Category: in english

Illustration: People Reading


Shaun Taun

Tor.com has a nice collection of people reading books in a wide range of media from fine art, illustration, cartoon etc. As these collections go, styles range from horrible kitchy to breathtakingly beautiful but since I have a weakness for all kinds of accumulations I totally dig this.

Oh, the also have collections on spring, summer, autumn, winter, archers, horses, etc.

Review: Brave

Spoilers galore!

Well, that was disappointing but nice at the same time. For me Brave was a prime example of expectation being crushed and replaced not by something terrible but goodokay. From the Trailers and Teasers* I thought Brave would be about Merida going on an adventure in the Highlands and I was quite disappointed for the first half of the movie when this was simply not happening.

I had also forgotten that this is a children’s movie aimed at children (unlike for example Brendan and the Secret of Kells (or most Ghibli movies) where it is clear that this is a children’s movie but it’s so good that you can still watch it at any age without flinching at the stupidity of what’s happening on screen every now and then) and therefore being full of stupid jokes and strange cartoon violence. I also reminded me why I don’t watch 3D-animated movies: the characters all look like puppets (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, see puppet animation) with 3D-animation they look like plastic puppets and everything just feels unreal to me.

Continue reading Review: Brave

Animation: The Reward

Bromance.


The Reward from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo. via Catsuka etc.

Well, this has been all over the blogosphere already but Animationsfilme.ch pointed out the production blog which led me to some blogs of the people involved: a Making of by Paolo Giandoso and one by Kenneth Ladekjær.

The bandit leader is by far the coolest character, so sad she only gets about three seconds screentime.

Animation: Paperman

m(

Here’s an insteresting and depressing feature on how Disney/Pixar (who cares, Kotaku … um, I mean io9) sees the future of 2d-animation: as an advanced render style for 3d-animation!

While the results look pretty nice it’s totally crazy how much effort goes into faking this 2d-look instead of just doing it in 2d (okay, that might still be more work but … but …). Then again the shortfilm breathes the „missing ye olde times“ so maybe it’s fitting. The interesting thing to know would be: does it work withtout the 3d? Did they find a way so you just need to do the keyframes and the computer does the rest? That would be neat.*

Update: Full thing is here (via Nerdcore). While the storyidea is boringokay, they just drag it on and on. And this is Oscar-nominated? I don’t know if that’s more telling for the Oscars or this short film if this mediocre piece is what they nominate.

And boy, am I bored of white people, does it always have to be white people? Turns out, it doesn’t.

*Especially because then there would be an alternative to this strange morphing that can be seen in movies like Waltz with Bashir and Alois Nebel, I really hate that.

Illustation: Adventure Time Artists

Here are twothree of the artists who put their sparkling creativity into the awesome Adventure Time:

Thomas and Peter Herpich:

and Natasha Allegri of gender bending fame (who was also responsible for the Mathematical Marceline/Princess Bubblegum lesbian love suggestion thingy. And we can’t have that, because, you know, if you show kids that being gay is totally fine they ALL BECOME GAY INSTANTLY.

Sigh.

Not to forget Pendleton Ward but he seems only doing the FB/Twitter both of which I’m not really a fan. Not that I am a tumblr fan, o no, but at least you can link to that shit (but no comments, soooooo stupid). Okay, his TwitPic is … um, ….

Howto: Change color profile on wake/resume in Linux Mint/Ubuntu

I’m trying out Linix Mint 14 on my Macbook Pro at the moment and while it is a huge step from my previous visits to the Linux world a few years ago there a still some issues. One was that the color-profile was set to default every time resumed the computer from sleep. But I’ve found a way around that:

First, install xcalib, a nice little program that can load color-profiles via xcalib PATH or /usr/bin/xcalib PATH in the terminal (xcalib -c resets the profile) and do a lot of other stuff.

Now place a script in /etc/pm/sleep.d/ that runs this line on wake/resume (see here for details). The problem is that the skript doesn’t get executed as it is because you have to specify the display and sudo the whole thing.

So the script in /etc/pm/sleep.d/ should look like this:

#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
    thaw|resume)
        export DISPLAY=:0
        su -c - YOUR_USERNAME
        /usr/bin/xcalib "PATH_TO_PROFILE"
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac
exit $?

Anyway, that’s working for me.

Review: Origin: Spirits of the Past

A few days ago I thought about watching Summer Wars again, which I quite liked and then gave Origin (what an exceptionally pointless name, even for a movie title which tend to be awful anyway) a try instead (can’t figure out the connection now, might just be IMDB’s „people also liked“-function). And since it’s produced by Gonzo, the people who brought us the fantastic all-female lead Last Exile: Fam the Silver Wing, I thought this might be worth watching.

But I was wrong. While the the movie has an interesting setting (a post-apocalyptic-world, who would not like that?) and some nice ideas like the people turning into trees, plus two cool female characters, the mayor(ess?) of the town and the soldier lady, the story wasn’t too surprising or original and the character-design ranges from cliche to ridiculous (the armor! -_____-).

My main problem was the ending, I was positively surprised by – SPOILER ALERT! – Agito dying at 3/4 of the movie and I thought this would finally be the time when there’s some character development in Toola. This would have been the chance to make her a strong person, going back to the town alone and setting things right, learning to come to terms with this new world and the forest. The volcano could have waited a little with erupting so she could get down the mountain (how is a moving volcano supposed to work anyway, that makes no sense). What an awesome twist that would have been: main character sacrifices himself so the sidekick can finish the quest? Nice one! It would also been a good reversal of the „sidekick/lover dies in the end to awake righteous anger in the main character“-trope.

But no, male main character comes back from the dead (ffs …) and mysterious sidekick from the past can keep on being saved and passive (aside from some random running around alone in dangerous places) like she did the whole fucking movie, except for when she decided to go with the bad, bad industrial people (which wasn’t a decision really, because they’d probably taken her by force anyway) and for three minutes Agita was dead (where she only did what he told her to do). So, so disappointing. And what was this scene with „women are allowed to wave at each other after being encouraged by males to do so“ in the end? Creepy!

So, sadly, don’t bother with this one. Fam the Silver Wing is nice though. But beware of the eastern European girl with the strange one curl anime-haircut. She actually might have been the main reason for me not to watched that ’til the end.

Animation: Catzilla

While I don’t dig the character design or style too much this a pretty funky video with a nice – albeit not very original – story that somehow reminded me of Akira (probably of the atom-bomb like explosion at the end) and Evangelion.

Since this is a demoscene-thingy you can use it as a benchmark for your Windows-PC.

Catzilla from Plastic Demoscene Group on Vimeo.

via Nerdcore

Illustration: Marian Churchland

I discovered Marian Churchland because she drew a chapter in Madame Xanadu which was by far the best about this otherwise totally neglectible and boring (= typical American mainstram) comic. She also drew maybe the best but certainly the most beautiful epsiode of the Northlanders series, a story about a girl in the Outer Hebredis. She also has a concept for a RPG computer game, called The Crossing which sounds almost as awesome (just look at these masks!) as her art is (naturally including PoC, look, it’s not that hard, fucking game-devs).


Review: Duelist / Hyeongsa (2005)

This movie is so full of cliches and it does every one of them so perfect. It’s pure awesome: from the ultra-stylized visuals (probably half of the movie is in slow-motion), the soundtrack ranging from Samurai Fiction-style cheesy rock to orchestral uber-schmalz, to the characters: Namsoon, the main character is a tomboy, a police detective of course falling in love with the beautiful mysterious, melancholic and androgynous villain. Guess if it ends badly? It sure does!

The story isn’t really important and I don’t really get it every single time I watch it but I love everything about the movie, the ridiculous fighting scenes (not much flying, though), Namsoon drunk and crying and screaming and kicking ass at the same time, snow falling in slow motion. This is asian cinema at its best, gender-reversed and wonderful.*

I also love the A Serious Man-style beginning that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the movie: the story of a man who invites himself into the spooky house of a sexy single woman, which gets interrupted because the guy telling the story is distracted. Why never find out what happens next. Nevertheless the thing comes to full circle because the last scene of the movie is the same guy telling how he witnessed the tragic „united in swordplay“-scene (which might arguably the real end of the movie) and almost jerked off to it.**

Oh, and don’t bother with the TV-series based on the same manhwa, it looks just terrible.

*Also no women or other supporting characters dying shortly before the final show-off as a plot-motif. Thumbs up.
** What is a nice comment on how this movie is taking itself not at all serious.

EDIT 2014: Pretty sure this doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, though (and if only barely), since this is one of these strange „only female character in there is the main character“-movies. It still totally rocks, anyway.