Gateway Cinephiles

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

Toy Story 3
2010 (USA)
Director: Lee Unkrich
Viewed: June 21, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli)

I’ve previously observed that the most gleefully gratifying aspect of Pixar’s triumph over the realms of American feature animation has been the burgeoning thematic sophistication of its films, which have evolved from wholesome entertainments into nimble and sensitive works of art.  However, I’ve also long held the perhaps heretical view among Pixar aficionados that Toy Story and Toy Story 2, despite their charming qualities and seminal status in animated cinema, seem, shall we say, slighter than the later-model Pixar efforts.  The first two chapters in the saga of Woody and Buzz Lightyear are unambiguously lesser films when held alongside subsequent films.  Little in the first two Toy Story films compares to Ratatouille’s virtuoso storytelling, WALL•E’s sweeping sci-fi explorations, or Up’s adroit blending of giddy thrills and profound sorrow. For this reason, there is a rich sense of fulfillment to be had in Toy Story 3, quite apart from its inherent sensory and emotional pleasures.  Director Lee Unkrich—here taking solo helming duties for the first time—expands the scope of the studio’s most familiar franchise to encompass delicate matters such as emotional abuse, the sting of betrayal, class-based tyranny, and the specter of mortality.  Yet Toy Story 3 never loses sight of the fundamental appeal of pint-sized adventure in the perilous wilderness of suburbia, nor of the essential pathos of growing up, here handled (as always) with the utmost care.  The third chapter in the Disney / Pixar behemoth reveals itself to be the best: gorgeous, intricate, a little frightening, and shamelessly touching.

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The Wyrm and His Boy

How to Train Your Dragon
2010 (USA)
Directors: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders
Viewed: April 18, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies Cine)

For over a decade now, Dreamworks Animation has been churning out Shreks, Madagascars, and various other talking animal mediocrities (anyone remember Shark Tale?), jousting with Blue Sky Studios for a distant second-place slot behind American animation’s reigning champion, Pixar.  In 2008, Dreamworks managed its first genuinely good film, Kung-Fu Panda, a charming, marvelously designed bit of fluff in the underdog sports movie mold.  Lacking contemporary kiddie animation’s characteristic risible pop culture references and cheap scatological humor, Panda hinted at better things to come from the studio in terms of feature animation.  And, lo and behold, here we are, two years later, and Dreamworks has delivered the exhilarating, dazzling How to Train Your Dragon, a film that should by all rights be nothing more than disposable entertainment, but attains something much finer.  No doubt this is at least partly due to the men at the helm, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, who were the minds behind that oddball late Disney Renaissance marvel Lilo & Sitch.  However, it’s undeniable that Dragon feels like the progeny of a studio that has finally found its stride and resolved to aim high.  The story is simple, the design breathtaking, the action rousing, and the humor mostly warm and sweet.  While Dragon lacks the grace and thematic sophistication of a Pixar film, it is by any measure a damn splendid animated feature.

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Late to the Game: 9

2009 (USA)
Director: Shane Acker
Viewed: January 10, 2010
Format: DVD – Universal (2009)

Shane Acker’s talent for nimble, evocative world-building is on full display in 9.  It’s telling that even at a lean 79 minutes, the film still feels a bit padded and sluggish on the story front, given that all the satisfying setting crunchiness is delivered swiftly and efficiently.  Acker deftly establishes the essential traits of his post-apocalyptic world and the clan of burlap-skinned homunculi that inhabit it, while leaving plenty to implication and imagination, including the precise mechanics of the setting’s steampunk-tinged alchemical magic.  Perhaps unexpectedly, the nine little doll-folk are quite distinctive, both visually and as characters, but the real draw here is not the simplistic story—a hero awakens evil and then defeats evil, etc., etc.—but the richness of the blasted landscape, the uncanny menace of the monsters that stalk it, and the thrills of numerous small-scale battles and escapes.  Even the vague, unnecessarily drawn-out ending doesn’t markedly detract from 9’s guiltless visceral appeal, which is that of a novel, densely detailed world sketched with precision and enthusiasm.  Acker gratifyingly demonstrates that not only aren’t the fantasy, science-fiction, and dystopian genres dead, they’re often found in the same film, and a gorgeously animated one at that.

Once Upon a Time, In a Place Called “Crescent City”…

The Princess and the Frog
2009 (USA)
Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker
Viewed: December 13, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

It’s been five years since Disney Animation Studios has produced a narrative feature that was at least partly hand-drawn, and longer than that since the venerable House of Mouse’s roughly annual doses of animated cheer could be regarded as unique cinematic events.  (1999’s Tarzan being the last triumph by my reckoning.)  It’s not surprising, then, that The Princess and the Frog is being trumpeted by the studio itself as a kind of overdue return to form.  In the wake of forgettable computer-generated mediocrities such a Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, there is a steely logic in Disney’s decision to abandon its anemic Pixar apings and instead pursue films created according to the template of its successful Renaissance features.  Indeed, TPatF possesses all the hallmarks of the studio’s 1990s films: hand-drawn animation embellished with dazzling visual effects; Broadway-style musical storytelling; a young, appealing protagonist; goofy comic relief characters; and simplistic moral lessons.  Perhaps it’s the long absence of that Disney Magic(TM)–benign, kid-friendly entertainment executed with stunning visual achievement–that makes that familiarity work so well in The Princess and the Frog.  Certainly, there’s very little that’s unexpected in Ron Clements and John Musker’s Jazz Age fairy tale.  However, there’s also nothing wrong with following a formula when the result is so gorgeous.  Just as Pixar has established itself as preeminent purveyor of children’s fare that is thematically richer and more downright cinematic than most “adult” features, Disney Animation Studio once made unbearably lovely moving picture books, far lovelier than their often crude stories or questionable politics warranted.  Perhaps the highest praise one can offer The Princess in the Frog is that it reignites that latent tradition with enthusiasm and boundless affection for its forebears.

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Crazy, Just Like Me

Fantastic Mr. Fox
2009 (USA / UK)
Director: Wes Anderson
Viewed: November 29, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Wes Anderson’s distinctive authorial signatures—the fussy, nostalgia-rich production design, the playful movements of his camera, the droll labeling of chapters and even shots–has at times been derided as a dollhouse aesthetic, more suited to playthings than real people.  It’s not a criticism I share, but there you have it.  One might say that Anderson’s latest feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, responds to such objections by taking them at face value, as it was made using literal dolls. Well, stop-motion puppets, to be precise.  A more natural fit between a particular style of animation and a living auteur would be hard to imagine, as Anderson’s propensity for treating every shot as a tableau is given its most ebullient expression yet.  There’s something damn near perfect about the marriage of Mr. Fox’s old-school animation, which heartily embraces its aura of toybox unreality, to the director’s natural affinities.  Anderson is an artist who thrives on meticulous attention to detail and on making every shot count, and animation provides ample opportunity to indulge such impulses.

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A Fish That Dreamed It Was a Girl

Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo)
2008 (Japan)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Format: Theatrical Print
Viewed: September 17, 2009

Japanese animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has an unusual talent for telling stories that are visually and emotionally compelling despite the admittedly murky character of his fantasy worlds.  In films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, one gets the sense that fidelity to a coherent mythology is, at best, an afterthought.  Miyazaki’s works operate on the senses and the heart.  That’s not a backhanded complement, but a truism that, once embraced, leads to an appreciation for his unusual and rewarding films.  Ponyo is no exception to this principle.  Trying to decipher every jot of this weird, wild aquatic fantasy is an exercise in futility.  Better to sit back and absorb it, revel in it, and let it weave its enchantments.  As with all of Miyazaki’s films, and in contrast to most works of animated kiddie fare, Ponyo lingers on both the intimate and epic while examining the intersection of the mundane and the fantastic.  Indeed, consistent with the animistic thread that runs throughout the director’s work, Ponyo presents the worlds of flesh and spirit as tightly entwined and ultimately interdependent.  This is underlined not merely through exposition—which is sparing and on-the-nose—but also through the rhythm and emphasis of the film’s scenes.  The steeping of noodles in hot water receives as much attention as a titanic sea goddess drifting through the ocean depths.  Such is the way of Miyazaki, who sees the human magic within the banal details of life and connects them to unrealities that possess a mythic tinge.

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Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Up
2009 (USA)
Director: Pete Docter
Viewed: June 18, 2009
Format: 3D Theatrical Print

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Pixar’s rise to the artistic apex of American commercial cinema has been the expanding sophistication of the themes that the studio is willing, even eager, to tackle.  That sophistication reached its pinnacle to date in last year’s WALL•E, an unexpectedly stirring film experience that addressed myriad science fiction concerns with a grace, liveliness, and humor unmatched by any genre offering in recent decades.  This trend—the studio’s determination to make the most challenging kid-friendly fare the public will accept—first emerged with Monsters, Inc., so it should come as little shock that that film’s director, Pete Docter, has delivered yet another feature whose breathtaking surface conceals deep currents.  If Up feels slightly less groundbreaking than Pixar’s recent offerings in terms of sensory dazzle, perhaps that’s because the comparison is so monstrously unfair.  Standing alongside the virtuoso direction and cinematography of Ratatouille, or the futurist vistas and elegant storytelling of WALL•E, Up is merely marvelous, rather than devastatingly marvelous.  However, Docter delivers what is the studio’s most essentially human story since Monsters, and certainly its most mature in terms of its psychological resonance.  Woven into a relatively straightforward tale of adventure, Up offers a poignant examination of how the reality of everyday life can gnaw at our dreams and seed cynicism in our hearts, tragically hardening us to the possibility of emotional connections with other people.

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You’re Lost, Little Girl

Coraline
2009 (USA)
Director: Henry Selick
Viewed: March 8, 2009
Format: Real 3D Theatrical Print

When Henry Selick delivered the ambitious, whimsically prickly The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1995, I doubt that he had any inkling that his little fable–rendered via the exhausting, old-school technique of stop motion animation–would become a cultural touchstone for a generation of nostalgic goths and wannabe goths, who grooved on the film’s mashup of Jules Bass Christmas specials and Tim Burton’s droopy sensibilities. (Not that I’m speaking from personal experience of anything. *Cough.*) In the years that followed, Selick made a blander stop motion follow-up and a rather notorious flop, but with his new film, Coraline, the director has come blazing back to the front lines of both feature animation and “mature” children’s storytelling. Here is a film that dares the viewer to resist its enchantments and terrors, boasting some of the most dazzling design since, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Coraline decisively surpasses Selick’s previous milestone in both a technical and artistic sense, setting a high-water mark for the sort of intricate, captivating animated stories that seem in short supply these days. And the story! The sooty fingerprints of modern myth-spinner Neil Gaiman are all over this wondrous tale, which borrows equally from Victorian nursery literature, kid-savvy afternoon TV fare, and a Hero’s Journey that would make Joseph Campbell do a double-take.

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First I Was Afraid, I Was Petrified

Sita Sings the Blues
2008 (USA)
Director: Nina Paley
Viewed: February 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Sita Sings the Blues was featured in a limited engagement on February 13-15, 2009 as a part of the Multicultural Film Series at the Webster University Film Series.]

Nina Paley’s magnificent Sita Sings the Blues is an endlessly appealing treasure that weds animation’s myriad visual possibilities to a witty, painfully personal howl of frustration and liberation. Recalling Yellow Submarine in its delirious blending of storytelling, music, and design, Sita proudly admits to its own conceptual simplicity. It presents a familiar story–one of the oldest, really–of love weakened by crisis and shattered on the shoals of mistrust and betrayal. But, oh how it tells that story!: With wondrous Flash-style animation whose captivating design can only be described as “Game Boy Bollywood.” With pop art-inspired compositions and low-key chuckles that echo the Children Television’s Workshop in its finest moments. With whorls and bursts of pure color. With ingeniously re-imagined jazz ditties that elicit sighs of delight. Paley offers that rarest of animated works: one that thrives on its own dazzle. Sita’s unexpected luster extends to every crevice of its intricate yet natty form. Its joys emerge from the accumulation of a multitude of stylistic embellishments united by the vision of a passionate and furiously inventive auteur.

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Once Again, I Don’t Recall

Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)
2008 (Israel)
Director: Ari Folman
Viewed: November 23, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

[This is one of several full reviews I am posting on some of the films that were featured at this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival and which have now opened in wide or limited release.]

Waltz with Bashir’s curious species–an animated documentary–serves to lure the viewer by means of sheer novelty, but it also emerges as a brilliant mating of form and function. Director Ari Folman adeptly employs the elements of a bold, compelling visual style to delve the rank sinkholes of memory and culpability, surfacing with artifacts that run from bizarre to disturbing to appalling. Via color, contrast, and motion, Waltz with Bashir tackles the sheer uncanniness of warfare, the slippery character of recollection, and the sway that remorse holds over our personal narratives. Never mind that such matters have been taken up by numerous film-makers before. Folman brings both a bruised and jittery aura of the personal–the film is, after all, partly the tale of his own experiences from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war–and a stunning instinct for the pairing of image and mood. The veterans Folman interviews are haunted by their wartime memories, which are blazing in their intensity but usually bereft of soaring wisdom. In the same way, the film burns vivid moments into the viewer’s mind, all while striking a slightly bemused, off-handed tone of hollow-eyed cynicism. Folman rejects the notion of war as a noble construct, plunging with grim familiarity into its surreal, monstrous facility for tangling morality and crystallizing animal instincts.

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