A moment of silence for one of the greats … Dianna Wynne Jones

Likely as not you never read one of Dianna Wynne Jones wonderful, archly funny and slightly dark fantasy novels which generally poked fun at the conventions of fantasy. (And one, Deep Secret, which also poked fun at SciFi & Fantasy conventions.)

If you have read her then likely as not you spent too much time in the library when you were younger, just as your correspondent did (does).

She was best known for writing Howl’s Moving Castle, which became the basis for the Hayao Miyazaki movie of the same name; and for her Chronicles of Chrestomanci which JK Rowling borrowed rather heavily from.

As Christopher Priest notes in his fine obituary for Jones:

Of the apparent coincidences, Jones said generously to this newspaper in 2003: "I think that she [Rowling] read my books as a young person and remembered lots of stuff; there are so many striking similarities."

She had a great skeptical eye which she earned. As a child she was evacuated out of London to the Lakes District where she encountered two well-know children’s book authors: Arthur Ransome, who thought she and her friends were making too much noise, and Beatrix Potter, who slapped her.

While I can recommend any number of her books, here are a select few which I particularly like:

• The Tough Guide To Fantasyland — lampoons all those tropes created by Tolkien and C.S. Lews (both of whom she studied under) in tour guide form.
• The Darklord of Derkholm – a fantasy world rebels after being turned into a theme park for people from earth wanting a fantasy world adventure.
• Archer’s Goon – A distinctly troll like debt collector invades a family home to collect the 2,000 words the father owes to a wizard.
• The Ogre Downstairs – is the new stepfather actually an ogre or just behaving like one?
• The Chrestomanci series

But, likely as not, you won’t read them. Your loss, not mine.

Advertisement

A moment of silence for one of the greats … Alex “Rocky & Bullwinkle” Anderson

It is difficult to imagine now but there was a time when there was practically no intelligent, funny animation on TV. When I was a kid all that me and the mastodons could watch on TV was Hannah-Barbara mass-produced dreck, leavened with re-runs of the great Warner Bros. cartoons. Wonder why Scooby Doo has such a devoted following? It’s because it was one of the better kids shows on at the time – and it really is just a shade away from pure crap.

Rocky & Bullwinkle were the exception. They were to TV what Mad Magazine was to publishing – subversive, under-the-radar, smart and funny commentary on the grown-up world. Boris & Natasha made fun of the Cold War (I have a framed picture of Boris on the wall in the living room at Collateral Damage HQ). Sherman & Peabody made fun of history, Fractured Fairy Tales made fun of, well, fairy tales, Dudley Do-Right made fun of Canada. Of course they were actually making fun of everything in the world under the guise of laughing at these topics but that was part of the fun. (Dudley’s girlfriend, Nell, has a crush on Dudley’s horse!) Rocky & Bullwinkle’s Wossamotta U. stories are a send up of college athletics on a par with The Marx Brother’s Horse Feathers. In this golden age of The Simpsons, South Park, Harvey Birdman, King of The Hill and Futurama it is easy to forget how plain old horrible TV cartoons once were. Even the cartoons explicitly aimed at youngsters are better. I will happily sit down and watch Phineas & Ferb,Kim Possible, Arthur, Rugrats and more without feeling I am being insulted and condescended to as I was watching Hannah-Barbara shows.

While most people associate Rocky & Bullwinkle with Jay Ward

Mr. Anderson, who grew up in a cartooning family in California, was also the creator of Crusader Rabbit, which became television’s first animated cartoon series in 1949. He spent much of his career in advertising, and his role in creating Rocky and Bullwinkle was overlooked with time. He fought a long legal battle late in life to reclaim recognition as the cartoon characters’ artistic father. … Mr. Anderson and Ward grew up together in Berkeley, Calif., and formed a business in the late 1940s to pitch cartoon ideas to television. Crusader Rabbit, Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right were among the characters they showed to studio executives before Crusader Rabbit was picked up. After Mr. Anderson’s other cartoon ideas failed to catch on, he joined a San Francisco advertising agency. Ward moved to Los Angeles, trying to sell TV studios on a Bullwinkle series.

Anderson took legal action after seeing a documentary about Bullwinkle that didn’t even mention his name. He won and in 1993 – four years after Jay Ward’s death — received a lump-sum settlement, along with a court-mandated acknowledgment as "the creator of the first version of the characters of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley."

Bless you and thank you, Mr. Anderson.

 

AND ON A SADLY RELATED NOTE: RIP and thank you to Leo Collum, a cartoonist whose blustering businessmen, clueless doctors, venal lawyers and all-too-human dogs and cats amused readers of The New Yorker for the past 33 years, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 68 and lived in Malibu, Calif. For a selection of his cartoons, click here.

A moment of silence for one of the greats … Satoshi Kon

The brilliant anime director Satoshi Kon has died at the age of 46 from pancreatic cancer. I’m not even going to pretend that most people have heard of him, let alone seen his work, which is a shame. Kon, along with Hayao Miyazaki, are two truly great artists whose chosen media is anime. Kon directed four amazing movies Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, as well as the incredibly strange and good TV series Paranoia Agent.

Unlike many anime creators, Kon’s work was rooted in the present – not a science fiction future or fantasy past. My favorite of his movies is Millennium Actress (I’m looking at my copy of the poster for it as I write this). It gives the history of 20th century Japan in the form of an actress telling her life’s story. Tokyo Godfathers is about homeless men trying to raise a baby they find. With all of Kon’s work you are never quite sure if what you are seeing is real or not. He brought magical realism to the screen far better than any other director I’ve seen. In Paprika, my least favorite of his movies, he goes over the top in trying to confuse the waking world with the dream world. Paranoia Agent is a totally unique work and well-worth watching. It’s ostensibly about a serial murderer in Tokyo, unless it’s about a woman who create a Hello Kitty-ish character for her company, or maybe it’s about police corruption? Agent is so claustrophobic, weird and, well, paranoid that it makes The Prisoner look like a Disney special.

On the good news side of things, Katoshi’s final film, The Dream Machine, was already in production at the time of his death and will hopefully be finished and released.