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Part 1, Shadow theater, the process
Part 2, Papercuts and storytelling
Part 3, Shadow art, paper art

The little series continues - in part 3, I've mentioned seeing an animation of running animals in a cave with very old paintings, and I've decided to discuss this topic in a bit more detail... From the artistic perspective. (Art critique of paleolithic cave paintings is not really a thing, I'm afraid - not least because an archaeologist who goes "this cave is boring; I've seen better aurochs drawings" will be fired.) The bad news: I still have no idea which cave it was that I saw as a kid. I don't even remember the type of animal! (I was a little kid; I wouldn't have been able to identify prehistoric fauna.) The good news: a bit of research showed that cave art animation was, indeed, a thing in Very!Ancient!France and Very!Ancient!Spain. (So, I'm not completely misremembering things; good to know.) And it's suuuuper impressive: just imagine being in a cave, in the dark, and suddenly you're surrounded by running animals! (There is, of course, no proof whatsoever there were other aspects beyond the visual, but as a performer, I'd also add some percussion soundtrack as hoofbeat.)

There are actually several examples of this described in literature.

Check out, for example, this very nice paper, Animation in Palaeolithic art: a pre-echo of cinema by Marc Azéma and Florent Rivère. The authors argue that cave art was supposed to convey narrative as well as movement, and they back this up with examples from the Chauvet Cave, the cave system of Lascaux, the Baume Latrone, and several others. (The genre must have been popular!) Most interesting to me is that the authors also discuss the techniques used by those prehistoric artists: interestingly, they had both superimposition and juxtaposition of successive images in their repertoire, and they were able to make quite advanced stop-motion animation, which means they must have known and used the principle of retinal persistence. Consider me impressed... (The authors also discuss another animation technique: a very old thaumatrope. There's also a short (2-minute) video by Marc Azéma, showing pretty neat examples:


...you get the idea.

If you want to see actual shadow art... There seem to be several examples of that as well. On Youtube, I found this very nice 1-minute video of a bison shadow of a decorated rock, in El Castillo cave (Spain):


Whoever made that bison shadow was a really great artist. And that's a shit ton of work that went into the piece...

Have I mentioned that shadow art is really fucking old? Here's an interesting article about the phenomenon, including the reconstruction of the light sources that would have been available to the artists, and how that influences the way the art looks.

So I had the opportunity to watch a relatively new Disney movie, 'Encanto', and... I don't know what to think.

The good part: I watch Disney movies mainly for the soundtracks anyway, and, WOW, Lin-Manuel Miranda delivers!

The bad part... Uh. I have this kind of hate-love for Lin-Manuel Miranda. He's clearly one of the best songwriters out there - really - but... He consistently ends up working on projects I hate. Whether that's super-weird political propaganda stuff ('Hamilton': questionable content with really catchy songs) or cringey Disneyfications of Polynesian religion ('Moana', and yes, it's really just as awful as the concept sounds - but with, again, really nice music... 'We know the way' and 'How far I'll go' are two of my favorite Disney songs, but I will say that film never should have been made), Miranda seems to have this special talent to immerse himself in seriously awkward shows. Still, I had hopes for 'Encanto': it's a story about a Colombian family with magical powers, and everyone lives together in a magical house. Basically, hearing the summary, I expected bland but somewhat entertaining kitsch in the narrative style of 'Frozen'. Not much that can go wrong there, right?!?

Um.

I'm not going to go into the treatment of Colombian culture here: I don't know anything about Colombia, I've never been there. It's obviously a Disneyfied view of that culture, with happy villagers who are dancing to folk tunes all the time - but, I mean, it's Disney, they do that with everything, and whether you want to call it racist or just accept it as a weird stylistic quirk is entirely up to you. XD Anyway - that's not my main problem with this film. (It's nowhere near as bad as 'Moana', anyway: at least it stays away from religion.)

My actual problem? I hated everyone.

Really. Every. Single. Character. Who the hell wrote this story? I mean - it's supposed to be a family story, and I'm sure the makers intended it to be this uplifting story about a girl working hard to understand her family members and bring them closer together with the powers of empathy and hope, yadda, yadda... But, seriously? That whole family is toxic as f*ck. I'll just say, if I were Mirabel (the annoyingly cheerful and optimistic heroine), I would run away and never contact my relatives again. They're not just constantly bickering the way normal families do, they even have a whole song about how much they hate one perfectly innocent family member they've chosen as a bullying target. (And - in true Miranda style - that content disaster, 'We don't talk about Bruno', is from a musical standpoint the best song in the film... Miranda really seems to like the awkward themes. Don't feel too sorry for that guy Bruno, either: while he's not a villain, he has the problem-solving skills of a toddler. Seriously, WTF?) While watching that family disaster unfold, I found myself wishing they'd all die in a house fire - while knowing that, of course, that wouldn't happen - it's Disney, after all.

Oh, but the music? It's great!

Seriously, go and listen to 'We don't talk about Bruno'. (At least if you're not triggered by toxic family situations. LOL) Even better: go and watch the animated sequence with the song. It's easily one of the best Disney songs of all times. All the singers (portraying multiple members of a large family) are not only very good (which is to be expected: again, it's Disney!) but also fit their roles perfectly. The song arrangement is brilliant, too: based on something like a cha-cha, it switches through several different musical styles, and, in the end, blends them all. It's great, and this song has been stuck in my head for days now! (Insta-earworm...)

So, can I recommend this film? Yes and no. Yes, if you don't care about the story either way and you're just there for the music. No, if you don't want to dive into the life of an incredibly toxic family. I will not recommend it to kids whose family situation I'm not 100% sure of, because otherwise, watching that thing without therapeutic processing is potentially harmful. And, I mean, I know kids, I know how resilient they can be, and that they usually can cope with media that adults don't typically trust them with - but this one? Heck, I wouldn't recommend the film to adults with any kind of family trauma, either...

But the music is really really really awesome. Thanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

So yesterday I was reminded of the existence of these classical fantasy books... And that they've been made into a series, and that I (although I rarely watch series or films) wanted to at least give it a chance... So today I did just that. I didn't watch it in the right order, just random episodes and scenes here and there, but that's enough to form a first impression.
They changed a lot when comparing the whole thing to the books, but, I mean, that's normal...

Best thing about the series? Clearly, the guy playing Geralt. Awesome actor (pretty famous too, apparently, but I didn't know him because I don't watch American media much), and... Yeah, basically, he is Geralt. Perfect choice for the role, really outstanding acting job.

Also, I really liked that they gave the female characters some depth. I mean, the original Witcher books are nice enough, but they suffer from the same problem as most nineties fantasy: the female characters, even the supposedly "strong women", tend to be male wanking material stereotypes. The series manages to actually make Yennefer an interesting character. Thanks for that!

Also, I've figured out why so many people in fandom ship Jaskier and Geralt: from the books only, that would be a pretty unlikely ship (with Jaskier a fairly minor character, and both Jaskier and Geralt being very much dick-driven into ladies), but in the show
- the actor playing Jaskier is extremely charismatic (which would make the character popular in fandom), and
- he clearly interprets his role as having a massive crush on Geralt, which, I mean, why not? As a narrative choice, that's actually an improvement. Their relationship really makes more sense this way! Amusing if you've read the very very much aggressively heterosexual books, but if you're introduced to the story with the series, the ship, at least in a one-sided version (though if you're looking for it, sometimes Geralt almost flirts back, which, cool), is actually canon?!? XD

Ciri is still boring, but, I mean, she's the worst Mary Sue in anything I've seen that's actually been professionally published, so I suppose making her an interesting character would have taken a miracle.
(Let's face it: she
- is the literal "magical child" trope played straight and without any detectable irony
- has ridiculous mystical heritage, complete with ridiculous "elvish" name
- also, needless to say, tragic backstory
- is ridiculously superpowered even in comparison to other superpowered characters
- is loved by everyone
- ....
...basically, she's a huge storytelling f*-up by the book author, and unfortunately she's a major character too, so she couldn't be changed too much without drawing fandom ire.)

I liked less that... how to explain this? The books are Polish, and the fantasy world and fantasy elements are very much inspired by Polish folklore. The series removed most of that and Americanized the whole thing. That's... actually pretty major. Cultural appropriation at its worst. Basically, the fantasy in the series is now your standard Western European and US American collection of tropes, because almost everything distinctly Slavic was carefully eliminated. Yikes! The original books lean pretty heavily on (and sometimes even parody: one of the things that made me keep reading the books because that's really well done!) Slavic mythology and folk tales. Oh, and even if the world is fictional and the countries have fantasy names, the characters are culturally distinctly Polish. I suppose they thought they could market the story to an American audience better if they minimize that (and just keep some Slavic mythical monsters, but have the characters behave culturally US-American, or, more precisely, the fantasy standard of How-US-Americans-Imagine-Medieval-Western-Europeans) - and, unfortunately, they're probably right about that, too - but really, this is not the way to treat literature from another culture. Not even when it's, let's face it, pretty straightforward unapologetic power-and-wank-fantasy stuff from another culture.

Basically? If this were my first introduction to The Witcher, I would have loved the show. The actors are all excellent, and in many ways the quality of the storytelling surpasses the entertaining but ultimately trashy original. It was just a bit disappointing to see a very American retelling of a very Polish story. Will probably not watch the whole thing, although I now have "Toss a Coin to your Witcher" stuck in my head. (Awfully catchy song! XD)