"Princess Mononoke" and "The Last Unicorn"

It's difficult to believe that for practically the entire 20th century you couldn't mention animation without mentioning Disney. It was the only game in town - sure, the Looney Toons over at Warners were much liked, but there was always something fundamentally unlovable about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. They were never a family - in nearly every Looney Toon, one character is actively trying to kill another one, and sometimes the cross-currents of backstabbing wrap themselves into spirals towards madness. How many times does Daffy betray Bugs, only to be himself betrayed? There's something dark and weird in the Warner Bros cartoons - morality is regularly undercut, laws of physics are betrayed, and characters run off the film strip with shocking regularity, a trick Bergman would borrow for "Persona."

So, if you were to go back and read the vast majority of reviews written about animated movies before this decade, you'll invariably find some reference to Disney - how the movies are different, how they are more violent, how they are less beautiful, how they are decidedly un-Disneylike. Now, of course, animation is practically more common than real-life, and there are so many different legitimately beautiful artistic options - "South Park," "Frisky Dingo," and the magnificent opening of "Kung Fu Panda" are just a few examples of how seemingly stripped down, unbeautiful animation can dazzle just as much as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," and with lots of funny, to boot.

Thus, I suspect it's much easier for Americans to appreciate a movie like "The Last Unicorn" (from the very early 80s) and "Princess Mononoke" (from the late 90s) for what they are, as opposed to what they are not. Because both films are many things, but one thing they decidedly are not is even remotely Disneylike.

"Princess Mononoke" is an epic masterwork, and "The Last Unicorn" is a bizarro curiosity. Both films come from creators with a genuine house style that's completely singular. Miyazaki is an unqualified genius, and his 2-D animation breathes with life - in some group shots, you can actually see people in the background inhaling and exhaling, so precise is the master's attention to detail. It's hard to describe this, maybe because it's difficult to describe what breathing looks like - your body doesn't move at all, and yet everything about it moves; your grow around the midsection, but shrink in the shoulders.

"The Last Unicorn" couldn't be more different - it comes out of the Rankin/Bass animation studio. All but forgotten now, Rankin/Bass produced practically every Christmas animation special two generations of kids grew up watching - "The Year Without A Santa Claus," "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July," and of course, the stop-motion "Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer." Still, they're probably best known now in very hermetic circles of reformed nerdlingers as the company that produced "The Hobbit," the animated adaption of Tolkein's first book.

Funnily enough, though, the two films share a common DNA: "Unicorn" was animated by a studio called Topcraft, which also worked on Miyazaki's "Nausicaa" before mostly reforming into Studio Ghibli, responsible for all of his later works - "Mononoke" among them. Thus, although the two films could not look more different, there is something weirdly similar about how people move - not quite as smooth as in early Disney (say, "Snow White"), but nor as plastic as in late-period 2-D animation, with computer cels and weirdly stolid waxwork people.

It's difficult to describe the magic of watching "The Hobbit" as a child, even more difficult to describe it having watched it again as an adult. The 2-D animation in the Rankin/Bass fantasy catalogue - besides "Hobbit," they produced a version of "Return of the King," a forgotten tale called "The Flight of the Dragons," and "The Last Unicorn" - is clunky in a way that most 2-D animation hasn't been clunky in years. In old Disney cartoons, people seem to breathe; in old Warner Brother cartoons, nobody breathes because they don't have time to, because they're on the move constantly in zip-zap-zoop motions; in the Rankin/Bass films, you can see the blips between cels.

When people talk, they almost always make the same strange movement, which is hard to describe but noticeable in all their fantasy films - their eyes stay wide open, but their bodies seem to pivot back and forth, as their shoulders lean in and then lean out. You get the overall impression that they're leaning in for an important secret, but then leaning out to make a pronouncement. Nearly every line of dialogue in these films is exposition - characters are constantly explaining who they are and what their quest is, sometimes immediately before their quest ends. The echo-tunnel quality of the dialogue isn't helped by the fact that voices tend to run in three directions - annoyingly goofy (for the underdog hero), stoutly athletic (for the knight in shining armor), or high-pitched prom queen (for the inevitably angelic female characters.) One character will inevitably be voiced by one of the three most baritoned actors ever - in "Dragons," it's James Earl Jones; in "The Hobbit," it's John Huston; and here, in "Unicorn," it's Christopher Lee.

What's aged the worst, though, are the musical interludes. "South Park" parodied this strange stylistic quirk in the classic Lemmiwinks episode. It's difficult to describe the genre of music these songs fall under - they sound a bit like songs you might find in a nightmare jukebox musical about the period of history between Led Zeppelin and The Outfield. The lyrics are painfully sincere - they tend to describe the plot of the movie, but take the curious tactic of often seeming to speak directly to the characters. The fact that they're inevitably sung by performers who sound a little bit like Bob Ross only adds to the weird vagueness. This opening credits sequence captures everything awkward yet perversely wonderful about the Rankin/Bass musical interlude - immensely hummable, painfully sincere, ridiculously hokey yet eventually mythic.

The Rankin/Bass films DO hold up, viewed again for adults, largely because they go so far beyond strange into the outright surreal. Dream logic pervades everything about "The Last Unicorn," giving the episodic plot the quality of a Bunuel film that thinks it's a Ray Harryhausen fantasy shocker. At the beginning of the story, two men are on horseback inside of a forest. One man says, "This is a unicorn's forest." The other man says, "Really?" The first man points out how green and wonderful the forest looks, and then says, apropos of nothing but the movie's title, "Surely, she is the last unicorn." The men ride away.

Cut to stage right: there's our unicorn, looking uncomfortably feminine, and suddenly, we hear her brain voice, and it sounds just like Mia Farrow: "The Last? Me? Really?" The whole engine of the plot is set in motion, as she decides to find the rest of her race. However, there's a long interlude - it feels like almost half the movie - where she's captured by a witch, voiced by Angela Lansbury. The witch has a zoo filled with mythic creatures - manticore, dragon, Midgard serpent. They're all fakes, except the unicorn, and a particularly grotesque Harpy, which is half-vulture and half-breasts. After escaping the zoo, the Unicorn runs into a group of Robin Hood-like thieves, who are adamant about their non-Robin-Hood-ness. After escaping the thieves, the Unicorn, now with two friends in tow - a woman named Molly and a wizard named Schmendrick, whose attempt to prove himself a real magician forms the only significant ongoing subplot in the whole movie - finds herself in a castle with a potentially crazy old King, a handsome young prince voiced (and painfully sung) by Jeff Bridges, and, somewhere in the depths, a gigantic, massively evil thing which is and is called The Red Bull.

I should mention that, at this point, the Unicorn has been turned into a human lady. There's some talk about how, if she stays human for too long, she won't be able to turn back into a unicorn. I hope that none of this is making sense, because it shouldn't - the plot contortions are freaky beyond belief. One second, you think you're watching a movie about eco-consciousness; the next, about spirituality; the next, about libertarianism. Like a great B-Movie, "The Last Unicorn" draws a strange amount of power from its own imperfection. It sticks with you. And it helps that it gets better as it goes along - or perhaps you're just more drawn into the world.

"Princess Mononoke" exemplifies what "The Last Unicorn" barely grasps at - the ability to build an entire sense of a fantasy world out of just a few, relatively tiny settings. Middle-Earth in "Lord of the Rings" feels very believable, but only because, by the end, you've seen practically all of it - at more than 10 hours, and with an incredible amount of location photography and settings whose whole ecosystems were transformed for making the trilogy, "Lord of the Rings" feels like the pastoral counterpoint to "The Wire," so completely are its various levels mapped out. (We even get the sense for the different ethnic traits - the Horse-Lords are Aryan viking blonde, the men of Gondor are dark-haired and pale, the hobbits are small and curly-haired, and all the bad guys are black and cockney.)

In "Mononoke," after an opening scene in a tiny village, practically the whole movie divides its time between just a couple of recognizable settings - an enchanted pond in the forest, and a burgeoning city of industry at the base of a hill. "Unicorn" begins in the Unicorn's forest, and then departs through the plains, but there's no real sense of particularity - the zoo is mobile, and seems to just stop along the road; so, too, the band of thieves, who hide out in the darkness; and finally, there is the castle perched on a coastline, suggesting a bird of prey on its roosts, a suicidal feat of fascist architectural engineering, and Castle Elsinore:

It's in this castle where the movie spends its final and most strange, and most disturbing, scenes. "Mononoke" is a much better movie - almost perfect, certainly more consistent, and far more openly ambiguous - but then, you have to watch this scene, and let Christopher Lee's voice wash over you:




I admit that I'm presenting the video out of context, but context doesn't really explain anything about this scene. At this point in the movie, it's not very clear whether the Unicorn is suffering from amnesia, if she's too busy falling in love with the prince to worry about her original goal, or if her original goal - to discover what happened to her fellow unicorns - was just not very important to begin with. This scene reveals that the King is the film's villain, but nothing really follows directly from it - he receives his just desserts at the end of the film, but there's never a sense of genuine reckoning (His last words in the movie are victorious - "I knew! I knew you were the last!")

This scene reminds me, for vague reasons, of a scene from Orson Welles' last film, "F for Fake," where he meditates on Chartres cathedral, on notions of authorship, on humanity, space, time, and existence. Both films are openly episodic, the plot less a series of events than a barely linear series of riffs. Neither film makes a lick of sense. Yet both stick in your head, and both contain scenes which, when surgically removed from the movie around them, seem to contain some hidden equation for understanding something deeper.

Perhaps it's just proof of the incredible allure of baritone-voiced soliloquies. You could listen to Orson Welles in "F for Fake," Christopher Lee in "Unicorn," and Keith David in the english dub of "Mononoke," and almost imagine that this is what it must have been like for Abraham or Muhammad or Heracles to hear some higher power speaking just to him.

Really Real

Human existence strikes you two ways: you're just one among many millions, or you're the only one that counts. You walk between those two roads your whole life, and where those two roads intersect, you've got synchronity, coincidence, fate - the grasping sensation that everything is connected. When I was traveling in Eastern Europe, I read a copy of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" that I borrowed from my brother. One day on a train, I put aside the book, picked up a magazine, turned a few pages, and found a reference to Bulgakov nestled into a sidebar. (It was "The Economist," natch.) Five days later, drunk and wandering for my life in Unpronounceable Ljubljana, I snapped a picture of the poster for a new opera that was just about to hit town:

This kind of thing happens all the time when you get older. Two weeks ago, I signed up for a free trial membership to World of Warcraft. The following week, I started reading Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash," a book which roughly invented the term "avatar" and certainly was a seminal work in the conception of a digital playspace that would be only slightly more hyperrealistic than our own overcrazy reality. Like most near-futures, the book is cagey about dates, but since the 35-year-old protagonist claims a birthday in the 70s, you could frankly conclude that the book takes place in 2008 - and, barring a few turns of the crazy wheel, you could equally argue that Stephenson's vision has more or less come true.

One of the many sidelong tangents which "Snow Crash" throws at the world of tomorrow involves the creation of genuine digital faces - how it took the invention of genuine, as opposed to plastic, digital emotion in order to make the digital world as palpable as the real one. The same week I read "Snow Crash," this video hit the internet.

Books that you like have a strange quality of seeming wholly necessary to the specific time of life in which you read them. Let me rephrase. It's impossible for me to imagine reading "Snow Crash" at any other time - it's focus on digital reality, its vision of a world happily ruled by corporations rather than governments, feels directly linked to my own concerns of the moment. But I first picked up "Snow Crash" three years ago, off of a friend's recommendation; read the first two chapters and then stopped right away, not because they were bad, but because the first two chapters of "Snow Crash" are so breakneck that the third chapter hits you like an instant comedown (a good friend once argued that the whole book never lives up to its opening, although sometimes I think you could arguet that about everything besides "The Great Gatsby.")

Similarly, right now I'm powering through a graphic novel series called "Transmetropolitan," a vaguely dystopic urban future which follows the travails of journalist Spider Jerusalem, a slightly britified Hunter S. Thompson. In Book 3 of "Transmetropolitan," Spider begins following the Presidential Election, which is pitting a fat shifty capitalist incumbent stooge against a bright shiny younger contender, who's nickname and general political platform are the same: "The Smiler." Spider despises the incumbent President, a thuggish cigar chomper out of the Warren G. Harding school. Yet he comes to despise his opponent even more, because, despite his call for change, he essentially offers the same gruesome money politics as before.

Meanwhile, in present-day reality, Matt Taibbi, often compared to Hunter S. Thompson though more like a modern-day H. L. Menken, just wrote a column in which he unblinkingly and unhappily points out how achingly similar Obama's fundraising tactics are to those who've come before - people named Clinton, but also people named Bush.

The real world is endlessly complicated. In the World of Warcraft, I created a new character, an Elf named Mcarthur. That puts me on both sides of the ongoing Horde/Alliance war. This strikes me as a wholly sane method for living two lives, although now I can't help but wonder if, when I'm not playing, my characters are dreaming of each other.

"Yacht Rock" at the Rickshaw Stop

A live event honoring a youtube series ("web TV" is naive and faintly rude, like calling a comic book a "Graphic Novel" or referring to a beatnik as a "white negro") gives the strangest kind of evening. The overall emotion is somewhere between seeing a Night Ranger reunion concert and witnessing the arrival of Dennis Quaid's palooka has-been baseball coach finally getting to play in the major leagues at the end of "The Rookie." Notice that neither event is particularly glorious - Quaid's playing for the Devil Rays, and unless they play "Sister Christian" on repeat for two hours the concert's 99 percent filler - but both have the low-rent appearance of actual glory. Layer in a dollop of considerable retro-post-irony - the double-back ability to appreciate a thing for its awfulness while loving it for its awesomeness - and you've got the special Yacht Rock screening at the Rickshaw Stop.

The Ineluctable Accrual of Time and Fantastical Experience: A Meditation on the Hills of Mulgore

I have no idea why I signed up for a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft on Friday. I would like to say that I was bored, but the truth is I'm bored all the time at my job, and I usually manage to coax my boredom (or perhaps harness it) by writing (a long email to friends and family), or reading (a novel, or the newest Taibbi), or sometimes even addicting(games.) Maybe it was because I'd had such a good work week - a great forward leap in all my many schemes had taken place. So, in much the same way that I feel good about eating sloppy and drinking nasty after a full week of Whole Foods and 24 Hour Fitness, so perhaps, after a week of such peak efficiency, I saw no reason not to delve into that wide world of personal inefficiency, video games.

Or maybe it was because I visited home last week - briefly. About a year ago, I put away my Playstation 2 and all my video games into a box, and that box was put into our new storage shack out back, which looks a little bit like a gigantic dollhouse, and so full of dust. But I was home, and I was bored, and I realized that I had never beaten the last level of "Kingdom Hearts." Like an addict discovering an unspent hypo, or perhaps more happily like a retired badman coming out of retirement for one last score, I put the fragile CD game (how long can those things last? Are they like fairies, dying away when no one's left to believe in them?) into the even more fragile PS2 (those things used to look so new and chic; now, they look like the wreckage of Manhattan in the background of the "Escape from New York" poster.)

Hooked again, I barely managed to stop myself at 2 in the morning from quitting right before an apt-to-be-hours-long final battle began. But the feeling stuck around. I don't know what that feeling is - I'm talking about why it's so fun to play video games in general, but why it's especially fun to play a gigantic fantasy game, with the bizarre set of reality-dominating rules, the steady build-up of yourself and your abilities and your outfit, and the inevitably horde of dragons.

But maybe that was going through my head, on Friday, when I pulled my desk against the wall and darkened my screen so that no passersby could see when I entered in my screen name and password.

Here's the thing: Warcraft works in a way that's somewhat different from any other game I've ever played. I'm not talking about what's specifically happening, since almost all of the specifics fade from memory almost immediately unless you're a complete mouthbreather, and even mouthbreathers who play Warcraft aren't usually monobrained enough to actually care if you kill Ramshackle Stirling of the attacking Beetlebum Castratos who reside in Tweedlepork Canyon or whoever the fuck was the chief of that tribe of weird man-beasts I killed in hour 4 of my great experiment.

No, the reason Warcraft works - at least at first, and I think also over time - is the steady accrual of spectacle and experience. When you begin, you're in a tiny little village - 4 or 5 little huts. You get sent out to fight annoying little birds and fearsome coyote things. After a little while, you kill enough coyote things to buy a new weapon. You think, "This weapon is the coolest fucking weapon ever." Using that weapon, you go after a new target: humanoid things. Along the way, you run into those birds and coyote things, and you kill them so much easier now, you can't believe they were ever a problem. The humanoid things are harder to kill, though: maybe, at one point, you get attacked by two at a time. You manage to kill them, though. Your village elder tells you: it's time to go to the next village.

You think: Well, what the hell, I get it. But the next village is bigger, and the enemies are fiercer, and slowly, you begin to get a sense for the deeper story. I'm a Minotaur-looking creature residing in a valley of Minotaur creatures - that's just about the whole world that I know now. But the whole valley keeps being attacked from all sides - dwarves to the west, goblins to the east, and I think I ran into a couple of centaurs at one point, appearing in my tiny little world like monstrous giants in Lilliput.

I can remember a similar kind of feeling in one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VII. Early in the game, although for me it was many weeks in, you come upon this gigantic moat. Inside the moat, you can see a gigantic shape moving around. You go into the moat, and the shape comes towards you. You go into battle mode, and you're facing off against the largest creature you've ever seen - a gigantic sea serpent. If you're lucky, it kills your whole party in one move; if you're not lucky, you have long enough to get one hit in, which barely dents him.

Here's the thing: much later in the game, when your party has swelled, when you've gone through any number of new weapons and armor, when you've basically crisscrossed the world seven times and gone to hell and back, you may find yourself back at that little moat. And you step in there, and the shape comes towards you. And there you are again, facing the gigantic sea serpent. And if you strike first, no shit, you kill it completely. In one. And if it strikes first, it barely even dents you. The master become the pupil. The serpent become a lamb.

Here's another picture of my boy:

A Tauren Named Crogart

"Seven Days in May" and "The Bourne Ultimatum"