The title sounds like a dry thesis but it’s something that bothered me to actually think about further.

When I originally watched Kill Bill and got to the animated sequence I thought it was an interesting style for the film and lent a surreal bent to the revenge flick but when I watched Guy Ritchie’s film,I plainly saw it as a stylistic rip off badly done which is fair enough with lesser talents but then I got thinking about the context.

In Tarantino’s film, animation was used to show the sub plot, which couldn’t be filmed as live action due to the underage scenes and would have been otherwise tasteless and plainly unfilmable. Making it in the style of a Manga cartoon bypassed the controversial subject matter to keep the story flowing without it becoming a controversial distraction.

Now Guy Ritchie missed this point and simply saw it as a stylistic choice and in my mind it made for a very shallow sequence in a very shallow film running on empty. There was no reason for Mrs Madonna to blatantly steal the idea apart from the fact that it was ’kool’ like the opening of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt.

A good director should have thought out each sequence  to help push the story forward and have reason to film it a certain way so next time you watch a film by a good director, ask yourself why he did it that way….

A good director always has an reason to use a particular style and Tarantino, Polanski et al would be proud of you.