“What. The. HELL?”
“What kind of deathmatch is this?! Why aren’t you killing each other?!”
“But no one’s voting for us! Everyone’s just being really generous and buying reviews outright!”
“Huh? Really?”
“Aw, that’s awesome. But still…three of you gotta die. Um…you!”
“Ugh!”
“Urk!”
“Noooo…I have so much to live for!”
“He’s crazy! Run for you lives!”
“FLEE, YOU CELLULOID BASTARDS!”
During the 2016 election there was considerable debate as to whether Donald Trump was simply a con man using nativist rhetoric to win the nomination and who would then swiftly abandon populism and ram through a hard-right platform designed to enrich the one percent, or whether he was actually the racist authoritarian that he played on TV. The answer turned out to be: “Yes.”
Things have gotten real bad, real fast and I think it’s clear that we are living in times that will have large, detailed chapters in future history books. I awoke this morning to learn that a close friend of mine is now banned from entering the United States purely because of her place of birth. The wall is being built. A white nationalist is now sitting on the National Security Council. The nation built by the poor, the tired and the huddled masses is refusing to admit refugees. The most powerful office in the world is less trusted and respected after eight days of Trump than after eight years of George W. Bush. I confess that I am deeply afraid.
As well as being afraid, I am angry, frustrated, appalled and sickened. But one thing I am not is despondent. I am not pessimistic. I am not disheartened.
Because the last week has reaffirmed what I already knew. The American people did not elect Trump. Trump was elected by a combination of fluke, a rotting and archaic electoral system, voter suppression and intervention by a hostile foreign power. The American people are the ones who voted for Hillary Clinton by a massive margin, who staged the largest demonstration in the nation’s history against Trump’s nascent kakistocracy and who are now fighting against the illegal detention of refugees at American airports.
The good outnumber the wicked and they always will.
This is a time when all people of good will must put whatever skills they have towards resisting Trump. For me, that means writing snarky reviews of movies which I will be the first to admit is not the most obviously useful skill in an anti-fascist resistance movement.
But that is why this year’s Unshaved Mouse Charity Movie Deathmatch is in aid of the American Civil Liberties Union.
So, how does the Deathmatch work?
Mouse, I’m wealthy, I’m charitable and I want you to review something NOW.
A $35 dollar donation gets you any movie or episode of a TV show reviewed that you like. $60 gets you two. $100 gets you four and quite possibly a statue somewhere when this all blows over.
What if I buy a review for a movie or series that’s competing in the death match?
In the case of movies, if you give a $35 donation and request a movie that loses the deathmatch, you get the review anyway. If your movie wins the deathmatch then I will contact you and ask you for your second choice and you get two movies that you wanted reviewed instead of one. Fair enough?
In the case of a TV series that wins the deathmatch, I’ll review an extra episode for every person that gave a $35 donation for that series.
Boring stuff done, so let’s MEET OUR FIGHTERS!
Hola, amigos.
Back again, am I. And off we go to watch and dissect another filmic wonder.
“What are we seeing today, Frog?”, you might screech.
Well…
///////////////////////////// Spoiler : No it isn’t.
Howdy-Ho, Neighboureeno.
Tis I, yond Frog. After a little Christmas/Birthday break, I am back and ready to review films for your entertainment.
What , pray tell, did I see this week?
Alright, this series of reviews that was supposed to last for one month has been going on since August so it might be a good time to pull the car over and try to figure out how we got here before the cannibal hillbillies come back. We started with animation in the silent era before moving to the dawn of integrated sound. We then had animated shorts as visual accompaniement and advertising for music and then as wartime proganda. Moving into the fifties we had the Golden Age of Warner Brothers shorts, the ignoble end of the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies in the sixties, the advent of more adult themed animation in the seventies and the first glimmer of the Pixar era in the eighties. So that brings us up to the nineties, a decade I am old enough for it to still feel like it was ten years ago. Refresh my memory, what was happening in animation in the nineties? Oh that’s right! The renaissance!
No, no, no. The ACTUAL renaissance.
Thank you.
So, exciting times. Great time to be an animation fan. Disney’s back, kicking ass and taking names, animé is more readily available in the west than ever before and even Western TV animation has stopped eating paste and is becoming increasingly not-awful. What changed? Well, the generation of kids who had grown up watching classic Disney movies and Warner Bros shorts were now adults and working in the film industry and wanted to bring the medium back to its former glory. Foremost amongst those kids was a guy called Steven Spielberg. Now, I say the word “Spielberg” and, depending on your age the first image that pops into your head is:
Or…
Or…
Or..
Or…
But you probably don’t immediately think of animation. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg is like the Forrest Gump of American animation post-1980. Practically every pivotal moment involved him somehow. Don Bluth? Spielberg produced his earliest films. The Disney Renaissance? Wouldn’t have happened without Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The drastic improvement in TV animation? Would have looked very different without Tiny Toons, Animanaics and Pinky and the Brain. Dreamworks? Whaddya think the “S” in “Dreamworks SKG” stands for, hombre?
Shaddup.
So in the wake of Roger Rabbit’s incredible success, Spielberg’s production company Amblin and Disney partnered to bring the long defunct animated theatrical short roaring back to life with a series of high budget, high quality Roger Rabbit shorts. And my God, you just need to look at the calibre of talent attached to these things to see how serious they were. Rob Minkoff, who would later go on to direct the single greatest canon Disney movie of all time I said it it’s official no one can disagree it’s over I won, super producers Don Hahn, Rob Marshall and Spielberg himself of course, Charles Fleischer and Lou Hirsch as Roger and Baby Herman and they even got Kathleen Frickin’ Goddamned Turner back to voice Jessica Rabbit even though she only averages three lines a short. So, before we go any further there’s two things you need to know about these shorts.
1) As animation, they are absolutely jaw-droppingly gorgeous.
2) As cartoons, they don’t really work.
That’s not to say that they’re complete failures. Anything this beautifully animated fully justifies its existence. But they are a fascinating example of the whole being less than the sum of the parts, and why sometimes fans of something are not always the most qualified people to make a new version of that thing. I’ll get back to that in a second. Only three shorts were made, with a fourth cancelled in pre-production and they very closely follow the formula established in Somethin’ Cookin’, the opening short in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The formula is as follows:
1) Mommie Dearest leaves Baby Herman in the care of Roger Rabbit, warning him that there will be dire consequences if anything happens to him.
2) Baby Herman wanders off into danger.
3) Roger loses his goddamn shit and screams like a Bedlam inmate.
4) Roger has to protect Baby Herman while suffering violence upon his body normally reserved for the Christ.
5) Gratuitous Jessica Rabbit cameo.
6) Gratuitous Droopy cameo.
7) Roger ruins the take and bursts through the fourth wall into the real world and everybody hates him for being a screw up.
8) FIN.
So let’s see how that plays out in practice with Roller Coaster Rabbit, the second short and by far the strongest.
*WHOOSH*
“Rick? Where are we…I…uh…I think I’m going to be sick, Rick…”
“Go right ahead Morty, it’s a blog. It’s probably about par for the usual *URP!* content.”
“I mean it Rick, I’m uh, freakin’ out here! Why am I in a little box?! Why are my words appearing below me?! Do I even still have my junk?!”
“There, there Morty. You’re just suffering from medium-transition anxiety and the fact that you’re a moist little PUSSY. We’re in a universe that runs on vastly different rules than ours.”
“What rules?”
“Running gags and fair use, mostly. We’re in a blog called Unshaved Mouse.”
“Unshaved Mouse? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Exactly, Morty, that’s the whole *URP!* point. NOBODY’S heard of it. Which makes it the perfect hiding place.”
“Hiding place for what?”
And so, as 2016 leaves the smouldering ruins behind and returns to the ocean from whence it came, I emerge from hibernation to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Be safe, be happy, be loved and, as Abraham Lincoln once said:
The script’s going really well but I miss you all, and I’m looking forward to getting back on the blog horse in February. Something that a lot of people have been asking me is when I’m going to do another Charity Movie Deathmatch and, much as I’d love to, I’m STILL working through the reviews from the last one and amn’t due to finish those until July. So, obviously, the only way I could do another Deathmatch would be if I was the kind of mouse who had a history of taking on huge projects while stile struggling to finish his existing ones…
“Oh right. I’m me.”
LET DEATHMATCH BEGIN!!!!!
In their book The Illusion of Life (still the Bible of animation 35 years after it was written), Disney legends Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas set out 12 principles of animation. The first and most important of these is called “Squash and Stretch”. Basically, it boils down to this: In animation, a form can change shape, but never volume. Observing this rule gives characters weight and solidity, and allows your brain to forget that you’re just watching a flat two dimensional image. As long as the character observes the same rules as an object in the physical universe, the brain perceives it as an object in the physical universe. In essence, it becomes real.
This rule was, for a long time, a hard barrier for computer animation. Early CGI could create solid three dimensional looking objects no problem, but they were always static. Rigid. To give the illusion of a living thing, an image has to not only be able to move but to change its shape while keeping its volume consistent and trying to do that with CGI in the early days would invariably cause any computer to throw up its hands in frustration and get back to plotting the enslavement of all mankind. All that changed in 1984. Well, not the plotting enslavement thing. They’re still doing that.
“Sooooon…”
So in 1984, Lucasfilm had a subdivison called The Graphics Group, a group of computer scientists who had been recruited out of NYIT by George Lucas, who had decided that computer generated imagery might be useful in creating special effects.
As sentences laden with prophetic doom go, that’s right up there with “That night, Alois Hitler decided not to bother with a condom.”
The Graphics Group decided to create a short to demonstrate that CGI could compete with traditional animation. And when I say “short”, I mean “short“. This thing clocks in at a whopping 86 seconds.
MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY HOLIDAYS to you, my dear friends.
I hope you’re all readying yourselves for the arrival of our Lord and Saviour St. Nicholas.
I bring you merry tidings.
I bring you…
Your Yearly Star War.
Fair warning – there be spoilers aplenty beyond the “read more” mark!!!!
unshavedmouse 