Cactus Game Design Message Boards

no love for planet 51?

:vomit:

I haven't seen it but come on, you're talking about Up here.  Dragon's probably good, but "Up" good?  Maybe "Kung Fu Panda" good but "Up" good is a high bar to reach.

I just saw it.

How to Train Your Dragon is not UP! good, but that's because the Carl & Ellie life sequence in UP! puts it beyond all competition. I would place How to Train Your Dragon near or on the same tier as The Incredibles and Iron Giant. Probably slightly lower than those, but in the same discussion.

My best animated movies list based on pure subjectivity and my own opinion:

1. Up!
2. Up! again
3. The Prince of Egypt
4. The Incredibles
4.5. Wall-E (I can't believe I forgot that one)
5. The Lion King
6. The Emperor's New Groove
7. Anastasia
8. Mulan (close, though)
9. Toy Story 2 (Toy Story never made me cry, the song with Jesse and her girl does, so don't get on my case for 2 over 1)
10. Titan A.E.

I would place How to Train Your Dragon near or on the same tier as The Incredibles and Iron Giant.

WHOA WHOA WHOA slow down, Skippy.  Let's back off the Brad Bird a little bit here with our Dragon praise.  You don't mess with The Brad.

SK makes a better point than advertised with Bambi.  Yes, the story makes you want to rake out your eyeballs with shrimp forks, but that's only because we are manly men.  Bambi was a grossly underrated phenomenon in its time, especially in the art direction.  Never mind for now the realistic depiction of various forest animals in motion, take your eyes off the characters for a while and just take in the backgrounds.  What's amazing is how LITTLE detail is shown there, that the lines are soft and the imagery is quasi-impressionistic.  This approach blends in to the viewer's eye and makes it FEEL a lot more like a forest than any hyper-realistic detail animation could achieve (I'm looking at you, Farcry engine games).

Part of what makes the no-dialogue scene in Up! work so well is Michael Giacchino's amazing score.  I've enjoyed this guy since Alias, and I loved the Alias-meets-007 work he did on The Incredibles.  But he's been scoring A LOT of films lately, and he is quickly moving up to James Horner territory on my list of beloved film composers.

There's another scene like this in Star Trek, of all films.  In the opening sequence, when Kirk's mother is giving birth and they're trying to evacuate and such, there's all this chaos and noise and such, and she's delivering and she cries out and that just fades out almost all the sound.  There's just a tiny bit of sound left for the next minute or so, and Giacchino's score just swells up and it is such a gorgeous moment in film even though it's in space with lasers and such.  And his father is getting ready to scuttle the ship and you hear this baby cry, and that just rang out in the theater, and that's when they fade the sound back in and start up the dialogue again.  I'm tearing up just thinking about it.  Props to Abrams' sound design team for that scene but it does not work without Giacchino's amazing music.

Quote from: The Schaef on April 12, 2010, 07:07:48 PM

Quote from: EmJayBee83 on April 11, 2010, 08:03:09 PM

I would place How to Train Your Dragon near or on the same tier as The Incredibles and Iron Giant.

WHOA WHOA WHOA slow down, Skippy.  Let's back off the Brad Bird a little bit here with our Dragon praise.  You don't mess with The Brad.

Have you heard of Bird? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons. The Brad is such a piker that he only hold two spots in my top five animated movies of all time. And two completely different types of films.

1. The Little Mermaid  Because the first sip of water after crossing the Sahara is the sweetest drink of all.
2. UP!  You are correct about the Giacchiano's score, but pretty much everything in the film is pitch perfect.
3.a. The Iron Giant.  He is Superman.
3.b. The Incredibles. The title is the best review of the movie.
4. How to Train Your Dragon  DreamWorks shows they can deliver something on par with the best of Disney/Pixar.

lemme guess, you weren't able to watch any movies in college because you had no money, and the first movie you watched was Little Mermaid?

The Black Cauldron is legit. Fox and the Hound is also a classic.

For me the thing that stands out the most is that in a technical sense the two Bird films are the best films in their respective genres.

Did Ratatouille not stand out as much for you?

You kids are so spoiled today.  Last year you had

• UP!
• The Princess and the Frog
• Monsters vs Aliens,
• Ice Age 3
• Coraline
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
• {something else}
• 9

In the entire period I was growing up I had what today would be considered direct to DVD fodder (The Rescuers), and two moderately ok films: The Fox and the Hound, and The Black Cauldron.

Fixed.

Ugh Enchanted was horrible! Worst Disney movie of all time. Now this is not a guy rant against musicals... this is a "I miss the old days of Lion King and Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast" rant. The face of Disney went from Mufassa to Miley Cyrus in 10 years. And that's not okay with me.

You'll have to hear the "rest of the story" to understand what happened:

When Disney lost Katzenberg to Dreamworks SKG (He's the "K"), Disney put out some poor performing animated movies - Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Atlantis, etc.. Their relationship with newcomer Pixar kept their animated division above water financially. Overall, however, Disney was hurting like it never had before. Their takeover of ABC complicated things even more because their television revenue was also dropping. They simply were not putting out the money-making characters like in the old days.

One solution that worked for Disney was taking the chief of the profitable TV franchise ABC Family and giving her control of all TV franchises. She came up with some of the most popular (and profitable) Disney characters of the time with Lizzy Maguire and Kim Possible, by targetting a preteen girl audience. So overwhelming was the response (and profit) that Disney decided to take aim at this new target audience and their eager-to-please parents. What would soon follow was a new marketing scheme for Disney Princesses, Tinker Bell (and a whole new set of fairies), Hannah Montana, and the amazingly successful High School Musical series. Disney had found its prize and would exploit it until it is no longer profitable. That, however, seems unlikely since the money has rolled in so much that they are now rethemeing much of the Magic Kingdom to include the Disney Princesses and Disney Fairies franchises.

So, suffice it to say that Disney has no need for macho stars, since most young males are more interested in video games than spending money at Disney Parks. Disney will still do Pirate makeovers if boys are really interested, but they have a waiting list a mile long for the Bibbidy Bobbidy Boo Shop, so marketing to young girls will be their primary focus for quite some time to come.

And now you know the rest of the story..... 

* This is brought to you as a tribute to the late Paul Harvey.

Is "Snow Buddies" Disney? If so, that takes the worst ever slot.

Idk, does space buddies have praying to santa?

You kids are so spoiled today...In the entire period I was growing up I had what today would be considered direct to DVD fodder (The Rescuers), and two moderately ok films: The Fox and the Hound, and The Black Cauldron.

1 - The Fox and the Hound was a good movie
2 - The cartoon movies may be better now, but the cartoon TV shows were better back in the day.

Exhibit A - Animaniacs
Exhibit B - Bugs Bunny
Exhibit C - Charlie Brown
Exhibit D - Darkwing Duck
Exhibit F - Flinstones
Exhibit G - G.I.Joe
Exhibit I - Inspector Gadget
Exhibit J - Jetsons
Exhibit P - Pink Panther
Exhibit R - Robotech
Exhibit S - Simpsons
Exhibit T - Transformers
Exhibit V - Voltron
Exhibit W - Woody Woodpecker
Exhibit Y - Yogi Bear

Obviously there are some missing letters, but I challenge anyone to find a current cartoon that is better than the show above starting with the same letter.