Gosh, Halloween blindsided me this year. You may say that it jumped out and went "Boo!" So if this post seems a little rushed, there's your reason/my excuse.
FARK recently shared this amazing footage that was apparently cut from a Martha Stewart special from about ten years ago (though the episode itself has been rebroadcast). There's no swearing, no nudity, nothing offensive, but the segment is a P.R. nightmare anyway. I can tell why Martha might have cut it and let's see if you can too:
My (Master's Degree in Education with a focus on Children's Media and many undergraduate studies in child psychology) educated guess as to why this was cut: Martha Stewart has no freakin' idea how to interact with children. I can't even imagine that Martha's world, with it's scented candles and scrapbooks and gauzy curtains, is one into which small children are ever allowed. Look at how she practically demands that they drink her "blood". The poor kids look desperate to run away! Hell, so would I!
Speaking of little innocent characters who stumble into a crazy older person's house on their hunt for Halloween candy and are desperate to leave, a fair number of people my age will recall being scared out of their minds by "Garfield's Halloween Adventure" (sometimes known as "Garfield's Halloween Special" or "Garfield in Disguise" and available as part of a very nice DVD gift set - although in slightly truncated form according to the comments). It's odd that this special has kind of faded away over the years, even though it used to be aired after "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" every year.
It is... less puzzling as to why Will Vinton's "Claymation Comedy of Horrors" has not seen the light of day (outside of being a special feature on the "Claymation Christmas Celebration" DVD) after it's very first and only airing back in 1991:
OK, even I have to admit that this is a little too strange for the wee ones (any child that makes it through the opening credits is either insane... or awesome). But it also contains almost everything that was amazing about Will Vinton. Look for the terrific gelatinous blob character, the crazy scene that sets the plot in motion and resembles "The Great Cognito", and the best-ever cover of "Climb Every Mountain".
Now, around the same time "Comedy of Horrors" debuted and disappeared, so too did "Tales from the Far Side". One of only two animated adaptations of "The Far Side", it was briefly available on video, but only through a mail-in offer that came with one year's Off the Wall Calendar (there are no words for how much I miss those calendars). I haven't shown "The Far Side" enough love around here, even though it's a pretty obvious influence on me. So here's one of the very few clips from the special available on the YouTube (bonus: it'll tide us over for the "Walking Dead" premier this weekend):
A year ago, Geocities imploded. It took many features from my old websites with it, including a review/transcript of the very, very strange short film "Michael Jackson's Ghosts". That film has been rediscovered by The Onion AV Club, and believe me, it's still something to see.
Finally, another clip that was deleted from a Halloween episode. Vincent Price and the Muppet monsters singing a sweet James Taylor song about the power of friendship = WIN.
First off, we've had a bit of a crisis at ArtEvolved, but it looks like it will have a happy ending. Glendon Mellow did a fine recap of Monday's events here, and if you are a Deviant Art member, you can still help us.
I also want to re-re-emphasize something in that link. On behalf of all illustrators, if you like our art and you want to use it then please don't be afraid to just ask us!
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With David Fincher in the news with "The Social Network" (aka, "Call it 'That Facebook Movie' One More Time and I Will Hit You as Hard as I Can"), and me needing an excuse to finally show some love to the "Alien" film series, I decided it was high time to revisit Fincher's first feature-length film. It was time to see what the altered cut of "Alien 3" (available on the excellent "Quadrilogy" set and -yes!- for rental through Netflix) was all about.
Shamelessly copy-pasted from IMDB: "In December, 2003, the 'ALIEN QUADRILOGY' boxset was released with a newly created cut of 'Alien 3' entitled 'the assembly cut.' It attempts to reconstruct David Fincher's workprint (which the studio balked at), but goes one step further and adds color correction and remixed 5.1 sound. Several scenes, however, suffer from poor on-set audio quality (mostly due to the use of fog machines and steam which obscures on-set dialog). Optional subtitles transcript the dialog."
This is not a director's cut. Fincher considers this film to be his Old Shame, and did not participate in making the new version, although he approved of it. It's easy to understand why he has a hard time with this movie; if you were an "Alien" series fan in the early '90s, then you may recall that this film's production was... troubled.
The surprisingly frank bonus disk (also Netflixable) tells the long, strange story over nearly three hours worth of special features. To start with, there were several wildly different ideas for the film kicked around in the late '80s. Four of these made it to script form:
William Gibson's script is probably the most famous but is barely acknowledged in the special features here for some reason. It involved several ideas that would later show up in the fourth film (Xenomorph-human hybrids) and the comic (more fun with Hicks and Newt!)
David "Pitch Black" Twohy wrote a version that introduced the concept of a prison planet...
And Vincent Ward's script turned the prison into a monastery (these ideas would be rather bashed together in the final film). The DVD spends a lot of time with this version, possibly because it has the most surviving pre-production material. This version would have been extremely surreal, with horrifying nightmare sequences.
Turns out the theatrical cut of "Alien 3" began filming with no script at all; just all these half-formed ideas hovering around. The result was a movie that -even the cast and crew admit this on the DVD- isn't very likable.
Fincher is not to blame, however. I can tell when a director has been assigned a movie that has been in development hell for years and years, because the director will usually be, like, "F*** it". (As an example, I have a hard time blaming Tim Burton for "Planet of the Apes".) In this case, however, since there was no script and vast galloping herds of executives ready to meddle, it looks more like David Fincher was, like, "F*** you, Fox."
"Well, that was all very interesting, Trish, but what is the 'Assembly Cut' like?"
You should know that I've never seen the theatrical cut of this movie all the way through -- but I have seen enough of it (it's probably on FX right now). I could tell right away that the Assembly Cut was practically a completely different movie. Without spoilers, the opening sequence is very different, the closing sequence is slightly different, and there is a lot more character development. Heck, even the Alien itself becomes a more interesting character in this cut.
Though that brings us to special effects. Perhaps it is simply because it is, for all intents, the work print, but the animation simply does not hold up. However, I learned through the special features that the Alien here is not a CGI character at all ("Jurassic Park" was still a year away); it's actually a small puppet animated in a manner somewhat similar to Phil Tippett's Go-Motion creatures. In that respect, it could be considered the last of it's kind.
I should mention, for David Fincher fans who have not seen this film yet, that it is very, very dark even for him. Really, from the studio logo on, this movie is like the cure for joy. There is almost no humor at all in it and -- well, you may have heard that it has a sad ending...
However, it is a fascinating film to watch whether you are a curious Fincher fan or an "Alien" series fan who was disappointed in the theatrical cut. Just leave your pet ox out of the room when you watch it; your dog can stay though.
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Ye Art of Ye Day! So much text! Here is a very elaborate digital painting to make up for it.
Second of all, when I recently reviewed John McLaughlin's Archosauria, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur anatomy, and Model a Monster, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur extinction, I had no idea there was a connection between the two. Well, according to the Jurassic Albatross blog, there is a connection. And, by the way, the crazy stuff in Model a Monster about how there were humanlike dinosaurs who killed everything with nuclear weapons at the end of the Cretaceous is an actual theory that has actually been proposed.
Speaking of unreal, you must read this recent "Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs" post. Because it contains an image that must go mimetic immediately. You will know it when you see it. (If not, my comment there will point it out.)
OK. On to the thing in the title.
Possibly the most beloved of all Halloween specials, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" premiered in 1966. The second special based off the Peanuts comic strips, after "A Charlie Brown Christmas", this is the only older Halloween special that is still shown on television with any reliability (more on that Friday).
That means that you've probably seen it a few times already, and I don't have to tell you how awesome it still is after decades and decades. (If you are a younger viewer, and you've never seen it, hopefully you aren't too jaded to enjoy it.) Instead, this is a list of things you might not have noticed at first:
* - If the "Peanuts" holiday specials weren't so cute and funny, they'd be the most depressing pieces of animation ever shown on television in America. This is a Halloween special that ends with three kids who have no Halloween candy at all, which is tantamount to tragedy in a child's mind.
* - And on top of that, Charlie Brown has a bag of rocks. Now, I know there were real aluminum Christmas trees, so was there ever really a time when adults could punish children with lousy costumes by giving them rocks instead of candy?
* - And on top of that, Linus forgoes trick-or-treating and waits for the Great Pumpkin all night to no avail. Taken another way, the Great Pumpkin has one believer. And the Great Pumpkin is ignoring his one believer. Essays have been written about this. Long ones.
* - It says a lot about the town in which "Peanuts" takes place that the adults agree to give Lucy extra candy for Linus, after she tells them he is sitting in a pumpkin patch waiting for a "Great Pumpkin".
* - Then again, this is a world where Linus is allowed to sleep outside in a pumpkin patch on a late-autumn night...
* - There is no way that wonderfully strange Red Baron scene would fly today. It's very long, it has nothing to do at all with the rest of the story (save for the payoff in the end), and is an exercise in color and mood.
* - I can't put this feeling into words, so I'll lift this quote from the great X-Entertainment: "Now, there's a big difference between watching the specials on officially released DVDs and videos as opposed to their annual taking over of an all-important prime time slot. There was something extra nice about watching the shows at the same time as millions of others; we all collectively felt the waves of spooky spirit both through Charlie Brown's poorly conceived sheet ghost costume and the many Halloween Happy Meal commercials dispersed between scenes. For those thirty minutes, everything bad in the world took a vacation."
* - And of course, there's Vince Guaraldi's instantly-iconic score running throughout the special. It's hard to imagine how Vince sold the producers on that jazz score for a kid's cartoon, but it's hard to imagine the Peanuts specials working so well with any other composer.
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Totally unrelated, but how's this for scary?
Discovered via SlashFilm. Highlights include Simba-Beast's stripey Tim Burton horns, teleporting Gaston, and their incredibly unsettling take on Lumiere.
I gotta tell you, as someone who lived through the heyday of Disney's Bronze Age, I find this trailer oddly comforting. In the early 90's, many many low-budget animation houses made (or more likely scrounged up) the most incredibly cheap knockoffs of every Disney film of the era and released them on video around the same time the Disney films had been in theaters for a while. And I'm not talking about just the Disney movies based upon public domain fairy tales either, they managed to do rips off "Pocahontas", "Hunchback" and so forth as well. Every company came up with a wildly different "Lion King" cash-in. They were taking advantage of the sad fact that some parents didn't realize the difference.
And it should be noted that the animation in these films is almost across-the-board terrible. What always puzzled me is the fact that these studios can get away with this at all. Shouldn't the Disney lawyers smite the pants off them? These are, after all, the same lawyers that started this little public relations nightmare...
Update: And, not surprisingly, GMToons has deleted all their trailers from YouTube. Too bad; I wanted to show you their equally unbelievable "Land Before Time" ripoff too. ----
A lot of you have probably already seen this but it's new to me.
It's... it's very dusty in here. Hang on a minute...
OK, the really amazing thing about this short film is that it's basically a demo reel to show what the open-source animation program Blender is capable of. Here's a brief explanation, from the short's YouTube page:
"Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1,000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film. This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world."
"Sintel" premiered on the first of October and already hit one million views on YouTube by the end of the week. The creators expressed their joy in the way only an animator can, "seems we’ve made everyone cry!"
Pretty amazing. I love how they've demonstrated everything their software can do while producing a short that gets me, as an animation fan, a heck of a lot more excited than, say, the "Megamind" trailer.
Announcement... really more like a disclaimer/apology in advance: I hurt my back pretty badly a couple of days ago. I'm in the "original injury is starting to feel better; too bad all the other muscles who had to compensate for the first injury feel worse" stage. It basically hurts to do anything besides lie down.
So basically, it hurts to sit up and type. I'm hoping I can find some way to work around this; I want to have *some* content for Halloween.
Yes, the holiday season has snuck up on me again. This, then, is getting older; "every year is getting shorter" and all that. I'll have some fun with that little existential crisis prompt while staring at the ceiling later.
---- Sketch of the Day! I haven't been able to upload anything new at the time of writing this, but I promise you the Pink Dinosaur Sketchbook project is still going.
Traditionally, a Triptych is a painting or panel in three parts, often forming an alter-like shape. Sometimes, as in this case, it simply means three similar paintings with a shared theme or design element made at the same time.
Which is to say, I had three small canvases, didn't know what to do with them, and decided they should have cute little animals on them.
For an extra challenge, I decided to do each of these as a speed-painting. They might not be the prettiest things, but I like them.
Here's the former-Jackalope-now-Rabbit:
Here's the baby Mammoth (here's hoping he's not too cutesy for the Art Evolved Elephant gallery -- I don't know if I have time to work on anything else for it):
And here's a little guy you may recognize from last week:
All together now: Awwwwww...
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Sketch of the Day! I think I may have to make the top half of this page pretty later:
I started with a self-imposed challenge to post at least two posts a week for the first three years. I am over the hump in achieving that goal, so go me.
I can't think of any better way to mark this occasion than doing a "Best Of" list, so for everyone who has wanted to do an archive binge, here are my favorites in chronological order:
11/6/09 - Time Has Not Been Kind to Ranger Rick The post with the MOST comments! I am as happy to see that there's so much nostalgia for the Alton Langford era of Ranger Rick as I am frustrated that I cannot find any more issues from that time.
I am not going to lie. I am going to use that little pink kitty every day.
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Painting of the Day!
I spent so much of this post bragging about how I've done two good posts per week at least. And it drives me crazy that this pattern might break next week as I am going to be super-busy this weekend and have no idea when I will be able to sit down for some quality time with my laptop before Monday. The irony here is that this is going to bother me far, far more than it bothers you, dear reader.
So until whenever the next post comes, here is an acrylic painting of an Incisivosaurus:
Back to the lecture at hand. I had another very lucrative day finding old dinosaur books at the library. This one's Dinosaurs in Your Backyard, written and illustrated by William Mannetti in 1982, published by Atheneum. The front cover is what made me bring this home from the library. I love the incredibly derpy-looking Tyrannosaurus. Also, more proof that Archeopteryx was the original "Sparkleraptor". The illustrations are kind of odd, but some of the ideas he presents were well ahead of their time. He comes right out the gate saying birds are dinosaurs, for example. Note the Funny Aneurysm here (I apologize for the wonky edits in the text scans):
So yeah, duh, there were dinosaurs in your backyard. It's almost time to start placating them with food again, come to mention it.
Now, most of Mannetti's dinosaurs tend to be oddly proportioned. His Tyrannosaurs don't look any better than the one on the cover, and his sauropods all look very strange. The animal in the picture above is meant to be Thecodontosaurus, which, it turns out, looks almost nothing like this.
And which is also, as a quick check of Wikipedia reveals, now named "Pantydraco".
Pantydraco.
On the List of Unfair Animal Names, I'm going to put Pantydraco up there with Woodcock and Bushtit.
Speaking of the unfair things humans do to our animal friends, here is a gem from page 99:
Well, you hear that dolphins, corvids, parrots, squids, ect? If you want our respect, you'd better start writing books and/or building machines. And they better be great machines. And start thinking deep thoughts, whatever that means. Maybe you should think about inventing money and jobs and other unnatural things to worry about while you're at it. And then we will treat you as equals. Maybe. We will at least think about it.
The madness continues. One reason why I am very happy to have found this book is that it finally provides solid proof of some very strange old dinosaur theories. They are admittedly pretty tame compared to some of the other theories we have seen, but it's still nice to have proof of what we were convinced those "puny" little T.rex arms were for:
Yep, that's it. (Where are his feet in the first drawing?) I was also very happy to see this theory illustrated, and it's almost as strange as McLoughlin's Buttheadceratops:
This book is a goldmine for Weird Old Theories I Am Glad I Didn't Hallucinate. More information about this particularly odd reconstruction of Brachiosaurus can be found at good old Tetrapod Zoology (go buy Darren Nash's book while you're there). It's also mentioned in Dr. Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies and illustrated in The New Dinosaurs.
And now, for my favorite-ever Weird Old Theory I Am Glad I Didn't Hallucinate. It really boggles my mind that anyone, at any point in history, could have ever taken it seriously:
I apologize for the text cut off here. I like how Mannetti is swift to call this theory a load of baloney. Finally, here is some proof that, at one point in the history of paleontology, there was an accepted theory that mammals caused the dinosaur extinction by eating all the dinosaur eggs. ...
...
...Take a minute. Let it sink in. ... Yes, essentially this old theory holds that WE did it! WE killed the Dinosaurs. (And of course, by "we", I mean mammals; the vaguely anthropocentric nature of this theory shows some brass balls.) We ate all the dinosaur eggs in the world. At the same time. And we didn't eat any eggs from crocodilians or testudines or certain kinds of birds. Or, for that matter, the eggs of other mammals. But apparently we ate all the pterosaur and plesiosaur eggs too (but note the comments, where Albertonychus has helpfully noted something that makes this theory even more disturbing: plesiosaurs probably didn't lay eggs). And then, I guess, we stopped. And we never again started eating all the eggs in the world of a certain kind of animal. .....
.....
.....
Ba-hahahaha! Oh, WOW!
I can't top that. So I will leave you with this drawing of a pair of Pteronodons with wings that have heard of these things called "anatomy" and "physics" and want nothing to do with them. (OK, really I am glad I am not the only person who gets hopelessly confused when drawing folded pterosaur wings. Poor pterosaurs; there are no animals around now that we can really compare them to and model our drawings after.)
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Pink Dinosaur of the day!
Based off one of the aforementioned oddly-proportioned brachiosaurs.
Next up, we pause on the retro paleoart for some shameless self-indulgence.
First off, I hope everyone had a wonderful Binary Day yesterday, and that everyone is having a great (enter sarcastic/satirical name for Columbus Day here) Day!.
When I was little, I got a dinosaur-themed calendar for Christmas one year. And I still remember it vividly, because it contained images like this:
After a recent trip to the library, I have learned that this is the work of Jane Burton, an animal photographer who collaborated with our old friend Dougal Dixon on the New Dinosaur Library series, published in America by Gareth Stevens Publishing in 1987. Now, this is one of those posts I am hoping to get a lot of responses to. It's been difficult to find more information about Burton and her work online (for example, I apologize tremendously if it turns out that this isn't the same Jane Burton as the late wildlife photographer). Specifically, there is very little information about her dinosaur photographs, which you'd think would be more popular. Anyway, how did she create these images? One of the Dinosaur Library books gives us a very brief idea:
This helps explain why some of the images look more like straightforward paintings (the styracosaur model looks more like a cardboard cutout, but it might be the odd angle), and others look like photographs of elaborate miniatures. Now, I'm on record as criticizing dinosaur art that makes it very hard to see what said dinosaurs looked like. Jane Burton liked to use dramatic back-lighting a lot, and unfortunately, this makes it a little difficult to get a good look at the animals. Still... her work is very very cool, even in this post-"Jurassic Park" / "Walking With Dinosaurs" world. Here are some highlights:
I'm kind of in love with this one:
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Fellow bird artists, here's something to add to our bookmarks: Brendan Body's massivetutorial on animating and drawing birds in flight. There's a lot of information, but most of it is backed up by lots and lots of video clips (warning: Quicktime). Speaking of birds...
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Big Sit Results! Went up to the lake and saw fourteen species. Not bad.
I should probably explain why this was a little unexpected. You see, a long, long time ago, when Disney was in the depths of it's Dork Age, whoever was in charge of pitching story ideas there basically said, "You know what? F*** it! We're all trying to make the next movie that will make as much money as 'The Lion King', right? So let's just do ANOTHER loose Shakespeare adaptation with celebrities voicing nonhuman characters who sing lots and lots of Elton John songs."
The last we Disney fans heard, the project had been scrapped. This happened back when "Meet the Robinsons" was being reworked. Since that was the last time I had heard anything of it, the sight of a trailer was a huge surprise. I guess another studio must have picked it up, which might explain why this is released under Touchstone. Disney (which is in the meantime working on a movie based on the whole Magic Kingdom because of COURSE they are) has been known to release "weird" movies under the Touchstone banner; the same thing happened to "Roger Rabbit" and "Nightmare Before Christmas". The whole situation was just too strange not to mention here.
What do I think of what we see in the trailer? Well, let me put it this way. I still dream of someday directing my own animated film. And when I do, I will insist that both the trailers and posters must include this or a similar tagline:
"From a person who was not at all involved in 'Shrek'! And while she kinda liked the first movie at the time, she frankly thinks that the 'Shrek' movies have a lot to answer for. (That God-forsaken 'Cat in the Hat' movie for example.)"
It only takes a few minutes. Head over to this website (linking to the English-language version; the project is based in Germany), follow the instructions, and they will plant a tree in Plumas National Forest. Go add your website to the list and spread the love around.
Since Nintendo is being a big meanie about screenshots and other graphics, sadly I will not be posting pictures. But here are some of the more intriguing spoilers:
The Plot is, However, Marginally Different in "Black" and "White". Somewhat similar to "Ruby/Sapphire", the Not-Team-Rocket you battle depends on the game. In "Black", it's smelly hippies. In "White", it's corrupt corporate executives. There is also a unique area in each game; Back has a city and White has a forest. Furthermore, certain characters will only appear in one game or the other. The identity of the final gym leader, for example, depends on what game you play. I doubt the plot will be all that different in practice, really.
By now you know about the Pink Dinosaur Project, Art Evolved's massive cancer research charity fundraiser. All you have to do to support the project is draw a pink dinosaur and send it in to artevolved(at)gmail(dot)com. And if you are under the delusion that you can't draw, you may donate directly here.
I've had this project on my mind for several days now.
I've also had this little Artist and Craftsman Supply watercolor sketchpad for a long time. I decided it was time to do something special with it. It's not very big, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do my first themed Sketchbook.
Here's the book in the middle of modification...
And here she is after modification. Dealing with the spiral binding itself wasn't as hard as I expected -- except for those tiny holes.
So what's my goal here? I want to draw one pink dinosaur per day. I'm not stopping until the book is full. Full of pastel-colored archosaurian goodness.
Yeah, I'm going to do more blogs about old dinosaur art and other things. Because I have watched the five (only five!?!) hand-drawn animated features by Dreamworks. And, well...
First off, I made the mistake of watching three of them in one night. My dreams -those awful way-too-vivid dreams that leave you more exhausted than you were before you fell asleep - were a blur of weird character designs, pop-composer songs, and random celebrity voices.
I feel as though the Dreamworks "Tradigitals" (their term) are not nearly as interesting as the story behind them. This old, old, old Entertainment Weekly article describes the world in which Dreamworks animation was formed quite well. It's The Land Before Pixar, really, and Jeffry Katzenberg is ready to show up his old bosses at Disney by making the most EPIC animated feature film ever made.
That would be "The Prince of Egypt", and all things considered, it's the only one of these movies that's worth a damn. OK, that sounds mean. It really is every bit as awesome as Katzenberg wanted it to be. There are some moments in it that are among the best pieces of animation ever created. It stayed with me for a long time after viewing and is one of my favorite religious films.
Even so, it suffers from the one problem that brings down each of these movies: They tried way too hard to make this film, "Everything that we assume people loved in 'The Lion King' -- but MORE." And that means more random and distracting celebrity voices, more big damn epic ballads (this movie's Obligatory Disney-Style Oscar-Baiting End-Credits Ballad has Witney Huston and Mariah Carey, which was a huge deal back then), more musical numbers, more action scenes, more big special effects showpieces, and more people falling off of high places. (And it is worth noting here that for the longest time, the Dreamworks/PDI animated films were "Everything that we assume people loved in 'Shrek' -- but MORE." If I ever get around to making my list of "Movies That Are Good But Have A LOT To Answer For", "Shrek" would be almost guaranteed to be at the top of that list.)
Even with these flaws, "Prince of Egypt" is very, very good. It is well worth a revisit if you haven't seen it in a while. The same cannot be said for "Joseph: King Of Dreams"; probably meant to be a follow-up film and dropped onto the direct-to-home-video market instead. It's instantly forgettable aside from the very bizarre casting of Ben Affleck as Joseph.
"The Road to ElDorado" starts out fun. And then it feels more and more like a cute little box stuffed with everything the directors ever pitched during the production. By the end, it just wound up being confusing and annoying. It also shows how quickly something that appears to be a can't-miss premise a few years ago ("Timon and Pumbaa stole the show during 'The Lion King', so why don't we just cut out the boring lead characters and make the cute funny sidekicks the main characters?") can come across as weird and dated.
And that brings us to the movie I dreaded having to watch again for the purpose of this project: "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron". I went ahead and wrote a long review of this beautiful disaster over at The Realm of Madness. Even so, I will sum "Spirit" up with the following macro:
Lastly, we have "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas". It has some fun action scenes. The designs of the monsters are awesome and very creative. I want to say they are by Nicholas Marlet, based upon the sketches that can be viewed in the DVD special features. And there is some fantastic effects animation whenever Eris shows up. And it is otherwise boring as hell, coming across more like a half-hearted "Pirates of the Carribean" cash-in than a movie the studio had real faith in.
So it's hard to decide exactly what to say about Dreamworks' traditionally animated films. I guess I'm glad I watched them all just to say I did.
