Small World

This week's Tuesday film was Surf's Up tonight. An animated feature, about surfing penguins, which we didn't expect to be hugely great, but that looked pleasant enough.

Actually, in its genre of animated penguin comedies, I think I prefer it to Happy Feet. It's a lighter film, not trying to hit you over the head with a big message, and done really quite well. (The big surfing waves appeared photographic at times.) The style was at least partly done as a hand-held camera documentary (a really odd idea in animation, where camera shake has got to be deliberate, but one that was really quite effective), and the characterisation was very sweetly done, without being saccharine. All in all, a film that succeeded very well in what it tried to do, which was to entertain.

And afterwards we visited the Peking, where it turned out that the couple at one of the other tables are bugshaw and major_clanger's neighbours, back briefly in Cambridge, who have been tidying up their garden. I think it's possibly the only place I've been where you can pretty well expect to discover the life stories of the other customers.

Small World

This week's Tuesday film was Surf's Up tonight. An animated feature, about surfing penguins, which we didn't expect to be hugely great, but that looked pleasant enough.

Actually, in its genre of animated penguin comedies, I think I prefer it to Happy Feet. It's a lighter film, not trying to hit you over the head with a big message, and done really quite well. (The big surfing waves appeared photographic at times.) The style was at least partly done as a hand-held camera documentary (a really odd idea in animation, where camera shake has got to be deliberate, but one that was really quite effective), and the characterisation was very sweetly done, without being saccharine. All in all, a film that succeeded very well in what it tried to do, which was to entertain.

And afterwards we visited the Peking, where it turned out that the couple at one of the other tables are bugshaw and major_clanger's neighbours, back briefly in Cambridge, who have been tidying up their garden. I think it's possibly the only place I've been where you can pretty well expect to discover the life stories of the other customers.