Peter Bunzl

Mr Vertigo by Paul Auster My rating: 4 of 5 stars I first read Mr Vertigo in the nineties, but...

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:17:00 +0100

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read Mr Vertigo in the nineties, but picking it up again recently and reading the first page I was totally hooked. (Coincidentally Man on Wire was on TV the other day and they are almost the same stories told in different mediums.) Mr Vertigo has one of the best opening lines ever: ‘I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it and I’m not going to pretend I learned the trick overnight…’

It is the story of Walter Rawley ‘Walt the Wonderboy’ - a smart mouthed orphan on the streets of 1930’s St Louis and also our narrator for this fantastical old fashioned tall-tale. On the very first page he takes up with the mysterious magician and showman Master Yehudi who makes him a deal that: ‘If I haven’t taught you to fly by your thirteenth birthday you can chop my head off with an axe.’ (this is also an amazing hook line for the first page of a book.) The rest of the story chronicles his adventures as the master teaches him to fly and they go on a vaudeville tour of America that starts in triumph and ends in disaster.

This first section of the book where Walt is learning to fly is totally engrossing, and beautiful heart in the mouth writing almost as good as you imagine the first flight is for Walt. Its a great mix of magic realism and Huck Finn and I love the fact that Walt has to put himself through such hardships in order to achieve his goal, it gives the story a gritty edge as opposed to the airy-fairy flying of Peter Pan. Yet there is still a sense of a young child’s wonder and imagination in a world where anything is possible if you believe it is and this is mixed with the harsh realities of the time - the racism, crime, poverty and the Wall Street crash, albeit some of these effect Walt more than others.

The second (and less interesting) half of the book chronicles Walt’s life as a grown up first as a big shot gangster and then as the usual everyman with ups and downs. It is only as an old man that he is finally able to come to terms with his failure and successes as a human being and reflect on his childhood. I found the very last section very moving especially Walt’s last thoughts on what humans are capable of. I suppose his flight is a metaphor for the height of human achievements, learning a skill to such a high ability that you transcend the mundane and it becomes sublime and enlightening, what it is like to loose that ability - that brilliance and realise that you are just an average Joe like everyone else, but how there is always a chance, however slim, to regain it if you believe.

View all my reviews

Crow Feathers at Les nouveaux cinémas

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:08:00 +0100

More Good film news - Crow Feathers has been selected for Les nouveaux cinémas festival this summer in Paris, I think it’s in July. I will post dates as soon as I get them. Here’s a link for their website http://www.nouveaucine.com/en

The Eagleman Stag A stunning short evocation of a lifetime in...

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:39:30 +0100

The Eagleman Stag A stunning short evocation of a lifetime in nine minutes…

Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:50:00 +0100

Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories

by Annie Proulx

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such a beautifully written book. The prose is so well crafted and polished until it shines. Annie Proulx’s subtle mixture of the character’s voice and local dialect and slang with her own elegiacal descriptions is a great example of free indirect style. She is amazing at describing landscapes and summing up people in a few sentences and she’s good at the subtlety of smell (all these cattle ranchers pong). My favourite stories were Brokeback Mountain - but you kind of imagine the story with the actors, having seen the movie a few times - and also The Mud Below - which was about a rodeo rider, and I imagine they also used bits of in the film. The rest of the stories are consistently good too.

View all my reviews

Crow Feathers selected for IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival.

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:10:00 +0100

Good news - Crow Feathers has been selected to compete in the 10th IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival. The festival will take place in the sea capital of Bulgaria - Varna, from June 29th to July 7th, 2012 at Festival and Congress Centre Varna. I love their poster design here’s their website… http://www.inthepalace.com

Crow Feathers at The Norwich Film Festival

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:22:00 +0100

Crow Feathers screened at The Norwich Short Film Festival on the 30th of March 2012. I didn’t make it along to the festival, but heard it went well. I will hopefully get to one of the festival screenings soon. Here’s a link to their website…

http://www.norwichfilmfestival.co.uk/

Loving this stop motion promo by Jamie Caliri for The Shins...

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 23:03:43 +0100

Loving this stop motion promo by Jamie Caliri for The Shins song: The Rifle’s Spiral

agirlwithoutwingsplay: The importance of breathing life into a...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 19:00:02 +0100

agirlwithoutwingsplay:

The importance of breathing life into a puppet.

Bone

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:11:00 +0100

Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume

by Jeff Smith

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Three cousins - the bones - are run out of Boneville and get lost in the desert. They wind up in a mysterious valley, where they meet a young girl Thorn and her Grandma Ben and get sucked into an epic adventure of good versus evil, magic, dragons, yokels, talking bugs, and stupid stupid rat creatures.

This is such a brilliant graphic novel. A cross between the Old Disney comics – think Carl Barks’ Donald & Scrooge McDuck or Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse adventure strips - and Lord of The Rings – you wouldn’t think such a thing was possible, but it is and it works really well! The three Bone cousins reference those old Disney comics in their design and character poses as well as their sassy forties(?) American comic book dialogue. Phone Bone is a kind of Mickey Mouse good guy hero; Phoney is the Scrooge McDuck of the gang with his greedy money making schemes and Smiley is more of Goofy type – but one who plays dumber than he really is. The humans too are nicely designed cartoon characters that reference a more modern nineties Disney style. The inking and the strong graphic black and white design of the panels is beautifully done. But what makes the comic is the banter of the Bone cousins as they go from comedy scenarios to high fantasy adventure.

View all my reviews

A Confederacy of Dunces

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:14:00 +0100

by John Kennedy Toole

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished rereading this book - I first read it ten years ago and had forgotten a lot of the details, but I was talking about it with some friends in the pub recently and so I thought I would read a little of it again. I opened it and from just reading the first few pages I was totally drawn in. The comic characters are so alive - their voices so brilliantly written, every single one of them. It really feels as if they are wandering around living their crazy lives and it all flows so effortlessly from there that it seems somehow as if J K T is just transcribing what they say. I’m sure the writing process was not at all like that, but that’s how it feels. It often brought a smile to my face reading it, and many laughs too, each situation is so deliciously absurd and milked for as much comic potential as possible. Ignatius may not be ‘likeable’ to those around him but he has a roguish charm for the reader with his haughty blustering view of a world in which he totally incapable of functioning. A gigantic fat car-crash of a man for whom the author obviously has great affection and patience, bemused and surprised by what his creation does next, rather like poor Mrs Reilly!

View all my reviews

Bunraku Puppets These are simple Bunraku Puppets that I got to...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:30:00 +0100

Bunraku Puppets

These are simple Bunraku Puppets that I got to use in the puppetry class, made by Ollie Smart the tutor.

Here are some of the other people’s cool muppets from...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:16:00 +0100

Here are some of the other people’s cool muppets from puppet class. The pictures were taken by Ollie Smart, the tutor.

Puppet Class at Little Angel. The first rule of puppet class is...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:11:00 +0100

Puppet Class at Little Angel.

The first rule of puppet class is - no one talks about puppet class.

Pictures taken by the tutor Ollie Smart and Jaya.

The Inheritors

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:06:00 +0100

The Inheritors

by William Golding

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A last tribe of Neanderthals (the people) arrive in their Summer home – a rocky outcrop near the top of a large waterfall. Peaceful hunter gatherers with an earth-mother religion, they do not understand tools, nor can they formulate complex thoughts, they speak simply and also they communicate telepathically through pictures. One day they smell strangers nearby and gradually the become aware of a tribe of Homo Sapiens (the new people) who have come up the river in dug out canoes and are camping on a river island. The new people steal the Neanderthal children and kill the tribe elders, only Lok and Fa, a man and woman, are left, and they set out to rescue the children.

Despite being written in simple language this is quite a difficult book to read. This is because WIlliam Golding has chosen to tell the story in style that suggest a Neanderthal mindset. Though it’s written in the third person the narration is skewed to suggest the protagonist - Lok’s - view. As he spies on the homosapiens a lot of their behaviour is alien to him. He also has a strange way of describing everything — from the geography of places to interactions between characters — there is sometimes no distinction in his observations between the real and unreal and this gives the story a dream like quality that is often hard to follow.

The Neanderthals in the book are verging on that cliche of the simple, peaceful tribal peoples who, once again, represent humans before the fall, before consciousness. Where as the homosapiens are more badly behaved, drinking, killing, beating etc. Stylistically it is an interesting device to use the writing to suggest the Neanderthal mind, I think it works really well but throws up lots of issues. At two points the narration jarred for me, when Lok used the words: ‘make love’, which sounded too twentieth century and also at another point when Golding stepped away from Lok’s view to give an authorial comment, and I can’t remember why, otherwise the style works really well. One of the other strange side effect though was that at the end when the narration switches to a Homo Sapien man’s view, he is suddenly starling sophisticated by comparison in the way he formulates ideas. The distinction works well but also makes the Homo Sapiens feel very advanced.

The books introduction suggests that Neanderthals didn’t have language, which makes sense, language is what separates us from other animals, it is the start of abstract thought and duality - separating and portioning everything out and printed words suggest that so strongly too, so maybe it would be impossible to use written language to create a neanderthal view of the world, but Golding has given it a damn good try!

View all my reviews

Linetests Old animation linetests from the days when I was...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:29:08 +0000

Linetests

Old animation linetests from the days when I was learning drawn animation. (circa ‘98)

Storyboards for my NFTS graduation film ‘The Garden’...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:21:00 +0000

page one

page two

page three

page four

page five

page six

Storyboards for my NFTS graduation film ‘The Garden’ 2002.

geisterseher: Thomas Hood. The headlong career and woful ending...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:54:35 +0000

geisterseher:

Thomas Hood. The headlong career and woful ending of precocious piggy (1860). Illustrations by Tom Hood.

Hitchcock’s Definition of Happiness (by bg365247)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:48:13 +0000

Hitchcock’s Definition of Happiness (by bg365247)

A clockwork Rhino

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:09:00 +0000

A clockwork Rhino

Black Jack by Leon Garfield My rating: 3 of 5 stars 1750 and Tolly Dorking is set to look after the...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:20:00 +0000

Black Jack

by Leon Garfield

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

1750 and Tolly Dorking is set to look after the coffin of a hanged man – Black Jack. But Black Jack has cheated the hangman’s noose with a length of pipe and when he awakens he drags Tolly off to help him find an apothecary. Thus begins their adventure. They meet Belle a mad girl, who is lost in the woods and all three join up with a band of gypsy caravans as they try to discover where Belle is from.

I recently saw the Ken Loach film of this children’s novel. I loved it and so wanted to read the book and see how that compared. The plotting in the book is definitely better, things that were unexplained in the film now make sense. I think the child leads come to life a little more in the film, but maybe that’s because I saw it first. The writing is quite sophisticated for a children’s story and sometimes I found the prose style a little dry, but there’s no denying it is very well written. Leon Garfield’s character descriptions and his eye for detail are amazing. I particularly liked the description of Hatch arriving at the lunatic asylum –

“a foul filthy face was pressed against the glass. Then, seeing itself observed, the semblance of a grin appeared, and its sharp, sharp eyes glittered like Judas windows in what seemed to be a mansion of mud.”

I found the love story between Tolly and Belle a little flat, even as a chaste first love there could have been more interaction between them. But despite this it was an enjoyable read full of great characters.

View all my reviews