Fantastic, Expensive, “People-Made” Corporate Puppets

They appear everywhere: skinny legs, perfect couture, under-acted voices.

Tiny stop-motion figures haunt my cine-dreams and regular movie-going.

Take The Fantastic Mr. Fox:

Following in the over-produced, quite-expensive, corporate-backed footsteps of phony people-made craft modeled by Be Kind Rewind, Zach and Miri Make a Porno and Paper Hearts, again we see a/our threatening world through a pseudo child-like naivete all set to represent overly-simplified pictures of comforting (post-feminist) traditional gender roles from the point of view of a lovable pre-sexual boy/man/(girl/boy: Charlene Yi). What’s up? In FMF the girlie boys will be men, macho men will be boys, Meryl Streep plays the help-meat, and so the family stays intact and we eat it up (me too). Style so bowls you over that you might miss that hand-made craft has been stolen (like so many chickens) by the crafty experts and the wild thing fantasies of naughty boy/men/girl/boys dominate, as ever, our celluloid dreams.

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