US purchase link:
Corpse Bride

I have to confess that I picked this up purely on the strength of the luscious Johnny Depp voicing one of the main characters (well, that and the fact that it was a wet Saturday afternoon with not much else for me and littl'un to do) and came away entertained and enthralled.

The film opens on the eve of young nouveau riche Victor van Dort's wedding to the aristocratic-but-impoverished Victoria Everglot - a union which their families respectively hope will escalate their place in society and restore the family fortune.

The wedding rehearsal goes horribly wrong and Victor flees the Everglot mansion in humiliation. Musing on his short-comings in the nearby forest, he inadvertently places the wedding ring on the "hand" of a dead branch - but the branch turns out to belong to an unquiet corpse who is more than happy to accept Victor's proposal!

Victor is dragged "downstairs" to the land of the dead, but meanwhile, someone else is paying court to his abandoned fianceé Victoria...

Director Tim Burton's vision makes the world of the dead seem a much more lively, colourful, entertaining world than the grey and dreary "upstairs" world of the living. The dead speak, they dance, they laugh, sing and cry - whereas the living seem to spend most of their time worrying that they're breaking the rules.

With a cast of all-star voices - Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's wife), Albert Finney, Christopher Lee and Joanna Lumley to name just a handful - plus some very interesting "the making of" special features on the DVD, this is an excellent choice for all ages.

US purchase link:
American Gods: A Novel

I've been a proud Gaiman fan since the early Sandman days and this, his first "serious" novel, was an eagerly anticipated book in my house.

The book opens with our protagonist, Shadow, waiting out his last days in jail. He's served his time by keeping his head down and staving off the boredom by teaching himself simple sleight-of-hand coin tricks. He's looking forward to returning to his life as a free man - he's got a job waiting for him, courtesy of his best friend, Robbie, and a home with his wife Laura.

But a summons to the warden's office heralds the news that his Robbie and Laura have been killed in a car accident. Shadow is released early to attend the funeral, but as soon as he boards the plane to take him home, he starts a journey across America which will by turns confuse, enthrall and enlighten him, but will end in pain, war and blood sacrifice.

The gods are here in America - all of them. Brought here by believers who came to America over the years, from the brownies and kobolds of rural Germany to the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the dead, from the African spider trickster-god to the British goddess of war - and behind and beyond them all, Odin, the All-Father, who has taken a very personal interest in Shadow.

Gaiman's vision is so broad and deep that the book is a very involved, worthwhile read, and almost impossible to do justice to in a review. It's not an easy read, nor a quick one, and the reader is constantly challenged. Prepare to rethink your position on every superstition and religious belief.

Prepare also to spend some instructive time at the local library looking up gods, heroes and mythical beings you never even knew existed. It's been Gaiman's gift through every piece of his writing - right from the first episode of Sandman - to scatter a cornucopia's worth of literary and cultural references into the mix, without making the text impenetrable to those of us without a degree in... well, everything, really. I come away from every Gaiman work feeling that I've learned a tiny bit about something new and now I've got to learn more - and American Gods is no exception. Highly recommended.

With Poser 7 now on the horizon, the time has never been more right to purchase Poser 6. Everyone purchasing 6 at the moment will receive a free upgrade to Poser 7 when it comes out. Also if you own any other version of Poser, you can pay the upgrade price for Poser 6 now and still receive the upgrade to Poser 7 free. Get the special edition version and you'll also get the full Miki character (with clothes and accessories) and Shade Designer 7 LE for free!

Poser 7 will be reviewed when I've got my hot little mitts on it, but for now revel in the glory that is Poser 6. Oh yes, it's got its problems - we still haven't got that codebase rewrite that the software desparately needs - but my god, for the pricetag you really can't do better.

Poser 5 was a huge improvement over Poser 4/Propack, and 6 in its turn is leaps and bounds ahead of 5. I've now been using it for so long that I've almost forgotten how much better it is - when I go back to 5 to test something in it, I'm left wondering how I put up with it for so long!

Poser 6 brought with it some great advances in the realism area, introducing ambient occlusion, image-based lighting and sub-surface scattering to really help achieve close to photo-realism. Check out the Photorealism galleries at eFrontier.

There are a new "family" of figures included with the program, as usual. For adults we've got Jessi and James (har-har - wonder who thought that one up?) and the kids, Kate and Ben. As usual, the support for the child figures is best described as "slim to non-existent". However, James and Jessi have been much better received in the community than the ill-favoured Judy and Don. (As a quick comparison - there are 337 products for Jessi and James in the Renderosity Marketplace, but just 78 for Don and Judy.) Both figures have their problems - arm and shoulder bending is particularly problematic - but variety is the spice of life, and it's good to have more options. Each also comes with a lo-res version for medium shots, which helps conserve memory.

Which come to mention it, is something that can be in short supply. The thing you have to remember is that Poser is largely a hobbyist market, and the users are generally on PCs which can't compare to the big super rendering machines (render farms, in some cases) of professionals doing this for a living. Asking your machine to render a scene with a high poly architectural set as backdrop, a number of props, all with reflection nodes for added realism, 5 or 6 human figures, all clothed and with their own hair props, with ambient occlusion on for more realism... and you've got a good bet of choking on the scene. There are workarounds - rendering in separate passes, exporting figures and props as .obj files and then reimporting, reducing texture sizes - but it's nevertheless frustrating to get three-quarters of the way through a 12-hour render only to be presented with the dreaded "out of memory" error.

But those tricks aside, there are a number of nice little irritants fixed from previous versions which almost make up for it. The openGL preview now means items with transparency can be viewed in preview mode, which saves a huge amount of time. There's a spot renderer - no more re-rendering the whole scene again and again trying to get something right, just render that portion. That's a massive time-saver which in itself is almost worth the purchase price, if you consider that time is money... the library palette can now be expanded out sideways for easier searching. The Content Paradise tab now actually works and has a good selection of products for sale and free (although I'd bet most users do as I do and just use a web browser...)

Sadly, we've still no multiple select or undo, and the rigging system is still the same - no major steps forward there. The manual remains in the chocolate teapot area of usefulness - you'd be better off relying on user tutorials on the various sites in the poserverse, or buy Denise Taylor's Practical Poser 6 book (and it looks like she's another one coming out for Poser 7 - see link to the right.) But still, in terms of price, you'll never get a better deal, and now's the time to buy.