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Urduja was alright. Not great, but not terrible either.

Wait, what am I talking about? For those who are only in-tune with what’s new from the other side of Pacific, ClickTheCity provides us with a good primer:

The Philippines has a pretty long history in animation, though few people really care to notice. Filipino animators have worked on the likes of Scooby Doo, Captain Planet and The Incredibles, providing talent for foreign outfits. Urduja is the first major effort to create a local animated feature, and though it still isn’t a full showcase of what we can do, it’s a pretty great effort.

The film tells a tale of Urduja, the legendary warrior princess of Pangasinan. Her father, the chief of the tribe, has fallen ill. Simakwel, an ambitious young warrior, seeks to gain the chiefdom by marrying the headstrong princess. But his plan encounters a hurdle when the dashing pirate Lim Hang arrives on their shores and saves Urduja from a Badjao arrow. Lim Hang and Urduja begin to play out a forbidden love, while Simakwel schemes to take back what he saw as his rightful place.

Being a locally produced animated feature film, I honestly did not expect Disney-caliber quality in terms of animation. There’s just no way around it; animation wholly produced here just isn’t ready to compete on a world stage yet. And it shows in the movie: the animation jumps from frame to frame in an irregular fashion, faces and bodies morph a bit during movement, and frames per second doesn’t stay consistent throughout the entire film. Sometimes scenes move along well, and sometimes they really don’t.

Another thing of note was the sound quality. During the first part of the movie dialogue was nearly inaudible due to great amounts of noise in the recording. Characters felt like they were far away from the scene they were actually in when they talked. Sometimes I even heard a bit of an echo in their voices. It sure wasn’t the cinema I watched this in. This led to a bit of confusion in the first part of the film, especially when coupled by a few snags in the animation. I really couldn’t understand what some of the characters were saying in the early segments.

What I didn’t expect at all, but enjoyed anyway, were the song numbers. In another moment of emulating standards set by Disney there were songs interspersed within the movie. Some of these songs were pretty forgettable (Kukut and Tarsir’s song comes to mind, which one could almost say tries to copy Hakuna Matata), although some were pretty good melodies as well, like the one sung by Lim Hang, even more so when you consider that Cesar Montano isn’t really a trained singer.

It lacks polish, and I definitely think Pinoys can do better. Still, at the end of the day no one can really say that Urduja isn’t something. The animation for all its odd hiccups serves its job of conveying the narrative. The dialogue, while a bit bumpy due to its mixing of old Filipino ideals with modern colloquial language, sees the audience safely to the end. And while the animators are still using a lot of ideas first made famous by Western studios, at least it’s applied to a distinctly Filipino milieu.

Urduja is definitely something to start on, and maybe years from now it will be looked back upon as the foundation of great Philippine animation. But for now, it’s just an alright effort.

Disclaimer: Some spoilers may be up ahead.

The tagline said “Prepare for Awesomeness”. And yes, you had to be, because there was a smattering of awesome right there in the moviehouse.

Kung Fu Panda is the latest feature film from DreamWorks Animation. The whole thing is being billed as an homage to actual kung fu films, instead of being another cartoony parody of the genre. It’s a surprising tactic, and for what it’s worth, the content of the movie does have enough of that Chinese martial arts film feel in it to warrant such a billing. After all, the moves you see are based on real kung fu fighting styles. From the fights to the choreography, everything feels authentic and top-notch.

Animation, as you’d expect from a studio like DreamWorks, was silky smooth. It was like watching water flow from one container to another - no wrinkles or out-of-place frames. Especially in a movement-heavy film such as this the quality of the work is really brought to the fore. And lo, it passes the test of the audience with flying colors. Palette-wise the whole thing was vibrant. I especially liked the way Tigress’ and Tai Lung’s eyes, as well as the Hall of Heroes were colored.

The character voices were generally good. Jack Black lends his usual off-beat self to the character of Po. I thought that he didn’t veer too far from what he usually does in his other movies (namely School of Rock and Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny), so in that sense it’s a bit limiting. Still, few can argue that he also lends his tubbiness well to the Panda. It was great to see it translate successfully onto the screen. Angelina Jolie was great as Tigress, the character sounded perfectly confident and sure of herself. A few surprises for me, and maybe for you: Jackie Chan as Monkey, and Lucy Liu as Snake. I didn’t see those coming. However, the best surprise of all was Ian McShane as Tai Lung - his naturally menacing voice was a perfect fit for what I thought were some of the best lines in the movie.

The dialogue gets a bit contrived and cheesy sometimes, but it’s all right: I’ve come to regard these kinds of lines as a necessary evil especially when dealing with a General Patronage audience, because writers have to extend a moral to the story. Having said that, I think that this is my only real complaint about the movie. Otherwise I thought people were getting a lot of bang for their buck.

For an animated film touted as a real kung fu flick, I guess it gets by. But if you see it with the intention of enjoying animation at its finest as well as getting in a lot of laughs, I’m sure you’ll find this as a great movie. I certainly did.

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It’s like a new house, almost everything is new. Even the Feedburner account. So yeah, unfortunately those few people who have subscribed to me, you have to subscribe again.

Anyway, everything works like I want it to, so there’s really no complaining from me.

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Let the playing commence again.

In a previous post I said I couldn’t play Guitar Hero anymore due to the fact that I wrecked the strum bar by playing one too many shreds. What was happening was not all clicks (physical upstrums or downstrums) were translating into strums in the game, virtually making the whole thing unplayable. I had actually stopped playing for months before I decided to try and fix things - I wouldn’t shell out money for a new guitar. As it turned out, it’s not impossible to fix by yourself. Why I didn’t look for the answer sooner I’ll never know.

A little searching yielded this thread on the ScoreHero forums. Basically, I loosened the four screws circled below and tightened them back. Voila, strum bar worked like a charm again, no more missed strums.

Never mind the arrows, they were already there in this picture I stole.

What’s weird is, now all my scores are higher. Way higher. I pulled off 30,000+ more points on Jordan on Hard. I somehow squeezed another 32,000+ points out of Jessica on Expert. The rest of the scores are up by an average of 3,000 points. Credit it to (too much) muscle memory. Or maybe I just magically stumble onto the optimal Star Power paths now.

Echochrome. I’ve been looking at this PSP game for a while, and it looks very fun. With gameplay revolving around traversing geometric objects by turning them into impossible constructions, it’s just like my current obsession. It’s also remarkably similar to Fez, at least in terms of moving the camera around to create new dimensions in the playing field.