Escapist #225: Electric Soul

For all their supposed superior intelligence, robots can be pretty stupid. They may be handy if you need someone to calculate pi to the thousandth place, but when it comes to the really tricky questions, they don’t have a clue. Present them with a paradox and they’ll blow a gasket. Read them a sonnet and steam will shoot from their ears. They can plot the very vectors of time and space, but they just can’t fathom “this emotion you hu-mons call … love.” You’d think that with all their advanced circuitry, they could just Google it.

Well, It’s One D Better, Isn’t It?

As a coda to King’s discussing the film Coraline, Colleen and I watched the movie yesterday. We both enjoyed it, me especially. After seeing so much recent movie fantasy skew epic, towards Tolkien or even C.S. Lewis, it’s comforting to see such a dedicated treatment of fantasy of the Carrollean tradition: Stories that are personal and reflexive, placing the mundane in sharp relief against the wondrous.

Coraline is weird and wonderful. It isn’t often you find a film that succeeds both in being perfectly intimate, and perfectly monomythic.

But! The same technology that King expounded upon, I found jarring and newfangled. Watching it on our tv at home, we found quickly that the benefits of 3D were strongly outweighed by the cons – namely, we found it loused up an otherwise fine colour palette, transforming the shabbilly beautiful shades of the film into a muddy smudge. After watching about 20 minutes, we switched to 2D… it may be one D worse, but we got by just fine.

Despite everything, I’m quite happy we got two pairs of rinky-dink glasses with the rental for free. Now, if I ever stumble across a re-run of “The Bots Master”, I’ll have 3D shades at the ready.

Or, more accurately, “3D Shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaades.”

Oh, look. It’s my childhood. What can I say? I’m a sucker for jive-talking robots.

– Rook