At this point you are aware of this book series known as the Twilight Saga, a magical romp through a land of glittery vampires, cuddly werewolves, epic battles between the two, and some other stuff that is not at all as interesting as it sounds. I read some of the books and watched the first movie all in the interest of science.
And I didn't like any of it.
I have since gotten into arguments over the quality of this series with my friends who do enjoy Twilight, and that brings us to the real point of this here post: If you have never heard of Twilight, you sure as hell have heard of it's fandom.
This is not without reason, mind you. Some Twilight fans are... aw, hell with it. Some Twilight fans are nuts. Sparkly vampire bat-sh*t insane, if you will. Several dozen copies of "Cracked Rear View" short of a used CD store. Crazy enough to be screaming for the fictional character portrayed by an actor but *not for the actor himself* (honestly, the vast majority of fans don't seem to give a pair of fetid dingo kidneys for the actors -- they just want the characters they embody, see all those chicks clawing at their jugulars so R-Patz Edward could feed off them.) Yet powerful enough to make the Mtv Movie Awards essentially useless for the next four years.
You know about them because the media loves to focus on the crazier side of fandom. This is why all Trekkers hang out in full Starfleet regalia at all times, all Furries are into the weird stuff, all Anime fans dress like "Naruto" characters and/or something called "Steamy-Punks" or "Lolly", and all "Avatar" fans are depressed over how life on Earth just doesn't cut it and they want to turn into Na'vi and move to Pandora and ride a Leonopteryx doin' barrel-roles and sh*t.
Some Twilight fans have delivered on the crazy fan behavior like no other known fandom. Boy, have they ever (and that's just from the surprisingly huge arts-n-crafts contingent).
SOME of them -- but not all of them.
As I've mentioned, I have friends who enjoyed Twilight. They are not crazy. They also like things that I can agree with. And they (well, except one of them) don't mind that I don't like the series.
Which brings us to this film that made the Internet rounds when "New Moon" was in theaters. And this, this right here, is how I learned to stop worrying and tolerate the Twilight fandom.
The first time I saw this, I thought it was pretty funny... for about the first minute or two. And then, when all the fans filed into their theater seats, excited to see the movie they've waited so long for, I got a little twinge of uncomfortable familiarity. Haven't I been in a crowd like that? As a matter of fact, yes I have -- my cousins and I were in exactly this kind of crowd going in to see "Matrix Reloaded".
And we all -- the whole theater -- would have been Bull. Sh*t. If this little bait-and-switch stunt had been pulled on us.*
* - Yes, I know. But imagine having to wait four years between, say, "Lost" seasons and you have an idea of the agonizing wait between the first "Matrix' and "Reloaded". Expectations were a *little* high. (And screw you all, I *like* the whole trilogy.)
But that's not the half of it. It isn't just that this guy isn't going to show the promised movie. He berates the Twilight fans for enjoying the series. And you and I might not like Twilight -- but imagine if you were brought into a theater as a teenager and told that the thing you love is bad and you should feel bad? Wouldn't that be heartbreaking? Wouldn't you feel awful and alienated?
And so, I give the peace sign to all the Twilight fans I may have offended in the past. I'm sorry.
(But I still maintain that getting into an argument with a Creationist is more fun than getting into an argument with a Twilight fan...)
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WIKKID IMPORTANT HEAD'S UP:
Amazon's Gold Box deal of the day is the complete series of "Fraggle Rock" for $37.50. If you do not own "Fraggle Rock" on DVD, hop to it! This is less than I paid for each individual season!
This goes double if you are a reader with kids.
Also, I got rid of the embedded video because it was causing problems.
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Sketch of the Day!
I believe we need something aggressively silly after all that.
It's been a while since I wrote a post about Sketchbooks, hasn't it? I figure I owe you a post about arty stuff, dear reader, after those last two ranty, only-obliquely-art-related posts.
Of course, there was a prompt for this one. I recently got this little fellow in the mail from the wonderful, if strangely-named, Dick Blick art supply catalog:
You may recall from a much earlier Sketchbook-related post that I first saw this brand of Sketchbook at the Massachusetts College of Art store. This is an Art Supply Enterprises Pen and Ink Watercolor Book (an Art Alternatives Watercolor Book according to the Blick catalog). As you can see, it looks like another lowfat Moleskine alternative, especially with it's rubber-band closure, it's (maybe) fake leather cover, and it's hilarious wrap-around dust jacket thingy:
"Embrace the Immediacy of Watercolor... and bathe your sketches in color!"
With the help of my handsome assistant*, you can see that this little book looks like a Watercolor Moleskine on the inside as well, and even sports a pocket. The only difference -and this is a bit of a disappointment for me- is that the pages are perforated. Maybe there are people out there who like the option of removing pages out of their Sketchbook, but I am not one of them.
* - My Oviraptor mascot needs a name!
So the only thing left to do is personalize this little fellow:
Obviously, this is the Sketchbook I'm taking to Florida with me in a few weeks. I usually go small when choosing a travel Sketchbook. It should be able to fit inside a fanny pack. This little guy could fit in a pocket if it had to!
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Now, I know making fun of Twilight is like shooting fish in a barrel at this point, but I recently got an issue of a magazine that had a special preview of the Twilight comic book. And as somebody who went through four years of art school, I can't let this pass without comment. (Illustrations by Young Kim. I can't find much about him online, so hopefully he was hampered by the source material -I know all too intimately what that's like- and this is not indicative of what he can do.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the many expressions of Mr. E. Cullen:
Bonus: Here is Bella scared out of her mind:
Yeah.
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Feederwatch Thursday!
Not much goin' on this week. To be fair, the rain/snow hadn't started yet really and I only had the suet feeder full.
Blue Jay 1
American Crow 2
White-breasted Nuthatch 1
House Sparrow 15
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Sketch of the Day!
I've been editing some more older pieces for DeviantArt this week, so I haven't had the time to upload anything new at the time of writing. Here are some dragons:
Most of you have probably already seen these, but for those of you who haven't, here comes nightmare fuel.
I... have nothing that I could say that would make these things less horrifying. I can only repeat what I said about Moose Jesus: Imagine going over somebody's house and seeing this proudly on display.----
I'm getting ready for a family trip in a couple of weeks, so for now I'm doing a twice-weekly post schedule. Which means it's time for
Feederwatch -uh- Thursday!
Man, what a storm on Tuesday.
Rock Pigeon 2
Mourning Dove 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Black-capped Chickadee 2
White-breasted Nuthatch 1
House Sparrow 15
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Sketchotheday! Assuming we all need some brain bleach after the "Manillows", here is cuteness from the Great Backyard Bird Count!
OK, readers (both of you). I'll level with you. I don't think I have it in me to do any kind of Advent Calendar or daily post for this holiday season. And yet, part of me thinks I can, as I've got lots I could talk about. I can see myself scheduling posts to go up each morning when I have free time (or not); meanwhile I'll be going crazy in real life doing things like this:
That's about one quarter of our Christmas stuff. I spent most of yesterday getting it out of the boxes. I'll spend much of this week making it pretty.
We shall see what happens. In the meantime, Nessie has a gift guide up.
And this has nothing to do with the holiday season, but it begs to be shared. Here is a well thought out argument, care of CHUD.com, for why David Cronenberg must direct the movie version of the last "Twilight" book. Spoilers galore, needless to say. There is also lots of naughty language, but here's the thing. I don't think a few F-words are going to do any permanent damage to your "Twilight" fangirl daughters. Especially when they've already read about (and can't un-read about) a vampire fetus who is not only capable of projecting her thoughts into her father's mind -which is plenty disturbing on it's own- but is also capable of kicking hard enough to shatter her mother's spine.
Oh, by the way, "Charlie Brown Christmas" is on tonight, as well as something called "Prep and Landing". The latter is one of those newbie Christmas specials that gets advertised seemingly every twenty minutes in every imaginable media, to the point where one is either pumped to see it finally or (more likely) already sick of it.
And, the funny thing is, it'll probably be postponed for the Presidential Address.
As usual, let's have some art (from last year, but still awesome) first. Click to go to the Flickr page and see the larger version.
I'll have my Comicon thoughts after they're organized. Heck, I am probably going to wait until after Halloween and devote the entire next week to it. It is going to take me a long time to sort through my freebies, purchases, photos, sketches, and contacts.
It was a very long and exhausting weekend in general, but I had a lot of fun and met a lot of really awesome people and exchanged lots of postcards with other illustrators. Illustration isn't a very social career choice, so anytime large numbers of artists get to talk face-to-face is fantastic.
I actually ran out of promotional postcards about an hour before I left - but that's definitely a good thing.
To anyone joining the Blog after meeting me there, welcome! I'll be writing about drawing, animation, film, literature, and anything else interesting that comes up. For those of you standing, please hold on to the handrails throughout our journey and stay clear of the doors. For the comfort of others, no smoking please. Thank you, and welcome to our highway in the sky!
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But because it's holiday-appropriate, if Mario and Princess Toadstool are reading, the "Twilight" features can be read here and here.
And if anyone still needs to find a costume for Saturday, I have some last-minute suggestions at The Realm.
I you have a Geocities website, you have until tonight to rescue it!
*sigh* Such are the perils of shuffling your scheduled posts around. I originally had this as a footnote to the next post, which was originally going to go up on Wednesday but got pushed back to Friday thanks to the "Let's Recast 'Futurama' For No Good Gorram Reason" debacle. Blame FOX. For everything.
Um, I mean, San Diego Comic-Con is this weekend! Woo-Hoo!
As you may have noticed, I usually focus on announcing conventions that take place in the upper-right-hand corner of the country (it's so that I don't have the "Ha ha, you can't go" song in my head), but this one's too important not to get a mention. I am unable to attend, due to being in the exact opposite end of the U.S. right now. But for those of you who can go, have fun, get your butt in the seat for the Disney Animation Panel tomorrow at 12:30 (Miyazaki!!!!!), and good luck dodging the Twilight fangirls.
Speaking of: Dear mainstream media. Girls enjoy attending comic book conventions. I know that, for whatever reason, this is very hard for your tiny minds to understand. But girl geeks who don't give a fetid pair of dingo kidneys about glittery vampires exist. And we are legion.
As far as the girls attending comic-con this year who do care about glittery vampires, a FARK commenter with the excellent screen-name Brigid Fitch said it so I don't have to:
"...The problem isn't women attending the con -- it's gaggles of non-fans swarming all over a con, sucking all the fun from the room. We'll never escape the Asperger's candidates & hygienically challenged portion of our ranks, but if you're stuck next to one, you can at least find common ground and have a reasonable conversation with them (if by "reasonable" you mean discussing the finer points of violating the Prime Directive, of course)."But the Twilight fans aren't like that. They're interlopers. We couldn't care less about sparkly vampires and they haven't a clue what to expect at a ComicCon! They're there to swoon over Robert Pattinson, and have no idea who Ray Bradbury is, let alone why someone would give their right arm to be at his discussion panel.
"...It's like a school trip to a Yankees game: The girls know NOTHING of baseball, ask a lot of inane questions, and are only there because they think Jeter is hot. And whenever he's on the field, they squeal in that ear-piercing way that only 15-year-olds know how to. How patient would you be?"
The reason why I'm not gushing about my trip last week yet is because I had the Disney Animated Films posts all set to go and it would be a total pain to shuffle their dates at this point. But the other reason is because I am sick as a dog. There were more sneezing, coughing people in the little room we waited in to leave the boat than there were during the entire trip, and I think I caught some horrible rare disease from one of them. Been coughing up a lung since Sunday night.
Speaking of, here is how I felt Sunday night, in all it's crappy MS Paint glory:
Yeah, this sucks. On to the Disney Movies!
The Very First Animated Disney Feature Film: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"
I have to admit, I never particularly counted "Snow White" among my favorite Disney movies. And that is damn weird for me to say because, honestly, I have only sat down and watched the thing twice.
Some background is in order for readers still in their teens. Believe it or not, there was a time, not very long ago, when Disney was awful about releasing their animated films on home video. The long, weird story of Disney movies on home video/DVD release can be read on this Wikipedia page, but the short story is that throughout the early to mid-80's, you either watched the movies in the theater during their rare re-releases or not at all.
Gradually, Disney movies did make their way onto video but it was a long and rather nonsensical process. ("Pinocchio", which may be the greatest Disney animated film ever, was one of the first ones on video but the craptacular "The Sword In The Stone" was kept off shelves because it was one of the "untouchable seminal films upon which our legacy was based". Seriously.) In a situation rather similar to that of "E.T.", Disney originally teased that they would never release "Snow White" on home video. We Disney Channel brats had to settle for teasing tidbits dispersed throughout clip shows and such. The Dwarves' marching songs here, the Queen's transformation sequence there, "Whistle While You Work" over there and so on. That, more than anything, built the movie's reputation up in our minds.
Disney held out on their vow not to release "Snow White" onto video until 1994, and with my love of a good ironic ending to a story, I'm actually kind of glad the movie wasn't available on Netflix. I watched "Snow White" on one of the original videos published in '94.
On the whole, the movie is much, much better than I recall. There are a lot of things Disney would do better in future films, however. Snow White herself is one of the blandest heroines Disney ever devised. Her big scene comes when she stumbles into the Dwarves' bachelor pad and immediately starts playing Suzy Homemaker. Later, she addresses the dwarves like a teacher shepherding a rowdy Kindergarten class. She spends the last act of the movie asleep and I really didn't notice much.
But while Snowy is almost too ditzy to live, she's at least more interesting than the Prince. He doesn't even get a proper name! You can't call yourself a Disney fan if you don't transpose the lyrics of his one big number to: "One line! / I have but one line! / One line in this whole movie!!!"
Ah, but the Dwarves are wonderful. It's really quite impressive when you think about it; we have here seven fairly identical people but each one of them has a unique personality. There is a point about a half hour into the movie where they first arrive at their newly cleaned home and the pacing threatens to grind to a halt (one thing I noticed on this viewing is that, save for this one scene, the movie is almost an opera). But then, during this sequence, each of the Dwarves gets his own great, funny little character moment. It's wonderful.
Rounding out the cast, I have to admit the Wicked Queen owns the whole show. She's all resentment and intimidation. The first in a long line of great Disney movie villains, she sets the standard very high.
The special effects are amazing, especially when you realize that they must have taken months and months to do at the time. Overall, I'm glad that I gave this another look.
Film #2: "Pinocchio"
Sincere and scary, this is the best of the Golden Age. It could easily be the best Disney movie ever.
Doing the research for this project, and specifically the home video release history of these films, I was struck by a couple of revelatory things:
1) The first wave of animated Disney movies released on Home Video did not include any previews. In fact, they had no advertisements on them in any way, shape or form.
Repeat: Disney movies. Released for home viewing. With NO commercials. None.
Ten minutes of commercials of all imaginable kinds in front of "Pinocchio" later, that kind of trivia breaks my brain.
2) Pinocchio is only the second full-length feature Disney made, but it's never been treated as well as "Snow White". As a matter of fact, while Disney threatened to never release "Snow White" on video, "Pinocchio" was one of the first five or so features released!
This is especially weird to me because, let's face it, "Pinocchio" tops it's big sister in every way. The special effects are jaw-dropping. It's the most dramatic of the features (indeed, it's more tense than many live-action thrillers I have watched) and it pointedly does not avoid scaring the hell out of the audience. It's greatest achievement, from a storytelling standpoint, is understanding how kids really see the world.
And it is also very, very funny. People tend to forget that. Jiminy Cricket is just about the best character ever and everything he says is hilarious (his exchange with the Blue Fairy is wonderful and easily overlooked; you wonder how much of it was scripted).
This is early Disney at its peak.
Film # 3: "Fantasia"
Well, first things first. This movie is taken way too damn seriously, especially in the animation fandom. There. I said it. The thing centers largely around dancing animals for cryin' out loud!
"Fantasia" is the first really wildly inconsistent Golden Age Disney movie (it's long-delayed sequel is often panned as being inconsistent, which is just about the dumbest argument ever; inconsistency runs in the "Fantasia" family). Fortunately, it's also an anthology movie. As you'll see, Disney made several of these. Most of them centered around music in some way. It seems more fair to approach such features as several short films rather than one long and confusing movie. Therefore:
"Toccata and Fugue" - Trippy, man. Trippy.
"Nutcracker" - Very nice with excellent effects.
"Sorcerer's Apprentice" - Everyone's favorite. I like it too but it struck me, this time, how odd it looks in context as it's the only segment with a real plot!
"Rite of Spring" - Cool. You can tell the animators were testing their skills on realistic animals, probably as preparation for "Bambi". And it's very strange how influential this one sequence is (early Dinosaur artists copied Charles Knight; early Dinosaur film-makers copied this. Heck, what am I saying "early"? You can see echoes of this as recent as "Land Before Time"!)
"Pastoral" - I always hated this bit. Really, without the Beethoven, this has as much artistic merit as a particularly good episode of "My Little Pony".
"Dance of the Hours" - It's fun. There's some wonderful character animation here.
"Bald Mountain"/"Ave Maria" - Now here's an amazing sequence. It's also our second encounter with a show-stealing villain. As a matter of fact, I'm sure many people completely forget the "Ave Maria" finale (it is a nice sequence with one wonderful effect, but it's amazingly anticlimactic).
It's funny how "Fantasia" was never supposed to be released on video either. Once again, us Disney Channel brats only got to see disconnected bits and pieces here and there. Often, we had no clue that these were all from the same movie. I remember finally getting to see what all the fuss was about and being just a little disillusioned ("Wait, that whole bit with the dancing hippos is "Fantasia"?!) Topping this off, when "Fantasia" was finally released on video, it had no previews (which had become a trademark of Disney videos by then) and it's clamshell box was black. Serious. Business.
I like the movie better now.
Oh, and for the record, the "Fantasia"/Smashing Pumpkins trick really does work. Mostly because there isn't really a wrong way to do it.
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Next Post: "Dumbo" and "Bambi". For more posts in this series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.
