Riding Home for Samhain: Halloween Challenge Night 11

So far, with some exceptional evenings attended by Mrs Simian (plus movie night at the Black Lagoon!) Halloween has been a somewhat solitary project, undertaken in the spare room while the rest of study and tamer televisual flair continues around me. But this night was different because I had Jet Jr in tow and a yen to return to the Disney Well.

We’d been here before, this month, with Something Wicked This Way Comes, but spurred on with the animated success of Trick or Treat I elected to go further back this time, both in studio time and in literary sources. Uncle Walt did the honours, guiding us through a bespoke animated and… worthy version of the author’s life – for it was quite a life, and the feature wasn’t quite to length. The author was Washington Irving, and the story?  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A delayed production, and initially paired oddly with a Wind in the Willows adaptation, this 33-minute short (plus 14-minute biography!) is worth checking out on its own for the season.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949, adapted from the short story by Washington Irving)

So. Much. Disney. DNA in this one! There’s music and songs, an avuncular voiceover (by the Bingmeister Crosby hisself), caricature of the characters, and a loose version of events - but faithful enough to the source material that it doesn’t go the way of Tim Burton’s version or, indeed, the TV series. The first twenty minutes or so go by well enough, being an introduction to our long-shanked, beak-nosed, chinless and twitchy ‘hero’ (the designers very much drawing on the waterbird for Crane’s profile) and his interest in lining his pockets the fair Katrina Van Tassel – plus his rivalry with town braggart and prankster Brom Bones.

It's the final ten minutes which really shine – rejected at a community dance, Crane sets off home on his horse Gunpowder, only to encounter the local bogeyman, the Headless Horseman during his travels home and to the safety of a covered bridge, the barrier which keeps the Horseman in. It’s a masterclass of classic cel animation, the design elements are there in spades, and the whole sequence itself meticulously choreographed with plenty of tension occasionally undercut by slapstick through the hapless hero. Junior and I laughed out loud several times and in all, good clean Disney spooky fun was there. The set-up may be a little long in the tale, but the resolution makes it worth it.

Halloweenometer. A classic, very much worthy of its reputation. Catch a nice clean print if you can, and buckle up for a good, safe, but chilling ride. Recommended – and would do well with Trick or Treat!

Pumpkinwatch: It's part of the story, so...

Bad Duck! Halloween Challenge Night 10

 When I was a youngster the Simian house was not awash with the comic form. We had, it would be fair to describe, an ‘assortment’ of juvenile reading material beyond an admittedly not bad selection of classic literature courtesy of the Children’s Library collection. But beyond the Robinson Cruesoes and Robin Hoods, your graphic narrative examples were lean pickings: some Disney Time magazines, the odd pickup from a church fair, the obligatory Phantom one-off, and a random assortment of Gold Key Comics, offering such variety as Tarzan, Star Trek, and Disney Characters. It was the latter that held most of my interest – particularly the Donald Ducks and Goofies, two of what I still regard as the heavy lifters of Uncle Walt’s menagerie.

One particular favourite of the Double D's was Trick or Treat, in which The Don met his comeuppance via the agent of Chaotic Good, Witch Hazel which he behaves like an absolute rotter to his becostumed, door-knocking nephews. It’s a great story, told with economy and illustrated by the reliable Carl Barks, and I treasured that issue. We lost it in a reliable Mum Purge in time, of course, but the memory lingered long after.

Recent gob smacking discovery was mine then when I found the ORIGINAL ANIMATION on Disney Plus – complete with jaunty song (which sounded quite unlike the simple mute rhyme in the comic version). It was a thrilling find, matching my memory of the strip so very closely it was as though it had come to life. The reality of course is the reverse – the comic was the adaptation, and even expanded the story – so, maybe a mission then to find a copy…

Donald Duck 'Trick or Treat' (1952)

Trick or Treat in either form is marvelous. The Big D in all his adult mischief and self-righteous rage is the perfect foil and victim because of his unscrupulous trickery to poor Huey, Louie and Dewey, and his apoplectic frustration at being bewitched, bothered and bamboozled by Hazel and her broomstick Beelzebub still had me cackling when I revisited it this evening. A masterpiece, with all of the Halloween trimmings, including some great and memorable detail: the Duck abode having (presumably for one night only) an empty wheatfield within reach to convey the harvest season, the reliable silent abetting of Beelzebub, and the weird but on point rendering of a Junior Duck’s eyes as black spots when dressed as a ghost (he never takes it off – is it makeup?)

So yes, here is possibly THE Disney Halloween joint – ten minutes of your time definitely not wasted, and a vintage Halloween in a catchy wee morsel. Sure, Lonesome Ghosts has the big Three animated characters predicting Ghostbusters years before, and the even older Mickey and the Haunted House is creepy in its own way, but Trick or Treat has the right balance. I’ll be revisiting it again next Halloween, I’m sure.

Halloweenometer: A perfect score!  

… but is there anything from the House of Mouse that could match it…?

Pumpkinwatch: A real beauty - animated and everything!

A Call to [Needles in] Arms

 'Defence Against Invasion' (Jack King, 1943)

Not anatomically correct: Disney's vintage vax reel

My mention this week of Grieg's 'In The Hall of the Mountain King'has made me try to think of where I may have heard the music beforehand. I know it didn't appear on the double Classical Music LP that my parents owned and which I'd listen to for hours as a young Simian, so perhaps it was at school? In an assembly hall, darkened with blackout curtains for the Very Serious Business of health education?

Defense Against Invasion was one of a small handful of educational films I and my class were subjected to in Intermediate years, alongside one or two I am Joe's, surely, and one particularly horrifying one about a fire breaking out in a hospital laundry. It was British, of course. DIA was not British, nor horrifying, but it was gripping, and it made a big impression on me, being cheered on when it came up for a repeat viewing some months later. I've looked for it under an abbreviated title for years, and finally found it. never knew it was Disney - makes sense now. never knew it was THAT old - although content-wise there's some sense to that, too. 

So what is Defense Against Invasion? Why, a short film about vaccination, employing the metaphor of the human body in a war-footing to bolster its, well, defences against infection. Or contagion. It's a bit murky, but just go with it. Because it's a charming little slice of wartime Americana, a sort of Why We Fight set in a doctor's surgery, and then in an imagined bloodstream and body styled in a 1940s Fleisher-like complex resembling a city with roads, bridges, factories (you have to have factories) and defensive ramparts. The heroes of the story are red blood cells (er...), and their horrific enemy "bacteria" (um...) taking ghastly arachnid form and animated superbly with near featureless fluidity. Ooh they're awful - massing in vast number, dividing and increasing appalling surety. It's only the introduction of a weaker strain of foe that readies our plucky red shirts to WAR, to boost their armoury, increase their arsenal, and knock this enemy from their borders with ruthless readiness. It's stirring stuff, and given the year is 1943, the parallels couldn't have been more obvious to a child of my age back then - whereas in the early 80s it seemed quaint, but still a little unsettling. 

So here it is in its short glory. I found it and played in on our telly, bringing Mrs Simian into the room knocked sideways by the reawakening of a very dim memory. Because like good antibiotic resistance, it does stay with you.

 

 

Ed Games

This has been out a week now, so apologies for the dated-ness.

But, datedness is sort of the theme of this post! Iron maiden's new album is out next month, and in advance of this their new single 'Speed of Light' was released to the internet just over seven days ago.

The song is pretty cool - something of a throwback to early Nineties Maiden with Bruce Dickinson's growly voice, and a more rocking feel than the progfests of recent albums. That said, it's an opening track, and the band tend to have form on this tactic - 'El Dorado' was the taster for Final Frontier, 'A Different World' was AMOLAD's opener, and it's arguable whether either was indicative of their parent albums.

But hey, I like it. It's got a lovely Ritchie Blackmore style riff to kick things off, some nice leads from all three guitarists, Bruce sounds great (pre-cancer diagnosis, it must be said), and there's more cowbell working hard here than Waikato Stadium in a home game.

To be honest, though, it's the video that's the drawcard. I love a good video, and with Maiden I think they're something of a rarity: the early days are very much live performance-based with movie cutaways; in the Nineties these turned into slicker products that somehow didn't really sell the band or Eddie very well - some of them just tried too hard. On the whole, however, it's when Eddie'in the visuals that the videos work best, and 'Speed of Light' is a great example, being almost all about the history of Eddie and Maiden's most memorable album covers, as experienced through the medium of... video games! I have fond memories of mashing rubber ZX Spectrum keys to the background sounds of Number of the Beast and Maiden's debut album (point of fact: both games and music were likely loaded on the same tape deck.) Iron Maiden are around the same age as your common or garden home entertainment system, so the synergy of the band's evolution alongside that of digital gaming works really well. Eddie is back in his rightful punkish fright wig original form, it's witty, deferential, self-referential (count those nods!*) and, I think, more than a little essential.

A brief pause to reflect that this is not the first time the worlds of Maiden and video games have crosed paths, as the mid-Nineties compilation/video game Ed Hunter attests. Reception in the gaming mags was not kind, apparently, and it goes to show that despite heavy metal making an excellent gaming soundtrack, getting the right mix is a delicate art. I think they've cracked it this time, though. Hell, I'd buy it :)

UPDATED: Thanks to Dave R's observations, it appears I got my wish! 

*Visual references I noted:

There's Nothing Like a Dane, etc.

Here it is, Barbarian, from The Darkness' forthcoming Last of Our Kind, due late May/early June.

As if I didn't already have one album to look forward to this year.



Truly, if this had been around twenty two years ago, Anglo-Saxon history might have been an entirely different prospect for me.

Friday Night Local: Chris Knox, 'My Dumb Luck'

Now, there have been a few upsets to a rough schedule in this Friday Night Music column, and today's entry is yet another. I didnd't intend to return to Chris Knox's music so soon after posting the Tall Dwarfs video a fortnight ago, and yet I didn't intend to go all J-Pop lat week either. This week was to have been either another female or all-female act, or a non-Flying Nun band from yesteryear, but instead I'm putting up another favourite video from one of Invercargill's finest former inhabitants.

My Dumb Luck is from Knox's 1988 solo sophomore effort Seizure, and is a typical track from the record (albeit a favourite song as well). I love the animation - it's simple, witty and creative, which are three things I also admire about Knox's compositions, as well as video and song here sharing a cyclical pattern. To this day I'm torn between appreciating Knox as a solo artist and for his collaborations, particularly with Alec Bathgate as the 'Dwarfs. By 1988 Knox's style was working its way into something of a groove, with buzzing guitars and looped percussion that wasn't a million miles from some Dwarfs songs (say, Crush), while the Dwarfs tracks remained more eclectic, sometimes more inventive and less direct, sometimes less accessible. I still like them both, although at the time I recall swinging fro Knox quickly and back to the duo just as soon. Was it the emergence of Knox's most famous solo song Not Given Lightly - a rueful, slightly cynical pitch at mainstream success (which did come after some time)? Perhaps. I never bought another Knox album after Seizure, with the exception of a cassette of Polyphoto Duck-Shaped Pain and Gum (whose stand-out track Inside Story was nearly a candidate for inclusion here - it's just not as fun as Luck) and the tribute album Stroke, featuring Knox's past work solo, as half of Tall Dwarfs or as frontman for The Enemy and Toy Love interpreted by his friends, colleagues and devotees. It's an impressive set of songs, and a testament to a creative spark whose work in music, film, animation, writing and cartooning seems to have been all but curtailed by a series of strokes five years ago. And I'm only just now thinking about how much Knox has inspired me in nearly all of these areas since I discovered him in my teens.

I'm posting this because there is a crowdfunding campaign underway to collect Knox's visual works in book form, Grafix Knox, next year - it's a great idea and deserves a wider platform, and you can find out more here!

Friday Night Local: Tall Dwarfs, 'Nothing's Going to Happen'

What, more dwarfs?

No, not really. It's Friday - time for another New Zealand video! And this one goes out to my big brother, who introduced me to Tall Dwarfs, had a D&D character (guess what race - go on) named after one of their EPs, and who eventually accompanied me to see them play on an especially brilliant night at Sammy's Cabaret in Dunedin, long ago in a New Zealand winter.

The memory cheats, of course. My teenage mind would have had it that a Tall Dwarfs video could be viewed on local music magazine show radio With pictures most weeks, but it seems the Dwarfs did very few videos at all, probably because the stop-motion nature of many of them would have challenged even a Flying Nun release schedule. But what we did get is strong stuff indeed, even in a low-fi sense. Tall Dwarfs proved to be a big influence on me and my friends, each in our own way, and its been fun to reconnect with the band after too many years' absence. Its difficult to pick a favourite - the mouldy orange peel faces of euthanasia anthem The Slide? The rumbling cut-up montage that accompanies Turning Brown and Torn in Two's anti-sexism polemic?  Or what about the loopy too-many-f-stops-in-a-suburban-basement Frankenstein shenanigans of The Brain That Wouldn't Die? All too tempting. We'll just have to revisit the works of the great and much-missed Chris Knox and his stalwart fellow ex-Toy Love-r Alec Bathgate some other time. Instead, let's go back to the beginning, back to the basics, back to the classics:



Oh, and Stu - that Wall of Dwarfs version you told me about back in '85 can be found here.

Bakshi's Balrog restored

As reported by TheOneRing.net here,two short segments from Ralph Bakshi's 1970s animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings have been restored and can be seen online.

Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings has not aged well, Indeed, it creaks painfully like a high school rostrum in places, but it’s animation history and it’s Tolkien history, and I like it. In its day its rotoscoping (of which there are both great and poor examples in the film) was regarded very highly by animators –  lest we forget that, one day, Peter Jackson’s efforts too will be subjected to harsher criticism than they’ve had so far. For my part however I like Bakshi’s work because after my brother’s telling of the story, this is the version I encountered Tolkien in, and bits of it are still with me. I actually think the Moria sequence is one of the more effective and faithful parts of the movie – but it does feel rushed, and maybe this recovery shows why.

The Balrog scene is, alas, infamous for showing up some of the film’s shortcomings. Chiefly, it’s a pivotal scene diminished by time and budget pressures – the rotoscoping is jerky in places, the design work is in serious need of a rethink (I’ll abstain from criticising the look of the Balrog itself as there is plenty of this on other sites already); in the end the actual battle between Gandalf and Durin’s Bane is truncated, replaced by Bakshi’s much more exciting looking concept paintings. What Eddie Bakshi has done is restore and reassemble the animation produced but abandoned – something that an enterprising animator might have been able to have done in recent times, but for the willingness and the time, I guess. Heck, I had links to those very brief sequences on Ralph Bakshi’s own website for a long time, but have no idea how to put it together seamlessly myself. In the mean-time Bakshi Sr flogged off cuttings of the Rings sequences (including, presumably, this piece) in recent years, further imperilling the chance of the footage being ever restored.  I presume, however, that those reels which did get snapped up fell into the hands of enthusiasts – and Ralph Bakshi certainly has those, even if they’re not strictly from the Tolkien fan community (who can be no less snooty than everyone else about the film, it seems.)

So there’s hope we might see more of Bakshi’s Rings out there; sure, bits and pieces – we’ll never see the story completed with a further movie as intended, nor indeed a complete Balrog sequence in this recovered style, but there are storyboards which provide tantalising snippets of what might have been – the Ents’ storming of Isengard being one. And if Eddie’s not for the task then there are fans of Bakshi’s work who have proved themselves enthusiastic – in the heyday of the last trilogy a fan-made movie script to complete Bakshi’s was being passed around the Bakshi forums, and there are  fans with knowhow and determination – witness the brave soul who has made it is purpose in life to [NSFW!] restore the censored gore and general disrobedness of Teegra in  Bakshi and Frazetta’s Fire and Ice. Amazingly, that man is married with children. Sir, I truly don’t know what to say.

Maybe if there’s anything positive that comes from the work of Eddie Bakshi, it might be to inspire another young animator with an interest in traditional animation and Ralph Bakshi’s vision of Middle Earth (not to mention the free time) to bring this forlorn chapter to life once more.

Ray Harryhausen

Stop motion was a dominant form of animation when I was growing up. It infiltrated so many shows and movies of my childhood in large and small ways - Star Wars, Vision On, Sesame Street, Land of the Lost, and ultimately Clash of the Titans, the final great show reel of the movie making genius of Ray Harryhausen. My first encounter with Harryhausen's work had been a TV clip of Jason and the Argonauts' famous skeleton fight - still an effective and masterfully-choreographed mix of live action and animation. You've seen it - of course you have. Let's all watch it again:




Classic work, with some assured, slight, genius touches 'humanising' the bony killers - I love the occasional cutaway to those oddly expressive and malevolent grinning skulls, the deft wall vault one makes around the 2:45 mark, and of course that initial baleful scream - in my opinion much mimicked (on more than one occasion by Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Xena franchises) but never equaled.

Of course Ray Harryhausen's work amounts to more than a standard Basic D&D level party melee, although you can be sure that a fair few skeleton encounters in my D&D playing games were based on that encounter and replayed in my head as a variation thereof. Surely that scene is why living skeletons are in the game to begin with? Speaking of which, surely, once again, there is a causal link between Golden Voyage of Sinbad's animated murderous ship figurehead and a similar murderous ship's figurehead in (SPOILERS!) AD&D Adventure Vault of the Drow. Even in my teens and pre-Jurassic Park the dinosaurs we encountered in our games were the stop motion monsters of Valley of Gwanji (still a favourite - somebody remake it. No, on second thoughts don't!), and though my adolescent adventurers never encountered a colossal Iron Golem, you can bet I'd have visualised it as Talos.

There are a lot of posts on the Internet about Harryhausen's effect as a movie pioneer and the filmmakers he inspired. I don't think there are as many championing his ability to penetrate the imagination. His work could amuse, enthrall, emote and horrify - the latter being ably exemplified in this sequence from my only big screen Harryhausen viewing (but it was a good one), 1982's Clash of the Titans' Medusa battle:


Probably a good ten years ago some friends and I revisited and experienced again Ray Harryhausen's entire oeuvre. Great early evenings of a mad scrabble from the office to the cable car and up to a viewing at VUW's AV suite. The movies were old and increasingly cheesy (particularly the Sinbad series), but made all the more enjoyable - the best viewing yet, in the company of friends.

Thanks for the thrills, Ray.

In a Hole in the Ground there Lived...

Over the weekend two great completions happened to my free time. Firstly, and most recently, my model of Bombur, appropriately hefty and now more green stuff than original figure, is at last ready for undercoating. I've a good feeling about this one, and that's all I have to say about that.

The other significant completion is that on Saturday morning in bed I completed reading Watership Down. Regular readers will know that my memories of the film adaptation are reliably traumatic, and even a recent playing of a video for Bright Eyes was... troubling. The original novel was something I’d never considered reading until it was recommended to me years ago by my brother, who singled out the mythological aspects of the story, the bits that I’d not remembered from the movie. This reading was inspired by my recent posting on the film, and was, I hesitate to add, anticipated as a mild form of therapy. It was read in small bites - the last twenty minutes of the day, occasional bus rides into work, and that's all. After a spell in bed last week the book kicked in properly however, and I was through it quickly. And what did I think?

Well, I truly loved it.

Watership Down is now one of the most enjoyable and satisfying novels I've read, although it pains me slightly that I've read this possibly a little late in life, knowing the effect it had on me now has to be different from the effect it would have had on my younger self. Nevertheless I found the novel well-wrought, moving, evocative of a passed time and, thanks actually to dim memories from the movie, in places as tense as hell. Not recalling which of the rabbits lived or died (and the movie departs from the novel in places, as it turns out) in this aspect meant that more was at stake, and reading it with an adult sensibility and a certain degree of leisure allowed me to think about the story and the rabbits’ world more. I’m not surprised the book has survived as it seems to have – the story of its discovery and publication seems similar to that of J K Rowling’s first acceptance of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and yes, there’s an element of Tolkien in here as you’d expect – a story created to entertain the author’s children grows in the telling, and like The Hobbit it has quite the cast, each with their roles significant or small – quietly I think Adams succeeds here where Tolkien didn’t with his Hobbit cast. I had clear favourites among them – even the villains; some I championed, some I fretted over and still see where the story could have been expanded without diluting the core of it all, Hazel’s personal quest. I guess Richard Adams may have thought the same when he briefly returned to Watership’s world in a late follow-up of smaller tales and myths, without falling to the temptation to sequel-ise.

It’s a very clever book – literary in its epigrams for each chapter (opening with Cassandra’s doomed prophecy from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon gave it a big and chilling tick from me), and of course its pedigree is secure: it’s The Aeneid, but told in such a loose way it is more robust, evidently allowing numerous interpretations from different audiences. I appreciated the refreshing, almost Semitic creation story and tales of Elahrairah, the lapine trickster god, and the myth cycle’s matter-of-fact duality, a world dominated by the polar forces of Frith the sun and Inle, its lack. There’s no good or evil in the rabbit world, nor justice, and wickedness and selfishness are accepted and evaded as any number of the hrair, the thousand enemies of rabbitkind. Finally, there’s to me a sense of the elegy in dam’s telling, the story opening as it does with the threat of the countryside’s subdivision and (as later horrifically described) carving up by men and machines. The idyllic English countryside seems to have been more easily imagined in the Seventies, in the decade before urban sprawl condemned this world, exhaustively and sensorally detailed with the lives of plant and beast, to islands. Animals killed to suit the lives of men, as one character relates it.

So, with some relief and gratitude I’ve enjoyed returning to Watership Down, and may return again soon. A lot of the joy of reading this was in appreciating the book close to 'fresh', despite my reservations, and the experience offered as many moments of relief and catharsis as it did moments of real despair. It's a book I will certainly buy and, yes, hope to introduce to Jet Junior once he's old enough.

Video Affects - Art Garfunkel: Bright Eyes (1979)

I am nine, and my family have just been to see Watership Down, an animated movie about rabbits which, going by the elegant and haunting music video accompanying its related single Bright Eyes, will be just the sort of wholesome, non-threatening entertainment the three youngest of us (fourteen, twelve and nine) should enjoy. The actual result, if you are unfamiliar with the story of Watership Down, is quite a different thing. I stay through to the end, and bedsheets go unbothered for nights afterward, but even now it’s clear to me that this was probably the first great instance of cinematic trauma I endured in my childhood. Added to the list of shorter snippets from the later Sea Gypsies (a shock shot of a skeleton in an abandoned cabin), the earlier The Mouse and his Child (a living doll decapitated under a cartwheel), Watership Down’s tooth-and-claw lapine warfare, scenes of mauling animals and warren gassing by farmers, plus the nightmarish and ever-present spectre of the Black Rabbit of death are the top of the list, an experience so vivid that even as an adult I recently recall genuinely hovering with hesitation over bargain bins with the DVD among the cheap offers. Google “Watership Down trauma” and you’ll see page after page of the same story. Previous generations may have had Bambi’s mother being shot, and later generations the Hamlet-on-the-veldt of The Lion King, but neither can compare to the relentless wholesale and, above all, matter of fact natural slaughter of the lapine characters of Watership Down.

   

Revisiting it recently, the music video itself comprises clips from the film, and of them there’s little that’s going to offend – Bigwig’s being caught in a snare, the red-eyed pale gassed rabbit, the warping jagged lines of a rural pylon. What delivers the blow now as much as then is the juxtaposition of expected reactions – as a nine year old, cartoon characters were for the most part wholesome, sympathetic or comic. They didn’t tend to actually die, but stepped away from their cartoon fates blackened with soot, flattened by anvils or crumbling into charcoal only to be reconstituted offscreen. They were immortal, and they didn’t bleed. But Watership’s wide-eyed rabbits like Hazel, Bigwig and Fiver do, as matter of factly as they do in Richard Adams’ novel. And accompanying this, the sleepy, near-pastoral strings and woodwinds of Mike Batt’s musical composition, lulling the unwary viewer like a will-o-wisp. The video as it stands is mostly safe for very young viewers. It is not, however, for grown men.

 I’ve long been puzzled as to why the movie and the song were soon after chosen as ripe for lampoon, and can only conclude that in part satire was a natural reaction for a large adult population stunned or offended by the movie’s shock factor and the incongruous longevity of its otherwise unassuming single. Even today there are plenty around who would dismiss Bright Eyes as ‘that song about cartoon rabbits’. The truth is of course that the song is a mediation on dying, one’s “following the river of death downstream’; a curious subject for a number one single, and the video bears this out too, with its odd combination of family-friendly bunny rabbits and dreamlike bounding shadow of the rabbit spirit. Art Garfunkel’s vocals are distant, offering questions that can never be answered: “is it a kind of a dream?” “a shadow?” And as in life there are no answers: “Nobody seems to know where you go”, a line reworked later, as I hear it, by Coldplay in God Put a Smile on Your Face. There’s spirituality in Richard Adams’ rabbit world, but an animal one – no salvation, no resurrection, just oblivion. The dying rabbit of the video's close leaves his lifeless corpse to join the Black Rabbit of Inle in a flight over the land, one with the 'fog along the horizon', the 'high wind in the trees', and no longer one among the living.

 Batt’s lyrics reflected the death of his father from cancer, supposedly the starting point for the song. The composition would be covered by others later to varying degrees – one of the more affecting I’ve come across is a self-conscious solo with guitar by James Dean Bradfield on the nights of Richey James’ last ever appearances with Manic Street Preachers. At the time the song was dedicated to the band’s late manager Phillip Hall, but naturally grew in fans’ minds to take in a broader picture. But for a nine year old me in a darkened cinema, the world of Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig was a very small thing indeed, subject to the cruelty and injustice of the wilds, occasionally visited by the brutal hands of men. You age and mature, and life’s lessons and lack of fairness become less surprising, some you can even prepare for. But life’s final phase, unseen, little-expected, unfamiliar and unyielding is still a mystery.

Oaken's Twelve: Rankin Bass's Twelve

Only three days to go now. Wellington, branding itself as "The Middle of Middle-Earth" is awash with Hobbit advertising, with toys, window displays, banners and all manner of hoardings proclaiming the up and coming world premiere. No pressure then. In less than seven days all previous versions of The Hobbit's company of Dwarves will be that weaker in influence, so before everything closes in for good, here's a last chance to see the most recent version of The Hobbit done as a feature-length film:

Rankin Bass' 1977 animated TV movie is mostly an unknown quantity to me, but what I have seen I've been surprised to discover I don't mind and in places quite like. Mood-wise it's different from the forthcoming trilogy of course, but it's also distinct from the feel of the book. Most importantly to me, though, where it is faithful is in the portrayal of the Dwarves - or their hoods and colours at least. It's cartoonish, to a fault - Fili and Kili are so young they're babyish, and you should see what they did with Gollum, but you can't blame it for having its own aesthetic. I could hope to have the same continuity of character in my models. So here they are, and let Wednesday's premiere roll on...

The Corellian Job

More than likely this is everywhere at the moment, and thanks to Dave for sharing it with me, but if you haven't already, you must check this out:



It's an animated Star Wars that is true to the originals! The colour palette, the sounds, the music and even the dialogue just sing Seventies Star Wars - and it's a beautiful thing.

I'm not a big Star Wars fan. I'm really not. But aged seven it was the biggest thing in my world, and even this many years later I can see and hear the in-jokes and visual references to the original trilogy and in particular the first movie here. It's not overdone, no-one's trying to push an agenda (the last shot is a bit of fun, and why the hell not?), and you can see how easy it would have been to have taken all the talent here and ruined it by going too far, too fannish. But they didn't, and that's really cool.

Lando has to appear in the next one though, guys!