Tag Archives: films

The original comic took place in Tokyo, but to make it their own, Hall and Williams decided to set the story in a brand new yet familiar city, melding the original locale with a near-future San Francisco. “It’s a very high-tech city that blends Eastern and Western culture, so we wanted it to be a mashup, just like the movie is a mashup between Disney and Marvel,” says Hall.

The resulting animated metropolis—which truly is its own character in the film, although people say that a lot—is a celebration of futuristic urban life and the high-tech culture that drives its residents. And it’s brought to life thanks to several new animation technologies developed in-house by Disney itself.

via A Tour of ‘San Fransokyo,’ the Hybrid City Disney Built for Big Hero 6.

I’m rather enamored of the trailers, and the city looks freaking amazing so far. I want to see it.

“Altered States”: a terrifically trippy TF film

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I watched Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States tonight, and I was astounded by all that occurred in it.

But I was surprised about the lead character’s (played by William Hurt) temporary transformation into an earlier ancestor of homo sapiens that then goes romping through the city for a night. I was surprised because this clearly reminded me of Whitley Strieber‘s 1990 novel The Wild, which follows alot of the same path of plotline as Altered States up to very close to the last scenes of the film. The "hallucinatory" degeneration of the lead character’s sense of reality, the physically-manifested changes of his own body, the near-breakdown of his (ex-)wife’s sanity at the sight of his situation, the involvement and intervention of his closest colleagues, all of these elements are present in both Russell’s film and Strieber’s book, both with equally-vivid description and elaboration.

Either way, I love both works.