Persepolis
Mish and I went to see Persepolis on the weekend. It’s an animated film about a little girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and follows her through her teens and into her early 20s under the Iranian fundamentalists. Definitely a sombre story, but what’s interesting is how the seriousness isn’t watered down at all by the charming cartoonishness of the film. When big boys like Disney are shutting down their hand-drawn animation studios it’s nice to see a movie like this to remind you how totally inferior computer animation is on so many levels. It just can’t communicate the warmness that you can only get from something created by human hands.
On another note… it’s kind of baffling to me how many theatres are in downtown Vancouver. Thankfully only a few of them play the blockbusters so we end up with a surprisingly wide selection of all kinds of good films. Of course, there are lots of bad ones too. (Thanks Tracy Morgan — because of you being in this movie I don’t have to bother thinking about going because I know it sucks)
Thee Oh Sees, Black Lips, The Sheepdogs, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Rolling Stones, Frankie Miller, Hayden, Al Casey, Kiss, Thin Lizzy, Takeshi Terauchi, Sloan, The Ventures, The Black Keys, The Kinks 
[...] is with much sorrow and shame that I must retract my previous rantings about Disney and the state of hand-drawn animation. According to this post from March 2007, [...]