Tim here. Kung Fu Panda 3 opens this weekend, and thus begins one of the most crowded years for animated features in living memory (technically, Norm of the North already kicked things off two weeks ago, but we're all better off consigning that one to the memory hole).
As a public service, I'd like to offer this highly abbreviated guide to some of the animation that will be coming out in the U.S. over the next 11 months. As with every year, there will of course be a healthy number of foreign imports that we can't predict, and hopefully a little indie or two that nobody has heard about yet; best to think of this, maybe, as a handy field guide to clearing your way through the glut of big-ticket studio films about to reign down upon us all.
Lots more Toons after the jump...
Franchise Installments
Besides Kung Fu Panda 3, the continuation of one of DreamWorks Animation's few outright great series, 2016 bears witness to the fifth installment in the annoyingly undying Ice Age franchise (despite their increasing domestic irrelevance, the films make gigantic piles of money internationally), Ice Age: Collision Course (July 22). This one is in space, at least partially. And if there was ever a sign that a series needs to be put out to pasture, "let's go to space!" is that sign.
Slightly more promising: after 13 years, Finding Nemo, one of Pixar's highest grossing-films ever, gets a sequel in the form of Finding Dory (June 17). It is, I imagine, long-awaited; though long-awaited to some of us more than others. Director Andrew Stanton doesn't seem too excited: all of his public proclamations have sounded distinctly forlorn, like he can't quite hide the fact that his corporate overlords want this more than he does. Still, Ellen DeGeneres remains one of the most ingeniously-cast performers in an animated film this century, so who wants to argue against her return?
Ill-Advised Adaptations
Video game movies! Those always work, if by "work" you mean "end up widely-castigated as soulless junk". But small studio Rainmaker Entertainment is still going to try once again with Ratchet and Clank (April 29), a sci-fi adventure that will benefit, if at all, from coming out at the end of the year's longest drought for a wide-release family film. Anyway, it's not even the most dubious-looking of the year's animated video game pictures: that's surely The Angry Birds Movie (May 20), coming out a mere, what, four years after the last point that the Angry Birds name had even the smallest cultural cachet?
But if you want to see a truly inscrutable adaptation of a property nobody cares about, look to the big dogs at DreamWorks, and Trolls (November 4). It is based on those immobile troll dolls with big bright-colored hair that were last popular before the children of 2016 were even born, and just this week, it was graced with this incomprehensibly awful teaser trailer:
The Big Studios
Illumination Entertainment, home of the Minions, has two different talking animals projects in the pipeline: The Secret Life of Pets (July 8), whose marketing campaign has been going on for what feels like thirty months now, and Sing (December 28), about which we presently know virtually nothing, other than that it boasts the far starrier cast: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, and Scarlett Johansson are among the anthropomorphic animals trying to put on a musical show.
The evergreen Walt Disney Animation Studios, sadly, only has one talking animal comedy: Zootopia (March 4), whose sloth-based trailer has already made itself iconic thanks, in part, to a prime slot in front of The Force Awakens (for myself, I can't stand it, but I concede the point to the target audience). But they also have their latest musical about a headstrong young woman, Moana (November 23), with songs by the white-hot Lin-Manuel Miranda, of Hamilton ubiquity. Plus, Dwayne Johnson is in the cast, and the directors of The Little Mermaid and Aladdin are on hand to make their very first CG movie. I'm sure there's a reason for pessimism in all that, but I can't imagine what it might be.
August: The Weird Stuff
No animated film in 2016 is still more opaque than Sausage Party (August 12), which finds Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg writing an adults-only script about food items musing on the nature of God, most rudimentary plot details; all that's clear is that Rogen and Goldberg and their usual coterie of actor friends wanted to prove that animation could be a strictly grown-up proposition. Or "grown-up", as the case will probably be; this comedy collective has its fans, but I'm not one of them, and I don't really get the sense that most of the Film Experience readership is either.
Just a week later, though, we'll all have the pleasure of the newest film by Laika, the company behind ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls: this time, company founder Travis Knight makes his filmmaking debut with Kubo and the Two Strings, a stop-motion fantasy drawing on Japanese artwork, and boasting the vocal talents of Charlize Theron, Ralph Fiennes, and current Carol Oscar hopeful Rooney Mara. Not one of whom, you'll note, is Japanese. Still, as one-of-a-kind gorgeous as the released footage looks, this one should prove to be among the year's most striking animated releases, whitewashing or not.
What animated releases in 2016 are you looking forward to?