(no subject)
Jan. 4th, 2025 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWe ended up bookending the new year by going out to the movies twice, so my last film of 2024 and my first film of 2025 were both brand new animated pictures -- this however is probably as much similarity as I can draw between The War of the Rohirrim and Flow.
The War of the Rohirrim reminded me of nothing so much as classic Rankin and Bass animated films of my childhood like The Hobbit and Flight of Dragons. Notably, I don't think either of these films is considered to be particularly good, but I loved them very much. I think War of the Rohirrim is probably better and definitely prettier than either of the movies to which I have just compared it, and had it come out when I was a child I also would have loved it very much. As it was, I had a very good time butgenarti and I did somewhat regret that we did not have the theater to ourselves ... apologies to the two guys sitting right behind us ....
The War of the Rohirrim concerns a very heroic princess of Rohan who gets caught in the middle of a long war and brutal siege when she rejects her childhood friend's marriage proposal right before a fight between their dads, in a one-two punch that turns said childhood friend tragically evil. (The childhood friend and his people are all brown-haired and dark-skinned in contrast to the blonde Rohirrim, but not to worry! our heroine has a very heroic dark-skinned cousin and the tragically evil childhood friend has an Honorable Advisor, the movie would like to assure you that it is Not racist and please not to think about it too much.) It is mostly a very normal Heroic Fantasy War Movie with a lot of moments of stirring and tragic heroism and there are only about thirty minutes where I kept catching Beth's eye and then had to completely cover my mouth to stop from laughing.
Ten of those minutes are early on in the film when the heroic princess of Rohan runs into an angry oliphant, and then lures the oliphant into the forest to get COMPLETELY SLURPED UP WHOLE by a stray Watcher in the Water who lives in a pond somewhere nearby. We spend several minutes watching this slurp. The animators really, really loved drawing it. God bless.
Then the next twenty come much later on, during the brutal siege bit of the plot, when our heroine's wounded and elderly royal father, the old king, mysteriously disappears from the siege hall where he is tragically failing to recover from his wounds!! meanwhile, outside, the besieging army whisper tales that the old king's spirit is haunting the troops and murdering people in the night!
Our Heroine, investigating, accidentally finds a secret passage that kicks her out of the fortress onto the freezing hillside where she finds the orcs who are the ones who have in fact been picking off the besieging troops, for unrelated reasons. We also assumed at this point she would tragically find the body of her father ....
BUT NO! Her father is ALSO hanging out on the mountain in the middle of the blizzard! Somehow he lost his sleeves and got incredibly buff! They fight their way back to the front gates to get back inside the besieged fortress .... BUT ALAS. The door is stuck and will only open wide enough to admit her, because her dad is TOO BUFF! So instead he turns around and fights the besieging army and kills like a dozen guys by himself.
ME: STOP praying for my grandpa! you are making him too strong!
BETH: catch these Rohands!
Then he heroically freezes into a grandpapsicle on the mountainside, after which the siege and the plot continues completely as normal.
Anyway. Pretty movie! Fun to watch! I recommend watching it in a situation where you can talk to your friends so you can ask them questions like "why do these elephants have cat-eye pupils, isn't that an evolutionary disadvantage?" and "is she wearing knee-high boots over thigh-high boots?" without bothering anybody else in the theater.
genarti and I also spent a lot of time catching each other's eyes and covering our mouths with our hands while watching Flow, but that was NOT to stop from laughing, that was because a little cat had its EARS BACK and was making SAD SCARED NOISES and we were pretty sure that cat was going to be fine but that did not stop us from being STRESSED.
Flow is a beautifully animated Latvian film about a cat's adventure through a surreal magical flood and its encounters with a variety of other animals along the way, and how they end up helping each other to survive in a transformed landscape. All the animals act exactly like the animals they are, if those animals were just like ten degrees smarter than the average (smart enough to figure out how to steer the rudder of a boat, for ex.) but that aside the Behaviors are really well-observed -- I especially loved every sequence in which one creature tentatively tries to make friends by mirroring another creature's posture.
There are no humans in this movie, although the signs of their presence and absence are felt throughout. There is no dialogue. The animals make animal noises. (Except the capybara, which, according to Wikipedia, makes baby camel noises.) The sound design is really incredible -- I never want to hear a human actor speak out of a cartoon cat again. We had plans to run errands after the movie, but we ended up having to make a detour home first to pet our cats. No regrets.
The War of the Rohirrim reminded me of nothing so much as classic Rankin and Bass animated films of my childhood like The Hobbit and Flight of Dragons. Notably, I don't think either of these films is considered to be particularly good, but I loved them very much. I think War of the Rohirrim is probably better and definitely prettier than either of the movies to which I have just compared it, and had it come out when I was a child I also would have loved it very much. As it was, I had a very good time but
genarti and I did somewhat regret that we did not have the theater to ourselves ... apologies to the two guys sitting right behind us ....The War of the Rohirrim concerns a very heroic princess of Rohan who gets caught in the middle of a long war and brutal siege when she rejects her childhood friend's marriage proposal right before a fight between their dads, in a one-two punch that turns said childhood friend tragically evil. (The childhood friend and his people are all brown-haired and dark-skinned in contrast to the blonde Rohirrim, but not to worry! our heroine has a very heroic dark-skinned cousin and the tragically evil childhood friend has an Honorable Advisor, the movie would like to assure you that it is Not racist and please not to think about it too much.) It is mostly a very normal Heroic Fantasy War Movie with a lot of moments of stirring and tragic heroism and there are only about thirty minutes where I kept catching Beth's eye and then had to completely cover my mouth to stop from laughing.
Ten of those minutes are early on in the film when the heroic princess of Rohan runs into an angry oliphant, and then lures the oliphant into the forest to get COMPLETELY SLURPED UP WHOLE by a stray Watcher in the Water who lives in a pond somewhere nearby. We spend several minutes watching this slurp. The animators really, really loved drawing it. God bless.
Then the next twenty come much later on, during the brutal siege bit of the plot, when our heroine's wounded and elderly royal father, the old king, mysteriously disappears from the siege hall where he is tragically failing to recover from his wounds!! meanwhile, outside, the besieging army whisper tales that the old king's spirit is haunting the troops and murdering people in the night!
Our Heroine, investigating, accidentally finds a secret passage that kicks her out of the fortress onto the freezing hillside where she finds the orcs who are the ones who have in fact been picking off the besieging troops, for unrelated reasons. We also assumed at this point she would tragically find the body of her father ....
BUT NO! Her father is ALSO hanging out on the mountain in the middle of the blizzard! Somehow he lost his sleeves and got incredibly buff! They fight their way back to the front gates to get back inside the besieged fortress .... BUT ALAS. The door is stuck and will only open wide enough to admit her, because her dad is TOO BUFF! So instead he turns around and fights the besieging army and kills like a dozen guys by himself.
ME: STOP praying for my grandpa! you are making him too strong!
BETH: catch these Rohands!
Then he heroically freezes into a grandpapsicle on the mountainside, after which the siege and the plot continues completely as normal.
Anyway. Pretty movie! Fun to watch! I recommend watching it in a situation where you can talk to your friends so you can ask them questions like "why do these elephants have cat-eye pupils, isn't that an evolutionary disadvantage?" and "is she wearing knee-high boots over thigh-high boots?" without bothering anybody else in the theater.
genarti and I also spent a lot of time catching each other's eyes and covering our mouths with our hands while watching Flow, but that was NOT to stop from laughing, that was because a little cat had its EARS BACK and was making SAD SCARED NOISES and we were pretty sure that cat was going to be fine but that did not stop us from being STRESSED. Flow is a beautifully animated Latvian film about a cat's adventure through a surreal magical flood and its encounters with a variety of other animals along the way, and how they end up helping each other to survive in a transformed landscape. All the animals act exactly like the animals they are, if those animals were just like ten degrees smarter than the average (smart enough to figure out how to steer the rudder of a boat, for ex.) but that aside the Behaviors are really well-observed -- I especially loved every sequence in which one creature tentatively tries to make friends by mirroring another creature's posture.
There are no humans in this movie, although the signs of their presence and absence are felt throughout. There is no dialogue. The animals make animal noises. (Except the capybara, which, according to Wikipedia, makes baby camel noises.) The sound design is really incredible -- I never want to hear a human actor speak out of a cartoon cat again. We had plans to run errands after the movie, but we ended up having to make a detour home first to pet our cats. No regrets.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-10 01:41 am (UTC)