Before I start writing I need to state two things. First off, I’m glad to see that Mr Rothman finally able able to produce Jathia’s Wager. Second is a disclaimer; I wrote the first complete draft of Jathia’s Wager referred to as “The Love Story Envisioning”. This means I had some vested interest in the project back when it started in early 2007.
Now, let me get to the heart of this post. The final film has the same issues that the original seven page partial draft written by Mr Rothman had. There is no plot, no driving force, and no reason to empathize with the main characters. The sad thing is because what I saw in that partial draft was a deeper meaning than what Mr Rothman decided to portray. However, with the summary below it doesn’t surprise me it was lost.
I’m not one for “yaoi” (homosexual relationship) when it comes to TV or movies, and I find it interesting that a group of people have tagged Princess Princess as such when it is closer to shounen ai (relationships between men). But I do bring it up because it has a decent plot for a twelve show series (Note it was licensed by Media Blasters for american distribution).
I watched The Plague Dogs, Wizards and The Cave. And of the three I have to say The Plague Dogs was the best. There was more warmed and humor in it, and it had better characterization. Like with Watership Down I have to say the author and the film director did a very good job in peering into a world and making us feel for the main characters’ plight.
Wizards is just well… Weird. It may have been fine if I didn’t watch the director’s take on it. After watching that I decided I really didn’t like it. He missed every target he wanted to hit in my personal belief. It isn’t a”family” show (The female main character shows that for heaven sake), it doesn’t have an intreging plot nor character nor characters. As for the animation style I have to say that the addition of the rotoscoping felt tagged on (which it was), and he may have felt he did justice to the movie when in reality it was just too stark of a difference. [..more..]
A friend of mine suggested Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. The latter I’ll have to talk about another night, but I watched Watership Down, and I have to say that it’s an interesting story.
I’ll leave it up to Wikipedia to describe the story, but I have to say that it is interesting to see a story about animals that doesn’t attempt to assign large amount of anamorphic properties to the characters. In fact, it attempts to portray the animal group closer to their behavior patterns.
The reason I bring this up is because as a writer I find this level of writing to be interesting. Wolves High is about an anamorphic highschool, but after watching the animated movie it makes me wondering, if I were to ever finish it, if I shouldn’t research animal behavior more and reflect those attributes more.
Why? Because it shows that you don’t need to nearly transform an animal into a human in order to tell an interesting story.