The movie worth noting this week is Earth to Echo, about a group of kids who finds an alien who needs their help. This one comes through Disney, and does look like it will be fun. Be sure to share it with your children, it looks like a full family story.
Put together by the folks who created the Coraline and ParaNorman animations, The Boxtrolls looks like it will be a lot of fun. The film stars Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost, which all by itself is enough to put it on my must see list. It is based on the book Here Be Monsters by Alan Snow, purportedly a children’s book but a fine example of Fantasy as well. Since it is volume 1 of The Ratbridge Chronicles (the fictional town it takes place in, based on the real town Trowbridge in Wiltshire), perhaps there will be more of these down the road. It should be hitting the big screen in September.
There are several interesting choices this week, with Transformers: Age of Extinction topping the list. Let’s face it, I would watch any Michael Bay Transformers movie, even though I never cared for the original Japanese animation series trying to promote toy sales. As the series evolved, Beast Wars came out, a story line built on evolution itself. It looks like Michael is finally incorporating that aspect of the franchise into his movies, and I can’t wait to see where he takes it.
Also this week, the truly twisted and paranoid Philip K. Dick masterpiece Radio Free Albemuth goes into general distribution! This gem has been going around the film fest circuit for a handful of years, it is nice to see it finally going into theatrical release. If you are in the mood for an After the Apocalypse kind of film, then Snowpiercer will give you major class warfare trapped on the Orient Express, with an international cast of favorite actors. If you are hoping for something a bit more light-hearted than any of these, there is a limited release of the 2004 animated classic The Incredibles, finally available in 3D.
The top choice in movies this week is pretty much a matter of what kind of mood you are into. On the one hand you have The Lego Movie, a boatload of cult silliness and geek goodness. It doesn’t actually have more superheroes in one film than any other production, but it begins to approach X-Men like numbers. If you prefer some serious (or at least less silly) live action type indi adventure, The Machine is another tale of our Evil Robot Overlords, or Evil Android Overlord, in this case. It has won a number of film fest awards, including 3 from BAFTA Cymru alone. Bottom line, I think these are both worthy of being in the permanent collection.
There is also a documentary called I Know That Voice all about the voice actors you know from many animated series like Futurama or The Simpsons I think might be quite entertaining. As someone who has taken a turn around the voice actor track myself, this one will absolutely be coming home with me. There are 2 other documentaries worth mentioning: Live from Space from the National Geographic Channel, and Adjust Your Tracking, about folks who collect VHS tapes. I find it interesting you can only get the extended version (20 extra minutes of documentary) on the combo VHS/DVD version; the DVD only version is missing the extra stuff.
I should also mention a re-release of a classic you may not be aware of. 1963’s Judex is a French film re-imagining the 1914 French movie serial of the same name. This was not the creation of Movie Serials (that was the also-French-made 1908 Nick Carter film series), which later became the basis of episodic TV series when they brought them to early TV in the 1940s. Judex may also be the earliest example of Superhero stories in any format, but I have to do some more research before I will know if that is the case or not. The story line, father murdered and ruined by evil banker, son adapts secret identity and hidden lair, gathering an arsenal of technology and a team of circus performers and criminals with special talents as his minions, has been redone many times since. It was the inspiration for things as diverse as Batman, Spiderman, and The Shadow from the US and a ton of others from Europe and Asia, including K-20: The Fiend With Twenty Faces. In fact, in 1940 the French publication Hurrah! started a comic book version of Judex, which was really a French translation of the American syndicated Shadow comic strip; so the inspiration came full circle.
In TV Teen Wolf: Season 3 Part 2 finishes off the season 3 story, and it looks like the best project MTV has been involved with for a while. If nothing else, it up-levels everything from season 2, where they didn’t seem to be really trying.
In Anime, Busou Shinki is a harem story, where the girls are female action figures with weapons… who happen to stand 6 inches tall each. Not exactly conducive to a rich social life if the male in question happens to be multiple feet in height. The other series this time around is Shiki, a horror story that now available in a S.A.V.E. version for a real good price. This one is also a commentary on the genre itself, showing off those tropes that that draw in the audience, and making every viewer pay attention and appreciate what is going on. I am not a horror fan, but this one was worth watching.
One show I have been waiting for is Red Data Girl: Complete Series, which is an absolutely brilliant TV program. A girl is raised in isolation in a shrine, and has trouble fitting in when she is finally allowed into a public school. It doesn’t help any that computers, cell phones, and other modern electronics all crash when she comes near them. Then she finds out she is the last vessel of the goddess Himegami, and that is when things start to get truly strange.
A new tune from Passepied, the song being Tokyo City Underground MV, and yes, the MV does mean Music Video. The lead vocalist is also a graphics artist and helps create the animations for her videos, as you may have noticed from Wednesday’s post. This track is from their new album, and will be in stores on June 18th, and available on iTunes at the same time. I also included another track which was from a mini-album released just a month or two back.
The band Passepied has a lead singer who is also a graphics artist, and she has brought some pretty interesting animation styles to her videos. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as anyone who has ever sat through the credits at the end of a feature length animation knows. There can be upwards of a few thousand animators, each working on their specialty for the small slice of the total project their production house got. Music Videos are much shorter than feature films, and take much less in the way of resources. This makes them the perfect environment to give you a sense of perspective into the process, since the size of a music video is about the same as the size of a given project slice for a feature film. Take a look at the Music Video Yes/No, and then watch the behind-the-scenes video for it, and see if it doesn’t bring the effort involved into focus.