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animation
The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.
The fourth and last instalment of the ogre animation is a belter. It’s in 3D for one thing and, while the pop culture and film references have been toned down in Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke’s screenplay (directed by Mike Mitchell), in order to tell a gentle morality tale, it takes as its inspiration Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. And that’s a very good starting point for any movie.
Last night’s gala opening of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival may have been touched by living history – in particular the presence of Sean Connery (pictured below, arriving at last night's screening), who strode up the red carpet looking sharp and dapper in black – but the film on show, Sylvain Chomet’s ravishing animated feature, The Illusionist, was haunted by old ghosts. Not only the private phantoms of the late comic all-rounder Jacques Tati, who wrote the original script, but also memories of Edinburgh’s past. The audience even enjoyed the strangely dislocating experience of seeing the venue they were sitting in, the Festival Theatre, depicted on screen in its earlier incarnation as the Royal.
I’m just back – goodie bag gripped greedily in paw – from this morning’s launch of the 64th Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs in the Scottish capital from 16-27 June. Since breaking away from the over-crowded August festival calendar and establishing itself in an early summer slot, the EIFF has become a much more robust stand-alone event, and 2010 looks like throwing up another fine mix of international premieres, new works by established US directors, superior art-house flicks from renowned auteurs and several interesting-looking debuts from talented young British movie-makers.
Something decidedly odd happened at one of last year’s Proms. In a night celebrating the golden age of the MGM musicals, one of the performers was Seth MacFarlane. The average Prommer wouldn’t have known MacFarlane from a poached egg. And even his devotees wouldn’t necessarily be too familiar with the face. But when in the course of the evening he started singing in a voice for which he is better known, the picture became clear. To some of the audience, anyway: MacFarlane is the genius behind Stewie Griffin.
Just don’t say you weren’t warned. "The Legend Begins in 3D," it says outside the Odeon Leicester Square in rather boisterous capitals. This is very much episode one of what the moneybags on Mount Olympus, working out of their Hollywood 91601 address, envisage as an all-whizzing, all-banging trawl through the Greek legends. The formula is very much as you were. It’s the age-old cinematic derby, yet another epic widescreen face-off between man and special effect.
We are in the far north of somewhere, where it's freezing and rains for most of the year. As if the weather isn’t bad enough, the sturdy Viking community of the island of Berk have a pest problem - not mice or foxes, but feral dragons who, with their huge talons and fiery breath, steal their sheep and set fire to their houses as they attack on a regular basis. The opening scenes of How to Train Your Dragon, presented by DreamWorks Animation SKG (Shrek, Madagascar) in 3D, which portrays such an attack, are certainly vivid.
Tucked away down a sleepy residential back alley in suburban Tokyo, Studio Ghibli, the headquarters of Hayao Miyazaki, is designed - by the visionary animator himself - in the shape of a boat. When I visited it five years ago, just before the release of his last film, Howl's Moving Castle, the team of young animators all had bowls of fish and terrapins on their desks. The result, Ponyo, is at last about to open in Britain: Miyazaki is a famously slow worker, and the delay has been compounded by a hold-up with distribution. But this irresistible marine fairy-tale is worth the wait.
Stop press. Avatar is being re-released. The commercial logic is of course impeccable. There are some people out there who by some extraordinary lapse in judgement chose to consume the film first time round in common-or-garden bog-standard fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry 2D. The good people at Cameronopolis are kindly offering them the chance to mend the error of their ways and catch it in all its many-splendoured three-dimensional glory.
It would be an understatement to say that the auguries weren't good for Wes Anderson's first animated movie, the world premiere of which opened the London Film Festival last night. The distributor - Twentieth Century Fox, by a neat coincidence - was coy about screening it to critics, the trailer (below) was teeth-grindingly unfunny and an uncommonly candid feature in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week reported deep tensions on the film's London set.
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Mad Men, Series 4, BBC Four
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Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
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What I'm Reading: Conductor Peter Phillips
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:20
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Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, Victoria & Albert Museum
To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:00
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