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Sara — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:00:54 +0000

(Writing new entries in the Beauty and the Beast series takes a while, so don’t be concerned if a new one doesn’t show up every week. Trust me, I am working on it.)

I have not seen Disney’s Winnie the Pooh yet, so I can’t comment on the quality of the film itself. What I can comment on is the film’s performance on its opening weekend. And unfortunately, it doesn’t look good. According to Box Office Mojo, the silly old bear’s newest adventure grossed just under $8 million in its U.S. debut, putting the film in sixth place right behind Disney and Pixar’s own Cars 2 in its fourth week of release.

Is Disney doomed?

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Sara — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:55:16 +0000

Most people have at least heard of Toy Story 3 and How To Train Your Dragon, two of this years’ three Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature. The Illusionist is less well known, but has been receiving more attention since it added an Oscar nomination to its list of accolades. It’s currently playing in a variety of theaters across the U.S. and is scheduled to open in still more over the next few months, giving audiences ample opportunity to see it. Is this quiet and melancholy film worth checking out?

The story of the illusionist”

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Sara — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 16:01:13 +0000

A busy Thanksgiving weekend kept me from seeing Tangled – Disney’s first computer animated fairy tale feature – during its first days of release. But after the holiday excitement had died down, my husband and I caught a Monday night showing. A big part of the reason that I was looking forward to Tangled was that Glen Keane – one of my all-time favorite animators – had a big role in the film’s development. I had also enjoyed last year’s The Princess and the Frog and while I don’t want to see Disney doing nothing but classic fairy tales, I did think putting out a few such films was a good way for Disney to reestablish its identity after so many years of the studio trying to find its place in a theatrical animation world dominated by Pixar and DreamWorks. But there were troubling signs as well. The movie had spent an unusually long time in development and gone through some major changes before the final story was settled on. (One version, called Rapunzel Unbraided, was planned as a Shrek-like sendup of the fairy tale genre where an evil witch transports a squabbling real world couple into the realm of fairy tales to break the track record of constant happy endings.) Disney marketing’s last-minute changes to make the film more appealing to boys – focusing much of the advertising on the male lead and changing the movie’s name from Rapunzel to Tangled – did not inspire confidence. Glen Keane had originally been one of the directors of the film, but was replaced along with his co-director Dean Wellins by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. So I went to see Tangled with a mix of excitement and worry. Happily, my excitement turned out to be justified. For while it’s not perfect, Tangled is a very good movie and a worthy addition to the Disney film library.

Full review under the cut

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Sara — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:08:15 +0000

I wanted to see Waking Sleeping Beauty from the moment I heard about it. A documentary about the revival of Disney animation in the 80s and 90s directed and narrated by the producer of several of the films from that time sounded right up my alley. I had hoped to go out to New York to see it, but the timing never worked out. So I was very happy to discover that the film was coming to my home state, specifically one town over from where I live.

My thoughts on the film under the cut

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Sara — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:47:15 +0000

I don’t think I would have been excited for The Last Airbender, the live-action film version of the animated TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, even if I didn’t have serious concerns about the casting. I lost interest in M. Night Shyamalan‘s films after The Village. The initial teaser trailer didn’t get me excited and didn’t convey what made this concept special and different from any other martial arts movie out there. (My husband came up with the simultaneously brilliant and obvious idea that a live-action remake of the TV series opening should have been the teaser trailer.) On top of that, I just didn’t see the point. Avatar: The Last Airbender was already an amazing TV series. I didn’t – and still don’t – see what a live-action movie based on the TV series and covering the exact same material as the TV series in a much shorter time frame than the TV series could gope to accomplish. At best, it could have been a very faithful live-action reproduction of the TV show’s first season, something I have little interest in seeing. The point seems almost moot now, since the vast majority of critics have concluded that the movie is not very good.

But, as you almost certainly know by now, there is a casting controversy, centered around the fact that most of the main characters in a film based on a show steeped in Asian culture are played by Caucasian actors. It’s this fact that has dropped my attitude towards the film from “maybe I’ll rent it or watch it on cable” to “not interested at all.” I find this decision off-putting, disrespectful to the source material, and blatantly racist. Shyamalan, Paramount Pictures, and the film’s other defenders have been twisting themselves into knots trying to argue that this isn’t a whitewash. That if you take into account the secondary and background characters, the casting is actually quite diverse. That the show was set in a fantasy world where neither Europe nor Asia exist. That we live in a post-racial society and should be open to “colorblind casting” – a weaselly little term supposedly meaning that the film’s casting took only the skill of the actors into account and not the ethnicity or skin tone of the character in the source material, but that I have only heard applied to projects where – through some amazing coincidence – the “best actors for the job” all turn out to be White when the original characters were not. None of these arguments speak louder to me than do screenshots of Katara and Sokka – members of the Inuit-like Southern Water Tribe – compared with their live-action counterparts or Paramount’s own casting call for young actors to play Aang, specifying that they are looking for kids who are “Caucasian or any other ethnicity”.

My decision not to see this movie was greatly influenced by an essay on the subject by talented comics creator and fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender Derek Kirk Kim. It’s an excellent blend of point-by-point answer to all of the defenses of the film’s casting as well as a personal response to the issues it raises. Since then, I’ve read other pieces on the issue, including “FacePainting” – which puts the controversy into historical context and includes a lot of pictures comparing the animated characters to their live-action counterparts, and this comic on the subject by Gene Luen Yang.

So where do you stand? Has the casting controversy sapped your desire to see the film too? Are you still going to check it out, despite your qualms about the changes made? Have you seen it already? Could you care less about the race of the actors? Whatever your opinion, and whether you agree or disagree with mine, I want to hear it.

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Sara — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:38:45 +0000

The following article discusses a new film currently in theaters. While I will try avoid revealing too much of the movie’s plot, there are going to be some spoilers. If you would prefer to avoid spoilers, see the movie first, then read the article. Otherwise, you’ve been warned.

I knew I wanted to see Toy Story 3 from the moment I knew there was going to be a Toy Story 3. (More accurately, from the moment I knew there was going to be a Pixar-helmed Toy Story 3. The eventually scrapped sequel that Disney’s now defunct Circle 7 Animation was less of a sure thing.) After all, this film would be the third in a series that included the first of Pixar’s animated features and one of my favorite movies of all time. So as the film’s debut grew nearer, I tried to learn as little about it as possible. I did see a trailer or two and ran into a couple of details here and there – some inadvertently. But I stayed away from books, news segments, “making of” information, and reviews. Even with this lack of new information, my expectations for the film were high, so high that my one fear was that no movie – no matter how good – could possibly live up to them.

Leaving the theater on Friday, I was not disappointed.

More on the toys\’ third film under the cut.

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Sara — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:51:17 +0000

When The Secret of Kells was named as one of the five films nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, the most common reaction was “What’s The Secret of Kells? It was a fair question. The Irish film had received only an extremely limited release in the U.S. I had read about it on a couple of animation news sites and was pleasantly surprised when it received the Academy Award nomination. I didn’t expect it would beat Up, which was favored to win the Feature Animation category. But I was hoping that the attention would earn the film a slightly wider release and an eventual U.S. DVD release. The latter hasn’t happened yet, but seems likely. The former is already happening. While The Secret of Kells isn’t playing everywhere, more theaters have started showing it in the wake of its Oscar nomination. Because of this, I was able to catch an evening showing last Friday.

Discover the secret under the cut.

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Sara — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:54:21 +0000

Another new trailer for an upcoming animated feature film has just hit the internet. This one is for DreamWorks Animation’s latest movie: How To Train Your Dragon. A lot of the excitement about this film is based on the fact that it’s directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the directing team responsible for Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. Since Sanders left Disney after being removed as the director of the film that eventually became Bolt, animation fans have been eager to see what he and his writing and directing partner would come up with next. And now, we get our first taste.

Once again, I want to know what you think. Are you looking forward to this movie or does it leave you cold? Is Disney going to regret losing Sanders and Be Blois? Do you see success on the horizon for DreamWorks, or failure?