Tagged: animation

Will Meugniot Giving Away Original Art To Promote ‘N.E.D.O.R. Agents’

To celebrate the November 9th release of Will Meugniot’s new N.E.D.O.R. Agents series first full length 26 page adventure in AC ComicsFemForce #157, the artist has teamed with PREVIEWSworld on Facebook for an original art giveaway. Three pieces of Meugniot’s art are up for grabs, one for cosplayers, one for retailers, and one for fans. The full contest rules and directions can be found on PREVIEWSworld’s Facebook page. Meugniot is best known as co-creator of the DNAgents, creator of Vanity, and animation producer director of X-Men TAS, Jem, Captain Planet, The Real Ghostbusters, and EXOsquad.

“I’m very excited about PREVIEWSworld hosting this contest for my comic”, says Meugniot. “It’s been over 20 years since my last long form stories in DNAgents and Vanity, and it’s thrilling to see the interest N.E.D.O.R. Agents is garnering. Vince Brusio at Previews World, Bill Black and Mark Heike at AC and I are trying to give something back to the people who support independent comics in the form of a fun give away.”

Here’s more details about the contest:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS75U74s7Qk [/youtube]

First look at The Secret World of Arrietty

Walt Disney has released the first images for their forthcoming Japanese import The Secret World of Arrietty.

Residing quietly beneath the floorboards are little people who live undetected in a secret world to be discovered, where the smallest may stand tallest of all.  From the legendary Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Ponyo) comes The Secret World of Arrietty, an animated adventure based on Mary Norton’s acclaimed children’s book series The Borrowers.

Arrietty (voice of Bridgit Mendler), a tiny, but tenacious 14-year-old, lives with her parents (voices of Will Arnett and Amy Poehler) in the recesses of a suburban garden home, unbeknownst to the homeowner and her housekeeper (voice of Carol Burnett). Like all little people, Arrietty (AIR-ee-ett-ee) remains hidden from view, except during occasional covert ventures beyond the floorboards to “borrow” scrap supplies like sugar cubes from her human hosts. But when 12-year-old Shawn (voice of David Henrie), a human boy who comes to stay in the home, discovers his mysterious housemate one evening, a secret friendship blossoms. If discovered, their relationship could drive Arrietty’s family from the home and straight into danger. The English language version of The Secret World of Arrietty was executive produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, and directed by Gary Rydstrom. The film hits theaters Feb. 17, 2012. (more…)

All Pulp Interviews – Will Meugniot

Prolific artist Will Meugniot has worked in comic book, animation, picture books, and more. All Pulp recently sat down with Will to talk about his career, his artistic influences, the differences between working in animation and comics, plus his pulp interests.

Click on the art for a larger view.

AP: Tell us a little about yourself and your pulp interests.

WM: I grew up in the 60s. It was a great time to be a kid interested in adventure fiction. Marvel and DC’s superhero revivals spurred many other publishers to enter the field, so you never knew what great comics you’d find when they finally opened the bales at the grocery store.

N.E.D.O.R. Agents

A similar thing happened in paperback books. Ace discovered that some editions of certain Edgar Rice Burroughs books had fallen out of copyright, published them, and triggered a pulp revival, which brought everything from Otis Adelbert Kline to Doc Savage back into print.

Doc was my favorite of the pulp heroes, though I bought as many reprints of The Shadow, The Spider, Phantom Detective and Dusty Ayres as I could find and afford. Related to this, I’m also a big fan of the sound serials and have a collection of most of the non-westerns on DVD.

AP: What does pulp mean to you?

Spider-Man Unlimited Vulture

WM: It means stories which focus on fast paced action in exotic locales and feature larger than life heroes and villains. On a personal note, I grew up in a small farming town and yearned for a larger life full of adventure. The pulp heroes pointed the way, and while I’ve never taken down a globe conquering miscreant, I have had a few interesting overseas experiences in my travels as a producer/director.
AP: When I think of Will Meugniot comics, I think of DNAgents (I’m proud to say I have the entire run) and FemForce. How did you get your start in comics and what is it that excites you about working in comics?
WM: First, thanks for thinking of my comics! So much of my time has been tied up doing animation that I really haven’t done as many comics as I intended.

Tarzan. Dave Stevens inks

I first broke into the comics in the 1970s doing strips for undergrounds like The OK Comics tabloid and ‘ground level’ early direct sales books like Faeiry Star. My big break came when I sent Marvel a batch of sample pages featuring characters which didn’t have their own strips at the time: Guardians of the Galaxy, Ka-Zar, Nick Fury, and the one that paid off, Tigra. I did a couple of issues of that, then Marvel imploded and I was out, but fortunately, Tony Isabella showed Mark Evanier some of my uninked pencils. Based on them, Mark gave me work on the Tarzan and Korak comics he was editing for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. That lasted for almost a year, but Marvel took the Tarzan license and the ERB line was cancelled, which was what sent me into animation.

DNAgents

A few years later, my friend Dave Stevens came by the Marvel animation offices to score some free Xeroxes of his as yet unpublished Rocketeer. (Which was OK with the company, BTW – it was very ‘family’ oriented and Dave had worked for its previous incarnation, DePatie Freleng.) Dave told Rick Hoberg, Russ Heath and me about the new creator-owned comics movement, and got us excited by it. I phoned up Mark to see if he was interested, and that’s how DNAgents and the second phase of my comics career began.
The things I love most about comics are the creative freedom, and the ability to do a piece of art which is identifiably your own. Animation requires you to blend into the style of the series, and by its nature results in work which is largely anonymous by design. I’m thankful and surprised that so many people recognize my work in that field.

Golden Girl

AP: I assume you get this question from time to time, but has there been any consideration of you and Mark Evanier doing more DNAgents stories?

WM: We’ve come close a few times, and I suspect we’ll do something with them in the next few years. Mark and I have stayed friends, but our careers have gone down different paths and it’s rare for us to have a big block of time free simultaneously.

I’m tightly booked for the next year or so with the N.E.D.O.R. Agents, a graphic novel of The Land That Time Forgot, Caspak (written by the great Martin Powell), and it looks like the pilot for an animated series I directed this summer clicked and the show will be in production as well.

The Land That Time Forgot: Caspak. The Step-By-Step Process
Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree

AP: The Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree book by you and J. J. Hart looks to be a pulpy fun ride. Tell us a bit about the book and what inspired it.

WM: My friends Shannon Denton and Patrick Coyle started a line of picture books under their Actionopolis imprint and invited me to do one. Zombie Monkey was already written, and I loved the subject matter of boy scouts versus zombified monkies, so of course I said yes! I’ve also illustrated a couple of other children’s books for Actionopolis, Pandora, and my favorite, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I think you can still get all of them on Amazon.

AP: Where do you, or would you like to, see the comic book industry in 5 or 10 years?

Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree

WM: I’d like to see it alive! This is a moment of incredible danger and opportunity for the industry. There is a clear shift in the way the medium will be distributed and that is going to ultimately affect its form. I don’t think print is going away, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot more print on demand and print to preorder books with the bulk of the distribution going electronic. Luddite that I am, I’m focusing on print at the moment, just because I love the feel of the physical product.

AP: With the advent of digital comics, the way many read comics has changed. What are your thoughts on digital comics and their impact on the industry and readers?

Pyro-Girl Animation Promo Art

WM: There is a need to adapt to the market, and it’s clear many younger readers prefer reading on a screen. The upside is that distribution costs should be less in the long run. The downside is that many publishers seem to be ignoring their responsibility and need to help the current and very important to the industry’s long term health distribution system with the shift.



Ultimate Avengers 2

AP: You’ve produced and directed several animation projects from The Real Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe, X-Men, EXOsquad, Jem and the Holograms, Conan, Captain Planet, Spider-man, Stargate, and more. How did you make the transition from comics to animation and what are the similarities and differences between them?

WM: The shift was an economic necessity for me at the time, and was achieved by dumb luck.
It started when Mark Evanier ran into Don Jurwich, producer of the Super-Friends cartoons. Don knew Mark had done comics and mentioned that Hanna Barbera was looking for artists with comics experience to help on the new action shows they’d sold for the 1978 TV season. Mark suggested I cold call HB and ask about it, so I did. The girl at the switchboard asked me whom I’d like to talk to and I said, “The producer doing the action shows.”

FemForce 158

She hooked me up with Doug Wildey (creator of Jonny Quest), which resulted in my being hired as a layout artist on his Godzilla series. Doug was a huge influence and a great teacher. I started drawing storyboards on the side for him, and we both realized that doing boards came naturally to me, so Doug brought me in house as his assistant, handing out and editing boards on Godzilla and Jana of the Jungle. He even let me do the retakes and meet with the clients on some episodes, which was a rare and generous thing. My next boss after Doug was Tex Avery who was the storyboard supervisor on The Thing, a comedy cartoon about Marvel’s Thing. I had great basic training.

Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree

While they are similar in some respects, film and comics are two different beasts. One of the things I’m really enjoying about my current strips is going back to form with them and using all of the classic devices which are unique to the comic book: varying panel sizes (the aspect ratio is constant in film, but it doesn’t have to be in comics), internalized dialogue via thought balloons (much more fluid that doing a voiceover to convey thought in a film), and even visualized sound effects via display lettering.

AP: Who are some of your artistic/creative influences?

WM: Kirby, Wood, Ditko, Williamson, Colan and Frazetta are the main ones. I particularly admire Wood as an artist/writer.

X-Men Storyboards

AP: What does Will Meugniot do when not making comic books?

WM: Professionally a lot of cartoons, either storyboarding or directing. Privately, I love old movies and non-fiction books about comics, movie serials and biographies. I also like just hanging out with my wife of 40 years, Jo.

AP: Where can readers find learn more about you and your work?

WM: I have a website: http://www.storyboardpro.com of which I’ve been very negligent, but features a lot of my art. My blog is www.maskedmayhem.blogspot.com I write about my interests there.

AP: Any upcoming projects you would like to mention?

Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree

WM: N.E.D.O.R. Agents is the big one at the moment. It has a 3 page preview in FemForce 156, a 26 page story in FemForce 157, and its own cover and 20 pages of story in FemForce 158. PREVIEWSworld is doing a Facebook promotion with me for the strip. If you ‘like’ their page, you’ll be able to follow the strip there and enter some contests to win original art, too.

AP: Are there any upcoming convention appearances or signings coming up where fans can meet you?

WM: I’m sorting that out now as part of the PREVIEWSworld promotion. Follow them on Facebook for updates about my appearances.

AP: You have served as a writer, artist, producer, and director. Are there any creative areas you’ve not been worked in that you would like to try your hand at doing?

WM: At some point, I’m going to do some low budget live action work as a director. It’s been offered me in the past, but I’ve just been too busy to take it on.


Meet Vanity

AP: And finally, what advice would you give to anyone wanting to work in comics, animation, and/or art?
WM: The main thing is to DO IT. You’re not a writer unless you write. You’re not an artist if you don’t create art. Don’t let your fear of rejection stand in your way of doing.

AP: Thanks, Will.

Janet Waldo the Ageless Teen Reviews her Career

For some, age defines you. You are either young or old. For others, age is a number and you remain your youthful, exuberant self.  Then there are the ageless wonders, among them actress Janet Waldo. Generations of people have grown up with Janet’s work even though her name may not be a familiar one. The 87 year old actress sounds as vibrant as she did when she first wowed audiences on radio with Meet Corliss Archer.

Today, she is best known as Judy Jetson or Penelope Pitstop, but she has portrayed countless characters of all ages in a rich career that includes stage, screen, television and tons of animation. After high school in Seattle, Waldo, a distant relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was performing in local theater when she won an award presented to her by fellow alum Bing Crosby, who was accompanied by a latent scout. She left for Los Angeles where she appeared in several films before beginning her radio career.

She did numerous roles in comedies and dramas before CBS cast her in Meet Corliss Archer, a teenage sitcom series designed to compete with A Date with Judy. She played the part from 1943 until it ended its radio run in 1956. By then she was married and turned down the part for television in order to raise Lucy and Jonathan with her playwright husband Robert Edwin Lee (Inherit the Wind).

When Waldo resumed her career, she wound up doing some television work, such as the recurring character Emmy Lou on The Ozzie & Harriet Show, commercials and the then-new field of television animation. She was cast as teenage Judy Jetson in Hanna-Barbera’s The Jetsons and has voiced the character exclusively ever since (the one exception being having her recorded voice replaced by pop star Tiffany for the 1990 movie).

During the 1960s, Waldo could be heard on all three networks and in multiple roles from Granny Sweet and Anastasia on Secret Squirrel to Penelope Pitstop (first seen in Wacky Races), and of course, Judy. (more…)

AniMiniCon SoHo 2011 this weekend, August 12-14

Having drawn capacity crowds for its debut last summer, AniMiniCon SoHo 2011 returns this weekend featuring a great lineup of guests and events, plus the return of the SoHo Host Club, a group of young gentlemen fans of anime and manga, who interact with the crowd and ensure that every guest has a great time!

Guests include voiceover artist and host of Anime News Network TV Mario Bueno, Lizbeth R. Jimenez (creator of Sacred: The Manga) who is scheduled to do a live demonstration of manga illustration techniques; Brian Mah, animator, designer, and visual artist, who will do a live workshop on animation cel inking, plus portfolio reviews for a limited number of pre-registered students; and costume photographer Stephen Tang.

This year’s events include:

  • Friday Night Cosplay Party with snacks, prizes, and more
  • Anime Screenings furnished courtesy of Eleven Arts, Inc., including the films [[[Chocolate Underground]]] and [[[Ice]]]. (Note: Both these films have English subtitles.)
  • Saturday Night Musical Concert featuring Alexandra Honigsberg
  • Sunday’s Gothic, Lolita, Steampunk, Victorian, and Cosplay Tea featuring high-quality snacks, high-end teas, and other activities
  • An expanded dealers room

The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art has high-resolution computer-controlled screens, creating the first gallery devoted to the of display digital art, both photographic and computer-created, as well as any traditional work of art that can be scanned in at a high resolution. For AniMiniCon SoHo 2011, the screens will show anime and manga art, as well as photorealistic scenes that transform the gallery into a virtual “time and space” machine.

TICKETS: Purchase 3-day pass online = $30.00 at www.animiniconsoho.com
At the door: 3-day pass = $35.00; one-day pass = $15.00 per day

TIMES: Friday, 5pm – 10pm; Saturday, noon – 10pm; Sunday 1pm – 6pm

REVIEW: Rockin’ with Judy Jetson

Hanna-Barbera was clearly running out of steam in the later 1980s as their style of animation and storytelling was no longer in synch with its young viewers. As a result, they did an awful lot of recycling of concepts including the two season-long Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10 which took Yogi Bear, the Flintstones and the Jetsons and told longer, and not necessarily better, stories in ten stories. The ten telefilms ran during the 1987-1989 seasons and since then have been in rotation on cable’s Boomerang channel with Warner Archive slowly releasing them to eager fans who can’t get enough of these properties. Their last release from this series was The Flintstones Meet the Jetsons.

This week, from Warner Archive, comes the release of Rockin’ with Judy Jetson, a Jetsons’ film that puts the focus squarely on the teen daughter, who is usually overshadowed by the rest of the cast. That alone would make the 92-minute film interesting  but it is another effort that clearly shows its writers didn’t know how to expand from the thirty minute confines to something longer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sdS1vOaDcc&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]

Check out the official synopsis:

Despite father George’s disapproval, Judy Jetson is totally into Sky Rocker, the biggest intergalactic rock star around. When the teen icon announces a surprise concert, Judy writes a super awesome song and sends it to him. And – oops – the song is accidentally switched with an evil magic message from music-hating witch Felonia Funk. Bummer for Judy! Then Felonia goes one diabolical step further: she kidnaps Sky Rocker. What a buzz kill – but don’t freak out yet! Judy and her friends – along with brother Elroy, family dog Astro and music-loving aliens named Zoomies – set out to save Sky themselves. Is Judy Jetson the coolest Space Age teenage cartoon star ever?

Mistaken identity, switched songs, intergalactic evil queens, all manner of things so unlike the futuristic sitcom which was based on the family comedies that were so prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s. The closest to an evil witch was Endora on Bewitched. Anyway, the story is pretty dumb from beginning to end despite it being a showcase for Janet Waldo, who had been Judy Jetson’s voice since the series debuted in 1962. Writers Charles M. Howell IV and Kevin Hopps could have done better with the characters. Director Paul Sommer at least tried to make it contemporary with rock video montages and some quicker than usual edits.

The song Sky Rocket turned into a hit, credited to Judy but not written by her, is the memorable nonsense known as “Gleep Gorp”. While a bit of a catchy tune, it has become a YouTube hit for those who grew up on the show but was written similar to the bubble gum pop of the 1960s, not the music the intended audience was more familiar with. The feature boasts six songs, most of which are the same two repeated by different singers.

The vocal cast is a welcome, familiar addition as Waldo is joined by the original team of George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Daws Butler, Don Messick, Jean Vander Pyl, and Mel Blanc. New voices include comedian Ruth Buzzi as Felonia with the rest being fairly non-descript.

Another missed opportunity, this one is only for those with a real sense of nostalgia for ‘80s H-B material.

 

Lucasfilm and Sony Partner to Release Alembic 1.0 Software

We love cool, new technology, as much as the next guy. But when the technology comes from Lucasfilm, where so much movie magic has been conjured up since 1977, it caught our attention. This press release just arrived:

VANCOUVER, B.C. – August 9, 2011 – Alembic 1.0, the open source project jointly developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm Ltd. was released to the public today, it was announced at ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Alembic is the computer graphics interchange format developed by the two entertainment giants last year and focused on efficiently storing and sharing animation and visual effects scenes across multiple software applications. It was designed to handle massive animation data sets often required in high-end visual effects and animation, which are routinely developed and produced by companies such as Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm Animation Ltd and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The studios each saw the need for a tool like Alembic, something that would fit within existing pipelines and allow for customization at the facility level without impeding the ability to share work.

In addition to the features announced at last year’s SIGGRAPH, Alembic 1.0 includes automatic data de-duplication. The software automatically recognizes repeated shapes in complicated geometry and only writes a single instance to disk. This makes Alembic 1.0 use dramatically less disk space than promised without requiring any extra steps on the part of the user and can improve both write and read performance as well. In the case of hero deforming humanoid characters, including hair, shot caches have been reduced by more than 70%.  For complex, deeply hierarchical and mostly rigid assets like the Transformers characters, tests have shown cache reduction in the order of 98%.

The code base for Alembic is available for download on the project’s Google Code site and more information can be found online at: http://www.alembic.io

Joint development of Alembic was first announced at last year’s Siggraph by Lucasfilm’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The companies joined forces when it became apparent that they were independently developing software designed to solve a problem universally faced by the visual effects and animation production community: how to easily share complex animated scenes across a variety of disciplines and facilities regardless of what software was being used.

Alembic includes tools that allow collaboration while working with a generic, extensible, data representation scheme. In essence, it distills complex and often proprietary, animated scenes into application-independent files with baked geometric results. These baked results can be fully re-importable across the range of supporting software.

Alembic addresses a fundamental issue in a world where assets are shared across many companies. Alembic’s production-ready ability to seamlessly translate shapes across a wide variety of applications saves time and resources,” said Rob Bredow, CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks. “By releasing Alembic as an Open Source project, users have the opportunity to improve the software based on their needs and experience. We’re really starting to feel the positive effects of Open Source, as a community of visual effects and animation professionals come together to solve problems more effectively today than ever before.” (more…)

GLENN HAUMAN: The Thirty Year War

GLENN HAUMAN: The Thirty Year War

“Ladies and gentlemen… rock and roll.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw6xesXLIAA[/youtube]

With those words thirty years ago today, a revolution came to an industry. The old ways of consuming pop culture weren’t dead, per se, but they were being badly eclipsed by what was coming down the coaxial cable into the home. And although it didn’t happen overnight, the old ways of doing business were gone forever. No longer would marketing to individual distributors scattered across the country in fragmented markets work, you had to change to a larger brand identity that relied on visual punch and integration with new media.

The new medium was subversive. Innovators could create for the new communications channel and gain a tremendous first mover advantage, which could then be maintained by fresh content on a constant basis.

In time, a new crop of stars came to the foreground. Some of them were pros from the old guard who learned to adapt. Others were people who couldn’t break in under the old regimes, but found a way in the new uncharted territories. And some of the most interesting work came from people who were immersed in the new ways, who didn’t have any reference for “the way things were supposed to be done” and came in and broke the rules precisely because they didn’t have any idea what the rules were.

This was incredibly disruptive, as you can well imagine. Some people simply couldn’t make the leap– their stuff just didn’t look all that hot. Some were too entrenched in the old system. But the ones who probably got it worst were the stores. First, the mom and pops and the hobbyists got pushed out, or amped up their game and got big. Then the formats changed, and while purists claimed the new digital format leached out all the fire and passion and humanity, most people either couldn’t tell the difference or—heresy!— preferred the shiny new format without scratches or imperfections, copies that were as crisp and sharp the thousandth time as they were the first. Soon, the old format was completely gone from the stores, and for that matter, a lot of the stores were gone too. The stores that carried the new digital format did okay… for a while. But then after a few years, most of them disappeared too, even some of the biggest.

In time, even the new channel lost focus. They started making movies, and dabbled in animation. But after a while, they seemed to stop being as relevant as they used to be, branching off with new storylines and products that seemed to have no connection to what they were once known for– even their name was divorced from their identity. It didn’t seem to be a problem, they were still reaching the demographic they were shooting for, or so it seemed, and they were still making money, although not as much as they were, because times change, y’know? Besides, they’d say, you just aren’t getting it because you’re old, and this is what the kids want now. They ignored the cries of people who said they’d completely gotten away from their original focus, but maybe they had a point– after all, you couldn’t cater to the fans of the old stuff forever. We can still make things for the nostalgia market, but we have to pay attention to the new audience too. And really, have you looked at some of the old stuff recently? It’s downright primitive. These were met with the predictable cries of “Sellout!” Meanwhile, new artists still break through to new audiences any way they can.

Mike Gold’s edict is that these columns should have something to do with comics.

Yeah.

I saw the latest reboot with new 52
We thought it was another crisis to go through
We didn’t know that printer invoices were due
ohh, ohh…
They took the blame for all collector dormancy
Forced to adapt their ways to new technology
and now I understand the problem at DC
ohh, ohh…
What did they tell you?
ohh, ohh…
There was no sell-through…

Conan the Adventurer Season One Coming to DVD

Conan the Adventurer Season One Coming to DVD

Conan the Adventurer (animated series)

Image via Wikipedia

Yeah, we sort of forgot this animated series even existed but to celebrate the Cimmerian’s return to the Big Screen, Shout! Factory is releasing the first season on two discs, coming out this Tuesday.
Here’s a refresher:

(more…)

Video Game Review: “Alice: Madness Returns”

Video Game Review: “Alice: Madness Returns”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8TNkeHk3Fo[/youtube]

In the year 2000, American McGee’s Alice took the story of Alice in Wonderland and turned it on it’s already twisted head. As a sequel of sorts to the books, the game opens with an accidental fire destroying Alice’s home in Victorian London, in which her parents and sister die. Alice then attempts to commit suicide (due to survivor’s guilt) and is committed to Rutledge Asylum. While there, her shattered psyche has her (and players) revisiting the Wonderland of her childhood, now decayed under the rule of the Queen of Hearts. By the game’s end, she destroys the Queen (who some believe to be a manifestation of her own insanity) and restores Wonderland to its original charm and glory, and is declared stable (or stable enough) to leave the asylum.

Perhaps that wasn’t for the best, however. In [[[Alice: Madness Returns]]] (out now on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360), it’s eleven years since Alice left Rutledge (and, ironically, eleven years after the original game). Alice is living with and being cared for by a child psychiatrist in London (as his oldest patient), and the death of her family continues to stalk her. Her madness has manifested again, and now she finds herself returning to Wonderland – albeit the Wonderland that we now know to be imagined – in order to restore order to its now-recurring chaos. This time, though, there’s an bigger question fueling her madness: was the fire that caused it all accidental?

The game divides its time between two settings: Victorian London, with its bleak, muted color palette, and the visual mind-bender that is Wonderland. Take Tim Burton, throw him in a blender with Dali and Picasso, and add a dash of steroids and heroin, and you’ll have a rough approximation of the visuals here. The settings are stunning, from the steampunk-esque Hatter stage, to the underwater follies of the carpenter and the Walrus, to the card bridge and the Queensworld…it’s all, well, fairly crazy actually. The animation is also fluid, as Alice jumps, twirls and floats through demonic paranoias and her own destroyed psyche, made visual in Wonderland. She can even shrink in size to pass through keyholes, which also gives her a new perspective on the layout of a level, revealing hidden clues as to where to go next, or thing she just couldn’t see at normal size.

At it’s heart, Madness Returns is a platformer, but there’s a heavy bent on action. Alice has many weapons at her disposal to use against the negative densiens of her mind. At first, black slime with babydoll faces known as “ruins” populate the land, and Alice can dispatch them with her trusty Vorpal Blade (which goes Snicker-Snack!) or a Pepper Grinder (basically a hand-cranked machine gun). Later she gains a Hobby Horse, which she uses as a melee club to bash and smash. All of these weapons flow effectively into one another for combos, and when combined with the dodge move, become invaluable in escaping hasty death from an onslaught of enemies. After traversing some areas, the foes become more familiar, namely the Card Guards, only now more…demon-esque.

As a platformer, there’s also a good amount of gathering collectibles, and each one has it’s own use. Scattered throughout the land are memories, which piece together the story for Alice (and the player). There are also teeth, which Alice gathers from fallen foes or smashable objects, and are used as currency in the game to upgrade weapons. It all seems like typical fare for an action platformer, but teh setting and storyline are really what set this one apart. There’s some truly messed-up things here, and the game really pushes the M rating.

If there were one complaint to make towards the game, it’s more about the little hiccups you encounter during gameplay. Sometimes, Alice will get hung up on an invisible wall or something in the floor, usually after releasing the “shrink” button on the controller. It’s a minor setback, but when the animation is usualy so fluid, getting held up in a graphical glitch can take one out of the moment. Also, the level layout is preposterously long. One chapter can have several individual sections, feeling like their own levels, but are really part of the chapter istelf. Sometimes this works to move the story along, and sometimes it gives the player the feeling of the developers trying to drag out the length of the game. Alice herself even comments on this, in a manor, when asked repeatedly by various characters in the game to do tasks for her, acting as though the level would be much shorter had they simply done teh task themselves. But then, it wouldn’t be a game then, would it?

While it isn’t a perfect game, it is certainly a fun one, and visually, one that will take hold of you, with it’s abstract settings and newspaper cut-out style cut scenes. It’s all very stylized and slick. As an added bonus, the original American McGee’s Alice is included on the disc (unlockable by download on an online pass included with new copies of the game). Playing through it is definitely a treat to those not familiar with the original, though I will say, it hasn’t held up well over time.

If you’re looking for solid action, decent platforming and puzzles, and a intriguing storyline, you needn’t look much further than here. While it may seems a bit unfair at times with the number of enemies beset upon you, the story is one certainly worth going through, and the adventure is truly a fascinating one. Horiffic though it may be for our heroine.

Rating (based on a scale of BUY IT, RENT IT, SKIP IT):

BUY IT!