April 17

Toothless

No… no me. My teeth are fine, I guess. No… Toothless is the cute name of that super cute dragon in today’s Photo of the Day. What? You haven’t seen the most wonderful movie How To Train Your Dragon (German: Drachenzähmen leicht gemacht)?? Why in the world not? What’s your lame excuse?

It’s one of my most beloved animated movies. And I loooooooooooooooooove Toothless. He’s the best 😉 His current residency is in the foyer of the CinemaxX in Mülheim… that’s where the pic was taken.

No dragons were seen in the movies we saw today though. First one was The Jungle Book. I have to admit that I’ve seen the original animated Disney movie only once and that was a hundred years ago. I only very vaguely remember it. Yes of course I halfway know about Mowgli and Baloo and King Louie… who doesn’t. But not every detail.

This new version had nothing to do with the animation they did back in the 60s though. And can we call it even an animated movie anymore? I don’t think so. Ok, apart from Mowgli, there’s nothing really REAL here. The animals, the jungle, the rocks, the water… even the glimpse of the one or other human… everything is computer generated. But OMG does it ever look REAL! I don’t think I’ve seen such real looking animals in an “animated” movie before. And yet there’s no such thing as “too real” for me here. It never occured to me that I was watching something that shouldn’t look so real and where real looking animals shouldn’t talk.

While Disney changed the story of the original books slightly back in the day because they wanted it to be “lighter” and more kids- and family-friendly, Jon Favreau (director) and the rest of the movie making guys went back to the original for this, which is a bit darker overall. That’s why some critics might say that this version is not for the very small children. No, it’s not crazy violent or disturbing, but it’s also not very-small-kiddie-savvy.

I had read and heard some reviews this week where some critics were like “well, this movie looks too real! And I couldn’t get over the fact that such real looking animals speak.”

Gotta say that I wholeheartedly disagree. Are some people not able to leave their oh-so-logic and oh-so-adult self out of the theater for 2 hours? What about imagination and fantasy? Are we really talking about something like “logic” here? It’s the Jungle Book. Animals save and raise a little boy and speak with him. Does it really matter if these animals look real or animated? I can answer that question for me at least with a big NO. That movie was phenomenal!!!

The story is well known, we don’t need to discuss that. But we can discuss how it was transported into the 21st century of modern movie-making and I’ve gotta say I LOVED it!! It was funny, it was thrilling, it was sad, but also very magical. And the little boy who played Mowgli was endearing! Not as much singing as in the 1967 version but of course some of the songs that we all know where in it.

Let me say a word about the German dubbing. In the USA it’s a regular thing that animated movies are dubbed usually by well known actors. That’s not always the case over here … they are dubbed by those people who dub other movies as well. And their names are not as well known. The Jungle Book made an exception: a bunch of top actors (Ben Becker, Joachim Król, Armin Rhode, Heike Makatsch, Jessica Schwarz to name a few) did the dubbing here and OMG it definitely payed off! Loved the voice work here vey very much! And now I would also be interested in the original version.

I highly recommend this movie! I find it impossible to not love it.

Second movie was The Huntsman: Winter’s War (“German” title The Huntsman and the Ice Queen.) It’s a prequel-sequel to the 2012 Snow White & The Huntsman (starring Kristen Stewart). Originally there was a sequel to that one planned, but then Kristen Stewart had an affair with the director which caused a huge scandal, the director was out, Kristen Stewart was out, and now they didn’t have a Snow White for the sequel. They didn’t want to recast the role of Snow White and so they had to come up with a story that involved The Huntsman and maybe also the evil queen Ravena and the Mirror … but exclude the Snow White character. And so this movie starts out as a prequel and then later skips to 7 years later after the events of the Snow White movie. They made it seem halfway logical and it was okay, but nothing more. It was watchable but then you don’t really miss anything if you don’t see it. Not comparable to the original Snow White movie anyway.

To end the movie day we had this. What you don’t see is that it not only contains lots of fresh fruit but also vanilla and wildberry ice cream but also frozen yoghurt.

YUMMY!