HEARING THE VOICES

One of the things we watch a surprising amount of, especially considering that this is a “child-free” (or is that “child-unfriendly”… there are many pointy corners…) household, is animated movies. You know the kind of thing. All of those “Pixar” and “Dreamworks” creations that make the primitive daubs that ordinary artists are knocking out on their own computers seem suddenly inadequate, all those brash, bright and witty outpourings of a conglomeration of creative outpourings that make your own musings seem dull and drab in comparison. Films like “Shrek” and “Cars” and “Kung-Fu Panda” which have entranced the generation that they are made for, but which also manage to pull off that sublime magic trick of being able to be sophisticated and interesting enough for the adults to watch too.

But I do have a problem with them, one that always, always takes me out of the story and leaves me fretting about it instead of just enjoying the movie.

It’s when a voice for one of the characters is familiar, but not familiar enough for me to be able to work out who it is. This is especially annoying when there are no names mentioned during the opening credits of the film and so you don’t even have that vague clue of having one of the names flicked up in front of your eyes within the last couple of hours and subliminally creeping into your forebrain and lurking there as slightly useful knowledge.

Not that showing the names really helps, of course.

Not with my memory.

But it can, however, start me up on going through a process of mental elimination, wondering whether I can work out just who it is, so that I will lose track of the movie completely and instead become fully focussed on who’s saying the words instead of listening to the words themselves.

When you’ve paid to go to a cinema to see a film and you can’t remember a thing about it as you cross the car park back to you car, then there’s probably something going very wrong somewhere.

At home, of course, it’s not so bad. If it is really bothering you, you can launch yourself at the nearest keyboard and find out quickly enough just who’s who, although it does get rather irritating for anyone who is watching the movie with you if you suddenly leap up an announce that it’s bugging you so much that you’re going to go and look it up.

It can quite take you out of the moment.

It’s also probably far, far worse than sitting in a room with people, trying to watch something as they continually drone on about things that they really, really could have mentioned earlier, before the film started, or when they want to discuss the finer points of the career of some actor or other (“Now where do I know him from...?”) whilst all you want to do is concentrate on the film that you’re trying to watch, and that you thought that they wanted to watch as well...

Ah yes, this “instant, need to know everything now, now, NOW!!!” culture which we seem to have made for ourselves. Sometimes I really do think that we’re all starting to lose the gentle art of having a bit of patience in this constant quest for instant answers. The really stupid thing is that, because most of us now have the answers available almost immediately, very few of us seem to actually learn anything because of it. More often than not, if you ask someone the same thing that they’ve just Googled today (other search engines are available...) on another day, and they’ll just Google it again instead of having remembered anything about it.

Recently we rewatched the recent “Tintin” movie, which we had seen at the cinema six months earlier, and found it to be surprisingly undiverting second time around. Maybe it was just too soon to be rewatching it, although at the time it did seem as if it would take multiple viewings. Maybe I’m just getting too old for that kind of thing. Maybe when you start to realise that the amount of days left to you are ebbing away, watching the same thing over and over again suddenly starts to seem like quite a ridiculous waste of your limited time on this planet.

Steven Moffat, who wrote the original screenplay for “Tintin” before choosing instead to write “Doctor Who” (and who, incidentally got a “special mention” on another film we watched a few weeks ago, although I'm struggling to remember which film it actually was - possibly “Steamboy” – but I do still find myself wondering what that was all about?) maintains that when parents complain that his scripts are far too complicated to follow, it’s usually because the adults can’t be bothered following the multiple storylines but that the kids have no problems at all with it.

Seeing as we live in a culture where anything more complicated on television than noting down the telephone numbers for the voting lines in some singing contest seems to be far too much trouble for huge swathes of the population, I can very well believe him.