March palette cleansers

New releases will be low on my list of priorities for the next few weeks, but anything I do happen to see in the 'Oscar off-season' (three so far) I'll mention here.

2016 predictions coming later this spring.

Review - Cinderella

Traditionalists can be forgiven for continually scoffing at Walt Disney Pictures for their current habit of repurposing their most beloved animated classics into money-sponging live-action productions. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland have already fallen victim to the artistically dubious Mirror Mirror, Maleficent and Tim Burton's unspeakable 2010 eyesore, with plans afoot for everything from Beauty and the Beast to Dumbo to Winnie the Pooh.
This year's episode of 'remake musical chairs' is none other than Cinderella.

Purists' initial reaction may be to cringe and look away, but with the right tone in the right directorial hands (in this case, the aptly theatrical Kenneth Branagh), who's to say that these relics can't be improved, even if only mildly?

While Walt's 1950 hit about the woebegone dreamer with the glass slippers may be remembered as a classic, it's sometimes misremembered as 'good' classic.
Truth is, it simply does not hold up to modern scrutiny, proving to be more Tom & Jerry cartoon than cinematic achievement, and only peripherally about its titular maiden. If any of Disney's dusty animated properties was due for a refurbishing,
it was this one.

One Category at a Time: Animated Short

Year in and year out, this is always one of my favourite categories, boasting a wonderfully diverse array of styles that make it well worth your time to seek out the Oscar Shorts program that brings them to theatres. While I still lament that Glen Keane's stunning Duet was left on the sidelines (ditto Bill Plympton's trippy Footprints), there's still lots to enjoy in the five toons that made the cut.

'Dragons 2' Secures its Oscar-by-Default Position

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2 took home six Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Directing for writer-director Dean DeBlois. With the Golden Globe also in hand and the former frontrunner out of the way, it's looking more and more like the beloved franchise will get to bask in Oscar glory.

Speaking of that former frontrunner, Academy snubees Phil Lord and Chris Miller did get a consolation prize for Best Writing, as appropriate a place as any to honour The LEGO Movie's meta comedy stylings.

Among Dragons' remaining Oscar competition, The Boxtrolls won two richly deserved trophies (for its immaculate production design and Ben Kinsgley's inimitable performance), while Big Hero 6 took home only one (albeit a hard-earned one for it cool animated effects).

But Disney can take solace in that fact that their Best Animated Short Oscar contender Feast won its correlative category here. The crowd-pleasing toon is indeed a formidable threat for the Academy Award.

Sadly, GKIDS offerings Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya were too modest to impress the organization. See all the winners after the cut.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Guys, we need to talk about Best Animated Feature. Most years, this is one category that hardly requires discussion at all. If it isn't a slam dunk victory for one obvious frontrunner (which it almost always is), then it can at least be boiled down to a two-horse race with the also-rans far in the distance. This year was shaping up to be another easy call you could use to inflate your prediction accuracy, until the biggest shocker of nomination morning. Everyone enjoys griping about presumed snubs that ultimately don't affect the outcome of the awards race, but this is one snub that has truly blown the category wide open.

The cast of The LEGO Movie is stunned by its Oscar snub!

Review - Big Hero 6

With Marvel Comics now securely locked beneath the turrets of Sleeping Beauty's castle, Walt Disney Animation is finally trying their hand at the superhero genre with Big Hero 6; A sanitized adaptation (directed by Chris Williams and Don Hall) of a comic book series so obscure, you'd never guess it was a Marvel property were it not for the obligatory Stan Lee cameo.

Set in the vaguely futuristic city of San Fransokyo – essentially San Francisco with some Asian facades – Big Hero 6 starts as a story of two orphaned brothers... because it wouldn't be Disney without some tragic backstory. The youngest, Hiro (Ryan Potter), squanders his prodigious robotics aptitude on seedy underground bot fights, much to the chagrin of the eldest, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), who applies his equally impressive knack for engineering at a cutting-edge technical institute.

Animated Shorts finalists give me a firm rooting interest...

Normally, when the Academy announces its shortlist of Animated Short contenders, a handful of them can already be found online. This year, the only readily available one is Duet, by legendary Disney character animator Glen Keane. And I can tell you right now that I'm rooting for him all the way.

Not that I necessarily think his elegantly simple 3-and-a-half minute short will be the best (some of his competition looks equally impressive), but the simple fact that it's Keane -- the man who breathed palpable life into Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Rapunzel -- who would be credited with the Oscar is enough for me to throw all my cheering power behind it.

One... er, Three Categories at a Time: The Shorts

For the last several years, Shorts International has done an excellent job at bringing the Oscar nominated short to theatres and other online outlets so that ordinary plebeians like myself can actually see all the entries in these once marginalized categories. There's something to be said for the creative liberation that many filmmakers enjoy when working with a shorter format, and this year's strong crop of mini-movies certainly verifies that. At the end of the day, good storytelling knows no length.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Last year saw what many assume to be the closest race in the twelve year history of this category, as Brave edged out Wreck-It Ralph. Even with two great movies like those in play, I still thought at the time that it had been a thin year for animation in 2012. Boy, was I unprepared for the sorry state affairs this year, which claims arguably the weakest list of animated releases to date. Accordingly, the resulting Oscar lineup contains two films that shouldn't be in the awards conversation at all, two films that should be in the conversation but would not have made it in a stronger year, and one film which is still widely unseen!

Review - Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks takes us behind the development of the Disneyfication of the Disneyfication of Mary Poppins (how meta!), the movie rights to which author P.L. Travers was notoriously resistant to sign over.

Emma Thompson plays Travers ('Mrs.' Travers, as she'll quickly tell you she prefers to be addressed), at the end of her rope and in need of money, urged by her agent to let Walt Disney Studios turn her beloved childrens book Mary Poppins into a feature film. She is loathe to let her precious creation become trivialized by the kid-friendly brand, but reluctantly agrees to travel to L.A. to work with Disney's writers and tunesmiths. Among her many insistences are that the film not be a musical, not star Dick Van Dyke, and contain no animation nor the color red. As history tells us, Disney reneged – or at least changed Travers' mind – on those stipulations.

Review - Frozen

Casual moviegoers with kids to entertain for an hour or so can be forgiven for thinking that the latest animated effort from Walt Disney Studios is little more than a slapsticky romp about an impish snowman. That is, after all, the only clue they've been given by the TV ads and movie posters, but those only represent the tip of the proverbial ice berg. With Frozen, Disney actually makes as earnest an attempt as they have in the last 15 years to recapture the magic of their 1990s musical heyday, with a Broadway pedigree cast and not one, but two new Disney princesses front and centre.

The story, written by Shane Morris and co-directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, is based very loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although its vague Scandinavian setting seems to be all that was retained from Anderson's original 19^th century fable. This re-imagining tells of two princesses in the fictional land of Arendelle. Elsa, the eldest and therefore first in line to inherit the crown, was born with the magical ability to form ice and snow with the slightest gesture. Anna, the youngest, adores frolicking in the indoor winter wonderlands her sister can conjure, until a near-death accident convinces their parents that the girls should be separated and Elsa's powers kept under wraps.

Sunday Top Ten - Animated Disney films

It feels like it's been ages since I last cobbled together a Sunday Top Ten list... because it has. But if I don't do one now, before the heat of Oscar season really starts beating down upon us, then it'd never get done! So here's a top ten list that a number of people have been asking for.

In anticipation of Frozen's imminent release (which I am very much looking forward to), I've finally joined the sizable flock of Gen-Y-ers on the Internet who have their own distinct ranking of the animated features of Walt Disney Studios. No two lists (and there are a ton of them out there) are quite the same, but they all share one thing in common: No one has an easy time making them.

I've discovered that my own relationship with the iconic studio's 52 theatrical releases – needless to say, the works of Pixar do not count – is a conflicted and perpetually evolving one. As a child of the 90s being raised on the miracle of “home video”, I indiscriminately loved Disney films of all ages, from the antiquated Snow White to their most state-of-the-art releases. Frankly, I couldn't tell that some of these films were made 60 years apart, and the notion of systematically ranking them against each other never crossed my mind for even a split second. It was the only phase of my life when what I felt for the movies was pure, unconditional love.

As my burgeoning interest in cinema (and a nettlesome sense of pretentiousness) began to develop in adolescence, I suddenly found that certain toons I had blissfully smiled through not long ago were failing to pass my new-found discernment. At the same time, new charms and nuances that had flown over my head when I was knee-high began to reveal themselves. The magic wasn't gone from these films – not all of them. The magic was simply changing. Letting a movie win you over a second time but for different reasons is a special sensation.

Weighing a combination childhood nostalgia and that unnameable quality that genuinely speaks to me as an adult was the only way I could come close to sussing out a top ten. I'm sure many readers will cry foul that 'this' film or 'that' film was omitted, but I believe it to be an appropriately diverse and personal list that nicely represents the things I love most about the Disney legacy. And no, I did not have an easy time making it (although long-time readers should easily be able to predict my #1 pick). 

So without further ado, my top ten Disney animated features:

Early Oscar predictions - Part 3

We're taking a look at Best Animated Feature and three of the visual craft categories this week; Cinematography, Editing, and Effects. Next week we'll complete the visual crafts with Production Design, Costume Design, and Makeup.

Best Animated Feature

Another unrequested Pixar sequel (well, prequel) doesn't have me all that titillated, but the steadily increasing quality of Disney's output these last few years has me excited for their upcoming musical fantasy Frozen, based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. If Pixar and Dreamworks disappoint, that might also open the doors to GKIDS' art house titles, which this year includes 2012 Cannes entry Ernest & Celestine.

One Category at a Time: Animated Short

Oh, if only it were a normal year! Best Animated Short would be so much easier to predict if only it were a normal year! But as we've been observing throughout the season, this Oscar year is anything but normal, and that abnormality extends to the arena of live-action and animated short films. For the first time ever, they are being sent on screeners to Academy members, all of whom are now welcome to vote, going by nothing more than the honour system that they did indeed watch the nominated films.

Some of the logic guiding pundits through the Animated Short race (filled with delights on a yearly basis) is that block voting will benefit studio entries like Paperman and Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”, whereas the old voting system would certainly have been more advantageous to lengthier and more artistically rendered fare like Head Over Heels or Adam & Dog.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Never can I remember the race for Best Animated Feature being as competitive as its been this year. Not that I think it's been a particularly stellar year for the medium. To me, the closeness of the race is due to all the nominees achieving roughly the same level of enjoyable mediocrity, with one standout clearly above the rest, but that doesn't mean it has the Oscar locked up.

Annie Award nominations

Nominations for the 40th annual Annie Awards have been announced by ASIFA-Hollywood. Leading the pack are the prize hopefuls from the Mouse House: Pixar's Brave and Disney's Wreck-It Ralph each landed ten nominations. ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania took eight apiece. DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians nabbed six.

More than ever, the organization feels like one with a severe identity crisis. In order to quell backlash from the realization a few years back of a disproportionally DreamWorks-based voting membership, they have been continually tweaking their voting process to cast a very broad net. It's more of a dishonour not to be nominated! And yet they still manage to miss obvious achievements in several categories. How does Brave not get cited for storyboarding? How does Frankenweenie lose out on character design? How do Wreck-It Ralph leads John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman get passed over for Alan Tudyk's broad impersonation of Ed Wynn in Voice Acting?

All in all, take it with a grain of salt. This group is hardly an influential one when it comes to the awards race.

Also nominated here are Animated Short shortlisters Paperman, The Longest Daycare, and Head Over Heals.

Best Animated Feature
Brave – Pixar Animation Studios
Frankenweenie – The Walt Disney Studios
Hotel Transylvania – Sony Pictures Animation
ParaNorman – Focus Features
Rise of the Guardians – DreamWorks Animation
The Pirates! Band of Misfits – Aardman Animations
The Rabbi’s Cat – GKIDS
Wreck-It Ralph – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Review - Wreck-It Ralph

Spinning off of an imaginative, Monsters, Inc-like concept about a community of video game characters living within the same arcade, Wreck-It Ralph may seem at a distance to be little more than a nostalgia trip for parents and a seizure-inducing distraction for their kids, but the marketing is a mirage. While it starts out merely as a clever homage to the arcade culture of the eighties, it transitions into something more substantial and compelling before its ingenious but admittedly thin premise has the opportunity to wear out its welcome. You need not be a gamer in order to relate to this beautifully spun tale about seeking acceptance and discovering self-worth, which is frankly the best movie Walt Disney Studios has given us since its 1990s heyday. It's like the Pixar movie we never got last year (what is this Cars 2 of which you speak?).

We all know what it's like to be in a rut; that feeling of desperation that comes from going through the motions of a dissatisfying routine, the frustration of being doomed to your “lot in life” when you desire so much more. Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) understands it all too well. He, the villain of an antiquated arcade game called “Fix-It Felix Jr.”, has been performing the same Sisyphean grind for 30 years. Ralph wrecks the building, Felix (John McBrayer) fixes the building. Felix is rewarded with medals and admiration from the tenants, Ralph is tossed in the mud and made to sleep on a heap of discarded bricks all by himself. Sunrise, sunset.

Review - Beauty and the Beast 3D

Aiming to take a load off my awards-addled mind – something I recommend everyone do this time of year – I spent the afternoon taking in the 3D resurrection of an old favourite. Springboarding from the surprisingly profitable release of The Lion King last fall, Disney is giving their timeless musical romance Beauty and the Beast the same treatment in hopes of drawing in audiences over less-than-compelling January fare.

It didn't take much to get my butt in a seat. The film is, in my opinion, a high watermark for Walt Disney Animation. While The Little Mermaid is justly adored and credited with being the game-changer for the struggling studio in 1989, Beauty and the Beast must be acknowledged as the film that refined the new formula to the point of near perfection, approaching the love story with more emotional maturity and the musical format with more sophistication than any of its many predecessors in the Disney canon. It won unanimous critical praise and a cool Best Picture nomination as reward. That it continues to charm new generations of movie lovers to this day is merely a verification of the "instant classic" status that was bestowed upon it in 1991.

Sunday Top Ten - Animated films that didn't do it for me

Some months ago, I considered doing a top ten animated films list at the suggestion of some very animated readers (pun, unfortunately, intended). After a quick draft, it became immediately apparent that my list was redundant. Most of the films on there (which show an almost unfair leaning towards the works of Pixar) have already been praised by me on this blog, and countless others I imagine. Something that might be (only slightly) more unique to me is a list of cartoons which I regret to admit that I truly, madly, deeply hate. I've been meaning to blow off some pent up negativity anyway.

Don't think that I'm trying to be a dick here. I like animation... good animation, that is. But some people have a hard time realizing that some of their favourite cartoons are, in fact, crap. The following list is a cold shower on ten animated films, revered by many as childhood staples, that just didn't do it for me.

Sunday Top Ten: Sound effects

Time has been somewhat tight for me this week, so you're getting an abbreviated edition of the Sunday Top Ten; a quick countdown of some of my favourite movie-related sound effects.