Killer Bunnies and Cooking Rats

Friday we we over to the Tracys' house to play Killer Bunnies. They discovered this game recently and had been telling us what crazy fun it was, so they invited us over to play. It certainly is a complicated, wacky game. I didn't really get a good sense of it, just playing it the one time (and we had to cut our game short because it was past Kate's bedtime), but I was intrigued enough to want to give it another go.



We found the font on the cards kind of annoying, which was one drawback, and we also spotted an "effect" that should have been "affect." Oops. It's one of those games that has multiple expansion packs, and some of the cards refer to other cards that haven't been created yet. Now that's planning ahead.

Saturday we went to see Ratatouille. We don't get to the theater very often--the last movie we went to see was Serenity, almost two years ago. But we are fans of Pixar in general and of Brad Bird in particular, and we'd been looking forward to Ratatouille since we first saw the teasers. We decide to take Kate along, figuring that two-and-a-half might be old enough for her first "big movie," and that a cute little rat might capture her attention. Well, the movie experience turned out much like the wading pool experience--she didn't want to be there. I eventually got her to go to sleep (which messed up her nap schedule for the rest of the day), but at least Doug and I had a good time.

This movie may not be particularly engaging for young kids, but we enjoyed it and will probably buy it when it comes out on DVD. In fact, while I was watching I found myself wishing we had it on DVD already so I could listen to the commentary. The story was solid and the execution masterful, as expected. We particularly enjoyed the stylized animation in the end credits. As my own art tends to lean heavily on the representational (essentially just copying what I see, most of the time), I am impressed by the pure artistry in this sort of thing. It's like a really good dish that you want to savor and study to figure out if you can reproduce it yourself.