For Kwanzoo’s second podcast, we talked to cartoonist and animator Nina Paley, creator of the film Sita Sings the Blues. You can watch the film in its entirety on YouTube or various places around the web.
There’s footnotes below the jump to follow while you listen to the podcast.
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And it is, you’ll understand, very much Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Not Alan Moore’s. Though his graphic novel has been praised (?) as being “cinematic,” the great writer was correct in saying it’s unfilmable. What Snyder created is something that contains only echoes of the novel, though all the important points are there. One usually speaks of being “faithful” to an original work, but that isn’t always what’s called for. My favorite example of this is William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, the screenplay being a completely different animal from the novel, but both equally beloved. Goldman had the right idea, but few filmmakers have the courage to take significant liberties with someone else’s work.
In the novel, Rorschach is the star. Front and center, with the diary, with the ever-changing mask that betrays a greater range of emotion than his human face. But it was only inevitable that, in a purely visual medium, Dr. Manhattan should become the most fascinating character. While readers of the novel almost universally latch on to Rorschach as the most interesting of the vigilantes, the movie spends more time on the visually impressive (and equally compelling, really) big blue man. Ebert certainly experienced the fixation, and on his blog, he attempted to dissect the godlike figure: Read more…
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This week, we’re sitting down with writer and animator Ken Pontac. His decades-long list of credits includes The New Adventures of Gumby, Bump in the Night, Clayfighter, Lazytown, the ultraviolent Happy Tree Friends and the even more ultraviolent MadWorld.
We asked him to pontificate on Hollywood, cartoons and inadvertently creating a YouTube meme, and he obliged.
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Multiple news sources, including Bloomberg, are reporting that Blockbuster is looking into filing bankruptcy.
Blockbuster is issuing denials. Either way, it’s one more sign that the future doesn’t look good for brick-and-mortar rental stores.
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Love food? Sure you do. We humans have a great way of taking the basic necessities of life and elevating them to great heights of joy and desire, and food is no different. Whether it’s a Dollar Menu burger or a $40 steak, food has a certain way of satisfying and guilting us all at once. It is, after all, possible to live off of beans and rice. But who wants to? Discover your unique food style with this quiz:
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Last time we went over the essential problem with telling a story in serial installments.
The audience gets hooked by a complication, and are satisfied by a resolution to that complication. If they don’t get that resoultion, they get mad. So, how do you satisfy an audience if you have to stop telling the story until the next episode? Especially if, as in video games and movies, it might take years to make the next installment?
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Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re playing a game, or reading a book, or watching a movie. All of a sudden, the story just sort of… stops. It ends, but there’s no proper resolution or denoument. You run to the Internet to vent your rage, but a great wailing of fanboys has preceeded you. “It’s one part of a trilogy,” they cry. “You can’t expect an ending!”
Not so! While we at Kwanzoo prefer to engage people with interstitial quiz widgets instead of narratives, we can tell you that writing in a serialized format doesn’t mean you have to leave your audience feeling like they’ve been smacked in the face. Over the course of a couple of posts, we’ll be reviewing storytelling theory and how it applies to trilogies and other kinds of series.
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We’ve been waiting to see Chandni Chowk to China since first laying eyes on the teaser trailer that promised to blend India with Hong Kong to make the first ever Hindi kung fu comedy. Now that it’s playing in U.S. theaters nationwide, thanks to co-producer Warner Bros., how does it hold up?
It doesn’t quite live up to its promise, as it turns out. It doesn’t so much blend the two film styles as plop them down side by side to form a decidedly uneven movie.
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If the Golden Globes were bleak, then this year’s Oscars are going to be downright depressing. Maybe it’s because we expect so much of them. But this year’s list of snubs is even longer than usual; it’s like the Academy blew every ounce of hip-ness on last year’s Juno nomination for Best Picture. This year it’s all dramas, a few of them quite obscure:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
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With the proliferation of cheap broadband Internet, there are now some truly remarkable things you can do to your television. As another demonstration of the Kwanzoo personality quizzes, we set up a widget to find out which one is right for you.
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