The characters look classically hand-animated, but the world around them is hyperreal in its vividness: impossibly gorgeous skies, extreme lens flares, vertiginous flights through lush, 3D landscapes, even time-lapse sequences.
What TV Burp also did was provide a firm real-world anchor for Hill's often startlingly vertiginous flights of fancy, but its self-imposed demise has freed him up to indulge himself.
But where the vertiginous beauty of Calvino's flights of fancy depends on their extended logical elaboration, Tel's imitation of the conceit lacks the same imaginative rigour, and so these diverting episodes come to seem like wispy daydreams.
I got my bearings from the castle's tower, which is open to anyone willing to climb four flights and a vertiginous ladder to the top, 35m above the village.
What is missing, perhaps, is a greater feeling for the vertiginous first years of the 20th century, the advances in flight and electricity, the bare knuckles, the calls for the overturning of order, and Jack London the adventurer careening through the middle of it all.
San Lorenzo is a six-hour flight plus layover on the red-eye from San Francisco, followed by a vertiginous trek, by truck or multicolored bus, up whipsawing mountain roads.
"Touching the Void" does not stint on excitement, or on the vertiginous raptures that drive sane men to the verge of insane behavior as a flight from mooching and mundanity.
The effect is vertiginous.
It is a vertiginous moment.
