Blogbook

The US trailer for Never Ending Man has dropped — it’s about Hayao Miyazaki’s post-retirement projects, including his struggle with 3D animation. Via Gizmodo:

Hayao Miyazaki shocked the world in 2013 with the announcement of his retirement. But the legendary animator has gone on to create a few new works since he stepped back from Studio Ghibli — including one that challenged so much of what he knew about he knew about animation: a CG short.

Miyazaki spent his career at Ghibli as a champion of traditional, hand-drawn animation, but retirement led to him wanting to challenge himself by creating something using 3D animation: Kemushi no Boro, or Boro the Caterpillar, a 10-minute short that has taken Miyazaki and his team years to create. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki is a new documentary that takes an intimate look behind the scenes at Miyazaki’s journey from retirement to a wild new world of animation techniques.

Kemushi no Boro started running at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, earlier this year, but Miyazaki has since gone on to express his dissatisfaction with the film’s format, hoping to expound on it in a feature-length film.

He’s also since gone on to reunite with Studio Ghibli for one “final” animated film, How Do You Live?, an epic fantasy based on the novel by Genzaburo Yoshino that the company is hoping to release before the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. But for now, at least we get to see one of the masters of a medium continue to challenge himself with new ideas and new techniques in an intimate documentary like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVe__Py2GuU

Apple’s quirky new iPhone X ad pushing its new phone embiggens everything, including an orange housecat and someone’s avocado toast. As to the phone itself, here’s the Wired review: Evolutionary, not Revolutionary:

This year’s new iPhones? They’re last year’s phone design with some new internals. One of those new features is an impressive new chip, one of the first of its kind in a smartphone. This chip powers faster FaceID unlocks, better photos, and advanced AI. For the $1,000 you’ll spend on this phone, you’re earning back seconds of your time, getting photos you can adjust after you shoot them, and experiencing sophisticated computer vision in mobile apps.

But aside from one of the phones having a giant display, the iPhone XS and the larger iPhone XS Max don’t feel much different from last year’s iPhone X. This year’s phones don’t spark strong feelings—except maybe chagrin that they cost so much.

Some people will upgrade because they’re due for an upgrade. Others will buy one of these because they want to have the newest thing. And that’s fine. They’re great phones. Just don’t expect to feel the kind of feelings, as you’re sliding this phone out of your pocket or purse, that you’d get with a radically redesigned piece of hardware. As I used these new phones, I found myself struggling to define, exactly, what felt new about them. It’s there; you just have to dig deep.

One Small Step by Taiko Studios is a beautiful short film by alumni out of Disney and Pixar, about a girl who wants to be an astronaut. Via Short of the Week:

Yes, yes it’s pretty standard stuff in a lot of ways, but the execution is quite exquisite. The use of a 2D style upon 3D models is reminiscent of Disney shorts like Feast and Paperman, and is no less charming here. The storytelling style of condensing lengths of time via montage has of course been employed across mediums and forms several times before, but its use here is similar in tone and emotion to the memorable sequence in Up.

The Disney DNA of the project is present in more than just its style. Taiko Studios is the brainchild of Shaofu Zhang, who worked at Disney for years and has credits on Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia among other projects. He wanted to create a true international powerhouse in animation, and the studio uniquely straddles China and America. While much of the production of the piece happened in the studio’s Wuhan facility, the directors, fellow Disney vets Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas, directed the film from the company’s Burbank headquarters. A recent profile in Cartoon Brew digs more into the company and the unique work-style they needed to develop to accomplish this.

Improving the human condition with Bill and Melinda Gates with Goalkeepers, an initiative to spur action and track progress toward the goals. An interview via National Geographic:

Susan Goldberg: I’ve just read the Goalkeepers report. Why did you decide to start doing this?

Melinda Gates: Because we think that the news—that the world has made this incredible progress, this increase in lives saved, the reduction in poverty—that news isn’t really out there. The UN set these amazing goals for the future to help us continue to reduce poverty, and we want to make sure that we hold people accountable for that progress and really inspire the next generation of leaders who are going to take these tasks on.

SG: One of the things I liked about the report is that the audience is treated as adults—you’re saying there are some areas where it’s really tough and we’re not making as much progress as we’d like. You talk specifically about how while poverty is going down everywhere, it’s not going down quite as fast in Africa.

MG: When we travel on the continent, we see this unbelievable potential, particularly with the young people coming up who have so much energy and ingenuity. But the reality is there’s also poverty. And so how do you make sure that the progress that we’re seeing that’s moving forward in places like Rwanda or Ethiopia, that it reaches everybody? And that the lessons that are being learned in certain countries are spread?

SG: What are you seeing in different countries? Who’s doing a great job?

Bill Gates: Even a very poor country can do a good job on health, can do a good job on agriculture, on education. That provides a lot of hope because you can copy what’s being done there. Rwanda has been a big outlier in the quality of those health services. Ethiopia, on agriculture, is growing over 5 percent a year. In education Vietnam is one we talk about, because they’re so far ahead of where you’d expect given their wealth. But it’s when you get those three things together—health, education, agriculture—that eventually these countries can become self-sufficient.

An explosive new Doctor Who trailer, featuring the newest Time Lord, played by Jodie Whittaker, the first female Doctor in the series. Via the Guardian:

Spaceships, a twin sunrise, explosions and a pair of goggles reminiscent of Doc Brown’s from Back to the Future – just some of the glimpses of series 11 of Doctor Who that have been offered up to fans in a new trailer.

“I’m the Doctor. When people need help, I never refuse,” says the new Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker, in the clip, which also features her trio of new companions: Mandip Gill, Tosin Cole and Bradley Walsh, playing Yasmin, Ryan and Graham respectively.

The first episode, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, written by the incoming showrunner, Chris Chibnall, will be broadcast on Sunday 7 October. This series will mark the first time in the show’s 55-year history that it will have a regular slot at the end of the weekend. The show had featured as part of BBC One’s Saturday lineup since being revived in 2005. The opening episode will premiere at a special screening in Sheffield next week, with the BBC having offered fans the chance to win tickets to the red carpet event.

Sharon D Clarke, Johnny Dixon and Samuel Oatley are the guest stars for the opening episode, set in Sheffield. The second episode, The Ghost Monument, will feature Shaun Dooley, Susan Lynch and Art Malik as guests.

The new trailer hints at the monsters that will feature across the 10 episodes – with no sign of famous adversaries such as the Daleks or Cybermen. Chibnall has promised all-new monsters for Whittaker’s debut season.

He said he hoped the new series would draw in new fans. “It doesn’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Doctor Who to get into it. The wonderful thing about this is every time there’s new cast members, the show is regenerated in a literal sense with the character. New energy is brought into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZuayQFD51w

The Gosar Siblings star in this viral political attack ad on behalf of their brother Paul Gosar’s Democratic opponent in Arizona. Via the BBC:

Local paper the Arizona Republic calls it “brutal, but not unexpected”. Mr Gosar made headlines after the violent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, by suggesting it was planned by “the Left” to undermine Donald Trump. He then branded Democratic Party donor George Soros a Nazi collaborator in an interview with Vice News.

Horrified, seven of his siblings signed an open letter to the Kingman Daily Miner, stating: “It is extremely upsetting to have to call you out on this, Paul, but you’ve forced our hand with your deceit and anti-Semitic dog whistle.”

Paul Gosar’s other controversies include boycotting a 2015 speech to Congress by Pope Francis. He criticised the pontiff’s support for climate change, calling it “questionable science” deployed “to guilt people into leftist policies”.

He has also defended British far-right activist Tommy Robinson, and attacked “disgusting and depraved” Muslim immigrants at a speech in London in July.

Further anti-Gosar adverts set to air on TV soon include one titled “A family defends its honor,” where David Gosar says: “We’ve got to stand up for our good name, this is not who we are.”

Ford and its F-150 Big Dog ad subtly mames fun of Ram and Chevy pickups, reinforcing their leadership in full-size pickups. Via Automotive News:

“This year was really about reiterating F-150’s standing and how that looms big over the competition,” Paul Trillo, the commercial’s director, told Automotive News. “The rest of the trucks on the market are sort of in F-150’s shadow, so no matter what they do, they are always going to be below the big dog.”

The spot was produced by Ford’s ad agency, GTB, which enlisted creative services company Big Block. The commercial’s director of photography, Paul Cameron, has worked on TV shows such as Westworld and movies including the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Despite the boasts, the automaker does not directly call out Ram or Chevy, in contrast to the Chevy Silverado commercials that attacked Ford by name and literally poked holes in the aluminum bed of an F-150.

“When you’re the No. 1, best-selling truck in America, there’s no need to directly call out the competition by name,” Trillo said. “Instead, it was about visualizing the F-150’s prowess in a way that no other truck commercial would do. There’s a cheekiness to the visuals, from the dog bobblehead to the exploding truck sand sculpture, that reminds us F-150 remains in the lead and it’s not afraid of having a little fun while it’s ahead.”

Why we say OK — a Vox Explainer article about how a shorthand expression that came about during the late 1830s became one of the most common expressions. Via the Nerdist:

In the list of the most commonly used words in the English language, there are plenty that are obvious inclusions. “The,” “a,” “it,” and other words that we use every day are on it, including “OK.” Of them all, though, “OK” is perhaps the strangest. What does the two-letter word actually mean? Where did it come from? It’s a word with an interesting history, a history that’s broken down and evaluated in a new video from Vox.

It turns out that the word emerged about 200 years ago: In the 1830’s, folks had a thing for intentionally misspelling abbreviations because they thought it was pretty darn funny. One of those abbreviations stuck: “OK,” which was short for “oll korrect,” or “all correct.” “OK” hit the big time when it was used in an issue of the Boston Morning Post in 1839. Other newspapers took note and spread the word around the country. From there, it was further popularized by President Martin Van Buren, and then the rise of the telegraph, since the word was easy to tap out and it sounded distinct from other words. The video goes on to explain other fascinating factors related to the rise of “OK,” such as the use of the letter K in branding and marketing, that led to it being the ultimate “neutral affirmative” word of today.

Our Friday Pick: Netflix’s Dark Tourist is a Netflix Original series following journalist David Farrier as he visits bizarre and dangerous locations. Via the Atlantic:

The host of Dark Tourist, David Farrier, is likened in the final episode of the new Netflix travel series to a kind of budget Louis Theroux, which he considers a compliment. Like the legendary British documentarian, Farrier is lanky, awkward, frequently befuddled, and undeniably charming (he hails from New Zealand, and most recently co-directed the 2016 documentary Tickled). His signature outfit is a button-down shirt over a pair of pink, pineapple-patterned shorts. It’s hard to marry the conceit of Dark Tourist—which is that Farrier is pursuing his dangerous fascination with all things “mad, macabre, and morbid”—with the show itself, which often feels like the world’s most genial librarian has accidentally ended up on a day trip to an Elite Hunting Club hostel in Slovakia.

It’s a disconnect that Farrier plays up throughout the eight episodes of Dark Tourist, which see him seeking out some of the world’s most disconcerting travel experiences. In Mexico City, while reporting on a sinister-sounding cult that worships death, Farrier jokes about a noisy exorcism drawing complaints from the neighbors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYq_-Txvrr0

Google Chrome celebrates 10 years with its “Don’t be a Browser” campaign, which partners with partnered with Virtue, the agency born from Vice. Via the Drum:

The internet may evolve faster than a cage full of rabbits, but over the last decade, Google Chrome has been a constant, a browsing partner to help us see and learn it all.

September marks the browser’s 10-year anniversary, and to celebrate the occasion, Chrome partnered with Virtue, the agency born from Vice, to create the ‘Don’t Be a Browser’ campaign.

In the past decade, people’s relationship with the internet has changed drastically. The internet and Chrome have gone from a destination we occasionally visited to a fundamental part of everyday life. It opens the door for people to do, create, and connect with absolutely anything and anyone at any time. But despite its global impact, its seamless integration and constant presence in our lives has sometimes made it fade into the background.

To remind us of the unlimited possibilities provided to us by Chrome, the ‘Don’t Be a Browser’ campaign states that the internet can be a tool for good and one that unites us. In the 60-second spot we see a smattering of varied search actions come to life with a wire frame window animated over each scene. Each one reveals through Chrome website tabs exactly how that person got to where they are. One man changes hair color in the aftermath of a breakup, while someone working on a dated bathroom sink is framed by the ‘Find a Fixer Upper’ tab. The breakup guy is revisited getting in shape and finding his center through yoga as his tabs multiply. His journey is interspersed with tabs of others donating to good causes – with a cameo by teen activist Marley Dias – adopting pets, floating in space and finding distant relatives, among others, before coming back to the breakup guy going on a new date.