Amanuensis's Journal

You know what I think is going to be interesting? I'm trying to imagine what Walt Disney World's going to do for its upgrade of the Hall of Presidents.

Imagineers, I sort of envy your task. That could be a true coup of creativity.

Today I saw Wreck-It Ralph. Oh, my goodness, it was wonderful. Non-spoilery teensy review: Going in I thought the premise was terrific, but felt the execution, while enchanting, was not quite up to Disney standards of amazing for about the first twenty minutes; I could predict what was coming and thought, this has to take a left turn soon to get really good. And then it TOOK THAT LEFT TURN and became all kinds of amazing. You would have to watch this film a couple of times to get all the verbal jokes; you could never watch it enough times to get all of the visual jokes. It seemed like every single background shot had something new. (I need, need to be able to play a working version of one of the "side" games that's featured.)

For those of us old enough to remember, they did something darling regarding one of the song artists. More than that I won't say. (I'll spoil it in the comments if you want to know.) I'm off to buy a couple of the songs right now.

And I adored the canon het 'ship! :D

Am at Walt Disney World this week, and I saw the Finding Nemo musical show at Animal Kingdom yesterday. It was charming. I'm unforgiving on musicals; if the songs aren't good I don't give points for the enthusiasm of the actors or the sets. And the songs were good! I heard the first two lines of rhyme and was worried, but everything improved after that. Sweet, catchy, great puppetry, beautifully staged, and a well-compressed storyline--not bad for 35 minutes of show. The "Fish Are Friends, Not Food" number is arguably the best. I especially liked the giant puppet they made of Mr. Ray, which is mounted on top of a tricycle-like arrangement and the puppeteer's got up like the Wizard of Oz underneath.

They even salvaged something that I would have sworn wouldn't have worked--Dory's dreadful "Just Keep Swimming" ditty is turned into an actual musical number. The humor of that ditty in the film is that it's a stupid, tuneless piece of crap, so I would have said you'd screw up that humor by making it into a real song. But it works, and not only does it work, it's reprised by Marlin as he hovers over the consciousness-losing Dory after she's been stung by the jellyfish. It was pure Marius and Eponine, I'm not making that up.

Only beef? They castrated Gill, man. Or whatever it is you do to male fish. Gill has one song and it's all "we can do it if we act together," which, blah, is nothing like Gill. Gill's a cynical loner ready to risk others for his own agenda--or sacrifice himself for theirs. I had to go read my own fishslash fic to take that taste away. Gill/Nemo OTP, man.

(And, yes, a week at WDW always leaves me with the urge to write Disneyfic.)