Which lower profile films might surprise in the Oscar Animated Feature race?

by Nathaniel R

Early Man was one of the earliest titles released. Will Oscar remember it? They do love Aardman filmsAs Oscar watchers know it requires only 16 eligible animated features to trigger a 5-wide shortlist of nominees for Best Animated Feature. That number is fairly easy to hit, making this category rather more like the Tony Awards than the Oscars or Emmys, in that it's drawing from a very limited pool. You have, statistically, quite a good chance of getting nominated if you exist. The Academy generally reveals the eligibility list between November 6th and the 15th.

Obviously we know that high profile films from studios and animation houses like Pixar (Incredibles 2), Disney (Ralph Breaks the Internet), Warner Animation (Smallfoot, Teen Titans Go!), Fox Searchlight (Isle of Dogs), Universal (The Grinch), Sony Animation (Into the Spider-Verse, Hotel Transylvania 3), Aardman (Early Man -- which was just nominated for the European Film Awards), and Paramount (Sherlock Gnomes) will be hoping to snag one of the five coveted nominations but what of the lower profile titles? History suggests that one or two of them could muscle their way into the shortlist ahead of an arguably less inspiring American option...

Click to read more ...

Middleburg: "Ruben Brandt" Collects and "Widows" Thrills

Day two of the Middleburg Film Festival

Friday kicked off with a special "sneak" of Stan & Ollie (which, more on tomorrow) and then two more movies which went like so...

Ruben Brandt, Collector
From the opening shot of this animated film from Hungary you know you're in for an idiosyncratic lark. We're humorously crosscutting between an ultra fast moving train and the molasses crawl of a snail on the tracks. Then we're inside the train with Ruben Brandt, a famous psychotherapist who is promptly attacked by a little girl with a very sharp bite who is dressed suspiciously like Diego Velázquez's  "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress". I say 'dressed like' because it's hard to make the connection at first...

Click to read more ...

Posterized: Warner Animation and "Smallfoot"

by Nathaniel R

The animated comedy Smallfoot opens today. It has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, so a mixed response from critics but we expect audiences will like it since they're not always so picky about animated films. Plus the concept is cute and there are lots of big stars to promote it.

Let's take a quick visual perusal of Warner Brothers theatrical animated films. Warner Brothers is such a massive corporation that their subsidiaries are legion and "Warner Animation" as it is now is not exactly like "Warner Bros Animation" of the 1990s or what not but you catch the drift. The various animated subsidiaries of Warner Bros tend to have specialized in TV animation and direct-to-dvd titles which is one of three key reasons that the company has yet to land an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature Film category. The second reason is quality. And the final reason is just bad luck. Surely their best film The Iron Giant would have been nominated had the category existed in 1999. And the snub of exceedingly clever blockbuster The Lego Movie ...well everything was NOT awesome when that happened, don't you agree?

How many of their 12 theatrically released animated features have you seen? The posters are after the jump...

Click to read more ...

1972: A Computer Animated Hand

By Tim Brayton

The Film Experience is going to look at the films of 1972 all month in preparation for the Supporting Actress Smackdown celebrating that year's nominees. It was a strong year for cinema in general, but in the history of screen animation, it's nothing less than one of the single most importany years ever. For it was in 1972 that a 27-year-old PhD student at the University of Utah named Edwin "Ed" Catmull, aided by fellow student Fred Parke, laboriously created a wireframe model of his own left hand, applied a series of polygonal shapes to it, and made it move along the joints between those polygons.

That might sound dully, deadeningly technical, and in a very real way, it is: Catmull and Parke were working in the storied computer lab of Dr. Ivan Sutherland, which was focused on pure research and industrial applications. Catmull himself was the only member of the lab with a strong interest in the filmmaking possibilities of their technology, which is likely why it fell to him to create what history has come to regard as the fist computer-generated animation of a natural, organic object.

Click to read more ...

Netflix in August: The Aviator, Her, Silverado

Time to play Streaming Roulette. Each month, to survey new streaming titles we freeze frame the films at random places with the scroll bar and whatever comes up first, that's what we share!

Remember when Netflix used to get recent movies and classics? Now they seem to be exclusively in the business of streaming things that are between 5-20 years old only... with the obvious exception of their original programming, cheap foreign tv series, and straight to streaming indie stuff that wasn't cut out for theatrical.

LYRA!

The Golden Compass (2007)
Have you ever read this book? It's fantastic and bold. The movie is sadly a compromised rendition but it's still a bit tragic that they didn't finish filming the trilogy. Nicole Kidman was a sensaysh "Mrs Coulter" at least. Whatever happened to Dakota Blue Richards? Remember what a surprise it was when this one beat the first Transformers movie to the Visual FX Oscar?!

Click to read more ...