Arthur Christmas

(2011) director Sarah Smith
viewed: 11/25/2011 at Platinum Theater Dinuba 6, Dinuba, CA 

After a dearth of worthwhile-seeming kids flicks during the autumn, the day before Thanksgiving saw the release of three films that my kids were interested in and that I was not averse to seeing myself.  Arthur Christmas was the least of the three in my mind.  I was more interested in the new The Muppets (2011) or the new Martin Scorsese-directed Hugo (2011), but the fates being what they are, Arthur Christmas was the first that we managed to see.

“Wallace and Gromit” studio Aardman, whose best work is done in stop-motion animation, is behind this latest in holiday movie-making (Christmas truly is a sub-genre unto itself).  Aardman’s first digitally-animated feature, Flushed Away (2006), done in the same visual style even though no clay was employed in the animating process, was surprisingly fun (I loved the chorusing slugs and the villainous frogs and toads), so despite the fact that the Arthur Christmas trailer hadn’t done a thing for me, I was more than willing to believe that the studio generally released quality products.

Despite being an original story, the whole thing felt vaguely familiar.

Arthur is Santa’s second son, the retiring, dweebish, uber-sincere Christmas fan who works as a cog in the whole complex Santa empire.  The Santas are meant to have been a generational group who hand down the title and responsibilities to the younger sons, but by present day (I mean, the current moment in time) the operation is run like a finely-honed military machine, with a horde of highly-skilled elves, a giant sleigh-shaped spacecraft, and a huge amount of NASA-like technology.  And Arthur’s special-ops, beret-wearing older brother, is the one at the controls, waiting his time to take over for his aging father.

The adventure kicks in when one present is accidentally not delivered and Arthur kicks into action with his goofy grandfather and his old-fashioned sleigh and reindeer attempt to deliver the gift before the sun rises.

The whole thing is about how important it is that Christmas is about every child being recognized (gift-wise), no child left behind.  The spirit of Christmas, of giving, of maintaining that magical quality of belief is what’s delivered ultimately by the one who most sincerely believes in the reason it exists.  That would be Arthur.   But it’s an ironical commentary, really, this passion and zeal for a sincere belief in a system completely concocted by the film.  I mean, this is not the traditional image of St. Nick, this is a comically modern vision.  This is not the religious traditions behind the holiday that the film seeks to fight for.  This is something about making each child believe.  Not believe that they matter, but believe because they get just what they wanted.

It’s a miry message, leaning heavily upon the sentiment that most holiday movies trade in, but what ultimately is being achieved here?  Really, that is a good question for the film itself, adding to the swollen cornucopia of Christmas entertainment, of which a multitude of varieties of versioning of the Santa myth already glut the occasion.  Why do we do it?  Why add to the pile?  More stuff to consume?  More gifts to deliver?  More carrying forward of the corporate culture of consumerism?

I may have taken a particularly cynical slant here, Scrooge-ish, even, but when I spent any time considering Arthur Christmas, I came a lot less to its small joys and momentary laughs, and much more down to its ultimate message.  And it’s not very heartening.

Puss in Boots

(2011) director Chris Miller
viewed: 10/29/2011 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

Puss in Boots was not necessarily the most likely of films to which I would bring the kids.  I’ve been pretty disdainful of the Shrek series of films of which this movie is a spin-off/prequel.  And 3-D, another bane of my film-going existence has started to be shown at the neighborhood movie house, CineArts @ the Empire Theater in West Portal.  I’d actually been quite grateful to them for showing only 2-D versions of many of this fad of greed films.  But starting just recently, they now do both formats, which is good for them, I suppose.  Bad for me if timing, being what it is, results in seeing 3-D versions that are currently $3.50 more expensive per ticket.

But the kids were interested and what with us having survived the dearth of kid-friendly movies that follows the end of the summer, I was more willing to give it a go.

Voiced by Antonio Banderas, Puss was actually one of the more amusing characters of the Shrek franchise.  A sort of Spanish Pepe Le Pew with a little more Zorro thrown in.  In this film, he’s teamed with Kitty Southpaw (voiced by Salma Hayak) and  Humpty Alexander Dumpty (voiced by Zach Galifianakis).  Kitty is the female equivalent to Puss, just as sassy and tough.  Humpty is a fretting bulb of an egg, a childhood friend of Puss’ who betrayed him in the past.  They all team up to try to get magic beans to get the goose that lays the golden eggs in a crafty scheme.  There are also Jack and Jill (Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris) who are scheming to do the same.

Frankly, the film isn’t nearly as funny as it could or should be.  The animation is of a high quality but I’ve never really liked the aesthetic of humans in the Shrek series.  They are stiff and waxen and hyper-real but still cartoons in a style that I can only say sort of gives me the creeps.

But for whatever reason, I found the film more tolerable than I was expecting.  The kids all enjoyed it (we had an additional 7 year old in tow).

Like the movie Rango (2011), though decidedly less so, a lot of the visuals play with the aesthetics and stereotypes of the Spaghetti Western.  Puss in Boots, however, has even less of an agenda of being anything beyond a pretty straightforward kiddie movie.  I tend to feel that animation always has such potential for the unusual or bizarre, and so many creative people are needed to screw in an animated light bulb, that it’s quite disheartening to see one that lacks wit and verve.  Maybe it was just the lack of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy’s characters that allowed this film to seem less annoying to me (than its Shrek predecessors).  I don’t know.

Rango

(2011) director Gore Verbinski
viewed: 03/06/11 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

Rango is one of the better-looking and vaguely more “original” of feature digital animation films to hit the big screen in the last year or so.  Starring Johnny Depp as the chameleon in the desert and directed by Gore Verbinski (who directed the Pirates of the Caribbean series, which propelled Depp to his highest points of commercial success), the film, being an animation, is a bit of a departure.  In the past, some animation directors moved into live action, but rarely, if at all, the other way around.

Rango channels the Spaghetti Western, but also pulls from several spheres, casting asides to the Pirates series, the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone series of films, even Depp’s portrayal of Hunter S.  Thompson gets a nod.  In fact, it’s a very post-modern film, almost “meta” in a sense.  The film also verges frequently into the strange and surreal, something Verbinski flirted annoyingly with in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), but here is often a site of some of the films most amusing moments.  However, these self-aware, reflective, and bizarre characteristics ultimately accompany a fairly traditional plot with the typically over-stated and painfully obvious “messages” and morals that so much popular cinema likes to spell out with damning clarity as if children couldn’t interpret anything on their own.

The character design and personae are sharper and more unique than the average animated film.  The aesthetic is, while cartoonish and not purely naturalistic, does lean toward a hyper-realistic three-dimensionality to the characters.  All the reptiles have very defined bumps on their skins, textures are rich, and details are deep.  The characters are less rote perhaps to the animated feature (with the exception of Rango himself, Beans (the female lead), and the main villains of the film, Tortoise John and Rattlesnake Jake).  The smaller roles are more caricatures of Western film types, devised and developed in their character design, not as much stand-ins for characters that populate the majority of animated films.

The film is a lot of fun.  It’s funny and lively (Felix liked it a lot), and Verbinski definitely handles the action sequences with a lot of verve.  The audience seemed to think it was pretty great.

Rango is a caged chameleon with no real life, until he is accidentally spilled out into the desert, where he finds his way to the throwback town of Dirt.  Dirt is a town with a diminishing water supply (a line of social criticism the movie opens about irrigated deserts — but doesn’t fully explore), and its people are poor and oppressed.  When Rango blusters and BS’s his way into the town as a tough guy and winds up sheriff, telling tall tales and keeping them going with clumsy luck, you can easily foresee the scene in which is charade is exposed and he “lets everyone down” that he is really a “nobody”, not a hero.  And beyond that, you know that he’ll overcome that all in the end as well.

This is the film’s great weakness, its standard core of a story arc and the moral that accompanies it.  I didn’t want to film to verge into indulgence, but I would have liked it to stay a bit weirder, more unpredictable, and to be as clever as its character designs and certain set pieces.  Not that I was expecting it; I had a sense of its approach from its trailers.

But of all of the animated features that have been running as trailers for this year, it’s been the only one that I looked at thinking that I’d like to see it.  I know I’ll end up seeing others, but this was a case of one that actually looked good to me.  And it is pretty good.  It’s funny, it’s fun, and it’s got quirks and excitement.  The whole little animal kingdom of Dirt was an odd mixture of creatures.  I don’t doubt that it will be one of the better mainstream animated features of 2011.

The Illusionist

(2010) director Sylvain Chomet
viewed: 02/19/11 at The Clay Theater, SF, CA

Having enjoyed director Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville (2003) so much, I was keenly looking forward to his latest film, The Illusionist.  And I was working to get the kids excited.  The trailer for the film is low-key, but I reminded them of The Triplets of Belleville, which they remembered fondly to build their anticipation.  Felix queried me, “Which one of the films received better reviews?”  I told him that I didn’t know, that they both had received good reviews, but I did tell him that I thought it was going to be less strange and fantastic than The Triplets of Belleville.  Turns out, I was very right.

And for the record, The Illusionist, while a lovely, melancholic film, is no The Triplets of Belleville.

Chomet adapted an unproduced script by Jacques Tati, the story of a touring “illusionist”, set in the 1950′s, bouncing from town to town, gig to gig, increasingly passe compared to the onslaught of rock’n'roll, quaint, talented, but not prospering.  The aging magician heads to Scotland, where he lands in a small town, where a young woman, believing his magic to be real, tags along with him to Edinburgh, like a long-lost daughter.

The film is low-key, as the trailer indicated.  Like The Triplets of Belleville, the film is virtually wordless.  Whether people are speaking French, English, or Gaelic, their words are mumbled and unimportant, with all of the story really told through gestures and images, which gives the film its primary charm.  The animation is traditional cel animation, with a particularly “hand-drawn” style that offers genuine character.   Chomet’s people are hilarious caricatures, with massive noses, buck teeth, grandly rendered.

The Illusionist is really an utter homage to Tati.  The illusionist himself is styled after Tati’s film persona, a gangly, pear-shaped, but deft and comic, much like Charlie Chaplain at moments.  And the story, which is said to have been inspired by a relationship with an estranged daughter, is sad and quiet.

Edinburgh, as everything else, is rendered in miraculous detail.  Much of the film is lovely and charming, though the most humorous character, the magician’s feisty rabbit, is only a bit player, a highlight.  The film focuses on the change of culture, to rock’n'roll and cinema, away from the Vaudeville-like stage performers who once created the magic of entertainment.  But as the illusionist tells the girl, in a card that he leaves for her, “There are no magicians in the world” (or something to that effect.)  In other words, in this process of aging and the changing of the world, things slip away, disappear, and quite frankly, there is no real magic in the world.

The kids liked it, though they noted how it was kind of sad.  It was a rainy day movie, and a apropos one at that, as it rains throughout the film quite a bit.  The film has charm, but it lacks the strangeness of Chomet’s earlier film, which was certainly a part of what made that film so interesting.  I guess I was a little disappointed with it.  Not terribly.  I’m glad we saw it.  Especially because the other kid film option in town yesterday was Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), which I’d gladly avoid on the whole, and snobbishly prefer that we saw The Illusionist anyway.

Yogi Bear

(2010) director Eric Brevig
viewed: 12/19/10 at AMC Loews Metreon 16

For as many movies as I see with my kids, and I see a lot, there are a number of trailers for movies that we see that I cringe from and think aloud, “Uh, we can miss that one!”  And Yogi Bear was of that ilk.

Circumstances being what they are, we didn’t miss “that one”.

Actually, the thing is that both kids were pretty amused and interested by the trailer, and while I grew up with the classic Hanna-Barbera character of Yogi Bear, I wasn’t too excited by this notion of seeing this new 3-D, digitally animated mixed-live-action version of the character.  In fact, perhaps we could have missed it.

The bottom line is that the kids enjoyed it.  Clara in particular.  And for me, I was grateful for the lack of fart jokes.

While I’d rank it among the far lesser of the kid-friendly movies we’ve seen (which interestingly enough includes other live-action/animation features like Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007) and G-Force (2009)), I have to say that it’s tolerable.  Perhaps tolerable at best.

The fact that Justin Timberlake voices Boo Boo is worth some weird element of pop culture insanity points.