Getting animated in quarantine with Netflix

THE WILLOUGHBYS and THE MIDNIGHT GOSPEL both try new things

There’s really nothing like those throbbing pianos, the sound rolling under you like you’re riding some giant lurching hurdy-gurdy, and walking around my neighborhood with the sounds of Fetch The Bolt Cutters rattling around my brain has been a welcome addition to the daily routine right now.

I no longer have anything new to say about the larger situation around us. Part of it is because I am afraid of what will happen if I uncork my anger right now. It’s not going to help anyone. Part of it is because I am in such a precarious state that if I get too far into it, I’ll be paralyzed by anxiety.

I hit a weird lull where I couldn’t watch or read anything for about 48 hours. I just couldn’t do it. My brain hit this place where everything just bounced off of it, no matter what I did. I’m sure many people are going through this right now, and I’m sure it’s affecting productivity across the board. That’s not really an option or an excuse for me, though, because there’s no shortcut to producing a newsletter several times a week or working on a book or writing a short story. You do it or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s nothing to publish. I don’t really have anywhere to hide right now. You guys are out there and I’m either sending you something to read or I’m not, and if I’m not, I can’t really expect anyone to pay for a subscription.

So you find a way back in. You just make yourself do it. And in my case, I am enormously grateful for that Fiona Apple album which landed at just the right time. It’s full of anxiety in its own right and that’s actually one of the things I love most about it. This feels like an album for right now, one of those accidents of timing. For the rest of my life, when I hear that strange stutter beat on the chorus of “Fetch The Bolt Cutters” or the languid skip along the keys as she sings “Shameika said I had potential,” I will think of this time and this crisis and these feelings as the entire world shakes itself into a new shape.

We have to be good to our brains right now because this is a massive, massive trauma we’re experiencing. What that means is different for everyone. I can only tell you some of the ways I’m finding joy right now and encourage you to pursue it vigorously yourself.

For example…

NON-STOP MOTION

I love animation in general. I think it’s a fascinating way to tell a story or express an idea, and it makes me sad that we’ve largely relegated that tool to use in telling stories for children. Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves, even though most modern blockbuster filmmaking might as well be considered animated considering all of the FX work in them. The word makes people weird. Maybe it’s because so many of those films we show kids first are animated. It just seems like a strange failure of imagination on a giant scale.

People who don’t like animation confuse me. I love how expressive it can be, and how far you can push stylization. A beautiful new example is the film The Willoughbys, which premiered today on Netflix. Directed by Kris Pearn and Rob Lodermeier, who have found a really lovely visual approach to adapting Lois Lowry’s book, this is sweet but not cloying, broadly funny without being crass, and it should be a delightful surprise for families looking for something new to watch together.

Or, you know, anyone who likes animation. I’m not quite sure how Netflix is marketing this since I haven’t seen any ads for it anywhere, but it’s not just for families, and that’s sometimes hard to sell. There’s sort of a Lemony Snicket sensibility at play here, with some dark humor and some grim jokes, but there’s nothing here I’d be uncomfortable showing any audience. Will Forte, Martin Short, Ricky Gervais, Maya Rudolph, Sean Cullen, Terry Crews, and Jane Krakowski all voice characters, and everyone’s terrific. Alessia Cara, who plays one of the kids, also sings in the film to tremendous effect, and it’s a genuinely lovely moment amidst the generally lunatic goings-on. The film’s sense of humor is very droll and there’s a nimble wit to the enterprise overall.

The biggest appeal is the animation itself, which is all done by computer, but designed to look and feel like stop-motion. At first glance, you might think you’re looking at something akin to the movies that Laika’s been making the last few years, and I honestly had to ask someone at Netflix when I got my first look at this film a little while ago. I wasn’t sure if it was stop-motion or CG, and I think that’s great. There is a tactile physical quality to the whole world, not just the characters, and I love the way Kyle McQueen’s production design all feels like it’s been done in a real space, using actual physical elements. It’s very Rankin-Bass, but pumped up and perfect, and it delighted me in sequence after sequence. Hats off to whoever had the idea to approach the film this way, but all of the hats off for the team who actually pulled it off. Amazing.

It’s a quick little 90 minutes about a group of kids whose parents are so horrible that they decide they’d rather be orphans. They arrange for their parents to go on a vacation around the world where they will meet a horrible end, allowing the kids to raise themselves. They aren’t counting on the nanny who shows up, though, or on the actual orphan baby who is left on their doorstep, and what unfolds is warm and silly and throws enough ideas for four other movies at you. It’s a truly lovely little gem and I hope it doesn’t get lost right now.

Check it out and let me know what you think, and in the meantime, do you have a personal favorite piece of stop-motion animation? It’s always held such a special place in my affections. I have an actual piece of one of the puppets from Coraline here at the house, and I think one of the most amazing things I’ve ever gotten to do as a journalist was the few days I spent on the Corpse Bride sets with unfettered access. Walking through a warehouse full of that world was something I’ll always treasure.

Now, if you’re looking for animation that breaks the rules…

WHICH SIMULATION IS THIS?

There’s nothing quite like creating a beloved hit that actually sticks the landing to buy you a little bit of room to breathe, creatively speaking.

Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time is a truly wonderful thing. Start to finish. I’m excited to hear he’s making four new specials for HBO Max. I think the generation who fell in love with the show will always appreciate a chance to revisit that dense, specific world that he created, but it’s clear that he also wanted a chance to do new things and push the medium in new ways. Now, working with Duncan Trussell, that’s exactly what he’s done. Trussell is a podcaster and comedian who is clearly on a life-long mission of consciousness exploration, and he is a man who knows his subject. He doesn’t just pay lip service to big ideas when he talks about psychedelics or religion or meditation; he digs deep, and he’s done the personal work to speak about these things at length with the people he interviews.

The combination of the two of them is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from putting Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussell together. The show is about a space-caster (which is podcasting on a cosmic scale) who has a used universe-simulating computer that he uses to explore different worlds, interviewing the beings he finds there as their worlds deteriorate and often crumble completely. The interviews are a combination of scripted stuff and actual interviews with guests like Damien Echols, Anne Lamott, Trudy Goodman, Ram Dass, and Caitlin Doughty, and they are truly heady conversations. Meanwhile, the worlds around those conversations are a near non-stop barrage of visual invention. It’s an incredibly difficult show to describe because of the way it throws information at you, but it’s oddly coherent. It shouldn’t really come together, and I’ve seen attempts at this kind of thing before that have just come across as someone throwing buzzwords at you to seem edgy or cool.

I’d love to know how this all worked. Clearly they started with interviews that Trussell conducted at some point, but there’s so much other stuff involving those special guests that they must have had them in a few times, and I can only imagine what those later recording sessions were like. What I find most interesting is how each new world is a blank slate for Ward as a visual artist, and each new world is somehow complete and thought-out and different. The sheer scope of his imagination is breathtaking, and there’s a simple charming beauty to much of what he’s designed here.

You can approach this as a sort of grab-bag of ideas and engage with it just on that level, or you can watch the whole thing in order, revealing a larger story that is just beginning to assert itself by the end of this first season. I hope this is going to be an ongoing series for Netflix. It is unique and strange and oddly moving and even comforting, despite the often insane levels of gore in the animation. Trussell is on a journey and he’s willing to share that entire journey with his audience. He is a strong interviewer because he’s genuinely curious and he wants to get in there and exchange ideas and he wants to walk away from the conversation richer. That’s certainly true of the show, too. I feel like I got something real from my time with it, and I feel like this is one of those total gambles that actually paid off.

A PERFECT BITE

I’m sure they didn’t coordinate the effort, but between Don Winslow and Stephen King, it feels like I’m suddenly neck-deep in novellas.

It’s such a strange middle-ground between the short story and the novel, and not everyone can pull them off. It’s harder to make them feel like a fully satisfying piece if you aren’t precise in the way you tell your story. It can either feel like a short story that doesn’t know when to wrap things up or it can feel like a novel you just didn’t cook enough. And yet, done right, it’s a really wonderful format for those things that are neither fish nor fowl, and I trust both of these writers enough at this point to know that they’re working in this form for a particular purpose.

Winslow’s Broken is a collection of six novellas, and right away, one of them has become one of my favorite things Winslow’s ever published. He’s one of those writers who I just plain enjoy, each and every time. A Cool Breeze on the Underground, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life, The Winter of Frankie Machine… these are all terrific books, and then you’ve got his larger series like The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border or his recent epic The Force. He is an ambitious writer whose work is grounded in dense research and a journalist’s eye for detail. He loves the people on the margins, people either making their life as criminals or people working to catch them.

The novella love most here, The San Diego Zoo, opens with one of the best first lines I’ve read in a long time. I’m jealous of it. I would be mad at Don if he didn’t also have a great story to go with that opening line, because it’s an all-timer:

“No one knows how the chimp got the revolver.

Only that it’s a problem.”

Goddamn. If that doesn’t make you want to read the story about what happens when the officer who responds to that distress call then gets tasked with tracking down the origin of the gun, then you and I have different interests entirely. There are characters who pop up in Broken who will be familiar to longtime readers of Winslow’s work, and the same is true of King’s If It Bleeds, which is four new novellas, including one that stars Holly Gibney, a character who was first introduced in Mr. Mercedes. I think it’s wonderful when authors fall in love with characters and can’t let them go. Holly was originally a fairly minor character as imagined by King, but now she’s the star of her own novella because he simply can’t stop thinking about her and checking in on her.

None of the King stories are his strongest, but they’re all good strong King pieces, and the second one is a strange experiment that ends up working as an emotional piece. No one’s voice soothes me the way Uncle Steve’s does, honestly. I could read Stephen King write about almost anything and get some pleasure from it, and I’m the first to admit that I’ve read many of his books out of sheer devotion to the artist rather than a love of the particular work. What amazes me most is how sharp he still is. I would kill to have a few years where I wrote with the discipline and the grace that King does, and he’s been doing it as long as I’ve been reading. King’s words are the foundation for me, part of the larger landscape, and I can’t imagine not soaking up his work at this point.

For both Winslow and King, the novella tends to highlight what’s best about their work. Winslow writes in short, sharp, punchy prose, and these books move as fast as his sentences. King sometimes suffers when he’s got to support the entire plot of a novel. Here, he gets in, lands some haymakers, and gets out.

They’re both fantastic diversions, and you can read them in quick gulps between other activities. If you have to pick one or the other, pick up the Winslow. You owe it to yourself to enjoy The San Diego Zoo. It is a pure good thing, and we need those right now.

AND FINALLY…

Universal sent a box to the house yesterday. I didn’t think I’d have mixed feelings about a package, but it was indeed an odd feeling to be getting promotional materials sent to me in quarantine. Guy Ritchie’s latest, The Gentlemen, is just arriving on Blu-ray, and I gave it a try.

I wish I liked it. I think Guy is a talented filmmaker who shouldn’t write his own movies. Not every filmmaker is both writer and director, and The Gentlemen is a great example of style with nothing to say, a cast that shows up ready to have fun but who ends up just spinning wheels because there’s no meat here. There’s a bag of tricks that Ritchie goes back to here that we’ve seen before, and I thought he’d run it into the ground around the time of Revolver. Turns out, he had more to say, and yet, absolutely nothing to say at the same time.

If you just want actors playing tough guy with each other, a slippery sense of chronological order, and untrustworthy narration, then The Gentlemen might do it for you. I certainly gave it all the opportunity in the world. The Universal box included some whiskey, a tumbler, and some whiskey rocks, as well as playing cards, a pair of plastic eyeglasses frames, and the film on Blu-ray.

If nothing else, I’ll drink the whiskey at some point, and I will encourage Ritchie to find a great script next time, one with something to say, because all the technique in the world doesn’t matter when the message is this empty.

Today’s newsletter is free, but I need your support if this newsletter’s going to keep publishing. We’re ad-free and entirely funded by you guys. It’s just $7 a month, and less if you go annual up-front. If you like it but you can’t subscribe, at least spread the word and forward this to someone who might enjoy it!

Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of Netflix
Image courtesy of Universal Studios