Engineering the ultimate gender crossover

What one task is of utmost importance for studios who make movies for children?

If you answered "Create something that will appeal equally to boys and girls," give yourself a gold star.

We saw Disney openly struggle with this with Tangled, which they refused to name Rapunzel because they thought it was unlikely to woo little boys. (This being one of the only times a person can use the phrase "woo little boys" without feeling icky about it.)

The mentality continued, somewhat, by taking a movie about a punching bad guy brute from a video game (Wreck-It Ralph) and inserting the character into a game where all the colors are some shade of pink. Frozen slouched back toward what they were afraid of with Tangled, appealing more to girls than boys, but the results spoke for themselves. An unnecessary course correction came in last year's Big Hero 6, which wooed mostly only those little boys. (Don't you like how I talk about these movies as though they are conceived and delivered entirely since the most recent previous movie on Disney's release slate, rather than being massive ocean-liners whose course is almost impossible to correct.)

While doing boffo box office with their theatrical releases, though, Disney has also maintained a burgeoning straight-to-video business. And in early 2014 they released a movie that seemed designed to address any and all concerns about which gender would be more interested. Answer? Both.

It's The Pirate Fairy, as you likely surmised from the poster art above. The title contains one masculine word ("pirate"), one feminine word ("fairy") and one definite article ("the"). That's about as split down the middle as you can possibly get.

Too bad we couldn't have seen how it would have done theatrically.

Actually, The Pirate Fairy did have a theatrical release of sorts. It played in some theaters internationally, and played at the El Capitan Theater (but only that one theater) in Hollywood for three weeks in March. But despite boasting A-list vocal talent like Christina Hendricks, Tom Hiddleston, Mae Whitman and Lucy Liu, and looking like a shimmering example of state-of-the-art Disney animation, it was branded with the stigma of straight-to-video.

I know what little I know about The Pirate Fairy because my son borrowed it from the library last week, and watched it twice before he had to return it. Just stopping in the room in passing, I was so taken in by the quality of the images that I almost wanted to plop down on the couch and watch it with him. (My snooty disavowal of films released straight to video ultimately won out.)

My son is Exhibit A of the gender crossover working. I mean, I could take one look at this movie and say "This is a movie intended for girls." But all he saw were the pirates and pirate ships. (Plus, he doesn't yet consciously turn up his nose at things girls like.)

The funny thing is, despite how I've characterized this as some kind of cynical attempt on Disney's part to reach the most number of demographics possible, this movie has ancient origins. It's yet another product from Disney's expanded Peter Pan universe, which has also yielded the kids show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, one of my son's favorites. You could say Peter Pan was one of Disney's original gender crossovers, featuring both both flying sprites (Peter and Tinker Bell) and evil pirates (Captain Hook). In fact, The Pirate Fairy is the sixth in the straight-to-video Tinker Bell series of films, which in the past has included such girl-leaning titles as Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue and Secret of the Wings. Adding the word "pirate" to the title does grab the interest of boys like my son, but it actually adds nothing new to the Peter Pan universe.

Anyway.

One thing I thought was funny about it was that it put me in a position of having to try to explain the concept of a prequel to my son. The villain in The Pirate Fairy is Captain Hook, but it's when he's younger and still has both hands. I don't think my son got this when he was watching because, well, he doesn't look like Captain Hook.

But in a little interlude that gets dropped into the closing credits, you see Hook, vanquished, hanging on to a bobbing wooden barrel in the ocean. He's using a hook to help grapple with the spinning barrel (wink). He's saved when a ship pulls alongside, and over the side pops Smee, Hook's eventual sidekick, who hadn't previously appeared in the movie (according to my son).

Later, my son asked me, "Dad, what was Smee doing there in the ocean?" He clearly didn't get how this story was associated with the world of Peter Pan at all, it taking place some 10 or 20 years earlier.

I tried to explain it, but laughed at myself upon hearing myself say things like "The events of this story take place before the events of Peter Pan." Even if he understood the chronological sequencing I was trying to convey, which is doubtful, he probably wouldn't understand what I was talking about anyway because he has not actually seen Peter Pan. In fact, I'm not even sure if he knows who the character Peter Pan is. I should have told him that it takes place before Jake and the Never Land Pirates, but to be honest, I'm not even sure how that show fits into the larger narrative.

Maybe the thing to do is get our hands on a copy of Peter Pan, and try to start showing him how it all fits together.

That can be the test run that prepares us for the screwy chronology of the Star Wars movies, which we plan to show him next year or the year after.

Time travel conundrums for kids

As in any type of movie, certain themes in children's movies seem to show up regularly around the same time.

First it was movies where teams of zoo animals band together to go on great adventures (The Wild, Madagascar). Then it was movies about penguins (Happy Feet, Surf's Up). Then it was movies about competitive racing (Cars, Cars 2, Turbo). And I'm sure a dozen others thrown in there as well.

Now we seem to be living through an era where animated characters travel through time.

I watched Free Birds yesterday afternoon on Netflix while both my sons were sick, marking the second time in a month I've seen a movie about time travel aimed at children. The first was Mr. Peabody and Sherman back on Mother's Day. 

My younger son is only five months old, and was not even really watching the movie (though he was fussing so much that I admit to hoping all the pretty colors would hold his attention). Quite obviously, I don't expect him to understand what's going on in a movie like Free Birds. However, my older son will be four in August. I'd think he should be able to grapple with the basic concepts these movies present.

Time travel is not such an easy concept to understand -- and the conundrums that result from time travel even less so.

First I should probably answer the question I hear many of you out there asking right now, even if only silently in your heads: Free Birds is about time travel? That was something I didn't know either. But yes, it deals with a pair of turkeys who board a government-built time machine with the express intention of preventing turkey from being on the original Thanksgiving menu. And yes, the movie itself is a bit of a turkey. Sorry Free Birds, you just made that one too easy.

It was clear to me that my son had no idea what those turkeys were actually doing, just as he had no idea what the dog and his boy were doing in the far more competent Mr. Peabody and Sherman.

Both movies kind of make it seem like the characters travel through outer space to another place on Earth. Because there's no way that my nearly four-year-old looks at Ancient Egypt or the Italy of Leonardo da Vinci or a pilgrim settlement in 1621 Massachusetts and thinks of it as "the past."

It got me wondering when children even start to understand the concept of "the past," when they understand that there were people here hundreds and thousands of years before they were born. If even the concept of a year is a bit tricky, the concept of hundreds of years is far more so. Then try to explain that there's a machine you can use to travel back to times that have already happened ... well, noodle fried, I would say. Or, more likely, noodle simply disengaged. They just wouldn't get it.

Now throw in, as both movies do, two of the central tropes of time travel movies: 1) multiple incarnations of the same character appearing in the same place, and 2) a character effecting a change in the timeline by causing a chain of events for which he shouldn't have been present. If you can explain that to a four-year-old, you win a medal. Heck, if you can explain that to an eight-year-old, you win a medal.

I think the difficulty in determining how old a person has to be to grasp this stuff arises from the lack of a good corollary in my own childhood. They just didn't play around with time travel all that much when people my generation were young. Few movies at all dealt with the subject, and even fewer of those (probably none) were movies aimed at kids. Back to the Future was certainly the first time I was confronted with the conundrums of time travel, and I was 11 when I saw it. I didn't have any trouble understanding it at the time, and in fact, it blew my mind. My Keanu Reeves "Whoa" reaction is probably one of the reasons it still rests near the top of my all-time rankings (#2). 

Today, though, you could argue that popular entertainment is super-saturated with time travel. There might be as many as half a dozen movies a year in which characters travel through time. I'm wondering if the mere presence of this in the zeitgeist allows children to grasp it much sooner than they would have when I was young. You know, kind of like how children are born these days understanding how to use a smart phone.

What I can tell you for sure, though, is that my nearly four-year-old doesn't get it. He didn't ask me why there were two Mr. Peabodys and two Shermans on screen when were watching Mr. Peabody and Sherman, in part because he actually has a pretty good idea about theater etiquette for a kid his age. When four versions of the main turkey, Reggie, showed up in Free Birds, he just kind of looked at me and laughed. If I had been able to translate that laugh into words, those words would have been "That's silly." As in, "They're just breaking the rules and I have no idea why."

Of course, I can't make an argument about why movies aimed at my son should do a better job of presenting things he can understand without getting a bit introspective. The real crime here may be that we parents are trying to find cinematic babysitters for our children at younger and younger ages, and that these movies really aren't meant to be comprehended by a child who isn't even four. When I was my son's age, I had probably only just seen Star Wars, which was the first movie I ever saw. There simply wasn't a way for me to see every Pixar movie, ever Pixar knockoff and every knockoff of every Pixar knockoff at home on my very own TV.

Still ... time-traveling turkeys? Rips in the space-time continuum? Talking dogs running around Ancient Egypt?

Forgive me if I find myself longing for a princess, an evil queen and a bunch of singing dwarfs. 

Three-star animation

I've seen two objectively subpar animated movies in the past ten days - Alpha and Omega and Escape from Planet Earth - and given them both three stars on Letterboxd.

My son saw the Netflix ad for a third objectively subpar animated movie - Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil - pop up after Planet Earth, so he's in there watching it now. I'm in here, typing this, to prevent myself from giving the supposedly terrible Hoodwinked sequel three stars as well.

Something seems clear: I have a harder time recognizing mediocrity in an animated movie than elsewhere.

It's three out of five, not three out of four, but the fact remains that I am giving a passing grade to movies that should probably flunk the test of being worth my time.

I'm entirely too comfortable with rewarding an animated movie for being a "good try." I know that Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks represent really daunting standards to live up to, both in quality of writing and quality of animation, so I'm acknowledging the handicaps that other movies start out with. But that doesn't mean that all other movies deserve the star rating that translates as a modest recommendation.

There are a handful of reasons I think I'm as easy as I am on these movies:

1) The animation, especially these days, is good enough to contain some "wow" moments. Plus, I know how hard they worked on every little detail. Most animated movies are a labor of somebody's love. It's much easier to mail in a live action film.

2) Animated movies tend to get top-flight vocal talent, mostly because it's an easy paycheck and does not carry any particular stigma. Studios will be glad to learn that their money is well spent, as I do tend to be impressed by the fact that William Shatner (who, let's be honest, will do anything these days) voices the villain in Planet Earth.

3) Animated movies are usually smart enough (i.e. safe enough) to stick to conventional plotting with familiar character types. With the amount of money invested in the polished final product, it does not pay to take risks on the story, nor is it possible to slide any remotely objectionable content through.

Vanilla, though, should not be worth three stars. It should max out at 2.5, even if it's pretty well-made vanilla.

However, as I've written before (though never specifically about animated films), I feel like giving something 2.5 or less means it's a thumbs down, an entirely too grumpy dismissal of a movie that's okay to pretty good.

In fact, the last animated movie I remember really slamming was one that did take an apparent risk with its plot -- an impulse I probably should have rewarded, except I thought it was just too wrong-headed of a narrative choice. That movie was Brave, which offered us some cockamamie plot about people turning into bears. I gave it 2.5 stars, but these days tend to think of it as a two-star movie.

So am I saying I like the generic underdog hero story and panoply of colorful sidekicks better in Alpha and Omega, Escape From Planet Earth and (let's throw in one more I saw earlier this year that fits the description) Planet 51? Are they better just because they don't make any egregious errors? Are they better just because the plot was deemed safe enough by every interested financial backer?

I'm a slow learner, apparently, because this is not the first time I've tried to get tougher with my star ratings. It's not even the first time this year. You may recall that back in April, I wrote this post after seeing Trance, frustrated by the instinct that made me want to award it three stars. And I still haven't figured out how to award lower when movies deserve it -- at least not consistently, and especially not with animation.

Maybe this time, I'll do as I write. "It didn't offend me" should no longer be the standard for what gets three stars.

The generosity ends ... now. Again. 

Cartoon characters seeking trophies

I couldn't help but notice a thematic similarity between the two animated movies I watched this past weekend, Disney's Wreck-It Ralph and Aardman's The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

The following analysis contains some spoilers, so if you haven't seen these movies, you may choose to abstain from this post. 

Both movies feature a protagonist who is "bad," whether he likes it or not -- the villain in a classic video game and a pirate captain. The video game villain actually wants to be perceived as less bad, while the pirate captain wishes people would see him as more vicious than he really is. In each case they are driven toward a talisman that they believe will validate them in the eyes of their peers. Wreck-It Ralph just wants to win a medal, any medal, while the Pirate Captain (that is his only given name) has his sights set on the prestigious Pirate of the Year Award.

Earning these trophies, they believe, will help them get out of the shadow of a rival. Ralph is naturally jealous of Fix-It Felix, the hero and namesake of the game, who is bestowed a medal as part of game play, while Ralph (quite diametrically opposite) must go sleep in a pile of trash at the end of the day. The Pirate Captain, on the other hand, has been trying to surpass the exploits of several rival pirate captains, most notably one so fierce and grandiose that he makes his entrance by emerging from the belly of a whale, whose every move he apparently controls.

Determined to reverse the natural order of things, each protagonist embarks on a quixotic quest into unfamiliar territory -- Ralph into the first-person shooter game Hero's Duty, and the Pirate Captain into 19th century London, where Queen Victoria is known for her zero tolerance policy toward pirates. In both cases the hero threatens the existence of his status quo by going after this elusive trophy. Ralph's departure from Fix-It Felix gets the game slapped with an Out of Order sign, which is the natural precursor to it being unplugged for good. And the Pirate Captain is exposing his whole crew to being lynched at the hands of the bloodthirsty queen.

When each hero does get his hands on the trophy, it necessitates a betrayal of a trusted sidekick. Ralph, after getting and then losing his medal, is in the position to get it back, but his new friend Vanellope thinks it's at the cost of selling her out. (It's more complicated than that, but Ralph does feel some guilt over the arrangement.) Meanwhile, the Pirate Captain is bribed by the queen with the kind of booty that will surely win him Pirate of the Year, but he has to relinquish his beloved "parrot" Polly, actually revealed to be a dodo.

Realizing his culpability in what has transpired and the fact that there were unintended consequences to his actions, both Ralph and the Pirate Captain lead daring third-act rescues that will assert once and for all their true capacity for good, while risking everything they have. And since I don't need to also spoil the end of these movies, I will leave off this comparison there.

I guess good story structure isn't that different the world over, but it's still good -- I really liked both films.

Wreck-It Ralph is the best animated movie I've seen since Tangled, pure and simple. I guess it's not such a coincidence that these are both Disney ventures under the watchful eye of Pixar founder John Lasseter. Lasseter simply knows a good story and knows how to tell it. I place this slightly below Tangled in terms of the immediate sense of joy it created in me, but only slightly. Wreck-It Ralph is an unqualified home run.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is not by any means at that level, but it's miles ahead of the previous foray into CG from Aardman Animation that I saw: the terrible Flushed Away. I still prefer when Aardman uses claymation, but I also understand this is an extremely laborious approach to animation, and the animators managed to make the images feel more tactile here than they felt in Flushed Away. Plus, the details of the pirate world are wonderful, the script is smart, and the movie has a couple classic Aardman chase scenes.

Now, off to vanquish several rival bloggers in my impossible quest for Blogger of the Year.

Excess animation discrimination

Almost exactly three years ago I wrote a post called "Animation indiscrimination," in which I decried my lack of selectivity when choosing animated movies to see in the theater. I was operating under the general principle of "if it's animated it must be good," and one particular viewing really showed me the limitations of that perspective.

Well, watching the dismal Astro Boy must have really had a profound impact on me, because since then I've gone in the opposite direction.

In the three years since Astro Boy, I've seen exactly eight animated movies in the theater. That's less than three per year. For the record, they were Disney's A Christmas Carol, The Princess and the Frog, How to Train Your Dragon, Toy Story 3, Tangled, Rango, The Adventures of Tin Tin and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. I've seen a couple others on DVD as well.

My general antipathy toward watching animated movies has even led me to shun both of the last two Pixar releases upon their theatrical releases. Granted, Brave and especially Cars 2 do not purport to find Pixar at its finest, but still.

To be sure, this trend is not just an overreaction to my assumption that all movies with state-of-the-art animation must be good. Part of it has been conscious, and has related directly to an event in August 2010: the birth of my son. Since he's been on the scene, I've thought it might be wise to stockpile movies he'd want to watch with me in a couple years. The fewer of these I'd already seen, the more I'd enjoy it when I eventually watch them with him. And if he loved them, it would mean one fewer of many viewings I might ultimately have to endure.

But I also think there come moments in people's lives when they undergo a transition. One day you like something; the next day you've grown out of it. And as I've pondered before on this blog, this transition may have been happening to me over the past couple years. Though there have been features that have reminded me what it felt like to discover animation for the first time (Tangled), there have been more movies that have struck me as only so-so (Rango, How to Train Your Dragon) or just as dismal as Astro Boy (The Lorax).

Of course, when confronted with realizations like this, most people want to blame external forces rather than themselves. And I think there's some validity to that. As with the rest of the film industry, the last couple years have seen the rise of sequels as the current standard bearers for animation. At times I just feel like I'm being stampeded by Shreks, Madagascars and Ice Ages. I react not only by getting out of the way, but becoming depressed about the state of things today. The surest sign of getting old is when you find yourself repeating "They don't make 'em like they used to."

All of this is an excessively long preamble to tell you that I am hoping to see my first animated movie in the theater since The Lorax when Wreck-It-Ralph comes out today. Ralph has just enough of a combination of originality and promise to seem like a good bet to break my current animation losing streak. Which probably dates back almost a full two years, to when I saw Tangled in November of 2010.

In fact, if it were anything shorter than 120 minutes, I might even see it this afternoon, when I get off work at 2:30 but don't have to pick up my son until 5:30.

In fact, I'm really disappointed that it is two hours long, because this is one where I need to strike while the iron is hot. I'm concerned that if I don't, it will fade among my priorities as we get deeper into November, and the year's prestige pictures start asserting their own claim to my attentions. And as much as this post finds me resolving to see Wreck-It-Ralph in the theater, I have to admit that the footage I've seen is not quite as unambiguously awesome as I hoped it would be. I'm not the viewer I was three years ago. Whereas then, I embraced any excuse to see an animated movie in the theater, now I embrace any excuse not to. The possibly slightly-less-than-awesome quality of Wreck-It-Ralph could easily sap my resolve.

But here's hoping it doesn't. I have enough reminders these days that I'm an adult. When the kid inside does want to come out to play, I want to let him.

Spawning the next generation of horror fans

I have a friend with an eight-year-old son who's been into ghoulies and goblins over half his young life.

You name it, he loves it. Ghosts. Skeletons. Witches. Jack-o-lanterns. Eyeballs. Fake blood. Even severed body parts don't faze him, though they would have to be the kind that looked pretty fake.

I'm sure that at least some of this has to do with having watched The Nightmare Before Christmas at a young age, and then seeing Jack Skellington and friends at Disneyland. But the joke was that he would start preparing for Halloween sometime in May. The best part of the joke was that it wasn't really a joke. He does start preparing in May -- or at least he used to. He'd probably start even earlier, except there has to be some amount of preparation that just qualifies as ridiculous -- even if our definition of what constitutes ridiculous might be different than his.

My friend's son is not alone. It seems that one of the chief ways for a young kid to assert his budding adulthood is to test his limits when it comes to fear. Even if this stuff is not all that scary, and the horror characters are pretty PG version of what they represent in reality, it still says something that young kids prefer things intended to scare them than things intended to be cute or make them laugh.

Naturally, the movies have taken notice.

Hotel Transylvania, opening today, is the middle of three high-profile animated movies released in a span of less than two months that seek to feed the macabre to children. Last month we got ParaNorman. Next month we'll get Frankenweenie.

Each of these movies actually appeals to me in some way, though it's unlikely I'll see any of them in the theater. At least they aren't just another movie featuring animals who team up for crazy adventures.

As discussed previously, the "fear" peddled here is very mild. My guess is that most of the characters in these films are comic relief, and their voices will be goofy if not actually cute.

Of course, this trend is nothing new -- it's just thrusting itself into the forefront of my consciousness because of the timing of these three movies. I'm not even sure there will be another movie aimed at children released during their two-month reign (unless you count Oogieloves. And really, do you?). Which means that if parents wanted to take their kids to the movies between early August and early October, they needed to test their children's tastes for this PG horror -- if their kids weren't already begging them to go, that is.

But like I said, it's nothing new. Allmovie.com has a very useful feature on each of its movie pages, which is to list similar movies -- a godsend when writing a post like this. The similar movies for ParaNorman include Coraline, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (the word corpse in the title of an animated movie?), Igor, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9, James and the Giant Peach, Monster House, Beetlejuice, Alice in Wonderland, and of course The Nightmare Before Christmas, among others that don't advance my thesis in any useful way. Oh, and of course Hotel Transylvania and Frankenweenie. For Frankenweenie's page, you can add to those titles Edward Scissorhands (not really a kids movie), Where the Wild Things Are and some other rather inexplicable choices, including Midnight in Paris and When in Rome. (Hey, I never said the algorithm was perfect.) Transylvania's page also offers us Monsters Inc. (that should have come up earlier), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Addams Family.

So, "scaring" kids has been a big business for years.

In fact, you could argue that a film in which there isn't some kind of intense antagonist is dramatically limp. Think of how far Disney has gone portraying its variety of witches and wicked queens over the years. It would be easy to say that some of those baddies are more intense than they really need to be. But clearly, having something that's genuinely at least a little scary raises the stakes for kids.

Since Hotel Transylvania stars the voice of Adam Sandler, I'm going to say there's a ceiling on how scary it will actually be. However, I'd bet you a hundred bucks there will be at least one character who can remove some or all of his limbs, and possibly even his head.

As long as it doesn't look realistic, I guess.

Pulling back the curtain

Most makers of magic aren't exactly eager to show you how it's done.

Actual magicians are sworn by an industry oath not to reveal their secrets, for the very practical reason that they'd be unemployable without knowing something their audience doesn't. But metaphorical magicians -- like the ones who make movies -- are often bound by a similar code to preserve the mystery of their illusions. Knowing the methods to the madness can detract significantly from its magic spell. Just ask the erstwhile wizard of Oz -- the man behind the curtain you're not supposed to pay attention to while quaking in fear at the large green head enveloped in smoke.

Disney showed no such reservation with Mars Needs Moms.

I didn't enjoy the movie hugely -- more than a marginal thumbs up, but not a lot more. Its dark color palette (which goes with the movie's themes, granted) made it play as sort of muddy and indistinct, and the story didn't feel incredibly original. There were parts I really liked but no parts I loved.

Until the end credits, when I kind of loved their decision to pull back the curtain, and watch snippets of major scenes a second time -- this time performed by actors decked out in motion-capture gear.

Producer Robert Zemeckis' name in the credits should have made me realize this was a motion-capture situation, like previous efforts where he wore the director's hat, such as The Polar Express, Beowulf and Disney's A Christmas Carol. Actually, his name didn't show up until the end credits, and the fact that I didn't immediately identify this as that same phenomenon is probably a tribute to how they're starting to do it better.

So yeah, during the end credits you get all the actors dressed up in suits, their faces speckled with small motion capture diodes -- not sure what the actual term is, but they resemble the world's shortest acupuncture needles. It was surprising to see the filmmakers care so little about "shattering" the illusion they'd just created by giving the layman such a technical introduction to the techniques used. They really risked killing the buzz of everyone who had just liked or even loved the movie. (And maybe they did -- the movie was not a hit.)

But I for one enjoyed seeing this stuff. For me, it made the interactions between characters more authentic to know that the actors were actually doing these things, leaping around a sound stage, acting not only with their voices but their entire bodies.

It was also amazing to see just how far the filmmakers went -- how much they committed. (For the record, I love "commitment" in all its forms when it comes to performance). You'd assume they could have digitally concocted a crowd dance seen at the end of the movie, and we wouldn't have been scrutinizing their motions to see if they looked believable. Yet pulling back the curtain revealed that this scene took a sound stage filled with extras, all covered with motion-capture technology, all dancing the same dance.

The next technical secret I want revealed: How 37-year-old Seth Green can convincingly do the voice for the film's lead character, a 9-year-old boy.

Notice I didn't ask how he convincingly did the height of a 9-year-old boy.

In an interesting coincidence, I ended up re-watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life later that same day. While these movies, on the surface, have nothing in common with each other, they do share one thing -- they are both animated films based on the movements of real people, giving them a certain "realistic" expressiveness that would be absent if they were merely being concocted from an artist's imagination of what a person looks like.

Whereas Zemeckis' thing is motion capture, Linklater's thing is rotoscoping. He's now done it at least twice, in Waking Life and in A Scanner Darkly. In this technique, real footage of real human beings is shot in real locations, and then it is painted over in ways that may or may not be realistic. See, the rotoscoper has the real footage as a starting point, then it is up to him/her to choose how much of that real footage to trace over with his/her paint brush. The technique gives the artist the freedom to remain grounded in believable human movements, then add expressionistic flourishes when necessary -- as in a scene in Waking Life in which a man slowly turns into an alien as he's proceeding through a monologue.

What both motion capture and rotoscoping have that traditional animation does not is a claim to a certain realism -- if not necessarily in the surface-level presentation, at least in areas like the believably jerky body movements of a real human being. The human body is such a complex, intricate organism that we still need these crutches to effectively render it. The human mind is incapable of reproducing the eccentricities of the human body without assistance.

Really glad, then, that we have this technology that serves as our crutch -- and also glad movies like Mars Needs Moms have the guts to show it to us.

By "removing" the magic, they're actually reminding us of a different kind of magic.

Subtract two dimensions

I am a big Hoodwinked supporter. I'd even go so far as to say I have a special place in my heart for it. My wife and I saw it together when we were still only dating, and we thought it was cute. Plus, I remember it a bit better than some other movies we saw because it was the only movie we ever saw together in Glendale. (For those of you outside Southern California, there's nothing special about Glendale. I just remember it because it's the only movie we ever saw there.)

In fact, for awhile, I held up Hoodwinked as some kind of example of how you didn't need Disney's or Dreamworks' millions to make a good animated movie. All you needed was a good script, and animation passable enough not to stand out. Hoodwinked had a pretty easy time meeting the former standard, and just barely met the latter.

If the animation was what kept it seeming kind of scruffy back in 2006, you'd figure that would be the easiest way to step forward if the movie is a hit and you make a sequel. I don't know that Hoodwinked was a hit hit, but it was close enough that they thought there would be money in a sequel.

Were they confident enough to put more money into the animation?

Not quite.

In fact, not only is it not a step forward from the original, it may actually be a step backward. The quality of animation you'd see on a movie released straight to DVD.

Perhaps the third dimension will make it better.

That's right, like everything else, Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (ugh, don't get me started on that title) is coming out in 3D. If it's changing a dimension from 2D, though, it looks better suited to going down one than up one.

Really, doesn't it look terrible? It's like you can see the program they used to make it on their home computers. "Move Character A through Environment B." I mean, that is what they do a lot of the time -- they create a character and then they animate his or her movements against different backgrounds. But it's supposed to seem seamless -- it's not supposed to look like one computerized image moving in its own plane, against another plane that contains the background. Except that is exactly what it looks like.

I mean, just look at that poster. Even the fonts are low-rent.

I hate to poop on Kanbar Entertainment. I mean, they're the consummate little guy trying to play the same game as the consummate big guys.

But it's kind of strange to get a taste of success, and then botch the follow-through. Even with another good script, the animation in this movie looks like it could alienate today's viewers. What earned an A for effort back in 2006 has seen the passage of five years without a significant upgrade. If they'd been able to make Hoodwinked Too the same amount worse than the 2011 industry leaders as Hoodwinked was worse than the 2006 industry leaders, that would be one thing. But a pale, clunky version of 2006 animation in 2011? I don't think it's going to fly.

Which is a shame, because I really have confidence in Cory and Todd Edwards, the brother who are basically the heart and soul of Kanbar. They wrote the script for Hoodwinked, but they also directed it and even provided some character voices. They are DIY at its best, and they wrote a clever movie. They've probably written a clever movie this time, too.

But 2011 kids are already a lot more advanced than 2006 kids. Will they go for the Kanbar animation when they can get better-looking animation in their ipad apps?

We'll see starting tomorrow.

Teaching kids to say the f-word

Is it just me, or are animated films involved in some kind of conspiracy to insinuate, use replacements for, and in all other ways put the word "fuck" into kids' minds?

This occurred to me as I was waiting for Rango to start on Saturday afternoon, when two straight trailers alluded to the word "fuck" without actually saying it.

First it was the newest trailer for Rio -- which, darn it, I can't find online -- in which the bird played by George Lopez says "Yippee Ki Yay [something something]." (See, that's why I needed to find the trailer.) Suffice it to say that he says a four-syllable phrase beginning with "M." That is, of course, an allusion to Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis famously says "Yippee Ki Yay, Motherfucker!"

The second was the newest trailer for Kung Fu Panda 2, in which the word "freakin'" makes several appearances. The word "freakin'" or "freaking" would not exist at all if it weren't being used as a non-vulgar substitute for "fucking."

You might say this isn't much evidence. In the first instance, you have to have actually seen Die Hard to get that the word "fuck" is being referenced. In the second, if you haven't heard the word "fucking" before, you have no idea that "freaking" is a cleaner synonym.

But we parents ... we get both of them, don't we? And it does make a person wonder.

And then, when Rango started, the allusions to swear words came fast and furious. I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I learned that these were the swear words: hell, damn, bitch, shit, ass and fuck. Yeah, there are words that are worse than all of these, that aren't technically swears, and at least half of these curse words can freely be said on television ("shit" and "fuck" being the only definite exceptions, and you can even say "shit" on basic cable now). But I think we can generally agree that none of them have a real place in a children's movie, right?

Well, I counted at least three instances of one of these words, either said or alluded to. When the hawk attacks Rango and that other lizard in the desert, and ends up grabbing the other lizard and flying off, you hear the other lizard curse Rango's name as he disappears into the sky: "You son of a biiiiiii ..." He doesn't get the whole word out, so it's okay. Then later on, the word "hell" is spoken at least twice. The first of which is really chilling, and may be the single clearest indication that this movie is not appropriate for young kids. The villain Rattlesnake Jake makes the following threat: "I'll send your soul straight to hell!" Yeah, I bet some kids were asking their parents about that one. Then the heroine, a lizard named Beans, tells Jake later on to "go to hell." Relatively tame by comparison.

I'm no prude -- not in the least. (If I were, would I have written out the word "fuck" eight times in this post already? Make that nine.) I just like to point out apparent hypocrisies when I see them. Here you have three children's movies that are, I'm sure, being embraced by conservative parents' groups everywhere, and each is doing its damnnedest (pun intended) to give their children a potty mouth.

But maybe it's much simpler than I'm making it out to be. Maybe those groups talk the talk about keeping young minds in pristine condition, but they don't really want to walk the walk. Maybe they really want their kids to learn these words.

Think about it. How much easier would it be if children could learn the bad language they're eventually going to learn, now, and just get it out of the way?

Parents would no longer have to worry about what their kids are watching on TV. They'd no longer have to wonder if the music their kids listen to contains explicit lyrics. Most importantly, they'd no longer have to worry about the words coming out of their own mouths. I think it's safe to say that a lot of us like dropping an f-bomb now and again, regardless of whether we're churchgoing folk, new-age liberals, or somewhere in between. If the kids knew those words already, it would let us all off the hook.

I'm obviously being a little bit disingenuous when I say this. It's straight-up bad parenting to not care what your kids watch or listen to, because it's not the word itself that is usually the problem, but an undercurrent of violence the word may suggest, in the context it is being used. We probably observe a difference between the way "fuck" comes out of our own mouths and the way it comes out of the mouths of gangsta rappers. At least when it's us saying it, we can control the context.

Still, I think it's interesting to note the way animated films are pushing their own standards of decency, just as the other parts of the entertainment world are doing the same. In the interest of making the movie seem like it speaks to adults -- and Rango may actually speak to adults more than it does to kids -- the writers want to give the movie some clear-cut adult content, or at least content that adults recognize is intended for them. The surest way to do that is something like the "Yippee Ki Yay" line in Rio, which will be entirely over the heads of children, but work as a wink to their parents. At some level it is simply a calculated attempt to get a higher box office. The best path to a good box office is when you can also get people to go without their kids -- like I did on Saturday.

I guess it's probably a freakin' good idea.

Faith restored

Editor's note: Darn it, I thought of a much better title for yesterday's post: "What a Rapunzeled web we weave." That would have been funny.

I must say, I've lost my way with animated movies in recent years.

For a couple years now, I've been involved in a crisis of faith about whether animated movies still do anything for me. And because the target audience for these movies is children, it's been difficult for me to decide whether it's the child inside me that's dying, or if the movies are just not as good as they used to be.

This is not to say that no animated movies touch my heart or my sense of awesomeness anymore. Instead, it's that they don't touch my heart/awesomeness as much as I feel they should, or as much as they touch other people. Even when ranking the two animated movies I had seen previously this year -- Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon, which both received extensive critical praise -- I felt like I was artificially inflating them because of how much I was supposed to like them, not how much I actually liked them. To be sure, Toy Story 3 is a great film, but I didn't consider it in the same category as Toy Story and Toy Story 2. This seemed to support the idea that it's me that's gotten more jaded, since the movie is not recognizably inferior in any way, shape or form, and may have even touched some viewers like the other two did not. As for How to Train Your Dragon -- well, terrific visuals, but a pretty stale story if you ask me.

Enter Tangled.

I wouldn't usually write about the same movie two days in a row on my blog, but after seeing Tangled, I knew I needed to go about correcting any misconceptions I may have promoted, as soon as humanly possible. I even considered doing something I've never done on this blog -- writing two posts in one day.

That's how I felt after leaving the theater yesterday.

Quite simply, Tangled was one of the best animated movies I've ever seen. "Ever." That's a strong word, but it applies here.

My thoughts are not formed enough to give you a proper review. It's still swimming around in my head as a dizzy soup of images and moments. But let's just say this: It literally has something for everyone. Want a movie about princesses? You got it. Want a movie about a rakish thief? You got that too. Want terrific non-human characters as sidekicks? Pascal the chameleon and Maximus the horse are two of the most fun Disney has ever produced. Want tender moments? You've got them. Want hilarious comedy? There was one line in the middle that left me laughing for 15 seconds, and then a couple bursts of laughter in the ensuing minutes just replaying the line in my head. Want dazzling visuals like none you've ever seen before, with the kind of detail, depth and imagination befitting of a fairytale? Step right this way.

Tangled is so good that it might be better than all but the top few Pixar movies. It's so good that it might be better than all but the top few fairytale movies, including live action and animation. And it's also one of the most vivid 3D experiences I've ever had in the theater.

I don't want to overhype Tangled. But sometimes, excess hype is necessary if you want to overcome someone's doubts. And I think there will be a lot of doubts out there about Tangled. There will be a lot of people who think as I did in yesterday's post, who deride Disney for lacking the courage of its convictions in choosing the title for this film. Well, if the title Tangled gets one more person in the theater than the title Rapunzel would have, it's worth it, because that's one more person who will discover this spectacular romantic adventure.

But the biggest thrill I got from Tangled was that it transported me like an animated movie hasn't done in years. It whisked me away into that world and reminded me that I do have a kid still inside of me. It just takes the right story and script and vision to come and wake him up.

Tangled is the right everything, and it's one of the best movies of the year. On Thanksgiving, I want to give thanks to Disney for getting it just right, and reminding me of the endless possibilities of theatrical animation.

The stink of kiddie

In an age where almost all animated movies are appropriate for five-year-olds, do we really still need to make animated movies that are targeted at three-year-olds?

I may be wrong, but to me, Alpha and Omega (releasing tomorrow) has the stink of kiddie on it.

You've had the experience before. You pop in an animated movie, thinking it's one of the majority of theatrically released animated movies that are filled with pop culture references and winks to their adult viewers. These may not be clever references or winks, but at least you feel like part of the target audience. Then, anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes into the movie, you realize it's just supposed to be a bunch of bright colors and shapes that will please babies.

Last time this happened to me was last year with Battle for Terra, which featured a very simplistic version of the already simplistic Avatar story (before Avatar was released) in a way that instantly struck me as developed for human beings who were teething.

Back in the day, it used to be easy to tell what kind of animated movie you were getting just from the quality of the animation. When another Winnie the Pooh movie hit theaters, you could be 100% certain it had nothing to offer you, if only because the animation was the furthest thing from cutting edge you could imagine. Now, however, the technology exists to make reasonably credible visuals without giving away your meager means. You can still tell if you look closely, but the average viewer is easily fooled.

So how are you supposed to avoid watching a kiddie movie -- that is, assuming you're not carrying around a little one in a Baby Bjorn?

To assist you in this scenario are Vancetastic's Five Indicators Your Movie is Meant for Toddlers:

1) The characters are all voiced by actors under the age of 12, rather than comic actors who appear in Judd Apatow movies;

2) The trailer is narrated unironically by that guy who did voiceover for that toy commercial you accidentally saw once while channel surfing;

3) Any humor in the trailer has to do with the male character falling on his butt while meeting cute with the female character, or inoffensive bathroom humor;

4) The trailer music is cheesy "adventure music," and the movie is usually about a cheesy adventure of some sort;

5) The animation is at least 20% less sophisticated than Pixar.

Maybe they should also come up with a new rating that's less than G, that says, "Don't watch this unless at least one person in your family cannot form complete sentences."

To be fair, Alpha and Omega already violates at least one of these rules. None of Dennis Hopper, Justin Long, Hayden Pannettiere, Danny Glover or Christina Ricci are under 12, and only Long, Pannettiere and Ricci can play under 12. But you get the idea.

I watched the trailer for Alpha and Omega again just now, and I realize I'm being a bit unfair to it. The animation may only be 15% less sophisticated than Pixar, and it's really working at more of a 7-year-old reading level than a 3-year-old reading level.

But I guess the point in any exaggeration is to illustrate something true, and in this situation, the true thing I'm trying to illustrate is that the most successful animated movies of recent years have made themselves into increasingly sophisticated entities, leaving a huge gulf between them and the ones that are not quite so advanced. Whereas something like Bambi was as much sophistication as anyone needed back in 1942, today, Bambi would be considered highly square, even by pretty young tots. Today, the animated movies kids want to see are the Despicable Mes and the Megaminds, where an evil genius has mastery of high-tech computer equipment. Movies where animals prance through the forest -- like Bambi, and like Alpha and Omega -- are therefore ghettoized as something best suited to show fetuses who are still in their mothers' wombs.

Well, good luck, Alpha and Omega. May you exceed your kiddie stigma at the box office.

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.

Ranking Pixar

What's wrong with me?

What's wrong with my inner child?

When I left the theater after Up last night, I felt ... well, not underwhelmed, but let's just say, less whelmed than I wanted to be. And this is the third straight Pixar film I've left feeling that way: generally impressed with its storytelling, certainly impressed with its animation, and recognizing I'd seen a quality film, but without that sense of wonder a Pixar film is supposed to instill in me. Which Pixar films used to instill in me without fail.

For most people, the triumvirate of Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up represents Pixar at its absolute finest, which is why my current Pixar funk is all the more troubling. I don't usually mind being out of synch with popular opinion, but it does make me wonder why I'm out of synch -- are they wrong, or am I? Am I just getting older? Does it take transcendence across the board to really transport me?

Like I said, it's not that these aren't very good movies, movies worth praising sturdily. But the breathless rhapsodizing about these three films has been out of scale with what I believe they deserve. It's as though a certain segment of the filmgoing population has decided that Pixar is a lifeboat in a sea of animation mediocrity, and therefore, everything that Pixar produces must be heaped with adulation in order to demonstrate the distance between Pixar and its competitors. Well, I'm going to deliver my first (second? third?) of many controversial statements in this post -- I actually liked Dreamworks' middlingly reviewed Monsters vs. Aliens better than Up. (Even if, on some levels, Monsters vs. Aliens probably rips off Pixar's Monsters Inc.) There, cast me out, and never trust my opinion again.

The problem with Pixar is that its films are all basically excellent. This sets the bar way too high, and makes some films suffer when compared to each other, or when compared to the expectations you have for them. I admit it's very possible I liked Monsters vs. Aliens more than Up because I was not really expecting to love Monsters vs. Aliens, but was expecting to love Up. When the former exceeded expectations and the latter came up short, it blurred the strengths of these movies relative to each other, in my mind at least. (Another factor: I found the 3-D extraordinarily vivid in Monsters vs. Aliens, and somewhat subdued in Up).

Then again, why be apologetic about it? The essence of being a movie fan -- any kind of movie fan -- is that you like what you like, and you don't what you don't. Trying to "pretend" you like something more than you do only does yourself a disservice.

So I thought the tenth release by Pixar was the perfect opportunity to post my first list in a long time -- my personal rankings of Pixar films from 1 to 10. I know you don't usually comment, but if you're reading this and you care about this topic, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments section. Plus your own rankings, though I don't expect you do to go into the same detail I do.

Without further ado ...

1. Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter). The most amazing thing to me about Pixar is that it arrived on the scene as a fully developed entity, totally sophisticated in the animation department and the story department right out of the gates. Pixar's first film will probably always be my favorite -- I can't think of another time when I felt such awe sitting in a movie theater. So much so that I saw Toy Story again ... the very next day. Not only is the concept delicious -- what do your toys do when you're not looking? -- but the characters are wonderfully rendered, with Woody's insecure sarcasm and jealousy providing the perfect counterpoint to Buzz's obliviously optimistic machismo. Sure, the human characters looked a little clunky, but who cares? The moment I saw those little green army men come to life, I knew I'd never seen anything like this, and probably wouldn't again.

2. Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Until four years later, that is, when Toy Story 2 nearly did the impossible: outshine Toy Story. Over time I've decided that the original is the superior effort, but the margin is razor thin. The old characters are back, some good new ones are added, and the adventure of saving Woody from an evil toy collector is almost as good as saving Buzz from a sadistic neighborhood brat. Plus the video game opening is just awesome.

3. Finding Nemo (2003, Andrew Stanton). Pixar's best non-Toy Story movie is another epic quest, this time a neurotic clown fish trying to find his sole surviving offspring in a vast ocean full of diverse creatures. What I love so much about this film is that two sets of characters and two parallel stories -- Nemo also must figure out how to escape from domesticated life in a fish tank -- are carried off with equal panache and poignancy. Plus, Ellen Degeneres' performance as the absent-minded Dory is absolutely wonderful -- I say this as a person who's not particularly an Ellen fan.

4. Cars (2006, Joe Ranft). This will undoubtedly be my most controversial ranking on the list, but see my previous comment about surpassing expectations. Cars looked like Pixar's dreaded slumming into total Saturday morning cartoon baby-ishness, its "screw you" to Disney as the final film in the initial agreement between the two companies. But it ended up having huge amounts of soul and cleverness, at least in my humble opinion, and the colors really pop off the screen. The desert looks great, and I loved the affection for cars and for the American southwest on display here. And even though the cars have googly eyes, it doesn't come across as stupid. A pleasant surprise that shot it all the way up to #4. Let the disagreements begin.

5. Monsters, Inc. (2001, Pete Docter). The world of monsters was another wonderful way for Pixar to flex its imaginaton and animation capabilities, and Billy Crystal and John Goodman are terrific as the lead scare-mongers who are anything but ferocious. I loved the giant (albeit Men in Black-style) headquarters where they worked, and I remember being really tickled by the kid who voiced the baby, known as Boo. There are some slow patches here, but this is a winner.

6. The Incredibles (2004, Brad Bird). The Incredibles is much beloved -- even by me in a sense, as I ranked it #9 out of 59 movie I saw that year. But compared to some other Pixar films, I think it comes up short in the story department. Love the idea, love the character design, love the world it creates, love a bunch of things about this film -- but I don't love the script. I didn't think it was the best idea for what to do with the characters, and I think the narrative suffered as a result.

7. Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton). What I like about Wall-E is what I think most people like about it -- it is the most different from other Pixar films. I'm not suggesting Pixar needed to vary from its winning formula, or that it even really has a formula. Just that it was incredibly bold to set a "children's movie" on a dystopian post-apocalyptic Earth where all humans have evacuated, and those of the species who still survive are blobs flying through the universe on the spaceship version of a cruiesliner. But it doesn't mean that this film didn't leave me feeling a little cold and lonely. I was bombarded by other people's affection for it, but I just couldn't bring myself to their level. I liked the love story but didn't love the love story.

8. Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird). My my. Paris looks absolutely wonderful, and the animation is as lovingly detailed as in any Pixar film. However, I must say, I thought the plot meandered, and the result was an over-long movie. I like the message of finding your creative bliss, and there were a lot of things about this movie that really impressed me, but in the end, I left the theater with my socks firmly on.

9. Up (2009, Pete Docter). I don't want to say too much about Up because many of my readers won't have seen it yet. I will say that I had a bad hour leading up to showtime, so it's possible that colored my impression of it. And I also felt myself clawing at the 3-D glasses a bit, so there's that. And since I only saw it 24 hours ago, it might end up deserving to be higher on this list. But let's just say that outside of a couple terrific passages -- the opening marriage montage is classic Pixar -- this is a weird movie full of curious decisons, some of which are downright head-scratching. There's something very abstract, even European, about the idea of a house carried away by balloons. Up needed more of that vibe.

10. A Bug's Life (1998, John Lasseter). And here's where there's a real drop-off. I agonized over some of the other decisions on this list, but not this one. Pixar may not have known that it would eventually be able to create one brilliant film per calendar year, but it still seems strange that this was the best the three years after Toy Story could produce. I don't give A Bug's Life an actual thumbs down, but I do have to think about it for a moment. Certainly there's some good stuff in it, but the story is boring, the character design is lacking (the ants are blue?!), and it's just not very memorable. For me it also suffers in comparison to Dreamworks' Antz, which came out the same year and was a more satisfying realization of the concept, though I know I'm in the minority on that one.

As I just performed this exercise, it was difficult, because Pixar is so good that it feels uncharitable to call any of their movies even relatively bad. (Except A Bug's Life, that is). And I'm struck with the notion that I really need to revisit some of these films, especially the ones people love much more than I do.

But I do think there's probably a reason that four of my top five choices are four of the first five movies Pixar made. Not that they got worse over time, but that I got older. That I became more jaded and less receptive to the flights of fancy that are Pixar's bread and butter. My generation is the first to come of age with a wealth of different animated movies to choose from. The older generation had one Disney movie a year (or maybe every other year), and that was it. Us? We have animated favorites ranging from The Secret of N.I.M.H. to The Iron Giant, not to mention all the movies in Disney's 1990s revival. And so it is that many of us have proudly carried our love of animated movies into our adulthood, determined to never lose our ability to love children's movies. It's what keeps us young, keeps us from admitting that we're actually adults.

But we are adults. And it's only logical that our affection for these movies would deteriorate just a little bit, even if we'd rather not acknowledge it.

I guess the proof will come on June 18, 2010. If there's anything that can cure my Pixar blues, maybe it's the release of Toy Story 3. After 11 years, Pixar's best two films will finally get their long-awaited, long-discussed, once-destined-for-a-DVD-release sequel. And if that can't do it for me, maybe nothing can. (Oh, except possibly Cars 2, scheduled for release in 2011. See? Other people liked Cars too. Hence, Cars 2. See what I did there?)

Here's hoping I'm still a kid.