Nostalgia Corner: Felix the Cat- The Movie

My generation was the last in America to grow up on an exclusive diet of hand-drawn animation. By the time we entered our teens, computer animation had asserted itself in highly successful films like Toy Story and in trendy TV shows like the Canadian tech-fancy toon Reboot. With the slickness and relative simplicity of CGI, cartoons lost a lot of the depth and fluidity that characterized those late-period traditional toons. Still today, CGI is about spectacle. It's used more often than not to generate ooh's and ah's from the audience, whereas hand-drawn animation (especially in the Western tradition) spent the 80's and 90's attempting to be as complex and expressive as possible. This combination of artistic drive and increased marginalization led to some of the strangest, most affecting cartoons in history. One such hand-drawn oddity was the unlikely Felix the Cat: The Movie, an attempt to revive a beloved character for another generation that, in failing to do so, achieved an unforgettable artistic stamp.

The Felix character has been a part of the cartoon world since 1919. He was born in Pat Sullivan's studio at Paramount Pictures, though animator Otto Messmer claimed that he invented Felix, not Sullivan. Whoever brought that iconic cartoon cat to the screen, Felix became a hit around the world and was one of the most recognizable characters in the silent film era. Ironically, it would be a mouse that knocked Felix off his pedestal. Walt Disney's Mickey launched the talkie cartoon market and Felix didn't transition very well into sound. It would take a revival by Pat Sullivan's assistant Joe Orielo in 1953 to make the Felix most people know today. Orielo gave Felix his iconic Magic Bag of Tricks and created an entire supporting cast of friends and villains.

The Felix movie was yet another revival attempt, this time by Joe Orielo's son, Don. The original intent was to launch a new Felix TV series but the combination of high production costs ($9 million in 1987) and the dark strangeness of the final product kept Felix from another regular television spot.

Felix the Cat: The Movie has little to do with the famous cartoons of the 1950's. Aside from Felix, the Magic Bag and a couple other recognizable characters, the movie consists of a mostly stand-alone plot pulled from an unrelated and considerably more mature fantasy adventure. The movie fits alongside a lot of the cartoon adventures of the era in its intensity and sense of scale. Feature-length toons like The Brave Little Toaster have a similar road movie/peril aesthetic, though Felix sports an unsettling series of bizarre, nightmarish images and high-fantasy gorgeousness. The plot revolves around Princess Oriana, the deposed leader of a dream-like world full of odd creatures and deadly corners who needs someone to help her fight her evil uncle. To see the plucky, shrill-voiced Felix running around a world filled with steam punk fascists and vicious flying heads is more than a little dissonant.

A lot of the weirdness of the Felix movie is the result of the Hungarian animation studio contracted to draw it. Pannonia Filmstudio definitely had impressive credentials but Don Orielo obviously hadn't been paying attention to how much animation and film in general had changed in Eastern Europe in the 70's and 80's. The aesthetic was dark, apocalyptic and surreal; far from the nonthreatening brightness that made Felix famous. Still, Felix the Cat: The Movie did well enough in the home video market to justify occasional rotation on cable TV, most frequently on the Disney Channel. In today's age of carefully crafted scheduling and endlessly streaming original properties, television really isn't the place for oddities like Felix anymore. Like hand-drawn animation itself, the weirdness of botched cartoons is mostly a thing of the past.

Seattle Set Television Shows - an Accurate Portrayal?

Seattle, Washington is by all accounts a fabulous place to live. We have some of the lowest crime rates (among cities of similar size), a relatively affluent and well educated population, and for about 3 months of the year - fabulous weather (seriously - it is like perfect). As with every place one lives there are positive and negative aspects - but here in Seattle the negatives are few - in fact, I think if you were to do a poll, you would likely only hear about either the 9 months of gray, mild, weather or the "Seattle Chill" - which actually has to do with social custom rather than the temperature outside.

I often wonder, however, how the city is viewed by outsiders who have no experience with the city. They can get a glimpse of what it is like to live here by watching a variety of television shows or movies - or by reading - Anne Rule loves to set her stories in Seattle or the surrounding area. The city is a popular setting for numerous reasons but one thing usually stands out - the gray weather and rain - which can set a certain mood for romance or horror films.

How would the city be perceived by someone watching television, which for argument's sake, we will say is the easiest and likely only way we can be seen by the masses. We will take a small sample of shows to use as examples: Frasier, Grey's Anatomy, iCarly, any Kyle XY. If one were to watch all of these shows a few things about Seattle would become apparent - the people are smart, most are pretty well-off, the city loves coffee, and technology plays a big role in our lives - likely more than in the lives of others. Is this an accurate portrayal of Seattle? I think it is in a sense - but for reasons that are pretty shallow.

There is so much more to Seattle than the Space Needle and Pike Place Market and so many different colors and types of people who are often neglected to be shown. These shows also fail to show a side of Seattle that the real citizens deal with everyday - homeless residents - of which there are many. I love traveling to cities and have been to many - and there is no other place that I can think of (even SF) that has so many people without a place to live. I think in order for these shows (if still on the air) and future ones to be more realistic there should A) be a lot more walking - we like to walk here, B) after a character gets his skinny soy latte from a small locally owned cafe he should step over an unfortunate homeless person who might be dead to get to where he is going - it doesn't get any more real than that, and C) there should be more diversity - especially involving members of the gay community - liberal, left leaning, Seattle loves the gays.

TV executives: you can show all the gray you want - but if the characters are not walking (or biking) everywhere, supporting local business and social initiatives, and have a diverse group of friends - it should not be called Seattle. If you get to speak with wardrobe - please feel free to request someone wearing socks and Birkenstocks, pants rolled up into capri, or a North Face jacket - it will really help set the scene.

Stoning Festival in India

FESTIVAL MADNESS

I watched the CBS News video of the Stoning Festival in India, a religious festival in Northern India, with the celebrants throwing stones at one another. My take on the event is that it is another example of summer madness. I know India is in the Southern Hemisphere and is having its winter right now. But this stoning festival is an outdoor activity.

Stoning each other is much more serious than a food fight, and can and do cause injuries. Frankly, it doesn't look attractive. It looks like groups of villagers are at war, -- though the war is supposedly good-natured.

As I watched, I recalled movies scenes of ancient and Medieval battles. I wondered how any one can consider this fun? Then I remembered football. A game in which people hurl their bodies at each other. Football probably may seem a little crazy to an outsider. Football I like, and I still can't get over the fact that the folks in that festival are hurling rocks.

Mother of All Tomato Fights

SUMMER MADNESS

What is a person to do in the summer? In the eastern Spanish town of Buñol, there is an answer: FOOD FIGHT!

Yesterday, Wednesday, the event for all the food fighters of the world, the battle known as the Tomatina -- with "more than 45,000 visitors from all over the world " clashing, hurling "more than 100 tons of tomatoes at one another for about an hour," the annual, friendly bout of summer madness! See the video.

Pilar Garrigues, the councilwoman in charge of 'fiestas”, said "This year’s event transpired without any serious incidents and the municipal services only had to treat about a dozen people for fainting and slight eye irritations."

This mother of all tomato fights began in 1945 and has grown into a summer spectacle. And my goodness, if no body gets hurt, it is a fine way to get off a little aggression, to get back to our pre-historic roots, and to just fight. Well, it looks like it's more fun than football.

Food fight!

Satoshi Kon: 1963-2010

This week the world lost one of its great artistic minds. Satoshi Kon, the man behind some of the most stunning anime in history, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. He is survived by his wife, his parents and many friends, colleagues and fans he acquired over his all-too-brief time as a hard-working artist and director.

Kon's work comprises a significant portion of the past decade's most respected anime. His directorial debut Perfect Blue shows Kon's early flare for affecting psychological drama, following a pop star turned actress as the mounting pressures of her life begin to confuse the distinction between the characters she plays and the person she truly is. Perfect Blue arguably had a bigger impact in the West than at home in Japan. Fragments of the film have popped up in places as diverse as a Madonna music video and in the work of director Darren Aronofsky.

The jumbling of fantasy and reality through the eyes of a performer is also a prominent theme in Satoshi Kon's next film, the critically acclaimed Millennium Actress. Along with the more family-friendly work of Hayao Miyazaki, the film helped usher anime into the American mainstream. Kon saw further critical and commercial success with Tokyo Godfathers, a story about a group of beggars who find themselves in charge of an infant. The movie's vibrant color scheme and inclination to comedy lightens what is otherwise a rather sad story.

In between film projects, Satoshi Kon created and acted as the director of Paranoia Agent, a truly stunning anime TV series. It is a collection of free-floating ideas Kon developed but couldn't expand into feature-length stories. Humorous, deeply metaphorical, frequently satirical and occasionally macabre, Paranoia Agent is unlike any other anime. Kon followed up PA with what is generally regarded as his greatest success, the surreal anime film Paprika. It is a free-flowing story of a psychologist who uses a special machine to enter his patients' dreams. It is based off of Yasutaka Tsutsui's 1993 novel of the same name.

Just before he died, Satoshi Kon wrote his final words in a long letter addressed to his friends and family. The letter was posted after his death on his personal blog. No official English translation is currently available, though one fan has made a generous, unauthorized attempt here. It's rare to get the chance to read an individual's last thoughts, so it was kind and thoughtful of Kon to do those of us left behind the service of recording his dying contemplations. The letter chronicles his sudden diagnosis of cancer, the efforts of his friends to help him get his affairs in order, a somewhat whimsical escape from the hospital so he could die at home and some very touching, very honest expressions for those he held most dear. In the letter, Kon depicts himself as a stubborn workaholic who approached his art with equal passion and protectiveness. He worries for the fate of his unfinished film The Dream Machine and approaches the inconvenience of his sudden passing with a characteristically Japanese sense of propriety. At the end, Satoshi Kon, displaying the unique mix of humor and rich subtext that made him famous, begs our pardon for leaving earlier than expected. If we could have imposed upon him to stay, we certainly would have.

Augustus Pablo - "AP Special" (Video)

For the most part Augustus Pablo serves as a name for those interested in reggae, but not well acquainted with it, to drop and appear well educated on the topic. More over, Pablo's work is pretty one dimensional. That, though, doesn't "AP Special" from being one of those tracks that just gets stuck in your head.

Bull fighting, bad

Item: A video of protest against bullfighting.

The AP reports, "More than 100 semi-naked protesters lay down in the shape of a dying bull Saturday outside one of Spain's most iconic buildings -- the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao -- to demand an end to bullfighting in the Basque Region. " See the video.

In the Catalonia region of Spain, the residents have voted to ban bull fighting, starting January 2012. It should have been banned already, yesterday. Anyway, the rest of Spain, and those Latin American countries, and the parts of France, where this horror is practiced upon innocent animals need to be shamed.

The 21st century should have no room for bullfighting. The torture of bulls and of other animals should be banned. How anyone can enjoy watching the spectacle of an animal being tortured to death? It's pretty sick. It is indefensible. It is barbaric to the point of sheer craziness.

America Wakes: Part Thirteen- Home

Chapters

1       2

3       4

5       6

7        8

9        10

11      12

 

Just four months into the making of this film, the funding for our first year of research and photography ran out. Part of that was my fault. I had been a bit too optimistic about how far we could stretch each Euro because I wanted so badly to get this project off the ground. The rest of the extraneous spending came from unexpected costs. Pricey hotel rooms, exorbitant taxi cab fares, unmarked tolls, bribes, taxes, equipment registration. Key lime pie. Even with my tiny crew the idea of taking on the entire former United States in one go seems, well, naive. Reluctantly, we packed up all the footage and equipment we hadn't already mailed back to England and boarded a plane for home.

It would be another seven months before I could secure enough resource for a second trip. In the meantime I busied myself with reviewing the raw content, making notes for the eventual editing process and even recording a bit of the voice work for the final product. It felt so strange to do all that work when there was so much we hadn't seen, so many questions we still needed to answer. I'm not going to go so far as to say we spent four months in North America and hadn't even scratched the surface. To be honest, we got more information than has ever been captured by other journalistic endeavors. It was rather like leaving a meal after only finishing the first course. I was still unsatisfied. I was still hungry.

In retrospect, there was at least one blessing to being called home earlier than expected. In reviewing the interview footage we had gathered on the trip I began to notice what one might call "tics" and inconsistencies. I wasn't so foolish as to believe we would be told the absolute truth wherever we went, but I was surprised at the places in which I noticed the signs of dishonesty. People who seemed to have no reason to lie had told us things that simply weren't true. This was not restricted to the halls of power. Some of the people who seemed the most humble turned out to be the most dubious. Bold as it may seem to say it before proffering the evidence, there are lies in America, great lies that threaten to swallow what I am convinced is the most important political development of the century. That in mind, my mission for this project changed, however slightly. I set out to unearth the true history of the American Transition. After the first trip ended, I resolved to do just that, but also to reveal the way certain individuals attempted to smudge the records of history before they were even written. Along the way we ended up making friends, and enemies, in strange places.

 

 

End of Segment I: America Wakes. Coming soon, Segment II: Lies in America

A bull charge a pagan crowd, the old gods must laugh

The old gods haven't left us. They never will as long as some of us keep to the old pagan ways. As long as some among us remain so blood thirsty, that they have to see blood, and have to smell it, taste it, watch it flow, the old gods will remain. The old gods will never wander far away, as long as they are fed. Fed? Yes, fed with the spiritual juice of the blood lust.

In Spain and in Mexico too, in places where the beastly gods reign high over the arenas, where for sport -- Well, this is not about sport, there is no sport in this, just blood entertainment -- blood soaked entertainment for men and women.

Mommies and daddies, young children too, spend afternoons enjoying the blood treat that the old pagan gods give them. They watch with glee the taunting, torturing, the humiliation, then the killing of -- whom? Christians? No, that was in Nero's time and in ancient Rome, where the blood of martyrs, for their Faith in the non pagan God, was spilled to please the spectators' appetite for blood. This is the 21st century, martyrs are not slaughter, no human dies, this is not the era of human sacrifice, only of animal sacrifice, for the amusement of the crowd, that keeps to the old pagan ways.

Good darn! Isn't karma something? Heaven, be praise! In Northern Spain, while the pagans sat ready to see a bull die, the bull leaped out of the ring, into the stands and charged the crowd. Oh my! Spectators had to run for their lives! See the video.

The old gods probably were laughing their heads off. They are glad to see blood, tickled to see animals, non human or not, frightened nearly out of their skins and running scared for their lives.

See the video. Of course the humans have the guns and the numbers. The bull is overpowered and captured, and he cries. And he cries.

Final word for this post: Yes, I hate bullfighting. It is pagan. It is wicked. It is animal cruelty. It has no place in the modern world.

Tug of War In The August Heat

A tug of war in the summer heat?

It is the summer time, August. What else is there to do? It's is too hot to think, and so the residents of two Mississippi River towns have figured out what to do. Why shouldn't they do it?

It is the time of their annual Tug of War contest. A sweaty, can get dirty and grimy, battle of brawn and grip in the crazy heat -- Leave the brains to the people wearing the straw hats. The people have come to chill, to have fun.

Everyone needs fun. If we don't do the silly-crazy now and then, take a break from the serious, take the time out to just have fun, our lives would be boring.. Those moments of play, when we do or watch things that exist for the sole purpose of making us laugh, are what keep us going. Hell, those moments keep the world going.

The Associated Press reports --"Teams from Illinois and Iowa pulled on a 24-hundred foot long, 800 pound (rope) for bragging rights and a coveted bald eagle statue." See the video.

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