CineLinkr #156: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
Mad God took Phil Tippett roughly three decades to finish. That is a long time to spend making tiny handmade figures suffer, but the result suggests he never once considered a healthier hobby.
🟢 Easy: Adult stop-motion made for grown-ups
Movies: Anomalisa · Mary and Max · Mad God · Memoir of a Snail
Stop-motion often arrives carrying the visual grammar of a children's film. Then Anomalisa checks into a Cincinnati hotel and starts worrying about loneliness, sex, and the numbing repetition of other people. Its puppets make the emotional discomfort worse, not safer.
Adam Elliot directed both Mary and Max and Memoir of a Snail, turning clay figures into unusually blunt company for grief and isolation. Mad God goes the other direction and removes nearly every comfort. The group works because none of these films uses animation as an escape hatch from adult trouble.
🟡 Medium: Creations turn on their creators
Movies: Pinocchio · Tron: Legacy · Prometheus · Avengers: Age of Ultron
Geppetto gets the gentlest version of this problem. His puppet causes chaos, but at least Pinocchio eventually heads into a whale to rescue him. Kevin Flynn creates Clu and receives a hostile corporate takeover inside his own computer system.
Prometheus makes the family tree cosmic: humans meet an Engineer and discover that meeting your maker does not guarantee useful answers. Ultron is less coy. Tony Stark and Bruce Banner build him, and he takes one look at humanity before drafting a demolition plan.
🔵 Hard: A wedding day turns violent
Movies: [REC] 3: Genesis · Shotgun Wedding · Til Death Do Us Part · Demon
Shotgun Wedding has pirates seize a destination ceremony. [REC] 3: Genesis lets a zombie outbreak tear through the reception, then abandons the franchise's found-footage format once the massacre spreads. The camera operator has bigger concerns.
The other two weddings barely reach the paperwork stage. Til Death Do Us Part sends a runaway bride into a fight with her former fiancé and his groomsmen, while Demon invites a dybbuk to the reception. Nobody in this category is getting the deposit back.
🟣 Tricky: They discover they are clones
Movies: Oblivion · Never Let Me Go · Alien: Resurrection · Impostor
This reveal changes the grammar of each film. Jack Harper is not one dutiful technician in Oblivion. The pupils in Never Let Me Go are not being educated for ordinary adult lives. Ripley 8 is the successful result after seven failed cloning attempts.
Impostor makes the discovery its final trap: the man trying to prove he is human learns that the accusation was right. The category clicks when four identity crises become manufacturing defects.
The handmade misery of Mad God still wins the day for me. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle offers a gentler production line, provided you consider endless conveyor belts gentle.