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Owls can make candles. Apparently

One of the chief criticisms that has been thrown at Pixar's Cars franchises is that whilst the stories are fairly, perhaps overly, simplistic, the world that they take part in is maddeningly oblique and relentlessly weird. The central idea of a world of sentient cars is, on the surface, playful, but any deeper consideration of it and it all starts to get a little disturbing, as questions like "If these films take place on Earth, then where are all the people?" "How can cars build houses?" and "Have the cars overthrown their human masters, and do they now toil as a slave race who maintain their automotive overlords' houses under pain of being torn to shreds by having chains attached to each of their limbs, which are in turn attached to awaiting, bloodthirsty cars?" start to arise. Also, how would the cars manage to attach the chains to the human slaves' arms in the first place? Anyway, I'm getting distracted by thinking about Cars again. I haven't seen Cars 2 yet, but I seriously hope they show us the human slaves this time because I'm losing sleep worrying about this stuff.

On the surface, the world of NAZI OWLS! doesn't seem that odd, since it just seems to be a film about a bunch of talking owls waging unceasing war against each other. (I am willing to concede that my idea of "odd" might not be the same as most people's.) But there are so many little things that don't make sense in it that they end up distracting from the film itself.

Usually in films about talking animals, there are two distinct approaches to the story; either they are normal animals who exist in the real world, but who can communicate with each other and have their own secret world, or they are anthropomorphized creatures that occupy the same position that humans do in the real world. In NAZI OWLS!, the characters are, for all intents and purposes, normal owls that live in a world which is, apparently, uninhabited by humans. If that is the case, we can assume that owls are the dominant species, yet everything they use is stuff that owls, even ones in a film like this, could never plausibly create, like candles and cloth, because their talons don't bend in a way that would make it possible. One of the characters spends the whole film carting around a harp. How the hell could owls learn how to make harps? They've got talons, talons which lack the physical dexterity to perform the delicate carpentry required, or the intricate process of threading the strings and tuning them. Also, the harps would sound awful being plucked by talons.

And that's just the little things. I mean, why is the evil owls' home called St. Aegolious? How are their saints in this world ruled by owls? Are the evil owls *Catholic* owls? Is there an Owl Pope somewhere canonising other owls so that they can name mountains after them? The world of the film is so poorly thought out that it distracts from the actual plot. Speaking of which...

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