LONDON CITY NIGHTS: animated

Monday, January 19, 2015

'Big Hero 6' (2014) directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams

Monday, January 19, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Peeling back the mirror-polished carbon-fibre shell of Big Hero 6 reveals a bustling throng of fascinating influences. At its most basic level Disney's latest is a superhero origin tale via Japanese pop culture: mashing together sentai shows, classic manga and Marvel comics into a surprisingly coherent whole.

In a Neal Stephenson-esque touch, our hero is named Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter). He's a young, spikey haired robotics prodigy. We first meet him defeating all-comers in an underground robot fight club, his harmless and cute looking contender proving to be more capable than it first appears. Though he triumphs over his opponents, his brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) warns that this is a waste of his talents and drags him to his "nerd school". This proves to be a prestigious high-tech university, where students are given access to the latest materials and development technology.

After introducing Hiro to classmates Honey Lemon, Go Go, Wasabi and Fred, Tadashi shows off his own laboratory. Here we meet his masterpiece: Baymax (Scott Adsit), a nurse robot that Tadashi envisages helping people worldwide. With his soft white spheroid proportions and minimalist features Baymax looks the Michelin Man as redesigned by Apple. He's programmed to scan and offer medical assistance to anyone suffering even a minor scrape, only deactivating when told "I am satisfied with my care".

But this is a superhero movie and tragedy is always just around the corner. And so, as Act 2 opens, a bereaved and numbed Hiro has taken possession of Baymax and is gradually molding him towards becoming an all-purpose crimefighter in order to get revenge on those that've wronged him. He's soon joined in his quest by the other university students, each with their own technological superhero suit, as they attempt to track down a mysterious masked villain.

This is by the numbers, but there's enough little wrinkles present to set Big Hero 6 apart from the crowd. The biggest is Baymax, who's as funny a character as Disney have created in the last 20 years or so. With his rounded body and dainty motions his every tiny motion packs a gag, especially when trying to reconcile his nurse programming with the kickass robot superhero Hiro desperately wants him to be. By the time Hiro has outfitted him with a jetpack and is flying about on his shoulders there's more than a touch of How To Train Your Dragon to the pair, but whereas Hiccup is trying to make his dragon less fearsome, Hiro is trying to subvert his instinctively caring nature and turn him into a badass.

The film is easily at its best when the action is confined to Baymax and Hiro, the directors giving a masterclass in comedy physicality as Hiro squeezes and shoves the rubbery robot through action sequences, playing straight man to the robot's concerned inquiries about his physical and mental health. Occasionally it feels as if the film was developed entirely from the idea of 'A Boy and his Bot', there's so much focus on them that the other characters end up a bit undeveloped.

While eye-catching; fellow Big Hero 6ers Wasabi, Fred, Honey Lemon and Go Go are relegated to being 'the fast one', 'the girly one' and so on. The villain of the piece has a visually dazzling superpower yet suffers the same problems, his motivations understandable but drawn in simplistic strokes. He does have a empathetic dimension but this pales in comparison to, say, Tangled's Mother Gothel or pretty much any Pixar baddie. Even with a paltry ten or so characters there's only really room to develop Hiro and Baymax, the rest a victim of a short run-time and (I suspect) some trimming of a longer script.

The flip side of that is that the film rockets along at some speed, serving up exciting action sequences and comedy skits at breakneck pace. These car chases, superhero fights and slapstick (or all three at once) are beautifully conceived and executed, crammed full of tiny details and gags so quick you'll blink and miss them.

Though it might be a touch on the short side, Big Hero 6 certainly is dense. My personal highlight was San Fransokyo. The only clumsy thing about this wonderful mashup is the name; otherwise it's an intelligent cocktail of pagodas, townhouses, trolley-buses, blimp/turbines and futuristic architecture. This neon denseness reminded me a hell of a lot of Studio 4°C's excellent Tekkonkinkreet (with a more than a smidge of Osamu Tezuka), a tech utopia populated by oversized advertising statues, dayglo flourishes and an abundance of careful details that really reward the close observer. A lot of people have spent a lot of time realising San Fransokyo and their efforts were well spent, this is one of the most attractive fictional locales I've seen in some time.

Big Hero 6 isn't going to go down in history as an all-time Disney masterpiece and it's certainly not going to achieve the same level of cultural penetration as last year's Frozen. That said, it's an energetic, imaginative and precision-crafted animation with a tonne of love poured into it (and in Baymax at least one truly memorable character). But though pretty and entertaining it falls short of the classic it could feasibly be.

★★★

Big Hero 6 is released 30th January 2015

Sunday, August 10, 2014

'The Congress' (2013) directed by Ari Folman

Sunday, August 10, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

How on earth do films like this made? The Congress is an aggressively confusing, utterly idiosyncratic cocktail of a thousand different influences in which meaning, motivation and even the bare bones of the plot slip through your fingers like quicksilver. Using the critically acclaimed Waltz With Bashir as a springboard, Ari Folman has wrung out the contents of his mind onto a the silver screen, ending up with a movie that explores the far reaches of what cinema might become by way of an animator's wet dream.

At first it seems so straightforward. Robin Wright (Buttercup from The Princess Bride and Jenny from Forrest Gump) plays herself; a middle-aged actor for whom parts have almost entirely dried up. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) lays it out to her: she's made too many bad choices, she was dealt a winning hand and bodged it, leaving her over the hill , unemployable, a cinematic liability. There's only one option available to her; new technology allows the Miramount film studio to completely digitise an actor, scanning every millimeter of them into a computer and recreating them digitally on screen. While she ages in obscurity her digital self will remain forever young, able to be slotted into whatever roles the studio decrees.

The film is no slouch visually in the non-animated bits either.

"20 YEARS LATER". Act two opens in the year 2033, where a 64 year old Wright attends the Futurological Congress, introducing new chemical technology allowing people to don animated avatars. Anyone can become whoever they want to be. It's here that we transition from humdrum reality to an intense animated world of motion and colour. The dirt and grime of reality is scrubbed away to leave a primary coloured psychedelia heavily influenced by animation legends like the Fleischer brothers, Gerald Scarfe and Ub Iwerks.

It's at this juncture that the Folman slams his foot down on the accelerator and zooms off into the realm of the bonkers. Narrative fades away into a chaotic blizzard of references, characters transition from people into walking metaphors and every single frame vibrates with fractal levels of detail. We feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, initially struggling to map out this Gordian knot of conflicting symbols, imagery and pop culture. Soon you realise your best bet is to relax, let yourself be swept along into a truly beautiful cinematic world that's like few other things I've ever seen in cinema.

Oh yeaaaah.

Visually the closest comparison I can make is to the densely populated, fast-paced cinematic worlds created by Studio 4°C, primarily the wonderful Tekkon Kinkreet and the avant-garde masterpiece Mind Game (a criminally unseen film). What they and The Congress have in common is a desire to push animation as far as it can go. After all, with just a few strokes of pencil on paper the animator becomes God, conjuring whole universes into being direct from his imagination. Why settle for recreating desaturated, gritty dull old reality when you can spin a blanket of skyscrapers that flutter into the air like butterflies, faces that blossom into flowers and jet planes that flap, dovelike, through the sky?

Textually, though the film credits Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (writer of Solaris) with inspiration I was more reminded of the work of Philip K. Dick, particularly the unsettling queasily drug-tinged worlds of Ubik and VALIS. Part of what makes Dick's science fiction so compelling is the utter divorce from the familiar. In The Congress' future of inhaled experiences, where people change personae like we change t-shirts and where the human form tends to gloopily disintegrate at a moments notice, we feel this typically Dickian disconnection - us understanding the future is as unlikely as a caveman with an iPhone clutched in his hairy fingers figuring out Candy Crush Saga.

Good shit.

That said, in the midst of this beautiful confusion there are ideas that repeat like melodies. Folman uses the prehistory of animation as a vehicle to explore the future of cinema, a future that begins with digital actors and goes from there. We see a studio executive excitedly proclaiming the end of cinema as we know it, the medium replaced with a kaleidoscope of individual, personal experiences in which we can cast whoever we want. As if leading by example, Folman casually casts Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Jones, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Jesus Christ and David Bowie (among many, many others). He teases the prospect of casting our girlfriend or boyfriend as the romantic lead in a sweeping epic, or your family in a lighthearted comedy.

He concludes with the idea of pop culture completely superseding reality entirely, masking the cruel realities of life with a consensual hallucination of day-glo beauty powered by limitless imagination. Most impressively there's no moralising argument that the only acceptable way to experience the 'real world is without blinders, Folman correctly concluding that a topsy-turvy LSD influenced world where everyone can be whoever they want to be is as valid as any other.

My kinda movie.

God only knows how he managed to scrape together the funding for this - though the litany of logos at the end of the credits hints at a Herculean effort in convincing practically every film board in Europe to chip in. All that hard work has paid off; in a swamp of fast food blockbusters advertising photorealistic HD carnage, The Congress shines as a monument to ambition, creativity, beauty and a bloody-nosed devotion to the ideal of cinema as artistic endeavour.

★★★★★

The Congress is on limited release from 15 August.

Monday, December 2, 2013

'Frozen' (2013) directed by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee

Monday, December 2, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

When Disney bought Marvel Comics in 2009 many feared the worst. Would Spider-Man become tinged by Disney's everything's-just-peachy attitude? Would The Punisher wind up with a smartass talking bird sidekick? Not quite. The opposite has happened: a Disney Princess musical complete with loveable singing sidekicks and floppy fringed Prince Charmings has wound up infected with Marvel superhero DNA. Frozen is essentially fairytale princess romance by way of X-Men: a weird cocktail of classic Disney animation, Marvel superhero sensibilities and a contemporary fascination with genre subversion. With so much packed in it's a miracle that Frozen works at all, let alone that it's actually really good.

Frozen takes inspiration from Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen - though the stories share little in common beyond a broadly similar plot and characters. The centre of Disney's film is the relationship between two sisters; Elsa and Anna. They're young princesses of a vaguely fantasy tinged Scandinavian country named Arendelle, and Elsa is next in line to the throne. Not only that, but she possesses magical powers, able to conjure ice and snow at will. One day while playing. she accidentally seriously injures her younger sister, resulting in her parents placing her seclusion in the castle until she learns to repress her powers.

Damn good looking CG snow.

We skip forward in time the two sisters' teenage years. Anna has no memory of her elder sister's powers, assuming that her distance and seclusion is a result of some personal slight she committed. Eventually the time comes for Princess Elsa's coronation. Placed before the nobility of the kingdom she desperately tries to control her powers, almost freezing the rod and sceptre she's asked to hold. Later, at a ball she finally loses it, lashing out in a dramatic icy rage, leaving the castle and heading off for a life of seclusion in the mountains. Unfortunately a side effect of her icy rage is that the kingdom is frozen solid, and so Anna must venture into the freezing peaks to try and thaw both the land and their relationship.

Princesses in peril is Disney's bread and butter. If they couldn't knock this sort of material out of the park there'd be something dreadfully wrong in the House of Mouse. Throughout the film there's a constant feeling that you're in a very safe pair of hands, a confidence borne of 80ish years of making animated musicals. But what elevates Frozen above merely being an alright Disney film is that its fully aware of the audience's trust in Disney, mercilessly exploiting our expectations from start to finish.

Don't assume by that I mean it's an Shrek or Enchanted style piss-take of genre cliches. For example, Frozen plays it straight when it introduces developments like the magical properties of "true love's kiss". It's more that the film assumes that the audience is familiar with past Disney animations, allows us to draw conclusions about what's going to happen and then slyly subverts them. There's an understated intelligence to the way things play out: the script unpredictable and written with classical fairytale sensibilities.

Elsa in her rather Dr Manhattan-y ice palace.

Emotionally the film's onto a winner from moment one. The dilemma over Princess Elsa's ice powers is taken wholesale from the classic Marvel playbook; her relationship with them a symbol for repressed desires and guilt - a parallel to adolescence. The furore over whether she's a monster or not is straight out of X-Men, and while she's undergoing her dilemma she ends up dressing a bit like Magneto - leading me to wonder if she was going to go full-on supervillain for a bit.

If Elsa has been created with an eye towards Marvel, Anna has a more Disney outlook. With her mop of ginger hair and charismatic chattiness she's instantly charming, ably voiced by Kristen Bell, her every expressive motion expertly animated to accentuate her personality. As the one that sets out on a quest to save her sister she becomes our de facto protagonist, teaming up with a quintessentially Disney group including a hunky ice-cutter, his cute reindeer sidekick and a smart-talking enchanted snowman.

Let's talk about this enchanted snowman for a moment. His name is Olaf and his gormless buck-toothed grin leers out of every piece of marketing material. Not helping matters is his disturbing resemblance to the demonic Gabbo from the classic Simpsons episode Krusty Gets Kancelled. I realised not far into Frozen that it was going to be pretty great, yet at the back of my mind I was dreading the arrival of this hateful looking creature, who I just knew would throw a dampener on the whole thing. Astonishingly Olaf is not just tolerable - he's actually really funny. If this film can make that thing funny, ice-powers are far from the only magic on display.

The only real slack element are the songs. There was a lot of hype about these as they're written by the lethally clever song-writers behind Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon. It's not that they're particularly awful, just that they're so damn boringly produced that they contrast unfavourably with the obvious imagination everywhere else in the film. That said, they're not completely awful, just mediocre - though a particularly dire ditty called Fixer Upper comes painfully close.

Right up the end Frozen continues to impress, concluding with a touching ending that affirms the special bond between sisters. It's perhaps a fool's errand to argue that a film about pretty magical princesses has a feminist outlook, but at the very least the film's heart is in the right place when it comes to gender politics. The two sisters in the film are allowed full autonomy within the plot, rescuing each other rather than kowtowing to the attentions of the buffly handsome men.

With Frozen Disney proves that despite stiff competition from Pixar, Dreamworks and myriad others, there's still some intangible magic that only they're able to reliably summon.

★★★★

Frozen is on general release from December 6

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

'Free Birds' (2013) directed by Jimmy Hayward ★★

Wednesday, November 27, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Free Birds is an animated film about talking time travelling turkeys, something that at the very least is a relatively high-concept idea. In terms of animated films we're just at the end of the Pixar renaissance; their unbroken streak of classics through the 2000s terminated by the run of Cars 2, Brave and Monsters University. Thankfully there's some interesting stuff being made in response; animation companies realising that if they can't compete with Pixar's emotional heft, they can at least be funnier, to play the Bugs Bunny role to Pixar's Mickey Mouse.

We follow the tale of scrawny misfit turkey Reggie (Owen Wilson), ostracised from his flock for trying to convince people that they're being fattened up to be eaten. Fortunately he's saved from being killed by the intervention of the President, whose daughter selects Reggie as the one turkey to be pardoned at Thanksgiving. Reggie then wallows in luxury until one day he's kidnapped by Jake (Woody Harrelson), an insane warrior turkey. Jake's plan is to steal an experimental time machine (voiced by George Takei), travel back in time to the first Thanksgiving and get turkey off the menu, thus preventing an annual turkey massacre and saving turkeykind.

Marketing a Thanksgiving film outside the USA is a difficult task as these film tend to rely on the audience's emotional memory of their own family Thanksgivings. So it's a clever choice that for the most part, Free Birds portrays the holiday from the turkey's point of view - an outsider's perspective. I guess technically by the end of the holiday it'll have developed a literal insider's perspective, but by that point it'll be a pile of bones and cartilage so unlikely to have much insight.

The film has an interesting pedigree; director Jimmy Hayward has a 3D animation resume second-to-none, directing the first episodes of pioneering CG animated show ReBoot, before moving on to work on Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo. Writer Scott Mosier comes from the Kevin Smith clique; producing and collaborating on every Kevin Smith movie from Clerks to Zack and Miri Make a Porno. The two (who share credit for the script) have gelled well, settling for an irreverent tone that suits the absurd subject matter.

The problem is that this irreverent tone is pretty much the exact same irreverent tone and the exact same kinds of jokes that you see in practically every animated feature. The high-mark of absurdist 3D animation is the excellent Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which Free Birds suffers in comparison to. Both movies have a pleasingly cavalier attitude to science and general sanity, as well as a preoccupation with food. What harms Free Birds is its narrative rigidity, firmly sticking to some pretty bland time travel conventions.

It's frustrating really: the film has the potential to take some interesting swerves but never does. The central conceit of time travel is unimaginatively realised, you'd assume a film about altering the past would result in some imaginative impact on the future - but there's nothing. More egregiously Free Birds says next to nothing about the ethics of eating meat (which considering the film is about finding an alternative to killing turkeys for Thanksgiving) feels rather cowardly.

Free Birds opens with an excellent shot of a Thanksgiving dinner table with a succulent stuffed and roasted bird as the centrepiece. The camera then pans upwards to see the horrified face of a turkey as he realises his destiny. This is promising stuff - a mainstream children's film equating a likeable talking animal with dinner is relatively bold subject material for a children's film. These opening scenes recall memories of Aardman Animation's excellent Chicken Run, and whet the appetite for a film that's not only funny, but might actually have something to say.

Unfortunately it quickly transpires Free Birds is absolutely terrified of actually having any message at all. The idea of our lead characters being killed, cooked and eaten quickly devolves into an abstract notion rather than a real danger. This robs the characters of any real motivation and ever-so-slowly anything unique drains away to be replaced with the same samey, sludgy morass you could find in any number of identikit children's animation. What remains is a tired old Ferngully rip-off where the turkeys play vaguely offensive, dated Native American stereotypes as they wage warfare against the first settlers.

For all that there's nothing technically ruinous about the film, the voice-over cast do a largely professional job (George Takei as the time machine is probably the funniest thing in the film) and the animation is broadly competent in a by-the-numbers sort of way but won't show you anything haven't seen in a hundred other movies. As a side note, many of the character designs look created capitalise on the success of Angry Birds, which is a rather cynical way to promote your movie. The one highlight is chief villain Myles Standish, who benefits from an interesting, well-animated design and being voiced by everyone's favourite grumpy Irishman Colm Meaney.

It's not that this is a particularly awful film, and I'm sure its target audience of children will gobble it up (no pun intended). Unfortunately children are stupid and tasteless and will happily watch anything if it's got talking CG animals in it. It's the adults that'll have to see this with their children that I feel vaguely sorry for. On their good days Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and so on can put out films that appeal to everyone under the sun. Judging by Free Birds there's no technical reason this studio can't aspire to this same level, the only thing holding them back is the cowardly desire to dumb things down and play it safe.

★★

Free Birds is on general release from 29th November 2013

Sunday, May 12, 2013

'Epic' (2013) directed by Chris Wedge

Sunday, May 12, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

How do you judge the success of a children's film? I saw it with a cinema full of kids who laughed (though not uproariously) at the jokes, shut up for the emotional parts and I didn't see any particularly miserable children on the way out. There's certainly a convincing argument to be made that if a film aimed at children succeeds in entertaining them then it's a success. So what separates, say, Finding Nemo and Shark Tale? What's the quality that makes Kung-Fu Panda so much fun to watch and Bee Movie so dire? To young children the difference is intangible, but even so, deep down they must sense the difference in quality. Why else would films like Wall-E be so beloved and Robots (by the same director as Epic) be so forgotten?

‘Wreck-It Ralph’ (2012) directed by Rich Moore

Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

When I get confronted with a really good idea in fiction I feel a little thrill at the possibilities and potential stories it creates. I felt that liberation at the beginning of ‘Wreck-It Ralph’. Very quickly it establishes itself as a film that can become whatever it wants, a film that can drape itself in whatever aesthetic it chooses, a film that’s only limited by the imagination of its creators.

‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is the self-titled story of a video game bad guy. He’s the villain in a Donkey Kong-like 1980s arcade machine called ‘Fix-It Felix Jr’. Ralph’s existence consists of smashing up an apartment building, then battling Felix, the game’s hero. Felix inevitably wins, and Ralph is then unceremoniously thrown off the top of the building into a pool of mud. He’s been thrown off that building day after day for decades, and with the game’s 30^th anniversary just around the corner, he’s suffering a kind of existential ennui. He isn’t an evil person, he’s just someone playing the role of a bad guy, and yet he’s ostracised by the community within the game. After being snubbed one too many times, he snaps, setting out into the wider world to prove that he can be heroic rather than just villainous.

Ralph at his support group for bad guys.

This wider world is the games arcade that Ralph’s machine is in. When the arcade is closed characters freely travel from one game to the others. Brilliantly, the world has shades of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, with the population consisting of ‘real’ videogame characters. When Ralph attends a ‘bad guy’s’ self help group he hangs out with M. Bison and Zangief from ‘Street Fighter’, Dr Robotnik from ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and Bowser from ‘Super Mario Brothers’. Seeing these characters fraternising with each other provides some of the funniest moments in the film and goes a long way to making Ralph feel like a ‘classic’ character with a familiar story. Clearly these writers and designers know their stuff, in wider shots you see more obscure characters walking by and graffiti referencing some pretty obscure gaming trivia. The relish with which these references are made underlines one important fact about the creators of this film: these people get it. 'Wreck-It Ralph' isn't a film made by people trying to appeal to gamers, it's a film made by them.

The original characters in the film fit in seamlessly with the classics, and all of them are brilliantly voiced and animated. John Reilly's gruff voice accentuates Ralph’s working class tenacity, capturing perfectly the stoical nature of a man caught in a Sisyphus-like scenario. The mirror of Ralph is the hero of his game, Felix, (Jack McBrayer). Going in I assumed that he’d be the villain of the piece; what better way to accentuate the story of a bad guy trying to be good than a good guy going bad? But, smartly, Felix is genuinely a nice guy. He’s got a down to earth, innate Southern goodness to him, sweetly exclaiming ‘Oh my lands!’ whenever he’s surprised. My favourite though was the hard as nails space marine captain Calhoun (Jane Lynch). She’s been programmed to have the most tragic back story possible, and spits a constant stream of hilariously hard-boiled dialogue like “Doomsday and Armageddon just had a baby and it... is... ugly!”

Calhoun (Jane Lynch)

The final character I found slightly less fun. That’s Vanellope, the bratty, cheeky girl outsider living on the outskirts of the ‘Sugar Rush’ world. She’s voiced by Sarah Silverman, and while I feel like a grump for saying it, she annoyed the crap out of me. Granted, this is a film for children, and she’s a good child identification character, but she's a never-ending pun machine and she drove me up the wall.

When we’re in the world of ‘Fix-It Felix Jr’ the animators brilliantly exploit capture the blocky retro-game aesthetic; everything feels like a videogame, from the cuboid bushes to the way cake splatters in pixels across the walls. But ‘Fix It Felix Jr’ is from the 80s, and our characters travel from there into more modern games: ‘Hero’s Duty’, a space marine shooter and ‘Sugar Rush’, a sweets based kart racing game. These two, particularly ‘Sugar Rush’, unfortunately feel pretty generic, environments that could have been transplanted from any 3D animated film. Once we enter the world of ‘Sugar Rush’, we stay there and it’s at this precise point that ‘Wreck-It Ralph becomes less compelling.

Get used to this colour scheme, you're going to see a lot of it./

Nearly the whole of the ‘Sugar Rush’ sequence left a bad taste in my mouth. We switch gears from making jokes referencing videogames to jokes referencing sweets. So, our characters find themselves sinking into ‘Nesquiksand’, or pursued by angry Oreos. It’s not so much that they’re especially bad jokes, more that they have an unpleasant whiff of product placement about them. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite complaining about this, one of things I must I enjoyed in the film was seeing classic videogame characters in the background of scenes, characters which are as much corporate figures as a brand of sweets. Even so, something about product placement for Nestle doesn't sit right with me.

What’s more frustrating is that the film abandons its own compelling internal logic. Whereas the other ‘worlds’ are small and self-contained, constructed tightly around the rules of the game they’re depicting, ‘Sugar Rush’ is it’s own mini-civilisation, much of which bears little resemblance to the kart racing genre it’s supposedly parodying. It feels like you've stepped into a blander film; everything being pastel pink gets visually cloying pretty fast. I found myself wishing the film would live up to its premise and let us see some more environments, but sadly not.

It’s also here that the characters begin to come slightly unstuck. There’s a bizarrely disturbing scene where Ralph physically tortures someone for information. He picks up a talking gobstopper called Sour Bill, and licks him repeatedly until he tells him what he wants to know. Sour Bill’s reaction is sheer terror, and it’s deeply unpleasant to see our lovable protagonist torturing someone without consequence. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ has been getting a lot of negative publicity for its torture scenes, but the torture seems slightly more sinister here. It's a worrying example of acclimatising children to the concept of the ‘good guys’ using torture to get information and at the very least the scene is a depressing symptom of a society that has grown to accept it..

But, despite the setting taking a boring and generic turn, despite the insidious corporate advertising that permeates and despite some character mis-steps, ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ remains worthwhile viewing, almost purely because the central characters are so likeable. We understand and sympathise with them, and Ralph is such a likeable, put-upon everyman that it’s impossible not to want him to succeed. ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is a good film, one of the best non-Pixar 3D animated films yet, but unfortunately one that doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.

***/*****

'Wreck-It Ralph' is on general release from February 8th

Monday, December 10, 2012

'Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings', directed by Roberts Gannaway and Peggy Holmes, 10th December 2012

Monday, December 10, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I was somewhere around parliament, on the edge of Westminster Square, when the fairy dust began to take hold. Jesus it was strong. Half a bottle of Canadian Club whisky was sitting uneasily in my gut and suddenly someone had stuck an egg whisk in and was going crazy. A waterfall of sweat was running down the small of my back, my eyes bulged out of my head and tiny pin pricks of light dotted themselves all over my vision. I mumbled "join the fuckin' dots man" at no-one in particular. A child stared me as its mother ushered it away, saying something about care in the community.

God fucking dammit where are these smokes. The white clad walls of power seemed to loom over me as I shakily meandered my way across the pavement, hands in my pants on a quest for tobacco and skins. Dodging traffic I stumbled across a road and collapsed against Winston Churchill. Finally I found my apparatus and shakily constructed a malformed rollie. I asked Winston Churchill for a light. The protest hippies parked on the grass regarded me with suspicion. They were right to, I stole their light and ran across the street giggling as taxis beeped me and shouted throaty working class swear words. I leaned against a big black railing as I sparked it up, taking a rude lungful.

Too much. I retched, head spinning wurse than ever. I balled my eyes up and squeezed my fists clothes. My teeth hit each other harder than I ever had before catching a bit of tongue between them. The booze in my stomach turned and some kind of liquid splurted from my mouth against the walls of parliament. "o fuck its red". I distinctly remembere thinking this because I know it's bad when you puke up the red stuff. A cop with a machine gun walked up to me with an angry look on his face and also in his voice and body. If the blood was coming from my tongue I figured I'd be okay. I tried to explain to him that I'd bitten my tongue and probably puked at the same time but only managed to burble incoherently at him as his machine gun seemed to breathe out.

What the fuck man! Machine guns aren't supposed to do that. I explained it to him as best I could through my ruined tongue. I then said policemen aren't allowed to have guns like this anyway. But there was a pounding drum beat building in volume inside my head and it was hard to argue properly. A crowd was forming around me now. Some fat guy took a photo of me. I tried to claim copyright on it but I tripped and whacked my hed on the stone by the cop. In a misguided attempt to politicise the incident I would later try to claim the cop had clubbed me with the butt of his gun, but I always knew this was bullshit.

I lay twitching on the ground, staring up at Big Ben which was spinning round and round in a warped whirlpool. It all goes fuzzy here but in the witness statements they say I yelled "firssst on til morning!", soiled myself and lapsed into unconsciousness.

Memory is a tricky game and unfair as hell. Happy times slip away like golden and glistening sand through your fingers and the bad times indelibly tattoo right in there. Next thing I knew I was sitting in some green and pleasant woodland. It was hyper-real, like the world with all the settings jammed onto 11. Somewhere far away I could hear a beep beep beep of an elektrocardiogram. Panic. It crept up my spine like the first rising vibes of a cartoon frenzy. Insects with human faces flitted around my head squeaking burbling Mickey Mouse gobbledegook at me. One of them had the face of Marilyn Monroe. Here I was, alone in fairy land, completely twisted inside out. No cash. No smokes.

Frightened squeaks like deranged mice surrounded me as I moved around, every movement tearing something apart. I was like Godzilla and not in a good way. Green weaved baskets were scattered across a clearing and I blundered into a big pile of them. These crazy winged bitches pulled my earlobes and beat their fists against my face but I was drunk on my own fire now.

And then the owls came.

Big white snowy bastards swooping out of nowhere! I couldn't tell if they were just clumsy or actively trying to take me out but one thumped into my chest, knocking the wind out of me. I gasped for air and for a split second second I could see a serious looking doctor pounding down on me but as I looked up I was suddenly looking down at a owl limply staggering into some kind of tiny hospital with blood seeping from a snapped wing. He banged on a buzzing bug and let out a hoot of agony.

Then things got really weird. I felt the life drain out of my cheeks and snow began to tinkle down from down from the bright blue sky. It spun crazily in perfect geometric mandala patterns towards me. So real I could almost reach out and grab a piece. The animals of the wood put on their winter costumes. Some weasels turned white and fluffy. A bunny got all dressed up in snow fur and skipped away full of itself. Dreamily I laid back on the ground and lolled my head up at the sky. An infinite cloud of grey descended upon me from the heavens. I lolled my head to the side. The girls were screaming and shuddering. Their insect wings couldn't take the cold. They writhed on the floor, leaf dresses totally unsuited to this temperature. Those little gossamer wings ain't going to cope with this I thought. As they rolled the wings splintered in tiny glass fragments. and screaming so high pitched I wasn't sure if I could hear it or not filled the air. Apocalypse in fairy town.

I hear the cottonwoods whispering above my head and the freeze descending upon the place. My body becomes a recumbent landscape, going into hibernation. Lazily I grin and begin rubbing the cool frost all over my body. A jumble of thoughts fight for consciousness in my brain, but somehow I know that the frost will keep me safe from the Big Cold that's coming. My lips turn Violet Beauregarde. The sweet woodland ambience of the place had vanished, turned into a still nightmare hell. Frozen fairies with silent screams frosted onto their faces stared at their ruined world. It all gets furry and indistinct. No sympathy for the devil riiii? Uh.. wait Buy the ticket... take the ride? god their big pacifist eyes beautiful in their fairy skin not understanding the sacred fallacy of the hypo culture and you know someone must be tending the light at the end of the tunnel when you stand on the edge of her feather expecting to fly to learn the real secret of the wings.............

The grey skies opened and my chest tore open and an injection of light filled the world as the golden fairy dust snapped back into life and high definition full Real D ThreeD everything jerking into frantic clarity and I jerked bent double in two. Fairy land had been a lame Sunday morning fuck around! A waste of time! A big fat hypodermic poked out of my split sternum my veins bulged obscenely all over my body a doctor stepped back looking frightened as a nurse hid behind him. A cop stepped up to the party and slapped a handcuff on my wrist. I was just with-it enough to laugh and spit my rancid bile in his face.

It was all worth it. All the shock, hate and horror. It grew me. It changed me. I am improved.

'Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings' is on general release from Friday 14th December