S'mo BS

Just fished a piece out of my files that I've been looking for for some time now. Mouth City as I so creatively named it won me first place in a state art show in (I don't know what
category) and some prize money I have long since spent on lottery tickets and extended warranty on my automatic egg-boiler. The piece itself is humongous for me, it covered a 2 foot piece of bristol and was drawn with a combination of quills, gel pens, sharpies, and my own blood and dung (naturally). It was done in class, worked 40-ish minutes on it everyday for a week. I wish I was that productive the rest of the time.

I mounted it on some black display board and customized it with the fancy lettering at the bottom before submitting it.

Coraline WASN'T directed by Tim Burton, you assholes!

Impending belly achin'...

Cutting through the fat; to those of you who think so - NO - Coraline (the bitchinest new stop-motion film to hit the big screen) was not directed by Tim Burton.

The confusion started with the commercials advertising the film as being the product of "The director of The Nightmare Before Christmas", but just happened to omit the name of said director. Henry Selick is one of the few directors that I still respect. In an age of Tinsel Town where the animation genre has come to mean recycled CG tripe, and traditional animation has all but gone the way of the dodo; Henry Selick comes to the rescue with fresh ideas in a stimulating medium.

Those of you who are familiar with Burton's mode of storytelling and visual style should be able to differentiate something like Coraline from his usual Caligarian fare. Now, I don't hate Burton. In fact he's one of my personal heroes. It's just that he's become a bit of a hack.

Henry Selick knows not to spread himself too thin. He puts so much effort and care into his work that he's only been able to churn out a handful of movies in the last two decades. He's also very loyal to his medium, opting for traditional FX wherever possible, giving his films an organic and beautiful imperfection to them.

In the last five years, Dreamworks and Disney have squatted on their haunches and pinched out at least a dozen CG turds respectively. I call them "babysitter films", banal and generic eye candy with cookie-cutter plots and cardboard characters that you put on the TV to keep the brats of the house quiet for a couple hours. While these films are garbage (and make no mistake, that's exactly what they are), they help to put artful movies like Coraline on a pedestal to shine, and remind audiences - if only briefly - what a good animated movie is all about.

Bottom-line; Coraline is amazing. Go see it in 3D and send Mr. Selick some good vibes.