I've developed a bad habit of going to the Los Angeles County Museum's exhibits at the end of their run, and as a result, I haven't bothered to blog about the last few I've seen. However, there's still time for Angelenos to see Dali: Painting & Film, especially with the holidays coming up.

I'm not a big fan of LACMA's blockbuster exhibits when they are organized around a single artist or movement. I much prefer their major exhibits when they present a definite slant or perspective, even if the result is a partial rather than a comprehensive view of the subject.

Dali: Painting & Film focuses on an aspect of Salvador Dali's work, the connection between his paintings and various film endeavors. This framework offers more experienced viewers with a new way to look at familiar Dali pieces as well as previously unseen material. For those who might be seeing Dali in depth for the first time, the exhibit sketched in enough of Dali's biography and other important works to give a sense of his overall development and contribution as an artist.

I knew of some of the connections between Dali and film on entering the exhibit, but hadn't realized Dali was so influenced by film comedy. The exhibit traces Dali's famous melting watch image back to the silent film Safety Last! and documents Dali's attempt to work on a project with the Marx Brothers, who he thought of as surrealists.

The dour side of Dali is present in his more autobiographical paintings, which often revolved around his troubled relationship with his father. The dreamlike imagery of these paintings shows up in Hitchcock's Spellbound, for which Dali designed a dream sequence. You can watch the scene on YouTube here.

For me, the highlight of the exhibit was being able to finally see Destino, the animated short created by Disney based on ideas and storyboards provided by Salvador Dali. Although Dali worked with the Disney Studios on plans for the film during the 1940s, the short did not actually get made until 2003. There have been a few showings of the film in Los Angeles, but Destino has never been widely released and is not available on video or DVD.

The action reminded me of a ballet in the way the main characters' movements expressed emotion and narrative. As we sat together watching the film, it became clear to me and the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend why it was not made earlier: there is a sensuous and even erotic quality to the female lead. It's not titillating so much as it is bold.

As the female character explores her dreamlike surroundings, there is a playful metamorphosis of objects as she interacts with her environment. A bell becomes a ballerina, insects turn into bicyclists. Emotions transform, too, as grotesque imagery suddenly gives way to a sorrowful tableau. The emphasis on transformations surprised me, since so much Disney animation is based on a quasi-realism.

Dali, however, embraced the theme of metamorphosis in his non-moving work, as shown in the painting I've included above. This was one of my favorite works from the exhibit, using sequential doubles to indicate transformation.

There are some segments of Destino on YouTube but they don't give a very good impression of the whole. There are also very few still shots from the film available on the web, due to obviously well-policed copyright restrictions. I hope the short will be released on DVD at some point; in the meantime, grab the chance to see Destino if you have the chance.

I feel sorry for the children who go see the new animated film Ratatouille, for they will not have the pleasure of doing as I did immediately after watching this film--uncorking a bottle of red wine and drinking it with a good meal. As the Cute-Little-Red-Headed-Girlfriend said to me right after the movie, "Who knew an animated film about a rat could make you want to drink so much wine?" But that is the exact effect the movie has, so my advice to you is: see it first, then go eat.

Ratatouille uses the familiar fish-out-of-water formula for its plot, but the example is so extreme--a rat who wants to be a chef--that it avoids seeming overly cute. The rat lead character is mostly Disney adorable, but not completely so. At times, the realism behind the action animation overshadowed the rat's characterization, and all I could see was the image of a lifelike rat scrambling inside a working kitchen. Those moments made my stomach lurch, but they also made the rat's story more poignant, because I had to overcome some of my own repulsion in order to root for him.

Paris serves as the main setting for Ratatouille. Having seen Sicko last week, with its enthusiastic depiction of French life, I wondered if there wasn't some sort of mini-backlash at work here--a swipe at the anti-French sentiment of the Bush administration. My favorite moment in the film was a cartoony nod to Proust's madeleine involving the movie's antagonist, the food critic Anton Ego, shown here. I don't know if a swipe at Republicans was intended, but the many swipes at critics were too heavy-handed to miss.

I enjoyed the film enough that I sat through the credits all the way to the very end, where I saw a peculiar message about the type of animation ("No motion capture") used to make the film. I looked for information on the web and found an interesting write-up and discussion about it on the the Onion's A.V. Club Blog. If you're interested in animation technique, it's well worth reading.

I watched Monster House on DVD with the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend awhile ago, having missed it in the theater. It's up for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year, which is interesting, because I looked up some of the film's reviews before writing this entry and noticed many critics found the quality of the animation lacking.

Some reviewers felt there was an unfinished quality to the animation overall, while others felt uncomfortable with the human characters in particular. One critic felt the human figures fell into the "uncanny valley" of simulation, being neither lifelike enough to seem realistic, nor stylized enough to seem artistic.

I found the animation style distinctive rather than rough. I also thought the 3D techniques were well suited to experiencing an architectural monster; the CGI animation made me feel like I was moving inside the house. It felt like being on a virtual ride inside a video game, and maybe that was the problem for some film reviewers--not everyone appreciates game aesthetics. Of course, I saw the movie on the small screen, so it's possible some flaws in the animation were not as apparent to me.

I was not expecting the movie to be as scary as it turned out to be. Perhaps scary isn't the right word; it was more like a feeling of unease. As the film progressed, I noticed my unease seemed to stem as much from the depiction of femaleness on screen as from the storyline.

I don't want say too much about the female form in this film, because I don't want to spoil the movie for anyone who wishes to see it, and almost anything I divulge on this topic might do that. Nonetheless, what I will say is that this movie reminded me of some of the original Grimm's fairy tales that I have read.

Disney's animated films have often been criticized for sanitizing the folk tales they draw from as source material. Monster House channels some of the gothic brutality found in Grimm's tales; it also dips into the ancient folklore that cautions against the horrors of the female body and the female condition. These qualities make it a powerful--and in an uncanny way--a familiar film. But in the end, uneasy is exactly the way I feel about it.

I'm still watching Drawn Together and enjoying it. I really like its time slot on Comedy Central, right after South Park. That way, if South Park hasn't blown my mind sufficiently (or if the episode has been censored), then I can always depend on Drawn Together to shred whatever is left of my sensibilities.

Somewhere over the course of season two, the Cute Little Red-Haired Girlfriend and I became big fans of the character Wooldoor Sockbat. We were very excited when we found video interviews with the voice talent behind all of the Drawn Together characters online, including the actor who voices our beloved Wooldoor. If you're a fan of the show, these interviews are great fun to watch. I wasn't aware that a single actor provided a voice for two of the main characters.

I know that Disney likes to call animation "the illusion of life," because in their aesthetic the job of the animator is to represent in a series of drawings the sense of liveliness or motion of a living character. But seeing these actors work really made me appreciate more the job of the voice actor in bringing animated drawings to life.

A co-worker sent me a link to this well-done animated short, Store Wars. It's an educational/activist piece about organic foods and it's also very entertaining. You'll meet all your favorite Star Wars characters in the form of fruits and vegetables, like Princess Lettuce, pictured here. The redo of the bar scene from the first movie (and fourth episode) is especially energetic.

This morning I was reading the feed for Tom's Hardware Guide and ran across a link to an interesting article about the making of the Wallace & Gromit film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The article has a number of photos that show real people interacting with the scale model set, which helps one understand the painstaking artistry involved in stop-motion animation.

I initially clicked on the link to the article because I was intrigued to see that Aardman was making use of CGI techniques in their film. Rather than use models exclusively, they chose CGI animation for special effects, especially atmospheric effects and some large-scale motion effects. I saw the movie this past weekend and I did wonder at whether they had blended animation types or if special camera techniques had been developed to produce certain scenes.

I like the gentle humor of Wallace & Gromit, though I understand that it leaves some people bored. As an example of the movie's low-key humor, I noticed the article mentions the film's creators were proud to have made the first vegetarian horror film. It made me chuckle.

The June issue of Curve Magazine included a really large feature story called "Dykes in Comicland" by Lori Selke with illustration by Colleen Coover. There were also several sidebars on web comics, superhero comics, and manga, with contributions by Jocelyn Voo and Diane Anderson-Minshall. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, and although it's possible to order the back issue it appears in, there's an order minimum of two issues.

The artists discussed include Elizabeth Watasin, Roberta Gregory, Dianne DiMassa, Alison Bechdel, Colleen Coover, Paige Braddock, Gina Kamentsky and many others. It really is a generous overview, and comes at the question of women in comics from an angle outside of the usual industry-centric focus.

I've also noticed that After Ellen has been giving more feature space to comics recently. Their most recent feature is An Introduction to Yuri and Manga.

While perusing the most recent issue of Wired, I came across a reference to an interesting exhibit on display at the Japan Society Gallery in New York. The exhibit is called Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, and it explores the roots of the kawaii or cute aesthetic in Japanese art and culture.

According to the gallery site, the name "Little Boy" refers to a nickname given to the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima as well as to the innocence of a traumatized child, an emblem of post-war Japan typified in the oversized eyes of manga and anime characters. I noticed this show is a follow-up to the Superflat exhibit, also curated by Takashi Murakami, that I saw here in Los Angeles several years ago.

I stopped blogging for a little while a few weeks back, and a number of people inquired to make sure I was okay, you know, mentally. My friend Joe, who suspected the presidential election had made me go off the deep end, worried, "I haven't heard from you...you were blogging about turning in to a zombie...I thought, 'Maybe she's taking this really hard.'"

Actually, I was sick, and then I got sick again, only much, much worse. But since you asked--thank you--there is something that has been driving me insane the last few weeks. And now I'm going to tell you about it.

First, if you don't live in Los Angeles, I need to give you a little background information. Because if you live in a small town, for example, a movie opening is not such a big deal. There will be TV ads announcing the movie, yes, but the movie may not even be playing in your town on opening weekend!

Movie openings are not like that here in Los Angeles. Here they are major cultural and news events. Here, it's like the publicity company for every movie being released sets up shop inside your asshole so they can make sure you know their movie is coming--that's how invasive it is. It's constant non-stop hype for weeks prior to the event.

So it is that I began to see this billboard for the forthcoming Fat Albert movie on my daily drive to work some--I don't know--six weeks ago. The location is the entrance to the Fox Studio. For a sense of scale, notice the SUV at the bottom of the picture, and the regular sized billboard advertising Kinsey next to it. I can see it from three long blocks away.

This abomination was burrowing its way into my skull for weeks when, all of a sudden, there were more of them.

One day I left my house and drove onto Venice Blvd., a major cross street near me, and started to turn right: huge Fat Albert billboard. I abruptly decide to turn left: another Fat Albert billboard. Beneath the enormous Fox Studio billboard, there is now also a Fat Albert poster on the side of a bus stop.

It reminds me of the time I visited Moscow before the fall of the Soviet Union, and everywhere I looked there were billboards and posters of Lenin staring back at me. Except here, in the country that won the Cold War, it's Fat Albert that gazes down on us workers like an overstuffed Big Brother.

That is not even the worst of it. What bothered me so much about the Fat Albert billboard was the terrible moment I knew would have to come. And come it did, while I was innocently watching a bit of Entertainment Tonight. I was hoping for a word or two about the Michael Jackson trial, only to be sucked in further with the promise of news about Ellen DeGeneres's recent breakup with her girlfriend in an upcoming segment.

Then the moment I had dreaded came: the appearance of Bill Cosby, offering his sentimental perspective on the movie. Please, please, please let this not be a comeback. A girl can only take so much.

Unless you watched it yourself, I'm not sure you could really comprehend how juvenile, shocking and tasteless Drawn Together was when it debuted last week. But that's okay, because that means you might be motivated to view the new "animated reality show" yourself, and you might enjoy it just as much as I did. That is, if you enjoy things that are juvenile and shocking and tasteless.

And I'm not kidding about the tasteless part. I was somewhat alarmed by Pop Culture Gadabout's take on the racism jokes in Drawn Together. So much so that I wound up discussing his review with the Sister, who also watched the show, to assess what I thought about how these jokes were handled. I viewed them more as a commentary on the egregious racism on display in today's reality shows, rather than as a critique of the character type of the princess. But there are certainly other ways to interpret them, including plenty of room to take offense.

Of course, the hot tub kiss between two women really sold me on the show, although I also appreciated the steady course of in-jokes for animation aficionados. The Sister and I agreed that the defecating pig was our least favorite character in the show, although I will also add that when the country you call home is on the verge of sliding into complete chaos, a good doo-doo joke may be just what the doctor ordered.

Even if you're not a gamer, you might want to check out the opening animation sequence for the Anti-Bush Game. Click "Play" to load the animation, then, since it's interactive, you'll need to click some more to keep it moving.

After you've seen the animated intro, you can take on the Bush baddies yourself by playing online or downloading the game for free. But beware! You will have to fight against the Toxic Cheney Robeast, pictured here in all his fearsome awfulness. I've heard this is what Cheney actually looks like after you've called his daughter a lesbian.

Brother, Can You Spare a Job? is a pro-voting cartoon that draws parallels between the Great Depression and the "Great Recession," a term used by economist Paul Krugman to describe the current U.S. economy. The short cleverly borrows the stylings of '30s cartoons as well as familiar characters and themes from that era.

I went to see Shrek 2 when it came out, but it's taken me awhile to come to grips with the experience. I liked the movie when I saw it, and found it to be just as entertaining and wonderful as all the reviewers said it was, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it didn't seem like animation to me. It seemed like some hybrid format, like a filmed stage musical enacted by digital avatars.

Animation is an unwieldy category, embracing works drawn and modeled, in 2D and 3D, made by hand and computer-generated. I think because the rise of computer animation happened slowly, and with varying results, it was easy to lump it in with other types of animation as if it were an extension of these older forms. Also, because computer animation techniques displaced the labor of classical animators, the idea that computer animation is a substitute for classical animation was reinforced there as well.

What Shrek 2 makes me wonder is whether computer-generated animation is becoming another genre altogether, distinct from what has been called "animation" in the past? I also wonder if computer-generated animation contains the seeds of a future genre--perhaps a more successful attempt at what is meant to be captured in "interactive movies" or online multiplayer games.

I was thrilled to read on Franklin's web site that the forthcoming DVD collection of Warner Bros. cartoons will include "What's Opera Doc?" The Cute Little Red-Haired Girlfriend got me the last collection for Xmas and I was surprised to see this classic wasn't included. I can't wait to hear Elmer Fudd croon, "oh, Bwunhilde!" to Bugs Bunny.

I went to see the Triplets of Belleville a few weeks ago with the Cute Little Red-Haired Girlfriend and my friend Joe. Just before the Oscars each year, the girlfriend and I go on a film feeding frenzy trying to see as many nominated films as possible. We never quite hit all of them, but this year, because of the early telecast, we really fell short.

There were only three nominations in the animation category this year, and we managed to see just two of them: Finding Nemo and The Triplets of Belleville. I enjoyed them both and thought they made an interesting contrast in animation styles. While Nemo is a polished example of Disney storytelling, next to Triplets it seems formulaic and rather conventional. Although I am a huge fan of Disney animation, a movie like Triplets shows what has been lost through Disney's dominance in the field, at least in the U.S.

Where Nemo is heartwarming and clever, Triplets is, well, trippy. The story is told for the most part without dialogue, yet its narrative manages to be much more specific than Nemo. We know more about the internal lives of triplets characters, in part due to the film's evocative story-telling methods. For example, portions of the Triplets story are told through the dreams of a dog that belongs to the lead characters, which provides the viewer with a completely different, yet intimate perspective on the action.

Many viewers rightly praised Nemo for its beauty and technical achievement. The ocean provides a fantastic setting for dramatic colors and textures. I was a bit jaded going into Nemo, however, because I have for some time suspected that I may suffer from Animated Liquids Fatigue. This condition affects mainly animation fans who have seen one too many gratuitous scenes of animated water (e.g., Pocahontas), lava (e.g., Shrek) or other liquid, inserted into a film primarily to show off and say, "Hey! Look how realistic-looking this liquid is!" Wow. Just like water. How much did I pay for this ticket?

The ocean sequence in Triplets, on the other hand, lasts only long enough to make its story point: we are crossing water now. And it does so artfully, relying not on realism but on more suggestive, painterly effects. The animated transformations in Triplets are intended to make us marvel and to stretch the imagination, rather than to smoothly give the illusion of life. In this sense, I think the film embodies more of the spirit of animation, and is a better exemplar of the art form, than more technologically sophisticated endeavors.

I loved many of the characters in Nemo (a lesbian fish!), including the villainous, fish-eating sharks. The fish-eating Triplets, on the other hand, are not sentimentalized--they remain spooky and mysterious even in close quarters. None of the characters in Triplets are exactly lovable, though they are memorable. I expect the club-footed, bespectacled grandmother in Triplets will live long in my memory even though her character is not destined to become a stuffed toy in the Disney store.

As in the Wallace & Gromit series, there is a strange Rube Goldberg-like invention at the center of the story. At one point, the Triplets form a slapdash band, making music from household objects instead of instruments. Even the jazzy Triplets theme song, which was also nominated for an Oscar, is filled with verbal contortions. It is this unexpected action, of things turning into other things, that makes the film so magical.