Just under two weeks left now! Been a lot more conscious of how I've been spending my time as a result, trying to get trips organized and see places, take photos, work on stuff before my departure on the 24th. To that end, it's been fun—Caby and I even saw a movie on a whim!
Earlier on in the trip, Caby happened to see a poster for The Bad Guys 2, and neither of us having seen the first one, we thought we'd hop in on an afternoon showing and miss the train rush back home through it. If you're not familiar, The Bad Guys was originally an Australian book series about a team of criminal animal people who elect, unsuccessfully for various reasons, to work to become good. You got all the species you'd want, a wolf, a snake, a...shark, a pirahna? Tarantula? (I really really thought Wolf was played by George Clooney, but it turns out he is not.)
Anyway, the second one finds them kidnapped by a new team of thieves looking to pull off the biggest heist the world has ever seen, under threat of releasing footage of governor Diane Foxington's past life as a master thief herself. The interplay between the Bad Guys and the New Guys is very funny (especially Snake, who is utterly betrayed by Doom the crow numerous times and is still completely smitten with her, been there), but what Caby appreciated the most is that all the girls were just plain compelling without their being women even being noteworthy. Growing up used to weirdly sexualized female counterparts in animated movies, having a butch boar true crime nerd was pretty heartening to her. I'm inclined to agree.
Anyway, knowing none of this going in and having no preconceived notions outside Diane being pretty popular on DeviantART, I was smiling big through the opening scene, showing the Bad Guys pulling off a truly spectacular heist in Cairo where you see everyone's specialties play out. Shark is the amusingly convincing master of disguise. Snake is a safecracker who connects his art to, um, lovemaking. It's what Caby calls the art of letting artists do their thing. You're making an animated movie, and where Disney at this point is too precious with their brands to let their artists do anything other than stiff, status quo dollhouse films, The Bad Guys 2 pseudo-mixes mediums between paper explosions and comic book interstitials, each scene loaded with fluid visual gags that demonstrate total mastery in the language of animation. It looks just as fun to have made as to watch the final product of.
That's high praise for a kids film, I get it, but it really is interesting to me how everyone's left Disney behind at this point. It's not that Dreamworks is incapable of making hot dogshit (we got a trailer for that fucking Gabby's Dollhouse film before this one and boy does that look like a trash fire), it's just that you have bangers like this and the last Puss in Boots film and then Sony's Spider-Man animated films that by all accounts are a total visual treat, and then Disney continues to turbofuck everything up with their inability to let artists do their thing. They're twitchy little creatures whose bones animate with ideas regardless of if you're paying them or not, and when you let them chase those ideas down with a decent budget, surprise! You get better films. Shocker.
Anyway, to get back to The Bad Guys 2, I really appreciated how well it was paced and how well it navigated the usual story beats of an animated movie. There was that "oh, everything is fucked and these guys are down and out" bit in the middle—for like, a minute and a half, and then it did something else fun with it. Caby turned to me in the climax and went "wouldn't it be really funny if this happened?", and then that thing happened two minutes later. I'm being vague to not give away the plot, which isn't gonzo shocking but is enough fun to push you towards seeing it yourself. This is a movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and is super fun to watch for both a minute and for the whole 104 minute runtime. That's batting a lot better than other kids films, I'm sure you know.
And I haven't even mentioned the best part! Moss from The IT Crowd plays a fucking hench guinea pig.
There. Now you have zero reason not to see it.
