Filed and Filmed

On Monday October 22, 2007 we received a notice from Americans Adopting Orphans that our dossier had arrived at China Center for Adoption Affairs. The documents arrived in Beijing on October 15 at 3:36 p.m. This is our “Date to Country”. Our waiting process does not officially begin until our Log-in Date (LID). That date should be sometime this week, but we will not find out what our official LID is until CCAA contacts AAO with it in a month or two. Apparently there is a good deal of sitting in a pile this paperwork will go through. Either way, we have officially entered the hardest part of the entire adoption process, the waiting.

To pass the time, Ang and I are beginning to look into familiarizing ourselves with Chinese culture and with adoption culture. As a film critic, I have found that many films deal with adoption. In fact, this week marks the release of a recent film featuring adoption issues on DVD. If you missed the Disney CGI animated film “Meet the Robinsons” in theaters, DVD (or of course for you hi-def freaks out there Disney Blu-Ray) is a wonderful place to check out this odd little film.

As animated features go, this one kind of flew in under the radar. That may be because it is a fairly unconventional film. It has that retro-future look of cartoons which imagined what the future might be like in the ‘60’s and seems to have been approached by its writers and animators like many of Disney’s early animated feature films, with a tilt toward the absurd and down right lunatic. It was blasted by some critics for its fragmented and simplistic storyline, but I found that it embraced a freedom of imagination that is rarely seen in film today and the animated CGI format is well equipped for. Read my review of it using this link: Meet the Robinsons / *** (G).