Animazing.....

So in the past year I've been completely enthralled in animation, learning it, doing it, watching it and studying it. I just have to say, lately it's completely blown my mind. I referring mostly to the movies that I've seen in the past year. The list is as follows: Bolt, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Horton Hears a Who, Igor and now Coraline. All the movies were totally entertaining and the stories in each movie was great and compelling. And of course the animation was completely awesome in every way. It really does inspire me to keep on learning and practicing more animation. First, let's talk about the one movie of the year that didn't impress me.

Recently, I saw Madagascar 2, although there were some really funny lines and a couple of cool scenes (like the plane crash), the story and concepts are completely played out and it was almost like they didn't take the extra time and focus on the story. Granted they did their research and went on a giant safari in Africa, that showed in the movie, but they should have spent a lot more time on story development. I think one of the major things that Pixar excels in over any other studio (especially Dreamworks) is their environments. Especially the Madagascar franchise. Their environments are too realistic. I'm not sure exactly how Pixar does it, but if you look at Cars for instance, they do such a great job in making a photo-realistic environment that is exaggerated just enough to make it cartoony and magical. The environment in Madagascar 2 was too realistic, in the special features they were showing comparison images, from what they captured from the safari and the 3D scene from the movie, it looked exactly the same. Where's the magic in that, recreating a completely realistic environment that's in a 3D movie... what's the point? My opinion in 3D is this: you have the ability to do whatever you want and make things look whatever way you want them to, total control. So why not make the trees have a little more exaggerated personality, or the rocks... enough about Madagascar. One last thing, the animation was awesome again! I love the style of the quick and snappiness of it, really cool looking and fun to watch... moving on.

Trying to list these in order from my best to worse is pretty hard, they all had such great qualities and in my opinion were awesome in their own way... but here goes: Bolt, Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Horton, Coraline and finally Igor. Igor was decent, it was a good story and overall the style was cool, but it was lacking something, I'm not sure if it's empathy for the characters or the lack of compassion you feel for the situations throughout the movie. The first four listed are truly amazing movies; I will own them all when they become available and watch them over and over.
If you haven't seen any of the ones listed above, go and check them out....

This is getting way too long, my intention was to talk about the movies I fancied (I guess I'll save that for a later time)... so I'm going to leave you with a trailer from Coraline, which is the first 3D movie with 3D glasses I've seen in over 20 years. I forgot how fun it is.... and soo cool! Oh, plus this is the studio my current mentor is working at.....