It's been a while since we looked at trailers for upcoming animated (or not) films together, hasn't it? Fortunately, there's a huge crop out in the wake of ComiCon and they include some unusual films indeed. And questionable book-to-film title changes. Lots of them.
First off, "Winnie the Pooh", a very unexpected and pleasant surprise in this overall dreadful summer, is in theaters now. This is worth mentioning because it was released on the same weekend as, and has been a teeny tiny bit overshadowed by, another movie based on a beloved British children's book.
By the way, great jarb there Disney.
Here, just to get it out of the way, is the full trailer for "Happy Feet 2: Farewell to the Flesh". You are probably already aware that I disliked the original "Happy Feet", and while I figured the sequel might improve things (this is the same George Miller who gave us the awesomely bizarre "Babe: Pig in the City"), this here trailer is... discouraging. Actually, there are several things I could say about it but I will instead say this: At about the twenty second mark, I figured the makers of this film are, in fact, f**king with us.
I love how this cute teaser for Aardman's "Arthur Christmas" openly acknowledges right from the start that it's hard to get excited about a Christmas movie in high summer. I also like how this reminds me a little of the late, lamented "Cranium Command" show at EPCOT.
One of the overlooked treasures of the young adult novel section at your local library is illustrator Brian Selznick's Caldecot winning semi-graphic novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The film, directed by no less than Martin Scorsese, comes our way in November. The trailer is a bit heavy on the slapstick (and the love-it-or-hate-it stylings of 30 Seconds to Mars Frozen Embryos), but everything else looks gorgeous.
A second trailer for "Tintin" was trotted around the internet recently and... disappeared mysteriously. Hopefully, this French trailer will stick around for a while. Is it me or does it look like they're still suspiciously reluctant to show the characters' faces?
So... here's "Puss in Boots". After this is over, can we be done with "Shrek" and everything associated with same? Please? I'll be good!
And now for our most far-flung movies. Although the film doesn't hit theaters until March, Aardman has dropped the trailer for "Pirates!" already. You may have heard that they are no longer affiliated with Dreamworks. You may have also heard that Nick Park and company have been wanting to make a pirate movie since at least "Flushed Away" (which originally involved -yes- pi-rats and wound up a bit of a mess instead). I'm getting a distinct "Look at what we can do NOW" vibe from this trailer.
Finally -FINALLY!- we've got our first look at PIXAR's "John Carter" (which anyone reading a blog like mine probably already knows is, in fact, "A Princess of Mars". And yes, that is on my summer reading list.) Obviously most of the "big" effects aren't done yet, so this looks a little generic.
And Fridge Logic: Why not use "Kings and Queens" here instead?
And speaking of PIXAR, here's the teaser for "Brave". Seeing as one of PIXAR's hallmarks is the fact that they like to research their asses off, I am giddy with excitement over this one.
As far as series, and me being giddy with excitement, hey there, "Legend of Korra" trailer!
And just because I can, here's a very special find. A teaser trailer for a film that never saw the light of day. Originally, "Siegfried" was to be a full-length animated feature, but the funding was cut. The story was eventually made into a graphic novel, but the trailer, with a look somewhat similar to early period Don Bluth films, shows us we missed out on something amazing.
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Sketch of the Day!
I said recently I hadn't drawn enough dragons. Came up with this turtle-dragon.
So... I am aware that there has been a dearth of Tricia's Art lately on Tricia's Art Blog. This is largely because (a) I haven't had a chance to scan stuff lately (b) nor have I had a chance to sit down and draw because (c) it is REALLY FREAKIN' NICE OUT. Believe me, if you've suffered through the winter I have, you'd be outside partying everyday too. I promise I'll bring my poor, neglected Sketchbook next time and I eventually want to get behind a big canvas again like last summer.
OK, on to the subject of this post. As I have mentioned before, 2010 was a phenomenal year for animated films. So much so that there were actually a few animated sleeper hits. One such film that (appropriately enough) flew very quietly under most people's radar was Zack Snyder's "Legend of the Guardians", which will henceforth be referred to as "The Guardians of Ga'hoole" since (a) it's a much less generic title and (b) I'm pretty sure anyone reading my blog is aware that this film is based off an anthology of preteen fantasy books.
Now I didn't expect anything from this movie when I first sat down to watch it. As you may recall, when the trailers first arrived for this film, I was... a little incredulous. Zack Snyder directing "'Star Wars' but Everyone is a Different Species of Strigiform" with the team behind "Happy Feet" (which, you may have heard, I loathed) was a bit of a hard sell. But my trusted /Filmcast sold me (skip to about the twenty minute mark), and I decided to give "Guardians" a shot.
First off, I want a nice big "Art Of" book for "Guardians of Ga'hoole". This movie is absolutely knock-your-socks off gorgeous. See it on the biggest screen you can. The different species of owls actually look like owls and act like owls and the film avoids Feather Fingers and Acrophobic Bird like crazy. This must be what it felt like to be an ichthyologist watching "Finding Nemo" for the first time.
I also would like to know exactly what Zack Snyder's involvement in the film was, because I think he might have found a niche. His films have been basically animated anyway, and he appears to have grounded the Animal Logic studio. If there was any motion capture in "Guardians", I couldn't tell - the animals move like animals and I never got the uncanny valley feeling I got from "Happy Feet".
Now, I don't want to build "Guardians" up too much. Remember, I expected nothing at all from this movie and while I did want to be a cheerleader for it, it's with some reservations. The characters are kind of dull and you can tell what their various arcs and roles in the story are going to be within a few seconds of their introductions. Additionally, it sounded like Hugo Weaving was voicing every other character... Not that I had a problem with this because Hugo Weaving is THAT awesome. The story really is "'Star Wars' But Everyone Is An Owl", and there is a song that appears about two thirds of the way in that... Yeah, actually I'm going to need a whole paragraph for this one.
OK, so there is a song that appears about two thirds of the way in "Guardians" that is such an utterly baffling inclusion that I'd give anything within reason to learn, in essence, WTF? It's a song by Owl City, and it plays over what is essentially "Guardian"'s equivalent to the Hobbits' arrival in Rivendell. Now, I get the thought process that would lead to involving a band named Owl City in a movie about owls. But I would probably listen to their music first and see (or hear, rather) if it were in any way a good fit. Because all the music I have heard from Owl City so far has been... eh, I'm going to use the word twee. I wouldn't go so far as to call it saccharine, but it is rather annoyingly cute and has no place in a soundtrack otherwise made up of Epic High Fantasy Themes (tm).
Other than this one major problem (and it isn't that big of a deal really all things considered), "Guardians of Ga'hoole" is quite good and I actually would have no problem at all if they decided to make a sequel. If nothing else, in the ironically cliched world of fantastic fiction films, at least a secret weapon made out of irradiated owl puke is a new one.
Speaking of, the gizzard is a digestive organ that has very little if anything to do with flying. Knowing this makes some of the dialogue in the film unintentionally hilarious.
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Other Person's Art of the Day!
It's the Summer Solstice! I'd be remiss if I didn't share this oddity from the early days of Disney. Holy cow, those little fruit flies are the cutest things ever.
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Sketch of the Day!
As I said, tragically I haven't had time to sit down and draw and I don't feel right!
So because unicorns are good luck, here is an older drawing of a Quilin:
Because it's been a wacky Memorial Day Weekend! And that means we're on a two-posts-per-week summer schedule! Here is some news I managed to read in time to regurgitate here:
I should save this one for last, but here is a review, on Comics Alliance, of what just might be the greatest ever work of western literature. That was written by a nine-year-old girl. Circa 1990. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Maybe this is old news for most of you, but Darren Naish found a thing.
TetZoo also posted an article on one of the strangest animals you'll ever see.
Speaking of animals, turns out reindeer may be able to perceive ultraviolet light. I got a new theory about Rudolph's nose.
There's another new teaser trailer for "Muppets Legacy" (hee hee) and, as Tough Pigs demonstrates, it's basically incomprehensible if you managed to never see the teaser for "Hangover 2". I still don't know if I'm sold on New Guy Walter.
Speaking of teaser trailers. When I reviewed "Happy Feet" back when this blog was young, I said that nothing in the world could be as deeply surreal as the in-film sight of a cute little newly hatched baby Emperor Penguin singing "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash. Suffice it to say that in the new teaser for "Happy Feet Two: Penguin in the City", George Miller has outdone that scene. Twice.
Speaking of movies that may scar you for life, Pajiba has a terrific list with clips, and half the films on the list are wonderfully obscure.
And on the same subject, the very funny "How Did This Get Made?" podcast discussed the notorious super-long McDonald's commercial/"E.T." rip-off "Mac and Me", and tried to determine exactly what the message of the movie was supposed to be.
And yet more things that might scar a child for life! While we're stuck with the incredibly stupid "Hey we should sue ourselves for stealing our own taste" campaign, Bogleech showed us that the way they advertise Coke Zero in the UK is... different.
There's a nifty new website called Living Lines Library with a ton of animation production art to sift through.
If you needed proof that the well-loved and familiar American Robin has no {censored}s to give, the Urban Pantheist has found some.
So... this is what goes down during Walt Disney World's Star Wars Weekends. Holy cow the thing that happens at the 1:07 mark.
This is evidently concept art from "Dinosaurs vs. Aliens". It's almost exactly what I expected.
Disney is apparently planning to release "The Lion King" to theaters this autumn in 3D. While I do want to see "TLK" on the big screen again, I have no idea how that's going to look.
i09 shared this whimsical animated short.
I can't express how deeply disappointed I am to learn that we may indeed be getting a "Fantasia"-Style History of the Earth (tm) in "Tree of Life" (first the Earth forms, then suddenly there are dinosaurs, then they conveniently go extinct to make way for YAY HUMANS WOO!!!). However, all is not lost. We've got "The Voyage of Time" to look forward to now.
And there's a new teaser image from "Brave"! Woo-hoo!
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Sketch of the Day! Another thing I need to bring to finish:
Say hello to my slightly larger friend:
And boy howdy did I need it.
So this is it. Out of all the movies Don Bluth ever made, this is the one he disowned. He is not listed as a director. The film was originally credited to Alan Smithy, the name directors used (before Joe Esterhaus ruined the fun for everyone with his awful "An Alan Smithy Film") when their own film is so terrible that they are too embarrassed to put their own name on it. If I'm lucky, this will have been the nadir of this here Don Bluth Month project. I really hope it is.
Because good God, this movie is terrible. I could see why Bluth turned away from it almost immediately: there are times when the animation is just downright sh**ty. I know bad animation bothers Don Bluth more than story problems, because even something like "Rock-A-Doodle" has excellent effects and character animation.
In "Penguin" the animation, particularly of the characters, is either inconsistent or downright ugly. Oftentimes, it's both. Seems they farmed the animation duties off to some other, cheaper studio. The characters freely change size and perspective while standing still. They shimmer in and out of existence. They even occasionally appear as immobile still frames that may "twitch" once and again; the effect is less like the kind of fluid, lifelike animation Bluth was trying to keep alive and more like something mind-scarring from a Japanese horror film.
There is even a scene, late in the film, where they forget to draw a major characters head. 'Nuff said.
Add to this the fact that the penguin character designs are downright ghastly. Why do they all have such prominent teeth? Why is Marina given a pair of human-like hips way the hell up near where her wishbone should be? It's "Happy Feet" all over again, with all the creepy almost-anthropomorphic penguins running about. Why the hell is it so easy to mess up the cuteness of a penguin?!
And the story is... man, you know what, f*** it! I don't even remember it!
That says a lot. As I mentioned before, story problems do not appear to bother Don Bluth too much. I might have hated "All Dogs Go To Heaven", but at least it's memorable because it has some insane fever-dream logic at work (the scene where the infamous King Gator suddenly reappears as a singing big gay unstoppable force of nature for example). It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least it is fun to make fun of, and to wonder what kind of deranged mind came up with it.
"Penguin" is just irredeemably boring and tedious, with ugly, unlikeable characters, a story that goes nowhere, and songs that feel like an obligation in the fact that they just keep showing up and stalling the plot. There's one in particular that almost made me want to gouge my ears out with a skewer, in which Hubie and Rocko sing about how friendship is nice or something. It goes on forever. In the duration, we learn that the two characters are exactly like what we thought they were before (though we do learn that Hubie is more annoying than we thought we did, so yay for whatever character development we can get). Also, during the song they advance a physical distance of about twenty feet on their adventure from New Zealand to Antarctica.
I guess the more important question is this: how in the hell do you go from "The Secret of N.I.M.H." to this?!?
Up next, "A Troll in Central Park". Please, please at least let the animation be better in this one?
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Art of the Day!
Got something on canvas now...
CHUD.com, a movie news website I enjoy, has been listing their choices for the worst instances of CGI animation in (usually) otherwise live-action films. They range from Wolverine's "Roger Rabbit" claws in "X-Men Origins" to the forty-two sauropod pileup in Peter Jackson's "King Kong". As a person who has blogged quite a lot about animation, I figured I should share it. Right now, they can all be found accumulating here, or you could start with part one and work your way through.
I have to say, I agree with most of the selections (Part One in particular, as it covers the Scorpion King sequence in "The Mummy Returns", which is easily one of the most downright embarrassing and Narm-tacular things ever put on a screen.) I have to nitpick, however, that many of the sequences were done with the best animation available at the time and simply have not aged well. That said, a fair number of them were... not. And I agree with their argument that we wouldn't be having this discussion at all if the sequences that could have been done practically were.
Take entry ten, the "Burly Brawl" in "Matrix Reloaded". Now, when I saw that at the theater I thought it was awesome. Then when I watched it again last summer it was still awesome... up until a point. There is a moment, and you can tell exactly where it is, when the film-makers eschewed practical effects and stuntwork for motion capture. This is about the only scene in the entire trilogy where they do so and... man, it just sticks out like you can't imagine. It looks like something out of "Happy Feet' and happens to be the only really badly animated scene in the trilogy.
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Speaking of absurdly bad-looking animation, I have a very strong feeling that this little slice of WTF that has recently made the animation fan website rounds is shaping up to be the next "Food Fight."
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DRAWGASMIC IS THIS WEEKEND!!! Actually, this may warrant it's own post later...
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Sketch of the Day!
Randimal anidoms!
Yes, even though, ages ago, I said I didn't feel like I'd ever need to. Because this movie about a penguin who tap-dances to bad covers of popular songs can't possibly be a fraction as entertaining as reading the message boards and discussion threads where people, people who are probably reasonable adults in real life, have ridiculously intense arguments about (just as a reminder) a movie about a tap-dancing penguin.
As you may recall, the animation-enjoying population of the internet was essentially ripped asunder when this thing won Best Animated Feature. If you do not recall, or you want to relive the magic and wonder of that experience, here's the relevant Cartoon Brew thread. (Bring marshmallows. Lots of them.)
It was partially that and partially rereading this Onion AV Club review of "Babe: Pig in the City" that inspired me to add it to the ol' Netflix Queue. I rented "Pig in the City" as well and was able to watch both films back to back. (It is three-thirty in the morning as I write this fresh off the experience.) My reaction to "City" was nearly identical to that of Scott Tobias and his readers. It is a brilliant, criminally underrated, beautiful film that is also batsh*t insane in all the right ways; "the stuff of impeccably choreographed nightmares". The animals are better actors than most humans and, best of all, the voice-over acting is refreshingly understated with help from a witty, oddly moving script. Naturally, I was pumped for "Happy Feet".
As I mentioned, it is very early in the morning as I write this. I could probably just say that I can see why people were, shall we say, opinionated about this movie.
Let's get it out of the way: the Mo-Cap is ugly. There's something off-putting about human eyes and giant, humanlike mouths and tongues in an otherwise fairly realistic nonhuman creature. There's something off-putting about seeing a creature that is anatomically wildly different than a human move and act like a human. I never thought I'd ever feel like I was hit with the Uncanny Valley stick by a cartoon penguin.
The voices are downright surreal. Why hire Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman for your animated film if they're just going to do lame impressions of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe? What the hell is the point? Why not hire actual voice actors who'd do better imitations? And why oh why do we have to be hearing Robin Williams come out of the noise-hole of every other character? (OK, maybe it just sounds that way after a while. Still.)
The songs are beyond surreal. Sometimes you can tell, during a musical whose soundtrack is made up of pre-existing songs, that the people who compiled the songs were only seeking catchy beats and tunes or focused on one or two lyrics relevant to the story. This is such a musical. Boy, is it ever such a musical. There's a scene where an adorable/creepily humanlike baby penguin sings "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash, and I do not believe that it is possible for any living thing with breath in their body to watch this scene without going: 😨
As far as the story... Okay, WTF was the lesson here? Pick a moral, kids!
* - Animals are only interesting when they act like people.
* - If there is something new and different, everyone must eventually conform to this new thing or else.
* - If you are different and/or special, your life is going to suck. Hard. Even if you eventually save the day, you must expect to be banished at some point. Probably by your own family.
* - The last wild places in the world, those uninhabited by mankind, are worth saving. If they're amusing to humans. If not, f*** 'em.
The film also boasts a memorably awkward happy ending, the last moral on my list (I guess I was supposed to get "save the penguins" out of it but it sure doesn't come across that way) is delivered with all the subtlety of an entire season of "Captain Planet", and did I mention that Robin Williams voices more than one major character? I don't even know how to react to this movie. It is astonishing. Not the good kind of astonishing, but the "What the hell did I just watch?" kind of astonishing.
Overall, Best Animated Feature of 2006? Really? Really? REALLY?!? So the lesson I'm taking is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences obviously hates Richard Linkletter's animated films with the white hot fury of a thousand stars.
Oh, the well-loved Tex Avery short, "I Love to Singa" is on the DVD, and I find this ironic, funny, and sad because it owns the hell out of "Happy Feet".
Addendum: Albertonychus' review!
