Henry Selick leaves Laika

Things are starting to look grim at Laika, the Oregon animation company formerly known as Will Vinton Studios.

The studio had a critical and commercial hit with Henry Selick's recent stop-motion wonder Coraline. But since then, it's been nothing but bad news. First came the word that Laika was abandoning its computer animation projects and firing its 128 computer graphics employees. Now Variety is reporting that Selick, Laika's supervising director for feature film development, has left the studio because he was frustrated with delays in getting his next film going.

Laika was of course named after Laika the Soviet space dog, who boarded a rocket in 1957 and became the first Earth creature to orbit the planet. She also died horribly in space, becoming the first Earth creature to perish in orbit. Here's hoping that Laika the dog's short rise and sad fall is not prophetic for the Laika's studio's fortunes.

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A Visit to the Ackermansion

Forrest J. Ackerman wasn't just a geek icon, he was also just about the most lovable old coot you could ever meet. Ackerman was the longtime editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, creator of Vampirella, Ed Wood's literary agent and coiner of the term "sci-fi". He was also such a genre super-fan that his large LA home - dubbed the Ackermansion - was packed from basement to attic with classic movie props, models, masks, rare books and far too many other wonderful things.

But while Ackerman was a voracious collector, he was not at heart a greedy man, and he didn't keep his collection to himself. For years he offered free tours on Saturday afternoons, to flocks of fans who came to gawk at his stuff. Ackerman hosted these tours himself, answering questions and telling anecdotes about his days hanging with Boris Karloff or his arguments with L. Ron Hubbard. Well into his 80s, the guy was still funny, informative and sharp as a vampire's fang.

There can be an ugly and tragic side to geekdom, the side that Chris Ware captures with such depressing fidelity in his Rusty Brown comics: bitter, angry, stunted men, hating each other almost as much as they hate themselves and living in an airless world of dusty action figures and endless reruns of children's TV shows from 1978. But Ackerman made fandom seem truly cool, like you could pursue your obsessions and even build a life around them, while meeting amazing people and doing all sorts of interesting things out there in the real world.

If you didn't keep up with the group on an Acermansion tour you'd find yourself alone in a room with piles and piles of priceless stuff for the taking, tiny treasures just sitting there begging for you to slip them in your pockets. But Ackerman trusted you not to take anything, and that's the kind of trust you'd have to be a real monster to violate.

Youtube user Powser2 has been kind enough to post an unedited, 1998 visit to the Ackermansion online in several parts. The sound is a bit murky and the color is faded, but this is worth seeing as a record of something special that's now lost to us. Those of us who were lucky enough to visit the Ackermansion came away with a lot more than a snapshot of the original model from King Kong.



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WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1949

Bunin Productions' 1949 Alice in Wonderland is a version like no other, mixing live action and the stop-motion animation of Lou Bunin to re-imagine Lewis Carroll's story as a series of rather left-wing parables, with a troop of marching fish soldiers singing an anti-military marching song and the white rabbit as a rather slimy character who has schemed his way up from poverty to become a noted figure in the court of the mad Queen of Hearts.

The Disney studio was working on its own Alice movie around the same time, and they managed to get the American release of Bunin's Alice blocked for years. When the film was finally released in the US, it played in just a handful of theaters. It fared little better in Europe, where it was allegedly suppressed because the Queen of Hearts was seen as a caricature of Queen Victoria.

Bunin was blacklisted in the McCarthy witch hunts, and Alice would prove to be his only feature. His name has become rather obscure today, which is a real shame. He was a true animation pioneer, and his work has a creepy charm all its own. But his Alice is too weird and too interesting to remain forgotten forever, and in recent years the film has begun to attract a cult audience.

The clip below offers a few random sequences from the film, giving you a taste of Bunin's style.




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New DOCTOR WHO logo, set pics

There's been a lot of Doctor Who news today, with the previously noted K9 - The Series trailer, a new Doctor Who logo (click image below for a larger view), and a bunch of behind-the-scenes Flickr photos from Matt Smith's first episode as the Doctor. I'm told there are spoilers in the photo set, but I didn't notice anything too revealing... With the arguable exception of Karen Gillan's sexy police lady uniform with the micro-miniskirt.

Gotta say, I am not thrilled about the new Doctor Who logo. The semi-serif font looks a bit awkward, the big Tardis "DW" seems hokey and obvious, and the logo and the "DW" compete with each other too much, I'm not sure where to look first. But hey, after those Colin Baker-era, 1980s new wave nightmare titles we brought you the other day, I suppose anything else is a step up!

Wow. By bitching about the new Doctor Who titles, I think I've just exceeded my maximum daily allotment of geek. I'm gonna go ride a motorcycle or play hokey or something.

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New clip from SPLICE, the upcoming mad science thriller

I've been very curious about Splice, the upcoming genetic experimentation thriller from Cube director Vincenzo Natali. Cube is an underrated little mind-warper, and Splice has the potential to be a classic Frankenstein story. Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody star as two scientists who create Dren, a human/animal hybrid that rapidly mutates from a deformed infant into something larger and more dangerous.

The early form of the creature, seen in this clip, is a bizarre little plucked chicken thing that's horrifying and endearing all at once. You can sympathize with Polley trying to be gentle with it, and you can also sympathize with Brody for wanting to just gas it on sight.



(Via Sci-Fi Scoop.)


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K9 series trailer online

The full-length trailer for the Australian Doctor Who spinoff K9 - The Series is now online. Check it out below, courtesy of SCI FI Wire.



While this looks like it probably won't be very good at all, I have to admit it doesn't look nearly as bad as I'd assumed. I had the impression that the British Doctor Who crew had little to do with it, and everything I'd heard made it sound like K9 was going to be pitched at very small children. I pictured it as something like Dora the Explorer, but starring a robot dog. So this trailer at least makes the show look a bit more Doctor Who-ish than that. It seems like it could be a fun show for kids - and who knows, maybe some adults will like it, too.

Still, if this show ever airs in the US, I can't quite imagine making time for it in my schedule. K9 will make four series set in the Who-niverse that are all airing at once. As much as I love Doctor Who, there's such a thing as just too much new Who.

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De Soto talks LIVING DEAD: ORIGINS 3D

Shock Till You Drop has posted an interview with Zebadiah De Soto, the spectacularly named gentleman who is directing a 3D CGI spinoff based on George Romero's 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead. To be frank, it's not very encouraging.

He tells the interviewer that he wants his movie to have the same chaotic feel as the very real and very ugly LA Riots of 1992. In the hands of a skilled storyteller, a zombie movie inspired by the LA Riots might actually work. It could be very edgy and frightening, showing civilization breaking down and desperate survivors of the zombie plague turning on each other. Romero's movies have always contained plenty of barbed social commentary. Sadly, it sounds more like De Soto just wants a movie with lots of fire and explosions.

"I want to see a helicopter clipping its propeller on a building and careening into a crowd of people," he tells the site. "Zombies going through the streets. A thousand people tearing each other apart, zombies tearing them apart, total chaos.

"One of the first horror films I owned was Night of the Living Dead, it made a huge impression on me," he continues. "There are all of these interesting little back stories in terms of the other characters, but we only got to follow Barbara in the original. They were always describing these really big scenes, like Ben says a truck is chased down by a horde of zombies. I always wished I could have seen that."

De Soto seems to have missed Romero's point in much the same way that Zack Snyder misunderstood Alan Moore's Watchmen. Like, De Soto thinks Romero's original movie is totally awesome and everything, dude, but what the story really needs is a lot more bloody violence!

"It's not a prequel," he maintains. "I loved Romero's movie and there are so many people out there raping it to death, I didn't want to be next in line to the gang bang."

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New WILD THINGS clip: WHAT'S YOUR STORY?

An impressive new Where the Wild Things Are clip is now online, featuring Max having a heart-to-heart with KW, the female Wild Thing. That's Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose as the voice of KW, with young Max Records as Max. I really fell for KW in this little clip; I love her sweet, almost maternal quality, and that fuzzy nose you wanna pet like a giant puppy.




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CHOP CUP

The folks at weareom.com bring us the classic cup and balls magic trick. Only, something has wrong. Very, very wrong.

CHOP CUP from :weareom: on Vimeo.

(Via Metafilter.)

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Happy 40th, MONTY PYTHON

40 years ago today, October 5th, 1969, the BBC aired the first episode of a surreal little sketch comedy program that was unlike anything before it. That program, Monty Python's Flying Circus, would go on to be one of the best things ever.

The show's first episode, Whither Canada?, was a bit uneven, as if the Python boys were still working out the kinks. But it did include this classic bit about the Funniest Joke In the World.




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