Strange enough to post on The Porch? Why, yes!

Last night I was up late. I had a project to get ready for a presentation for our rocket club this afternoon (payloads for night launches). Daughter number two was home from college and everyone else was up late too; the family was watching "The Prince of Egypt" on DVD in the living room.

All that preamble to explain that I turned on the bedroom T.V. after midnight out of curiosity to see what was on, and I saw some really bizarre stop-action animation on 16-5. I watched long enough to appreciate the creativity, but I still had no idea what was going on, and closed captioning was hit and miss...it didn't help much.

My digital converter remote has a "tv guide" of sorts built in, so I pushed the appropriate button to find it was something called "The Legend of the Sky Kingdom" (click here for a trailer from Youtube). I searched for that on the internet, and Wikipedia had an entry. This is the first stop-action animation movie from Africa (Zimbabwe), and it was released in 2003. It's probably the lowest budget movie you've ever seen or ever will see, you might even say it was close to "no-budget". The characters (who I took to be robots at first) were all made from junk, as were the backgrounds - old broken computer keyboards in one scene. Apparently the camera they used was also home made from "junk" parts.

Maybe I should look around and see if it's available to rent so I can see the whole thing. I was entertained for the few minutes I watched, though I still can't say I get what was going on. It's impressive what you can make out of next to nothing when you put forth the creative effort.