"Dumbo" Teases

by Nathaniel R

click to enlargePrediction: By 2040 Disney will have remade all of their animated features as "live-action" movies. Well, maybe not Song of the South or The Three Caballeros. Live-action is in quotes because some of the remake titles are basically still half animated -- like The Jungle Book in 2016, or Beauty and the Beast in 2017. Next up in the Disney remakes department is Tim Burton's take on Dumbo. 

The name Tim Burton used to automatically thrill but he lost his mojo at exactly the turn of the century (just after Sleepy Hollow in '99) and hasn't been able to get it back. He's made 10 features since and the only uncompromised / totally satisfying artistic success among them, I'd argue, is the animated features Corpse Bride (2005). And to a lesser extent Frankenweenie (2012) if we're feeling a bit generous...

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I Have Altered The Auteur, Pray I Do Not Alter It Further

by Salim Garami

What's good? This is opening weekend for Solo: A Star Wars Story, a Disney/Lucasfilm production that saw a bit of behind-the-scenes drama. It's hardly the first production of the space opera franchise to be so contentious: Rogue One had Tony Gilroy take over post-production in lieu of director Gareth Edwards and the still in-production Star Wars Episode IX interrupted its development when Colin Trevorrow stepped down as director to J.J. Abrams, returning from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

After the jump, more on Solo and five films that had survived such a director change to a decent reception after the jump...

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1970: The Aristocats

Our year of the month is 1970. Here's Tim Brayton...

From the standpoint of 1970, we find ourselves at the dawn of what is almost certainly the least-interesting decade in the history of American animation. Television screens were then dominated by the flat, cheap nonsense of Hanna-Barbera while Warner Bros. and MGM had abandoned their short film programs. Just about the only person trying to do anything with the medium was Ralph Bakshi, whose vulgar cartoons for adults were very often "fascinating," but almost never "good." The problem, in all likelihood, is that for 40 years, American animation had been primarily a matter of people reacting to the things Walt Disney had done; and in 1970, Walt Disney had been dead for four years.

This left his namesake studio in a state of full panic and confusion, looking to find any sort of project that felt like it might be "what Walt would have done." The first of these, released for Christmas, was The Aristocats, based on the last story (by Tom McGowan & Tom Rowe) that Walt had briefly glanced at and given his vague blessing to before his death...

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Soundtracking: The Best Oscar Winning Original Songs

by Chris Feil

While Soundtracking aims to look at the depth and relationship between movies and their music, one of this series’ minor ambitions is to defend the purpose of Oscar’s much maligned Original Song category. Complain about some of the weak nominees in recent years and you are (alone yet) not alone. But this category has a rich history of classics and film-defining tracks, some of which you may not know have their origins in the cinema. Case in point: holiday staple of hot takes "Baby It's Cold Outside" won the Oscar in 1949 for Neptune's Daughter.

While this year’s nominees run from the unfortunate to the immaculate, I’d also offer that Oscar’s Original Song is currently in an upswing in quality. It has also faced some underwhelming periods (take a look at the 50s) and may never return to its 70s-80s level of radio rotation, but Original Songs remain as essential as the films themselves. So to showcase the category, I’ve ranked the best of the Original Song winners! If your favorite didn’t make the list, consider that a reminder of how much you actually cherish the category...

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16 days til Oscar. Ranking the 16 Animated Feature Winners

by Nathaniel R

which movies willed this category into existence?

With just 16 days to go until Coco wins Pixar its 9th Academy Award for Best Animated Feature let's look back over the first 16 years of the category. (Yes, that's right math geniuses, Pixar has won a full 50% of the animated Oscars thus far.)

The History, Chronologically

1988-2000 The category didn't exist until 2001 but it wasn't just created on a whim. The previous dozen years which included the renaissance of Disney, the sizeable popularity influence and beauty of what was happening in Japanese animation, the explosion of new animation studios all over the map, and the rise of Pixar in particular, all led us to the inevitable: an Oscar category for animated features...

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