Word: pasteles
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This scene--of a wraithlike pestilence casting a monochrome shroud over the pastel-painted Egypt and insinuating itself through the doors of the condemned--is splendidly eerie. It makes a compelling argument for the Exodus story to be told in the unique language of animation. The film's colors and textures are handsomely diametrical: the cool elegance of Pharaoh's palace as opposed to the burnished warmth of the Israelites' huts and, more daringly, the angular Jewish features against the Africanized Egyptian...
...film) only intensify the conflict. Into the middle of this maelstrom, Kapur places Elizabeth: young, innocent, with flowing hair and a penchant for dancing the volta. There may be something tenacious and unreadable in Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, but Kapur doesn't help much, filming the young royal in pastel gowns with a bevy of handmaidens and a robust beau, prancing giddily in some absurdly verdant corner of the English countryside. This is the Virgin Queen before she was a virgin (to quote the preeminent Elizabethan scholar Groucho Marx)--and if this preposterous rapture is the best the film...
Ultimately, the performance had an overall fairy tale-like atmosphere amply reinforced by the bright, pastel set, as well as the lovely Gilded Age costumes by designer Jana Howland. Maybe Where's Charley is an oldie, but it definitely is still a goodie...
...flick of Rick Sayre's keyboard tells you all you need to know about the future of animation. "We start with a pencil and a paintbrush," says Sayre, senior animation scientist for the digital studio Pixar. On his screen is a graceful line-and-pastel drawing of two ants gazing across an underground landscape, an early rendering from the much anticipated film A Bug's Life, which opens this week. "When we recruit artists," Sayre says, "we still look for people with great hands." Then he hits the return key, and up pops the finished shot, lush with color, aglow...
...deal on a Tahitian Gauguin, Bathers. With time to kill, they dropped in on the small upstairs gallery of Thomas Gibson, a private dealer in Old Bond Street. And there, on an easel, was a painting that had just come in on consignment a few hours before: Degas's pastel Dancer Taking a Bow, 1887, one of the finest of his ballet scenes, which had been in one of the collections of the Rothschild family for the past 80 years and had not been exhibited publicly in a half-century. "It just shone," Wynn recalls. "It knocked me flat...