Stopped motion

Well I guess that settles any debate about the reasons my son like Wendell & Wild.

When my soon-to-be nine-year-old really enjoyed Henry Selick's latest a few Sundays ago, it made me realize I should try out Henry Selick's first on him -- it being Christmas season and all.

The fact that he said he wasn't sure how much he liked the animation in Wendell & Wild, and in fact that he may have liked the film despite its animation, did not deter me. I figured, The Nightmare Before Christmas is considered a classic by many people, if not by myself, and it was high time I myself gave it another watch, my most recent one having come in 2006. Such a classic, in fact, that even though he may not have remembered it, the Haunted Mansion ride we rode at Disneyland would have been decked out in Nightmare Before Christmas seasonal attire. (Then again, that ride may have happened in 2014 when he was not yet one, so he probably didn't even go on it.)

Well, my confidence was sorely mistaken.

So mistaken, in fact, that my son did something I don't think I can ever remember him doing in any movie we've sat down to watch together -- he actually left halfway through.

It all started when I could tell he couldn't get comfortable. It's been the first truly hot weekend of the year, with summer having officially started on Thursday due to the convention of changing seasons on the first of the month in Australia. But I was perfectly comfortable with the temperature in our garage and I suspected that boredom/disinterest were the bigger issues.

He moved up to a camping chair, and tried several different positions in that, before moving back down to the floor with me, lying in an array of beanbag chairs.

It was at this point that I gave him permission to leave if he wanted to, though I also told him that the movie was only 79 minutes long so he wouldn't have to settle in for a long wait before it finished. He sensed that it was a really big deal for him to quit on a movie, and I could tell he didn't want to. "I think it's going to get better," he said.

After another ten minutes in which it did not get better, for him anyway, I renewed my offer to have him stop watching. I made the offer in a state of complete graciousness, not any passive aggressive suggestion that he had failed me, so I assume that was what allowed him to finally slink out of the room like a guilty criminal, leaving me to finish by my lonesome. (My wife and my older son opted out before the movie began). I also explained that it was not a personal favorite for me, so he really wouldn't be hurting my feelings.

And though it's true this is not a personal favorite, I do think I like it a little better every time I see it. This was the third time. I still got to the end feeling pretty sure that this was never going to rise to the level of personal favorite, but it's hard not to appreciate the artistry of this film, even if it misses a little bit on its tone.

I think one problem was that for the portion he watched, it was a lot more Halloween oriented than Christmas oriented. He loves Halloween, but in December, that's so four weeks ago. As I continued to watch, though, I doubted that even the Christmas portion would do much better for him. I'm not sure how he would have taken to Jack Skellington delivering headless troll dolls as Christmas presents and the like. And this is to say nothing of the scene of Santa on a rack at the hands of Oogie Boogie, who unravels into a mass of worms and other creepy crawlies by the end.

I think he might have also been turned off a bit by the percentage of dialogue that's sung. He may not have been fully keeping up with the story, since I think it's a learned skill to get as much meaning from song lyrics as you do from spoken dialogue. I didn't conduct a post-film interview to find out.

Then there's the animation. If it was a potential detractor for him in Wendell & Wild, it must have been all the harder to hold onto when he wasn't getting or following the rest of the story. That may also be something of a learned skill. I'd guess that you maybe aren't obsessed with stop motion animation on a technical level until you are old enough to appreciate what's actually going on. We have discussed the process and he seems to find it impressive, but at this age, a movie is the impression it creates, not a knowledge so much of how it was made. 

And who knows if the gothic Tim Burton stylings is something kids pick up at a young age either. While we adults are in awe of that sort of creativity, it might just seem macabre to him. I have it on good authority that other kids have loved this movie at a young age, though I've never sat with one of them myself while they were watching it.

Well, nothing lost I reckon. There are not a huge number of great films he will miss out on if he doesn't go for stop motion. The Laika films are mostly great, of course, but some of them are big misses. And he'd probably like Nick Park's stuff fine because it's very cheery in its tone. 

Combined with Saturday's viewing of Violent Night (review here), which I really did not like, Christmas viewing season is officially underway. I know we're planning to watch the new Will Ferrell-Ryan Reynolds comedy Spirited with the kids, probably closer to Christmas, and I may also be trying to see the new animated Scrooge movie as well as the Christmas Story sequel, though I think that last is on a service I don't get. Even if we miss the sequel, we are sure to watch the original, as my dad will be here for Christmas and he's always considered this to be a window into his own midwestern childhood. The kids haven't seen it yet. 

So we'll have our other opportunities and we'll likely hit on the next one, especially if it doesn't have a spindly skeleton man kidnapping Santa Claus and torturing him on a rack -- or at least allowing those things to happen on his watch. 

Ghosts and goblins

Wendell & Wild was a real hit with half of my family. My younger son and I loved it; my older son and my wife were falling asleep. 

What're you going to do.

I was planning to watch this early enough after it was released to review it, sticking as I do to a policy of putting up reviews at the very latest two weeks after the Australian release date. And in the cases where I do go that long, it's usually to accommodate another writer, who is dawdling on completing their review. Wendell & Wild hit Netflix on October 28th, which is just too long ago. 

The reason I didn't review it within that timeframe? My wife came into the living room when I was five minutes in and said "Oh, I thought this was something we might watch with the kids." So I stopped, knowing that meant the death of the review. When we watch something with the kids, my wife never wants to hurry it up so it will happen as soon as I need to write the review. When I try to force it, it never has good results. (If I'd been planning carefully, it could have been part of our October 30th Halloween double feature -- but with two other 2022 movies already lined up, it was just too much.)

If I'd known how it was going to turn out, I would have roused the eight-year-old from bed, watched it that night and given it my glowing review. Now you'll just have to hear me talk about it glowingly here as a secondary outcome to why I'm writing about the movie today.

After the two (semi) haters had shuffled out of the room, I mentioned to my younger son that we should watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, another Henry Selick film, especially considering that this was the season for it. Delving further, I discovered that he might have enjoyed Wendell & Wild as much as he did in spite of the stop-motion animation, not because of it. We will definitely watch it anyway.

During my pitch I said "You'll like it, it has ghosts and goblins in it too."

Ghosts and goblins. It's a phrase that probably comes from my childhood, that people a generation younger than us don't use. But without ever having specifically thought about it before, I'm pretty sure it's a phrase that extends beyond my own house or immediate circle of influence when I was a young person. I feel like it's a general phrase we use to describe any content in any medium featuring the macabre supernatural -- in movies, anything you might watch at Halloween, more likely something directed at children.

The reason for the phrase is obvious: alliteration. And it's got to be the sound it has in common, not just the spelling. That's why we don't say "ghosts and gnomes." 

But it occurred to me for the first time last night:

There are a shit ton of movies about ghosts, but almost none about goblins. 

If you are going to consider Wikipedia a nearly exhaustive resource, which it usually is, the Wikipedia category "Goblin films" includes a mere nine titles:

The Black Cauldron
Goblin
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hobgoblins
Labyrinth
Scooby Doo! And the Goblin King
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Strange Magic
Troll 2

And that's not just some superficial list of only movies with "goblin" in the title. They've gone one level deeper and considered whether goblins actually appear in the story. I've seen more than half of these movies but wouldn't have remembered that goblins were in most of them. And while there are surely some missing, you wouldn't say that number would be more than a dozen or two.

The category "Ghost films" on Wikipedia?

For starters it takes you to a page with eight different subcategories, then also a flat list that currently has *copies to Excel* 526 titles on it. And you'd have to say the actual number might be higher by orders of magnitude. 

So clearly ghosts and goblins are not on equal footing here.

Of course it's easy to identify what's going on when we use that phrase. In order to make the alliteration work, we are not referring to a goblin literally as a "small, grotesque, monstrous creature that appears in the folklore of multiple European cultures." (Thanks again Wikipedia for that definition.) No, it's a catch-all term to describe ghouls, trolls, gnomes, leprechauns, gremlins, ogres, and a half-dozen others on a taxonomy of creatures who go "boogedy boo." Most people probably don't know what a goblin actually is -- a hand wave is good enough.

Well there are definitely ghosts and goblins in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and within a few weeks, we'll discover whether my son likes a movie like this because of or in spite of its animation ... or even likes it at all. (I always found this movie something less than perfectly great. I mean, did they really have to torture Santa Claus on a rack?)