According to this article from the New York Post, America’s favorite slackers are bound to return to the small screen in the near future.

Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead

Once more, teenagers will have the opportunity to watch teenagers watching MTV.

With so many cheesy music videos playing on TV these days, Beavis and Butthead won’t run out of source material to make fun of anytime soon. I can’t wait to hear their sarcastic cracks on the next Lady Gaga video.

Like before, Mike Judge will create the new cartoon series and lend his (altered) voice to the two main characters.

It looks like the new cartoon series will retain the essence of the original series, with simple hand-drawn animation.

Apparently, the kids will still be in high school. I believe that’s a good idea. It’s hard (and pretty scary) to imagine how those kids would end up in an environment for grownups. Please, Mr. Judge, never let Beavis and Butthead graduate.

Mike Judge is an artist for whom I have a lot of respect because of his integrity and originality.

The animation of Beavis and Butthead was kept to a minimum in the original TV series. At all times, Beavis was pictured sideways and Butthead was pictured in front view. Using this “bare essentials” approach, it looked as if Judge didn’t really care whether his cartoons would become popular or not. As for “King of the Hill”, another one of his creations, who could have thought that it would be any fun to watch the ordinary life of some middle-aged propane salesman from Texas?

Mike Judge also directed “Office space”, a slightly offbeat movie which bombed at the box office but then became a huge cult phenomenon among IT professionals.

Artistic creations such as cartoon characters are often a reflection of the era during which they were created. Just like Mickey Mouse was given birth during the great depression, Beavis and Butthead were born in the aftermath of the 1990-1991 recession.

In 2010, the planned return of Beavis and Butthead is happening at a time when Mr. Economy is dragging his feet and looking like he’s not about to stand up straight anytime soon.

Our recession has led many unemployed people to give up looking for a job. As a consequence, slacking off is becoming “hip” again. People are enjoying simple effortless activities. They don’t feel the need or the pressure to be too productive. These behavior traits form the modus operandi of Beavis and Butthead. Many of us will relate to these two experts in time-waste management.

The days of living above our means are over. It’s no longer cool to work like crazy in order to be able to afford the latest 4×4 SUV owned by an arrogant neighbor…who purchased it with his credit card and a 10K credit limit. Beavis and Butthead, like most teenagers, are broke and hold a low-pay job at a fast-food joint.

Teacher David Van Driessen and Coach Buzzcut

The gap in political ideologies seems to be getting wider each day. Two of the show’s recurring characters are caricatures of left and right ideological extremes. Teacher Van Driessen is an overly gentle hippie who actually cares for Beavis and Butthead, while coach Bradley Buzzcut is a macho vietnam veteran who enjoys kicking the boys’ asses. The presence of these two characters is even more relevant now than back in the nineties.

For all these reasons, making “Beavises” and “Buttheads” of ourselves is becoming cool again.

Therefore, next time you return from work (or from the unemployment office), I suggest you grab yourself a bag of nachos, take a trip down to your battered basement, turn on the TV, sit back and enjoy the Beavis and Butthead show. Get ready for those new episodes coming up some time in 2011.

Revamped Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck

Bugs Bunny and his gang of loonies are planning to make a comeback in the “Looney Tunes Show”, a half-hour weekly series scheduled to air this fall on the Cartoon Network.

The show will take place in a typical suburb where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck now live as housemates. Their neighbours will include Porky Pigs, Tweety Bird, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam.

Think “Desperate Housewives” but with cartoon characters instead of, uh…housewives.

The creators of the new show are probably feeling a huge load of pressure, because reinventing those classic characters is no easy task. Bugs Bunny and his gang are still an integral part of our culture, even though most of their classic cartoons were created in the 1950s.

Looney Tunes are the epitome of TV cartoons (my personal favorite is the masterpiece Rabbit of Seville), so the bar is set very high. Future versions of the show will inexorably suffer from comparisons.

Snapshots of the new character designs have started to appear on the web, and the illustrators have already been receiving both criticism and appraisal from fans of the old cartoon series.

What struck me in particular is the size of Bugs Bunny’s feet. I feel it will take me some time to get accustomed to those. The characters look different from their original version, but that’s the artist’s vision and we have to respect that.

Who knows? Maybe Bugs Bunny’s big feet will help him land a job as Dr Schoell’s spokesperson…

A scene from upcoming Looney Tunes show

Anyway you can’t really criticize the look of a cartoon character until you see him in action. I remember the first time I saw Bart Simpson on a t-shirt I thought he was some mutant kid with a bad case of jaundice.

I would recommend to the creators of the new series to make sure the characters stay true to their original personality. In my opinion this is the most important aspect of character design, and unfortunately I’ve seen too many cartoon characters personalities (d)evolve from edgy to boring.

Bugs Bunny is a good-natured rabbit who can quickly become mischievous if one plays tricks on him or invades his territory. He’s not cocky, just very confident. There’s a thin line between being confident and cocky but Bugs Bunny never crossed that line. This subtlety is a very important aspect of Bugs’ personality.

It remains to be seen whether the new suburban set-up will work. For Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to settle down in a house is quite a change. In the old days, they were carefree vagabonds constantly on the move from one episode to the other.

Still, it would be funny to see how Daffy Duck would interact with jehovah’s witnesses knocking at his door.

Also, let’s hope it doesn’t turn into an animated version of a clichés-ridden sitcom. Unfortunately, this has already happened to what used to be my favorite cartoon tv show some years ago.

Revamping classic cartoon characters is in vogue these days. Mickey Mouse is returning to his roots in the “Epic Mickey” videogame, and Yogi Bear is set to star in a live-action/CGI movie later in 2010. I wrote about this before, and I will ask again: could this be a consequence of our evolving socio-economic context?

As for the Looney Tunes, maybe people will find comfort in characters from their childhood, a time when socio-economic conditions were not as harsh as they are today. Back then, there were no credit swap derivatives nor bank bailouts to stress over.

I truly hope that Warner Brothers successfully pull this attempt of reviving the Looney Tunes. It’s a franchise that deserves to live on.

Tim Burton must have felt like the rabbit in the story, because it looked like he was in a hurry to finish the story in the shortest amount of time possible.

It’s not that the screenplay wasn’t going anywhere. It went from point (A): “Alice (Mia Wasikowska) falls down the rabbit hole” to point (B): “Alice fights in a battle against the evil queen”. What happened between those two points was really confusing.

The characters, just like the screenplay, kept zig-zagging from one end of Wonderland to another.

The producers probably insisted on keeping the movie under a 2 hour duration.

Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland is a heterogeneous world filled with a multitude of eccentric characters. Within this complex environment, fitting a story in a short time frame (1h48mins to be exact) can be a perilous endeavor.

The screenwriter attempted to stuff the story with as many Wonderland creatures as possible, sometimes without a purpose. The dodo character, for instance, didn’t have much of a part besides questioning whether this is the real Alice following her arrival to Wonderland.

It takes some time for an audience to empathize with movie characters. Personally, I didn’t care much for any of them. There’s a segment in the film where the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) tells the story of all the bad things that happened in Wonderland while Alice was gone. There was nothing emotional about his story. It had zero impact on me.

Throughout the film, Alice kept wondering whether she was in a dream or not. That should have been left for the audience to figure out. For the third time Alice asks that question to a fellow character, it is truly becoming annoying.

Some people have criticized Johnny Depp for taking the role of another wacky character. This is ridiculous. If Johnny’s enjoying this and is good at it, I say let Johnny play all the loony characters to his liking.

All actors offer a fairly good performance, which is quite an achievement when you consider the screenplay they had to deal with. The most difficult character to play must have been Alice, because the evolution of her character through the story is not too clear. Congratulations to Miss Wasikowska for keeping her cool and delivering a steady performance.

Mia Wasikowska plays Alice

The design of the characters was very interesting. I especially liked the Cheschire cat. The coolest cat to star in a movie since Puss’n boots.

The 3-D effects were ok, but nothing to knock you out of your seat. Like I mentioned in a previous post, Avatar sets the bar pretty high for 3-D effects, so future comparisons are likely to be disappointing.

Alice in Wonderland is a bland movie that doesn’t hold well together. However, I didn’t regret watching it, because a movie set in Wonderland is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, you’ll always find something good about it. I suggest you rent the movie once, but don’t set your expectations too high.

Mickey Mouse to star in "Epic Mickey"

The video game features Mickey Mouse sporting his old-school looks of the 1930s. Players will guide Mickey through a world called Cartoon Wasteland in which retired cartoon characters enjoy a peaceful retirement. Among those characters lives Oswald the rabbit, Disney’s first cartoon star and predecessor to Mickey Mouse.

Players will have the opportunity to let Mickey perform good or evil actions throughout the game. The choice of actions will have an effect on the path of the game, and players will have to deal with the consequences of their decisions as the game progresses.

Wait…Good old Mickey Mouse behaving badly? Now that’s quite unusual. Is your mom going to be ok with that?

Disney is about to give Mickey a major personality makeover, and a lot of marketing experts are watching. After all, it’s not every year that you see the world’s biggest entertainment company re-engineer its flagship character. One can imagine that the decision has not been taken lightly by Disney executives. If Mickey ain’t broke, why fix him?

Some marketers suggest that Disney is about to pull a “New Coke” stunt. They don’t realize that, rather than introducing a “New Mickey”, Disney is actually letting Mickey return to his true roots.

Mickey in "Gallopin' Gaucho" (1928)

Most modern parents don’t know this, but Mickey used to be quite a troublemaker in the 1930s. As the New York Times puts it, he was “The Bart Simpson of his day”. For example, in the 1928 cartoon “Gallopin’ Gaucho”, Mickey was an outlaw who lived by his own rules and enjoyed the taste of beer and cigars.

Parents in the 1930s took notice of Mickey’s mischievous behaviour and the bad influence he exerted on their children. Wanting to keep parents happy, Disney quickly adapted Mickey’s personality to their preference and recasted him into a more affable character. It was necessary for Mickey to become politically correct because he was no longer just a cartoon character: he had become a brand.

Mickey then left the spotlight to Donald Duck, who went on to star in many more cartoons released in the 1940s and 1950s. While grumpy Donald stayed true to his original nature, Mickey softened and eventually became a suburban yuppie of the 1980s…and ended up stuck there. Mickey’s original edgy personality gave way to a bland, less exciting character.

"Mickey's Good Deed" (1932)

At its root, Mickey was a product of his era. He was a child of the Great Depression. You couldn’t be a wimp in those days if you wanted to survive. Discrepancies between the rich and the poor were quite high. Released in 1932, “Mickey’s good deed” is a good illustration of that context. In the cartoon, Mickey tries to earn a living by playing double bass outside on a cold snowy day. In order to help a poor widow and her children, Mickey finds the courage to sell Pluto to a rich man whose son is a spoiled brat.

The adversity faced by Walt Disney also played a large part in designing Mickey’s personality. When he was a child the Disney family had to move often because of economic hardships, and as a young adult he worked as an ambulance driver during World War One. Most importantly, early in his career as a producer, Walt Disney got royally screwed by his business associates, considering that the rights to his flagship character at the time, Oswald the lucky rabbit, had been taken away from him. Knocked down but not out, Disney gave birth to Mickey Mouse soon after, with the help of long-time partner Ub Iwerks. These unlucky events shaped Walt Disney’s “fighter” personality for years to come, and that trait was reflected in Mickey’s character. From then on, Mickey would be the little guy who stands tall in face of adversity.

In my opinion, a return to Mickey’s original character was long overdue, and the timing couldn’t be more appropriate. Our collective social mood is greatly affected by the current economic slowdown. Average citizens have not faced this much adversity since the great depression. The carefree suburban yuppie is becoming an endangered species. Most of us will relate to this Mickey redux who has flaws and qualities along with a strong determination to fight obstacles. Just like in the days of the great depression, a combative Mickey is a better fit for our current socio-economic conditions.

At first glance, the reorientation of Mickey’s character looks risky from a marketing perspective. Mothers all over the world are accustomed to his inoffensive stance. How will they react to this new, unpredictable Mickey Mouse? I believe that, on the contrary, not making this change would be a bigger risk for Disney and the beloved Mickey Mouse. I’m no marketing expert myself, but I fully agree with Seth Godin (the marketing guru) when he says that in our day and age, a product needs to be remarkable in order to survive. “Just good enough” doesn’t cut it anymore. Accordingly, the best way to revive Mickey Mouse is to bring back his original, edgy personality.

I’ve always had a personal preference for the Mickey Mouse of the 1930-40s, for both its personality and graphic design. So I’m glad the Disney company is making this move. The revamped Mickey will be closer to Walt Disney’s original vision. I’m sure it will give Mickey Mouse a boost in popularity among all generations.

All that was missing were the odours and the mosquito bites.

Avatar is a masterpiece. I can’t remember the last time I felt like this after watching a movie. That time was probably after watching Star Wars for the first time, and that was a long, long time ago.

Avatar made such an impression on me that I had to catch my breath at the end of the movie.

Set in the year 2154, the story takes place on the planet Pandora, where a human colony is attempting to harvest precious metal ressources worth billions of dollars. The mining company encounters a few glitches. The planet is already inhabited by blue humanoids called the Na’vis, who are living in close harmony with their environment, and want to keep it that way. Furthermore, the planet’s atmosphere is toxic to human beings, such that a breath of fresh air on Pandora will have you dead in less than four minutes. In order to improve their knowledge of the Na’vis and their biology, a team of scientists has developed a program in which Na’vi bodies are grown using human DNA. These bodies, referred to as avatars, are controlled from a distance by human beings who are genetically and telepathically linked to the avatars. The main protagonist of the story, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is an ex-Marine who is now paraplegic. Jake is hired to fill in the shoes (more specifically, the avatar body) of his twin brother who has been murdered while operating the avatar on Pandora.

The message behind the story is what moved me the most. As an avatar, Jake is eventually accepted by the Na’vis and gets introduced to their way of living and philosophy. The Na’vis connect themselves with their surrounding environment, and not only literally. Their beliefs are reminiscent of human philosophies where the respect of nature is of primary importance. For instance, there is a scene in the movie where a Na’vi has to kill an animal for protection, and then asks for forgiveness. Likewise, during a hunt, Native Americans used to make a prayer right after the killing of an animal, praying for its soul and thanking the animal for its sacrifice. Concepts of nature’s energy flowing through us, of humans being an integral part of Nature, rather than a distinct entity, are themes that can also be found in Hinduism, for instance. These messages are gradually carried throughout the movie, and not in a preachy way.

James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) and his special-effects team managed to create a fantastic world full of life and colours; that’s something I especially appreciated on a grey winter day. The 3-D effect makes you feel like you were there, wandering through the plants and animals which inhabit the jungle of Pandora. All that was missing were the odours and the mosquito bites.

The action scenes in Avatar are quite spectacular, and they are plenty. You will experience virtual rides in many different ways.

It might sound strange to say, but those ecology lessons have a greater impact when they’re being taught by another species, even a fictitious one. Imagine if polar bears were suddenly able to talk: it would put a whole different perspective on the global warming debate! Let’s hope that the Na’vis philosophy will eventually percolate through our collective mind.

It was refreshing to see a movie where special effects serve the story, and not the other way around. To truly appreciate the movie, you need to go to the movie theater; if you don’t like crowds, I suggest you go to the 11:00 pm screening on a monday night.

I’ve never had a better 3-D experience in a movie theater. Future 3-D performance-capture movies will be compared to Avatar, and this one sets the bar very high (sorry, Alice). Avatar is a great movie to start the new year and take some time off from that cold winter and dragging recession.

Did we really need another helping of the classic Dickens story from Hollywood? The answer is an enthusiastic yes! Disney’s version of A Christmas Carol exceeded my expectations by a long shot.

What I anticipated to be another family-friendly Christmas flick is in fact a thrilling ghost movie, to the point that I actually jumped in my seat a few times during the screening.

You can take your kids to see it but I would definitely not call this a kiddie movie.

We all know the story by heart, but here’s a quick recap anyway: in 1843 London, Ebenezer Scrooge is an old, stingy businessman who has no interest in partying or helping those in need (two things the rest of us normally do around Christmas time). On Christmas eve, Scrooge receives the visit of his associate, Jacob Marley, who doesn’t look nor sound too good, which is kind of normal since the guy’s already been dead for seven years. Marley pledges Scrooge to change his ways and announces the arrival of three ghosts who will visit Scrooge over the course of the night: a ghost of Christmas past, a ghost of Christmas present, and a ghost of Christmas future. With each ghost, Scrooge undergoes an express form of shock psychotherapy which proves to be quite effective by the end of the night.

Accordingly, the movie featured a number of ghost characters, both principal and secondary. At times it felt like a commercial for the Haunted Mansion at DisneyWorld. The ghosts were very well designed. I especially liked the ghosts of Christmas past and Jacob Marley. In Dickens’ book, it’s not clear what the ghost of Christmas past is supposed to look like; therefore the art directors had to come up with their own version of the character. The ghost of Christmas past looked like a cute, creepy version of Lumière, the candle guy from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He was a cool character to listen to, even though he had a minor speech deficiency. Marley’s ghost, on the other hand, looked like he had paid a visit to Medusa‘s hairdresser. I found him quite scary-looking.

Shot with performance capture, the movie sits midway between a cartoon and a real life action picture.  The 3-D effects were nice, but I didn’t find them essential to the visual atmosphere of the movie, except for the flying scenes. Those were quite exhilarating. The setting of London in the 1840s was very well recreated. In his book, Dickens wanted to depict the extreme poverty that was affecting a great number of Londoners at the time and the movie did show that it was not the most pleasant time to be living in.

Jim Carrey does a fine impersonation of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with Gary Oldman who impersonates a number of characters, the most striking being Marley’s ghost.

Alan Silvestri wrote the score for the film; I liked the way he took on Christmas classics and mixed them with his own compositions.

The storyline flows smoothly through the movie, except for a chase scene that I found overstretched towards the end of the movie, when the ghost of Christmas Past is trying to catch Scrooge.

Robert Zemeckis, who also directed The Polar Express, has a blast making those performance-capture movies, and it shows. He injected a lot of creativity into this film. It is not the kind of animated production you would normally expect from Disney studios, and I’m pretty sure that the producers have let Zemeckis build the movie according to his own vision. It is a refreshing version of an old Christmas classic that will eventually become a classic in its own right.