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November 23, 2003

Today's words: bipennis and oases.

Today's words: bipennis and oases.

Chapter Three is done. My knee is doing something very disturbing, and is a little swollen from me walking down a stair, so I probably won't go to aikido tomorrow. There's a little voice telling me I'd probably be fine, but there's no CTRL+Z in reality, and on the off chance that this isn't just a little something, I would rather sacrifice a day of practice than potentially lose several months of it.

There are six characters currently running around in the foreground of the story, and two of them are main characters. I know exactly how many of these characters will die by the end of this novel, which may or may not be good. Death is transference of power in the universe I'm writing in (as it can often be in the universe I live in), and since there is a lot of weird power in my written universe, there is a lot of death.

We watched Finding Nemo. Disney has it all wrong. It's not the hand-drawn animation that's causing their movies to bomb at the box office, it's their utterly wretched formula they insist on pouring all their films into. Finding Nemo is pretty AND well written AND different from previous Pixar films (the main character is a Dad! A DAD!) I love it.

...which doesn't explain why Hayao Miyazaki films fail to take well in the USA. Several reasons for that, really. For one, there's rarely a clear-cut good or evil in his stories.

Or maybe it's the marketing. Everyone I know who saw Spirited Away loved it, but no one knew a thing about the film when I told them to go see it. I think a simple title change could have saved that one. Like Alice in Wonderjapan or Non-Sucky Movie about a Little Girl Who Saves Her Parents or Chihiro and the Happy Fun Dragon. Something. Anything.

Anyway, Pixar is single-handedly saving the American animated film industry, and Cartoon Network is saving the television side of things. God bless 'em all.

Posted by sdshaver at November 23, 2003 01:34 AM