Do you hate animated films too?

[dodecafático]

Hello everyone,

About Pixar/Dreamworks/Whatever: For me the difference is very clear. When I'm going to watch one of these, I simply set my mind differently. The scripts are always simple enough in a way that even a hollywood producer might understand it, the editing has ALWAYS the same tempos, same camera movements, same everything that every hollywood blockbuster has already shown us. They completely ignore the possibilities in working with animation. But, on the other hand, sound and image quality is always top notch (because they can afford it, obviously). And I enjoy that. So that's what I go for when I watch some of these.
For Pixar, I would recommend Ratatouille and the first half of Wall-E (as mentioned before), and some of the short films. And Toy Story. Wouldn't recommend anything from Dreamworks, not even for the technical features.

This is something I just watched and wanted to share with you all.
The Cat Piano (2007)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj4RBmU-PIo

[Seth]

Agreed that there are very few good anime movies. All the good anime is to be found in TV series (there are a couple of good films that tie in to TV series, but you wouldn't want to watch them without knowing the shows).

But for an anime film that's standalone that I thoroughly enjoyed you could do worse than sit down with Wings of Honneamise. It's set on an alternate Earth, about a bunch of losers involved in a feeble space program that becomes politicised when a rival nation gets wind of the plan to develop an orbital rocket for the first manned space flight. Pretty bleak. By Studio Gainax, back in their Otaku No Video/Gunbuster early days when they were DIY kit bashers straight out of University, a bunch of geeky troublemakers who later established a well-earned reputation for trolling their fanbase. More about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spac ... C3%AAamise

I really dislike Pixar, although I guess what I dislike about them applies to most CG animation studios. The films are either pitched around what-can-we-anthropmorphise-next? or some wacky high concept, which only ever provides enough story for a 30-45 minute short film. They then pad out the rest with spitball session sight gags and a couple of action set pieces around which programmers can base a level of the video game tie-in. Add a scene to give the story some emotional gravitas, a simplistic moral message and some uneven to dreadful performances from stars thinking they can pass themselves off as voice actors and then call it a movie. You could write it as an equation.

[mono tony]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Cagliostro (on netflix, worth checking)

came here to mention tekkonkinkreet though, great little film

[Seth]

came here to mention tekkonkinkreet though, great little film

Yeah, it's fab (up until the last twenty minutes, which didn't really work for me). Like an animated Borribles (which should definitely happen). Highly recommended.

[Dan Bennett]

We watched Brave on Monday and it really is a dull patronising and ideologically shouty film in the "individual choice triumphs over social destiny" mould. I wouldn't even mind that last bit so much if the story arc that carried us through the lesson had some plausibility, the action had some wit, or if any of it had any of that sense of genuine fun that occasionally peeps through in Pixar - none of that here. By numbers cheeky little triplet sidekicks, faithful horse, and basically an utter lack of characters in the whole piece. Even the visuals - one thing I do like about Pixar is the combination of attention to detail and texture combined with sometimes genuinely imaginative set building. Here the detail and texture are very well done, but in the sense of a technical exercise. Scottish highland landscapes are always going to look epic, but if you add this little of your it becomes a bit of an empty exercise in technical excellence.
The lass' hair is remarkably well rendered though. If you like very detailed hair then maybe this is your film.


I can't hate Pixar on the whole. I enjoy their films more than I enjoy most things that make it to multi-screens. I liked Wall-E enormously for the first 1/2 - the dialogue free bit. Even if the rest of it was moralising and hypocritical slush the visuals, timing, characterisation and sound design of that first section made it pretty special. Ratatouille had the visual imagination and characters to let me enjoy it without questioning the sentimentality and even in Nemo the fishtank lot had great visual characterisation and I thought the scene with the whale managed to conjour a genuine sense of awe.

[Dan Bennett]

And I know this might be a silly point in a Pixar Family film, but I kept thinking how much they'd wasted the potential of the "Bear-King's Wife becomes a Bear" story. I wasn't expecting Svankmeyer levels of folkloric taboo prodding but the gap between the potential implications and the flatness of the execution here was glaring.

One of Disney's worst crimes has been to sentimentalise some fairly dark folk-tales, stripping them of their psychological horror, and here it felt like Pixar created their own dark folk tale, only to sentimentalise it out of existence.

[Seth]

One of Disney's worst crimes has been to sentimentalise some fairly dark folk-tales, stripping them of their psychological horror, and here it felt like Pixar created their own dark folk tale, only to sentimentalise it out of existence.

Say what you will about anime in general, there’s no medium better than anime telly serials for keeping a creepy, scary subtext intact when it comes to children’s fiction. Revolutionary Girl Utena plays with fairytale conceits; throughout the final quarter of the “story” (there’s substantially more subtext than actual text) I actually felt pretty violated with all the incest and domestic abuse lurking around the edges of the frame. And the first series of Rosen Maiden has the probably the most awkwardly sexually charged scenes you’ll ever see between a thirteen year old and his superpowered mail order child bride/sex doll (ick, but very, very interesting for a supposed kids' show). Appreciate that out-and-out psychosexual WTF & horror arguably goes beyond simply keeping fairytales as complex and dark as they should be and that this stuff possibly shouldn’t be filed under KidFic Which Respects Audience Intelligence (it sometimes does, but definitely doesn't always), but there you go.

[johnson]

Walerian Borowczyck is one of my favorite filmmakers, his animations with Lenica and his live-action films alike. Of course, he argued that all cinema was animation, live-action really being the animation of photographs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as5pI6IWR1U

Also a big fan of Vladislav Starevich.

[timdrage]

Masaaki Yuasa

Probably MIND GAME (2004) is the main recommendation but everything he's done is amazing one way or another. If you want a series his Kemonozume or Kaiba are highly recommended, and his latest Tatami Galaxy is superb too but maybe not the best first introduction to his work for someone who doesn't 'like anime' or isn't used to watching anime series.

[Seth]

I watched Kaiba when it first aired, it's due a rewatch. I remember finding it unbearably sad... you're not so much mourning characters as they die as you are configurations of characteristics as they flow into new iterations. The extent to which it imposes itself on you is also pretty commendable, it takes a fair bit of work to reorient yourself to its set of starting assumptions, which occasionally turn out to be assumptions you're familiar with in new guises or put to unexpected use.

Enough about that, though. Let's talk about Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt.

[jpeatt]

Masaaki Yuasa

Probably MIND GAME (2004) is the main recommendation but everything he's done is amazing one way or another. If you want a series his Kemonozume or Kaiba are highly recommended, and his latest Tatami Galaxy is superb too but maybe not the best first introduction to his work for someone who doesn't 'like anime' or isn't used to watching anime series.

I enjoyed Mind Game a lot.

[Mo Noyz]

Jon, I'd highly recommend any of the Pixar shorts. Won't take up much of your time, and you'll get a good idea what their films are like. Best of all, I think you can find every one of them on YouTube for nothing.