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Animation Movies Shorts

The Big Snit

Director – Richard Condie – 1985 – Canada – 10 mins

*****

Both sweet and funny. The first five minutes look like exactly where we are now under the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s basically the story of an old married couple who not only love each other dearly but also get on one another’s nerves. He looks at her Scrabble tiles while she’s out of the room. He is obsessed with sawing and tunes in to the TV Show, ‘Sawing For Teens’. She, meanwhile, compulsively removes her eyes from her face and shakes them.

Five minutes in, neither of them are watching when an emergency announcement interrupts regular TV programming. If the first five minutes are about a couple isolated in their home, the second five are an end of the world scenario with nuclear missiles flying through the sky and people panicking outside in the streets. Our central couple are, however, blissfully unaware of this, caught up as they are in their own domestic squabble. Richard Condie’s drawings, colour and overall visual sense are an absolute delight and the film is hilarious. Ten minutes well spent.

Nominated for Best Animated Short at the 1985 (58th) Oscars.

Free to watch on the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB) channel.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Books Features Live Action Movies

Harryhausen
The Lost Movies

There’s nothing else quite like the filmography of stop-frame animator and special effects maestro Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013). A new book, Harryhausen The Lost Movies, is an undeniable treasure trove for those familiar with his films, which include such gems as Jason and the Argonauts and One Million Years B.C. and incorporate fantastical, stop-frame animated creatures and additional bravura special effects into live-action movie narratives.

Compiled by documentary film maker and author John Walsh from over 50,000 items in the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation archive, this coffee-table book sets out to provide an overview of the film maker’s oeuvre through his various unmade projects, lavishly illustrated with photographs and drawings.

I review Harryhausen The Lost Movies for All The Anime.

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Books

The Mars Trilogy

Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson, VOYAGER £15.99, Hbk.

Red Mars, Green Mars

VOYAGER both £5.99, Pbk.

As Mars is terraformed, its dusty red surface shifts through the green of vegetation to the blue of ocean waves as its north polar ice cap is melted – the three volumes in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy being named accordingly. Although Blue Mars can be read alone, it not only continues on from where the second book left off (the Terran flood disaster of 2127 and subsequent Martian bid for independence) but contains so many references to what has gone before that one can get far more out of Blue Mars if its read following the two preceding volumes. For instance, the opening crisis as to whether the radical terrorists should or should not destroy the (second) cable elevator link with the asteroid New Clarke relates to a whole prior history, including the destruction of the original cable and the freeing of the first Clarke from orbit, with the spectacular and devastating collapse of miles and miles of cable furnishing the unforgettable finale of Red Mars.

Not that the Mars trilogy is purely for techno-geeks. Principle characters are members of 2027’s original group of settlers, appropriately named the First Hundred even though their number also includes a hidden hundred and first member, a concealed stowaway later nicknamed Coyote.… Read the rest