OMG awesome-sauce...if this doesn't get the Oscar for best animated short there is no justice...

And how the HELL did they get around all the Intellectual Property issues? Canal+ backed this so it's gotta be legit.

Hilarious freaking short.

This is hawesome.

Wil Wheaton voices a gaming geek named Kyle, who falls in love with a goth chick named Rosemary. No, this is not "MTV's Downtown: The Next Generation." This is something really special. Enjoy. And if ASIFA-Hollywood doesn't give this short some Annie love next year it would be a crying shame.


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Tekkonkinkreet: yet another classic Japanese mindf**k anime

On July 1st, I went to see not one, but two movies. One was SiCKO, of which I will only say two words: SEE IT. (This does not apply to people who live in rational countries with single-payer health care.)

The other was Tekkonkinkreet. Based on the manga "Kuro to Shiro" (Black and White), the curious name of the movie is three Japanese words mashed together: in English, those words are IronConcreteMuscles. Perhaps not in that order.

Two feral children, Kuro, the older and fiercer of the two, and Shiro, the younger and more childlike/childish, live in the decay of Treasure City. Is the city in Japan, or somewhere else in the world? It is left very much up in the air, as you see verbiage in English, Thai and Hindi on buildings alongside the Japanese Kana and Kanji. There are some references that are very Japanese, however: the city is being carved up by rival Yakuza gangsters, some of which might actually be Yakuza from another planet. After the Yakuza chew through some of the lesser young toughs of the city, they find that dealing with Kuro and Shiro is much harder than it seemed it would.

The movie shifts between the world as it is, and the inner lives of the two feral boys. They are linked together telepathically, and you are not sure at times from whose point of view you are looking at the story. You wonder how much of the story is going on in real time, and how much of it is actually going on within their minds. This is not new: movies have been playing around with this for decades, and so have artists like Dali and Rene Magritte. At times things get so surreal and hard to follow it will probably take several viewings to untangle, and I have yet to only get the benefit of one. You get the feeling, however, that the effort is worth it.

This movie marks the first time an American working in the Japanese animation industry has directed an anime feature. Director Michael Arias was born in Southern California, and through a circuitous chain of events learned animation and computer programming at NYU, then returned to California to work in computer special effects at places like Digital Domain. He then went to Japan to work alongside the artists of Studio Ghibli as their digital effects programmer, beginning with Mononoke Hime. Before Tekkonkinkreet, Arias is best known for his involvement in The Animatrix, an assemblage of 9 Matrix-universe animated shorts which arguably is the best of the sequels to The Matrix.

It is in the best interest of the animation industries of both America and Japan to come together in these kind of hands-across-the-Pacific collaborative efforts. Considering the state of the industry in both countries (the US is almost dead, Japan is struggling) it is likely that collaboration will not make matters worse, and will likely help both to revitalize.

Tekkonkinkreet is going to be coming to theatres this weekend. It is likely to be released to DVD quite soon after this, but seeing the movie in a theatre with a huge screen and excellent sound is well worth it.

The big news at Celebration IV

Right here, gentle readers. Clone Wars, the series.

The Force is strong with this one. Very, very, VERY strong. If anything, the CGI in this makes more sense than the CGI in the Prequel Trilogy because it doesn't look as alien and lifeless as it did when it was added to live action animation.

I like the fact they have purposely made the character designs reminiscent of Genndy Tartakovsky's drawn character designs for the Clone Wars shorts. They also are reminiscent of Gentle Giant's Star Wars maquettes.

This, and the live-action teen comedy 5-25-77, are the things that make me say "impressive, most impressive" at this biennial fan confab. Hopefully we'll get to cover these on the Cartoon Geeks podcast in future episodes.

Pixar redeems themselves: Ratatouille cooks.

Leave it to Brad Bird to save Pixar's reputation after Cars. Ratatouille is going to own. Big time. Bird seems to be the first person to really get the knack of doing cartoony CGI human characters that don't look like crap. And Our Rodentine Hero...c'est magnifique!

I don't like the "deus ex machina" aspect of the deceased chef, Auguste Gusteau, becoming Remy's guardian spirit. Too neat. Too tidy. Oh well, it's a big part of the movie. At least he's not made of stone and fairly crying out to be thrown into a concrete recycling machine like the wacky sidekick gargoyles in the last movie where Disney went a la Francaise.

Brad Bird did sentimental without being sappy in Iron Giant. The Incredibles was action, action, action 98% of the time, with only a little sentimentality. This one you might want to bring your kleenex for, because you needed it with IG.

Interesting that the one animated movie that didn't blow goats last year featured a mouse or rat or whatever he was. Also this IS just a clip. This might be the entirety of what's good in the movie, and I run the risk of having to eat crow (in sauce Bearnaise, mais bien sur!) if this turns out to be crap.

Nine minutes of Ratatouille can be found at http://home.disney.go.com/index for a "limited time." Have at it. Yomigaeru iyaaan RAAAT!

Confessional time: I didn't vote for the Annies...

...and I don't intend to, either.

Why?

Because watching the snippets and bits and pieces of animation I was supposed to vote on was hell. I have never seen so much UGLY in one spot. If you were to sum up the entirety of what I looked at before I just gave up on the process, which incidentally was online for the first time ever, it was ALL PLUG-UGLY CGI, all the time. Except for one pencil-drawn bit of animation by Bill Plympton, the short "Don't Download This Song." That was cool. The rest of the stuff I saw just sucked and sucked and sucked.

I was not given the opportunity to vote Flushed Away as best picture. That opportunity was taken away from me. Instead, you had to make a choice between Cars, Over The Hedge, Monster House, Happy Feet and Open Season. GOOD GOD THOSE ALL SUCKED RUNNY EGGS!!!

Even the commercials were plug-ugly CGI. I mildly enjoyed the Hilton one with its recollection of Chuck Jones' The Dot And The Line, and the CGI cut-outs of the United Airlines "Dragon" commercial. But none of them said "I'm good, I'm really good, reward me!"

2006 will go down in history as the year of the crappy CGI production. No redeeming qualities. I hope I don't lose my Annie voting privileges over this by not just opting out of voting but spilling some of the beans about the super-seekrit process of voting. Maybe this year I'll be able to say I genuinely enjoyed some of the stuff and enthusiastically vote for it. Last year, however, was a desert.

Happy Feet: message good, execution bad.

OK, I didn't like Happy Feet. However, my reasons for not liking it have nothing to do with politics, with whether or not I believe that the oceans are being overfished, (they are) whether there is such a thing as Global Warming or not, (there is) and whether or not I think we humans have done a crummy job caring for the planet. (we have.)

My beef with Happy Feet is very, very basic. It speaks to what animation is, what live action is, what the Uncanny Valley I raved on and on about in the Ashcan Podcast is, and why this animated movie is a total and complete botch.



It has to do with the ability to make characters ACT. There was NO ACTING in this movie. These flightless birds (who nonetheless can fly under water) can bop around, can sing, can be manipulated like marionettes, but they have no capacity to ACT. It's all in their design. The eyes are too small to register emotion. The beak is an immobile piece of leather. There is no real way to connect with any of the penguins other than Mumbles, Our Intrepid Hero, because they all look too much like Emperor Penguins which are all quite eerily uniform. Aside from a few variations, the characters all look alike according to their species. The Argentine penguins who all speak broken Spanglish look alike. Lovelace the Macaroni Penguin looks like a Macaroni Penguin who had an unfortunate encounter with a plastic 6-pack caddy. And none of these species have the facial structure to convey emotions.

The ultra-realism prevented acting, and it also made every single creature in this movie, be it penguin, seal, orca or human, fall right into that Uncanny Valley where they all look like puppetry with taxidermy. Folks, wake up and smell the creepy. This movie had the same "brrr" factor that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the Animatrix short Last Flight Of The Osiris, and the movie The Polar Express had. And by "brrr" I'm not just talking the icy landscape so beautifully rendered here. Puppetry with taxidermy, people. Zombie flightless fowl.



The movie might have had more success if its main characters visually resembled March Of The Penguins less and resembled more cartoony penguins like the Linux mascot Tux more. Think about it. Tux has big eyes, the better to convey emotions with. Tux has very short but human-like legs, the better to convey Savion Glover's dancing with. He's stylized and cartoony. Think Tux. Think Opus. Think Daffy Duck.



It is a crying shame to imprison the vocal acting performance of Robin Williams in a prison of feathers and photo-realism. Think about his Genie from Aladdin. You see Robin Williams' actual facial expressions and gestures in the animation job done on the Genie. You don't see that here, and it is a crime.

The other missing element, something missing from every CGI movie I've seen this year except for Flushed Away, is STORY. I can't believe it, but even PIXAR forgot the absolute critical importance of STORY and STORYTELLING this time around. With Flushed Away, you get the idea that the blokes at Aardman had a definite plan for what this story would be about, a plan for how the characters interacted, and what would make you care about them. Every other CGI animated movie I've seen this year, this one included, is a series of set pieces in search of a story.

I always use the example of Antz and by comparison A Bug's Life to illustrate what I mean by this. Antz strikes me as having been whipped up as a pitch. You have the artists' renderings of THE BIG SCENES, and some guy doing a bad impersonation of Woody Allen kvetching his way through life to hold those BIG SCENES together. A Bug's Life, on the other hand, has great characters, a gripping story, and a lot of heart. Did you see that in Cars? No. You saw a remake of several "Sophisticate gets stranded in the sticks and learns Life Lessons" movies holding together a few grand set pieces.

Basically Happy Feet wanted to be a little bit Footloose while telling that same old tired "Hero's Journey" story we've been forcefed ever since Star Wars (Episode IV) hit the cinematic world like a blast from the Death Star.

And yeah, this is a good soundtrack. But what they do with it is just horrible. The best Pixar movies have shown that animated features do NOT have to be musical comedies to be successful. Suffice it to say that pop tunes are used in an even WORSE way than they were in Madagascar and leave it at that. Call this movie "Antarctic Idol" if you must.

In the upcoming "LA Special Edition" of the Cartoon Geeks podcast (I've given up on numbers) I made one huge mistake. I made a false mouse move and lost Tom Reed's whole take on seeing Happy Feet. He liked it. Maybe he was in a better mood than I was. It's funny, he had that whole "Russian Judge" persona on this one message board but I really think I'm the real "Russian Judge" because I am so hard to please. Maybe I'm too picky. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

However, I just couldn't get behind Happy Feet. I wanted to just as much as he wanted to. I think Michael Medved, one of the film's critics, should have stuck to giving out Golden Turkeys and resisted being seduced by the Social Conservative Cabal. I think that the rest of the people who have criticized Happy Feet for its political/environmental message are similarly contemptible. However, I will not climb onto a film's bandwagon just because I like its political stance.