Thursday, January 8, 2015

I, Robot Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth. Dir. Dan Gallagher. Perf. Mirai Booth-Ong, J. A. Curcione, and Dan Gallagher [The Robot Shakespeare Company]. DVD. Bright Red Productions, 2012.

A few years ago, I spotted a Kickstarter request proposing to film an all-robot Macbeth (for which, q.v.). Well, they got their funding, and they made their film!

The film is . . . mildly interesting. The animation is adequate, and the film angles are often quite interesting, but I was hoping for something a bit less straightforward. I'm now wondering how to use it. Would it be good for introducing the play to kids? To robots? To robot kids?

I'm a bit ambivalent about another aspect of the film. They've provided modernized subtitles (as in the image above) for the entire play. I suppose this, too, could be useful to viewers who are having trouble with the language, but they're a bit too simplified. They might be a good crutch, but they would be a bad stick.

As is my wont, I'm providing the dagger speech here to give you a sense of how they handled it—and, by it, a sense of the rest of the production.


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Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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