missmediajunkie

The worried murmurs started last week. Did you see that PIXAR's "Brave" racked up three negative reviews out of eleven, bringing its early score down to 73%? As of this morning, it's at 71%, with six negative reviews and fifteen positive ones. The early reviews always tend to skew toward the positive because of marketing pressure, so this would seem to indicate that "Brave" may be in serious trouble with the critics. However, when you read the reviews, they run the gamut from raves to pans, with most falling somewhere in the middle. People are reacting to the film very differently, and there is no apparent consensus. And that's a problem.

One of the deep dark secrets of most movie goers is that we like consensus. We're easily swept up in hype, we like to be part of a mass experience, and we like our reviews and reviewers to be simple and declaratory. We like star ratings and letter grades and Rotten Tomatoes percentages. We want the critical establishment and their opinions to be monolithic, because then it's easier to process and react to them. Analysts and box office watchers who still occasionally believe that the reviews do matter, also find it easier to quantify their impact if they're uniform. The urge to conform can be strong. Witness the mockery and abuse heaped on the few reviewers who didn't like "The Avengers," and the few who defended "Sucker Punch." The trouble is that in most cases there isn't a consensus, and attempts to create the appearance of them can be seriously misleading.

Look at the reviews for "Madagascar 3," our reigning box office champ, currently sitting pretty with a 75% positive review score. Most of the reviews say more or less the same thing - it's a big improvement on the first two "Madagascar" films and exceeds expectations, resulting in positive marks. However, there's still a wide range of opinions about why the film deserved those marks. Some reviewers are adding points for improvement, while others aren't making comparisons to the previous films at all. Some are grading on a curve because the movie is aimed at kids, while others make no such allowances. There are commonalities that you can derive from looking at these reviews in aggregate, but the 75% figure only tells us that 3/4 of the reviewers came out it favor of the film overall. To get a better figure of how much the average reviewer actually enjoyed "Madagascar 3," it would be better to look at Metacritic, which assigns numerical values to each review and averages them to reach a final score, in this case a 59, indicating predominantly mixed reviews.

The only thing the Rottentomatoes score tells us about "Brave" is that there will be no positive consensus on the film, as there have been for the past PIXAR films. And yet the rumors and whispers keep circulating, and I've started to see premature speculation about whether this could make a dent in the box office returns, and whether there might be something seriously amiss at PIXAR to result in two critical misses in a row. In some ways I think this kind of anti-hype is helpful in countering the ridiculously high expectations that some viewers place on the most anticipated new films like "Brave," "Prometheus," and "The Dark Knight Rises." On the other hand, jumping the gun with these kinds of conclusions should be discouraged. There's so much pressure in the entertainment press to be the first in time with analysis, there's been a growing tendency to slap a label on film's performance before it actually has a chance to perform.

I don't think there's too much danger of that happening to "Brave" because it's PIXAR, and their reputation is still very good with the family film-going set. True, this is technically a "princess" film with a female lead, making "Brave" a harder sell to little boys, but that didn't stop Disney's "Tangled." Also, animated family films are notoriously critic-proof. "Cars 2," in spite of all the negative press, still made a respectable $191 million domestically. Meanwhile, the very well received "Kung Fu Panda 2" underperformed with $165 million, and it's unclear whether we'll see that series continue. I have no idea whether the masses will embrace "Brave" or not.

However, right now the small collection of raves for "Brave" sound a lot more convincing to me than all the lukewarm praise for "Madagascar 3." I hope that the Rottentomatoes commenters trying to shout down the negative reviews on the site will get their heads around that idea. Consensus is often illusory, and not worth the trouble. Controversy is often more interesting, or at least more fun.
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Ready for a little anime history lesson? This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the FOX network, which will be airing a special this Sunday to remind us of all the good times, and their best shows like "The X-Files" and "24" and "Arrested Development." However, one corner of FOX's television history I'm sure they're going to ignore is what happened to FOX Kids, which had the top rated children's programming in the country for most of the 1990s, before it and most network children's television was scrapped or farmed out in the early 2000s. And there's no chance that they'll acknowledge what remains the worst thing I ever saw them put on television: the FOX Kids edit of the Bandai anime series "A Vision of Escaflowne."

First, some context. Anime series have been acquired and edited for American cartoon viewers for decades. However, starting in the mid-90s, we had a significant boom. "Pokemon" got huge, and then the Cartoon Network started Toonami in 1997, their afternoon action block that started bringing in the anime titles that skewed a little older and little more risky than the shows that ran on the networks. The emerging young otaku population, which was starting to get their anime unedited and unfiltered through smaller distributors and the internet, made the Toonami block a hit. In the year 2000, they attracted a lot of attention with the success of shows like "Gundam Wing" and "Tenchi Muyo." The big networks, namely Kids' WB and FOX Kids, got interested. This resulted in a brief arms race as the different channels went after popular anime series. That fall, Kids' WB nabbed "Cardcaptor Sakura," renamed "Cardcaptors," and "Yu-Gi-Oh!" Fox Kids had "Monster Rancher," "Flint the Time Detective," and "A Vision of Escaflowne," a fantasy series Toonami had previously expressed interest in.

It became very obvious very quickly that FOX had no idea what they were doing with "A Vision of Escaflowne," retitled "Escaflowne." The original version was an adventure serial made for older children and teenagers. Its protagonists were a girl, Hitomi, and a boy, Van, both about fourteen years old. The story was mostly told from Hitomi's point of view, a girl from Earth mysteriously swept away to Van's world, the fantastic planet Gaea. FOX wanted an action show that would appeal to its target demographic of 6-12 year old boys, and edited "Escaflowne" to fit. They deleted the entire first episode, deemed too slow, and too focused on Hitomi, opting to insert parts of it into later episodes as flashbacks to fill in any story gaps. Poor Hitomi, like Sakura in "Cardcaptors" the same year, was heavily de-emphasized in favor of the male lead. All the romantic storylines were cut or minimized. Episodes were edited for time and inappropriate content, but also to speed up slower scenes, to provide more blatant exposition, and to make the action sequences more prominent.

Imagine "Game of Thrones," edited for the time and content constraints of network television. Now imagine that it's edited so that the child characters in the ensemble are now positioned as the lead characters. Now imagine that it's also edited to appeal to the sensibilities of teenage "Twilight" fans. You get my drift. "Escaflowne," ironically, didn't have all that much objectionable content. There wasn't nearly the amount of violence as something like "Gundam Wing." However, the show had mature elements like an ongoing war, missing and illegitimate children, arranged marriages, and lot of the story revolved around romantic relationships. "Escaflowne" was a terrible fit for FOX Kids from day one, and the going theory at the time was that the show had been acquired by the network solely to spite its competitors.

Existing fans were already bracing for the worst when the promotional material started being released, but nobody was really prepared for how bad FOX's "Escaflowne" would turn out to be, or the unusual strength of the backlash. In the end, only ten episodes of "Escaflowne" aired on FOX Kids before it was cancelled and replaced with "NASCAR Racers." The entire run aired in Canada on YTV, where it came to light that the series had been shortened to 23 episodes from the original 26, due to the extensive cuts. So much material was removed, that several episodes ran short, and had to be supplemented by adding scenes from the next episode. This resulted in a string of installments that were actually the back half of one episode grafted to the first half of the next. This played havoc on the show's existing story structure. And by removing all the slower-moving incidental and character building scenes, and relentlessly focusing on the action and spectacle, the result was a severely simplified and dumbed down "Escaflowne" that was practically unwatchable.

There had been badly localized anime before, but the notoriety of this particular adaptation was fueled by a couple of other contributing factors. One was access. This was one of the first cases where you had a significant number of fans who were already familiar with the original anime and understood how severe the changes were. Bandai, through the AnimeVillage label, had already released the entire series with English subtitles on VHS tapes in 1998. "A Vision of Escaflowne," an ambitious title with high production values, was very popular and well-known among older American anime fans. I had rented my way through the whole set the summer before the English language version premiered. Also, as the FOX edit was being broadcast, one of the story editors who had worked on it, using the pseudonym "TVGuy", was posting about the adaptation process to one of the Usenet anime groups. He was very forthcoming, and clearly very frustrated by the situation, detailing a constant struggle behind the scenes to keep the edits from being worse than they already were. He attracted a lot of debate and discussion that otherwise might not have happened.

TVGuy not only provided an insider POV, but he also confirmed the existence of a lot of the lousy network practices that had only been suspected up to that point. For instance, acquired programs had their existing scores replaced by music composed in-house, to make the editing easier. This meant that "Escaflowne's" highly praised orchestral score, composed by Yoko Kanno, was replaced in many places by a new techno-heavy one. Kanno's score would have been replaced entirely, but Bandai fought to keep it. However, the surviving pieces, rearranged and credited as "additional music," didn't mesh particularly well with the new themes. And thanks to a network rule that no cartoon was allowed to have silence for more than 90 seconds, the new "Escaflowne" was terribly overscored. All the quieter moments were remixed to add music, changing the tone and atmosphere considerably.

"Escaflowne" got a happy ending, though. The original Japanese series was already a worldwide hit, and when the unedited version was released on DVD later in 2001, it sold well. The kids who saw "Escaflowne" on FOX and were curious about it could easily get a hold of the originals, which was rare in those days. As for FOX Kids, they were part of the Fox Family acquisition by ABC, and ceased to exist after 2002. The FOX version of "Escaflowne" also had a home video release, but it was quickly cancelled after only four volumes.

Oh, and there was an "Escaflowne" movie, released in Japan in 2000. It had a limited run in 2002 in the US, and aired on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim in 2005, with no apparent edits.
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My experience with Chinese produced animated films is quite limited. I've seen exactly two features, both screened at the 2004 Anime Expo in Anaheim. One was "Master Q: Incredible Pet Detective," following the comic adventures of the manwha character Old Master Q. The other was "The Butterfly Lovers," a period fable with character designs that looked like they'd been lifted wholesale from "Mulan." Both were pretty awful and derivative, but there was clearly a lot of ambition behind them. In China's never-ending quest for greater cultural relevance, they've long recognized that animation can be an important medium. The most profitable category of American films in the last decade has been its animated children's films, which bring in staggering revenue at the worldwide box office. Anime from neighboring Japan is more of an acquired taste, but viewed and adored by fans from all over the globe. Most importantly, Western and Japanese animation does very well in China, and the Chinese are itching to break into the market themselves. Last year, a massive new animation studio was announced by the Chinese authorities, being built for the explicit purpose of competing with Western toons.

Historically, there have been some influential Chinese animated films, like "Princess Iron Fan" (1941) and "Havoc in Heaven" (1961), from the Wan brothers. Unfortunately the political climate in China made all filmmaking difficult for decades, and animated films have been rarities. This has put Chinese animation far, far behind other countries. There have been some gains in recent years, with reports of interesting films coming out of Hong Kong and Shanghai, but these have been very low profile. So, the latest tactic has been to recruit help from bigger players. The "Kung Fu Panda" movies have been hugely popular in China, and it's no surprise that Dreamworks Animation announced a joint venture with China Media Capital to form Oriental Dreamworks back in February. They'll be producing family friendly live action and animated content geared toward Chinese audiences. Dreamworks Animation had a rough 2011, losing over 40% of its market value after films like "Puss in Boots" flopped, so this is a good opportunity for them. Then on Tuesday, per Deadline, the Walt Disney Company announced it had "entered a partnership with the culture ministry and Chinese internet giant Tencent to develop the country’s animation business." And as a bonus, a new Shanghai Disneyland has just been approved for construction.

This could end up playing out in a couple of ways. Chinese animation hopefuls would do well to remember what happened in South Korea when it opened dozens of animation studios in the 80s and 90s and the United States and Japan farmed out large amounts of labor-intensive animation work to them. Any kid who watched cartoons in that era should remember the prominent lists of Korean names at the end of every episode. It's become a running joke that many popular American cartoons like "The Simpsons" and "Futurama" depend on Korean animators, toiling over endless drawings, often in substandard working conditions. And it's rare that you see Korean talent making any major contributions to the writing, planning, direction, or design of the Western projects they work on. But hasn't all of this helped South Korean produced animation? Not really. Like in China, major South Korean animated projects have been few and far between, and they haven't gained much international attention. However, of the few titles I've seen like 2003's "Oseam" and "Sky Blue," the Koreans have the potential to do much bigger things, and they'rein a better position than the Chinese are on the creative front.

That's the biggest problem I see with Chinese animation. I think they're going to make sure they have far more opportunities to turn out animation that reflects their own sensibilities, and working closely with the major American studios will certainly help them to avoid becoming simply another cheap outsourcing destination. I definitely see the Chinese benefiting on the technological side. However, that's only one part of what makes modern animated cartoons so successful. Originality, creativity and innovation are going to be the biggest stumbling blocks. China may have lots of eager young animators, but the rigidity and the formalism of their learning system, plus the the heavy cultural politics, plus the constant concerns about censorship and staying on message do not add up to a good atmosphere for creating silly, loveable cartoons like "Kung Fu Panda." The Chinese don't need Disney and Dreamworks to help them figure out how to make their CGI look better. They need them to explain the value of absurdity and the business of caricature and that first and foremost a cartoon needs to be entertaining and tell a good story.

I'd love to see them succeed. I really would. Another thriving Asian animation center would be wonderful to have. However, at the same time I don't relish another propaganda-driven arm of the current mainland Chinese film industry, turning out the cookie-cutter morality tales their government likes so much. And frankly, they'd all be a bust commercially. Animated films have to cater to a very tough audience: small children. The kids will pick silly, fun, wild, and crazy over ideologically pure any day. And at the end of the day, even in China, I'm willing to bet the adults will too.
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Notes on the "Ninja Turtle" Situation - First "Mutant" was out, and the latest is now that our heroes are not going to be "Teenage" either. This has become one of those rare cases where the shortening of a movie's title actually does make sense, but at this rate I wouldn't be surprised if Michael Bay reveals next month that he's actually making a "Biker Mice From Mars" movie. Why did Nickelodeon hire him again?

5 Dr. Seuss Adaptations I Want to See - On the heels of the success of "The Lorax," it has been revealed that the next Dr. Seuss property Illumination Studios will adapt is indeed "The Cat in the Hat." This makes sense, as The Cat is still the most iconic Dr. Seuss character, and very toyetic and marketable. Hopefully this will keep the threat of a "Lorax 2" at bay. Crossing my fingers.

Not a Great Year for Animation - Speaking of movie toons, quite a few trailers are now in circulation for animated films we'll be seeing later in 2012. Here are your first looks at Tim Burton's updated Frankenweenie, Genndy Tartakovsky's Hotel Transylvania with Adam Sandler, and The Rise of the Guardians from Sony Animation (all links go to Youtube). Along with "Brave" and "Paranorman," this is shaping up to be an interesting group. Also, keep an eye out for Disney's video game themed "Wreck-it-Ralph."

Rated M for Managing Expectations - Sylvester Stallone has clarified that "The Expendables 2" will be rated R, in spite of whatever misgivings Chuck Norris has about the level of violence. I still think it doesn't make any damn difference, because neither of those things are going to change the fact that it's all going to be fantasy violence anyway. Stallone and Norris and much of the rest of the "Expendables" cast are older than dirt.

Trouble in "Terra Nova" - The first season of FOX's massively hyped time-travel series "Terra Nova" will be its only season. Briefly, there was talk of Netflix possibly continuing the series, but that's fallen through. I don't think it would have been a good move on Netflix's part anyway, since "Terra Nova" was a notoriously expensive show, and to be honest, it just wasn't very good.

Twitterpation - I've given up on Twitter for the foreseeable future. I'm still updating my own feed regularly, but I've almost completely stopped reading the tweets of the people I'm following. I like having the access and the chance to participate, but just don't have the time for it anymore, and in most cases I'm following individual critics' and writers' work through other channels already.

2012 May be DiCaprio's Year - Most of the rumored projects are still on the table, but it looks like Leo's going with the least interesting option here. He's making The Wolf of Wall Street with Martin Scorsese, which will be their fifth collaboration together. Meanwhile, the leading man in Clint Eastwood's new "A Star is Born" may end up being Tom Cruise, which I'm totally okay with.

But What About Arnold's Acting Career? - Of all the roles that it was speculated Arnold could reprise, guess which one he's going with? If you guessed Julius from "Twins," you're absolutely right! Danny Devito will also be returning, and the two will discover that they have a third brother - to be played by Eddie Murphy! The working title is reportedly "Triplets." I could not make this stuff up if I tried.

Life With the NY Times Paywall - I don't think the new model is working out for the New York Times. It was announced that starting this month, the number of articles that non-paying users will be able to access each month is being reduced from twenty to just ten. There is a loophole that allows you to access a certain number of stories from outside search results, but that's becoming more limited too. Personally, I still browse the headlines, but there are hardly any stories I actually click to read anymore. I don't think the new changes are going to affect me at all.

The Battle for Thursday - Finally, regular readers of this blog will know that I've had divided loyalties between "The Big Bang Theory" and "Community," which both air in the same time slot on Thursday nights. Well, in the latest round "The Big Bang Theory" has taken a dive. I haven't watched an episode in months, not since the winter break at least. Once I got out of the habit of watching the show, and got out of the appointment television mindset, I totally forgot about it. I'm still hanging on to "Community" though. I hope Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase make up quick. I'm still holding out hope for six seasons and a movie!

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"The Sweatbox," is a documentary about making an animated film, that was completed roughly around 2001, premiered at a film festival, and had a limited run in exactly two theaters before it all but vanished off the face of the earth for over a decade. Nothing in the documentary is controversial or contentious. It's probably not even going to be particularly interesting except to a certain subset of film historians, animation lovers, and Disney geeks. However, it does capture a certain piece of Disney history the company is not keen on acknowledging: the troubled production of "Kingdom of the Sun."

The back story goes something like this. Back in 1997, Sting was approached about writing songs for a new South-America themed Disney animated musical, to be directed by "The Lion King's" Roger Allers. He agreed to do the project on the condition that his wife, filmmaker Trudie Styler, was allowed to document the process. Disney fans will know that "Kingdom of the Sun" was originally meant to be a sweeping epic patterned off "The Prince and the Pauper," but ultimately it reached theaters six months late, reworked as a zany buddy comedy, and renamed "The Emperor's New Groove." The six songs that Sting wrote were reduced to an abridged opening number and a song over the credits. The missing songs only remain on the film's soundtrack, as they were written for an entirely different movie than the one that was actually released.

Since Trudie Styler was given unprecedented access to the film's production, she wound up having a front row seat to all of the film's behind-the-scenes woes. There were delays in production. Early versions of the film didn't test well. A new director, Mark Dindal was brought onboard who often worked at cross purposes with Roger Allers. Finally, Allers quit and the entire film was drastically overhauled. "The Sweatbox," named after the pressure-filled screening room where the in-progress animated footage was reviewed, was completed shortly after "The Emperor's New Groove" was released in theaters. The documentary, which runs a pretty brief 84 minutes, is actually longer than the completed feature, which is an even briefer 77 minutes. Of course, Disney owned the rights to Styler's film and made sure that it was seen by only very limited audiences. It was never publicized, never released on home video, and never made available to the general public except in heavily edited form.

Until now. A few days ago, someone leaked a workprint of "The Sweatbox" to the internet, where it has been making the rounds on filesharing and video sharing sites. As a Disney fan, I'm ecstatic. I never expected the film to resurface, considering how notoriously uptight Disney is about its public image. It was only in 2010 that a mostly candid documentary about the beginning of the Disney animation Renaissance of the 90s, "Waking Sleeping Beauty" was put together by a few Disney veterans with the company's blessing. That documentary was about Disney's successes. "The Sweatbox," on the other hand, was made during that period when things at Disney Animation were really starting to go wrong. Disney fans disagree about when the Renaissance ended and the downward spiral began, but for me the turning point was the Disney films that were released right around the year 2000: the awful "Dinosaur," the uneven "Fantasia 2000," and "The Emperor's New Groove," which was, ironically, a perfectly good movie. After following the rumors of the film's endless troubles for years, I saw "The Emperor's New Groove" in theaters in December, 2000 to wind down after finals, and loved it.

The biggest irony about "The Sweatbox" is that it isn't the shocking expose that Disney seem to think it is. Rather, it's proof that sometimes the creative process is messy, very talented people can go off track, and making one of these films is not nearly as easy as the company like to pretend it is. Some want to bill "The Sweatbox" as the record of a catastrophe for the studio, but I think actually captured the creation of one of Disney's last successes in traditional animation. Though the original version of "Kingdom of the Sun" went down in flames and "The Emperor's New Groove" was considered a bust at the box office, the movie has actually gone on to be one of the most popular of the late-era animated Disney films. It even got its own direct-to-video sequel and a television spinoff. Hollywood has seen a lot of troubled productions and a lot of filmmaking disasters, and in the end "The Emperor's New Groove" actually came out okay, despite all the drama shown in the documentary. I feel badly for Roger Allers and Sting for all their wasted efforts and disappointments. Really, I do. But in the end, I think I'd much rather have the Tex Avery homage with llamas that Mark Dindal whipped up, instead of that big epic musical extravaganza.
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I really should have posted this little tribute last month, to coincide with the American release of the new Studio Ghibli film, "The Borrower Arrietty," also known as "The Secret World of Arrietty" or just "Arrietty" depending on which version you've got. Miyazaki was credited only as producer and co-writer, but his influence is all over the gorgeous visuals, and the lovely, pastoral atmosphere of the picture. I'd know his contributions anywhere. Of all the directors I've spotlighted in this blog so far, it's Miyazaki's work that I know the most thoroughly, from his contributions to early anime features like "Puss in Boots" and "Hols: Prince of the Sun," to his work in television with the first "Lupin III" series, "Anne of Green Gables," and "Future Boy Conan," and finally his own iconic films, starting with "The Castle of Cagliostro" in 1979.

Now, "Cagliostro" was an awfully good film already, a James Bond style caper with some great action setpieces, but Miyazaki kept improving his craft over the next twenty years with a run of incredibly influential, successful features that no one in animation has matched outside of early Disney and perhaps PIXAR. I struggled over which of his films to write about. My childhood favorite was "Kiki's Delivery Service," but his later, most mature features, "Princess Mononoke" and "Porco Rosso," are more challenging and daring. Then there's "Nausicaa" and "Totoro," the films he's best known for in his native Japan. But ultimately, I have to admit that the first movie I think of when it comes to Miyazaki is the one that he's received the most acclaim for, 2001's "Spirited Away."

Ten-year old Chihiro and her parents are moving to a new town, and stop over at what they think is an abandoned amusement park. In actuality, it's a resort town for the spirits, and Chihiro's parents greedily eat up food that wasn't meant for them, a transgression that gets the pair turned into pigs and traps Chihiro in the dangerous spirit world. Luckily, she gets some help from a mysterious boy named Haku, who helps her gain employment at the bathhouse run by Yubaba the witch. However, Chihiro's position is still precarious, and she has a lot to learn before she can save her parents and find her way back to the human world.

One of Miyazaki's great strengths has been his ability to create wondrous, enveloping fantasy environments, and the bathhouse for the spirits in "Spirited Away" is one of his best. It is an endlessly fascinating place, full of strange old gods and monsters from Japanese legend, every shot crammed full of gorgeous, ornate details, and all of them painstakingly hand-drawn and painted. There's an appealing incomprehensibility to the images at first, where it's difficult to say exactly what we're looking at from one minute to the next. However, the bathhouse does work by a certain complicated logic, which keeps the place from feeling like a collection of random elements thrown together. Everyone has a certain job or a role to fill, and once Chihiro figures out how things run and who she can trust, she begins to navigate the place more easily, as do we.

Chihiro is not a typical Miyazaki heroine, at least not at first. She's very much an average ten-year-old girl, not thrilled with the prospect of moving and having a good sulk when we first see her with her parents. She reacts to the strangeness of the spirit world as any girl might. She gets frightened and tries to run away at first. She stamps her feet when she's impatient. After too much excitement, she feels dizzy and faint. But once she starts to get the hang of things, she becomes as brave and resourceful as any young heroine you could wish for. In a movie full of shapeshifters and spirits, she's easily the best character of the lot, and probably one of the best, most well-rounded animated children to ever grace the screen.

Much of the fun of the film is the feeling of being swept away with Chihiro, brought to a totally alien place and culture that seems too big and too complex to ever fully understand. The spirits that inhabit the bathhouse can look like human beings or giant radish roots or overgrown ducklings, and several of them are disguised in other forms. Yubaba has a beloved baby boy the size of a sumo wrestler, and is aided by three creatures who can only be described as bouncing green heads. Despite a twisty plot, there's not much exposition for a viewer to rely on, no rules that are ever explicitly laid out for us. There are a plenty of hints and examples to help Chihiro think her way through various puzzles, but much of the time she's at the mercy of luck and circumstance. It makes her adventures all the more exciting.

Some have found similarities in the story to "Alice in Wonderland," but "Spirited Away" gives its heroine a very clear goal and real challenges to overcome, creating far more tension and suspense. However, the narrative is never straightforward, and Chihiro only manages to accomplish certain tasks in a roundabout way, often with digressions that don't really matter to the plot. And yet, it's some of these moments that are the movie's best. There is a sequence on a train that could have easily been excised from the story, and it takes some serious mental gymnastics to explain the presence of a train in this universe in the first place. Yet the sequence is so perfectly right, just where it is, giving us a few languid, meditative moments to pause and compare Chihiro's behavior near the end of her journey with the beginning, and to take stock of the odd little group of traveling companions she's collected - an accomplishment that proves extremely important.

When you compare Miyazaki's films to Western children's entertainment, they are considerably slower in pace but frequently more absorbing. One of the biggest criticisms I have of the Disney dub of "Spirited Away" is the way it adds extra explanations for things that really don't need explaining. Some of the film's mysteries simply don't have answers, and no one is expected to provide them. That's the strength of Miyazaki's work, his ability to present the strange and the fantastic in such a coherent, indelible fashion, that after a while you stop trying to figure out any kind of rationality behind them, but just accept and enjoy their enduring splendor.
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"The Lorax" opened today, and the reviews have been mixed, but not bad, and the box office returns should be decent. I'm not crazy about the marketing tactics or all the celebrity voices, but I hope the film does well. I'm very fond of Dr. Seuss and there are several of his books that I think would make good children's features. In fact, I'm surprised the filmmakers went with "The Lorax," which has such a strong environmentalist message, that they must have known was going to get them in trouble. Anyway, the guys at Illumination Studios seem to have the Seuss visual style down pat, and I'd love to see them tackle some of the following Seuss stories next:

"The Butter Battle Book" - One of the problems with the Seuss adaptations so far is that they've all been based on such short stories, picture books that only take a few minutes to read. "The Butter Battle Book" is a slightly more substantial one, about the Yooks and the Zooks who have almost identical societies, except that one likes to eat their bread with the buttered side up, and one prefers the buttered side down. They allow the one small difference to become a reason to hate each other, which escalates into a Seussian allegory for the Cold War. The messages still ring true, however, and the narrative is strong enough that it could be expanded much more naturally without so much obvious padding.

"Bartholomew and the Oobleck" - Bartholomew first appeared in "The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins," but his encounter with the oobleck would be much more interesting to see onscreen. It's a "be careful what you wish for" story of the King of Didd, who wants a new kind of weather, different from than the same old rain, snow, sun, and fog. He gets his wish in the form of ooblek, an unpleasant green goop that predictably causes havoc when it starts falling from the sky. Only the king's page, Bartholomew, has the good sense to figure out how to stop it. Actually, you could do both books together in one movie. Maybe "The King's Stilts" too, which is also about the adventures of a little boy and an eccentric king.

"The Cat in the Hat" - I think it's been long enough since that terrible live action Mike Myers movie to start thinking about another version of "The Cat in the Hat." This one would take some work, though, because the "Cat in the Hat" books don't exactly operate by conventional narratives, and shoehorning the character into one can lead to bad results. However, there is a lot of material for filmmakers to draw from. In addition to "The Cat in the Hat" and "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," he also appeared in an animated television special that Dr. Seuss wrote with a different plot than either of the books. The Cat in the Hat is also a figure who pops up in a lot of Seuss's other work, which brings us to...

"Daisy-Head Mayzie" - Billed as a long lost Seuss manuscript when it was published posthumously in the '90s, "Mayzie" got a lot of attention when it first appeared, and is already a cable television special. Some critics dismissed it for being slight, but I like its messages and its sweetness. "Mayzie" is the story of a girl who first has to deal with being different, because of the yellow daisy growing out of the top of her head, and then with the dangers of sudden fame, after an agent parlays her uniqueness into celebrity. The Cat in the Hat serves as the narrator and as a Jiminy Cricket figure, giving Mayzie important advice, but I don't think he's integral to the story. Mayzie can stand just fine all by herself.

"Gerald McBoing-Boing" - Not a Seuss book, but one of the great UPA cartoon shorts, which Seuss wrote, about a boy who speaks in sound effects instead of words. There were three further shorts, and Gerald hosted his own television show briefly in the '50s, and then returned for a Canadian cartoon series just recently, in 2005. Now the greatness of the original short was in its simplicity and the concept couldn't be stretched out to feature length without adding a lot more to the existing story, which would be very tricky. I'd try combining it with one of the Seuss's stories with less compelling protagonists, like "I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew," or maybe even "Oh, the Places You'll Go!"
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Disney animation fans should be happy to hear that the long in-development animated feature film adaptation of "The Snow Queen," based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, is finally back on track. It even has a release date staked out: Thanksgiving, 2013. On the other hand, those who love Disney's hand-drawn, traditionally animated films, myself included, will be less happy to learn that the new movie, though initially conceived to be traditionally animated, will be done in 3D CGI, like Disney's last fairy-tale film, "Tangled." And it's also getting a name change, going from "The Snow Queen" to "Frozen."

When John Lasseter assumed leadership of the struggling Disney animation unit, he vocally announced his support for the resurrection of traditionally animated films at the studio, and he got a lot of people's hopes up. But then "The Princess and the Frog" did only middling business, while "Tangled" unexpectedly became a monster hit. Now, I don't have anything against "Tangled." I thought it was a great film, and I'm glad it got such a strong response and convinced Disney that there is still an audience out there for its fairy-tale musicals. However, when you compare the performance of "Tangled" to "The Princess and the Frog," the easy conclusion to draw is that "Tangled" did better because it was a CGI feature. I'm not convinced that this is true.

However, the final nail in the coffin of was the new "Winnie the Pooh" film, which despite receiving a lot of critical support, was a total disaster at the box office last summer, opening against the final installment of "Harry Potter." It's an incredibly charming piece of work and I enjoyed it, but it's hard to summon much enthusiasm for a feature that only runs 63 minutes. It didn't even pick up an Academy Award nomination in the Best Animated Film category this year, losing out to a pair of foreign contenders, "Chico & Rita" and "A Cat in Paris." Ironically, both are also hand-drawn features.

And there's the strangest part of it. Traditional feature animation is doing just fine everywhere else in the world. CGI hasn't made many inroads in Japan's flourishing anime universe, and the beloved Studio Ghibli is still turning out blockbuster hand-drawn films. "The Secret World of Arrietty," one of their latest, is finally reaching American theater screens next week. France and Russia, countries with long, animation traditions, have turned out their share of CGI features, but they haven't dominated the scene to nearly the same extent that they have in the US.

When you look at the American animated films being produced by the big studios, the ones that get played on thousands of screens across the country, they are overwhelmingly CGI animation. "Winnie the Pooh" was the only new traditionally animated film to receive a wide release in the United States last year, and "Arrietty" will be the only one this year. Compare this to seven new CGI films, and three stop-motion ones coming out in 2012. This is not counting, of course, the rereleases of "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King" which were converted for 3D viewing.

Meanwhile, new technology has allowed more traditional animated films to be made in the last few years than at any time in history. We're seeing animated features, both traditional and CGI, coming from places as diverse as South Africa, Israel, and Singapore. A small but vibrant independent scene in the US still produces a few hand drawn features every year, like "Idiots and Angels" and "My Dog Tulip," both aimed at an adult audiences. Even animated documentaries are becoming in vogue, after the success of "Waltz With Bashir."

I'm glad to see so much diversity and innovation in these animated films, but at the same time it's sad to that the most talented, most commercially successful studios are stuck working in the confines of such a limited range of stories and styles. It's bad enough that Americans still can't get out of the mindset that animated films are for children, but now those films are all increasingly conforming to a standard visual aesthetic. Everybody wants to look like PIXAR, essentially.

Not that there's anything wrong with PIXAR. But when the majority of American animation looks like all PIXAR, all the time, then we have a problem. So many studios are doing so well these days, I can't believe we don't have room for a few traditionally animated features in the mix. They don't have to be the polished, perfect Disney extravaganzas of old, but the medium still has so much promise and potential, and others around the world have done such great things with it lately – and I can't help feeling that we're missing out on all the fun.
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I can't make fun of the folks who enjoy "Twilight." I just can't. And I can't make fun of the kids who like the Kardashians or Justin Bieber or the latest tween sensation who can't actually sing. When we're young we all become enamored with some godawful pieces of pop culture, only fit for undeveloped minds and future VH1 nostalgia retrospectives. I fell prey to my share of them, just like everyone else. And so today, taking advantage of this whole anonymous blogger thing, I'm going to confess that when I was in high school, I was a fan of a little Japanese cartoon called "Sailor Moon."

Let's get the most embarrassing parts out of the way first. "Sailor Moon" was the first piece of anime I was really exposed to, aside from a few children's movies and a few boy-oriented mecha cartoons. Compared to everything I've seen since, the American dub was pretty dreadful, cutting episodes to pieces, tacking "Sailor Moon Says" morals on the endings, and writing out anything remotely unconventional. They screwed with the characters' ages, turned a male villain into a female one, and never let us see anyone die. Oh, and Sailor Moon was very obviously voiced by a mature woman who did a terrible job of trying to sound like a teenager.

I didn't care. Looking back, I know exactly why I liked "Sailor Moon" - it was because of the visuals. I had never been any kind of a romance fan, and had never wanted much to do with Barbies or ballerinas or the usual girly pink nonsense prevalent in Western media for little girls. However I did like fantasy stories and loved cartoons. What "Sailor Moon" did was to introduce a different kind of visual aesthetic, the shojo manga style that was sexier and bolder with its imagery, and yet still very feminine. I'd never seen anything like it before in a cartoon, especially not at that level of quality. Most of the "Sailor Moon" animation was done on the cheap, but certain sequences, like the henshin, the transformation scenes, got extra attention, and it showed.

It helped that "Sailor Moon" was so obviously targeted at girls, back at a time when few Western cartoons were. I'd largely missed the age of "Jem" and "She-Ra," when there were still some efforts toward gender parity in kids' shows. By the 90s the toy marketers were focused on the boys, who tended to maintain cartoon-watching habits longer than girls did, and were considered easier to program to. It was accepted wisdom that girls would watch boys' cartoons, but boys wouldn't watch girls' cartoons. So "Sailor Moon" stood out immediately, for having a passel of female superheroes save the day on a regular basis. And it wasn't some cheap commercial for a doll or toy line like so many of them were back then, but something made specifically for girls right at the age when they usually stopped watching cartoons. How could I not take notice?

I didn't fall for the show right away though. Despite the eye candy, the stories and the characters didn't appeal to me. I didn't much care for the monster-of-the-week formula or all the emphasis on romance and boyfriends. I thought Sailor Moon was a ditzy airhead and didn't have much patience with her. I'm much fonder of the silly girl now, having realized she was a pretty good caricature of teenage growing pains, and always her own best comic relief. It was only after I saw a mini-marathon of several episodes over the holidays that I realized the series had plot arcs and character development and all kinds of fun stuff, once you got past the bad dubbing and edits. From that point on I was sold. I never broadcast the fact that I was a fan (I was in high school ferpetesake), but I got up early most weekdays to catch "Sailor Moon" at 7AM before school, and I started looking around for similar programs.

It's thanks to "Sailor Moon" that I went through my otaku phase which eventually got me interested in world cinema. I still have very fond feelings toward anime. My favorite to date is "Revolutionary Girl Utena," which is often described as a deconstruction of shojo shows like "Sailor Moon," and depends on knowing a lot of the old tropes and formulas. "Utena" doesn't have transformation scenes as good as the ones in "Sailor Moon" though. Nothing ever really did.

So hang in there, fanboys and fangirls, whatever your media guilty pleasure is. We all need 'em, for different reasons, and not everyone gets the same things out of being a fan. And sometimes, if we're lucky, it can lead to better things.
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It stands to reason that after a particularly strong year for animated films, like 2010, you're going to have a weak one. However, 2011 has just been one disappointment after another so far. The films have all been doing well at the box office, with a couple of exceptions. We started off the year with the February release of "Gnomeo and Juliet," a very modestly budgeted first feature from a no-name studio. It cleared nearly $100 million in domestic receipts, despite mixed reviews. In March, "Rango," followed with $123 million, very good for a first feature by ILM, but not quite enough to cover its production budget. Fortunately, foreign numbers were about on par, more than enough to make up for the shortfall. In April, Blue Sky's "Rio" brought in $143 million, and if you count the partially animated "Hop," it was good for $108 million. Not great numbers in either case, but respectable.

There were only two pre-summer bombs. One was "Mars Needs Moms," the troubled mo-cap feature that only earned $21 million domestic with a reported budget of $150 million. The film's performance was bad enough that Disney parted ways with Robert Zemickis, quashing future projects in the pipeline, including a proposed "Yellow Submarine" movie. The other underperformer was "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil," the sequel to the surprisingly well-received "Hoodwinked," that was good for $50 million back in 2005. The sequel brought in about a fifth as much in April, and there's been some ugly behind-the-scenes clashing between the production company and the distributors, the Weinstein Company. There are a few features that crash and burn every year, though, so a few flops were not unexpected.

But then we get into summer, where the more highly anticipated films started rolling out, and we started seeing some really worrying numbers. First, "Kung Fu Panda 2" landed in May, where it came in second to "The Hangover 2" in the first weekend, failed to match the opening numbers of the first "Kung Fu Panda," and only totaled $165 million domestic to the original's $215 million. What's mystifying is that there was hardly any discernible difference in the reviews or audience reaction to the two films. "Kung Fu Panda 2" was well-liked and had little competition for the youngest viewers during the early summer months. Also, the general trend for animated sequels is that the box office numbers tend to go up for at least one or two successive installments. Fortunately, "Panda 2" was a major blockbuster overseas, with nearly $500 million in foreign receipts, edging the worldwide total higher than that of the original, and putting it in fourth place for 2011 worldwide grosses so far.

In June, "Cars 2" was a different story. $191 million domestic can hardly be called a failure, especially as "Cars 2" remains the highest domestic grossing animated film of the year. However, compared to PIXAR's past box office successes, it's certainly a disappointment. "Cars 2" is the studio's first feature to fail to cross $200 million domestically since 1998's "A Bug's Life." Again, overseas numbers eased the pain, but not nearly to the extent that "Kung Fu Panda 2" enjoyed. In the worldwide numbers, "Cars 2" trails by well over $100 million. Another blow to Disney was the flop of "Winnie the Pooh," the traditionally animated feature that opened against the last "Harry Potter" movie in July, and was promptly flattened. Then "The Smurfs" opened a few weeks later, and flattened them again. So far "The Smurfs" has brought in $140 million to "Winnie the Pooh's" measly $26 million. Fortunately "Winnie" was a cheap feature and will likely recoup its budget, but this doesn't bode well for the future of traditional animation in the US.

"The Smurfs" was one of the surprise hits of the summer, and did particularly well overseas, about on par with "Cars 2." There was also the success of the 3D rerelease of "The Lion King" in September, which topped the box office two weeks in a row and was good for another $92 million. Otherwise, numbers have been down across the board, especially at the domestic box office. Only one animated film, "Cars 2," has cracked the top ten for the year. In 2010, there were five titles, which all broke $200 million domestically. But then again, 2010 was an unusually good year for animation, with the last "Toy Story" and "Shrek" movies, and strong originals like "Despicable Me," "Tangled," and "How to Train Your Dragon." Also, though the critics have generally been kind, the hard truth is that this year's films just haven't been as good. I liked "Kung Fu Panda 2" quite a bit, and "Cars 2" and "Rio" were passable, but only "Rango" was really anything special. The best reviewed animated film of the year was "Winnie the Pooh," but I admit that like so may others, I let it get lost in the summer scrum and haven't seen it yet.

We have a couple more 2011 animated films left to go. Box office analysts are currently fretting that "Puss in Boots" only took in an estimated $35 million over the weekend, in spite of good reviews. Dreamworks hasn't seen opening numbers that low in years, and my gut feeling is that it's probably a sign that people have had about enough of the "Shrek" franchise. Moving on, November brings "Happy Feet Two" and an Aardman original, "Arthur Christmas." I do not understand the "Happy Feet" love, but maybe they can make lightning strike twice. I'm afraid "Arthur" may be doomed by its Britishness and a bad ad campaign, but then you should never underestimate Christmas movies. In December, we'll see "The Adventures of Tintin," which is already being rolled out in Europe, and getting good notices so far. I don't think it'll do as well in the US, however, since "Tintin" isn't well known here, and the mo-cap animation is still awfully off-putting. Oh, and there's "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip Wrecked," and the less said about it, the better.

Finally in the independent and foreign realms, there's surprisingly little this year. Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal's "Chico and Rita" is getting an Oscar qualifying run, but Studio Ghibli's "Arrietty" has been pushed back to February, 2012. "From up on Poppy Hill," Ghibli's latest, has scarcely had any buzz at all. The new "Trigun" film was supposed to have a limited release in the US this year, but I haven't heard a word about it in ages, or anything else from Japan for that matter. France's "A Monster in Paris" hasn't been picked up for US distribution yet - maybe next year. Also MIA is "Tatsumi," a Singaporean film that got some attention when it played at Cannes.

But these things are cyclical. Next year we'll see originals from PIXAR, Dreamworks, Laika, Ghibli, Aardman, Sony, Illumination, Disney, and far fewer sequels (two next year, opposed to five this year). That's plenty to look forward to.
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