Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)

Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!) By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part. Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

WAKING LIFE (2001)

In some ways, Richard Linklater's sixth feature played like a sequel to his first, Slacker. Like that seminal low-budget indie, Waking Life is largely plotless as it prowls the streets of Austin, Texas, encountering one talkative oddball or dime-store philosopher after another. It sure doesn't look anything like Slacker, though; while the former film aimed for street-level realism, Waking Life takes place in a dream state realized through an animation process developed by Bob Sabiston (and ripped off many times since). Using computer software, animators were able to draw on top of edited video footage. With each new scene, a different artist takes the reigns, resulting in a fluid, continually evolving picture. The images ebb and flow like ocean waves, which may be problematic for viewers susceptible to sea sickness, but will prove entrancing to those on Linklater's wavelength. (Honorable mention goes to Linklater's second foray into animation, A Scanner Darkly, which uses a similar process to very different effect in its depiction of a paranoid world just on the edge of our own reality.)

THE IRON GIANT (1999)

For a film that seems so completely seamless on screen, The Iron Giant has one of the most Frankensteinian origin stories of any of the movies on this list. It’s based on a children’s story by Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath, former poet laureate of England, and author of some of the most bloody, visceral poems of the 20th century. When it was first optioned as a film, it was meant to be a live-action musical, with music by no less than the Who’s Pete Townshend; although that never worked out, Townshend did produce a soundtrack for a stage show based on the story. Disney Studios engaged Warner Bros. in a bidding war, with Warner, on the winning side, finally handing the project off to Brad Bird – who, just a few years later, would be working with Disney anyway, on Pixar’s The Incredibles. On top of all that, it was originally envisioned as a completely traditional cel animation project, then reconceived as a film done in 3D computer animation – only to eventually arrive on screen as an amalgam of both, with the bulk of the film done in standard animation and the main character – a colossal alien machine who befriends a young boy while being sought by a paranoid government – done in CGI. The Iron Giant took years to make, and went through innumerable reconceptions, personnel changes, and battles between the filmmakers and the studio – which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s such a terrific piece of work. Charming, funny, and moving by turns, and featuring all of what would become known as director Brad Bird’s hallmarks, it’s a movie that couldn’t have been any better if it had come out of Pixar – which we mean as the highest possible compliment.
FANTASIA (1940)

With all the praise that’s been heaped on it over the last six decades, it’s easy to forget that Disney’s Fantasia could have been a disaster. Indeed, many critics predicted such a fate for it, and a few (including the notorious Irish author Flann O’Brien) held that opinion even after it was released and began piling up the accolades. Animation, then as now, was taken less than seriously as a film medium, and when Walt Disney announced that he would be releasing a film combining his studio’s unique, whimsical style of animation with some of the greatest works in the Western classical music canon, trepidation was widespread: those who loved the music feared it would be bastardized by the presence of cartoon characters, and those who loved the cartoons feared that Disney was overreaching by putting his work in the service of such highbrow affairs. And, to be truthful, the movie isn’t pure perfection; at times, it does come across as pretentious, and at other times, hopelessly middlebrow. But when it works – and the great wonder of Fantasia is that it works more than it doesn’t – it’s because the music is so perfectly matched with the material. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment is simply the finest Mickey Mouse cartoon ever made, and Leopold Stokowski’s interpretation of the musical accompaniment does it its proper service. The “Rite of Spring” passage is simply an inspiration, a clever conceit carried off without a single hitch, and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment, which could have become an overblown gasbag of a passage, instead plays perfectly well. Coming down to earth with playful humor whenever it threatens to become too self-impressed, Fantasia overcomes the culture clash at its heart to become one of the finest animated features of all time.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Ollie Johnston, 1912--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The death of animator Ollie Johnston, at 95, marks the end of our first-hand access to an era: Johnston, who worked at Disney from 1935 until his retirement in 1978, was the last member of the core group of the studio's animators who were known collevtively as "the nine old men." (Most of them were in their twenties when they were given that label.) Johnston worked in various major capacities on such features as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi; among other accomplishments, he was famous, or notorious, for having animated the death of Bambi's mother, thus making him responsible for several generations of childhood traumas. A real company man, he married a co-worker, a Disney pen-and-ink artist named Marie. (The marriage lasted for 63 years, until his wife's death in 2005.)

Among animation geeks, his name came to be closely associated with a fellow member of the nine old men, Frank Thomas, who he knew at Stanford University and who retired from Disney the same year he did. The two were popular attractions on the lecture circuit and co-authored a number of books aimed at recording and preserving the story of how the Disney classics came to be made, including Bambi: The Story and the Film, The Disney Villains, and Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Their own story was the subject of a 1995 documentary feature, Frank and Ollie, which was made by Frank's son Theodore Thomas. Their shared website is here. Frank Thomas died in 2004.

The Screengrab : fantasia

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Two)

Ollie Johnston, 1912--2008