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The main squirrel in The Nut Job looks like Squirrel Balto.
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Jan 2, 2014 00:00
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Senior Scarybagels posted:Well really Disney is the reason why in the west 2D Animation has failed ;it created the idea that 2D animation is child like, were as with 3D it has kept both a child-like and adult mentality due to the likes of pixar and dreamworks that allows a wider audience to enjoy it and get different things out of. So really the truth is that 2D Animation might always be seen as for children unless there is a surge of adult oriented animated movies that bring in a large enough draw. I don't think that tonally Dreamworks or Pixar films are any less child oriented than Disney/Disney-esque 2D feature animation, with the possible exception of Shrek (given that those movies are lampooning other animation/storytelling traditions). They're very accessible to adults and children alike, sure, especially the best ones, but so are classic Disney films.
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Jan 2, 2014 19:20
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Koramei posted:That's sorta a running theme ever since Whisper of the Heart. Aside from like, Mononoke, and maybe the Yamadas (it's not really that kind of film), I think every single Ghibli film has been pretty let down by its ending. Howl's might well be the worst of the lot of them though. The thing with Howl is it's MASSIVELY, UTTERLY different from the book it's based on (which is fine), but uses whole chunks of that book pretty much wholesale but lacking the context provided by all the bits they've cut and changed and surrounded by material that doesn't serve to replace that context with anything that makes sense (which is less fine). It's very pretty indeed but I have basically no idea what happened in it and I've seen it and read the book. It's more a series of loosely connected vignettes than anything with a clear throughline and A-B plot structure. This is true of a lot of Ghibli films (Mononoke and Nausicaa both play like a series of set pieces and while they do both have plot, I would have trouble relating the events of either of them in sequence and I've seen Nausicaa like ten times) and a lot of Japanese storytelling in general, but it's particularly glaring in a film as confusing and complicated as Howl.
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Jan 4, 2014 20:15
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Pick posted:They also add dialogue where there was none previously. "Whaaat, Haku's a dragon!?" Yeah, I saw the Disney sub of Totoro which just uses the dub script, and there are a bunch of lines over silence.
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Jan 4, 2014 22:53
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Tartarus Sauce posted:I've seen Howl's Moving Castle probably three times, and there are parts of the ending I still don't understand. I chalk some of it up to "symbolism n' poo poo." Try reading the book. It won't make the plot of the movie any easier to decipher, but it might help you tease out which bits are lifted straight from the book but not fully contextualized in the film, thus making them confusing. Also it is good.
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Jan 5, 2014 01:26
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Despicable Me was on the telly last night and it was...fine. Perfectly serviceable. I liked how goofy it was, the bits that played out like an homage to old Tom and Jerry or loony tunes cartoons were great, and the sentimental bits were sweet enough. I didn't like it as much as Cloudy or the best Pixar films but I do sorta understand why it did so well financially, it's super accessible and has a ton of stuff with no dialogue that would cross international boundaries, and it's clever enough that adults aren't bored out of their skulls. Weirdly, my roommate, who is usually quite cynical about that sort of thing, loving LOVES the minions. I mean, I don't have a problem with them, the physical humour is well played and their short tempers are amusing, but he just found them the funniest thing.
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Jan 27, 2014 14:56
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Pick posted:The one thing I do find difficult when critiquing Aladdin is trying to piece out to what degree the design sensibilities of the villains are specific to the setting being Middle-Eastern. For example, how much is communicating an ethnicity versus just establishing ugliness? (Its own can of worms.) I think a lot of it is in the hooked noses in particular (maybe the kohl too). And there is something different about their noses/teeth even compared to other hook-nosed, tooth-missing Disney characters. I think part of it is that the designs of Disney/animated heroes tend to be very smooth and more "human" looking and realistic, while villains and supporting cast are allowed to look more like cartoons, so you end up with much more exaggerated features on villains. Compare the beast in human form to Lefou, or Prince Eric and Ursula, they're not even in the same universe in terms of design and proportions. It's been that way since the year dot, cartoonish dwarves interacting with a frequently rotoscoped Snow White with perfectly human proportions. Unfortunately, when the villain or supporting character is non-white, the designers often fall into the dangerous and lazy trap of exaggerating them in a stereotypical way that often becomes a racist caricature, while the hero has non-exaggerated features and so can seem "whitewashed" by comparison, even if when taken in a vacuum the protagonist design is more like an actual member of that ethnic group than the villain design. Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Feb 4, 2014 00:22
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Tartarus Sauce posted:My understanding is that Song of the South was an attempt at fostering better race relations. After all, Walt Disney pushed for James Baskett to receive an Oscar for his performance as Uncle Remus, and had him voice most of the animated characters. Disney sounds like he was genuinely impressed with Baskett as an actor. How are the actual animated segments? Could Disney release a truncated "tales of brer Rabbit" DVD without too much controversy, are the stories themselves offensive, or is it just that their association with the live action parts has tarnished them? As far as I know most brer rabbit stories are adaptations of Anansi stories and other African trickster myths transposed into the American setting and with allegorical aspect relating to slavery and power. Even the tar baby is VERY closely related to an Anansi tale, and it's status as a racial slur obviously came later than the original African stories
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Feb 4, 2014 18:59
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Going back to Disney villains for a moment, there are at least a few properties where the villain is presented as excessively masculine; obviously Beauty and the Beast springs to mind, but there's also Tarzan, the recurring use of Pete in various shorts and Goofy properties, The leader of the Mongols in Mulan. It's not as ubiquitous as the schemer archetype, but the bully who throws his weight (and often societal privilege) around definitely happens enough to be another pattern.
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Feb 7, 2014 13:03
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:And while we’re on the topic of Disney villains and gayness it’s worth mentioning that the sea witch Ursula was modeled after legendary drag queen Divine. Divine is played by a man though. Does Ursula being emphatically female still mean she reads as "gay-coded" or whatever, specifically to the segment of the audience not that aware of Divine? Drag queens are extreme parodies of femininity but are necessarily played by men, when a character who is clearly female is given those traits, do they still evoke homosexuality, or just appear to be parodying certain "feminine" traits within a female vessel?
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Feb 8, 2014 10:08
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Samuel Clemens posted:Also, I'd kill for a chance to see Nausicaä in an actual cinema. Any Ghibli film really, but this one in particular must look amazing on a big screen. I saw it in the cinema once but there was something wrong with the print AND the sound setup, the print was ancient and the picture quality was absolutely rotten, and the sound was about 3 times louder than it should have been, it was buzzy as poo poo and was loving painful. I was younger at the time, but if it was me today I'd have walked out after ten minutes and complained, and either gotten the projectionist to fix the sound balance or got my money back. So, uh, I guess if Nausicaa is screening near you and they're advertising it as 35mm rather than digital, take care, because at least some of the prints floating around out there are absolutely wrecked. I saw it later at a uni screening played from DVD on a lecture theatre system and it was WAY more enjoyable.
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Feb 13, 2014 13:04
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The problem with actual factual physical animation on cels is it's just an unbelieveable pain in the arse. I occasionally paint single cels just for fun, and my god it takes FOREVER, like an hour or two per cel. Even with the specialist quick drying cel paint it would take 30 minutes+ for a somewhat complex frame, more if it's multi layer. You can do the same thing on a computer in a few seconds or a couple of minutes. And of course a lot of folks still do the actual animation on paper, they just scan it in for colouring. While having the screen-used cels available to collectors is nice, other than that I don't really mourn the loss of the process, cels were a solution to a problem that computers solve more efficiently. Visually you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference, in fact Princess Mononoke has some shots done on cels and some coloured on computer when they ran out of time, and I challenge anyone who doesn't already know to tell me which ones are which. And if you're not spending 2/3 of your budget paying a hundred non-animators to do all the donkey work of colouring, you can afford to make the more films, or to make the same number of films richer and more detailed, or take more risks.
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Mar 19, 2014 13:38
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Wittgen posted:I was finally able to see Frozen, and it was pretty good. (I know I'm late. Japan is slow sometimes) I liked how everything was pretty much the awful, awful parents' fault. This power could be dangerous if she isn't emotionally well adjusted? Better cut off all contact with the outside world and stress how a fundamental part of her is a dangerous, shameful secret she has to hide and suppress. Great plan guys. I dunno, I think the fact the parents died pretty soon after making that decision was fairly key. It was made in the heat of the moment after one of their daughters very nearly KILLED the other one, I don't think that makes them awful as much as scared and misguided. I think they were frightened FOR Elsa in many ways and were trying to protect her from herself, because if she had an episode in public she'd probably be lynched. Had they survived they would probably have seen how much it was messing up both of the kids and come around to a more appropriate way of dealing with things, maybe importing some sort of teacher who could help her keep her emotions under control without completely shutting down. I've only seen it once though, so I could be misremembering
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Apr 3, 2014 11:08
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Wittgen posted:Elsa and Anna were little girls at the time of the accident and three years from age of majority when their parents die. My impression was that 5-10 years passed between the accident and the parent's death. That's a long time to not realize that everything you're doing is making all the problems worse. I get that they were scared and that they made that decision in fear. That doesn't make it any less of an atrocious decision. I mean, they spent all of five seconds thinking up the approach before implementing it. Literally. Troll grandpa says (without any explanation) that he'll remove all the memories of magic "to be safe". Dad nods once and goes, OK, I guess that means I need to completely socially isolate my daughters from the world and each other. Also, the only way to make sure my daughter isn't undone by fear is to drill into her that her powers must be contained at all times or they'l destroy everyone she loves. Yep. That'll get rid of all the fear for sure. Fair enough, as I said I only saw it the once. Even so, I don't think the parents were meant to be bad people, just horribly ill equipped to deal with their daughter's unique gift/curse and completely unable to come up with a good solution. If you're in a pseudo-medieval kingdom dealing with a kid who can literally kill everyone then end up being burned at the stake if she gets upset, in an age without modern psychological help and understanding, getting her to shut down and hide might make more sense than the alternative, which is to take the risk that she has just ONE episode and ends up dead. I think the parents loved both their kids, a lot, and were just completely lost and made some bad decisions. Remember they themselves withdrew too, the whole palace was shut up; "evil" parents would have shut the magic kid away in the East Wing and continued to enjoy their lavish life, not taken the entire family out of the public eye. I'm certainly not saying the parents couldn't have handled things better, they obviously could, but I think they were acting out of concern and love, just doing things so loving wrong that it made things worse. They're not Gothel in tangled, manipulating and emotionally abusing a trusting child for personal gain, they want what's best for both their kids, they just don't have a clear idea of what IS best of how to achieve it. They're ruled by fear, but it's fear FOR their children. That's all fairly typical of Disney Bad Parents, excepting cases where the parental figure is the actual villain like Tangled (and of course she's not the biological parent), most bad parenting comes from a place of misguided love not malice. King Triton would be a good example, he truly wants what's best for Ariel but is really bullish and pig headed about it and ends up driving her away, and him accepting her as a person who can make her own decisions is the core of the emotional climax of the film
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Apr 3, 2014 11:43
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computer parts posted:An interesting trend at least from Disney movies has been that the most memorable song has been basically the opposite of the message the film is trying to say. Hakuna Matata and Under the Sea are basically temptation songs where the hero has to overcome the attraction of sitting around getting baked all day and actually do something productive with their life. In Lion King it takes Simba years to outgrow sitting around the jungle doing dick all, in Little Mermaid it's her old lifes last ditch effort to hold her back. The fact that they're contrary to the message of the film and are attractive and catchy at the same time is sort of the point, the protagonist has to resist them, and if they weren't great songs it wouldn't be much of a feat. Mother knows Best is the same thing but using fear and shame rather than the promise of an easy life to keep Rapunzel in line and under control. Again the song has to be catchy or ignoring it is easy. I wouldn't say Let It Go is the *opposite* of the message of Frozen as much as a step in the right direction. Elsa is coming to terms with her powers and becoming more comfortable with them, but isn't yet ready to reveal them around other people. Contrast with the earlier parts where she's scared of her powers and of people, and the end where she's comfortable with both. It's the beginning of her journey rather than the end but it's definitely a point along the way.
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Apr 11, 2014 16:06
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LaughMyselfTo posted:Does The Incredibles count? Sure, Syndrome's cape was what sucked him into the turbine, but he only wound up next to the turbine in the first place because he got a loving car thrown at him, which presumably could have killed him in and of itself. I don't think so. there's somewhat of a divide between situations where actions the hero take end up resulting in the death of the villain, and cases where the protagonist or other character on the good guys side very deliberately and specifically kills the villain. Disney generally goes for the former, and cases of the latter like Little Mermaid and Mulan are somewhat less common (though obviously far from absent)
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Jun 9, 2014 11:25
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Triskelli posted:I honestly think the '55 version loses something by updating it to nukes. Part of the dark appeal was in seeing how "monstrous" humanity had become, and the concept of the two final humans hatefully destroying each other with rifles and sinking into the muck, both forgotten and alone is so much more powerful than "two men killed everyone by pressing a button" yet again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8stkqssLYc Original version, "Peace on Earth". In this one, after the last two men die, the animals build a lovely idylic town out of all the discarded helmets and other war materials. It was released in 1939, and given the production cycle for animation, was presumably in production before the declaration of War in Europe.
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Jun 9, 2014 15:32
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Al-Saqr posted:I just saw How To Train Your Dragon 2 in the cinemas, is there going to be a thread for it or is talking about it here fine? It's not out here for another month, and a lot of people have been avoiding even the trailers due to reported spoilery nature, so if you do talk about it in this thread it would be appreciated if you could be extra careful with spoiler tags
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Jun 9, 2014 17:25
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Why are they having it come out at different times in different places? At a guess, timing for the school holidays. Out schools (UK) tend to take a 6 week summer break starting in late July. You release as close as possible to times of peak demand, and for HTTYD-2, that is as close as possible to the time parents are trying to keep their kids occupied on weekdays.
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Jun 9, 2014 19:10
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Corek posted:Oh, it's good to see that the cheapquels have finally returned after less than a decade. eeeeeehhh, I don't actually mind TV movies/TV series half as much as DTV sequels. They don't feel like they're trying to be important or trick people into thinking they're the "real thing"; you can get box sets of Disney classics and their cheapquels packaged as if they're proper trilogies or whatever, which I don't imagine will be the case here. Dreamworks has been doing TV spinoffs for ages, there's a kung fu Panda one and a HTTYD one and they're easy enough to just avoid, while the real high grade sequels are still being made by the studio proper and released in theatres. Basically as long as it's positioned and marketed as a feature length pilot for a TV show rather than "NEW LION KING MOVIE!!", it's fine by me. This seems like it's gonna be a show for pretty small kids with an educational/lesson type approach, I can't begrudge them using a recognisable brand for that.
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Jun 10, 2014 22:51
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Shaocaholica posted:A whole week without any Dragon2 discussion? Sigh, I guess Dreamworks is doomed. I asked for it to have it's own thread because it's not out in my country for another couple of weeks and Pick kindly obliged.
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Jun 20, 2014 10:41
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Most people who know who Popeye is know that he is a sailor man, he eats spinach to get strong, he has a girlfriend/love interest called Olive Oyl, an enemy/rival called Bluto and that he punches things a lot. They might know about other peripheral characters like Wimpy too. Most people who know who Betty Boop is know what she looks like and possibly her catchphrase. Both characters may have survived and still be recognisable icons, but in terms of making a movie, Betty Boop has no plot hooks or conflict. A Popeye movie will almost certainly feature eating spinach to get strong, some kind of romance plot with Olive Oyl, and fighting Bluto. I have literally no idea what a Betty Boop movie might feature other than Betty Boop being in it. Of course that doesn't mean you can't make a movie with Betty Boop, but it does means it's much more of a blank slate than something like Popeye who has all these attendant ideas already attached. For a studio that feels more risky, and for a viewer, it's less familiar and comfortable. Look at the breakout (or even the flop) terrible cartoon adaptations of the past few years, pretty much all of them have a simple easy to sum up concept. Marmaduke is a dog who is big and hard to control. Garfield is fat and sarcastic, has a luckless owner Jon, and torments a dog called Odie. The smurfs are magical gnome men, have an enemy called Gargamel and there's only one girl one. The Chipmunks are naughty/smart/chubby respectively, have a caretaker called Dave and sing in silly voices. Yogi Bear steals picnic baskets, is in conflict with a park ranger and has a small friend called Booboo. For all these movies, a sizeable part of the audience was familiar with the basic setup, and whatever plot the movie stapled on top of it they went in with a broad knowledge of the base situation. Popeye is like these, Betty Boop, for most people, isn't. Fatkraken fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jun 22, 2014 |
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Jun 22, 2014 18:16
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redcheval posted:Funnily I kind of agree, but I just love the way that it looks. I'm also incredibly jazzed to see what Glen Keane is up to these days. Maybe it's just me but after Disney gutted its animation department it's always really exciting to see legends like Keane still working in 2D. Now do one where the boy is a ballet dancer and the girl is a rock climber 
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Jun 28, 2014 11:18
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an overdue owl posted:Question for you guys, it's my Grandad's birthday coming up soon and he really enjoys animated films. He likes studio Ghibli and has most of their stuff, he also enjoys Aardman Animations and he LOVED The Triplets of Belleville. He owns a lot of films and I was wondering if anyone could recommend something less mainstream or well known that might be a good gift for him. Or even if there are any artwork books that someone who enjoys these kinds of things would find interesting. has he seen Earnest and Celestine?
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Jul 7, 2014 11:21
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Madurai posted:It's doubly odd because the original Nausicaä was already the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the story, which at the time the movie was made, hadn't even finished yet. Of all of Miyazaki's works, it's the one that could really stand a remake. As a series. Yeah, the comic is dense as hell, super complex and REALLY loving heavy at times. It's only four volumes, which isn't huge for manga, but there's a hell of a lot packed into those volumes There are also some bizarrely striking similarities with certain aspects of Evangelion, specifically the poison induced madness of Kushanas mother and the breakdown of Asukas mother, both of whom believe a rag doll to be their daughter, as witnessed BY that daughter. Anno actually worked on the animated version of Nausicaa, the scene where the melting God Warrior crawls over the dunes and laser beams the Ohmu was one of his, and wanted to do a side story to the Manga based around Kushana, which Miyazaki refused.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:25
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Samuel Clemens posted:I think you meant seven volumes, unless that's a joke I'm not getting. Ah you're right, I have the old "perfect" collections (that were shrunk, flopped, printed in the wrong colour ink and had all the sound effects redrawn...), so I always think of it as four not seven. In any case, it's about 1000 pages total, which isn't very long for manga, but stylistically it's unlike any other Manga I've read so it's hard to compare.
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Dec 12, 2014 00:55
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I liked the trailer too, it's broad strokes but broad strokes can work in comedy.
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Dec 12, 2014 11:17
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Das Boo posted:I'd be pleased to see someone do a breakdown of Mars Needs Moms. I have no idea what the gently caress that thing even was other than ugly. YES! I never watched it because it looked awful, and I've heard it's offensive and tone deaf on about seven different levels. I'd love to see someone do a break-down-take-down.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:49
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Tartarus Sauce posted:I also think it's more a movie for adults than for children, honestly. I've yet to meet a kid who saw it and genuinely enjoyed it. I haven't seen the movie, but I agree that none of the pre-publicity really made it look like a movie aimed at small children, whatever the nature of the source material. It definitely sold itself as a thoughtful film ABOUT childhood for people who have come out the other side.
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Dec 22, 2014 12:32
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Shrek was on TV the other day. What I was struck by was it's a) quite good (if more dated than Toy Story due to greater reliance on pop culture) and b) loving PIG ugly. The ogres look fine, the animals are mostly great, but the human beings just look horrific, stiff, lifeless and unappealing. Fortunately 80% of the heavy lifting is done by non human characters, but the crowd scenes are just awful. If they'd ramped up the cartoonishness of the people to match the mythical creatures and the animals it would have been enormously improved from a visual standpoint
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Dec 27, 2014 17:46
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Pick posted:The original Shrek is a drat good movie. Especially when you consider when it was made. It doesn't seem particularly out-of-the-ordinary now, but I think it helped bring in a new wave of more sophisticated family films. Yeah, as I said it's a perfectly fine movie, it's more some of the design decisions, they were more than capable technologically of making good looking characters (Shrek himself works fine, the Donkey is fine, the dragon is drat nice and bit part fantasy creatures like the gingerbread man, pinocchio and the blind mice look OK too) but the human characters just look awful, both static and in motion.
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Dec 27, 2014 18:04
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