b r a v e c r e a t u r e s

Here is something kind of important you need to know about me - I love animation.

 And I particularly love well made kids animations. I know they are cliched, corney and obvious, but there is a reason that cliches mean something to us.

So imagine my sadness at the last decade of lack lustre work from the Disney Studios. Once a shining light, they fell into a sad decine over the last few years, lost in a quagmire of technical geekery, desperate avoidance of digital, trite plots and uninspiring cameo voices.  None of which is what I go to see an animation for.

I go to have my heart warmed.

At one time Disney ruled the animation roost and looked set to reinvent musical theatre on screen. And then in 1995, with the overly chesty Pocahontas, it all seemed to die leaving Pixar to struggle on to create beautiful stories. Stories that warmed the heart and lifted the spirit of the young at heart.

That seemed to be the thing that Disney forget - Its not about the technology, or the actors, or the effects or the marketing or the franchise - it is about the story. Nothing else REALLY matters.   

Last night for me things changed.

My mate P and I went to see "Meet the Robinsons". My heart was warmed, my faith restored.

At last Disney seems to have recovered their way. I am not going to go into plot details here, they are pretty obvious to be honest, but it was thoroughly enjoyable - even the added geekery of the 3D glasses didnt dampen the films glowing smile. Disney even managed to recover some of their music cred with a great tracksoundtrack from Danny Elfman (of course) including a corker from Rob Thomas (see below).

There is even an interesting lesson in the films villain; look to the reasons WHY someone does the things they do and seek to help the cause, not punish the symptoms. A lesson that comes straight from Americas growing awareness that they need to share the planet with the rest of us.

All of this in a kids film. 

If you are a child at heart, go see it. Trust me, speaking as the worlds largest 9 year old, you will love it. It wont expand your horizons, it wont challenge you, it wont provoke thought - but it will lift your spirits. Sometimes thats what we need.

This is some seriously disturbed animation.

Take a Cosby fan so obsessesed that he creates a cloning machine to replicate his idol. What if every 10th Cosby had super powers, but the others were just, well strange. You’d have a House of Cosbys.

I never liked Bill Cosby in the first place so this is deeply funny to me. Give it a few episodes and then by the time the lawyers for Bill Cosby Jnr weigh in, you will be as bummed about it as I was.

Thanks to Brenner [Not Only But Also ] for the tip.

I have long listed Tim Burton as one of my favourite directors. His visual style and eye for detail is challenging, beautiful and engaging.  He seems to see the world in simple and brightly coloured way a child does. And I love watching it. I have been able to ignore Big Fish and Planet of the Apes, because Nightmare before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow and Mars Attacks are simply so wonderful.
So imagine my delight when two Tim Burton films come out in the same year - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and another stop motion confection (like Nightmare), The Corpse Bride.

While I wasn’t at the opening weekend, I did go the following one and while I did enjoy the film, I wasn’t floating out of my chair.

The film tells the story of Victor (Jonny Depp), the sensitive son of the nuevo riche, social-climbing canned fish tycoons Nell Van Dort (Tracey Ullman) & William Van Dort (Paul Whitehouse), who is being forced into an arranged marriage with Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), the daughter of pompous, aristocratic but poor nobles.

When Victor can’t remember the lines for his marriage at the rehearsal, he wanders miserably through the woods and by a stroke of misfortune finds himself wed to a corpse bride (Helena Bonham Carter) who takes him off to the underworld to meet her family.

Simple enough plot line.

Actually it is pretty simple and after I recovered from having my optic nerves pumped full of Burton’s and (co director and animator) Mike Johnson’s incredible visions I found the story to be a little light on. Most of the plot movement was fairly predictable, excluding the final resolution which was beautiful, but felt a little out on its own plot wise.

I have to say that I also have a beef with the current trend in over voicing animations. Animations houses seem to feel the need to fill the cast with “known” voices, presumably to gain some marketing leverage but on the whole I feel this is of little effect.  Nightmare has no really recognizable voices and is a fantastic film. In comparison, this film has some great talent as the voices (Joanna Lumley as the repugnant Maudeline Everglot), but they are lost. I can’t see that it is really worth the effort.

Another sad thing for this film is that the Danny Elfmans music, while still excellent,doesn’t come up to the toe tapping standard of Nightmare, some of which I can actually sing from memory. The music, or more accurately the musical numbers, not so interesting or memorable. The incidental and orchestral music however is fresh and inspired, without relying overmuch on the themes that Elfman has used in the past.

Those gripes aside, all up this is a good film, with out being great. It’s visually BEAUTIFUL with an ok story. Worth seeing on the big screen if you like this sort of thing.

As a little bit of trivia on this film, the puppets used neither of the industry standards of replaceable heads (like those used on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) or replaceable mouths (like those used by Aardman Studios in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)) but instead used precision crafted clockwork heads, adjusted by hidden keys. This allowed for unprecedented subtlety, but was apparently even more painstaking than the already notoriously arduous animation. One animator even reported having recurring nightmares of adjusting his own facial expression in this fashion.