“Spirituality is not about solving your problems.”

– scribbled on a note card during church last Sunday

Warning: Musings about animation work follow.

I stumbled on a DVD at Toys ‘R’ Us last week: Disney Christmas collection. For US $10, it has Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Pluto’s Christmas Tree (the one with Chip and Dale), and Small One. I’d never heard of that last.

So I popped it in, and watched ‘em. Small One had a long intro, and then the final two credits came up and I snapped to attention:

Produced by Ron Miller

Written and Directed by Don Bluth

Ron co-directed The Great Mouse Detective and The Little Mermaid, and of course Don Bluth is Don Bluth, so I immediately perked up.

It’s an overtly Christian story, in which a boy in ancient Palestine tries to sell his favorite, sweet donkey, and nobody will buy it. He eventually seells it to Joseph and Mary, as Joseph’s the only one who sees the use of a calm, sweet donkey.

It’s a fine little concept, aimed at a half-hour TV slot. The early sequences of the boy and the donkey playing and working demonstrate their relationship beautifully. The character animation is flawless.

But this is directed by Don Bluth, so we have two full-length musical numbers in a half-hour film. The first occurs just after the boy’s father breaks the news that the donkey, Small One, must be sold. The boy (who looks exactly like Mowgli) then sings a sweet, quiet song about how much he loves Small One, despite the four minutes of previous animation demonstrating how much he loves Small One. After half a minute, I fast-forwarded through the song.

The boy then goes to the city, where a guard (differently designed and animated; looked more like a Fleischer character) directs him to a nearby shop. The animation becomes creepy and foreboding in the way that late 70′s/early 80′s animation could be (think The Secret of NIMH or The Rescuers). Turns out this is the shop of a tanner. The sequence plays a bit longer than necessary, but it’s effective.

The boy and donkey run into the street, where we hit our next musical number: the three wise men, as merchants, singing about how much they love to buy and sell things. They toss around coins, they dance, they squash and stretch in a classic Don Bluth way, and they have nothing to do with the story. The boy just watches this in shock and wonder, then moves on.

Perhaps Bluth was trying to convey the emptiness of commerce for commerce’s sake. But he does this again in the next sequence, where the boy tries to get Small One into a market, only to discover it’s a high-end Horse Market. The auctioneer and crowd mock Small One, looking only at his outward attributes and not his personality.

It works. It overstates its point a bit, but it’s an important point.

Then the boy, in despair, wanders to a quiet area, where Joseph steps up to him and asks if this donkey’s for sale. The boy sells Small One, we get a slightly tearful but upbeat farewell, and…

…we fade to a long shot of Mary and Joseph, with Mary riding Small One, then cut to a stable with a star shining down on it. The end. Oddly abrupt. We get nothing more about the boy.

It’s a shame. If you cut out the musical numbers and tightened up the other sequences, Small One would be a great little film. As it stands, it wears out its welcome.

A shame. Especially considering how much more work it took to make this worse than a shorter version.

Perhaps this is a good example of Antoine De Saint-Exupery’s dictum, “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Observe: Charles. An atheist. A realist. If he doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t believe it. He’ll give confusing, complicated concepts the benefit of the doubt—dark matter, quarks—but if something doesn’t make sense to him, he rejects it.

If he hears about samurai sacrificing themselves for their lord, believing this will improve their karma in their next lives, he shakes his head and says, “How stupid.”

If he hears of a young man attaining enlightenment while fasting and meditating under a tree in India, then quickly gaining thousands of followers, he snorts and calls it “A mystic preying on weak minds.”

Charles, the world is much bigger and more complex than you can possibly comprehend. And you are poor for your so-called reality.

You are a prisoner in a dungeon, insisting that nothing exists outside of your cell.

May the rest of us avoid this trap.

(And, no, I’m not talking about Darwin.)

Maybe I’ve been consuming too many Japanese works lately, but I’ve been thinking about the importance of discipline.

I mean little daily disciplines. Exercise. Getting to bed on time. “Little” things.

They don’t even really add up over time, the way that other habits can. Practice karate every day, and you’ll build an amazing set of skills. Get to bed on time, and your life will drift out of alignment in subtle ways. You’ll find yourself more irritable, more tense. But it’s not obvious.

I wonder how important those little daily disciplines are. We all stay up late every so often, but what’s too often?

I’m thinking perhaps I should be much more devoted to those disciplines than I am. Perhaps we all should be.

Maybe I’ve been consuming too many Japanese works lately, but I’ve been thinking about the importance of discipline.

I mean little daily disciplines. Exercise. Getting to bed on time. “Little” things.

They don’t even really add up over time, the way that other habits can. Practice karate every day, and you’ll build an amazing set of skills. Don’t get to bed on time, and your life will drift out of alignment in subtle ways. You’ll find yourself more irritable, more tense. But it’s not obvious.

I wonder how important those little daily disciplines are. We all stay up late every so often, but what’s too often?

I’m thinking perhaps I should be much more devoted to those disciplines than I am. Perhaps we all should be.

Saw Beowulf today, which was a disappointment and a joy. Joyous to see well-animated fantasy action that managed to stay fairly true to the original story. Disappointing because the story is modernized in ways that annoy me. All the problems in the film are caused by men giving in to their horniness, contrasted with the principle woman, a long-suffering virgin.

It certainly should have been “R” rated. Its status as an “animated film” exempted it, but that shouldn’t matter. The material in this film is “R” rated.

This may be the movie that opens up the American market for more mature animated films.

I keep hearing about Twitter, so I decided to try it out. You send one-liners to the service, telling it what you’re up to. You can see other people on there, and watch their updates, which I gather is the real power of the site — seeing exactly who’s doing what, in quasi-realtime.

So I’m on Twitter now. Brennen‘s the only friend I can find on there; any of you using it?

So, anyone of you use del.icio.us? I’ve finally gotten around to setting up my own del.icio.us page, so if anyone’s interested, link me or connect me or whatever it is you do on this site.

(I’m also on Facebook, if you’re interested, as BrentNewhall.)

A late night, and I stumble upon a blog of hundred-year-old photos, all in startling detail. More candid than I’m used to seeing. These look like real people. People chuckle at private jokes; kids crack grins.

And they all worked sixteen hours a day.

An interesting point made on the “This Week in Tech” podcast: A billion people in India and China will be joining the internet for the first time in the next few years. And their first exposure to the internet will be on celphones, not desktops or laptops.

Imagine the money to be made by celphone manufacturers, content providers, and entertainers.

I wonder how hard Hindi is to learn….