Film Fest: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The folks at Aardman are geniuses.

'nuf said.

Their new animated film - a blend of claymation and computer generated animation - is wonderful.  Funny, true to it's briny piratical roots, and stowed full of delightful gags and physical comedy.  It also takes English history and reality as we know it and tosses it like a salad: Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, dodo birds, ham, maps (oh! the wonders Aardman does with maps!),  and every "Best Of" awards competition you've ever sat endlessly through get treated with delightful and witty irreverence.

Immediately buy a ticket!

A poster from Belfry - The Animator, but don't watch the trailer here, it gives too much away.

I'm not kidding.  STOP reading.

Buy a ticket.

(And how appropriate that this story was written by a man named Defoe? Oh, and HERE's a discussion of the stop-motion process from the L.A. Times.  BTW I think Darwin was probably a nicer guy than portrayed in this film.  Earlier Darwin posts HERE and HERE.)

Animated Set Design

It took a while for this idea to sink in with me but, of course, there is also set design - production design - in animated films.  In animation, in "straight" films with computer CGI backgrounds, and in computer games, virtual, animation settings are a big deal!  For games like World of Warcraft the settings are half the fun.

What joggled this little fact home to me recently was almost simultaneously watching Pixar's Cars 2 - of which the settings are the best, most imaginative part - and reading a terrific book Dream Worlds: Production Design in Animation, by Hans Bacher, who was production designer for Mulan.  Gorgeous illustrations and an interesting back-stage kind of text.  Among his other designs is the iconic poster image for The Lion King.

the Lion King poster, designed by Hans Bacher

Film Fest - Rango

Rango is a terrific film!

Notice I don't write "animated film"?  Animation has now evolved to a point where, well, it's pointless to use it as a category in much discussion.  I love hand-drawn animation, but that is - has to be - 2D illustration and seems to fall naturally into a category of its own, with different concerns and criteria than a live-action film.  The apparently 3D animation computers make possible is now so good that the audience forgets it's drawn at all.  (Or never knows.)  Mingling of CG animation into photographed "reality" in films like Avatar or Lord of the Rings has begun to make "real" versus "animated" a quibble.

For instance, I think Rango is one of Johnny Depp's best performances.  It's convenient to credit Depp, and his voice (and, I suspect, in-house-film-example physical performance) makes the character "his", yet Depp needs to share the accomplishment with who-knows-how-many talented animators, story board artists etc...?  Frankly, I don't care.  Rango is an ensemble character.  He's wonderful.  'Nuf said.

Image borrowed from Digital Trends, film by Paramount Pictures, directed by Gore Verbinski, starring Johnny Depp.

The whole film is clever, funny, imaginative, true, and, I think, brilliant.  Go watch Rango!