animation

Coonskin (1975)

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The 1928 animated short “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain last month, which has inspired a lot of speculation about what perverted things people are going to do to and with Mickey Mouse now that his copyright protection is loosening up.  Unfortunately, there isn’t likely to be much great cinematic payoff to this historical pop culture moment, at least not if last year’s dreadful slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is any indication.  There might be a couple “Steamboat Willie”-inspired public domainsploitation horrors released in the near future, but it’s likely that our imaginative play with Mickey Mouse’s image will stop there.  That’s what makes it so wild that animator Ralph Bakshi already warped & perverted the cursed rodent’s image 50 years ago in his ironic minstrel cartoon parody of Disney’s Song of the South.  The brief appearance of a disc-eared rat might not rank among the top 100 wildest things about 1975’s Coonskin, but it’s still indicative of how limited our imagination has been as icons like Mickey & Winnie have entered the public domain recently – not to mention our litigious cowardice when it comes to playing with fair-use parody (The People’s Joker innocent).

Given that Coonskin was produced three decades after The Song of the South, it cannot be totally contextualized as a direct response to that nostalgic Disney apologia for slavery-era racism in the American South.  Rather, the film ties a long history of racial caricature in American media together for one confrontational comedy of discomforts, with Song of the South standing as the nexus.  Coonskin is effectively an animated take on blacksploitation cinema, both mocking and indulging in the Black action filmmaking aesthetics of its own era.  The broad-stereotype caricature of 1970s blacksploitation tropes is emphasized here as a revival vintage blackface iconography, sometimes literally so in archival photographs that provide the animation’s multi-media backgrounds.  Song of the South was far from the only animated continuation of that racist iconography into the 21st century; it just happened to be the most racist.  You can also see classic minstrel imagery reflected in the white gloves and blackface mugging of classic Looney Tunes character designs (which are also alluded to in Coonskin through the repurposing of the classic “That’s all folks!” Merry Melodies backdrop) as well as the original design of Steamboat Willie himself.  Bakshi’s nightmare perversion of “Mickey Mouse” may only materialize for a brief few seconds of screentime (as a rat who is executed by gunfire from an unnamed character, mid-anecdote) but his ugly, racist legacy as Disney’s mascot is a specter that haunts the entire picture.

The question of whether white men like Bakshi (namely him & contemporary Robert Crumb) were doing anything politically valuable by resurrecting this incendiary racial iconography has been debated since they first started on the 1960s underground comics scene.  I first encountered that moral grey area in the 2001 high school drama Ghost World (directed by R. Crumb documentarian Terry Zwigoff), which includes a climactic art show controversy about whether it’s more racist to dredge up these vintage minstrel-show images for fresh debate or to pretend they never existed in the first place – effectively locking them away forever in the Disney Vault.  I felt no more comfortable with that question watching a Ghost World VHS rental as a teenager in the early 2000s than I did watching a repertory screening of Coonskin with a live crowd in my 30s.  Hell, I felt deeply embarrassed just saying the title aloud at the box office.  Bakshi’s film is transgressive in a way that truly feels dangerous & subversive half a century later, which I can’t honestly say about most Cult Cinema provocations of its kind.  It can be a productive discomfort at times, at least in its willingness to acknowledge that America is a racist country with an even more racist past (something politicians have been struggling to avoid admitting to news cameras this year).  At other times, it just feels like Bakshi regurgitating the racist iconography of his youth without much purposeful subversion of the tropes.  Often, it’s both.

There isn’t much plot to hang onto here, as Bakshi films are more about experiment in form than coherence in narrative.  A live-action jailbreak sequence provides a framing device for a narrated parody of Song of the South, chronicling the many adventures of an animated rabbit, fox, and bear in 1970s Harlem.  The three animal friends go on the lam, Sweet Sweetback-style, after killing a white Southern sheriff and hustle their way up the Harlem hierarchy to local positions of power – outmaneuvering phony preachers & activists, grotesque mobsters, and an endless supply of even more racist cops during their ascent.  Like the cartoon animals of the famous “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” sequence in Song of the South, Rabbit, Fox, and Bear are animated on top of live-action cinematography; only, Bakshi pushes that mixed-media style to point of experimental psychedelia.  Sometimes the background is a still image.  Sometimes the camera spins in a nauseating circle.  Sometimes the real, hip citizens of Harlem mix with the vintage-minstrel cartoons that reduce them to stereotypes.  The only constant is that every hand-drawn character is a grotesque exaggeration of an American cliché, from the racial caricatures of the main protagonists to the scrotal monstrosities of their white oppressors to the homophobic condemnation of the ninnies who play both sides.  The only exception to that treatment is the personification of America herself: a buxom blonde who seduces the Black men beneath her to their peril, releasing machine gunfire from between her legs.

The more I think about it, the only truly subversive thing artists could do with the Steamboat Willie image at this point is to return Mickey Mouse to his racist minstrel-show roots to expose how rotten American culture is at its core.  Maybe that approach is better suited for a quick Robert Smigel gag in a TV Funhouse sketch than it is for a feature-length comedy, but Bakshi still gets major credit for fearlessly getting to the punchline early and punching it harder than he really had any right to.  I’d also like to give major credit to WW Cinema (the local screening program formerly known as Wildwood) for daring to publicly exhibit this film in the 2020s, which in some ways feels even more dangerous than if they went straight to the source and screened Song of the South.  It was an uncomfortable night at the movies, productively & memorably so.

-Brandon Ledet

Robot Dreams (2024)

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I had two animated features on my personal Best Films of 2023 list (Suzume & Mutant Mayhem), and neither one was nominated for Oscars.  I am at peace with this outcome, just as I was last year when my pet favorites Mad God & Inu-Oh weren’t nominated either.  In general, I find the practice of getting hung up on Oscar “snubs” to be deeply silly, since the process of narrowing down the best movies of the year to just a few selections in any category is silly by nature.  There are only five slots for Best Animated Feature nominations and only a few movie distributors with enough marketing funds set aside for substantial FYC campaigns, so it’s obvious that dozens of worthy titles are going to be left off the list.  My personal favorites may not have made the cut, but the 2024 slate is largely decent.   If nothing else, I enjoyed both The Boy and the Heron and Across the Spider-Verse a great deal, and I would be delighted if either of those titles takes home a statue; they’re both worth rooting for.  Disney’s Elemental and the Disney-forsaken Nimona represent the kinds of kid-friendly CG animation that eats up Oscar noms by default in this post-Pixar world, but it feels encouraging that they’re no longer the dominating force in every new round of Awards Season discourse.  That leaves one open slot for this year’s long-shot outsider, a cutesy buddy comedy titled Robot Dreams.  Since it’s the one film on this year’s list that hasn’t yet been distributed wide, it’s the only one I hadn’t seen or heard much about before the nominations were announced.  And since its distributor Neon can now easily market it off of its awards buzz, it will soon be hitting a large number of theaters across the US – which is exactly what The Oscars ritual is good for: not determining the best movies of the year but boosting awareness & appreciation for a select few lucky contenders.

The premise of Robot Dreams sounds like the exact Disney-branded kids’ fluff that clutters up the Oscars slate most years.  It’s a movie about the friendship between a robot & a dog, set in 1980s NYC.  They dance in City Park, they enjoy a fun day at the beach, and they strut around the city whistling the Earth, Wind & Fire hit “September” while other various animals & robots beam smiles back at them.  After a short stint of happy companionship, they’re separated and spend the rest of the movie trying to get back to each other to revive the good vibes from the opening act.  There isn’t much narrative or thematic complexity to Robot Dreams, at least not when compared to the new Miyazaki & Spider-Verse films it’s competing against for an Oscar statue.  Thankfully, it’s a much more artistically complex movie than it is a complex story.  It’s entirely dialogue free, which forces it to rely on the traditionalist physical humor of an ancient Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati comedy, something that makes it feel both widely accessible & vaguely classy.  Despite its American setting (which is nostalgic enough for the past that it prominently features the Twin Towers in as many frames as possible), its Spanish production also gives it a default air of Euro sophistication, despite sounding more on paper like The Secret Lives of Pets than The Triplets of Belleville.  It’s also a strangely melancholy film.  There’s nothing sadder than a lonely dog, since they were specifically bred to love & obey, so the movie taps into some easy emotional heft in its earliest stretch where the canine protagonist gets so lonely that he orders a robot friend from a TV infomercial.  Watching his new robo-friend learn the basic rules of public life is funny in the same way that watching Bella Baxter & Stereotypical Barbie navigate the world for the first time was in last year’s funniest comedies, but then the unlikely friends are separated for long stretches of heartbreak & isolation until they can find companionship again. 

Of all the things that make Robot Dreams commendable among this year’s Best Animated Feature nominations, the thing that I most want to celebrate is its chosen medium of traditional, hand drawn 2D animation.  Just as the visual gags in the film’s comedy sequences are more cute than hilarious, its animation style is more tidy than expressive – recalling the simple, clean lines and character designs of a syndicated cartoon.  Watching the movie is like reading the Sunday funnies on a week when the cartoonists are feeling especially sentimental; neither the highs nor the lows are especially surprising, but it’s still a warmly nostalgic act.  The “dreams” of the film’s title also hint at its adherence to one of my favorite plot structures in narrative filmmaking: the repeated fakeout that our hero has emerged from a nightmare, only to be pulled back to their starting position like a rotary dial (best exemplified by my all-time favorite X-Files episode, “Field Trip”, in which Mulder & Scully repeatedly hallucinate that they’ve escaped a magic mushroom prison while they continue to rot there).  In short, Robot Dreams is not an especially great movie, but it is an especially likeable one.  Considering that it’s competing in an Oscar category that was created to award something as abominable as Shrek in its first year, getting by as “likeable” is a worthy enough achievement to celebrate.  If it does win an Oscar at this year’s ceremony, it will fall more into the low-key charmer category of former winner Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit than it would fall into the category of a hideous embarrassment like former winner Happy Feet.  Even if it doesn’t win anything, it’s already greatly benefited from its nomination, which is one of the few ways that non-Disney, non-Pixar, non-superhero animation has a chance to land proper distribution & marketing in our modern corporate hellscape.  I’m only ever rooting for a few reasonably good movies to benefit from an Oscars bump—not necessarily my exact personal favorites—and this one fits that descriptor just fine.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern — First Flight (2009)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Rewatching these DC animated movies has been a strange ride so far. I remembered enjoying Superman: Doomsday as decent but not noteworthy, New Frontier as an unassailable masterpiece, Gotham Knight as forgettable, corporate-driven trash, and Wonder Woman as being quite good. It’s strange to come to such different conclusions now, with Doomsday as a memorable story of grief on the part of Lois Lane despite the film’s off-putting and occasionally ugly stylistic choices, Frontier as fun and novel but hampered but its sudden and overt jingoism, Knight as stylish and fascinating, and Wonder Woman in particular as being much grosser and more sexist than I remembered. The change in my perspective on this one, however, is perhaps the most extreme to date. Green Lantern: First Flight is truly adult in a way that the preceding films have attempted but not achieved. And it’s not simply about going grim and dark through violence (although that is present here, and it’s spectacular), but through a more nuanced approach to the narrative and a few genuine surprises. 

Hal Jordan is a modern-day test pilot for Ferris Aircraft whose simulation pod is forcibly drawn to the dying corpse of extraterrestrial humanoid Abin Sur, who explains that he is a member of an extraterrestrial police organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and that he has chosen Hal as his successor. Within a fairly short time, several other members of the Corps show up to take Hal back to Oa, the planet from which the Corps operates under the supervision of the Guardians, little floating blue guys with red robes and giant heads. These beings were the first intelligent life in the universe, and they created the giant lantern-shaped battery from which the many members of the Corps draw their power. As the rest of the galaxy considers Earth to be a backwards planet of smelly, greedy, crude brutes, the Guardians are resistant to the idea of letting a human join the ranks of the Green Lanterns, but highly decorated and trusted veteran Sinestro requests the opportunity to train Hal and, in so doing, test his worthiness. Their first order of business is tracking down the man who dealt Abin Sur his mortal blow, and use him to locate his employer, the warlord Kanjar Ro, who is rumored to be building his own powerful battery to rival that of the Guardians. 

If you thought Wonder Woman speedran through that character’s origin (it handles in 20 minutes what took an hour or so in the 70s pilot movie), this one really puts the pedal to the metal, with Hal getting the ring before the 5 minute mark and him en route to Oa within three minutes of that scene (not counting the credits). That’s not a bad thing; New Frontier had already covered much of the same territory (albeit in a different era) and the ill-fated Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern was in production already at this time and would cover the origin story yet again, so it was wise to breeze through all of that and get to the meat of the story so that it could spend more time developing the plot rather than the exposition. That may be why this feels the most like a proper movie of these first five, since it hits the ground running and gets to the point with enough time to explore the characters better. By fifteen minutes into the film, Hal is already on a mission with Sinestro that plays out like a scene from Training Day, wherein Sinestro tracks down the mistress of their suspect and, using an orb that produces a narcotic-like euphoric effect, tortures her to the point of nearly overdosing until Hal intervenes (a little too late for us to find him “heroic,” to be honest, but the narrative requires that Sinestro pushes the envelope, so I’ll allow it). 

The cast here is great, as it has been in all of these films. Christopher Meloni is an obvious choice to voice a cop, even one who operates across an entire sector of space rather than simply a unit for special victims. The real standout, however, is Victor Garber as Sinestro. You don’t even really have to be familiar with the comics or any of its adaptations to see his turn to the dark side coming—I mean, his name is Sinestro—but this is one of the more interesting versions of this character that we’ve seen. He’s the epitome of a cop: looking down on those he is supposed to serve and protect, an outsider in the communities that he is policing who thinks his badge ring gives him immunity to instigate and escalate violence with little regard for collateral. He’s trusted and respected by his superiors and peers, but he doesn’t hide this side of himself from Hal for long, immediately saying upon their arrival at the standard wretched hive of scum and villainy that he suggested that the place be destroyed via meteor shower, only for his leaders to laugh off his earnest suggestion. Sinestro is often a character that it is difficult to take seriously—again, his name is Sinestro—but Garber imbues his performance with such strong contempt that he sells the character’s malice completely. It’s really something to behold. Juliet Landau, probably best known either for being Martin Landau’s daughter or for portraying Drusilla in Buffy and Angel, gives a great performance as minor character Labella that sells the pathos of her position, but it’s another actress best known for her genre work, Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, who deserves a call out here. As fellow Green Lantern Boodikka (I know), Helfer makes Boodikka vulnerable and trustworthy in a way that—spoilers for a fifteen year old movie incoming—make her betrayal of Hal all the more agonizing, even if the fact that it’s Helfer in the role means we should have seen that twist coming. 

When it comes to stakes and action/violence, this is the best of these films yet. Late in the film, Sinestro deactivates the lantern battery, preventing any Lanterns in the field from using their rings, so that any who were traveling through space or in a situation where they were protected by said ring are killed, with the rings then returning to Oa where they fall from the sky as thickly as rain in a raging storm. And that’s offscreen violence—characters die by falling into the walls of space transit tunnels and exploding into vapor, Sinestro temporarily reanimates the corpse of a fallen foe into a shambling semi-conscious undead thing in order to ask it some final questions, and one of Kanjar Ro’s men is sucked into space spine-first through a six-inch hole punched in the hull of a spaceship. It’s not simply darkness for the sake of being edgy, it’s often very inventive and integral to the plot. I’ve already given away too much, I fear, so I won’t spoil anything else, but I will say, this is the best one so far, and the most worthwhile one yet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman (2009)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

It’s a testament to just how starved we were for Wonder Woman content in the aughts that this animated movie, which came out in 2009, was so well received. It’s not bad per se—in fact, in many places, it’s quite good—but this movie’s version of Steve Trevor is gross in a way that was probably apparent even at the time, but which has become even more apparent in contrast to the way that the character was portrayed by least problematic Christopher in Hollywood, Chris Pine, in the live-action 2017 film that was released just a scant eight years later. 

The 2009 Wonder Woman film starts in the distant past: Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Virginia Madsen) is locked in battle with god of war Ares (Alfred Molina), her former lover. As her warriors die on the battlefield, locked in combat with an army of mythical monsters led by her and Ares’s son Thrax, she turns the tides by beheading her own offspring. Preparing to do the same to Ares, she is stopped by Zeus and Hera (Marg Helgenberger), who tell her that they cannot permit her to kill a god, but they will bind his powers and allow her to hold him as her prisoner in perpetuity, granting her and her people a new home on the paradise-like island of Themyscira, safe from the dangers of “man’s world.” After she and her people build their new home, Hippolyta is granted another boon as she crafts a child for herself from the island’s clay, which the Olympians bring to life: a daughter, Diana (Keri Russell). Decades later, Ares remains under lock and key under the guardianship of Persephone (Vicki Lewis), a warrior who lost an eye when she jumped into the line of fire and took a blow that was meant for bookworm Alexa (Tara Strong) in the war against Ares in the prologue; this lack of interest in battle on the part of Alexa makes her the target of mockery for supposed cowardice by her older sister Artemis (Rosario Dawson), Hippolyta’s right hand general. When modern USAF pilot Steve Trevor (Nathan Fillion) lands on Themyscira after an aerial dogfight, a contest is held to determine which of the Amazons should travel beyond their peaceful oasis to return him to his nation. Diana wins this competition, but her excitement is short lived, as Ares’s escape while the island’s inhabitants were distracted by the contest means that she will not need to seek him out and return him to his cell. 

There’s a tonal issue at play here that drags this one down a bit. It’s got a PG-13 rating, and at the time of release, there was some outcry about the level of violence in this one. I think that’s reflective of a systemic issue, as this film is no more violent than Superman: Doomsday, which didn’t receive the same kind of criticism, and I think it’s owed solely to the fact that the combatants here are women. There is a decapitation (in shadow), but in the earlier film, Doomsday murdered an actual child (although the “camera” cut away), but because Amazonians (read: women) are doing the violence, this one received more criticism. It makes sense that this would get the MPAA rating that it did because of this, but the dialogue remains very PG. There’s a recurring bit that starts because Trevor says “crap” in front of the Amazons, then has to explain that it means excrement; each time after this that he uses the word, the Amazons take this as further evidence of the crassness and baseness of mankind, until Diana finally uses it herself at the end as a demonstration of her becoming more acclimatized to man’s world. That’s all well and good (if a bit pat and trite), but its failure to push the boundaries of the film’s rating demonstrates that the franchise is still trying to bridge a gap between appealing to (and being acceptable for) children while aiming to attract an older audience through a novel, more mature approach to storytelling. 

Once upon a time, I owned this movie on DVD, having obtained it for a mere $5 from the CVS on Leon C. Simon, when I was a student at UNO. I have a very clear memory of watching the special features, which included several talking heads from the film’s voice cast, and Rosario Dawson using the word “warriess” several times, which I always found endearing. Dawson is giving a great performance here in general, with a couple of quite badass lines—my favorite of which is when someone teases her about her giant sword, and she replies that it “is but [her] dagger.” Very little in the film stuck out in my mind, however, other than the speedrun through the stations of the Diana of Themyscira canon: born of clay, paradise island, crashed air pilot, championship to determine the ambassador to man’s world, crusader for truth and justice. Once Diana comes to the modern world, there’s a distinct lack of charm in her fish out of water story that acts as a demonstration of why this narrative works better as a period piece; the Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie sets its events during WWI while the Lynda Carter TV classic was set in WWII (at least initially), as the earliest comics had been. This allows for there to be some natural chemistry between this isolated demigod princess and a man who can be a little regressive but still likable in that he was more aware than average for this time. Here, Steve Trevor is a total hound dog, in a way that would have been obnoxious even for a contemporary guy at the time of the film’s release. 

All of the stuff with Wonder Woman herself is great (minus a comment that she makes about Etta Candy that is supposed to shame her for being a stereotype), but I’d really rather not have heard Steve Trevor tell Queen Hippolyta that “[her] daughter’s got a nice rack,” even if it’s supposed to be a moment played for comedy (he’s bound with the Lasso of Truth). Later still, he tries to get Diana drunk with the implication that he expects to have the opportunity to take advantage of her! It’s vile, frankly. The rest of the film, as wonderful as so much of it is—the fight between the Amazons and the reanimated dead is a particular standout, especially as it exists both as set piece and as vehicle for closure on the Alexa/Artemis relationship—doesn’t make up for the fact that its male lead is an attempted sexual assailant by any other name. Edit all of that out and you have a 4-star animated flick, but it is in this film, and that leaves us where we are.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League — The New Frontier (2008)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Many years ago, I used to own the two trade paperback volumes that comprised Darwyn Cooke’s New Frontier comic. The miniseries is an exercise in reimagining the transition between what is considered the comic book Golden Age (about 1938 to 1956, notable for the introductions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) and that same medium’s Silver Age (1956 to 1970, notable for the introduction of the modern versions of the Flash and Green Lantern as well as the formation of the Justice League in place of the Justice Society). Set over the course of fifteen years, the series begins with the disruption of the superheroic Justice Society in the face of McCarthyism and sees Superman and Wonder Woman go to work for the government while Batman retreats into the shadows. Later, the emergence of new heroes like Flash and Green Lantern, and the accidental transportation of Martian Manhunter from his home planet to earth, arise just in time for the combined forces of two generations of heroes to take on an extinction level threat in the form of a living island populated by sauropods. 

Those two volumes were, unfortunately, some of the many books that I sold before my interstate move eight years ago as I was paring down my belongings. I haven’t read it since, but I recall it fondly, and I remember being very pleased with the animated adaptation’s ability to tell the same story concisely without the omission of too many important details. I even used to own this one on DVD before it, too, was resold in one of my many moves. Although it mostly holds up as a movie, I must have grown a lot since the last time I saw it, as some of its flaws stand out rather clearly these days. 

In the closing days—in fact, the final day—of the Korean War, USAF pilot Hal Jordan is shot down by Korean pilots moments after learning that an armistice has been declared; he is able to parachute into relative safety, but finds himself facing an enemy soldier who is unaware that the war is over, and is forced to kill the man in self defense. His resulting PTSD from this incident causes him to be the subject of mockery from others after discharge, as they consider him cowardly and perhaps too sympathetic to communism. Elsewhere, Martian J’onn J’onzz is teleported to Gotham City by an astronomer running an experiment, who then dies of a heart attack upon seeing the extraterrestrial’s form. A shapeshifter, J’onzz adopts the persona of a trustworthy detective, all while remaining fearful of violence from humans should they see his true form. These three new heroes as well as the DC “trinity” are brought together, alongside a bevy of comic deep cut characters and some who have become more well-known in the interim because of their presence in the CW “Arrowverse” shows, to face off against the living island and the malevolent consciousness called “the Centre” which animates it. 

This is a gorgeously animated movie. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is a very strong entry into this canon, since the source material was so well loved that it won all three of comics’ major awards, the Eisner, the Harvey, and the Shuster. Darwyn Cooke’s distinctive art style for the comic translates well to fluid motion, and the imagery is evocative of an older era that works well for the narrative. I really appreciate a lot of the artistic choices made here, with the choice to draw Wonder Woman as half a head taller than Superman being a particular source of jot for me. Although the film updates the title to include the phrase “Justice League,” the majority of the story focuses on Hal “Green Lantern” Jordan, and it may simply be that I am a Buffy fan (now and forever), but the choice to cast David Boreanaz, most well known to many as the vampire cursed with a soul, is particularly inspired. Hal feels guilt and shame, but not for the things that his fellow combatants think he should, and is tortured by the blood on his hands, and that’s not only within Boreanaz’s wheelhouse, it’s his forte. Equally genius was the casting of Lucy Lawless to voice Wonder Woman, even if it’s a shame that there’s so little of her in the film; still, she shines in every scene that she is in, and there’s a particular standout sequence in which she liberates a camp of “comfort women,” teaches them to fight, and leaves their former enslavers at the mercy of the freed women. Superman is aghast at this as they are both working as agents of the U.S. at the time, but it’s a well-crafted reminder that this immortal woman has an ethics and morality that is defined by a sense of justice that predates his “American way.” 

Despite Diana’s rejection of it, there is a distinctly jingoistic flair to some of the proceedings, and there’s a strange sense of sincerity to it that was lost on me in previous viewings. It is important to bear in mind that post-9/11 American Exceptionalism was an ever-present shadow on the entire landscape of media produced in the west, and in 2008 we were still a few years out from the point where non-satire mainstream films would be able to be openly anti-authoritarian and question the state again (the dam-breaker being the success of The Hunger Games, or at least that’s where I normally pin the turning point). As a comic, New Frontier was able to be a little more subversive, with the narrative focus on McCarthyism serving as a parallel to the contemporary (2004) witch-hunting and scapegoating of members of government who opposed the Bush Administration’s warmongering in the Middle East. The film also cut (other than a mention in the news) a storyline about a Black vigilante who fought the KKK before being murdered at the hands of a white lynch mob, as another indictment of the idea that the past was a place where things were “simpler” and “better.” Most of what remains is shown through the eyes of our objectively good viewpoint characters: the xenophobia that Martian Manhunter knows exists and cloaks himself against in order to “pass,” the muttering of bar patrons that they suspect Flash of being a commit because of his red costume, and the aforementioned belittlement that Hal Jordan receives from those who mistake his pacifism for cowardice and his PTSD for weakness. All of that disappears in the back half of this movie, however, as the film goes full Uncle Sam at the end, with all of the assembled forces against The Centre being identified explicitly as Americans, and, upon their victory, an excerpt from the JFK speech is played over a montage of the new and senior heroes fighting alongside one another as they move forward with a new (American) destiny. It’s not that the film’s sudden, new, shallow patriotism is bad in and of itself (it arguably could be, but I don’t have that in me today), it’s that it comes out of nowhere. I think that the intent is to show a rejection of McCarthy-era fearmongering giving way to a new dawn, but it’s a little too quick of a turn in a film that runs less than eighty minutes. It’s still one of the best of this series, but something I couldn’t ignore on this rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Superman — Doomsday (2007)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, a new Swampflix feature for 2024. For background, I was a twenty-year-old college student in 2007 when there was a brand-new surge of comic book adaptations into films. Iron Man premiered in theaters the following year and, although it didn’t seem like it at the time, foretold a society-moving shift in the cinema landscape that would echo through today; elsewhere, someone at DC Comics was like, “What if we just started making animated direct-to-DVD features?” We were still four years out from the controversial 2011 DC comics reboot “New 52” (from which this feature takes its name), which most non-comic fans in the general public ether know nothing about. If they do, they might half-remember seeing a morning or midday show fluff piece about Superman’s new outfit (it was the one with the blue t-shirt and jeans, to make him seem more down to earth), or the noteworthy controversy surrounding the fact that DC’s creative staff dropped from 12% women to 1% during the editorial shake-up, or the fact that the new continuity portrayed Barbara “Batgirl/Oracle” Gordon’s previously permanent paraplegia as a temporary condition from which she recovered, essentially getting rid of one of the very few notable wheelchair users in comics. Or they might know of it from the fact that it was the new continuity introduced in the wake of Flashpoint, a Flash-centric timeline changing event that the general public is more aware of since it’s been adapted several times — first as an animated film in 2013 (which we’ll be getting to), then again as a plot point on the CW’s long-running (no pun intended) Flash TV series, and most recently last year as one of the inspirations for the narrative for last year’s Flash film. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Since that year, Marvel has produced thirty-three features (and over a dozen TV shows), while DC’s animation wing has produced about fifty-two of their animated movies without, to my knowledge, a single one of them ever hitting cinemas. I say “about fifty-two” because there are some that are split into two parts, the placement of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm within this list is debatable, at least one that is a repackaging of episodes of a webseries, and because anyone familiar with DC comics knows how much they love the number 52. With that in mind, I thought I might torture myself for as long as I could take and watch every single one of them, a new review coming each week to your virtual comic book stand here on Swampflix. I might go insane. Come along with me?

Superman: Doomsday was the first (give or take your feelings about the above-mentioned Mask of the Phantasm) of these films to hit the shelves of your local Best Buy, and I remember very clearly watching it on a Netflix DVD shortly after release. I also recall being impressed by it, with one particular scene standing out; it’s the intro scene for Lex Luthor (James “Spike” Marsters), in which his assistance Mercy Graves (Cree Summer) enters a room and he motions for her silence before finishing some kind of calculation in his head and entering it on his device and handing it off to her. When she asks if it’s the cure for cancer, he tells her it’s actually the cure for muscular dystrophy and directs her to have one of Lexcorp’s internal biomedical scientists work on turning the cure into a treatment—that is, to water it down and turn a one-time windfall into an ongoing source of income. I remember being utterly shocked at the sheer banality of his evil, truly the epitome of corporate emperors. 

This is immediately contrasted with Superman (Adam Baldwin), whom we see in his arctic Fortress of Solitude, spending his down time between rescuing cats from trees and fighting mechanical spiders trying to protect human life in a more mundane way. Lois (Anne Heche) is there with him, trying to get him to admit his secret identity—which she has already figured out on her own—as Clark Kent to her, which he skirts around with the excuse that confirming would somehow put her in danger, which she chalks up to simple fear of commitment. Elsewhere, an illegal drilling operation under the Lexcorp banner uncovers a buried spaceship, which turns out to contain an alien called “Doomsday” which was genetically engineered by an extraterrestrial race as the perfect, unstoppable soldier, which they then threw into space when they were unable to control him. Doomsday carves a swathe of murder and destruction all the way to Metropolis, where he engages in a lengthy battle with the other title character that ends with both of their deaths. 

In some ways, this is a condensation of the infamous “Death of Superman” comic book arc of the ’90s, with Kal-El’s death at the hands of Doomsday leading to the rise of several potential replacements, the most notable of whom were Conner “Superboy” Kent and Steel. In some ways, that’s what initially led me to be interested in starting this project, as 2018 saw the release of a more direct adaptation with the DC animated release of Death of Superman. Having long lost touch with this animated feature endeavor, my mind boggled at the fact that within ten years, they had already circled back around and were remaking their own work. I’m sure it won’t be exactly that when (if) I ever get to that one, but a quick look at the cast list and their associated characters tells me that it is a story that’s more extensively involved with a larger comic book character community. In Doomsday, the “Reign of the Supermen” super-mantle succession crisis of the comics is replaced with a singular clone of Superman, created by Lex from blood shed in Kal-El’s battle with Doomsday, one who starts out with the same ethos as the character that we have seen die but who gradually becomes more fascistic, going so far as to execute a recaptured super-felon rather than risk the possibility that he escape again. 

That’s an awful lot of discussion of Clark and Lex, but in my eyes, the real main character of this story is Lois. In a cast full of great performers (Martha Kent is voiced by Swoosie Kurtz!), the late Heche is doing absolutely phenomenal work selling Lois’s frustration, grief, cautious hope, and fierce determination. Having seen some of the later releases from this animation house, I can tell you that it would be easy to sleepwalk through the recording sessions and that some actors definitely do later on, but not Heche. I mourned her more watching this movie than one would expect from a purely commercial enterprise, but she carries this movie, with no apparent strain at all. A lot of the scenes are clearly condensed, but there’s still a surprising amount of pathos there. Particular standout scenes include her first meeting with Martha Kent, where both women are necessarily cagey—Martha because she’s unaware that Lois knows Superman was Clark and is thus concerned that the younger woman may simply be looking for a scoop, and Lois because she’s hesitant to admit how much she knows, and the scene in which the apparently newly resurrected Superman flies Lois home and responds with confused indifference when Lois kisses him—because, as a clone, he knows only what Luthor knows about Superman, and so isn’t privy to the real Superman’s private life. Heche and Lois are great here. 

Where the movie is less enjoyable is in the visuals. Although there is a lot of really great, dynamic animated action (the Doomsday vs. Superman battle takes up a solid chunk of screen time but never quite reaches the point where the audience is bored), the character designs are inconsistent. Some of this can be blamed on the designs being imported from the DC Animated Universe of TV shows that had recently come to a close with the ending of Justice League Unlimited in 2006, very shortly before this film went into production. That canon began with Batman: The Animated Series all the way back in 1992, where the eyes under Batman’s cowl were simply featureless white space, which allowed for the animators of that series to allow the character to express emotion through the shape and change of the “eye holes.” When Bruce was out of costume, he and the other characters had a fully drawn eye, with an upper and lower line representing the outline of the eye, sclera, and a single dot for both the iris and the pupil. When Superman: The Animated Series started airing in 1996, both Clark and Superman were drawn with a simpler eye design of a single line to indicate the upper edge of the eye, and again with a single dot to represent the pupil and the iris, but no identifiable sclera; I can only assume that this was to keep Clark’s face from looking too “busy” or being too detailed with the addition of his glasses. When you look at all of the Justice League together in their respective shows, they all have different eye designs, but they don’t look odd next to each other because there are so many different designs: Supes has his single line and dot, Martian Manhunter has his red eyes, Wonder Woman has very detailed eyes (full upper lid line, partial or full lower lid line, visible sclera, distinct blue iris and black pupil), Green Lantern has his distinctive fully outlined eye shape with a singular green iris with no pupillary dot, and the characters with masks like Flash either follow the Batman design of white spaces under their cowls or, in the case of Hawkgirl, have solely pupils under the mask but pupils and an iris when unmasked. 

Here, however, three of our main characters are so disparate in their design that they look janky together in a way that distracts the eye. Superman once again has the single upper lid line and the single (almost beady) pupil dot, while Lois has the fully detailed eyes like the Wonder Woman example above, except that her eye color is darker, so that she appears to have a distinct pupil and iris in some close ups but in most wider shots appears to have a single, gigantic pupil. Jimmy Olsen, in turn, has all the details, including a blue iris that also appears to be too large when compared to the other characters. I understand that importing these character designs from the TV animation probably saved a lot of time and work, but I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice it, and even if you’ve seen this before and didn’t consciously recognize that had happened, your unconscious probably did. Once you add in Mercy Graves’s lack of any nose (she just has two nostril slits), it’s messy. 

That having been said, this is a fun movie. In a pre-MCU and pre-Big Bang Theory world, it was pretty daring to have an animated feature—and therefore to many people’s minds, a movie for kids—that is so unflinching in its depiction of violence and grief. It was moderately controversial at that time for precisely that reason, although I feel it’s probably faded into relative obscurity now that the self-appointed so-called moral guardians have moved on to harassing accepting parents and inciting violence against librarians. Looking at it now, fifteen years later, when the market has been completely oversaturated not just with superheroes but various conceptual deconstructions and reconstructions of them with the mainstream adaptations of things like The Boys and Invincible, this one looks rather tame in comparison. Still, it’s not to be scoffed at, and there are much worse ways to spend seventy-seven minutes. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

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Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with what to write about The Boy and the Heron for over a week now. It’s obviously a beautiful movie, made with loving care, attention to detail, and bizarre imagination that one has come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and has all of his hallmarks of adorable and anti-adorable creatures, but also has a narrative that feels more incomplete than normal. I should also disclose that, although I am a forever proponent of watching these films with subtitles rather than with dubbing, my viewing experience was of the dubbed version of the film, and I’m not certain if there are differences between the two versions that could explain some of what I’m missing. 

Mahito Maki is a twelve-year-old boy who awakens one night to learn that there is a fire raging through Tokyo, and that the hospital where his mother is located is in the center of the conflagration. He runs toward the fire’s destruction, but his mother is lost. Some time later, his father, a manufacturer of air munitions, evacuates his family to his wife’s ancestral estate, currently occupied by his late wife’s sister, whom he has married in the interim since the opening scene. Mahito has trouble bonding with Natsuko, whom everyone remarks upon as being nearly identical to his late mother, and he further isolates himself by intentionally gouging a nasty wound in his head that is then presumed to have been the result of violence from bullies, and he is allowed to remain at the estate rather than having to go to school. Exploring the area, he finds a run-down structure and enters it through a doorway that is not completely sealed; later, he learns from one of his stepmother’s seven attendants, Kiriko, that this was the library of his great-granduncle, who was obsessed with magic and who disappeared in his youth, prompting the tower to be sealed. Mahito also finds himself the subject of the attention of a large grey heron, which speaks to him in a language he understands and tempts the boy to follow him into the tower. Fashioning himself a bow and an accompanying arrow (fletched with a recovered feather from the heron), Mahito enters the tower with Kiriko when searching for Natsuko, who has disappeared; deep within a hall, they encounter the heron again, who tempts Mahito with an image of this mother. Mahito manages to injure the heron in its beak because of the transitive magical properties of the heron’s feather, turning him into a grotesque bird man, who is ordered by a wizard to assist Mahito in his journey, and the heron, Kiriko, and Mahito find themselves transported to another world.

This isn’t a new story, not really. Children going to fantasy worlds is one of the oldest tropes of children’s literature, whether that world be Narnia or Oz or Neverland or Wonderland or Fantasia or the Labyrinth (etc.), and, from what I can tell, the novel from which The Boy and the Heron takes most of its narrative inspiration, 2006’s The Book of Lost Things, is also one of these narratives. In that novel, the main character’s stepmother has already given birth to his half-sibling (rather than being pregnant still, as in the film), and so there are even more parallels to fantasy media of this kind; I haven’t read the book, but a review of several summaries implies that the presence of a new baby is part of the incitement of the protagonist’s journey, as in Labyrinth. The tropes here are from all over. Just like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mahito has been evacuated from a city center during WWII (although we’re not supposed to think too hard about the fact that Majito’s father is making military equipment for the Axis); the recent death of the boy’s mother is even more strongly felt here than in The NeverEnding Story; and this film manages to ride the line that divides the Oz books from their most famous adaptation with The Wizard of Oz, as Mahito’s journey is clearly real, as Dorothy (et al)’s travels into Oz were in L. Frank Baum’s novels, but said world contains images that are derived from things that he has seen in the real world, as in the 1939 picture. 

What is new here also seems to have come largely from Miyazaki. There’s nothing in any of the summaries of The Book of Lost Things that indicate recurring bird images and motifs as part of that novel’s narrative (the book seems to largely feature canines and lycanthropes), but we all know that this man loves flight; it’s all over his work. Here, this is seen in the “real” world via Mahito’s father’s work as an air munitions manufacturer but which translates into several different species of birds in the “fantasy” world, all of whom have different natures that present to Mahito as things which at first seem cruel or wicked to him but which ultimately prove that the apparent violence of nature exists not because of malice in the world, but simply because existence does not conform to us as individuals. There is the heron first, whose motivations are unclear and who exists more as a trickster, whose behavior is inscrutable. Second are the pelicans, who first attack Mahito and are later seen descending upon and devouring this film’s cutesy sprite creatures, the Warawara. Although they seem to be malicious in this attack at first, a dying gull tells Mahito that their people are starving as a result of having been brought to this place, where they have no other natural food source. Finally, we meet the parakeets, who are largely anthropomorphic and willing to eat human flesh. The last of these do have some malicious intent, just as Mahito’s emotional climax of the film requires that he recognize that he has malice within himself as well, which saves him from the same fate as his great-granduncle. It’s this same realization that he has come to an age where he has to force himself to grow and mature as a person by recognizing that he can feel negative emotions and not act upon them that leads him to finally accept Natsuko and go home. After he has a fun adventure with the time-traveling child version of his mother, of course. 

I’m not sure that this one is destined to become an indisputable classic like some of Miyazaki’s other work, but that’s what we always say about late additions to the canon of an auteur with a career that has already proven that it will have a lasting legacy. It’s clearly a deeply personal film, and when making something that is created with an intentionally idiosyncratic worldview (rather than aiming for something more like universal appeal), there’s always the danger of making it insular and inscrutable. I certainly expect this one to have a smaller audience of devotees than something like Princess Mononoke or even Howl’s Moving Castle (which was greeted with a similarly lukewarm/confused audience reception as The Boy and the Heron upon initial release, to my recollection), but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years, it’s that there’s no Miyazaki film that isn’t someone’s favorite, and that will apply here, too. It could even happen to you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Oink (2023)

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I don’t watch enough modern children’s animation to know what adults are supposed to get out of it, but whatever it is I do know that it’s missing from Oink.  The recent farm animal morality tale is billed as the first stop-motion feature ever produced in the Netherlands and, if true, that’s the only remarkable thing about it.  I assume that all most parents want out of children’s films is amusing flashes of vibrant colors to babysit the kiddos for a couple hours, accompanied by metaphorical messaging that’s wholesome & innocuous enough that it won’t poison their little developing brains (i.e., “Believe in yourself,” “Don’t be selfish,” “Obey your parents, your teachers, and the police state,” etc.).  Oink is passable on both counts, at least in my estimation.  It’s got an adorable hand-animated stop-motion technique akin to the recent French film My Life as a Zucchini, which offers a welcome, tactile counterbalance to our post-Pixar CG animation landscape.  Its messaging is a little more daring than its visuals, deliberately teaching kids vegan & vegetarian values in opposition to the evils of the meat industry.  Some parents will object to that blatant political advocacy, but only because there isn’t much else happening onscreen to distract from it.  There’s plenty of anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist messaging in modern children’s media, but it’s often buried under distracting, for-the-parents pandering like Shrek parodying The Matrix, or the Angry Birds dabbing, or the Minions twerking, or whatever.  Oink does feature a cute cartoon animal doing goofy physical comedy for the whole family’s amusement, but all of its drama is centered on children’s desire to not see that animal butchered for sausage meat, so that there isn’t much to it beyond its overt politics.  Essentially, it’s moralistic propaganda for children with a cute piglet mascot.  So, if you’re not a child who needs the moral conundrum of industrialized meat consumption explained to you in simple, black & white terms, there just isn’t much happening onscreen worth engaging with.

As you can tell by the title, the animal in peril is an adorable piglet named Oink.  The cutesy baby pig is adopted by a misfit Dutch girl with uptight vegetarian parents who cannot abide the chaos an untrained pet brings into their household, but they relent to their daughter’s infatuation with the animal almost instantly.  The pig is accompanied by an estranged grandfather figure from the United States, who’s reluctantly invited back into the family home despite past selfishness & cruelty to his own daughter.  It’s immediately clear that the grandfather encourages the protagonist’s affection for the pig because he wants to fatten & butcher it for an upcoming sausage-grilling competition, one he narrowly lost the trophy for decades ago.  There’s no twist or nuance to this foreshadowed villainy.  As the competition approaches, he kidnaps the pig and attempts to feed it directly into the meat grinder.  All butchers & meat eaters are monstrous in this shameless vegetarian propaganda.  They’re intimidating old men who lie to their families, sneak rat tails into sausage links, and chase children down the street, yelling “I’ll put you in the meat grinder!” at the helpless tykes.  Oink‘s anti-meat messaging makes Okja look subtle by comparison, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were literally any other moral or dramatic tension in the film.  I wasn’t especially shocked or offended by its vegetarian righteousness as an occasional meat-eater myself.  Although, I did object to a last-minute claim that vegetarian sausages taste better than pork; that’s just a lie.  It’s just that I’ve already weighed out the grey-area nuances of how my personal meat consumption affects my fellow animals and the planet we share, and I’ve ultimately decided for myself that meat is a sometimes treat instead of a dietary cornerstone (after a few sporadic years of cutting out beef & pork entirely, most recently inspired by the aforementioned Okja).  Most adults watching Oink have likely already wrestled with the nuanced morality of that personal decision, and so the film’s naked vegetarian messaging is only really useful to adults if they’re looking to convert children to a specific side of that internal debate.

Oink is at its best when it functions as pure visual comedy.  There’s something classically funny about calm family gatherings being disrupted by a rambunctious pet, especially when that pet is as small & cute as Oink.  The film even goes a step further by disrupting that prissy decorum with scatological mayhem.  Oink shits everywhere, smearing long streaks of brown clay all over his hapless owner’s once-pristine family home.  He also continually farts stop-motion clouds of cotton and, eventually, saves the day with his overactive colon.  The film’s scatology is funny, but it’s never as shockingly over the top as the recent stop-motion gross-out The Old Man Movie, which was similarly billed as the first stop-motion feature from Estonia.  Its depressive outcast protagonist is adorable & relatable, but the movie doesn’t dig nearly as deep into her emotional turmoil as My Life as a Zucchini does with its cast of melancholy orphans.  The Netherlands may be lacking in stop-motion feature films to be gushing over, but the world at large is not, with plenty more novelty & nuance to be found in recent titles like Mad God, Wendell & Wild, Marcel the Shell, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and the still-not-released-in-the-US Little Nicholas, to name a few.  Everything that happens in Oink is meant to underline how cute pigs are and how despicable it is that Texan barbeque enthusiasts like to kill & eat them.  That dynamic is just far too morally & thematically simplistic for the film to amount to much, at least not for adults.  The best I can say in its favor is that it’s got an adorable visual aesthetic and I got a few solid chuckles out of the stop-motion pig farts.  Well, that, and at least it’s not another Shrek.

-Brandon Ledet

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

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I caught up with the animated superhero actioner Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse a full month into its theatrical run, which is just about the least compelling time I could possibly chime in on a populist film’s artistic merits & demerits.  After their initial tidal waves of ecstatic buzz and the exhaustive cataloging of fan-service Easter eggs that inevitably follows, there’s not much left to be said about 4-quadrant crowd pleasers that hasn’t already been repeated a thousand times over (or that won’t be worthier of deeper cultural analysis years down the line).  Across the discourse-verse, the new Spider-Man movie has already been declared to be “in the running for best superhero film ever“, celebrated for its covert trans teen representation, had said representation called out as corporate queerbaiting, and then taken to task for abusive labor practices that are disturbingly common among all modern animated productions.  It’s that overwhelming deluge of opinion & observation that has kept me from checking out the latest chapter in the interdimensional travels of Miles Morales, despite having very much enjoyed his origin-story game changer Into the Spider-Verse in 2018.  Even more so than I’ve been exhausted this summer’s record temperatures, I’ve been so drained by the season’s bleakly uninspiring new release schedule that I couldn’t work up much excitement to see any superhero picture on the big screen, even a good one.  The near-unanimous praise for it eventually wore me down and bullied me into having another good time with my friendly neighborhood webslinger, but I can’t say I found much in it that wasn’t already showcased beautifully in the previous film.  Across the Spider-Verse strictly adheres to a “continuing adventures of” style of comic book storytelling (complete with a cliffhanger ending), so even its highest highs can’t help but feel like more of the same.  “The same” just happens to be especially great in this case, at least in contrast to how dire the rest of mainstream animation & superhero cinema is looking right now.

I’ve experienced a strange, almost physical response to these Spider-Verse movies that I rarely get from American studio products these days.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about the Spider-Man story as it’s told (and retold and retold) here.  In the first film, Miles’s version of reality is invaded by alternate-dimension Spider-People, displaced by a glitch in The Multiverse.  In its sequel, Miles travels outside his little reality bubble to meet the other infinite-variation Spiders-Men in their interdimensional clubhouse.  There, they insist that he go through the Stations of the Canon that all Spider-Men suffer (most essentially, mourning the loss of a dead loved one), reinforcing that his story has to be boringly familiar to count as a Spider-Man story in the first place.  There are a couple variations in perspective that shake up the way Spider-Man is typically depicted onscreen—mostly in the familial Afro Latino community of Miles’s universe and in the femme teen fury of his closest friend Spider-Gwen’s—but it’s still a template we’ve seen repeated dozens of times before, even within this specific series.  Still, something happens to me when I watch these movies, where even though I’m not especially interested in the characters or story I unexpectedly well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually.  Let’s call it the art of the moving image.  The layered, off-register Ben Day dots comic book artistry of the Spider-Verse films is an awesome breakthrough in computer animation technique & technology, a psychotronic deviation from the rounded edges & hyperreal backdrops Pixar has set the industry standard for in recent decades.  There’s no discernible deviation in the routine of superhero storytelling to match that visual extravagance (especially not while every superhero franchise is currently mired in multiverse tedium), but the psychedelic visual art is itself substantial enough to fill that void and, apparently, fill my heart as a movie lover.

At least, it feels substantial enough for now.  As gorgeous and as playful as the Spider-Verse animation style can feel in the moment, there’s something exhausting about watching yet another connective-tissue superhero film in such a bleak box office wasteland where everything is part of a larger cinematic universe, and nothing is functional as a self-contained work.  Across the Spider-Verse is half a movie, with its Part II conclusion supposedly arriving sometime next summer (although the behind-the-scenes drama of Phil Lord’s mismanagement suggests it may take even longer).  Meanwhile, the novelty of its CG art style is being diluted by application of the technique to other studio-licensed IP: a recent Shrek spin-off, an upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot and, most novel of all, the original standalone feature film The Mitchells vs The Machines.  In a field increasingly crowded by those few newly expressive experiments in CG animation and by countless other episodic superhero sagas, I’m struggling to find Across the Spider-Verse as exciting or essential as Into the Spider-Verse felt just a few years ago.  And yet there’s still some genuine emotional power in its visual artwork, especially in the spectacle of a climactic chase sequence where Miles is hunted by his interdimensional Spider-Siblings and in scenes where Gwen Stacy’s watercolor dimension bleeds into various warm & cool tones to match her big teenage feelings like an atmospheric mood ring.  I don’t know that the Spider-Verse films can ever make another industry-shifting impact the way they did in the first entry; that would require another technological innovation or radical shift in narrative style that’s unlikely to be introduced (and unfair to expect) three movies into a continuing series.  Still, I’m always going to be onboard for a visual-style-over-narrative-substance approach to filmmaking, especially when the style is this substantial and when all other modern superhero media is so lacking on both counts.

-Brandon Ledet

Arrietty (2010)

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It comes up here from time to time, but my favorite fictional thing is a story about tiny people in a normal sized world. I’ve talked about my childhood love of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and how that translated into a fondness for the (first two) Ant-Man movies, but a lot of it can be traced back to my utter absorption into one specific series of novels I read in my youth: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. There’s nothing more magical to me than tiny beings using normal-sized objects in novel ways: the knight from a chess set as a kind of decorative bust; a watch, sans band, hung on a wall as a clock; a postage stamp framed as a piece of art. I never understood why those books were so much less well known than other fantasy novels of the same ilk, and I never could figure why Arrietty Clock, who was just about the coolest girl in the world, was less famous than Lucy Pevensie, Dorothy Gale, Pippi Longstocking, or Wendy Moira Angela Darling. There have been numerous adaptations over the years, but one of the best came out when I was too busy with grad school to take note of it, but I finally have, and it’s a delight. 

Arrietty was released in Japan in 2010 before seeing a U.K. release the following year and U.S. distribution through Disney in 2012, under the title The Secret World of Arrietty. I refuse to call it that (can you imagine if The Wizard of Oz was titled Dorothy’s Secret World or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was called The Secret World of Lucy?), but I do want to list it here for those of you who will want to seek it out for your own enjoyment. I’ll also recommend that, since the film is available on HBOMax in both the original Japanese and the U.S. English version, that you check it out in its original language, in spite of my love for Carol Burnett, who voices the Haru equivalent in the English dub. I was particularly fascinated to see this adaptation, which sets the story in (seemingly) 1980s Japan rather than Edwardian England, as I’ve always thought of this as a quintessentially English story, like Mary Poppins or the Narnia series, and although the idea of updating the setting to the U.S. seems heretical to me, I knew the Studio Ghibli aesthetic would more than make up for any displacement. 

Arrietty is a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother Homily and father Pod. The three of them are “borrowers”: humanoid beings of 4-5 inches in height, who live alongside and parallel to full-sized humans. The former survive by “borrowing” from the latter, whom they call “human beans,” keeping themselves hidden and their existence secret. As the story opens, Arrietty has finally reached an age when she is to be taken on her first borrowing expedition into the home of an older woman named Sadako, who lives with her housekeeper Haru and who has recently taken in her great nephew Shō, a boy roughly Arrietty’s age who suffers from a heart condition. In the novel, Arrietty’s family lived in the base of a clock (hence their surname there), but here, they live largely beneath the house in a beautifully detailed home of their own; they access the larger house through a series of secret holes that are accessible only to them because of their size, although the passageways between them require a bit of exploration and adventure to navigate, and vermin like rats pose a threat to them. Shō spotted Arrietty in the garden when he first arrived and is fascinated by her, and he startles her when she and her father are on one of their expeditions, causing her to drop a precious sugar cube, which the Borrowers are forced to forsake. Shō further attempts to befriend Arrietty, with whom he shares both a profound loneliness and a deep melancholy, as she is likely to be among the last of her kind and has never known anyone other than her parents, while he has spent his short life as an invalid with few friends and little hope for a future despite an upcoming operation. Despite his best intentions, however, their friendship endangers the Borrower family in ways that neither could have predicted. 

This is not a perfect translation of the novel(s), but it is a marvelous and lovely example of how to translate a denser text for the screen. Some changes are small; I already mentioned above that the family lives in a crawlspace rather than a mantel clock, but there are also character changes that shift the story subtlely, and not for the worse. Shō is much friendlier from the outset than the unnamed boy in the novel, who has a bit of the old British superiority complex despite having been raised mostly in India; that is completely removed here, as is the fact that he had little English literacy as a result of having lived abroad. In the novel, it is this fact and Arrietty’s willingness to read to him that helps the two to bond, while here, the things that he does for the Borrowers he does purely out of the goodness of his heart. There are also fewer Borrowers here and the Clock family’s isolation is more profound as a result; Pod mentions to his daughter that there used to be others of their kind elsewhere in the house but that they have either moved on or been killed. The Clock’s relatives like Uncle Hendreary (Pod’s brother) who are rumored to have moved to a nearby badger sett and the boy’s attempts to transmit letters between the two families are cut, which also adds to the textual richness of the questions regarding any other Borrowers out there in the world; until we meet feralish Borrower Spiller later in the film, we’re unsure whether Arrietty and her family are the last of her kind, deepening her kinship with Shō. This also eliminates a lot of the squabbling between the various Borrowers, which is a fun comedic element in the novels as they get into rather large rows for such tiny specimens but makes for a more concise narrative here. 

But what’s most impressive here, of course, are the visuals. The backdrops are painted with that lovely Ghibli precision, and the style lends itself well to creating the sumptuous verdancy of an ivy-draped garden from the perspective of a four-inch teenager. Because Arrietty and her family are so tiny, the idiosyncrasies of every teacup, sideboard, and wainscot are terrifically magnified, and all of it is lovingly rendered in gorgeous detail. Great attention is paid to smaller characteristics as well; in one scene, Homily pours tea for her family, and it comes out in (relatively) huge globs because of the surface tension of the water, a characteristic that carries over to the behavior of rain in a different beautifully animated section of the narrative. A glob of cheese on toast, likewise, does not flatten, but retains its bead-like shape. All of these details combine to make the film incredibly immersive, and it’s all the more to its benefit. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond