Named after the ancient Persian city, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is a memoir of her life in Europe and Iran after the Iranian revolution. This animated feature joins the growing ranks of comic book adaptations that prove that comics are not only about superheroes that dress up in animal-themed costumes to battle crime. Hopefully it, along with other good comics-to-film triumphs Ghost World and A History of Violence, will broaden moviegoers’ awareness of the many alternative genres already explored in comics.
The spirit of punk invades Iran
In a rare privilege perhaps only ever shared by Frank Miller in making Sin City with Robert Rodriguez, Satrapi served as co-director and writer of the film (with Vincent Paronnaud). She sings music to my ears in the DVD bonus features; to paraphrase, she states that it is a fool’s errand to make a literal, strict adaptation of any graphic novel to film. As comics writer Alan Moore once brilliantly and succinctly put it, comics are wholly unlike movies because, simply, “movies move.”
The recent trend in Hollywood is to perform fan service (as it’s known) and make the most literally faithful adaptations possible. Sin City, 300, and the upcoming Watchmen all procede from the flawed presumption that the source materials’ fanbase (the nerdy, genre-convention-attending strawmen in studios’ equations that they expect to be buying the tickets and DVDs) want nothing less than perfect transitions from page to screen. But such a thing is never possible, let alone desirable.
Politically conscious at a young age
That said, Persepolis the film does share the strikingly stark look of Satrapi’s characteristic pen and ink illustrations. A mostly black & white animated French memoir about a young Iranian woman could never be mistaken for blockbuster material, but it is funny, illuminating, and moving.
Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo immediately preceded Pixar’s slightly more sophisticated collaborations with director Brad Bird, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. But despite being one of Pixar’s more overtly kid-oriented films, Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo is rife with anxiety and death. In the tradition of its spiritual ancestor Bambi, which also famously features a mother’s arbitrary murder in its opening moments, Finding Nemo is childlike without being childish.
If I was stranded in a dentist’s office aquarium, and I could take only one of Stanton’s Pixar movies with me, I’m afraid I wouldn’t select Finding Nemo. I found his follow-up WALL-E to be a more sophisticated film that relies less on dialog and celebrity personae.
Batman: Gotham Knight is a direct-to-DVD production from Warner Premiere, intended as a back-door prequel to the feature film The Dark Knight. Warner Bros. has tried this tactic before, and will again. 2003’s The Animatrix was a planned interlude in Matrix franchise, enjoying extensive involvement from creators The Wachowskis.
Coming soon is a motion-graphics animated version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen, preceding the forthcoming live action feature film adaptation (no doubt Moore, who has long since divorced himself from his past work for Warner Bros.’ DC Comics, has a few choice words for this development).
Do you think that maybe we’ve all forgotten that Batman a childrens’ comic book about a millionaire who dresses up like a bat to catch bank robbers?
The Animatrix and Gotham Knight are portmanteau films, the products of multiple writers and animation teams. But the latter is only tangentially related to its sister live-action film, The Dark Knight. A pair of detectives figure as characters in both, and the gang war that percolates in the background of The Dark Knight is the driving incident behind many of the Gotham Knight tales. But the short films (mostly in an anime style) vary wildly in quality and comprehensibility:
“Have I Got a Story For You” (Shoujirou Nishimi) – A pack of skate rats tell tall tales of the Batman, until the real deal shows up. One of the best of the lot, with a unique hand-drawn animation style, mixed with a little CG.
“Crossfire” (Futoshi Higashide) – Two detectives are literally caught in the crossfire of a gang war. Suffers from particularly awful dialogue.
“Field Test” (Hiroshi Morioka) – Batman receives a new toy from Lucius Fox that works a little too well.
“In Darkness Dwells” (Yasuhiro Aoki) – Guest-starring two veterans of Batman’s rogues’ gallery: Killer Croc and Scarecrow. Some of the best animation, but the story is incomprehensible.
“Working Through Pain” (Toshiyuki Kubooka) – Batman, shot in the gut, struggles alone just to get home. He has hallucinatory flashbacks to his spiritual training in the art of overcoming physical pain. He recalls how his teachers rejected him for his impure motivations (to enable his revenge plan, not to attain higher spirituality). This, one of the best stories, leads directly into…
“Deadshot” (Jong-Sik Nam) – …one of the worst. A master assassin (a blatant rip-off of the character Bullseye from Marvel Comics’ Daredevil) targets Lieutenant Gordon. A really lame conclusion to the collection.
With the delightful WALL-E, Pixar continues its as-yet unbroken winning streak of instant-classic films for all ages. While my personal favorites are Brad Bird’s darker and more psychologically complex The Incredibles and Ratatouille, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is easily also one that will resonate decades hence with children of all ages (as the saying goes).
Other animation studios continue to produce disposable pastiches such as Shrek and Ice Age, laden with pop cultural references that will not age well and eventually be forgotten. While eye-popping now, perhaps some day Pixar’s animation will appear less than state-of-the art, and I do fear that one day Pixar may miscalculate and produce a critical and commercial failure. If they ever do, it will be because they lost their emphasis on storytelling craft and sense for timeless relevance.
WALL-E trips the light fantastic.
WALL-E looks backwards in cinema history for inspiration to envision its grim distant future. WALL-E’s daily travails on an ecologically collapsed Earth resemble the desolate wastelands seen in such joyless apocalyptic downers as The Terminator and The Matrix. WALL-E is the lone survivor of his kind, dispassionately salvaging spare parts from his dead comrades. All this is potentially very scary stuff for kids, but the little guy has become charmingly eccentric over the course of his several-hundred year long mission, and his positive, can-do energy provides an amusing counterpoint to the dead world about him. Still, the themes of loneliness and environmental crisis are there for adults to plainly see and even the youngest viewers to pick up on.
Long before WALL-E, the camp sci-fi classic Logan’s Run supposed a future devolved humanity, reduced to a self-sustaining infantile state. Humanity imprisoned itself for the sake of survival, but the rational was long since forgotten and the closed system no longer unnecessary. It takes the rebellion of one free spirit to wake up the whole of society to the reality outside the walls of their enclosed womb (or tomb).
WALL-E befriends the DustBuster3000
WALL-E draws its ecological metaphors and even the visual design of WALL-E himself from the classic hippie science-fiction film Silent Running. The last remnants of an overpopulated Earth’s biosphere are preserved in orbiting greenhouses, until venal corporations decide they are no longer necessary and are to be demolished. But one driven botanist and his team of cute gardening droids conspire to preserve a garden of eden forever, adrift in space, but a great cost: their rebellion is a bloody, murderous one.
The last major cinematic touchstone for WALL-E is, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The visual design of the Buy ‘n’ Large ark carrying the remnants of humanity is all about the clean, white lines of Kubrick’s space station, and none of the filthy grunge that has dominated science fiction ever since Ridley Scott’s Nostromo in Alien (but Sigourney Weaver does provide the voice of the ship’s computer, perhaps finally finding vengeance against Alien‘s evil computer M.O.T.H.E.R.).
WALL-E‘s chief villain is the droid AUTO, with the single, sinisterly unblinking red eye of HAL 9000. Both are artificial intelligences that stunt the evolutionary advancing of the human race in a twisted literal reading of their programming to protect it. Deleterious overprotection is also a theme in Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo; the Marlon learns that his prohibitive coddling of his son prevents him from blossoming.
Pistol-packin’ Princess Leia-bot comin’ through!
But more than anything, WALL-E is a love story. If you think about it too much, you realize WALL-E is several hundred years old, and is thus rocking the cradle when he falls for the later model droid EVE. A pistol-packin’, short-tempered spitfire in the fine tradition of Princess Leia, EVE is so far advanced that she’s practically a different species of robot. Still, when WALL-E upends an entire society in stasis, he also awakens EVE to the joys of life.
Pixar has long had business ties to Apple, but this is the first film of theirs to make overt in-jokes. WALL-E has somehow rigged a vintage VHS cassette of Hello, Dolly! to play on nearly-as-vintage iPod. Apple’s resident industrial design genius Jonathan Ive reportedly consulted on the design of EVE. WALL-E’s startup sound is the classic Macintosh boot-up fanfare. The “evil” robot AUTO speaks with the voice of MacInTalk, the text-to-speech technology invented by Apple in the early 90s. Any one of these gags would have been cute, but taken as a whole, one suspects the Berlin wall between companies is breaking down, resulting in crass product placement.
There’s a huge interest in Japanese manga and anime in the US, but it’s rare for an anime feature film to get a theatrical release. From the name and poster alone (indeed, what caught my own interest), one might not even guess Paprika is foreign-language, let alone anime. Anime is a medium, not a genre, but it does have a certain popular perception in the US: either the apocalyptic sci-fi of Akira or the fairy tale fantasia of Spirited Away. And that’s not even taking into account the expectations of a generation of kids that grew up watching the dubbed Robotech and Star Blazers serials (which would be exemplified by… me).
The popular perception is not wrong; I’m not an anime expert, but Paprika has several of the superficial trappings: cybernetic technology (like Ghost in the Shell), a ghostlike female creature (like director Satoshi Kon’s earlier Millennium Actress), and an exponentially growing world-eating beast (like Akira and America’s own The Blob). But what sets Paprika apart is its psychedelic imagery, adult themes, and sheer weirdness.
Valley of the Dolls
Like Blade Runner, it’s equal parts detective story and science fiction, with a splash of horror. The mystery genre provides a structure for the nominal plot: Paprika is the dream alter ego of Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a dream researcher building a machine for use in psychoanalytic dream analysis. The device they’re building is called the “DC Mini”, a name which, every single time, made me think of DC Comics’ miniseries. Chiba’s Blade Runner-esque mission is to track down three missing DC Mini devices, and their co-creator.
I hate it when that happens
Paprika even shares a theme with Blade Runner: the moral repercussions of new technologies. If dreams are a kind of “place”, and can be a shared reality (like the world of The Dreaming in Neil Gamain’s Sandman comic book series), what is the difference between it and real life? The potential of one world bleeding into another is very literally dangerous. One of the film’s villains uses the dream reality to commit a very disturbing form of rape, and another goes so far as to label the technology a potential form of terrorism: “Implanting dreams into other people’s heads is terrorism.” This is not hyperbole in the film’s universe: the city is almost destroyed by dreams.
Two final little things:
What’s the deal with the name? Is it a translation issue, or something about Japanese culture (or cuisine) I’m not aware of? A metaphor of spices and recipes is used at one point, but it still seems oddly random.
A key character is movie-obsessed cop, an amateur filmmaker in his youth. His noirish dreams only further expand the Blade Runner parallels. Paprika explicitly equates movie watching with dreams and memory.
The Iron Giant is a sorely underrated animated film, remarkable on so many fronts, not the least for being a rarity (among the company of The Incredibles — not coincidentally also directed by Brad Bird) as a story truly for the ages and for “all ages.” Also one of the few movies capable of choking up such a hardened emotional rock as myself.
Happy Feet is a tough one to try to reduce to a single stars-out-of-five rating. It possesses two extreme split personalities, its lack of integration calling into question its integrity. Was there a struggle behind the scenes between a studio wanting another cookie-cutter cartoon animal kid flick vs. a filmmaker envisioning something of substance?
The first film totally embodies the worst cliches of the contemporary CGI animated film: dancing, singing animals talking the kind of stereotypical enthnic jive that would be condemned as racism in a live-action film. People laugh at Robin Williams’ “let me ‘splain something to joo” Mexican schtick in Happy Feet, but feel queasy about Ahmed Best’s gay rastafarian routine as Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars Episode I. The cuteness of seeing anthropomorphized penguins shimmying to contemporary pop hits wears off fast, yet takes up at least half the film, sorely testing the patience of any adults forced to be in the audience (in my case, it was a free work junket).
The second film is more in keeping with director George Miller’s track record with Babe: Pig in the City. A surprisingly dark and edgy film, the sequel to Babe was a stealth “real movie” that appealed to adults as much as kids, having more in common with City of Lost Children and Brazil than Charlotte’s Web. After seemingly endless, I say endless, musical routines, Happy Feet slowly begins to reveal its true nature as an ecological parable. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for turning kids into ecowarriors, but many childrens’ films have managed to blend life lessons more fully into the narrative; Toy Story II is about engaging with life, love and friends now as opposed to worrying about the future or pining for the past; Iron Giant is about breaking the cycle of violence; Happy Feet is about… either bootyshaking or overfishing. I’m not sure, and neither is the film itself.
