Archive News
Toy Story 3 director in Galway for screening
Date Published: {J}
by Paul Heaney
Toy Story 3, the latest Pixar animation release, has opened nationwide in Irish cinemas this week after breaking box office records in the US. To promote the film and as part of a special screening for the 2010 Galway Film Fleadh, the film’s director Lee Unkrich and producer Darla K Anderson flew into Galway for a series of interviews.
The pair are between them responsible for almost three billion dollars of tickets sold worldwide, with Unkrich’s having worked on the Toy Story trilogy (he was editor on Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and co-directed ‘2’, TS3 is his sole directing debut) and Anderson’s having produced A Bug’s Life, Cars and TS3.
Easily Pixar’s best film, both emotionally and creatively to date, Toy Story 3 has been met with well-deserved critical and commercial success worldwide. Pixar first introduced the CG-animated feature with Toy Story in ’95, creating a blueprint for what animation should be and revolutionizing the industry overnight.
Then, four years later, Pixar soared to even greater heights with Toy Story 2, laying the foundation for subsequent ambition and innovation. Fifteen years after Buzz and Woody first met, the studio bids a bittersweet farewell to Woody and Buzz’s adventures in Toy Story 3 which opened nationwide with a rare start-of-week debut on Monday.
A question that has intrigued me is why, after Pixar’s still unbroken string of creative and commercial successes, animation is still somehow seen as only for kids, or at worst, secondary to live-action films? Unkrich has a readymade answer. “Well, you know, there’s this weird bias, in the United States especially – that animation is just for kids. We’ve done our best over the years to try to break that. I think we’ve made slow progress, but we’ve made progress.
“From the beginning, we tried to make movies for everybody. They’ve never been targeted to kids. I think the moment you try to make something for kids, you are making something really cruddy that even kids don’t want to watch most of the time. These movies are for everybody, and we want everybody to relate to them on different levels.
“There are mature ideas and themes and feelings in this film that I think are going to affect many grownups, but kids are at a different stage in their life. They don’t experience things the same way adults do. They don’t have the same feelings, and they’re going to have a very different experience of the film. Hopefully they’re still entertained, but it’ll be in a very different way from adults,” he says.
Things have not always been smoothly planned at the studio, as the near-calamity with Toy Story 2’s production suddenly unfolded. “With Toy Story 2, it was more a realization that when we were all together, we could do amazing work, because we had to redo that whole film in only nine months. We basically shut down the studio and it was all hands on deck to get the movie made.”
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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