The Future of Animation?

I’ve always been a fan of animation, of course growing up I watched cartoons like any other kid, but I was rarely interested in any programme or film for that matter that wasn’t animated. I’d watch the same series over and over again, never getting bored. Certainly there were those which I didn’t like that much, but if there wasn’t anything else I’d still watch them anyway. You may say I had somewhat of a misspent youth, and you might be right, but then is any time truly misspent if it’s spent doing the things you enjoy. But then Gary Glitter likes molesting children, maybe he could spend his time more constructively.

Just as Glitter leaves children alone once they’ve grown up, so to do most children leave behind animation, which would beg the question did I ever grow up because I still like watching cartoons . Granted  there’s a lot of things I used to enjoy as a child that having seen them again in adulthood don’t stand up anymore, but then there are others that still do, generally it’s the programmes that had higher production values or more adult themes, like Transformers, Thundercats or Ulysses 31. If something is genuinely good to start with, it will always be so, even if it may seem dated by today’s standards.

As I’ve gotten older my taste for animation has developed as enjoying the world of anime, not that I would call myself a true anime fan, in my experience the true believes seem to like anything that falls under that banner, but given that the Japanese don’t really separate animation from live action, with a good third of their entire television and film output is animated, covering all subject matter and age certification, saying you like anime is like saying you like the BBC.

So we’ve established I like animation, but since this is a film blog, I should try and steer this rudderless boat down the right river. I tend to watch most animated film, be they from Disney or DreamWorks, Pixar to Studio Ghilbi. The thing all the major producers have is their own style, when you watch a Disney movie you know your watching a Disney movie, a fact which makes any new kids on the block tend to stand out, even more so when their a one off, made by an already established filmmaker, like Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr Fox or Gore Verbinski with Rango.

Gore Verbinski’s biggest films to date have been the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but these films nor anything else from his back catalogue point towards animation, the closest is maybe the cartoon like family comedy Mouse Hunt, but that was live action.

It is perhaps this lack of experience in the field that lead Verbinski to make the film in a very different way to your average studio animation. That’s not to say it didn’t have studio backing, it did, just not from the usual big hitters. The studio in question, Nickelodeon, who have produced animations in the past, mainly big screen versions of their TV channel mainstays, such as Rugrats and SpongeBob. They've also produced a number of family friendly live action movies like The Spiderwick Chronicles and Nacho Libre. But last year they brought out the big guns, the now Oscar winning Rango and The Adventures of TinTin: Secret of the Unicorn, which won the Golden Globe for best animated film, the first non-Pixar film to do so since the category was introduced. Basically if 2011 is anything to go by Pixar have some non-DreamWorks competition, but then Pixar’s 2011 contribution was Cars 2, one of the worst films they’ve ever made.

Back to Rango, and how it could have changed the way animated films are made. At the early stages of development Verbinski assembled a group of artists and writers together, not all of whom are from the celluloid world, and tasked his collective with coming up with the story and the conceptual art for the characters. The four artists involved would go off and work on charters, come together, compare notes, steal ideas, go back to the drawing board, then convene again, repeating until each design was complete.

That was the first thing Verbinski did differently, the second was assemble his cast, which may not sound revolutionary, even sound pretty standard. But what happens usually in animation, the voice actors come in one by one, record their vocal track in a little booth all alone, then they go home, they may not even come into contact with the other cast members until the premiere, if at all. With Rango Verbinski took a different track. Johnny Depp (who voices Rango) had a couple of weeks where he was available to record, so Verbinski gathered together all the other actors, including Ned Beatty, Bill Nighy, Ray Winston & Isla Fisher together, and rather than record their dialogue alone, they played dress up (apparently to help them get into character) and acted out the scenes together, allowing them to react to each other as they would in any other film.

Thirdly Verbinski convinced ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) to animate the film, ILM who are a special effects house, and have never made an animated film before (that’s of course if you discount the Pixar connection, but if you want to know more about that find my blog entry entitled ‘Birthing the Giant’ where that connection has previously been explained, we’ll be here all day else)

All these elements together create a unique animated film, a classic western populated by desert creatures, a plot hijacked from Jack Nicholson classic Chinatown, and a stars wars style trench battle with bats.  It has a look and feel all of its own, it’s not full of bright colours like you’d find in something like Toy Story, nor child friendly cute and cuddly characters like Madagascar. It’s not a story of race cars rediscovering themselves (I think that sentence sums up how shit Cars is), nor is it a story about nomadic prehistoric creatures returning a child, or anything quite as innocent. It’s a story about a man (or Chameleon in this case) who has no identity of his own, a dreamer who becomes a hero to a town  being choked to death by corrupt officials and thugs, about the march of progress regardless of whoever stands in the way, it’s about community, it’s about hope.

Rango Trailer

I Aint Afraid Of No Ghost!!

Sunday was Mother’s Day and what with the weather being somewhat patchy, and being as a family we all like our movies, we went to the cinema.  Turns out there’s not a lot of choice on a Sunday afternoon,  there was John Carter which frankly doesn’t look good, We Bought A Zoo, the story of the man who saved Dartmoor zoo, which has been relocated to Southern California, and I’d already seen The Muppets, which left us with The Woman In Black.

The Woman In Black is a period horror film based on the 1983 book by Susan Hill, and stars Daniel Radcliffe in his first post Harry Potter project. Radcliffe is quite competent as the lead, Arthur Kipp, a widowed solicitor who is send to clear up the affairs of a recently deceased client, and ends up with more than he bargained for.

What we’re given is an atmospheric ghost story, a horror film which doesn’t really on mindless violence and shock tactics to keep the chills up, which is obviously why it got away with a low  certificate rating, that and the fact that millions of Harry Potter fans will want to see Radcliffe in his post wizard project. But that isn’t to say it’s been dumbed down.

The only problem is I spent the first twenty minutes or so seeing only Potter, despite Radcliffe doing is best to pull off the big boy pants, I was still wondering when he was going to get to Hogwarts.

The other noteworthy think about the film, besides Radcliffe, is that it’s made by Hammer, who since being bought up a couple of years ago have started to make their presents felt in the horror realm once again.  The Woman in Black is the fourth instalment of the new wave of Hammer Films, the first being Let Me In, an English language remake of the brilliant Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. Let Me In was an adequate horror movie, but not a patch on its Swedish counterpart, losing a lot of the magic of the original, but that always happens, just look what happened with the trend of rehashing contemporary Japanese horror films a couple of years back, when Hollywood butchered the remakes of The Ring and The Grudge. The main problem with these recycled movies is, one they end up looking far too polished, and two, they get dumbed down, because Hollywood think we’re all idiots.

But it seems I’ve digressed somewhat, so to summarise,  and tie up any loose ends: English language remakes are rubbish, and I as yet do not have an exception to that rule, if you can think of one do let me know. Secondly as I think I’ve made fairly clear before, citing it as one of my movie year top five last year, Let the Right One In is superb, and you all should go rent/buy/stream/download/steal (delete where applicable) it right after you finish reading this marvel of literature.

It appears I may have digressed from my digression correction; it seems I’ve turned into a Billy Connelly routine.

An-y-way, time for the obligatory history lesson, I say obligatory, you could just skip over this bit, but DON’T, you might learn something, which although won’t help you in your day to day living, it could prove vital at the next pub quiz.

Hammer was founded in 1934, producing various types of film including Science fiction, thrillers, comedies and film noir, but it is for their output of horror films for which they are famous. Hammer pretty much dominated the genre from the mid-fifties until the early seventies, that is until two things happened. The first was a new lack of American funding, and secondly the market being saturated with the genre, with many other companies getting their fangs wet. The cheapest films to make have always been horror, often acting as a gateway for some of today’s directing cream, such as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and will no doubt help to produce some of tomorrow’s directorial greats. Hammer still produced numerous films during the horror glut, but had varying levels of success, and like most British film institutions were eventual forced to close their doors, finally stopping production in the mid-eighties. The company didn’t die, but hid from the world, regenerating in its coffin, eventually being bought up by a consortium in 2000, who announced their intention to resurrect production, but which ultimately came to nothing. In 2007 it was purchased by its current owners, who as I’ve already mentioned have started producing new material.

A couple of days after watching The Women in Black, I ended up watching another horror film by the name of Insidious, directed by James Wan, the man responsible for the Saw franchise, but don’t let that put you off, it’s nothing like that gorefest wank. The film starts of just like any other haunted house tale. However when the occupying family move home, they find the strange goings on keep going on, it appears it wasn’t the house that was haunted, but their oldest child, who is in an unexplained coma, in turn allowing him to become a vessel for lost spirits and demons.

Insidious is one of those films that starts of very routine, but as it progresses becomes more and more interesting, with the exploration of astral projection, something which I’d only come across before in X-Men, the comics rather than the films, where Professor Xavier battles the Shadow King.

It’s one of those films that if it had carried on as it was going wouldn’t have been terribly exciting or at all memorable, until the halfway mark I wasn’t that interested, but for the second half, I wasn’t necessarily on the edge of my seat, but I was definitely sitting forward.

So to conclude before we all get bored, I watched The Women in Black and Insidious, and I liked them both.

The Woman In Black Trailer

Insidious Trailer

Club 53

Most people have heard of the 27 club, a group of gifted musicians who all died at the age of 27, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, there are a few others that qualify for this honour, but I don’t want to bore you with lists. Yeah most people have heard of the 27 Club, but I can guarantee nobodies heard of Club 53. A group of highly talented or influential individuals who passed on at the age of 53. Maybe nobodies heard of Club 53 because the 27’s were all at the top of their game, with so much more still to give the world before their time was tragically cut short, and the members of Club 53 had time to accomplish a great deal before they left this mortal plain, becoming part of the social conscientiousness, or it could be nobodies heard of Club 53 because I’ve just made it up. But that’s not to say the members of Club 53 are any less prolific. Since it’s my club, it’s my rules, you might have died at the qualifying age, but if I ain’t heard of you, you ain’t getting in. with that said here’s my list:

·         George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth Jr. – The man who is to Baseball, what Hulk Hogan is to Wrestling or Pele is to Football.

·         Dian Fossey – An American zoologist who undertook an extensive study of gorillas over 18 years, before her tragic murder. Fossey’s story was told in the film Gorillas in the Mist staring Sigourney Weaver.

·         Vladimir Lenin – The Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist Politian who led the 1917 revolution, and the first leader of the Soviet Union.

·         Jim Henson – The creator of The Muppets

And it’s Mr. Henson and his accomplishments which I’m going to ramble on about, you may be thinking that introduction was somewhat over thought and unnecessary , but so’s your face.

Jim Henson started out with a series called Sam & Friends which he made whilst still at college and featured the prototype for his most famous character, Kermit the Frog. However it wasn’t until he started to make regular appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show that the Muppets really started to take form, and we where we first met muppet Rawlf the piano playing dog.

Then in 1969 Sesame Street was born, a programme designed to entertain and educate pre-schoolers, and which not only extensively featured Henson’s various puppet creations, but also several animated sequences produced by the puppeteer. But not wanting to be pigeon holed, he also during this time produced a number of sketches for the fledgling Saturday Night Live.

It was a combination of his experiences on both programmes that spawned his most famous and most enduring creatation, The Muppets. The Muppet show ran for five seasons form 1976-1981, and took the form of a variety show, with as much focus on the behind the scenes as the acts and parodies. Surprisingly for something which became so successful American networks didn’t want it, thinking it would only appeal to children. It was through an investor that the show was financed at all, being filmed in England, then sold to various networks around the world. Eventually becoming so successful it spawned a number of films.

The Muppet Movie (1979) – After a chance meeting with a talent agent in his swamp Kermit decides to head to Hollywood to become a star. Along the way he meets Fozzie, Gonzo and the rest of the Muppets, all of whom have Hollywood aspirations of their own.

The Great Muppet Caper (1981) – This time the Muppets are in London, and attempting to foil a jewel heist. Although this second instalment was as acclaimed and successful as their first movie outing, I really don’t think that much of it.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) – After graduating from drama school the Muppet’s decide to move to New York, with the aim of putting their show on Broadway, but it doesn’t go according to plan. Although it didn’t do quite as well financially as its predecessors, it’s in my opinion the best of the original run of Muppets films. It’s also the first film to be directed by Frank Oz, one of the main Muppet performers, voice of Yoda, and future director of Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels & The Indian in the Cupboard.

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) – After taking a little breather, The Muppets return with their interpretation of the Charles Dickens classic. Gonzo portraying Dickens himself, narrates the story of Ebenezer Scrooge (played by  the legend that is Michael Caine) and how the penny pinching miser learned the true spirit of Christmas. This has to me my favourite Christmas movie, and judging by the result of last year’s poll on this very blog, you’re all in agreement. It was also the first Muppet film to be made after Henson’s death, with the film being dedicated to both him and Richard Hunt, another of the original Muppet performers, who also died before the making of the film.

Muppet Treasure Island (1996) – Following the huge success of Christmas Carol, The Henson Company opted for another adaptation of a literary classic, unfortunately they couldn’t strike gold twice. Despite a brilliant turn from Tim Curry, as Treasure Island Villain Long John Silver, it’s pretty shit. It’s definitely a toss-up between this and The Great Muppet Caper for worst Muppet movie.

Muppets From Space (1999) – In the last film in their second run of movies, The Muppets head out of the library and into the real world, as real as the Muppets get anyway. Plot in a Nutshell: Gonzo discovers he’s actually an alien.

This was one of the first DVDs I ever bought, back in the day when DVDs all cost between £20-£25, and W.H.Smiths had an offer on, 3 for £40. Now bearing in mind this was when my hourly rate was about £3.50 an hour, so £40 was still a lot of money. One of the other films I got was Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, which is easily in my all-time top five. I’m trying to remember what the other one was, but it escapes me, obviously it was shit, and has since been deleted from my consciousness, but I digress.

Muppets from space was the last of the second run, but we weren't left to shiver and sweat cold turkey, there have been regular doses of Muppet morphine around the corner, injections of TV specials such as Letters to Santa, The Wizard of Oz and even the freebasing of a new TV show, Muppets Tonight.

The Muppets (2012) – The film follows Walter, a kid who never fitted in, ending up finding solace in the Muppet Show, which is full of  ‘people’ he can identify with. Walter’s comfort becomes an obsession, until he makes a pilgrimage to the Muppet studios. The studios have seen better days and The Muppets have all gone their separate ways. Upon learning his holy land is to be torn down, Walter embarks on a mission to reunite The Muppets and raise the money to save the studio.

This is a worthy addition to the Muppet franchise, easily standing shoulder to shoulder with Muppets Take Manhattan and Muppet’s Christmas Carol, and honestly one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a long time. Henson would be proud.

The Muppets Trailer