These New-Fangled Comic Strip Movies!

As we all know, the nerds have taken Hollywood by storm in more ways than one. Of course, we've had Snores of the Bo-rings adapted into a mega-blockbuster series, Harry Potter and his little wizard friends have captivated audiences including adults, for some reason, and comic books have turned into movies. However (to turn this post from snarky to geniunely glowing), for every ten Fantastic Four movies that come out, there's at least 0.1 movies with as much genuine beauty and meaning as Persepolis. Yes, folks, this former comic book, er, graphic novel hater has fully changed his mind about an entire phenomenon of movie adaptation.

Of course, my first problem was grouping all films adapted from graphic novels into a substandard lump of the absurd. Persepolis used the medium it was adapted from to an extremely effective model. It was the first time that I realized that sometimes a story can be told better from the hyper-realistic medium of animation. Persepolis, animated in the style of the original graphic novel, beautifully wove the real life story of a girl who grew up in Iran who lived through the Islamic revolution with her imagination. It was, in that way, like an episode of "Doug" but with serious political issues underlying the action, not serious identity issues underlying the action.

In conclusion, I shouldn't have ever judged a film by its source material. Sometimes, a story can be told better through an artistic rendering of one's memories than it can by CGI, dream sequences, and Keanu Reeves. Of course, most stories can be told better without Keanu Reeves, but that's a whole other day's story. And, if Persepolis had been seen by me before the Blogulator's cutoff date, it would have been in my Top 5 Films of 2007. What's next, I start watching anime?

This entry was posted by Unknown, on Sunday, January 20, 2008. You can leave your response.