Originally Posted By mawnck Place your bets! <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/biz/18-animated-features-submitted-for-2011-oscar-race.html" target="_blank">http://www.cartoonbrew.com/biz...ace.html</a> The 18 submitted features are: The Adventures of Tintin” Alois Nebel” Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked” Arthur Christmas” Cars 2″ A Cat in Paris Chico & Rita Gnomeo & Juliet Happy Feet Two Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil Kung Fu Panda 2 Mars Needs Moms Puss in Boots Rango Rio The Smurfs Winnie the Pooh Wrinkles
Originally Posted By ecdc Tintin. So I finally saw Cars 2 this week. I sit down, the opening starts, and I think, "You know, my expectations are so low for this that I'm bound to have a good time. I'm sure people were just used to Pixar's insanely high standard." I was wrong. It was just a surprisingly bad movie. Not a little off, but just...stereotypically bad, the kind of thing I expect in theaters in the summer. But not from Pixar.
Originally Posted By jasmine7 I agree about Cars 2, ecdc. I watched it today. I won't say I absolutely hated it, but I was just blah through the vast majority of it. I think I actually laughed 2 times, and it really stirred very little emotion in me. So off for a Pixar film. I really liked Rango, & I still need to see Kung Fu Panda 2. That's up next for me, so at the moment, based on my very, very limited viewings of this year's animated films, I'll say Rango for now.
Originally Posted By mawnck A couple o' observations: 18 MOVIES? Holy oleo, Batbat! I was expecting WAY less. But then, there haven't been very many memorable movies this year. And there's 4 on the list I wasn't expecting. 18 eligible movies means we get five nominees in the category. But these 18 haven't been declared eligible yet - only submitted. If the eligible number drops to 15 or fewer, there will only be three nominees. Like last year. When there actually were five movies that deserved a nomination. GOD I hate that rule. On shaky ground: Mars Needs Moms & The Adventures of TinTin New rule added this year: “Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique.” Ruh-roh. Looks like we get to find out if they really, REALLY mean it. ("My sources say no." - Magic 8 Ball, Steven Spielberg Edition) Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked & The Smurfs As always in these cases, someone at the Academy is going to take a stopwatch to these suckers to make sure there's an animated character on screen for 75% of the running time. Movies have been disqualified for this in the past. But I suspect The Smurfs is in the clear. Conspicuous in its absence: Mia and the Migoo. There was probably too much time between the initial release and the US premiere. Finally, I just wanted to take this one last opportunity to make this statement, because it just can't be repeated too many times. MARS NEEDS MOMS WAS TERRIBLE. Thank you.
Originally Posted By mawnck By the way ... INconspicuous in its absence: The Lion of Judah. You mean I endured that horror show for NOTHING? And it's looking disturbingly like I've missed both Wrinkles and A Cat in Paris - which from the sound of things might both be actual contenders. Grumph.
Originally Posted By magic0214 Based on Rotten Tomatoes scores....Winnie the Pooh looks like the winner, which I would be A OK with, since it was a great movie.
Originally Posted By mawnck RT sux. Lukewarm reviews are treated just as fresh as raves, which works in favor of movies like Winnie the Pooh that nobody has a strong opinion about. Check Metacritic, which goes by how positive or negative the reviews are. Tintin in first place, Rango 2nd, Winnie the Pooh third. Good news! "The sound of things" was wrong. I ain't missed nuthin'. The next few weeks are going to be VERY busy in animated movieville, starting with Chico & Rita, in West Hollywood, this coming weekend. One more curiously missing flick that I forgot about. It ran in LA back in January - Escaflowne 2.0. In fact there were no Anime movies submitted this year at all. That's a first, isn't it?
Originally Posted By FerretAfros The only one I've seen is Cars 2, and I sure hope that there's something better. However, the reason I didn't see the others is that they also didn't look very good. I think that if enough of these are deemed eligable to get 5 nominations, they might finally reconsider their rules. The last few years have had very strong, but small, fields; this year has a larger, but not-so-great field, yet it could easily get more nominations.
Originally Posted By EmmaJayne Given how incredibly sucky Cars 2 was, I think it's safe to say it wont be a win for Pixar this year. Which is nice. I saw Rango but made the mistake of taking a four year old to it.. which means I spent most of the time watching him run up and down the stairs in the theatre, though I wasn't that impressed with what I did see. My fiance raves about it though and I know popular opinion is that it was pretty good. Gnomeo and Juliet we tried to watch but fell asleep ( in it's defense we did put it on at midnight, in bed) and the same again for Rio.. How have I missed so many movies this year? I was shocked at the size of this list. It just seems like kind of a weak year for animated film..
Originally Posted By mawnck >>How have I missed so many movies this year?<< Eight of them haven't been released yet. Four of those are getting "qualifier screenings" in the next few weeks. The filmmakers (or distributor, or whoever) pays a scruddy little theater somewhere in the outskirts of LA County to run their movie for one week. As far as the Academy is concerned, that's a release, although the folks in Des Moines may feel differently. You can catch Chico and Rita this weekend if you happen to be in West Hollywood. This scheme usually doesn't result in a nomination, but it did for The Secret of Kells two years ago (and deservedly so). And with such a weak field this year, who knows? >>Rango ... I wasn't that impressed with what I did see. My fiance raves about it<< There sure doesn't seem to be much middle ground with Rango. I think its biggest strength and biggest weakness is that it is the one CGI flick in the bunch (other than Mars Needs Moms, which was awful) that looked nothing like your typical American CGI movie. If you wanted safe, cute and cuddly, you sure didn't get it. It was kind of ... "prickly", for want of a better term. People aren't used to being prickled by their animated movies. >>Gnomeo and Juliet we tried to watch but fell asleep ... and the same again for Rio.<< Drink a Red Bull or two next time. Might help, might not. Rio at least looks good and has some decent music. Gnomeo is better tolerated if you treat it as a game of "how many Elton John songs can you find hidden in the background music?" I bet a lot of the movies you missed would have provoked the same reaction. This has indeed been a WEAK year. Yet another for the conspicuous-in-its-absence file ... remember "Hop"? Yeah, me too. Sorry to spoil your Monday with that memory. My suspicion is they didn't submit because they knew it didn't clear the 75%-animated rule. Confusion has broken out over whether this is the "submitted by the deadline" list or the "confirmed and just waiting for the qualifying run" list. The Academy's press release says the former. >>Submitted features must fulfill the theatrical release requirements and meet all of the category's other qualifying rules before they can advance in the voting process.<< <a href="http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2011/20111104a.html" target="_blank">http://www.oscars.org/press/pr...04a.html</a> Jerry Beck (who is on the nomination committee) insists its the latter. >>I happen to know that these are the 18 films (no more, no less) that will be screened for the Animation Branch.<< <a href="http://www.cartoonbrew.com/feature-film/18-qualify-for-best-animated-feature.html" target="_blank">http://www.cartoonbrew.com/fea...ure.html</a> Shrug.
Originally Posted By basil fan I'd be happy to see Pooh win the Oscar. I really liked that film. Mo-cap doesn't count? Sounds good to me.
Originally Posted By mawnck "Chico and Rita" is a contender. Hollywoody love story about a Cuban jazz pianist (Chico) and a Cuban jazz singer (Bertha - no, I'm just kidding) who are in love of each another but never can seem to get it together. Fantastic music throughout, and a decent though occasionally hokey script. The animation will probably be a point of contention with the Academy committee, since it's rather crude and squiggly, though for me it seemed to fit the material nicely for some reason. The art style looks a little Waking Life-y, except that it looks more like real animation. And it doesn't suck. Oh, and there's a sex scene with female full frontal. Don't take your third-grader. Well, unless you want to. Not a top-tier movie by 2009 standards, but this ain't 2009. It just has to be better than Rio. And it's MUCH better than Rio. I'll have to stew on it overnight to decide if it's better than Rango. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMdL4Y5KB6A" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...L4Y5KB6A</a>
Originally Posted By mawnck A few updates. "The Smurfs" have been declared ineligible. Reason not given. I guess either the Smurfs weren't on screen for 75% of the time, or the Academy decided they weren't the main characters. The other stuff that you'd think would be out (Tintin, Chipmunks, etc.) is in. I guess it's official ... The rules don't apply to Spielberg. So that's 17 movies eligible, therefore there will be five nominees. And here's me out on a limb: I predict that Wrinkles will be one of them.
Originally Posted By mawnck THE MAWNCKSCARS COUNTDOWN - 2011 EDITION or The Year in Oscar-Eligible Animated Features or I Watch the Chipmunk Movies So You Don’t Have To or Gawd Did This Year Suck or What? As of right now, having just come back from enduring Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, I have seen all 17 of the Academy-blessed animated features for 2011 in the theater (plus a few extras that either weren’t eligible or didn’t even try – which I have placed in their appropriate spot in the lineup without actually assigning a number). This was a pretty weak year, with a veritable smorgasbord (orgasbord orgasbord) of movies that are just ... OK. This makes ranking them mighty difficult, but I laugh in the face of difficulty! (Certainly more than I was laughing in the face of the Chipmunks today.) Ready? Then let’s gooooooooo! (xxx) The Lion of Judah A work of awe-inspiring ineptness, and a very serious contender for the worst movie in the history of the universe. This one is, quite literally, Plan 9 From Outer Space awful. The fact that Jesus is in it is just icing on the turd cake. A lamb (who is so infuriatingly obnoxious that you are rooting for his long, painful, agonizing demise well before they uncrate him and you actually see him onscreen) is being taken to Jerusalem to be slaughtered at the Great Temple for Passover. A group of heinously designed, apparently brain-damaged CGI barnyard animals (the same ones who were in the Bethlehem stable when Jesus was born, as chronologically unlikely as that seems) head out to rescue him, and keep stumbling into the Passion story. They also stumble upon a gang of crows who are stealing laundry for reasons I’m still at a loss to explain. Highly recommended if you are a connoisseur of really ghastly movies. (The entire audience LOVED this movie, BTW, and I should know because I was it.) 17. Mars Needs Moms This one was not entertainingly awful. At all. It was just awful. The only good thing about it is that it was SO awful that Disney pulled the plug on Zemekis’s impending desecration of Yellow Submarine, proving that you can make even a movie executive come to his senses if you use a big enough crowbar. (xxx) Hop Gaaackk!! BAD movie! BAD, BAD movie! The most astonishing thing about Hop is that there are two movies below it on this list. Some great visuals in this one, but it was basically just a very bad Chipmunk movie minus two (or is it 5?) chipmunks. This wasn’t even submitted to the Academy for consideration, and I can think of lots of reasons. Maybe it will just go away and be forgotten forever. (continues below)
Originally Posted By mawnck (xxx) Evangelion 2.0: You Will (Not) Advance The only Anime flick I managed to see in a theater this year, ineligible due to its Japanese release date (I think). Whatever merits it possessed were thoroughly torpedoed by hamfisted cliché-slinging. The story is too confusing to describe, except that it involved sullen junior-high-school kids in gigantic untested robot suits fighting invincible aliens, with a heaping side-order of naval-gazing psychodrama regarding the meaning of life and duty and child labor and stuff. 16 Hoodwinked Too Did NOT live down to my expectations (IE it was better than Hop), but don’t let that stop you from avoiding it at all costs. The first one was better. Take that as you will. 15 Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked The second half is actually … OK, but that was after 45 minutes of relentlessly insulting my intelligence (and my kids’ intelligence too, except that I don’t have any kids). Gets bonus points for a blatant and recurring Totoro reference, which I am apparently the only person in the world who noticed, probably because most Miyazaki fans wouldn’t be caught dead at this movie. Ironically, that’s still not quite enough to move it ahead of ... 14 Cars 2 I could write a dang term paper on all the things Pixar got appallingly, amazingly wrong on this one, as I’m sure can we all. All I’ll say here is … One more like this, and Pixar can kiss their reputation goodbye. The Eisner Cheapquels didn’t suck because they were cheap or because they were sequels or because they were corporate-marketing-initiated product. They sucked because they sucked. Lasseter, your poop DOES stink. (/rant) (xxx) The Smurfs Declared ineligible by the Academy for reasons not stated, way too late to stop me from seeing it. Thanks a lot, guys. This one wasn’t quite as dumb as I expected, but it was still pretty dumb. 13 Alois Nebel This year’s critical-darling-that-mawnck-thought-was-totally-overrated. Black and white noir-style rotoscope animation (a little Scanner-Darkly-ish). A train dispatcher gets institutionalized and then gets mixed up in some sort of political murder family smuggling something something. The story is hopelessly confusing, and apparently requires the viewer to have a lot of familiarity with the politics of 1980s Poland. I know this is hard to believe, but I didn’t. Not sure it would’ve helped anyway. The storytelling is obtuse, and that’s putting it kindly. A good movie if you enjoy being bored to tears in the name of a “cultural experience”, and researching on the internets for two hours afterwards trying to figure out what that was all about. And the animation was yucky. Just like in A Scanner Darkly. (continues some more below)
Originally Posted By mawnck 12 Winnie the Pooh I know it’s 2D Disney, and we all want to see 2D Disney do well. And it’s good ol’ Pooh. And most critics found it, if not enchanting, at least tolerable. But I still expected better than this. Way, WAY better. The plot is a mess, and ALL the characters are too dumb to be believable, even for a cartoon. (One or two clinically dumb characters is tolerable, but not all of them.) I refuse to grade on a different curve just because it’s a little kids’ movie, or because “that’s how it is in the book”. (/another rant) 11 The Adventures of Tintin Amazing that a movie with this much action can be this dull. The script is what really lets this one down. Since the mocap visuals obviously can’t inject personality into these characters, the script has to do it. And it didn’t. It’s way too talky too. The big whoopdedoo action scenes were the best part of this one, except that Kung Fu Panda 2 had some similar scenes that were a gazillion times more fun than these. 10 Gnomeo and Juliet Fun for the purposes of playing “Name that Elton John Tune in the Background Music”. As a movie, not so much. But it was … OK. And I can’t believe it’s in the top 10. Man this year sucked. 9 Happy Feet Too Much like HF1, it suffered from overstuffing. Way too many characters, way too many concepts, way too many parallel story lines, and as a result, way too many plot holes and way too little interest in the goings-on. And it’s pretty confusing to boot. It has its moments though. Mostly musical ones. Therefore it’s … OK. 8 A Cat in Paris European 2D kiddie action flick about a kid, a cat, and a small-time cat burglar vs. an evil gangster with bumbling sidekicks. The script, which was … OK, clashed with the wooden, expressionless artsy-fartsy animation style, resulting in a whole that was much less than the sum of its parts. This was probably the biggest disappointment of the year as far as I was concerned, since I’d heard so many good things about it. But it’s … OK. (xxx) Mia and the Migoo Girl goes off in search of her father, who is in danger at a construction site in the middle of the jungle or the ocean or something. She has several weird new-agey adventures on the way. This 2D Korean import is being compared (negatively) to My Neighbor Totoro because there are some giant forest monster thingys in it, but I don’t like to just regurgitate what everyone else says, so …. Ummmm …. Uhhhhh … Well … I’d have to say … it’s kind of like an unsuccessful Korean My Neighbor Totoro. Only not exactly. Oscar ineligible, I suspect, because of the original Korean release date. It’s … OK. (movies that I actually liked, still to come)
Originally Posted By mawnck 7 Puss in Boots It’s … OK, and it probably would’ve been downright wonderful if Humpty Dumpty hadn’t been in it. But he’s in most of it. There’s potential for an excellent sequel without him, unless they replace him with another constantly yammering irritant. Why does Dreamworks keep putting these characters into their movies? (/yet another rant) 6 Rio This is Animated Features 2011, summarized in one gloriously average movie. Good music, pretty visuals, cute focus-grouped-to-death story that’s adequate to keep you awake if nothing else. It’s the very epitome of … OK. 5 Chico and Rita This one’s better than OK. A star-crossed pair of musicians – a pianist and singer, respectively - pursue a torrid off and on relationship through the history of Cuban Jazz. Awesome music. Great story. The 2D animation is mediocre, but not bad enough to stop me from strongly recommending this one. (Note: Not for kids.) 4 Kung Fu Panda – The Kaboom of Doom Not up to the standard of the first one, and it has some story problems, but it’s nearly as gorgeous as the first one visually, and it has a great villain and a good script. 3 Rango This one was so visually striking that it could’ve been kind of crummy otherwise and I still would’ve loved it. But it was much better than that. The story was a little creaky, but the creativity and quirkiness that enveloped it made this one a standout in a year that badly needed them. 2 Arthur Christmas And of course, the hands-down no-contest best mainstream flick of the year got ignored. Get your butt (and your family’s butts) to the theater and see this in 3D while you still have a chance! Please! This is me BEGGING! And the 2011 Mawnckscar goes to … 1 Wrinkles (a/k/a Arrugas) Spanish 2D feature about an Alzheimers patient’s experiences at a nursing home. Yeah, it’s as depressing as it sounds, but it’s also totally involving and strangely positive despite all the lousy things you see happen in it. The animation is B-grade, but everything else about it totally overcomes this limitation. (And you sure couldn’t have pulled this film off in live action!) Allegedly it’s getting a wider arthouse release in a couple months. GO SEE IT. I will be doing the Secret of Kells Memorial Happy Dance if this gets a nomination. It deserves one. Tune in again next year. If you're Brave enough. See what I did there? Har har.
Originally Posted By FerretAfros >>(One or two clinically dumb characters is tolerable, but not all of them.) I refuse to grade on a different curve just because it’s a little kids’ movie, or because “that’s how it is in the book”.<< And that's the problem that I have with the entire Pooh franchise. The characters are dull, the stories are non-events, and there's just nothing going on. And somehow it turned into a multi-billion worldwide franchise that people just can't get enough of. I never really watched any of the Pooh stuff when I was a kid (I occasionally watched one of the TV shows, which I thought was just okay), so I don't have the emotional connection, and I just don't see what all the fuss is about. And thanks for giving reviews of all of these! I'm glad that I only ahd to see one of these films this year, since they all really do seem to be stinkers.
Originally Posted By mawnck >>they all really do seem to be stinkers.<< The top 5 aren't. Actually, 9 through 6 aren't exactly stinkers, they're just not anything special. >>The characters are dull, the stories are non-events, and there's just nothing going on. And somehow it turned into a multi-billion worldwide franchise that people just can't get enough of.<< The first two shorts - in their original form - are excellent IMHO. But the only character "of very little brain" is Pooh. His honey lust drives the storyline and everyone else reacts to him and it. Works much better than watching dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb and dumber stumbling around the Hundred Acre Wood for 80 minutes. And the best part about the shorts? They're SHORT.
