The Dotted Logline

Through a somewhat random series of events, I applied for and was accepted as the Firefox News series reviewer for Avatar: The Last Airbender.  My review for “The Day of Black Sun” two part episode has already been posted (it does contain spoilers if you haven’t seen the episodes.)  This seems like it will be a really fun gig.  Unfortunately, the show is on hiatus now for who knows how long.

For those not familiar with the series,  Avatar: The Last Airbender is an animated fantasy airing on Nickelodeon.  It’s a surprisingly complex and beautifully crafted show that has garnered a sizable (and well deserved) fanbase.  Season 1 and Season 2 (referred to as “books”) are available on DVD. I highly recommend checking them out.

I caught Toy Story 2 again today, the movie that makes all toy collectors feel incredibly guilty. In many ways, I think it is equal to or better than the original. But at the same time, there is something painful about toys contemplating their mortality, especially when the indication is that their final fate will be lying around in a junkyard somewhere with full awareness. True, they are independently mobile, but it’s a far darker destiny than that of my favorite childhood fictional toy, the Velveteen Rabbit.

Hopefully, most children don’t put quite as much thought into this or parents will never get them to give up their old toys.

I was able to catch the full run of Clone Wars tonight on Cartoon Network. I think Star Wars was meant to be animated. The Jedi powers just look more impressive when taken out of a live-action setting. Even when the effects are done in flawless CG, violating the physics still looks just a bit silly.

But what really impressed me was General Grievous. Imagine a creepy badass horror movie monster stalking terrified helpless kids and slaughtering them one by one. Now take out the terrified helpless kids and replace them with Jedi.

I can’t wait to see Episode III now.

A friend convinced me to watch a repeat of the pilot of a new anime-inspired series on Nickelodeon of all channels called Avatar: The Last Airbender. The story isn’t particularly original; four countries based on the four elements, each with people known as “______ benders” who manipulate that element and an Avatar who can control all four elements and maintains a balance.  When the Avatar disappears, the unchecked Fire Nation spends a century taking over the world.

But what I like about the series is it doesn’t have that pressing despair that so many similar fantasy stories have. It might be because it is aimed for a younger audience, although the complexity of the world and the politics somewhat dispute that. It’s simply that the hope outshines the overwhelming odds. There is no question that the current Avatar, a 12 year old Airbender named Aang, will save the world. It will be a hard journey, but a fun one, and one that will be enjoyable to watch.

Also, the fight/magic use scenes are SO COOL.

I went and saw The Incredibles again, this time with my dad and sister. My father is pretty blah on anything animated, but he rather enjoyed this movie.

My dad pointed out something I hadn’t noticed the first time I saw the film. As he loves to point out, night scenes in movies are often filmed during the day using night filters, resulting in a scene that looks like it is nighttime but still has very strong shadows from the daylight. The night scenes in the jungle in The Incredibles had the same shadows. However, this was a computer animated film, which means the animators actually ADDED those shadows to make the scene resemble something with a night filter.

I love it when artists add little details like that that maybe only one in a thousand viewers will catch. It speaks volumes about the care and attention they lavish on their work.

I went and saw The Incredibles today. I’d really been looking forward to it, not in the least because I’m writing a superhero satire myself. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie. There were a few points where I just couldn’t follow the character’s thought process  but that might have just been because I was very tired.

This is definitely not a movie for little kids. There were a quite a few at the showing I attended and I’m sure a number of them are still traumatized. There were a couple of points where the darkness surprised even me. Maybe I’m just too used to family movies that  show the bad guys parachuting to safety when their vehicles blow up. One of the things I admired about the last movie by director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant, was its unflinching acceptance of the reality of death. Still, there’s something inside of you that just cracks when you see a mother explaining to her kids that the bad guys won’t hold back on account of them: “They WILL kill you.”

I have to say that this movie really showed what it really takes to be a superhero. The secret isn’t the super powers.  It’s reaction time and adaptability. The action scenes are amazingly frenetic, to the point where you can still manage to follow along but you can’t understand how the characters, animated or not, are able to take out that many enemies and avoid that many blows in that little time. It’s even more amazing (or incredible) when you consider that most of the scenes involve heroes either brand new to the game or badly out of practice.

Over all, it’s a fun movie that explores the human side of superheroes, a great step forward in computer animation, and a loving satire of comic books from someone who’s clearly a fan. This is the first movie in a long time that I want to go see in the theater again, as well as buy lots of fun merchandise from. God help me.

The WB has been airing a brand new Batman animated series, aptly titled The Batman, done by an all-new creative team with new designs, voice actors, and a brand new continuity. I was excited to see a fresh take on the property, and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

Setup: The series takes place during year three of Batman’s career, with Bruce in his mid-twenties and not quite the stick-in-the-mud he’ll be later on in his life (in other words, he occasionally cracks a joke or smiles.) The public and the police are just becoming aware that The Batman really exists. The psychos are all starting to come out of the woodwork as well.

Art: The art style works well for the show. There are similarities to the Bruce Timm style, but it is closer in look to The Jackie Chan Adventures, as it is done by the same people. The movement is very fast and fluid and the character styles fairly angular. I’m still adjusting to seeing Bats with a pointed chin. Otherwise, Batman looks similar to the old animated series, though he’s really the only one that does. He does have what look like clawed gloves, as well as a longer cape, which they are doing some wonderful things with.

Voice: For having heard Batman voiced by the same actor (the wonderful Kevin Conroy) for over 10 years, I took to Rino Romano pretty fast. His Bruce Wayne voice is stronger and used more often than his gravely Batman voice, but he does have a good distinction between the two. The show hasn’t dealt with the Bruce/Bats dominant identity issue yet, but so far, it doesn’t seem that he necessarily considers Bruce to be just a persona.

There have been four episodes aired so far, each introducing a different villain:

The Bat In The Belfry: I thought it was interesting that they started with the heaviest hitter in the Rogues Gallery, the Joker. The character design is radically different from anything done before; Joker has spiky dreads, wears a straight jacket with the sleeves torn off, and no shoes. Kevin Michael Richardson does a great job with the voice, from very deep and creepy to Mark Hamill-style screeching. And it was good to see the Joker be a flat out raving lunatic. It seems sometimes the old animated series softened up that side of him. Interestingly, the Joker here is proficient at fighting, albeit he resembles a giant monkey when he does.

Also of note, it was revealed that one of the cops investigating Batman is an old (basketball?) friend of Bruce’s, and his female partner looks like a potential love interest for Bruce.

The Call Of The Cobblepot: I’ve never really liked the Penguin as a character, but at least they gave him something of a background: he’s from a wealthy family that Alfred’s uncle previously worked for that fell into poverty. Oswald also had an interesting pair of female ninjas in Kabuki masks he picked up in Asia and a rather dangerous beach ball-style of fighting. Alfred manages to almost get himself killed in the second episode.

Traction: I was disappointed when I heard that Bane was going to be in this series. He’s perhaps the most boring villain ever, character-wise. Luckily, other than a cool new character design, they pretty much left him alone to smash things and instead focused on the relationship between Alfred and Bruce, and the support the butler provides.

There was also a stunning visual sequence of young Bruce sitting in a police station, a too-big police cap covering his eyes, tears streaming down his face, sliding the remaining pearls on his mothers’ necklace along the string on by one, while faceless cops passed by. The brilliance of that moment made up for the blatant insertion of Bruce in a mecha batsuit clearly designed to be a part of the toy line.

The Cat And The Bat: I was waiting for the appearance of Catwoman before I formed a set opinion of the show, and I both really liked and disliked this episode. Catwoman had an interesting makeover with goggles pulled from the current comic book style, a cowlneck catsuit, and red accents on her gloves and boots. Her chemistry with Batman was fabulous, probably the best I’ve seen on the small screen. The best defining moment was when she had the chance to escape with the loot, and instead smashed it over the head of the thug attacking Batman. That always seems to be the decision that classifies where she stands, and I was surprised to see her pick Batman so early on.

On the other hand, Selina Kyle was a bit annoying. She used far too many cat puns, and Gina Gershon vamped it up too much. She spent what seemed like half the show trying to figure out how the remote on Batman’s utility belt worked (hee hee, she stole his belt) And they gave her blue eyes for some unknown reason. She pretty much looks like Aeon Flux with her hair down. She seems to be well off but has no background so far. Hopefully in a future episode, her and Bruce will meet without the masks.

Verdict: Overall, I’m really enjoying the show. There is some obvious toy marketing worked in, and the world is still being established, but it is a nice blend of old and new, and the people working on it seem to have an interest in making something more than just another thrown-together dumbed down kids show. I definitely recommend checking it out, and I can’t wait to see where it goes. The official website has screencaps from the first three episodes and a poor-quality version of the opening, for those interested.

While reading the latest issue of a certain popular comic book, I realized that one of the things that make mainstream superhero comics so fun is how often you find yourself saying “Hey! I thought he/she was dead!” This used to be fairly common in anime as well, but in some of the more recent series I’ve seen, the current trend seems to be “Let’s kill off beloved characters completely out of the blue and not bringing them back except in the angst-filled memories of other characters that will drive them to suicidal behavior.” And that isn’t nearly as much fun. True, killing off characters unexpectedly creates buckets of tension, but it is of the one-note variety. Bringing people back from the dead, literally or figuratively, instigates all sorts of interesting chaos.

I moved back home a few days ago, and while going through a number of items I had on order that had piled up, I ended up reading Mystique Volume 1 and watching Feat of Clay parts I and II from BtAS in the same day. Though I wouldn’t consider either to be literary masterpieces, they did delve into the psychology of appearance and identity in interesting ways.

While superheroes often deal with concept of identity, they are themes that are easily found in mainstream lit: dual identities, one’s place in society, etc. But shapeshifting pushes the concept of identity beyond the realm of the familiar. If you can be anyone or anything, why do you choose to be who or what you are? And if you can be anyone, is there really a definitive you?

Issues like this are what I love about speculative fiction. There are only so many ways of looking at normal human issues. Sometimes, to really learn something new about yourself, you need to look at outside of their expected limits of human experience.