• AlterBadger loves winter, when children run and play and frolic in the snow... they taste delicious when they're cold.
• The documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty came out last week, and it's a great film for anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes world of the entertainment industry.  Waking Sleeping Beauty is about Disney animation from around 1985 to 1994.  At the beginning of the film, Disney is in major trouble, facing the possibility of being sold off piece by piece.  Disney animation films from the 70s and 80s were a pretty sad affair, and the film opens with one of their major failures, The Black Cauldron (Cauldron itself is kind of a frustrating affair; it's a very dark fairy tale, more scary and violent than any other Disney film and with some very impressive visuals, but unfortunately the story and characters are pretty lackluster).  This is the story of how the studio came to the brink of failure, how Disney animation was nearly ended altogether, and then over the next few years produced some of the greatest animated films in history.  The film does not approach all this with rose-colored lenses, there are many accounts of infighting, disputes between studio heads and animators (and amongst each other), and a number of expensive failures among the successes.  There were some very talented people working there at the time, and they were not always benevolent, and they rarely got along, but you can't argue with the results.  The film ends in kind of a weird place, with a number of important works still in development and with Toy Story just a speck on the horizon, but this isn't the story of Disney animation, it's the story of a particular group of people at a particular time who came together to build a phenomenal success out of failure.
• Speaking of Disney, Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 both came out on Blu-Ray last week, along with a new DVD release of both films in one convenient and shiny two-pack.  I never did get around to seeing the 2000 version, but the original Fantasia is nothing less than a masterpiece, one of the greatest if not the greatest animated film of all time.  In order to really appreciate this new release, it helps to know the history:  at the end of the 1930s, Disney's Donald Duck and Goofy characters had completely eclipsed Mickey Mouse in popularity.  Walt Disney was happy for the success, but he had always loved Mickey and felt the character deserved better.  He redesigned Mickey's appearance and planned a big comeback cartoon for him, a meticulously animated short called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice."  Walt spared no expense for the cartoon, insisting on the very highest quality.  Unfortunately, the cost of the short skyrocketed (it was three times more expensive than his other cartoons), and Walt realized that the best way to recoup the cost would be not to release it as a short, but as the centerpiece of an entire film, one made up of gorgeously animated musical shorts.  Or, to use the musical term, as a fantasia.  Walt and company set to work, and it's amazing to read about all the hard work and technical innovations that went into making it.  Walt knew he had something special, and he felt Fantasia deserved a treatment beyond that of a regular cartoon.  He started the film as a traveling road show, a concert or event which people would have to get dressed up and come to see.  A new sound system was designed (multi-channel or stereophonic sound) in order to fully highlight the sound of the orchestra.  But the expense of the road show and its new sound system proved to be too high, and after a few showings in 1940, distributor RKO converted the film back to monophonic sound and began running it as a regular theatrical release in 1941.  Later that year, the film was pared from 126 minutes down to 81, finding that audiences were generally uninterested in it (though records do show that the people who bothered to see it loved it; just not enough people came to see it).  The film was a tremendous failure, especially given the tremendous cost of the production, and Disney quickly had to rush Dumbo into theaters in order to stay afloat.  Fantasia was re-released in 1946 and 1956, though still failing to gain popularity.  During the 1960s, however, it became immensely popular with stoned teenagers, who liked to get high and watch the pretty colors on the screen.  It was a desperate Disney that re-released the film in 1969 with psychedelic posters advertising it, but it worked and the film finally recouped its cost and turned a profit.  Another wise choice was made in 1969:  a very minor character called Sunflower was edited out of the film.  Sunflower was a grotesque racial stereotype who served no purpose to the story, and her removal was an improvement (today you'll see a lot of negative reviews on Amazon complaining that Disney caved in to "political correctness," whining about "censorship" and that the new release should have restored Sunflower.  The people saying this are all idiots).  In the intervening years, the multi-channel soundtrack was restored, and some scenes were added back in and taken out and added in again.  Finally, in 2000, Disney's restoration team set to work on fully restoring the original roadshow version of the film (Sunflower was once again edited out, this time using pan and zoom techniques that left the scenes intact, just without her in them), and a few more pieces have been restored for the 2010 release, making this the most complete version of the film to be released since 1940.  Fantasia's embattled history shows how lucky we are to even have this film in our hands today, and shows once again the unwillingness of moviegoers to accept a piece of genuine art.  Even with the near-universal adoration that critics feel toward Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 only grossed $90 million worldwide (which sounds good until you realize it had an $80 million budget, and had been in production since 1990).  I've actually never seen the sequel (and we all know the story behind the sequel, that Fantasia was originally envisioned as a perpetually-running show, with new segments being inserted and old segments taken out, so the sequel was an homage to Walt's original plan...), and though I expect I'll be disappointed with its CG-heavy animation, I'm looking forward to seeing it.  Seeing the original again, though, I'm really looking forward to that.  The film's tremendously meticulous animation is stunning, its subject matter adult, its orchestration and music choices strong.  From the beautiful abstract animation at the beginning to the glowing forest at the end, Fantasia is unlike any other animated film, and though that uniqueness has caused it no share of problems in the past, that same feature also makes it the greatest film Walt Disney ever produced.
• Finally got around to seeing the classic film Inherit the Wind.  I don't know how they got away with such a boldly atheist film in 1960, but they did, and it was damn good.  Bit melodramatic and overacted in parts, as films of that era have a tendency to be, but it's a good portrayal of religious intolerance and the fight for truth, very realistically done (which it ought to be, being based on a true story).   Damn good, and Spencer Tracy in particular does a great job in it.
• After many, many days of reading, I finally finished William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, which many critics regard as the best modern Southern novel.  What makes Faulkner's work so interesting is that he was deeply interested in perspective, and the subjective experience.  The Sound and the Fury featured four sections:  the first was by a mentally handicapped boy, written in first person, the second was by an emotionally disturbed teenager, written in a subjective third person, the third was an angry but mentally stable young man, again in first person, and the fourth was in third person objective narration, told primarily through the lens of the family servant.  Absalom is a companion novel to The Sound and the Fury and features some of the same characters, and appropriately enough it uses some of the same tricks, but while the former is a general march toward clarity, the latter's movement toward "the truth" ends in an entirely different place.  The plot of the novel is centered around the history of a Southern family (the Suttons), set in the Civil War and Reconstruction era.  We're told very plainly WHAT happened to the family, all the major events of their lives; most of the novel is concerned with the discovery of WHY things happened as they did.  The first major part of the book is told by Rosa Coldfield, who was alive at the time but whose involvement in the family's affairs was not always direct, and was at times very distant.  Her reminiscences are peppered with lies and exaggeration, her vindictiveness coloring her memories.  We then move into a second section (though Rosa's narration is revisited later on) told by Mr. Compson, whose father was a friend of the Sutton family.  Mr. Compson's son Quentin was visited by Rosa Coldfield, and Compson is now telling Quentin everything he knows about the family.  We've moved on from direct experience to secondhand information, and ironically the presentation of information is now much clearer, even though we know it's further from the truth.  Quentin returns to Harvard, and in the third section of the book he begins to tell his roommate, Shreve, all the information he learned from Rosa and from his father, trying to explain the South and what it means to live there.  Shreve doesn't understand it all, and he and Quentin begin speculating wildly about the facts of the history laid out before them.  This is the most clearly presented section of the book, and as Quentin compiles together the secrets told to him by his father and by Rosa, we do learn some secrets that neither of them were able to deduce themselves, having only half of the story.  But even those secrets aren't enough for Shreve, and the two of them begin to replay scenes in their heads, inventing characters and motives and lives in an effort to understand how this all could have happened.  Is this the "truth?"  Of course not.  The point is that real life does not work like novels, history and memory are a messy business of subjective stories and incomplete records.  Ultimately we're all like Quentin and Shreve, inventing, speculating, trying to understand.  The novel ends with Quentin recounting an exact memory, an experience that he and Rosa Coldfield shared when she returned with him to the old Sutton plantation, a final offering of genuine "truth" (such as "truth" can even exist in a work of fiction); we may not now why or how everything happened in the past, but we know how it ends, which in real life is all that we ever really know.  The final pages are devoted to a brief chronology and geneology, and finally a map of the town where the story took place.  The map is dotted with markers showing where events took place, but most of the events marked on the map don't take place in the novel, they don't even concern people who were in the novel or related to the novel in any way.  It's Faulkner's last point:  even if you did know the whole story of the Suttons, if you knew every second of their lives, you still wouldn't know anything at all.  We're all part of a larger world that barely remembers we lived.
• This week's reading:  The Columbus Art Museum was having a sale on their books, so I picked up a copy of Robin Blake's Essential Modern Art.  It's been over a year since I did any major reading on art, and I'd hate to let it go so long that I forget everything.