Young Justice: Season One

The original Young Justice comic was the perfect source material for an animated series. It sadly never came to happen, but the Teen Titans cartoon was a good substitute. It still would have been nice to see Tim Drake’s Robin teamed up with Impulse and Superboy in an ongoing animated series.

A couple years ago an announcement was made for a Young Justice cartoon, featuring an Aqualad of color and a lack of overall humor. The latter was a deal breaker for YJ purists with the former being a deal breaker for DC purists. I was of course interested in the series, and it did not disappoint.

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

[Author's Note: If you're just curious about what I thought of the movie, skip down to where you see the asterisks. Otherwise, this is a very lengthy post. I've noticed that no one tends to read the entries about anime (except for the dozens of people who keep coming here for Tekkaman Blade pics), so I went crazy with it. If you want to read a 2300-word post, knock yourself out. I promise you none of it will be on the exam, though.]

It is difficult to find good, creative, original science fiction. Sure, some people might have that one friend who does nothing but read science fiction anthologies and keep up with all of the latest material on the web, but the rest of us have few sources and even less time. What the popular multimedia world is most often known for are the scifi retreads – either of old works or old ideas. “It’s the delivery that matters!” we say to ourselves. While true, it also opens ourselves up to eating the same cereal so long as the marshmallows are offered in new shapes and/or colors. For example, I loved four and a half seasons of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica despite the fact that it was a retread of the original BSG that invoked the darker and edgier trope and borrowed heavily from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade Runner and a little from the rest of the Philip K. Dick library. I recognized the sources clearly but still moved forward. That may very well be the reason why I was able to move forward with it.

There are no more original ideas. It’s all be done before. The movie trailers on TV look like items from either a few years to a few decades ago. It seems like movies are being made just so the studios have a steady flow of product coming out. No one holds off for the great ideas. No one devotes time to meticulously perfect a creation. Having something out there is generally regarded as being much better than having something great.

I’ve always been an anime fan. The general anime fan likes to cite creativity as a reason why s/he prefers Japanese output over American. I’m not that fan. I’m not an otaku, as I’ve said before. I watch what I watch. While the ideas over there are decidedly different in origin, they area also quite plagued by hackneyed ideas. Watch enough Japanese content and you find that it becomes increasingly more difficult to find original ideas. (Even in writing this introduction to a review about The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya I’ve realized that it is not entirely original because it could be considered a lighter and fluffier version of Akira. I’m still moving forward with this idea of original content, though.) No matter where you look, people borrow from ideas that they find interesting.

Shrek Forever After doesn’t suck

It took long enough, but I finally got around to seeing Shrek Forever After, which I still think should have been titled Shrek 4ever After just to be cute. We did not see a 3-D showing of the movie, however, because the child I took was recently diagnosed with epilepsy and I have a strong disdain for the visual styling anyway. The film was overall unremarkable for a Shrek film. The performances seemed phoned in by the principal cast and the lesson was heavy handed. The main reason I am posting is because I talked about Shrek before.

The supporting cast was great. The ogres featured the voices John Hamm and Craig Robinson, and the latter certainly stole some scenes with his chimichanga fixation.

Why girls suck at the game

This is a short animation with a title that I believe translates to “Girls Suck at Video Games”. Click the URL and watch it: http://vimeo.com/12625441

The one in which Toy Story 3 is discussed

Pixar’s Toy Story 3 made a ton of money this past weekend, and I am not ashamed to admit I added to the number they will use to advertise the profitability of their company. It was a good movie. No, it was a great movie! It is amazing how moving a story about talking toys can be. The first two proved that toys can be entertaining. OK, I take it back. The first one proved that toys can be entertaining. Toy Story 3 goes beyond that.

The most striking thing about the film, though, is that it does not seem to be a good fit for a younger audience. Kids will absolutely love the visual stimulation the film provides, not to mention the fairly punchy script. Now take the plot into consideration. Andy is now 17 years-old and has to part with his toys. Not only does he have to learn to part with his childhood, his toys have to learn how to let go as well. The film is incredibly sentimental, which may go completely over the heads of the children in the audience.

It leads me to ask if the movie was really intended for them or for those who were children when the first two Toy Story films were released?

Regardless of the answer, there was an amazingly powerful scene near the end which could have very well been the end itself. It’s a spoiler, so avert your gaze or skip down to the next paragraph if you want to be surprised. Anyway, the most powerful scene was when the toys found themselves in the dump, on the way to the incinerator. While Woody scrambles as best as he can to get away, the others solemnly look to each other and join hands. Eventually Woody joins them. They look head on at the incinerator, silently accepting death together. There is something very powerful and probably Buddhist about it, and it brought tears to my eyes. (Everyone else cried at the end when Andy gave away his toys, but this scene was much more meaningful to me. Probably says more about me than anything else.) Toys should not be able to elicit such a response from me! Sadly, it is a scene that kids wouldn’t understand.

Some are already saying that Toy Story 3 is the best Pixar film to date. That sentiment is heard after the release of every single Pixar film, with the exception of Cars. Of course, this means that people are saying that it is better than Up! Naturally, I totally and utterly disagree. But it is up there. It is a great film. It may be the best movie of 2010.

An aside, though. Am I the only one who thinks that Buzz’s Spanish mode is a tacit admission that DreamWorks got things right with Puss in Boots? Or was I too busy laughing to be offended by the stereotyping used in both cases?

Shrek Doesn’t Suck!

Whenever there are doubts about how to properly digest pop culture, the best sources to peruse are PopMatters for the general products and io9 for science fiction. The authors present themselves as authorities on cool, valid, and intelligent works in our media world today. While the news on the sites are generally worthwhile reads because they do all the work in hunting it down (especially io9’s Morning Spoilers), the authors never hesitate to let it be known that they are intellectual hipsters who know better about the media. The greatest fault of the growing blogosphere is the replacement of journalistic integrity with the author’s desire inject his or her own personality into things.

This morning I read an overview of the Shrek movie franchise simply titled “Shrek Sucks!” It is the kind of title that is simply crafted to generate hits. Those endeared by the works will gravitate toward it to see how someone could be so harsh regarding a series of children’s films, and those who find the writing of the films trite will gravitate toward it because someone out there is providing a further bolstering of their negative opinion. “Shrek Sucks!” is not horribly written. It is not even completely wrong. It just disappoints me because it is overcritical and oozes the attitude, “If you want to be cool, you don’t watch Shrek and like it.”

The natural response after reading this much is, “Why are you wasting text on this? It must mean that you like it and disagree.” That would be correct. I have had to watch all three of the previously released Shrek films at work throughout the week. In fact, some of them twice. This forced me to reevaluate the series, since I had originally soured on the odd-numbered films, with number two being a standout because of Puss ‘n Boots and the “Holding out for a Hero” sequence – which admittedly has little more to it than an insurgence of raw energetic pathos. I realized that all of the films were good because they tried, really tried, to say something while also trying too hard with their in-the-moment pop culture references.

“And aren’t you turning into one of those internet bloggers who pushes his opinion about cool, valid, and intelligent?” Where have you been? I constantly discuss those aspects of the media, generally contrary to sites with actual popularity, to dispel the myth of authority. I do not claim this blog is a source of anything more than the perpetuation of the idea that we need to look beyond what and how other people give us multimedia information. Anyway, I want to talk about cartoons right now.

The Shrek films are not visually stunning. The pop culture references do not seem to have in mind a particular audience. (Fiona’s Street Fighter moves in 2001’s Shrek do not work for children who grew up during the decline of the fighting series’ popularity. Why was “Livin’ la Vida Loca” chosen as the closing song for Shrek 2, five years after the song was a hit? The soundtracks in general seem best suited for grandparents who might be taking their grandchildren to the movies, but that does not seem like the most appropriate audience to target.) Somehow, though, the films remain charming to me. The original presented a much more tangible love story than I had remembered. Not to mention the lesson about the many layers of people and how what is on the inside that counts. I love reading short internet accounts of someone watching Shrek’s climaxing with Fiona remaining an ogre and the viewer understanding the important lesson, only to overhear someone else in the theatre speaking loudly about it is not understandable that Fiona could be happy that way. This was addressed in Shrek 2, with Shrek’s quest to give Fiona the happy ending he thought she wanted. The story is really about self doubt and learning to trust your partner’s feelings. It is about stopping your assumptions about others. (Or, in psychology lingo, it is about learning to cease projecting on others.) Shrek the Third was originally more difficult to read, but it is just about growing up and accepting responsibility. Shrek’s having learned that lesson already makes the premise of Shrek Forever After look disappointing, but I will proudly see it in theatres with my nephew. I do not doubt I will like the movie more than he.

It is completely understandable why some people may not like the Shrek films. They are not perfect. They are not Up. But they are charming and amusing films written ultimately from a good heart. (A greedy heart that wants your money, but nonetheless one that provides some positivity.) I challenge everyone to watch the original films all over again. There is something amazing there, although I could be mistaken.

South Park: “Whale Whores” and racism

Last week’s episode of South Park was a pretty biting commentary on reactions to whaling as well as to the show Whale Wars. At first I thought it was being unnecessarily racist to the Japanese, a culture Trey Parker appreciates enough to have become fluent in the language. By the end of the episode, you see where it all goes. It’s pretty brilliant.

Watch the episode here.

What at first looks like a racist commentary of Japanese whaling turns into a commentary on cultural norms. We kill cows and chickens all the time. Hell, we breed them specifically for the purpose of consuming them. It’s the American way. The Japanese eat whale meat. So long as they target whales of sufficient population size, it shouldn’t be a problem. Cow and chicken populations aren’t threatened, and that’s why the world embraces our desire to ravage those particular species.

But it’s probably presumptuous to say that everyone will understand what Parker and Stone were saying with that South Park episode. The ending was just a high brow tag to an otherwise very low brow episode. Many viewers were probably snickering too much at the racism to realize that the projection of our values on other cultures is even more racist.

I want to give credit to the South Park team for how they handled the episode, but I don’t think they intended on the result they have here. The episode, as I saw it, was presented through the perspective of an unintentional racist who just happens to see the practices of other cultures as silly and primitively brutal. This is an embellishment of the perspective we have whenever we are approached by something foreign and say, “What the—? That’s not right!” And don’t say that people don’t do that. Try going out to dinner at the average American diner and strike up a conversation about the consumption of dogs and cats in other cultures. Get back to me with notes on the reactions.

The roundabout point of the episode was that whaling isn’t such a big deal considering what we do over here. I just think the meaning can easily be extrapolated for other discussion on norms, especially given the fact that they went out of their way to make the Japanese mere caricatures of their own culture. Now I just wish more episodes could be more like “Whale Whores” and less like “Butters’ Bottom Bitch”.

The Legacy of Voltron lives! Sort of…

Seth Green and his band of maniacs on Robot Chicken haven’t ever hid their love of 1980’s cheesy giant robot non-epic, Voltron/Golion. Probably their most infamous sketch on the first season of the show was their Voltron meets You Got Served bit, which was so striking that Media Blasters requested to have it included on one of the official Voltron releases.

The other day, io9 posted an article about a new project by the Robot Chicken guys slated for release on September 27th, Titan Maximum. This was apparently announced back in July during Anime Expo, but convention coverage is generally crappy in Web 2.0. (Personal opinion.) Titan Maximum is the next step in RC’s evolution starting with the very first Star Wars special – from random parodies on their show to direct parodies in the Star Wars specials to consistent and continual parody in Titan Maximum.

Shakey cam trailer! Too bad the trailer shows nothing…

So, what’s the plot? Who knows? The show is the modern equivalent of the super marionette but mashed with an anime plot, and the result will likely be Team America meets Mighty Morphing Power Rangers. That’s not a bad thing, especially in weekly 15 minute doses. Doses, I might add, that have a splash of Billy Dee Williams for flavor.

Bonus video, also ripped from io9:

This isn’t the only sentai team parody airing only in nerd circles this year. New web series MegaBot also promises to rehash our memories for laughs – but this one features Fran Kranz, aka Dollhouse’s Topher.

Pixar is up above all others

Remember my glowing review of Up! and how I said that Pixar is simply better than all of the other studios? I’ve apparently been given more reason to believe that’s true. Read this story about a dying girl, cold calls to Pixar for a request, and the subsequent home viewing of Up! delivered by a Pixar employee. Yeah, you can’t do much better than this studio. They involve writers who treat viewers like they have an iota of intelligence and are overall quite humanitarian.

Up – Pixar’s latest success

There is something magical that Pixar manages to include in everything it makes. I would be hard-pressed to find a misstep that they’ve made (well, Cars…). They’re amazing, and everyone knows it. It’s clear what part of the magic is – they don’t treat their audience like it’s simple, despite the fact that their target audience is children. There is so much that the other major studios could learn from Pixar.

Up’s trailer slightly misleads as it doesn’t spell out the whole plot, which is rare these days for Hollywood films. All the audience is given is a cantankerous old man named Carl who lifts his home away with balloons and accidentally takes a young scout with him. Why does he want to go away? Where is he going? The explanation is in the first 10 minutes of the film, but it’s all shown and not told. We get exactly why he wants to take that house to South America and stay there until he passes. He’s not an angry old man – he’s a romantic.

Which brings up one of the clever themes integrated into the movie, devotion versus obsession. Carl crosses paths with his old hero whom he had always thought simply fell off the face of the Earth. No, the man disappeared because the world didn’t believe in his discovery, which he has been tracking for the better part of the past forty or fifty years – and ending anyone he believes might be getting in his way. There’s something obviously Ahab about him, and he works wonders as Carl’s foil.

This review isn’t as full of spoilers as I usually like, but like the first act of this film, it’s all better when seen rather than explained. This film is art at its finest – an experience that appeals to your senses and emotions. If you don’t feel something at least during the beginning of the film, you either know too well how to separate yourself from fictional experiences or you simply need to learn how to feel.

I should make a special mention about the dogs. Anyone who has ever had a dog or spent time with dogs will find the dogs hilarious, especially the joke that Dug shares with his new friends – whom he already loves. And the cone of shame…you have to love the cone of shame. And yes, I am understating everything. There’s a reason. Go spend your money on the film.

Bechdel Rule: Failure. There are no two women who speak to each other. Not that it matters. There’s nothing NON-feminist (masculist?) in this film, so no one should care. This film is good for the whole family – period.