Does anyone share my feelings on this year's crop of animated films?

C

Conspiracy Carrot

New member
I think something's wrong with me. I just got back from The Princess & The Frog, which was kind of my "last hope" for animated films this year. So far I can say that this movie, Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline have been the most critically acclaimed animated films this year. I also saw 9 and Monsters VS Aliens, which got low-to-average reviews, and Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, which fell somewhere in between these two groups (mid-to-high-70 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes instead of being in the 80s-90s or 50s-60s). I didn't see Astro Boy, Ice Age 3 or Planet 51.

So why don't I love a single of the movies I have seen? Why is it that I simply like every single one of them, and feel that my opinion is so similar for most that it would be almost impossible for me to rank them from best to worst?

I feel like my opinions should at least be more varied. I feel like I should be lavishing praise upon Up for its emotional moments, but I thought that all went to the wayside 20 minutes in for talking dogs and goofy birds. I feel like I should be calling Princess & The Frog a return to form for Disney, but the first half-hour was so much better than the rest of it. I feel like I should bash Monsters VS Aliens for its pop-culture references and underdeveloped characters, but the more original jokes made me laugh and I liked the action scenes.

Am I alone here? Is it weird to feel like this? As someone who's loved cartoons all his life, to the point of spending the last two years studying the medium at art school and having aspirations of breaking into the industry, should I be feeling so middle-of-the-road about these films? It seems to most film critics and filmgoers that this has been a fantastic year for animated films, so how come I'm not feeling the love or even the hate?

EDIT: I updated my blog for the first time in over a year to go a bit more in-depth with my thoughts on all of these movies if anyone's interested: http://escapistcartoons.blogspot.com/2009/12/back-with-vengeanceand-rant-about-this.html
 
Sorta. At the very least, back when the trailers were released, I was singing Up's praises and demonizing Monsters Vs. Aliens as everything wrong with animated film making. When I finally saw them, however, I actually found Up to be one of my least favorite Pixar movies and absolutely loved MvA.

That said, though, I can easily say Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of my favorite animated movies ever, and easily ranks with Star Trek as one of my favorite movies of the year.
 
Gee, I think that out of all those movies, I've only seen Up and Astro Boy (and loved both of them)....

But dude, you're being too hard on yourself. Just because you have different feelings about the movies than critics doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It just mean that you disagree. We can't objectively say that Up is great, or that Monsters v. Aliens is horrible. You always hear people saying "I think this movie is overrated" or "I think this movie is underrated". For example, I think Star Wars is overrated, and I think Astro Boy is underrated. You have a lot of these views this year. There's nothing wrong with that at all. I mean, it's not like come 20 years from now, people are seriously going to look back at 2009 and remember any animated movie made in that year without having to struggle. And even if it was - I think Star Wars is overrated!
 
2009 has been the best year for animated features since EVER. ;) With the exception of Ice Age 3, I've pretty much loved every 'toon feature released this year. :D
 
I do. Out of those you listed, Coraline looks like the only thing this year that looks appealing to me (I haven't seen it yet, but it's on my Christmas list). The rest looks like the usual junk we get year after year (sorry, I don't get the praise for Mr Fox. It just looks mighty creepy :o). But then, there are only a select few animated features I think completey work, most of them being made more than fifty years ago.
 
I am very fond of Up, it started well and yet it kind of got bogged down with the addition of all the silliness of talking dogs and rainbow birds. If they could have stayed primarily in the realm of Mr. Frederickson through the whole movie, it would have been worth it.

The kid was all right, but he should have had a deeper connection with the guy by the end of the movie and not feel like a distraction. In that sense it's just a little bit too much like The Incredibles. If you're going to have kids fine, but make them feel more of an asset then a problem.

That's what I liked about Shrek, it opens to kids but invites the adults in as well. I'd like for an animated movie to be able to perfectly blend adult and kid humor, that'd be good. ;)
 
Well, after seeing only 3 unique animated films (Coraline, Ponyo, and 9), and the fact that I might see The Princess & The Frog just to see if Disney hasn't lost their traditional animation edge, I'd say it was a great year for animation, really.

...Thing is, those 3 films I mentioned that I saw? It was a pain in the butt waiting for those titles to come:

Coraline: Was released on the US in February, wasn't released here until April. Was released here with a Spanish Dub.

Ponyo: Was released on the US in August, wasn't released here until October. It was only in 1 theater, and it had no Spanish subtitles or dub, as other usual animated films here do.

9: Was released on the US in September, wasn't released here until December. Was only in a few theaters, and like Ponyo, it had no Spanish dub or sub.

Yeah. The theaters here are nuts.
 
They lost it about forty/fifty years ago :shrug:. Princess and the Frog isn't going to change a thing, except we'll be getting the same lame, contrived stories over and over and over, but now hand-drawn. The only thing different or new the movie ever brings , of course, a black princess.
I think it's obvious that, if there's going to ever be another really great, groundbreaking animated feature in the future, it's NOT going to be made by anyone at Disney, Dreamworks, etc (Sita Sings the Blues).
 
I have, it was pretty good.

Anyway, I have only seen four of the movies listed. I cannot really answer too much about them though. But Up and MvA are about equal to each other to me (Good, but not great).

So yeah.
 
I understand how you feel. While I don't think any of these movies are horrible by any stretch of the imagination, I feel empty watching them. I know it's supposed to be good, but why don't I feel that way about it? That's pretty much how I felt about animated movies this entire decade.

This attitude just made me look elsewhere for cartoons.:)
 
I saw Astro-Boy and found it very enjoyable.
Didn't care much for Coraline, maybe if I was a kid I'd have enjoyed it more but it was "meh".
 
I thought it was very good year for animation. While UP and Coraline are definitely a tad overrated by critics (and I contributed a fairly lengthy criticism of UP on the Disney forum, despite the fact that I liked it), they are generally fairly strong, entertaining films and well crafted. While Up is perhaps slightly mechanical in its story construction, it has many wonderful subtle moments of depth in its portrayal of an aging widower. Coraline is solid, old fashioned Alice in Wonderland romp that is only slightly hindered by the thinness of its midsection and its heavy use of "macguffins" in the final act.

Monsters vs Aliens was a good old fashioned brainless romp featuring some slick design work and a zippy, innocuous plot. Not a masterpiece by any means, but a great film for a rainy afternoon or a sleepless night.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is the same, but with a wittier script and a goofier concept. It's no masterpiece, but it's highly enjoyable in the same way "The Goonies" is--a perfectly modest but innocently fun movie for kids.



The Fantastic Mr. Fox, while still maintaining a slightly irritating "twee" tone that you find in Wes Anderson's past films, is generally a witty and intelligently crafted screenplay combined with interesting visuals.

I've not seen Astro Boy and Princess/Frog yet.

A lot of people online have slagged the anime contributions to this year's animated film list, but I felt Ponyo and the under-the-radar-DVD-release of Sky Crawlers were artful films in their own right that displayed a lot of formal beauty and innovation. Ponyo showed that you could do a children's movie that's all about the director's love of art (seriously, Ponyo is more a love letter to the love of ART and DRAWING rather than just a cute fairy tale, and even the story itself is actually a subtle metaphor for Miyazaki's love of art as well as nature) and Sky Crawlers displays Oshii's expertise as a visionary who has total control over every element of production. If there was a Stanley Kubrick of the anime world, Oshii is it. No joke! Film nerds should pay close attention to how much attention is paid to the construction of his scenes, the thought put into the compositions of his shots, the subtle manipulation of sound elements. I was never a big fan of Oshii in the past but I always recognized his talent as a director and in Sky Crawlers everything I liked about him coalesced for me.

Wow, this might be the most positive post I've ever wrote on rabroad!
 
I've enjoyed most of the films so far this year. Although I did think Up was a bit overrated. It's not a horrible movie at all, it's just that the start of the start of the movie (Carl & Ellie, flying off with balloons, etc) and the second half (with the talking dogs and the giant bird and the typical psycho villain) seemed like two separate films. Maybe it's just me. As for The Princess And The Frog, I'll definitely have to see that over Christmas break :)

Side note: Just a thought, but maybe Dug the dog was inspired by that talking Labrador Retriever in Dexter's Lab.
 
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