Avatar: Bullshit in Blue

Unless you live on Pandora, you've heard of this "environmental" film called Avatar. And if you do live on Pandora you should be aware that the director of Aliens and Titanic has made a film about your happy peace loving planet turning all of you into a bunch of hot stereotypical minorities ala Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves.

There is a lot wrong with Avatar which every friend of a hip film lover and former film major in the country has heard and doesn't fucking care LET ME ENJOY A MOVIE! It's lazy character development and design. It's set in the future yet the american military seems to have advanced any further than our genocidal past. It focuses on amazing visuals rather than a strong plot as would be expected from James Camerons near constant self back patting about his environmental film.

Look at him... saving the environment and lookin' good while he does all blue and... blue.


We're supposed to be touched by his plea to respect beautiful things before we lose them but the message from environmentalists is rarely just Save the Pretty Tiger. It's usually save the planet. The whole planet. We already want to save flowers and tigers, it's other areas like dirt, amphibians and fucking AIR that's still at the top of the Stop Poisoning This list. But I digress.

I mean look at how pretty that is! It's like if the ocean had sex with the best dog and had mutant ocean cute kitten babies!


Avatar is bullshit BUT it is successful bullshit. And yes that is half brilliant marketing and half incredible visuals and that is sad. BUT this has opened the door. We all know to cram the hippie message of save the world you have to cover it with enough icing to crack a smile on any down-home doin it for the little people politician. If a geeky twenty-something walks up to a fifty-year old stocker at Walmart just getting off the graveyard shift and says "You know, fossil fuels won't last forever and gas is never getting cheaper so why don't you hop out of your Ford diesel and into this Prius" he'll probably wake up on a trash barge heading to garbage island. But if a beautiful sexy woman walks up to the same guy and says "Tigers make me feel sexy but they're endangered and it won't get any better until we find alternative fuel" Lacking logic in the statement or not, the guy will jump into that Prius. For the tigers. Those sexy sexy tigers.

My point is, with everything going on in the average American's life, debt, kids, shitty jobs, hearing that they need to turn their whole life around from some dirt is not going to fly. Unless it looks inviting, beautiful and fucking AWESOME. Ah the trick of marketing. If slugs had the PR team Avatar did, banana slugs would be the it pet of the year. So fuck you Puggle.

Sorry puppy, a slug fits better in my purse next to my eye shadow and tampons.


But aside from the tacked on environmental message the technology used in Avatar are leaps in visual communication. In a year of every movie coming out in 3D, Avatar is the only one that used and created technology that when utilized in more interesting ways could create some interesting pieces of art in the future. The thing about 3D is not every movie is necessarily even when it says it is. There are two ways to create 3D. First way, you shoot the movie second person like we're all familiar with then add some lenses and editing and... look I don't know the specific technology just wikipedia it. The second way is using an actual 3D camera. That's why some 3D films look and feel strange and usually give you headache and others fit your eyeballs in a much more pleasing natural way. Avatar is it's own animal. And while it is depressing the idea that droves of people would still only show up to a film for the "experience" which is equivalent to showing a newborn the pictures in a storybook, we can't expect the first of it's kind to be a sort of 3D Godfather. If we go back in time, the first color picture (shot in color not had color added later) was a A Visit to the Seaside released 1908. Remember that film? Yeah I just looked it up too. Rotoscoping (drawing over live action like in Titan AE, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) was invented in 1915 to animate the directors friend in a clown suit for Out of the Inkwell and again to animate, wait for it, Betty Boop.

Here's Betty Boop one of the first famous rotoscoped ladies.


And Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, two ladies in later rotoscoping.


And for good measure here's Out of the Inkwell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tszUgxP9kog

Both color film and rotoscoping began and continued in small projects without the gain of narrative prowess but were harnessed later to add a visual truth to a strong plot. To put it simply, fun tool created just to be seen used later to create atmosphere.

So Avatar is bullshit and a proud of example of the power of money. But, if it did anything wonderful, it opened two doors. Talking about the environment in a forum that doesn't require a Mate tea and a big chip on the shoulder and a technology advancement that really could advance a media further than it's gone in decades.

Family Guy

I'm an animation lover and lately I've been focusing on primetime cartoons as they have the most familiarity and exposure. These cartoons are generally the Fox line-up Family Guy, Simpsons, American Dad and The Cleveland Show. Today I'm focusing on Family Guy.

Now I'm a huge Family Guy detractor. I find it lazy animation and a great example of how one popular show can poison everything around it.





And...



And of course....



Genius.

Once Family Guy found huge success (after two cancellations) King of the Hill found itself cancelled and The Simpsons, the animated real life on TV pioneer, suddenly began combating becoming stale with similar cut away jokes and incongruous plots.

But I like Seth MacFarlane and have always had a theory that the current Family Guy format is not where he first imagined the show going. While being a detractor, I've also seen every episode and own seasons 1 through 5 (although I only bought 1 through 3... damn family at Christmas not knowing what I'm into or asking and buying me the same thing every year because "You love Family Man!"). Seasons 1 through 3, while having the cutaway jokes and random humor, still had pretty solid plots and at some points reached some poignant moments. Like the episode where Brian becomes a caretaker for a shut-in and finds the beauty inside her juxtaposed with Peter coming to terms with taking care and letting go of three baby birds nesting in his beard. It's not brilliant but neither were the first two seasons of the Simpsons and like the Simpsons it seemed to be heading to something interesting.

Then Family Guy was cancelled.

Fox has a rule. If a show isn't insanely popular in five minutes, it will be canceled no matter the quality. Ask Firefly for more information on that. But Fox is also fickle and after the first cancellation, they brought Family Guy back to finish their third season moving the show around to random time slots and then eventually putting it up against Survivor and Friends. If anyone remembers the early 2000's and the Survivor craze (is that show still on?), they'll know that Fox basically put a death sentence on Family Guy and, just before the third season, announced it's official cancellation. But, due to high DVD sales, Fox brought back Family Guy in it's current form. It's hard for me to imagine that after two cancellations and Fox shifting the show around like a kid poking at a dead skunk on the side of a hot road, Seth MacFarlane thinking this was a good time to experiment with the format of his first show as they were attempting in the first three seasons. What's the safest thing you can do with a cartoon in primetime? Make sure it appeals to the lowest denominator. Make it funny in a way that both people will remember (thus they'll watch again) and have jokes simple enough for a drunk and stoned twenty-year old to understand (no heavy shit, fart jokes and funny hats please).

If this is what happened (and obviously I'm not MacFarlane's buddy, this is just a theory) then it explains why the show shifted from episodes about Chris trying to bond with his father Peter to episodes that start at Stewie's play and end with Peter being sexually harassed by his boss.

Tonight I watched the 150th episode. You know what? I think I might have been right. In ten years, NEVER have I seen an episode like this come out of Family Guy. No cutaways, the plot didn't bounce around to the easiest joke and it was lovely in places. Almost heart-wrenching.

Stewie and Brian are locked in a bank vault together and spend the episode... mostly talking. There's toilet humor of course but it doesn't stand alone and actually helps build the plot to a climax. Seth MacFarlane has before stated that Brian's character is based at least partially on his own personality (hence why Brian is one the most developed characters on Family Guy) and the dynamic of Stewie and Brian has resulted in the best episodes of the series before. But this episode almost screamed to me "I CAN WRITE!"

Seth MacFarlane has gotten a lot of flack for Family Guy before. Even John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, has come out of the woodwork for Family Guy's blood stating "If you’re a kid wanting to be a cartoonist today, and you’re looking at FAMILY GUY, you don’t have to aim very high. You can draw FAMILY GUY when you’re ten years old. You don’t have to get any better than that to become a professional cartoonist. The standards are extremely low." http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/the-john-kricfalusi-interview-part-2.html. And of course, everyone's aware of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's opinion (see Cartoon Wars part 1 and 2 if you're lost). But I think this is simply a case of a man seeing where the money is and going for it.

Now I'm talking a lot about Seth Macfarlane as he is the creator therefore the house should come down on him just like with the awful new episodes of Simpsons I still put blame on Matt Groening even though he's barely involved anymore. But the thing is, Seth didn't write Brian and Stewie, the 150th episode holding the most redeeming qualities of the show. That credit goes to Gary Janetti (whose only written two other episodes technically) and Dominic Bianchi the director. I looked up the other episodes they worked on and... didn't find any of the episodes that spoke to me. It looks like the whole FG crew is following the rule of successful animation on Fox. Lowest common denominator. If you're going to be offensive, just be as offensive as you can be. That way, only the Parents Television Council (glorified PTA) and religious nuts will be offended and no one really cares what they think anyway. Seriously. The Parents Television Council? When have we ever needed that? Instead of creating a group to monitor television why don't they just watch their fucking kids?

The point:

Seth Macfarlane is not an asshole who's out to destroy the credibility of animation. He had an idea that he turned into a VERY successful venture. The man, with more than half of the animation on Fox being his creation, is the highest paid writer in television... EVER.

This man.


While that puts a twitch in my eye (loving the Wire and Southpark as I do) I'm also poor and if I had the option he had, even with my rantings and standards, I'd fucking take it too. It's almost a meta joke. If Brian and Stewie becomes a popular episode I think we could see a slow change to form or at least more interesting developments from Seth Macfarlane. Or maybe we'll break even and The Cleveland Show will finally get canceled for the racist poorly written abortion it is.