Last week I saw two stop-motion animated movies. One was in theaters and the other was new on DVD. ParaNorman, currently in theaters, was an enjoyable movie, but it wasn't totally what I expected, which isn't a bad thing. I chose to saw in 3D, and it doesn't need to be seen in 3D considering you can only notice the effect in the beginning titles and end titles. That bugged me, but really I should know better by now for every time there's a new movie released in 3D, I think that this time it'll look amazing and I'm let down. For me the most effective (besides theme park attractions) have been Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon.
Going into ParaNorman, all I knew of the film was based on the advertising which looked like good-natured fun, wonderful character design, and the studio producing it. For those of you that don't know, ParaNorman was produced by one of the few fully stop-motion animation studios, Laika. Laika is currently best known for producing Coraline in 2009, which was a creepy film with not very likable characters, but still felt like a fun film. Before Laika was Laika, they were Will Vinton studios, best known for the California Raisins advertisements. When Will Vinton was fired from his own studio, the majority shareholder of the company handed the reigns to his son, who was an animator at the studio, Travis Knight (Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike is his dad). In my last post, I had stated that there are few movie studios making original family films. Pixar has been quite successful at making original stories, but are now making more and more sequels off of their original stories. Dreamworks has been making original stories and sequels interspersed with ones based off of books (Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon), but soon that may change. First Dreamworks is making a feature film based off of Sherman and Peabody, characters that were featured in Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle series. Recently Dreamworks acquired Casper the Friendly Ghost, He-Man, Baby Huey, Felix the Cat and a slew of other animated characters.
It's easy for movie studios today to take a known property, like an old TV series, a remake or reboot, and/or sequels to old movies, and make a movie to sell to a new audience. Laika is based off stories that are maybe not that well-known, like Coraline, or creating movies that are original, like ParaNorman.
Like I said earlier, I was expecting a light-hearted film, much in the way The Goonies and Monster Squad felt like to me when I was a kid. ParaNorman starts off with a goofy take on a zombie film, it's quite funny and you think this is the film you're in for. Quickly we are introduced to Norman, who is watching the zombie movie on TV while his Grandma sits behind him. We quickly learn that Grandma is a ghost and Norman has the gift of speaking to the undead. His parents find him weird. His sister finds him weird. The entire town finds him weird. He's an outcast and because of that, Norman is bullied. Suddenly the movie doesn't feel so light-hearted. Norman's mom tells him that people bully out of fear, because they fear what they don't know. It's an interesting moral, one that I don't think has been featured in a film before and one that is definitely important today. ParaNorman has moments of fun sprinkled throughout, but it also appears very violent for a family film. This is the second animated film in two years that I can think of, where a pistol has been pointed directly at a child's face. The first was Rango and this one it's a police officer pointing it at Norman. This bothers me that the filmmakers think it's ok to have a gun pointed at a child. I wish they would rethink how to make this effective. I'm not saying remove guns entirely, I just think there's a better way to stage it.
I liked ParaNorman, but I didn't love it. As you can tell, I'm mostly talking about Norman, bullying, violence and that's what I took away from the film. It's a movie featuring zombies and ghosts, yet I didn't feel that connected to those aspects of the movie, which is funny considering the movie is called ParaNorman. I wanted to see that fun monster movie for kids, but that isn't exactly what this film is.
The other stop-motion movie I saw was The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Produced by Aardman Animation and released by Sony Pictures, The Pirates is based off of the book "The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists". Aardman has produced short films, commercials, tv series, and feature films for decades, but they're probably best known for Wallace and Gromit. Aardman has a long history with US animation studios, which I was about to write about here, but I may save that for another post.
The story of The Pirates! centers on a not so impressive group of pirates who love ham. The pirates all want to be taken seriously in their "profession", especially the Pirate Captain, voiced by Hugh Grant. That is his name, the Pirate Captain. In fact all of the pirates on the ship, don't seem to have any names, so we don't really get to know them. The movie starts off interesting enough. the Pirate Captain wants to be taken seriously, and to do so, he wants to win the Pirate of the Year award. When he goes to apply for the award, he quickly sees that he's a laughing stock by other pirates. He's about to give up, when his crew, seeing that the Pirate Captain is down, convince him into plundering and pillaging to win the award. There's a quick montage of them failing miserably and then they find themselves on Charles Darwin's ship. This is where the film takes a left turn. The Pirate Captain has a "parrot" that is in fact the last living Dodo and Charles Darwin convinces the Pirate Captain to use the Dodo to win the Scientist award for discovering the bird.
Suddenly the film is less about pirating and more about if the Pirate Captain should give up his beloved bird. It may be because I was watching it at home, but I started to lose interest in the story. Like many of Dreamworks animated movies, this film has a lot of pop culture references. Many aren't funny, and instead you're rolling your eyes while watching them. Also, I think because many of the main characters don't have interesting names (or no names at all), you really don't connect with them. They just become, pirate.
The movie was ok, but I think I was hoping for something more.
What I did notice in this film and in ParaNorman as well, is the attention to detail. One of the best things about stop-motion animated films is that almost everything on screen is tangible. Everything is hand made, sculpted, sewn, puppetted. In the early Aardman Animated films, you could see fingerprints on the characters left by the animators pressing the characters into place (In Flushed Away, Aardman even put fingerprints on the CGI characters). In the climatic kitchen scene in The Pirates, the ovens, vents, tiles, windows, even the tiny spatulas and kitchenware all had to be created by hand. It's quite impressive. In ParaNorman, the wood houses, the cars, the trees... it feels like you're watching your childhood toys come to life in a cinematic way. This year alone, there'll be three full-length stop-motion animated features being released by major studios. Next up will be Tim Burton's Frankenweenie, and based on the trailers, it looks like it will be a lot of fun.... but then again, don't always trust the advertising.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Oogieloves?!?
About two months ago my wife and I went to see the Disney/Pixar movie Brave. Since its a "family" film, it seems obvious they would play trailers before the movie for other family movies. There was the Ice Age 4 trailer, Hotel Transylvania, Frankenweenie, Wreck-It Ralph, and of course OogieLoves.... Wait? What? OogieLoves? I had two initial thoughts: first, it must be based off of a popular children's show I never heard of. So popular that they could get somewhat recognizable stars to be in it. I mean c'mon it's got Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Lloyd in it! My second thought was that they have to be the ugliest live-action animatronic characters since Garbage Pail Kids the movie. Like a combination of Teletubbies and the Garbage Pail Kids:
I kind of wrote it off that I just wasn't aware of kids shows as much as I thought I was.
Over these past two months, I kept seeing more and more of these ugly characters on tv advertisements, posters, and on large city buses. I had to find out where they came from. I finally googled it and lo and behold I find out that it isn't a series at all! The OogieLoves aren't even a toy property or a series of children's books!
According to Wikipedia (I know not the best reference source) :
The film was produced and written by Kenn Viselman, who was behind the American localization of the British children's series Teletubbies and Thomas & Friends. Viselman claims that he and Teletubbies creator Anne Wood had multiple disputes with each other, because Wood refused to let Viselman pursue a film adaptation of the show, but when he went to a showing of the Tyler Perry film Madea Goes to Jail, he saw how people in the audience would shout out advice to the characters on screen. This lead him to the idea of creating a children's film in the vein of Teletubbies with the interactive aspect, allowing the children to sing, dance, and respond to the characters on screen.
So I was somewhat right about the Teletubbies look, but in my opinion it looks like a three year old's interpretation of what the Teletubbies look like. And who would ever think that a Tyler Perry movie would inspire someone to make an interactive children's film?! Also the film is budgeted at $12 million. That's not a large amount for a feature film, but even Wes Anderson, an established feature film director, was only given $16 million for his latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, a film starring major box office stars Bruce Willis, Bill Murray and Edward Norton. And based on how much advertising I've seen for the OogieLoves, I'm sure the studio is spending many more millions just on promoting the movie.
As I continued researching The OogieLoves movie, I come to find out that there is no major studio behind the movie. Kenn Viselman created a studio to make the film and he (or a team of people he hired) are distributing it as well. It's rare that you see that with movies today, but considering most major studios only bank on recognizable properties for "family" movies to put into theaters. We have already seen The Smurfs, Yogi Bear, Marvel and DC superheroes, Dr. Seuss characters and coming soon Alf, Popeye and Woody Woodpecker. There is only one studio that comes to mind who produces original family films and that is Pixar, and even they are making sequels to their own properties. So I do have to give Mr. Viselman credit, he had a dream to make an interactive family film and probably pitched it to every studio in town, only to be told "no". He thought he had a great idea though, so he made it happen. I guess we'll find out next weekend if he did have a great idea or not.
And if he is right, I'm going to be coming to him with plenty of ideas and what I think to be more competent character designs, to get my own children's movie made. Sure I may not be able to get Cloris Leachman and Toni Braxton, but maybe I could get Charlotte Rae and Brandy to star.
I kind of wrote it off that I just wasn't aware of kids shows as much as I thought I was.
Over these past two months, I kept seeing more and more of these ugly characters on tv advertisements, posters, and on large city buses. I had to find out where they came from. I finally googled it and lo and behold I find out that it isn't a series at all! The OogieLoves aren't even a toy property or a series of children's books!
According to Wikipedia (I know not the best reference source) :
The film was produced and written by Kenn Viselman, who was behind the American localization of the British children's series Teletubbies and Thomas & Friends. Viselman claims that he and Teletubbies creator Anne Wood had multiple disputes with each other, because Wood refused to let Viselman pursue a film adaptation of the show, but when he went to a showing of the Tyler Perry film Madea Goes to Jail, he saw how people in the audience would shout out advice to the characters on screen. This lead him to the idea of creating a children's film in the vein of Teletubbies with the interactive aspect, allowing the children to sing, dance, and respond to the characters on screen.
So I was somewhat right about the Teletubbies look, but in my opinion it looks like a three year old's interpretation of what the Teletubbies look like. And who would ever think that a Tyler Perry movie would inspire someone to make an interactive children's film?! Also the film is budgeted at $12 million. That's not a large amount for a feature film, but even Wes Anderson, an established feature film director, was only given $16 million for his latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, a film starring major box office stars Bruce Willis, Bill Murray and Edward Norton. And based on how much advertising I've seen for the OogieLoves, I'm sure the studio is spending many more millions just on promoting the movie.
As I continued researching The OogieLoves movie, I come to find out that there is no major studio behind the movie. Kenn Viselman created a studio to make the film and he (or a team of people he hired) are distributing it as well. It's rare that you see that with movies today, but considering most major studios only bank on recognizable properties for "family" movies to put into theaters. We have already seen The Smurfs, Yogi Bear, Marvel and DC superheroes, Dr. Seuss characters and coming soon Alf, Popeye and Woody Woodpecker. There is only one studio that comes to mind who produces original family films and that is Pixar, and even they are making sequels to their own properties. So I do have to give Mr. Viselman credit, he had a dream to make an interactive family film and probably pitched it to every studio in town, only to be told "no". He thought he had a great idea though, so he made it happen. I guess we'll find out next weekend if he did have a great idea or not.
And if he is right, I'm going to be coming to him with plenty of ideas and what I think to be more competent character designs, to get my own children's movie made. Sure I may not be able to get Cloris Leachman and Toni Braxton, but maybe I could get Charlotte Rae and Brandy to star.
Monday, August 20, 2012
My first post: RIP Tony Scott
Hello all and welcome to my first blog post as The Cinemascapist. I love movies. I love the idea of watching a movie and just being immersed into a film. Escaping into another world, another time, another place.... Hence why I decided to call this blog Cinemascapist.
It's because of my wife that this blog came to be. Besides watching movies, I love to read about their histories, the trivia, and the business itself. I often am giving my two cents about movies to her, after which she often says "you missed your calling as a studio executive" or "Maybe you should write a blog about movie stuff". Since I believe she may be right that i have in fact missed my calling, a blog seems like the perfect place to write down my thoughts of all things movies. Over time I may make a video blog and or podcast to accompany these sentiments, but for now it'll simply be in written blog form.
My wife had given me the blog idea months ago and I had even started creating the blog itself weeks ago, but today seemed like as good a day as any to start the blog after hearing the passing of director/producer Tony Scott.
It's sad to hear of his shocking passing. I know I had enjoyed films that he directed and the ones he produced with his brother, Ridley Scott, over the years, but it wasn't until I looked at imdb.com after hearing of his death just how many I've enjoyed. The first film I saw of his that he directed was Top Gun. I was 11, and I went to the theater (I believe the Star Winchester or the AMC Hampton) to see it with my friend, Roger Hurst. We were ready for a high flying action film, but what we got was a slow-paced romantic drama with some cool aerial stunts throughout. It wasn't until years later that I appreciated the film a bit more, but still it's not my favorite Tony Scott film. I'd have to say my favorite of his goes to Crimson Tide. I know many will say theirs is True Romance, but truth be told, I haven't seen that movie in roughly 20 years and can't say I remember much about it besides that awesome seen between Hopper and Walken. It's definitely one I need to revisit. I would like to say that Beat the Devil is my favorite Tony Scott directed film, but it's really a glorified BMW commercial that was made for the web. There's definitely many other Tony Scott movies I enjoyed, but I have to say the one that sticks with me is Crimson Tide. It's a suspenseful film almost completely taking place on a submarine, much like The Hunt For Red October and Das Boot (from what I hear, because I've never seen that film). I was working at the Star Rochester Hills theater when the movie came out. As an employee of the theater we always got to see the movie late on Thursday the day before it opened. I had seen it that night in May of 1995 and I had enjoyed it so much, I treated my parents to see the film later that weekend. There are many things that still leave an impression on me: Gene Hackman's "Go Bama" speech out in the pouring rain; Denzel breaking up a fight between two sailors on which artists' interpretation of Silver Surfer was better (a scene supposedly written by Quentin Tarantino); Hackman's not-so-blanketed racist analogy of lipponzoner horses; the use of the term Defcon over and over; the tension you could feel between Hackman and Denzel throughout the film; and finally thinking how much Viggo Mortensen looked and sounded like Kirk Douglas (something my dad also thought). In fact this was the first movie I had seen Viggo in.
It's an engaging film, like most of Tony Scott's films. You are entertained by not only the acting and writing, but also the look and the feeling that you too are on that submarine with them in tight quarters. Credit that most definitely has to go to Tony Scott. I think of his movies as being exactly what I want movies to be, escapism. Thank you for making such entertaining movies Mr. Scott.
It's because of my wife that this blog came to be. Besides watching movies, I love to read about their histories, the trivia, and the business itself. I often am giving my two cents about movies to her, after which she often says "you missed your calling as a studio executive" or "Maybe you should write a blog about movie stuff". Since I believe she may be right that i have in fact missed my calling, a blog seems like the perfect place to write down my thoughts of all things movies. Over time I may make a video blog and or podcast to accompany these sentiments, but for now it'll simply be in written blog form.
My wife had given me the blog idea months ago and I had even started creating the blog itself weeks ago, but today seemed like as good a day as any to start the blog after hearing the passing of director/producer Tony Scott.
It's sad to hear of his shocking passing. I know I had enjoyed films that he directed and the ones he produced with his brother, Ridley Scott, over the years, but it wasn't until I looked at imdb.com after hearing of his death just how many I've enjoyed. The first film I saw of his that he directed was Top Gun. I was 11, and I went to the theater (I believe the Star Winchester or the AMC Hampton) to see it with my friend, Roger Hurst. We were ready for a high flying action film, but what we got was a slow-paced romantic drama with some cool aerial stunts throughout. It wasn't until years later that I appreciated the film a bit more, but still it's not my favorite Tony Scott film. I'd have to say my favorite of his goes to Crimson Tide. I know many will say theirs is True Romance, but truth be told, I haven't seen that movie in roughly 20 years and can't say I remember much about it besides that awesome seen between Hopper and Walken. It's definitely one I need to revisit. I would like to say that Beat the Devil is my favorite Tony Scott directed film, but it's really a glorified BMW commercial that was made for the web. There's definitely many other Tony Scott movies I enjoyed, but I have to say the one that sticks with me is Crimson Tide. It's a suspenseful film almost completely taking place on a submarine, much like The Hunt For Red October and Das Boot (from what I hear, because I've never seen that film). I was working at the Star Rochester Hills theater when the movie came out. As an employee of the theater we always got to see the movie late on Thursday the day before it opened. I had seen it that night in May of 1995 and I had enjoyed it so much, I treated my parents to see the film later that weekend. There are many things that still leave an impression on me: Gene Hackman's "Go Bama" speech out in the pouring rain; Denzel breaking up a fight between two sailors on which artists' interpretation of Silver Surfer was better (a scene supposedly written by Quentin Tarantino); Hackman's not-so-blanketed racist analogy of lipponzoner horses; the use of the term Defcon over and over; the tension you could feel between Hackman and Denzel throughout the film; and finally thinking how much Viggo Mortensen looked and sounded like Kirk Douglas (something my dad also thought). In fact this was the first movie I had seen Viggo in.
It's an engaging film, like most of Tony Scott's films. You are entertained by not only the acting and writing, but also the look and the feeling that you too are on that submarine with them in tight quarters. Credit that most definitely has to go to Tony Scott. I think of his movies as being exactly what I want movies to be, escapism. Thank you for making such entertaining movies Mr. Scott.
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