Shorts SHORT Review: Zombie in Love

Zombie in Love
by Kelly DiPucchio and Scott Campbell

Book Design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian
Published by Atheneum Books For Young Readers
An imprint of Simon and Schuster

Welcome to the shorts SHORT Review, today we'll be talking about Zombie In Love (you can check out it's sequel here). The simplest story you could see a mile away, boy meets girl, then a quickstep to the altar. Though by the end of the book you'd want no one else in his life then the woman that found him.

In life there's a lot of radical ideas that we make up, like the abstract thought of time. Though in this Children's Illustrated Novel we join the adventures of love. That all inspiring and crushing emotion, even after death we're bound by our hearts. This is a beautiful telling of a person looking to find love in another. The best part about the main character being a Zombie is that this represents that person, their life style, their personal grooming habits, even what type of entertainment they enjoy. Majority of existence, we find people the most attractive when certain ideas mix, I'm not saying there's a "one" though in this story our main character has tried many methods and relations before she found him. Remember the plot isn't thick, our Zombie protagonist meets a Zomberella, then they get married. This is a lovely story of someone that believes there's another like them, it's literal since they're both decomposing stiffs. It would be great (in the real World) to have a literary device that would allow you to know that people in your life (romantically) would be compatible.

One of the most trivialized things about a book is the design, Children's Illustrated Novels especially. It's maybe the number one thing that I look at is the design. Designers are the ones that create the presented experience and this is what fabricates a hold on the reader from start to finish, since it will be what takes the emergence of the story and the art.

The Water-color and the design of the characters are fantastic, though water colors and Zombies, are the most cliche for contemporary books. It works so well for decay, and making situations more awkward since a corpse is making romantic advances, and creating a jouissance space that feels clammy. The character acting was well composed, which is common place for a lot of Children's Illustrated Novels, though not so fully realized in a first novel, which is a surprise to find in this book. Scott Campbell made the characters move and flow, but as an idea of motion within inaction. Though it was the background characters (extras) that stole scenes, a spectacular job of reacting to the insanity of Mortimer (our protagonist). One thing I really love are running gags, in the story the joke is an extreme closeup of the Zombie and/or the Zomberella smiling. It's such a good poke at a lot of kid's books and it gives (in a way) a homage to the Loony Tunes cartoons when needing to point out something that demanded full concentration or was incredibly grotesque.

All in all this was a wonderful story, with a more contemporary way of finding love. Since most stories rely on the characters to just happen on each other, rather than putting in effort and trying to improve or signal another's heart toward their own. In short, if you get this for the plot you will be not be challenged, though if you over think the story and enjoy the details and wonderfully water-colored pages, then you've made a fantastic addition to your collection.

I trust you enjoyed the inspection, thank you for reading.
Support the creator, check out the book.
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Keep well and Stay well.

Cowboys VS Aliens

The Film was great, the Comic was horrible, that's the short and long of a lot of media translations, either one will be better than the other or both weren't good in the first place. Most of the time it's the film that does poorly compared to the written material, though there are exceptions to the rule based on the source material either being too great in length or poorly conceptualized. My first thoughts of the film by poster and trailer were excitement, even with the cover to the comic's collected volume made me interested in the tale, since Science Fiction and Westerns are two of my favorite genres.

Shorts SHORT Review: PokeMonster Hunter

PokeMonster Hunter: Mash Up featuring the Game Grumps
Presented by Polaris

Animators:
JulianGD2-
YouTube
Nevarky-
YouTube
Tumblr 
Sarah MoonSmoothie-
Tumblr

Welcome to the shorts SHORT Review, today we'll be talking about the Polaris Mash-up Animation of PokeMon and Monster Hunter. I'm surprised that there aren't more of these gags made within the community of either franchise, though at the same time I'm thankful, since this was an enjoyable short. Over saturation or competing ideas could have ruined the punchline joke, though I do enjoy the imaginative fanart from creative artists of both collectives. To brake it down to the basics, this is a limited animation collaboration between three animators and eight voice actors. The pacing to the story was made clear and was clever even to those that don't know either series. There's not many problems with the short feature and the style choice makes the other parts of the animation stronger, even the opening parallax is wonderfully presented. The background is beautifully flat, though with the minor details of implied floral and rural life spring the effect of a multiple layered landscape. One of the most enjoyable parts of the three minute short was the final fight with Charizard. The music had elements of the PokeMon series and the battling Game Grumps felt perfectly at home with the slaughter of monsters. In short, the acting visually and vocally was well casted and directed, the design and animation choices were well executed within time limitation. This really showed a lot of passion for PokeMon, Monster Hunter, Octopimp - Blacksmith, and Game Grumps, I hope to see more from these creative individuals.

I trust you enjoyed the inspection, thank you for reading.
Support the creator, check out the links above and watch the short.
If you want to stay up to date on my reviews, subscribe to this page.
Keep well and Stay well.

Avengers: Present, Future, Past

(Editor: This was written after seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron)

The Avengers, this is an old franchise that I've enjoyed off and on with different forms of media. My main interaction was with comics, they were like how S.H.I.E.L.D. currently is, an organization that takes down what everyone else can't stop. Groups were popular in the 80's and 90's, though this could have been due to gangs and clubs being popular during these generations, everyone wanted to feel like they belonged somewhere. Personally I liked the idea of teams, DC tried to do the same thing, though a lot of the groupings felt forced, Marvel did a pretty good job. Though the Avengers were the main catalyst for most supers (in the Marvel universe) finding their hope and desire to be of use to the community, which was inspiring to fans, writers, and artists in our reality.

Justice League War

**** Hey (2018) Cartoon Cyborg Cinema citizens, it's Mister Forte here with an EDIT, that's right, I wanna rework the blog a little, make it more of a positive effort to cinema and books than something that's gonna discredit and harm the passionate project that people have put time and effort into making. I'll be putting small changes into these posts, just making them flow a little better, or correct grammar or spelling errors, but mainly I want you to seek out these features in your own life and enjoy them to the fullest. I'll still critique them on issues and embellish other points, though I feel more can be done then feed negativity. The main goal of this is to bring positivity to reviewing and conversation to topics that don't always get the same amount of love back (more on this topic over here). Thank you for the privilege of your time and enjoy this review. **********

This is a big jump for DC Animation and WB Animation alike, since the Justice League is the Avengers of DC Comics. And on top of that the Justice League (and Justice League Unlimited) Animation Series is a well loved program, so making a movie that updates the characters and plot in a more modern setting is going to be a challenge, then the uphill battle of convincing fans. With that in mind Justice League War is a brash title for an introduction to these new version of old friends.

Let me get this out of the way, I'm an old school fan of DC Comics, though I understand cinematic versions and updated versions (new 52) of the characters are out there and applied to modern adaptions, but their spirit should be placed into all media. What I'm saying is when my memory of the past comes into place I'll give you my nostalgia, then my understanding of the character within the film. Again most creative teams want to make their version of the characters or use their dream team or their favorite characters from their favorite creative team. This can be seen as successful with the TV series X-Men from 1992 and Teen Titans from 2003, so I can't blame them for being ambitious in trying to have lightning strike twice.

That's where this movie comes in, they want to take a good idea, update it and make it something that they can create a film series, that's not too ambitious, since they've done that with many of these characters. Just to name a few Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, and always Batman, though they saw a trend in the fabric of what was moving in pop-culture and it was teams. With the success of Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers they needed to bring back their heavy hitters, though a little dusty they just needed a new paint job. This is my speculation, and you'll hear more about this 'between the lines' thinking in this post.

Problem Thoughts

One thing to remember about all films and books, there's a certain amount of control that most pieces of media have. In today's world creative teams only have so much power over the product that they are in-charge of, though take on all the blame for its failure or success. With most animation productions the storyboard team become the writers of the film or TV series, though approval goes through many channels, as does anything live-action. Meaning that either the outline wasn't written well for the storyboard artists to understand the points to hit, the revisionist can't make a story out of the mess, the director is professionally immature, or some last minute detail had to be shoehorned into the idea to make things fit a demographic. It's a common thing that happens with most shows, time, budget, and approval / politics get in the way of what gets presented to the masses.

For those familiar with Kevin Smith, he mentioned in "An Evening with Kevin Smith" that he was paid to write a story for a Superman film. And what person (that's been reading comics) doesn't want to be able to involve comics into their life. He wrote a script (which I'd love to read sometime) though was asked to put one specific thing into the film, a giant spider. I don't think there was a moment in any Superman comic that he fought a spider, let alone a giant spider, nor a mechanical spider. The closest thing was Spder-Man, it was a special in 1981 and again there was a whole crossover thing in the 90's, I'll get into that with a review later. I'm getting off topic, in the lecture series Kevin Smith mentions that he was commissioned to have Superman duke it out with a giant spider, well like he thought the company passed on the script. Now he left it open ended if it was or wasn't what the studio was looking for as a Superman film or if it was the giant spider. Since later that year (by the same producer [Jon Peters] that suggested the idea to him) there was a giant mechanical spider in the film "Wild Wild West".

This is the hardest part about making something in entertainment, studios / creators have an idea of what they want, so in the long and short of things it's all about the pitch. So the idea might be amazing, though the execution doesn't always match the details on paper. What all this means is we, as viewers, have to take everything with a grain of salt. I'm not saying we should look away on something that doesn't fit the world that was created, though we shouldn't throw total blame on one party member. As one of the best episodes (The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show) of "The Simpsons" series shows, characters and plots are sometimes inspired or pressured by individuals for better or worse. Fans forget the power they have over the movement of what is popular or what they want to see, more or less these pleasures are created, not always the intent that was wanted.

We need to take our ego out of what we expect and try to live within the world of the entertainment we're enjoying. It's sometimes hard, since characters can be close to us, though this is why we converse about all these different forms of media and have websites dedicated to pointing out these problems or congratulating those that made something excessively well. I hope this clears up some of my opinion points for media that tried to take on something ambitious and didn't quite succeed. Taking one's personal bias out of things sometimes help the enjoyment, though I will point out problems that should have been seen nonetheless.

In short, a lot of heart and vitality went into a lot of entertainment media, this is a review blog, but I'm not going to be crushing, just critical. There's a lot of books and movies and cartoons to just about replace every person in North America, so let's explore these multitudes of forms and probe the unknown with a positive mind.

Carrie

**** Hey (2018) Cartoon Cyborg Cinema citizens, it's Mister Forte here with an EDIT, that's right, I wanna rework the blog a little, make it more of a positive effort to cinema and books than something that's gonna discredit and harm the passionate project that people have put time and effort into making. I'll be putting small changing into these posts, just making them flow a little better, or correct grammar or spelling errors, but mainly I want you to seek out these features in your own life and enjoy them to the fullest. I'll still critique them on issues and embellish other points, though I feel more can be done then feed negativity. The main goal of this is to bring positivity to reviewing and conversation to topics that don't always get the same amount of love back (more on this topic over here). Thank you for the privilege of your time and enjoy this review. **********

My knowledge of Carrie before reading the book or watching the films were limited to parodies and homages. Though the posters advertising the films and peer evaluations on each media kept me wanting to learn more about the featured character. All I knew about the film was it's a horror movie and the writer was a skilled horror author, I was surprised by how skilled Stephen King was at writing a consuming tale. I grew up with more fear of scary movies than education of what makes a scary movie or story. Over the last 7 years I've become more openminded with this genre of entertainment that comes my way, this has become an amazing journey.

A Bit about Cartoon Cyborg Cinema

Hello, hello! This is Cartoon Cyborg Cinema the multiple media analytical review blog.

My name is Mister Forte and these are my anthropomorphic counter parts, Professor Steeping and his creation Gom (Vägra att Gom, is it's full name). They will be helping me look over (primarily) Feature length Animations and Animated Shorts with Books, Comics, and Live-Action Films in the mix. If you like critical eyes and spoilers of some of the best and worst of the entertainment world, then you've found your favorite editorial illustration and review blog.

So let's start exploring like the amateur detectives we are and think like the novice historians that we want to be.