Better Fiction: The Blog

I've been publishing a list of my favorite animated movies, a genre which I believe no one should ever outgrow. There were many films that others would put in their top ten lists: Akira, Wall-E, Toy Story, Toy Story II, and Monster's Inc. are some that I've seen come up or suspect would. Toy Story II is the big surprise, hitting #1 on more than one list. I'm not a fan of Wall-E, but I appreciate the other films. They are not on my top list, though.

One that will be on the next update is Pixar's "Up". I don't know yet how it will fit in, but enough time has passed to convince me it belings in the top 10. I bought the DVD, yesterday. Let me get back to you after a dozen viewings, and we'll see.

As of now, I just remember what I saw in the theater. The opening was wonderful. Like Wall-E, it was artsy, but it worked and worked marvelously.

(I know. You loved Wall-E. Everyone did. I'm glad. I'm a fan of Pixar and Andrew Stanton. That being said, the whole world took a mental breather on that one. And if Pixar doesn't get off it's rear and start making more movies of the quality of Up, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo and less like Ratatouille and Cars, the critical world is going to lose its love affair with them. And what new wonders are coming on the horizon? Toy Story 3 and Cars 2! The Disney resurgence in the 90's had to end. Maybe the glory days of Pixar and grinding to a close as well. I may be no fan of Wall-E, but I'd much rather see an uneven attempt at greatness like that than Cars 2. Toy Story 3 has promise in that is comes from a line of groundbreaking films, but it needs to come amidst a rush of films that prove Pixar remains an original thinker. Not this way. Not with Cars 2... Sigh. OK. The ending of Cars works. It's a decent but not above the status quo kind of film. Maybe they'll achieve something surprisingly original with the sequel. I doubt it, but I'll go in hoping. Let's just say that if it weren't for "Up", I'd be close to GIVING UP on Pixar.)

One last note: Presto, the short film that preceded Wall-E, is an all-time favorite of mine among the Pixar short films. One Man Band would be another.

Oh, and how could I forget!!!??? There will be another film added to the top next time. It deserves its own post, in fact, and perhaps will have one soon. Sita Sings the Blues.

Definitely one to see.

Continuing in this new movement of simply writing something because I want to, I'm returning again to the animated film. This time, I have in mind to begin a list, in order of merit, of animated feature films. The list will include both American films and foreign films that have entered the American mainstream. Though this will reflect my personal tastes, I will be open to suggestion as this progresses. I may have forgotten something or may even decide that I was wrong on a matter. Who knows?

Let us begin. From best to last, or from The Incredibles to The Wild.

(A work in progress)

The Incredibles
Finding Nemo
Kung Fu Panda
Beauty and the Beast
Pinocchio
Cinderella
Shrek
The Iron Giant
Flushed Away
Akira
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
The Little Mermaid
Sleeping Beauty
Les Triplets de Belleville
Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-rabbit
Tarzan
The Simpson's Movie
Spirited Away
Ice Age 2
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Toy Story 2
Aladdin
Chicken Run
Fantasia
Toy Story
Antz
Ice Age
A Bug's Life
Monsters Inc
Lilo & Stitch
Bolt
Steamboy
Coraline
The Lion King
Ratatouille
Shrek 3
Cars
Wall-E
Dumbo
Bambi
101 Dalmatians
James and The Giant Peach
The Corpse Bride
Shark Tale
Chicken Little
Mulan
Pocahontas
The Rescuers
Shrek 2
Robots
Happy Feet
The Wild

Any suggestions?

It's been three weeks. Almost forgot how to log in.

So, here's the thing, if I'm going to sit down and write this, it's going to be about what's on my mind. Trivial stuff. I'm sick with a head cold or something, and that's given me some time to do this, but it's also taken away any desire to keep up some writer-ly pretense.

You know what I want to write about? Kung Fu Panda.

2008 saw the release of three feature animated films of substance. Wall-E came from Pixar and was perhaps the best-rated movie of the year and took the Oscar. Personally, my take on it was that it was the most ambitious of the Pixar films, and the most disappointing. The silent opening dragged on too long, and the rest of the movie was a mess. The human dialog, which was the only real dialog, was amazingly boring outside of the one gag: "I didn't know we had a pool." The film-makers threw together a gang of robot friends to help Wall-E but gave them no time to become anything but blips on the screen.

In the end, Wall-E was an over-rated attempt. The opening was self-indulgent enough to lose its wow factor, the rest of the movie bland and underwritten. It's claim to fame was its anti-consumerism, eco-friendly message. At least it managed to be a better film than the atrocity that was Happy Feet. Both films won undeserved Oscars.

Neither, by the way, won the Annie, the animation world equivalent of the Oscar. Cars won it opposite Happy Feet, and Kung Fu Panda won it in 2008.

Of course, there was also Bolt. Bolt proved that Disney animation is on the upswing. Meet The Robinsons had been a nice step up, and Bolt beat that. It was decent. I fell short of being great, but did what Disney desperately needed it to do. It lacked the ambition of Wall-E, but, thankfully, most films ever made lack that kind of ambition.

Don't get me wrong. I love Pixar, and I'm happy that the rest of the world loves Wall-E. I want the Pixar golden age to continue. Frankly, after the only-decent Cars and the celebrated disaster that is Wall-E, I was getting worried.

And Pixar is saving Disney to boot. To remember how far animation can fall, I need only think of the Disney movie, The Wild. Shudder. I would rather sit through Happy Feet again, or be waterborded. Either one.

The Wild. Happy Feet. Robots. Chicken Little. Meet The Robinsons. Wall-E. Ratatouille. Cars.

I tried to list them in order of watchability. This assumes that I could actually watch Wall-E again, which I have managed to do with Chicken Little.

Robots makes the list as the worst of the sexual-puns-in-a-family-film offenders. Otherwise, it would have been a good, funny film.

I tried to put Bolt in that list, but I'd have to see it again first.

Kung Fu Panda, on the other hand, I have seen many times already. I love the film. It is the opposite of Wall-E, which I could not love despite an ambitious meaning. I loved Kung Fu Panda despite its meaning, and that's what I intend to eventually get to here.

Ice Age 2. Kung Fu Panda. Finding Nemo. The Incredibles.

...the end of the list I began earlier, with The Wild being perhaps the worst major animated movie of all time, and The Incredibles being the best.

It's not a complete list, nor one that's complete even in the parts I've listed. Is Iron Giant better than Ice Age 2? Probably. Shrek, too, as well as Beauty and the Beast and many of the Pixar films and most anything from the two golden-eras of Disney animation.

I'm only sure of the top three and the bottom two. I'll leave it at that.

But what about the meaning of Kung Fu Panda?

"There is no secret ingredient."

I saw this on two shallow levels. One: Hollywood-friendly dogma. "Believe in yourself." Two: A non-Christian statement. What about the Holly Spirit?

I recently said as much, but it soon occurred to me that there are problems with these approaches. First, many characters in the film believe in themselves--none of them can defeat the villain. Second, the story has a religious (though not Christian) environment out of which the statement in question comes.

This second question raises the point: How do we reconcile this with the point woven through the film that "there are no accidents". This is a movie that believes in design, purpose, destiny, and even faith. (The faith here is expressed in the need for Po to believe in his master "as I have come to believe in mine".)

In the end, the biggest display of self-esteem did not win the day. Rather, it was an Esther-like moment. Po had been placed there for just this very moment.

As for "there is no secret ingredient"? There was desire and training, plus something else: Po himself and the moment for which he alone was destined. Why he alone? Because there was a secret ingredient: fat. Po's point of weakness is what defends him from the enemies most dangerous attack. The message then is that Po has been given all he needs to fulfill his destiny. It takes hard work and faith to use what he has been given, but he doesn't need to be something else or someone else. He is who he is for a reason.

The movie dominated the Annie awards that year, but it is still an easy film to under estimate. The biggest complaint among the critics was that it had a message you could fit on a fortune cookie. Perhaps we were all wrong about that.

The depth of some works is easy to spot. Kung Fu Panda is not that kind of movie. It appears beautiful but shallow. I now believe it is something else.

And there are very few films that prove to be deeper than first believed. Jump back in and see for yourself.

Wade

In the movie and book, "Twilight", a young girl finds love with a "good vampire". He and his family do not drink human blood nor participate in the other typical behaviors that mark the evil vampire characters we are used to from literature. This concept has raised some eyebrows among Christians. The AFR morning radio show, "Jump Start", with Buster Wilson and Meeke Addison, tackled this subject last week, and I believe their commentary needs commentary of its own.

They believe this is a work of the devil for it "calls evil good". Isaiah 5:20 says, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"

The support for this position was, as Meeke put it, "Vampires are evil. We know this."

Fiction can be harmful. "It's just a story," is not an excuse. When I remind everyone that there is no such thing as a vampire, that they are fictitious characters, I am not making such an excuse. We do, however, need to begin examining Meeke's logic with that point. Vampires are not real. They are a creation of fiction and defined by the writer.

In past stories, these characters have been evil. What made them so? It was the evil that they did and their association with the evil side of the spiritual world. As I understand it, "Twilight" disassociates the characters from these things that mark the vampire as evil.

Today, our culture is guilty of what Isaiah warned against. In one example, we now call sexual immorality good and attack those who stand against it. The concept that "Twilight" uses could be applied in a story to show the fallacy in our modern thinking. The good vampire, refusing to drink human blood, could have been a symbol of man standing against the base desires of the flesh, demonstrating that we need not be slaves to our urges, and convicting readers of the fact that evil is not justified by our desire to commit it.

By making illogical and blanket statements like the hosts of "Jump Start" made, they condemn all writers who may seek to take a character the reader "knows" is evil and turn that assumption on its head. The Jews of Christ's time "knew" that Samaritans were evil, and Christ told the story of the Good Samaritan, using their assumptions to drive home His point.

Now, does that mean that their concern has no merit? No. Though the argument is poor, the concern may be justified. "Twilight" is not a Christian book or movie. That in itself is okay. However, the story will not point readers and viewers to Christ but rather leave us simply with a love story about a good vampire. Since it points us to the vampire, and has nothing greater to offer us, the girls who adore this book may desire to delve deeper into vampire fiction. Their love for this good vampire could then be transferred to the vampires that Anne Rice used to write about, among others. In this way, they are seduced. This is not meant to condemn those who have read "Interview with the Vampire" but to point out out the fact that these new readers will pursue such books with a built-in expectation to find love and acceptance in the character of the vampire. They very well may be ready and willing to accept as good all manner of evil for the promise of romance.

"Twilight", then, could lead readers down a path where they themselves will eventually call evil good and good evil. This is the logic that justifies the concern.

Christ's story of The Good Samaritan was not meant to put the focus on the Samaritan. Likewise, I think a Christian writer could write a story about a good vampire, a friendly ghost, or whatever, but we should ask ourselves: what or who do our stories point to?

We might also ask ourselves, have we gone beyond the realm of fictitious characters which are and must be defined by the writers themselves? Are we guilty of taking something truly evil and calling it good?

It is popular in Christian fantasy to invent worlds in which there are God-loving people wielding magic. Often, I can't see the difference between what these "godly" people do and the sorcerers that God's Word condemns. These kind of stories make me uncomfortable, and I will not write them. I understand the writers are trying to make godly points with their stories, but this draws too close to Isaiah 5:20 for me.

What God says is evil, is evil in any context. Sorcerers fall into that category. Vampires do not.

Wade Ogletree

It can be a risky thing talking about a movie you haven't seen in over a decade. Still, the subject of film is still on my mind, and that brings me to today's topic: John Carpenter's _The Thing_.

You'll know the basic story if you read the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell, saw the original 1951 version with James Arness, or read _The Blind Assassin_ by Margaret Atwood. OK. Maybe you won't know what I'm talking about even if you did read the Atwood novel, but one of the sci-fi stories invented by the lover is an unimaginative knockoff of _The Thing_. I don't know what Atwood was thinking. It was an awesome book, otherwise.

Anyway, though I should be writing about Atwood, I'm not. This is about John Carpenter. The man will have his fans for directing films like _Ghosts of Mars, Big Trouble in Little China, Starman, Christine, Escape From New York, The Fog, and Halloween_. In all honesty, though, we, as a viewing public, ruined Carpenter as a director. It's all our fault, and it's all about a movie called _The Thing_.

At the time he made _The Thing_, Carpenter was huge. His low budget _Halloween_ was the highest grossing independantly produced movie in history at the time. (1) Then came _The Thing_.

"Critics slighted it, audiences, for the most part, ignored it. And in a summer where audiences fell for fantasy, John Carpenter's THE THING definitely was marching to a different drummer. Instead of lovable aliens and high adventure, Carpenter dished up a saga of bone weary men fighting off an uninvited extraterrestrial creature that looked God-awful and ate everything in sight - humans included." (2)

Forgettable film, right? Today, there is a prequal in the works of the film that some now call "a classic". (3)

"Critics have been known to denigrate talented filmmakers to the point of obscurity, thereby flushing some of their greatest films down the public toilet. These artists are merely victims of circumstance -- charged with crimes that exist only to protect the sensibilities of cowardly men. No, I'm not talking about the defendants of the Army-McCarthy Hearings. I'm talking about horror directors, man. John Carpenter's masterpiece, The Thing, came out in 1982, around the same time E.T. and Annie jerked millions of law-abiding citizens into a flood of tears. But the competition wasn't the only reason The Thing sank at the box office. It's also a hard-edged film that never tried to appease its audience. The film exists on its own merit, a great piece of art that never worried about how it would be received." (4)

"On a scene-by-scene level Carpenter's mastery cannot be denied. Every monster attack is a jolting surprise. Unlike the characters in a thousand "haunted house" movies, nobody acts entirely stupidly; quite the opposite. MacReady [played by Kurl Russell] makes good snap decisions, not hesitating to kill when necessary. We appreciate the commonsense approach when MacReady first hears the howling dogs. In a movie like Ridley Scott's Alien MacReady would trace the ungodly howling alone to its source, and be attacked in the dark. He instead plays it smart and hits a fire alarm. The whole camp is alerted." (5)

This is a smart, scary, original film, and today lists among the favorites of horror fans. I recall reading that our dismissal of the film hit the director hard at the time, and, in my opinion, he never recovered. _The Thing_ is tough, dark, and pessimistic. True, it's not the kind of movie I would run off to see today, and I haven't seen it in many years, but for the horror-film lover I used to be, this was one of the best. Afterward, Carpenter's films became cheap and silly and often outright bad. I shudder now to think of how I once looked forward to the release of _They Live_.

He's not the first artist to be ruined by a classic being ignored. Herman Melville was so unpopular, he eventually quit writing. If Van Gough had ever sold a painting in his own lifetime, maybe he wouldn't have devolved into the kind of person who cuts off his own ear.

I think of this and ask my fellow writers, are you a Carpenter, Melville, or Van Gough? Is your classic being ignored? _The Thing_ did eventually find the following it deserved. Perhaps time will be as kind to you. Either way, be strong. Don't let the tastes of today ruin your creativity tomorrow.

Of course, I suppose I'm preaching this to myself. My "I Quit" post was the byproduct of frustration with editors who either didn't understand my work or aren't doing a good enough job of convincing me I just plain stink. Like Carpenter at the time, I have some measure of success to look back on (though mine is humble indeed), but somehow that only increases the frustration. I am not, cannot, and will not produce something that tries to fit into the mold. I don't have a heart for the mold. The stories would be born dead on the page.

Fine, I'll try to take my own advice. You take it, too. Be strong. Plug on.

Wade Ogletree