Animation indiscrimination

Why did I see Astro Boy on Sunday?

I was asking myself that question even when it was Sunday, when I was sitting in the darkened theater waiting for the movie to start. I had this itching sensation that I didn't really want to be there. I was seeing this movie out of some rote diligence to a principle in my head, a principle that states that animated movies must be seen on the big screen in order to soak in the fullness of their grandeur.

I felt even less enthused when a line full of six boys came in and plopped themselves down next to me, in that spasmodic way that spills them over into your personal space. I'd selected my seat -- on the far left of the first raised row, the one with the bar in front of you -- for its relative isolation, especially in a theater that was only a third full. I never imagined that I'd be sitting not only close to, but directly next to, an eight-year-old boy. Yet there he and his friends were. I should add that they were completely commendable audients, with the notable exception of this one random moment when one kid stood up on his seat and yelled something to his mother, two rows back. But that incident was over pretty quickly.

The fact of sitting next to the boys was not, in itself, anything more than a colorful environmental detail that sounds sort of funny in the re-telling. I didn't question why I was at Astro Boy because I thought it made me look like some kind of predator, a 36-year-old man attending a 2:35 Sunday afternoon screening and sitting next to a line of six boys. (Hey, I was sitting there first!)

No, I questioned attending Astro Boy because I didn't have any specific reason to think I would like it. I had only a sense that its anime-influenced computer animation looked pretty polished, and that the character design seemed reasonably good. I didn't have any idea about the pedigree of the writers, the history of Astro Boy as a Japanese entertainment property, or even which studio was releasing it.

Yep. Animation indiscrimination, pure and simple.

And I should have known better. In my piece ranking Pixar's ten films earlier this year -- in which the most recent three occupied slots 7 through 9 -- I came face to face with the realization that animated films weren't casting the magical spell over me that they once did.

So what do I go and do? Yep, I see 9, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and now Astro Boy in the theater. An attempt at a market correction.

In fact, that makes a total of six 2009 animated films that I've seen in the theater, ranked as follows:

1. Monsters vs. Aliens
2. Coraline
3. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
4. Up
5. 9
6. Astro Boy

So I guess you could say my viewing of Cloudy did have the intended effect, to some degree. At least I liked it better than Up, and yes, I do expect to be cast out of the Pixar fan club after admitting that. Yet its overall ranking out of the 53 films I've seen this year is not very high, somewhere around 23. This from the guy who once regularly ranked his favorite animated film in his top ten each year -- and currently has two animated films ranked in his top ten all time (see sidebar), with Toy Story ranked at #1. (Monsters vs. Aliens currently stands at #15 this year, but will probably be pushed significantly downward by the cavalcade of high-profile releases coming out between now and late December.)

As I was waiting for Astro Boy to start, it occurred to me how perfunctory this trip to the theater was. And as I watched the trailer for Planet 51, due out in a couple weeks, I wondered if I'd be back here for that, maybe in this very seat, wondering the same thing:

What am I doing here?

Astro Boy was not terrible. It had its moments. It had its cool robots (along with its stupid ones), and its cool action set pieces (along with the ones that seemed too intense for kids -- but more on that in a moment). But it's the first animated movie in a long time that I would actually give a thumbs down. I hemmed and hawed about it as I was leaving the theater, but by the time I got home, I put my foot down. Go with your convictions, Vance. Thumbs down.

I guess I didn't want to be reminded of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence that many times when watching a kids movie. For starters (spoiler alert!), the Astro Boy of the title is a robot, not a flesh-and-blood human. You probably knew that already. But what you might not know is that he's a robot designed to look like the son of his inventor, who gets vaporized when trapped inside a military experiment gone wrong. That's right, you meet Toby, the model for the eventual Astro Boy, for about ten minutes at the beginning of the movie before he basically blows up, leaving only his baseball cap behind. I'm not saying you see chunks of little kid raining from the sky, but the fact remains -- this little boy gets killed at the start of the movie. Heavy, and not in a good way.

What follows is a dreadfully formulaic story of the robot simulacrum getting cast out by its creator (and how mean is that, character voiced by Nicolas Cage?), then trying to find his way in the world in the hopes of eventually trying to win back the love of his "father." Along the way Astro Boy meets a handful of precocious kids (who are being looked after by a Fagin-like character, in the umpteenth Oliver Twist reference I've seen in a film recently), and crosses paths with a bunch of British-accented robots who belong to the RRF (Robot Revolutionary Front). Booo-ring. Didn't really want to be reminded of 2005's Robots while watching this, either. Another thing we tend to count on in animated movies, in addition to the visuals: that the script will be good. But the dialogue was almost totally without cleverness, the story irredeemably trite.

And the visuals themselves? Those have to be the saving grace, the trump-all, the real reason I decided to buy a ticket -- right?

Good but not great. A little washed out.

Maybe I'll wait for video on Planet 51.

A confluence of 9s

I'm trying to figure out if the reason there's so many movies with 9 or nine in the title this year is because it's 2009.

That seems too easy. But could it really just be a coincidence?

I saw Shane Acker's 9 on Tuesday, and it seems pretty clear that Focus Features embraced the year tie-in once they recognized it. After all, the film was released on 09-09-09. But there's no need for the chicken-or-the-egg debate to start, because Acker's film was based on an Oscar-nominated short, also called 9, which he made in 2005. Because 9 is the name of one of the characters, and the film also features characters named 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8, he could have actually changed the title with the times if that had really been his plan. But then the first movie would have been called 5, and that would have just been silly, because 5 is a relatively small character in the film.

Then there's another film this year called Nine, the latest from director Rob Marshall (Chicago), scheduled for release on November 25th. This too doesn't really seem to be specially timed for the current calendar year. In fact, this film has an extremely serpentine history that got it to this point. The original 1982 musical, with book by Arthur Kopit and lyrics by Maury Yeston, was actually based on an Italian play, and that play was inspired by a movie, Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2. Not only that, but in 2003, Nine: The Musical won a Tony for best revival, and featured the likes of Antonio Banderas and Jane Krakowski. The film features such heavyweights as Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman. In short, with all this behind it, you'd think that its 2009 release was simply felicitous, though it's hard to be sure.

And then of course there's District 9, likely to be the box office champion of all these. Ironically, like 9, District 9 is also based on a 2005 short film by its director, Neill Blomkamp, whose first film was not called District 9, but rather, Alive in Joburg. The film operates as a (not very subtle) metaphor for Apartheid, and the title itself references a real place in Cape Town, South Africa, called District Six, which was declared a "whites only" area in 1966. One would think that the actual choice of the number 9 was somewhat random -- the movie might have just as well been District 8 or District 11.

So, just a coincidence, I guess.

One thing I can tell you: 9 was a short-ass movie. Slightly longer than its forbear, to be sure, 9 still clocked in at a mere 79 minutes. (There's that number 9 again).

"How short was it?"

Well, it was so short, I had to go to the bathroom before it even started, but decided to just hold it. That's right, I'd filled my bladder up with a Coke on the drive up, then a beer at the theater bar (I met five other friends a half-hour beforehand, expressly for this purpose), and I still said "Ah, fuck it" when I walked in to the theater and the trailers were already playing. Instead of alleviating a known need to urinate, I decided that 79 minutes was short enough to hold it.

And not only did I hold it for those 79 minutes, but I didn't even end up going until 25 minutes after the movie ended, after driving back home.

Now that's a short movie.