Buffalo sauce. (Made, as far as I know, from real buffaloes.) When we started looking into theaters again for this year's return to being in-person, there was a new contender. And because of various factors (including capacity, availability, and proximity to world-famous Hollywood landmarks), this year's show was held at the David Geffen Theater at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It only just opened in the fall, and it's as absolutely state-of-the-art as a theater can get. The signs on the seats are "reserved" signs for sponsors (we have quite a few of them): The whole thing is inside a giant concrete ball. Kind-of looks like the Death Star. Funny nobody mentioned that on the day of the show. Since, you know, I'm pretty sure Dave Brubeck liked Star Wars. They even have the requisite C-3PO Oscar statues: The theater holds 1000 people, but our target was around 500-600, so we could still have some social distancing. Everyone was required to wear masks and have proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test. Apparently, it worked. I haven't heard any reports of anyone getting sick that evening. In the end, we had over 500 people. For our first year back, I'd call that a win. Here's a rather clunky composite of several photos as people were getting seated. My iPhone absolutely refused to capture a panorama that was actually usable: I stayed in the back for the whole show. By then, I'd seen every film multiple times, so for me, it's more about watching the audience (especially students) react to the films, rather than watching the films themselves. Even then, I found myself watching the show because the sound and projection in the theater were absolutely first-rate. And we got some great compliments from the technical staff at the theater about our preparation and the quality of our DCP which is always nice to hear. Especially since this is THE Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. It's kind-of like Apple telling you, "Hey - nice computer!" The show was by all accounts a complete success. The audience had a lot of fun, the films all got great responses, the students got terrific industry exposure, and everyone enjoyed being back together and seeing friends and colleagues again for the first time in years. You can read the official CalArts blog about it here. (Although the list posted there doesn't actually link to any films.) If you want to watch some of the films, check out our Vimeo channel our or YouTube channel. (Not all films have been posted online yet. That's up to the students.)

Here's a little animation I did with my APAC interlaced converter. Clash of the Lightsabers 130XE - english.atr

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about our students' 2021 Open Show. An eight-hour marathon of animated films, produced over the last two academic years (since we couldn't have a show at all a year ago). For the first time ever we held it online, since we still can't have large screenings in person. But that meant anyone got to watch it! Quite literally, from all over the world. Of course, not everyone wants to sit through an eight-hour show. But this Saturday night, you can instead sit through just a two-hour show! This is our faculty-juried Producers' Show, which is a curated selection of films from the Open Show. The Producers' Show is usually held in a theater in or near Hollywood. We've been at the TV Academy's Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre (although we had to change theaters when they closed it for remodeling), the Director's Guild of America Theater (we had to leave this one because of remodeling too... are they trying to tell us something?), and most recently, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hmmm... Emmys and Oscars. I wonder if the Grammys have a theater we can borrow? While the Open Show is a public event that everyone can attend in-person (normally), the Producers' Show isn't. You have to reserve a ticket because seating is limited, and they go fast. Studios, sponsors, alumni, students, friends and family... and suddenly boom! There goes 600+ seats. It's quite the industry event. If the animation industry had stars, this would be star-studded. I suppose they're stars of a sort, to animation nerds. But basically, they're still just animation nerds themselves that have had success in the biz. Of one sort or another. Anyway, we can't do the theater thing this year for the Producers' Show, so it's online too. And that means anyone can watch it. No tickets. No limited seating. No restrictions. For 48 hours. Then the sponsors (whoever they are) get exclusive access to it because money. But we'll put it back online later, and I'll put that link up when the time comes. Meanwhile, this Saturday evening at 4:00 PM PST, the 2021 CalArts Character Animation Producers' Show gets streamed live from here: https://watch.redcat.org/landing/REDCAT2345 And by live, I mean completely pre-recorded. But there are two hours of really good films in there. And about 20 minutes of talking. All at the beginning. I'm not suggesting you tune in late or anything. We do have a pretty cool guest speaker. And some of our students will receive awards for their films. But if you're going to order DoorDash or something, have them show up by 4:20. Anyway, check it out. It's pretty cool seeing the amazing work that students can do in the midst of a pandemic. Actually... it's pretty cool any year.

In previous years, I've posted about our end-of-school-year student film screenings for the Character Animation Program at CalArts (my day job, when I'm not working on homebrews). Let's recap! 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 I wasn't blogging before that. But I've been editing these shows since '93 (when I was still a student!). Anyway... oh, wait a second. Those last two links are broken. Oh Invision! Will you ever fix your blog software? (sad trombone sound) Anyway, a year ago, because of the pandemic, for the first time in the history of the college (that I'm aware of) our screenings were cancelled. We had a mini-show online in the Fall of films that had been turned in over the summer. But we were hoping for our annual show we'd be back in person this spring. Well, that's not going to happen. But, since we've spent the last year figuring out how to do things online, we will be having our full show again this year online. So while we can't all actually be together, we can be virtually together. And that means if you want to watch it with us - you can! Usually, you'd have to drive all the way out to California and sit in an uncomfortable plastic folding chair for eight hours to watch our students' films. But now, you can spend eight hours sitting in an uncomfortable plastic folding chair watching student films from the comfort of your own home! (If you want the true experience, that is. Otherwise, I suppose you could sit on a couch or something.) The show is streaming on YouTube tomorrow night (Saturday, April 24) live, starting at 4:00 PM PST. Here's the link: We will also be posting it to Vimeo afterwards, which I'll post the links to later. (Edit: Links added in comments below.) So stop by, watch some films, eat some popcorn (not provided), and enjoy the show! There are some great films in there! (Note: This show is not intended for kids.) And I'm totally not kidding about the eight hours, either. (Although the last third of the show are the films screened in the Fall. So if you watched those, you can skip out early.)

Yes, there's a new Star Wars Holiday Special. The most infamous piece of Star Wars lore returns to Disney+, but this time in LEGO form (and yes... LEGO is supposed to be all caps). If you're unaware of the first Star Wars Holiday Special... well, I just don't know how to describe it. It's unbelievable in its awfulness. Imagine some weird, unfunny mash-up of the worst 70's variety show you've ever seen, featuring has-been TV comedians doing painfully unfunny "comedy" sketches, a couple of trippy musical numbers, a cartoon, and mortifyingly embarrassing cameos by the Star Wars cast (with Carrie Fisher singing) and... well, you're not even scratching the surface. This is the train wreck of train wrecks. This is the train wreck that other train wrecks slow down to look at in astonishment, then quickly turn away from because it's so bad. I watched this as a kid when it first aired. It was the first new Star Wars anything after the original movie, while we were all eagerly waiting for what seemed like an eternity for The Empire Strikes Back. There was no home video. No cable. No way to see Star Wars since it had left the theaters. So of course anticipation for the special was high. But in the end, it was a train wreck. It was a train wreck, inside of a train wreck, that was happening on top of another train wreck. It didn't matter that it was Star Wars. Or that I was a kid at the time. I knew awful when I saw it. The cartoon was okay though. Weird looking animation, but still, it was kind of cool. Maybe because it was the only part that wasn't irredeemably awful. It also introduced Boba Fett who didn't once fall into a pit. So good for him! Yay, Boba! But the rest of that mess was genuinely unwatchable. Time for an anecdote! Some years back, I got a bootleg copy of the special on DVD from a sketchy internet site (before it was readily available on YouTube). For our Christmas/Holiday Party at the college where I work, we hosted a screening of it on the big projection system in one of our multipurpose rooms. We have a lot of Star Wars nerds there, and the screening started out with a pretty good crowd, since few had ever seen it. Well, that didn't last too long. The further we got into it, the more people left. Finally, near the end of it, we were down to maybe three or four people, most of whom were asleep on the floor by that point. One of them walked towards the door and we told him, "Don't leave yet - Carrie Fisher is about to sing!" We kidded him about not being a hardcore fan, at which point he rolled up his sleeves to show an Imperial tattoo on one arm, and a Rebel tattoo on the other, and then he said, "I'm a huge Star Wars fan... but I just can't take it anymore!" and left. What I'm getting at here, is if you've never seen it, don't. It's just not worth the two hours* of your life you'll never get back. George Lucas disavowed the Holiday Special. Rumor had it that he was actively trying to track down and destroy every copy of it. It has never, and will never be officially released. Yet now - there's a new one. A LEGO one. But it's not terrible. In fact, apart from the name and it centering around Life Day, it has basically nothing to do with the original. Rather, it's very much in keeping with the cute, irreverent, humorous tone the LEGO Star Wars games (and TV specials) have always had. It even manages to poke more than a little much-needed fun at the sequel trilogy. It's all pretty silly, and the personalities of the Emperor and Darth Vader are almost straight out of Robot Chicken. There's an attempt in there to have a heartfelt story of sorts, but c'mon... it's LEGO + Star Wars + Holiday Special. That should tell you how much time they actually dwell on anything resembling a plot. Some of the cast members from the movies and The Clone Wars series reprise their roles**. Those that don't are voiced by exceptionally good mimics. There are a lot of "blink and you'll miss it" in-jokes, and more than a few that are completely ham-fisted. But hey... holidays and ham go together! I got a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments out of it, including the very final shot which, frankly, made the whole thing worth watching (especially if you're a fan of holiday classics). At less-than-half of the run time of the original Holiday Special, the LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special is just long enough to be entertaining without wearing out its welcome. Pop some popcorn, grab some egg nog***, and curl up in front of the TV. There are worse things to spend 44 minutes watching. The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special gets a 6/10. (*With commercials.) (**If you're interested, here's an article on the making of the special.) (***Mix egg nog 50/50 with 7-Up. Makes for a great holiday punch. Watch out for the foam.) Edit: This gives an overview of the original Holiday Special, but still doesn't fully convey how bad it is:

As you know if you've read my blog, I'm a fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic. I've bought all of his albums, books, videos, and many years ago went to one of his concerts (and really would like to have gone to more). But one thing I didn't buy, was a boxed set of all of his recordings that came out in 2017 called Squeeze Box. Why? Well, first, I have all of his albums. And even though there was a bonus CD of extras called "Medium Rarities" there just wasn't enough on there to warrant buying the whole set. They weren't really even Medium Rare, as they were Medium Common (I know... that's not a pun). A lot of his early work from the Dr. Demento show wasn't included because, well, he wrote it as a kid and he felt some of it wasn't very good. But that's the sort of stuff fans want. I know this, because I've bought tons of Monkees reissues over the years precisely because of all of the unreleased tracks that have seen the light of day this way. Similarly, I've been subscribing to the Maynard Ferguson Lost Tapes club, which has been releasing a new CD of previously unreleased live recordings every month. They're starting on the third (and final) edition now, and at $100 for six months, that only works out to about $17 per CD. So I don't mind paying for something that I want to own on physical media. Price isn't so much the issue. So, back to Squeeze Box, because it's tangentially relevant to this blog post. The reason I didn't buy it wasn't solely because of the weakness of the bonus CD. It was because of the packaging. It came in an absolutely humongous replica of "Weird Al's" accordion: Those aren't CDs sticking out of the top. They're LPs. That should give you a sense of scale. (You could get CDs instead, but the accordion was the same massive size.) I just didn't have any interest in that. I have no place to put it, and I don't really care to display a giant, fake accordion somewhere. It would just end up getting shoved into a closet somewhere, for the sake of basically getting one CD. Oh, and a book came with it too, although I already had a book about "Weird Al" and didn't feel I needed another one. (Of course since then, I've bought two more, with a third on the way. But they don't come in a giant, fake accordion. They're just books.) So, I didn't buy that set. Just recently though, I bought something stupider. Something else you'd know if you've read my blog, is that I grew up watching Speed Racer. I reviewed the (awful) live action movie here some years ago. I'll leave it to you to find that review, since the blogs here are so horribly broken right now, I can't even find things in my own blog. Which reminds me - yes, I'm starting to blog again. This is my second blog post now in... oh, 9 months or so. I'm on a roll! I've had stuff I wanted to blog about, but the current state of the AtariAge blogs since InVision's last "update" has left me so completely frustrated that I just haven't bothered. So even though nobody wants to slog through the mess that's the front page, can't look up anything by category, and they'd be better off using Bing to search for something than use the built-in search here, I'm going to blog anyway. So there. Good luck finding anything. Right. Speed Racer. For years, the U.S. rights to Speed Racer was owned by Speed Racer Enterprises. Starting in 2003, they put out some DVD releases of the series, but they were mostly disappointing. The main titles and end credits had been overlaid (badly) with modern graphics. And while the first disc had some nice bonus features, none of the other discs did (the biggest omission being the original Japanese version of the series). Also, as more editions were released, the quality began to suffer (including "time compressing" one episode so it played at a higher speed). But okay... at least I could watch the TV series again in some form. Then, there was the packaging. These were all "Limited Editions" in "collectible packaging". Okay... if I had to buy that to get the series, I guess I would. But I'm not a fan of this sort of marketing gimmickry at all. I don't like "exclusives" or "limited editions" or "collectors' editions" that come in non-standard packaging. Just sell me the thing. If you want to add more content and charge more, then add more discs and raise the price. When I buy a DVD, I just buy it, stick it on a shelf, and once in awhile take it down to watch it. I have no interest in displaying them as "collectibles". The first DVD was actually pretty good. It did have some bonus material, mostly in the form of trivia. The packaging included an outer sleeve that featured actual rubber, stamped like a tire tread. To be fair, I could just discard the sleeve and keep the case inside. But this was okay. Pointless, but okay. The second one had a cover that opened like a book, then played a sound clip and the Mach 5's lights would light up. This was actually kind of cool. Until the battery died. So, now it's a cover that does nothing. But hey - foil stamped logo! Woohoo! The next one is the one that really started putting me off. At least the first two were standard DVD cases in a sleeve. But for some reason, Volume 3 came in a metal can, wedged into half of a cardboard DVD box. It looked like a film reel, but it was supposedly the Mach 5's steering wheel. Just getting the disc out meant popping open that stupid can (and the disc just bounces around inside it), and the box would break down more every time you took the can out or put it back. But I still have to keep the box to prevent the can from rolling off the shelf. Something which may not be readily apparent, is that the artwork started taking a hit in quality at this point. More on that in a minute. The next one was actually kind-of-cool, because it included a die-cast version of the Mach 5. The outer box was larger than normal, but it did include a normal DVD case inside, and the toy was cool. In fact, they should've just done that for every edition, with a different car for each one. Collectors could display them separate from the DVDs, and kids would have something to play with. And of course, the cars were the stars of the show! ' Here though, is where the artwork really started to go downhill. Speed's outlines look like he was drawn with a paint roller (click to zoom in): The final volume included a small, stamped, metal license plate. So... yay. I guess I could... just leave it in the box forever. I have no idea what else I would do with it. With this one, the artwork finally took a complete and total nose-dive. You probably can't see how atrocious that is, at that size. So here's a zoomed-in version (click for the close-up). Sparky's teeth are just... wrong. I can't tell if Trixie is winking, having a stroke, or was punched in the face. The line "quality" is catastrophically bad (I'm guessing MS Paint). And apparently, Speed ran over Spritle's hand. And face. But okay, I guess at least I had the episodes. And they do fit on a shelf. (At least I didn't buy this thing.) Now, do collectors like this stuff? Maybe when I was ten I would've been into some of that. I don't know. The toy car was the only one that really had any appeal to me. The rest I just found annoying, because what I really want is a DVD in a normal case, that I can easily get the discs out of when I want to watch them. I don't "get" or like the collector's editions that come in weird cases. I don't want some big, oversized, tin, plastic, cardboard, or wooden thing that I have to find someplace to store. Maybe this is one of the reasons I've largely stopped buying physical copies of movies. I can get a set of movies on iTunes, without the trappings. But for some things... I still want to own physical media. Music, for example. I always buy CDs. I only buy downloaded music when it's the ONLY way I can get a piece of music. I want to own my music, physically, so if the cloud-of-the-week that it's on disappears, I still have it. Same with certain movies or TV series. I have a connection to them, and I want to own them. For recent stuff, like the Marvel movies, I genuinely don't care. They're on TV all the time, and I have them on iTunes (and they're on Disney+ as well), so I can watch them whenever. Or not. I don't have that emotional tie to them. Star Wars, on the other hand (and don't ask "which one"... there's only one movie titled "Star Wars"), is something I've bought multiple copies of over the years. I keep hoping (against hope) that Disney will release a proper version of the original theatrical print. And if they do, I'll buy it again. Even if it comes in a big, giant, plastic Death Star or something. For me, owning the movie on a disc is important. And because Speed Racer was a big part of my childhood, the same applies to that series. Which brings me, longwindedly as usual, to the whole point of this blog entry. By the way - did'ja miss me? Because if you've followed this blog at all, you had to know going into it that this blog entry was going to be a rambling, incoherent mess. Regular readers (or irregular ones) wouldn't expect anything less. You wouldn't want me to be brief and to-the-point would you? Where would be the fun in that? Right. Speed Racer. So, Speed Racer Enterprises lost the rights to distribute/market Speed Racer several years ago, after some legal battles with the original animation studio Tatsunoko. Funimation took on the task of releasing the series on Blu-ray in 2017. Now, I didn't even hear about all of this until just recently. I hadn't searched for the series in years. But I ran across one of my Johnny Lightning Speed Racer cars the other day, and thought, "Hey... I wonder if the series ever came out on Blu-ray?" So I checked Amazon, and well, it had. Thanks, Captain Terror! The complete series was available in a nice, standard Blu-ray case for only $20. So, did I buy it? Well... no. Because they had also put out (sigh...) a Collector's Edition. An "Ultimate" Collection, according to Funimation. In a really big box. How big? Well, we'll get to that. Now, what did this Collector's Edition offer? Not only the complete Speed Racer series... but also the original Japanese version of the series: Mach Go Go Go! Yeah. I had to have that. (Yes, I have the manga. Thanks for asking.) And of course, it wasn't available in normal packaging. You could only get it in this ridiculous, giant-sized Collector's Edition. But it had the bonus content I wanted. Content worth the price of admission. Unfortunately, and predictably, it also included superfluous junk I didn't want: the 1997 remake series (Mach Go Go Go Restart), DVD copies of the Blu-ray content (why??), and a keychain. Oh, and a giant plastic head. Ugh. This thing is huge. It's the size of a bowling ball (note - these are pictures from Funimation, I didn't want to waste the time setting up a space big enough to take pictures of mine). It's well made, I guess. But it's really the stupidest thing I've ever bought. It's huge. And I have no interest in seeing Speed's gaping mouth yawning at me from a shelf (I actually don't have any shelves big enough for this thing). Currently, and forever more, it sits in the box. That huge, huge box. I have to find space in a closet for it somewhere. I suppose there's a keychain in there too, but I haven't looked for it. Now, given the (brace yourselves) $300 !!!!! sticker price for this, you may be thinking I'm insane for having bought this. Well, Amazon is currently selling it for $224. Which is better. But when I ordered it (from Amazon) a couple of weeks ago, for some reason, it was only $109. So that's why I bought it. Totally worth that price for the discs. Despite the stupid head. Besides, the discs themselves actually come in cardboard booklets, that can be removed by taking the back of Speed's head off, and reaching into his skull. Did I mention this is the stupidest thing I've ever bought? Anyway... the episodes themselves look as well as can be expected, for 50+ year-old TV animation. The transfers are clean, and you get to see the series as it was made. Warts and all. In fact, there are some interesting artifacts visible around the edges of the screen, as they shot this on full-frame film, and around the edges you can see unfinished artwork that was meant to be cut off by televisions of the day. I'm glad they didn't mask those out - it's part of the charm of something like this. The titles and end credits still have modern overlays for some reason, but they're more in keeping with the style of the originals. They were clearly created with modern technology though, with little attempt to try to match the look of the original filmed elements. That's disappointing, because someone with just a couple of hours work in After Effects could've easily made them at least appear more authentic. For a Collector's Edition, I'd expect that. As far as bonus content, well, there's Mach Go Go Go and the reboot series. Otherwise, just a single interview with Connie Orr (Trixie). I would've thought there would've been more interviews done over the years, or other archival materials that could've been included. But maybe Speed's brain only had so much space in it. Anyway, I don't regret the purchase, because I got the discs I wanted, and am enjoying watching the series. After an episode or two I'm skipping through the titles and end credits anyway (there's only so many times you can listen to that theme song). I've only looked briefly at the Japanese series - I want to re-watch Speed Racer first, then go through Mach Go Go Go and see what the differences are (I don't think it was heavily edited like some later anime series, but there are certainly dialog changes to "Americanize" the language). It gives me something else to binge watch, which is good. Since the Coronavirus pandemic started, I've been working my way through every episode of This Old House, and I'm 24 seasons into it. I could stand to change things up a little. Well... that took awhile to write. What to do next? I suppose I could do an Artie the Atari episode. I even have one written. And I can guarantee it's the funniest one in over a year! Mainly since I haven't done one in over a year. I think this is the longest stretch without an episode ever. I have a ton of New Old Music I could write about. Which is easily the least popular feature of my blog. So that would seem apropos for a blog that nobody can find anything in anyway. Or maybe it's time for a movie review. Not that I've actually been to the movies since... December. But I'll figure something out. Well, there will be some sort of blog entry. You may not be able to find it. But it'll be here.

Live - RIGHT NOW. The Virtual 2020 CalArts Character Animation Open Show: https://youtu.be/zjXrDox2a08 We didn't have a show in the Spring, and can't meet in person yet. So we're kicking off the fall semester remotely by screening the films online that our students were able to complete over the summer despite the craziness of the Coronavirus pandemic and resulting campus shutdown. Enjoy!

In the last few weeks, I've been working on sprite extraction and insertion scripts for use in animations. As a test case, I made a mosaic of Space Invaders aliens: The animations were compiled from the arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, MSX, NES, and ZX Spectrum versions. How many of these have you played and which is your favorite?

Hello all! I thought I would post a project I've been working on. It's a small animated thing that pays homage to Hideaki Anno's anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion. I was a bit chuffed to learn that they dropped the Frank Sinatra song from the end credits, so I decided to make my own rendition on the Apple II. ? Requires: Apple II Plus or higher, 64KB of RAM (as it runs under ProDOS only). Real hardware tested on: Apple //e (64kB early, with 6502), Apple //e Enhanced (128KB w/ 65c02). It should work on the rest, though I'd love to hear your experiences! Location to download (including source code): Evangelion A.2 You can watch what it does in this video recording (made with AppleWin): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4U1Gg--7JU

Well, that was weird. No, not the movie. My last blog post. Well, not the post, but the way it got posted. It used to be, that when you posted a new blog entry, it would move to the top of the main blog page. But mine didn't. It stayed down at the bottom, right below Eric Ball's latest entry: The weird thing is, I posted my entry on August 10: And Eric had posted his on July 10: And uh... Wait. Why did the blog software make that graphic so big? It's huge!! Give me a minute here. (Several annoying minutes and edits later...) Okay. So, one of the things I hate about high resolution monitors, is that everything arbitrarily scales things to the size they think they "should" be. This includes screenshots in whatever Apple OS I'm using this week. It used to be a pixel was a pixel. Now you're just guessing at what size things may or may not display at. And this brings up another problem with Invision's lousy blog software (in case you're wondering what I'm talking about, hang in there a minute...). You see, for the most part, I link directly to image files I use in my blog, rather than uploading them. This way I can simply replace files in my FTP folder when I want to update something. But not anymore. Now, Invision's stupid blog software cache's its own local version of a linked file. So when I upload a new one, it doesn't change. And it's not my browser cache either, because I cleared that. And I also confirmed this in another browser that I hadn't even logged into AtariAge with. If this looks twice as large as the other one, then you're seeing Invision's stupid caching: Because if you open the actual image link in another window, you'll see the actual size of the file: http://cheeptech.com/misc/blog_pics/july-10.jpg (Here's a screenshot, since this will probably eventually be fixed accidentally by Invision or the cache will randomly expire): In order to update the screenshot to the smaller version, I had to rename, re-upload and replace it. That completely defeats the purpose of linking to the FILE IN THE FIRST PLACE!! (sigh) Yeah, I'm on another Invision rant. You may have missed the last one, because instead of putting that blog entry at the top, it buried it amongst the older entries. Like I was mentioning before. That entry, by the way, was a movie review. But it devolved into a rant about Invision's stupid blog software. But clearly, Invision doesn't care about blogs, because they've now been relegated to a submenu under Apps, rather than having their own link. Thanks, Invision. So, why did my other post get posted out-of-order? Well, if I had to guess, it was probably because I didn't click "Immediately" for "Publish Time". I had saved it while working on it, so the time stamp was a little bit earlier than "Immediately" would've been. Since the blogs no longer list when entries were actually posted, but just show "Latest", I'm guessing the time stamp is screwed-up, or missing, or whatever. So this time, I'll click "Immediately" and see what happens. Why not? should be fun. Anyway, onto the movie review. As with Spider-Man: Far From Home, I actually saw this a few weeks ago while on vacation, but never got around to typing up a review for it. Actually though, I never planned on seeing it in the first place. You see, I'm kind of done with Pixar. And Toy Story. I'm just tired of them. When I saw Toy Story 3, I really, really liked it and... WHAT IS A WEB BROWSER POLL DOING IN MY TOY STORY 3 MOVIE REVIEW?!?! WHAT THE INVISION IS GOING ON HERE?!?!? I did NOT put that in there. Now admittedly, that would've been a pretty funny joke. But I have no idea where that came from!!! Wow. Maybe I need to move my blog. MySpace is still a thing, right? Sheesh. Okay... let's try and finish this. So, I really liked Toy Story 3 when I saw it in theaters. But the weird thing is, I never re-watched it. Whenever it comes on TV, I avoid it. Not ignore - avoid. Why? Well, I'm just kind of tired of those characters. Oversaturated with them. And the movie, while it does have some really funny moments, in hindsight the emotional stuff is all a bit cloying and manipulative now. I still think Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are really good movies (although they're starting to look pretty dated now), but that's because they were still exploring new ideas. But with Toy Story 3, it was the whole unloved/lost/abandoned/Woody-is-all-angsty toy schtick again. But it closed out the series, and that was fine. The toys were in good hands, happy ending, the end. Of course, Disney wasn't going to let it end there. They became sequel-happy. And the sequels have been ridiculously successful, with Toy Story 3, Incredibles 2, and Finding Dory each earning over $1 billion worldwide. In fact, now including Toy Story 4, the only Pixar movies that have cleared a billion dollars worldwide have been sequels. Sure, Pixar has recently said that they won't be doing any more sequels, but don't you believe it. I never bothered seeing Cars 3 or Finding Dory, but even beyond the sequels, I've grown weary of Pixar's original films as well. The Good Dinosaur was a train wreck, Inside Out did nothing for me (and I've never re-watched it), and I didn't think much of Coco either and... wait, WHY IS THERE A YOUTUBE VIDEO IN THE MIDDLE OF MY COCO REVIEW?!?! Oh right... that used to be a link, and Invision arbitrarily decided to turn it into an embedded video. Idiots. You know, writing movie reviews didn't used to be this difficult. Anyway, so... I'm tired of Toy Story, Pixar, blah, blah, blah. But we needed something to go see during vacation, and there was nothing else in the theaters worth seeing (I'd already seen Spider-Man), so we figured Toy Story 4 was well-reviewed enough to justify seeing. And it was okay. It was well-animated. Had some funny scenes. And the new characters: Forky, Ducky and Bunny really need to get their own road-trip movie. Seriously - I'd pay good money to see that. But I'm just tired of Woody and his endlessly repeating need to re-learn some valuable life lesson. It's just worn thin. To the writers' credit, they did come up with an interesting take on the whole "lost toy" idea, but by far the most interesting character in the film was Forky, and they didn't spend nearly enough time delving into what makes him tick. They touch on it here and there, and it makes for some of the best scenes in the film (including a scene during the credits that's almost worth the price of admission), but just as they get into it, it becomes about Woody again. As for the rest of the Toy Story characters, they were effectively relegated to support roles, when they showed up at all. And yes, that includes Buzz. In Toy Story 3, his gimmick was that he was reset and spoke Spanish. In this one, he has another gimmick related to his digitized voice, and given how long the character has been around, it seems he's actually regressed in this film, from where we would expect him to be. They did bring back Bo Peep who had been missing after Toy Story 2, and we get to find out a little bit about what she's been up to. But again, this is Woody's film, and even her story becomes about him. So while she probably has a really interesting story to tell, it becomes more about his reactions to where she is now, than giving her the center stage. It almost seems a little like they're pandering to girls in the audience, without really following through with the character in any meaningful way. Speaking of pandering, that's the only way I can describe the ending of the villain's story in this film. It was shlocky and lazy. It's like someone saw an early Pixar movie, and decided they wanted to copy the feeling they got from watching it without understanding how it was accomplished. As an aside, there was just some weird stuff in this movie, too. Previously, the toys didn't impact the world around them much or interact with people directly (except Woody's line to Sid at the end of the first film), and the movie even alludes to those being rules that aren't allowed to be broken in a couple of really funny scenes with Ducky and Bunny. But then near the end of the film, the toys completely throw those rules out the window in a really big way. It just doesn't fit in with the established Toy Story universe, and it seems like a lazy solution to a story problem the writers found themselves in. Toy Story 4 would've been a better film if it were used as a vehicle to pass the torch to the next generation of characters (as mentioned, Forky, Ducky and Bunny were standouts), but this was more like Toy Story 2.5, than Toy Story 4. It's not that it's a bad film, but it missed its best opportunities to be something new and different. Toy Story 4 gets a 6/10. But in hindsight, I'll probably look back at it and think I should've given it a 4 or 5. That always happens when I go back and look at old movie reviews. I often score a movie I've seen in the theater higher than I otherwise would, probably because the theatrical experience enhances my perception of the film. Maybe having waited a few weeks to write this review will have tempered that somewhat, but these are pretty-much the thoughts I had when I was leaving the theater. Maybe 5.5 would be better.

In case you're wondering.... I started writing this a couple of weeks ago under the title: "Temporary title". I got used to it, and don't feel like coming up with something else. Every year around this time, for the past... well, it's been awhile, and I'm too lazy to look through my old blog posts... we'll just say several years, I've posted a recap of the Character Animation shows I edit together as part of my job at CalArts. Some random website thinks we're one of the best animation schools in the (insert region here)! And so does Variety! Because if you're going to make a choice of the college you're going to attend to determine the path you're going to follow for the rest of your life, the first resource you think of checking is Variety! (Because they're boffo.) Right. So anyway, here's last year's blog post. Basically, it's the same thing this year, with a few little changes. First, the number of films plummeted this year. From our record high of 192 last year, all the way down to 190. Circle the wagons! We're dooooomed!! Seriously though... I long for the good ol' days when we only produced around 160 films per year. Two years ago. Ah.... memories. Good times. Good times... This year, the Open Show was on April 27th. That's when we ran everything the students turn in. Despite fewer films, the length of the show actually went up by over an hour. 8 hours, and 7 minutes of films. And (unlike Avengers: Endgame) we actually threw a few intermissions in there, so the whole show ran just over 9 hours, start to finish. I'm pleased to report though, that the show went off without a hitch, or any reported deaths. Canon also generously loaned us one of their amazing WUX7000Z laser projectors. The picture quality was absolutely amazing, especially for being thrown over 100 feet to a 20-foot-wide screen, in a space with terrible ambient light issues. The picture was vivid, bright, and had terrific black levels. I didn't take any photos at the show this year, because I was too tired by the time the show rolled around to remember to do so. This despite shaving some 13 hours off of my usual 90 hour work week, thanks to having my counterpart in the Experimental Animation program help me go through and check specs and audio levels on the submitted films (thanks Michael!). Anyway, once that show was done, we moved onto our second show on May 8th - The Producers' Show. This is a faculty-curated "best of" that we show to the animation industry. This year, because the films were a little bit longer, we ended up at only 19 films for an hour-and-a-half show. That's only 10% of the submitted films. Pretty rarified air. This year, we were back at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills (our first time since 2012). This is the theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Yeah - the Oscars. Now, this isn't the theater where they hold the Oscars telecast, but this is where they do a lot of industry screenings and events. So it is a nice theater. We had about 730 people there (not 900, as reported elsewhere), which is about 100 more than we can usually stuff into the theaters we've been in before. But the Directors Guild of America (our usual haunt in recent years) is undergoing renovations, so we had to move. The Goldwyn itself had been renovated recently, and is currently probably the best screening facility in Los Angeles. The sound and picture were incredible. Best of all, the theater projectionist there complimented us on our DCP, and said, "If we were putting it together, that's exactly how we would've done it." Now that's some pretty sweet validation. (We're using DCP-o-matic, which is the best solution we've found to date. And it has the added benefit of being free.) Here's a write up on CalArts' blog about this year's Producers' Show. And here's a write up that Animation Magazine copied from the write up on CalArts' blog. Something not mentioned in either article, nor shown in the dearth of photos available for it, was one of the coolest things to happen that evening. Bob Persichetti, CalArts alum and Oscar-winning co-director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the Guest of Honor at the show. Usually, the Guest of Honor gives a motivational speech talking about their work, their time at CalArts, and encourages students to go out and change the world through the power of cartoons. Then they announce our annual awards given to three of the student films as selected by the faculty, Vimeo, and the students themselves. Then the students come up, get handed the award and are congratulated by the guest of honor, and make acceptance speeches in front of some 600 people. But Oscar don't play that. You see, there's a rule at the Goldwyn. You can't hand out any awards there. The only awards that can be handed out at that theater, are Oscars. I think that's where they hand out the Oscars that aren't shown on the main Oscars award telecast. Anyway, when we were there in 2012, we cut out that entire part of the program. The Guest of Honor came up and spoke, but we did nothing about the awards. The students couldn't go up and make any speeches, we didn't announce them, nothing. We just put simple title cards before each film, noting what they'd won (they were also listed in the program). At the time, that's all we thought we could do. This time, we did a little more digging, and asked how fine we could actually split those hairs. As it turned out, the theater was very accommodating. We could introduce the winners, congratulate them, and even let them do their speeches - as long as it was all in the past tense. "So-and-so won the award for such-and-such". We couldn't hand out the awards, but we could say they'd already won them, and they could do their speeches, get congratulated by Bob and the whole bit. So that was pretty cool. But it's not what was coolest. You see, Bob had his own plan. Unbeknownst to anyone. Bob did his speech, introduced the first student winner, and as the student came up to the podium, Bob reached into a bag, and handed them... his Oscar. Each student, in turn, got to hold a real Oscar. Bob's own Best Animated Feature Oscar, which he won for directing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. How's that for motivation? How much trouble we got into for that... I have no idea. The Oscar people take their Oscar stuff very, very seriously. One of the rules they have, is that we can't have any images of the Oscar in any of the official photos for the event. Now, this is already tough enough given that there are two huge Oscar statues flanking the stage. But now, every photo we have of the students on stage also has an actual Oscar in it. So apparently, we can't use any of them. Fortunately, tons of people had cellphones, and were taking their own photos. So I'm pretty sure there are photos out there somewhere. So then... on with the cartoons! As always, many of our student films are posted on Vimeo: 2019 CalArts Character Animation films on Vimeo And of course, I've posted quite a few of them here as well. (Note: Some language may be NSFW.) First up: the films of the 2019 Producers' Show (note: some films may not be online, or may become password protected at some point): 2019 Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize Winner: Walter Lorenzo Fresta https://vimeo.com/335248138 2019 Vimeo Award Winner: Dead End Victoria Vincent https://vimeo.com/333006149 2019 Peers' Pick Winner: Kukuru Julia Rodrigues https://vimeo.com/335258250 Spring Herald Curie Lu https://vimeo.com/332805663 The Immortal Alex Avagimian https://vimeo.com/333447138 Birdboy Sanjna Bharadwaj https://vimeo.com/333239998 Do-ji-le? Cindy Yang https://vimeo.com/333924016 Chapter One: The Party Ty Wilson https://vimeo.com/335309919 Ghost Hunt Valerie Kao https://vimeo.com/333475085 Tummi Toys Andrea Reyes https://vimeo.com/306739628 Everything is Fine Jason Gabriel Ticket to Limbo Sinai Hwang https://vimeo.com/332752873 hair today, gone tomorrow Rob Gilliam https://vimeo.com/282356860 Witches And Their Worries Anchi Shen https://vimeo.com/333915937 Taku & Mama Clarisse Chua https://vimeo.com/335255004 After School Hanna Kim https://vimeo.com/334545833 A Day in the Life Anna Lee https://vimeo.com/333897471 French Fly Liam LoPinto https://vimeo.com/334343644 Little Kevin Kevin Alters https://vimeo.com/335279733 Beyond the Producers' Show, here are some of my favorite films from the Open Show: 888 Tours Jennifer Nye https://vimeo.com/333014099 At the Zoo Lindsay Scanlan https://vimeo.com/329716206 Campsite Madison Stubbs https://vimeo.com/333706673 Evil Villain! Lee Witz https://vimeo.com/333013400 Film2019 James Heelis https://vimeo.com/333452829 Framed! Aya Kneitner https://vimeo.com/333028565 Home Erin McDermott https://vimeo.com/332550451 Hungry Yaou Chen https://vimeo.com/334781618 Lights On Rayna Buxton https://vimeo.com/333212019 On The Road Siti Lu https://vimeo.com/332341786 Room for Two Fernanda Haiabe https://vimeo.com/332911361 Sonder Jonathan Chen https://vimeo.com/332925474 Sword Jingqi Zhang https://vimeo.com/330844233 Visitors Chalky Wong https://vimeo.com/332991454

I'm not even sure Ralph Breaks the Internet is still in theaters. I saw this back in November, but only now have had the time to write up a short review for it. Actually, I've got three movies to write reviews for, hence the need to keep them all short. What do you mean, you'll "believe it when you see it"? I don't always write needlessly long-winded, rambling, circumlocutory reviews. And yes, I did look that last one up - I felt there would be additional humor if I made a counterpoint to my own statement within the statement itself. Padding the beginning of this out implies to the reader, "Here he goes again" when in fact, I do plan on making these three reviews more concise. Mostly because I don't feel like writing long reviews today. I'm afraid this newfound (and temporary) brevity has less to do with giving readers a break, and more to do with my own laziness. The point is... I'll be brief. Right. So on with the first one. I really loved the first Wreck-It Ralph movie. Mostly because it was a loving tribute to video games, and more importantly, video arcades, which are now all-but-gone, and were the places I hung out with my friends in high school and college. It was a great nostalgia trip, and a funny movie. I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet at work, which may seem odd if you haven't read some of my reviews before (I work here), but being closely tied to the animation industry, we get special screenings there from time to time in our theater. In this case, co-director and alumnus Rich Moore was there to do a Q&A and introduce the film. Seeing an animated film with 120+ animation students is the ideal audience, since if it's a good film, their reactions are going to be really strong because of their level of appreciation for the work. That was the case here. They cheered, laughed, applauded, and really seemed to love the movie (particularly Gal Gadot's character). Being in that room, it's hard for their enthusiasm to not be infectious. But while I liked much of the film, a lot of it just sort of fell flat for me. It's certainly got its funny moments (including some choice parodies of Disney itself), but I just didn't connect with it like I did the first film, or as much as the students did. The reason? Well, this film wasn't made for me. It's made for the current generation who have grown up on (and are immersed in) the internet and its culture. Even though I've been on the internet since 1994, I don't live there. I'm not into social media. I don't keep up on memes. I don't do online gaming. So while I understood the humor in the film - I didn't connect with it. The students loved it. But I think the real problem I had with the film goes deeper than being generational. Wreck-It Ralph was a movie about Ralph being on a journey of personal growth. He had a character arc where he significantly changed over the course of the film. He learned what his true worth was, and went from selfish to selfless. Other characters had arcs too - Felix became more understanding of Ralph's feelings, Vanellope learned her true potential and realized her dream of being a racer, the Nicelanders learned to be accepting of Ralph, Calhoun moved past the hurt of her previous relationship and found love with Felix. The movie was packed with character development. Not so much in the sequel though. The movie focused almost exclusively on Ralph and Vanellope and their quest to go find something on the internet. It wasn't driven by character development, but rather a MacGuffin. And even though there is some character development with Vanellope, it's all very superficial. As a character, she doesn't really change. She goes through a journey of discovery of sorts, but it pales in comparison to the one she already went through in the first film. Ralph is largely wasted in the sequel, as, if anything, his character actually regresses in order to have some sort of arc forced upon him in order to learn something by the end of the movie. For the most part, he's just used as a point of ridicule where he ends up involved in various internet memes to propel the main quest along. Felix and Calhoun are completely wasted, get very little screen time, and are given almost nothing to do. It's not that Ralph Breaks the Internet is a bad film... it does have some really funny moments, and is generally entertaining and visually impressive. The ending is, frankly, sappy and overly sentimental. Considering the effort that they put into the climax of the movie, I had hoped they'd find a more exciting way to resolve it than what they did. Ralph Breaks the Internet is, if anything, a missed opportunity. Or rather, several. One thing they really missed, was an opportunity to bring in Tron as a side character. After all, Disney owns Tron. The arcade game makes a brief cameo, and Tron himself is called out by name, but seriously - couldn't they get Bruce Boxleitner to come in and even read a few lines for the movie? How much fun would it have been for Tron to be the straight-man in this film, accompanying Ralph and Vanellope through the internet? Discovering that outside of his game, his light disc only has the properties of a Frisbee? It would be a great running joke as his useless Frisbee repeatedly, harmlessly bounced off things, and failed to get them out of several jams. Finally, Tron would get fed up, and bring something over from his game that really worked: a tank! "I fight for the USER!" Go get 'em, Tron! (sigh) But the biggest missed opportunity, in my opinion, was to make the move about Felix. From the very first time I saw Wreck-It Ralph, one line stood out in Ralph's opening monologue that immediately jumped out at me as a film that I wanted to see: "So yeah, naturally, the guy with the name Fix It Felix is the good guy. He's nice enough as good guys go - definitely fixes stuff really well. But uh, if you've got a magic hammer from your father, how hard can it be?" That's the story I wanted to see. How did that happen? What's Felix's relationship with his dad? Does a Fix It Felix Sr. game get rolled into the arcade? Was Fix-It Felix Jr. more popular? Was Sr.'s game a flop? Is Felix embarrassed about his dad? Is his dad resentful about his son's success? Or was Sr. the popular game, and Jr. was only popular at Litwak's? What is the quest that they need to go on? Are they mending their relationship? Or maybe the game arrives without Sr. in it, and they have to go on a quest to find him for the game to be restored. There are so many possibilities here for really good stories, and Felix's story is the one that needs to be told - everyone else had their backstory told in the first film. Then Ralph and Vanellope could be the ones going on the side quest this time. A huge, missed opportunity. All that said (and yes, this counts as a "short" review, relatively speaking), Ralph Breaks the Internet was a bit of a disappointment to me, despite the enthusiasm of the audience I was with. Wait for it to show up on Netflix. Or the Disney Channel. Or rent it. Maybe you'll like it more than me, if you're more immersed in the internet than I am. Ralph Breaks the Internet gets a 6/10.

When I first heard Sony was making an animated Spider-Man film, my first thought was, "Ugh. Really? Have they learned nothing from their past failures with Spider-Man? Why can't they just leave creative control of the character to Marvel, and take whatever money Marvel gives them?" Then, when I heard it would feature the Miles Morales version of the character (from the Ultimate Universe), I was even less interested. Even though I knew people really liked that character, I had stopped reading comics some 20 years before the character was created, so I had no connection to him. Peter Parker, as far as I was concerned, was Spider-Man. Then, after the second or so trailer, I thought, "This has a pretty cool look to it." Better than the typical animated comic book fare. Early positive reviews, and the fact that one of the co-directors is an alumnus from where I work, sold me on the idea of seeing it. So while I was on vacation over our winter break, I did. Now, I almost saw it in 3D. But 99% of the time, 3D is less-than-impressive to me. So since there were more 2D showings nearby, we saw it in 2D. In hindsight, maybe I should've seen it in 3D. But either way, I'm glad I saw it. Because Sony Pictures Animation (not to be confused with their live-action arm who made their other Spider-Man films), absolutely knocked it out-of-the-park. Into the Spider-Verse is a lot of fun. It also has totally unique, and at times breathtaking animation. It's visual style is incredible. It probably looks great in 3D. It's probably one of the few films that really could. The animation is difficult to describe - it's mostly CG animation, but with some traditional animation, and unique texture mapping that gives it a very distinct, illustrative look. This doesn't look like your typical rubbery/plasticky CG animation. This embraces its medium of origin: comic books. Not just embraces, but relishes, basks in, and fully celebrates comic books, using textures reminiscent of Ben Day dots, but in a way that works in CG, rather than on a flat, printed page. Besides the visual look, the animation itself is stunning. There's probably some performance capture mixed in there, but everything is so nicely stylized it never intrudes. There's also just some straight-up cartoony animation as well, and somehow, everything merges together into a cohesive whole. It's unlike any other animated film (or film, for that matter) that I've seen. Visuals are all well and good, but what makes this movie work, or outright shine, are the characters. Marvel made its name because when Stan Lee created characters, he brought to life characters that were interesting as people. Not just as superheroes. The people behind the masks made the characters compelling and relatable, and that's what Sony Pictures Animation has captured here so well. The film centers around Miles Morales and his origin as (one) Spider-Man, and if this is how his character is in the comic books, then I can see why people like him so much. He's his own Spider-Man, with his own family, backstory, issues, and apart from a similar set of powers, isn't derivative of Peter Parker's Spider-Man. They're as different as two characters, or two people, can be. Bound by a common accident, but otherwise completely different. The basic story of Into the Spider-Verse centers around Miles, and other Spider-characters (including Peter Parker's Spider-Man) who are brought together to fight a common foe (of course). Without going into detail, suffice it to say they're all very different characters than the Spider-Man you're used to. Some are more serious, some are played more for laughs, but each are entertaining and engaging in their own way. Stylistically, they're all very different too, as if the movie knows they were all pulled out of different genres of comic books, and is perfectly okay with that. The animation styles for each matches who they are. Given how different they are, it probably shouldn't work. In a live-action film it would be a hard sell. But in an animated film, you can get away with it. Everything is blended perfectly. Cartoons are a wonderful thing. There's great action, great humor, and genuine heartfelt moments. Some of the Spider-characters have less to do than others, but that's okay. The filmmakers knew who to focus on, and when. There's nothing wrong with having some comedy relief, and it's far better when a film like this uses it appropriately - as a break in the action, to lighten a moment, or just for sheer entertainment value - rather than overdoing it and detracting from a main character. Or worse still, using a sidekick as a crutch when the main characters are weak (I'm looking at you - Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Bug's Life, and more other animated films than I can count). The voice casting and acting throughout is excellent. There's not a weak link in the bunch (and Nicolas Cage was a particularly inspired choice). And the post-credits scene is my favorite so far of any movie. Period. Top that, Avengers: Endgame. I don't want to go into any more detail about the movie, other than to say go see it. Set your expectations aside, and just go. It's fun. The animation is a rare, unique treat. The characters are compelling. I'd recommend seeing it in a theater, for the sheer visual experience of it. Maybe even in 3D - and I rarely recommend that. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse stands on its own, apart from any other superhero film, animated or otherwise. If you love comic books, see it. If you love animation, see it. If you just want to kill a couple of hours with a bucket of popcorn, see it. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse gets a 10/10.

Well, I've voted. So instead of sitting at home watching insipid coverage of the results, I've decided to catch Wreck-It Ralph in 3-D. Normally I avoid 3-D screenings, but since this is true 3-D and not some half-baked conversion I figured I'd fork over the extra money for the privilege of wearing an extra pair of glasses over my own for a couple of hours. Speaking of forks and half-baked, at the moment I'm at Johnny Rocket's, waiting for my dinner to arrive. It should be along any moment now, so I'll pick this up again once I'm in the theater. _________________ Well, so much for dinner. They were pretty swamped, which probably explained the delay and less-than-piping-hot food. But now I'm in the theater, and with about 20 minutes to go, I literally have the place to myself. I would have expected at least a few other early people, but this is strange, especially for an 8:00 PM showing. But it is a Tuesday night, election night, and Wreck-It Ralph isn't exactly Skyfall, y'know (which they're already selling tickets for). For animated films I try and avoid early shows to avoid kids, so I considered hitting the 10:35 PM show instead, but thought that most people would be hanging around home watching election coverage. I just didn't expect it to work this well! (15 minutes to go... still the only one here.) So I guess I might as well waste some more time typing. This is the first significant typing I've done on my iPhone 5, and I'm just not used to the different width yet (landscape mode). I keep hitting the wrong keys, and auto-correct hasn't quite figured that out yet. Guess I need more practice, but I rarely text. 10 minutes to go. Still just me. Maybe if I ask nicely they'll just start the movie now. Whenever I go to movies (usually with others) we try to guess how many trailers they're going to run. Since I'm by myself (quite literally) I'll just say... six. Should be quite a few holiday movies, maybe one or two for next summer, and inevitably, several I've never heard of. Maybe seven... nah. Already said six. I'm hoping Ralph is a good movie. Generally I've heard good things about it from people at Disney. There's a positive vibe about the film at the studio I haven't seen in a long time. It made good money at the box office its opening weekend. Good thing they got it out before Skyfall hit. Yeah, so... still just me. About one minute before showtime, so time to post this and shut off my phone. Not that there's anyone here to complain. _________________ (A few hours pass...) That was a fun film! I wasn't sure what to expect with Wreck-It Ralph, since the trailers seemed to be pointing the film in a pretty obvious direction. However I'm pleased to say that the film took me in directions I wasn't expecting, and the film played out much differently than how I thought was going to. The movie takes place in a video arcade that's been in business for over 30 years (so you know that this is something that can only happen in the movies…), and centers around the denizens of the games that occupy the arcade. In this case, the game is Fix-It Felix, Jr., a mix of Donkey Kong and Crazy Climber, whose antagonist is Wreck-It Ralph, a giant of a character whose job for those 30 years is to wreck the same building over and over. When Ralph tires of his lot in life, we get to follow him into Game Central Station - a massive power strip all of the arcade games are plugged into (again… try not too hard to think about it - just enjoy the ride). Here, after hours, all of the characters of the games can mix and mingle. It's also where we learn some of the rules that apply to this world - you're not allowed to violate your programming, jump to other games, and if you die outside of your game - you die forever. No extra lives. We also find characters who had their games unplugged, and now wander Game Central Station homeless. At the same time it's both funny and wistful, especially for those of us who lived through the heyday and crash of arcades in the early 80's. There's a passage of time montage showing the games changing over the years, and I couldn't help but wish I could stop time and go visit that arcade when some of my favorite games flashed by. And oh, the games! I lost count of the games I recognized. There were a number of fictitious games there for the purposes of the film, but plenty of real games as well. And while I could nitpick about some of the cabinet artwork not being dead-on (I'm looking at you, Frogger), I suspect that was dictated more by the license holders than a design decision of Disney's, since they so often got so many other things right. Now, if it was just a nostalgic walk through an arcade, it wouldn't be much of a film. But the movie goes beyond that, and creates a fun world where video game characters come alive, and those characters are the heart of the film. Ralph's journey takes on unexpected twists, and along the way draws in characters from his own game and others as well, most notably Vanellope von Schweetz, voiced by Sarah Silverman. She's a character from the game Sugar Rush (think San Francisco Rush but with everything made out of candy), who, like Ralph, has become alienated from her own game. Their relationship is a lot of fun, and really makes the film work. It's a rare Disney film where the central characters are the most interesting, but they've managed to pull it off here. Felix (Jack McBrayer) is also a lot of fun with his "aww shucks" Richie Cunningham-esque naiveté, as is Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch), a tough-talking space marine from a modern day first-person shooter. They manage to mix and match these characters from different eras of videogames very nicely, with Felix's characters often moving in very stilted, abrupt poses, and making the different videogame worlds all look unique, yet still believable as being somehow connected. The visual design of the film is first-rate. There's a wealth of detail, especially in Sugar Rush, and more candy-related puns than you could shake a Pixy Stix at. The characters are well designed and animated (particularly those in Sugar Rush), and they managed to do a good job of bringing some classic 2-D videogame characters into the 3-D world. The film is a visual treat, as you get the sci-fi world of Hero's Duty, the candy-overload of Sugar Rush, and countless nods to video games, characters, 8-bit artwork, and more. The best way I can describe it, is that Wreck-It Ralph is a love-letter to video games. There's a definite air of nostalgia to it, and countless details that long-time gamers will appreciate. There are a ton of moments where you'll be going back and freeze-framing the Blu-ray disc in order to pick out details of many scenes and set pieces in the film. There are so many fun touches in the film that to spill any one of them here would just spoil the fun. So go see the film and keep your eyes peeled. I plan on seeing it again, and I rarely do that anymore. And be sure to stay all the way through the credits for one final video game treat. The stereoscopic 3-D worked very well, in that it simply worked and wasn't obtrusive or annoying. 3-D movies tend to "flatten out" for me as I watch them, where I'm less aware of the 3-D as the movie goes along. Maybe that's just me, but I think that's how 3-D should work - where we just take it for granted. It shouldn't "jump out" at you, anymore than anything else in real life does. It should help define space and depth, and that's it. So from that standpoint, I thought it was just fine. The end credits were particularly effective in 3-D, however, because of their design. I can't say Wreck-It Ralph gains anything by being in 3-D, but it doesn't lose anything either. So I guess that's a recommendation of sorts. Maybe I'll see it in 2-D next time. Showing ahead of Wreck-It Ralph was the new Disney short film Paperman. This is really an extraordinary little short film, and more in keeping with a lot of the short films I see at work than anything you might expect from Disney. This worked very well in 3-D, as it was an interesting mix of CG and traditional animation, and the added depth at times was very well integrated into the film. My only gripe is that there was a fake film or paper grain applied to the whole thing which "floated" over the image the whole time, so it was like watching it through a slightly dirty window whenever my eyes focused at that level. But that was a minor gripe - it's a very cool short film. Probably would bore little kids to tears though. But I really applaud Disney for stepping back into make an interesting short for the sake of animation as an art form, rather than just trying to make something funny or commercial. (And for what it's worth, it is funny, but in a sophisticated way.) Anyway, go see Wreck-It Ralph. If you like videogames, especially arcade games, you owe it to yourself to see it. It's just a really fun, neat film to watch. There are some genuinely funny moments in it, and some heartfelt ones as well. Good characters, good animation, good fun. Also - try to see it with an audience. Only three other people were in the theater with me, and although it made for a nice, private screening, it would've been more fun with a bunch of other people laughing along. Wreck-It Ralph gets a 9/10. Oh, and there were seven trailers. Including one for this train-wreck-in-the-making. Ick. Seriously... does this look good to anybody?

Other would say, Santa brought that. But come on, how old are you? badapple.zip Only one year after the jaguar version (http://atariage.com/forums/topic/273595-bad-apple/) but only 1/10 the size

Hey all, I tried to spend the weekend learning the basics (ha!) of IntyBasic. And what better way to learn for a "retro" console than to make a PONG clone? So I made a very rough PONG clone called "PONGadelic" to learn: Simple sprite definition and rendering. Controller input and translating input to sprite movement. Simple collision detection. How to handle color-switching on the Inty. I've attached the BAS and ROM files for your perusal. The PONGadelic_title.BAS simple renders the classic title screen (adapted from the SDK's classic title screen example - thanks!). So down to my questions - I've got the Inty in ColorStack mode: MODE SCREEN_COLOR_STACK, STACK_BLACK, STACK_CYAN, STACK_BROWN, STACK_YELLOW 'I have no idea how to use anything after STACK_BLACK BORDER BORDER_BLACK This results in my entire play field being BLACK, which is what I want for now. Great. But say, after either player scores a point, I want to change the whole play field to the next color in the stack - that is everything that was STACK_BLACK should now be STACK_CYAN. I was not able to figure out how to accomplish this. Is there some sort of "advance color stack to next color" command? I saw something about setting $2000 but I'm not sure how or where to do that. I don't want to change the color of a sprite or printed object; I want to make the entire play field a new color. Second question - I have a Ball object (SPRITE 6) that I want to animate in a simple, back-and-forth kind of deal. I have two sprites loaded into GRAM for this purpose; SPR03 and SPR04. SPRITE 6,ballX+HIT+VISIBLE,ballY+ZOOMY2,SPR03 + ballColor 'this is where Id like to animate the ball, (i.e. change to SPR04 for X frames, wait X frames, then change back to SPR03). My assumption is we need some kind of counter that switches the line from using SPR03 to SPR04 every X frames, then starts over and switches back to SPR03 after X frames elapse again - but I struggled with how to implement this. When I had counters swapping the sprites, I ran into collision detection issues. Final question - WAITs - I don't really understand when I should (and shouldn't) be using them. I understand that certain things need to "settle" sometimes, or you can only do certain operations once every "cycle"... but I'm kind of lost . Besides those (probably obvious!) questions, PONGadelic is a totally functional albeit rough PONG clone! If you feel like trying it out, here's how it works: Classic PONG - use your paddle to bounce the ball and prevent it from going out the back of your side. Left Controller - Left Side; Right Controller - Right Side. Player who just gave up a point gets to "serve" the ball using any of the Side Buttons (serving merely sends the ball in a random direction from the center). When the game first starts, Left Player gets to "serve". First player to 9 points wins the game. Walls, Paddles, and Ball have a random color during each round of the game (hence PONGadelic). Thanks in advance for your help! J. Lewis pongadelic_title.bas pongadelic.bas constants.bas pongadelic.rom

It's that time of the year again! Or rather, it was. I'm now in recovery-mode, after living through our two student Character Animation shows at CalArts. This is last year's entry, in case you haven't been following along. The first one, on April 21st, was the Open Show. Every student can submit whatever film they want that they've created during the school year. Or films. Some students make more than one. During the fall semester, some students make a one-week film as part of their classes. In November, students have their own 48-hour film event, where they get together, pick a theme, and everyone makes their own film in just 48 hours. These are in addition to their principal films each student will make during the school year. Creating their own films, every year, is one of the things that makes CalArts unique. Most other animation schools either have students work on group projects, or they just do assignments, and not actual, finished, independent films. What this means, is our students end up learning the whole process of making an animated short film. They become filmmakers - not just animators, or storyboard artists, or character designers, or visual development artists. They learn the whole thing. They're creators, writers, directors, performers and producers. They work with composers, voice actors, sound designers and other collaborators. They learn compositing, editing, sound design, effects, 2D, CG... it's all touched on. With almost 170 students, that means we have a lot of films. This year, we had 192. I think they're trying to kill me. That's twenty-five more films than last year, which itself was a record. The show ran 7 hours and 1 minute, not including intermissions. And it's my job to edit everything together into a show, and turn our Main Gallery on campus into a movie theater for 350 people to watch it all over the course of a very long afternoon. It takes me about 90 hours over the course of a week to put all of that together. But there's nothing quite as rewarding as watching the students watch each others' films. It's the most enthusiastic audience anyone could hope for, and after graduating, few will ever get that sort of experience again. Sure, they'll get far more online views than there were people at the show, but nothing beats the experience of having a live audience wildly cheering, laughing, or applauding your film. The Open Show. Yes... people actually sit on plastic folding chairs watching cartoons for over seven hours. Last week, on May 2nd, we had our Producers' Show. This is a pared-down, faculty-juried selection of films from the year. This year there were 22 of them, running about 1 hour and 20 minutes. We had so many good films this year, we probably could have made a second Producers' Show with the ones that didn't make the final cut. As much as the Open Show is a CalArts event, the Producers' Show is an industry one. We rent out the Director's Guild of America (DGA) theater in Hollywood, and pack the place out with over 600 people, most of which are from the animation industry. The list of sponsors who help foot the bill include Cartoon Network, Disney (Feature and TV), Dreamworks (Feature and TV), Pixar, Fox, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros., Sony, Netflix and Vimeo. And that's only about half of them. New CalArts President - Ravi Rajan - opens the Producers' Show. Photo by Rafael Hernandez. The reason for all the hoopla is because of the track record of so many of our alumni. Because we teach them to be independent, creative-thinking filmmakers, they tend to work their way to the top creative positions in the industry. To date, they've created over two-dozen animated TV series, including: Adventure Time (Pen Ward) Dexter's Laboratory (Genndy Tartakovsky) Eek! The Cat (Savage Steve Holland) Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends (Craig McCracken) Gravity Falls (Alex Hirsch) My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Lauren Faust) Regular Show (J. G. Quintel) Samurai Jack (Genndy Tartakovsky) Star vs. The Forces of Evil (Daron Nefcy) Star Wars: Clone Wars (first series) (Genndy Tartakovsky) The Fairly Oddparents (Butch Hartman) The PowerPuff Girls (Craig McCracken) Tripping the Rift (Chris Moeller) Wander Over Yonder (Craig McCracken) We Bare Bears (Daniel Chong) And many more. These are series created by our alumni - not just ones they've worked on. Episodes of these and other series that have been written or directed by our alumni number in the hundreds if not thousands by now. The Simpsons, Spongebob Squarepants, King of the Hill, Phineas and Ferb, and countless others have our students' influence all over them. Beyond television, there have been almost 130 feature films directed by our alumni (and those of the Experimental Animation Program), with more on the way this year, including: The Incredibles 2, Hotel Transylvania 3, The Grinch, Wreck-It Ralph 2 and Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse. Here's just a small handful: Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (Tim Burton) Better Off Dead… (Savage Steve Holland) Beetlejuice (Tim Burton) Batman (Tim Burton) The Little Mermaid (John Musker, Ron Clements) Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise) Aladdin (John Musker, Ron Clements) The Lion King (Rob Minkoff (co-director)) Toy Story (John Lasseter) Mulan (Tony Bancroft) A Bug's Life (Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter) Tarzan (Chris Buck, Kevin Lima) Toy Story 2 (Ash Brannon, John Lasseter) Stuart Little (Rob Minkoff) Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter) Lilo & Stitch (Chris Sanders) Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton) Shrek 2 (Conrad Vernon, Kelly Asbury) The Incredibles (Brad Bird) Madagascar (Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath) Surf's Up (Ash Brannon, Chris Buck) Ratatouille (Brad Bird) Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne) WALL-E (Andrew Stanton) Up (Pete Docter) Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton) Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Thor Freudenthal) How to Train Your Dragon (Chris Sanders) Megamind (Tom McGrath) Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird) Brave (Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman) Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsky) Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore) Frozen (Chris Buck (co-director)) The Book of Life (Jorge R. Gutierrez) Big Hero 6 (Don Hall (co-director)) The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (Mike Mitchell, Paul Tibbitt) Inside Out (Pete Docter) Minions (Kyle Balda (co-director)) Zootopia (Rich Moore (co-director)) Finding Dory (Andrew Stanton (co-director)) The Secret Life of Pets (Yarrow Cheney (co-director)) Moana (John Musker, Ron Clements) Coco (Adrian Molina (co-director)) This article is about a year out-of-date, but it gives you some idea about why the studios are so interested in us. It also links to an infographic showing more of the film titles. Now, the reason I know all of this stuff, is because I'm the one who compiles all of that movie data. I started doing it out of curiosity, then our administration caught wind of it, and decided to pay me to keep the list updated. Maybe they don't have the internet in their offices... Anyway, as of January this year, our worldwide box-office total had exceeded 43 billion dollars. Let me put that into a little perspective for you... If CalArts were its own film franchise, we would have out-earned all MCU, DCEU, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movies, combined. In fact, we have four more billion-dollar earning films on our list, than DC does in its entire history. (Of course, they haven't had any recently. ) All of that box office revenue doesn't translate directly into truckloads of money for CalArts, unfortunately. But as long as the studios keep hiring our students so they can pay back the ridiculous student loans they have to take out to go here, then that's the important thing. It does translate to some nice press for the Producers' Show, however. Animation Magazine attended and did a nice write-up. Variety previewed the show, featuring our Guest of Honor: alumna and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes; and then followed up with a really nice review of the show afterwards. I'd especially encourage you to read that last one from Variety. It's pretty cool, and it mentions one of my favorite films from this year, which I'll get to in a minute. Related to all of this, a couple of our students have a documentary in the works about the history of the Character Animation program. You can see an early trailer for it here. And if you want to see the history of how CalArts itself was founded, well, let the fine folks at Disney tell you all about it. And no... we didn't end up across the freeway from the Hollywood Bowl. Sure would've made it easier to get to the DGA though... Right. So on with the films! You can see many of the films from this year on our 2018 Vimeo channel. Below are the films from the 2018 Producers' Show, in the order that they were screened. After that are some additional favorites of mine from the Open Show. The film I wanted to call attention to is the second one: Dennis the Dinosaur. This is one of the films mentioned in the Variety article. The filmmaker - Gabby Capili - created a brilliantly funny parody of legendary animation pioneer Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. McCay toured Gertie on the vaudeville circuit, playing animation of a dinosaur projected onto a screen onstage "responding" to his commands. After awhile, McCay stopped doing the live performances, and his film was shown in movie theaters with a live-action intro instead. Here's the film with an edited-down version of the intro: https://vimeo.com/23059359 Gabby's film was one of the winners of this year's Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize. This is a faculty-juried prize for the top-ranked film of the year. This year, two films tied and both won the award - the other being another favorite of mine: Anchi Shen's Barry. (We also have an award that Vimeo chooses, and one that the students select - the Peers' Pick, both seen below.) Gabby quoted Winsor McCay during her acceptance speech, which was certainly appropriate for her film, and not unexpected. But she quoted someone else that I certainly wasn't expecting - me. I never thought of myself as being all that quoteworthy. The reason she quoted me, is because earlier in the year she asked me if she could submit eleven films to the Open Show. I answered her, "Gabby, you can submit anything you want to the Open Show." That's what she quoted. That's why it's called the Open Show. And in fact, she did submit eleven films (basically, they were short chapters of a longer film - linked below - that she wanted interspersed throughout the show). Then she submitted a twelfth film - Dennis the Dinosaur - which was a type of project we'd never attempted before, and something that really speaks to why students come to CalArts. The opportunity to create anything they want. Not just the opportunity though... but active support and encouragement. We want students to find their own creative voices. Not just do what they think other people expect. As Gabby said in her speech, "Let's not let the confines of a screen define our art, and let's not let rules that we didn't make up, define us as artists. We have minds to think with, and hands to draw with, and in animation, those are the only constraints that we have." Gabby re-imagined Gertie the Dinosaur into something uniquely her own, and performed her part, interacting with her own dinosaur - Dennis - live. First at the Open Show in front of 350 people, then again at the Producers' Show, in front of 600. Gabby absolutely knocked it out of the park. At the moment, only the Open Show version is online, but you can clearly hear how much fun the audience was having. As soon as the Producers' Show version is available, I'll post that here as well. Winsor McCay would've been proud... Gabby and Dennis have a moment at the Producers' Show. Photo by Rafael Hernandez. And now, the films of the 2018 CalArts Character Animation Producers' Show: Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize Winner: Barry Anchi Shen https://vimeo.com/266809736 Walter and Gracie Lantz Animation Prize Winner: Dennis the Dinosaur (Open Show performance) Gabby Capili https://vimeo.com/266202360 Vimeo Award Winner: Little Bandits Alex Avagimian https://vimeo.com/265284284 Peers' Pick Award Winner: Goodbye Galaxy Girl Yden Park https://vimeo.com/266052411 Raccoon and the Light Hanna Kim https://vimeo.com/266613969 Polaris Hikari Toriumi https://vimeo.com/267534459 The Long Uber Back Bayson Chang https://vimeo.com/266391005 Burnt Out Catharine Ren https://vimeo.com/265984156 Then and Now Li Wen Toh https://vimeo.com/265961743 Such is Life... Ning Cheng https://vimeo.com/266005675 Aram & Alex (#9 in a series of short films, shown in their entirety here) Gabby Capili https://vimeo.com/266138546 Burger Boss Rachel Kim https://vimeo.com/266429853 Candy Crushed Chloe Hsu https://vimeo.com/266012838 When the raven comes Cindy Yang https://vimeo.com/265122202 YOKO Wesley Fuh https://vimeo.com/268437173 Love Me Aya Kneitner https://vimeo.com/266054207 Merryweather Fox and the Baron of Burrow's Bend (trailer only - full film is not yet online) Rhea Dadoo https://vimeo.com/266384710 Jido Noor Rasoul https://vimeo.com/266244840 I didn't have any ideas Hanna Kim https://vimeo.com/234973886 So this is how it feels Chalky Wong https://vimeo.com/265376326 Lunch With Me Today Anatola Howard https://vimeo.com/266957060 Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday Jackie Files https://vimeo.com/266825418 Due to time constraints, we can't include as many films as we might like in the Producers' Show. Consequently, 170 films didn't make it in this year. That's more films than were submitted in total last year! Here are some personal favorites of mine that didn't make it into the Producers' Show: Jumbled Up Isabella Spadone https://vimeo.com/266043548 Monday Motivation Mix Yusuke Watanabe https://vimeo.com/267053712 Pebbles Michelle Lam https://vimeo.com/265855716 Voyager Pamela Hoogeboom https://vimeo.com/264178800 An Acapella Aquascape Colleen Castleman https://vimeo.com/266151304 Gumball Machine Jeongho Lee https://vimeo.com/266012536 Cookie and Pie Lee Witz https://vimeo.com/266034458 The River Claire Weber https://vimeo.com/266140463 Beautiful Brain Mabel Ye https://vimeo.com/265995376 Bigman Businessman Clarisse Chua https://vimeo.com/266044738 Wake Up! Hanfei Huang https://vimeo.com/266041254 Melody James Heelis https://vimeo.com/267537517 Penrose Kris Stanton

The first Cars movie wasn't Pixar's best. Oddly enough, after playing the PS2 game, I began to like the characters more, and therefore, I began to like the film more. I don't think that's going to work this time. Cars 2 isn't Pixar's worst film - that dubious honor still belongs to A Bug's Life - but it's certainly their second-worst. After more thoughtful efforts like Wall-E and Up, and the funny yet emotionally touching Toy Story 3, Cars 2 is a huge step backwards for the studio. The entire time I was watching it, I felt like I was watching a movie made for 10-year-olds. This was a pretty big disappointment, knowing many of the people who work at Pixar (as a result of my time at CalArts, where a lot of the animation industry culls its talent from). I suppose I should've seen this coming, since a couple of years ago (prior to Up being released) a friend of mine there expressed his concern that Cars 2 was going ahead even though no story had been written for it yet. It wasn't just a slight concern either, it was more of a "the hammer is going to fall" concern. But Pixar had managed to pull bad films back from the brink before (Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille were basically gutted and re-made halfway through production), so I figured the same would be the case here. Not so. Cars 2 has potential, but never realizes it. The basic premise is that the now-four-time-champion Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is invited to race in the World Grand Prix, and somehow he and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) - his rusty tow-truck best friend - get mixed up in a spy adventure. Now, that sounds fun. Reminiscent somewhat of Speed Racer (the series, not the movie), and in Speed Racer, it was all about the racing. The exotic locales, the opponents, the challenge of overcoming adversity, and through it all was the undercurrent of some villainous adversary trying to do something that Speed had to stop. With Cars 2, I expected the World Grand Prix to be the focus. For there to be a lot of racing, and strategy, and exotic locales, and exciting action. Lightning McQueen as Speed Racer. That would work for me. But that's not what this is. After Cars came out, Pixar created a number of shorts called Cars Toon - Mater's Tall Tales. These aired on the Disney Channel, and of course, are available on home video. The premise being, Mater would start off telling a story like, "Why that reminds me of the time I was a famous stunt truck..." and then it would become a fantasy/flashback where Mater would be a stunt truck, and somehow Lightning McQueen was there, and hilarity would ensue. Then they'd be back to the present where McQueen would say, "That never happened", then something from the fantasy would show up to reinforce Mater's story. The end. And Disney could sell toys of Stunt Truck Mater. Entertaining enough as little short subjects, but that is basically what Cars 2 is. It's Mater's film. It's his spy adventure. Racing merely serves as a backdrop in the film, and Lightning McQueen has very little to do in the film (and his cohorts from Radiator Springs are all but left out of the movie). There's almost no time spent during the races, and the results are completely inconsequential. The bulk of the film is spent with Mater and two British spies - Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) and Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) - trying to stop a group of evil cars from sabotaging the race for nefarious and somewhat convoluted, yet utterly boring, purposes. Now this could have made for a fun film, but it didn't. The writing simply isn't good enough. The movie's not funny enough. The dialog isn't smart. There are way too many toilet jokes in the film. I don't care if it is a car, I don't want to see it sitting over a bidet getting water shot up its rear-end. I don't want to see it peeing its pants in public (yes kids - incontinence is funny). I don't want to see a bad guy dunked into a tank of raw sewage. I don't want fart jokes. If I wanted to see that kind of crap, I'd go see a DreamWorks film. Even without all of that, what's left onscreen simply isn't very funny, or entertaining, or emotionally resonating, or interesting, or engaging. It's just weak. I counted the times I laughed during the films, and I got four mild chuckles out of the whole thing. There was also something else in this film that really just bothered me though. The whole idea of a Cars world without humans. The first film mostly worked, since it was written and staged so that it didn't seem too weird that there weren't humans in it. You could give it a pass in that regard, if you didn't think about it. But in this film, humans are completely conspicuous by their absence. It's a world built for humans. There are too many things that only humans could do or would need that the world just doesn't make sense. And there are too many inconsistencies, too. Most of the time when cars eat or drink (which in itself is a weird concept), it's oil. They drink that through their mouths (although gasoline gets put in their tank directly). But there's a scene where Mater is going over to a food line, and there's a chef making sushi. Not car sushi... but actual sushi. The whole thing is meant as a way to get Mater to eat wasabi, and subsequently freak out, make wacky faces, and humiliate himself in public. The number of things that they simply gloss over in regards to how things are moved, built, assembled, held, or used by characters who can basically only move their tires and radio antennae is mind boggling. Maybe not to a 5-year-old, but for the rest of us, it's a pretty hard world to accept now. It's just gotten too complex to buy into. (Admittedly, if the film had been more entertaining, maybe I wouldn't have been dwelling on what the filmmakers probably considered insignificant minutiae.) Cars 2 seemed like a film made solely for two reasons: First, to cash in on the massive success of Cars merchandising ($2 billion per year). Every corner you turn in this film, there's a new character introduced that just seems to have "Buy me!" stamped on it. Cars is a natural for merchandising. Mix cartoons + cars and what 3 to 12 year old boy wouldn't want that? It's Disney Princesses for the male demographic (and girls like Cars too, judging by my nieces). Now, you add spy gadgets (and fart jokes) to the mix, and you have a merchandising gold mine. How many different versions of Mater alone can they sell? Normal Mater, Mater w/gatling guns, Mater with rockets, Mater with parachute, Mater with vampire disguise, Mater with bad-guy truck disguise, Mater with lederhosen, funny car Mater, Kabuki Mater, peeing Mater, farting Mater, Mater with removable air filter cover... and on and on and on. Then of course there will be different versions of Lightning McQueen, since he has different wheels and tires in different scenes (I figured out after the fact, that one set was supposed to be the equivalent of dress shoes). And then there's all of the other race cars. And all of the villain cars. And the good-guy spies. And planes. And boats. And on and on and on. The second reason for Cars 2 was that it seemed as if director John Lasseter saw what Brad Bird did with The Incredibles, and wanted to make a spy/adventure thriller of his own. It really felt that derivative, but yet completely lacking in everything that made The Incredibles such an awesome film. From the standpoint of how well the film is made technically, I suppose it's about as good as you could do with the material. It's a decent looking film, but lacks the visual punch of their previous efforts, and lacks the cleverness and visual impact of even the first Cars film (with its expansive desert vistas). They really blew the opportunity to make this a World Grand Prix. Instead, we see snippets of it, and frankly, it looks too much like our own world (again... where are the humans?). The animation is just fair, because there's not much you can do with cars with faces. And if anything, there are too many "cheats" in this film, where the cars try to do too much with their tires (McQueen and Mater do an elaborate handshake which was really stretching beyond anything established in the first film), or too much is left unexplained (too many small objects that would need to be manipulated). There is also one moment in the film where they seem to be poking a little fun at the Chevron cars, which instead just comes across as oddly disturbing and very much out of place (think "eye transplants"). Speaking of out of place, there's a fair amount of violence in this film. Now, probably no more so than a typical spy film, but when a living car is tortured to death on screen, that doesn't exactly seem very fitting for a movie aimed at little kids. In fact, there's some intense and loud action in the film, that was freaking at least one little kid in the theater right out. (Note to parents: you shouldn't be taking real little kids to screenings that start at 9:45 PM.) Cars 2 just wasn't the fun movie it should have been. The humor wasn't up to Pixar's standards. The story was weak. The characters were weak or under-utilized. There was bad casting throughout (the villain was completely forgettable, and while Michael Caine is great in live action, as a voice actor he's downright bland), and there just wasn't enough racing. Someone mentioned to me that he'd thought of it more positively after a friend at Pixar told him to look at it as if John Lasseter was playing with his own toy cars. Rrrright. The only one who has fun when they're playing with toy cars, is the person playing with them. For the rest of us, I guess we're left with the sight of a pudgy, balding, middle-aged millionaire in a Hawaiian shirt, making "vroom! vroom!" noises while pushing toy cars around on a carpet. That's just not worth the price of admission. Cars 2 gets a 4.5/10. (But only because Green Lantern was worse.)

In a word - perfect. While Toy Story 3 was in production, a friend of mine at Pixar (who was sworn to secrecy) would only describe it as "like visiting with old friends". I have to agree with that sentiment. I was concerned that Pixar had an uphill battle in making a worthy sequel to two of the best-loved animated films ever, and the commercials that they've been showing didn't really alleviate those concerns. However, this is easily my favorite of the three. The sense of adventure in this film surpasses the previous two. There are a lot more unknown factors at work in this movie that have never been dealt with in the series before, which makes it more uncertain for the characters, and more engaging for the audience. There are also some of the funniest Toy Story moments in this movie - ever. The commercials, mercifully, haven't really spoiled anything (yet). But if I were you, I'd take no chances, and go see the movie before they let something critical slip out. There's a lot more to this movie than you'd suspect from the commercials, and quite a few things I wasn't expecting at all. They went places I wasn't anticipating, and there were twists I didn't see coming (although there were some things you could kind-of predict, but never quite knew how they were going to get where they needed to). Toy Story 3 felt exactly like it should. Like these are characters we've spent years with (because we have) and who have spent years together. Time hasn't always been kind, but it's all dealt with honestly. There are some tense moments in the film, which some critics have derided as "dark". Nonsense. These moments are essential to the emotional core of the characters and the story, and are more than counterbalanced by the funny and heartwarming moments in the film - and there are plenty of those. (Favorite moment: Mr. Potato Head's mission.) This was the perfect film to wrap up the Toy Story trilogy. Very emotionally satisfying, and extremely entertaining. Well worth the ridiculous amount of money I paid. The short that precedes it - Day and Night - is brilliant. It's very different for Pixar, and shows them being willing to take risks for the sake of making the kind of films they want to make. The only negative is the narration, which isn't really necessary. It seemed a little heavy-handed, and the visuals got the message across just fine without it. I saw it at a packed 10:05 PM showing in 3-D (stereoscopic, that is). The 3-D worked very well, especially in the short film where it was one of the cleverest uses of 3-D I've seen. During Toy Story 3, after awhile, I basically stopped noticing it, which I think is the best thing that can be said about it. It became non-obtrusive. The same can't be said though about the rest of the evening. First, the screen was dirty. This is especially noticeable when watching something in 3-D, since the crud is always hanging in space, in the same location, no matter what else is on screen. After awhile, I could mostly ignore it. Worse though, was the endless string of commercials they run while you're waiting for the movie to start. There had to be a half-dozen or so just for product tie-ins to Toy Story 3. Come on... I'm already paying $16 + snacks to see the movie! Leave me alone for a few minutes, can't you? Then, when the commercials ended, they had you put on your 3-D glasses. Great! Time for trailers, right? Nope. First they had 3-D commercials!! We had to sit through even more commercials, before we could even get to the trailers! I lost count of how many trailers there were. I do remember three things though: 1) there was no trailer for Tron: Legacy 2) Despicable Me looks hilarious, and 3) the Smurfs movie looks like it will be the worst film in the history of everything. Anyway, I highly recommend Toy Story 3. It's a real treat to visit with these old friends again. 11/10 (Okay... that's cheating slightly. But I really did have that good of a time.)

Okay... I had no plans to see Minions, but when your impossibly adorable niece wants to go see a movie, how can you say "no"? Plus, I went to CalArts with one of the directors. So, we saw Minions. She loved it. For me, not so much. The Minions are fine in small doses as comedy relief, but their incomprehensible gibberish wears pretty thin after a few minutes (much less an entire feature). Also, the plot is really flimsy and contrived, and is just there to hang some jokes off of. Even that would be fine if the jokes were funny (see: "Airplane"), but they just weren't. There were a handful of cute moments, a few fun scenes, but they were all too few, too short, and too far-between. Minions made for a far better trailer than a movie. Also, the movie takes place in 1968, and all of the cultural and musical references go right over the heads of the target audience of little kids. Since the Minions all effectively act and talk in nearly the same way, it's hard to connect with any of the three main characters the movie focuses on. The main villain in the film isn't particularly menacing (or memorable), and the most interesting characters in the film (a family that picks up the hitch-hiking Minions) only appear for a short time, and don't really figure into the plot at all. I kept hoping for them to step in during the finale, but they were only there as spectators, and were completely wasted. Now, I should say Minions isn't a bad film, in that it's well animated, not offensively stupid, and is mercifully low on butt jokes and toilet humor. But that's the best that can be said about it, apart from it keeping my niece entertained for an afternoon (which in and of itself is well-worth nine bucks). I suppose for what's effectively a disposable kid's film, expecting any more than that is asking too much. And given that it's already exceeded $640 million worldwide, my opinion doesn't really matter anyway. It's easy to see how this movie came about. The Despicable Me films have grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide, and someone at Universal thought, "Hey, those Minions sure are popular - I bet a movie about them would be a huge hit!" They weren't wrong. But Minions still gets a 2/10.

Sometimes, working at CalArts is a good thing. Like on Thursday. Co-director Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph) held a screening and Q&A session for his latest Disney animated film - Zootopia - which opens in the U.S. Friday. So hey - free sneak preview! Now, I thought Wreck-It Ralph was excellent, so I was hoping for good things from Zootopia. As the first trailers trickled out for it, the film looked like it would be funny and well-animated, making for a nice, cartoony return to the "talking animals" genre for Disney. I wasn't really expecting more than that, but I was hoping it would at least be a good, funny, entertaining movie. And it was. But it was more than that. A lot more. Zootopia pointedly brings home some ideas in a way that fits perfectly in animation, much in the way the original Star Trek series did. By masking them in the genre, you're entertained, but never beat over the head with "a message". Nonetheless, these ideas do get through, and often in a more effective way because you become involved with and empathetic towards the characters, before you even fully understand why. If that sounds vague - that's my intent. Because I think that people will get different impressions from this film that will slot into their own experiences. For example, Rich Moore started off his introduction by recounting his time as a student at CalArts, and how the original Disney animators and early CalArts grads who were just achieving success at that time would come and lecture to his class, and how he realized that they were opening up the world of animation to him and his peers, and, in his words, "There was enough room at the table for everyone - even me." That message was not lost on the next generation of animators sitting in that theater on Thursday. There's room at the table for them too, as long as they persevere and never give up on their dreams. Perhaps that sounds a little cliché, but in the context of this movie, it's never treated that way. This movie has a very big heart, and a lot of emotional impact. It's one of the best animated films I've seen in years. This is the type of film you once expected Pixar to make. That said, I want one thing to be very clear - this is not an overly-serious movie. But it is an incredibly thoughtful one. Best of all, Zootopia is a funny movie. It's brilliantly funny at times, even poking some most-welcomed fun at Disney itself. While there were certainly emotionally impactful moments in the film, there is always balance. The humor worked on every level, too - visual, slapstick, satire, verbal - the film was packed with it. The two main characters - Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) - are excellent. Their personalities and relationships drive this film. They have meaningful, heartfelt stories that you want to watch unfold. And they're flawed, too. Genuinely so - sometimes without even realizing it themselves, leading to some truly poignant moments. As for the ancillary characters - there's not a weak one in the bunch. None of them felt throw-away or extraneous, nor overly important given their screen time. They were there to support the main characters, but they never take over the movie from them. The main characters are the focus, and unlike many Disney films, they are the strongest, most likable characters in the film. The film doesn't rely on wacky sidekicks to keep the film moving. (There are plenty of wonderful, funny characters in the film, but they don't overstay their welcome. They serve their purpose well, and get off the screen.) The main story of the film is about the two main characters. The main plot of the film that the characters are involved with is completely secondary. I was so engrossed in the characters, I effectively didn't really care about how the main plot turned out, except in how it impacted them. While the ramifications of their success or failure were large in scope, I was far more concerned with how it affected them personally. That's good writing. The animation is absolutely first-rate. This is what an animated film should be - telling a story in a way that's completely unique to the medium, with characters that can only exist in animation. Not something that could just as well be done in live action (or on ice). Again, this is what you would have once expected from Pixar. The animation runs the gamut from broad, physical humor to fast and furious action to the most subtle of emotions. All of it masterfully executed. Visually, the film looks just right. That may seem like an odd compliment, but what I mean by that is that even though the environments are huge, and varied, and detailed, and clever, and wonderfully designed - they fit the film. Unlike The Good Dinosaur where all of the emphasis was on hyper-realistic environments and Gummi-textured dinosaurs, in Zootopia - everything looks like it belongs. If it calls too much attention to itself, they're doing it wrong. Here, we're treated to an overview of the city at the beginning of the film to enjoy the spectacle of it, and from that point on - it just is. It's the city, and it's where the story happens. That is how you design an animated movie. Now, I should point out that I saw this in a theater packed full of animation students. And their responses to animated films tend to be heightened. For a truly good film, their responses are wildly enthusiastic. For bad films... well, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of it (they were laughing at The Good Dinosaur in all of the wrong places... not with it). With Zootopia, it was terrific fun to be in the room and hear the laughter and share the joy they had in watching it, and it was clear by some of the comments in the Q&A (as well as the standing ovation Rich Moore received after the film) that the movie emotionally resonated with them as well. Me too. Apart from a tacked-on end-credits song that didn't really do much for me (I should point out - this is mercifully not a musical), Zootopia is a thoroughly entertaining animated film, up there with the absolute best of the best. It's incredibly funny, genuinely thoughtful, exciting, thought-provoking, uplifting, and just plain fun. A rare combination, and it all works. Go see it. Twice. Buy extra popcorn. Bring the kids. Buy the Blu-ray when it comes out. Zootopia gets a 9.5/10.

Hey look - another review! You'd almost think that a whole bunch of movies were being released at the same time of the year for some reason. Can't imagine why. The weather's beautiful outside today. Anyway... It's been fourteen years since The Incredibles was released. How long ago is that? Well, that's before this blog existed. That's a long time. Consequently, there's no review here for The Incredibles. But if I had to place it somewhere in Pixar's pantheon of animated features, I think it would probably be my favorite. The reason I say "probably", is because it's been around so long, it's lost some of its impact over that time. But I still do remember the first time I saw it, and I remember it being fun, exciting, funny, and, well... incredible. It was the first film in decades that gave me the same kind of rush that the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi had. Were I to guess, I probably would've scored The Incredibles a 9 or 10 out of 10. So that's a lot to live up to. And now, there's a sequel. When Pixar fully jumped on board the sequel train after being acquired by Disney, I was worried. Pixar had been at their best with original films. Sure, Toy Story 2 was great, but Pixar themselves had spent years railing against Disney wanting to make sequels of Pixar films. Ultimately though, we got sequels. And the question that begs to be asked is, was it worth not having an original Pixar film, every time they had to devote the studio to making a sequel instead? Well, the answers, as it turned out were yes. Then no. And no. And two more no's I didn't even bother seeing (Cars 3 and Finding Dory). Sure, they all made money, and soccer moms needing something to baby-sit their kids with for 90 minutes were more than happy to go see them. And Pixar's track record for original films isn't exactly spotless anymore, either. So I was worried when I heard they were doing another Incredibles film. The Incredibles is one of those films that's so good, you want to see a sequel. But it's such a perfect film on its own, it doesn't really need one. Back To The Future is another example of this. Back To The Future Part II has some clever ideas and some fun moments, but it's also disappointing in many respects, and neither sequel lives up to the first film. We would have been just fine without them. At worst, a bad sequel can actually tarnish your enjoyment of the original film. Even with Brad Bird back to direct, I was still worried. Bird's previous effort wasn't exactly one of my favorites, and I wondered if he could recapture the magic of the original, fourteen years later. Could he stay true to the characters, and make their story still interesting and relevant, despite 73 (count 'em) superhero films being released since the original? Fortunately, the answer is a pretty definitive "yes". I know... you can't really be "pretty definitive". It's either do or do not. There is no "pretty definitive". Incredibles 2 is a fun film. Let's get that out of the way, first. Superhero films should be fun. This one is. Helen (Elastigirl) takes center stage in this film, and we really get to see how formidable of a superhero she really is. We only caught glimpses of her abilities in the first movie, but here it's almost an Elastigirl solo film for a good chunk of the movie. And it works. It works so well, I kept thinking... "Hey, with the right director, a Fantastic Four movie could be really cool! Mr. Fantastic would be awesome!" Hopefully, Marvel can get that sorted out someday. Anyway, the Helen and Bob (Mr. Incredible) roles from the first movie are effectively reversed for Incredibles 2. Helen goes out superheroing, Bob stays at home with the kids. And then things happen, and... well, that's kind of where the "pretty definitive" part comes in. Incredibles 2 pretty-much follows a lot of the same plot points as the first film. Yes, things are switched around a bit, but overall it's a pretty predictable film. In some cases, a bit too much so. Oddly enough, the predictability didn't matter that much. In most films, it would be a problem. But with Incredibles 2, the emphasis is on the main characters - the Parrs. Everything else is in support of that. Even though on a larger scale things were predictable, and that may have reduced the overall impact of the plot of the film, it didn't diminish my enjoyment of it. The individual character moments, the family's interaction, action sequences, humor, and fight scenes (one in particular is my favorite superhero movie fight scene - ever), all pay off. Revisiting the Incredibles was a lot of fun. It picks up right where the last one left off, and feels like a perfectly natural extension of it. The technology used to create these films has grown by leaps and bounds, but the filmmakers resisted the urge to change the look of the film. Aesthetically, it fits right in with the original, but still takes full advantage of advances in CG software and hardware to add a little more texture here, a little more detail there, or smooth off some previously rough edges. It's subtle, but it manages to match the original, without looking dated. The voice cast is (mostly) back, except for Dash, who they had to recast since the original kid's voice is completely different now, and Rick Dicker, because the original voice for the character - Bud Luckey - passed away. Everything is amazingly seamless, considering how much time has passed. But CG doesn't age, and with the same director at the helm, the same composer and voice cast, there's continuity across the board. Probably more than most films, you could run this back-to-back with the original, and it would all just work. The characters all naturally just fall right back into place, and the chemistry between them is still there, as if this were made right after the original. They're just as likable (and often flawed) as before. I'd questioned Bird's plan to pick this film up without any time having passed, but it really works. Plus, we don't have to wonder about how characters got from where they were back then, to some completely different point now. We get to enjoy seeing them pick right up where we last knew them, and take off from there. We also get to see more of Jack-Jack and his developing (and unpredictable) powers. Some of this is hinted at in the trailers, and it looks cute there, but Jack-Jack really steals a lot of this movie, and has some of the absolutely funniest scenes throughout the film. Where the film is less successful is the villain. The villain is a significant step-down from Syndrome in the first movie. While the new villain (The Screenslaver) certainly has their motivations, they're lacking the same personal connection to the Parrs that Syndrome had. The Screenslaver also isn't as much fun as Syndrone was, but more of a typical, cookie-cutter, disposable, villain-of-the-week. Yes, the stakes are still high and all that, but the stakes are always high. That's a given. The villain should be more special. More engaging. More fun. Fortunately, the rest of the film and characters are fun enough to make up for that. Incredibles 2 is still a very fun ride, and one sequel I'm glad Pixar made. It doesn't have the originality, freshness or excitement of the original, but it's certainly a worthy successor, and it was great fun revisiting these characters again. Go see it with a big, buttery bucket of popcorn. Incredibles 2 gets an 8/10 A word of warning: if you're susceptible to flashing lights, be warned that there's a scene in the film that could cause some problems. I don't have issues with that sort of thing, but the flashing was so intense, I immediately thought, "Wow... I hope everyone's okay with this." If you want to go see the film, and want to know where it's going to happen: