Jimmy Kimmel said something a little more than eye-rolling on the Oscars stage. Jesting that the Academy parent voters relied on their kids to vote for the Best Animated Feature, Fallon made a reductive, cliche joke that insinuates that animation is exclusively for children. This reduces both kids and the animation industry itself. It reminds me how little is spoken of the intelligence of children, who are capable of connecting to animated films as art. The animation industry is just as complex.
So speaking of art for children, my attendance at the New York International Children’s Film Festival has been mostly virtual. But I encourage you to try to see these films, whether you are kid, a parent, or a childless adult. These three features I caught might just warm your heart and extend your perspective.
Kensuke’s Kingdom
One of this year’s notable animated features is a castaway tale of a boy, Michael (Aaron MacGregor), marooned on an island and then befriending a secretive human inhabitant, the eponymous Kensuke (understated voice-work by Ken Watanabe). With his new friend, the boy learns to pay his respect to nature. Kensuke’s Kingdom is thick with heavy sequences (including the bombing of Nagasaki), but director Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry treat their young audience as intelligent enough to digest the intensity without being graphic.
The Concierge
Bubbly and sweet, The Concierge might just go down in one of the I.G. Productions’ unique feature anime presentations. Adapting Tsuchika Nishimura’s manga, Concierge is an episodic slice-of-life where a newly hired Concierge (Natsumi Kawaida) tends to the wondrous animal-populated mall. So elastic and playful is the character animation that we root for her as she faces a diverse animal clientele of various needs. This film is the definition of a fantasy, one that transports you into a vibrant world.
Frybread Face and Me
Billy Luther writes and directs this funny, and heart-wrenching, coming-of-age of a Diné child, Benny (Keir Tallman), whose understanding of his complicated family dynamic evolves throughout the film. Despite initial misery about being sent to his grandmother (Sarah H. Natani) on the Navajo reservation, he begins to take curiosity of his surroundings and his family’s behavior there. You can watch the film on Netflix.
Being a Muppet gal, I attended my starter panel “So You Want To Be A Puppeteer.”
The Speakers involved Ben Durocher, Stacey Gordon, Chris Thomas Hayes, and Myra Su, who shared valuable insights on the puppet industry.
As a 4’11” woman who has always wanted to puppeteer a heavy Skeksis (like Louise Gold), I find the puppeteer industry tricky to enter. The panelists affirmed issues of exclusion, especially when the Muppet industry institute height requirements.
Ben Durocher (who did the off-Broadway Avenue Q) talked about sexism factoring into heightism in the puppeteer profession. Stacey Gordon (who was employed as Julia on Sesame Street due to her experience as a therapist for autistic children) also tied it to racism as well: “Not everyone is a Scandinavian.”
To my surprise, the puppeteers and puppet builders also noted this apparent pigeonholing: If you do any puppet building or wrangling, it might decrease your chances of being considered a performer. They suggested that some puppeteers have to speak up if they want a performer position, while hoping that the industry would move away from this pigeonholing.
Hopefully, I’ll check out more puppet panels at Dragon Con.
There are great animated films that ponder on meaning of life. The Inventor is among that bevy of films.
Leonardo Da Vinci (Stephen Fry) yearns to learn about the soul. One problem: The Catholic Church has their beady eyes on him. So he departs Italy to join the French court to carry out his heretical experiments in secret. There, he befriends the princess Marguerite (Daisy Ridley). Together, they scheme up the Ideal City that would help all civilians. If only the rulers were into their plans.
Written and directed by Jim Capobianco (a story writer for Ratatouille), The Inventor is one of the great conversational animated films of the year. The stop-motion is molded into this world of childlike innocence while not shying away–sometimes ribbing at–the frank darkness of the early 1500s. While being lighthearted, The Inventor is an ambitious breed, structured as breezily as a slice-of-life while crafting a serious and optimistic gravity to Da Vinci’s search for meaning.
More info about Fantasia Festival can be found here.
The Inventor will have a wider theatrical release on 25 August 2023.More info about the film can be found here.
How the Force did this came into existence? The 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is the befuddler of Star Wars legends. Notorious for being disowned by George Lucas, any rare copy of that Wookiee-populated special has been a collector’s item and curiosity.
Is this long-awaited documentary on the biggest galactic blunder worth it? Charting the well-intentioned marketing foundation of the Special, the 90-minute documentary certainly makes the ride entertaining but it misses the more compelling scenery. It may be entertaining to watch celebrities like Kevin Smith and the late Gilbert Gottfried marvel at the bizarreness of the special’s variety show blunders, but there’s a much more human story about how the special was labor to its writers and performers. It’s not absent, but it is gasping for air in this documentary.
More info about Fantasia Festival can be found here.
The First Slam Dunk is a rendered miracle. Whether or not you have a relationship with basketball or the manga source materials and its anime adaptation, this movie can give anyone a euphoric adrenaline shot.
The original manga artist-writer Takehiko Inoue directs this film with a physical rhythm and distinctive choreography on the court. While an animation fan may worry about CGI lacking the kinetic energy of 2D, Inoue finds these tensions between the weighty mass of CGI-bodies and the swiftness of foot- and handwork. The ultimate heartbeat of this film is Koji Kasamatsu’s sound design, which has an ear for the physical thud and sneakers squeaks in a way that balances the chaotic and kempt.
While I had very little time to view AAIFF, this film snagged by attention.
Art College 1994 is navel-gazy. Its college-age protagonists might be insufferable. And that’s what makes the movie work. It’s what makes them human. It’s an apologetic lens on disgruntled Chinese art students who contemplate the chromatic questions of art. Liu Jian (the director of the Sundance Have A Nice Day) probably grappled with these questions himself as an artist. He never takes a side, but he weights them all out and considers how they came to their own ponderance or conclusion. By drawing his humans and their academic and exterior environments in animation, Jian encourages us to grapple with their both the aesthetic artifice and the authenticity of their humanity. It’s a beautiful illusion, no less real.
As we anticipate these new and exciting films at Fantasia Festival, let us also meditate on the Writers Guild of America and the SAG-AFTRA respective strikes and think about the ways we can improve living conditions for our artmakers.
We Are Zombies
I admit that even I have zombie-fatigue at times, but We Are Zombies sounds like a premise for our time. After all, zombies are classic metaphors for our numbness to our own humanity. Here, these zombies are the “living-impaired” and wander among humanity with no desire to eat flesh. Trio creatives Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell and François Simard are directing this tale about three slackers up against a mega-corporation.
Birth/Rebirth
Now speaking of more reanimated corpses, Mary Shelley readers might flock to this contemporary telling of Frankenstein. The death of a little girl is tragedy. Now the resurrection of said little girl only doubles the pain. Single mother (Judy Reyes) is shocked when she discovers that a rogue morgue technician (Marin Ireland) has reanimated her little girl from the dead. As this haunting trailer teases, the desperation can only escalate from here. From that premise alone, it sounds like a heartbreaking dive into loss. It’s also darkly comic.
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Depression has never been so relevant in this day of thankless jobs and a dying Earth. Take one glance at the title of Sometimes I Think About Dying. Same, same. Daisy Ridley’s Fran goes through her daily life thinking about dying. Then, the arrival of a new co-worker begins to break through Fran’s shell. Anything with a talented Ridley – with her knack for introspective expressions – ought to elevate a project.
The Concierge
The Concierge sounds like a childhood dream career: being employed at a mall with animal shoppers. This anime movie follows Akino’s new job as a concierge at the sumptuous Arctic Department Store where all the customers are animals. The great Production I.G. (Psycho-Pass, Haikyu!!) is animating it. The trailer is absolutely sunlit like a dream, with the comic expressions just elastic enough to inspire a laugh.
The First Slam Dunk
Are you a fan of sports anime? If you found Haikyu!! to pluck the heart of a sports lovers, then The First Slam Dunk may pique your interest. Just as the volleyball sailing over the net can spark adrenaline, so does slamming the basketball into the hoop. Much discussion has been made of its picturesque 3D stylization, combining a soft shading to its illustrated realism. Interestingly, it’s directed by a triple-threat Takehiko Inoue, a basketball lover who also wrote and illustrated the original manga.
Sand Land
Do you know any Akira Toriyama work outside the sphere of Dragonball? Then Sand Land may grab your interest. The plot is that it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where water is scarce. Satan’s son Beelzebub is on a quest. It may be tempting to get skeptical of CGI telling a Toriyama tale, but the director is Toshihisa Yokoshima, whose CG short film Cocolors won a Satashi Son Award in 2017. Brandishing character designs and landscapes that pop, the trailer looks jam-packed with fun across the wasteland desert, a-la Mad Max.
Ramayana
This film jangles with crowds and details. The gods compel you to watch Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, a 1992 classic anime film that represents a rewarding collaboration between India and Japan (Studio Ghibli artists included). Presented in its original English-voiced form, Ramayana has graced a few screens across the U.S., with yet to be an official physical distribution of the film.
Further details on the Fantasia Festival can be found here.
When I had a tinier body, I once asked my late father, “What causes time?” in the backseat of his car. I can’t peg my age, I can’t peg the horizon or destination. It’s a good question, I remember him saying years before liver cancer killed him. Time is as elastic and short and stretched as we can comprehend. It’s measured by how humans measure age, the way we notice a face gains wrinkles or a blade of grass yellowing and browning, or the lagging legs of your aging cat.
Time is the theme of “Oratorio for the Living Things” by composer Heather Christian. Life’s too short and we’re fighting against an Earth that has been scorching for decades. When Twitter mutuals were urging followers to go see “Oratorio for Living Things,” they meant go experience “Oratorio for Living Things,” Ars Nova’s latest immersive chamber piece with the surround sound of a moving choir and instruments.
In the provided libretto booklet before entering the circular chamber, “Oratorio” promises you “the quantum, the human, the cosmic” and indeed it does as the room soaks in ultraviolet and a chorus that slinks up and down the stairs vocalizing Latin and English. It submerges you for 90 minutes into its individual introspection and collective confessional. It understands our consciousness of time and its tangible fragments are all as whole as oceans, fragmented like pebbles, and tiny like marbles. During a pandemic time where pleasures are delayed or cursed with conditions, such a musical meditation and communion is inviting.
The introductory program notes that Oratorio can be cogitated like a Rorschach Test: “It’s made to engage with you at whatever level you’d like to do so.” Pour through the pages of its booklet and marvel at its aesthetic accomplishment: Latin and English verses paired with each other, text overlapping and vanishing, and text vanishing into blotch and blurs, and Latin encircled by a halo of English in “Memory Harvest 1.”
Through a river of arias and ensemble pieces, “Oratorio” is seeped into your cerebrum.
“Oratorio for Living Things” is playing at the Greenwich House on 27 Barrow Street, New York, NY 10014 through May 15th.
Anthony Goss, DeShawn White, Eric Yang, Alinca Hamilton and Henry Yuk. Photo by Gerry Goodstein
Gong Lum’s Legacy, which titles playwright Charles L. Wright’s world-premiere play, refers to the 1927 Gong Lum v Rice SCOTUS case in which a Chinese Mississippian fought for his American-born daughter to be recognized as “not a member of the colored race” and thus eligible to attend a white school. To a white audience, it may at surface level represent the ugly result of “separate but equal” segregation in education–that would be overruled by the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954. But within the Asian and Black community, Lum’s case also invokes a textured and complex cautionary tale about the poisonous prize of (conditional) white acceptance. From a Korean storeowner shooting 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in 1991 to the sight of a Hmong cop standing by as a white cop murdered George Floyd, the play carries the currency of long-existing dialogue for the Asian community to confront anti-Blackness and the price of white acceptance.
Lum does not surface as a character in White’s play but rather operates as an offstage spirit. Lum’s fight for his American-born Chinese children to attend an all-white school in Mississippi underscores the racial legalities that threaten the stability of a fictionalized Chinese-Black romance. Situated in the 1920s Mississippi Delta where Jim Crow reigns in the South, a young Black aspiring teacher Lucy Sims (DeShawn White) teaches English to a Chinese store assistant Joe Ting (Hansel Tan). Despite her insistence that she doesn’t want a husband to focus on her degree (much to her brother’s chagrin), their courtship blossoms into a clandestine marriage. But John’s father Charlie (Henry Yuk), the storekeeper, tries to take charge of their fate at the expense of their relationship and his own soul. A friend and advocate of Lum’s mission, Charlie sees Joe and Lucy’s relationship as a threat to what he presumes to be impending white acceptance into white-run education and church spaces.
Veering back and forth from the Sims (Anthony T. Goss is Lucy’s brother Melvin, Alinca Hamilton is Lucy’s friend), Tings, and Joe and Lucy’s courtship, Gong Lum’s Legacy explores both ends of the Black and Asian community on stage, encouraging the audience to not draw equivalences but to discern the parallels and microaggressions passed among interpersonal relationships between two marginalized families. The scale of Chris Cumberbatch wooden-boarded set design–the Chinese-owned storefront dominating the stage while the Sims’s household is tucked smaller to stage left–reflects the tension co-existing with the growing amiability budding between the Sims and Ting. Their opinions and perspectives are sculpted by white supremacy limiting their scope, as illustrated by the recollection of Black church gossip that scrutinizes Lucy’s feelings for Joe, Lucy’s own surprise at Joe’s traumatic immigration experience on the prison of Ellis Island, and Joe’s disbelief at just how far Charlie would meddle in his and Lucy’s happiness. (Chinese women, perhaps deliberately, exist as specters, consigned as offstage souls thought of as docile and submissive creatures to Chinese husbands.) Although Joe’s and Lucy’s romance is the heart of the play, their courtship is not as compelling as the charged conversations they have with their own or the other’s families about said relationship. There, the playwright mines the crucial social and racial atmosphere that could encroach on their relationship.
The play has a uniformly solid cast. Playing a set-in-his-ways elder (who might try to compromise a little) who thinks fitting in is the way to go, Yuk is able to load a line like “White people keep colored down so they can stay on top” and insinuate cold pragmatism, pessimism and moral disgust against the institutional injustice, and yet a venomous adherence to white supremacy all at once. And Goss is a standout for how he adroitly navigates Melvin’s dimensions: his overprotective idea of masculinity (Melvin really harangues Lucy to marry), his charismatic affability (he bonds with Joe over haircuts and fishing), his moral boundaries (even as he assist Charlie at the climax, he allows no grace for Charlie’s misdeeds), and even his perhaps too-generous autopsy on the soul of a frustrating elder at the play’s ending.
Two twists happen: one that only expedites rather than develops the romance, but the second does wonders to confront complications that test the couple. However, on the night I attended, auditory misfires domineered over crucial dialogue. Storm sound effects drowned out, not underscored, crucial Act 2 twists and emotional outbursts. Context washed away in the flood. With a press script in hand and my incidental proximity to stage left, I can only imagine how the rest of the audience that night heeded the betrayal, reveals, and arguments. The climax is pivotal to understanding the white supremacist and xenophobic laws can taint the happiness of a couple like Lucy and Charlie and place the burden on said couple to overcome them.
Gong Lum’s Legacy is playing at the Theatre at St. Clements on 423 W 46th St, New York, NY 10036 until April 24.
So the Time Travel ADHD novella thing is nearly a bust, another archived “partially done novel project” I’ll tell my writing peers about. Not that I won’t return to it. But it will be put off into the Procrastination Pile.
BUT ANYWAY
“Lilaca” the play project progressed and evolved the most out of all the projects. Some comedy sketch drafts got finished.
New poems got produced. Old poems got edited.
All in all, I’m fine. This was one of my best Campnanowrimo.
The maximinalist millennial 