(special to The Dreher Report)
By Michael Burton
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a masterpiece. (Spoiler alert if you have not seen it yet). Geppetto and his son Carlo are developed in heartfelt detail within the opening 15 minutes. As a consequence, Carlo’s death (which you know is coming) leaves you feeling empty.
Geppetto goes down a dark road of drinking and self-loathing. He quits working and, in a drunken stupor, cuts down Carlo’s memorial tree to make a puppet. It all happens deep in the night while he’s completely shit-faced. A life-long mastery of woodcraft is blurred by alcohol yet it is obvious he can handle a chisel and block plane. It is not until morning, after Pinocchio is brought to life, that you see how freakishly assembled he is. It is shocking at first.
Voiced by a wonderful actor (Gregory Mann), Pinocchio quickly overcomes awkward social queues, falls in with a loathsome puppeteer named Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), and becomes a beloved performer. You fall in love with him too.
Then he dies.
Throughout the film, Pinocchio ventures back and forth between the afterlife. Each time he encounters four black rabbits who look like the bunny in Donnie Darko. He learns the rules of eternal life from Death (Tilda Swinton) who is scary at first. She embodies Greco Roman, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian Gods all mixed together.
The narrative becomes a proto-Grecian myth as Death explains things patiently to Pinocchio. Each time he dies (whether by vehicle, bullet, or sea-mine) he learns that he has agency in life and he can learn from his mistakes. He learns of deeper more troubling problems too, privy only to those who live forever.
Pinocchio cost $35 million to produce. Once you see the quality of stop-motion animation you might guess why. This is by far one of the best stop-motion films.
Check out this interview with the character designers, animator, and production designer https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/pinocchio-stop-motion-behind-the-scenes?fbclid=IwAR3uYfkFOMLvehvN7mIgy4jNlbAK9B2mB1HV6SlTpPjavE_nfLegLlk2MQc
Michael Burton is a digital artist, film director, and animation producer. Burton combines art, film, and animation to create historically based stories. He has produced several hybrid-animation shorts including Gold Slipper by Willa Cather (2020), Anna (2018), and Freedom Stories (2022). Burton produced and animated the feature film The Bell Affair (2022). Burton’s digital artwork has been featured across the country and in solo exhibitions at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, the Denver Art Museum, RISD Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Digital Graffiti in Alys Beach, Florida, and the Sheldon Art Museum.
He is currently the director of the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery and an Assistant Professor of Foundation Art and Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Prime Notes
by: Jameel Rashad Patterson
Jameel Rashad Patterson comments on the decision Deion Sanders made to accept the offer of Head Coach at the University of Colorado. Sanders’s decision has drawn controversy given he left Jackson State University, a beloved HBCU in Mississippi.
Special to The Dreher Report
I see both sides of it. It would have been cool if he could have ushered in a new era where the Black community had stake in the talent base of Black athletes. Ultimately, we do not know what Deion Sanders went through as coach of Jackson State, how much support he received, and how the HBCU community welcomed him.
I guarantee you this: Somebody at Jackson State and in the HBCU world is happy he is gone.
From my experience, some members of the Black community would rather keep things the way they are because they benefit some kind of way. Even when Nick Saban [head coach at the University of Alabama] came at Prime, there were probably people in the HBCU world who agreed with him. People usually side with power. Even the people bashing Prime for doing what he deems to be best for him and his family probably do the same thing in their own communities and families.
We really stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, our people who stuck together and created networks. We are not the same as our ancestors, however, even though we stand on common historical ground. They owned sports teams, built communities together. Our ancestors started these colleges, and supported the civil rights movement. In some ways, that’s not our culture today. We bend toward individualism.
In essence, Coach Prime talked a good game so that is why he is getting criticism. Oftentimes when we embark on agendas for the Black community we are not prepared for Black people to be adversarial with us. That’s disheartening, and if Prime went through that, I do not blame him for leaving.
Ultimately we want Prime to lead a grassroots effort of building from the ground up. It is not that we do not have the parts, it is a kind of culture we have embraced for the past four decades in which those parts do not operate in unison. It is an individualistic type culture. Some of us still have the communal ways of our ancestors but those ways are not the dominant culture in Black America .
One of those parts is the HBCU. Why don’t we see rich Black athletes putting their money together to create conglomerates? We say we need to start our own league well Ice Cube did it but you do not see Jay Z, Dre, Puff or whoever helping him for purpose creating our own institutions. It’s obvious: the incentives are not here but can be found in the 40s and 30s, those times. I am not mad at Prime moving with the current of the culture. We have to embrace change and embrace new ideas or a culture of individualism will take shape. I say let’s change the culture.
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Posted by drdreher01 on December 13, 2022
https://thedreherreport.com/2022/12/13/prime-notes/