What is a person but a collection of choices?
Ed Harris as William, Westworld Season 2
I don’t have much experience with adult animation films. (And by “adult” I don’t mean porno, but movies aimed at grown-ups instead of children.) So this week I watched two animated films directed and co-produced by Ralph Bakshi, the long-time filmmaker, animator, and painter. Fire and Ice (1983) was a collaboration with Frank Frazetta (1928 – 2010) and Frazetta’s influence on the art is very clear. The story was written by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, both names I’m familiar with from my comic-collecting days for their prolific work with Marvel Comics.
The story of Fire and Ice is fairly simplistic. There is a good kingdom and a bad kingdom, and the bad kingdom invades the good kingdom because that’s what bad kingdoms do. There is a princess, there is a warrior. They fall in love while spending the entire film mostly naked, and good heavens if I looked that good I would parade around in animal-skin thongs, too. The art is the primary reason to watch Fire and Ice, and that holds up very well decades later.
Fire and Ice impressed me enough that I immediately watched Bakshi’s American Pop (1981). This has a more complex story, following the male descendants of a family from 1890s Russia to 1970s New York City. At a runtime of only 96 minutes, I would have liked a little more depth from American Pop. But, like Fire and Ice, the art is a lot of the appeal. So if you’re in the mood for a visual feast, I recommend both movies, and both are streaming on Tubi at the time I write this.
After watching Westworld Season 1 the previous week, I went forward with Season 2 this week. There’s still a lot to like, but the story is not as consistently compelling as the first season. Most of the first season episodes were written or co-written by series creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. They were much less involved in writing Season 2, and I feel the show suffers a bit as a result. Still, the acting, music, visual effects, and overall production are still outstanding, and far more interesting than most TV series I see advertised these days. And the series continues to contemplate issues of identity, free will, loss, and whether we humans are really as important as we think we are.
The Creative Life Adventure 