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| | huh? |
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| | You made children around the world cry. ;) |
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| | “...the bad people, who always look the way we’ve come to expect them to look”. So you’re saying W&G; would have been better realized if it had portrayed the villains as attractive and nuanced characters, instead of using the ancient and time-tested shorthand symbolism of childhood mythology? More Robert Altman than Grimm’s, perhaps? The idea that this is somehow a disservice to children – because they are ‘the future’, you know – is off target. A child’s first encounter with “good” and “bad” in art is, of necessity, going to be in the broadest of terms and starkly simplistic. Nuance comes later. And for the adult viewers, I’m willing to assume that most of them experience a po-mo frisson of delight at the purity of a black-hats and bad-toupees worldview. |
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| | The children being ‘the future’ ... that was a direct quote from a Whitney Houston song. My perhaps haphazard pseudo-moralism comes out of boredom – but I’m still not seeing why 'a child’s first encounter with "good" and "bad" in art' should be broad and simplistic. Rearing them for capitalism? Or is it that you think they can’t grasp something more nuanced. They can. I had a little of your frisson with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but afterwards felt a bit nauseous. Are you familiar with the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, Howl’s Moving Castle)? Here are fine examples of entertainment for children. Or Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant? These resonate more strongly for the grown-ups too. |
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| | "Rearing them for capitalism?"(?) |
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| | Yeah, I’ve seen Spirited Away. And have a copy of Iron Giant. Is the argument that anime is inherently superior to western product? Because after raising two sons and helping run a daycare that averaged up to twelve kids on any given day, I know from experience that children aren’t as excited by anime as adults are. And they’ll choose Disney or Looney Toons or Betty Boop over Iron Giant any day. “Rearing them for capitalism” says more about your own personal obsessions and agenda than it does about the subject at hand. As if anime is somehow purer -- less of a commodity and capitalist product -- and Miyazaki is just giving it away for free to build a better society. Of course children can grasp nuance, but not straight out the box. First they learn letters, then they learn words. But you don’t actually have children, do you? Yours is a theoretical construct. |
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| | For my part, I felt like you needed to have seen the other W&G; movies to really enjoy this one. And I enjoyed it. Still, I think to expect nuance from Wallace and Gromit is to expect Marx to engage systems of oppression that don't somehow have income at their foundation. But to play Devil's advocate (for Mr. Allison, that is), can we be so sure that we haven't somehow trained ("socialized" for my fellow sociology majors) little kids to prefer Disney over Miyazaki (who rocks my socks)? |
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| | Skuter666: I find your comments interesting, and of course you are right, I don’t have children. I have no idea how difficult it is. But here are a couple of thoughts I am having: 1. It cannot always be best to give children what they want. 2. The inception of disney must surely begin in the home. In my imagination of having kids I see myself putting them on the carpet in front of a careful selection of the more sophisticated kid’s entertainment. Maybe to make it a point not to expose them to disney in early life (just because that’s what everyone else is doing). I guess I can see it must be difficult to find the sort of extra time that takes, but I can’t help feeling like it might be important enough to try … as you no doubt have – what with owning a copy of The Iron Giant etc – but who am I to be condescending? I certainly agree, my thoughts are a theoretical construct.
“Of course children can grasp nuance, but not straight out the box. First they learn letters, then they learn words.”
I’m just trying to see eye-to-eye with your analogy. So … villains with bad toupee’s are letters … and what are the words – is a character like Madam Sulliman in Howl a word? Why must a child see the villain with the bad toupee first? How does establishing the untruth that ‘bad’ fits neatly into a tradition mould aid their understanding of a wholly different reality? We could always learn about the western mould later in sociology, with proffoker. Then we’d be appreciating Miyazaki as children, and Disney as adults (instead of the other way around) – for what it is: crap that can be harmful to developing minds. Sounding way dramatic now aren’t I.
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| | Uh, think you can change that picture seeing how it's a major spoiler?
What a great critic you are.... giving away the ending. |
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| | It's been a long time since I've seen the original Wallace & Gromit shorts (if you can call something that's 20-30 minutes a "short") but I fondly remember them and have always considered myself a fan. So why didn't I like this one quite as much? Hard to say. Actually, I found Wallace to be a completely intolerable character to have to spend almost an hour and a half with, and while I like Gromit more than ever, their constant failures to communicate grew tiresome after a while. Of course, I sympathized with Gromit in that regard, and maybe that's the point, but having to watch characters piece struggle to together a plot that everyone else has been let in on for well over 15 or 20 minutes isn'e usually something I enjoy anyway. I've never seen Madagascar, but I think I enjoyed the short cartoon about the penguins they showed beforehand more than the feature presentation itself. |
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