Kubo and the Two Strings

Last time I was over at Leo's he recommended some movies I needed to catch up on. One of them was Kubo and the Two Strings and -- wow. Just wow. I don't want to say anything spoilery (even that trailer gives away a little surprise that's waiting in the end credits) so I'll just urge you in the strongest possible terms to watch this asap. It packs in ten times the wit, charm, imagination and originality of the typical blockbuster SF/fantasy movie. Oh, and fans of my Blood Sword gamebooks will realize by the end why I especially cherish this story. A real delight.

Gotta kiss a lot of frogs

‘We need a writer for an animated TV show. It’s from a concept by Viv Stanshall – ’

I was off like a shot. Viv Stanshall? The Bonzos. Do Not Adjust Your Set. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Cumberpatch the gardener – not to mention Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Work on something cooked up in that great rambling, fecund greenhouse of a mind? You bet.

Well, even the best of us fires a blank from time to time. Viv’s “concept” was of a bunch of kid tadpoles living in a canal. The leader’s name was Walthamstow. That was the first red flag. It was where Viv grew up, but dammit, I don’t call any of my characters Stoke Poges, do I? The first gag in the script was a pun on Henry Ford’s comment that “history is bunk”. In a show for 7-10 year olds. A writer, they said they needed? I had to explain I’m not qualified to administer the Last Rites.

Other characters in the original pitch were Taddy Boy, complete with frock coat and Chris Isaak quiff, and a frog called the Wise Old One. Along with the name of Walthamstow’s gang (the Telstars) that rather stamped an expiry date on the whole package. There was also a Scottish tadpole who wore a Tam O’Shanter and always carried tartan bagpipes. Let’s not even, as they say. To help sell all this there was an animatic for which the production company had somehow managed to rope in Stephen Fry and Neil Innes. (Innes isn’t too big a surprise, admittedly, being Viv’s old mucker and therefore bound to do it for Old Times’ Sake, but what Fry was thinking I don’t know.)

The guys at the production company were excited because they had shown the animatic to a BBC exec and he had expressed a flicker of amusement. I wasn’t there, but I’m familiar with those Matrix-like halls and I’m willing to hazard that it was really just a hiccup after a long lunch. Encouraged as they were by this apparent evidence of approval, the production company nonetheless realized that the whole thing needed to be torn down, sown with salt, and rebuilt in pristine materials.

‘That name Walthamstow…’

‘Yeah. No. That’s shit, obviously. You can get rid of that.’

‘So what do we have to keep?’

‘Well, it’s got to be called Tadpoles.’

That’s what you want in a brief – ie, it actually was. I had just finished working at Elixir Studios, so I was familiar with the canals of Camden Town and liked the idea of dropping an edgy feeling of urban clamour and detritus into the canal – a development that I don’t believe Viv would have objected to.

As it often helps to have a writing partner when you want to spin up the levels of energy needed for comedy and/or animation, I roped in a friend of mine. (She is quite well-known these days, though wasn’t back then, and as I haven’t sought her permission to talk about this, I’ll be a gentleman and leave her name out of it.) We knocked out a script (this is one of several versions) after first changing all the characters:

TADPOLES Aquatis Personae

Finzer – aka (only to himself) "The Finz". Desperately wants to be cool, so the fact he's a tadpole AND a kid really gets him down.

Bino – Finzer's cousin. An albino tad; big and tough (for a tadpole).

Izzy – a wannabe tad. Don't call him a newt to his face.

K8 – pronounced "Kate". She’s sweet on Finzer, although she's in heavy duty denial about that.

Sprat – brainier than the rest and boy does he like them to know it. Sprat is a fish and, brainy as he is, he still can't figure out how come he and Finzer are half-brothers...

Dad Pole – dumb as ditchwater, but doesn't realize it.

Massy – Dad Pole’s girlfriend; the mother-figure of Finzer's household.

Mrs Todpuddle – the gang’s teacher. The longest suffering tadpole in the canal.

Spikey – the local bully/menace. He’s a mean-eyed fish and he’d like to eat you, but not before he’s sold you a dodgy timeshare in the Norfolk Broads. Think Arthur Daley at 78 rpm.

The Frogs – three grand old figures who are only glimpsed at the water’s edge, turned half away in profile like brooding Easter Island statues. Everyone thinks the Frogs are enormously wise and the source of all good fortune, but they never speak to tadpoles and might very well not even know they exist.

What came of Tadpoles? I’m not sure. I was busy with Leo Hartas preparing our comic strip Mirabilis: Year of Wonders to appear in The DFC, as well as developing book concepts with Jamie Thomson such as the Dark Lord series. Meanwhile, my Tadpoles writing partner had projects of her own. And the production company that hired us went out of business with the new animatic only half-finished. So, shrug. You get a lot of things like this to work on if you’re a freelance writer, usually for no money up front, and most of them deserve to be deep sixed. It’s not like it was a project very dear to my heart. The only regret is that it would have been nice to do something in memory of Viv Stanshall. Maybe this show, though, would have done him no favours.

Final destination

We like locomotives. And we like things that are a bit unsettling. So check out this brilliant animation, Madame Tutli-Putli, by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski - interviewed here - and a whole talented team with too many consonants in their names to list here.

If this appeals, you may want to pop over to Wrong - the modern magazine in the tradition of Weird Tales, EC Comics and Warren - and Coven 13, of course. The idea of the magazine is that it is wholly owned by the creators themselves. Come and give it your support; dictatorships aren't toppled by people saying, "I might show my face next week."

Mirabilis on your iPhone

Did the filmstrip effect there make you do a double take? It’s a bit of artistic licence to draw attention to our latest experiment. We’re going to pick a few episodes of Mirabilis (probably ones you haven’t seen yet – yay!) and convert them into e-book form.

In the demo versions this will entail using Flash for some fancy fades, zooms, rostrum work, and maybe the occasional visual or sound effect. The end result will be a little like the trailer (US readers will need to look here for that) but it’ll be a complete episode that you can pause while you read the text.

For something similar, see the Watchmen Complete Motion Comic. When I first heard about that, I couldn’t see the point. But if you think of it, not as a slightly messed-up version of the book or a low-rent version of the movie, but instead as a trial run for how the original content could be repurposed for e-reading then it starts to make sense.

Okay, this is not how I prefer to read a comic. Viewing one frame at a time means sacrificing the effect of the page as a whole. But that’s just personal taste, and in any case it’s all swings and roundabouts. What we lose in terms of the richness of the reading experience, we gain by opening the story up to a whole lot of people who never go near print comics. And with paper getting more expensive every year, that might soon be the majority of comics readers.

The Factory of the Future

These images are from Fangleworths, a project that Leo and I spent a couple of years developing for television. I hope we might return to it one day, probably in comic book form.

The concept was of a factory run by robots. Not your modern hi-tech variety, but the sort of bumbling retro-future robots you'd expect in an Aardman movie.

The story in a nutshell:

Boomer is boss robot at Fangleworth’s and he runs a tight ship. At least he tries to, even though his crew aren’t the brightest tools in the box.

Nothing scares Boomer more than the thought of disappointing his boss, reclusive billionaire Hiram Fangleworth. So he’s all in a tizzy when Fangleworth sends a new addition to the workforce. And it's a girl!

Reluctantly Boomer accepts the inevitable. He and Nettie have a sparky relationship but they learn to get along. And for a while it looks like everything might be hunky-dory.

Then they discover the truth. Hiram Fangleworth has frittered away his fortune. Now he’s planning to sell out to his arch-rival, who intends to close the factory, flood the valley, and sweep our plucky band of motorized heroes onto the junk pile.

Boomer and Nettie set aside their squabbling to join forces. Will their combination of valve-powered determination and microchip sassiness be enough to save the day?

The flavour were were going for was Ealing comedy by way of Pixar. We came up with an interesting bunch of characters and I am still convinced they would get a lot of affection from fans.

I love the 3D models Leo created for this project. Especially the view of Boomer in his office here, which takes me back to the cherished TV shows of my childhood: Fireball XL5 and Torchy the Battery Boy!