Forget the Film, Watch the Titles

I'm taking a design class during summer session, and since we are doing a short unit on typography my professor sent us a link to Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, a site that features movie title sequences that are animated, feature motion graphics, use 3D effects, or incorporate mixed media. This site is a fun way to kill some time. Be sure to check out the animated titles for Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, one of my favorite title sequences of all time. And although the film was just okay, the titles for Thank You for Smoking are also pretty cool. Enjoy!

New Google Chrome ads

I was watching 30 Rock on Hulu tonight, and this ad for Google's new web browser came on. I'm a total sucker for clever animation, so I figured I would share it here.


I guess it's trying to say that Google Chrome is simpler, cleaner, and without all the visual clutter. I've been planning on doing a post on how I think Google will get broken up in the near future, so do they really think it's a good idea to create a web browser to add to the myriad other products and services they offer? In my opinion, they are definitely dipping their quills into way too many ink wells.

To see more ads for Google Chrome, check out their YouTube page.

The Aladdin example

(In response to watching this video clip, something that a classmate put up during an online discussion of racial representation for Media Studies: Ideas.)



If one thinks about the fact that Aladdin was such a beloved film, it's kind of frightening to know that children (and I put myself in this category, for I was only 8 when this film came out) are running around singing the songs from this film, especially the one that introduces the story to the audience: "O I come from a land, from a faraway place/ Where the caravan camels roam/ Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face/ It's barbaric but hey, it's home."

What I find interesting is that when the film came out on VHS, Disney retracted its former statements of racism and changed the lyrics to "Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense/ It's barbaric but hey it's home." Maybe an initial revision would have been more effective; to me, this is just a major corporation saving it's own ass. And, they still include the idea that living in the desert is somehow barbaric and inhuman, that the desert is not the natural place in which one should live. Nice try, Disney, but this film, as the clip from "Reel Bad Arabs" put it, is still so chock full of recycled racial stereotypes that are completely unnecessary to the telling of the story that the revision of one line of lyrics is not going to suddenly undo the offenses that have been done.

Umberto Eco's "The Myth of Superman"

Umberto Eco is essentially treating Superman as a mythical character, and utilizing this character as a sign for us as human beings. This chapter is from within a book entitled The Role of the Reader, and therefore Eco makes many references to the ways in which the reader interacts with, digests, and consumes (although never completely swallows and is rid of) Superman as a character within an iterative (cyclical) scheme.

The Superman serials also exemplify something about the nature of the reader and the way in which we consume stories of a cyclical nature. He refers to "self-identification" of the reader with Superman (108) and Superman's mortality (if Superman were immortal, we the reader would find it difficult to identify with him), the "'romantic' demands of the public" for Superman to find love and have impossible adventures in the Imaginary Tales serials (115), and the reader's author-inflicted and self-induced loss of temporal progression within an iterative narrative. All of these methods of storytelling and character development are what make the Superman franchise a successful and identifiable one, one in which the character can be upheld as a mythical, god-like figure yet still have a humanly sense of responsibility and civic duty, and mortality in the form of the threat of Kryptonite.

The concept of these Imaginary Tales represent the readers' need for romanticism and satisfaction, yet Eco believes the reader would not be fulfilled if Superman were to, for example, actually marry Lois Lane. If he actually had a definite end to his courtship (marriage) and could no longer question if his love for Lois would ever be returned, Eco notes "it would of course be another step toward his death, as it would lay down another irreversible premise" (115). The comic book character must never have any milestones that relate to a progression in time, or there would be a clear end to the story, or at least a certifiable end in sight.

We also see this to be true for cartoon series, especially one with such longevity as "The Simpsons." American pop culture has followed this family for the past 19 years, and yet none of the characters have aged: Maggie has remained in diapers with a pacifier when she should by now be in college. These characters are also see wearing the same clothes in each and every episode and spouting the same catch-phrases, relating to Eco's concept of redundancy and the reader/watcher's tendency to follow "certain 'topical' gestures of 'topical' characters whose stock behavior we already love" (121) as a form of comfort and familiarity. In "The Simpsons", we see parallels to the Superman Imaginary Tales serials where the characters are placed in "what if" situations, but these are always set as hypotheticals (what the characters would look like when they do get older, what would happen if Bart were to continue a life of malfeasance, etc.).

Wall-E

I have strayed away from writing this review for several reasons, one of them being that I really wanted to ingest and digest this film, chew it over and attempt to obtain the essence of Pixar's newest stab at animated filmmaking before I committed to any solid comments on the film. I spoke to many people on the topic of this film, saw it twice in the theaters (which is, indeed, a spoiler for the rest of this article; I obviously enjoyed it enough to drop $20 on the film. Well, more like $29.50 if you include my $9.50 pseudo-meal of nachos and a bottle of Dasani water), and read many inputs on the movie, finally coming to an ultimate conclusion: remaining true to the Pixar tradition of stunning imagery paired with emotional story-telling, Wall-E scores high marks in both visual and narrative categories, while falling slightly short of cunning and realistic science fiction.

The film's initial fifty minutes are akin to a Chaplin pre-1927 flick, sans dialogue yet steeped in visual gags that involve the clumsy Wall-E (short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class) rolling curiously around a trash-riddled planet Earth, discovering treasures among the massive heaps of garbage that the human race has left behind. I fell in complete love with Wall-E in the first few minutes, identifying completely with his pack-rat mentality and penchant for antiquarian collections. The only audible sounds are a series of squeaks, whirls and whistles that he emits to himself and his undying (literally) cockroach buddy who follows him around as he performs his duties, and brief words exchanged between Wall-E and EVE, his sleek and futuristic love interest. There's a quite hilarious sight gag involving a spork, some touching moments as Wall-E sighs or dances along to a battered VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, and all this without any excessive strings of dialogue. Much like a young child can watch City Lights or The Kid and retain a basic understanding of the story, even a three year old can follow this film through at least the first hour.

Where I give major kudos is to the music department: I thought it was genius that the filmmakers didn't write any original songs for the movie (except, of course, the horrible Peter Gabriel song "Down to Earth" that dramatically crescendo-ed along with the ending credits) but instead relied on narratively-driven repetition of two songs from the Hello, Dolly! soundtrack, Louis Armstrong's "La Vie en Rose", and a wonderfully original score from composer Thomas Newman.

At the core of this film is beautiful love story about loneliness and acceptance. But sitting right next to the romantic tale of robot love is the undeniable apocalyptic science fiction tale of an Earth gone to hell in a handbasket from excessive waste. The humans (all of them, of course, American) have chosen to abandon this problem by setting off on a 5 year space cruise aboard the enormous spacecraft Axiom in order to leave all the Wall-Es of the world and the Buy 'n Large corporation to clean up in time for their return. 700 years later, a fat, liquid-diet-centered, self-absorbed, yet surprisingly amicable, human race is still aboard the Axiom, with no date of return in sight. I recently read in the LA Times review of this film that they felt Wall-E fell short of expectations by not being "ground-breaking" enough (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-scifi13-2008jul13,0,5812148.story). While the film does not delve into the realm of well-crafted science fiction, I think it's thought out well enough to do the trick and get a pertinent message across. And with references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, you have to give their writers some meta-filmic credit for their homages to the genre. This film is, however, ground-breaking visually, there's no question about that; there were certainly several times that I caught myself forgetting I was watching animation. Whether or not it was completely original I think is a matter of speculation and trivialization, because this film contains a beautiful, innocent and touching heart that pairs well with its stunning visual sequences. Take anyone and everyone you know to see this movie, and expect to be entertained and amazed.