Chicken in the Bread Pan, Pickin' Out Dough! (plus pandas)

I realized that raccoons and violins don't fit too well together.  In fact, the only logical animal to play the fiddle would be none other than the Tasmanian devil.

Hopefully, at least a few people will get the joke; my binturong design is among my best-sellers, so this little devil may have a chance.
In case you haven't figured it out, here is the origin of this silliness:

And here's the design on a T-shirt:

Yup.

In other news, I saw Kung Fu Panda 2 yesterday.  Pixar cannot beat Dreamworks this year; the plot was a bit cliche, but good, the art was incredible, and (holy pistachios!) fight scenes everywhere!  But even with the copious amount of legendary-fighting-ness and general Jack Black-ness, there was a decent amount of character development.  And the Jack Black-ness had been significantly reduced.  I like Jack Black, but this is an animated action movie, not Tropic Thunder.
Granted, the fight scenes lacked the epicness of the original, which had two insanely awesome brawls, (Tai Lung's prison escape and the bridge fight) but the new villian, Lord Shen, is among my favorite characters.

Just look at his design:


From About.com

Now, imagine that doing kung fu, with its whippy tail and all.  For a few moments at a time, you can't help but forget he's pure evil and a half, and just think, "pretty burdie!"
Then he stabs a rabbit or something and you remember that the peacock is the bad guy.

Frankly, I can't believe Dreamworks is still in the shadow of Pixar.  In terms of graphics and animation, Pixar's Wall-E or Finding Nemo may be the best 3D animated movies ever created, but in general, it doesn't compare to the art in Dreamworks' recent movies.  Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon easily have some of the prettiest animated sequences I've seen, and the storylines are relatively great.  HTYD even manages to avoid the typical Disney ending, a trap that Pixar almost always falls into.

Seriously; it's not just kids watching animated movies.  Give us something that ends on a melancholy note, or maybe something bittersweet.  Heck, give us something incredibly sad.  Shane Acker's 9 (Focus Features) has been the only 3D computer-animated feature film I've seen with a remotely sad ending, but the story wasn't fantastic.  Studio Ghibli has some great art and great storylines, not all of which end on a completely happy note, but it's all 2D animation, so it's not quite relevant to what I'm talking about.

If you should take anything out of that long digression of a ramble, it's that Kung Fu Panda 2 is a great film, 8/10 stars!

See it twice, once for the story, once to see all the purdy-purdiness of it all.

What's more, school's out!  Cheers!

Happy summer!