Nick came over yesterday; as we often do, we curled up in the living room and watched some media he’d brought. This time it turned out to be “Asterix in Britain”. In Dutch.
And I discovered that I’ve read enough Asterix that it really didn’t matter that it wasn’t in English (aside from the occasional veddy veddy English interjection). I know the characters, I know the general shape of how the story’s going to play out. I’m sure we missed out on a lot of the jokes and terrible puns, but on the other hand this also forced Nick to pay more attention to the visuals then he normally would – I joked that he was seeing this cartoon the way I see everything.
This was the first time I’ve seen one of the films; I knew there had been a few (Wikipedia says there are eight animated features, and four live-action) but had never tracked any down. I was really, really impressed by how lovingly animated all the jowly, pudgy people of the Asterix world were; everyone had just about exactly the same level of detail as the drawings in the comic.
I never realized until now what a whiny baby Obelix can be, though. Or that Asterix and Obelix are basically professional freedom fighters – about half the stories are in the general format of “A&O leave the tiny Gaulish village they defend, wander into some other part of Europe, and push back Roman forces there”.
Anyway. I’m debating between taking a nap, or taking some overdue books down to the library and poking at some Rita down there. Having a carb-heavy cookie at the cafe with Nick this morning probably didn’t help my awakeness, to be honest.