Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Who Woulda Thunk it?

Right now the kids are watching an animated fantasy movie with much killing and hacking off of limbs. My 6 year old is hooked and every time the good guys jab another goblin through the skull with a dagger he cheers.

We're watching that movie because the one I had put on just before it scared the bejesus out of him. Want to know what it was?

Flatland. Yes, a movie from that book about two dimentional shapes living on a plane-world.

See, there's a scene in which the leader of the shapes is talking to the senate. According to his sinister plan, soldiers (acute triangles) invade the senate and begin slashing apart senators. Despite the hokey voice acting, music that doesn't quite fit the scene and the fact that we're dealing with animated circles and triangles, the scene is gruesome. Scarier is when the senate makes a run for it and the violence spills out into the streets where innocents get killed. While Catherine and I were jabbering on about how Roman this all seemed, Harry was cuddling into me. He finally spoke up and said that he couldn't watch the movie anymore.

I think part of the scare for him was that he couldn't sort out who was good and who was bad. It seemed that squares were being torn apart at random. Not only that but they were almost always fleeing from the slaughter. They weren't deserving of death in any way.

So we're watching the movie with goblin masacres. Goblins are very clearly bad and so are fair game.

And Flatlands. A little weird (I've never read the book) but Catherine is eager to watch the rest when Harry isn't around. The strangeness of it, the drama and the feeling of familiarity (to what we've read about the Romans) all seem to have her hooked.

A note: There are two recent Flatland movie releases. The one we watched is not the version some may have heard of with Martin Sheen and some other big names. This one is supposedly more faithful to the original. Regardless, Catherine and I have enjoyed what we've seen so far.

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