Wolves and Wargs

I recently watched parts of a couple movies with my dad: Lord of the Rings, and Wolfwalkers. We watched Wolfwalkers between a couple of the Lord of the Rings movies. And as we were watching Wolfwalkers, my dad said it was violent. I was astonished, and asked what he thought all the battles in Lord of the Rings were. They're far more violent than Wolfwalkers. He said that Lord of the Rings was "fun violent." What a weird thing to say. I mean, I guess there's a bit of that with Legolas and Gimli bantering about how many orcs they've taken out.

But violence isn't fun. There's slapstick, which is funny if it's good. But there's a line between slapstick and violence. Wolfwalkers doesn't have fun violence because there's nothing fun about violence. And Lord of the Rings has some silly stuff in their battles so the films don't get too heavy and dark. But Lord of the Rings doesn't make violence fun either. Think of Boromir.

There are movies that make violence funny. I don't like them. There isn't anything funny about people getting badly hurt and killed. People shouldn't be thinking that way. (It depends on how it's done - in Coco, it's kinda funny when the bell falls on top of a certain famous singer. But that is part of setting up a movie about the dead. It was a deliberate way to lighten people up about death for the duration of the film, so they could really get immersed in the Land of the Dead. Oops, that turned into a Coco tangent).