Third Update in Two Days

You are some very lucky buckies, you-few-who-read-this. I've just noticed that Celluloid Dreams' Web site has a lengthy, English-subtitled extract from Folimage's Mia et le Migou (not released even in France until 3 December 2008) and a proper trailer (a teaser appeared on Catsuka a while ago) for Cartoon Saloon's Les Armateurs-produced feature Brendan and the Secret of Kells. There is also a Blog of Kells kept by the director, Tomm Moore, in addition to his personal blog.

As you should be able to see, I'm now attempting to make the effort to brighten this up blog about mainly visual things with some embedded images (the two above are from Brendan and the Secret of Kells; that in the previous post is of The Princess and the Frog). I haven't done so before as I've been worried about copyright infringement and hosting space, but this evening came to the realisation that no one else seems to care about the former and the latter could be avoided by using those images already uploaded by others. The only obstacle this leaves is that many hosts nowadays block the use their images on other domains – therefore I need you, lucky buckies, to tell me whether these images are showing up for you or not. If not, please say so in the comments and I can remove the attempts to embed.

One more thing – a reminder for myself more than anything. It's a shame that neither Brendan, even less so The Princess are likely to be released here before I write my dissertation, as it looks like they would make good examples for a three-way comparison of the depiction of people of one ethnic minority (albeit as large and loosely-defined as "African" is) in contemporary, family-aimed animated features. By "depiction" I don't mean only the visuals of their character designs, but also their role in the story and, distinct from this, their role in the world in which the story takes place. Without seeing the films for myself I can only write in any authority about the first of these – though I could always make assumptions from what I'm read of them on the Web, I don't want to eventually experience them first hand only to find that I wrote about them is quite different from my own, now informed interpretation. Of course, in Ocelot's original features, Africans are not the minority, though they are in the large majority of the countries in which they were made. It seems important to me that Ocelot has chosen to make a film about African-Africans, while Disney have chosen to introduce one of the missing racial groups among their princesses by making a film about African-Americans.

Current music: Joanna Newsom – "Colleen"
Proves that folk is the audio equivalent of stop-motion – well, of the Eastern European kind – in it's natural ability to evoke a sense of folklore for the story to take place in.