The Screengrab : wallace and gromit

DVD Digest for February 10, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With St. Valentine’s Day less than a week away, you’d think studios would start rolling out some of their romantic classics on DVD. But I’m seeing very little of that this week, unless of course your idea of romance is vastly different than mine…

DVDs of the Week: But then, for me, nothing says romance like a pair of movies from surrealist master Luis Bunuel. This week brings two of his favorites, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, courtesy of the folks at Criterion. The Exterminating Angel is the known quantity for me, a wicked satire of bourgeois manners, in which a group of upper-crusters finds itself unable to leave following a dinner party, which brings them no end of trouble. Simon, Bunuel’s telling of the story of an ascetic who stood atop a remote pillar to prove his love for God, is one I’ve yet to see (do I smell a future Reviews By Request?), but its DVD release is no less noteworthy. The films, made during Bunuel’s sojourn in Mexico, have been given the deluxe Criterion treatment, with new transfers, documentaries, new interviews with actress Sylvia Pinal and others, and more.

Other noteworthy this week is Janus’ Essential Art House: Volume 2, which includes The 400 Blows, Black Orpheus, Pygmalion, La Strada, Ikiru, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in single-disc editions, also available separately. In addition, Lionsgate is releasing new editions of the Wallace and Gromit short films, A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers. Finally- and I can’t in good conscience call this a classic, though it’s not new- Universal’s got the “Extreme Edition” of the final film from the great Raul Julia, Street Fighter (also Blu-Ray). So if you enjoy things that suck, set aside money for that one.

If newer movies are more your speed, this week’s recent releases coming to DVD include: Courtney Hunt’s double Oscar nominee Frozen River (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Genius Products; Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac in Soul Men (Genius Products); Richard Gere and Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (Warner, also Blu-Ray); and a pair of very different showbiz satires, Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened? (Magnolia), and Bruce Campbell directing Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce (Image, also Blu-Ray). Also this week, a quartet of curious films from fascinating filmmakers: Oliver Stone’s W. (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Spike Lee’s WW2 drama Miracle at St. Anna (Buena Vista, also Blu-Ray); Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness (Buena Vista); and Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (E1 Entertainment Distribution), allegedly the master’s final film. Oddly enough, the Rohmer looks to be the most romantic movie in this week’s column. Don’t know if your Dirty Dancing-loving special lady would go for it though…

Finally, a pretty action-packed and bloody lineup of Blu-Ray only releases this week: Martin Scorsese’s classic Raging Bull (MGM); David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (Warner); a pair of John Grisham adaptations, A Time to Kill and The Pelican Brief (both Warner); a double feature starring The Rock, Doom (Universal) and The Rundown (Universal); and two of Onion AV Club critic Scott Tobias’ New Cult Canon picks, Donnie Darko (Fox) and The Boondock Saints (Fox). Also, Milos Forman’s Amadeus: The Director’s Cut (Warner) and the table-tennis comedy Ping Pong Playa (Image).

Oh, and Pretty Woman (Disney).

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO (1975)

I can't say for certain whether or not I first encountered the work of Sally Cruikshank in general (or Quasi at the Quackadero in particular) on the USA Network's 1980s stoner staple Night Flight, but either way, I'm pretty sure I wasn't entirely in a legal frame of mind at the time. Not that psychedelic substances are required to appreciate Quasi's dreamy, stream-of-consciousness groove: Cruikshank's anarchic style is a mind-altering substance all by itself, a subterranean version of the (relatively) clean, orderly mainstream Disney/Looney Tune style of animation with all the color, personality, wisecracking animals and fairy tale fancy reflected in a funhouse mirror of surrealistic Id.

NEIGHBOURS (1952)

You wouldn’t get very far in a discussion of great animated shorts without mentioning the National Film Board of Canada. Since 1941, the NFB has supported and funded important and groundbreaking works from some of Canada’s most important animators, beginning with the great Norman McLaren. McLaren experimented with a number of animation techniques throughout his career including pixellation and even scratching and painting on the film stock itself. But today, his most famous work is Neighbours, a hybrid of stop motion animation and live action photography. The film -- an allegory for the Cold War -- finds McLaren using his human subjects not as actors, but as mannequins to be literally manipulated in the service of his story (somewhere, Robert Bresson must have swooned). Stylistically playful yet thematically serious, Neighbours became one of the most feted animated shorts of its day, yet it’s a testament to its topicality that it ended up taking home not the Best Animated Short Oscar, but rather the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.

MIRACLE OF FLIGHT (1974)

Terry Gilliam made this five minute film after the original Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series had completed its final season but before Python caught on in the United States, a development that, along with the success of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, made it clear that the troupe would remain a going concern for years to come. Gilliam would later develop his own voice as a live-action filmmaker, but this cartoon is basically a stray Python skit that's developed at greater length than most of the animated bits that Gilliam contributed to the TV shows. Not that there's a goddamn thing wrong with that.

CREATURE COMFORTS (1989)

Nick Park, the co-founder of Aardman Animation (and the creator of Wallace and Gromit) had a weirdly accomplished triumph with this award-winning short, which attaches the thoughts expressed by man-on-the-street interview subjects to animals doing time in a zoo. The success of the film led to a series of TV commercials in a similar style and then, in 2003, to a brilliant TV series that ran for two seasons in Britain. (CBS commissioned an American version for a summer series last year but pulled the plug after broadcasting three of seven completed episodes.)

THE CRITIC (1963)

Pauline Kael once wrote that "the best way" that Mel Brooks "could be employed on any movie" would be for him to "hang around on a cloud" during shooting, "with permission to replace any actor at any point." Nice image, Pauline, but Ernest Pintoff trumped you when he made this parody of an arty animated short, and then put the icing on the gravy by asking Brooks to assume the persona of an old Jewish man -- this was back when Brooks was still a young Jewish man -- and record this worthy's baffled responses to what the hell his eyeballs were being subjected to as punishment for having dared to venture into a movie theater with an expectation of being entertained. It's too bad that Brooks doesn't still have a way of getting in touch with that cranky old guy; we'd love to sit next to him at Young Frankenstein on Broadway.

FRANK FILM (1973)

Frank Mouris wrote, directed, edited, and narrates this autobiographical collage, which aims to sum up the artist's life as best he can through nine minutes of words and images. Mouris talks about his experiences and impressions on the soundtrack while pictures of things important or just pleasing to him crowd onto the frame. The total effect is of an amazingly cool, elegant fever dream.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS (1992 & 1995)

Even now, The Spirit of Christmas is funny as hell (and, uh, REALLY dirty...so if you haven’t been fired already, you might want to think twice before clicking the above clip at your workstation, unless of course you work in a Tourette’s ward). But way back in 1995, before Trey Parker and Matt Stone were famous, before South Park was a basic cable staple and before Stan, Kyle and Cartman were allowed to curse like cardboard cut-out sailors in their R-rated big-screen debut, this short (commissioned as a video Christmas card by a Fox TV exec who’d seen Parker and Stone’s college short “Jesus Vs. Frosty”) was a jaw-dropping revelation, a blend of comic provocation, pop culture geekery and relatable humanity that became the animators’ signature style when the cult popularity of their seemingly primitive debut catapulted them to infamy.

THE WRONG TROUSERS (1993)

One of the risks with animation is that the work it takes to create a finished film will bog down the story the film tells. But this has never been a problem for the films of Nick Park. With his beloved characters Wallace and Gromit, Park created some of animation’s most enduring films, which use a veddy British sense of humor to leaven some truly awe-inspiring flights of fancy. Nowhere is this more the case than in the second Wallace and Gromit adventure, The Wrong Trousers, which finds the dotty Wallace taking in a new boarder, with disastrous results. Armed with plenty of sound effects but only a single speaking role, Park tells his story almost completely through his images with a visual flair and storytelling efficiency that puts most features (animated or otherwise) to shame. The film even builds to an action-filled climax so assured that it reportedly inspired David O. Russell at one point when he was editing Three Kings. The Wrong Trousers demands multiple viewings -- not only because you might miss something the first time around, but also it’s hard to pay attention to Park’s bravura technique when you’re being so thoroughly entertained.

LUXO JR. (1986)

Other animation studios might make as much money as the geniuses at Pixar, but no American animation outlet can boast their critical cachet, a testament to the care with which they make their films and their ongoing quest to pursue new horizons. Even in their early days, Pixar was always experimenting, something that was in evidence as early as their second short film, Luxo Jr. Partly out of necessity, director John Lasseter and his team of animators didn’t use any of the cute animals that dominated the Disney model of animation, but rather a pair of everyday desk lamps. But while this decision was no doubt due to the fact that living creatures are much more difficult to animate via computer (a problem Pixar has long since resolved), Luxo Jr. nonetheless finds life in its inanimate protagonists. By finding possibilities for personality in the handful of possibilities presented by the lamps -- little more than a bulb, a swiveling head, a hinged arm and a base that hops around (complete with a power cord tail) -- Pixar established a knack for animating seemingly limited characters, something that would serve them well later on with such creations as Toy Story’s Mr. Potato Head, Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski, and even WALL*E and EVE. Pixar still cranks out a new animated short in conjunction with their features, but none they’ve made since has had the same level of charm as Luxo Jr.

NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN (1940)

Alas, not all old-school animation techniques have managed to survive. When husband-and-wife Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker created pin-screen animation- which involved manipulating a screen holding hundreds of thousands of pins and photographing the images a frame at a time- they couldn’t have known that their painstaking process would only end up being used on roughly half a dozen projects. But while pin-screen ended up requiring more work than most filmmakers were willing to give, it’s hard to argue with the results. In Alexeieff and Parker’s very first completed pin-screen short, Night on Bald Mountain, there’s a kind of expressiveness that can’t be found in any other form of animation, a smooth yet eerie sort of shadow play that, in the cast of this particular short, suits the material perfectly. It takes some searching to find Alexeieff and Parker’s other works (their best-known effort can be found at the opening of Orson Welles’ The Trial), but for fans of animation, it’s well worth the effort.

FAST FILM (2003)

Given the time required to make an animated film today, it’s understandable when animators use computers to aid them in their work. Still, it’s bracing to see an animator who attempts something impossibly ambitious without resorting to digital assistance. Perhaps the best recent example of this is Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film, a thirteen-minute piece from 2003 which integrated images from classic movies into an animated framework. Watching moments such as the one in which various movie-themed boxcars race down a track, it’s easy to think Widrich accomplished them with CGI. But think again- Widrich printed over 65,000 frames of film onto sheets of paper, folded the sheets into various three-dimensional objects to be placed into the image, and shot them in the proper frame order. Granted, after a while all the virtuosity on display here becomes a little overwhelming. But that seems a small price to pay for a work of such jaw-dropping ambition.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Feature Films (Part Five)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

FINDING NEMO (2003)

Among the animation directors whose names are on the Pixar Hall of Fame, Andrew Stanton's may not have quite the same degree of luster as that of John Lasseter (who made the Toy Story pictures and A Bug's Life and who is now, oh yeah, the fuckin' head of Disney animation) or Brad Bird (who even before directing The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Pixar had distinguished himself with The Iron Giant and the classic Amazing Stories episode "Family Dog"), but that can only be because his titles have been piling up slower. This year's Wall-E confirms that the wit and warmth of his little-lost-fish story were no fluke, and also that his plan seems to be to keep getting better. (Mention of his forthcoming Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation John Carter of Mars has been known to cause Screengrab writers to flap their front flippers together and lie down on the floor and spin around while going "Whoowhoowhoowhoowhoo" in merry anticipation. Is it any wonder that we don't get a lot of dates?) In director Eduardo Coutinho's remarkable documentary Playing, there's an amazing scene where an educated, middle-aged Brazlian woman tears up a bit while discussing the movie before cogently explaining that she sees it as a metaphor about her relationship with her own grown daughter.

CHICKEN RUN (2000)

This parody of The Great Escape and other military POW films (with gray, overcast English skies that serve as a memento mori) was the first feature from the mighty Aardman Animation studio, best known for Nick Park's films featuring Wallace and Gromit and other claymation shorts. (Park co-directed Chicken Run with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord. The project was reportedly seen as a test run for the more recent Wallace and Gromit feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: a way for Park and company to see whether their talents could sustain a full-length feature without taking a chance on tarnishing the W & G brand.) Not surprisingly, the jokes are stretched thinner here than in the shorts, which pop like firecrackers from beginning to end, but the project demonstrated that the sheer beauty of the visual craftsmanship of the claymation masters was enough to make up for that. The movie has a special historical interest now as the last recorded evidence of a time when Mel Gibson's brain cells were still happily alive and arranged in the desired order.

TWICE UPON A TIME (1982)

This experimental cut-out animation film, a sardonic sort of fairy tale with a cast that includes such improvisational comedians as Marshall Efron, Lorenzo Music, and Hamilton Camp, was executive produced by George Lucas in one of his periodic attempts to throw a lifeline to the independent filmmakers he'd known as an aspiring director and since moved past on the career ladder. It was directed by John Korty, whose '60s indies (The Crazy Quilt, Funnyman) once had a frisky reputation and are now very hard to find, with an assist from Charles Swenson, who credits as an animator include a section of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels and a movie version of Bobby London's scabrous underground comics character Dirty Duck. At its best, Twice Upon a Time is one of the rare movies that captures some of the termite-gnawing wisecracking feel of Jay Ward's TV cartoons, but it ran into problems getting seen at all: first the Ladd Company, which had the distribution rights, went bankrupt, and then Korty and producer Bill Couturié got into a pissing match over which dialogue tracks to use, which ended up costing it a steady life on cable TV and delayed its release to home video. It was finally issued on videocassette, but at this time no DVD release has planned. However, clips and audio tracks are all over the Internet, the movie's cult status having been greatly enhanced by both its unavailability and the fact that there are so many possible versions from which to choose, and to argue over. (The war over the dialogue tracks stems from the fact that the cast members were encouraged to make up their own lines, which resulted in some versions that are less family-friendly than others.)

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (2003)

Sylvain Chomet's wildly funny, outrageously cariactured farce about an old woman's efforts to rescue her grandson from the clutches of the villains who use his bicycle-hardened calves to power their gambling den is the most imaginative animated entertainment to emerge from Europe in recent years. Grand in scale, meticulously detailed, weirdly suggestive, and deranged in the friendliest way possible, it's that rare picture that makes you wish that people still went to midnight movies. Chomet's next film, The Illusionist, an animated feature inspired by an unproduced screenplay of Jacques Tati's, is eagerly anticipated: Tati is something of a presiding spirit here as well.

SPIRITED AWAY (2001)

Rumors that this would be Hiyao Miyazaki's final film before retiring have since turned out to have been premature, but that doesn't make it any less of a career apotheosis and a superb capstone to his career. This ever-expanding fantasy about a little girl's passage to maturity while serving time in an alternate spirit world and looking for the opportunity to be reunited with her lost parents brings together elements from his previous epics (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke) and his smaller scale classics about the magic that co-exists with the beauty of regular life (Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro). As a puny Westerner, there are nuances and touches here whose full meaning I suspect that I will never fully grasp, and God knows that's my loss, but Miyazaki delivers more to audiences that can only half-understand his work than most filmmakers who draw you a scorecard while sitting in your lap.

Click here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, & Part Four