Word: superheroics
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...With popularity on par with the Batman character in the U.S., Ultraman is a silver-and-red-clad superhero with buglike eyes and a reputation for countless victories. Actors and comedians - not former Prime Ministers - usually perform the voices for characters in the series' live-action or animation films. And at first, Koizumi was no exception; he originally turned down the role, in which the Ultraman King delivers a rousing speech to the film's main characters. But Koizumi's 28-year-old son Shinjiro, a first-time Diet legislature member, persuaded his father to do it. Shinjiro, a longtime...
Superman was modeled partly on Moses. The comic-book hero's creators, two bookish Jews from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, drew their character's backstory from the superhero of the Torah. Just as baby Moses is floated down the Nile in a basket to escape annihilation, baby Superman is launched into space in a rocket ship to avoid extinction. Just as Moses is raised in an alien world before being summoned to liberate Israel, Superman is raised in an alien environment before being called to assist humanity...
...girl and her flying house. The old guy alights in a wonderland, meets magical or malevolent animals and an old villain and is rejuvenated by the simple act of letting go of his obsession and caring for someone else. By the end of his adventure, he's a movie superhero, an older version of Indiana Jones. He also realizes that the small pleasures often trump the big thrills. Oz may provide death-defying fun, but what's the matter with Kansas...
...Except for The Incredibles, Brad Bird's obligatorily cartoony vision of a superhero family, Up is the first Pixar feature in which the main characters are humans. Up isn't realistic either. It revels in a minimum of dialogue, deft comic underplaying and a style the Pixar people call simplexity, a character design that stresses circles and cubes. (Carl looks like a trash-compacted Spencer Tracy in his later years.) "We tried to push caricature," Docter says, "and the language of shapes - to make these drawings an expression of the characters. Carl wants to stay enclosed...
...electorate that rallied behind superhero Arnold Schwarzenegger in the recall election in 2003 mostly views him as part of the Sacramento problem he had promised to fix. The most recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found Schwarzenegger's approval rating among likely voters under 35%, while the state legislature is seen in a favorable light by only one in five voters. (See pictures of the career of California's First Lady Maria Shriver...