Disney, My Other Love - Tangled Review

  First off, I lost the next book in the Corellian series! All this AL/NY back and forth I finally lost it. It was bound to happen I guess… I know I didn’t leave it anywhere so it’s not lost for good… just very misplaced :-P

  I am quite annoyed with this and hopefully it will show up sooner than later but till then I got a hold of some movies I have never seen so here we go…

  If you didn’t already know I grew up with Disney and it probably played a huge role in my love for acting and singing, but anyway… I stopped watching Disney movies after The Lion King so I never saw Pocahontas and so on… I have seen some of Hercules which was awful. After around 96 Disney just went downhill. They brought in the Pixar stuff; again as I keep saying I hate computer animation! I remained a huge fan of the “Golden Era” (The Little Mermaid – The Lion King) but had no interest in Disney’s new work.

 A few years ago Disney brought out a line based solely on the “Disney Princesses”. I’m like, WHY did you not have this when I was a kid?!?! I bet you can guess I have bought a few Disney Princess things ;-)

 I also like to pin pics of Disney art on Pinterest. I started noticing new “Princesses” joining the club, haha, even Leia when the news was announced that Disney was buying Star Wars! I love that! Other new princesses who have joined the club in the last couple of years have been Tiana, Rapunzel, and some red headed Irish girl I’m not sure of her name… It finally accrued to me to maybe watch the new ones and see what Disney is up to lately…

I picked Tangled. (2010)

  I was quite taken by the animation! Some of it was quite beautiful… to be computer generated. Disney has improved computer animation to the point of near watchable. The thing that bugged me the most was there was such detail and realism that I found myself staring at not only Rapunzel’s hair but the rest of the character’s too! It was fascinating to a fault. I would have preferred to be looking at their faces rather than their hair but it was so real looking I was in awe of it!

  For once a Disney Princess looked her age or maybe younger then. I did not like the way she was portrayed though. The modern teenage slang did not merge well with the surroundings. I also felt like characters weren’t originals but bad knockoffs from here and there. Flynn clearly was fashioned after Errol Flynn. For a while there I was really thinking Rapunzel was Taylor Swift! The wicked mother, Bernadette Peters? Is this just me here?

Well, looks I'm not alone here...

  Otherwise the story was cute, not partially clever, but cute. Could not compare to the grand movies of the 90’s but it wasn’t bad. What was bad was the music. I know they sang a couple of songs but not one that would stick in your head and come close to finding yourself walking around singing. The movie would have been just as good without them. If I recall correctly, Disney didn’t use to put songs in unless it moved the story forward… obviously they have abanded this rule. These little ditties where pointless and didn’t even have a catchy tune!



Concept Art

  As with most Disney films it’s a little different than the classic tale. Personally I don’t think they improved it any. It’s a good little movie but not a master piece unless you’re looking just at the animation which as I said before is quite lovely for computer animation. One thing about this film that first caught me was the concept art which was done by hand! I came across some on Pinterest and that was when I actually gave this movie a 2^nd thought! They are pretty enough to make you want to frame and hang them alone as art.

  I think I see Disney could make a comeback! They just need to find the right recipe again. They found it when they created The Little Mermaid and kept it going through the 90’s. We can only hope Disney can do a repeat one day!

The Clone Wars - Movie and Season 1

 

This is me, and yes, it scares even me!





Actors have such crazy lives! I am currently working at a premier haunted house in Sleepy Hollow NY. As a child I did not even know there WAS a REAL Sleepy Hollow! Before I moved up here my mom was looking at a map of NY and said something about Sleepy Hollow and I was like, there is really a Sleepy Hollow?! I remember the cartoon and could hardly watch it when I was little! I found the ledged of the Headless Horseman a tad bit too scary for me! I’m not a lover of going to haunted houses either even today.  It’s interesting how I’ve come to now to specialize in them! Well, make that haunted houses based on history, the scary side of history… but that’s a long story… but oh the irony!

  Anyway, I spent part of this summer in my home town and returned for the show in Sleepy Hollow which meant a long road trip from AL to NY! I came across a copy of The Clone Wars (Movie and TV show) before I left and put them on my computer to watch if I felt like it. I knew nothing about the whole Clone Wars deal. I knew there was a show and a movie but otherwise that was about it. Oh, I can thank the movie for sparking them to sell lightsabers at Halloween some years back… oh if they had those when I was a kid… wait, what am I talking about, it’s fun to play with now! ;-D Better late than never?

 On the road I watched Episode 1 & 2 cause I haven’t watched them in a long time. I’m wondering if I had ever seen all of The Phantom Menace before because I didn’t remember the beginning. The Clone Wars movie comes in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith so since I like to watch/read things in order I started up the movie not sure what I was about to see.

Not putting The Clone Wars down, but this is kinda funny!

 George Lukas must be having a grand time! Maybe it’s because of my interest in movie making since the age of 8 that I feel for him and his ability to make these movies with all the technological advances made since A New Hope in the 70’s. I grew up with a computer in the home (I remember having a Commodore 64 playing some sort of space ship war game on it) At the age of 8 I thought computers could do a whole lot in film making that they really couldn’t do. I wanted to upload videos and edit them on one, I wonder now what I was thinking because that was not really quite the way it was done back then but it was a good idea and did eventually come to pass… While today I am not a fan of computer animation (I feel there is something in hand drawn work that can’t be done with a computer, (life and emotion one can pick up from the work of a fine artist’s hand) I have to give them credit that computers somewhat worked with this. I didn’t completely hate it! There are some Disney (big Disney fan here)/Pixar movies that I cringe at the sight of because they made a mess out of it by using computer animation! In most cases I pretty much hate computer animation! I’m sure in time computer graphics will improve, it’s not perfected at all, if it ever can be. I do understand why Lukas has gone this route. For a galaxy far far away it gives much freedom! The battle scenes can be done with unlimited imagination! The cost of makeup artists, costumers, and numerous actors are cut along with fighting weather and Murphy’s Law on a film shoot. On the other hand emotion is limited on the human computerized form. It was much like watching the graphics of a video game like Knights of the Old Republic which I really enjoyed and have played all the way through twice. Playing KOTOR did help me except the computerized forms in this, if that make any since… anyway…

  The movie wasn’t too bad. It took Anakin’s story in a direction I wouldn’t have thought. The thought of Anakin teaching another padawan is weird for lack of better word to express it.

 I have all three seasons of the TV show and since I kinda liked the movie and was interested in where they were going with this I started on the first season.

 It seems I found at a young age that Star Wars is a great way to de-stress. I get caught up in it now and then at various times in my life. When they pulled it out of the vault in the early 90’s to show on TV is when it started, then they announced there will be three more made in the late 90’s, then when those three finally make it to TV… This last kick I’m on of Star Wars is combined from a number of things. Partly fueling it is that the internet has made it so much easier to find thing such as the novels and movies. Curl up and chill with Star Wars, nerdy? Don’t get me started… and I mean it!

 I just finished watching the last episode of the first season. Watching the show has basically taken up most of my reading time so I haven’t started on a new novel yet since I finished Shadows of the Empire before I left AL. Due to being busy it took me a while to get my review of it up in case you notice the date I published it was very resent. I actually finished it a while back.

  One thing that got me with this show was the showing of the good side of Anakin Skywalker. This is not the Anakin from Attack of the Clones! At times you wonder if this character is slightly based half on Luke. Ha! I actually like THIS Anakin and see why Padme does! At first it’s hard to see how you could ever get Darth Vader from this …well, hero! As the shows go on they do start the show his weaknesses, mostly centering around Padme.

Yes! Someone else had the same idea!

 Really, you have to wonder if at any time Leonardo Dicaprio was ever considered for Anakin?! Some reason I have ALWAYS thought Anakin should be Leo, I don’t know why… but yeah, going off subject a bit too much here… :~)

 I particularly liked E13 Jedi Crash & E14 Defenders of Peace which deal with Jedi’s struggle with attachment and a village of peaceful village who refuse to fight. And also E17 Blue Shadow Virus & E18 Mystery of a Thousand which are obviously about a deadly virus. The show seems to gain more depth as the shows go on and I hope as I start on the next season it will only get better!