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Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny | Happy Feet

Happy Feet

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the computer-animated cartoon is here to stay and hand-drawn animation has gone the way of the dodo. You will never see an organic feature-length animated film that will compare to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or any of the early Disney films ever again. It’s sad and it sucks but it happened because animation has evolved to such a level that no film studio is going to put the time and money into it when they can do it at a fraction of the time and cost. And its because of this that the dam has been broken and a tidal wave of half-assed ideas have flooded the market of kids’ movies and you can’t so much as take a dump without running into a computer generated creature with a celebrity’s voice selling a happy meal.

The problem is that the movies look so incredible and the stories are dogshit. You almost want to hunt down and kill whoever wrote this shit up, cook up the carcasses, then serve them as dinner to whoever did the animation. And Happy Feet is making that sick and twisted dream an inevitability. I can’t watch (or more to the point listen to) a movie about penguins singing Prince songs like I’m watching fucking Moulin Rouge and have to deal with the be yourself message puked up everywhere I look. But the problem is I wanted to see the penguins because penguins kick ass. Like a lot of bad dates, I wanted to look but I didn’t want to listen.

So I got sedately drunk in the parking lot on Tom Maccio’s homemade wine and snuck my Ipod into the theater. I listened to the first part of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis then switched gears and listened to as much of Dopesmoker by Sleep as I could until the movie ended. And I’ve got to tell you that the whole Dark Side of the Moon thing with Wizard of Oz thing doesn’t hold a candle to the Miles Davis/Sleep in tandem with Happy Feet thing. I was smashed, sure, but all I know is I turned what could’ve been an hour and a half coke commercial with spirit-killing adult contemporary music into my own personal wonderland.

As for Maccio’s wine: I think he put too much antifreeze in this time. My eyesight started to blur somewhere toward the end of what I’m assuming was the third act. But the gummy worms I forgot about six months ago in my coat pocket really helped out. Otherwise it had that nice, tart quality that all his home brews usually have. I had to shave my tongue afterward so the man’s still got to be doing something right.

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