Did CGI Change Animated Storytelling?

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It’s an interesting question. The thesis of this video is that hand-drawn animation, by its nature, wants to tell stories about small numbers of characters in an isolated setting, because that kind of story is easy and less expensive to draw, whereas the nature of CGI and its ability to animate large numbers of objects at once pushes animation in the direction of telling stories in a larger, more cosmopolitan setting, like a big city. As a result, hand-drawn animation works well with traditional fairy tales, in which the old order is corrupted and it is the hero’s task to restore the status quo, whereas CGI pushes storytelling in the direction of a more complex society, one with injustices that the hero is called upon to redress.

It’s worth watching, because the video makes a convincing case, though I would quibble with the use of the words “conservative” and “liberal” to describe these two types of stories, as those two words harbor political implications that have nothing to do with the thesis and therefore muddy the waters. I would have described the two kinds of stories as “restorative” and “transformative.” Still, an insightful video, well worth watching if you’re interested in feature film animation, but try not to get hung up on the conservative/liberal thing.

“The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Recognize a King” Announcement

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I am happy to announce that my fantasy short story, “The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Recognize a King” will be published by Aliterate magazine!

Aliterate describes itself as a magazine of “literary genre fiction,” and I have been told the story is tentatively scheduled for publication in the Spring 2018 issue. It may also be posted online, although I can’t tell you that for sure, yet. So stay tuned; I’ll be able to give you more solid information when we get closer to the date.

“The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Recognize a King” is based upon an authentic Khmer folk tale, “The King and the Buffalo Boy.” Of course, I have elaborated significantly on the original story.

I hope you like it!

My Thoughts on National Coming Out Day

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I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s. One of my classmates was a guy named Steven A. Marquez.

I met Steve at a summer job, and we became pretty friendly. We didn’t have any classes in common, but we stayed in touch for the rest of our time at Penn. I can’t say we were really close; we never went out for beers together or anything like that, but I thought of him as my friend.

And I envied him a little. He wanted to be a newspaper reporter; I had dreams of becoming a writer. But while my dreams were just dreams, he was a positive zealot about becoming a newspaper reporter and was working hard to make it happen. And the paper he dreamed of writing for was the Philadelphia Daily News. He took English and journalism courses and was Managing Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, the school newspaper. When a Daily News editor came to Penn to teach a journalism class, Steve was so there. He wrote a story for that course that moved the instructor to say that he wished the reporters working for him at the Daily News could produce work that good.

But it was tough to get work in journalism, even then. Steve told me senior year that he had mailed out his first batch of 100 resumes (that’s how we did it then) and gotten zero responses. (Today it’s much worse for journalists, of course, but still, that was pretty tough.) Just before graduation, he told me he had landed a job at the St. Petersburg Times. I wished him well, and we parted ways.

I never saw him again. I thought of him from time to time; I imagined him in sunny Florida, criss-crossing the Tampa Bay region, uncovering scandals. Then, eight years later, in 1987, I picked up a newspaper and read his obituary.

I was shocked. At the age of 29, you may have experienced the deaths of people much older than you, but that is way too early to be losing your peers. As I read the obituary, I learned that Steve had eventually landed his dream job at the Daily News and had returned to Philadelphia, where I was also living. He was making quite a name for himself at the paper (no surprise there), but then he had contracted a long and painful illness. He’d spent months in the hospital, slowly wasting away, until at last it took his life. He was 29, the same age I was.

He had died of complications from an HIV infection. He was mourned at the Daily News, and The Daily Pennsylvanian now has an annual journalism conference named after him.

Steve was gay. And I never knew it. He was dying nearby, and I never knew it. My wife and I had our first child in the same hospital where Steve was dying at the same time. And I never knew it.

The pain of his death, and the strange and roundabout way I learned of it, never left me. I am shaking right now, as I type these words. The shock of losing such a young friend is part of it. The regret I feel that I never got the chance to visit him in the hospital during his illness—which I certainly would have done, had I known—never diminished.

But the biggest shock of all was that Steve was gay and I had had no idea.

I had thought we were friends. I had thought I knew him fairly well. But only after his death did I learn that there was a whole side of his life I knew nothing about. And I didn’t know because Steve was afraid to tell me. He was afraid of what I might think. He was afraid I wouldn’t want to be his friend anymore. He was afraid of what would happen if his sexual orientation became common knowledge.

It was that fear that led to his not telling, which led to my not knowing, which led to my not being there at his side when he needed love and support, which led to the shock of my finding out about his death in a newspaper.

If you had told me, Steve, I would have been okay about it. Yes, the 1970s were very different, and I was a churchgoing young man from a rural community who had zero experience with LGBT people, and I probably would have freaked a little. But I wouldn’t have hated you. I wouldn’t have rejected you. I would have learned. I would have grown. I would have become a better person sooner, and a better friend to you. And I most certainly would have sat with you in the hospital, even held your hand.

But I don’t blame you. You had hard choices to make in the 1970s and you had career ambitions that were important to you. You wouldn’t have wanted anything to get in the way of that, and I fully understand. I blame the society that put you in that hard place. Sadly, both of us suffered for it.

And that brings me to #NationalComingOutDay. Coming out isn’t nearly the big deal it used to be. Times have changed quite a bit, as I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you. Coming out is easier, except perhaps for young people and people within certain communities.

But I share this story in the hope that it might reach someone who is still not yet “out.” I understand that you may be silent for good reasons. Your own safety and well-being may be at stake, just as it was for Steve. But I bet you also know someone in your life like me. Someone who might freak a little at first, but will not hate or reject you. Someone who will learn and grow from the experience, just as you will, and will stand with you when you need a friend.

Tell them.

If there is no such person in your life, then contact me. You can message me or email me or drop a note in the comments, and we’ll talk. i promise I won’t freak. I know it’s scary, but it’s the first step toward making it better. For both of us. For all of us.

It’s National Coming Out Day.

(UPDATE [3/26/2023]: See the comments on this post and on this one. I made an unwarranted assumption about Steve. I’m glad to set the record straight, though the above post reflects how I have been thinking for the past 35 years. Those of us who remember the early days of the HIV epidemic remember how stigmatized people with HIV were in those days. It boggles my mind that today we see TV commercials pitching medications to treat HIV.)

“This Is Not Going to Go the Way You Think!”

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I hope not.

So there’s a new trailer out for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and it looks pretty cool:

But do I have qualms? Of course I do!

The Force Awakens wasn’t bad—it had much to like, in fact—but it seemed an awful lot like a rehash of the original 1977 Star Wars. Similarly, this trailer suggests a film that rehashes The Empire Strikes Back. It seems a safe bet that Kylo Ren and Rey are related in some way. Siblings? Cousins? This is Star Wars after all. The trailer is hinting at an “I am your brother” moment. The loving shot of a line of classic AT-ATs does nothing to ease my fear. Please, please, please, can you do something new and not keep rehashing the original trilogy? Thanks.

It could be just the way the trailer is edited. If you watch it closely, you can see it’s mashing up moments from different scenes to make you think things are happening that aren’t really happening. So maybe the trailer editor just thought it would be fun to mess with us.

Also, the last time Star Wars did something new, it was Jar-Jar Binks, which is a pretty good argument that rehashing the original trilogy is maybe not the worst idea.

We’ll find out soon enough.

You Only Live Twice

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Waypoint Kangaroo
by Curtis C. Chen
2016.

Waypoint Kangaroo is the debut novel of Curtis C. Chen. It’s a science fiction spy thriller, and it’s quite a lot of fun. The title may puzzle, but it begins to make sense once you learn that the protagonist is a US spy codenamed “Kangaroo.” In classic Bondian fashion, the first chapter of Waypoint shows us Kangaroo just winding up a mission in Kazakhstan, trying to slip out of that country without attracting attention. He fails rather badly at this and winds up on the wrong end of a chase, though to his credit, he puts himself at risk to save the life of one of his pursuers. So he’s an ethical spy.

Kangaroo returns to Washington to get chewed out for sparking a diplomatic incident, and his superiors send him on an enforced vacation until the ruckus he’s created has a chance to settle down.

This being about two centuries in the future, “vacation” means an all-expenses-paid-by-the-agency holiday trip to Mars, aboard Dejah Thoris, the flagship of the Princess of Mars Cruise Line (Get it?), a Disney-esque company that has brought interplanetary travel to the middle class masses. That includes stuffing the ship full of food, drink, entertainment, and hundreds of ways to separate the passengers from their money. This would be the vacation of a lifetime for your average working stiff, but for Kangaroo, it’s hell on earth. Hell in space, I should say. He paces the ship, as restless and miserable as a tiger in a cage, and it’s hilarious.

You see, Kangaroo is deeply embedded in this spy business. His real name is so secret he won’t even tell you, the reader. He has all kinds of cool spy tech surgically embedded in his body. He can do things like scan a person or a piece of equipment with his eyeball or communicate with his superiors by blinking in the right pattern. If that isn’t enough to wow you yet, Kangaroo also has a unique psychic power: he can access another universe, which he uses for storage. He calls it his “pocket.” (His code name is “Kangaroo.” Get it?) He’s got a ton of gear in there, gear no one else can detect, but he can access at will.

But none of this is helping Kangaroo relax. His job is literally a part of him. It’s in the nature of his career that the quotidian pleasures of his fellow tourists—family, relationships, sightseeing—are like a foreign language to him. Hence his difficulty getting into the spirit of life aboard Dejah Thoris as he travels toward Mars in a ship stuffed with people he can’t relate to. How to relax and have a good time just isn’t part of a spy’s skill set. All Kangaroo can manage to do is eat too much and drink too much until boredom finally drives him back into espionage. He begins to play spy aboard the ship, scanning and studying the other passengers, trying to work out who they are and what they’re up to, because that’s the only real pleasure he knows.

His job is also his hobby, it seems. Still, it’s harmless enough. Until he discovers that something really is going on….

I’m not going to spoil the plot. It’s a well thought-out adventure taking place in a future solar system still recovering from a terrible war, where some people just can’t let go of the past. Plot twists abound as Kangaroo traces out a conspiracy that starts with murder and graduates into crimes far more horrifying, a plot that keeps Kangaroo (and the reader) guessing until the last chapter.

So instead of spoiling the plot, let me say a word about Kangaroo’s interestingly limited psychic power. I keep thinking of Larry Niven, who used to love to play around with this stuff in his early works. Gil Hamilton, for instance, who had the power of telekinesis, but in his mind it was a “third arm,” so he could only do with it what a hypothetical third arm could do. Or Matt Keller of A Gift from Earth, who had the ability to force other people’s pupils to dilate or contract, and thereby induce an increase or decrease of interest in whatever they were looking at. Early Larry Niven would have loved Kangaroo.

That’s all well and good, but I have a protest to make.

This is a fun thriller, yes. Complex mystery? Check. Pulse pounding denouement? Check. Fun and startling technology? Check. Every reviewer gives Curtis Chen credit for these things, and justly so. But I want to talk about character. Kangaroo is an intriguing and complex character, a fact which gets less attention than it deserves, because of all the fireworks going off around him. He lives his life so deep undercover that even he can’t seem to keep track of where his cover story leaves off and the truth begins. How do you get close to other people when you can’t even tell them your real name? It’s a question Kangaroo finds himself wrestling with. He is an orphan, and the brief flashes we get of his childhood are more chilling than heartwarming. He has no relationships. He doesn’t know how to enjoy himself. The only thing Kangaroo has in his life is his very special job. And when your work becomes your pastime, when your identity is something assigned to you by your boss, do you actually have a life at all? Even his face isn’t his own; it’s been surgically altered to be nondescript. Not too handsome; not too ugly.

There’s hardly anything left of Kangaroo (whoever he is) underneath the accoutrements of his career. And the thing is, it sometimes seems as if he’s not even very good at that. But you have to be careful here. Waypoint Kangaroo is told in the first person, which means the narrative is filtered through Kangaroo’s own insecurities, which appear to be many. So maybe he’s just being hard on himself. He covers his insecurity as many people do, with a nonstop patter of jokes. These range from clever to cringeworthy. (He actually considers using the old “If I could walk that way…” chestnut, which must be 300 years old by Kangaroo’s time, but thankfully, he thinks better of it.)

In other words, Kangaroo is just like your conversation partner at your last party. You forgive the clunkers because the next one will be better, just as you forgive Kangaroo when he screws up a mission, because you know the next time, he’ll do better. And that’s what makes Kangaroo so endearing. He has no identity, apart from his work. He tries hard, even though he’s not sure he knows what he’s doing, and if he fails, he tries harder, all the while wondering who he is and how he wound up in this mess. (Sound like anyone you know?)

But you can’t help but wonder what drove him to give up a shot at a normal life for this. Was he running away from his awful upbringing? If so, he has exchanged a stunted childhood for a stunted adulthood. How long can he keep mingling with happy vacationers, pretending to be one of them while silently acknowledging theirs is a life beyond his reach? How long can he keep lying to everyone? How long can he keep covering up the contradictions of his existence with one-liners?

Waypoint Kangaroo ends without answering these questions, but this is the first book of a series, so happily there will be plenty of room to explore these questions in future books. Thrilling plot, exciting twists, and imaginative gadgets are always fun, of course, but I’m looking forward to learning more about Kangaroo, because underneath the plot fireworks, there’s one very intriguing character here. Let’s not forget to give Curtis Chen credit for that as well.

 

Kangaroo Too
by Curtis C. Chen
2017.

And while I was writing the review for Waypoint Kangaroo, I went ahead and read Kangaroo Too, which continues the adventures of Curtis Chen’s marsupially-codenamed spy. I’m not going to write at length about the plot, as that would only spoil the adventure. I’ll just say that this book is a worthy follow-up to its predecessor, and it probes more deeply into Kangaroo’s character and background, which is what I was hoping for after I finished the first book. This character examination comes in a surprising way; I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so I’ll just note that it is hinted at in the title. Read Waypoint Kangaroo first, of course, but after you do, you’ll surely want to pick this one up as well.

A Hard Man Is Good to Find

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Exo
by Fonda Lee
2017.

Exo, a young adult SF novel by Fonda Lee, is a great illustration of three of the things a science fiction story can do really well.

One is fantasy fulfillment. Exo is set 150 years in our future, and its protagonist, 17-year old Donovan Reyes is a soldier with a difference. He is an “exo,” meaning that his body has been modified so that he can exude at will a hard exoskeleton, tough enough to stand up to bullets. Don’t even try to hit him with your bare hand. In the time it takes you to swing, his armor will go up and you will hurt yourself worse than him.

It’s high concept, and a great metaphor for a young adult novel. What adolescent wouldn’t want emotional armor that snaps into place when things get tough and lets all the hurt just bounce off you? But this is science fiction, so there’s a catch. Earth of the mid-22nd century is a complicated place. A hundred years earlier, humans were defeated in a terrible war by a non-humanoid alien race called the zhree. Now zhree colonists rule the planet, in cooperation with human governments. Their rule seems benevolent, or at least gentle, but then we are seeing it through Donovan’s eyes, and Donovan is one of the elite humans whom the zhree have admitted into their complex caste system. What life is like for the majority of humans who are not among the chosen is left largely for the reader to speculate upon. Donovan himself isn’t much interested; he seems pretty divorced from the concerns of ordinary humans. His father is a high-ranking official in the collaborationist government; his exo armor is zhree technology. Donovan’s role as a soldier-cop seems mostly to hunt down Sapience, a well-organized anti-zhree resistance movement. Is it that most humans who are not among the elite support Sapience, as the novel makes it appear? Or is this a consequence of seeing his world through Donovan’s eyes, where most of the humans he meets are either the elite or Sapience troublemakers?

A second thing science fiction can do well is illustrate for the reader the experience of being othered. Sapience extremists believe soldiers like Donovan are traitors to their species, and that exos are not merely modified physically by the zhree but also mentally, and have been made into mindless slaves. Killing an exo is to them no crime. It may even be an act of mercy. The zhree colonists on Earth like humans well enough, but we also meet zhree from other worlds who find human appearance repulsive and question whether humans are worth all the trouble they cause. Donovan believes in himself and his work, yet as his story unfolds, he must endure abuse—both emotional and physical—from both zhree and human extremists.

Yet conflicts come in shades of gray, another lesson science fiction, and Exo, present effectively. Not all Sapience members are cold blooded; some see Donovan as a likable young man led astray by the aliens. Some zhree fully embrace humans as their equals; one of the zhree characters even covers for Donovan when he goes rogue. It helps that Lee has given us a cast of well-drawn characters to illuminate the full spectrum of views in this complicated world she’s created.

This world is big. It’s no surprise that a sequel is in the works, as there’s plenty of room left for more stories. Though the canvas is broad, Exo is a personal story. It is Donovan’s story. At first he seems pretty confident in his understanding of the world and his place in it. I might even call him “hard bitten”; surprisingly so in such a young man. But then when you follow him from the warrens of Sapience to the highest levels of zhree government, you discover along with him that there is much more to his world, and to Donovan himself, than either of you suspected.

Exo is just the kind of story that got a lot of us started reading science fiction. It would make a good gift for a young person interested in science fiction. It might also be just the gift for that young person you’re trying to get interested in science fiction.

Barbarian at the Gate

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Arslan
by M. J. Engh
1976.

(Warning: This review contains spoilers for a forty-year old book.)

Arslan was written in the late 1960s and was first published in paperback in 1976. It must have come and gone with little notice: I certainly didn’t notice it. But some important people did, because in 1987 it was reissued in a hardcover edition by Arbor House. Algis Budrys, who did a book review column for Fantasy & Science Fiction at that time, wrote an extensive and enthusiastic review that motivated me to buy and read Arslan. I only read it once, thirty years ago, but I never stopped thinking about it. Once Arslan gets into your head, he’ll never leave. This is an amazing and horrifying work. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that those important people who read it in 1976 were agitating for a reprint eleven years later.

From time to time I’ve wondered what became of Arslan. Recently I got an email plugging the book and learned that yes, Arslan lives on. It’s still drawing reviews; there are some good ones here and here and here. And so, I decided to read it again after thirty years, and see how it stacks up after all this time.

Engh is a scholar of ancient history. If you know even a little ancient history, you probably heard stories of peaceful, prosperous civilizations suddenly confronted by an irresistible barbarian army led by a charismatic commander. Think Attila. Think Genghis Khan. Think Tamerlane. Think, an army of people who respect nothing but raw power. And they have all the power. We think of this sort of confrontation as something belonging to the ancient past. Arslan asks a simple but hard question: What would it look like if middle America of the 1960s encountered a modern Genghis Khan and his horde?

I can’t honestly “recommend” this book. It is powerful and memorable. It is also deeply disturbing. Whether you ought to read it depends on how you feel about a deeply disturbing book that will haunt your thoughts for the rest of your life. Some people rave about this book; others report throwing it against the wall after the first chapter. I should give a trigger warning here, because this book contains, well, just about every awful thing you can imagine one human being doing to another. To paraphrase Nietzsche, beware of looking too deeply into Arslan, lest you find Arslan looking deeply into you. Follow me to the other side, if you dare, but don’t say I didn’t warn you….

Continue reading →

Riverdale, Revisited

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Ms. Grundy and Archie. This is as happy a moment as any you’re likely to see on Riverdale. (Image: CW)

 
Okay, so it’s been a while since I posted my thoughts on Riverdale, so time to check back in with the series and see what’s up. In that previous post, I expressed my thoughts, especially on the Archie-Ms. Grundy relationship the show was exploring. I was concerned about the direction the producers were planning to take that story line, and I explained why. I also said that they deserved the benefit of the doubt until we saw how that story played out.

I am happy to report that in the very next episode of the series, Ms. Grundy got driven out of town by Archie’s father and Betty’s mother because of the inappropriate relationship with Archie. So, hooray! Now, this is Riverdale, so there were a lot of nasty conversations and Betty and Veronica broke into Ms. Grundy’s car and stole her gun and a whole lot of other stuff that we wouldn’t want to see anyone do in real life but is par for the course in Riverdale, but hey, the story of that relationship ended without getting icky. (Maybe I should say “ickier.”)

No, the ending actually modeled some good ideas for any teenagers who might learn that a friend was in an inappropriate relationship with an adult. And by “good ideas,” I mean, “tell your friend the relationship is unhealthy and needs to end, then tell some adults.” Since this is Riverdale, there were also midnight sleuthing and petulant adults who can’t resist turning any discussion no matter how important into a rehash of decades-old grievances, but we’ll let all that pass because it’s Riverdale. What did you expect?

Some critics have remarked that the ending of the Ms. Grundy story line seemed abrupt. It all came to a screeching halt just four episodes in, which might surprise you, given that about half of the hype about this show before its premiere revolved around “Oooh, Archie is having an affair with Ms. Grundy, can you believe it?” It’s tempting to speculate that this represented some sudden change of heart. Perhaps the show runners were getting too much flak about this story line, and made a last-minute decision to cut it short? Maybe. But I say, what matters is that they made the right decision, and they deserve praise for that. How and when they made the decision is unimportant.

All right, so now that we are ten episodes in, and the Ms. Grundy unpleasantness is behind us, what do we make of Riverdale? Well, Riverdale is…weird. It’s a CW teen soap opera that’s so over-the-top that you can’t help thinking that it’s a sly parody of teen soap operas. But here’s the thought that’s bothering me these days: I asked myself, “If this show were exactly the same as what it is, except that the characters were not named Archie and Betty and Jughead and Veronica, if there were no tie-in to Archie comics, would you still be interested?” I have to confess that the answer to this question, at least for now, is a resounding “No.” A lot of the draw for Riverdale right now is seeing how amazingly far removed from the comics the show has gotten and watching it strain to move farther still, even from the recently re-booted and more realistic and relatable Archie comics.

But this is a draw that can’t go on forever. As the show enters its second season (it’s been renewed), it will become harder to keep going back to that well. Riverdale is going to have to stand on its own, without leaning so heavily on the comics. Otherwise the conceit of the show, “Hey, we sure are different from the comics you read as a kid, aren’t we?” is soon going to wear thin.