Feeling not entirely great today, so I am afraid tonight’s entry will be a lot like yesterdays fooble-tastic entry : a few clips from the world of animation.

Could be worse, I suppose, I could be whinging endlessly about how bad my sleep has been lately or the weird dreams I have been having.

(Seriously. In one I was taking a trip from Vancouver to Pakistan. In a bus. It was going to be a three hour trip. Like, what the hell?)

But no, not going to go there today, maybe tomorrow, but not today. Instead, I will provide something like content for a change.

First up, we got some sweet video for your hungry eyeballs : the first full-length trailer for that Tintin movie coming out soonishly.

And remember, as you watch this, that THIS CLIP IS ENTIRELY ANIMATION.

Holy key frames, Batman, but that looks amazingly realistic. Like I said when I posted the teaser trailer for this mofo, we are definitely heading into an Uncanny Valley of prodigious depth and breathtaking scope and scale. It’s not going to be too much longer before telling the difference between animation and live action will take the sort of visual detective skills now used to spot Photoshopping in Internet pics.

As to the content, I have to ask, though I fear I know the answer : why the heck is everybody British? Not American, or French, but British?

The answer, I am afraid, is likely one of a demographic compromise. If people know anything about Tintin, they know he’s not American, so they could not get away with just transplanting the whole thing to America like they would do with other things.

On the other hand, foreign things scare Americans, for they find any reminder that non-America exists and that everyone else is pretty much OK with that to be a painful and confusing thing. So they went with the least-foreign place that seems like it’s in vaguely the right direction to Americans, Great Britain.

Of course, by that logic, Canada would have been an even better choice, but Americans are a lot more familiar with the UK.

After all, it’s right across the Atlantic from them!

Being of French descent, I rather resent the de-Gallification of French properties. I would have preferred it remained at least somewhat French. But I suspect I am in the teeny tiny minority on that score.

Also, is it my imagination, or does our heroic adventurer Tintin look like a very young Conan O’Brien in some shots?

Just re-brand the movie from Tintin to Coco. The hipsters will love it.

Snowy, by the way, looks perfect. Haddock, well, if you drew him right he would be way too damn ugly to look at.

Speaking of cool animation, we have this number from The Animation Workshop, called Last Fall. I am including it because it reminds me so much of an animated version of one of those eight pager stories from Heavy Metal magazine.

Last Fall from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

I mean, look at it. It’s visually rich, seems sort of deep, definitely has a feel of vaguely European art design, but ultimately amounts to little more than a lengthy artist’s wank session with a plot whose paucity is patina’d over with a thin layer of vagueness and pretension in order to convince you that it is deep.

Sounds like Heavy Metal to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed a lot of the stuff I read in Heavy Metal back when I was a teenager with an unquenchable thirst for reading material and a serious periodicals habit.

But it was a part of my become a sadder but wise fan when I realized that a lot of the material, and especially a lot of the lead story stuff that made the cover and was always the first story in every issue was pretty much just the artist drawing whatever the heck they liked to draw (floating alien half-naked space chicks, weird plant monsters, mutants with extra genitalia, whatever) and then, as an afterthought, tacking on a few little bits of plot to make the whole thing seem like it had a point.

And as a person who is heavily biased towards narrative (what writer isn’t?), that simply does not cut it for me.

So it was a harsh crash to realize that all this gorgeous and impressive art was not, in fact, actually telling much of a story.

And that is how I feel about Last Fall. It was mostly just an excuse to do a big cool looking clunky robot (who apparently wrecks the joint every time something goes amiss) and some other cool looking factory-punk stuff with a generic heartwarming plot tacked on.

Wake me up when you have a story worth telling.