Legend Of The Guardians

Lets get this out of the way. I have a real soft spot for Zack Snyder. The things that everyone finds so annoying about him are exactly the things I find endearing about him. The fact that he shoots like Ridley Scott, and wants to be John Carpenter. The fact that he’s seemingly making films based off of the doodles in his eigth grade notebook. His perma magic hour sheen. That normal then slow mo technique that pisses everyone off so much. The fact that he seems to think that subtlety is a rare fish found only in the Indian Ocean. The EVERYTHING MUST BE EPIC ALL THE TIME aesthetic.

I pretty much like all those qualities, right across the board.

Lets face it, the product of those working within the studio system has become more and more homogenized. And within that restrictive frame work Snyder has been able to carve a real creative identity for himself. Not just the look, but with films focused around the power and importance of storytelling, corrupt bureaucratic authority and the definitions of heroism. He's a definite auteur. That alone should earn him more consideration then he gets. You might not like what he’s doing, but he is unquestionably the muscle behind his own films.

Legend Of The Guardians, is exactly what you think an animated film about warrior owls directed by Zack Snyder would be. It’s both sillyly majestic and majestically silly. It’s the kind of movie I would blame exactly no one for not liking, but which I couldn’t help but like an awful lot.

Tonally the closest I think it comes to is the ultimate Don Bluth film Bluth never made. Alternating between animation that is truly awe inspiring, and scenes that are unabashedly some goofy shit. A film that is unabashedly a children’s film in a way I didn’t quite expect, but contains owl on owl violence so lovingly detailed that it actually earns the hoary old criticism of being pornographic. Helen Mirren voices an evil owl.

The story follows Soren, a young owl who along with his brother is pressed into service, by an evil gang of slaver owls. Escaping with an unusually flat secondary cast (The exception being his girl Friday Gelfie, who is ten pounds of adorable in a one pound bag. A sentence I didn’t expect to write about an animated owl when I woke up this morning) they seek a clan of warrior owls out of legend. And yeah, it’s all just about as goofy as it sounds. But Snyder never winks. Never comes close. I don’t think he has a winking bone in his body. It's his saving grace, his secret weapon and Achilles heel all in one. It’s the reason he can make something as melodramatic and broad as 300 really work. And also the reason why, though it’s intentions were noble and sections of it brilliant, Watchman did not. He lack’s Moore’s dark irony, but has Miller’s true believerism. Indeed Snyder is perhaps the most deeply unironic filmmaker working today, and I for one find it his most endearing quality and why I feel comfortable going to the mat for him as more then a journeyman hired gun.

It’s visually stunning. Narratively sweeping. And thematically simple. It’s a Zack Snyder film. You dig em or you don’t.

The Secret Of Kells

(Myself while watching The Secret Of Kells)

Really I don’t have much more to say then that.

The Secret Of Kells is pretty freaking mind blowing.

A beautiful, painstaking film, that manages to take most of the things I love, Catholic theology, pagan mythology, 2D animation, Irish History, and blend them into a finished product so beautiful that it actually makes my eyes hurt.

The Book Of Kells, for those who don’t know. Is a Copy of the New Testament that is frankly one of the greatest things western civilization has ever produced. A work of such painstaking detail and beauty that it boggles the mind. You have to remember that this was when the practice of “writing shit down” was itself, considered a novelty. The Secret Of Kells, acts as a kind of secret origin for that work. Telling the story of a young monk, Brendan, living in Ireland during the time of the Viking raids and his troubled apprenticeship to the holder ot the book. As the Vikings draw nearer, the film follow’s Brendan out into the woods as he gathers materials for the books making. And encounters many of the spirits of the pagan spirits of the woods, both good and evil.

The Secret Of Kells is one of those films that’s damn near impossible to write about, because to appreciate its technique you just have to see it. Just as an example; I’ve heard many compare this to the work of Gendy Tartakovsky. There are some concepts like the animalistic Vikings that are very much in this school. So on a very superficial level I can see how you’d think that.





But in motion that’s not what the film looks like at all. Its one of those blessed rare cases where the style lends the film substance. Incorporating the ruthlessly two dimensional style and brutal lack of perspective of pre Renaissance Medieval art in a way that looks like something that I can confidently say, you’ve never seen before. It's representational art in only the most rudimentary sense, Really its iconography and its beautiful.

It’s the sort of thing that could ONLY be done in 2D animation. As much as I love Pixar, there’s a certain spontaneity and life that can only come from 2D animation. And the eagerness with which people are discarding it saddens me. Even something like Princess And The Frog is at its heart a nostalgia piece. Its behind glass atop a Lucite block. The Secret Of Kells lives and breaths.

To call the film beautiful is not enough. Every corner of every frame is filled with the sort of detail and grace that makes a veteran animation fan weep.

Calling the film merely hypnotic would be doing it a disservice. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a completely beautiful visceral experience that as an animation fan made my brain go “SQUUUUUEEEEE” the whole way through. But its much more then that. It’s a startlingly weighty meditation on Cultural Heritage and Responsibility. It’s a film that provides no easy answers. No cut and dry villains, no morals. The Book Of Kells is content to be what it is, a beautiful, utterly stunning experience.