Writer-director Jason Brown’s The Adventures at Comic-Con is an experimental art documentary about his first time at San Diego Comic-Con in 2012. Brown says the Disney classic Fantasia inspired him. In the film’s press release, he describes it thusly: “Ultimately, this film is a musical love letter to art, its visual components in storytelling, and a celebration of Comic-Con that honors the legacy of pop culture and its pioneers.”
Music and slideshows of captured stills from the convention are broken up by interstitial text cards and narration, with occasional video diary entries. The first-person perspective is from “Jason,” who one assumes to be Brown himself. While we see through his eyes, the narration is all in the third person, which is jarring. Along with the video and music, Brown has included clips from interviews and sound bites from guests of that year’s con, as well as stock clips of those guests from other sources. These can go on at length, interrupting the flow of the ground-level review of the experience.
The music in The Adventures at Comic-Con is a combination of published pop songs like Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle, along with classical music. Is that all in the Public Domain? From an editing perspective, the sound levels are startlingly dynamic, as the music is much louder than the narration.
“…an experimental art documentary about his first time at San Diego Comic-Con in 2012.”
The subject matter is beloved by all nerd kindred and definitely of interest to a broad audience. My rating of the film reflects that. We love this stuff, but it desperately needs to be updated, as over a decade is way too long, and the material on display ages fast. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and the film includes some artists who’ve become persona-non-grata because of scandals, including Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon. This material is ancient history at this point.
Comic-Con is endlessly fascinating, both in terms of the media, cosplay, and the individual stories of the experiences along the way. That said, it’s also true that con tales are like post-D&D session stories: so much fun to recount with a few beers, but audience engagement drops off logarithmically as you move away from the people who were there. Go home and try to tell your non-playing wife what your Dwarf Fighter did this week.
Brown calling The Adventures at Comic-Con an “experimental art documentary” forgives a multitude of sins, but really this is a memoir from 2012. I was also this excited my first time at SDCC, but with 116,000 attendees that year, this is not a uniquely captured experience. If you are a con-goer, I’d bet you have a version of this film on your phone from your latest venture. Try this: select all your con pics and videos, then “play as slideshow,” et voila. That’s your documentary.
The bottom line is that 127 minutes of slides and clips from 13 years ago is just too long. What I think could work better, if I may suggest, is newer material in a series of vlog entries where a viewer could either watch in sequence or choose their favored area of interest and go directly to that video. In terms of creating a documentary film, the material needs to be fresh and feature on-camera interviews with attendees. The Adventures at Comic-Con should’ve left out the recorded panels and stock clips, or at most have a few seconds of them. Make snappier edits, and the whole thing should run, perhaps, 30-45 minutes max.
"…I was also this excited my first time at SDCC..."
