Worms' meat

The Verona project, parts IV (Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss) and V (Romeo & Juliet: A Monkey's Tale)

Who (how old), when, how long? Animated seals (or sea lions--the filmmakers don't seem to be aware that there's a difference; in fact, mustachioed Montague appears very walrusy, while the Prince resembles nothing more than a manatee), 2006, 1¼hrs; live macaques, 2007 (Animal Planet), 3/4. As for age, it's fair to say early sexual maturity in each case, whenever that might be for the respective species.

What sort of R&J? Pinniped and simian, respectively.

Seriocomic scale for first scene? In the seal pic, the scene relies as much on West Side Story as on Shakespeare's play, with both the comedy and the danger relying on the successively stronger troops mustering on each side. The monkey pic doesn't really have that scene, only "Tybalt," a member of the temple troop in the Thai city of Lapburi, explaining the generations-long enmity between his aristocratic clan and the market moneys in the squalid slums across a nigh-unpassable road: "They did bite their thumbs at us" (shot of market monkey doing just that).

"Wherefore": do the film/playmakers know what it means? Emphatically no: in the seal pic it comes up repeatedly, always as if the word means where; in the monkey pic just once, but ditto.

Carrion flies? No, though the monkey pic probably could have worked it in, what w/ the slum's squalor and all.

Body count? In the seal pic, Mercutio seems actually to have been dispatched, but he returns at the end to prod the drugged young lovers awake; in the monkey pic, a literal plague descends upon both houses, but specific deaths are not delineated.

What (else) is missing? Actually, what's surprising is how much Shakespeare survives, especially in the seal pic. Yes, these are both (particularly the cartoon) essentially for little kids, but a lot of the language of the play works its way into both pieces. The about-to-apparently-die pinniped Mercutio (though most of his Shakespeare in the piece is random quotation from other plays) tells Romeo, "Look for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave . . . seal," and the voice of wisdom (Friar Laurence here, about which more below) tells the two seal tribes (here separated by color: the Capulets are white, the Montagues brown; and oddly, all the other aquatic species share the two groups' prejudice against mixing their blood), "We are all punished."

Much more of the narrative frame is omitted from the monkey pic--after all, they were working with actual animals, so it must have been harder to fit characters. The only named characters are the titular pair and Tybalt. Still, an apt line now and again: "These violent delights have violent ends."

What (else) is changed? In the context of the story involving pinnipeds and fish, it is odd to say that the oddest change is that the Prince (a grotesquely huge seal or sea lion with an even more grotesque schnozz), after warning off the warring parties in the opening scene, becomes a sort of Malvolio: it is he who falls repulsively for Juliet and to whom Capulet agrees to marry her, and so after having dignity in the opening scene, he is an ominous and ridiculous character thereafter. The kids do go to Friar Laurence (no freakin' idea what he's supposed to be: some sort of furry quadruped with a long tail) to get married (he makes some rather audience-inappropriate jokes about their sexual eagerness), and J gets the coma potion from him, but in this version, when Romeo kisses her, she still has enough in her system that it knocks him out too--so they have their seeming tragic death but both get to survive.

The monkey story's happy ending comes when the humans in the town have a big festival of food, which the monkeys from both sides of the street can share in peace. By this time both the titular characters have gone off to make babies elsewhere.

What (else) is odd? Gosh, tough call: the Titanic tribute (don't ask)? The shark chase? The monkey skipping town on a train? Pretty much the whole of each film is pretty odd.

End-of-the-play exposition? Nothing of the overlong and tedious nature that WS gave us, no.

Can't say I'd ever see either of these again, but Sealed is something I wouldn't mind having my 2yo granddaughter see as her introduction to the story (though, of course, she wouldn't get the parts that really rely on it). And it's always fun to see monkeys. In short, not the wasted evening I feared it might be.