JamesG
06-27-2011, 12:28 AM
The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films
6/23/11
25. Lady and the Tramp (1955)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/brand-new-and-sealed-lady-and-the-tramp-dvd-54351.jpg
It's said that when he first watched a rough cut of his studio's next feature cartoon, Walt Disney absolutely disapproved of one scene: when the Cocker Spaniel Lady and the roguish mutt Tramp dig into a plate of spaghetti on a romantic night and catch ends of the same strand, their faces coming closer to a kiss as they nibble.
This, of course, is the moment — played to the strains of Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke's Neapolitan ballad 'Bella Notte' — that immediately entered the DNA of millions of moviegoers and is still cherished more than a half-century later.
Disney's 15th animated feature, and its first released in CinemaScope, was one of its more modest productions in a decade when the studio had mixed results with its ambitious adaptations of such famous tales as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty.
Returning to the core Disney values of humor and heart, veteran directors Clyde Geronimo, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson gave Lady and the Tramp the pedigree of a winner that delights every new generation of children.
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/6393a.jpg
Stop-motion animation is exacting, exhausting work: building puppets, placing them on a miniature stage and moving them one frame at a time — tens of thousands of times. Harder still is bringing insouciant life to this arduous process.
That's what director Wes Anderson and animation director Mark Gustafson managed in this delightful version of the Roald Dahl children's classic about a dapper, larcenous fox (voiced by George Clooney) who aims to pull off one last, impossible heist.
The vibe of Fox and his wife (Meryl Streep) and rebellious son (Jason Schwartzman) is as comically tense as it is in families from earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and co-writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale).
But the brood soon bonds, revealing its humor and humanity, its intrinsic and intoxicating foxiness.
23. Yellow Submarine (1968)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/4a4ca096a5e56_115425n.jpg
Intended to take the songs of the Beatles into the medium of animation — and to cash in on the 1960s' greatest and most profitable pop phenomenon — Yellow Submarine somehow found a sense of humor and sophistication worthy of the Fab Four.
To translate the group's groovy, borderline-psychedelic spirit to pictures, Canadian animator George Dunning assembled a writing team that included Erich Segal, soon to be famous as the author of Love Story, and Roger McGough, Britain's foremost punster poet.
They came up with a free-form, mostly underwater narrative that sent the lads (voiced by soundalikes) swimming backward and forward through the Sea of Time, getting lost in the Sea of Nothing and fighting a vacuum-cleaner beast in the Sea of Monsters, all while fighting off the evil Blue Meanies on their trip to Pepperland.
Some sequences were their own short films (Charles Jenkins created the poignant 'Eleanor Rigby' segment), but the thing held together thanks to the hallucinatory opulence of Heinz Edelmann's design.
A G-rated head trip, the movie appealed to kids, their stoned older siblings and their hip parents. As 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Help!' had invigorated live-action film a few years before, so Yellow Submarine proved that the Disney style wasn't the only way for animated features, and the film's financial success made possible rougher fantasias such as Fantastic Planet (1973) and Heavy Metal (1981).
Could the movie, so indelibly a part of its era, speak to ours?
Robert Zemeckis thought so: he planned a 3-D version for release in 2012. But after the box-office failure of his animated Mars Needs Moms, his sponsoring studio — Disney — killed the project.
22. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (2008)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/horton-hears-a-who-.jpg
In the Jungle of Nool, something foreign — the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville — lands on a piece of clover, and Horton the elephant (voiced by Jim Carrey) detects cries from the clover speck.
He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows they're in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected, against the collective protestations of other jungle creatures.
Who-ville's microscopic mayor (Steve Carell) has the same problem convincing his constituents that some giant unseen creature wants to help them. Ted Geisel's 1954 book is about belief in what you can't see, fidelity to a cause that others think is ridiculous and community service to reach an improbable goal.
We're all in this together, Seuss says; everyone's important. Or, as Horton puts it: "A person's a person, no matter how small."
This children's classic — a plangent plea for kids' rights — was the source material for a 1970 TV cartoon by the great Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones.
In the feature version from Blue Sky Studios, directors Jimmy Hayward (a veteran Pixar animator) and Steve Martino elaborated on the TV show's designs to develop a dense, gorgeously goofy Who-ville — a town whose bright colors and sweetly tilting towers might have been dreamed up on a peyote-munching jag by Antonio Gaudi and Red Grooms.
(Who-ville's daft architectural logic makes a comely contrast to the jungle lushness of Nool.)
As the faithful elephant and the cheerfully addled, increasingly desperate mayor, Carrey and Carell do inspired voice work. Though there are enough clever gags to entertain the most demanding media-savvy toddler, Horton remains faithful to the Seuss spirit, 100%.
Blue Sky produced the Ice Age franchise, whose first three films have earned nearly $2 billion in movie houses worldwide, and this year's color-and-comedy riot Rio, but Horton is still the studio's peak achievement.
21. Kung Fu Panda (2008)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/kungfupandar1art1.jpg
Po (voiced by Jack Black) dreams of martial-arts glory: defeating the legendary Furious Five kung fu masters in mortal combat. When he wakes, though, he's just a doughy panda who works in the village noodle shop run by his father — who happens to be a goose, but never mind that for now.
Po unaccountably is declared the region's savior and put under the tutelage of the sage Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) — not to battle the Furious Five but to team with them to defeat a Voldemorty beast who'll be breaking out of prison any day now.
Taking as their source the same Hong Kong martial-arts films that inspired both Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the oaf-becomes-a-hero plot of Stephen Chow's 2004 Kung Fu Hustle, directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne devised a master course in cunning visual art and satisfying entertainment: the best and ultimate DreamWorks feature.
If Pixar is the ring bearer of the classic Disney style and uplifting temperament, Jeffrey Katzenberg's DreamWorks Animation studio is an update of the zany Warner Bros. gestalt: zany, parodic, brimming with pop-culture references.
Pixar films might aspire to (and achieve) universal art; DreamWorks reminds the movie industry that "animated feature" is just a fusty phrase for "cartoon."
There's no question which studio is more influential. DreamWorks' vaudeville vibe, first paraded in the Shrek series, directly infiltrated animated films from Ice Age to Despicable Me and plenty more.
Panda seasons the Katzenberg recipe with a splendid kinetic elegance in the fight scenes — kung-furious panda-monium — and trumps it with the contemplative message that strength and discipline can't be taught but instead must be discovered within.
A wise heart matches the movie's art.
20. Paprika (2007)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/o_VeWuYIOXVpUmkKp.jpg
Anime, the Japanese form of cartooning, has yielded far more animated features in its 40-some-year existence than the rest of the world put together.
From this teeming, often dark and astonishingly sophisticated output, Satoshi Kon's last completed film is one of the most forbidding and beguiling.
It's an R-rated psychological detective story about a machine, the DC Mini, that offers the key to unlock the meaning of dreams — even as animation is, in a way, the key to unlock the feeling of dreams.
A police detective hopes to solve a murder by telling his dreams to the sexy Paprika, who is also a staid researcher named Atsuko. They are aided or threatened by the usual sci-fi-noir suspects, but the plot is so complicated, it's best not to worry about parsing it and just go with the seductively somnambulist flow, which is where the movie finds its true life.
Paprika alternates dream with reality, or abruptly fuses the two, until the detective, and the viewer, can't tell them apart.
Kon, whose earlier films included the sado-thriller Perfect Blue and the movie-crazy Millennium Actress and who died in 2010 at 46 of pancreatic cancer, saw modern media as not linear but oneiric. "Don't you think that dreams and the Internet are similar?" asks Paprika. "They're both places where the repressed conscious mind vents."
But the place where the detective will unlock his mystery is a movie palace, the dark cathedral where the communicants' separate obsessions become one dream on a giant screen.
And the most fluid form of movies is animation.
Paprika is both an argument for and a demonstration of animation's power to put us into a state of alert hypnosis. Watch the images that float by, the impulses that pass from the characters to you.
You are getting ... very ... dreamy.
19. Tangled (2010)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/tangled-dvd-pack.jpg
Disney's first CGI feature based on a fairy tale returned the studio to its hallowed beginnings as a spinner of fables about put-upon princesses. From Snow White and Cinderella to Ariel, Beauty, Pocahontas and Mulan, girls were the focal characters who could be expected to come of age, triumph over adversity and, in general, woman up.
When Pixar's John Lasseter took control of Disney's languishing animation unit, he green-lighted two femme-centric features: 2009's The Princess and the Frog (a hand-drawn film of spectacular élan and artistry) and this adorable update of the Grimm Brothers' story of Rapunzel, imprisoned in a high tower by a witch, with the girl's long hair the witch's only means of access and egress.
In the new version, directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the witch Gothel (voiced and sung by Broadway's Donna Murphy) discovers that the hair of Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) somehow brings eternal youth, or at least chic middle age, to an old witch. She can swan around as long as her victim stays locked up.
Gothel could be many modern American parents who think that confining their teens in enforced preadolescence helps them feel younger too. The character design of Disney veteran Glen Keane frees Rapunzel from visual stereotype and gives her poise and spunk.
Oh, there's a Prince Charming (Zachary Levi), but Tangled, like The Princess and the Frog, is a rallying cry for girl power — and an indication that the studio that created the princess-musical animated feature can still give the format vibrant life.
18. The Lion King (1994)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/3_The_Lion_King_1994_Platinum_Edition_2-Disc_DVD.jpg
Disney animated features had two great periods: the "classic" films in the decade that began with the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the "renaissance" movies in the decade that began with 1989's The Little Mermaid.
Supervised by Jeffrey Katzenberg before he left to form DreamWorks, these latter films revived Walt's formula of comedy, heart and hummable songs. The blockbuster of the renaissance phase was this majestic epic, which added the element of high melodrama. Not since Bambi had so much been at stake in a Disney tale.
There are kingdoms to be sundered, deaths to be atoned for. The father of a prince is killed, his conniving uncle seizes the throne, and the father's ghost instructs him to seek honorable revenge.
Put it another way: a boy leaves home, escapes responsibility with some genially irresponsible friends, then returns to face society's obligations. On the grasslands of Africa, Hamlet met Huckleberry Finn.
With Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane and Cheech Marin lending their vocal talents to the enterprise, and with a sheaf of hit tunes ('Circle of Life', 'I Just Can't Wait to Be King', 'Hakuna Matata' and the Oscar-winning 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight) by Elton John and Tim Rice, The Lion King proved to be one of the seismic smashes of the past 20 years; in real dollars, only Avatar, Titanic and The Phantom Menace have topped it.
Yet the film was also the beginning of the end of traditional, hand-drawn animation. Subsequent Disney features like Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were more ambitious but less successful at the box office.
And a year after The Lion King, along came Pixar's Toy Story.
The first full-length film made on computers showed audiences a new look, technology and attitude. Within a decade, 3-D animation had almost totally replaced 2-D, and The Lion King would find its most lasting popular appeal as a Broadway puppet show.
17. Akira (1988)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/013023172692.jpg
In 1951, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon declared to the world that Japan's was a complex and vital national cinema.
In 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira introduced to many Westerners the head-swiveling richness of anime.
At the time it was the country's most expensive animated film — and the year's biggest hit. Adventurous Americans discovered the movie in the cult section of something called video stores, a curious artifact of the late 20th century.
Akira finally got a big-screen U.S. release in 2001.
Boiling his 2,182-page manga multinovel into a 2-hr. epic, Otomo retained the books' sprawling, darn near confounding narrative while bringing a kinetic kick to its sex and violence (and violent sex).
Set in Tokyo in 2019 (the same year in which Blade Runner, one of many of Otomo's influences, was set), the film traces the convergence of teen rebel Tetsuo and his gang with a government project known only as Akira.
You watch it less for the nuances of facial detail, which aren't much more sophisticated than those in Astroboy, than for its dark glamour and noir-ish camera angles.
Call it Mad Max Space Odyssey, or a cyberpunk Godzilla, or a Peckinpah bloodying-up of The Matrix (Neo-Tokyo was the postapocalyptic name of Japan's largest city), but Akira is its own grand and startling vision.
16. Happy Feet (2006)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/112092DVDFLT.jpg
The last non-Pixar film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Happy Feet seduced audiences with its perky title and the story of Mumble the penguin, born to a tribe of great singers but whose only gift was for dancing (choreography provided by tap master Savion Glover).
That sounds like your basic ugly-duckling fable, meant to cheer special-ed kids and their parents — a story similar to Babe, the heroic-pig saga produced by Happy Feet director George Miller.
But Miller, the Australian physician and lecturer whose Mad Max trilogy imagined a postnuclear wasteland populated by feral biker gangs, and whose Babe: Pig in the City dropped its porcine star into urban depths, had darker dreams to relate.
As Mumble is separated from his tribe and wanders Antarctica with his own ragtag gang, he is buffeted by blizzards and threatened by rampaging "aliens" (the enemy is us) whose crimes against the climate are shrinking his world. (Happy Feet is film noir emotionally, film blanc visually.)
Another penguin, Lovelace, is strangled by the six-pack ring carrier he wears as a "sacred talisman."
These political points made the film a favorite scourge of right-wing commentators. But moviegoers didn't care. They took to an animated version of the basic Miller theme — the outsider who enters a community and becomes, in the director's phrase, "an angel of change" — and danced out of any theater playing Happy Feet.
A sequel is due in November.
15. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/002564091.jpg
Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is a cheerfully vague bachelor whose obsession for dreaming up elaborate contraptions almost equals his fondness for cheese. (His bookshelf contains such volumes as East of Edam, Brie Encounter and Fromage to Eternity.)
Gromit, his master's fretful servant and savior, mutely conveys his always justified anxiety via minuscule twitches of the most eloquent movie eyebrows since Groucho's.
In three short films — 'A Grand Day Out', the all-time fabulous 'The Wrong Trousers' and 'A Close Shave' — Aardman Films' Nick Park created sublime comedy through the insanely intricate form of animation known as stop-motion, in which plasticine creatures and tiny props must be posed for a single frame, then moved infinitesimally for the next.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the series' expansion to feature length that Park co-directed with Steve Box, contains 122,400 shots (based on 24,000 storyboards), which explains why this mini-masterpiece took five years to make.
To protect the vegetable crops in his village and win the approval of dear Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), Wallace has invented the Bun-Vac 6000, which scoops up rabbits, painlessly, by the hundreds. ("It blows and sucks.")
But his machine is no match for the mysterious, vegemaniacal Were-Rabbit ravaging the town.
The movie has some vigorous action scenes: Gromit's World War I–style aerial combat with another canine (a real dogfight) and Lady Tottington's housetop confrontation with the dread Were-Rabbit.
The priceless exchanges, though, are between man and dog — both in the empyrean of comic artists, as are their creators.
6/23/11
25. Lady and the Tramp (1955)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/brand-new-and-sealed-lady-and-the-tramp-dvd-54351.jpg
It's said that when he first watched a rough cut of his studio's next feature cartoon, Walt Disney absolutely disapproved of one scene: when the Cocker Spaniel Lady and the roguish mutt Tramp dig into a plate of spaghetti on a romantic night and catch ends of the same strand, their faces coming closer to a kiss as they nibble.
This, of course, is the moment — played to the strains of Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke's Neapolitan ballad 'Bella Notte' — that immediately entered the DNA of millions of moviegoers and is still cherished more than a half-century later.
Disney's 15th animated feature, and its first released in CinemaScope, was one of its more modest productions in a decade when the studio had mixed results with its ambitious adaptations of such famous tales as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty.
Returning to the core Disney values of humor and heart, veteran directors Clyde Geronimo, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson gave Lady and the Tramp the pedigree of a winner that delights every new generation of children.
24. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/6393a.jpg
Stop-motion animation is exacting, exhausting work: building puppets, placing them on a miniature stage and moving them one frame at a time — tens of thousands of times. Harder still is bringing insouciant life to this arduous process.
That's what director Wes Anderson and animation director Mark Gustafson managed in this delightful version of the Roald Dahl children's classic about a dapper, larcenous fox (voiced by George Clooney) who aims to pull off one last, impossible heist.
The vibe of Fox and his wife (Meryl Streep) and rebellious son (Jason Schwartzman) is as comically tense as it is in families from earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and co-writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale).
But the brood soon bonds, revealing its humor and humanity, its intrinsic and intoxicating foxiness.
23. Yellow Submarine (1968)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/4a4ca096a5e56_115425n.jpg
Intended to take the songs of the Beatles into the medium of animation — and to cash in on the 1960s' greatest and most profitable pop phenomenon — Yellow Submarine somehow found a sense of humor and sophistication worthy of the Fab Four.
To translate the group's groovy, borderline-psychedelic spirit to pictures, Canadian animator George Dunning assembled a writing team that included Erich Segal, soon to be famous as the author of Love Story, and Roger McGough, Britain's foremost punster poet.
They came up with a free-form, mostly underwater narrative that sent the lads (voiced by soundalikes) swimming backward and forward through the Sea of Time, getting lost in the Sea of Nothing and fighting a vacuum-cleaner beast in the Sea of Monsters, all while fighting off the evil Blue Meanies on their trip to Pepperland.
Some sequences were their own short films (Charles Jenkins created the poignant 'Eleanor Rigby' segment), but the thing held together thanks to the hallucinatory opulence of Heinz Edelmann's design.
A G-rated head trip, the movie appealed to kids, their stoned older siblings and their hip parents. As 'A Hard Day's Night' and 'Help!' had invigorated live-action film a few years before, so Yellow Submarine proved that the Disney style wasn't the only way for animated features, and the film's financial success made possible rougher fantasias such as Fantastic Planet (1973) and Heavy Metal (1981).
Could the movie, so indelibly a part of its era, speak to ours?
Robert Zemeckis thought so: he planned a 3-D version for release in 2012. But after the box-office failure of his animated Mars Needs Moms, his sponsoring studio — Disney — killed the project.
22. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! (2008)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/horton-hears-a-who-.jpg
In the Jungle of Nool, something foreign — the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who-ville — lands on a piece of clover, and Horton the elephant (voiced by Jim Carrey) detects cries from the clover speck.
He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows they're in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected, against the collective protestations of other jungle creatures.
Who-ville's microscopic mayor (Steve Carell) has the same problem convincing his constituents that some giant unseen creature wants to help them. Ted Geisel's 1954 book is about belief in what you can't see, fidelity to a cause that others think is ridiculous and community service to reach an improbable goal.
We're all in this together, Seuss says; everyone's important. Or, as Horton puts it: "A person's a person, no matter how small."
This children's classic — a plangent plea for kids' rights — was the source material for a 1970 TV cartoon by the great Warner Bros. animation director Chuck Jones.
In the feature version from Blue Sky Studios, directors Jimmy Hayward (a veteran Pixar animator) and Steve Martino elaborated on the TV show's designs to develop a dense, gorgeously goofy Who-ville — a town whose bright colors and sweetly tilting towers might have been dreamed up on a peyote-munching jag by Antonio Gaudi and Red Grooms.
(Who-ville's daft architectural logic makes a comely contrast to the jungle lushness of Nool.)
As the faithful elephant and the cheerfully addled, increasingly desperate mayor, Carrey and Carell do inspired voice work. Though there are enough clever gags to entertain the most demanding media-savvy toddler, Horton remains faithful to the Seuss spirit, 100%.
Blue Sky produced the Ice Age franchise, whose first three films have earned nearly $2 billion in movie houses worldwide, and this year's color-and-comedy riot Rio, but Horton is still the studio's peak achievement.
21. Kung Fu Panda (2008)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/kungfupandar1art1.jpg
Po (voiced by Jack Black) dreams of martial-arts glory: defeating the legendary Furious Five kung fu masters in mortal combat. When he wakes, though, he's just a doughy panda who works in the village noodle shop run by his father — who happens to be a goose, but never mind that for now.
Po unaccountably is declared the region's savior and put under the tutelage of the sage Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) — not to battle the Furious Five but to team with them to defeat a Voldemorty beast who'll be breaking out of prison any day now.
Taking as their source the same Hong Kong martial-arts films that inspired both Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the oaf-becomes-a-hero plot of Stephen Chow's 2004 Kung Fu Hustle, directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne devised a master course in cunning visual art and satisfying entertainment: the best and ultimate DreamWorks feature.
If Pixar is the ring bearer of the classic Disney style and uplifting temperament, Jeffrey Katzenberg's DreamWorks Animation studio is an update of the zany Warner Bros. gestalt: zany, parodic, brimming with pop-culture references.
Pixar films might aspire to (and achieve) universal art; DreamWorks reminds the movie industry that "animated feature" is just a fusty phrase for "cartoon."
There's no question which studio is more influential. DreamWorks' vaudeville vibe, first paraded in the Shrek series, directly infiltrated animated films from Ice Age to Despicable Me and plenty more.
Panda seasons the Katzenberg recipe with a splendid kinetic elegance in the fight scenes — kung-furious panda-monium — and trumps it with the contemplative message that strength and discipline can't be taught but instead must be discovered within.
A wise heart matches the movie's art.
20. Paprika (2007)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/o_VeWuYIOXVpUmkKp.jpg
Anime, the Japanese form of cartooning, has yielded far more animated features in its 40-some-year existence than the rest of the world put together.
From this teeming, often dark and astonishingly sophisticated output, Satoshi Kon's last completed film is one of the most forbidding and beguiling.
It's an R-rated psychological detective story about a machine, the DC Mini, that offers the key to unlock the meaning of dreams — even as animation is, in a way, the key to unlock the feeling of dreams.
A police detective hopes to solve a murder by telling his dreams to the sexy Paprika, who is also a staid researcher named Atsuko. They are aided or threatened by the usual sci-fi-noir suspects, but the plot is so complicated, it's best not to worry about parsing it and just go with the seductively somnambulist flow, which is where the movie finds its true life.
Paprika alternates dream with reality, or abruptly fuses the two, until the detective, and the viewer, can't tell them apart.
Kon, whose earlier films included the sado-thriller Perfect Blue and the movie-crazy Millennium Actress and who died in 2010 at 46 of pancreatic cancer, saw modern media as not linear but oneiric. "Don't you think that dreams and the Internet are similar?" asks Paprika. "They're both places where the repressed conscious mind vents."
But the place where the detective will unlock his mystery is a movie palace, the dark cathedral where the communicants' separate obsessions become one dream on a giant screen.
And the most fluid form of movies is animation.
Paprika is both an argument for and a demonstration of animation's power to put us into a state of alert hypnosis. Watch the images that float by, the impulses that pass from the characters to you.
You are getting ... very ... dreamy.
19. Tangled (2010)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/tangled-dvd-pack.jpg
Disney's first CGI feature based on a fairy tale returned the studio to its hallowed beginnings as a spinner of fables about put-upon princesses. From Snow White and Cinderella to Ariel, Beauty, Pocahontas and Mulan, girls were the focal characters who could be expected to come of age, triumph over adversity and, in general, woman up.
When Pixar's John Lasseter took control of Disney's languishing animation unit, he green-lighted two femme-centric features: 2009's The Princess and the Frog (a hand-drawn film of spectacular élan and artistry) and this adorable update of the Grimm Brothers' story of Rapunzel, imprisoned in a high tower by a witch, with the girl's long hair the witch's only means of access and egress.
In the new version, directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the witch Gothel (voiced and sung by Broadway's Donna Murphy) discovers that the hair of Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) somehow brings eternal youth, or at least chic middle age, to an old witch. She can swan around as long as her victim stays locked up.
Gothel could be many modern American parents who think that confining their teens in enforced preadolescence helps them feel younger too. The character design of Disney veteran Glen Keane frees Rapunzel from visual stereotype and gives her poise and spunk.
Oh, there's a Prince Charming (Zachary Levi), but Tangled, like The Princess and the Frog, is a rallying cry for girl power — and an indication that the studio that created the princess-musical animated feature can still give the format vibrant life.
18. The Lion King (1994)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/3_The_Lion_King_1994_Platinum_Edition_2-Disc_DVD.jpg
Disney animated features had two great periods: the "classic" films in the decade that began with the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the "renaissance" movies in the decade that began with 1989's The Little Mermaid.
Supervised by Jeffrey Katzenberg before he left to form DreamWorks, these latter films revived Walt's formula of comedy, heart and hummable songs. The blockbuster of the renaissance phase was this majestic epic, which added the element of high melodrama. Not since Bambi had so much been at stake in a Disney tale.
There are kingdoms to be sundered, deaths to be atoned for. The father of a prince is killed, his conniving uncle seizes the throne, and the father's ghost instructs him to seek honorable revenge.
Put it another way: a boy leaves home, escapes responsibility with some genially irresponsible friends, then returns to face society's obligations. On the grasslands of Africa, Hamlet met Huckleberry Finn.
With Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane and Cheech Marin lending their vocal talents to the enterprise, and with a sheaf of hit tunes ('Circle of Life', 'I Just Can't Wait to Be King', 'Hakuna Matata' and the Oscar-winning 'Can You Feel the Love Tonight) by Elton John and Tim Rice, The Lion King proved to be one of the seismic smashes of the past 20 years; in real dollars, only Avatar, Titanic and The Phantom Menace have topped it.
Yet the film was also the beginning of the end of traditional, hand-drawn animation. Subsequent Disney features like Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were more ambitious but less successful at the box office.
And a year after The Lion King, along came Pixar's Toy Story.
The first full-length film made on computers showed audiences a new look, technology and attitude. Within a decade, 3-D animation had almost totally replaced 2-D, and The Lion King would find its most lasting popular appeal as a Broadway puppet show.
17. Akira (1988)
http://i879.photobucket.com/albums/ab358/JamesGrec1/013023172692.jpg
In 1951, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon declared to the world that Japan's was a complex and vital national cinema.
In 1988, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira introduced to many Westerners the head-swiveling richness of anime.
At the time it was the country's most expensive animated film — and the year's biggest hit. Adventurous Americans discovered the movie in the cult section of something called video stores, a curious artifact of the late 20th century.
Akira finally got a big-screen U.S. release in 2001.
Boiling his 2,182-page manga multinovel into a 2-hr. epic, Otomo retained the books' sprawling, darn near confounding narrative while bringing a kinetic kick to its sex and violence (and violent sex).
Set in Tokyo in 2019 (the same year in which Blade Runner, one of many of Otomo's influences, was set), the film traces the convergence of teen rebel Tetsuo and his gang with a government project known only as Akira.
You watch it less for the nuances of facial detail, which aren't much more sophisticated than those in Astroboy, than for its dark glamour and noir-ish camera angles.
Call it Mad Max Space Odyssey, or a cyberpunk Godzilla, or a Peckinpah bloodying-up of The Matrix (Neo-Tokyo was the postapocalyptic name of Japan's largest city), but Akira is its own grand and startling vision.
16. Happy Feet (2006)
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The last non-Pixar film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Happy Feet seduced audiences with its perky title and the story of Mumble the penguin, born to a tribe of great singers but whose only gift was for dancing (choreography provided by tap master Savion Glover).
That sounds like your basic ugly-duckling fable, meant to cheer special-ed kids and their parents — a story similar to Babe, the heroic-pig saga produced by Happy Feet director George Miller.
But Miller, the Australian physician and lecturer whose Mad Max trilogy imagined a postnuclear wasteland populated by feral biker gangs, and whose Babe: Pig in the City dropped its porcine star into urban depths, had darker dreams to relate.
As Mumble is separated from his tribe and wanders Antarctica with his own ragtag gang, he is buffeted by blizzards and threatened by rampaging "aliens" (the enemy is us) whose crimes against the climate are shrinking his world. (Happy Feet is film noir emotionally, film blanc visually.)
Another penguin, Lovelace, is strangled by the six-pack ring carrier he wears as a "sacred talisman."
These political points made the film a favorite scourge of right-wing commentators. But moviegoers didn't care. They took to an animated version of the basic Miller theme — the outsider who enters a community and becomes, in the director's phrase, "an angel of change" — and danced out of any theater playing Happy Feet.
A sequel is due in November.
15. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)
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Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) is a cheerfully vague bachelor whose obsession for dreaming up elaborate contraptions almost equals his fondness for cheese. (His bookshelf contains such volumes as East of Edam, Brie Encounter and Fromage to Eternity.)
Gromit, his master's fretful servant and savior, mutely conveys his always justified anxiety via minuscule twitches of the most eloquent movie eyebrows since Groucho's.
In three short films — 'A Grand Day Out', the all-time fabulous 'The Wrong Trousers' and 'A Close Shave' — Aardman Films' Nick Park created sublime comedy through the insanely intricate form of animation known as stop-motion, in which plasticine creatures and tiny props must be posed for a single frame, then moved infinitesimally for the next.
The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the series' expansion to feature length that Park co-directed with Steve Box, contains 122,400 shots (based on 24,000 storyboards), which explains why this mini-masterpiece took five years to make.
To protect the vegetable crops in his village and win the approval of dear Lady Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), Wallace has invented the Bun-Vac 6000, which scoops up rabbits, painlessly, by the hundreds. ("It blows and sucks.")
But his machine is no match for the mysterious, vegemaniacal Were-Rabbit ravaging the town.
The movie has some vigorous action scenes: Gromit's World War I–style aerial combat with another canine (a real dogfight) and Lady Tottington's housetop confrontation with the dread Were-Rabbit.
The priceless exchanges, though, are between man and dog — both in the empyrean of comic artists, as are their creators.