Word: americanizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...voted recently to eliminate evolution from the state science curriculum, the sophisticates had quite a yuk. One editorial cartoon had an ape reclining in a tree telling his mate, "We are descended from the Kansas School Board." The decision has been widely derided as a sign of resurgent Middle American obscurantism, a throwback to the Scopes "monkey trial...
Well, to begin with, the Scopes trial is not the great fable the rather fictional Inherit the Wind made it out to be. The instigators of the trial were not bluenosed know-nothings wanting to persecute some poor teacher for teaching evolution. They were officials of the American Civil Liberties Union so eager for a test case to overturn a new Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution that they promised to pay the expenses of the prosecution! The A.C.L.U. advertised for a volunteer and found one John Scopes, football coach and science teacher, willing to take...
...what is anime? Easier to ask: What isn't it? An American cartoon is simple to define. It's Disney--the Disney style of romantic realism, questing kids and cute critters. Anime is all kinds of differents. "There isn't a single artistic style in anime," says Helen McCarthy, British author of four books on the subject, including Hayao Miyazaki: Films, Themes, Artistry. "The major difference from Disney-style animation is the limitless possibilities existing in anime." If you can dream it, anime-tors can draw...
...medieval Japan, Mononoke imagines a war involving several bands of humans--and a more desperate battle between man and the environment. Ashitaka (given voice in Neil Gaiman's American adaptation by Billy Crudup), the youngest survivor of a vanishing tribe, is gored by a demon boar that is a protector of the great forest. His wound will kill him if he can't solve the mystery of his curse. He meets Eboshi (Minnie Driver), ruler of Iron Town, and her fiercest foe, San (Claire Danes), or Mononoke, which means spirit. They want to use him or escape...
...animaster's great coup may have been to impose his will--that the film not be cut--on Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax. Weinstein is notorious for his itch to trim foreign films to suit the faster American pulse; he reads a sonnet and dreams of a couplet. Says Weinstein: "It's a genius movie. Could it be streamlined? Yeah, and it could be more accessible as a result of cutting. But Miyazaki is like Kurosawa or Sergio Leone--one of the greats of international cinema. The very idea of cutting is anathema to a director of this importance...