Will Smith get his hands on animation, so why can't his brother?

Harry Smith has a company called Smith Global Media. Previously, they signed a deal with Sony Home Entertainment, now they are getting into the animated features business. Another competitor has entered the proverbial ring...

The pictures in question come from Shrek producer John H. William's 3QU, one of Cinesite Animation's partners: Charming and Gnome Alone.

The former got itself a trailer a few weeks back, but then it got pulled. If you've been around here for a while, I've been tracking both of these. Charming is basically the Shrek coattail rider that looks like it was made in 2007. No shock, H. Williams and his Vanguard Animation also made the fractured fairy tale Happily N'ever After. Produced for $20 million, Charming is indeed hitting US theaters as of now. I don't mind the premise of it (Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty are all engaged to the same Prince Charming), but the trailer did little to give me confidence.

If any Grecians are reading this, can you confirm that IMDb's July 6th release date for the picture is true? Apparently South Africa gets it on August 4th. Honestly, it doesn't look all that theatrical to me, looks more direct-to-video quality than anything. But I've seen far worse at $20 million.

Gnome Alone was supposed to be directed by The Nut Job's Peter Lepeniotis, a tale where garden gnomes must fight off evil creatures from a fantasy land that are trying to invade their owners' house. A fantasy tale that was compared to 80s family movies, movies that weren't afraid to have a little bite. Lepeniotis compared it specifically to Ghostbusters, Gremlins, and... Monster Squad? If the movie lives up to that promise, then I think it could be a surprise. Animation really needs more family movies that aren't afraid to show some real frights.

Here's a first look...


... and a non-theatrical poster from Cinesite's website...


Those are... The creatures the gnomes are supposed to fight? Hmmm, not sure if I'm digging the design, looks like an evil Sour Bill with a pinch of Crazy Frog. I mean, I was kind of expecting something else, but I guess they may work out in the end. I do dig their name, though... The Troggs. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a reference to the band of the same name in the movie itself...

(If you're lost, they were a band that was mostly active in the mid-to-late 1960s, their biggest hit being the song 'Wild Thing,' which was covered in the rather infamous George Lucas animated fantasy-jukebox musical Strange Magic.)

Charming is done, judging by the pulled trailer and the Greece release date, though anyone can edit IMDb - which is why I ask. Cinesite's site seemingly hasn't been updated, because it says Charming is set for a spring 2017 debut, and says Gnome Alone is expected to be completed that same season... Well, spring 2017 is mere days behind us now, so...

Smith's company, however, intends to release the pictures in reverse order. Charming is now eying a Q2 2018 debut, Gnome Alone will set for later this year. They better hurry up and get a solid date for Gnome Alone, because The Star (also done by Cinesite for Sony) and Coco have taken up prime November slots, and Ferdinand rests in the middle of December. Not that these features are expected to be big behemoths anyways, so I guess any release date for Gnome Alone is fine. It could fare well some time in October, or maybe at the end of December. These things always change in animationland, so I don't expect the late 2017 date plans to be final.

Charming's aiming for the second quarter of 2018, meaning April-June... Again, a $20 million feature. Should have no real trouble, not that they need a bajillion dollars back. I'm surprised it's not going straight to video, but apparently some folk still think there's something to be made in fractured fairy tales, especially in the wake of Frozen's success, to say nothing of Disney's live-action fairy tale "reimaginings."

Meanwhile, Animal Crackers is still - as far as I know - without a US distributor... Makes me wonder if this team will pick it up.

What say you?

Seven years after the launching of the franchise's current iteration, thirty-one years after the theatrical animated movie based on the first incarnation of the franchise, My Little Pony: The Movie is coming, and the new trailer is here...


Well, I will say... It's very pretty-looking. Some of the art direction showcased in this trailer was quite nice, beautiful even... and the animation doesn't seem too bad for an upscaling of a Flash show. It is also admittedly nice to see something coming to theaters that isn't a computer animated feature that's trying so hard to look just like real life. Yeah, animation that isn't an exact recreation of real life, novel concept!

Content-wise, it looks cute enough. I admittedly haven't seen too much of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, because I just... I'm gonna be honest, guys, I couldn't really get into it. That being said, I totally respect its fanbase and the love many adults have for it. I'm glad that something speaks to someone in some way, no matter what it is. Is the show mainly aimed at 6-year-old girls? Maybe, I don't really care, if folks love it and aren't harming anyone, what's the fuss? I extend that to pretty anything that will get you picked on in some way. I myself, however, never really got into it. Plenty of folk outside our circles, you guessed it, still don't get it.

Anyways, My Little Pony: The Movie looks like it could be a pleasant diversion, maybe it's much more, I don't know. I just find it kind of funny that it and the 1986 movie share the same exact name... My Little Pony: The Movie. Which one?

What say you on this trailer?

Well here we are, still waiting for the altered version of an independent European animated feature, made possible by Harvey Weinstein.

Leap!, for those who are not in the know, is an alternate version of a French animated film called Ballerina, which debuted this past Christmas to decent critical reception and fair box office. While it is a French film, an English dub was made at the time, and was only released overseas. The Weinstein Company then picked it up for an American theatrical release, and at first they surprised us, it seemed like they were going to give us the first English dub of the movie.

Then the delays started happening, and soon we realized... Weinstein was going to yet again work his dark magic, to take this French flick and "tool" it for us Americans. Dane DeHaan, who voices the boy, was replaced by Natt Wolff. Mel Brooks was inexplicably added to the cast as well, and his character got some spotlight in the previous American trailer for this movie. Kate McKinnon replaces three voice actors from the first dub. It appears that we're still getting this, as evidenced by the new trailer that came out today...


Definitely a much better trailer than the last one, it doesn't look terrible per se, but would it have killed our friend Scissorhands to just release the dub that was released in the UK? The Argentinian animated feature Metegol was given this treatment by the guy, and was delayed nonstop till it just went straight to video. I wouldn't be surprised if Leap! shares the same fate. He seems to miss the memo... Celeb voices don't always sell animated films, and really, I doubt they ever do except in some special cases.

Anyways, what do you think of the trailer?

For the past few months or so, Fox Animation has been announcing projects left and right...

Of course, it all makes sense. Up until now, 20th Century Fox distributed films by their flagship animation house Blue Sky, and also films by DreamWorks. Occasionally, they'd distribute some films by a random assortment of makers. DreamWorks' distribution deal with Fox ended with Captain Underpants, now DreamWorks is owned by Comcast, and all their future movies and sequels will be Universal titles. Of course, Fox has been looking to fill the void that DreamWorks left.

So many projects have been planned... Most recently, we've heard about things like Momotaro, The Littlest Bigfoot, Zita the Spacegirl, Escape from Hat, With Kind Regards from Kindergarten, The Caring and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole, and so on... Well, one of these projects finally has... A release date.

And it's one that wasn't announced recently... An adaptation of Noelle Stevenson's webcomic-turned-graphic novel Nimona. Fox Animation has had this one on their docket since roughly mid-2015, and it's supposed to be directed by Feast and Pearl director Patrick Osborne. What is it about?

The book's official synopsis: "Nimona is an impulsive young shapeshifter with a knack for villainy. Lord Ballister Blackheart is a villain with a vendetta. As sidekick and supervillain, Nimona and Lord Blackheart are about to wreak some serious havoc. Their mission: prove to the kingdom that Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin and his buddies at the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics aren't the heroes everyone thinks they are. But as small acts of mischief escalate into a vicious battle, Lord Blackheart realizes that Nimona's powers are as murky and mysterious as her past. And her unpredictable wild side might be more dangerous than he is willing to admit."


Described as irreverent but heartfelt, Nimona fits right in with the fantasy pictures that Fox Animation is really pushing for. With Osborne directing, it's possible that the CG (because I doubt it'll be 2D) will take on a traditional animation-esque look like his previous works did. Stevenson's art style is suitable for this direction anyways, so I wonder where they'll go with it, visually.

The release date is February 14, 2020... That's one week after Paramount Animation/Nickelodeon Movies' TV show adaptation The Loud House. We're seeing more and more animated movies open so close to each other. This past spring, Smurfs: The Lost Village opened the week after The Boss Baby. DreamWorks and Sony Animation have projects dated a week apart from each other in 2020.

Anyways, the date shows that Fox Animation is more than ready to finally move forward with a big slate of animated features, now that DreamWorks is now circling the rival globe. I get the sense that multiple studios will be handling these non-Blue Sky Fox-distributed animated pictures, so I'm interested to see who's behind this one. As for Nimona itself, the premise sounds like a mix of the big, the epic, and a bit of the weird, which is welcome. It's also cool that it focuses on medieval-era fantasy villains...

In more unfortunate Fox Animation-centric news, THR also confirmed that the Blue Sky adaptation of Bruce Zick's Anubis Tapestry, simply titled Anubis, has been removed from the calendar. It was only a matter of time before that would happen. For those who aren't up to speed, here's the deal: Fox had it on their slate for years and years, and it turned out that the movie was not given any form of go-head nor was it in any form of production... Yet it was slated for 3/23/2018, for a long time. Fox executives got cold feet in early 2016 after a movie called Gods of Egypt bombed at the box office, pulling the usual "conventional wisdom" card. "Mummy movies are too big of a risk!" they seemed to think. They made Blue Sky put the project on hold, but no release date change/cancellation ever occurred.

The execs were waiting to see how The Mummy would perform, and apparently it didn't give them any confidence in a totally unrelated animated Egyptian adventure movie. So, Anubis is currently no more. Give me more reasons to despise "conventional wisdom"...

What say you?

Well here we are, another weekend, another big-time animation release...

Despicable Me 3 easily took top shelf this weekend with a strong $72 million. Now this is indeed down from Despicable Me 2's $83 million take back in 2013, and several clicks below spin-off Minions' jumbo-sized opening... But no fretting, because I was actually expecting this all along. The Shrek trajectory...

Consider. Despicable Me, like Shrek, was like an out-of-nowhere sleeper hit. Good-sized opening, leggy run, popular hit. Despicable Me 2 arrived on time, just three years later, and was a rare sequel that outgrossed its predecessor by a country mile. The last time that ever happened in animation was with Shrek 2. Shrek 2 sold roughly 24 million more tickets than its predecessor, Despicable Me 2 sold 14 million more than the first one.

Expectedly, Shrek the Third failed to match the success of the second one in the long run. Despicable Me 3 looks to do the same, but still... $72 million is a great opening. I recently collected animated sequel data for what I hope is a helpful list, showing that this kind of thing is normal for animated movie franchises.

So no, not "sequel fatigue," as some are shouting. Do you really need to spend hours figuring out why Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and Transformers 5 didn't impress? Prometheus 2- I mean, Alien: Convenant? Especially in a year where Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 matched the success of its predecessor and X-Men entry Logan did damn well. Fate of the Furious, the eight entry in a 16-year-old series, shows that the F&F franchise has lots of juice left.


Cars 3, on the other hand, is having trouble. The Pixar threequel (and their second threequel ever) fell nearly 60% to 5th place, probably because it lost plenty of screens and the new animated kid is on the block. I think in the coming weeks, it should stabilize, but at this point I see it missing $170 million domestically. It's still not out everywhere around the globe, either, so we just have to wait and see how it ends up doing. To break even, it has to make roughly $437 million worldwide. The original did that, without 3D and without IMAX, and like this new film, it's very American and not very universal... But if movie numero uno could gross $218 million overseas, this should make significantly more.

Even if it does come up short, I'm sure big Disney won't care a bit, toy sales are probably still monstrous. I am upset about this underperforming, and I am not, if that makes any sense. I felt Cars 3 really made up for the detour they took with Cars 2 (a film I still enjoy, mind you), was overall a solid picture, and it ended on a strong note. I don't really want a fourth Cars, necessarily, I'd rather see the series continue through shorts and maybe a television special, because I do want to see more of a certain someone that debuts in the movie. Only time will tell, but however it performs, it's no big deal for Pixar.

DreamWorks/Mikros'Captain Underpants took an even bigger hit, falling 73% and losing a good chunk of screens. It's at $69 million here and $76 million worldwide, just double the tiny budget. Again, it's not out in some key markets yet, so I'm currently confident that this one won't be a money-loser.

The other DreamWorks picture hung on, The Boss Baby only fell 30%. It looks to finish up with around $175-176 million when all is said and done, and it may just tip $500 million worldwide. Who knows, but still super-close.

... And I want to give a shout-out to a particular live-action film that debuted this past week... Edgar Wright's Baby Driver.


A critical darling, Mr. Wright has never really scored a box office smash in his career, but Baby Driver is already an inch away from outgrossing his biggest film: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. And get this, that was an adaptation, Baby Driver is an original story. A damn good original story at that. See the film, help it become a big success, and show Hollywood a thing or two. No really, it's actually that great of a movie. Wright directs with such verve, but it's really the editing and sound design that elevate what could've been another run-of-the-mill heist picture, and indeed the really strong script by Wright himself. The movie was like a fuel-injected turbo shot into the coffee. It pains me that his DreamWorks project is probably a no-go at this rate.

What say you on all this box office business?

Times have changed for Pixar...

The other day, I realized that when Coco comes out in November, Pixar will have been making animated features for 22 years. I divide Pixar into two eras right now, the years where they were that little house making pictures for the Mouse, and the current era where they are a cog in the Mouse machine. Everyone knows that The Walt Disney Company has owned Pixar for over a decade now…

Think about this. The Disney acquisition of the company was finalized sometime in the summer of 2006, when the studio’s seventh feature film Cars was released. The acquisition itself was announced in January of that year after then-new-to-the-throne Disney CEO Bob Iger smoothed the ruffled feathers that his predecessor was responsible for. Cars was already in full production, probably halfway done at that point. Finished animation for the film turned up as far back as September of 2005, when Toy Story returned to DVD for its 10th Anniversary.

I place Cars in the pre-acquisition era because it was also part of the Disney contract signed when Eisner was still top dog. If Pixar were to split from Disney in some alternate timeline, Cars would’ve been their final feature for the company. From Ratatouille onward, Pixar films could’ve been distributed by Universal or Warner Bros. or some other big distributor. Of course, Iger saw what the company was losing, and got the studio back into the fold without fuss.

Seven features in the span of 10 1/2 years… That means that the wait times between a few of these films were pretty long. Toy Story’s follow-up didn’t arrive till three years later in the form of A Bug's Life, and after getting your fill with Toy Story 2 in fall 1999, you had to wait nearly two years for Monsters, Inc. By the time the studio got to finishing Finding Nemo, the wait times got a wee bit shorter: A year and a half.

Nowadays, a new Pixar film is like an annual event. In 2015, the company unleashed two feature films in the same calendar for the first time, and they will do that a second time this year. They also have plans to release two new features in the year 2020. From 2006 to now, they have only sat one year out due to various issues concerning a troubled picture in the pipeline, and have released 12 feature-length films in that timespan.


That’s a lot… A real lot. For one studio and their teams, no less. It even took Pixar some time to finally release two features in a calendar year, and when it finally happened, one of the pictures - The Good Dinosaur - didn’t fare so well at the box office. Coco looks to reverse this if Cars 3 makes a profit, and so far the automobile picture is doing troubling business at best. We now live in a climate that wants movies with concrete release dates, and fast. Pixar wisely claims dates and then doesn’t say what movies are opening on those dates, and even if they do slip something early (Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur at the 2011 D23), a delay or two can still happen, cancellation if things really go south. (Newt)

But here's the rub... One a year could cause problems in the long run.

No longer does Pixar get the opportunity to take time between features to smooth them out. Nowadays, if one has to move, another one needs to be ramped up in order to take its place. When Pixar bowed out of 2014 altogether because of difficulties with The Good Dinosaur and no film being ready enough to take its original summer 2014 spot (or for that matter, a spot held by another Disney-distributed title, i.e. November 2014 and Disney Animation's Big Hero 6), some shareholders freaked. A year without a Pixar film? How could it be? It's as if corporate Disney is at the mercy of shareholders who want a new product from the same studio every single year. Rumor has it, Bob Iger commissioned Cars 3 and Toy Story 4 so that he could announce something to please shareholders... Plus they have a Toy Story theme park to plug. Unsurprisingly, Cars 3 and Toy Story 4 played a few rounds of musical chairs. Remember when Toy Story 4 was set for this summer while Cars 3 had no firm release date?


Seven years ago, Pixar founded Pixar Canada. A unit in Vancouver, they were set to make various shorts and specials (such as the Toy Story Toon pictured above, Small Fry), but the company swiftly shut it down. The reasoning? To keep everything happening under one Californian roof... But what if a smaller, out-of-the-way unit like Pixar Canada had flourished into something greater? Something similar to that of Disney Animation's defunct Orlando unit? Disney's Orlando animation unit - which was located near what is currently Disney's Hollywood Studios - had a similar beginning. Launched in 1989, they first made Roger Rabbit shorts, and then later they contributed to the mainline features, until completing their own full-length feature in 1998: Mulan. They continued until the executives pulled the plug on traditional animation in 2004, Brother Bear would be their last - and third - feature.

I think a Pixar Canada/Disney Orlando-esque unit for Pixar would serve them well, and could perhaps fill in gaps just in case Emeryville's folks need more time on a particular feature. I also think that they could function similarly to Disney's Orlando studio in other ways.

The Orlando studio hit its peak with Lilo & Stitch.


Produced for roughly $80 million and released in the summer of 2002, it didn't cost as much as some of the Burbank productions over on the West Coast did. Disney Feature Animation spent over $100 million on Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis, and Treasure Planet respectively. Back in the early aughts, these were huge numbers for animated films. Even Pixar wasn't spending as much on their films at the time. (Finding Nemo and The Incredibles respectively cost under $95 million to make.)

Lilo & Stitch was also the work of two first-time directors: Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois. Chris and Dean came up with a very oddball premise, that had hints of sci-fi but was mostly a brutally honest family drama that just happened to involve a fugitive alien. For some reason, Disney's executives kind of backed off of this one. During this time, these same executives were having way too much say over the films being made at the main studio, resulting in messy, compromised products. Many of which failed at the box office. For the most part, they backed off of Lilo & Stitch. It made its money back at the box office, and EXPLODED by the time it reached home video. Stitchmania...

You thought Frozen Fever was annoying? I lived through Stitchmania, and he was everywhere. In your face, even to the point where he was appearing with Mickey and the gang on merchandise in the parks. He got three direct-to-video movies in the span of three years, a TV series, and so much more. Yes, a traditionally animated movie from the early 2000s that was just as big as the CG heavies. Problem is, Disney ran that into the ground, and soon the quirky little alien was yesterday's news. A phenomenon like that is dime-a-dozen, and even if Lilo & Stitch didn't fare well at the box office in some darker alternate timeline, the film still could've exploded after its home video release. Kind of like how The Shawshank Redemption did throughout the 90s.

Of course, it's 2017, not 2002. Fifteen years makes a difference. Films don't seem to have those kinds of second lives on home video anymore. At best, a lower budget film can eventually grow a sizable fanbase after its out on home video (see Pacific Rim and The Book of Life), but it seems like nothing will ever be Lilo & Stitch or The Shawshank Redemption. Maybe Frozen comes close, but that film's hype took off when it was still in theaters.

Disney Feature Animation Orlando followed up Lilo & Stitch with Brother Bear in the autumn of 2003, which the executives had more control over. As a result it's a pale shadow of Lilo & Stitch and Mulan, and despite the film's gorgeous art direction and top-notch animation, it's widely agreed that it's a near-trainwreck. I have multiple issues with that film, and while it actually made its tiny budget back, Disney called it a flop in order to justify their bigger plans. (i.e. killing traditional animation) Still, Brother Bear's box office totals were pretty weak and doesn't seem to hold up with the general public, while Stitch still has some traction and has aged well for the most part.

Where am I going with this? Well, Lilo & Stitch was a more experimental movie than most of its contemporary Disney animated brethren. Again, a family drama with a touch of sci-fi, space, and aliens. No princesses, no fairy tale settings. An original story, not a "Disneyified" update of a literary classic like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or a centuries-old folk tale. No musical numbers! No, Stitch grooves to Elvis Presley! Now, the Burbank-made likes of The Emperor's New Groove (an irreverent buddy comedy with no musical numbers) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (a creature feature-type action-adventure) were similarly experimental. The Emperor's New Groove - unlike the middling Atlantis - turned out to be a good movie, but its box office fortunes were determined by its off-putting title (the marketing people, according to a production story by animator Nik Ranieri, were behind that one) and its unconvincing trailers. No one saw it on opening weekend, until word got out on how great it was... Except those strong legs at the box office still couldn't save it. It certainly lived a fruitful second life on home video as well.

Still, Lilo & Stitch was very unique. Since it wasn't a bigger budget production, something more offbeat was allowed. Before its rather conventional third act, Lilo & Stitch wears its weird with pride. Instead of feeling like a movie that wanted to go for different "target" audiences, it felt like its own beast, the work of a group of people who just wanted to make the movie they themselves wanted to see.

Some folks feel that Pixar isn't sporting a more experimental, oddball flair. For me, it can show up from time to time. Inside Out is not dissimilar to Pete Docter's previous feature, Up, it definitely has a uniqueness to it. The Good Dinosaur, which may seem like an unorthodox choice, is kind of weird in its own way while still seeming like a normal, rather conservative film on the surface. Finding Dory and Cars 3, being sequels, feel more comfortable. Not quite risk-averse, but not quite groundbreaking, either. Of course, I'm speaking of the directorial and editing choices, visual flair, and quirks. Finding Dory breaks some ground through its storyline, but not so much the presentation. Cars 3 wasn't quite innovative, just very straight-forward and fine-looking like a 1950s Disney animated film.

Some folks feel that Pixar needs to be more director-friendly and allow some auteur-ish movies to go through the pipeline. Something similar to a movie I just saw... Edgar Wright's Baby Driver! But really, in high-end feature animation, auteur-driven work is also dime-a-dozen. Then you may argue that they - the Pixar brain trust - should loosen their grip and be a little less harsh than they normally are with directors. In such instance, you might get Pixar's equivalent of Lilo & Stitch. Not quite the all-around auteur-driven movie, but something that has its own thing going and the stamp of its creators. I feel you do get that in the films by Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Brad Bird.


The post-Toy Story 3 films are the ones that are regularly contested. Was Brenda Chapman's touch erased completely from Brave? Or is the movie an uneven hybrid of her style and what the brain trust wanted? I never saw Chapman's Brave, for it was never made, but I liked the movie a lot and felt it was different from what came before. Some may disagree and say it felt like design-by-committee piddle-paddle, or that it felt like a lost 90s Disney movie. Was Dan Scanlon trying to keep Monsters University in line with Pixar's previous films? Or was it its own unique thing? Somewhere in the middle, I believe. The cabin third act was something cool and new for a Pixar film, and I quite liked the movie's overall intimate, quieter tone. The Good Dinosaur felt like a frontier movie, unlike anything Pixar had done before, that was also a directorial debut - for one Pete Sohn.

But I know what those folks want... They want something Lilo & Stitch-esque. Not something that's low-key weird and unusual, no, they want to see a Pixar movie that basks in weirdness or a style that's very different. Something that's really different and really unlike anything they've made in the past 22 years. The Picasso to their Rembrandts. Lilo & Stitch mixes the Golden Age watercolor backgrounds with Sanders' aesthetic, it certainly was no Lion King! So, will we see a Pixar film that looks like... I dunno, this upcoming "experimental" short that they're currently working on?



Maybe.

Would a smaller, satellite studio be a home for those kinds of pictures? The smaller, more offbeat films as opposed to the big event ones made up in Emeryville?

I know it's been hard. They have been rather cautious with first-time directors. In the early 2000s, the edgier Brad Bird nestled in quite nicely with John, Pete, Andrew, and co... So what happened? Why no room for Chapman? I guess you could say Chapman's Brave was shaping up to be like Jan Pinkava's iteration of Ratatouille. Maybe not, but even long-timer Bob Peterson got booted from his dinosaur picture, but he's still at the studio unlike Chapman and Pinkava. Let's not forget about Cars 2's original director Brad Lewis, he did a stint at Warner Animation Group recently. It's troubling, yes, but given the reception of Cars 2, Brave, and The Good Dinosaur, maybe the time is right to just let a director go through with what they've got...

It would be the ultimate test: Will they finish up with a masterpiece and prove that Pixar's brain trust is too tough and restricting on free-thinking directors? Or will the movie be an outright disaster and show that the brain trust actually doesn't squash out creativity?

Who knows what's around the corner for Team Emeryville. Pretty soon, we will see what kind of director Dan Scanlon is when he completes his original film that's been in the works for a while. Mark Andrews has an original project brewing as well, so we'll see how he does as well. If both of these pictures are bold, acclaimed works, will we continue hearing about how Pixar is too tough on directors? Scanlon and Andrews are technically part of the brain trust, but they aren't Lasseter-Docter-Stanton. The argument is that they were "yes-men" on Brave and Monsters University respectively, so maybe with their own original films, we'll really see what they're made of. The same goes for Brian Fee, director of Cars 3. Good work, but it's a Cars movie, so he had to keep in line with the first movie. Will he get to do an original picture that shows his style?

If you've been here for a long while, you'll know that I don't think Pixar has been in any sort of a rut. Studios face these kinds of things, and Pixar turned 30 years old last year. 30 years old! (They're nearing 40 if you count their Graphics Group days!) 22 of those years? Spent making feature-length films! Of course, a couple of them were bound to not resonate with everyone. Of course, the Internet amplifies an annoying hive mind consensus that constantly shrieks about how they're declining and how "these [x] films are bad. FACT!" Leave that behind and swim into other channels, you'll see nuanced views. Some may say "Some Pixars I like, others I don't, like Finding Nemo." Others may say, "Cars 2 was fine, their worst is actually WALL-E, the second half kills it!" That kind of talk interests me more than, "Pixar was great! Until Cars 2, but Inside Out was great! But they suck now!"

I might be one of the few weirdoes who feels that The Good Dinosaur is a better overall film than Finding Dory. I'm also the same nut-basket who doesn't feel that Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH is a masterpiece, that most of the Disney Renaissance films aren't amazing, that How To Train Your Dragon 2 was significantly better than the first movie, that Storks is one of the best animated comedies of the last 5 years, that Peter Pan is one of the weaker 50s Disney animated features, that Cars 2 is a fun little blockbuster romp, that Frozen has lots of issues, you get the picture? I like when folks make up their own minds, not when they subscribe to one popular view. Case in point, the view that states that Pixar had ceased making great movies - with the exception of Inside Out - seven years ago.

Pixar isn't declining to this guy, they're just maturing and evolving, but I feel the above issues do need to be addressed. The day Pixar makes a movie I don't care for, it's not like I'm going to need consolation. Walt Disney Feature Animation made the middle-finger-to-Walt movie Home on the Range, one of my favorite musical groups - The Beach Boys - released a terrifyingly bad album called Summer in Paradise, the Star Wars prequels exist, there's a string of bland Tom & Jerry shorts from the later MGM/Hanna-Barbera era, Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 is the nadir of the Sonic series, my state basketball team has lost plenty of times. I'll be fine.

Let's see how the folks in Emeryville move forward, as we slowly approach the new decade...

It's less than a year away, one of the most anticipated animated movies of the next few years is closer and closer...

Apparently, the D23 Expo app dropped a piece of concept artwork for Incredibles 2...


A low-resolution image, sadly, but this piece has already raised lots of questions... It appears that the Parr kids haven't aged, there are more supers flying around, there's a random raccoon present, and... The Underminer? Really?

Honestly, fellas... I was hoping Incredibles 2 would jump way ahead of The Underminer and age the kids. To me, the whole ending with the evil drill-driving villain was no set-up for a sequel, but rather an affectionate tribute to how old action and pulp adventure serials ended: With a classic cliffhanger moment.

Many folks argued for years that The Incredibles was the only Pixar film that warranted a sequel, and that its ending deliberately set up a sequel. I never thought that was so. Director Brad Bird, even as far back as 2004, kept saying that he was only going to do a sequel to his superhero spectacular if he had a good idea for it. Over the years, he had "ideas," but he didn't want to make any move until he could put them altogether into one cohesive storyline.

In the mean time, he decided to do other things. He took over Ratatouille soon after The Incredibles was released, and after Ratatouille was finished, he willingly did projects for Paramount (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) and Disney Studios (Tomorrowland). He didn't come up with a storyline for a sequel until Tomorrowland was in production. Disney's brass and Pixar made it known to the world in spring 2014 that he finally cracked it, which was weeks after filming wrapped on his Disney picture.

I was kind of hoping that Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack would be older. Going straight for the Underminer seems kind of safe, especially since that was already the plot of a 2005 video game follow-up. A game that I actually never played, apparently it was from the same development team who did the first Incredibles tie-in game, which I really wasn't big on at the time. Maybe the Underminer is but the opening sequence of the movie, and that it jumps a few years ahead after that.

Whatever story Mr. Bird choses to tell, I'm still behind it because I trust him. I'm not in the pool of people who dislike Tomorrowland, so in my humble opinion, I am very confident that Incredibles 2 will work.

I keep saying Incredibles 2.

Well, apparently, they did like Mark Zuckerberg and dropped the "the."

At CinemaCon this past April, they presented the film's new logo, no "the" in sight.


... and the D23 app keeps calling it Incredibles 2 as well...

Screengrab via /Film.

Interesting... Well, whatever they choose to call it, it's fine by me. It appears that John Walker is back to produce, alongside Nicole Paradis Grindle, who was an associate producer on Toy Story 3 and Monsters University, and a producer on the short Sanjay's Super Team. It's cool to see her bumped up to main producer role.

The concept art is overall very rich and colorful, and perfectly captures the spirit and unique feel of the first Incredibles. Again, lots of questions... More supers, the raccoon, the Underminer's presence... We may learn more next weekend.

What say you?

In a series of posts about Fox Animation, I've made a couple of mistakes...

Here, I'll correct all of them for convenience and for reference...

Nimona, the adaptation of Noelle Stevenson's webcomic of the same name, is actually being done by Blue Sky and will be the release that follows 2019's Pigeon Impossible. Marc Haimes, a writer on LAIKA's marvelous Kubo and the Two Strings, is set to pen the script. Patrick Osborne, director of Disney Animation's Feast and the acclaimed VR short Pearl, is directing. Osborne confirmed that Blue Sky is doing Nimona, in an article published back in February. It's also set in the future, not during the Middle Ages.

Some projects on 20th Century Fox Animation's overall slate were thought to be live-action/animation hybrids...

The Littlest Bigfoot, Zita the Spacegirl, Momotaro, and everything else in development are to be all-animated features...

The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Puff, the Magic Dragon are expected to be live-action/animation hybrids...

Blue Sky is, according to reports, doing Escape from Hat.

Carry on... Here's my latest news recap, with all those Fox Animation errors intact!


...

Two Sony releases...

SPOILERS Ahead...

Let me just say, I'm surprised an Edgar Wright film happened under Sony Pictures, especially a Sony Pictures that has someone like Tom Rothman as part of their team. Maybe I'm just jaded when it comes to this kind of thing, but it's pleasantly surprising that another great Edgar Wright film was made possible by this company.


Baby Driver seems like a straightforward heist flick, but it comes with its own unique flavor and it effortlessly manages to tell a lot of story in mere scenes that last maybe a few seconds. Our young protagonist has tinnitus, and always has his music on to block it all out. He also makes mix-tapes out of mundane things, a nice little touch. Living with his deaf foster father, he's torn between being a getaway driver for a crime syndicate and starting a new life with a girl he meets at a diner.

Simple as it may seem, Wright textures everything and shows his flair all throughout, bolstering all of this with an amazing, diverse soundtrack. I mean, I can't go wrong with a soundtrack that has a non-single track off of Pet Sounds on it! The music really drives the film, but so does the editing and the sound editing, creating a very one-of-a-kind experience that just keeps you sucked in. The presence of songs is completely justified, and adds another emotional layer to the story in the same way something like Guardians of the Galaxy does. We've been in a sort-of wave of movies that try to ape Guardians' use of songs (i.e. Suicide Squad), but something like this comes along and it's like a masterclass on how to integrate pre-existing songs into a narrative.

Apparently conceived by Wright in the mid-1990s, the movie also doesn't suffer from any overly-modern touches that may date the film. Baby uses a classic iPod model, which made me happy because I use a classic myself! I have no interest in whatever new iPods are around, because they don't suit my needs. I like to meticulously organize my music, my albums, etc. The film also has vinyl, flip phones, it feels like it could've taken place 5 or 10 years ago in some ways.

Baby Driver is like a fuel-injected turbo shot into the coffee. It opens with a bang, ends on a bang, the whole movie is a bang. Definitely don't miss this one...

The other new Sony release happens to be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe...


Spider-Man indeed came home, and with triumph.

For me, it was a little tough for the past ten years. Spider-Man 3 was a movie I didn't dislike, in fact I will argue that it's a pretty decent movie that does a lot right. It's only soiled, as many others say, by Venom's presence and some of the choppy handling of Peter's symbiote-driven antics. Raimi's trilogy ended on a good note, though. I also was quite sympathetic of The Amazing Spider-Man, that too was a very meddled-in-post mess, but I felt its better moments saved the picture. The second one, however...

Thankfully Marvel Studios stepped in and said "Let us have the car keys."Spider-Man: Homecoming is the first genuinely good Spider-Man movie since Spider-Man 2, and a film with a lot more personality and spark than the very corporate-feeling "Amazing" movies. Part high school dramedy, part father-son mentor story, part action movie, this Spider-Man flick is thankfully on-the-ground. No, not "grounded" in the worn-out Christopher Nolan-wannabe sense, but actually on the ground. It's much more intimate than its Marvel Cinematic Universe counterparts, and a lot of it takes place in school. Peter's a teen, it's a teen-centric movie, it doesn't immediately throw him into college or in a big battle than spans all of New York.

Throughout the tight story, Peter tries to balance his high school life, his internship with Mr. Stark (who is thankfully not in it too much), and his desires to be more than just the "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" that Stark wants him to be. The Vulture is handled well, too, even if Adrian Toomes isn't like his classic comics counterpart. I like what they did with him, he's a disillusioned and somewhat sympathetic former blue-collar worker who has not only been screwed over by Stark, but he and his henchmen (including Shocker) plan to use the same methods Stark once used to get their way.

Other standouts here are Parker's best friend Ned, Aunt May, and a classmate named Michelle. There are also a few great twists and surprises along the way, but the proceedings are peppered with lots of great humor and quips. It even has a solid soundtrack!

While a little clunky in some areas, Spider-Man: Homecoming really succeeds. Thankfully keeping Peter in high school, they go down some unexpected and intriguing paths, all the while balancing heroics, responsibilities, and some bittersweetness. A very nice touch.

Both films are very much worth your time...

Fourth of July festivities have passed, now it's back to business...

Despicable Me 3 slid 53% on its second weekend, with an estimated $33 million, but it's already up to $149 million domestically. A sharper dip than Despicable Me 2's second weekend, but not as steep as Minions' second weekend drop, I suppose it'll gain traction next weekend and become a leggy movie. While the previous Despicable Me films scored over 4x their opening weekend grosses respectively, this may end up pulling Minions legs. (A relatively weak 2.9x) Worldwide, the picture has already made 5 1/2x its budget. $447 million. Unstoppable Me, more like...

Cars 3 thankfully didn't pop a tire. Slipping an estimated 41%, if it keeps steady from here on out, it should gross over $150 million domestically. It'll miss the typical animated feature 3x multiplier, but perhaps Cars - like a lot of franchises, animated or not - was just one of those one-and-done things. I figured the saturation of it over the years (merchandise, the DisneyToon-produced Planes spin-offs) had a hand in it, and general disinterest here and there. As much as I defend the series (more so than most out there), I can admit... It just isn't that go-to Pixar property with the general public. Worldwide is still a moot point, it isn't playing everywhere yet.

Captain Underpants landed an estimated 71%, taking yet another hit. $70 million here, $78 million around the globe, still not out in every territory, but I'm confident it'll get into the black. Tiny its international roll-out may be, some key markets could come to the rescue. It's already doubled its microbudget.

The Boss Baby still chugs, the Blu-ray is due out at the end of the month. $173 million-inching-on-$174 million here, $493 million around the globe so far.

Overall, this has been a rather strange year for animated features. Most animated films don't have a hard time making 3 1/2x their openings, but this year, we've seen many features miss that. Some by a hair, some by a mile. Even last year had plenty of standard performers... Perhaps it's just ticket prices or the way things are going right now, but I still doubt it's "cannibalization" or that there are "too many animated features." (No such thing, in a world where over a thousand live-action movies come out every year.) Perhaps Despicable Me 3 will rebound and make 3 1/2 or 4x its opening, maybe something later in the year will do it... Coco, maybe? The Star? Who knows.

Maybe it's time to finally step up and say... The family tentpole isn't the only thing we can do. Pipe dream, but... Just throwing it out there.

What say you on the box office results?

A former co-president of DreamWorks who went down during the Comcast acquisition of the studio, veteran Mireille Soria is now looking to head up Paramount Animation. Not a studio of course, but a tree that animated projects fall under, be they Nickelodeon show-based movies (Sponge out of Water, Loud House) or new IPs (Amusement Parks). Basically Warner Animation Group, but without a snazzy name or logo.

Paramount has been seeing changes lately, now that they have a new CEO and all. They've had it rough lately, outside of some flagship franchises like Mission: Impossible and small-scale successes like 10 Cloverfield Lane, so it looks like they'll be rebuilding some areas. Before the previous CEO's ouster, Paramount's animation wing was seemingly heading for a fall. After charging out of the gate with SpongeBob movie numero due, the initiative seemingly went nowhere as announced projects were left to wither, and then the name was attached to the disaster-in-the-making that was Monster Trucks. Other debacles included the last-minute cancelling of The Little Prince's domestic theatrical release, and them bailing on their plans to partner up with the studio behind the Spanish animated film series Tadeo Jones. (Tad, the Lost Explorer, as it was called here.)

Here's the expectedly corporate statement from the CEO, Jim Gianopulos, on this new move...

"I’ve known and have worked with Mireille for many years and know that with her running our animation group, Paramount continues to build a great team for the future. With her creative instinct and talents, Mireille will help us grow the studio and develop a strong slate strategy in animation."

And from Soria herself...

"I’m ecstatic to join such a legendary team of brilliant and successful filmmakers who understand good storytelling, and thrive on the wonderful, creative, and unique entertainment we get to bring to audiences worldwide. I can’t wait to get started."

This is Paramount Animation's slate right now, which indicates that they were willing to improve after the whole Monster Trucks debacle. Somewhat...

03/23/2018 - Sherlock Gnomes (Rocket/Starz)
08/10/2018 - Amusement Park (Ilion)
03/22/2019 - "Untitled Paramount/Nickelodeon Animation"
08/02/2019 - Untitled SpongeBob Film
02/07/2020 - The Loud House Movie (Nickelodeon)
07/31/2020 - "Untitled Paramount/Nickelodeon Hybrid"

Very Nick-heavy, plus Amusement Park is intended to launch a Nickelodeon TV series. I assume the same for all their future originals.

I can only imagine what direction they'll go in, but hopefully we get good results. They at least need to get on track and make good films, though I doubt we'll be seeing any innovation from this relative newcomer. It's clear that they too will keep it all in the family-friendly box like nearly everyone else is doing... So that being said, I just hope for films that at least stand out and not homogenous Minions-y mush. With SpongeBob numero tre and maybe Loud House, we'll at least get some 2D animation on the big screen.

What say you?

Out in less than a few weeks, The Emoji Movie's presence is growing.

With that, Sony has released two minutes of the film online and billed those minutes as the film's opening scene... So I decided to take a look and see if it's anything to cry or howl about...

Before I get to it, I just want to say... (And you can skip over all of this)

The Emoji Movie is a real hot button. Not in a long time have I seen an animated feature greeted with such disapproval, and that disapproval is completely understandable. When the pitch for the movie was being shopped around, I was a very vocal critic of this project. Emojis? Just a cheap attempt to cash in on the success of The Lego Movie and what's big right now! Well, yeah... It pretty much is.

Let's just remember that, if the reports are to be believed, The Emoji Movie started out as a pitch created by former Disney and DreamWorks story artist Anthony Leondis. (Also the director of the MGM-released animated film Igor, and would-be director of DreamWorks' ill-fated ghost movie.) Leondis' pitch was something multiple studios gushed over, so three of them got into a bidding war to get it... Yes, a bidding war... To get the film. Sony was one of them, the other two were Warner Bros. and Paramount. So before we write Sony Pictures Animation off altogether, let's keep in mind that this could've been a Warner Animation Group movie (and they did The Lego Movie!) or a Paramount Animation movie...

It just so happens that Sony won the bid. This was after their new management was cemented, not too long after their previous management - who went out the door after the 2014 hack snafu - rejected Genndy Tartakovsky's take on Popeye and his original project Can You Imagine? The new management showed Lauren Faust the door and handed Medusa to someone else, to my understanding it's not really about Medusa anymore.

So yes, I can understand why we're all miffed. I miss Genndy's projects and I wish the other cool-sounding ones weren't torpedoed, but let's just focus on the movie itself... The latest trailer was okay, not bad, not good, so... How are these 2-or-so minutes?


Well, all I can is... It looks... Bearable. Like the protagonist, this one's gonna get a "meh."

The world of the smartphone is nice-looking enough, and there were some funny gags (TJ Miller's Meh emoji trying to smile at the little munchkin babies is clever) here and there mixed with a lot of lame ones. It certainly reminds me of every bad aspect of American feature animation, it seems that the movie will sport a joke-a-thon script and will have this need to make everything - funny or not - into some kind of "gag." Or maybe the rest of the movie is solid and much better, maybe there are some surprises to come. I really don't know, it's just the opening scene, and it's just... There.

Again, I will eat serious crow if this thing turns out to be somewhat good. Yes, a movie starring a talking piece of fecal matter possibly being good. If it is good, then we'll be living in a world that's weirder than we think! Then again, we do live in a world where a 14-year-old Korean animated short about sentient dog crap is interesting, if not good. Again, it's just the whole idea that turns me off... It just sounds so corporate and so cynical, I'd rather see animation be used for, you know, amazing and otherworldly stories. Not something like "What if the Emojis in your phone are alive?" Why does live-action/photoreal VFX get to do all the stuff like Valerian and the City of the Thousand Planets (just imagine an animated adaptation of Valerian, just picture how mind-numbingly amazing that would be) while we're stuck with this and Minions and farting squirrels and such?

Yes, The Emoji Movie is kind of the linchpin of my frustration with the state of feature animation... So if it's "good," I'll consider it a pleasant surprise. I like pleasant surprises, sometimes more so than liking things that I know I'm going to like. The opening scene is just there, let's see what Sony has in store at the end of the month.

In the mean time, at my movie theater job, I'll continue doing the Devil's Work...


Can't ya tell I'm pumped about promoting this thing?

What say you on the Emoji Movie clip?

Since D23 2017 is right around the corner, I've decided to report on it the way I did the last two times...

Live! But not from there, but from my house on the East Coast! This is going to be similar to my live blog of the 2013 and 2015 D23 Expos, where I updated the posts as the presentation progressed. Tomorrow, we're going to hear about what's going on with Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar. The panel should last about two hours, the site says from 2:30-4:30PM PST. I'll likely be here to report on the news, not like last time where I had to go into work. Tomorrow and Saturday, I'm off, so I'll take advantage as much as possible...

I'm hoping that some of my predictions come true, such as a tiny word on what Walt Disney Animation Studios has on the docket after Gigantic's fall 2020 release, details on Pixar's two 2020 releases (similar to how, during the 2011 D23, they revealed the premises for two original pictures set for the future - they ended up being Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur), and more...

See you all tomorrow...

TO BE UPDATED...

Another animated movie about garden gnomes?

Gnome Alone, if you're new here or haven't been following this picture, is from 3QU Media and Vanguard Animation. Two companies spearheaded by Shrek producer John H. Williams, who still tries to bank off of that 16-year-old achievement. Vanguard's back from the grave, now part of this 3QU joint and also associated with the up-and-coming Cinesite Animation. I've been tracking Cinesite because they are helping former Disney animator Sergio Pablos make his revolutionary 2D/CG hybrid Klaus project into an animated feature.

They also have other pictures on their slate, and the team-up with 3QU/Vanguard has given them two films so far. Together, they did this feature and a fractured fairy tale called Charming. Will Smith's brother's company, Smith Global Media, has locked both of these features and will release them theatrically stateside. Gnome Alone comes first, Charming will follow in the second quarter of 2018, the former now has a trailer and a rating...


I do like the trailer's spooky vibe, as it was hinted that the film was inspired by the PG-rated films of the 1980s, films like Gremlins and Ghostbusters. That was back when having those two letters actually meant something. It doesn't look half bad, either. A little been there-done that, and the monstrous Troggs are kind of generic-looking, but on the whole it could've been worse. It looks better than your regular tiny-budget animated picture, and it's certainly better-looking than Charming, whose trailer leaked a little while back but then got pulled. (Is it playing in your country? I heard it opened internationally, but can't get any info.) Usually these sorta low-budget pictures that want to compete with the American heavies have such forced scripts and such, but this seems like a significant cut above them.

The concrete release date has been set, a suitable October 13th, though that is one week after My Little Pony: The Movie. Both of these aren't expected to be juggernauts, so I think the two will do fine domestically. This film was made for roughly $20 million, and for something that small-scale, it looks pretty impressive.

Anyways, let's see what 3QU/Vanguard is made of now, though I'm more interested in seeing what happens with Cinesite's Klaus... And if that gets picked up. Another story for another day.

What say you on Gnome Alone?

Not a video this time...

I'm experimenting with a new way of expressing my thoughts on the ever-flowing animation news. I feel that my work has come up short and lacks what it once had some 3-5 years ago, so I'm going to try something new. I'll wait for a few stories to come about, let the announcements and such sink in, and then I'll collect all my thoughts in a megapost like the D23 one... Except it's not live.

Anyways, there have been some happenings... Some interesting, some shocking, some unsurprising...


Warner Bros. once again added more movies to their ever-growing movie slate, one of them being a new Warner Animation Group project. The untitled picture curiously carries a 6/1/2018 release date, which places it before Smallfoot (9/14/2018), The Lego Movie Sequel (2/5/2019), and the Scooby-Doo feature (5/22/2020). Right now, a small variety of non-Lego projects are in development, one of them being the long-gestating adaptation of Jeff Smith's graphic novel series Bone, a couple of Hanna-Barbera adaptations (The Flintstones, The Jetsons), and a Space Jam sequel.

Right now, I think the likely candidates are Bone and the Lego spin-off The Billion Brick Race. The former has Mark Osborne (Kung Fu Panda, The Little Prince) tapped to direct and co-write with Adam Kline, who apparently is writing an Artemis Fowl movie for a particular studio that hasn't made any movement on it in years. This made the news back in November, and it's possible that they were on the project long before the announcement, so maybe the summer WAG event will indeed be Bone.

The Billion Brick Race was announced back in early 2015, and has had writers and directors attached since then (Iron Man 3 scribe Drew Pearce and Jason Segel), and some folks assumed that it would be released on May 24, 2019. Warner Bros. claimed that for an untitled film, and later gave it to the in-development Minecraft movie, but it's obvious that Warner Bros. probably won't release anything on that date now...

Warner has a unique way of keeping quiet on things. For a long while, the fall 2016 was occupied by Ninjago, until out of nowhere they revealed that the secretive Storks was now coming out on that date... A film they barely talked about after announcing it in 2013. The animation release date chess is an ever-changing thing...

On the Sony Animation front, director Shannon Tindle posted a taste of his upcoming original project, a superhero send-up.

Latest draft has been delivered. Time to do some boarding:-) #sonypicturesanimation #2020 pic.twitter.com/o30XMPG5ki

— Shannon Tindle (@ShannonTindle_1) July 16, 2017

Apparently still on track for a 2020 release, it could take one of Sony's 3 remaining 2020 dates. (An update clarifying the "no 2019 projects" and "5 between 2020-2021" would be nice.) As for the small hint, to me that looks like the protagonist. For those who aren't in the know, Tindle's project is supposed to be about a billionaire superhero having to raise the kid of his/her nemesis. Of course, people already pointed out the similarities to The Lego Batman Movie, but I think it could be a good original superhero send-up not dissimilar to DreamWorks'Megamind. The superhero craze is still in full swing, so might as well try again.

Speaking of Sony Animation, a recent article on the split between the parent studio and LStar Capital confirmed that both of their other releases this year will be small-budgeted. It comes as no surprise, since Sony Animation moved all its operations to Vancouver. Smurfs: The Lost Village came in at $60 million, The Emoji Movie ended up costing $10 million less, so it's probably not going to flop at this rate. At worst, it does Smurfs numbers and Sony's brass deem it a failure just because it didn't make blockbuster numbers. What's more interesting is the cost of The Star, the Nativity retelling that they have outsourced to Cinesite Animation.

That came back at $18 million. $18 million! Just one click lower than that of Sausage Party's budget...



The early images of the characters indicate that the movie will look pretty decent on such a small budget. Like I've been saying, the small-scale animated feature is really rising. Captain Underpants, Smurfs, The Star, lots of little guys showing that you don't need to blow $125 million on something like The Boss Baby. It also seems like Hollywood is finally getting the picture, that not every animated feature is destined to be some gargantuan tentpole-starting blockbuster smash. They all can't be Despicable Me or Frozen.

Now, they've gotten budget down on the third Hotel Transylvania film. The first two cost around $80 million respectively, this new one - heading to theaters next summer - will cost closer to $60 million. The live-action/CG hybrid Peter Rabbit will also be a small movie, for it cost $50 million. It's also a UK and Australian production that Sony Animation's basically attaching their name to, a la Goosebumps and its sequel.

With this all in place, I can't imagine them having a big problem with their upcoming original movies at the box office. Unlike Illumination, it seems that they're actually going to take initiative and take advantage of the fact that they aren't spending DreamWorks or Pixar dollars on their pictures. Let's cast aside our Emoji frustration and our mourning of Genndy Tartakovsky's two projects for a second... Tindle's project sounds promising and having him onboard (he conceived Kubo and the Two Strings) means a lot, the other upcoming originals - from Michael Rianda's "robot uprising road trip" movie to the before-time-boy-and-a-dog story being developed by Jon Saunders - sound like they have a lot of potential.

Next up is the trailer for the Nickelodeon reboot that I'm actually rather excited about... Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling...


Static Cling is set to be a commentary of 90s kids' nostalgia for the bygone decade, but the Comic-Con trailer for the upcoming TV movie doesn't quite dive into the nitty gritty, rather it focuses on how Rocko's getting knocked around by all the new, modern technology and such. What's great is that they were really able to preserve the look and feel of the original show, without giving it some snazzy upgrade, something that could go either way with older cartoons. I think it's also brilliant because this will be a critique of being over-nostalgic for the past, so the original style more than bolsters that.

For me, this revival and the Hey Arnold! one make the most sense, but I do welcome the return of the weirdness that was Invader Zim. Not everything needs a revival, but I like the choices Nick is making as of late.

What say you on WAG's 2018 project, Sony Animation's budgets, and Static Cling?

Twenty-twenty. In less than three years from now, the next decade will be upon us...

What kind of feature animation will rule in the next decade?

Well the first question is... What animation is ruling this decade?

I think it's the cute, often safe comedy that seems to try to please everyone in the audience. I feel Illumination Entertainment embodies that.


In a way, the Despicable Me series is the 2010's equivalent of Shrek. The first movie was the debut feature of Illumination, a studio set up by former Blue Sky and Fox animation producer Chris Meledandri. Despicable Me seemed very derivative of its contemporaries and older animated works. It had Looney Tunes-type slapstick, a cartoonier tone that was more akin to Madagascar and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs than something like Ratatouille or Up, it had some of that early DreamWorks "edge" to it, and it had the "warm fuzzies" (to quote a friend) like a good Disney animated film or a good Pixar film...

The combination clearly worked, as it pulled in over $250 million domestically and over $500 million worldwide, a stellar debut for a new studio. It was not dissimilar to Pixar's first film, Toy Story, becoming a smash hit despite the odds. Of course, the sharp difference between a studio like Illumination and a studio like Pixar comes in...

Pixar technically did something new and perhaps risky, an all-computer animated feature film. They could've taken the safe route after Toy Story miraculously went over well with critics, audiences, and everyone inbetween. Toy Story was fresh for an animated feature in the context of the 1990s animated feature world, Despicable Me in the early 2010s? Not so much. Pixar sought to keep trying new things, while Disney immediately slapped them with a Toy Story sequel. They left a B-team to handle Toy Story 2: Collector's Item, while the A-team (with Mr. T in tow) focused on "Bugs," later known as A Bug's Life. Other projects in development involved monsters, fish, an Ugly Duckling story with talking cars, a robot on a desolate future earth...

Toy Story 2 ended up going from direct-to-video status to theatrical, and its 1999 release was the cause of a rift between Pixar and The Walt Disney Company, which was then being run by an ever-changing and erratic Michael Eisner. Did it count as part of the first 3-film contract signed eight years earlier? Steve Jobs definitely thought so, Eisner thought otherwise, and would play this game with a third Toy Story, which Pixar had interest in doing as far back as 2002. Roughly two years before the whole Circle 7 debacle which helped lead to Eisner's ouster and Disney's subsequent acquisition of Pixar. In the mean time, Pixar focused on originals and originals only. Now that the politics are different nowadays, Pixar does sequels more often, yet they still make time for original movies like Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Coco, and Dan Scanlon's upcoming "suburban fantasy world" picture. Three more are on the horizon after that, and no sequels in sight for now.

Illumination on the other hand? Despicable Me 2 opened two years later, and for a long time, Minions would follow in Christmas 2014 before it had to be pushed to the following summer. Despicable Me 3 arrived no more than two years later, and their originals from last year - Sing and The Secret Life of Pets - seemed to get good reviews, but at the same time there was some kind of "they get a pass for being cute" thing going on. No real trailblazing on the order of Pixar, their run is more like DreamWorks' run after the success of Shrek.

DreamWorks, like Illumination, was less a studio full of like-minded creators at their helm and more a vehicle for ex-Disney mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg and his executives were one-way: The traditionally animated features - such as Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas - had to be self-important and serious, or as one animator put it, like "Masterpiece Theatre." The CGI films had to be comedies, and hearsay indicates that the animators found themselves having more fun on the looser, more comedic CG pictures. DreamWorks' 2D output went belly-up at the box office, Katzenberg blamed the medium, but now he seems to put the blame on the tone of the pictures themselves. In a more recent review, he was shocked at how rough of a movie The Prince of Egypt was.


With Shrek soaring to box office heights hitherto unheard of for the studio, the new path was "CG comedies."Shrek 2's then record-breaking conquering of the box office more than sealed the deal. What followed were comedies that leaned heavily towards pop culture references, modern snazziness, and quasi-adult humor. It paid off well until the grosses started slipping, culminating in the underperformance of Bee Movie in late 2007. The critical reception of films like Shark Tale and Madagascar did not matter back then, executives knew where the money was at. They weren't interested in competing with Pixar on quality grounds.

DreamWorks saved themselves by changing, because eventually that formula was going to wear thin on audiences. Shrek-ian comedies were out by the beginning of 2008, just mere months before the release of their martial arts adventure-comedy Kung Fu Panda was released. It was a critical darling and their biggest non-sequel film since the first Shrek came out. Then for a little while, DreamWorks made a mix of fun comedies and adventurous epics, with some neat experiments inbetween. That was, until poor management, timing, and budget issues bit them in their collective rears. Now it seems like they'll be Illumination 2.0, specializing in unchallenging comedies and sequels to unchallenging Boss Baby-type comedies in the pipeline. Maybe.

Illumination has stayed the course, for their brand of unchallenging comedy romps that seem to reheat elements from better works is clearly working. Secret Life of Pets and Sing were box office monsters, and while the Despicable Me series is slowly facing a decline, it's still making ridiculous amounts of money. Will that change? Will audiences eventually tire of Minions-lite movies and things that are only just cute? Maybe.

DreamWorks saw that Shrek would wear thin, so they stopped it at Shrek Forever After in 2010. The trailers and ads for that movie sold it as "Shrek: The Final Chapter," rather than Shrek Forever After. The movie made a healthy amount, especially worldwide, but it was clear that the series wasn't going to reach Shrek 2's heights again. Flash-forward 5 years later, DreamWorks now sees that 90s/early aughts nostalgia is big, so they're taking advantage with a fifth Shrek. I'm sure that will open big, but then fly away like an untied balloon. If the 90s nostalgia boom wasn't the thing that it is, I doubt we'd be seeing a fifth Shrek. If they continued past the fourth film, it would be puttering at this point.

Just like how they saw that the snarky comedies were wearing thin, they saw that flagship franchise wearing thin as well. It makes me wonder... Will Despicable Me's next outing do excellently? What will Minions make? The first Minions opened huge, but then had very weak legs for an animated feature. By July 2020, will hordes of audiences still be craving for those jibbering yellow tictacs? Just how low will the series fall at the domestic box office by the beginning of the next decade?

Like Shrek, I really believe Despicable Me is like a flavor-of-the-month. Sure, Shrek had great and very likable characters, you can argue Gru and the girls are good characters as well... But great characters or not, Shrek didn't have the lasting appeal of something like Finding Nemo or The Incredibles or even Lilo & Stitch. Perhaps the same fate awaits Despicable Me, and that by 2030, more people will be talking about Inside Out or How To Train Your Dragon or The Lego Movie. Maybe, maybe. Sometimes, some things are short-term smashes, while other things continue to last. We know the drill. What 2007 movie do people talk about more? Ratatouille? Or Spider-Man 3? Shrek the Third? Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End? Transformers? I think more talk about Enchanted than the 19-or-so movies that outgrossed it.


I ask all of this because I think the success of Despicable Me has cast a shadow over theatrical animation the way Shrek kind of did in the mid-2000s, but in a much bigger way. In the mid-2000s, you saw a lot CG pictures that attempted to bank off of Shrek. Instead of chasing Pixar's inventive stories and imagination, they went after the simple things: Talking critters, potty humor, celebrity casts, and overly-modern touches that did little for the stories. I can name maybe a few mainstream features made in that period - that weren't from Pixar or the recovering Disney Animation - that at least tried to be solid and smart for both adults and kids, like Aardman's final two DreamWorks-deal pictures, Sony Animation's unfairly-rejected Surf's Up, and maybe the uneven first Madagascar movie. Heck, Happy Feet - even in butchered form - is still something of an oddball George Miller movie, so that kind of counts. Interestingly, it seems the animated penguins were our only hope back then. The Polar Express at least felt kind of old-fashioned and well-spirited. If the films weren't trying to do the Shrek thing, then they were just straight-up kidflix. Rental-type movies like, say, The Ant Bully and Everyone's Hero. Remember those?

While studios like Disney Animation, Pixar, Warner, Aardman, and LAIKA remain the way they are for the most part, we see the safe cute comedy with a lil'-bit-o-everything - i.e. the Despicable Me-type movie - succeed and flourish elsewhere in the current climate. It seems that the Zootopias and Inside Outs and Lego Movies don't inspire the executives at other studios, in the same way the Finding Nemos and Incredibles-types didn't back in the mid 2000s. Instead of a movie with the wit and creativity of The Lego Movie, we get a film like The Emoji Movie, which seemingly just wants to bank on the recognizable thing rather than tell a good story based on it. How come we're not seeing more earnest tales like Zootopia and Inside Out? Those were different and those were big hits! And you can do a fun comedy right, as well! Rio, Storks, Madagascar 3, even the first Despicable Me, all good examples!

I guess it all depends on what will be the next sleeper hit that isn't a Disney or Pixar film. This decade and the last one showed that their influence, oddly enough, doesn't ring through. What feature will come about that everyone chooses to copycat? Will it be another safe-as-vanilla comedy that's somehow different from Despicable Me? Will it be some bold new picture that somehow catches the attention of executives? Will it be some amazing Studio Ghibli-esque marvel? Will it be something like a great independent European picture? Or will it be a raunchy Sausage Party-type comedy?

The thing about sleeper hits... No one expects them, most of the time.

A Disney musical in the vein of the early films and the fairy tales with a mix of contemporary Broadway from the guys who did Little Shop of Horrors? Nahhh, it's about a girl. Boys aren't going to want to see that, don't expect it to gross more than Oliver & Company...

A snarky comedy spoof that sends up Disney and fairy tales? This thing has been a troubled production, it'll be lucky to make its money back...

Some generic comedy with these weird little yellow things? That'll probably just do okay...

It's a bit strange that Disney all of things barely inspired this sort of copycattery. In the 90s, yes, you saw plenty of Disney-esque musical movies, but they all either bombed or underperformed. A lot of the Shrek wannabes did the same, but the Despicable-lites do pretty well. It also helps that more studios are realizing that you don't have to blow over $100 million into these things each time out.

What do you think will come about in the next decade?

Trailers, things going on at studios, what's coming to disc... All right here...

It's been a good couple of weeks for trailers, for both animation fans and general movie fans...

Curiously, the first-ever trailer for Scott Sava's long-in-the-works Animal Crackers has finally arrived. Even though the film is still seemingly without a US distributor, it's still on track for a September 1st release.


For a film made on a $17 million budget, it looks nice. The style is like a mix of the quasi-photoreal look and something cartoony, you can see that in some of the asymmetry of some objects and buildings here and there. Like I keep saying, the small, tiny-budget animated feature continues to make its way to the forefront. You can tell the trailer wasn't edited and put together by a big distributor, for the first half isn't all over the place and it gives you an idea of what it's actually about before the comic mayhem sets in, among the other stuff.

Again, this is supposed to be a very personal project for its director, and ex-Disney animator and Mulan director Tony Bancroft's involved, so it has promise. Early reception from Annecy indicates that it's a fun ride altogether. It's good to see Bancroft finally having a post-Disney directorial feature, after the last thing he was supposed to direct - Bunyan & Babe - was mutated into something else.

On the whole, it looks like it could be solid and it's thankfully free of Minions-y, sugary stuff like that.

Next up is a trailer that had me in stitches. Literally...

During their presentation at San Diego Comic-Con, Warner Bros. unveiled the new trailer for The Lego Ninjago Movie, which arrives just in time for the release of The Emoji Movie...


Very rarely does a trailer for anything make me burst out laughing... Thrice!

Yes, I'm legitimately serious here. This trailer for The Lego Ninjago Movie made me burst out laughing three times... You can probably guess where for one of them, too.

Anyways, I'm fully onboard this picture. I was initially kind of skeptical of this particular film, because what could differentiate it from both The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie? What could set it apart? Would it still be unique and right in line with its brick predecessors? With this trailer, I'm not asking that anymore. The movie looks like a cross-genre blast that just happens to be set in a Lego world. I'm not familiar with the storyline of the Ninjago toyline and the TV series, but I don't think that's going to be much of an issue for me or casual moviegoers. The movie just looks like a really fun, really giddy, really zany send-up of blockbusters, crossovers, and all sorts of things. Kitty kaiju, martial arts, a potentially heartfelt evil father-good son story, and maybe even a high school drama where the young Ninjago heroes balance their daily responsibilities with saving the world.

You know, a little bit like Spider-Man: Homecoming.

In a way, I kind of wish this trailer didn't show Meowthra. Imagine that element just completely catching you off guard in the film itself? At the same time, without the cat monster, I wouldn't have laughed so hard three times when watching this trailer. The other bits that got me? Garmadon's arm at the end, and the part where they attempt to hide behind the trees. ("Ca-caw!")

It makes me wonder... Would a movie like this get off the ground at any other animation studio? If it weren't set in the Lego universe? Probably not, which is why I love this series. The Lego Movie series is a like a springboard for these irreverent, gleefully over-the-top mash-up movies that probably would have trouble getting the green light if they weren't Lego movies. I don't feel any oversaturation of this franchise, either, because... Well... There was no such thing as a theatrical Lego movie until The Lego Movie. You had some direct-to-video movies and cartoons here and there, but nothing like this. The kids of today are lucky, I wish I had these kinds of movies back in the 90s when I was a wee one.

What's so perfect about these movies is that they are great family films, and are smart for the adult audience while being every kid Lego fan's dream come true on the big screen. That's a fine balance right there, and it's so cool that Warner Animation group struck it twice, and might do it thrice! Oh, and to say of Warner Animation Group's first non-Lego feature. 2016's Storks seemed very divisive, with some really not liking it. Others really liked it, including myself. Some were more middle-ground, saying, "Eh, it's fun, but uneven." I'm in the "dug it" camp for Storks, and I'm really excited about Smallfoot and Bone, and interested in what they may do with the Hanna-Barbera movies.

Yeah, if I hadn't made it clear... I love Warner Animation Group.

Now, next up is not a trailer for an animated movie... Though it's for a blockbuster-type movie that uses a lot of animation, and has lots of connections to animated works...

The trailer for Steven Spielberg's sci-fi action epic, Ready Player One.


Based on the book of the same name, the trailer emphasizes video game action and thrills, but apparently the source material is another commentary on how our nostalgia for old things - in this case, video games and other works of media - might be our undoing.

Two things...

The Iron Giant... Apparently the titular star of the unjustly tossed 1999 animated feature has a big, big role in this movie. If this movie introduces folks to The Iron Giant, I'm not complaining. More fans for that movie is a big win, and it's great to see it coming out of a Spielberg film no less.

Second... Wreck-It Ralph, you have competition. Serious competition. Ralph Breaks the Internet was actually once set to open mere weeks before Ready Player One (which is releasing on March 30th), but now Disney Animation's video game adventure sequel is set to open during the Thanksgiving week. Now, with what we know from D23 and such, how will it stack up against this? This just looks absolutely bonkers, and the kind of thing I want to see pure animation do. Not jabbering yellow tic-tacs and emojis and fluffy animals and such, I think animation can certainly tell a big sci-fi/video game story like this.

Wreck-It Ralph, while not really a science fiction film, fits the other bill. Animation perfectly brought the film's three game worlds to life and differentiated them, while having great energetic action and strong character development to spare. I not only hope that the sequel does just that, but really goes all out. Ralph and Vanellope are going to the Internet, think of all the games outside of the arcade that they can go to! Not just Internet and mobile games, but also console games and the online modes of big console games. They don't have to be real ones, as the fictitious games in the first film work very well as great send-ups. You can throw them into Warcraft-like games, Mass Effect-type games, 90s-style platformer adventures, everything!

I'm just saying, Ready Player One is loaded. Ralph Breaks the Internet, in addition to having great storytelling, should be loaded as well. I don't want to settle for just parodies of websites and synergy crossover scenes with other Disney characters. I'm sure there will be more to it than just that, given that it's a Walt Disney Animation Studios movie, but at the same time I do want it to go all out and take complete advantage of animation's limitlessness. After seeing so many live-action/CG'ed blockbusters doing just that, it's animation's turn. The medium is way more than just bubbly comedies with cutesy creatures.

Anyways, I anticipate both. Two video game-based epics in 2018 along with some cool-sounding video game adaptations? Sign me up!

Over at an up-and-coming animation joint, things are a-happening...


Skydance Media announced back in March that they want to get in on the animation game. They teamed up with Ilion Animation, a Spanish house that is currently making Amusement Park for Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon. I'm not sure if their partnership will extend beyond that, it is very possible, but who knows at this point. Anyways, the two features they are working on now have directors.

The 2019 release Luck, set to be about the forces that determine the good and bad luck in the world, is going to be directed by former DreamWorks face Alessandro Carloni. Long-time animator at the moon house, he moved up to the story man position, and was supposed to direct the ill-fated 2D/CG hybrid Me and My Shadow. After that, he co-directed Kung Fu Panda 3 with Jennifer Yuh. Since DreamWorks has been changing, it makes sense that some of the old guard has left, so it's cool to see him spread his wings.

Another former DreamWorks individual is directing Skydance/Ilion's other animated feature that's in development, an untitled fantasy picture about a girl having to save her kingdom from dark, dividing forces. Linda Woolverton, of Beauty and the Beast and Lion King fame, has been the screenwriter for a good while. The director in question will be Vicky Jenson, an animation long-timer who had co-directed the first Shrek and also Shark Tale, while working on various projects at the studio. She hasn't really been active for a while (outside of some miscellaneous TV work), so it's cool to see her return to animation.

Who will distribute the Skydance movies, though? I don't think it'll be Paramount, because I've seen no evidence of them getting in on this joint venture, plus Skydance has made movies for other studios. (i.e. Life for Sony, Geostorm for Warner Bros.) Maybe a smaller company will pick them? Who knows, but it's interesting to see another player in the field, even if it's one doing movies for another distributor.

On the home video front, we have some good-sized news...

Shout! Factory is set to release the rather obscure British animated feature The Plague Dogs on Blu-ray sometime this year. 

Beautifully animated The Plague Dogs and the Paul Rudd classic ... Mac and Me coming too!

— Shout! Factory (@ShoutFactory) July 22, 2017

The Plague Dogs is pretty much the successor to Watership Down, a more widely-known animated film about rabbits that recently got a Criterion Collection Blu-ray set. Like Watership Down, this 1982 film is based on a rather dark talking animals novel by Richard Adams. A film about two testing lab dogs who are running from authorities because they are suspected to be carriers of the bubonic plague, it was certainly a product of the overall confused landscape of the late 70s/early 80s animation field. It is not a family film in any say, shape, or form. Like Watership Down, a lot of kids who grew up in the 80s will tell you that their parents bought these movies for them, accidentally thinking they were kids' films (because hey, in the 80s, everything animated was for kiddies!), and then they would be traumatized by them.

Also, like its rabbit predecessor, it was done at a studio called Nepenthe, and the same director - Martin Rosen - returned to helm the picture. An American unit helped alongside, animation legends Brad Bird (who presumably landed here after leaving Disney out of frustration during production of The Fox and the Hound) and Retta Scott (animator of the hunting dogs in Bambi) had a hand in making the film.


It wasn't really much of a box office success in Europe from what I understand. In America, the 103-minute movie was chopped down to 86 minutes. Screened in Seattle in 1983, the film got itself a limited American release sometime in 1985. Most home video editions of the movie contain the 86-minute cut (82 minutes if you live in a country where PAL's the video format), which mostly removed sequences that were thought to be superfluous. The only noteworthy cut here is the absence of a scene where we see the rotten carcass of a sniper. Towards the end of the second act, if I remember correctly, a sniper is hired to kill the titular canines. Their fox accomplice, simply called The Tod, causes the sniper to fall off the cliff. In that later aforementioned scene, the rescue crew sees his remains, making it clear that the dogs - Rowf and Snitter - ate him to survive.

While the uncut film was rated PG in the UK (back when there was no 12 or 12A rating), I can't imagine why the American distributors cut that one bit out, because the film still got a PG-13 rating here in the United States... And they also left in a sequence that I personally felt was much more disturbing anyways. The film's home video history has been rather murky. Folks say the theatrical cut was released on VHS in the UK right after the film left theaters, and only a few thousand copies were pressed. Most later US and UK releases contained the butchered version, an Australian DVD had the full cut but the print appeared to be beat-up and washed out. The 2008 UK DVD apparently presented the film in its uncut form as well. It's never been released uncut here, though.

Considering that Watership Down got the Criterion treatment, I was kind of hoping they'd do the same for this film. A great suggestions list for the Criterion Collection made many moons ago had this very film on it, alongside things like Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin, the legendary uncut version of Don Bluth's The Land Before Time, Harry Nilsson's ABC-Movie-of-the-Week The Point!, and - surprisingly - two Disney features: Song of the South and the also much-sought-after uncut version of The Black Cauldron.

No word on whether Shout's Blu-ray will be the uncut 103-minute version in the correct speed, as the announcement seemed to be a rather passing one. I saw the film a decade ago on YouTube, someone had broken their Australian DVD of it into 10-or-so parts. I think it's a great film, and a rare animated film that dips into some truly dark and uncomfortable waters, not dissimilar to some other 70s and 80s animated movies out there. (When the Wind Blows comes to mind.) I have little desire to revisit it myself, because I don't do movies like that, personally. I admire them for their writing and high quality, but generally bleak and dismal films like that don't gel with me. I may just get it for the heck of it, and to marvel at the animation itself.

Another animated film heading its way back to home video is none other than Disney's beloved The Lion King, returning to Blu-ray after being in the Vault for over four years.


The Walt Disney Signature Collection is really in full swing, and I mean *really*. Titles are coming out faster than the Road Runner, and the wait times between the previous vaulted editions and these new ones are getting shorter and shorter. I'm guessing that the company is slowly but surely eradicating the Vault altogether, or changing things up in a big way, because honestly... The Vault is nothing these days. It only gives scalpers the incentive to sell their old Lion King DVDs and Blu-rays for ridiculous prices. Actually, that has been a problem since the days Disney started releasing their animated features on video. It was an early indicator that the Vault really was outdated, even by the mid-1990s!

Yet it worked for Disney up until recently, Blu-ray and DVD sales for most of the classics hasn't been all that desirable to them. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainiment (that's a mouthful, just go back to Walt Disney Home Video) was apparently folded into the TV division, and a lot of their home media releases as of late have been let-downs. You've had some exceptions here and there like the Target edition of the Zootopia Blu-ray and a few of the Diamond Editions, but on the whole? It's been a rather sad state of affairs. Their cover art is pretty lazy nowadays, too.

Some of the new bonuses here sound cool, but I'll wait on reviews before double-dipping, because the 2011 Blu-ray was pretty comprehensive despite the BD-Live snafu, and I've got the 2003 DVD as well for the features the Blu-ray does not have... Of course, both of those editions were missing bonuses from the original LaserDisc! But hey, this problem spans multiple Disney home media releases.

Anyways, the new Blu-ray hits stores August 29th, earlier than I had expected. The Platinum and Diamond lines had this tradition where there would be one title in the late winter/early spring, and another in the autumn. Last year, the Signature Collection began and seemed to follow that trajectory: Snow White come out in February, Beauty and the Beast followed in September. This year? Pinocchio in January, followed by Bambi this past month, now Lion King just around the corner! Are we getting a Signature Edition in the late fall, too? Lady and the Tramp? Fantasia?

I'll actually dip if the Blu-ray presents the film the way it was shown in 1994. Only the film's 1995 VHS and LaserDisc release have the full theatrical cut, every following home media release changed something. It's not Star Wars-level severe, but a bit distracting in some ways. You see, The Lion King got an IMAX-exclusive re-release in 2002, which boasted an all-new sequence based on the film's Broadway adaptation: 'Morning Report.' Other changes were made alongside this addition.

One of the changes appears during the 'Can't Wait to Be King' sequence. A few singing crocodiles and toothpicker birds were completely re-designed and re-animated. I like the older ones better, honestly. That's not because of nostalgia, but because I feel their designs fit in better with the overall look of that sequence.




I don't know, do you find the 2002 ones better looking?

In fact, more changes were made to the 2011 theatrical re-release and Blu-ray. Take the scene where Mufasa's ghost leaves Simba towards the end of the second act. It was given a noticeable lift on the 2011 Blu-ray.



Yeah, I don't like little changes like that.
The other thing I want? Fix the opening title cards! Most Disney films made after the mid-1980s open with the Walt Disney Pictures castle. Some movies had their own special music playing over the logo, others did not and used the 'When You Wish Upon a Star'-sounding theme with the unusual sound at the very end. Until 2006, the common opening logo was a bright blue one. The original version of The Lion King opens with that, but there's no music, instead it's the morning sounds of the savanna. Sets the atmosphere, you know? Right before the opening chant of 'The Circle of Life.' The 2003 DVD has a different WDP logo, but keeps the sound effects. The Blu-ray uses the CGI Walt Disney Pictures castle with the 'Wish Upon' theme, no savanna sounds.

I know that's a super-nerdy concern, but I like when movies have the correct title card at the beginning, especially if it opened with its own unique music/sound effects.

Anyways, long story short, I'll dip if it presents the original theatrical cut - not the 2002 version sans 'Morning Report.'Beauty and the Beast has had this same problem on home video, as that got itself an IMAX re-release in 2002 with an added sequence and other changes, which turned into a home video clustercuss.

What say you on these trailers, the Skydance news, and the home video announcements?

A thought crossed my mind when re-evaluating the latter period of the Disney "Renaissance" on my more personal, alternate blog on WordPress...

Walt Disney Animation Studios doesn't really adapt literary classics outside of fairy tales anymore...

The last Disney animated feature to be based on a book that isn't a fairy tale or a Marvel comic was made ten years ago... Meet The Robinsons, based on William Joyce's A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In fact, adaptations were sparse in the post-Renaissance/pre-Lasseter years, too! The Emperor's New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo & Stitch, Brother Bear, and Home on the Range aren't based on any pre-existing IPs. Brother Bear was at one point going to be an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, the early versions of Home on the Range, when it was called Sweatin' Bullets, had Pied Piper elements in it, as does the finished film.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' current run and future is mostly free of adaptations, again, outside of fairy tales. The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen are extremely loose re-imaginings of the tales they're based on. They used some core ideas and elements, and built their own original narratives around them. Walt Disney worked similarly, stripping a story down to its basic structure and characters, and then - with his story men - adding their own material. Moana draws on some Polynesian folklore, but uses it to service the story it's trying to tell.

Only one anomaly stands out amongst this current line-up: Big Hero 6. A very loose adaptation of a relatively obscure Marvel comic, so loose that it could almost pass as an original animated feature if not for the characters' names, Big Hero 6 was adapted into a Disney animated movie for an obvious reason. Marvel is a goldmine, and there are plenty of characters that Marvel Studios wouldn't use for the MCU, so that gives Disney's other wings their share.

What's the reasoning? Why do they avoid adaptations now? I surmised that it was this...


During the Renaissance and afterwards, Disney had gotten flack for their adaptations of certain stories. Some of which were certainly not family-friendly in any sense, whether it's Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Edgar Rice Burroughs'Tarzan stories. Both of these properties were adapted into live-action movies during the days when Hollywood's little censorship thing, called the Hays Code, ruled the industry. Walt adapted several family-unfriendly stories outside of fairy tales during this era as well, but did so in a way that didn't insult the intelligence of the audience. No one seemed to mind that something like Snow White or Bambi was stripped of graphic violence or horrific imagery you wouldn't show to someone under the age of, say, ten.

In the 90s? No.

I think this was because Disney's executives got a little too arrogant. Few sneered about The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin being Disney-ified, but the company was literally asking for it when tackling Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. American history and a very dark novel about the hypocrisy of the church... Perfectly fine material for G-rated Disney animated adaptations!

With Pocahontas, former chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg was aggressively trying to chase that Best Picture Oscar that Beauty and the Beast was denied. Remember folks, Beauty and the Beast was not only the first animated feature to get a Best Picture nomination, but also the second-ever Disney feature film to get one, the first being Mary Poppins. Beauty and the Beast lost for obvious reasons, the Academy staff supposedly had a meltdown over an icky cartoon being in the running in the first place. Katzenberg was determined, and thought a meshing of Dances with Wolves and the Disney Renaissance formula was the company's ticket to a winning prestige event. Katzenberg jumped ship when it was in production, but the movie bears all of his stamps.


Michael Eisner, then CEO of the company, treated The Hunchback of Notre Dame the same way. That was his pet project through-and-through, and that would be the last animated feature that would be something of a quasi-prestige (pun not intended) picture for Disney Feature Animation. They got the directors of Beauty and the Beast back to do it, producer Don Hahn was on board, this was a surefire shoe-in, right? While Hunchback didn't end as disastrously as Pocahontas did, it has still split the audience and fans down the middle. One side sneers about how much of a bastardization it is of the original novel, the other side really digs it. I actually really love that movie, and my only real issue with it is the gargoyles, everything else I'm big on... As an adaptation of the novel? It probably fails, but who am I to say? I'm taking it as a movie on its own.

It's an understandably rocky debate, should Disney had even touched those stories or not? Disney slowly backed away from this problem altogether towards the end of the decade. Aladdin directors Ron Clements and John Musker did not want to do a movie like Pocahontas or Hunchback. An interview with Tad Stones from the period, I feel, summed up their attitude at the time:

“What Ron said was that the whole line of features that they were talking about like Pocahontas,Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aida (the opera that eventually premiered as a Broadway show instead) were about things that he and John didn’t want to work on. We are not the Miramax of animation. We kind of do what mainstream America would like to see so let’s put that kind of entertainment on the screen. Disney’s done quite well with that. It really did shock Jeffrey into realizing that he was pushing animation to an Art House formula. He started asking, ‘Who is the audience for this?’”

Ron and John took on Greek mythology with Hercules, but made a very loose adaptation that played out more like a superhero origin story. Something that could be molded into the Disney Renaissance formula that the executives aggressively clung onto. Mulan focused on the titular heroine's struggle, war is part of it, but it's not overt. Tarzan plays off the man-vs-nature element and turns it into a Romeo & Juliet-type story with lots of blockbuster action. All of these movies received criticism for "Disney-ifying" the source material, and were also dubbed "politically correct."

After that, we entered the experimental period that sadly turned out to be a bust for the most part. It was here that we only saw a few adaptations, Treasure Planet being a pretty good space opera retelling of Treasure Island - which Walt Disney adapted into his first-ever fully live-action picture some 52 years prior - and Chicken Little being... Chicken Little. Meet The Robinsons is the bridge between the Eisner years and the current era, it's a solid adaptation, but the source material was a children's book, so there wasn't much of an uphill battle there.

Like I said, outside of fairy tales and Marvel comics, nothing else... As if Disney Animation's runners are now too afraid of even touching a literary work, perhaps out of fear that those same people will come out and deride them for even touching said source material?

But the wounds have healed, and there are plenty of age-appropriate novels and stories that Disney Animation can option and adapt, now that the studio is not run by people like Eisner and Katzenberg anymore. I can imagine John Lasseter's Disney Animation doing a bang-up job on an adaptation of something like The Chronicles of Prydain, which Disney adapted into The Black Cauldron back in the mid-1980s, when the studio and company was a mess not far removed from where it was during Eisner's final years. If they locked into a multi-book series like that, they wouldn't have to worry about having to make sequels to things like Tangled, Frozen, and whatnot.


They almost got there in the modern era. After finishing The Princess and the Frog, Clements and Musker wanted to adapt a novel called Mort, the fourth book in the Terry Pratchett fantasy series Discworld. Problem is, there was a rights issue. Apparently Disney had to get the rights to the whole series, Ron and John only wanted to adapt Mort. The picture was cancelled by the end of 2010, so the dream duo pitched three stories, John Lasseter okayed the Polynesian-set story they pitched, rest is history.

The studio's future is mostly a mystery, the only officially-revealed projects are sequels and a fairy tale adaptation: Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen 2, and Gigantic. Dean Wellins' cancelled sci-fi movie was an original story, it is unknown what he's working on now, or what Stephen Anderson's new movie is, or what Byron Howard's new Lin-Manuel Miranda project is. Disney's live-action department, when they're not assimilating the animated classics, mostly does adaptations: A Wrinkle in Time, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, John Carter of Mars, and things Disney Animation probably would've never touched. Things like Prince of Persia and The Lone Ranger.

Now I'm not asking for Disney Animation to do more adaptations, I'm okay with them continuing to do original stories, because we need more of that in a movie marketplace that's mostly made up of adaptations or sequels/reboots/remakes/this/that. Good original stories, at that. But part of me would like to see Disney Animation try again, and acquire a really imaginative pre-existing IP that begs for an animated adaptation. I see live-action - with the aid of photorealistic CGI - adapting all these things, things that I think would work terrifically in animation, why can't animation have that? Forget the giggling tictacs, I want to see a fully-animated Valerian and Laureline movie. Or a fully animated Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Where's my animated adaptation of something like a great sci-fi novel or a great fantasy graphic novel? Most PG-13 blockbusters I see, I always think, "Imagine how amazing that would be if it were done in animation!"

Of course, Disney Animation would have to seek out age-appropriate novels, comics, novellas, and such... Adapt them in a way that makes them fresh and new, respect the audience both young and old, and they'd have a pretty strong movie and potential series on their hands. I would love to see an animated feature spawn a great saga, something like a Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings-type equivalent. That's much more exciting than the umpteenth sequel to a silly, risk-averse comedy romp. If the live-action department wants to pass up things like Artemis Fowl and The Stuff of Legend, then... Give them to Disney Animation! In fact, it'd be cool if they took those stories on!

Heck, Pixar specializes in original stories, what if they were to break the code and do an adaptation? They almost did! You know the Blue Sky animated movie Epic? Chris Wedge wanted to adapt the source material - William Joyce's The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs - at Pixar, until it was declined, and he shopped it back to his home studio. With Pixar and adaptations, that's another story for another day.

Whatever Disney Animation chooses to do, it's fine by me, but I still think the whole adaptation thing should be considered...

What say you?

A trailer, a TV show announcement, and more TV-related stuff...


After a lengthy wait, we finally have a trailer and first look at Sony Animation's next feature, The Star. Outsourced to the Montreal-based Cinesite Animation and made for roughly $18 million, the Nativity story re-telling looks fine for such a low-budget production. The animation is pretty smooth for the most part, and the art direction is nice to look at. Some of the colors in the trailer are quite nice, too, even if the film is more quasi-photorealistic than I hoped it would be. I was hoping for something very painterly and perhaps more Book of Life-esque, but here we are...


Unfortunately, the content of the trailer didn't really match up with the visuals. While retelling the Nativity story from the animals' perspective isn't a terrible idea, as that fits right in with the basic things animation can do, the movie looks way too goofy. Now I wasn't quite expecting something tonally similar to, say, The Prince of Egypt, but it just seems like the usual: Funny, wacky animals making awkward quips and such. Plus, a good chunk of the trailer is just an announcement of its star-studded cast... Is it 2005?

Okay, so I will admit, I liked how Bo the donkey tried to talk to Mary, that was a clever little bit... But then you have the dove doing the dance moves to distract the wolves, I mean is this supposed to be an irreverent comedy? Or a more traditional comedy where the humor should blend in with the setting? Jokey stuff like the donkey trying to talk to a human is funny, the dove scene is not. I think I'll agree with Joseph at the end, "There's something seriously wrong with those animals."

I expect a lot out of Sony Pictures Animation, because if you've been here, you'll know that my philosophy is that all the major animation studios have it in them to make high-quality works. It isn't just "Disney and Pixar are great, everyone else sucks." Sony Animation has proven themselves with two features in my eyes, Surf's Up and the first Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. (Which the trailer unusually references, and not a more recent hit like Hotel Transylvania.) They're also an interesting bunch because they go from Smurfs to emojis to the birth of Jesus... I mean, what other modern animation studio can have that on their resume?

But marketing is marketing. The Star could very well turn out to be a solid little film, and Sony was very smart to get this done at the lowest price possible. Niche Christian films have their own box office patterns, and often aren't blockbuster-type films. The Star should've never been expected to be a $100 million-grossing, tentpole-launching smash, and I'm kind of content the film is here because of that. I'm looking forward to a future of animated movies that aren't expected to be a Despicable Me/Frozen/Shrek/Toy Story-type right out of the gate, because animation isn't the "family movie franchise-starting tentpole," and animation certainly isn't just the "family adventure-comedy romp" as well. If a few small-scale family films lead us to a field with more diverse, smart-budgeted choices, that's fine.

I am not saying we should get lower-quality, low budget product, though. I definitely want more Captain Underpants-level stuff, not stuff like this. I don't think The Star looks very good, but at least a lot isn't riding on it. It'll come and go, score some holiday season legs, and it probably won't spawn countless imitators. Some argue that it looks very direct-to-video, and it does, but still... I see it as one puzzle piece in the grand scheme of things. Just another entry in a wave of low budget animated pictures. It's good to keep proving to Hollywood that not every animated feature needs to pull such numbers out of a hat. The requirements that often kill many good-quality movies, and put studios' people in trouble. Captain Underpants proved this, Sausage Party proved this, as did Reel FX's The Book of Life, the latter of which is getting a sequel.

Moving on...

On the television animation front, Matt Groening is launching a new adult animated series for Netflix called Disenchantment.


Expectedly a comedy that's being handled by Rough Draft, 20 episodes have been ordered and it has something of cast. 10 of those episodes are set to come next year. The show is set in a medieval fantasy kingdom called Dreamland, which couldn't be any further from being a dreamlike land. It follows boozer princess Bean, an elf simply named "Elfo," and her "personal demon" named Luci. Groening says...

"Disenchantment will be about life and death, love and sex, and how to keep laughing in a world full of suffering and idiots, despite what the elders and wizards and other jerks tell you..."

It seems like Matt Groening is taking a very simple backdrop and looking to do something fresh and new with it. With the early seasons of The Simpsons, Groening and his team spit in the face of family values sitcoms and clean, inoffensive television that had dominated for far too long. With Futurama, they toyed with sci-fi, fantasy, all sorts of different ideas while still keeping a core set of characters to bolster the sheer worldbuilding. Futurama may have similarities with other works, but the way it went about its 3000 setting was very creative, making it something of a dazzling love-letter to all kinds of things, whether it's Star Trek or I, Robot.

I actually point to Futurama as one of the better shows of the "adult" animated show boom of the late 90s/early 2000s. A little after the success of The Simpsons, Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill, and the runaway success of South Park, we started to see more of these kinds of cartoons. This was not dissimilar to the early 90s when the rush-job Simpsons imitators (i.e. Fish Police, Capitol Critters, et al.) came and went. In came shows like Family Guy, which was lucky to survive two cancellations.

Then you had a mixed bag of other shows. Among the better ones, I think, were things like The Oblongs and Mission Hill, both of which first aired on the long-defunct channel The WB. I did enjoy the former when watching the reruns on Adult Swim years ago, though to my understanding it's a heavily watered-down version of its rather twisted source material. Still, its unique premise and absurdist sense of humor made it stand out despite the family sitcom trappings. Mission Hill (pictured below) had really great art direction that took advantage of the limited budget you usually get with TV animation, in fact Get A Horse! director Lauren MacMullen did the Xerox-like design for the show. It was like a sort-of modern 101 Dalmatians in terms of its look, mixed with a sort of, I want to say... Modern art, almost Cubist-like style? In a way, it kind of reminds me of Cartoon Network's Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, which was modern and retro in its look as well. Like Oblongs, that didn't last too long and found itself on Adult Swim in no time.


These shows, I feel, work better than the tried-and-true that seems to be the thing in this field for a while, as it still shines in things like Sausage Party. Had their legs not been cut off, I think Oblongs, Mission Hill, and a couple other shows (Home Movies, for example) would've lead to something more interesting in the realm of adult-oriented TV animation, and maybe by extension, features. Futurama also had the misfortune of being screwed over by FOX in 2003, a year after Family Guy's second death-blow. Family Guy was truly a shock-value show back then, but I feel its earliest seasons actually did have strong writing and characterization. An unpopular opinion for sure, for Family Guy has always been divisive, long before its return to the boob tube.

No, where Family Guy really took off was on Adult Swim. Adult Swim, I have a lot of respect for because they were the launchpad for more oddball shows, stuff that probably wouldn't have flown on FOX or ABC or any major network. While I think [as] kind of did themselves in for a while with shows that overdid it on the shock value, they've pulled through, now they have things like Rick & Morty. 10-year-old me stumbled across Family Guy when I was in fifth grade, when I was finally beginning to watch Cartoon Network's meant-for-adults block. (I was a lame fourth grader in 2001/2002, plus I wasn't one for staying up late back then.) One of my classmates had recommended it to me, and I was hooked. I knew maybe a small group of people in school that watched it, too. We'd laugh about all the "inappropriate" jokes at the cafeteria table, like presumably every other middle schooler. Then every other kid I went to school with started watching it months prior to its 2005 resurgence.

Its return, I feel, lead to a series of knockoff shows that added little to the playing field here in the states. FOX only really invested in shock-value sitcoms and tired things, though I do consider American Dad! - a show Seth MacFarlane co-created that debuted a little before Family Guy's comeback - to be a cut above the usual. Comedy Central tried to launch more adult shows over time, and mostly failed, though they were the ones that revived Futurama... But Futurama didn't seem to lead to imitators that actually tried to infuse that kind of non-family friendly attitude with imaginative worldbuilding.


Futurama, I feel, is the best show from that era because of that. Also, it wasn't a shock-value show, the "adult" humor came naturally, from the situations. It wasn't content with always getting a TV-14 rating. (Edgy!) The writing would call for it, and the episodes didn't rely on over-the-top wackiness. There were compelling characters, great storylines, and some episodes - much like The Simpsons - brought people to tears. The episode 'Jurassic Bark' was one of the first animated anythings to make me feel near-dead inside, and that was when I was 12! I didn't really cry at things when I was a kid, I didn't cry at my Disneys, oddly enough. I sort of treated the big deaths with a "Well, it happens. That's bad." Nowadays, I'm a sap, any sad or emotional part in a good story gets me. Futurama and Toy Story 2's 'When She Loved Me,' those were the firsts for me.

Now by contrast, when Family Guy"killed off" Brian four years ago, a main character no less, what did it register? Mostly angry reactions, people sensing that it was just a cheap stunt... And it was. In fact, I can't really name a truly resonant moment on the show, post-cancellation. Brian faking his death in the 'Dog Gone' episode felt contrived, as did the near-end of 'Brian & Stewie.' Oddly enough, I got a slight tinge of emotion in the 'Road to Germany' episode, when Brian and Stewie time travel to WWII-era Europe and celebrate at a synagogue with neighbor Mort and his ancestors. The jovial scene is interspersed with scenes of the Nazis preparing for invasion, it was actually a rather effective moment in a strange way.

But enough waffling about this, what excites me about Matt Groening's new show is that it looks to basically follow in the footsteps of both The Simpsons and Futurama, in that it will play with familiar ideas while giving us something to care about, and something that's genuinely funny, and some worldbuilding. What will this crapsack fantasy kingdom look like? Also, a female lead? Now you're talkin'. Plus it's also good to see the man have more than two great shows under his belt.

Netflix seems to be turning things around for adult animation, what with BoJack Horseman, the new Castlevania series, and plans to back a feature-length film. We may be onto something...

In the previous recap, I talked about the trailer for an oncoming Nickelodeon reboot. A trailer for another Nick reboot happened to drop during Comic-Con as well, and it's the one for Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie...


Yeah, they're actually calling it that...

Like the Rocko's Modern Life reboot, the Hey Arnold! reboot looks to keep the original series' style and aesthetic. The look of it is spot-on. Jim Lang's smooth jazzy music is back, which was always one of the best things about the show itself. When revisiting the older Nickelodeon shows of the 1990s, I felt it was among the better ones, because it was actually about something. Arnold's overarching storyline concerning his parents may be one thing, but the series actually had some heart and some real weight to it, which took me by surprise. This is very evident in episodes like 'Pigeon Man' and 'Arnold's Thanksgiving' and such. The reboot, or should I say the conclusion the series should've gotten a decade ago, looks to be no different. Most of the other 90s Nick shows, I looked at them and said they were solid cartoons, not the greatest things ever like 90s babies seem to think.

As I said on the post about Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling, I'm actually surprised at how Nick is going about rebooting its beloved 90s properties. Static Cling is going to be an exploration on nostalgia and the problems that can bring, while this looks to be a fitting end to Hey Arnold! We all know the story of course, creator Craig Bartlett had troubles with Nick that ended up torpedoing The Jungle Movie and ending his roughly 8-year tenure with the network. Now some 13 years later, it all comes around.

The trailer itself is light on the premise, it's just a sort-of "greatest hits" kind of retrospective of the show. Not bad, as it was designed to get people around my age hyped up... But for me, I already knew this thing was coming, so I was kind of hoping to get a small bit of the storyline. Oh well, it's still a well-made trailer nonetheless, and the production values - much like Static Cling - are surprisingly pretty good. Faithful to the original, new-looking in a way, still good.

I'd be content with Nick stopping after the TV movies of Rocko and Invader Zim, they needn't rehash every single show from the sacred 90s. I'd be okay with Doug returning, where he's in college, but I think that one's probably a no-go because of its move to Disney in the mid-90s, and I don't know if they still hold the rights or not. If Disney still owns it, why hang onto it? Doug doesn't fit their bill, it can't be morphed into a mega-franchise a la Marvel and Star Wars, so why not just send it back?

I don't know...

Lastly.

If you've been here since the beginning, over five years ago, you'll know that I love retro video games... It was one of the big reasons why I was so hyped about Disney Animation's Wreck-It Ralph. Well, it turns out... My favorite 80s arcade game from the Golden Age is getting an animated adaptation.

Galaga.


Yes, that's right. Namco's space-shooter arcade classic, pretty much a sequel to the company's 1979 answer to Space Invaders, Galaxian, it is getting an animated series from The Nuttery Entertainment. A small American and Swedish company, Nuttery is looking to get top-notch talent to handle the oncoming series. Nuttery CEO Magnus Jansson says...

"We are incredibly honored to be able to work on such an amazing legacy property and help launch it into the animated space. There is such a deep love for this game from fans around the world and our team is excited make sure the next chapter in the Galaga saga is equally impressive and inspiring as its humble 8-bit beginnings..."

Despite my love for the original 1981 game, I am out of the loop... Apparently this thing spawned some kind of mini-franchise? I mean I knew it had some sequels, like Galaga '88 and Galaga Arrangement (this was a full-on expansion of the original that was designed for an arcade collection of older Namco games that was released in the mid-90s - my local bowling alley had the cabinet, but I had it on a Namco Museum collection for my Xbox), but nothing beyond the mid 90s outside of some mobile game remakes and such. Like, the reports say it's working off of "existing lore..." What lore? Like the creature details themselves?


Anyways, I dig the idea. Galaga's cabinet and promo art, I always felt, would look awesome in animation. Galaxian's American flyer has a really nice rendering of an alien insect on it that would look cool in the medium as well. Of course, I'd love to see it as an animated feature, but a series has a lot of potential. They can make a really cool space war storyline out of this, and maybe it could lead to a new iteration of the game, who knows! I just think it's one of the more exciting things to come about on the TV animation end of things.

What say you on all of this?

A serious discussion on The Emoji Movie, you ask?

Can't we just toss this movie off a cliff and point torches at Sony Pictures Animation? Can we all just collectively call Sony Pictures Animation the worst animation studio in the modern age?

As you all know, The Emoji Movie looks to get no critical love or even something of a pass. The just-released reviews indicate that this picture truly is bad, bottom-of-the-barrel, Norm of the North levels of bad. 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of roughly 1.9/10... Most of the reviews say that it's the mediocre-nothingness kind of bad, and that is something animation truly does not need.

This, coupled with the reception of the teaser for the studio's upcoming The Star, has put Sony Animation on many... Well... How should I put it? Shit lists. I don't blame people for being angry. Sony Pictures Animation had something of a cool future ahead, some 3-4 years ago. Genndy Tartakovsky doing a classic-style Popeye movie for them and a heady original concept called Can You Imagine?, Lauren Faust was part of their ranks, and other cool projects like the adult-oriented stop-motion hybrid Superbago and fantasy stories like Kazorn & the Unicorn were on the slate.

Sony Pictures as a whole experienced a hack that compromised them at the end of 2014, and management changes occurred swiftly - in ALL departments - after things were getting back on the rails. The hearsay implied that the then-current management of Sony Animation, which was fostering Genndy's movies and Medusa, weren't effective as leaders. It was made clear that they just didn't know how to run a studio, yet ironically the new people haven't scored a hit. Hotel Transylvania 2 was in production before they came in, and it was going to be a success anyways because of how successful the first film was. The not-well-received Smurfs: The Lost Village made a mere fraction of what the last hybrid movie made, and no film was released in 2016 if you don't count The Angry Birds Movie. (An uncredited collaboration.)

You would think that a former DreamWorks chief, who was active during their Kung Fu Panda/How To Train Your Dragon heyday, would've made better choices. I'm referring, of course, to the studio's current president Kristine Belson. Smurfs was just another kids' movie, Emoji Movie has awful reviews, The Star hasn't inspired confidence so far. We know little to nothing on the two in-house movies being released next year, Hotel Transylvania 3 and Spider-Man: The Animated Movie. Peter Rabbit and Goosebumps 2 are films they've attached their names to. The original projects lined up for 2020-2021 do sound promising, especially since talented folks like Shannon Tindle (who conceived LAIKA's Kubo and the Two Strings) are there right now.

I know what you're thinking. Tindle and all those other folks could be torpedoed in a year from now, and their films will be cancelled to make way for more uninspired suckfests. Don't put it past the management, but let's have a tiny bit of context first.


Popeye, in Genndy Tartakovsky's hands, was already on the chopping block before the hack. The released emails revealed that the likes of Amy Pascal and Sony Animation's heads were not keen on Tartakovsky's decidedly retro take on the nearly 90-year-old character. His vision was based off of the great Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s, the very cartoons that turned a minor character from a comic strip (Thimble Theatre) into a full-on icon. Even though the released proof-of-concept animated sequence got raves when it was previewed to a test audience, these higher-ups didn't like it. They told Genndy that, and Genndy decided to move on anyways. Presumably, the current management axed Can You Imagine? I'm not sure if that was already dead in the water before December 2014.

Projects like Superbago weren't ever mentioned again. Lauren Faust was booted off of Medusa, the movie is still on track, and it will now be a different take on Greek mythology and not the story Faust had in mind. The Emoji Movie was picked up in mid-2015 by these same executives, merely two years before its release.


However, Sony Animation isn't entirely to blame... The Emoji Movie began life as a project created by Tony Leondis - who worked at Disney Animation, Disneytoon, and DreamWorks before directing his first theatrical feature, the 2008 MGM animated film Igor - after his plans to direct a ghost movie for DreamWorks fell through. Supposedly this Emoji story was a passion project of his, and three distributors got in a bidding war over it. Not just Sony, but also Warner Bros. and Paramount. So, in an alternate timeline, The Emoji Movie could've been a Warner Animation Group film and would've shared a pool with The Lego Movie. It also could've been from the distributor who gave us Monster Trucks.

Was Leondis' original pitch actually legitimately decent? Did the studio system destroy something that could've been a good movie? We all know how it goes... Executives tend to cynically go about movie-making in most cases, hoping for something that will make coin, regardless of its quality. In feature animation, we see a lot of mediocre films come and go, and you can detect their beats from a mile away. I can almost hear the boardroom people saying things like "Now let's see how we can make this plot complex, let's see what Pixar-like devices we can put into it,""How can we make this part feel heartfelt?" and "How do we keep the adults awake? What jokes will they laugh at?"

Of course, animated movie-making is not rocket science. It isn't some mechanic process that you can explain in a cute little infographic. The ideal situation is this: Someone or a small group of people have a great story, the executives greenlight it with some stipulations (stay on budget, etc.), they figure out the story themselves, work their collective rears off on it for a few years, and then the movie gets released. If things are truly going south, they may need help, whether it's from executives or an outsider. It happens sometimes. In few instances, executives saved movies. From the looks of it, The Emoji Movie was mechanically made. The studio heads probably picked up the pitch, made their little "modifications," and then gave it to a group of animators who had to work on it. That's still a job for the talented artists and animators, whether they or you like it or not.

As a historian said in the year 2001, the animators animate the product, they don't control it.

So what should we think of these executives? These evil creativity-killing monsters?

Well, I think it's complicated. Criticism is welcome, these bean-counters should definitely be questioned for these movies. Held accountable, even. I don't care right now whether The Emoji Movie was a bad concept from the start or not, my concern is... How did they let it turn out to be this bad? Or mediocre even? I'm sure somebody, the right mind, somewhere could've made something salvageable out of The Emoji Movie. If a John Lasseter-type was running Sony Animation, the creative team would be pushed to make this thing work. I don't think it was ever doomed to fail, per se. In better circumstances, this movie could've been some quirky, avant-garde marvel that was a wry commentary on how some people are too glued to their smartphones or whatever. It could've been a great parody, a send-up of how Hollywood treats animation. It could've been an adult comedy, for Pete's sake!

But it wasn't. It turned out to be another tossaway kids' movie without much passion put into it.


Do I wish for the thing to flop? Well... No.

Why's that? If the movie flops, the animators - who did all the real work on the movie - are likely to be affected and not the people who approved of such a miserably bad movie. If it did flop and those executives got the boot, that'd be a miracle, but I doubt that'll happen if The Emoji Movie fails. The film cost $50 million to make, so I have a feeling it'll make its money back somehow. Projections have it opening at $25-30 million domestically, which isn't terrible, but not necessarily great, either. I'm not sure what its worldwide prospects are.

My hope is this... It doesn't fail, per se, but it doesn't make enough money to ensure a sequel or countless halfhearted imitators. Belson recently made it clear that Smurfs: The Lost Village - despite the fact that it made over 3x its budget - was a failure in the collective eyes' of the studio heads. That grossed roughly $195 million worldwide, so the executives were more upset about the overall numbers than the profit margin. If The Emoji Movie makes around that amount when all is said and done, then Sony Animation's leadership may likely view it as a flop as well.

As for you... Well, don't go to the film to hate-watch it, in fact... I wouldn't encourage you to really go and see it, unless you are willing to give any film you go to a fair shake, like my writing buddy/YouTube reviewer Mister Coat does. Instead of paying to see it just to hate-watch it, spend your money on some great original movies that are playing right now. Go see Dunkirk (I saw it yesterday, it's really good!), go see Baby Driver (that was excellent!), go see Girls Trip. (Haven't seen it yet, reviews say it's very good.) Don't give shovelware your support, vote with your wallet! You want better animation? Don't go and see bad animated movies. Save the tossaways for Netflix or Redbox or whatever.

We shouldn't have to tell animation fans this, but audiences... That's the problem right there.

Sadly, The Emoji Movie is yet another example of Hollywood's rather low view of animation. While Hollywood wants animation because it makes lots of money for them, they don't see it as an art form. That should be dreadfully obvious by now. They haven't seen it as an art form in decades. Like I said when pondering about the 2020s and what that will bring to animation, Hollywood tends to chase rather than lead. For the most part, they see a studio score a big hit out of a sleeper, they try to get that, instead of striving to create something that's actually worth it. They want franchises, not good movies.

Sometimes they're rewarded for this, sometimes they are not. When they're not, they find something new to chase. The Shrek-style comedy faded, they chased Despicable Me, when that fades... What will they pursue? In the mean time, I see Emoji Movie as an executive's halfhearted answer to the success of The Lego Movie. A complete misunderstanding of that movie's success, which I feel had a lot more to do with its quality than it being a film based on the beloved construction toy. Sure, a Lego movie would've opened huge anyways, but if it were a truly bad film, it wouldn't have had the staying power that it had.

I was indifferent in the last few months. I initially blasted the idea, but once it entered production, I figured there was no use in complaining. I kept saying, "I'll eat crow if this thing is actually decent." I guess that's not on the menu for me tonight...