Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

News that the many-voiced Harry Shearer is leaving the cast of The Simpsons, as the series heads into its 27th season, triggered a discussion around my office.

One colleague wondered why they're still making the show. My position is that they are true to the philosophy Bart expressed back in Season Two, when The Simpsons aired a special tag in tribute to the then-voluntarily-ending Bill Cosby Show (its competitor for ratings on Thursday nights).

My pal had never seen this clip. To Youtube!

And so we see that the producers of The Simpsons are perfectly consistent with the spirit of this 1992 proclamation. This is why I am unsurprised that they continue.

(For the record, I still tune in, because while it's no longer firing on all cylinders, the show can still make me laugh sometimes. But then, given the ravages of time, I have arrived in the demographic slice that is reputed, like Grandpa Simpson, to enjoy Matlock, so why should anybody listen to my opinions about television any more?)

While preparing for Thanksgiving festivities, I switched on the good old Macy's Parade. And discovered another thing that high-definition TV is well-suited for. But I noticed a couple of odd things.

1. A large marching band playing "Simple Gifts" in the middle of this very large and colorful parade, accompanied by performers in bright skirts twirling huge, colorful flags. Wouldn't a sentiment like "'Tis a gift to be simple" be better expressed by, say, a single person walking down a deserted street, playing a dulcimer?

2. A commercial for a new animated movie entitled Frozen. It had not occurred to me-- and maybe it had not occurred to executives of the film company-- that this would result in an announcer uttering the words "Disney's Frozen." Will this rumor never die? I checked Snopes. No, he's not.

In today's otherwise charming Google Doodle, an animation celebrating Earth Day*, the phase of the Moon is wrong.




*As seen from my location within the U.S. Your Doodle may vary.

As I have already written, we went to some trouble to see The Secret of Kells last week, but we were amply rewarded. It's a visual feast.

It's an animated movie about Brendan, a boy living in a 9th-century Irish abbey, who assists the monks in transcribing and illuminating sacred manuscripts. Outside the walls lies a scary forest, home to wild animals and creatures of folklore; beyond that, the menace of raiding Northmen, bringing death and fire wherever they go.

When Brother Aidan, a legendary master illuminator fleeing the raids, takes refuge at Kells, he brings an incomplete book and invites Brendan to help him finish it. Though Brendan is forbidden to venture beyond the walls, in order to gather materials for inks he enters the forest, discovering both terror and beauty there. He is aided by a mysterious orphan girl, Aisling (to my ear, "Osh-leeg," the final "g" being barely audible), who says "Let me show you my forest..."

Good overview of The Secret of Kells, with plenty of large stills.

Good trailer.

Even better trailer. Gives a good sense of the storyline.

"Related videos" clips in right-hand column of this give you a better idea what the film looks like, at the risk of being a bit spoilery.

Really terrible trailer, whose voiceover makes an outstanding film sound like boring Extruded Fantasy Product. Best avoided, unless you are a student of "how not to write copy for movie trailers."

Eight Reasons Why You Should See The Secret of Kells, from John L. at Creative Juices.

The Blog of Kells, by co-director Tomm Moore,begun in 2005, which, among other things, collects lots of reviews in one handy place. Plus, you can go back in time and watch the multinational production effort unfold. The film was spearheaded by Irish animators, but other studios in France, Hungary, Brazil, and Belgium collaborated. The financing was even more of a patchwork. The blog features lots of model sheets, backgrounds, and other impedimenta of animation.

The film was released in Europe last year, as Brendan and the Secret of Kells. As always with independent films, distribution in the United States is a struggle. It's being shown in art houses, approximately one per city. Not in neighborhood theaters, so far. Confirmed dates for screenings in the U.S. Is it showing where you live? Go see it!

One may hope that a DVD is released in this country, eventually. There is already a DVD for Region 2, so if your player can handle it, you could watch the film at home.

A thoughtful review by Stephen D. Greydanus in Christianity Today heaps praise upon the movie, but offers a mild complaint I had myself: it soft-pedals the Christianity of the Irish monks, never explaining that the Book is a book of the Gospels, and may leave audience members wondering why the tome is so important to the characters.

I don't know much about the Book of Kells, but my friends with an interest in medieval culture have mentioned it frequently. In four volumes, it contains the Gospels in Latin. Roger Ebert writes: "The Irish are a verbal people, preserving legends in story and song; few Chicagoans may know there's a First Folio of Shakespeare in the Newberry Library, but few Dubliners do not know that the Book of Kells reposes in Trinity College." It represents a pinnacle of illuminative artistry, and its Celtic designs keep inspiring later artists, century after century.

The town of Kells wants the Book back, but Trinity College isn't letting go.

Illuminated manuscripts are rare these days, but here is one project to produce a modern handwritten Bible in English: the St. John's Bible.

In one of the most fascinating interviews I've ever seen on C-SPAN, Donald Jackson, chief calligrapher, talks about the Bible project, and demonstrates some of his techniques.

Charles Solomon of L.A. Times comments on the cat portrayed in The Secret of Kells. Most of the other characters are fictional, but Pangur Bán is a historical figure.

English translation of a famous Gaelic poem about Pangur Bán.

Here's the Gaelic version. It's recited over the movie's opening credits.

Solomon writes:

Director Tomm Moore says, "We learned the poem in school, along with the story that a monk had written it in the corner of a page he was illuminating. It was only later that I learned that the last line can be translated as 'turning darkness into light' or 'turning ink into light,' which I thought was a nice reference to creating an illumination."

Even though he and the other artists making the film have spoken of identifying with the scribes in the story, here Mr. Moore misses an additional possible meaning:

"Turning ink into light" is also a nice description of making an animated movie.

Is the Siskel Center the only place that The Secret of Kells will be playing in the Chicago area?

If there is a theater planning to show it in the suburbs, please let me know.

The film was Oscar-nominated, K is very interested in Celtic art, and I am very interested in animation.

Generation X question:

So Transformers are these robots, originating on a distant planet long ago, which are able to fold themselves into a perfect replica of semitrailer trucks, fire trucks, and (if memory serves) a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. I believe the latter was recast as a Chevy Camaro for the live-action film.

Do the Transformers have an arbitrary ability to change their forms? If they found themselves on, say, Mars, could they disguise themselves as Martian trucks? Or were they designed originally to fold up into a Volkswagen Beetle (etc.), and nothing else?

Not many engineers have been the subject of an Oscar-winning animated musical biography. At the moment, I can only think of one.

Great is a 1975 short film about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, paragon of Victorian engineers, directed by Bob Godfrey. (IMDB entry here.) I saw part of this many years ago, and have searched without success for a copy I could watch again.

Yesterday I learned, thanks to Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew, that Great has turned up on Youtube in three parts. It's a farrago of catchy tunes, suspension bridges, sly innuendo, railway tunnels, singing Victorians, and the most fantastic steamship ever built.
( Embedded video below cut... )

I said yesterday:

(Like the vocalists in the clip, I, too, remember the almost-not-animated 1966 Grantray-Lawrence Iron Man series. Reading up on it today, I learned that it featured both stories and artwork lifted directly from the comics. These cartoons (along with Captain America, Prince Namor, the Incredible Hulk, and the Mighty Thor in the same syndication package airing on CKLW) were my first glimpse of the Marvel characters. They seemed darker but more intriguing than Superman and his friends. I wonder whether the new movie will make such a big deal out of Tony Stark's artificial heart being "transistorized.")

Later, I found the opening theme from the 1966 Iron Man.

I see that animation emperor Joseph Barbera has died. Fans of animation history may be interested in extensive 1997 interview with Barbera on Google Video. (The link is to the first of seven installments, totaling hours of memories.)

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation has placed lots of oral history interviews with aging TV people into Google Video, so look around if you'd like to see more. Mister Rogers. Andy Griffith. Betty White. Elma (Mrs. Philo) Farnsworth. George Takei.

Remember when I posted about the 1923 Fleischer animated film explaining special relativity?

According to Richard Godwin, his ever-eclectic company Apogee Books is coming out with an edition of Garrett P. Serviss's The Einstein Theory of Relativity. It comes with a DVD that includes not only the animated relativity movie, but also the Fleischer film Evolution, which stirred up controversy in the 1920s and which features stop-motion dinosaurs by Willis O'Brien.

(The relativity film is really Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitäts-Theorie, directed by Hanns-Walter Kornblum, repackaged by Max Fleischer for the U.S. market. I think he may have added some footage to the German movie.)

Fifteen bucks gets you the Serviss book and both movies. Wow.

(I don't know whether the films are the seven-reel classroom versions or the four-reel, 40-minute theatrical cuts; I suspect the latter. Will have to ask Richard.)

Yes, this is the same Garrett P. Serviss, a tireless popularizer of science, who penned an unauthorized sequel to War of the Worlds, namely Edison's Conquest of Mars. Which you can also buy from Apogee! Two-fisted adventurers Tom Edison and Lord Kelvin reverse-engineer the alien spacecraft and death-rays, build their own fleet, and take vengeance back to the Martians, while rescuing pretty girls in the process.

Edited to Add: I'll embed a Youtube clip, only 20 minutes long. Disappointingly, this version ignores the most interesting parts of Einstein's relativity.