Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Fantasia"

Sorry for the delay on this one. Last night got away from me a little. Okay, a lot. Like Mickey's multiplying brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" the problems in finding blog time just kept expanding. But here we are. This week I asked the Best Shot club to  look at Disney's ambitious Fantasia and choose their Best Shot from the "Rite of Spring" sequence since that riot-inducing Stravinsky composition is now 100 years old and I have a thing for Centennials. Ambitious "Sorcerer" level bloggers were asked to also choose a best shot not from the film as a whole but one from each musical sequence.

 Refresh your screen periodically for more...

Cinesnatch I knew Vinci would go the sorcerer level and choose a shot from each segment because he does that anyway even when I don't ask. Image explosions every week over at that blog! 

The Film's The Thing Abstew's magic couldn't cure him of being too sick to write up the shots this week but he still found time to conjure them. Dedication!

Hop Low (swear to God, he has a canonical name, and you can thank me whenever there's a Disney night at bar trivia that I've just helped you to win), the best example in Disney's many long decades of work of instilling personality into a non-speaking character whose face never changes. His clumsy, out-of-step dancing is pretty much as sweet and delicately-expressed as it gets, right up until he finally gets it together in and quickly arrives perfectly in place just in time for the music to stop. That's the moment in the shot I've chosen: when even the clumsy little kid is able at the last second to get everything perfect. An absolute treasure of American animation.

Antagony & Ecstacy is a True Sorcerer of the "Best Shot" series and gives you seven articles for the price of one, covering everything from Mickey Mouse's expert redesign, anthropomorphic mushrooms and exquisite control of color palettes. (If you aren't a regular reader of Tim's blog and you are obsessed with Disney animation, you are missing out. He writes about it often and with much insight)

We Recyle Movies Anne continues to break her writing hiatus for this series and we love her for it. She's also got a shot for every segment and also knows her film history. Here's one observation I wholeheartedly second:

Ostriches eating oddly-shaped fruit is never not funny.

The Entertainment Junkie Jason all loves those animals on parade, the mixture of profane and sacred and has a real recurring thing for reflected images in this series -- which I totally get. I always want to choose them, too!

Dancin' Dan remembers which parts he fast-forwarded as a child (The Rite of Spring - ha!) and loves the feeling of gliding, captured in the "Waltz of the Flowers" section

My own choices are coming soon...

NEXT WEEK'S FILM, the spring finale of Hit Me (which will return in late June or early July), is the 1963 classic "Hud" starring Paul Newman which won three Oscars including Cinematography. It's available for rental on Netflix and instant watch on Amazon Prime.

Early Bird Oscar Predix: The Toons

Last year's Animated Oscar race is going to be a tough act to follow. In what was arguably the most competitive race of all 12 years of Oscar's newest category, there was precious little agreement about who might win and even less about who deserved to; Brave, Frankenweenie, ParaNorman and Wreck-It Ralph all had their loyal camps (Pirates! A Band of Misfits was the only "just happy to be nominated" contestant.) At the very last minute, buzz-wise, it appeared to boil down to Disney vs. Disney/Pixar. Big-fisted Ralph fought big-haired Merida and the Scottish lass won.

But what does 2013 have in store for us? It's looking like a much leaner year, and a least at first glance, a far less animated (heh) one. Monsters University might just be emblematic of what's going on. The prequel to the inaugural loser of this very category (Monsters Inc) is, like all the rest, part of a franchise or would-be-franchise and also a noisy colorful 3D CGI fest for very young children. That's about all there seems to be from The Croods on through Free Birds in which two turkeys (voiced by Owen Wilson & Woody Harrelson) travel back in time to stop the first Thanksgiving. There's less variety both in types of audiences sought and in types of animated styles.

For different styles and tones of animation we'll have to look to foreign films. Pray and pray hard that Hayao Miyazaki's latest The Wind Rises crosses the Ocean in time. I don't know if it's finished since news has been sparse but Ana Y Bruno is a Mexican film about a little girl who meets a goblin (or some such) in the psych ward of her mother's hospitable (?). But even with foreign films they're often just trying to be Hollywood blockbusters. I haven't seen more than a still from South Africa's Khumba! about a half-striped zebra but it looks very much like a Madagascar-spinoff. And one of it's characters is "Bradley, a self-obsessed, flamboyant ostrich." Uhoh. Should we alert GLAAD?

Hayao Miyazaki's "The Wind Rises" is bowing this summer in Japan

The film that I'm most excited about Song of the Sea, a follow up from the team who made the jaw-droppingly gorgeous The Secret of Kells, will not be ready for this year's race. Big sigh. Which is not to say that this year's race will be lacking in previous Oscar players. One interesting possible development, depending on which films achieve eligiblity is the presence of former Best Foreign Film nominees as directors of new animated features. The Argentinian director of Oscar winner The Secret in Their Eyes, Juan José Campanella, has made a toon called Metegol (aka Foosball) about a foosball team come to life and the Mexican director Carlos Carrera whose drama The Crime of Father Amaro was Oscar nominated is behind the aforementioned Ana. 

We hope that GKids, the new off-the-beaten path animated distributor, brings us something interesting again but for now my crystal ball says it's Disney vs. Disney/Pixar again this year (Round Two). I'm predicting that the final battle will come down to Frozen (based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale 'The Snow Queen') vs. Monsters University. Only this time maybe Disney will beat Pixar... forcing Mike and Sulley to remain Oscarless. Oscar voters will continue to live with their greatest shame: preferring Shrek to Monsters, Inc.

In the absence of a Pixar original (I'll stop weeping that they've joined the rest of Hollywood in franchise laziness and just live with it though I reserve the right to spit at Toy Story 4 whenever that rolls around given that its existence would forever tarnish the finality . What other choice do I have?) the film I'm most eager to see is definitely Frozen. I loved Tangled (which went unnominated in a narrower field of three) and I'm hoping that their latest musical fairytale -- this one has Kristen Bell and Broadway musical alumni Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, and Jonathan Groff doing the voicework -- is a worthy follow up.

RELATED: New Animated Feature Oscar Chart

Hit Me With Your Short Film Double

For this week's abbreviated edition of Hit Me With Your Best Shot I asked y'all to watch two short films with me (both available online if you click on the titles). Shorts sometimes function like auditions or training ground for feature directors but many artists, animators in particular, often stay with them exclusively. Certain feature auteurs return to them periodically for experimentation or creative rejuvenation or even, if they're music videos, cash. Short films are their own curious artform. Movie blogs should care more about them and this week's double feature, an ode to Short Film of the Week, is my own wee effort in stating so.

A short film also presents an ideal opportunity to acknowledge the original quite succinct concept of this series which was to choose a single image and discuss it. More often than not we end up with a screenshot party because a) it's too hard to stop at one and b) parties are fun. 

DEATH TO THE TIN MAN
This short is from the filmmaking collective of Court 13 who rose to prominence last year with Beasts of the Southern Wild -- you'll see Dan Romer & Benh Zeitlin sharing the composing credit again in the credits. It's an absurdist fable loosely based on the Frank L Baum's "Tinman of Oz". I didn't quite know what to make of its stop and start sound design or its  mix of influences (the not-quite emotionally detached narrator felt a bit Wes Anderson and isn't the cinematography Lynchian?). I think it goes off the rails quite a lot in multiple ways (politically, religiously, narratively) in the last few minutes. But despite my reservations I've watched it three times and I'm still stirred by its weird fusion of the tender & grotesque (or, more plainly, hard & soft such as in the image of the tinman holding flowers). That unholy marriage is organic to the story but also beautifully captured in images like a still life of body parts snatched from the morgue. My favorite shot, equal parts beautiful and disturbing, is the one wherein Jane lovingly paints eyes on to the reanimated corpse of human Bill before kissing him. It's troublesome on an anthropomorphic level. Tinman Bill is very much human but he needs anthropomorphism to be loved and Jane won't. Corpse Bill is less human but looks the part so she doesn't need to ascribe feeling, just eyeballs. Despite the strong light and shadow the shot feels warm but you know that this Bill must be ice cold to the touch; he's got no heart.

THE EAGLEMAN STAG
I chose this short primarily because I would give it an "A" full stop and wanted everyone to see it since Oscar weirdly refused to turn its immense spotlight on this hugely deserving accomplishment. Writer/director Mikey Please's (also known as Michael Please) short is a marvel of playfulness, creativity, technical prowess, thematic ambition, and arch wit and he packs it all into a dizzying rush of nine minutes of cinematic accelerated...fear of aging?

The entire world is defined by context. even the way we experience the passing of time - every second is smaller compared to the last."

The Eagleman Stag, more than many features we've watched for this series, presented a ridiculous challenge in that its greatest strengths come from its screenplay, production design and especially its editing -- the images in juxtaposition mean at least thrice as much as any of them do on their own. Frankly, Stag has worthy best shot choices -- the lighting of the stop motion structures is often astonishing -- at virtually any freeze frame many of them much more beautiful than the one I've chosen. But frankly I feel so small in this short's presence that I can only relate to the insignificant worm our narrator holds up to the sunlight when he's 4 years old "Fascinating!". I've watched this three times and know it will be just as rewarding at thirty. So I'll go with the worm in a way. The shot I've chosen is a blink and you miss it reference to that earlier shot when the narrator holds up... himself... for his own intellectual consideration.

Yes, this seems about right."

Click over for more on these two fascinating shorts
Encore Entertainment unpacks dense themes
Antagony & Ecstasy self inflicted failure and silent film riffs
Amiresque enigmatic beauty and sheer comic value
Okinawa Assault amalgams and vandalizations 
The Film's The Thing unleashing imagination, moments that pulls us in
Allison Tooey didn't like the movies but plays along
We Recycle Movies watches from her iPhone while in line for... next week's movie!

Next week on Hit Me With Your Best Shot, we helicopter in to JURASSIC PARK (1993). Please join us whether that's in movie theaters for the 3D conversion or at home with your dvd or fossilized vhs tape. There's a lot of acreage on that island and there's room for plenty of room for anyone who wants to choose a "best" image and tell us why! 

can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?

Can you paint with all the colors of the wind? Well, can you?

poll by twiigs.com

 

it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...

Brave archery set. It's safe for ages 3 and up...

...unless one of your children is named Kevin. In which case We Need To Talk About Him.