Chico & Rita: Grade B

B

Chico & Rita (2010)

Limara Meneses, Eman Xor Oña; Directors Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando. (Spanish; subtitled).

This low-budget animation is the story of a Cuban pianist in 1948 who plays jazz in clubs and dreams of making it big. He meets Rita, a club singer with an extraordinary voice and convinces her to join the band. It works for a while, but Chico cannot commit and Rita becomes jealous and finally a fancy rich guy “discovers” Rita and whisks her off to New York and the fast lane. Chico pursues her but by this time she is a star and living large. The decades roll on. The structure of the story is reminiscent of “Remains of the Day.”

The characters are not well developed emotionally, so the romantic story is only sweet and affecting. The animation is old-fashioned, hand-drawn, simple and colorful, with lots of flat panels of saturated color, no textures or rounding, making it look like an artsy graphic novel (comic book). The sets and scenery are drawn in loving detail, especially those of prerevolutionary Havana.

The music is good, but not what I expected. I was waiting for hard latin jazz, maybe meringue, salsa, Tito Puente, Miami-style blaring trumpets, etc., but instead it was mostly ballads with hardly a pulse, pleasant enough but disappointing.

Oddly, the end-credits reveal that there were at least a dozen animation companies, from all over the world, involved in the production of this feature. I can’t imagine why that would be, but it does explain why the animation is so variable. For example, the main characters’ skin color kept changing . In the beginning, Rita is lightly tanned, while Chico is chocolate, but later, the reverse is true. Maybe that was on purpose, but I doubt it. On the upside, there is one brief dream sequence, maybe three minutes long, that is truly spectacular and mind-blowingly creative, unlike anything else in the movie. I have to wonder why that team was not given more input; it would have made an astonishing movie. Instead, this animated story is more charming than spectacular, and for that, worth seeing.

Rango: Grade A

A

Rango (2011)

Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Ned Beatty, Alfred Molina, Bill Nighy; Director Gore Verbinski.

The animation in this feature is as good as anything out of Pixar or Dreamworks. It is done by Industrial Light and Magic and puts them in the first tier of animators. The characters are fully rounded wire-frame animals, with excellent emotional capture. ILM animators have completely mastered the computationally difficult rendering of fur, water, glass, and other supposedly impossible textures and flows. The film is a triumph of animation technology if nothing else.

But there is much else: it's a good film. The characters are desert-dwelling animals living in a run-down western town called Dirt, where the economy is based entirely on water. Their taps have gone dry and even the reservoir in the bank is desperately low. No consideration is given to rainfall or aquifers – they seem to be on city water of some kind, but never mind that.

A histrionic chameleon named Rango (Depp) wanders into town, strutting and bragging about having killed the whole Jenkins gang with a single bullet. He ineptly and luckily saves the town from a killer hawk with a tin beak. He is acclaimed and named sheriff. But the evil mayor (Beatty), who is diverting the water for his own project, hires Rattlesnake Jack (Nighy) to kill Rango. There is a showdown. Meanwhile a romantic interest develops between Rango and Beans (Fisher).

The story line is formulaic, a pastiche of dozens of westerns. There is no dramatic tension, not even the manufactured kind in Cars, for example, and the romantic relationship is unconvincing, nothing like the one in Wall-e, for example; there isn’t even cheap sentimentality, as in Finding Nemo. I don’t know if kids care about those things. For adults, though, what makes the movie great is its sheer creativity. The script is funny and the excellent voice acting (the range of Depp's vocal expression is astonishing) is a treat. Also to appreciate are the beautiful and witty animations, enjoyable music (Los Lobos), and wink-wink allusions to other movies, from Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider, to Star Wars, The Fugitive, Chinatown, and many others. Those references are enormous fun for movie lovers.

Because it lacks a good dramatic story, the movie might not catch on with kids, but because of all its other virtues, I think it will become a classic in the animation genre.

Waltz With Bashir: Grade B

B
Waltz With Bashir (2008)
Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman (voices); Writer and Director Ari Folman.

This hand-drawn animated documentary is stunningly beautiful. The sets and characters are drawn with such care that it is sometimes worthwhile to stop the DVD and examine details in the background. Colors are mesmerizing. Motion animation is only perfunctory, so the feel is that of a graphic novel, not a Dreamworks project. The illustrations are there to help the documentary along, not to create a whole alternate world.

And the story is tough. It is about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the early 80’s, the horrors of war, and ultimately about a massacre of civilians committed by the Israelis. The main character is a soldier who allegedly does not remember what he did in the war, so he goes around interviewing his old war buddies and gradually his memory comes back. This is a neat device for telling the story and allegorically, it also reflects the psychological and emotional conflict this story presents to modern Israelis, who do not want to admit that they committed such a massacre. It is apparently a very sensitive, political topic even today, and this film presents a radical breakthrough in public discourse in that respect. An animation also lets an Israeli audience maintain some emotional distance from reality even as they learn what happened.

The story is very sympathetic to the Israeli soldiers, not necessarily justifying the killing or the war, but it is from their point of view, showing how they were just ordinary soldiers suffering the privations and confusion of being in battle, not monsters, not killing machines, not committers of war crimes. The actual massacre is only touched upon lightly at the end, as if it were too “hot” even for this movie. So I don’t think it is as brave a picture as it pretends to be, but I am not Israeli and not a historian. Politics aside, just as an appreciator of film, I’d say it is engaging, a good-looking piece of work, worth seeing.

Igor: Grade C

C
Igor (2008)
John Cusack, John Cleese, Steve Buscemi, Sean Hayes Jay Leno, Eddie Izzard, Jennifer Coolidge, Molly Shannon. Director Anthony Leondis (animation).

The animated fantasy world of Malaria exalts evil, and this fable focuses on a competition among evil scientists to create the most evil monster, a riff on the Frankenstein genre. Igor (Cusack) is a hunchback assistant who dreams of becoming an evil scientist. He gets his chance, but his monster (Shannon) turns out good rather than evil, and then is mistakenly programmed to be a neophyte actress who wants to play the lead in a production of Annie, which leads to some pretty funny “evil” jokes.

Buscemi and Hayes are Igor’s sidekicks, the funniest and most creative characters in the script. The writing for them is a level above. Buscemi steals every scene he is in (using only his voice!). Unfortunately, Cusack is not much of a voice actor, and since Igor is the main character, he flattens the whole picture. Izzard stands out although his character is stereotyped and not very funny. Coolidge does excellent voices, but her characters are not very funny either. Leno is undistinguished. Shannon, as the good monster, gives an adequate performance, but she has some great lines so the character is a big success. The writing is highly variable, from Buscemi’s delicious, nihilistic rabbit-thing, to Hayes’ brain-in-a-vat, all the way down to Cusack’s Igor, a character that is not cute, funny, or interesting. One wonders how one writer could be so inconsistent.

Animation is attractive but quite simple. The style is more sketchy than fully realized, with the overall art direction borrowing heavily from Burton’s Corpse Bride. Other liberal borrowings are from Wall-e, Monsters, Inc., and Kung Fu Panda, and they are quotations, not parodies. The characters are creatively drawn, cleverly animated, and a few are brilliantly conceived, even if the story line is cliché. Music is loud and noisy, as kids prefer it. Kids will like this cartoon-- it is silly, not scary -- and there are plenty of LOL guffaws to justify adults’ time.

Kung-Fu Panda: Grade C

C
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Lucy Liu, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogan (voices); Directors Mark Osborne, David Stevenson .

This Dreamworks animation is a great story for kids and has enough humor to amuse the parents. Set in a remote valley in China a hundred years ago, the panda (Black) is chosen as the next martial arts Dragon Master, to save the valley kingdom from the Luciferous Tai Lung (McShane). Panda is a clueless overweight buffoon, expressed well and naturally by Black, a source of much of the movie’s humor. Hoffman is his exasperated kung-fu trainer. Meanwhile, a gang of five superheroes stand at the ready: Monkey, Viper, Tiger, Crane and Mantis. However, they are defeated by the bad guy, leaving only Panda to save the day. Guess how it ends?

The colors are very bright, and high contrast blocks of saturated color give the film an attractive comic book look. The choreography is a pastiche of Jackie Chan movies, Hero, Crouching Tiger, and any number of other martial arts films of recent years, along with a good dose of Wile E. Coyote gags. Animation is smooth but more like a Saturday morning cartoon than a subtly expressive Pixar character. Still, it surely will pass muster with the young ones, as will the hyperkinetic scenes that move the farcical, pseudo-serious story along.

Wall-E: Grade B

B
Wall-E
Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin; Co-writer and director: Andrew Stanton. (Animated).

Wall-E is a beat-up, post-apocalyptic robot trash compactor on a desolate earth. The apocalypse was not the customary sci-fi nuclear holocaust or biological plague, but an environmental tragedy: the planet overwhelmed by trash. In Wall-E’s world there are piles of trash as high as skyscrapers (most of it seems to be scrap metal), no living things except a solitary cockroach, and a desolate desert landscape plagued by fierce duststorms. However, electricity is still plentiful, advertisements play from loudspeakers and illuminated billboards offer fast food. Hey, it’s a kid’s movie.

All the humans took spaceships to a distant mother ship, Axiom, where they have lived in spotless luxury and hi-tech comfort for 700 years. Of course they have all turned into shapeless whales gliding on hovercraft chairs as they slurp their 32 ounce sodas. They are surrounded by fast food advertising of a generic nature, but which is colored yellow and red to give the unmistakable impression of McDonald’s.

The mother ship sends out a robotic probe to Earth. The probe is a sleek, white, jet- and laser- powered, egg-shape named Eva. Eva was obviously designed by the people who did the iPod, whereas Wall-E was designed way back in the 21st century by a tractor company. Inevitably, the two robots develop a romance, and that is the heart of the story. Wall-E stows away on the shuttlecraft when Eva returns to Axiom, and Star-Trekian onboard adventures ensue as the humans are awakened to their senses and motivated to return to Earth.

The animation is out of this world, as we have come to expect from Pixar. They have no peer for technical skill or animation creativity. I was amazed at how a wide range of simple yet effective emotions were projected from a couple of robots with minimal human features. They have no eyebrows, not even noses or mouths, and hardly any language, and yet somehow, the two robots are anthropomorphically alive. It’s brilliant.

The Romeo and Juliet emotional caricatures and the heavy-handed eco-message are too simple minded for most adults. But there is a layer of inventiveness, humor, and allusion that will keep you engaged. There is also another thematic layer to consider. Wall-E and Eva, despite being robots, are clearly the characters we identify with, whereas the blimped-out humans are robotic. There is a satirical concern about our technologically-driven society, nostalgic longing for a fanciful agrarian past, and anxiety about the future of humanity.

Disney distributes Pixar, so it is noteworthy that the usual invidious gender stereotypes are largely missing from this movie. Wall-E and Eva have no sexual characteristics (other than their names) and do not behave in stereotypically gendered ways. That is a very large step forward for a children’s movie and I applaud it.

Persepolis: Grade B

B
Persepolis (2007)
Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Gabrielle Lopes; Co-writers & co-directors Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi. (French, subtitled)

This animated feature is an autobiography of Satrapi, who grew up in Teheran during the Islamic revolution, survived the long war with Iraq, and finally left for good to escape the oppression of the modern theocracy. Apparently there is a graphic novel (comic book) of this story, upon which the movie is based. The animation style is unusual, using only flat black and white areas, no shading, with close foregrounds and far backgrounds in a sepia tone, giving the scenes just a bit of depth against the very high contrast figures. Nearly every shot is vignetted, reminding us that it is a memoir. The style is simple, but not simplistic, as there are plenty of interesting angles, silhouettes, and unique point of view shots, including some fantasy and dream-like sequences that are the most creative parts of the film. There are a few colored scenes to indicate the present, but since 99% of the film is memoir, most is in black and white.

Satrapi apparently felt that Iranian people are not known in the West, except as violent fanatics, so this movie intends to demonstrate that she is, and most Iranians are, just ordinary folks like everyone else. That sentiment is expressed in the movie. There is also national pride in the selection of the title, as Persepolis was the magnificent palace of emperors Darius and Xerxes, built near Teheran after 518 BCE.

Despite its 95 minute length, the story drags after the novelty wears off, as anybody’s life story other than one’s own always will. It is no more nor less than the banal story of a girl growing up, going to college in Vienna, returning after the war to the oppressive theocracy, then finally moving to France. Nothing special happens to her or her wealthy, comfortable family, and she remains politically naïve, so the film sheds little light on Iranian or international political or cultural history. However, the autobiography seems honest and heartfelt, and it is easy to become emotionally engaged with the Satrapi character.

Bee Movie: Grade B

Bee Movie (2007)

Jerry Seinfeld (co-wrote), Renee Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Chris Rock, Ray Liotta, Sting, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King. Directors Steve Hickner, Simon J. Smith. (Animated).

The grade was not pre-ordained despite the double entendre title, but the jokes and gags are not plentiful enough to sustain the film as a joke-fest, yet the story is too weak to make an interesting drama. Seinfeld’s wit is scintillating as ever and his droll delivery reminds us who’s behind the protagonist. But that’s the problem. If this is supposed to be a Seinfeld stand-up routine, the pace is too slow. If it is supposed to be a kids’ cartoon, it is too sophisticated and not dramatic enough. If it is supposed to be a social commentary, the theme is missing.

Barry the bee (Seinfeld) leaves the hive, discovers that humans eat honey, and is appalled. He decides to sue the humans to end the exploitation. He is assisted in the human world by Vanessa, a housewife (Zellweger) who appreciates bees. After the lawsuit is successful, the bees have plenty of honey and stop working. Crops wither from lack of pollination. I can’t remember how that crisis is resolved, so limp is the dramatic tension of the story.

The animation is adequate though the visual gags are weak, not what we saw in Antz, for example. But the Seinfeld wit is omnipresent. Having Sting criticized for exploiting a bee theme is a stroke of brilliant silliness. Chris Rock is predictably hilarious. The sophisticated verbal humor raises the picture above average (for adults) but overall, I get the impression that this film was just a lark for everyone involved.

The Simpsons Movie: Grade B

B
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, other voice actors. Director: David Silverman. (Animated).

In this movie-length episode of The Simpsons television series, Homer pollutes the town’s water supply so badly that the EPA is called in. The EPA administrator recommends to President Schwarzenegger that a giant dome be put over the town to protect the rest of the country. Cut off from the world, the townspeople march to Homer’s house to lynch him, but he and the family get away and even escape the dome, becoming fugitives in Alaska. The story continues in a long series of disconnected jokes, visual gags and isolated scenes. I really enjoyed the satirical political humor, especially the Al Gore send-up, and the visual parody of Disney animation from Bambi. But there wasn’t much of that. Most of the humor concerned family relationships and farce, and that was funny, but only as funny as a Roadrunner cartoon.

I confess I have never seen The Simpsons television show. I have looked in, but it never held my interest, so I did not recognize or appreciate the plethora of characters from the TV show in the movie, nor did I understand any allusions to the TV show. I just watched an animated movie, and I found it funny, well-written and well-drawn, but not hilarious. I think Leslie Nielsen movies are funnier. Shrek I was funnier. Finding Nemo was funnier. Team America was funnier. The Simpsons humor is centered around ridiculing social ineptitude, low intelligence, and lowlife motivation, and because of those base themes, it is soon tedious. The best part of it for me was the visual humor, not the script. I recognize that The Simpsons is an international phenomenon and that I am the odd one out here. The box office grossed almost half a billion dollars and the DVD will probably do three times that. I acknowledge that Bart, Homer, Marge, Lisa, and all the others are cultural icons, but for me, honestly, this movie was only a mildly amusing diversion, above average for its genre.

Ratatouille: Grade B

B
Ratatouille (2007)
Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, Peter O’Toole, Janine Garofalo (voices). Writer and Director Brad Bird, Co-director Jan Pinkava.

I give this movie a B rather than a C because of fine animation (except for the oddity that Remy, the main rat, was blue). Pixar has set a standard for animation that few others will be able to achieve. The tone does not strive to virtual reality, but conveys a magic world, like Snow White did in another generation. But the narrative content has the stamp of the Disney pablum “message” (Never give up your dreams; anyone can achieve anything...), and despite a few witty lines, the script is prosaic. O’Toole, the implacable food critic, is by far the best character and the best voice, but we don’t get much of him. I also wanted more food jokes, garbage jokes, cooking jokes, satire of the haute cuisine world, parody of French food obsession, even more rat jokes, something, anything that would convey the comedic point of the movie. But there is no point. It’s just rats acting cute. And how cute can rats really be? When the kitchen is seething with thousands of them, it’s creepy. The animation is so precise that when they move, they really do look like scurrying rats, and that’s creepy too. Maybe kids wouldn’t mind, since they do not associate rats with the Plague and so on. But I think kids need more than cute characters to sustain them and even the pernicious Disney glorification of individualism seems like an afterthought.

Pan's Labyrinth: Grade B

B

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú. Director Guillermo del Toro. (Spanish, subtitled).

Chthonic is the word that comes to mind to describe this film. Along with dark, muddy, creepy, bloody, disturbing, and in the end, tragic. A preteen girl (Baquero) is brought with her pregnant mother to a military compound in Spain, in the mid 1930’s during the Spanish civil war (nice cars). The Captain, the woman's husband, but not father to the girl, is a Nationalist, hunting anti-fascist rebels in the woods around his compound. The girl lives in fantasy, which is the main theme of the movie. She enters into the underworld guided by insect-like fairies, and is instructed to undertake dangerous trials involving scary monsters, an allusion to Dante’s Inferno. The underground world, and much of the movie, is rendered in a dark blue tone that obscures detail and which I found very unpleasant to look at. However the animation effects, especially the fairies, are highly imaginative, and elevate the movie above mediocrity. There is no story, really. There are a few mini-melodramas, but no overall narrative. It is a hodge-podge of imagery from Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Brothers Grimm, and Mayan mythology. Good imagery it is, but even a fairy tale is supposed to be a tale, and there isn’t anything coherent here. The child’s point of view is not consistently held so it is not just a charming fantasy either. The above-ground theme of the civil war involves torture, blood and violence, making it not really a children’s movie, so you have to wonder who the target audience is. If there is an analogy between the underworld adventures and the politics of 1930’s Spain, I didn’t get it.

Cars: Grade B

B

Cars (2006)

Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Larry the Cable Guy, Cheech Marin, others (as voices). Director John Lasseter.

Animation is the star of this Pixar/Disney movie. Throughout, I marveled at the computing power needed to render the complex reflections and motion effects that made the animated surfaces and movements look so good. In fact the weakest part was the background scenery, which Snow White artists could have done as well. Also, everything was too bright. Even the shadows were bright, which detracted from the realism. The car characters however were near-perfect, despite some anthropomorphic awkwardness involving hands, arms and shoulders (how would a car operate a camera, anyway?) Wilson was perfect in the lead.

The story is typical sentimental claptrap reinforcing normative stereotypes, which is why I find all Disney films so depressing. In this case the themes were that community trumps individualism, simplistic aesthetics are best, cramped, change-resistant, small-minded, small town values are best, all steeped in 60's nostalgia. Still, the voice acting was terrific, the realizations of character in the cars was excellent, and the dialog was genuinely funny, subtle at times, and consistently strong enough to sustain the piffle of a story. I understand that NASCAR is all the rage these days, but I had to fast forward through many repetitive turns around the track. The extended tipping tractors joke could have been cut. Kids will love this movie for decades to come.