How much of an animation geek am I? I spent last night watching Lady and the Tramp, including most of the ”making of” extras.

I’d read that the new DVD release of Lady and the Tramp is like a new film. And they were right; the transfer is beautiful, and it’s so perfectly cleaned that it looks like it was made yesterday. And the animation is so good that I could believe it was made yesterday.

It’s a startingly taut little film, too. The story just moves along at a rapid clip, steadily increasing in intensity until climaxing with that wonderful chase to stop the dog catcher.

I discovered that it took about two decades for Lady to finally make it to the big screen. During most of that time, there was no Tramp; the initial concept was just to show Lady being pushed aside by the arrival of a human baby. Walt never felt satisfied with that story, so it languished for years, occasionally re-visited but never really coming together until Walt read an article about a ”sarcastic mutt,” and had the idea of putting a ”street tough” dog into the film to stir up Lady’s world.

And, in retrospect, it’s exactly what the movie needs. Without Tramp, the movie would have easily devolved into a series of quaint domestic scenes as Lady dealt with the new baby—probably entertaining, but not gripping drama. Tramp arrives just in time to make Lady really wonder about her role, and more importantly, give her an option. She refuses that option almost out-of-hand, but it’s so important to the movie that she’s provided with the option.

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Never ceases to amaze me just how much I can get done when I sit right down and do it.

Tonight, for example. Came home from work, put a load of laundry in the washing machine, started a loaf of bread in the bread machine, made an omelette, made some sugar cookies (they didn’t work out), called a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while and talked for a while, checked my e-mail, and checked my blogs. And it was all done in under three hours.

A few years ago, I’d wonder why I didn’t just do that every day. Now I understand that I just can’t maintain that pace all day, every day. I need some rest.

But it’s fun to do every so often….

Woohoo! I just accomplished everything on my to-do list tonight.

Of course, there were only three things on my to-do list. But they were all fairly significant:

1. Call back a friend of mine. We haven’t talked in a while, and we’d missed each other at a meeting on Saturday, so I was afraid there’d be some bad blood or something. But he was very apologetic, and I had a great time talking.
2. Write a thank-you note for the bull riding on Saturday. Tom Peters says that, when it comes to building relationships, the best return-on-investment activity is sending thank-you notes. And I so enjoyed watching those cowboys risk their necks that I wanted to thank them. So that was done.
3. Write more on Giant Armors (my young adult novel). That was really the hard bit; it’s amazing how much Resistance can push back at you when work needs to get done on a project like this. But I muscled through it and wrote another six hundred words or so. I’ve added some nice character texture. So that feels good.

So, I feel good. I set myself a couple of do-able tasks, and I did them.

Wasn’t so hard, now was it?

7:32 p.m.

I may come back and write a nice, long post about something in particular—I have quite a lot to write about, actually—but I just finished reading Saalon‘s post about Buffy. As in, I started reading and just couldn’t stop until I was done. I held my breath, realizing somewhere deep that I was reading something really good, something from the heart.

I want to go watch Buffy now.

Life Is A Highway…

My second viewing of Cars was exactly as enjoyable as the first.

A rare thing, really.

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I’ve had a perfectly wonderful day.

It was frustrating, and confusing at times. Software refused to function at work. Hardware was sullen, too. Some folks were their normal prickly selves, and I had several dull security briefings.

But at lunch I had fried shrimp and a big peanut butter cup sundae. I came home and watched two episodes of Eureka 7, which was enjoyable (though it’s still finding its feet) as I ate some delicious leftover chicken and rice stew. I then tidied up a website, made some phone calls, had nice long chats with friends, and now I’m reading the first book in the Melendy series.

To give you an idea of just how good of a writer of children’s books Elizabeth Enright is, here’s an excerpt from the chapter in which six-year-old Oliver is spending his Saturday at the circus, and is interrupted by a sharp little voice nearby calling out, “I want some of that candy”:

“Don’t bother the little boy, Marleen,” said the little girl’s mother in the kind of weak, uncertain way that no self-respecting child pays any attention to.

“I want some,” repeated Marleen through her nose. She meant business. She was a very little girl and she had a pointed chin, dark eyes, black curls as stiff as cigars, a blue hair ribbon, a gold ring, and pink stuff on her tiny fingernails. Oliver detested her. He looked coldly away and went on eating his candy.

I think we’ve all met people like that.

I’m feeling good because I think I’ve turned a corner, psychologically. I’ve been spending some time—not a lot, but actually spenidng time—on things that are really important to me. Well, first, I had to figure out what is important to me, and that takes some doing (it’s not just what’s important; it’s what’s important to me, personally and uniquely).

And I’ve let a lot of other things slip, things that I had a lot of emotional stake in even a couple of weeks ago. I let the garden go to seed, metaphorically and literally.

…And the garden went to seed. How about that, I’ve been saying to myself. I have a garden that’s gone to seed. Nobody’s disappointed in me for it. It hasn’t made me a bad person. In fact, I feel more alive, somehow.

It’s come from realizing that, while I want a whole lot of things on a surface level (a clean house, a beautiful yard, a full savings account, etc.), those things aren’t important to me, not deeply. What is important is, well, getting home and watching a bit of good anime, cleaning up the works I’ve put out in the world, maintaining my friendships, and reading good books. Among other things, of course, but why should I spend my time wrestling with a computer’s configuration when that’s just not important to me? Why not drop it and find something else important to do?

I finished watching Ghost Stories last night. ‘Twas great fun, with caveats.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Ghost Stories is a thoroughly average kids’ anime made in 2000, capitalizing on a ”ghost craze” that was sweeping through Japan. Apparently, every school in Japan has lots of superstitions and a stable of ghosts, and this is the story of a group of kids who accidentally unleash a horde of them, and have to exorcize them an episode at a time.

Every character is pretty bland, and the episode’s plots are usually either straightforward or nonsensical. It’s a low-grade horror series made to spook grade schoolers.

So ADV licensed it and did something that I’m surprised more people haven’t done (in the wake of works like What’s Up, Tiger Lilly? and MST3K) — they threw out the Japanese script and ad-libbed their way through it. The result is a constant stream of jokes and humor. The actors frequently break the fourth wall, and hint (sometimes more than hint) at hanky-panky. The primary characters all have solid comic timing, and the rest of the cast does a good job with it.

So an otherwise average series is turned above-average. I’d applaud it wholeheartedly, except that the actors went exceedingly sexual in the later discs (particularly the last one), with a lot of crude sexual remarks coming from the mouths of eleven-year-old characters. I don’t mind the occasional sly joke about such things; it’s one thing when a grade schooler knows about sex. This goes far, far beyond that.

Which is a shame. Ghost Stories is a lot of fun, and if that sort of humor had been at least toned down, this would have been a fantastic comedy series.

Just goes to show you how many things have to go right for something to work for people.

I think I’ve caught my breath now. Work was busy, but not crazy; I was able to keep up with everything, and even have some quiet moments to take a cup of hot tea.

Though this was hardly the day for a cup of hot anything; the temperature has been climbing steadily for the past few days, and today it was in the lower 90′s and humid. I’d walk out of the office and my feet would try to walk me right back inside. It’s just too hot for June. June should be a mild month, leading up to the pleasant heat of July and the brutal scorching of August. But you can accept the heat in August, because you know fall is coming, and you know this is the last of summer.

I came home and, so as to fully recover from this mild illness/allergic reaction of the past few days, I made a pot of stew. Chicken and rice stew, with onions and baby carrots. The hearty, homey scent filled the kitchen like cotton in a comforter. I then made cookies for tea at work this week, and played around a bit with my Secret Programming Project.

And then I finished The Four Story Mistake. I borrowed this and the other books in the series from my parents when I was over there last, as I happened to remember they were excellent childrens’ books and I’ve been in the mood for some light fare after months of business and self-help books. I remember loving these books as a kid.

And it was almost as good as I rememberd it. Better, in some ways. The author has a tendency to tell rather than show, but when she does show, she does so fantastically. Some of the phrasings are marvelous.

All in all, a good day. Productive, but not overwhelming. Wonderful to spend a good chunk of the evening with a treasured childhood book.

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Just cleaned up from a visit from my parents. As usual, we had a great time; I made dinner (hamburgers with onions, Ruffles potato chips, and lemon cake with chocolate icing) and we watched Memoirs of a Geisha.

Which was quite a remarkable film. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it seemed to track with what little I know of Japanese culture. And if nothing else, it’s a fascinating little morality play, full of human twists and turns. Friends become enemies. Lives are twisted because of little mistakes. The acting is universally superb.

And although the ending is generally positive, it’s a pretty dark film. The protagonist narrates that, at the end, she “learn(ed) kindness after so much unkindness.” She had a really rough life. And it didn’t exactly turn out all okay in the end.

But then, that’s life too.

Friday night, I watched Avalon, a live-action film from Mamoru Oshii (director of the Ghost in the Shell movies.

It was about the worst brilliant film I’ve ever seen. By ”brilliant” I mean that every shot was beautifully framed and worth putting up on a wall. By ”worst” i mean that it’s full of overly-long shots and pointless time spent watching things that just have nothing to do with anything. Do we really need to spend half a minute with the protagonist on the train home? Three times? I’m not exaggerating.

The plot would have been a lot more interesting if Oshii had really delved into its implications. It concerns one of the top players of a supposedly illegal VR game called “Avalon,” one that is insanely difficult at the top levels. In fact, it’s so difficult that nobody has been known to beat it. All that have tried have eventually been sidetracked into some mythical “special level” where their minds are blown away and they become vegetables.

So, most of the film is spent with this player, Ash, as she kicks butt and looks serious and pouty and has grim little conversations with various players. There’s a sub-plot dealing with a team she used to play with, but….

…actually, that’s the problem I had with everything. Nothing in this movie moved me. Ash is a stern, cold woman, so I wasn’t particularly interested in her. The other characters are pretty straightforward, and in any event have so little screen time they can’t develop to any significant extent. And the plot is such a thriller standard that I had little to look forward to.

And all of this is told in gorgeous, interminably long sequences of characters, um, walking. Or looking. Or shooting guns. Oooh! I’ve never seen guns being fired in a movie before.

So. Not my favorite film. But it sure is beautiful.

I’m preparing a rather massive post to explain the server outages of the past few months. I want to explain exactly the sort of treatment we were getting and the experience we had with iPower. It was…shocking, to be honest.

But enough about that until I can assemble my thoughts into a coherent explanation. I’ve been on vacation for the past couple of days, and yesterday I took advantage of this to go see the new Pixar movie Cars.

If I hadn’t started Otherspace lo these two years ago, I’m sure I’d have approached this movie with a completely different mindset. And if I hadn’t read universally mediocre reviews of the film, ditto.

I expected a nicely-animated but drab movie. I got a beautifully constructed little flick.

Okay, I will agree with most reviewers that the story is straightforward. But so what? Must every story be original or challenging or complex? And I prefer my stories to be thought-provoking, but when they’re not…well, you have to look at the rest of the film.

And the rest of the film is a beautiful testament to the automobile, particularly the American car, and everything it means, from supercharged racing to truck stops in the Midwest.

This is a movie about cars. Much of the film is spent in a little town on Route 66, now abandoned thanks to a massive interstate that cuts through the scenery instead of winding through it. What starts as a movie about an arrogant racing car stuck in a rural outpost becomes a film about beauty passed by for convenience.

And what beauty it is. The scenery is flat-out gorgeous. In fact, I wonder if this is Pixar attempting to address a problem they’ve had: the obsolescence of 3D films. 3D animated films look out-of-date much faster than 2D animated films. Look at Toy Story and Toy Story 2, which look quite stiff and bland by modern standards (and compare them with Pocahontas and Tarzan, the 2D films Disney released in the same years; they both look good today). But the visuals in Cars are classically beautiful; these sweeping vistas of the American Midwest that not only took my breath away, but I wanted to hang on my bedroom wall. You know 3D is good when a still frame is worth, um, framing.

And the way they animated the cars was interesting, too. Really the only “cartoony” bits were the windshield eyes and the bumper mouths. When we’re looking at the rear of the Porsche as it cruises down the highway, it looks like a regular car on the road, and it looks fantastic. It feels like a good car commercial.

The characters? Fine. No complaints. I loved the inclusion of the Click & Clack, as well as the ubiquitous John Ratzenberger (who, I’m sorry, will always sound like Cliff to me). The rest of the characters are simple, and again, that’s okay. I was enjoying the underlying messages of the film rather than studying the subtle nuances of the characters.

Okay! We’re moved over to a new server. Finally.

This has been a really incredible week. Work was incredibly demanding—people wanted immediate answers to questions, and several pieces of software and hardware decided to stop working. Just before vacation. I left work with a massive headache on Tuesday, just from the strain.

But now I’m on vacation. I’m not going anywhere; I’m just staying at home, taking care of home business. Cleaning out old files, taking inventory of things that need to be done around the house; that sort of thing. Nothing too fun, though it will be very nice to have some breathing room within which to do all this stuff.

And I can, on a whim, take a cup of tea out into the garden, and sip it as I watch the birds at the feeders. Bliss.