My Cool Dad

Mirsand Ltd. [Cyprus] | Loews 446 Screenings: Thurs. Nov. 3 at 11 a.m. & Mon. Nov. 7 at 3 p.m. at Monica Film Center 3 Once a happy man, Salazar is now a 45-year-old facing a midlife crisis. His personal life and career in ruins, he seems to have nothing left to lose. But nothing is impossible for this professor: he even manages to lose his own body! Ingesting the mutagen he invented, a bad day turns into an absolute nightmare. To return everything to normal he’ll have to return to a place he has avoided like the plague for years … the real world. Directed by Viktor Glukhushin. Produced by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazalevs. (Post-production; 2017) mirsand.com/cy/project/mycooldad

Katana is a unique beast in the CG toolbox. Its functionality is focused and limited, which makes it exceptional at what it does, rather than pretty good at a whole lot of things (which many generalist 3D package suffer from). So what does Katana do? It collects geometry assets, assigns shaders, uses lights and cameras to generate a scene, which it then packages all up and throws to a render engine to make the final images (along with AOVs). So, it’s basically a scene assembler. You don’t model in it. You don’t animate in it. You don’t simulate in it. You develop looks, light assets, and render them.

Katana uses a Nuke-like (or Houdini-like, if you prefer) node-based workflow to build scenes. Camera, ABC animated geometry, etc., all come in as nodes, which essentially makes it procedural and reusable. Change something upstream, and the result pops out downstream. So, if you have a bunch of similar scenes, you can recycle the same setup, using different cameras or animation, but getting the same look. The node tree — or even part of the node tree — can be saved as a “recipe,” which can be shared with other lighting artists.

Look-dev artists can work in parallel to the lighters, publishing new variants to audition without necessarily breaking everything in process. Since the shaders are applied within the Katana node tree and not to the model directly, the workflow becomes a bit safer. Additionally, Katana shaders are driving versions of all the installed render plugins. RenderMan, Arnold, V-Ray and 3Delight receive their version of the shader as it gets sent to render.

These are all cool features — and in my mind, kinda critical. But it’s Katana’s scene management that really makes things worthwhile. It loads in assets, or subsets of assets, and it works in conjunction with delayed read processes (within having to save out to the specific file format per renderer). It only worries about the pieces of the scene that you really need — providing you with an interactive render of the scene without bringing in the 2 billion polygons from the full geometry. This keeps load time down and the UI responsive. Because, if you have artists waiting for files to load, that’s a lot of money wasted. Better to have them be productive.

Katana is powerful and it’s catering to a niche market — which may grow now that it’s available for Windows. This makes it an expensive investment and may not be worth the cost for a mom ’n’ pop VFX house. It also becomes more powerful if you can bolster it with pipeline tools developed in Python, or internally using LUA, and this kinda requires a bit more of a support team. So, all in all, it’s extremely useful — and has been proven in studios like Imageworks (where it was first created), Digital Domain, ILM and MPC, just to name a few. But it may be luxurious for smaller boutiques. www.thefoundry.co.uk

Fourteen-year-old Renton Thurston (Johnny Yong Bosch), the hero of the broadcast series Eureka Seven (2005), lives in a crumbling flyspeck town with his mechanic grandfather. He dreams of leaving his humdrum life behind to join the elite pilot-mercenaries of the Light Finding Operation aboard their ship, the Gekko. When LFO pilot Eureka (Stephanie Sheh) crashes her mecha, the Nirvash Type Zero, on his grandfather’s lot, Renton is immediately smitten with her beauty and her piloting skills. He gives her the Amita Drive, a mysterious invention of his father’s that’s been sitting around the shop since his death. The Drive increases the power of the Nirvash astronomically.

Renton also aspires to ride the planet’s aerial currents, known as Trapar Waves, with the skill and panache of Holland (Crispin Freeman), the rebellious leader of the Gekko. Series director Tomoki Kyoda and his crew choreograph these aerial maneuvers — which suggest a combination of skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding raised to the Nth degree — with great élan. The exciting aerial sequences are supported by the handsome designs, which recall Last Exile, but with a bolder, brighter palette.

Eureka takes Renton in the Nirvash to the Gekko. Once aboard, he has two new goals: winning Eureka’s heart and becoming a full-fledged member of the crew, although his desire to join the group surpasses his understanding of who they are and what they do. Renton naively obeys every order he’s given, even when the crew hazes him. Bosch pulls off the neat trick of capturing the enthusiasm and insecurity of a rookie without letting his character become a pest.

Eureka proves more problematic: She’s burdened with three obnoxious orphans she rescued during a battle. Perhaps in response to the trend among younger Japa- nese women to bear fewer children and to have them later in life, anime creators burdened many of their young heroines with foster kids in the early 2000s. The trio in Eureka Seven rank as the most loathsome animated brats to come along since Bébé’s Kids. They delight in tormenting Renton, who’s too worried about displeasing Eureka to give them the hit upside the head they richly deserve. Not What She Seems When Renton discovers a bit belatedly that the mecha battles he’s been fighting kill human beings, his revulsion recalls Shinji’s in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Renton jumps ship but returns from his solo adventure just in time to save Eureka from the military. This bold rescue embodies every adolescent boy’s fantasy, and makes a dynamite finale for the show’s first season.

During the second season, the story grows more complicated and the threats more dire as Renton learns that Eureka is a Coralian, a native of the planet where the story is set, who has assumed human form. Hoping to unleash her latent powers, the crew heads for the temple of the god Vodarac, where Eureka and Renton are allowed to pass through the barrier of the Great Wall to “the genuine promised land,” which looks a lot like Earth.

By this time, Eureka Seven has developed more plots and subplots than the characters can support. The filmmakers have so many story points to unscramble, they resort to extended Morris-the-Explainer scenes: When Renton finally meets up with her, she spends nearly 15 minutes filling in the back story.

All these elements lead to a climactic, take-no-prisoners battle. Kyoda unleashes some prismatic special effects to balance the exposition and physical chaos. But the flashy eye candy can’t disguise that Eureka Seven was more entertaining in its first season, when it focused on Renton’s efforts to win a place as a crew member of the Gekko. That light-hearted adventure devolves into a apocalyptic battle saga with overtones of Evangelion. Yet Eureka Seven spawned numerous follow-ups and alternative re-tellings, including a broadcast series, an OAV, a theatrical feature and three manga adaptations. [

FUNimation: $69.98, 7 discs, Blu-ray

Astunning sequel 13 years in the making, Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane’s undersea adventure follows forgetful blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) as she sets off in search of her family with clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence). Chance encounters introduce her to new friends as well: Hank, a cantankerous septopus (Ed O’Neill); Bailey, a beluga whale with faulty sonar (Ty Burrell); and Destiny, a near-sighted whale shark (Kaitlin Olson). The DVD comes with theatrical short Piper and commentary.

As usual, Disney’s Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D options ($39.99) are stuffed to the gills with extras: all-new mini-short Marine Life Interviews, for making stories come alive with enchanted origami. When he accidentally summons a vengeful spirit, he must embark on a quest to uncover the truth about his fallen samurai father and his mystical weapons — with a little help from Beetle (Matthew McConaughey) and Monkey (Charlize Theron).

The DVD includes commentary with Knight a boy named Leo can save it! The 11-year-old superhero has the power to leave his body and float around the city as a spirit. When a mysterious villain named The Face emerges, he teams up with an injured cop named Alex to stop an act of biological terrorism … in just 24 hours. their existence … and what it really means to be chosen by a hungry shopper.

The cast list is a who’s- who of comedy: Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek.

Also available on Blu-ray ($34.99) and 4K ($45.99), bonus features include “The Booth,” “The Great Beyond,” “The Pitch,” “Shock and Awe: How Did This Get Made?,” “Animation Imaginatorium,” “Good Food Gag Reel” and “Line-O-Rama.”

You’ll never look at baby carrots the same way again.