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.

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

(2010) director Zack Snyder
viewed: 11/07/10 at AMC Loews Metreon 16, SF, CA

When I first saw a trailer for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, I recall thinking the whole thing seemed extremely convoluted in its pseudo-uniqueness.  Owls wearing battle helmets?  With Australian accents?  Shot in 3-D and digitally animated in hyper-realistic detail, the film also seemed to feature an action-edged stylization that seemed less apt for a children’s film and more typical of a major action film.

Though I did know that it came from the studio that had made Happy Feet, little did I know that it was directed by Zack Snyder, director and stylist of 300 (2006) and Watchmen (2009).  For the Australian bird-oriented animation, the former made sense, and when you think of all the slo-mo battle sequences, the Snyder angle made sense, though what attracted the R-rated Comic Con dude to the material?  Who knows?

Adapted from an Australian series of children’s fantasy novels, the film is also a pastiche of a multitude of other influences: Star Wars, vaguely Watership Down, and a lot of other things that came to mind while watching it but failing to return now as I write.

It’s a violent and action-packed thing, though rated PG, the violence is bloodless.  But the armored owls are like birds at a cockfight, with sharpened spurs on their talons.  There is a strong Nazi-oriented theme to the villains, who call themselves “the pure ones”, and are elitist based on the “type” of owl that they are.  These themes, while ominous, aren’t really given that much depth in the end.

The film is slick, as is often the case with Snyder, who knows his way around digital effects for films that have photographic characters in them, so in a film with digitally animated owls, the effects turn out to be some of his go-to set of techniques.  Namely, as the fast-paced action unfold, the camera locks suddenly into ultra slow-motion, in which every raindrop, every tiny feather, is vividly rendered, heightening drama, but also heightening one’s sense of the details of the animation.

The story is about two young owl brothers who are abducted by an evil group of owls, forced into their brutal, controlling structure.  While one brother escapes and battles the system, the other brother joins up.  The rebel seeks the legendary Guardians of Ga’Hoole, a group of noble owls who have fought for good versus evil in the past and are said to live at some place near the ends of the earth.

The film was preceded by a new 3-D animated Road Runner cartoon, which was painful just to look at, much less watch.  It just looked so “wrong”, especially considering Chuck Jones’ very 2-D Road Runner cartoons of the 1950′s, an aesthetic of simplicity in massive contrast to the 3-D computer animation in this new feature.  While Felix liked the Legend of the Guardians more than he thought he would (and I thought it was decent, too), after the Road Runner cartoon ended, he just looked at me and shook his head.