I went to go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier some
time ago and it was the best movie I saw thus far this year and that made me
think about toys and storytelling. Sitting in that dark cinema watching a
remarkably good comic book movie I realised that we are living in the best time
in terms of seeing things that you could only imagine translated into visual
stories.
Growing up reading fiction novels and comic books many
people of my generation are at home living in their heads. All you needed to
keep you busy for hours was a Lego set. Older generations can boast that they
only needed a stick and a stone and that’s fine too. The point is that we were
all happy mucking around with sticks or Lego blocks and building these vast landscapes
in our minds where robots battled it out with monsters or whatever else. But
then we grew up . . . We grew up and our toys were discarded and left to gather
dust in a garage but we didn’t discard our imaginations.
Our movies, books, video games and even our toys are taken
from the things we loved as children. Michael Bay’s Transformers movies may not
have had good plots but I absolutely adore them for their visuals. Every single
time I see an Autobot or Decepticon transform I smile. Those are the visuals
that I had in my head as a child every time I played with a Transformers action
figure or watched the cartoon. To this day I can’t get over how CGI took images
I could only see in my head and plastered them onto screens. There’s a little
magic about it. It’s like pizza, even if it’s bad it’s still nice to have.
Stories and how we tell them has always been very
fascinating to me. Movies are big
business and Hollywood has gone back to your childhood to dig up all your old
toys and is telling those stories on the big screen and it works for the most
part. Marvel has successfully translated many of its comic franchises into film
and they have many plans going forward. Guardians of the Galaxy is their next venture
and they sure are being adventurous because the characters aren’t well known by
general audiences. Marvel is good at taking their quirkier franchises and
making good films though. When Iron Man came out lots of people didn’t know who
he was.
DC is not having as good a time with their offerings failing
more often than not but Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy sure did set the
benchmark for gritty, realistic superhero movies. Everyone and their dog loves
Batman but even as a kid reading the comics, watching the cartoons and playing
with the action figures you know that the idea of a running around fighting
crime dressed as a bat is ridiculous. Batman is probably my favourite comic
book character but I’m the first to admit that he is the most ridiculous of the
superheroes. You buy into though because it’s fun. Then Nolan sells it to you
in a straight-up serious setting and it works. If you didn’t have a guy dressed
as a bat the movies could simply be good action/thriller stories. Marvel did a
great job with placing Captain America in a realistic setting in Winter Soldier
as well. Take away the star spangled costume and Winter Soldier is just a
really good spy flick. It’s an interesting dynamic, that, taking stories people
think are for children and selling them to adults (and children still) as fun
shoot-‘em-ups or taking them seriously as stories that could be entirely
plausible.
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| Sad Batman is sad because he knows he is ridiculous. No worries, we still love you, bro'. |
It’s a great time to be alive and to see things you loved as
a kid being reincarnated in ways that make you love them again or make you want
to hire a squad of ninja pirates to assassinate everyone involved in ruining
your favourite comic book (guys behind Green Lantern, I’m referring to you).
You even get charming things like The Lego Movie! We’re throwing all our storytelling
telling toys in the sandpit and having a great time playing with or just peeing
on them. Life’s good.
