One thing I forgot to mention in the comment that went along with this comic is that I've switched back to the vertical orientation. I abandoned it way back at Khatru 11 for two reasons. First, I felt the "widescreen" effect fit the atmosphere I was trying to make with the "Spooky Room" story, and second because I only had time to draw and edit half the comic that week.
Making Khatru in those days took me about three times as long as it takes me now. I used actual pencil for the pencils, which I then went over in any of a number of pens, then I scanned it, had to fight through the GIMP (sort of a free, lesser clone of Photoshop) interface, clean up all the stray pencil and pen marks, then color it, then dick around with the image size, then place the text, then paint around all of the boxes, then erase everything behind the text and within the boxes I drew, then try to save it down to a managable file size.
Super fun, right? Right. I decided to go back to the vertical orientation mostly because of resolution. I figure everything by image width. I've arbitrarily decided that comics will be 1100 pixels wide, no matter what. Vertical orientation is only 8 inches wide on the paper, whereas the old way was anywhere between 9 and 10 inches. One of my biggest issues with my comic was that I could never get the resolution how I wanted it. Drawing larger and switching to vertical is a step closer to having Khatru look as good as I want it to. I almost want to go back and re-do all the old ones. Particularly Khatru 4. Apparantly I didn't know what inking was back then. Moving on.
Putting on my movie reviewer hat now (the black fedora, opposed to the grey one for writing and drawing), I watched the newest Pixar movie "Up" this evening. As I've gotten older, I have become slightly more cynical. My friends from the marching band might joke that
slightly is a bit of a lie, but the fact remains that net cynicism (and I have now written the word cynical or cynicism enough that the word has become meaningless and difficult to spell) has increased.
Disney movies are firmly on the idealistic side of the
Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. They represent a happier time in our collective lives, when innocence and hope ruled the cosmos. Now we've got two unwinnable wars, global economic crisis and, slightly more in the long term, the threat of computers rising up to take us over (once we give them the ability to improve themselves). But I'm straying off topic.
Over the summer, at my job at the downtown Downers Grove ice cream store, I entertained my coworkers with a verbal dissertation of how most Disney movies are secretly depressing if you look hard enough at them. Someday I will share with you, the Internet, that list, but today (tonight from my perspective), we're talking about "Up."
Chances are you already know what the movie is about, so I'll only do a quick rundown of the plot. Carl is an elderly man who sits in his dusty home after his beloved wife dies. He is violently opposed to anything that disturbs his status quo, particularly the construction project that's going on around his home. Long story short, Carl flees an attempted booking-into-a-retirement-village by attaching a crapload of helium balloons to his house and flying away.
Stowing away on this voyage is Russell, a portly
Boy Scout, er, excuse me, "Wilderness Ranger" with daddy issues. Russell has placed his hopes that once he gets his final badge, his apparently extremely busy dad will come back into his life and finally express some love for him. The last badge Russell needs is "Assisting the Elderly," which I don't remember from my Scout Handbook....
Anyway, they have an adventure, meeting an exotic bird, an adorable talking dog, and one of Carl's heroes, an explorer who is trying to reclaim his reputation by capturing or killing the exotic bird companion Carl and Russell pick up. This adventurer, voiced by Christopher Plummer, has gone a little bit crazy living in South America with nobody but his dogs to talk to. Perhaps this craziness is what allows him to physically best Carl (himself a 78-year-old). If you look at the movie's timeline, Carl and his future wife Ellie meet when they are perhaps 10. Plummer's character is already a seasoned adventurer, with connections to the academic elite. I'm not sure how it was in the 1930's(?), but today you have to work pretty hard to get that sort of standing and press coverage that Plummer's guy had. So that would make him around the age of 100 by the time Carl and co. meet him. Yet he's still able to swordfight, climb around on the outside of a blimp, and blast away with his gigantic shotgun. So there's one little flaw. Regardless.
What I like about Pixar's characters (compared to the standard Disney fare), is that they actually have motivations. They're a lot more believable than any given Disney Princess. Carl is clearly mourning his wife's death, and this is what finally drives him to set out on his adventure. He sees his house as a representation of Ellie, speaking to it and all, and he seems kind of haunted. He doesn't know what to do with himself now that she's gone, and I think a lot of people can identify with that.
Russell is after his father's affection, which is kind of standard, but its interesting that his father never actually shows up to the "Wilderness Ranger" ceremony like Russell hoped. He becomes content with Carl giving him the fatherly support Russell's real father doesn't give. Russell becomes somebody for Carl to take care of, giving Carl purpose.
There's one particularly interesting scene in the middle, when Plummer's guy gets the drop on our heroes. The floating house gets jostled and set on fire, and Ellie's portrait falls to the floor and breaks. Carl abandons the exotic bird to put out the fire. Carl yells at Dug (the talking dog) and Russell feels betrayed. After Carl tows the house to the spot he and Ellie dreamed of, Russell takes off with some of the balloons, and Carl lets him go. He enters his grounded house and gets his living room back in order. Throughout the movie, whenever Carl was inside his home, there was a vitality, but now, everything is grey-tinged and quiet. Carl can't remake the status quo, because the spirit of his wife is gone. Now that Carl has something to lose, he can't just hide in his house any longer. There's a sense that Carl has started to accept that Ellie is gone, and the trip through her scrapbook helps him. He spent his entire life waiting for an adventure that never came, while she lived an adventure with him. It wasn't the same kind of adventure, but it was fulfilling none the less. Its only after Carl gets rid of the heavy pieces of furniture that tied him to his past that he was able to go rescue Russell and the bird.
I think a lot of people could learn from this lesson, myself included. But I've found that very few people have the strength to cut themselves loose from the parts of the past that weigh them down. Think of what we could accomplish if we were that strong.
