Disney eschews animation in favor of continued aesthetic and commercial torpor

There are, of course, supposedly solid business reasons for this; there always are. But for me, as an animation historian, Disney's decision to eliminate hand-drawn animation for its features is sad. It implies on the part of management disrespect for the studio's history and a lamentable lack of flexibility and vision.

Amen to that, Mr. Canemaker (link from ALD). When I consider the successes among Disney's recent cel-animation offerings - Lilo & Stitch, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove - I can't possibly imagine how these stories could have been better served by CGI. These three movies so successfully integrate the element of surprise (in the Emperor's case, with a devilish, manic genius), their stories are perfectly served by the 2-D medium.

I suppose I'm enough of a latent Catholic to feel some sorrow (and irritability) at an institution's decision to forsake the anima that got it up and running. Still, just because the suits at Eisnerland have forsaken the faith, doesn't mean the spirit is fated to die. Hayao Miyazaki was asked by Entertainment Weekly if he thought CGI was "going to destroy 2-D in the end?" His response: "I'm actually not all that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in corners of garages [making 2-D animation] to please themselves. And I'm more interested in the people who hang out in corners of garages than I am in big business."

Artists, to your garages.

Taking a short pause for technical matters

With a little luck (and techno-perseverance) I'll be back to full blogging capacity in the next week. I'll be jury-rigging a computer salvaged from a dumpster (thanks, Tom!). The BIOS seems to have been compromised, but I should be able to run LINUX on it. Should - we shall see.

Hiroshima

The morning newspaper depressed me more than usual today. 60 years after Hiroshima. The Globe & Mail gave an account of some of the Canadian PoWs "held" by the Japanese from the Chinese conflict. They all confess it's difficult feeling too badly about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since the atomic bombs brought the Pacific War to an abrupt conclusion and effectively saved their lives. (Personally, I could further argue that those bombs saved the life and some shreds of my great-uncle's soul, who fought in Europe and was determined to transfer to the Pacific when Berlin fell, because he was not at all, let's say, "confident" he could adjust to civilian life after all the carnage he'd witnessed and taken part in.)

So, here am I, an Anabaptist compelled to follow through several generations' worth of pacifist experiment to its inglorious conclusion. A civillian with a limited experience of violence (but enough experience, I think, to agree with Gandhi's sentiment that no-one should bother with pacifism if they haven't taken up arms first). I understand that the Japanese atrocities in China were horrific, and had design and scope that defied mere "cruelty". But the numeric logic of war still bothers me. It bothers me that the only conceivable way one group can put a stop to another group's atrocities is to answer back in the language of attrition.

It's been recently pointed out that the canard, "There are no foxhole atheists," is a myth - that the reality is in fact quite the opposite. And I suppose that informs some of the despondence I feel today. Here beneath the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, are we all merely potential casualties, or the final orphans of God?

"Un-ACC-EPT-able!"

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. “I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest,” the screamer fumed. “I just want to be a good actor.”

“Well, you've failed at being a good actor,” Moore replied reasonably. “Why not try for the popularity contest?”

Point taken. But what would Mr. "James Bond" think of my parenting style? (Link from Volokh Conspiracy.)

Memo to Jon Stewart: Unfortunately, fewer laughs = less love

I'm gratified to see I'm not the only one who thinks the ominous new decor to Jon Stewart's Daily Show has taken a toll on its esprit. Whoever piped up and said, "If it ain't broke, break it," must be seriously back-pedalling right now.

Birnbaum & Vowell: IT

One reason I like writing nonfiction is [that] it's all about the implausible. It's all about Lincoln's kid being there for the first three assassinations. Or Lincoln's son's life being saved by John Wilkes Booth's brother on the train tracks. All these weird coincidences. And bizarre occurrences. With nonfiction it's like, "Holy cow, I can't believe this thing happened!" Whereas fiction seems to me, for it to work, it actually has to seem kind of plausible. Which I would find incredibly difficult.

Sarah Vowell, interviewed by Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory

Thomas Pynchon: Reigning Emperor of Smart-Ass Lit

I'm not sure why this appreciation of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is being re-packaged and re-sold as a "Summer Issue" - seems to me Bookninja linked to the same essay last fall. But it's a good essay, and a very provocative one for those of us who read GR in our twenties and treated it like The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In the early 90s I was yet another scrawny, scruffy acolyte in the Cult of Pynchon. Like most of the other smart-asses in these twitching lower ranks, I eschewed biblical commentaries (A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, etc.) in favor of uninformed Reader Response, thinking the free-associative synapses in my young brain could intuitively connect all the dots for me. I dived into this fray of words, and came out the other end with vague notions of what I'd spent the last month doing. Clearly I'd have to read every word the man had published.

I went back to his earlier stuff - The Crying of Lot 49, Slow Learner, V. - and bought Vineland hot-off-the-press. By the time Mason & Dixon came into being, I'd read enough Pynchon to last the rest of my life. Gravity's Rainbow is the author's "inescapable" book - everything prior to it reads as if it is leading up to it; everything after reads like a baffled act of recovery.

I have a mild hunch that the act of becoming a parent quickly reduces the appeal to such darkly luminescent works as GR. GR explores, among other things, the weight of war. What is the value of family, economy, any perceived social safety-net, in the face of random obliteration? Pynchon asks these questions with the bravura of a young man too intelligent for his own good. He risks all, and discovers ... well, it's been 15 years since I last read the book. I've forgotten just what he discovers, and I'm not at all sure I ever knew.

Did Pynchon become a father after he wrote GR? Vineland ("For my mother and father") is enough of a meditation on the the sunnier (and predictably crazy) hopes and dreams of the American Family to pose the question. I could almost posit that the novel's opening scene as a metaphor of the author's life: protagonist Zoyd Wheeler, preparing to do his yearly public dumb-ass stunt to qualify for mental-disability benefits.

Whatever. All I know is, since I've become a father I've become disinclined to read Pynchon. For one thing, his books demand too much; if I'm irritable with my kids after reading a few pages, that's not a good thing. I still have his books on the shelf, however, and reading this essay gets me thinking a re-visit of Gravity's Rainbow might just be in order. In small doses, of course.