22 November 2012

Some complaing and SPOILERS

 This'll have like spoilers and stuff, so consider ye warned.


So I saw Wreck It Ralph recently, and admired the film very much. Except I felt it lacked a distinct.



King Candy bears a striking aural resemblance to old time Film and Radio Comedian Ed Wynn, and more specifically to another cartoon that Wynn voiced, the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.

 

Big deal, you might say. Feature animation characters often rip off other film roles. Either directly, or through homage.  

  For Example,  both 'Tangled' and the Original Broadway production Of "Into the Woods" feature very similar interpretations of Rapunzel's witch-mother, right down to magic age-changing and a love of capes.

And voice actor is a celebrity in their own right, the character often winds up looking like 'em, so Why doesn't King Candy look more like Alan Tudyk?  


Of course, swiping cartoon character designs is a venerated tradition, as many an internet meme will point out. 


But if the Ed Wynn Mad Hatter  was the perfect choice for a character in a movie that takes place in a video game universe, I'd like to know why




 This is subjective, but I feel villains need to be interesting, even entertaining in their own right.

Alfred Hitchcock directed tons of thrillers throughout his lifetime, but honestly, which is the most well remembered? 

After two and a half decades of boilerplate spies and saboteurs, the most well-remembered character in the Hitchcock canon is the villain of Psycho "Mother Bates".

A distinct, entertaining, even  colorful villain can mean the difference between a ponderous, talky, boring movie and an intriguing adventure.

Even in low-key "family fare", the bad guys have to at least be memorable,




But who was the bad guy in Wreck It Ralph? 

The guy from the board game? 
The Mad Hatter? Wait, which one?




 It's a shame, because on the whole, Wreck-It-Ralph is a fantastic movie, crafted with wit and sensitivity, but I find it's dragged down by an antagonist who appears little more than a thin celebrity impersonation.






07 November 2012

Kick'n November with some sketchbook exerpts

  Not much to say with this sketch dump, really.

This is  a variation on Niccolaides' "Daily composition" exercise from "The Natural Way to Draw" (kickass book, by the way), albeit in comic strip form. 
  The Daily composition is a 15 minute sketch from memory of any scene seen during the past 24 hours. Nothing fancy, nothing precious, nothing to be shared: just do it and move on to the next.
  So Why not a daily 3 panel strip, and train that old brain to think visually and sequentially? Unlike autobiographic strips like James Kochalka's American Elf, the daily strip is not really for sharing (not yet, anyway), more of a variation on a theme. *
  


I can't say I'm really happy with what I'm turning out right now, BUT
 to paraphrase Fredrick Nietzsche: "Art is something to be surpassed".


*For those of you curious as to what the strip is portraying, a co-worker had come in that day in a dirty T-shirt, claiming somebody stole his laundry. Since the Michaels' hit squad comes out of the walls if you aren't to dress code, I hiked over to Macy's and got him an $8 work shirt from the clearance rack. 
   If I ever get hired at Dreamworks I hope I don't have to buy people clothes.