The Snowman, Street of Crocodiles, Girls Night Out, Creature Comforts, Screen Play, Bob’s Birthday, The Man With the Beautiful Eyes, City Paradise, Rabbit: A truncated litany of some of the brilliant shorts that since the mid-1980’s have defined British animation the world over, and are jaw-droppingly impressive. What they, and the unlisted others, share apart from their creative potency is, perversely enough, an institution. A government mandated, uniquely funded institution that luckily for all of us was peopled by passionate souls who cared about art and diversity (writ large), and who actively contrived to put money and resources into the hands of the most talented, fecund creators they could uncover. No, not the NFB (but thanks for thinking of us) Britain’s Channel 4 – or Channel Four, more correctly – television network.

In British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, Clare Kitson, Channel 4’s commissioning editor for animation throughout the 1990s, has written a humane and intimate history of the ups and downs of animation at the Channel, leavening it with just the right amount of dry wit, personal insight and anecdote. The book is a deft balance between an academic tome offering historical context and background and an eye-opening guide to anyone interested in the many behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings that go on to actually get these kinds of films made and-most importantly in Channel 4’s case-on to air.

As an NFB producer, the themes that resonated for me (both for the echoes and the dissonances) are Kitson’s perspective as a commissioning editor rather than a producer, and the Channel’s intrinsic ability (and sometimes inability) to get things onto TV screens around the UK. While these are not mass audiences by most standards, they are certainly much larger audiences than short animation otherwise gets on broadcast television – if our films get onto television at all. Such a luxury, but as Kitson points out also such a curse, was each season’s scheduling matrix even for a broadcaster so committed to diversities of topic, technique and running length.

The Channel 4 Factor is valuable history. But as memoir about what Kitson likes and why, it’s revealing and fun, and already well exceeds the price of admission. The middle section, in particular, reveals the makings of several of the Channel’s most famous films from her own unique vantage point along with the filmmakers’ own tellings of the tale. It’s as a sociological dissection of how such an organization came about, almost from whole cloth, where Clare hits her stride. As a case study, Kitson offers up much of the recipe for success that created and sustained both Channel 4 and the NFB. Indeed, parallels to the NFB regularly caused me pleasant surprise. Compressed in active years, Channel 4’s animation history is like the NFB’s but accordioned into itself three times over.

I suspect many producers see commissioning editors as mercurial demagogues, unaware of real work of filmmaking and blithely changing objectives and mandates from season to season. Kitson quite effectively put that myth to rest. She reveals the very passionate people who created an ethos committed to being background players. Producers boosted artists by giving them money to make films, but more importantly by creating a culture that was willing to take big risks on small films. Here’s the original job posting for Channel 4 commissioning editors:

Television production experience may be an advantage but is not essential. Whether your passion is angling or cooking, fringe theatre, rock, politics, philosophy or religion, if you believe you can spot a good idea and help others realise it on the screen, we are looking for commissioning editors and would like to hear from you.

Clearly, the early, passionate years of Channel 4 were driven by both by its unique mission and by strength of personality and will of its editors and executives. What kind of society is predisposed to permitting such a creature to be born, and more importantly, to live and thrive? Is it peculiar to Anglo-Saxon socialism, which would also explain the NFB?

Kitson writes about diversity and minority remits (but not just about skin colour or ethnicity or orientation) and cultural big thinkers who believed in social change and art as the change tool. She admires a 1980s UK society and a handful of faithful who were ready to lift and be lifted to a new plateau of humanity and criticality, of engagement and responsibility. While not of the same soaring oratory and historic portent of Barack Obama’s presidency, Channel 4 changed the game. I wonder if Mr. Obama might see PBS and the NEA anew were he to read The Channel 4 Factor. I suspect he already carries those convictions or ones quite similar, but I’m quite certain he’d enjoy the animation education he’d get from Kitson's caring and insightful writing.

Of course, there’s no telling what the success-to-fail ratio was for Channel 4’s roster, much as it’s hard to know for the NFB unless one is dogged and inclined to statistics. There’s a chance many animators are like me and prone to apocrypha rather than evidence. Although I do think it’s absolutely true that reputations are built on equal parts evidence and belief, and it’s only when belief has no tangible, recent success to riff on that paper lions are revealed and fairly scrutinized. The ratios may have dipped a bit in recent years, but Kitson leaves us with hope for British animation by the book’s end, and it’s a hope I share in all my various capacities within the animation shorts world.

We always need a secular, art-centric “city upon a hill” that challenges and binds us. There are precious few such institutions left, but Clare Kitson has given valuable clues and insights in how to go forth and multiply.

Michael Fukushima is a producer in the National Film Board of Canada’s Animation Studio, apparently with a bit of closeted anglophilia.

Where To Get It

British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, by Clare Kitson published by University of Indiana Press (North America) and Parliament Hill Publishing (UK).

Labels: books, Clare Kitson, reviews, shorts, Television, United Kingdom

I tend to be very protective of the books I’ve read and loved, and I feel that most film adaptations don’t do their literary sources justice. Author Neil Gaiman’s repeated positive references to the progress of the stop-motion animation film adaptation of his Hugo-award winning short novel Coraline on his blog and in interviews have kept me hoping for the best, and I’ve enjoyed the vignettes and teasers Laika has released. Nothing in the promotional material gave me cause for concern: Henry Selick seemed to be treating it with respect. And that’s not a surprise, because when Gaiman completed Coraline he handed it to his agent and asked her to send a copy to Henry Selick before it had even been published. When the author trusts the filmmaker enough to do that, it eliminates the need for excessive amounts of anxiety on my part.

Director and scriptwriter Henry Selick has created a fantastic (in the true sense of the word) adaptation of the world in the multiple-award-winning book by Neil Gaiman. The screenplay is remarkably faithful to the book, with the exception of the addition of a new character. Wybie, a boy approximately Coraline’s age, was created by the filmmaker to serve as a foil for Coraline. In a book an omniscient narrator can share a character’s thoughts with the reader, but in a film that character sometimes needs interaction with others to evoke their feelings or thoughts. Wybie serves his purpose, and doesn’t detract from the story or from Coraline herself in any way. And whereas the book has Coraline very deliberately planning her final triumph over her Other Mother, the film has a more immediate and action-based conflict and resolution. If you’ve read the book, you’ll have expectations of the mouse circus: it’s delicious in film form, too. The pacing is excellent, the balance of dialogue to action is good, and each character is well-defined. All in all, the screenplay is a success.

My other concern about the film was its use of 3D technology. Too often this technology is used as a gimmick or a way to prop up what might otherwise be a less than successful sequence. This concern, too, was laid to rest in the enjoyably chilling opening sequence. Coraline is the first animated stop-motion feature to be filmed entirely in 3D, and successfully uses stereoscopy to create a seemingly more realistic stop-motion animation. There’s no gimmickry here, only a serious use of the technology to enhance the entire experience and to create the feeling of a stage with depth instead of a flat screen. There are a couple of things in the opening sequence that move out toward the audience, a nod to the experience the technology can give, but in general the technology is used to create the sense of depth and space. It makes the story more real instead of pointing out its meta-reality.

The animation is outstanding. The smoothness of the motion, the camera moves and angles are justifiably jaw-dropping. The production design is incredible. Apart from the unity of style throughout the design, the colour palette and texture are big players in the film. There’s a certain excitement knowing that the animated film you’re about to see has been actually constructed in tangible, physical form. The magic is real; it’s not an effect. Of course, the star of the film is also only twenty-two inches tall, but that doesn’t make it any easier to build her world realistically. Textures and fabrics need to be to scale, and everything needs to be as realistic as possible. For certain close-up shots of hands and such things, larger models need to be built to provide the proper sense of proportion and scale. The animating team also used rapid prototyping technology to create the multitude of facial expressions exhibited by the puppets. Working from scans and casts of original sculpts, the rapid prototype department built multiple replacement faces in CG modeling programs, which were then “printed” by three-dimensional object printers to create the puppet faces for the replacement animation technique, hand-finishing each face before applying it to the puppet.

The film features excellent voice acting from a strong cast. There’s no stunt casting here: every voice actor has been cast for a genuine talent and what they bring to the role. Dakota Fanning manages a wonderful balance between eleven-year-old bravado composed of aggression and fear, while Teri Hatcher’s Mother and Other Mother are a terrific contrast between mundane and just too good to be true. The delightful John Hodgman voices Father and Other Father.

Bruno Coulais' score fits right into the film without being memorable on its own, supporting the story without calling attention to itself. The children’s choral pieces successfully contribute to the unsettling feel of the film, particularly in the opening sequence. The score features lots of harp, which creates an idyllic feel for the Other House. Much of the music makes one think of a music box, a parallel image for the falseness of the world beyond the secret door. There’s a fun little They Might Be Giants ditty sung for Coraline by her Other Father, too.

While the film projects a strong message of self-reliance, overcoming fear, and being careful about what one wishes for, it also features creepy visuals and chilling concepts, and could well serve as nightmare fodder for younger children. (Heck, I know adults who are unsettled by the notion of buttons for eyes and who refuse to see the film.) Parents considering bringing a child to the PG film should view the available trailers and excerpts available at www.coraline.com, and evaluate their child’s maturity level and story preferences carefully beforehand. (On his blog, Neil Gaiman addresses this problem by saying much the same thing: You know your child better than the filmmakers and the MPAA do.)

Stay till the end of the credits for a credit cookie, as well as a bonus “for those in the know.”

Labels: 3D, Coraline, features, Henry Selick, Laika, Neil Gaiman, reviews, stereoscopy, stop-motion

For the first time in a long time, I saw a Disney film and missed the publicity hype preceding it. Except for some of the recent commentary scanned on Cartoon Brew (a testament to my level of Busy; this blog is a pleasure in life that you need to take your time to read), I managed not to see any web banners, marquee posters, or newspaper, radio or television ads.

At a much earlier time, I read of the changes to the stewardship of the Bolt in the wake of restructuring changes at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. I knew from the Brewmasters' reports that the film had changed markedly from its original vision, but I hadn't really thought about it lately.

But time had passed, and Bolt was not really on my mind as the studio was gearing up for the film. I managed to side-step the Disney hype machine this one time. So I'm writing this based entirely on my impressions of what I saw in the cinema on Wednesday.

Bolt is a winner.

There are tons of laughs in the film, but you don't feel like you're having your buttons pushed, and the dialogue is really snappy, but not in the way I find a lot of mainstream animation features tend to do it - lots of pop culture references, "aren't we clever" one-offs that get dated quickly. The lines are truly clever and fit the characters' perfectly.

Also, it's no secret that I'm not a fan of stunt-casting. The celebrity voice talent do their job well and don't get in my way of enjoying the film. They make their characters more believable and serve characters, not the other way around.

I did see the trailer for this film just this morning, and I must say I'm glad I went into without any preconceptions. As a result, the opening scene was more thrilling and taut than I think it would have been if I knew what was coming.

This is a fairly conventional Disney family feature, but I don't mean that in a bad way. Yes, it's safe. But it doesn't draw away from the fact that the film is engaging, the timing and pacing are dead-on, and the character animation is above-average. I can't help but wonder how much further the character animation could have been pushed if it were hand-drawn. Like Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda, there is a point where the animation style changes and I wonder, why does all digital animation that touts the CG label feel it has to be hyper-realistic? However, I don't really spend much time on it because I thought that the animation I was watching was well-done.

Speaking of techniques, I did watch this film in 3D (as well as trailers for Blue Sky's next Ice Age instalment, and Pixar's Up), and as much as I get annoyed by reading reviews that solely focus on a new technique or "gimmick" I liked the use of 3D in the film (as well as the trailers) because they all finally got something right. Unlike Beowulf, I never felt like the whole point of making Bolt was so we could watch it in 3D. Instead of setting up shots so that the viewer would get the feeling of things being moved toward them, the enhancement was used to convey a feeling of depth. There was very little effort made to break the fourth wall. Instead, the screen was the boundary for the actors on a stage.

The next Disney feature regardless of technique better be good, because a lot of viewers will be disappointed if it doesn't entertain as much as Bolt.

Labels: 3D, Bolt, CGI, Disney, features, reviews, stereoscopy

I hate it—I mean, really hate it—that whenever an animated feature is reviewed, writers feel compelled to mention whether or not kids would like it. It's a testament to the fact that, regardless of what the individual writers, editors or publishers feel, the public at large still can't process the idea that adults might want to watch animated features for themselves.

Past responses to this prejudice have included making films that are most definitely not for children, making films that are mainly for kids but include nod-and-wink throwaway gags for adults, and making films that kids and adults can enjoy equally. These have worked to varying degrees, but they all carry with them a fairly standard idea of what children will watch and enjoy.

WALL-E is a bit different in this regard, because it expands the idea of what kids will find entertaining. When Cast Away was released eight years ago, a big deal was made of the fact that there was no dialogue for almost half the movie (in the literal sense; Tom Hanks's character did speak, but no one answered). A similar fuss is being made over the lack of dialogue in WALL-E, but the unspoken question is, will kids be able to sit still for a 103-minute film where the main characters rarely speak?

From the reactions of the kids in the audience (especially the ones in the row right behind me) on Wednesday night, the answer is yes. And in the same way that Tom Hanks's acting was credited for making the dialogue-free parts of Cast Away so compelling, the Pixar animators must be given props for the remarkable acting in WALL-E.

With one exception, none of the many robot characters in the movie can truly speak, and the two that do (WALL-E and EVE) pretty much only say their names, each other's names, and the word "directive." That means that every robot character has to rely on rigid bodies and eyes (or eye surrogates) to communicate and express emotion. Interestingly, WALL-E himself is among the least flexible of the movie's robots; he has treads instead of feet, a pair of rigid mechanical viewfinders instead of an eye-mimicking LED display, and unbendable arms with three flat "fingers" at the end.

In sum, the movie has to be carried by characters that can't speak and are all limited compared to human bodies, and the main character is in some ways the most limited. And it works, thanks to Pixar's careful application of animation's twin traditions of pantomime and bringing inanimate objects to life. There are several references in WALL-E to A113, an in-joke that refers to CalArts's old character animation classroom. In few other films is that gag as relevant as it is in WALL-E; the movie is such an accomplished expression of the pre-digital yet universal art of conveying emotion and story purely through movement that when human characters show up and start talking, they seem clumsy and inelegant in comparison.

So, yes, kids will like WALL-E, as will adults. And we have the art of animation to thank for that.

Labels: CGI, computer animation, features, Pixar, reviews

It's a given that even with such a wealth of animated shorts on the Internet, there's nothing like rubbing shoulders with like-minded people at a film festival. But when it comes to festival compilations on DVD, things get a little trickier. After all, if you're going to watch a bunch of shorts on the small screen, why buy them on DVD when you can probably find many of them, legally or otherwise, online?

That question plagues the third iteration of the annual Animation Show DVD release; a quick glance at its contents revealed three shorts that I'd seen online already, and I'm sure most, if not all, of the rest are lurking around somewhere.

Ah, but then you wouldn't have the distinct pleasure of watching 103 minutes of some of the best shorts of the past three years by pressing just one button from the comfort of your couch. Really, there isn't a false note here. I've seen Rabbit, City Paradise, Tyger and Learn Self Defense a gazillion times, and cheerfully sat through them from start to finish again. The kaleidoscopic Collision was serviceable and short enough not to be too taxing, and One D entertained me despite its one-note gag, unsurprising animation in-joke and glaring technical inaccuracy. (Hello, these characters are two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. Watch Ladd Ehlinger, Jr.'s interpretation of Flatland to see it done right.) Overall, a nice variety of films in a nice variety of styles.

Also, you wouldn't get great extras like an animatic and three video interviews, along with text interviews you can read by putting the DVD into a computer. That's some good bang for the bucks.

For all that, though, there are a few things that bother me here. I'm still not sure if I'm keen on the DVDs including a bunch of shorts that weren't screened during the theatrical run. I expect to see shorts on the big screen that I won't see on DVD due to rights issues, but it feels kind of odd that neither medium, by itself, is the complete experience.

Most glaring, however, is the inclusion of an eight-minute trailer for MTV's The Maxx, which is stuck in the middle of the festival extras instead of with the MTV trailers. (The Animation Show DVD is distributed by MTV Home Entertainment.) It's strange, because it's not part of the festival content, but its placement implies inclusion in the festival. Er, um, why exactly? It feels like a bit of corporate pimping, which doesn't reflect well on anyone involved.

Where to Get It
Buy The Animation Show, Vol. 3 on DVD from Amazon.com

Labels: Animation Show, festivals, reviews, shorts

There are a few things I didn't like about Kung Fu Panda.

First, I couldn't take all the fat jokes. Actually, not the fat jokes per se, but one line ("I eat when I'm nervous") adds a subtext to some of them. In the funny-animal world of Kung Fu Panda, it kind of makes sense that everyone would make fun of title character Po, as he's the only rotund character around, while being somewhat graceless and easily tired despite his designation as the prophesied Dragon Warrior. The problem is, that one sentence (and one the end of a later scene) ratifies some of the stereotypes surrounding real-life overweight people by suggesting that he eats so much due to a lack of control (i.e., it's his fault he's fat; weight becomes a character issue). But he's a panda. Of course he's round, and of course he eats a lot. It's like criticizing a frog for eating flies. The movie could have played out the same way without that element.

Second, when Po wistfully looks off in the distance at the film's opening because he dreams of being more than a noodle cook—exactly like in every other animated feature in which our frustrated hero yearns for something more than his or her dreary life—I wanted to scream and throw something at the screen. Enough, already!

And yet, much to my surprise, I enjoyed the rest of the movie. I say "To my surprise" because I'd barely gotten out of the lobby after Bee Movie when I realized I was sick of DreamWorks' apparently endless formula of using wisecracking New York humour. Same with the earlier Madagascar, where they were often joking about New York. It's a bad sign when side characters (the penguins) uspstage everyone else.

Ah, but Kung Fu Panda doesn't do that. It is a period piece, more or less, with all of the characters firmly entrenched in a village in China, much as in any live-action kung fu movie. And while much of the humour is verbal, it's equally physical, sometimes at the same time. In fact, for all of the brouhaha about Madagascar's cartooniness, I'd say Kung Fu Panda comes closest in practice to the Looney Tunes comedy aesthetic; that is, in making the timing and snappiness of the drawings as important as the timing and snappiness of the jokes, balancing quiet with loud, broad with subtle, and seen with unseen. Mix that in with crackling action scenes that can get laughs without sacrificing tension, and you've got—surprise!—an enjoyable animated comedy.

As much as I enjoyed it, though, I'm a little disappointed. The introductory scene, which is a tight bit of stylized hand-drawn animation, was so well done I was let down when we got to the CGI. As much as I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda as it was, I'd really like to see the movie they were hinting at.

Labels: CGI, computer animation, DreamWorks, features, reviews

Countless column inches, magazine pages and pixels have been devoted to the question/problem of racist black stereotypes in animation, and at some point someone says these cartoons need to be framed or presented in their historical context. It's unstated, but that phrase often means "Let's acknowledge that these cartoons were produced in a less enlightened time, and that the images are offensive. But man, are they funny. Can we go back to watching them, please?"

Not that the first sentence is untrue, but it's a simplistic reading at best. If you really want context, then start with Henry T. Sampson's That's Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, which catalogues the many American cartoons that used these images, along with plot descriptions, production credits, and industry publication reviews—necessary and welcome, but maybe a little too clinical. The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954, in contrast, takes the same kind of data as That's Enough Folks and shapes it into a decades-long narrative.

Lehman recounts a chronological history of film animation from its beginnings at the hands of J. Stuart Blackton through most of the Golden Age of animation, weaving in descriptions and explanations of the types of racist images used. This really does put things in context, as for the first time we get to see how the evolution of these images and the gags behind them corresponds to the evolution of animation, movies, pop culture and society at large.

After I finished the book—at 137 pages it's a quick read—it occurred to me that The Colored Cartoon is, in itself, an answer to many of the questions and misconceptions that have swirled around this debate for at least as long as I've observed it. Why is it okay to make fun of Elmer Fudd, who is white, but not black characters who chase Bugs Bunny? The seemingly obvious answer is that Elmer Fudd's skin colour isn't the source of the humour, his ineptitude is. For those that argue that a black character's ineptitude isn't necessarily racist, Lehman's long-range view breaks down the different types of stereotypes and why even the most innocuous-looking depictions were part of a larger trend. Is the call to stop broadcasting cartoons with these images a recent example of political correctness run amok? Hardly. The NAACP—you know, black people—have been protesting these cartoons since World War II. (If you'd read Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, you'd know that. But if your reading list is restricted to animation books, The Colored Cartoon will fill you in.)

The Colored Cartoon isn't perfect. Far from it, in fact. While I liked how Lehman sometimes talked about simple economic or technological issues (like the trouble early animators had with lip sync) and how they affected what was seen and heard onscreen, I was less enthused by some of his conjectures that were presented as fact. Was Bugs Bunny a descendant of African-American mythical trickster figures like Br'er Rabbit? Sure, I can get behind that interpretation. Does that make him, and his trademark cool, an example of black culture being mined and transformed for cartoons? Maybe, but that leads to the thorny question of intent. While animation artists like Bill Littlejohn and Martha Sigall weigh in throughout the book, they don't offer any insights here, which leaves Lehman's assertion as an untestable theory.

I'd have preferred if the book was longer (but then, with good books I usually do), held back on the theorizing and gave us more animator interviews, more in-depth stories of activism (I like Lehman's frank description of the NAACP's missteps, and I'd like to see more interviews in that area) and more industry insights—for starters. Still, imperfect doesn't mean bad. At the very least, The Colored Cartoon is a start—a start at providing the often-cited context for this debate that will allow it to move on to a different level. That alone makes it a worthy entry in this still-nascent field.

Where to Get It
Buy The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907-1954 from Amazon.com

Labels: books, Looney Tunes, reviews

If there were awards for truth in advertising, then Kino International would have to win something for the use of one adjective. The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto contains the bulk of the animation master's work, seven short films made between 1968 and 1979.

Kawamoto is considered a stop-motion animator, and his recent feature-length masterpiece, The Book of the Dead, features gorgeous sets to accompany his beautiful puppets. However, this DVD serves as a reminder that his shorts were rarely quite so straightforward. All of the films on the DVD involve the manipulation of physical objects—if not puppets, then cutouts—but Kawamoto freely mixes them with drawn animation and flat paper cutouts with varying degrees of abstraction.

In earlier films like 1972's The Demon, Kawamoto plays with this stylization by having characters move in sync with the background music's rhythm, almost as if they were performing the story as a dance. By the time of the final film, 1979's House of Flames, he's also using stark lighting and elegant compositions to suggest, at times, a stage play. The three middle films in the collection, An Anthropo-Cynical Farce, The Trip and A Poet's Life (from 1970, 1973 and 1974) all break from the use of puppets and the use of ancient Japan as a setting, but are no less compelling. They are perhaps a bit more obtuse in that unique way that independent animation from the 1970s could be.

Kino has also released the feature-length The Book of the Dead, which features some of Kawamoto's most exquisite—there's that word again—stop-motion work to date. Like his best-known short-form films, the movie features Buddhism in ancient Japan. However, this time Buddhist teachings are central to the film, as it takes place in the eighth century, around the time that Buddhism was being introduced to Japan from China. Unlike his shorts, Kawamoto has chosen here to fill out his sets with physical objects and far more characters, all realized with considerable detail. It's hard to watch a sequence with a room full of elegantly dressed puppets with their clothes blowing in the wind and not be awestruck by both the scene's verisimilitude and its poetry.

As lovely as these releases are, there are a few things I'd have liked to have seen. The Book of the Dead uses the English narration with no option to hear the original Japanese (though all the dialogue is still in Japanese, with optional subtitles) and neither disc includes any kind of extras. While Kawamoto's work speaks for itself, the level of craftsmanship on display on both DVDs leaves you wanting to see and hear more. Finally, completists are likely to wag their fingers: The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto lacks four shorts that were included on the Region 2 Kihachiro Kawamoto Work Collection DVD.

Where to Get It
Buy The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto from Amazon.com
Buy The Book of the Dead from Amazon.com
Buy Kihachiro Kawamoto Work Collection from YesAsia.com

Labels: anime, features, Kihachiro Kawamoto, reviews, shorts, stop-motion

A few weeks ago I watched Mind Game again, and not for the first time I wondered what director Masaaki Yuasa was up to post-Genius Party. And what do you know, shortly after I found out: he's directing the series Kaiba, which just started airing on the Japanese satellite channel WOWOW. Makoto Fukuda reviewed the first episode in today's Yomiuri Shimbun. As she describes it, the show is "set in a world when memories can be filed as data, and humans no longer regard the death of their physical bodies as the end of their lives."

I just finished watching the first episode, and I have to say that I agree with Fukuda's review, but she only hints at what I think makes it interesting. At its core, Kaiba offers up a lot of things we've seen before: the titular protagonist wakes up with amnesia, and is almost immediately attacked; strange machinelike creatures are attacking people while a ragtag resistance fights back; even the character designs, which Fukuda describes as echoing "those found in manga for children popular several decades ago" capture that 1960s and 1970s retro feel.

What Yuasa does is he mixes it up and makes it fresh. I like how little is explained as Kaiba makes his way through this new world. When the camera pans up or across in a scene, you're following his viewpoint. Nothing is explained to either of you, so you have to pay attention to everything you see. (Some things are conveniently spelled out, but as the title sequence hints that there's considerably more to Kaiba, you get the sense that there's information that should be filed away for later.) The world is just familiar enough that you know you're in a shady bar, but just weird-looking enough that you're trying to figure out what those lumpy wall protrusions are for. The character designs are retro, but they don't quietly elide the oddball wacky-looking characters I was fond of in older anime in favour of the graceful designs of the protagonists. I got a nice fix of people walking around with potato heads, wobbly jowls, bright red noses and the craziest hips you've ever seen. The cartooniness infects some of the action as well, but not in an at all jarring way. In some ways it's a better interpretation of what Tezuka did in his manga than the beautiful but perhaps too crisp Metropolis.

What I'm particularly fond of is Yuasa's interpretation of movement. As we saw in Mind Game, little of what he does falls into stock anime poses, staging or motion, and that feeling of always seeing something new is invigorating. Between the animation and the storyline—I particularly want to know what's going on with that bird-creature that's saved Kaiba three times now—Kaiba has my attention. I'm hoping someone picks it up domestically so I can watch it with subtitles, but, in another throwback to the old days, I'm perfectly willing to watch it entirely in Japanese just for the sake of seeing it.

Images and a Youtube trailer below.

Labels: anime, Kaiba, Madhouse, Masaaki Yuasa, reviews

DC: The New Frontier was an ambitious, twelve-issue series created by Darwyn Cooke that reimagined the circumstances of the first encounter of the DC superheroes who would become the Justice League in the late 1950s. Justice League: The New Frontier, its animated adaptation, is on the ambitious Warner Premier label, which aims to release OAVs based on DC properties, along with striking acquisitions like Appleseed: Ex Machina. And with all this ambition going around, you'd expect a pretty amazing end product, right?

Let me back up a bit. In 1998, I was blown away by the striking, dynamic opening sequence to Batman Beyond, so I interviewed the man who was responsible for it. Fellow Canuck Darwyn Cooke's background was originally in graphic design, and he brought a fresh approach to his animation work, and later to his comics.

Last year I picked up the trade paperback compilation of DC: The New Frontier and read the whole thing in two and a half hours. I'm a fast reader, so that's a bit long for me; but I kept stopping to admire Cooke's bold lines, his compositions and his colours. He's one of those artists who makes good work look much easier than it is.

All of this is in service to one hell of an idea. After World War II, the "mystery men" who aided the war effort—the Golden Age heroes like Hourman, Dr. Fate, Black Canary and the original Flash—are forced to register or retire as Cold War paranoia whips up. Superman and Wonder Woman sign loyalty oaths and work for the government. Batman goes underground. But now a new, younger breed of heroes are starting to pop up, working in secret to do good, like the new Flash and the Martian Manhunter—all at around the same time Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman are realizing their old ways aren't working anymore. (Cooke expertly lifts some of these ideas—in a good way—from previous must-read comics mini-series JSA: The Golden Age, The Dark Knight Returns, and Kingdom Come, all of which expertly mix adult themes with the mythological wonder of the superhero story.)

It can't be unintentional that these events mirror what happened to DC superhero comics themselves between the 1940s and 1960s; they too were neutered post-war, and the Silver Age of comics was officially kicked off in 1959 with the introduction of the new Flash, launching an era of the "scientific" superhero. Many Golden Age heroes were born from the war or mysticism, but in the Silver Age just as many came from space or had their origins in astronomy, chemistry or physics. Cooke mined this and wrapped the story of The New Frontier—a phrase from John F. Kennedy's Democratic Party nomination acceptance speech—in the sense of discovery, adventure and optimism of new scientific discoveries that mixed with the uncertainty of growing social upheavals.

Embodying this spirit and this conflict is Hal Jordan, a jet jockey who will become the new Green Lantern. Driven to see the stars, the pacifist Hal joins the Air Force during peacetime and becomes embroiled in the Korean War. But he's also a man utterly without fear; presented (for the second time) with a death-defying, world-on-his-shoulders mission, his only response (again) is a smile and the simple response, "Outstanding."

That's a lot to fit even into a year's worth of comics, which points to the animated version's biggest flaw. With a mere 75-minute running time, a lot had to be pared down. Many characters and events were eliminated, sidelined or combined, and the net effect is a feeling of being rushed. Comics are incredible because a single panel can represent a split second, or several years; narrative animation tends to be more literal, so Justice League: The New Frontier is actually about 75 selected minutes out of a few years' events.

That would be fine for a conventional three-act story, but the New Frontier comic flits between the threads of multiple storylines and people that are gradually pulled together, each at different speeds. The animated version sticks with the same structure but doesn't have the luxury of time, which eats into things like characterization, back story, pacing and explaining who the hell these less familiar characters are.

The same comic/animation tension affects the visuals, too. A quick glance at the credits reveals the combined talents of the last sixteen years' worth of animated DC series, and it's all right up there on the screen. There's no resting on laurels here; although they've defined and refined a particular vocabulary, they're always pushing things forward. Everything in Justice League: The New Frontier screams 1950s, from the UPA-ish opening scene to the Saul Bass-ish title sequence to the many iconic Cold War-era locations, from Vegas to roadside diners. Colour design, compositions and staging are as sophisticated as the story's ideas. But for my money it all falls apart whenever I look at Wonder Woman.

Darwyn Cooke's Wonder Woman is pure 1950's smoking-hot sexy with generous zaftig curves that convey life, passion and power. Meanwhile, the current incarnation of the Bruce Timm-derived style has become increasingly angular, and the two just don't fit. This tension affects all the characters to one degree or another.

Like the real and fictitious era it represents, Justice League: The New Frontier is about ambition, but also uncertainty. I applaud Warner Premier's very existence, and the resources they put behind such a project. But to shoehorn everything into another 75-minute DC superhero cartoon regardless of the original style or format seems short-sighted and short-changing. One of the factors behind the initial success of the Japanese OAV market was a freedom from format constrictions; expanding Justice League: The New Frontier to a longer running time or mini-series and letting more of the Cooke visual magic shine through would have been a bolder experiment, and captured the bold spirit of the comic at the same time.

Justice League: The New Frontier
Buy Justice League: The New Frontier DVDs and more from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
Buy DC: The New Frontier books and more from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

Labels: comics, Darwyn Cooke, DC Comics, features, OAVs, reviews, superheroes, Warner Bros.

Review by René Walling

Horton Hears a Who!, Dr. Seuss' classic tale of an elephant discovering a town on a speck is a childhood favourite for many people. The sheer inventiveness and magic of his book has been translated to an animated film before, with Ted Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) himself as producer. The question was, could the folks at Blue Sky expand a half-hour story into a feature without losing the magic in it? And could they do it without the author at the helm of the project?

Read the review

Labels: CGI, features, reviews

When I read the first Mechademia volume, I felt that it maintained a tenuous balance between different kinds of scholarly essays on manga and anime. Mechademia Vol. 2: Networks of Desire has about the same amount of works—23 contributions compared to the original's 20—and more of a focus.

The subtitle of this volume accurately describes the book's theme, and essays are divided into four sections (Shojo, Powers of Time, Animalization and Horizons). Each essay spins "desire"—and sometimes its own section title—in different ways.

Five essays in particular are standouts, and worth the price of the book on their own. Deborah Shamoon's "Revolutionary Romance: The Rose of Versailles and the Transformation of Shojo Manga," Toku Masami's "Shojo Manga! Girls' Comics! A Mirror of Girls' Dreams" and Keith Vincent's "A Japanese Electra and her Queer Progeny" combine to provide a rich, textured history of the origins and progression of shojo manga and their depictions of same-sex relationships. Miyao Daisuke's "Thieves of Baghdad: Transnational Networks of Cinema and Anime in the 1920s" offers a fascinating look at the "Japanification" of Noburo Ofuji's 1926 Bagudajo no kozoku (The Thief of Baguda Castle, incidentally part of the Cinémathèque Québecoise's early-anime retrospective), which was a sort of remake of the American live-action feature The Thief of Bagdad.

For me, the crown jewel of the book is Mizuno Hiromi's "When Pacifist Japan Fights: Historicizing Desires in Anime," an look at how the evolution of postwar Japan's militarism, nationalism and masculinity were expressed in 1977's Space Battleship Yamato and 1995's Silent Service. The piece was so compelling it made me want to rewatch Gasaraki and further appreciate Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, both of which featured conspiracies to remilitarize Japan. It's worth noting that this essay is the longest in the book, but reads so smoothly it feels like it's the shortest.

Otherwise, the book is hit or miss depending on the kind of scholarly essays you prefer. As a fan of Occam's Razor, I'm a bit wary of essays that read a lot of symbolism into anime that the creator makes no claim to. Granted, there are those shows like Haibane-Renmei and Neon Genesis Evangelion where the creators are specifically adding layers of meaning, but I had to roll my eyes when Christopher Bolton read various shades of meaning into 2000's Blood: The Last Vampire's use of CGI for mechanical objects, specifically airplanes. While it's true that this was a pioneering blending of CGI and cel in anime then, the same techniques had been used elsewhere in the world for almost 15 years in pretty much exactly the same way. It's a symptom of my long-standing complaint that at times anime aficionados wall themselves off from animation history at large.

This same issue comes up in William L. Benzon's review of Takashi Murakami's Little Boy: The Arts Japan's Exploding Subculture book and exhibition, but in a good way: After thoroughly examining Murakami's thesis of how Japan's unique national trauma (the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their defeat in World War II) explains the frequent use of apocalypse in the country's fiction, he turns around and says he doesn't buy it. Why not? Because "apocalyptic art and fantasy are in no way unique to Japan. For example, apocalypse has been a persistent theme in postwar American culture," despite the fact that the U.S. was never bombed during the war.

It's exactly this kind of intellectual awareness and honesty that anime scholarship (hell, anime fandom) needs more of. There are many things about anime and manga that are unique, and there are many books (including Mechademia) that celebrate that. But if we really want to position these media within the cultures of the world at large, then we need more work that looks at them in relation to what's going on outside of Japan, and there's no better place to do it than within the rigorous structure of academic writing. I'm happy that Mechademia is starting to encourage this kind of thinking, and I hope the next volume takes it further.

Labels: academia, anime, books, manga, reviews, shoujo

Review by Noell Wolfgram Evans

The recent release of The Pixar Short Film Collection Vol. 1 shows the studio's utter mastery of the animated form. Watching these pieces must be what it would have been like to watch Babe Ruth in his prime—you understood what he was doing but it was difficult to comprehend how he was doing it so well. All that you could do was sit back and enjoy. And that's really all that you can, and should, do with this short film set.

Read the review

Labels: CGI, Pixar, reviews, shorts

Beowulf is no monster, but animation fandom seems to be welcoming it as if it were Grendel itself.

Robert Zemeckis' latest feature foray into the world of motion-capture moviemaking comes correct, despite any aesthetic predispositions and prejudices. Professor Z and his uncanny CGI-Men have lost all of the "dead eyes", much of the plastic skin, and most of the lanky posturing that infested previous big-budget, Hollywood attempts at motion-captured semi realism (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Polar Express, Monster House).

Viewed in Disney 3-D with the oversized, specialized glasses (they fit over my small glasses), the effect is mixed, but mostly positive. Rapid foreground movement tends to appear blurry, but slower scenes crackle and pop with amazing detail. This isn't some chintzy Viewmaster effect. While humans sometimes appear flat, most objects (from pebbles and surging waves) have infinite depth. Even conventional, low-angle shots suck you in, before galloping horses trample over your head. The experience deserves at least one shot from any jaded moviegoer.

Beyond Beowulf's technical achievements is a far rarer achievement for North American animated features: It's a well-crafted, animated drama. With screenwriters Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary brandishing their fine ears and pens to complement Zemeckis' cinematic sense, they bring brains and soul to this ancient story. The drama is less clumsy than Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and more coherent than either Paprika or Tekkonkinkreet. It also has sharper wit, meatier dialogue, and stronger performances than all of them.

The storytellers are earnest enough to tell the tale with genuine emotion, but generous enough to play to the back of the room. Gaiman and Avary respect grand pronouncements and bawdy interplay. Zemeckis respects playful camera work, dramatic pauses and silent exchanges. Someone on staff respects blood and buck-nakedness, so the PG-13 rating is bent with glee. Crafty craftsman that he is, Zemeckis ensures that impalings and other impolitic protrusions are artfully obscured. Grendel's brutal assaults in Act 1 are bathed in an otherworldly blue firelight that strobes just enough to blot out the more gruesome deaths. The camera hurtles through spears and arrows instead of the bodies they pierce. Some naughty bits are obscured by foreground objects. Others are obscured by gold trim and dark shadows.

Which leads me to mention that a functionally nude Angelina Jolie facsimile appears in the movie. She may not be a thick-lipped, thick-hipped Ralph Bakshi goddess (like Elenor from Wizards) but she'll do. To wit, Ray Winstone has a gruff, Russell Crowe alpha-maleness mojo going, but I don't think he'll make anyone forget about Gerard Butler's Leonidas from 300. Sorry, these supposedly sensual elements of the story aren't fantastically nebulous enough to be smokin'.

What the performers lack in physical hotness, they make up in emotional presence. Unlike Tom Hanks in Polar Express, the actors don't have to pantomime excessively to get the performance across. With surprising nuance, the best scenes feature tiny smirks, darting eyes, and pained brows. These are not the wax puppets that you see in most video games. (God of War certainly didn't have the patience to tell a story with this much deliberation and visual detail.) Without the brilliantly rendered facial contours, we might miss the visual subtleties of Robin Wright Penn's notable performance, for instance. When her aged queen converses with a young mistress, the subtext in her face could only be captured by the finest character animators. Even the hammier performances of Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich grow on you, leading to incisive interplay late in the film. Don't judge these animated figures based on the motion-captured aesthetic offenses committed by past films. Watch this film and make the distinction.

Think of Zemeckis as a student of the Fleischer school of mimetic action animation, having completed his prerequisite study in Rotscoping 202 and The Animated Short Films of Superman. He's the art major with a computer science concentration, so forgive his literalism and obsessive sense of static detail. If Disney can develop a better multiplane camera to emulate live-action dollies and zooms, then surely the Z-man shouldn't be garroted for employing his own form of hybridization.

Silicon Valley has not yet crossed over into the Uncanny Valley, but it's getting pretty darn close to the down slope with Beowulf.

Labels: Beowulf, CGI, computer animation, features, reviews

We're all animation fans here, right? And there are probably few things that irritate us more than people who think that all we watch are the juvenile antics of anvil-toting funny-animals. I've said before that the mainstream press (and marketing departments) are a big part of the problem, as they help perpetuate a limited (and often inaccurate) view of animation's content and process.

As it happens, today I spotted two articles that both refer to their writers' limited views on animation. One of these is predictably disappointing; the other is surprisingly encouraging.

I'll start with the good news. In yesterday's New York Times, Stephon Holden summarized the New York Film Festival's highlights, and he led off with (and praises) Persepolis despite, as he put it, a "longstanding resistance to animation":

Because it is animated, Persepolis is a bold choice for the festival’s closing-night selection. "A cartoon?" you may sniff. "How dare they?" But the movie is so enthralling that it eroded my longstanding resistance to animation, and I realized that the same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and narrative drive that bold, simple animation encourages.

This is a refreshing and commendable report. Confronted with an animated feature that challenged his preconceptions about the medium, Holden adjusted his worldview in light of this new experience, without once feeling the need to denigrate the rest of animation's offerings. If only more film critics, fans and artists did the same.

Montreal's Al Kratina, on the other hand, gives a typical backhanded compliment in yesterday's Montreal Gazette:

In September, Anchor Bay Entertainment released a slew of anime titles, including Perfect Blue, a film that avoids most anime clichés. It's not futuristic, there are no robots, and at no point is a schoolgirl threatened by some sort of pulsating sex monster. Instead, it's a complex story of a young pop idol who's stalked by a crazed fan, with exaggerated themes of obsession and paranoia that feel like Alfred Hitchcock directing a Road Runner cartoon.

More of the same old, same old. Kratina has, like most mainstream critics (and more than a few in the animation press, as well) seen only a sliver of all that anime has to offer, and yet he figures he already knows "most" of its tropes—sorry, "clichés." So far as he's concerned, it's not typical anime if it's "not futuristic, there are no robots, and at no point is a schoolgirl threatened by some sort of pulsating sex monster." And of course there's the inevitable comparison to Disney films or Looney Tunes.

Enough is enough, already. As I wrote eleven months ago, if we want to see better animation writing we need to tell writers and editors when they've screwed up. I encourage you to write to newspapers, magazines, radio shows, TV shows and websites when this kind of lazy criticism occurs; it's the only way we'll ever see real change. Here's what I wrote to the Gazette:

Sad to say, I'm not surprised that Al Kratina makes the backhanded compliment to Perfect Blue that it "avoids most anime clichés. It's not futuristic, there are no robots, and at no point is a schoolgirl threatened by some sort of pulsating sex monster" ("'In' films for 'out' crowds," Oct. 12). There are many anime productions that don't fit into his preconceived categories, but as is often the case with people who don't take the time to understand a genre or medium, he figures a few generalizations will suffice.

The irony here is that Kratina reviews comic books, another medium that is often unfairly judged. If I said, "The Sandman is a title that avoid most comic clichés, because it doesn't have spandex-clad muscle-men whaling the tar out of each other in adolescent power fantasies," he'd probably tell me about how comics have become more mature and/or complex in content over the last three decades, and that there's a whole world of non-superhero comics that go beyond that tired stereotype.

In short, he'd be asking me to look at the medium with an open mind. He might consider extending the same courtesy to anime.

Have you come across anything egregious in the media lately? Let us know about it.

Labels: animation press, anime, Persepolis, reviews

For any new filmmaker, getting that first movie in the can is a monumental task. Add a demanding script and a predilection for toggling between animation and live action and you’re really talking about a challenging debut effort. With his recently premiered film Imagination, Eric Leiser has assembled a surprisingly ambitious project that complements his animation skills, but he’s generally let down by his actors, who are desiccant to the film’s sea of imagery.

Imagination steps into the surreal world of twin sisters Anna and Sarah Woodruff (Nikki and Jessi Haddad) who have confronted their disabilities by turning inward to their own imaginations and shared alternate reality. One girl has been rendered blind; the other has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism characterized by difficulty interacting and socializing with others. The girls’ well intentioned but ill-equipped parents (Travis Poelle and Courtney Sanford) seek the aid of neuropsychologist Dr. Reineger (Edmund Gildersleeve) to chart a path to normalcy through the twins’ mental shroud.

The girls’ behavior becomes increasingly difficult for their parents to comprehend. Their food transcends the dinner plate to become living sculpture, and the girls play games in intricate, frenetic patterns that only minds in lockstep could achieve. Faced with the twins’ increasingly apparent and unexplainable abilities to defy accepted science and medical knowledge, Dr. Reineger is consumed with a profound professional crisis. He cannot effectively treat the girls, nor can he decode the bewildering world they have built for themselves within their minds.

The film’s real strength lies in its animation. Leiser’s whimsical but intricate method recalls Czech surrealism and charts a brave experimental path, though he’s not quite ready to stand on the podium with Jan Svankmajer. Nonetheless, Leiser’s multifaceted abilities are put to great use in Imagination’s engaging animated segments. His stop motion and puppetry work is spellbinding at times. Leiser also has some raw ability as a filmmaker beyond his wheelhouse of animation and sculpture, but Imagination’s live action portions are less appealing.

With the exception of a solid effort by Gildersleeve, the cast sleepwalks through its lines, nearly negating Leiser’s efforts to move Imagination’s narrative forward through force of artistic will. The effect makes an already challenging film even less forgiving of its audience. While acting is the primary offender, there are other weak points as well. Prominent plot devices (like the earthquake) come off as contrived, with camera work to match, but you have to admire the pluck Leiser shows in taking on thorny cinematic tricks with a $110,000 budget and limited experience. A lovely musical score by Leiser’s brother Jeffrey, who also co-wrote the script, helps mask the lapses and seals the duo’s status as a formidable creative pair. Imagination’s animation and ambitious script are enough to carry it through a successful run on the festival circuit, which will hopefully lead to more projects from this promising duo.

Labels: features, live action, reviews, stop-motion

Review written by Aaron H. Bynum

As profound an impact as Osamu Tezuka has had on the artistic and commercial cultures of manga publishing and the production of Japanese animation, it nevertheless remains true that in no place other than Japan is the late Tezuka acknowledged in scholarly media with constant fervour each passing year. A man whose ambition knew no bounds, Osamu Tezuka is one of Japan's most recognizable icons, while at the same time the nation's best-kept secret. He was a veritable "one-man dream factory," as author and translator Frederik L. Schodt wrote in his new book, The Astro Boy Essays. Known to the Western world mostly through his manga creation of a little rosy-cheeked robot boy named Atom, Osamu Tezuka was an individual of colossal imagination.

Read the review

Labels: anime, astroboy, books, Japan, Osamu Tezuka, reviews

Ever since I first discovered CG-Arts and the Japan Media Arts Festival, I've been delighted to find that every year the festival features at least one short that looks and feels unlike any film I've ever seen—my criterion for an excellent film fest. This year one of the most striking was Tomonori Hayase's Mix a Miniascape.

Set to music by Jumpei Yamada, Hayase's film uses Adobe Photoshop and After Effects to create a funky, unusual Tokyo travelogue. Hayase took hundreds, if not thousands, of photos of people, places and thing as he passed by them, or they passed him. He then assembled the images into a collage, animating his travels through the city by erasing the image of, say, a building piece by piece at the same time as the next image of the same building is being built piece by piece. The effect is of moving through a fractured urban landscape, propelled by Yamada's breakbeats while navigating periods of both chaos and calm.

While Mix a Miniascape was an example of something new, there were also some nice reprises. Tochka Factory's Pikapika made its Japan Media Arts Festival debut—if you haven't already heard about this literally brilliant short, you should read my earlier praise—and Hikaru Yamakawa followed up last year's Oh Hisse (itself a followup to the previous year's Tope Con Giro) with La Magistral.

In Oh Hisse, Yamakawa presented a surreal world in which hundreds of faceless schoolboys marched in increasingly outlandish geometric processions, to the utter disregard of a man sitting on a bench and three schoolgirls talking among themselves. Oh Hisse's hypnotic appeal lay in its minimalist colour palette (black, white, a few shades of grey and spots of red), the mannequin-like quality of its characters, and its rhythmic and only vaguely natural movement. In La Magistral, Yamakawa explores the same concepts, but opens things up a little bit. The range of colours has expanded to include blues, greens and browns, as seven nearly identical men in grey tracksuits ride unicycles along a slender beam, observed on by swaying figures in coloured tracksuits, all of whom have spheres, cubes and cones for heads, and often casually defying gravity.

Not only does La Magistral have more colour than its predecessor, it also has a more dynamic cameral and yet, it's just as mesmerizing. Another distinction, however, is that Yamakawa decided to give La Magistral an actual ending—one that induces a chuckle, maybe, but otherwise doesn't offer much.

A more compelling film, however, was also perhaps more modest, at least in its tone. Naked Youth is directed by Kojiro Shishido, who coincidentally composed the music for La Magistral. As the film starts, a young man emerges from a school's shower stall. His towel falls, and just as he pulls it back up someone steps out of another stall. The two wordlessly face each other, and the camera cuts away to another scene. We soon see the boys training together and learn that they're members of a boxing team. There's little in the way of linear narrative here; the camera lingers with equal summer laziness on the sunlit trees and blue skies in their Japanese suburb, the mundane scenes of road trips, and the boys' vigorous exercise and practice regimen.

And then there's that shower scene, which appears and disappears like a metronome tick, four times throughout the film. Like the rest of Naked Youth, the scene is wordless and features just the right sounds to establish a sense of place and mood. But that mood is ambiguous, and increasingly charged with tentative eroticism whenever the boys face each other.

Are there clues to their relationship in other scenes? The boys sometimes work out together, sometimes alone; and they look away from each other as often as not. When one of them changes out of his shorts next to the boxing ring—a seemingly common occurrence, as no one really pays him any mind—is the other boy looking at him, or you know, looking at him? The delight of Naked Youth is that it obeys the maxim of "show, don't tell," but it doesn't go out of its way to show everything, either. Subtlety is king here, and the audience still has to work to figure out what it can.

From the standpoint of technique, Naked Youth presents its story in a way that seems very traditional, and yet unconventional. It's hand-drawn in what we consider the anime style, though its characters are perhaps a little less streamlined and a little more detailed—closer, one might say, to more of a manga style. The animation direction also favours a look and feel that's less flat than most commercial anime. Athletic scenes feature a moving, "handheld" camera, with figures looking more as if they're moving through three-dimensional space, with little of the exaggeration that's common in anime. Much of this look is a result of strikingly stylized integration of 3D computer animation, hand-drawn animation and beautiful lighting and texturing effects.

Shishido gives Naked Youth space to breathe by providing many moments of figurative, if not literal, silence, in which nothing more happens than, say, the team waiting out a summer downpour or sunlight filtering through the trees as crickets chirp. Of course, these kinds of moments aren't new to anime; for decades, this appreciation of stillness has been part of the medium's appeal. But in Naked Youth these scenes are even more engaging, as Shishido uses light CGI touches and careful audio work to effectively place the viewer in the scene. That downpour, for example, is pretty convincing, and while one nightttime scene is a just a little CGI-flashy—since when do moths flitting around a street light cast such stark shadows?—it beautifully conveys that feeling of being out alone on a quiet summer night.

It's films like Naked Youth that put the lie to the sentiment that animation must necessarily be simple, childish, or fantastic in subject matter; the complicated yet simple Naked Youth's exploration of a slice of adolescent life could well have been told in live action, but it would have been all the poorer for it.

Labels: anime, CGI, festivals, Japan, Japan Media Arts Festival, music videos, reviews, shorts

One of SIGGRAPH's (many) hidden gems is the collection of digitally animated shorts from the previous Japan Media Arts Festival. Hidden because in the middle of the constantly repeating Animation Theater, the 90 minutes or so of selected Japan Media Arts Festival shorts are each shown exactly once, across three half-hour programs. However, those screenings represent just a slice of all the films shown during the nine days of the festival. (For that matter, films are just one part of the fest, which includes manga, artwork and installations.)

A case in point is that the two films lodged most firmly in my brain were in the festival's Entertainment Division, and both are rooted in live action. In Tadashi Tsukagoshi's Arrow, a man notices that the cigarette butts he's extinguished under his shoe form an arrow, which points straight to a procession of ants marching... in the shape of an arrow. Digital trickery (as well as creative prop placement and hair gel) creates the procession of pointers that the man follows first out of curiosity, then out of dark compulsion.

Koichiro Tsujikawa's dreamy music video to Cornelius's "Fit Song" spends its entire time in the confines of a house, where CGI brings everyday items to a strange sort of life. Strange because aside from a few objects (most amusingly, a discus-throwing action figure and a top-heavy, ambulatory magnifying glass), almost none are anthropomorphized—and many replicate themselves with more of an eye to what looks good and, above all, what works with the music, rather than any strict adherence to physics. I'm a lifelong puzzler, so I was delighted to see a ball of matches explode into a floating array of early 20th-century Japanese matchstick puzzles, some of which solved themselves as the camera floated by. And is it just me, or is the rolling (and, yes, self-reproducing) sugar cubes' initial dance a nod to Norman McLaren's 1964 film, Canon?

The Entertainment Division did have some fully animated works, however. Satoshi Tomioka's Exit online ads for Taito are frantic and deliriously absurd, both involving noisy and chaotic chase scenes with characters looking for a way out of predicaments they've brought on themselves. (A naked man with a bored, negligée-clad girl in tow flees a woman—her mother? his wife?—down a hotel corridor; a cat tries to liberate a fish from the dinner table of an elderly couple. Oddly enough, in both cases the pursuers have glowing laser eyes and preternatural abilities.) Every time I watch these one-minute ads I think about the buckets of money companies like Dreamworks spend trying to make 3D CGI more cartoony, while smaller studios just sit down and do it—sometimes with better results.

Labels: anime, CGI, commercials, festivals, Japan, Japan Media Arts Festival, live action, music videos, reviews, shorts

Review by Emru Townsend

Anime has always existed at something of a remove from Western audiences. For more than half the time since the 1963 debut of Astro Boy (originally Tetsuwan Atom), our main point of contact with anime had been through edited, rewritten and otherwise adapted works; and most of its enthusiasts didn't speak or read the original language and were half a world away, geographically and culturally. Combined with the informal nature of its adoption here, through the ad hoc nature of science-fiction and comics fandom, the result has been a historiography that, for the longest time, was partly built on speculation and hearsay masquerading as fact.

A multitude of factors has helped change that, especially over the last decade or so, but there's still been precious little on the origins of animation in Japan, beyond tidbits of information scattered here and there. This is why Digital Meme's recent Japanese Anime Classic Collection isn't just a boxed set, it's a godsend: it goes a long way toward clarifying things, or fleshing out what we already knew.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews, shorts

Review by Mark Mayerson

While Pixar is one of the most advanced computer animation facilities in existence, before they bring their programming smarts and processing power to bear, they start with the art.

The Art of Ratatouille concentrates on displaying that art. The book is full of drawings, paintings and sculptures showing how the characters and sets evolved before the nuts and bolts of computer animation were applied.

Read the review

Labels: books, Pixar, reviews

The second animated feature to be shown at the Fantasia film festival this year was Aachi & Ssipak, a Korean film that, violence and urban dystopia notwithstanding, is miles apart from fest opener Tekkon Kinkreet, or from other Korean features like Sky Blue or My Beautiful Girl, Mari. Unlike those other three films, which profess some kind of introspection, Aachi & Ssipak is an outright and outrageous comedy, whose entire basis is, er, crap. (So maybe the touchstone should be Doggy Poo.)

It's like this: in the future, the world's new energy source is human feces. Everyone has an implanted anus ID ring, so that when someone goes to the bathroom they're rewarded with Juicybars, yummy—and, as it happens, addictive—popsicles. Blue mutants, led by a muscled, pierced, dreadlocked messiah, have been heisting Juicybar shipments in Shit City to such a degree that the city's disturbingly doll-headed fascist leader has commissioned a mad scientist to create a super-cyborg out of cadavers to fight them. Meanwhile, Aachi and Ssipak, two idiot petty Juicybar thieves, find themselves in trouble thanks to their no-good associate, the auteur-wannabe porn producer Jimmy. It's in the course of Jimmy's payback that they encounter the sexy Betsy (Beautiful in the English subtitles), and Ssipak falls head over heels for her on first sight. Betsy becomes the movie's MacGuffin when she's forcibly implanted with a new anus ring that delivers mountains of Juicybars whenever she hits the can, which further complicates things to the point where everyone is trying to catch and/or kill everyone else, with Betsy as the main prize.

At this point, reasonable people would no doubt shake their heads in bewilderment and move on. They'd also miss one of the funniest and well-crafted animated movies I've seen this year. Kino Kid put it well after we saw the film when she said, "It is what it is"—not in that shoulder-shrugging, "what are you gonna do?" way, but in the sense that in the first ten minutes, between the exposition and the car chase/gun battle, you know what type of story it is. And once the basis is established (the world is powered by shit!), there's no need to go for gross-out jokes or squishy sound effects; it's just part of the world, right down to its advertising. (Sure, the ads about happy communities crapping together is absurd, but is it any more absurd than animated marching cigarettes or winking Esso signs? Not really.)

Scatology aside, Aachi & Ssipak is also a relentless action movie that manages to be both ultra-violent (those blue mutants make for excellent exploding-body cannon fodder) and cartoony. If you check out the film's official website, you'll see what I mean. Even as the cyborg mows down mutants with a fervour and style that would be the envy of any Terminator, his body and his equipment maintain the same kind of squash and stretch we expect from gag cartoons. And bonus points to director/screenwriter Jo Beom-jin for putting in all kinds of movie in-jokes that are actually funny without calling attention to themselves (unless, as in the case of Jimmy's Jiffybar-overdose freakout, that's the point). If you've seen Battleship Potemkin you'll howl at the extended riff on the Odessa steps sequence, but if you haven't it's still funny and exciting on its own.

In terms of animation and design, Aachi & Ssipak is both consistent and ambitious. Everything in this dirty, corrupt world holds together visually, and the film is crammed with the kind of dynamic composition, animated camera moves and quick but clear editing that drew many people to anime over the last four decades.

One of the film's many movie posters declares that it contains "2D funky action in an awesome 3D reality!" It's true that there's some 3D work in there, but with one or two forgettable exceptions it's integrated quite well. Having watched the film only once (so far), I'd venture that 3D digital tools were largely used for anything that would be too complicated by hand, but the director set the "too complicated" bar pretty high. The result is that we still get some of that exaggerated, sometimes-snappy, sometimes-elastic feel in many action sequences, rather than fairly literal motion and acceleration. (This is why I'll take the space combat scenes in Macross over those in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles any day.)

It's refreshing to see that the subject matter didn't make the filmmakers lazy, or too self-satisfied in their subversiveness. Aachi & Ssipak's story and animation work together to make a tight, hilarious action film. I don't know how likely this it is to get a domestic release, but fortunately the Korean DVD includes English subtitles.

Aachi & Ssipak
Directed by Jo Beom-jin
90 minutes
Buy the Aachi & Ssipak DVD (Region 3) from YesAsia.com

Labels: Fantasia festival, features, festivals, Korea, Montreal, reviews

One of the most obnoxious things about Hollywood movies is the tendency to put kids in danger to mine a little extra anxiety from the audience. It's a cheap stunt, because bad things rarely happen to kids in Hollywood films. (Steven Spielberg is a serial offender here. Remember Short Round on the bridge in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Tim climbing the soon-to-be-re-electrified fence in Jurassic Park? Right.)

There's none of that fake danger in Tekkon Kinkreet, the Studio 4°C film that opened the Fantasia film festival this year. The young protagonists live in a harsh, gritty world that gives no quarter, and that sometimes takes the movie to places that Hollywood movies fear to tread.

Tekkon Kinkreet is the story of Kuro and Shiro (whose names literally translate to Black and White), two of the many orphan children who prowl the streets of Treasure Town. Shiro, the younger of the two, is the innocent, while Kuro has no problem with getting his knuckles (or a length of pipe) bloody to protect him or their turf. In this mix are two cops (one older and wiser, who keeps an eye out for Kuro and Shiro, the other a young rookie); a young yakuza who's leading his boss's advance into Treasure Town; and a mysterious and sinister elfin character who aims to turn a fair chunk of Treasure Town into a massive theme park.

There's a lot going on in this movie, and every one of its 100 minutes is put to good use. The kids, the cops, the yakuza and the developer all have some sort of interplay between each other (sometimes with words, sometimes with violence, sometimes with both), but just as importantly, they each have some sort of interplay with the city itself. In fact, Tekkon Kinkreet is as much about our various relationships to the urban landscape as anything else.

Based on the Taiyo Matsumoto manga Black & White and directed by Michael Arias, Tekkon Kinkreet shares elements of other anime films that feature outsider children. Like Grave of the Fireflies, Kuro and Shiro have struck out on their own, with the older character willing to take on any burden to protect the younger's health and innocence. Like Akira, the movie dwells mostly among those who live in the city but who have dropped out of society. And like Kakurenbo, these kids' relationship with the urban landscape has little to do with its intended use, but is in many ways more intimate and more thorough than for ordinary citizens.

The movie looks fantastic, with Treasure Town a lush forest of rooftops, fire escapes, cables and signs. The characters who inhabit Treasure Town are angular, slope-shouldered, asymmetrical—they owe more in look to Mind Game than, say, Naruto—and fit right in with the bustling, chaotic city. I was quite surprised during the post-screening Q&A when an audience member implied that most of the film was clearly CG; not only because it's obviously not the case, but because if there's any film that proves it doesn't matter which elements are CG and which are hand-drawn, it's this one. The appropriate tool is used at the appropriate time, and it's put together not with the express intent of hiding the seams, but of making the scene work. The end result is something you'll want to repeatedly freeze-frame when the DVD comes out, but which you should catch on the big screen when its limited North American run starts on Friday, just to drink it all in.

Tekkon Kinkreet
Directed by Michael Arias
100 minutes
Buy Tekkon Kinkreet Limited Edition on DVD (Region 2) at YesAsia.com
Buy Tekkon Kinkreet on DVD at Amazon.com
Buy Tekkon Kinkreet soundtrack CD at Amazon.com
Buy Tekkon Kinkreet soundtrack remix CD at YesAsia.com

Labels: anime, Fantasia festival, festivals, Montreal, reviews, Studio 4C, Tekkon Kinkreet

Review by Aaron H. Bynum

When the development of new war technologies are either kept underground or sold to the highest bidder, discussions on the mutation of human DNA result in more questions than answers, all while the Cold War has lasted nearly a century and a half... you sort of gain the impression that things aren't going so well. Fortunately, for agent 009-1 Mylene Hoffman, the tense relations between Eastern and Western factions of world political and military powers only make for more work. 009-1, a blonde femme spy of undivided loyalty to the Zero Zero Organization, is in the business of sex, bullets and butt kicking.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

It's normal for a popular animated TV series to go feature-length at some point, no matter which side of the Pacific you're on. Teen Titans, Kim Possible, Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Cowboy Bebop—to pick four random examples—have all had a go, to varying degrees of success. But none of them went from movies to TV series to movies again, and I'm hard pressed to think of any others that have. The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society TV movie may well be the first such undertaking.

I'm not completely sure it works here, but that's because Ghost in the Shell has gone through different hands for different media. The first two features were directed by Mamoru Oshii and carried his trademark intellectual style and visual fervour. The two Stand Alone Complex television series, both directed by Kenji Kamiyama, are just as smart but in a different way—it's like comparing David Mamet's dialogue to Tom Stoppard's—and, due to the nature of the medium, simultaneously more action-oriented and more intricate. It's the usual tension between the episodic half-hour format and the overall ten-hour running time.

Kamiyama helms Solid State Society, which finds our heroes in a state of flux. The Major is no longer part of the Section 9 team, having resigned to work toward her own mysterious objectives. Togusa, the least upgraded and least hardcore member of the team, has been promoted to take her place, and some new members have been added to the team. As usual, it's part police procedural, part high-concept science fiction, and part action movie.

As is typical of the Stand Alone Complex series, Solid State Society explores the more prosaic aspects of mass cyberization, as compared to the movies. That means things like healthcare for the elderly versus philosophical ruminations on the nature of consciousness; more politicking and fewer dream states. Solid State Society finds itself between two worlds, as its smaller-scale focus finds itself expanded to a longer running time and consequently more extended narrative beats. Although Kamiyama juggles Ghost in the Shell's various aspects with his usual skill, I found myself wishing that Solid State Society had been a miniseries rather than a feature.

Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society
Directed by Kenji Kamiyama
Manga Entertainment, 2007
109 minutes
Buy the Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society DVD at Amazon.com
Buy the Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society Limited Edition DVD at Amazon.com
Buy the Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society CD soundtrack at Amazon.com

Labels: anime, Ghost in the Shell, reviews

Review by Terrence Briggs

Ratatouille is Pixar's best film since Toy Story.

It may lack the rapid-fire whimsy of Toy Story's dialogue, but it tells a more nuanced and imaginative story than Toy Story 2, with fewer softball cultural references. As in Iron Giant and The Incredibles, Brad Bird grounds the characters with largely believable dialogue, and goes through amazing pains to legitimize its many narrative conceits. It's drop-dead gorgeous, almost the equal of Finding Nemo, with more elaborately choreographed action.

Read the review

Labels: Disney, features, Pixar, reviews

Review by Aaron H. Bynum

Peach Girl is about the melodrama of a high school girl, nothing more. "Why does my fate always take me to people who are drowning?" Momo Adachi often ponders. A Japanese animated television series that follows the highest of highs and the lowest of lows that echo through the hallways and stairwells of a contemporary high school, Peach Girl at its best is only moderately appealing and seems capable of only satisfying viewers with a penchant for soap operas.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

3x3 Eyes Vol. 1: Immortals (DVD)
3x3 Eyes is a fun, short-form anime that follows a guy whose encounter with an immortal demon poses to him quite a quandary. Although the storytelling is a bit difficult to follow, partially due to the fact that half of this anime was produced two years following the completed production of the first half, 3x3 Eyes has genuine characters, cool action and a pretty decent backstory. This is a very good anime for new otaku freshly galloping into the medium because it's fun and easy to engage. —Aaron H. Bynum

Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl Vol. 1: Role Reversal (DVD)
A cute play on both the love triangles and gender-bending common in anime. Hazumu is a sweet, slightly effeminate high school student who is goaded by Tomari (a tomboy who has been his friend since childhood) into confessing his crush to a shy girl named Yasuna. But Yasuna turns him down, so to lick his wounds Hazumu wanders off into the countryside where (as so often happens in anime) he is promptly killed when an alien spaceship crashes onto him. The aliens have the technology to reconstruct and revive him, but only in a female form. Once the silly set-up is out of the way in the first episode, the real story begins as everyone has to deal with Hazumu's sudden gender switch. Hazumu isn't bothered much by the change but now Yasuna is attracted to him since "he" is now a safe female, while Tomari finds herself increasingly jealous of Yasuna and upset over her own attraction to Hazumu. Add in parents who "always wanted a daughter," a (male) best friend who has trouble talking to Hazumu now, and a couple of space aliens tagging along "just to observe" and mix it all together for maximum comic effect. Despite its comic aspects, the characters grow on you and by the end of the series it turns into a sweet tear-jerker. The unique aspect of the marketing of this anime series is that Media Blasters is not bothering to make an English dub of this title, releasing it in a subtitled-only format in North America. Whether this trend of releasing sub-only anime will catch on now (ADV and others tried it in the late '90s) remains to be seen. (Note: The first two volumes of the manga have been released in English by Seven Seas Entertainment.) —Marc Hairston

Suzuka Vol. 1 (DVD)
Suzuka Vol. 1 + artbox (DVD)
Sports-themed manga and anime are a staple in Japan, but for some reason they have never caught on in the West. Suzuka mixes sports drama with romantic comedy and Funimation hopes it will be popular with the fans here. Yamato Akitsuki is a high school freshman who has just moved to Tokyo from Hiroshima to attend a prestigious high school. He lives with his aunt who runs an all-female apartment and bathhouse. (Despite this setup the series never turns into a harem anime, though it does provide some opportunity for fan service.) Yamato's apartment is next door to another freshman who has also moved to Tokyo to attend the same high school. Suzuka Asahina is there on a sports scholarship and pegged to place in the national high jump competition. Yamato is smitten the first time he sees her practicing. But Suzuka has her own personal demons and goes through most of the series unable to admit her real feelings, thus spending much of her time either ignoring Yamato or angry at him. Of course this just makes Yamato want her even more... While the "will they ever get together" aspect of the story could get tiring, the sports competition backstory and the slow revealing of Suzuka's past does keep the interest up. (Note: The first four volumes of the manga have been released in English by Del Rey.) —Marc Hairston

Labels: anime, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Review by Mark Mayerson

Understanding how to use tools to reach a goal is the basis of the animator's craft. The trick is to know why you're doing something and sometimes a computer can get in the way. Character Animation: 2D Skills for Better 3D works both the 2D and 3D sides of the street, using drawings to get the reader to think about motion principles before tackling the complexities of software.

Read the review

Labels: books, CGI, computer animation, reviews

I have a soft spot for mythology and folk tales, especially when they're produced by individuals or small teams. Favourites include the Dust Echoes series and the films of Nick Kozis; now I can add Croatian Tales of Long Ago, produced by Helena Bulaja. Helena brought together animators from around the world to create eight Flash-animated shorts based on stories from Ivana Brlić Mažuranić's 1916 book of the same name, allowing each one to put his or her spin on it and add interactive elements. For me, the perfect matchup between story, style and interactivity was How Quest Sought the Truth by Nathan Jurevicius: the laid-back delivery, quirky style and fun but challenging (and completely optional) Flash games just clicked for me. But honestly, the whole project is a delight. You can check out segments for free on the project's website, or buy the CD-ROMs—which are chock full of extras, including the original stories—from the Web shop.

Last year, many of us in the northeast faced an enormous quandary: go to the 30th anniversary Ottawa International Animation Festival, or to the inaugural ADAPT Conference in Montreal, held the same weekend? Independent animation or the gorgeous art to be found in big-budget features? Konstantin Bronzit or Syd Mead? It was a dilemma of soul-crushing, garment-rending proportions. Fortunately, this year our spirits and outerwear are safe: the 2007 edition of ADAPT is being held immediately after Ottawa, so you could conceivably rush from one to the other. None of the master class topics have been announced as yet, but Syd Mead, Iain McCaig and Mark Goerner are already confirmed as guests.

Forgot to mention earlier that Laurie Maher and Jason Walker will be hosting the North American premiere of Madame Tutli-Putli at the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto on June 13.

Coolest mug ever.

Do you create animation in SWF format? If so, you'll want to contact Adobe's Customer Research team; they're looking to collect SWF content to get an idea of what people are using the format for, so they can better support them. If you want to make sure animation is well represented, send the following to flashresearch [at] adobe.com by July 6:

• Your SWF or a link to your project or a screenshot of the project
• A brief description (3 to 4 sentences) describing the audience and purpose of the project
• Descriptive tags to categorize the project's content and purpose – Use as many or as few tags as you like, and feel free to make up your own. Some examples tags are included below.
• Percent of all your projects that are SWFs
• Percentage of time you spend writing ActionScript
• Percentage of time you spend using the timeline
• Your name
• Your job title and company
• Your phone number (so a member of the Adobe's customer research team can contact you for a quick 15 minute phone call if they need more information)

Adobe's sweetening the deal with $50 Amazon gift certificates given out at random for 1 in every 50 submissions.

Labels: anime, computer animation, Croatia, events, Flash animation, Madame Tutli-Putli, Montreal, National Film Board of Canada, NFB, reviews

Afro Samurai (edited) (DVD)
Afro Samurai Director's Cut (DVD)
The last time I saw this kind of careful weaving of music, design and animation it was in a little series called Cowboy Bebop. It remains to be seen if Afro Samurai can get past its seeming ultraviolence-of-the-week structure and create something woven together as tightly as Bebop, but it's encouraging to note that all of the pieces are present right at the beginning. If you can take the gore, that's a good enough reason to keep watching. —Emru Townsend (excerpted from an earlier review)

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Earth Book 2 Vol. 3 (DVD)
An important chapter of the second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, these episodes contain great series direction and fantastic writing. The episode "The City of Walls & Secrets" is as dark as it gets for Nickelodeon children's television animation, featuring an episode chock full of government conspiracies, kidnapping and even more teen angst. Avatar is a fun show to get into and possesses plenty of layers of intrigue for a variety of demographics. —Aaron H. Bynum

Doki Doki School Hours Box Set (DVD)
At less than five feet tall, 27-year-old high school teacher Mika Suzuki on many occasions finds it difficult to maintain the attention of her class. Fortunately, her ability to see her students eye-to-eye figuratively as much as she can literally grants Mika the opportunity to develop strong relationships in an academic setting. Doki Doki School Hours is a schoolyard comedy, but still manages to comfortably peek its way into serious discussions about the maturation of today's youth in between episodes about school festivals and the like. —Aaron H. Bynum

Gunbuster 2 Vol. 1 (DVD)
Nearly 20 years after the original Gunbuster introduced the world to the idea of female mecha pilots and the infamous "Gainax bounce," Gainax has gone back to their roots and done a sequel. This time around Kazuya Tsurumaki (FLCL) is the director instead of Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion), and you can definitely see this is closer to FLCL than the original Gunbuster. —Marc Hairston

Paprika (Japanese release) (Blu-ray)
Paprika (Movie)
I was lucky enough to see Satoshi Kon's new film at the Dallas Film Festival in March and it's Millennium Actress on steroids. It's the same idea and style as Millennium Actress and ratcheted up to 11. Millennium Actress combined reality and movies to blur the line of what is real. Here he's combining reality and dreams and movies to blur the line. Same styling, lots of running, lots of repeated scenes and images, and the resolution scene circles back to a throwaway scene at the beginning. Personally I think it's his best film yet, and as soon as the lights came up I wanted to go back and watch it again. Based on a story by the Japanese sci-fi writer Yasutaka Tsutsui, who also wrote the original story for The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which won the Japanese Academy Award for best animated feature last year.

Labels: anime, features, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

I've been remiss, because I haven't yet mentioned that Bitter Films Volume One: 1995-2005, the collected films of Don Hertzfeldt, is one of the funniest and most enjoyable DVDs I've watched in a while. You could make a convincing argument that shorts like Billy's Balloon (in which a rogue balloon beats the tar out of its toddler owner) and catchphrase-inspiring lines like "My anus is bleeding!" place Hertzfeldt's work squarely in the frat-boy demographic, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing with you. The thing is, Hertzfeldt combines delightfully deadpan dialogue with a minimalist (read: stick-figure) yet expressive drawing style and a real talent for planning technically elaborate sequences that fit the story without screaming "Aren't I awesome?" Dive in to the copious extras and you'll probably come away more impressed than when you went in.

Speaking of DVD compilations and independent animators, you don't want to miss Liquid Tales, the collection of Patrick Smith's work. In some ways Smith's work is the opposite of Hertzfeldt's—it's colourful and scratchy and distinctively rendered—but it's no less enjoyable or personal. But hey, what say I show rather than tell: check out Puppet, his latest film, on Yahoo.

I've always said that a key difference between live-action filmmaking and animation filmmaking is that it's possible, though unlikely, that a live-action director can shoot a ten-minute film in ten minutes, while it's utterly impossible for an animation director to do so. J.Walt Adamczyk, who contributed to our January 2006 issue, insists on proving me wrong. His Spontaneous Fantasia, a one-hour animated program that he creates live, will be showing in a 180° full-dome theatre at the Glendale Community College Planetarium for four days in June, for a mere ten bucks ($6 for the under-twelves).

Don't know how this book slipped under my radar, but it looks fascinating. Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm digs into the CIA's hand in the creation of Halas and Batchelor's 1954 feature adaptation of George Orwell's novel. Author Daniel Leab not only dug through production archives and interviews, but CIA papers uncovered through the Freedom of Information Act. By the way, you can get 20% off the rather hefty $55 list price if you call 1-800-326-9180 (it's toll free) and mention the code OSRC.

Labels: books, CGI, computer animation, features, reviews, shorts

Japanese Classic Anime Collection (DVD)
Digital Meme's region-free set of 55 short anime films from 1928 to 1936 presents the shorts as close to their original formats as possible, down to the sound of the needle drop on the "record talkies," which used gramophones for synchronized sound. It's a four-disc slice of history. —Emru Townsend

Gun Sword Vol. 7: Last Rites (DVD)
The conclusion to a pretty good and relatively exciting action anime, the last DVD volume release of Gun Sword may be the last opportunity for the everyday otaku to catch a program that so willingly and wonderfully succeeds at catering to various elements of select genres—elements that difficult to ignore and are often a great pleasure to watch. —Aaron H. Bynum

Shana Vol. 5 (DVD)
Still highlighted by wonderful character personalities, Shakugan no Shana is a television anime that is comfortable with being good at what it does, without needing to shoot for the spectacular. Here, reluctantly adventurous youth hunt demons and save souls in a somewhat average but ultimately dangerous animated world. —Aaron H. Bynum

Stop-Motion Filmography: A Critical Guide to 297 Features Using Puppet Animation: Volume One, A-K (Book)
Stop-Motion Filmography: A Critical Guide to 297 Features Using Puppet Animation: Volume Two, L-Z (Book)
Two volumes, 838 pages, 189 photographs (51 in color), 47 filmographies, 4 appendices. If 297 features can't please you, you have something against puppets. The book comes with a foreword by Ray Harryhausen. —Jason Vanderhill

Labels: anime, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Review by René Walling

What do Tekkaman, Elric of Melniboné, Vampire Hunter D, Final Fantasy, Neil Gaiman's Sandman and The Tale of Genji have in common? Yoshitaka Amano illustrated, created concept art for, or otherwise worked on all of them. And the list above is just a small sampling of what this incredibly creative and productive artist has worked on. Worlds of Amano is an overview of just part of his career, from the mid-eighties to the turn of the millennium.

Read the full review

Labels: anime, reviews

I've been pretty busy these past few months, and as a result there have been a number of things I've watched or read that I've wanted to write about but haven't for lack of time. So here are a few quick mentions of some things I didn't want to fall through the cracks.

Animation Block Party Mix Tape, Volumes One & Two
When someone says "block party," "mix tape" and "Brooklyn" to me, I think of early hip hop. These collections of shorts from the Animation Block Party animation festival (which hits the streets this year from July 27 to 30) follow the same kind of aesthetic: roughly hewn, sometimes falling short of the mark, but with so much energy you'll be acutely aware of just how overly slick and over-thought other festivals' fare can be. A few arbitrarily chosen favourites: Fin Film's Easy, a look at a strange and slightly disturbing love affair that at times invokes Little Red Riding Hood imagery, with characters mostly rendered as sleek silhouettes; Cunning Stunts, where Jeff Scher colourfully rotoscopes explicit porn footage and sets it to jaunty music (check out his homemade rotoscope stand in the DVD extras); and Andy and Carolyn London's (pseudo-?) autobiographical The Back Brace, a collage film in which the angsty Jewish narrator talks about his unfortunate adolescent experiences with scoliosis.

BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo Vol. 1: Bo-nafide Protector
Believe it or not, the title is actually the name of the main character (Bo-BoBo, for short), a man with a golden-coloured afro, tiger stripes on his arms, and retractable nose hairs that he uses to defend 31st-century Earth from the minions of an evil emperor who has decreed that everyone should be bald.

The best part is, the description alone doesn't even hint at how bizarre this show truly is. However, you have to have the proper mindset for it. BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo is one of those manga adaptations that isn't all that animated, and often has someone posing while saying something ludicrous, which someone else then reacts to with a different, startled pose. Think of it as taking the low-key presentation of Cromartie High School and ratcheting it down a notch.

A note: BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo is, in the tradition of Samurai Pizza Cats, dubbed with only some regard for the original story details. No problem there, but the subtitles are actually just a transcript of the dub—which means those of us who want to get all the Japanese gags will have to, like, learn the language or something.

Mechademia Vol. 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime and Manga
A while back I commented that the book Cinema Anime had lofty goals (scholarly analysis of anime) that were undermined by its execution (too much emphasis on being academic, rather than making new ideas accessible, and not enough familiarity with what's outside of the anime sandbox). The first volume of Mechademia—an annual series of themed critical essays relating to anime and manga—largely avoids this problem, and is a pleasure to read.

As with its subject matter, Mechademia's variety is key to its success. There are twenty contributions in this issue, and they vary enough in tone, length and style that if something bothers you in one essay, the next one will make up for it. Mechademia's explorations bounce between fan culture, Japanese culture, manga history and film studies, providing a rich, textured view of the anime and manga world.

That's not to say there aren't problems. I've long had a problem with anime fans' ignorance of the rest of the animation world (though this is less of a problem now than, say, 20 years ago), and an aspect of this pops up in Ueno Toshiya's essay on the intersections between animation, live-action, and dreams in the aesthetics of Mamoru Oshii's films. Toshiya's jumping-off point is the experience of viewing the storyboards to the second Patlabor movie, but just before he makes his observations on how Oshii's storyboards might reflect his view of the world around him, he confesses that he hasn't seen many storyboards. I had to read the essay (an interesting one, I hasten to add) a second time just to get past the fact that someone would make these comments without first looking at other storyboards to determine what, if anything, is unique about Oshii's.

But this, like the handful of annoyances found throughout the book, is fairly minor; with one exception, none of these problems went so far as to completely derail my enjoyment of an essay. Mechademia's first outing makes for a stimulating look at anime through the lens of culture, and culture through the lens of anime. I can't wait for the next volume.

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews

Ergo Proxy Vol. 3: Cytotropism (DVD)
Increasingly complicated and predominantly a series of interrelated events about intelligence war unlike any other, Ergo Proxy is a thoroughly dark anime that should be a good find for enthusiasts looking for a gritty, bare-bones title that presents the influences and effects of raw human emotion. —Aaron H. Bynum

Labels: anime, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Review by Noell Wolfgram Evans

Instinct is a funny thing. We know we should follow it and yet we rarely do. When we don't follow our instinct we kick ourselves and yell—we're angry because we didn't listen to ourselves and we're angry because we had to suffer in some way because we didn't listen to ourselves.

My instinct told me to avoid Happy Feet. I did so during its theatrical run but after its Oscar win and recent DVD release I decided to give it a chance.

Read the review

Labels: features, reviews, Warner Bros.

Meet the Robinsons is an inventive, engaging and fun film. It's enjoyable from start to finish and with luck could herald a new age in American animation. (That's not to say it's perfect or an instant classic, but it's got enough going right that the film gives us something different and special. In this day of copycat cookie-cutter films, that can't be overlooked.) This just-released Disney movie is a rare breed of Hollywood-produced animated films. It's not ironic, not moralistic, not a fairy tale on a grand scale; instead it's a pure story, well thought out and executed. It's the kind of movie that I left the theater liking and on the drive home found myself thinking back on and enjoying even more.

Read the review by Noell Wolfgram Evans

Labels: Disney, features, Meet the Robinsons, reviews

TMNT (Movie)
A man in a funny costume can fly and fights crime. A young boy befriends a giant robot from outer space. A bunch of turtles mutate after being exposed to radioactive slime and become ninjas battling 3,000-year-old stone warriors. All of these ideas may seem ludicrous at first, but both comic books and animation allow for an amazing amount of suspension of disbelief if done well.

Eastman and Laird's comic book combined humour and grit, pulp magazine fantasy and strong character interaction in a way that caught people's imagination. And now, we finally have a movie adaptation that lives up to the original.

The art, animation and voice acting are a big part of that, but in the end, it all boils down to a good, fun story. The people who worked on this realized that it's not enough to have the rights to a popular franchise, you have to do something with it that the fans will like, and they did. —René Walling

Labels: releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Batman Beyond Season 3 (DVD)
Batman Beyond Seasons 1-3 (DVD)
Arguably the weakest of Batman Beyond's three seasons, these final thirteen episodes still feature some of the series' better ideas, along with great character interplay and dialogue. Old and new nemeses return, including favourites Inque and the Royal Flush Gang, but the best are those from Bruce Wayne's past: Ra's Al Ghul (as always, given sinister voice by David Warner), Kobra and a silent, but no less dangerous, Starro. This season also marks the first animated appearance of the Justice League in the Timm universe, a two-episode thrill ride that set fanboy hearts racing. —Emru Townsend

Justice League Unlimited: Complete Season 2 (DVD)
Justice League Unlimited: Complete Seasons 1 & 2 (DVD)
The Second Season of JLU is fantastic to say the least, and truly offers a drama and an adventure for animation fans keen on more mature themes. Settling fierce internal conflicts, re-aggravating in-group rivalries and trying to figure out just what in the heck should be done about the Cadmus project; some of JLU's most interesting animation direction and much of the series' development of secondary characters occurs here. —Aaron H. Bynum

Shana Vol. 4 (DVD)
In the middle of this anime about a kid whose run-in with a flame-haired, crimson-eyed female demon slayer, things are starting to slow down a bit and the characters are beginning to find some comfort with one another. Though the action seems to be rather sparse at this point in time, the addition of strange villains and much fuller background artwork are a plus. —Aaron H. Bynum

Labels: anime, Batman, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Cool McCool is back. For the unaware, secret agent Cool McCool was the star of the late-'60s animated spy spoof of the same name which has just been released on DVD by BCI and Hearst Entertainment. This three-disc set presents the complete run of the show, although it was a scant run at just twenty episodes.

Read the review

Review by Noell Wolfgram Evans

Labels: reviews

First presented at the Grand Palais in Paris in fall 2006, the exhibition Once Upon a Time Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios makes its way to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it will undoubtedly create quite a buzz. It is indeed a rare occasion when animation films—let alone Disney—get the limelight in a museum.

The exhibition's companion catalogue is a luxuriously illustrated book whose scholarly analyses invite us to re-examine the Disney aesthetic through its relations with European fine arts.

Read the review

Review by Marco de Blois

Labels: Disney, exhibitions, Montreal, reviews

Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Complete Season One (DVD)
Clever and original, this animated television series is chock full of curious and unique character designs and is bustling with just as many eccentric personalities to match said designs. The program really takes off in later seasons, but this is where it began; the story of a kid unwilling to outgrow his imagination, and the friends he makes who also believe that creativity and innovation, on any level, are timeless. —Aaron H. Bynum

Labels: releases, reviews, upcoming releases

Middle school student Ikki Minami's a tough, confident young man with a couple of good friends and a knack for getting into trouble. Ikki lives with the Noyamanos, four sisters ranging in age from ten to twenty-something, a situation that leads to some comedy and the sort of sexual tension and fan service one would expect from a show based on a manga by Oh! Great (Ogure Ito), who also wrote Tenjho Tenge.

During some snooping around the house, Ikki discovers that the sisters compete as a gang of highly ranked Storm Riders, participants in an extreme sport that marries a technological advance in powerful miniature motors with inline skates to create Air Treks, the ultimate rollerblades. The result is something like the next generation of Wile E. Coyote's jet propelled roller skates.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

In the mid-18th century, Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée Éon de Beaumont was sent to Russia as a member of Le Secret du Roi, King Louis XV's secret spy organization. Legend has it that D'Éon was able to secure the support of Russia against the Habsburg Monarchy by disguising himself as a woman and serving in Empress Elizabeth's court as Mademoiselle Lia de Beaumont. In Le Chevalier D'Eon, director Kazuhiro Furuhashi and Production I.G have created a complicated, imaginative period piece based on a novel by Tow Ubukata that brings D'Éon's tale into a world of occult and conspiracy.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

Origin: The Movie (DVD)
At its core, Origin is an adolescent power fantasy. In fact, there are two power fantasies here. Toola has the technological power to save the world by bringing back civilization more or less as we know it; Agito has the mystical power to save the world by preventing Toola from doing so. This tension is what adds an extra layer to the story. For most of the film you can ask which position you'd rather be in, which is another way of asking which is better: A world with clean air where getting water is a daily struggle, or a world that's comfortable but in many ways unnatural? —Emru Townsend
Read the review

Labels: anime, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

BoBoBo-Bo Bo-BoBo Vol. 1 (DVD)
It's a rare thing for me to recommend something sight unseen, but it stars a man with a golden Afro. Who has mastered nose hair karate. Rebelling against an evil emperor who shaves heads to display his ruthless power. Honestly, how can you not just drop everything to watch this? —Emru Townsend

Delta State Season 1 (DVD)
Based on a graphic novel that has yet to actually see the light of day, Delta State almost seems like the stuff of bad dreams: Four self-absorbed, super-powered twentysomethings, guided by a cryptic older mentor, are crucial elements in a plan to save the world from the extradimensional Rifters. Actually, it kind of is the stuff of bad dreams as much of the series takes place in the Delta State, an alternate reality that follows dream logic.

The heavily rotoscoped Flash animation is off-putting at first, but it doesn't take long before you realize it suits the tone perfectly: It's both real and unreal at the same time. The first season isn't quite perfect—some episode endings are too pat—but it still makes for good late-night viewing. —Emru Townsend

Grenadier Economy Pack (DVD)
Grenadier, the story of gun-toting gal Rushuna Tendo and samurai Yajori Kojima , both experts with their respective weapons and on a quest to end strife and fighting, mixes action, some serious drama and unusual characters to create a fun series. —René Walling

Labels: anime, releases, reviews, upcoming releases

This six-episode series, Kazuya Tsurumaki's chaotic allegory for adolescence, is the tale of Naota Nandaba, who finds his boring life completely disrupted when Haruko Haruhara enters the sleepy little town of Mabase on her Vespa scooter. Haruko's motives are not immediately clear, and Tsurumaki's breakneck pacing means that even with the relatively small amount of material, viewers might have a hard time discerning the actual events of the story—especially when the animation is lush, luxuriant, and advanced enough to distract the eye.

Read the article

Labels: anime, reviews

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward is proof positive that a series can improve by becoming more conventional. Compared to the previous adaptation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise (which I dub "TMNT 2003"), this incarnation is less dynamically animated, less somber, less dark, less ambitious. Its plights and perils are firmly in the tone of other Saturday-morning action series, and its characters are never asked to challenge us.

It must be said, however, that TMNT: FF is a much better run-of-the-mill, Saturday-morning action comedy than TMNT 2003 was an action drama. TMNT 2003 aimed high and bombed. TMNT: FF sticks its landing with a lower degree of difficulty.

The series is no great animated accomplishment. At its worst, disposable plots in banal futuristic settings keep the show from being too high-minded. (It must be said, the first two episodes are ghastly.) Even at its best, it never begins to approach the perfect fusion of action and comedy in the five-part pilot to 1989's series.

What it does accomplish is salvaging our heroes as characters. This is mainly due to a sense of camaraderie that helped distinguish the original TMNT from the action heroes of the day. These turtles aren't the green drones and amateurs who infested the previous TMNT series; the returning characters are more sharply written. Whereas TMNT 2003 would have been happy with a weak one-liner or first take, this new series asks for a better line and a second take.

The show also hits on the lightness of being that made the original TMNT animated series more charming than it deserved to be. I know you can love a show where the latest video game release is treated like the opening to Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace; where the present-day horror movie fan is revered like a great historian among future-day film buffs ("Don't have fun, or you're gonna get it!"); where New York hot dogs and their gaseous aftereffects are celebrated as vulgar universal truths ("I can still taste my hot dog!"/"Isn't it great?"/"The gift that keeps on giving.")

TMNT: FF's accomplishments aren't about the big things (like plot and character evolution and such); they're about the little things that make every other scene enjoyable. There's something to be said for that.

Labels: reviews

Teen Titans, an animated series that fuses Japanese animation stylings and American writing sensibilities, goes to Japan.

What could be a better love letter to fans than that? So the feature-length film, Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo is really 75 minutes of Japanophilic fan service, with some wish fulfillment for most of the characters.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

Re-released under Bandai's Anime Movie Classics brand, Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade deserves the label for its daring to stretch the boundaries of the form with its bleak, grim, violent and complex treatment of life under fascistic oppression.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

Cinderella III: A Twist in Time is the latest direct-to-DVD sequel from the Walt Disney studio. It follows 2002's Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and the original Disney film, 1950's Cinderella. While I have not been a fan of Disney's sequels to its classic film roster, I will admit that this particular film was a pleasant surprise.

Read the review

Labels: Disney, reviews

The story of five young men and their journey to Earth as soldiers from neighbouring space colonies, the anime television series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is an interesting tale of wartime struggle. The anime itself utilizes a deep cast of characters and multiple Gundam mecha (known as mobile suits) as the stage for a war between politically active military organizations and independent space colonies. The series, spanning nearly 50 episodes, is a whirlwind of overconfident adversaries and conditioned soldiers who all possess a great deal of charisma in some form or another.

Mobile Suit Gundam-W: Endless Waltz is a three-episode OVA released two years after the conclusion of the television series.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

Open Season is Sony Pictures Imageworks' first CGI feature film. The story, which unfortunately will seem overly familiar, has to do with a wild animal living comfortably in civilization who ends up back in his natural environment and has to adjust to his changed circumstances. Yes, it's the same basic plot as Madagascar and The Wild.

Read the review

Labels: reviews

The Animation Show is a short film festival organized by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt that celebrates groundbreaking independent animation. The Animation Show two-DVD set is a treasure box for every fan of the medium. The shorts on these discs will hit you from the left and steal your heart while you are laughing. Independent-animation fans will recognize many of the recent festival favourites found here, but this is for anyone with an interest in animation and short-form filmmaking. If you get this mini-box set, you will be treated to over two hours of beautiful storytelling, surreal and absurd concepts that somehow make sense, insanely original characters and design, twisted technical accomplishments and, last but not least, a refreshing, animated perspective on the rituals of everyday life. In addition to the shorts, there is an hour's worth of featurettes including commentaries, deleted scenes, making-ofs, animatics, art galleries and more.

Read the review

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews

In case you were wondering, you didn't sleep through the releases of Anime Studio's first four versions. In its earlier lives, the software was known as Moho.

The name change is significant. When e frontier acquired Moho, why did they change the name to Anime Studio instead of, say, Animation Studio? One reason might be simple branding: Prior to Anime Studio's release, e frontier had been selling a comics production program called Manga Studio. Neither product is tied specifically to the Japanese style, but it occurred to me that it was a marketing masterstroke. The anime/manga culture on both sides of the Pacific has a strong fan-creation component; the implication that these programs will allow you to make anime and manga taps into that.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

In 1973, Star Trek's popularity was rising, despite its cancellation four years earlier. The reruns were widely syndicated and a devoted following was starting to organize itself with conventions, clubs, and fanzines. There was an ongoing comic book series from Gold Key and there had been two original novels by Mack Reynolds and James Blish. Cashing in on the revived interest, Paramount contracted Filmation Studios to produce a half-hour animated Star Trek series, with Gene Roddenberry acting as executive producer. The series was picked up by NBC for their Saturday morning fall lineup.

Read the review

Labels: reviews

Written, produced, animated, edited and directed by Christiane Cegavske, Blood Tea and Red String is a murky stop-motion fairy tale that sets a group of white mice, red-eyed and clad in ruffled cuffs and Victorian coats, against the Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak: furry, bird beaked, bat-like creatures, sans wings, in a fight for possession of a dour, pale faced female doll with an egg stitched into her belly.

Read the review

Labels: reviews

The new millennium is a polymorphous multi-platform mediaverse. Reality shows spin off cookbooks and fashion guides. Novelists and Hollywood scriptwriters turn to comics, writing decades-old superhero franchises, creating new ones, and extending cancelled TV series with a new season that exists only on paper. Toys become TV cartoons and live-action movies and novels and videogames and comic books, and vice-versa.

For professional creators, this convergence represents opportunities for new work in new fields. However, scripting skills in one industry do not extend automatically to another; nor do drawing or programming skills translate automatically into usable scripts.

Read the article

Labels: reviews

While most people with a knowledge of animation history will know of the 1941 Disney strike and others may know of the 1937 Fleischer strike, the history of the labour movement in animation has mostly gone unreported. Instead, histories have concentrated on studios, cartoon characters and individual artists. Tom Sito argues, however, that unions have had a significant effect on animation history and he documents it in this groundbreaking book.

Read the article

Labels: reviews

By the time Henry Saperstein bought UPA in the early 1960s, the studio's creative fire was fading, but not quite smothered. Saperstein's heavy push into television led to artistic sacrifices in UPA productions like Dick Tracy, but the minimalist backgrounds and bold graphic interpretation of city streetscapes and iconic freeway interchanges peppered across the show's five minute episodes are a tantalizing glimpse at the pioneering UPA of a decade earlier.

Read the article

Labels: reviews

It doesn’t take much to make me pine for the days when the animation in movie theaters was solely produced using traditional methods. Happily N’Ever After, which opened this weekend in North America, is a grim reminder that CGI movies should be left to the precious few studios that have mastered the art. In Happily, a BAF Berlin Animation-led production team has matched listless, stiff animation to an equally inane story. The resulting brew is a boondoggle of a film.

Fairy Tale Land’s orderly flow of fairy tale endings is threatened by Ella’s (as in Cinderella's) wicked stepmother Frieda, who takes advantage of an untimely golf trip by the Land’s guardian wizard. Frieda’s soon wreaking havoc with the fates of resident characters like Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and the Seven Dwarfs and it’s up to Rick, a humble dishwasher and Ella’s love interest, to save the day. Still awake? Fractured fairy tales can be fun and have certainly been popular fodder for animation, but this yarn is an unraveled mess.

Other than the obvious difficulty of pulling off a CGI film that’s pleasing to watch and the importance of a decent script, there’s a third crucial lesson to be learned from this feature: celebrity actors cannot save a bad movie. A voice over cast including Sarah Michelle Gellar, George Carlin, Freddie Prinze, Jr., Sigourney Weaver and Andy Dick does nothing for this film. If the professional voice actors in the cast (Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulsen and Kath Soucie to name a few) weren't relegated to backup roles in favor of a conglomeration of Big Names, there may have been some hope of breathing life into this lubberly yawn-fest.

Labels: reviews

As you might have guessed, the pleasure of Afro Samurai is in its over-the-top execution. A show that further blurs the definition of anime (the production is part Japanese, part American), Afro Samurai is set in an indeterminate future where the tropes of every movie set in feudal Japan run up against cell phones, ancient mystical legends, science-fiction gadgetry, and 1970s funk, hairstyles and fashion. It's such a crazy mashup that the absurdity of a black samurai standing in front of a Buddhist shrine, facing off against someone who looks like a character from a Sergio Leone film seems mild in comparison.

Read the review

Labels: anime, reviews

Animation fans who hate realistically rendered human beings populating down-to-earth, character-driven comedy/dramas are duly warned: Paradise Kiss is not the show for you. (Relax, they can't all be FLCL.) This anime soap opera from Madhouse and writer-director Osamu Kobayashi is firmly in the realm of Here is Greenwood and Maison Ikkokou. Aside from a few comic morphs, the odd background replacement, and the occasional bit of slapstick artifice, the visual narrative is extremely low-key. It's not about flash and fantasy; it's about fashion and friendship. It's not Days of Our Lives; it's The Bold & the Beautiful, sans the femme fatale.

Read the article

Labels: anime, reviews

Mark Mayerson's written a review of Barnyard, but we just couldn't stop there. Back in February Bob Miller went on a press junket for the movie, a bit of an oddity because it occurred while it was still in production. Then in July he was invited to the world premiere in Los Angeles. He gives us the lowdown on how the press was schmoozed and the celebrities trotted out. He also provided photographic evidence of the whole affair—marking the first time that Andie MacDowell has ever graced our pages. I can't say it was something I ever expected.

Labels: reviews

Elevating a character from a supporting role to a starring one or taking a character from one medium to another can be a tricky proposition. There's no guarantee that what made the character popular in one incarnation (or at least popular enough to warrant more exposure) will translate to another. What usually happens is that either the character becomes homogenized or their traits are hyper-realized to a point that they no longer resemble their original self.

When the transfer goes right and all involved stay true to the character, exciting and entertaining things can happen. One example of this can be found in Disney's Ducktales—the late '80s television series that followed the adventures of Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie. Ducktales Volume Two—a three-disc DVD set featuring nineteen episodes of the second season (plus the pilot—which was inexplicably omitted from the Volume One set) has just been released on DVD.

Read the review

Labels: Disney, reviews

It's pretty common for children of the 1980s to look at the cartoons of the era with rose-coloured glasses, no matter how awful they were (I'm sorry, there is no reason to look back at G.I. Joe fondly, except as satirical fodder). However, it's hard to deny that Dungeons & Dragons is a huge favourite, because the darned show was just so ambitious for its time. So when a series-spanning boxed set became available, we had both Ceri Young and Terrence Briggs take a look at it, from the perspectives of a nostalgic fan and a latecomer to the show.

Labels: reviews

The Walt Disney Company has just added to its Walt Disney's Funny Factory DVD series. Now out are Walt Disney's Funny Factory with Goofy, Volume Three and Walt Disney's Funny Factory with Huey, Dewey and Louie, Volume Four. For the unfamiliar, these are collections of the disc's stars' short cartoons. (Mickey and Donald held center stage with Volumes Two and Three.) In many ways this series is a "Disney Treasures Lite" as nearly all of the shorts on each disc have previously appeared in that highly regarded series. They are repackaged here with none of the extreme care or extras as the Disney Treasures series.

Read the article

Labels: Disney, reviews

Suzan Pitt is a painter who realized that her images suggested specific moments in time. She began to wonder what those images would look like in the moments before and after she painted them and that led her to work as an independent animator. Her background as a painter informs everything she does. She is far more interested in the value of the image than in narrative or character.

Read the article

Labels: reviews

What would you do if you found out you could jump backward through time? The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema's closing film, gives us an answer: If you're high school senior Makoto Konno, you extend your karaoke session until your voice gives out.

It all starts when Makoto has an accident in the chemistry lab after school. Not the superhero-comic kind, with electricity and beakers and bizarre chemicals; rather, she's startled, slips, and falls—landing on a walnut-shaped object which, she later discovers, lets her go back in time at will. (Her power works best when she takes a running jump, leading to a series of hilarious landings throughout the film.) After tentatively trying out her power by recovering the pudding her little sister stole, she sets about correcting all the little mistakes she had made throughout the day, ending it with that marathon karaoke session. It isn't until later that she realizes that even innocuous changes, or those made with the best of intentions, can have consequences ranging from inconvenient to horrific.

It's not the first time a filmmaker has played with the idea of altering history by changing a seemingly insignificant detail—The Butterfly Effect is probably the most recent example—but The Girl Who Leapt Through Time does so with a level of humour and humanism rarely seen in any film, let alone an animated one. Set as it is in contemporary Tokyo, its vibe is somewhere between Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers and the work of Studio Ghibli, which is unsurprising: Director Mamoru Hosoda was originally to direct Howl's Moving Castle before Hayao Miyazaki stepped in, but at 39 he's closer to in age to Kon's (he's 43) and likely his sensibilities.

While I'd like to see what would have become of Howl under Hosoda's direction, I'm glad that he left to make The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. While the film could have been made at Ghibli, a studio that is no stranger to films with mild science-fiction elements, I can't help but think that its atmosphere would have been different. Makoto's character lies between the fierce independence of Miyazaki's heroines and the more traditional female characters found in Takahata's films; she feels very much like a real human being as she pieces together bits of advice from the people around her and combines them with her own experience to form her worldview. Unlike most movie characters with fantastic powers, she's well-adjusted throughout the film, coping the same way as all ordinary people cope with extraordinary but ultimately solitary events.

At 98 minutes, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is just the right length with every scene serving a purpose without it feeling like a logic puzzle or a screenwriting exercise. Blending belly-laugh humour, adventure and wistful memories of the twilight of childhood, this feature is, quite simply, one of the best films I've seen in recent years. I'm looking forward to seeing much more of Hosada's work.

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, WFAC

Saturday night at the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, the main question on my mind was whether Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles would break the curse that had plagued Robotech spinoffs. The first movie (Robotech: The Untold Story, a bastardized Megazone 23) died ignominiously, and rightly so. The wholly original Robotech II: The Sentinels series got caught in an economic crossfire and had to be released as a direct-to-video movie. The Shadow Chronicles, the first spinoff effort to hit the screen in almost 20 years and the first not to have Carl Macek at the helm, has a lot to overcome.

The first third of the movie overlaps with the last two episodes of the TV series, focusing on the Robotech Expeditionary Force's return to Earth in a last-ditch effort to expel the alien Invid. Robotech fans know what happens next: Thanks to a small band of resistance fighters and the human-Invid hybrid Ariel, the Invid leave Earth, leaving humanity to try to rebuild a world ravaged by three interstellar wars.

Fans also know that to claim the title Robotech, the Shadow Chronicles has to serve up love, loss, the fear and eventual acceptance of an alien race, a new and mysterious enemy, and thrilling combat scenes. It does offer all these things in principle, but the execution stops just short of really delivering.

Emblematic of this problem are the computer-animated battle scenes. CGI presents all kinds of opportunities for space combat scenes—just watch Battlestar Galactica for proof—and none of them are taken here, with directors Dong-Wook Lee and Tommy Yune opting instead for a "more of everything" approach instead of actually choreographing the battles. If anything, the scenes here make you admire the hand-drawn work in the original series all the more. Demerits, too, for the unnecessary and fan-service T&A, which not only includes two female characters on a warship's bridge in skintight outfits that display awe-inspiring cleavage, but two shots of women with their butts sticking up in the air.

But the real problem with The Shadow Chronicles is that it spends too much time just doing stuff, rather than fleshing out characters. Marcus, a new character and a hotshot pilot clearly destined to be the focal character, is a complete cipher. He's got a thing for his commanding officer, the half-Zentraedi Maia Sterling, he's still mourning the loss of his sister Marlene (killed at the opening of the TV series' third part), and... that's it. Outside of that, the three things to look forward to in this movie are Louie Nichols's dialogue, especially in scenes with commanding officer Vince Grant; catching obscure Robotech and anime in-jokes; and finding out more about what kind of alien threat will bedevil our heroes now. Frankly, that's pretty thin. Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is better than The Untold Story and Sentinels, but that's damning with faint praise; they'll have to do better if they want us to keep watching this new story unfold.

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews, Robotech, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, WFAC

An interesting aspect of many of the films at the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema is that many of them are culturally specific. That is, unlike the Disney (or is that American?) tendency toward Americanizing stories from other nations, these films tell stories that are specific to the cultures of the people that created them. Currently we experience that with anime—in fact, its "Japanese-ness" is a big draw—but beyond that, the animation we're exposed to (with the exception of short films) is nationality-free.

We saw two such films back to back on Friday. Fire Ball is from Taiwan and is yet another retelling of part of Journey to the West, an ancient story that is constantly adapted and retold in popular culture (some recent examples are Dragon Ball, the live-action A Chinese Tall Story and the futuristic CG Journey to the West TV series).

Fire Ball is about one of the many adventures faced by Monkey, Sandy, Piggy and the monk Tripitaka on their journey to find the Buddha's sutras—in fact, it's based on the same story as one of the first animated features ever made, Princess Iron Fan. In Fire Ball, a feisty kid named Red is tricked into believing he has to kill Tripitaka and grind his bones to cure his sick mother, Princess Iron Fan. As it happens, Tripitaka and his companions are nearby, trying to clear the Mountain of Flames; a feat they can only accomplish using the giant iron fan the princess is named after. Mischief, action and humour abound as the many characters find themselves at cross purposes and play off of each other's weaknesses.

Set in 17th-century Siam (now Thailand), the Thai Khan Kluay is named after its hero, a young elephant whose father had been captured for use as a war elephant before he was born. Overwhelmed by grief, Khan Kluay's mother refuses to speak about her lost mate, which drives him to find answers in a nearby soldiers' encampment. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to his becoming Prince Naresuan's war elephant, and together they lead the battle that will decide Siam's future.

The two films are put together quite differently. The hand-drawn Fire Ball plays much like its source material, with a rambling structure and digressions that are fun, but would never make the cut in a meticulously constructed screenplay. The CGI Khan Kluay more or less follows the predictable Disney structure (it's directed by ex-Disney animator Kompin Kemgumnird), though with only one musical interlude. However, both films are similar in crucial aspects. For one thing, though the structures as I described them could be considered negatives, they're not: Fire Ball's story is well known to its audience, so its wonky plot progression is actually an asset. Khan Kluay's overall predictability is offset by its loose adherence to modern Disney storytelling. While it has most of the elements (the hero's driving need, the love interest, the loss of a parent and the climactic battle, to name a few) they're not adhered to slavishly, nor presented as mechanically as, say, Brother Bear.

But perhaps most important is that both of these films have children as their main audience, but are genuinely entertaining for adults as well. Rather than trying to keep parents' attention through nods, winks and sly asides, they come by their over-12 appeal honestly. Fire Ball does it by using a familiar story; Khan Kluay does it by crafting characters that resonate (Khan Kluay's mother radiates grief at her mate's disappearance, hope that he might still live, and fear that she might lose her son; on the other end of the spectrum, a recurring gag with a soldier who so longs for his wife he deliriously clings amorously to anything and anyone generated huge laughs from the audience). Meanwhile, they never talk down to the younger members of the audience.

The kicker is that neither of these films is as expertly polished as the blockbusters we're used to seeing, but they're done well enough to properly convey the ideas and emotions the filmmakers are trying to get across. And that's why Hollywood's rabid focus on technique will mean nothing in the face of more films like these. I say, bring it on.

Buy Fire Ball (Region 3) from YesAsia.com

Labels: festivals, reviews, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, WFAC

Origin: Spirits of the Past is Gonzo Digimation's first feature, and it was the opening film at the Waterloo Festival of Animated Cinema on Thursday. The movie takes place on Earth after a disaster has wiped out much of humanity, made water a scarce commodity, and made the remaining forest an intelligent and semi-mystical entity. Agito is a popular boy raised in Neutral City, carved out of the shattered remains of a metropolis on the forest's edge. He discovers Toola, a girl awakened from a hibernation pod that had ben activated when the calamity started.

Slow to adjust to this new world, Toola leaves for the neighbouring Ragna when Shunack, another refugee from the past, offers her the chance to bring the world back to what it was. Agito, bestowed inhuman powers by the forest, races to get her back.

At its core, Origin is an adolescent power fantasy. In fact, there are two power fantasies here. Toola has the technological power to save the world by bringing back civilization more or less as we know it; Agito has the mystical power to save the world by preventing Toola from doing so. This tension is what adds an extra layer to the story. For most of the film you can ask which position you'd rather be in, which is another way of asking which is better: A world with clean air where getting water is a daily struggle, or a world that's comfortable but in many ways unnatural? Agito and Toola come from dramatically different backgrounds, so their answers are different. In some ways, the central questions and resulting clashes make Origins sort of a Princess Mononoke-lite.

Origin may be aimed at a younger audience, but it has a lot of nice little sequences that add some interesting touches. For example, I like how life in and around bombed-out skyscrapers makes Agito agile and totally unafraid of heights, and that what he considers a simple walkway over a chasm gives Toola vertigo. Still, there are a few nuances missing that you would find in a film that skewed older. I liked Origin, but I think I needed to be 13 to truly appreciate it.

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, WFAC

I don't make it a habit to comment on things I haven't experienced in their entirety, but in the case of the Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition DVD box set, I'll make an exception. After all, I've been dipping into the six-disc set, savouring its crisp, restored films, and absorbing its supplemental materials for three months now—and I still haven't covered half of the included films.

Read the review

Labels: Norman McLaren, reviews

Through bad timing or simple bad luck, I missed about half of the animated shorts showing at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma last week (including, sadly, Adam Parrish King's The Wraith of Cobble Hill, which Jason Vanderhill covered in our eighth issue.)

Of the few I did manage to catch, my single favourite was Our Man in Nirvana, a German tribute to psychedelic rock in which a guitarist suffers an accident onstage, dies, and finds himself exploring a trippy afterlife before being confronted by the arbiter who will decide if he gets to enter nirvana or will return to our world.

There's not a lick of dialogue throughout the film's 11 minutes; the story is told entirely through visuals and music. The look is inventive without calling too much attention to itself: The scenes in our world are presented in the style of Thai shadow puppets, and the afterlife is eye-poppingly colourful computer animation that remains puppetlike. (It's a nice conceit: The real world is just a shadow of what's to come.) One could complain that the afterlife wasn't quite trippy enough, but I thought it was just right; the design got the message across, was a pleasure to watch, and never felt cluttered or overly resplendent. It's emblematic of the film as a whole; director Jan Koester knew when to let things loose, and when to pull back. I'm looking forward to more work from him.

Labels: Festival du Nouveau Cinema, festivals, FNC, reviews

Back in late 2004, Fred Patten referred to Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence as "coldly cerebral." Whether or not you agree with the adverb, you can't deny that pretty much all of Oshii's oeuvre is cerebral—and that includes his latest feature, the bizarre comedy Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast-food Grifters (originally Tachiguishi Retsuden) the last feature I saw at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma.

Tachigui is that strange kind of comedy where everything is over the top yet played straight, so that it's hysterically funny but you barely laugh. For the most part, the film is a mockumentary—hardly an accurate description, but the closest fit—that chronicles the rise of a particular kind of con artist that uses elaborate techniques to scam free eats. At the same time, the movie chronicles the evolution of fast food in Japan, as it starts in a small soba shop just after World War II and finds its way through modern franchises like Yoshinoya by movie's end. The third parallel thread is that of Japan's social evolution.

Much of Tachigui's humour derives from the presentation, that of a semi-academic ethnographic analysis of the key figures over these six decades, larger-than-life characters like Moongaze Ginji (who stuns his victims by engaging in philosophical discourse they can't hope to win) and Hamburger Tetsu (who can single-handedly destroy a burger chain's operations one franchise at a time through a masterful combination of a massive appetite and split-second timing). About three-quarters of the way through the plot zigzags a little, as the narrator's relationship to the story becomes clearer, but by then it doesn't matter: the viewer has totally given in to this strange new reality by that point.

Incidentally, one of the best gags in the movie is revealed during the end credits: Just about every character is played by someone significant in the anime industry. A few of the names I caught and managed to scribble down were Shoji Kawamori (mecha designer for the original Macross series as well as the movie, and director of Macross Plus), Kenji Kawai (who composed the music to both Ghost in the Shell movies and Tachigui), Kenji Kamiyama (director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), Toshio Suzuki (producer of both Ghost in the Shell movies as well as many Studio Ghibli films) and Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, the president of Production I.G. Oshii himself is in there as well.

Tachigui uses a technique Oshii calls "superlivemation," where objects and live actors are digitally photographed in a variety of angles and poses, then the digital images are heavily processed, sometimes disassembled and reassembled, composited and animated. The end result is an odd but appealing blend that lands somewhere in the nexus between JibJab's 2-0-5, Toshikatsu Wada's Bip & Bap, and Oshii's own Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (which, like Tachigui, was produced at the Production I.G. studio).

A final note: Tachigui is linked to Oshii's multimedia Kereberos universe, which connects books, anime and manga. You don't need to know that to enjoy the film, but like the anime-creator gag, the more you know the more you get out of it. And isn't that always the way with cerebral films?

Shop
Buy Tachiguishi Retsuden Collector's Set (Region 2, Japanese language) from YesAsia.com

Labels: anime, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, festivals, FNC, Mamoru Oshii, reviews

There are two classic themes in Sony Pictures' first animated CG feature, Open Season: leaving home and animal survival. Both are principally acted out by the film's hero, the grizzly bear Boog. Both remain underdeveloped during the course of this slapstick film, and so following it on a story level feels like a chore. That's not to say that it's not worth checking out this movie—its visuals, especially in IMAX 3D, are very engaging.

Read the entire review

Labels: reviews

By rights, I'm not even supposed to like The Tick. Nothing about the art or animation are particularly accomplished and it's extremely talky. But I laughed my head off with every episode when it made its debut on Fox Kids in 1994, and now, twelve years later, watching the first season's episodes (minus "The Tick vs. the Mole Men," inexplicably) on The Tick vs. Season One, I'm laughing just as hard.

Read the entire review

Labels: reviews

To stay current in the entertainment world, people often switch roles. Actors become directors, directors become producers, and producers start their own cable networks. In animation, this means that directors sometimes delve into the world of live-action cinema. Katsuhiro Otomo's (Akira, Steamboy) Bugmaster, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, is not his first. Otomo's previous foray into flesh-and-blood film-making was World Aparment Horror, based on a story by anime auteur Satoshi Kon. In Bugmaster, Otomo once again adapts manga for film, bringing Yuki Urushibara's tale of turn-of-the-century Japan to the screen.

Joe Odagiri plays Ginko, a white-haired, one-eyed traveling "bugmaster" whose life was changed years ago by the "bugs," which the film defines as the spirits that inhabit both the dead and the living. These "bugs" (mushi) have a complex spiritual ecology. Each mushi has a function in the world. Some produce sound; others eat it. Some create darkness; others are in place to eradicate that darkness. Each belongs to a certain species of mushi and they often swarm, like insects. When mushi invade the bodies and souls of human beings, only a bugmaster like Ginko can heal the victim. Carrying only an unassuming manner and a pack of herbal remedies, Ginko is an apothecary, exorcist, and counselor to his clients.

The film deals with Ginko's confrontation with his past, and how he became a bugmaster. It vacillates ambitiously between period drama, buddy travel movie, light romance, and horror. Throughout, Otomo's aesthetic sensibilities as an animator show themselves in small ways. Most of the interior scenes are well-framed, and the slow pans pay close attention to detail. Kuniaki Haishima's unobtrusive, creepy score leaves room for the sound of wind through trees. Wisely, Otomo chooses to use special effects sparingly, but the blend is near-seamless. (One scene in which kanji crawl up walls like ants will resonate with fans of Kon's Paranoia Agent.) And Otomo's use of Makiko Esumi—and her distinctive, powerful voice—is flawless.

However, Bugmaster is 131 minutes long, and viewers will feel every second of it. Like Ginko, it moves slowly but steadily. The film also skips backward and forward in time, with many flashbacks. And Otomo gives Bugmaster so many good places for an ending that the film's final moments come as a complete surprise—it could just as easily go for another two hours, but would the audience feel any deeper resolution?

For strict anime fans, Urushibara's story has already been serialized in animated format. Called Mushishi and directed by Hiroshi Nagahama, it spans 26 episodes. Whether or not the series is released in North America may depend on Otomo's success with Bugmaster. As a live-action film-maker, Otomo is more of a Kurosawa than a Miike. Bugmaster is an interesting story populated by a plethora of sympathetic characters, especially the thoughtful Ginko and Lear-like Nui. And the environments are beautiful, with forests as green, dense, and primeval as any Miyazaki wonderland. It is poetic, ambiguous, and possesses a certain aura of magic realism. However, viewers who grow impatient with slow action, ambiguity, or convoluted flashbacks may want to wait for the DVD—provided Otomo's latest finds distribution.

Labels: anime, festivals, reviews, TIFF, Toronto International Film Festival

Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in advance of its release, this co-production between France, Luxembourg, and England was shot using a combination of motion capture and rotoscopy. Set in Paris, 2054, the film tells a familiar neo-noir tale about a hard-bitten cop, Captain Karas (Daniel Craig) of Section K, tasked with finding Ilona Tasuyiev (Romola Garai), a promising young researcher for the ubiquitous Avalon corporation, whose slogan is: "We're on your side for life." Naturally, things go from bad to worse for Karas, as he embroils himself ever deeper in Avalon's evil machinations, falls hard for Ilona's bad-girl sister Bislane (Catherine McCormack), and finds himself re-connecting with an old Arabic gangland friend.

Most other summaries of this film mention Frank Miller and Sin City. The comparison is tough to ignore, if only for the high-contrast black and white presentation and the brief-but-meaningful violence. However, the film closely resembles Shinichiro Watanabe's "Detective Story" portion of The Animatrix, and its plotline, which other reviewers found difficult to unravel, owes more to Jin-Roh and The Maltese Falcon than anything by Miller. Lovers of noir will have no trouble understanding Karas' struggle to find Ilona, or where Avalon's dirty secrets fit in.

The animation is also beautiful, and the blend of motion capture and rotoscope lets even small details like pinched lips or a surreptitious glance come through. Volckman takes great pains to add texture where there is no color, depicting a Paris with a Byzantine underground, controlled by crime bosses who bring to mind Sydney Greenstreet. The Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame blend in seamlessly with graffitti, post-modern Blade Runner architecture, and the animators' special treat—lovingly re-created snow and rain. (Curiously, the brief flame effect left something to be desired. It was blurry, more of a fire-signifier than anything else.) The film also spends a long time on reflections in water and glass, which are rendered believably. In addition, it's impossible not to bring up Nicholas Dodd's dead-on score, which also "colours" the film. The foley work here is sharp, too—sound often makes up for the lack of colour or immediately-recognizable star-power.

In short, see it. It's a triumph for Western animation that seeks to compete on the feature-length adult market. With any luck, the support for this one will be exactly what it deserves, and we will see more in this vein.

Labels: festivals, reviews, TIFF, Toronto International Film Festival

For the longest time, I've felt that animation's relationship to live action has not been a healthy one. Which is why the French-language Quand le cinéma d'animation rencontre le vivant, which looks at this relationship in a new light, is so vital. Edited and mostly written by writer and National Film Board of Canada producer Marcel Jean, the book serves as a companion to his series of retrospectives bearing the same name.

Read the entire review

Labels: live action, reviews

During a conversation with a friend at the National Film Board, she mentioned that as part of the NFB's 65th-anniversary celebrations, they're really pushing their animation heritage. "Oh yeah," I thought, "because you guys never talk about animation." Har har.

Anyway, the Montreal World Film Festival is underway as of today, and the NFB has four recent shorts in the lineup. My favourite—I've watched it six times in the last 48 hours—is Georges Schwizgebel's four-minute Jeu. Like L'Homme sans ombre, which I went gaga over last year, it's a dazzling, colourful, kinetic ride, and a hand-painted delight.

Jeu is set to the scherzo of Prokofiev's Concerto for Piano No. 2, Opus 16, and its visuals match the uptempo whirl. As the orchestra tunes up, we're treated to a countdown in which one number transforms into the next; as the camera pulls back, we see that it's part of several grids of numbers, each at different stages of transformation, resembling your worst Sudoku nightmare. The numbers fade to the title, the music starts in earnest, and we're off—letters transform into shapes, shapes transform into reflections in a pool, we see shadows in the pool, we see the men casting the shadows playing ball... and so on. Unlike L'Homme sans ombre, the camera occasionally comes to a stop, if rarely. But the transformations become faster and wilder as whole scenes transmogrify within themselves and as images—on more than one occasion, the camera pulls back during a transformation and it's revealed that the scene is part of something greater.

I first watched Jeu cold, without bothering to read any of the accompanying material. After watching it for the third time, I finally read the one-sheet, which said that the film is about the frenetic pace of modern life. While the pace and the seeming chaos fit with that thesis, frankly I don't see it. Not that it matters—Jeu is still a feast for the senses.

Labels: National Film Board of Canada, NFB, reviews

The old days of getting animation on video from abroad were pretty hard compared to our digital age. If you really wanted to explore what the world had to offer back in the day, you had to somehow arrange to get tapes from overseas, then get them translated from PAL or SECAM to NTSC, and hope you could make sense of the production's original language once you finally sat down to watch it.

The DVD format solves many of these problems, especially if you buy a region-free, multi-format DVD player. However, The Best of Anima 2 is one of those discs that brings the old days back clearly: it's only available in the EU, it's in PAL, and it only has French and Dutch language tracks. Frankly, it's worth the trouble.

Read the entire review

Labels: festivals, reviews

When discussing CGI there's often mention of the "uncanny valley"—the phenomenon where the closer CGI imagery gets to reality, the more the minor discrepancies are magnified and off-putting.

While watching Ultimate Avengers 2: Rise of the Panther, I think I discovered another uncanny valley: the closer animated adaptations of Marvel comics get to their DC counterparts, the more we notice what's lacking.

Read the entire review

Labels: reviews

The 1980s and early 1990s were a great time for the OAV format. The medium was new enough the there was a lot of experimentation; budgets were relatively high as Japan enjoyed a surging economy; and with a fairly strong feature animation market providing competition, studios had to work harder to produce compelling material.

It was under these circumstances that the three-part Area 88 OAV series was created, based on Kaoru Shintani's then-current manga of the same name.

Read the entire review

Labels: anime, reviews

The basic premise of Astérix et les Vikings (Astérix and the Vikings) is supposedly the discovery of the meaning of fear; or to be more precise, what it feels like to be scared. A novel and promising concept that was also at the centre of Astérix et les Normans, the 1966 Goscinny and Uderzo comic book on which this new French/Danish animation is based on.

Read the entire review

Labels: reviews

Sometimes you can look at the first episode of an anime series and know you're in for an interesting ride. Even if the expected plot resolution in the final episode rises bigger than the Statue of Liberty from the first minute, you want to see how the show gets from point A to point Z. Midori Days (about a high school tough guy whose right hand turns into a diminutive girlfriend one night!) is one such anime; another is the recent offering from ADV Films, Nanaka 6/17.

Read the entire review

Labels: anime, reviews

What It's Like Being Alone, a new series debuting this Monday on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's television network, follows the adventures of the misfit children in Gurney Orphanage, located "geographically and metaphysically in the middle of nowhere." Canada is currently creating a lot of stop-motion output, but other than late-night episodes of Aardman's Creature Comforts last summer a series of this type—on the CBC, made by Canadians, and during prime-time—is the type of thing that makes people straighten up and take notice. So I really want to like it, I really do.

The design of some of the characters and setting recall Edward Gorey and Tim Burton. Aldous, the eldest of the orphans, looks like she could do a cameo on the set of the Mystery! opening credits and her banter is reminiscent of Lydia at the beginning of Beetlejuice.

The initial comparison to Burton and Gorey are expected. The setting seems a little darker than most and there are children involved in what could be possibly macabre situations (which applies to both creators), there's stop-motion involved (definitely Burton) so it lends itself to this type of evaluation. But the mix of characters includes some that one wouldn't see in one of their works, which I find thrilling, since it was an indication the creators of this show want to do their own thing.

Maybe that's true—as far as character design goes. Most everything else about this series takes the easy way out.

The first episode, "Being Alone For Beginners," suffers from "pilot-itis." It is obviously the first episode in the series, trying to explain everything and leave few rocks unturned in 23 minutes, and barely wraps a story around itself. Princess Lucy is a grey frog-like lollipop-clasping mutant in a signature pink bow and frilly dress, who shows up at the Gurney Orphanage. She, along with the audience, gets acquainted with each of her fellow orphans and other supporting characters. When she tries to escape, the viewer gets a rather pat description of her geographical surroundings instead of letting the facts unfold a little at a time. Much of this is done rather artlessly, and it doesn't help that Princess Lucy has one of the most irritating voices I have heard in a long time. Unfortunately, she gets the most lines in the episode.

There is enough that was potentially interesting about the characters and possible interactions between them that I was hoping subsequent episodes would pull back more from the cheap gags (I didn't mind some of the visual gags from the first episode but prayed for improvement), especially Lucy's ability to pass incredibly bad gas. I also hoped there would be better developed ideas, including gags with better timing.

In the second and third episodes, "Do Orphans Dream of Electric Parents" and "An Orphan's Life Indeed," things seem to get better in the first few minutes but quickly take a turn for the worse in both cases. "Do Orphans..." had a little more going for it at the beginning, focusing on Brian Brain, whose face is in his torso to make room for his extra-large brain in his head. Which makes for a greater let-down when the "jokes" go, yet again, for the cheapest, easiest laughs (I find that rather unfunny, really).

The show has a few funny pop culture references, but relievingly, isn't littered with them. They include the play on words in title of the second episode, a nod to Don Knotts and an Army of Darkness spoof. But that's about it, over a three-episode span.

I'm not often interested in pigeonholing a show, but I couldn't help thinking, "Who is this for?" Sammy Fishboy is always drunk and makes some uncomfortable remarks from what should be a young boy, in contrast to Princess Lucy who is naïve and extremely childlike. But she is used endlessly for fart jokes! And someone is often getting stabbed to garner laughs (which I wouldn't mind if the attempts were funny).

There is a lot of fodder for a fun series here: some of the more interesting orphans include the cyclopean Seymour Talkless, who uses his art to express himself; Sammy Fishboy is definitely the lovechild of the Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Sea Monkey queen that graced many back covers of comic books in my youth; Charlie is a human torch who is a flamer in more than one sense of the word. There was enough to keep me watching, always hoping that it would get just a bit more sophisticated. But in the end it didn't, making grab after grab for the cheapest laugh possible.

I felt a sadness at the end of the third episode. I didn't know if I wanted to watch ten more episodes in the season and be subjected to more of this, just to give it a chance and see if it changed for the better. Because it would be a terrible thing if the CBC gets a chance to air more animation during prime-time and turns it down because of the more sophomoric aspects of this series.

What It's Like Being Alone
debuts on CBC Television
Monday, June 26th
9:30 p.m. EST

Labels: reviews

Cars is Pixar's latest theatrical release. It's really a compendium of the animation industry's (and particularly Pixar's) greatest hits. Unfortunately, as with most compendiums, it's strong in some areas and lacking in others.

Read the entire review

Labels: Pixar, reviews

Let's get this out of the way: The Wild, produced by C.O.R.E. and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, bears as much resemblance to DreamWorks' Madagascar as Pixar's A Bug's Life did to DreamWorks/Pacific Data Images' Antz—there are surface similarities, but they're different films.

Read the entire review

Labels: Disney, reviews

All right, a show of hands. Anyone in the audience used to read Luerzer's Archive at the public library? Did you ever tear sheets out of magazines and collect your favourite ads? Or perhaps you recorded television just to capture the occasional commercial of interest? If you were like me, maybe you actually went to the ad agencies directly, and requested a copy of your favourite, cream of the crop, witty, and visually spectacular television commercial. It's unlikely you'll have to go to such lengths these days with digital demo reels and video sharing services in abundance.

In fact, there are plenty of places where you can go today to get your digital fix of cool V/FX and awesome animated ads, though the cost of admission is sometimes high. The Superbowl ads this year received considerable online attention from iFilm, Google, and AOL, among others. Google is certainly one online force that would like to index and archive online video content, but there are others that should not be ignored.

Let's begin with the gold standard in advertising, the Cannes Film Festival Advertising Awards. They currently have an ad archive searchable with admission (daily, weekly, or a pricey annual fee), containing all Cannes Lion winners from 1990, all Cannes entries from 1998, and more. In America, home at Clio Awards, you have the presentation and winner's reels available for purchase in their store, and text searches are available in their archives. In Canada, ihaveanidea.org offers an ad archive, rating system, and online forum.

Among other ad awards sites, you might wish to include adforum.com, offering free searches and various subscriptions, or ad-rag.com, an ad blog with critiques & clips available by donation. If you remember the original adcritic.com site from 1999-2001, adcritic.com or the ads.com from 2001-2002, you'll see that only the site adcritic.com has survived. It has been transformed into an official voice of Creativity Magazine, with a $99 annual membership required to access content. There's also the Canadian trade magazine 'Boards' which has an online screening room with a dedicated section for both animation and short films.

Where youtube.com offers video streaming services to the average web user, V/FX hot-house The Mill uses Beam.tv for their demo reel. In Canada, Adbeast has been offering similar video streaming services.

For those of you who like the idea of a regular DVD subscription, Luerzer offers quarterly DVDs for a handsome penny (98 Euros each; incidentally, they are now offering annual online access to their entire ad collection for 99 Euros/year). Then there's shots.net from the UK with its own DVD collection, and relative newcomer stashmedia.tv from New York & Vancouver which offers a monthly DVD subscription. Even if you just visit their website, stashmedia.tv offers an impressive preview of each disc, with very thorough credits for the digital artists and studios. From there, you can also link to many of the commercial studios online. Each Stash DVD is filled with more than just the month's top commercials; they also feature the occasional film fest shorts, music videos, and bonus behind the scenes pre-visualizations. They are even soliciting entries for their own annual Global Student Animation Awards. With very nice production values, each disc comes with a finely printed booklet. If you missed out on any sold-out back issue, you can OD on a mini-library 6 pack of discs (albeit without those printed booklets).

You may not be the type of fanatic to rush out and purchase a subscription DVD filled with advertising, but in case you need to hunt for that elusive 30-second spot, you've now got more sources to search than ever before.

Labels: reviews

I'm usually a pretty patient person, but back around late October I decided I couldn't wait until the March release of the Howl's Moving Castle DVD and pre-ordered the Japanese Region 2 DVD, which was coming out in November. (Actually, it's part of a three-disc box set; I'll get into the other stuff in a minute.)

Oh, the tragedy. Through some kind of Canada Post mix-up, my order never made it here, and between various other obligations I didn't have the time to pursue the issue until last month, around the time of our hosting debacle.

And so now, with just over a month before Disney's DVD release hits the shelves, I've had a chance to watch all three discs. While it's a good thing I'm a patient person, I'm also glad I was impatient enough to pick this up. Although some of the extras will be duplicated on the North American release (complete storyboards, original Japanese trailers) there are others that may or may not be. For instance, I don't know if the interview with English-language director Pete Docter (director of Monsters, Inc.) on the North American release will be the same as the one on the Japanese disc; for that matter I don't know if it will include all fifteen trailers (six theatrical, nine televised).

But there are a few things on this disc that won't be on the North American one, according to Disney. There's the Howl in the World featurette that shows the movie's premieres in Italy, Tokyo, Taipei, Venice, New York, and Paris. (The latter includes a stop at the Hayao Miyazaki/Jean "Moebius" Giraud exhibition, where we see footage of the two looking over the exhibit. As a longtime devotee of both creators, I felt a frisson of awe just by seeing them in the same room—I wonder what they spoke about?) And finally, there's a slightly awkward interview with original Howl author Diana Wynne Jones.

The real bonus for longtime fans, however, is the Ghibli ga Ippai Special: Short Short set. (I got it as part of a twin box set with Howl, though it's also available separately.) This DVD collects 22 shorts that Ghibli created between 1992 and 2005, few of which have been seen outside of Japan and maybe a few film festivals. Leica reels, test footage, interviews and other variations and background information from these shorts provide a total of 53 items.

A mix of ads, film festival signal films and music videos, the shorts provide an interesting look into the workings of Studio Ghibli. In the public mind, the studio is tightly wedded to Miyazaki, and to a lesser degree to co-founder Isao Takahata. The question of succession has lingered in the air at Ghibli for over a decade, and at one point it seemed as if Miyazaki's torch would eventually be passed to Yoshifumi Kondo. Proof of this was the music video Ghibli produced for the pop duo Chage & Aska, On Your Mark, which Kondo directed. Although Miyazaki's influence is strongly felt, it's clear that Kondo had his own style, blending some of anime's science-fiction aesthetic with Ghibli's trademark humanism and attention to the play of light and colour. (If you manage to get your hands on the Japanese laserdisc release of Little Nemo, you'll see his pilot film for the movie that's just as assured.) Unfortunately, Kondo died of a brain aneurysm just a few years later.

On Your Mark isn't the first short on the disc, but it's the first that presents an interesting question: Miyazaki and Takahata produce personal, director-driven films, and their styles have pretty much defined the studio. How, then, can a budding talent within Ghibli come into their own? Kondo's channeling of the Miyazaki style presented one possible answer, but watching the different ads here, many of which stylistically evoke Grave of the Fireflies, Omoide Poroporo, Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas—it's almost as if no one dared to emulate Miyazaki after Kondo—you get the feeling no one else could get out of the masters' shadows.

Until, that is, the recent trilogy of music videos for Capsule, a Shibuya-pop group on the Contemode label. Set in an optimistic, high-tech future, they trace three interconnected episodes in a girl's life as she shops, parties, and meets someone who could well be the man of her dreams. As airy and fluffy as the bouncy music suggests, these have nowhere near the pseudo-gravitas of On Your Mark, which channelled standard anti-authoritarian anxieties (and, by an accident of timing, apocalypse-cult fears), but their mood and aesthetic prove to be as infectious as the tunes they accompany. Not only do these look nothing like any other Ghibli production (not least because of the heavy reliance on CGI), they don't look much like other anime either. Is this an indicator of a possible future direction for Ghibli? Hopefully a box set in thirteen years will provide the answer.

Update: Andrew Osmond points out that I accidentally confused Yoshifumi Kondo's directorial debut, which was Whisper of the Heart, not On Your Mark. Miyazaki did, in fact, direct On Your Mark.

Howl's Moving Castle
Studio Ghibli
119 minutes
Buy Howl's Moving Castle (Region 2) from YesAsia.com
Buy Howl's Moving Castle (Region 1) from Amazon.com or Amazon.ca

Ghibli ga Ippai Special: Short Short
Studio Ghibli
42 minutes
Buy Ghibli ga Ippai Special: Short Short from YesAsia.com

Buy the Howl's Moving Castle + Ghibli ga Ippai Special: Short Short Twin Box from YesAsia.com

Labels: anime, Hayao Miyazaki, reviews, Studio Ghibli

fps got its start because I'm interested in the boundaries between different styles, techniques and animation cultures—or rather, I'm interested in exploring the connections that transgress them, because most of these boundaries are artificial in any case. Kino Kid calls them border crossings. I call them gray areas.

Whatever you want to call them, I think this year has been fantastic for them—look no further than The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, which combines new-school three-dimensional computer graphics with old-school silhouette animation, à la Prince Achmed.

I just finished watching the pilot for Skyland, a coproduction between Method Films in France and 9Story in Canada that uses anime as its jumping-off point. They make no bones about it; the Skyland demo that's been on 9Story's website since last year uses music from Akira Symphonic Suite as its soundtrack. Like my two other favourite East-West hybrids, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Teen Titans, Skyland doesn't take the slapdash let's-mimic-anime approach favoured by Invasion: America and the unwatchable Loonatics. You can tell that the creators studied a wide range of anime from various perspectives, and took the best of what they needed. Teen Titans, Avatar and Skyland all feature rich backgrounds, strong poses and frame compositions, designs that immerse you in another world, scores that are true to the shows' genres, and a reluctance to soft-pedal certain aspects because, you know, they're cartoons.

Skyland is also a hybrid in that it uses CG and motion capture along with cel shading. At present it's sort of an imperfect experiment. The backgrounds are the best part; they have all the complexity and solidity of CG, but with the painterly look that's straight outta Miyazaki's films. (Look at Skyland's blocks of Earth floating in the sky and just try not think of Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Go on, I double-dare you.)

The characters are a different matter, though, closer to the MTV Spider-Man than to Kakurenbo. Their biggest problem is that they don't sit still—they bob and shift their weight, like real people being told to move for the sake of movement. There's also that literalness that rotoscoped work tends to have. Their second biggest problem is their dialogue, which is just a little forced in terms of script and execution. One or the other wouldn't be insurmountable (the original Star Wars trilogy shows that good things happen when you combine good performances with B-movie dialogue; the second trilogy shows what happens when you mess up both), but the two combined are just off enough to be problematic.

The story, too, seems a bit formulaic (though I like the idea of good guys and bad guys both trying to fulfill a prophecy to their own advantage—very Neon Genesis Evangelion), but as it's only the first episode, there's plenty of potential for surprises later.

However, none of these negatives detract from the pleasure of watching Skyland and seeing a show created with such obvious care. The show has such a good visual foundation that I'm willing to wait to see if everything else comes together.

Skyland comes out January 14 in North America, Europe, Latin America and Australia. The channels I know of are Nicktoons, Teletoon, France 2, ITV, and ABC (Australia). Nick and Teletoon are airing sneak previews of the pilot tomorrow night.

Labels: anime, reviews

Today, I'm writing from the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema. The great news is that Waterloo's ultra-cool Princess Theatre (which is hosting most of the festival films) has wireless internet. So, when most people get up for popcorn - that's when I'll be posting and checking my email.

The festival started yesterday, but I just took the train (and bus) down from Montreal today, so that's when I'll start.

The print of the first film was late getting to the theatre, so the audience was treated to the work of this year's Sheridan grads. Some of the shorts were fantastic. Especially a little film called...

An Eye for Annai


This is an irresistable short story of a one-eyed polygon searching for its second eye. The art is so simple and endearing and the flute score beautifully matches the action. I could keep ranting about it, but you'd do better to see it for yourself as it looks like it's usually available on-line.

Bookmark Burst of Beaden



The theme for today's films was heavily political but wrapped in whimsy. We took in two Eastern European animated feature films that both had harsh things to say about American foreign policy, but said them in two completely different ways.

Frank & Wendy (Estonia)



The heroes of this 2d feature are based loosely on Muldar and Scully prototypes from X-Files fame. In a very appealing minimalist, absurdist style, Frank and Wendy wend their way through a surreal landscape of sausages, shaved monkeys, and obese Americans as they try to uncover an alien plot to replace all living beings with glowing green cubes.

It sounds surreal and it is. But it yet somehow remains engaging and at times hugely entertaining. As festival curator, Joseph Chen pointed out in his introduction to the film, it "pokes fun at everyone: its creators, its own country, Europeans, and, of course, the United States."

I also wholeheartedly agree with Chen's caveat: "Whether you enjoy this film largely depends on how much you had to drink the night before."


The District (Hungary)



This is the first animated feature film to come out of Hungary since 1989. Using a combination of Photoshop, Flash, and 3D software, a team of 15 animators spun this rambunctious and beautifully drawn story of a dysfunctional neighbourhood that finds itself in the middle of an international oil crisis.

At first, the film lulls viewers into a sense that perhaps it's fit for families. But as we get to know the motley, multi-ethnic neighbourhood better, we realize this is one to leave the kids at home for. Predictably, the film involves the US dropping an atomic bomb on Bucharest.

For a sense of the fresh, complex aesthetic, definitely, check out the Trailer.

+++++++

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the big day at the festival. I think I'll be watching about six films and taking in a couple lectures... so check back for more updates!

Labels: festivals, Nyocker, reviews, The District, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema, WFAC

When I was editing Armen Boudjikanian's article "Sifting Through Layers of Illusion" for our most recent issue, I thought its underlying premise—that "2D animation," as a term, is ill-defined and still largely unexplored—would have best been served with an accompanying DVD, so that readers could get an eyeful of the array of techniques out there.

It looks like the National Film Board agreed: within days of fps #5's drop date, they released Mindtravel, a compilation of eight recent (and two less recent) animated shorts by eight different artists, using eight different techniques.

The DVD release coincided with the International Day of Animation, and it's a fitting selection; these films are all wordless or close to it, so they showcase the art of animation with minimal distraction. (Of course, it's impossible to be distracted while watching Craig Welch's Welcome to Kentucky; the precise linework and its slow but inexorable rhythm are mesmerizing.)

Some of the shorts struck me as particularly outstanding. Nicolas Brault's Islet (with a story that reminded me of Mark Baker's The Hill Farm, but with Inuit characters) was completely drawn using a graphics tablet, yet it looks as sketchy and vibrant as pencilwork. Lejf Marcussen's Angeli looks like an extremely clever application of 3D CGI; actually, 98% of it is an even more clever application of great drawing and composition skills.

I'd seen some of the shorts before, but found that repeat viewings didn't hinder my enjoyment at all. Last year I praised Jacques Drouin's Imprints for its revolutionary use of the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen; watching it a second time, I actually liked it more. Similarly, Geroges Schwizgebel's L'Homme sans ombre (The Man Without a Shadow) held my attention more than when I first saw it. Most of the film is painted on glass, a technique that requires destroying the previous frame in order to paint the new one. This results in an energetic, straight-ahead style of animation, but Schwizgebel takes it farther than most by keeping the camera moving at the same time. In the first few minutes of the film, the camera circles, swoops and dives as the action continues, with one scene transforming into another. It's a little vertigo-inducing, but this time I was more appreciative of how it contributed to the dreamy, fablelike quality of the story.

The only thing missing? Commentary tracks. I'd like to hear what each artist has to say about his or her work, especially since some are so open to interpretation. The best we have are artist biographies, which provide only the tiniest insight, as well as show once again that the strangest things can spring from the minds of seemingly ordinary people.

Mindtravel
National Film Board of Canada
98 minutes
Buy Mindtravel from the NFB Store

Labels: National Film Board of Canada, NFB, reviews

Things have been pretty busy in the last month, between our fifth issue and the recent Animation Innovator event. So I didn't quite get around to watching Kakurenbo as quickly as I'd intended, though I'd been quite taken with the teaser I saw at the Japan Media Arts Festival screenings at this year's SIGGRAPH conference.

Kakurenbo concerns seven children playing hide & seek on the streets of Tokyo after dark, in defiance of their peers' warnings that demons wait for exactly those conditions to take children away. (One of the characters has personal reasons: his sister disappeared one night). They start out recklessly brave, but when strange creatures manifest and start to hunt them down, it quickly turns to fight or flight for the hopelessly outmatched kids.

As an atmospheric, short horror film (it's a mere 25 minutes) that leans heavily on digital animation (the characters are cel-shaded 3D CGI), Kakurenbo's most obvious spiritual connection is to Production I.G.'s Blood: The Last Vampire, another short horror film that leans heavily on digital animation. Both are also short on plot and heavy on atmosphere, but in an appealing way. (Kakurenbo, in particular, has the character of a ghost story being told among children.) The less obvious predecessor is Akira, which also brought out the idea of a nighttime Tokyo as a dark children's playground, combining the modern urban with the ancient mythological. Also, as far as I can tell, Akira is the first commercial anime production to have atmospheric nighttime scenes with truly dark palettes and a wide range of colours within the shadows, providing rich and enveloping textures. (Earlier films like Wicked City still tended to use colours that would pop on a dark background. The only movie that comes close is Osamu Dezaki's Golgo 13, recently re-released on DVD.)

The other similarity to Akira is its use of children who aren't particularly sympathetic. Only one kid here appears as an overt brute, from the beginning, but watch what happens when two other kids find themselves boxed in: wordlessly, they arm themselves with a rock and a lead pipe with unnerving familiarity. (We also never see their faces; the kids wear masks throughout the film.)

Kakurenbo highlights why teenagers and college students gravitate more toward anime than, say, Disney or Dreamworks. Kakurenbo is all about kids, but isn't in the least bit sweet. Children are put in danger, without the underlying expectation that they'll come out okay just because they're children. (This is also why you should stick with the Japanese language track; the Japanese voices are, or at least sound like, real children. The American voices sound like adults trying to sound like children.)

It's also interesting to watch how studios outside of North America experiment with CGI. Kakurenbo, My Beautiful Girl Mari, Sky Blue and The District are four CGI movies that point in four different directions, stylistically and thematically. As much as I liked Chicken Little, it didn't go anywhere new visually or storywise. And neither will Cars, Shrek 3, or Hoodwinked. And that's a damn shame.

Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek
Yamatoworks/D.I.C./Central Park Media
25 minutes
Buy Kakurenbo: Hide & Seek from Amazon.com

Labels: anime, Nyocker, reviews, The District

Unlike, I suspect, many animation fans, I walked into Chicken Little with no opinion about the movie one way or another. I'd seen an extended clip at during the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival jury, and attended the Disney presentation at the conference itself where Mark Dindal and others spoke about the making of the movie at length. And of course I'd seen the trailer online and on TV. Everything I'd seen suggested that it was a good movie, but I've been burned by clips before. And Disney hasn't exactly earned my trust in the last few years.

But there's a lot at stake here for the company. Chicken Little, which they're calling their first fully computer-animated feature (technically true, though it kind of sweeps Dinosaur under the rug), is their one shot at justifying their claim that CGI now rules the roost (sorry) and their shuttering of the Florida and California studios.

So with all these conflicting bits of data, I had no real preconceptions as I sat in the cinema before the preview screening. I did allow myself to over-analyze a few things, like the noticeably extravagant prize drawing (an indifferent-looking tween got herself an Xbox 360), and the opening of the film itself, where a narrator rejects two potential openings as trite: the opening moments of The Lion King, and a truck in on an open fairy-tale book. Interesting, I thought. The corporate mantra has been that Disney is embracing its heritage as it moves into CGI, and here the film is explicitly turning its back on it. It seemed a little heavy-handed, as if they couldn't trust the movie to speak for itself.

But after that, I stopped watching for portentous signs of Disney's new groove and tried to get into the movie.

Believe me, they didn't make it easy. In the first fifteen minutes or so, I found Chicken Little's use of music to be too heavy-handed. When Chicken Little and his dad Buck drive home in more or less awkward silence after a school incident (they're both trying to get past Chicken Little's "sky is falling" faux pas from a year earlier), we're walloped on the head by maudlin piano music and too-loud lyrics that tell us how sad everyone is. I found myself missing Randy Newman's simple and evocative "I Will Go Sailing No More" from Toy Story pretty badly.

I also couldn't reconcile the character design (cartoony, symmetrical) with the stylized, asymmetrical mechanics and backgrounds. I can see how it would work on paper, but the crispness of CGI only reinforces the dissonance between symmetrical and asymmetrical designs, at least for me.

These were the two problems that I couldn't let go of throughout the film, though the use of music stopped being an irritant as the story progressed and it actually became a plot element. But overall, I've got to say that Chicken Little is pretty darned good. Storywise, it deviates from Disney's established formulas and gives us a few surprises. Most Disney movies from The Little Mermaid onward are driven by the "I want" motive of the protagonist (usually established in a song, and obtained after much hardship at the end). Fairly early on, Chicken Little actually gets what he wants (to save face and earn his father's affection), after some effort; what drives his actions after that is his fear of losing what he's finally gained.

I also found I had to reverse an earlier opinion on the film's emotional core. Chicken Little is one of those rare North American animated films that focuses on the relationship between fathers and sons, but I couldn't get into Little's dad's emotional distance at first—there were too many missed opportunities for subtle (and therefore more powerful) interplay. But later, when father and son realize that their initial reconciliation is paper-thin, it leads into more interesting territory—especially for Buck, who doesn't know how to express certain emotions and whose pleading for a return to their too-brief period normalcy feels especially desperate. When the two do really reconcile, he's still not quite sure of how far he can go, which becomes material for some good gags.

Chicken Little isn't quite a home run, but it is something that Disney hasn't had in a long time: an honest-to-God family movie that everyone can enjoy without apology. What irks me—infuriates me, really—is that Disney and the people who buy their line will point to Chicken Little and say, "See? CGI is where it's at."

The thing is, Chicken Little is a good CGI movie. It's cartoony in an assured way that's head and shoulders above Madagascar, while its compositions, use of colour and framing are certainly "cinematic,"—but in its own way, without being too showy. (No roller-coaster rides here.) But my feeling is that all this extra care was put into Chicken Little because of how much was at stake. In short, Disney was desperate enough to put a lot of care into the storytelling and visuals—the kind of care they should have been putting into most of their movies post-Lion King. Too bad they had to be desperate to get to that point.

Chicken Little
Walt Disney Pictures
81 minutes
Buy Chicken Little from Amazon.com or Amazon.com

Labels: Disney, reviews