What makes Roger Rabbit Run?
I have always been a fan of the animators art. The magic of making drawings move must be a captivating mystery to all children when they first experience such a thing. The following examples are, for me, mainstream highlights of the art retaining a creative excellence in their concept or craft:
Yellow Submarine (dir George Dunning)—A sublime pop art confection blessed with some of the best popular music ever written. Some of its imagery is unforgettable, particularly the segment for the song Eleanor Rigby.
Fantastic Planet (dir René Laloux)—A very European, rather dreamlike extra-terrestrial fantasy, though somewhat lacking form and pace.
The Man Who Planted Trees (dir Frédéric Back)—A picture I know I've mentioned in previous correspondence and a delightful consideration of Man's—and a man's—relationship with nature, in a thoroughly beautiful impressionistic rendering. An absolute gem.
A Christmas Carol (dir Richard Williams)—A succinct and sublime rendering, hitting every narrative beat (in an astonishingly short half-hour) of Dickens' classic Christmas story, directed by Williams, who worked on both Roger Rabbit and Aladdin for Disney. Some of the animation is astonishingly inventive and dynamic, and Alastair Sim reprises the leading role that he'd played first in live action twenty years earlier. Another absolute gem.
Animal Farm (dir John Halas/Joy Batchelor)—Halas and Batchelor had significant post-war success in Britain. I doubt anyone now remembers them unless they are at least my age and were exposed to the broadcast of their extremely simple shorts featuring the rather continental characters of Foo-Foo and his adversary Go-Go. Anyway, this is obviously their adaption of Orwell's famous story which was—allegedly—commissioned from the studio by the CIA. More of an interesting curio, but well executed.
As a Brit, I could hardly touch on the subject of animation and not mention Aardman Studios and writer/director Nick Park. Shot through with (whatever's left of) benign and playful British character, their shorts and features are rightly contenders for, and winners of, many industry and audience awards. Particularly inventive was the early Creature Comforts, a film that inspired subsequent commercials and shorts setting vox pop interviews to claymation. Park's own characters, Wallace and Gromit, captured the hearts of the nation and brought him international fame and plaudits through inventive humour, the good-natured parody of northern English stereotypes and an affectionate world view consistent with the director's time and place of upbringing. The apotheosis of the characters came in the excellent feature film Curse of the Were-Rabbit, where a coincidental inability of creative partners, Dreamworks, to appreciate the defining character of Aardman's productions led to an inevitable dissolution of the said partnership. W&G spin-off character, Shaun the Sheep provided a successful children's TV series and an excellent dialogue-less first feature film. British preoccupations also fuel Aardman's movie Chicken Run, with a plot that picks up the fascination for POW escape-orientated war pictures with their unavoidable (but not always applicable) sense of public school [private school] high jinks, together with a mistrust of (sorry!) perceived American brashness!
Being an early example of digitally animated features, it was perhaps easier for Disney/Pixar to get things right with Toy Story, but the series comprises a set of films where a bullseye is achieved, certainly for the first three pictures (I still haven't seen the fourth entry in the canon). Technically, given the state of the art at the time of the first entry, the choice of toys as subject matter is astute: their shapes and textures would have been relatively easy to render. Such objects are also a familiar and beloved presence in most children's lives, imbued with life in their young owners' imaginations. The touch of genius, in my view, lies in the narrative concepts explored in the arc of the films which (helped by the release schedule of the sequels) mirror real family developments over time. This worked with absolute precision in my own family's experience: my son was three years old when the first picture was released and therefore at a point of similarly investing his playthings with personalities. By the time of Toy Story 3, he was making his plans to apply to university, as was the character in the movie who owned the toys. The mapping was perfect. So perfect that the three of us were left covertly sniffing back our tears in the dark of the theatre as the movie played out. Perhaps that's why I've never watched the fourth entry in the series: the third was a fitting end to the story for the three of us, and with our son—now adult—probably finding no connection with, or reason to watch succeeding movies (unless and until he has a family of his own), Toy Story's ongoing relevance has possibly, for us, expired. Great films, though, and I'll always enjoy them.
I have considerable enthusiasm for The Incredibles, with good characterisation and a brilliant story that successfully blends the burgeoningly popular superhero trope (before it inevitably became tiresome) with Bond-like spy-fi. It was great fun and very entertaining. I waited with a mixture of eager anticipation and concern for the sequel: the bar had been set very high—but excellence was not an unachievable goal. In the end I was both relieved and disappointed. It was an enjoyable picture, sure enough, and artistically and entertainingly successful in its own terms, but it attempted and achieved little more than the first.
I had mixed feelings about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There was so much about the picture that was entertaining and that could be admired. A setting in the golden age of Noir? Great! A stream of great visual jokes in the Warner Brothers tradition? Hilarious! Amusing and endearing new characters in Roger and Jessica? You bet! Fondly remembered supporting characters from a well-loved heritage of American animation? Charming! Bob Hoskins? Wonderful! Ingeniously melded live action and animation? Superb! Yet it still didn't rate as highly with me as I thought and hoped it would. Why not? I think because, for me, there was a conceptual mismatch, and one that seems often to occur in the nostalgic creative revisiting of older, cherished properties with different, modern sensibilities. There's an uncertainty of tone in its sophisticated, real-world concept for the dramatic threat to be overcome that works in the Noir period setting, but that's incongruous in the simpler world of animated characters: murder connected with a real estate fraud (if I remember correctly). And, though the violence is depicted in cartoon, some of it is not in the slapstick, everyone-walks-away-unharmed tradition of, say, Tom and Jerry. There is a scene I recollect where "sentient" cartoon shoes are effectively being tortured—indeed, I've seen the movie broadcast on TV with the said scene excised (I might add that there is something approaching a similar dissonance in the Wallace and Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, concerned as it is with the murderous proclivities of a vengeful female serial killer!) In the final analysis, therefore, it's a bit of a "curate's egg" for me: good in parts. I thought the accompanying, fully animated short films were hilarious, however.
Most recently I had the pleasure to see Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, a thrilling new vision of the well-known tale that has the imagination and wit to overcome an immediate instinct to compare it with possibly Disney's best traditionally animated picture. Retaining the dark undercurrents of the narrative, the film is a satisfying new look at familiar material.