Tag Archives: Damsel in distress

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Posted on by Henry

Visually, I love Atlantis: The Lost Empire. It’s gorgeous.

I love Mike Mignola’s style, which permeates everything in this movie. I’m very fond of his Hellboy comics, and had no trouble with this movie’s resulting un-Disney-like animation. Admittedly, some of the animation choices felt a little weird, like the animators struggled at times to convert the character designs into moving figures in ways that felt good. Yet at other points (especially in the movie’s climactic fight scenes) those same characters moved fluidly and naturally through a variety of perspectives, surpassing my expectations beautifully. My love of Mignola’s designs smoothed over the awkward bits for me, and I was very happy overall. If you don’t like Mignola’s art style, or you don’t like the movie’s character designs, you might not enjoy this as much as I did.

Narrative-wise, this movie is… fine? It’s both good and bad.

I love adventure stories, which Atlantis is. I love them so much that I’ll put up with a lot. That said…

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Mistress of the Catacombs, by David Drake

Posted on by Henry

Mistress of the Catacombs is the fourth book in David Drake‘s Lord of the Isles series.  Published in 2001, it continues to deliver on the promise of the first few books.  I’m not sure I have new words to describe the delightful admixture of classical influences that form this heady concoction of Roman and Greek culture and technology, Sumerian religion, and ancient Mediterranean magic.  Suffice to say that it comes across with an appropriately Atlantean feel, and *itty bitty spoilers* that the various wanderings through other worlds never break the feeling of the world(s) that Drake has created.  Magic is powerful and scary, and this is made clear not just by the ways in which people react to it but also through the consequences of people’s use of magic.  And more than ever before in this series, Drake makes clear his own thoughts about violence as a solution to your problems.

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