Harley Motherf***ing Quinn

[Warning: adult language and situations. No spoilers, though.]

Harley Quinn, voice supplied by "The Big Bang Theory's"
Kaley Cuoco. So less of the insane Brooklynite attitude from
previous iterations, more of a scary SoCal girl.

I don’t review TV shows that often, animation almost never, and I’m not a comic book fanboy. But I chanced upon a review on io9 that was so intriguing I had to check it out— and I was not disappointed.

“Harley Quinn” is a comedic adult animated web-based show now streaming on DC Universe, behind an $8-a-month paywall. It tells the story of Harley Quinn, the Joker’s lover and sidekick, as she dumps him and tries to invent herself as an independent person and supervillain in her own right. She does this with the help of her best friend / roommate Poison Ivy (Lake Bell, a wonderfully dry voice performance), and her crew of minor villains who I would know if I actually read comic books.

Harley and Poison Ivy, roommates. These two characters
may be the most 'shipped couple on the internet. So far
they are depicted a just close friends, but the season
is not over yet.

The dynamic between Harley Quinn and Joker has been well-documented, and they’re even going to make it big deal out of it in the Margot Robbie-starring live-action film coming out next month. Her character has been described as suffering from dependent personality disorder: in her former life she became so obsessed with Joker while treating him in Arkham Asylum she abandoned everything to become his often-abused sidekick. As a super villain origin stories go it may be the most mundane one ever: Harley was a victim of abusive, manipulating partner, a trauma untold thousands of people are suffering every day in the real world. It has given her character a special resonance with fans: even though Harley is a supervillain, her personal emotional issues have a human scale and her efforts to break free of her abusive partner make her even more relatable. The show does not shy away from this unhealthy dynamic, and in fact it casts most of her personal growth as an anodyne to Joker, her romantic obsession transformed into professional competition. Harley a fun character, given considerable depth: she is "a bad guy, but not a bad person," and her story arc probably has her headed to antihero status.

The creators of “Harley Quinn” made a strange but ultimately transformative decision: As it is not a broadcast show there are no real restrictions to language and content, so they decided to make a show for adults. It's a bit of a shock. To give a feel for the dialog:


Harley (to Joker, in a subconscious confrontation): “You think you created me, but no one did. My fucked-up parents didn’t create me. Neither did Jessica Sarner when she lied to the whole fucking camp and said I lost my virginity to a horse! A HORSE!” (applies baseball bat to Joker’s crotch: he doubles over) “Neither did those cops who questioned me for hours about what happened to Jessica Sarner! And YOU sure as hell didn’t fucking create me, Puddin’!”

And the sexual innuendo is of the single-entendre variety:


Bane (to Joker on phone): “Harley is at Penguin’s nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.”
Joker: “She crashed the stupid thing?”

Bane: “Yeah. Seems like she’s doing pretty well. Brought a tiger. Pretty cool!”
Joker: “What? Anyone can buy a tiger. You know she has HPV, right?”
Bane: “Most sexually active adults do.”
Joker: “Shut up!”

Dr. Psycho, after the second time he called someone a c**t.

Yeah, the filter is off and this makes it for fairly exhilarating viewing. There are some limits: no female nudity (yet*), but lots of pixelated male crotches. The show even has a line, and one character crosses it: Dr. Psycho, one of Wonder Woman’s nemeses, is blackballed out of the Legion of Doom for calling her, in the heat of battle, a c**t. (it’s the only profane utterance bleeped on the entire show.)

I know adult-oriented animated series are not exactly a new phenomenon: “South Park” is 20+ years old, seriously raunchy, and the movie was legendary in that regard. Every episode of the immensely popular Adult Swim series “Rick and Morty” is filled end-to-end with bleeps and blurred-out genitalia.

What makes “Harley Quinn” exceedingly unusual is the fact it is camped dead center in the DC Universe. It is not a sidecar, like the way Deadpool— the foul-mouthed, violent antihero from Marvel— is a sidecar, peripheral to the X-Men universe (several X-Men make an appearance in the sequel) and completely walled off from the big-money Avengers universe. Deadpool will never crack dick jokes with Captain America. (Professor X, maybe.)

In her show Harley regularly interacts with the big hitters, Batman and Superman and the like. The iconic superheroes they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies about. And by “interact,” I mean when Harley meets The Batman in the first episode, she adamantly insists he is called that because he fucks bats.

Wonder Woman, eating her own brand of breakfast cereal,
realizing all the ground rules have changed.

This juxtaposition turns an amusing series into a surreal one. What we have is a series which has IP-critical superhero guest cameos— and they basically stand in inhibited silence while a collection of supervillains dance around them, calling them out with ripe curses and sexual innuendo. The decision by DC and Warner Bros. to execute this vision is mystifying.

The other exhilaration that comes from ”Harley Quinn” is how this adult theme remakes every character anew. All the profanity and frank sex talk draws attention to the eroticism that rushes like a deep undercurrent under all superhero stories.The supervillans and superheroes depicted in the blockbuster movies are (mostly) extensions of their juvenile, sexless origins as juvenile, sexless comic-book characters, still hewing to a long-gone 70-year-old Comics Code. Not on “Harley Quinn:” on that show, everyone depicted are People Who Fuck.

People Who Fuck are all around us: it is the normal state of the human race. The great majority of DC and Marvel movies and TV shows still depict their intellectual property as non-existent from the waist down, like Muppets. This is my biggest peeve with the MCU: missing the normalizing dimension as People Who Fuck, for all the significant kisses and long, lingering gazes they’re all just cardboard simulations of real people.

This is the liberating synthesis of “Harley Quinn,” the result of the thesis of comic book characters mixed with the antithesis of real-world People who Fuck. Even though they are set in an unbelievable, unrealistic universe of magic and superpowers, the characters depicted within seem more real than any version of them that came before.

*One of the most confounding things about Adult or R-rated entertainment of late: no problem with profanity and verbally describing sexual situations-- but nudity is increasingly rare. I think, in the case of this show, the influence of the internet is the major deciding factor. If the showrunners ever decided to show Harley Quinn running around with her tits out, every fanboy image server on earth would promptly explode. So that will never happen.

Anti-Christmas Movies

(Full disclosure: This is another re-edited TPN rescue. Well, about 75% of it, at least.)

The holidays have hit big time, and I'm tellin' ya the TV Yuletide assault in already in high gear. Just in the last week, I've seen bits and pieces of “Christmas Carol” adaptations featuring Reginald Owen, Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, Kelsey Grammer, Bill Murray (Scrooged: awful, awful) and Patrick Stewart. (no sign of the Muppets, The Flintstones, Mickey Mouse, Blackadder or Mr. Magoo as of yet.)

Ignorance and Want, from Richard
Williams' Christmas Carol

The 2009 George Zemekis CG version voiced by Jim Carrey is in heavy rotation on the premium channels (a fine interpretation, IMO) but the 1971 half-hour adaptation made by animator Richard (Roger Rabbit) Williams hasn't surfaced yet. This is a real gem among Christmas Carol adaptations-- It's a bit truncated story-wise, but it was painstakingly animated in the style of a 19^th century engraving. It's also quite scary. Dickens' original story is quite scary in and of itself, but most production tend to pull punches so as not to frighten the kiddies. Not this one. A fuzzy upload can be seen online here.

As long as we're parsing Holiday entertainment, Slate has an article listing the five worst Christmas movies of all time. Two of the usual suspects are in the list: Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and the truly weird Mexican Santa-vs-Satan Santa Claus.

All well and good to list bad movies, but I'm here to list my three favorite Anti-Christmas movies.

The anti-Christmas movie does not just point up the absurdities of the Holiday season, it actively tries to deconstruct the reasons and traditions of Christmas. Most of the time this is done in a spirit of irony, pointing out the sillier parts of what is undeniably an over-the-top holiday. I for one will argue that sappy, formulaic star vehicles like Jingle All the Way or Deck the Halls or Christmas with the Kranks or The Santa Clause trilogy in their own way do more damage to the spirit of Christmas than films that actively make sport of it. Fake sincerity is generally more pernicious and damaging than active mockery, a form of complicit betrayal, a treason of the season, if you will.

The Hebrew Hammer (d. Jonathan Kesselman, 2003) The titular character, the defender of Jews everywhere, is a superhero in the Mystery Men genre, thoroughly mortal and played with a streetwise flair by Adam Goldberg . The heavy of the piece is Damien Claus (Andy Dick), the evil son of Santa Claus, who kills his father and sets out to make Christmas the only December holiday. Central to his plan: making all Jewish children watch It's a Wonderful Life. The Hammer eventually defeats Damien and saves Hanukkah by-- and I'm quoting both Wikipedia and the film here-- “using Judaism's ultimate weapon (complaining and guilt).” This is a fun little film with a good heart and a message of tolerance, even as it rips on every ethnic stereotype you can imagine non-stop.

Santa's Slay (d. David Steiman, 2005). The opening scene was so stunning I had to see it all the way through. The Masons, a typical bickering middle-class family, are sitting down to Christmas dinner. Santa enters the house and proceeds to gruesomely slaughter everyone. Leading the cameo appearances as the Masons are James Caan, Fran Drescher and Chris Kattan. Santa is played by WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg. See a pattern here?

The premise of this film is that Santa is actually a demon who lost a bet with an angel and had to do 1000 years of community service as a good guy giving out presents. Now the bet is off and every Christmas he goes on a killing rampage. He's basically a thinly veiled lift of Robot Santa from “Futurama:” according to the film, before Santa lost the bet and had to be nice people spent Christmas hiding from him.

As weird and inspired as the opening sequence was, the film quickly goes downhill from there and becomes a holiday-themed gore-fest. Like The Hebrew Hammer this movie has a strange sort of Jewish bent to it, but unlike that film Santa's Slay is not well-written enough to convey any sort of message, which makes it fairly worthless entertainment.

Bad Santa (d. Terry Zwigoff, 2005). A holiday movie with 170 occurrences of the F-word, its protagonist is Willy, a perverted, foul-mouthed, alcoholic safecracker who badly impersonates Santa in department stores so he and his elf-sized partner can rob it after hours. Billy Bob Thornton does an impressive job of portraying a worthless, shiftless bastard with absolutely no redeeming qualities and lots of repellent ones. I'll venture an opinion about Mr. Thornton as Willy: he does a good job, but I never thought he was quite right for the role. He's too rangy and skinny, even though I can't imagine anyone else doing a better job on the voiceovers. Apparently, Jack Nicholson was interested in playing Willy, but ultimately had other commitments and had to back out. A shame: he would have been just perfect.

Wonderfully, Bad Santa never even gets close to a cheery holiday-themed message: in the end, there is redemption for Willy, but without spoiling the ending let's say it involves the Christmas sentiment of others, not the principal characters. It's the perfect antidote to the holidays.

March Oddments

••• It's strange to be witness to another entry in the "biggest flop of all time" contest. Of course, we're talking about Mars Needs Moms. Sometimes Hollywood just sneaks 'em out: yet another bouncy, kid-friendly computer-animated 3D flick, with some mild laughs in and cool-looking stuff in the trailer. Then it premieres, and the opening weekend comes and goes, and it racks up a few million in ticket sales. At this point, it shares a surface commonality with the majority of films on Dan's Weekly Box Office Report: It opened wide, a few people saw it, big deal. But then the news breaks wide in the trades (and the New York Times: read it before the whole news site vanishes behind the paywall!) that the damned thing cost the studio $150 million and two years to make.

What? $150 Million? Didn't somebody once say that CG movies would eventually be cheaper than live-action films? Do you mean to tell us that Mars Needs Moms, which is based on a children's picture book by Berkeley "Bloom County" Breathed, cost as much to make as Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King? Really? I once wrote an article praising Dax Shepard that pointed out that his cute little film Employee of the Month (2005) cost $10 million to produce and it eventually collected $30 million in first-release BO: a modest profit, but a profit nonetheless. Did anyone at Disney (who rarely step in the horse exhaust as badly as this, might I add) realize they could have used that motion-capture and compositing money,  made fifteen Employee of the Month movies (covering five seasons worth of employees) and raked in nearly half a billion dollars?

••• I think I have a little crush on a cartoon character (again): Cheryl (or Carol) from "Archer," a TV-MA animated Cold War spy-spoof on FX. Strong recommendation for this show: It's slick-looking, flash-style animation, with handsome, realistic character renderings (it looks a bit like a Saturday Morning version of "Mad Men") and some of the sharpest , funniest writing of any current series, period. It shares a heritage between creator Adam Reed's heady earlier series, particularly "Sealab 2021", and, of all things, "Arrested Development" (Jessica Walter, Jeffrey Tambor and Judy Greer do voices on it).

Anyway, Cheryl (or Carol, voiced by Greer) is the secretary for Malory Archer, the head of ISIS, the spy agency at the center of the story. She is amazingly, mind-bendingly stupid. That's her, drinking rubber cement. She has displayed her near-total lack of intelligence at various times-- to quote her Wikipedia bio-- by "trying to turn on her computer by typing O-N on the keyboard, wondering aloud who brings Jewish people their Christmas presents and thinking that a website can tell her whether she's pregnant." She defies a trio of armed police officers trying to arrest her by yelling "You're not my supervisor!" At the end of an episode that deals with cancer non-stop (it's very funny, I assure you) she leans over to another character and asks "what's cancer?"

It's always a kick to see a character who is set up to be an ignoramus, because if it's written and performed well, you're both amused and a little bit stunned. Cheryl (or Carol) as a character reminds me a bit of Larry, Darryl and Darryl from "Newhart" (1982-1990), who had the ability to throw down absolutely amazing non-sequiteurs. But Cheryl (or Carol) is better because she's smoking hot as well. No Uncanny Valley in "Archer," no sir. Full episodes are available on IMDb.

••• The awful events unfolding in Japan make a mockery of any comparison to fictional disaster or fictional anything, really. Having said that, I should point out that I'm not the first person to draw the most obvious comparison, or at least one that is culturally appropriate: Godzilla. A raging force of nature that destroys indiscriminately and lays waste with a plume of radioactive fire. It's so terribly apt that one could almost see it as science-fiction time loop, a 50s monster inspired by events that occur in devastating cadence half a century later.

But there is another icon from Japanese culture that truly gives me hope for the beleaguered people of Japan: Domo. He's NHK's mascot (and mine too, kinda): a squared-off, stubby-legged monster with beady eyes and a huge, toothy square mouth. Check him out: he's cute enough with the napped fur and outreaching arms, but he's got teeth. Big sharp pointy ones. There's an unlikely mix of winsomeness and determination to him. He always shows his mouthful of shark-like teeth to the world, almost like a challenge. Any culture that can produce a little character that embodies such a dichotomy of cute and tough can internalize these qualities, and they can do anything-- And that is something we at Hang A Lantern On It definitely believe.

Oscars: Tough Call this Year

This is one of those years, like last year, when the acting categories are easier to handicap than Best Picture-- and not just because there are only half as many noms per category. It looks like a bunch of shoo-ins: Colin Firth for The King's Speech, Natalie Portman for Black Swan, Christian Bale for The Fighter, and Amy Adams for The Fighter as well. Okay, maybe Hailee Stienfeld for True Grit, but I doubt it.

Nonetheless, here is the huge, unruly mob of Best Picture candidates. They have widely different budgets and each excels in very different ways, all of which makes comparison difficult. Seen six of them, which ain't bad: I'll see at least two more before Oscar night, I'm sure. In alphabetical order:


Black Swan - It's picked up a slightly unsavory reputation and had decent but not great box office, which gives it long odds. Darren Aronofsky has become the new Brian DePalma: An excellent director, but one that can't be trusted not to go completely over the top. (Haven't seen this yet.)


The Fighter - Saw it and loved it. Boxing epics, with their strong visuals, extremely obvious conflicts, and simple rags-to-riches storylines, are Academy voter catnip. It'll take acting and technical, but it doesn't quite have the scope and breadth of a Best Picture. I should say everyone but Mark Wahlberg has a shot at winning, as he was the quiet, underacting center of the film and therefore didn't get nominated. And I'm cheering hard for Amy Adams, who threw the best punch in the movie.


Inception - Love to see it win, because it's such a unique film, and it's a production that hews close to the ideal for a Hollywood big picture. But director Christopher Nolan wasn't nominated for some reason, so it's unlikely.


The Kids Are All Right - Didn't see it. No director nod, so no chance. I liked the 1979 Who rock-doc it was based on, though. Wait…

The King’s Speech - The front-runner, as things stand right now. It's got everything: Nice costumes, a unique historical perspective, and lots and lots of British actors.


127 Hours - Didn't see it. No director nod, so no chance. James Franco is second pick for Best Actor.


The Social Network - Just an amazing story, the most unique among the ten. It captures whole the feel of the now, a slice of the evolving present, with a clarity rarely seen in contemporary films. A morality play for a time with no morals. I'm handicapping this one as a very, very close second pick to The King's Speech.


Toy Story 3 - Awesome to see this one win, but it's animated so it probably won't. If you want to measure the quality of a film by it's power to convey strong emotional moments, this one beats anything I've seen this year. True, it didn't make people throw up and faint like 127 Hours did, but that's probably a good thing.

True Grit - This one has done great box office, and has that something extra that might mean a Best Picture win: It seems to have captured the public imagination in a way unique to the list of nominees. There's a fascinating article by Frank Rich in the New York times that draws a parallel between True Grit and The Social Network: both are about conflicts in moral vacuums, one in the Old West of the 1880s, the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2003.


Winter’s Bone - Huh?

Tough to pick a front-runner, and mine is provisional: I reserve the right to change my mind. It's anyone's game!

The Maritally Estranged Mr. Limpet

Just seen in super-sharp HD: The 1964 film The Incredible Mr. Limpet. I would not consider this the zenith of the Don Knotts cinematic ouevre – That honor goes to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which was ahead of it's time in density of wit and running gags. But I saw Limpet a lot on TV as a kid, and I'll admit to having a soft spot for it.

This new viewing was a bit of a revelation. I assumed it was a kiddie film, but now I can see it wasn't, despite it's animated fantasy elements. The story begins a few months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor: Mr. Limpet is an unassuming bookkeeper who is far more fascinated by fish than his work or his marriage. And we see why: his wife Bessie is overbearing, and his friend George has managed to join the Navy, while he is 4F. Limpet is in such a state of general pessimism about the human condition that early in the film he voices a hope that we will all be eradicated in the upcoming world war, which will allow fish to evolve into our replacements.

Through a bit of unexplained wish-granting, Mr. Limpet falls into the Atlantic and turns into a fish. He quickly adapts and even gains the love of Ladyfish, a comely, naïve female of his new species who talks in a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice. But Mr. Limpet still feels the pull of his old life-- and addresses it's disappointments by helping the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Fleet locate and destroy German U-Boats.

From a 2010 perspective, Mr. Limpet is an unusually bloodthirsty animated protagonist: there are lots of stock-footage shots of submarines imploding and the seas strewn with shattered hulls. Das Boot and Crimson Tide lie between us and this film, and we as an audience now know how horrible it is to die in a submarine. But in 1964, the war was still a fresh memory, and I'm sure every person in the cast and crew were WWII veterans. The enemy was invariably identified as “Nazis” in the film, as in “I'll lead your ship to the Nazi submarines!”

After a lot of German sailors, most of whom were not Nazi Party members, go to their watery graves, the war eventually ends. With the explicit permission of his estranged wife, Mr Limpet and Ladyfish swim off to “the spawning grounds.” The end.

Mr. Limpet, as a fish, often contends with how this unusual dilemma affects his relationships. His former marriage is de facto void, but since Bessie is not technically a widow and they never divorced, his guilt (and then-current social morés) initially prevents him from consummating his relationship with Ladyfish (which should consist of her depositing a clutch of eggs while he sheds gametes into the surrounding water: I'll bet he didn't think that part through when he was wishing to be a fish). His unexplained metamorphosis creates ethical and logical problems no amount of hung lanterns can explain away.

This leads to a completely different reading of The Incredible Mr. Limpet. With one small adjustment, the story can make sense: when Henry Limpet looks out into the sea and says to himself “I wish I were a fish,” what if he meant “I wish I were single?” As a bachelor/fish, Mr. Limpet is able to achieve his full potential: he makes friends, joins the service and receives a commission, and gets to be the hero who eradicates the Axis menace from the Atlantic. None of this would be possible if he had stayed married/human. In the end, after the fighting is over and he retires with honors, Mr. Limpet amicably parts with his first wife and moves on, to live happily ever after with his comely, naïve Ladyfish/second wife.

Just to drive this home, but maybe as just an indication of how serial monogamy worked in the 1960s, I was struck by how much this reminded me of the last season of “Mad Men,” set in 1965. Bessie, in her shrill, domineering way, reminded me of Betty Draper, Don Draper's first wife; Ladyfish had the same youthful, big-eyed, come-hither ways as Megan Calvet, Don's soon-to-be second wife. But Don Draper and Don Knotts: polar opposites, save that first name.

And yes, I'm afraid The Incredible Mr. Limpet is being remade. Warner Bros. has tapped Kevin Lima to direct this effort, which is a good idea: He directed Enchanted, and knows a thing or two about blending reality and fantasy that skews for kids and grownups both. To portray the updated Mr. Limpet, they're looking at Zach Galifianakis. This is an awful idea, for a reason that should be painfully obvious: How can a fish version of Zach be designed to resemble him when fish don't have beards? Duh. I'll even ignore the fact that his style of humor couldn't be a worse fit for the role. Of course, by the time this film is released Zach Galifianakis will have completed his magical transformation into Jack Black and this point will be moot.

3D Remakes Test the Formula

Everyone who has seen the scary successful Alice In Wonderland has also seen the trailer for Tron Legacy, the long, long, long-planned sequel to Tron (1982) And TV is currently saturated with ads for Clash of the Titans, a re-make of the 1981 version set to open in April. Both of these films are in 3D, of course.

Let's see if we can apply the Daniel's Remake Formula to these new films. That formula:

Never redo a classic – always remake a movie that had a great premise but somehow didn’t quite work. That way the premise gets another chance, and only a handful of people are familiar with the original and probably don’t like it anyway. Everybody wins! –Daniel K.

Tron was filled with cutting-edge CG for it's time, so I don't know if it can be faulted for having poor effects. It was never a giant hit, but it was profitable and is still quite beloved, has a cult following, and was spun off like crazy. This is probably why they're not actually remaking it from the ground up. They even have Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges and Box Brucelightner again. (Hey, where's Cindy Morgan?) It has been rumored the budget for Tron Legacy tops $300 million, far more than Avatar. Yikes.

Clash of the Titans hews closer to the Remake Formula. Sure, the original was a Harryhousen flick, full of good stop-motion action, and it featured Lord Laurence Olivier and Harry Hamlin (whose next film would be Arthur Hiller's Making Love). But it is also a silly film, so-called "family fare," with Greek heroes battling a Scandanavian Kraken and a cute R2D2-style robotic owl tossed in for laughs. The limitations of special effects in 1981 informed how the original Clash of the Titans was structured: Long stretches of yakking with short stop-motion sequences. The new film looks a mid-budget CGI-fest, which portends two things: they probably won't waste a lot of time trying to improve the story, and it should make a pile. The remake is budgeted at $70 million: the original had an estimated budget of $15 million, which was quite considerable for it's time, maybe even equivalent to the remake in inflation-adjusted dollars.

If these two films are successful, look out for more strip-mining of early 80s fantasy and sci-fi films. Galaxina, Outland, Scanners, Basket Case, and The Beastmaster, all comin' at ya in 3D. Oh, and just to complete the 3D circle, Comin' at Ya! (1981) too.

Bruce Willis Hunts Gorillaz

Gorillaz is a great idea. It was hatched by musician Damon Albarn of Blur and artist Jaime Hewlett. The band is comprised of four fictional characters, 2D (Albarn's vocals), Murdoc (bass), Russel (drums) and Noodle (guitar). Because the only consistent musical element is Albarn, the band encompasses a wide variety of styles and features a dizzying number of guest musicians, from Tina Weymouth to Snoop Dogg to Bobby Womack. Their look is provided almost entirely by Hewlett: his visual style is cartoony, awesomely detailed and strangely realistic.

Gorillaz make great music-- they're maybe the only band left, aside from Asleep at the Wheel, I still lay out money for. But it's really all about the music videos: they are arresting, amazing, great. As a virtual band, they were made for that medium. Check out the Gorillaz channel on You Tube and watch: You don't find 2D animation that good anywhere anymore, and it blends with live action seamlessly.

"Stylo," the new video released in advance their new album Plastic Beach, is close to fully live action affair. In a neat cameo, Bruce Willis hops into a vintage red El Camino and tears off across the desert, in all likelihood a bounty hunter or assassin or both, pursuing three members of Gorillaz in a 1968 Camaro SS. They were rendered in 3D computer animation.

So here's the problem: Gorillaz doesn't work as 3D animation. They work, animated or otherwise, as bold line art. Jaime Hewlett's sharp style and exuberant, tight animation (usually done by London's Passion Pictures) overcome the oddities built into the character sheets: empty black or white eyes, green skin, snaggly teeth. In "Stylo," 2D looks sick, Noodle robotic (well, apparently she is a robot now: who knew?) and Murdoc ghastly and undead. In an attempt to better blend the virtual characters into live action, they stumbled and fell deep into the uncanny valley.

There was a term I learned in a class on animation I took in college: "Appeal." It refers to the combination of elements that make animated characters work. Big eyes, simple lines, and slightly stylized features embody the concept of appeal. Mickey Mouse, anime characters and Spongebob have it. But a lot of 2D characters only work that way: render them in 3D, and the appeal vanishes. Think of a Simpsons action figure: not quite right.

It's nice to see fresh Gorillaz content out there, even though their feature-film project seems to have caved in. I just hope "Stylo" is a bump in a long desert road, and the real-life creators steer their virtual creations back to a hand-drawn look.

A Very Canadian Cartoon

The latest cartoon I have been watching too much of is “6teen,” an animated tweener "situational comedy." This native product of Canada chronicles the lives, loves and adventures of Wyatt, Jonsey, Jen, Jude, Caitlin and Nikki, six high-schoolers working and hanging out in a huge shopping mall. It’s a colorful show, animated in the line-less Flash style: Erin Esurance would feel right at home there.

Cartoon Network airs this show in the United States (with a TV-PG rating, unusual for a non-"Adult Swim" show) but I've managed to catch most of the episodes on YouTube. As it is with anything on TV I find worthwhile, “6teen” has some quirks to it, both endearing and outright puzzling.

• Six inseparable pals, three guys and three girls, and one “will they-won’t they?” relationship in the mix: sound familiar? Yeah, it borrows heavily from “Friends.” Character traits have been diced up and redistributed from one to the other: “6teen's” Caitlin Cooke is a slightly daffy shopaholic with keen comic timing-- so she’s Rachel and Phoebe. It may be derivative, but all you have to do is recall the lame plagiarism of “The Honeymooners/The Flintstones” to realize this is an improvement.

There is one aspect this Canadian 'toon has way over the American sitcom it derives from: It's characters are (likely by government decree) racially diverse. The "Friends" were lily-white. And “6teen” is, in terms of character, a more mechanically sound and effective comedy than “Friends” ever was. As opposed to the gang of 30-something New Yorkers, the six kids from Canada have a very good reason to carry on like a bunch of 16-year-olds.

• “6teen” is a purely Canadian product. It’s refreshing and unusual to see a show made in Canada that isn’t trying to be American (The late, and very lamented, “Reaper:” set in Seattle, shot in Vancouver). The $5 bills that change hands are blue; everybody is assumed to know how to ice skate. Jonesy-- the tall lothario of the group-- speaks with a strong Canadian vowel rising. (Jonesy is now in committed relationship with Nikki, which makes him both Joey and Ross.)

• If this show is indicative of the society it depicts, Canadians evidently have a strong affinity for humor based on bodily functions. Alright, It might just be the show itself: fart jokes are the definition of sophomoric humor, and “6teen” features, and is demographically designed for, sophomores. The thing that is remarkable is the volume and centrality of gross-out humor, especially considering this show is partly funded by Canadian taxpayers.

Comparing “6teen” to non-cable prime-time sitcoms, it actually pushes the gross humor envelope further than most. One episode is centered on the question of whether or not a man can still love a woman after seeing her excreta. One character is constantly ribbed for having thrown up in his girlfriend’s mouth on a first date—and eventually we get to see this happen on-screen. “Two and a Half Men,” an adult-oriented sitcom on CBS, can barely compete at this level, and remember: this is kid’s programming.

This brings us right to another animated series featuring fart-obsessed Canadians: the Terrance and Philip “meta-show” on “South Park.” According to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, they created the Canadian duo as a response to complaints that their show was all bad animation and fart jokes. But if you tune into “6teen” it quickly becomes plain that Canadians really do own this subgenre of humor. One of three things has happened here:

1. Trey and Matt actually DID know Canadians are really into poo-poo jokes, and wrote Terrance and Philip accordingly;
2. The showrunners of “6teen” are knowingly playing into the “South Park” joke;
3. Native Canadian humor as a whole has, solely by the influence of “South Park,” evolved into a constructed stereotype.

Season four of “6teen” began a few days ago (“Labour Day,” which was shown on Teletoon on Labour Day, the same day as American Labor Day). It was, of course, available online a few hours later.

Wizards who don't age well

I didn't mean to parallel Daniel's 1970s-film reassessment, honest: I had this entry prepped a few days ago. I see it as proof of positive zeitgeist.

Got home late on Saturday, surfed the premium channels for a semblance of entertainment. Found something that I used to consider very entertaining. Not sure what changed.

The film in question is Wizards, Ralph Bakshi's animated fantasy from 1977, released four months before Star Wars. I thought this film was the absolute apocalypse when it came out, the best animated film ever. So did all my friends. It was a staple at midnight screenings, and I must have seen it (and, as I worked the midnights sometimes, screened it) a dozen times.

So I let Wizards unspool and I settled in. In ten minutes, I was exasperated. By the time a half-hour had gone by, I was aghast. After 80 mercifully short minutes, I was questioning my sanity.

This film, which I loved so much in younger days, was absolutely terrible.

Thirty-two years after it's release, I was seeing Wizards for what it was: A unique sort of failure. Mr. Bakshi had set out to make an animated fantasy-comedy: He objectively failed on all three fronts.

Fantasy: The story concerns the struggle between twin wizard brothers-- one good, one evil-- in a far-off future Earth. The good one (a cross between Gandalf and underground cartoon character Cheech Wizard) lives in a realm full of magic, elves, dwarves, etc., while the evil one rules a land full of technology, orcs, and mutants. The McGuffin is unearthed Nazi propaganda: The bad, Sauron-like wizard uses it to motivate his mutant underlings to take over the world. A quest is then organized by the agents of good to travel to the blah blah blah to defeat the blizblaz of the himham. Alright, it's Lord of the Rings: Details are lifted numerously and wholesale from Tolkien. But it's more of a mash-up: Fantasy vs. Sci-Fi, magic versus technology, fairies versus radioactive Nazi mutants. Bakshi sort of squishes it all together, and it's so ridiculously overdone it's hard to care what happens at the end.

The final stroke of the story-- exactly HOW good Avatar bests his evil brother Blackwolf, is a •••spoiler•••, so I won't reveal it. But I will say it completely negates Bakshi's carefully lifted-- er, carefully built premise.

Comedy: The funny parts are painful. Bakshi's way of lightening the mood in Wizards is to stop the story cold for borscht-belt schtick. Not to geek out, but it's sort of hard to get into the D&D mood when the lead character sounds like Peter Falk and rich New York accents come out of half the character's mouths.

Animation: If you see a cool sequence once in Wizards, you'll see it two more times at least. Bakshi reuses his cels more than Hanna-Barbera ever did. A 12-cel action cycle (for instance, Nekron 99 galumphing along on his two-legged whatever) will be spun out for minutes at a time. The battle royale at the end is thickly padded with rotoscoped (i.e. xeroxed) battle scenes from Zulu, Patton and El Cid.

I know hand-drawn animation is an expensive, labor-intensive endeavor, and Bakshi and Disney were the only ones putting out feature animation in the 1970s. But sheesh.

Seen anew, it is easy to figure out why I liked Wizards so much when it first came out: There was literally nothing else like it out there. It had a hip, cynical sensibility, and it aligned with late-hippie core beliefs: magic good, technology bad. (Apparently, the concept for the film was hatched in late 60s, which explains things a little.)

But between 1977 and 2009-- from Star Wars through the Rings trilogy to Pixar and Harry Potter-- the bottom bar for fantasy films has been raised to the very apex of Hollywood. Wizards is a representative of a time when American animation was dying out, and fantasy films were scrubbing around the margins for studio financing. These may be factors in the film's many shortcomings, but I can't help but feel we all gave it a pass back then because it was the only game in town.

--Skot C.