The Screengrab : the iron giant

2008 Highlight Reel: The Top Twelve Screengrab Posts of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Compiling the weekly highlight reels here at the Screengrab is not such an arduous task, but putting together a year's worth of the finest in film bloggery was a considerably more formidable undertaking. Using a complicated points system akin to the BCS in college football, I have surveyed my fellow Screengrabbers, weighted the page views and reader comments, and come up with the following dirty dozen: the best of the year in Screengrab.

Top Ten Reasons The Dark Knight Isn't As Good As You Think It Is

Love it or hate, it's hard to deny The Dark Knight was the pop culture event of the year. Our man Osborne has some qualms.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight in the Political World

Of course, as with any pop culture phenomenon in an election year, The Dark Knight was used to score political points, few of which made any sense to me.

Forgotten Films: The Oscar

Phil neatly dissects one of the all-time great so-bad-it’s-good movies, and apparently gets legendary author (and The Oscar screenwriter) Harlan Ellison to comment. (L.P.)

The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne knows that, just as there are only seven kinds of stories, there are only five ways to make the endings of those stories totally blow your mind. (L.P.)

Classless Man in Voiceless Brawl

Leonard brings us the heartwarming tale of film critics engaging in a stimulating exchange of ideas.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul focuses on the single fiction film made by one of the cinema’s all-time greatest documentarians – a movie so bad I wasn’t even aware that it existed. (L.P.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden - or as we call him around Screengrab headquarters, "the breeder" - looks at the Brad Bird classic through the eyes of both child and Childs.

CGI Must Die: 5 Reasons Why

Andrew asks the musical question, "Why so much digital crap, Hollywood?"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard evaluates the oeuvre of one of our most underrated schlockmeisters, Albert Pyun.

Five Reasons We Want Mad Max Back

Enough with Indy, Rocky and Rambo. It's time for our favorite road warrior to make a comeback.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil prefers the later, loonier Cruise. Find out why.

Unwatchable: It's Pat

I had to include an Unwatchable on this list, and this one seemed to be a favorite.

(Special thanks to Leonard Pierce for an assist on the comments and to Phil Nugent for diligent research.)

The View through the View-Master: The Iron Giant

Hayden Childs — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I can see where some might consider The Iron Giant too sad or too scary for little kids. But my little kids have taken to it. After all, it does feature a boy's relationship with a giant robot from outer space, which a story that kids really want to hear. I find it inexpressibly tragic, but my kids do not, and I'm happy about that.

The Iron Giant was Brad Bird's first film, a few years before The Incredibles and Ratatouille. It's based on The Iron Man, a story that Ted Hughes wrote for his kids to comfort them after their mother's suicide. Their mother was, incidentally, Sylvia Plath, who was never too good at math, according to noted scholar Peter Laughner, who knew a thing or two about premature death. The Iron Man is different in some important ways from The Iron Giant. For instance, the titular metal character fights a space-dragon instead of vintage Cold War fear.

The movie was originally put into production as a version of the stage production of Pete Townshend's rock opera The Iron Man. Brad Bird apparently fought to remove Townshend's songs, and thank goodness for that. I say this with all love for the bulk of Mr. Townshend's ouevre: they're not very good. Bird's artwork is all autumnal, beautiful, two-dimensional pastels, and there's not much continuity between the way that these characters are drawn and, say, The Incredibles, with its blobby roundness.

The plot centers on the unlikely friendship between Hogarth, a latchkey child of the 50s in Maine, and the Iron Giant, who is both metal and huge. A self-centered government agent arrives in Maine looking for the robot, and Hogarth has to enlist the help of a local beatnik to hide the robot from the government agent and his single mother. Eventually, the military is called in, and things go all klaatu barada nikto. Excuse me! I mean, things go awry based on humanity's penchant for violence.

My kids love the message of the movie, which is that anyone can choose who they will be. The Iron Giant learns about superheroes from Hogarth, and in the climax, chooses to emulate Superman rather than follow his programming. Superman Returns, which ground our noses in the symbolism as if we were naughty puppies, could have used a similar take on the meaning of sacrifice.

The Iron Giant's sacrifice is where the waterworks come in. For me, I mean, not my kids, who are way tougher. Also, they've seen the movie, so they know that there's a fairly happy ending in the near future. Parts of the movie are certainly pitched over their heads, but the humor in it is gentle and broad enough that even the preschool set finds it funny (of course, they'd find it funnier with more poop jokes). And the tragic parts don't seem so tragic to them, so no harm/no foul. Do yourself a favor for the next family movie night! It beats the holy heck out of another talking animal movie.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Feature Films (Part Five)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FINDING NEMO (2003)

Among the animation directors whose names are on the Pixar Hall of Fame, Andrew Stanton's may not have quite the same degree of luster as that of John Lasseter (who made the Toy Story pictures and A Bug's Life and who is now, oh yeah, the fuckin' head of Disney animation) or Brad Bird (who even before directing The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Pixar had distinguished himself with The Iron Giant and the classic Amazing Stories episode "Family Dog"), but that can only be because his titles have been piling up slower. This year's Wall-E confirms that the wit and warmth of his little-lost-fish story were no fluke, and also that his plan seems to be to keep getting better. (Mention of his forthcoming Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation John Carter of Mars has been known to cause Screengrab writers to flap their front flippers together and lie down on the floor and spin around while going "Whoowhoowhoowhoowhoo" in merry anticipation. Is it any wonder that we don't get a lot of dates?) In director Eduardo Coutinho's remarkable documentary Playing, there's an amazing scene where an educated, middle-aged Brazlian woman tears up a bit while discussing the movie before cogently explaining that she sees it as a metaphor about her relationship with her own grown daughter.

CHICKEN RUN (2000)

This parody of The Great Escape and other military POW films (with gray, overcast English skies that serve as a memento mori) was the first feature from the mighty Aardman Animation studio, best known for Nick Park's films featuring Wallace and Gromit and other claymation shorts. (Park co-directed Chicken Run with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord. The project was reportedly seen as a test run for the more recent Wallace and Gromit feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: a way for Park and company to see whether their talents could sustain a full-length feature without taking a chance on tarnishing the W & G brand.) Not surprisingly, the jokes are stretched thinner here than in the shorts, which pop like firecrackers from beginning to end, but the project demonstrated that the sheer beauty of the visual craftsmanship of the claymation masters was enough to make up for that. The movie has a special historical interest now as the last recorded evidence of a time when Mel Gibson's brain cells were still happily alive and arranged in the desired order.

TWICE UPON A TIME (1982)

This experimental cut-out animation film, a sardonic sort of fairy tale with a cast that includes such improvisational comedians as Marshall Efron, Lorenzo Music, and Hamilton Camp, was executive produced by George Lucas in one of his periodic attempts to throw a lifeline to the independent filmmakers he'd known as an aspiring director and since moved past on the career ladder. It was directed by John Korty, whose '60s indies (The Crazy Quilt, Funnyman) once had a frisky reputation and are now very hard to find, with an assist from Charles Swenson, who credits as an animator include a section of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels and a movie version of Bobby London's scabrous underground comics character Dirty Duck. At its best, Twice Upon a Time is one of the rare movies that captures some of the termite-gnawing wisecracking feel of Jay Ward's TV cartoons, but it ran into problems getting seen at all: first the Ladd Company, which had the distribution rights, went bankrupt, and then Korty and producer Bill Couturié got into a pissing match over which dialogue tracks to use, which ended up costing it a steady life on cable TV and delayed its release to home video. It was finally issued on videocassette, but at this time no DVD release has planned. However, clips and audio tracks are all over the Internet, the movie's cult status having been greatly enhanced by both its unavailability and the fact that there are so many possible versions from which to choose, and to argue over. (The war over the dialogue tracks stems from the fact that the cast members were encouraged to make up their own lines, which resulted in some versions that are less family-friendly than others.)

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (2003)

Sylvain Chomet's wildly funny, outrageously cariactured farce about an old woman's efforts to rescue her grandson from the clutches of the villains who use his bicycle-hardened calves to power their gambling den is the most imaginative animated entertainment to emerge from Europe in recent years. Grand in scale, meticulously detailed, weirdly suggestive, and deranged in the friendliest way possible, it's that rare picture that makes you wish that people still went to midnight movies. Chomet's next film, The Illusionist, an animated feature inspired by an unproduced screenplay of Jacques Tati's, is eagerly anticipated: Tati is something of a presiding spirit here as well.

SPIRITED AWAY (2001)

Rumors that this would be Hiyao Miyazaki's final film before retiring have since turned out to have been premature, but that doesn't make it any less of a career apotheosis and a superb capstone to his career. This ever-expanding fantasy about a little girl's passage to maturity while serving time in an alternate spirit world and looking for the opportunity to be reunited with her lost parents brings together elements from his previous epics (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke) and his smaller scale classics about the magic that co-exists with the beauty of regular life (Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro). As a puny Westerner, there are nuances and touches here whose full meaning I suspect that I will never fully grasp, and God knows that's my loss, but Miyazaki delivers more to audiences that can only half-understand his work than most filmmakers who draw you a scorecard while sitting in your lap.

Click here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, & Part Four

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

“Pinocchio in Outer Space” and Other Forgotten Cartoons

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Have you seen Mad Monster Party lately? “Featuring the final screen ‘appearance’ of horror icon Boris Karloff, Mad Monster Party was co-written by comics legend Harvey Kurtzman, creator of the original Mad comic books, and featured character designs by cartoonist Jack Davis of Mad Magazine and EC comics — a genius at combining humor and grotesquerie.” Or how about Down and Dirty Duck? “Likely assembled as a quick cash-in on the underground success of Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, Down and Dirty Duck was put together with the assistance of erstwhile Turtles (and Mothers of Invention) Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (nee Flo and Eddie), who contributed voice, music and plot elements. (The duo’s former employer, Frank Zappa, makes a cameo appearance during a particularly bizarre segment in which his head rises, sunlike, in the sky over the main characters.)”

These are but two entries in Bullz-Eye.com’s eye-opening Animated and Forgotten: Feature Length Cartoons You May Not Remember. (The key words there being “may not.” It’s a fun list, but how could we ever forget The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Iron Giant?) You can read the whole thing here, but if you want to see video clips from some of these obscurities, you’ve come to the right place:

PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE (1965)

One advantage to being a wooden boy: when you travel to other planets, no space helmets are necessary. But why is that goofy turtle trying to romance him?

MAD MONSTER PARTY (1969)

Little Tibia and the Fibias rock, but what could be more disturbing than a stop-motion Phyllis Diller unwrapping the poor Mummy while he’s trying to get his groove on?

THE POINT! (1971)

The animation in this acid-trip inspired Harry Nilsson musical is a little, how shall we say, crude by today’s standards, but you’re never going to hear a more charming ditty about decomposition than “Think About Your Troubles.”

ROCK AND RULE (1983)

Apparently Mick Jagger didn’t care much for Lou Reed’s performance as “Mok Swagger” in this “post-apocalyptic tale of satanic magic and the rock and roll lifestyle among mutated, extremely anthropomorphic, cats, dogs, and rats.”

LITTLE NEMO: ADVENTURES IN SLUMBERLAND (1989)

Not to be confused with Finding Nemo, this adaptation of the Winsor McKay comic strip is hard to find, but you can watch the whole thing on YouTube starting here: