Quarantine Control #134: Lost Birthdays by Night

DC Staff | October 27, 2022 | Animation, Features, Movies, Television | No Comments

Would it be a mood-killer to note the COVID-19 variants that have recently been detected? Yes? Well, it’s too late to take that back. It’s funny in a morbid way how the virus always feels like it might — might — be on the edge of extinction, only to reassure the people who still care about whether they’ll infect others or not that it just won’t leave us alone. It will continue to find ways to come roaring back as long as a significant number of the population won’t get vaccinated and especially boosted, including in countries that have plenty of vaccine doses, thanks to the sheer amount of misinformation out there. It feels like local governments have given up putting much effort in fighting it now, too. Not great.

Geoffrey Barnes

Werewolf by Night (2022)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 1

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has at last reached the point where Marvel Studios is taking light risks, at least as far as the occasional TV show and special are concerned. The newest among them is Werewolf by Night, the special Marvel fittingly provided for the Halloween horror season. This marked a worthwhile opportunity to introduce characters somewhat well-known from comics and occasional video games into the live-action universe alongside an entertaining homage to old-school horror classics, in a special with welcomingly little connection to the overarching story told in the laundry list of TV shows, movies, and specials.

Werewolf by Night begins with a collection of monster hunters gathering together in a somber and spooky place known as the Bloodstone Temple, after which the attendees are thrown into a competition for a special relic fittingly known as the Bloodstone. The hunters gathered range from normal-looking to downright peculiar, with the biggest focus unsurprisingly being given to Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly), who proves to be one of the most capable fighters among them. I won’t be that asshole and spoil the other characters who show up beyond the titular character, despite the answers being all around the internet by now.

The presentation of the special is deliberately low-budget, with director Michael Giacchino (primarily a composer) making a largely black-and-white homage to old horror films. There are occasional blotches on the screen to assist in providing the feel of an old movie, but it still very much looks like a new production. That’s fine, considering they wanted an audience across all generations to watch this, and it doesn’t detract from the old-school feel. The black-and-white image also helps the special get away with being surprisingly violent, the bloodiest outside the non-MCU R-rated productions and Netflix Marvel shows. It’s also all very entertaining, and packs in a surprising amount of character development into its roughly 52-minute runtime.

I know it’s a dangerous and blasphemous thing to ask for, but I wish there was a bit more to this. There wasn’t much room to expand on the concept, so I’m not stating this as an outright flaw, but I’m itching for more. I’ll reiterate that it was the perfect length for a special of this type.

This was also a great way to introduce Elsa Bloodstone, a skilled hunter who isn’t boringly impervious to everything. They made sure to distinguish her from Jessica Jones, despite Donnelly’s look and occasionally snarky personality being eerily reminiscent of Krysten Ritter’s Jones portrayal. I didn’t have much of a problem with Elsa not being a redhead here, with Donnelly keeping her natural raven color. (She was blonde in the comics at one point, so it’s not as if there was previous consistency.) But I’m looking forward to seeing her in a more comics-accurate outfit come her next appearance. There’s no clue as to when that will be, but they have an opportunity to work her into a certain film that just got a ten-month delay. I’m glad to be the first person to think of this.

I hope Marvel will keep up the trend of providing specials like this, especially if they have a more unique feel compared to the other MCU fare — for now, anyway. They’re the new and more robust replacements for the one-shots they were including on the Blu-ray releases years ago. The Guardians of the Galaxy series is getting a holiday special next month, and depending on how well both do in viewership, there should be a good amount of them coming in the near future. But I’m sure they have larger plans for Elsa and the other characters that debuted here in other movies and shows soon, depending on Donnelly’s schedule. If they don’t, they’ll hear from me.

Joseph Daniels

Halloween is only four days away, as of this writing, and as it just so happens, this is the week I also wanted to write about a piece of media, featuring a tiger, that I really don’t think should be recommended to anyone. Except maybe its target audience, but even then, there are better options. Back away in fear from the terror and misery that is…

Barbie & Chelsea: The Lost Birthday (2021)
Source: Netflix
Tiger representation: Snipper

Do you remember ReBoot? It was a decent show with rather rough-looking CGI. Even just looking at the way mouths are animated nowadays compared to the mouths on characters in ReBoot, you can tell that the technology powering such modern hits such as Frozen, Zootopia and Encanto have come a long way in 25 years.

This movie from last year looks like it’s using 25 year old technology, albeit with better textures and the animators clearly have a lot more RAM to render with, but their character animation doesn’t seem to have made any of the leaps forward that companies like Disney have made.

The plot also kind of sucks. Barbie and her family – including birthday girl Chelsea – go on vacation on a cruise ship, and start looking for somewhere perfect to hold Chelsea’s birthday party. It’s the day before her birthday and the family wants to make sure it’s perfect. There’s an encounter with an asshole activities director at the trampoline basketball court (which doesn’t seem like a safe activity on a cruise ship), who refuses to help the group and would rather get off on his power trip “directing activities” (read: enforcing arbitrary rules) and arranging “private hula lessons” than to answer questions. He refers the group to his assistant activities director, Arlene. Arlene speaks like a pirate for no real reason and finds a spot for the family to enjoy at the ship’s lazy river, complete with water slides and a zip line.

I’ve never been on a cruise ship, but it doesn’t seem believable that there’s a zip line available, or trampoline basketball. A lazy river, yes. But the other activities? I guess I would need to go on a cruise and find out.

The lazy river malfunctions, though, because someone takes Chelsea’s toy elephant and uses it to sabotage the lazy river’s control box. The activities director gleefully shuts down the lazy river, smirking as he does so, ruining any chance of her having her birthday party there. It makes me wonder who shat in his cereal that morning, that he’s getting off on ruining specifically Chelsea’s vacation. Three guesses who took her elephant to sabotage the lazy river.

The next day, everyone is astonished to find that it’s not actually Chelsea’s birthday, it’s somehow the day after her birthday. Turns out that they crossed the International Date Line, and the asshole of an activities director is utterly gleeful with the news that her birthday is lost forever. Dejected, Chelsea takes her stuffed toys and hides away from her family but a parrot tells her about a magical wish granting gem hidden on a jungle island. So Chelsea zip lines onto the tropical island and this is where the adventure truly begins. Along the way, Chelsea meets living versions of her stuffed toys, one of which is a music-making, vegetarian tiger named Snipper. Meeting her sets off a musical number, and while the song is alright, the scene plays like a really bad music video.

While Chelsea is having her adventure, her sisters are trying to find her on the island, and they encounter mishap after mishap. A patch of flowers that cause an uncontrollable itching that can only be cured by a Thermos of oatmeal Barbie happens to be carrying, quicksand, hungry seagulls… although it turns out that this island is one that the cruise ship stops at all the time for its passengers to spend some time on, it seems like the risks far outweigh any fun passengers would have.

Chelsea has been avoiding these traps and instead, encounters riddles and new friends in such a manner that it almost seems like a video game plot, one aimed at young girls around Chelsea’s age. There’s a cuteness factor and it isn’t all bad, but anyone older will likely wish for it to be a shorter movie. Eventually, after defeating a tiki statue with the voice of the activities director, the group finds the gem on top of a pedestal that looks a lot like a birthday cake. To get your wish, you just blow out the flame at the top. This is not a subtle movie, and the ending has almost an Alice in Wonderland feel to it. I also can’t help but wonder if Chelsea’s going to grow up to be a furry with an elephant fursona named Kelsie. I wouldn’t be surprised.

In conclusion, this seems like the kind of thing that gets put on as a babysitting tool and not as anything a parent would actually enjoy watching. Not going to lie, though, I would listen to a singing tiger named Snipper.

——

Postscript: So after I sent in my contribution to Quarantine Control this week, I looked into who actually made all the Barbie stuff on Netflix. It turns out that this is what Mainframe Entertainment, now Mainframe Studios, is doing. They’re the ones in charge of the Barbie franchise.

If Mainframe sounds familiar, it’s because they got their start with ReBoot. It’s no accident that I thought about ReBoot as I watched this. It’s got the animation style of ReBoot as well as the kind of writing I remember from the first couple seasons. And I may have suggested that the quality isn’t that much better than what was possible 25 years ago, but at the very least, Snipper actually looks a lot more like a tiger than any of the tigers in Beast Wars did.

This might be preaching to the choir here, but anyone who yet to get the new COVID booster should do so. It’s perhaps a good idea to get a shot both before the newer variants spread around the world and before the vaccines are thrown into the hellscape that’s private insurance network in the United States. Until next week.

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