graticule

creature comforts

For those looking for animation so superb it surpasses the need of story, look no further than Aardman's Creature Comforts. The animation is astoundingly executed, sly and extremely poignant. It's funny and wry and honest. In less able hands it would be mean, but the kindness and compassion if the animators makes for sheer joy. If you're unfamiliar , the premise is unscripted interviews which provide the vocal track for animal-centric Aardman claymation, and what might be downright depressing confessions become uplifting social commentary. The matching of animal to voice is obviously very thoughtful... roaches talking about working low jobs, a seeing-eye dog talking about a life of public service, etc etc. Really really funny and perfectly done. Check it out.

stability

The story of Disney's silent film career is not so much one of artistic expression as one of commercial stability.
-Walt in Wonderland by Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman

This is still true. I've again been railing about the half-baked stories I see in so many animated projects, be they multi-million dollar features or indy home projects. It seems that everyone is concerned with success, so much so that the stories are sold rather than written. In The Player, Robert Altman makes fun of the pitch, the "It's like Shrek meets Little Mermaid in a Pulp Fiction meets Brady Bunch world, on ACID!" The idea that a story is good if everyone in the boardroom is laughing, that a script can be "developed" rather than written... maybe that's what I am against.
My favorite movies have all been written by a single individual. Sure, they have been tightened up, but the stories were not the collaborative, washed-out four-writer spectacles such as The Wild or whatever that Jennifer Anniston movie about The Graduate was called. Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, Brad Bird, Miyazaki... they are interested in writing something true. Pleasing the boardroom was never the point.
Walt never, never was that way. He had some great folks working for him, so he was lucky, but he could have done so much better.

icey aged

Ice Age 2. What can I say? It looked really nice. Great design. Some fairly funny frustration gags with Scrat, the dachshund/squirrel-thingy.
But story?

Well... Blue Sky doesn't seem to care about story all that much. They seem like they really fall in love with a concept and then try to write something to show their wares. It's like the way Jon Anderson wrote lyrics for Yes, I think... the meter fit, the words sounded pretty, so who cares if it's utter nonsense? In and around the lake mountains come out of the sky and they stand there? How stoned are you? Robots was one of the most visually stunning features I've seen, yet at the best part, the most emotional moment, you have Robin Williams riffing a bunch of verbal nonsense that strips even the grand visuals and tension of a wild roller-coaster ride of any emotion except irritation.
I can see this approach working in experimental DV film, something you can shoot, cut and forget about. But since animation requires so very much more to produce, shouldn't it be absolutely rock solid before even the storyboards are drawn?

miyazaki and pixar

The English versions of Totoro and Howl's Moving Castle are some of the best dubs I've ever seen.

Bad dubs have marred many fine Miyazaki films ( Laputa is almost unwatchable, with sacharrine performances and shitty dialogue), as you can tell when you watch the original. Now, though, the case is altered. It's clear that John Lasseter and the Pixar crew take this very seriously, working incredibly hard to get the best possible performance. ADR is always difficult in animation, and translation makes it exponentially so. Bravo for a job well done.
Hey, Brad Bird's next movie has been announced by Lasseter. It's called Ratatouille and is due out next summer. I can't wait... Brad Bird is one of the best directors in any medium.

dog doo-gal

Man, Doogal is one of the stinkiest movies since Racing Stripes. The films share the common malady of insipid (or even non-existant) voice direction. Doogal was a French effort and all the English dialogue was done in ADR fashion with the animation projected on the wall while the actors read whatever pallid lines were provided. Some of the performances are as bad as a kid reading Shakespeare alound in Freshman English. Jon Stewart is particularly hideous, but even the dreck-prone Whoopi outdoes herself in lame.

Great care was taken with some of the animation (there are excellent ice and water as well as hair, fur and so forth) but the script and celebrity performances were about as shitty as a thing could be. It seems that the Weinstiens are grabbing up available CG projects as they try to form an animation division to their empire. Hoodwinked had poor animation and a good script, the opposite this dreary film. They clearly are trying to milk the CG cow for all it's worth but they know not quality.

Next up is Ice Age 2 from the studio that brought us the story-starved yet very beautiful Robots.

I wish these big studios would buy some decent scripts. It's sad that things change so little.

Dying Art

In the DVD extras for The Corpse Bride, Tim Burton refers to stop motion animation as a "dying art." I beg to differ (although, judging from that script, screenwriting might well be considered one) because most of the animators looked to be in their eary thirties. Neil Campbell Ross  has a great site where he talks a lot about how they animated that film (and many other others). The DVD is worth it for the extras alone, especially the part about tghe mechanics of the amazing puppets.

vector animation

Long have I dissed bad flash animation, but I have to say that, when good animators are turned loose on a project, they can convey emotion with those slick, unfogiving lines. I speak (and this exposes me as a family man) of Disney's Little Einsteins. Now, if ever a project stank of money-to be-had, it's this one. A brief backround for the childless: a Denver woman and her husband discovered, by chance, that their fussy toddler loved videos of 15 second clips of her toys accompanied by classical music. Two years later, Disney purchased the franchise for some very large sum. Next, there is the next stage. Enter animated characters, obviously charged with strict budget. The project is only about money, after all. Babies, Right?

Obviously, there are folks on this project who know their business. Though the vector animation is likely done in Toonboom, it's good. Pose to pose you can see the characters reacting. Sure, it's crude, but it works. Whether accident or design, the show is a hit. And I am not a fan of the genre, lemme tell you.

the big screen

Last night I went with my older daughter to see the latest Ghibli, Howl's Moving Castle. I enjoy Ghibli because of their dedication to the craft of cel animation. I especially like Miyazaki, and this for several reasons. First, because of his odd sense of story. No clear-cut good v. evil, no event-driven narrative. The animations tend to unfold like a complicated map, each page more visually stunning than the last. This is, I think, because he doesn't script his work, preferring instead to draw storyboards. I also like his sense of nature and his accurate, loving treatment of sky, wind, air, trees, buildings... visually as pleasing as anythiing I have ever seen. Most of all, though, I admire his independent spirit. Ghibli is away from the city, and Miyazaki makes movies about the stuff he likes (which, no suprise, is stuff I like too). He likes the 30's, pre-Fascist Italy and old airplanes, so he made Porco Rosso. He likes forests and ghosts and prewar Japan's bucolic culture, so you have Totoro. Now, as he gets closer to his own death and as he watches the often horrible changes wrought on the planet he loves, he makes Spirited Away and Howl's, which are both fairly dark.
One funny story about him (in The New Yorker a few months back) told of his disbelief that none of the young animators in his studio knew anything of the natural world. Not one had a dog, or even a cat. He shook his head and muttered something like, "No wonder we are all doomed." I can certainly see that in his work.
Howl's Moving Castle is certainly one for my DVD collection. I can learn lots from it. The big screen is the place to see it, though. It's never quite the same at home, even on a 42" screen.

How Many More Times...

As I've noted before, I have a 2-year-old daughter and we watch a LOT of animation together. Truthfully, there is a but sparse handful of DVDs that stand up to repeated (dare I say incessant) viewing without becoming tiresome. I'm talking about movies and shorts that stand up in every way: animation, art, story, acting, sound, direction, editing... and "easter eggs," those delightful things that you only see after you've watched the movie a few dozen times in a row.

Here's my list:
The Incredibles
The Iron Giant
Lilo & Stitch
The Emperor's New Groove
Mulan
Porco Rosso
Neighbor Tortoro
Batman: The Animated Series (there are about ten really, really fine episodes)
Superman: Arctic Giant, Million Dollar Limited, Mechanical Monsters (Fleischer Studios)
...And anything directed by Chuck Jones.

There are a lot that almost make the cut but for one reason or another start to bug me:
Aristocats
101 Dalmatians
Sleeping Beauty
Princess Mononoke
SpongeBob Squarepants
Ren & Stimpy
etc...

This is completely subjective, of course. Everyone has their own preference. Lucky that my daughter and I share ours, though. Lord help me if she loved Little Mermaid or any other of the heavily musical features. Yikes.

The Glitch of Stitch

Lilo and Stitch passes the big "parent-who-is-also-an-animator" test in that it can be viewed and enjoyed again and again and again. Sure, I can view Ghost in the Shell, Hunchback, Lion King,  etc again and again simply because I am an animator,  but after a while it sure seems like work. The later Disney stuff has the same effect: the animation is superlative, but the story is so weak that after a while all I can see is each individual doing their best on their piece because they are pros, even if the overall project is a shite.

Some movies are not that way. Some are better every time. Some have in-jokes that you would only see after the thirtieth, fifty-fifth or even hundred-and-ninth viewing. Iron Giant. Lady and the Tramp. Incredibles. And, yes, Lilo and Stitch.

Thus, I was both intrigued and perplexed by the new sequel. Word was that the animation was tops and that the vocals were as good as the original. Watercolor backgrounds. Elvis.
All true, but also... weak-ass story. Very. No weaker than, say, Madagascar, but still not even up to the original. I wonder that such craft and skill (and , lord, the animation is pretty) are wasted on such weak efforts in the script department. Sure, when you see more than two credits in screenplay you know it's been troublesome, but I still wonder that anyone would spend the astounding effort to put to life something that wouldn't have legs as a two-page comic in the Disney mailer.
It's a truism in drumming that no amount of technique will stand in for a good groove. I think it's true in films too... no amount of hoo-hah will make up for a weak script. No offense to the animators... their work is tops. Milt Kahl was tops, and his best work is in weakly-scripted features. God bless Brad Bird, and long may he wave. He's as good a writer as William Goldman, as good a director as Hitchcock and a good enough animator that we have scenes like Hogarth talking to the Giant about death and the immortality of soul. There's one I will watch forever without tiring.