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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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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It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

Where The Wild Things Are
2009 (USA)
Director: Spike Jonze
Viewed: November 1, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

To call Spike Jonze’s bewildering, uneasy Where the Wild Things Are an “adaptation” of Maurice Sendak’s trim little bedtime story strikes me as the faultiest use of the term since David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.  While Jonze’s film co-opts Sendak’s indelible creature designs and the general thrust of his tale—a boy journeys to an untamed island, is crowned king of the resident monsters, becomes disillusioned, and returns home—it contains little else that is familiar, either from the source material or the whole history of films about children and childhood.  This film is wondrous, exhausting, confused, offensive, and deeply affecting, often at the same time.  Above all, it is unremittingly odd.  It is without question one of the most confounding films I’ve seen in the past decade, and I’ve seen INLAND EMPIRE.  The space between a film that says uncommon things in unfamiliar ways and a film that has no conception of what it is trying to say… well, that is a narrow and shadowed gap, and Where the Wild Things Are squats squarely in it.  The adaptation of a beloved children’s book should be a sure-fire opportunity to churn out a crowd-pleasing mediocrity.  Somehow, for reasons that only he likely understands, Jonze has refashioned Sendak’s tale into a challenging, fractured, and often frustrating work of cinema, and for that I still can’t decide whether he deserves some sort of auteur medal or a stint in the time-out corner. [Minor spoilers follow.]

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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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Review: High School Musical

2006 (USA)
Director: Kenny Ortega
Viewed: July 31, 2008
Format: DVD - Disney (2006)

Okay, get the teasing done now. You over there, I know you have a smart-ass comment to make about this being posted on a “serious” film blog. Go ahead. I’ll wait. And the oh-so intellectual Disney-gentrification-of-culture comments? Finished? Good.

As a childcare professional who works primarily with school aged children, I have seen this movie many, many times. I’ve seen the sequel. I’ll watch the threequel one too. Why? This is good, age-appropriate entertainment for my students.

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Review: WALL•E

2008 (USA)
Director: Andrew Stanton
Viewed: July 27, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

WALL•E delivers to the anemic landscape of science fiction cinema a much-needed shot of vitality and depth. This is especially the case for that rare subspecies of sci-fi film that WALL•E delightfully embodies, one that is at once engaging, challenging, and appropriate for children. If the film has a flaw–and its flaws are rare indeed–it is the filmmakers’ dogged insistence on exploring a proflieration of ethical and philosophical quandries when a sublime little allegory might have sufficed. Lest I damn with faint praise, let’s be clear about one thing: WALL•E is simultaneously the best animated film, children’s film, and science fiction film of the year. The electricity that tingles within its comfortable tropes signals a turning point in Pixar’s oeuvre, not to mention Disney’s. Although it lacks the virtuosity that made the studio’s Ratatouille one of the best films of 2007, WALL•E has an ache of grand ambition in its bones, one that bodes well for the potential of “children’s entertainment” to still take people of all ages to undiscovered worlds without and within. (Minor spoilers follow…)

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