Ntuple Indemnity

As some readers may have noticed – and whoever they are, I admire their persistence in providing return traffic in the face of abject futility, however motivated by ennui it may be – this alleged weblog has been less than rife with recent activity of late. As pleasurable as it is to thumb my virtual nose at virtual people in this besotted cyber-realm with only words as my weapon, I must admit it has not in contemporaneous times been my first and foremost love.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike is not my first and foremost love either, but it is most of what I have been galvanizing to fill the few extant temporal vacuums that betray the character of the astute hobbyist. It is, in short, probably the most enthralling video game I’ve played on any system this calendar year – the dream strategy title for those who prefer patient and methodical turn-based analysis to the rapid improvisation of an RTS, but can spare neither the time or the commitment to get mired in late-game micromanagement. For a crude associative description: think of it as a Sid Meier game with everything removed except combat and cold, hard cash. As a result it moves a lot faster, but has just enough depth to open the possibility of dragging out a battle to be settled by attrition – and you will sit through the ordeal without realizing how many hours are going by outside your soap bubble of virtual warfare.

In a way, the various incarnations of Advance Wars – and this one in particular, given the tangible manipulation of pieces offered by its supplementary touchscreen control scheme – mark the natural evolution of the tabletop board game, with all the conveniences of the digital age as their selected adaptations: interchangeable and editable board layouts, automated calculations in the place of twenty-sided dice, and artificial intelligence robust enough to provide competent opposition when there exist no other DS owners within a radius of thirty feet. I almost wish Dual Strike were released with support for Nintendo’s global Wi-Fi network to launch in November, but it already provides a bountiful playing experience as it is; besides, the scale of multiplayer matchups it makes possible have a tendency to result in disconnections and dead batteries.

And now for something completely different. As you may know, Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary this summer after a year of renovations and refurbishments – and boy, was it worth it. I’ve had the good fortune of visiting the resort on numerous occasions, and it’s never looked so good. The original rides are now decorated with gold-plated anniversary cars (or horses, or teacups, or whatever applies). There’s a museum of Disneyland memorabilia with such exhibits as blueprints and schematic artwork, every variety of admission ticket from every era, and a cheesy but insightful doc short hosted by Steve Martin and Donald Duck.

Classic Disney scenes are on display throughout the park in the form of photo collages assembled from the visages of animators, staffers and guests, each of them consisting of two to ten thousand images. As you enter Main Street, there is a grandiose two-level monochrome collage where these photographs congeal into the faces of the men and women who were with Uncle Walt’s empire when it began, which in turn compose a still from “Steamboat Willie”. I’ve found an online archive of these exhibits, and the one I just spoke of is here, but a mere JPEG does not capture the sheer ambition of the monument. Nor does a photograph show you that the Haunted Mansion collage glows in the dark. There are wonders to behold at this happy place, and this is just one of them. There are others.

The fireworks, for instance. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to pyrotechnics that it’s easy to be disenchanted at how fireworks, while still magnificent once you delve into the constructed choreography of a given display, all look and feel the same. Sure, the last decade or so have brought us the odd laser projection every so often, but we are fundamentally looking at the same old centrifugal fractal patterns set to Tchaikovsky, right?

Well, since 17 July, Disneyland has restored genuine spectacle to the ancient art of synchronized rocketry. The proverbial magic is back. Sparks fly over the repainted Sleeping Beauty Castle to the tune of “When You Wish Upon a Star” like the opening titles of a feature film, but live and right in front of you. Tinker Bell zips around the parapets. And it’s all narrated by Mary Poppins – that is to say, Julie Andrews.

Then the display becomes a sort of interpretive dance of light and sound, a whirlwind tour of Disneyland attractions representing each of its sectors (though “It’s A Small World” is noticeably absent, and the New Orleans sector is underscored by Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” played, not surprisingly, too fast). There’s a broadside battle waged right over the heads of the audience for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, and if you sit close enough you can see the Jolly Roger aglow on the Matterhorn’s peak like a distant Bat-Signal. “Star Tours” has laser cannons and explosions of green flame that light up the night set to John Williams’ end credits to Episode IV. The Frontierland shooting gallery features ducks with targets on them projected on the castle itself, which move about and seemingly get shot down one by one. And so on.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Chances are you haven’t either, unless you paid the House that Walt Built a visit of your own in the last seven or eight weeks.

If you plan to visit Disneyland anytime in the near future, or if you’ve never been there – make it so and make it soon. The “Happiest Homecoming on Earth” celebration is supposed to last until September 2006, according to the five-part golden anniversary retrospective that was posted at Jim Hill Media the same week I was in Anaheim, though by next summer’s end the top-billed novelty may have tapered off somewhat.

You really do have to see those fireworks show. My description does it about as much justice as a Klingon court-martial.

I haven’t devoted any of my recent blog-writing to what’s going on in wide-release cinema, in spite of having seen a passable, if less-than-usual quantity of major films of the ones that hit theatres between May and August, that quantity being eleven and a half. (The English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle is the half.) I attribute this to two causes. The first is that July and the better (or in this case, worse) part of August were for all intents and purposes dead, and all rumours of a box-office slump are for once both patently true and justified. The second is that the big films of May and June that were any good, a surprising number of them, turned out to be phenomenal; simply praising these achievements is a monotonous and redundant activity, and critiquing them intelligently takes too long.

Perhaps I will at some point offer a synoptic assessment that gathers and dispenses with the lot, but not today. For now, just go see the most satisfying film of the past few weeks, and certainly one of the best of the year. It’s called The Constant Gardener and it stars Lord Voldemort.

As of today, the Save Disney experiment is not only merely dead – it’s really most sincerely dead. In a way it’s been over since Stanley Gold and Roy Disney made amends with the House that Walt Built a month ago, if you can really call it a mutual armistice and not a conditional surrender once you examine the details of the agreement, as Jim Hill does in this article. It’s a raw deal for Roy and Stanley, and they’d be even worse off did Roy not bear the good fortune of the Disney name.

For my part, as a Save Disney wellwisher from the beginning, I’m glad to see that at the time of this writing the website is being left online, if no longer updated. Since the movement started to wane last year after falling just a few percentage points short of ousting Eisner (coupled with his surprise resignation not long after), a lot of the articles have taken on a more positive spin, reminiscing about the Disney legacy and leveraging it as a more oblique criticism of what the Eisner regime carelessly discarded.

So what are we going to see under Bob Iger now that this very public check and balance against the Disney boardroom is out of the picture? I expect some positive change, but I think a lot of it will be forced by market circumstances.

Now, I don’t know or care much about the Disneylands and licensing mania – I’m all about the films. So let’s take a look at the problems Disney needs to address from the perspective of an avid motion picture consumer.

First of all, Disney’s DVD strategy is not working, unless it was specifically designed to irk the serious collector. As far as availability goes, it’s atrocious. Sure, there have been some good moves, like finally restoring Song of the South for next year, but most of the classic Disney library is under wraps and schedule for one-a-year Platinum Edition releases that are promptly pulled off the shelf to make room for the next one. You can imagine the consternation when I lost my treasured two-disc Beauty and the Beast last year only to discover that it had been out of print since early 2003. I did eventually hunt down another copy, but life need not be so difficult.

I’m a latecomer as far as Disney fans go, in spite of being a child in the midst of the studio’s Renaissance of the early nineties, smack in the middle of their target demographic. I never initially took to The Little Mermaid and especially not Aladdin, which I thought mistook caricature for archetype on far too many an occasion (or however it is a seven-year-old would phrase an equivalent critique). But that’s what happens when you grow up exposed to a universe ruled by Don Bluth and his Three Laws: 1) There are no cats in America. 2) Three-horns never play with long-necks. 3) All dogs go to heaven (corollary: goats go to hell).

In retrospect, I missed out – hence the appeal of going back and realizing that it was in this era that Walt Disney Feature Animation was at the top of its game, the best it had been since its namesake passed away. Certainly the threepeat of Mermaid, Beauty and Aladdin represented some of the very best direct musical writing for film in decades, and I wonder if Disney ever truly realized what a treasure they had in Ashman and Menken. I’d love to go back and watch all the Disney features again, all forty-four of them from Snow White to Home on the Range, because I know but a third of them and only comfortably remember a quarter. But they’re making it very, very difficult.

Kids these days don’t even have a Disney to grow up on. They can’t even see The Little Mermaid on anything but shoddy full-frame VHS, because it’s not scheduled for release on pristine DVD until 2008. There was a brief DVD edition printed around Christmas 1999, but it was pulled two months later.

Disney has the Platinum Edition line charted out all the way to 2010. Something’s wrong with this picture, especially when you consider that the first wave of DVD-killer formats arrives less than a year from now, with Sony pushing the Blu-ray high-definition standard in the PlayStation 3. Which means that if Disney switches gears, and comes to see DVD as a stepping-stone format, a good chunk of their films will never make it to the medium. While I think studios are putting the high-definition cart way before the horse and punting it down the hill, Disney is missing boats. I know restoration work takes a lot of time and effort, but this is ridiculous.

Next grievance: Pixar sequels. I don’t side with Disney’s interests here. I think the most important bargaining term in any talks with Pixar – and I think Steve Jobs is on the same wavelength here – is that Pixar acquires all sequel rights to their film library.

Disney would be crazy, batty, nuttier than Chip ‘n Dale to make that concession. But speaking as a moviegoer, it’s a non-negotiable deal-breaker. Because right now, I’m very concerned about what Disney thinks it’s up to with Toy Story 3. For a while now, the persistent rumour has been that this is all a big power play to bring Jobs back to the bargaining table, but with increasingly tangible evidence that this is moving ahead – promotional posters, pre-production art, testimonials from excited animators working on it – read this article, also by Jim Hill, for details – I think they’re serious.

The concept they have for a third story – the Buzz Lightyear product line being recalled to Taiwan – isn’t in itself a bad one. And I don’t think that the people working on projects like these ever actively seek to make anything less than a good movie, though I think the record shows that there are limitations to working on a board-driven franchise-milker, especially in recent years when Disney has been shunting projects like Return to Neverland out of direct-to-video and into theatres. But I have a problem with a Toy Story 3 without Pixar involvement the same way I’d have a problem with someone acquiring the rights to Star Wars and doing something ridiculous like making Episodes VII, VIII and IX. It doesn’t ease my mind one bit that the man with directing credit, Bradley Raymond, comes straight from the DTV sequel production line.

I’m going to be very clear about this: I want Pixar to intercept this project before it gets too far along. Whether it cancels it or reworks it into something that tastes of the true hopping-lamp vintage is their decision. If the Pixar properties fall back into their own hands, I would sleep better at night. I have a lot more confidence in the discretion they apply in terms of when sequels are necessary and when they aren’t. You don’t have the board-level micromanagement that Disney did under Eisner and may yet have under Iger, and the folks actually working on the movies have a more direct hand in the decision-making process.

On traditional animation (i.e. not all-CG): I think Iger’s going to be forced back into approving it sooner or later, and I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if the first project greenlit to follow Rapunzel Unbraided is not a CG production. The overcrowded CG market is beginning to show some exhaustion, and it just isn’t smart business for Disney to make their films look and feel like everybody else’s.

The wildcard at this point is what kind of box-office reception Chicken Little gets when it opens 4 November. For my part, my opening-night commitment that weekend is V For Vendetta, even though I don’t have total confidence in that film either. But staying on topic: if Chicken Little is anything less than a roaring success – that is, if it ends up under the $200M mark, which even Madagascar is struggling to hit in spite of opening in DreamWorks’ treasured late May slot – Disney has something to worry about.

But as much as I want them to awaken to the fact that traditional animation is still very viable given the right coordination of good ideas and marketing support, both geared towards an interest in making, you know, classics. I’m not saying that I want Chicken Little to fail; in fact, I hope there’s a lot more to it than the hyperactive craziness that has been sold in the trailers so far, the kind of attempts at pop appeal that have hampered many a Disney film in the past ten years because at the screenplay level there isn’t a delicate boundary between the amusing and the outright silly. Let’s remember these are just the trailers, and even Pixar’s trailers have gone for the same approach at times, which might be why the movies pack such a wallop when they reveal themselves to be fugal exercises in unfettered genius.

Regardless of whether or not Chicken Little tanks as either a moneymaker or as a movie worth watching at all, we still have a lot to look forward to. I’m positively stoked about American Dog (and you would be too after seeing some of the shots from SIGGRAPH), curious about A Day With Wilbur Robinson and delighted to hear that Rapunzel Unbraided is going to have a completely different visual style modeled after oil-on-canvas, though I hope it doesn’t try too hard to be all hip and Shrek-like. See, I don’t mind one bit that Disney’s producing CG features, as long as they try to be something different, and not play catch-up with other studios who have already carved out certain stylistic territories for themselves.

I want to see Disney go back to being a leader, not a follower. I want to see these movies succeed, but I don’t want their success to send Iger the message that ditching traditional animation was in any way the right decision. It wasn’t.

A few days ago, Jim Hill published a piece stirring up some rumblings of Disney reassessing traditional animation. Apparently, the box-office underperformance of the last few all-CG smash-hits-to-be from various studios is getting the Mouse House in a sweat – which is without question a good thing, because it’s about time someone realized that the post-Lion King fall of 2D and rise of CG had very little to do with one medium supplanting another, and more to do with the quality of the stories involved. (Then the diverging momenta were only kept on course by marketing practices, like Warner’s appalling mismarketing of traditional animation’s last stand, The Iron Giant.)

The bottom line is that you can’t drive a film with technology alone, and even mainstream audiences are beginning to realize it. Pixar continues to churn out hit after hit because their projects are propelled by creative artists, particularly those with a 2D background (as was the case with Brad Bird’s core team in The Incredibles), who understand that their technique is a means of signification and not an end. The best films have a vision that challenges and steers the market; they don’t come about because somebody is trying to game the market and predict where the money lies. Boardroom decisions and filmmaking make for an unhappy partnership. It says something that the animated films I am most interested in seeing this year, aside from the one I’m going to mention in a paragraph’s time, are both done in Claymation.

Is anybody of those in my readership well versed in children’s and young adult fiction familiar with the novels of Diana Wynne Jones? One of them, Howl’s Moving Castle, was the subject of a recent Hayao Miyazaki film that is being brought over to North America in June. Word is that it will see both a subtitled and dubbed release, which is welcome news. I passed on Spirited Away in theatres because of the lack of a subtitled release, which was a painful waiting game for one of the very best movies I’ve seen this decade.

I hear that dubbed Miyazaki releases are not half bad, given how John Lasseter supervised the one for Spirited Away and Pete Docter is doing the same for Howl’s Moving Castle; as directors of stellar animated films themselves who revere the work of Studio Ghibli, I’m sure they have no tolerance for subpar quality. Still, I avoid watching dubs whenever possible as a matter of principle.

Could you imagine watching a film like Downfall with the voices dubbed over? (That’s a hint to watch Downfall, by the way – it’s magnificent.) So much of Bruno Ganz’s outstandingly, terrifyingly mad performance as Adolf Hitler is how his voice distorts and projects the coarse, glottal utterances of the German language. It’s irreplaceable, and one instance of many where that is the case.

Now, my opposition is not to the idea of recording voices off the set and layering them over pre-existing footage – that would be silly, since so much film dialogue is done in ADR. Aunt Beru and Darth Vader had separate voice actors in Star Wars, as did most of the supporting Italian cast in just about every Sergio Leone spaghetti Western. Almost all musicals have separate vocal tracks, sometimes with different actors entirely – Natalie Wood did not sing her part in West Side Story, nor did Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady or Minnie Driver in The Phantom of the Opera.

But the use of language in those films preserves a sense of internal consistency; you couldn’t have The Good, the Bad the Ugly with both English and Italian, and subtitles translating the Italian. You can have entire foreign films in their original language instead of recording translated lines with out-of-character unsynchronized voices. Dubbing dumbs down the work and dilutes it. Given how that possibility is available, why throw it away? I do not find that animation merits an exception just because the mouth movements are abstracted and synchronization is less of an issue.

Film is thankfully returning to equilibrium after the growing pains of a new technology fetish, and it is marked by a revaluation of aesthetic integrity. Unfortunately, video games are not quite there yet, and most of the recent history of video gaming is a history of technology fetishism and oneupmanship. Of the major players, Nintendo is the only one actively resisting the trend, which is one of many reasons they receive my continued support. I do not simply refer to experimental interfaces like blowing clouds away on the Nintendo DS or controlling Donkey Kong with a pair of bongo drums, but to their first-party software’s refusal to play ball with the trend towards photorealism.

Bringing it back to the subtitling issue, some criticize Nintendo for its continued resistance to voice acting, aside from a few abortive stabs at it like the horrid opening cutscene to Super Mario Sunshine. There is a major fallacy in the logic of some of those who think adopting voice acting is inherently immersive, and that is the assumption that the delivery of a story by way of text boxes is a relic of the technical limitations of an age gone by. It isn’t.

If you look at a recent game like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a very text-heavy title, the use of text boxes in speech bubbles was an integral part of the storybook aesthetic. It was used to simulate ambient background speech, rapid-fire speech you can hardly pick up, angry speech in shaky bold letters, and a myriad of other effects. Saying that video games are inherently better off with voices is like saying that just because comic books can come with bundled audio tracks, they should abandon their distinct use of stylized onomatopoeic lettering and panel-to-panel dialogue balloon trickery.

There have been games with impressive voice acting of cinematic quality that one would not want to do without – the Tim Schafer classic Grim Fandango comes to mind, as do the recent Knights of the Old Republic titles. They are not by themselves a valid argument that all games should necessarily be cinematic, as attested to by the success of video game titles that opt for harnessing current-generation technology and techniques such as cel-shading to move towards cartoon visuals – Paper Mario being one, The Wind Waker and Viewtiful Joe being others of note. If we can accept that visuals need not move towards realism, we can accept that dialogue-by-text is here to stay.

Which begs the question of oddities like the next Zelda game, which clearly has graphics that return to the pseudo-real and look really good in doing so, but is reportedly still avoiding voice acting. This decision has come under fire from the usual suspects like Matt Casamassina of IGN, who says, “This new game promises to be so epic on so many levels. It’s a shame to see Nintendo skimping on production values where voice work is concerned… I’m not even suggesting that Link needs to talk. He can remain a mute, for all I care. But the story would flow better if the characters he encountered used speech.”

My response to that is this: production values be damned – it’s not a limitation, it’s a valid artistic decision. The thing about abstraction is that it presents some degree of universal interpretability along the spectrum between the designer’s and player’s imaginations. Games, by the very nature of being interactive, should involve both elements. As for this franchise in particular, the last thing I want to see and hear is a Zelda adventure with hokey American accents like the television episodes that aired with The Super Mario Bros. Super Show back in the day. (Excuuuuuse me, princess.)

“They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional…”

This is what Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible, laments upon hearing of his son’s impending fourth-grade “graduation” in the best movie I have seen this year, The Incredibles. It speaks volumes.

I am not about to review The Incredibles. To do so would require me to do things like go on and on about composer Michael Giacchino’s throwback to the spy-jazz Bond-film musical textures of John Barry, employ comparisons to Alan Moore’s critique of the superhero’s place in civil society in Watchmen, and point out the subliminal commentary on the state of modern animation in the cameo by two of Disney’s Nine Old Men. There’s too much to say, and there will probably be even more the next time I see the film, as I quite inevitably will.

Instead, I want to begin with a look at something that is an identifying mark of any superhero story: what is it that makes the villain a villain. It doesn’t always come down to motive. Sometimes, the intent of the diabolical mastermind’s scheme demands sympathy; the master plan is meant to serve a noble purpose, but the point at which it becomes reprehensible is the means – say, for example, developing a permanent state of world peace and eliminating Cold War tensions by staging an alien invasion that kills half of New York. Earlier this year I looked at Spider-Man 2, the other “best superhero film ever,” and attributed some of its depth to how Doctor Octopus is driven not by a desire to destroy, but merely to complete his science fair project. The problem lies not in his wants, but in the ethicality of his means.

Sometimes there is a basic philosophical villainy to the motives themselves. Magneto, for instance, is out to destroy all humankind to turn the tables on the system discrimination against mutants. Branching outside the costumed superhero genre for a bit, we sometimes see literature make an open criticism of megalomaniacal technocrats – observe Totenkopf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or Clement Armstrong in that classic episode of The Avengers, “The Cybernauts.”

Syndrome is easy to pinpoint. He is a reprehensible character not because he developed so potent a weapon as the Omnidroid, but because the personal philosophy behind his ultimate objective is in itself evil.

(Spoilers follow. Please go see The Incredibles if you haven’t done so already. If you have, see it again.)

Something I admire The Incredibles for is its courage in directly and openly attacking one of the most dangerous ideas in recent intellectual history, one that has understandably amassed quite the popularity amongst educators and others. It’s ever so fitting that this is identified in a scene where Helen Parr, Elastigirl, drives her son Dash home from school. “Everybody’s special, Dash,” she says. (“Which is a way of saying no one is,” he grumbles in response.)

The world Syndrome envisions is one where that very notion is true: a world where not only do true superheroes no longer exist, ordinary people artificially emulate their powers. Syndrome’s goal, in a sentence, is to kill off every last superhero so everybody can be super in their place. In short, never, ever put this guy in a room with Magneto.

Far from being purely grounded in fiction, Syndrome’s plot is an extrapolation of what will happen if we let jealousy of the gifted spiral out of control. This mantra – that everybody’s special – has already found its way into much of our society unchallenged. In the past decade or two, one of the most influential sources of educational direction has been the work of one Howard Gardner and his patently tautological theory of multiple intelligences. In a nutshell, what Gardner says is that there is no such thing as a general intelligence; rather, there are several mutually exclusive “intelligences” that apply to everybody in varying permutations. Think about it in terms of Dungeons & Dragons-like role-playing games where you redistribute a finite number of stat points between quantifiable character traits like Strength, Wisdom and Charisma.

Over the years, Gardner has added successively ridiculous layers to his model, such as the introduction of an eighth and ninth intelligence for people who are in tune with natural and spiritual issues, respectively. He has also quite successfully convinced educators all over the continent to structure their curricula according to his stratification of interests. The decline of the school as an academic body can be attributed to this trivializing of the classical trivium-quadrivium of the liberal arts in favour of a belief that if some students are academically stunted, that’s perfectly excusable, because we’re sure they have other talents anyway, so let’s diversify our schools so they can be good at something. The corollary of this is that those with a greater capacity for true genius – the gift of creative thought that leads to success in maths, music, Scrabble or what have you – are no longer more talented in a comparative, relative sense. And without relative greatness, there is no greatness at all.

When educational policies follow Gardner’s principles, curricula diversify to the point where vertical progression is no longer possible. School then no longer has any value aside from its role as a social incubator. By diminishing the focus on academics, we excuse illiteracy and similar deficiencies, and the impact ripples up as students are handed unearned diplomas every year. The one system under which accelerated progress can happen is in a system like what is promoted by gifted education programs, where learning is geared towards the needs of an individual in order to deliver him or her from the constraints of a severely limited academic experience.

But these programs rely first and foremost on a belief in giftedness, and it is precisely the belief that they should be universally accommodating that is destroying them from the inside. Special programs constantly subject themselves to the threat of overexpansion; complicit in it are schools that are all too willing to offer them to bargain for funding, ignoring how not that many students are gifted – and as for those who are, they are exactly the students in the most need of those “smaller class sizes” for which so many agree is a good thing.

Thanks to The Incredibles, we finally have a message in the mass media telling us straight up what we should have realized long ago: it’s ideas like a universal equality of talent that have shaped us into a culture that disrespects its heroes. We should not deny that some people are inherently special, nor should we justify such a denial with a claim that they are flawed in some trivial ways we are not.

It all reminds me of one of Douglas Adams’ essays published in the posthumous anthology The Salmon of Doubt, where he criticizes the tired old joke that they should build airplanes out of the same indestructible material as black boxes. His message: if a scientist knows better than you, don’t make fun of him. Adams goes on to exalt the likes of the Monty Python troupe for using their humour to celebrate a grasp of multiple languages, music, literature and everything we commonly identify as the cultural properties of the intelligentsia, no matter what Gardner says.

Now, what values does The Incredibles promote?

Well, more than one pundit has tossed Ayn Rand’s name into the ring. The essence of the argument identifies the moral of the story as a plea to respect the talents of your betters. (And when Mr. Incredible lifts the Omnidroid v8.0, does Atlas shrug or what?) While that is an admirable statement, The Incredibles is a lot more than just that. Mr. Incredible may be super, and that’s why the society he lives in pins him down, but that’s not what makes him a hero. What makes him a hero is how he uses his powers to do the right thing. Moreover, he feels a responsibility for doing the right thing just because he can; and he does so not in any way at the expense of ordinary folks, helping out the little old ladies who don’t have the super powers of outwitting a bureaucratic insurance agency.

The irony is that at first glance, perhaps Syndrome isn’t all that different. He has a natural gift to call his own, that of technological innovation – just take one look at the rocket boots he invents as a kid. He, too, is interested in the deliverance of those he identifies as his peers. Syndrome is a superhero of the Bruce Wayne variety, but he lacks two things: first, the insight to recognize his gift, which he forsakes or ignores in order to identify with the common people; and second, the moral character to use that power for good. His goal is to destroy his betters; his error is a presumption that he speaks for those he considers his kin. In the end, it is in fact Mr. Incredible – the one with the inherent biological speciality of super strength, as soon as he loses a few pounds – who truly acts in the interests of those who are unable to help themselves.

It’s compelling that for all the talk about Mr. Incredible as a Randian hero, to put it in Marvel Comics terms, he’s a Xavier, not a Magneto. Xavier, if you’ll notice, is an educator who promotes co-existence, and cites the respect of aberrant talents as a pre-requisite. Magneto seeks to destroy those by whom his talents are maligned. That’s the difference, and that’s what gives The Incredibles its admirable value system.

The ultimate betrayal of our heroes is when we cease to recognize their heroics. Even worse is when such an environment puts them in the position of ceasing to recognize themselves as special. If we go down that path, celebrating mediocrity is all we’ll ever do.

I was going to say a few words of praise for an absolutely phenomenal gangster movie involving sharks, but most of you are already well aware of my opinions concerning West Side Story.

Instead, I’m stuck talking about Shark Tale, which cannot be faulted for not being a finger-snapping rhapsody of forbidden love and close-quarters switchblade combat – few movies are – but can hardly merit a strong recommendation of any sort, either. I’ll say this much: it exceeded my expectations, which were not all that high to begin with. Judging by Antz and the two Shrek films, PDI and DreamWorks Animation appear to be exercising a repeated application of a specific marketing formula: a) sell your film to the mainstream audiences who like loud, obnoxious fart-joke comedies so they can pay their ten bucks and laugh in unison at the exact same jokes that everyone already saw in the teaser trailer, and b) pull the rug out from under the snobby critical types who write for such pretentious rags as The Chicago Sun-Times and Nick’s Café Canadien by delivering some semblance of a genuinely compelling product.

As far as the second part is concerned, they kind of did, and they kind of didn’t.

By now, nobody should doubt that the production designers and animators over at Pacific Data Images know how to paint a pretty picture. At first glance, Shark Tale looks tacky. Sit through 90 minutes of it, though, and the tackiness sinks in as a cohesive aesthetic that fits the tone and character of the piece. Observe the first shot in the movie: the worm that wiggles and squiggles about as it is cast as bait into the open sea has the worrisome sort of bulging eyes that reflect the precise absurdity of its predicament – especially when a docile shark comes along and sets it free.

Later on, said shark (Lenny, voiced by Jack Black) paints himself a light turquoise and dresses up as a dolphin. One scene features a derby of galloping seahorses where the favourite is, of course, Seabiscuit. The reef on the ocean floor is an aquatic Times Square, complete with a Coca-Cola billboard in a half-joking promotion on the scale of the giant Mountain Dew can in Antz. In many ways, Shark Tale is your average inner-city Manhattan movie that just happens to deliver its visual narrative in the environment of a marine ecology.

That’s where the film’s problems begin: it tries so hard to be oh-so-trendy in that I-love-NY way that it gets swallowed up in the whirlpool of its overplayed pop-cultural consciousness. Not the least of its expressions of that consciousness is in the way its characters are built around the actors, a celebration of a negative trend in the film industry today.

Yes, one has to admire how Lola, the seductive, dusky fish who speaks in a velvet contralto and lets her fins droop around her face like a wind-swept curtain of wavy long hair, is the spitting image of Angelina Jolie (who provides her voice), right down to the all-too-appropriate trademark fish-lips. The problem is when that becomes the be-all and end-all of the movie – compounded by the fact that one of your high-profile voice actors, the one who plays your main character, Oscar, is Will Smith. And if I, Robot were I, Any Indication, the last guy in the world you want Will Smith to play is himself.

As a pessimist would rightly guess, Will Smith walking onscreen – vaguely disguised as a fish designed to look and act like him – is exactly what happens in this movie. And from that point on, it’s all downstream.

That’s not to say Shark Tale elicits all groans and no laughs. It fulfils its minimum academic requirement of three Titanic jokes. It makes reference to a whole bevy of other films, most of which are in some way related to its cast, like they got a good laugh out of mocking the clichés that have developed out of their own filmographies.

Note my choice of words there. It doesn’t spoof other movies, it makes reference to them. There’s a difference. References are trivial allusions that amuse in the act of being identified – like Rex chasing the toy car as seen in the rear-view mirror in Toy Story 2‘s second-long poke at Jurassic Park. References have their limits, in that you can’t build an entire movie around them, like Shark Tale tries to do with The Godfather. There are better ways to do The Godfather with sharks – or even Jaws, for that matter, as when it is performed by bunnies.

On a more positive note, though: sharks humming the theme from Jaws, I’ll admit, is pretty darn funny. Shark Tale has these bright spots, and Will Smith aside, it doesn’t annoy so much as it impresses in very limited spurts. It’s a temporary pleasure, dispensible after its hour-and-a-half is up, and not quite so bad that you feel dirty for having been reeled in by its thundering pace like some novels I know.

Wait for the DVD. Being from a digital source and all, I’m sure the transfer quality will be excellent. Rent it when you’ve caught up on any theatrical necessities you may have missed – Garden State and the like. I remain almost disappointed that the animation didn’t stink, or I could have used a quotable closing remark like “Shark Tale bites.”