The Home of the Creative Mind

Welcome to PooBahSpiel, the online voice and home of the creative mind of Mark Monlux, Illustrator Extraordinaire. Prepare yourself for an endless regaling of art directly from the hand of this stellar artist. And brace yourself against his mighty wind of pontification. Updates are kinda weekly and show daily sketches, current projects, and other really nifty stuff.

Monday, May 7, 2012

The Comic Critic Reviews The Hunger Games

The goal for many stories is to create empathy for the characters. Once you become emotionally invested with them, any conflict in which they’re involved takes on a large perspective. If that conflict is life or death, then that perspective is enormous. One way to create audiences’ empathy is to place them in a familiar setting without realizing they’re in a familiar setting. This is what I like about Hunger Games so much: all the ingredients of high school—the seemingly life-or-death struggle of peer pressure, the resentment of authority, the importance of fashion, the pain of romance, the sorrow of betrayal, the joy of friendship, the back-stabbing, all within an uncaring system apparently established to grind down the youth in its care to nothing. Hunger Games presents these ingredients in their most literal form. Had the story’s fundamental principal not been upheld every step of the way, this film could have easily gone south in a heartbeat. I haven’t read the series of books that inspired this movie, but I can understand why they’ve been so popular. Because I believe this is the start of a successful franchise and don’t want any spoilers, I might wait.
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