The Trailers Before Zootopia

Omaha and the kid and I went out to see Zootopia. No spoilers for the movie; let's just say that it's a rather astonishing piece of animated art which tells a story, has a plot, has a theme, has a meaning, and manages not to be preachy at all about it. It opens with a friggin' children's pageant (which is just about the preachiest thing you can imagine outside of a church), states two different themes before the main plot begins, takes a left turn and delivers a third theme, all the while being entertaining and touching as hell, with wonderful, quirky characters and a rather interesting plotline all the same. At the end of the movie, one of the main characters delivers a short exegesis of second theme, the one fit for kids, which fits perfectly with her character arc, leaving adults to ponder the third theme.

It's almost like the writers were working at four different things at once: a plot for kids, a plot for adults, a theme for kids, and a theme for adults. Oh, that first theme? Not relevant: if anything, the movie is an argument about civilization doesn't make for miracles.

What did we get before Zootopia? Four trailers for four different animated films: Ratchet & Clank, The Secret Life of Pets, Angry Birds: The Movie, and Ice Age 5.

Ratchet & Clank was unimaginably dull and uninspired; if that's the best they can put into the trailer, they have a problem. Ice Age 5 was stupid and unempathetic, focusing on body humor and embarrassment. The Secret Life of Pets had some potential, but still left me doubtful. Angry Birds: The Movie was a befouled hideous exercise in milking a franchise: bathroom humor of the worst sort combined with a thin tissue of unreasonable plot, combined with humiliation for the characters that encourages you to laugh at them, not with them.

Every couple of years, John Lasseter gets a couple of writers into a room with pens and notepads and a whiteboard and a set of rules and says, "Here's the idea. Make me a story." And he wrings everything out of them. They don't go by the beatsheet, they go by The 22 Pixar Rules of Storytelling.

But here's the thing: I don't think this is that hard. It takes discipline, time, and effort. All things I like to think writers pride themselves on. The evidence that any of the other films tried even remotely to do what Lasseter does shows that other animation franchises, when it comes to writing, just don't care all that much. They don't have any respect for their audiences (see rule number 2), and it shows.

"Idiopathic Dysgeusia" and other indignities of age

Let's talk about my mouth.

For the past couple of weeks, everything has been tasting... off. Funny. Sometimes it's a semi-metallic taste, like there was a penny in there. Most of the time it's a dry, caustic sensation, as if I had accidentally breathed in a bit of alum.

So I went to the doctor. She looked. She poked. She prodded. She swabbed and tested. And we can't find anything wrong. There's no infection, no pathogens found, no swelling, no other signs of dysfunction. Nothing else is wrong with me. There hadn't been any significant changes in medication or diet up until the first symptoms. The diagnosis is idiopathic dysgeusia, which is as sad as it sounds: "We don't know what it is, it happens to some people as they get older, it usually goes away after a few months."

Months‽‽‽

Usually‽‽‽

I've lived with it for five weeks now. As "crippling syndromes associated with getting older," this is one of those nobody ever told me about. Bad knees, bad eyesight, poor weight management sure. "Everything will taste funny and probably bad" was not on the list. And I can think of two things that may have gotten me here. The first is possibly my own damn fault. The other was that I was exposed to a slow, long-burning electrical fire that may have put tons of volatile metallics and burned insulation into the air. Both of those happened shortly before the symptoms manifested so... who knows?

It's distressing. It makes kissing less fun, much less other activities one does with his mouth. I'm eating less, so that's a win, I guess. I've lost three pounds. I don't recommend it as a weight loss program.