So for Valentines day, I had a planning meeting at work for election covereage and the DNC and then spent the rest of the day watching documentaries about hip hop and prison boxing. Great flicks whose names escape me right now.
My friend Alex and I drove home together and he toook me to see Biill Plympton's "Hair High." It was a funny cartoon in Plympton's characteristic, morphing body style. It was bit long in some stretches but certainly worth the dryer moments.
Watching Hair High took me back to my days teaching History of Animation at Columbia College. Now spending all my time watching depressing documentaries, I do value the pleasure of watching cartoons and discussing their often radical history. I'm not sure I would characterize "Hair High" as radical. It did a good job, perhaps appropriately for a hetero-holiday like V-Day, valorizing straight romance. Despite the anxiety of morphing, monsterous bodies turned inside out, the movie pretty much reminded everybody that love prevails in the end. A sweet but stupid moral.
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