Film Fest: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The folks at Aardman are geniuses.

'nuf said.

Their new animated film - a blend of claymation and computer generated animation - is wonderful.  Funny, true to it's briny piratical roots, and stowed full of delightful gags and physical comedy.  It also takes English history and reality as we know it and tosses it like a salad: Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, dodo birds, ham, maps (oh! the wonders Aardman does with maps!),  and every "Best Of" awards competition you've ever sat endlessly through get treated with delightful and witty irreverence.

Immediately buy a ticket!

A poster from Belfry - The Animator, but don't watch the trailer here, it gives too much away.

I'm not kidding.  STOP reading.

Buy a ticket.

(And how appropriate that this story was written by a man named Defoe? Oh, and HERE's a discussion of the stop-motion process from the L.A. Times.  BTW I think Darwin was probably a nicer guy than portrayed in this film.  Earlier Darwin posts HERE and HERE.)

Where Good Ideas Come From

I'm reading Steven Johnson's book, Where Good Ideas Come From.  Fascinating!

This is a well researched and thoughtful book.  (Useful research for my own project too.)  So far I particularly like the discussion of Darwin's process in thinking through The Origin of Species and the development of GPS.  I find the rebuttal to the Heroic Lone Designer theory interesting too.  I'm pretty sure he's right, it IS the network of seemingly random information and people that enable creativity.  It needs a little chaos.  Yet not too much.  There are some fascinating examples of the ways and means of insight and inspiration.

A link to the author's TED talk: here.  (If you haven't discovered the TED talks... Do so now!)  Or see Bill Gate's book report on the book here.