Watching...
So I went to see Inside Out, another masterpiece from Pixar (the best thing about Pixar is that the word "Masterpiece" is seldom dismissed as hyperbole).
Here we have a film that explores, via the medium of children's animated entertainment, the complex internal structure of the human mind. It deconstructs the sense of self using bright primary colours and cute little representations of each major facet of what drives us to be who we are.
I must confess that my grasp of psychology is limited, but I do know that the film condenses Jungian concepts of individuality and places them alongside a giant pink elephant/cat/dolphin hybrid that cries tears of candy and is voiced by Spin City's Richard Kind, one of the cuddliest actors on the planet.
Pixar have never pandered to the storytelling requirements of successful children's fodder, their films always feel personal in a very profound way. Even Cars and it's sequel, objectively the weakest titles in Pixar's oeuvre, are the result of John Lasseter's childhood obsession with automobiles. It's that personal touch that makes Inside Out so special, it never feels didactic, instead it's like peering through the looking glass of someone else's experiences and choosing whether or not to empathize.
Of course, there is a moral message and here it is as devastatingly insightful and downright human as the opening five minutes of Pete Docter's other Pixar gem, Up. The message is that sadness (here a main character) is an essential part of human development, one must learn to cope with it and harness it in order to push past the inevitability of disappointment, failure and change. The film proffers that, faced with the loss of both sadness and joy, our other emotions cannot cope with running the show and the result is a misguided and irrational individual. This is deep stuff for a film that I watched as children gleefully clapped and whooped in the row behind me.
It's not just the core message that displays nuance and intelligence, the film is replete with inspired elements that will work for kids on a surface level, but are built from the ground up for adults. Take the crossing into Imagination Land, arguably the films stand out scene. In which Joy, Sadness and adorable imaginary friend Bing Bong (Kind), find themselves being converted into nothingness via the "four stages of abstract thought". These stages consist of non-objective fragmentation, deconstruction, two-dimensional and finally non figurative. Ostensibly this is a showcase for the animators, who get to dramatically switch up the visual style for a fun little vignette, but it's also an incredibly smart way of explaining these concepts to children in a language they can understand.
Inside Out seems like it's unique concept could be part of some groundbreaking form of storytelling, but it's actually a traditional road movie. A journey in which the characters learn lessons about themselves and each other. The twist is that this all happens inside the head of an 11 year old girl, and while she goes through the motions of a turbulent upheaval of her status quo, we follow the journey of her emotions as they scramble for some semblance of equilibrium. Further viewings needed, but this may be my favorite Pixar film.
Playing...
Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain. The last hurrah of one of Japanese game development's most innovative mavericks. I couldn't care less about the shitstorm surrounding Konami (outside of the loss of Kojima), I just want to play with my Snake again.
MGSV is, for all intents and purposes, a triumph of execution and intent. That intent being to create a perfectly refined version of the formula established some three decades ago. The sneaking, the ridiculously convoluted storytelling, the Bond movie villains, the gadgets, the comedy (both intentional and unintentional) and most of all, the painstaking attention to detail paid to it's free form approach to traditional stealth mechanics.
More than any other installment, MGSV is a game of stories, anecdotes that happened organically while playing around with the games expansive toolset.
One mission involved blowing up two armored vehicles, a task I thought near impossible once I realized I hadn't developed any explosives and I couldn't manage to tail them to a point where I could place C4...until I spied a carelessly parked armored vehicle that I could use to make them go boom.
Another sortie saw me ice a bad guy that could have led to me finding a high value target. Multiple alerts later I realized that I could trace his escape helicopter and get him before he dusted off. Further failures forced my hand and I proceeded to drop in a launcher, take out the chopper, thereby alerting the target, who drove hastily to his pick up point, only to find the wreckage of his ride alongside a camp full of corpses and my blood soaked face.
There are so many mechanical quirks here that it's almost impossible to do any one mission (and there are many) the same way. Slipped up and find yourself pinned down by enemy fire? Airstrike! or call in your faithful chopper Peaquod and play some Wagner while he destroys your enemies. Having trouble with the kevlar-wearing grunts who shake off your bullets and darts? Send over DD, your faithful pooch to slit open his jugular with a bespoke tactical doggy knife. DD will also sniff out enemies and potential rescue targets in case you don't want go through the whole base-scouting process.
The buddy system is perhaps the biggest new addition in MGSV, introducing yet more variations on mission completion on top of the myriad ways to approach a sortie solo. You are graded for performance and there is an inherent desire to consistently smash that elusive S rank, but you'll have a lot more fun if you just ignore the scoring system and, well, play the game. I certainly did.
Story-wise....well....it's written by Hideo Kojima, ones enjoyment lies solely upon fondness/tolerance of his unashamedly mental and often meandering narratives. I personally love it and it is a darker and far more reserved tale than series fans are used to. Then again, it does open with a man consumed by flames, riding a pegasus out of a flying blue whale....which is also on fire. So, ya know, there's that.
The only downside to my time with Big Boss' final transition to series supervillain, is the decision to split the game into two disjointed chapters. Chapter one is the main chunk of the story, ending with the defeat of Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain's villain and an inevitable mech battle. Chapter two then remixes old missions with higher difficulties (stealth only, extreme) and a smattering of story conclusions across half a dozen main missions and some side ops. It is hugely jarring and I can only assume a direct result of the games troubled development. The closing chapter has caused me to taper off my interactions with the game, an overwhelming feeling of "what's the point" staying my hand when I reach for the controller. That, for the final true installment of my all time favorite series in gaming, is the biggest downfall of The Phantom Pain for me.
Reading...
Warren Ellis Planetary, how did I miss this? Making my way through some of the key single issues from my youth, I noticed consistent plugging for this series, coinciding with the rise of Wildstorm as a publishing imprint of DC. It is quintessential Ellis, but amidst the futurist stylings and the pessimistic world view lies a love of comic books golden age. The issues are split into one shots akin to old serialized titles, with one overarching storyline weaving through the high concept tales. What's interesting about Planetary is how these small, quasi-self contained stories are more appealing than the main plotline (that's not to say the main story isn't fantastic). Ellis knows this and revels in spinning tales of ghostly supercops, an island of dead kaiju and camps in which the US government perform grim experiments on suspected communists.
Moving onto book 3 of Invisibles and book 4 of Saga. Invisibles 3 sees Morrison calm down a bit, after the none more mental capture and rescue of King Mob, in which all hell breaks loose and nobody, least of all the reader, knows what the hell is going on. The events I am currently reading involve a medical facility containing Lovecraftian alien beings, time travel and psychotic Yakuza....and this still counts as Morrison calming down.
Saga, exponentially increasing in charm with each page, nay, each panel. Despite my initial apprehensions (largely because of it's popularity with people whose opinion I am wary of), I find it to be one of the most beautiful, funny and charming comics I have ever read.
So I went to see Inside Out, another masterpiece from Pixar (the best thing about Pixar is that the word "Masterpiece" is seldom dismissed as hyperbole).
Here we have a film that explores, via the medium of children's animated entertainment, the complex internal structure of the human mind. It deconstructs the sense of self using bright primary colours and cute little representations of each major facet of what drives us to be who we are.
I must confess that my grasp of psychology is limited, but I do know that the film condenses Jungian concepts of individuality and places them alongside a giant pink elephant/cat/dolphin hybrid that cries tears of candy and is voiced by Spin City's Richard Kind, one of the cuddliest actors on the planet.
Pixar have never pandered to the storytelling requirements of successful children's fodder, their films always feel personal in a very profound way. Even Cars and it's sequel, objectively the weakest titles in Pixar's oeuvre, are the result of John Lasseter's childhood obsession with automobiles. It's that personal touch that makes Inside Out so special, it never feels didactic, instead it's like peering through the looking glass of someone else's experiences and choosing whether or not to empathize.
Of course, there is a moral message and here it is as devastatingly insightful and downright human as the opening five minutes of Pete Docter's other Pixar gem, Up. The message is that sadness (here a main character) is an essential part of human development, one must learn to cope with it and harness it in order to push past the inevitability of disappointment, failure and change. The film proffers that, faced with the loss of both sadness and joy, our other emotions cannot cope with running the show and the result is a misguided and irrational individual. This is deep stuff for a film that I watched as children gleefully clapped and whooped in the row behind me.
It's not just the core message that displays nuance and intelligence, the film is replete with inspired elements that will work for kids on a surface level, but are built from the ground up for adults. Take the crossing into Imagination Land, arguably the films stand out scene. In which Joy, Sadness and adorable imaginary friend Bing Bong (Kind), find themselves being converted into nothingness via the "four stages of abstract thought". These stages consist of non-objective fragmentation, deconstruction, two-dimensional and finally non figurative. Ostensibly this is a showcase for the animators, who get to dramatically switch up the visual style for a fun little vignette, but it's also an incredibly smart way of explaining these concepts to children in a language they can understand.
Inside Out seems like it's unique concept could be part of some groundbreaking form of storytelling, but it's actually a traditional road movie. A journey in which the characters learn lessons about themselves and each other. The twist is that this all happens inside the head of an 11 year old girl, and while she goes through the motions of a turbulent upheaval of her status quo, we follow the journey of her emotions as they scramble for some semblance of equilibrium. Further viewings needed, but this may be my favorite Pixar film.
Playing...
Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain. The last hurrah of one of Japanese game development's most innovative mavericks. I couldn't care less about the shitstorm surrounding Konami (outside of the loss of Kojima), I just want to play with my Snake again.
MGSV is, for all intents and purposes, a triumph of execution and intent. That intent being to create a perfectly refined version of the formula established some three decades ago. The sneaking, the ridiculously convoluted storytelling, the Bond movie villains, the gadgets, the comedy (both intentional and unintentional) and most of all, the painstaking attention to detail paid to it's free form approach to traditional stealth mechanics.
More than any other installment, MGSV is a game of stories, anecdotes that happened organically while playing around with the games expansive toolset.
One mission involved blowing up two armored vehicles, a task I thought near impossible once I realized I hadn't developed any explosives and I couldn't manage to tail them to a point where I could place C4...until I spied a carelessly parked armored vehicle that I could use to make them go boom.
Another sortie saw me ice a bad guy that could have led to me finding a high value target. Multiple alerts later I realized that I could trace his escape helicopter and get him before he dusted off. Further failures forced my hand and I proceeded to drop in a launcher, take out the chopper, thereby alerting the target, who drove hastily to his pick up point, only to find the wreckage of his ride alongside a camp full of corpses and my blood soaked face.
There are so many mechanical quirks here that it's almost impossible to do any one mission (and there are many) the same way. Slipped up and find yourself pinned down by enemy fire? Airstrike! or call in your faithful chopper Peaquod and play some Wagner while he destroys your enemies. Having trouble with the kevlar-wearing grunts who shake off your bullets and darts? Send over DD, your faithful pooch to slit open his jugular with a bespoke tactical doggy knife. DD will also sniff out enemies and potential rescue targets in case you don't want go through the whole base-scouting process.
The buddy system is perhaps the biggest new addition in MGSV, introducing yet more variations on mission completion on top of the myriad ways to approach a sortie solo. You are graded for performance and there is an inherent desire to consistently smash that elusive S rank, but you'll have a lot more fun if you just ignore the scoring system and, well, play the game. I certainly did.
Story-wise....well....it's written by Hideo Kojima, ones enjoyment lies solely upon fondness/tolerance of his unashamedly mental and often meandering narratives. I personally love it and it is a darker and far more reserved tale than series fans are used to. Then again, it does open with a man consumed by flames, riding a pegasus out of a flying blue whale....which is also on fire. So, ya know, there's that.
The only downside to my time with Big Boss' final transition to series supervillain, is the decision to split the game into two disjointed chapters. Chapter one is the main chunk of the story, ending with the defeat of Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain's villain and an inevitable mech battle. Chapter two then remixes old missions with higher difficulties (stealth only, extreme) and a smattering of story conclusions across half a dozen main missions and some side ops. It is hugely jarring and I can only assume a direct result of the games troubled development. The closing chapter has caused me to taper off my interactions with the game, an overwhelming feeling of "what's the point" staying my hand when I reach for the controller. That, for the final true installment of my all time favorite series in gaming, is the biggest downfall of The Phantom Pain for me.
Reading...
Moving onto book 3 of Invisibles and book 4 of Saga. Invisibles 3 sees Morrison calm down a bit, after the none more mental capture and rescue of King Mob, in which all hell breaks loose and nobody, least of all the reader, knows what the hell is going on. The events I am currently reading involve a medical facility containing Lovecraftian alien beings, time travel and psychotic Yakuza....and this still counts as Morrison calming down.
Saga, exponentially increasing in charm with each page, nay, each panel. Despite my initial apprehensions (largely because of it's popularity with people whose opinion I am wary of), I find it to be one of the most beautiful, funny and charming comics I have ever read.
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