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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Monday, July 8, 2002
18:48 - What the hell was that?

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I saw the PowerPuff Girls movie last night. Very... well, very odd movie. It didn't play like I expected it would. It wasn't anywhere near as sarcastic, injokey, or smart as it could have been-- and while it did have moments of brilliance (the Chemical X injector reservoir centrifuge, the bizarre wordplay in the monkeys' names, the adult-perspective glimpses from the Professor and Ms. Keane, the protracted argument between the girls on the asteroid), it seemed to have an uncharacteristic amount of "kiddie material". An overabundance of sweetness-and-light. And while it makes for a stark, very mind-scraping contrast to have the classroom darkened, painted in aggressive grays and browns, with the din of construction and a stream of water from the busted sink the day after the cutesy and sugary-sweet name-reciting introductions, it's still a presentation that I wasn't quite ready for.

Maybe McCracken's and Tartakovsky's directorial style-- ponderous, lingering reaction shots and comedic beats punctuating impossibly long bouts of freakish action-- just doesn't quite work on a feature-length scale. I dunno. I'm still trying to figure out why the movie puzzled me so much. I did enjoy it; it took a while to get moving, but eventually it started to feel like a cross between Tron and The Wizard of Speed and Time-- not something that works terribly well right out of the gate, but something that you grow into.

Oh, and there's enough destruction of tall buildings-- even though in the jokey PPG style-- that this movie probably couldn't have flown if released in the first few months after 9/11. Really.


...But that's not what I wanted to write about. No, what really caught me off guard was the featurette before the PPG movie, a Dexter's Laboratory short titled "Chicken Scratch". It was directed by Tartakovsky, which hasn't been true of any Dexters for about a year now, much to the series' detriment, but... what the hell was that?!


"Chicken Scratch" bewildered me. Sure, the story was funny enough, and the directing was spot-on from what I'd come to expect from Tartakovky. But... what the hell was up with the art style? It looked like the unholy union of Dexter's Lab with Ren & Stimpy. The background art style had taken on the retro 50's look that the current Dexter season seems to be clawing for. Every shot of any of the characters seemed to have been drawn from a different model sheet. Proportions were monstrously overdone, facial expressions were full of uncharacteristic creases-- seriously, it looked like something done by John Kricfalusi-- and while I generally will go out of my way to see something John K. had a hand in desecrating, Dexter's Lab is not what I had in mind as the target for such a treatment.

... I dunno. I left the theater last night very, very confused.

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