One of the great pleasures of postmodern storytelling is its willingness to go beneath and beyond the obvious and explore what lies beneath the easy-to-access tropes and cliches. This means that in a film like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the “villain” is rendered not as some ne’er do Continue Reading
On 4th day of Christmas … I read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum
There are some figures that loom so large in the public consciousness that it’s easy to feel like you know, or you can imagine, pretty much everything about them. Santa Claus is one of those figures. We owe our collective modern idea of Santa Claus to the Greeks (Saint Nicholas, Continue Reading
The short and the short of it: The intriguing stopmotion beauty of Fabricated
SNAPSHOT A stop-motion film ten years in the making, ‘Fabricated’ is a journey through an alien world which was once our own. (synopsis via Vimeo) There is not a lot of correlation, in general, between the natural and mechanical worlds, the two quite inimical to each other in a Continue Reading
On 3rd day of Christmas … I watched Anna and the Apocalypse
If you’re a Christmasaholic, you may well wonder what zombies are doing shambling their way through your favourite holiday. After all, isn’t the song-evoked “most wonderful time of the year” a joyous time of peace and goodwill to all, chestnuts roasting over open fires and sleigh rides through the Continue Reading
Husband and husband: True love in graphic novel form
SNAPSHOT Time and time again we are reminded that we are better together—and it all started with Husband & Husband! When we launched our webcomic we thought to ourselves, ‘Wait, why isn’t this name taken yet?’ And then we realized, ‘Oh, yeah! It’s because we were just recently allowed Continue Reading
Can a naughty kid become nice? Air NZ’s Christmas ad answers the question
Ah, the age-old Naughty and Nice list. The bane of kids with poor behavioural karma the world over, Santa’s obsession with “making a list and checking it twice / Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice” forms the centrepiece of this year’s Christmas ad from Air New Zealand. Reflecting Continue Reading
On 2nd day of Christmas … I listened to Songs for the Season by Ingrid Michaelson
It’s a reasonably safe bet that anyone who records a Christmas album is in love with the festive season and all its multitudinous warm-and-fuzzy trappings. That’s certainly the case with indie pop artist Ingrid Michaelson whose holiday album Songs for the Season released on 26 October. In a recent Continue Reading
How Hanna-Barbera used simple animation to highlight music, dialogue and sound design
SNAPSHOT The difference between what we did at Warner Bros. and what’s on Saturday morning is the difference between animation and what I call illustrated radio. If you can turn off the picture and still know what’s going on, that’s illustrated radio. (synopsis via Laughing Squid) Hanna-Barbera was very Continue Reading
Dr. Tenth Christmas Surprise! Or how to deal with a man in red and white and a lively snowman
Let’s be fair – Santa, stripped of all his promise of toys and red-and-white clad jolliness is a bit weird. I say this as a man very much-enamoured of Christmas and its many and varied feel good trappings, who rightly regards Santa Claus as a fairly good guy who Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 11 new pop culture ornaments
I am not a Christmas traditionalist. Well, I am and I am not, said as I pivot, rather precariously on the fence of what sounds dangerously like festive decorating ambivalence. What I mean is that while I love all the warm-and-fuzzy, bright-and-shiny trappings of the season so much so Continue Reading