Comp-anima MoviesFollow

I've watched three over the last couple days; Rango, Tangled, Hood-winked.

Rango - I have a bit of a hard time with stories that can be perfectly well told with humans as the characters, but animals are used instead. There was some cuteness and a couple yucks, but of the three I liked this one the least. I still don't know what kind of an animal the leading lady was, but I hope she was a reptile as she hooked up with Johnny Depp the Chameleon. SpoilerThe turtle turned out to be the evil villain.

Tangled was ok. The fact that Rapunzel's hair just happened to have whatever magical ability that was needed at the moment was only a little bit questionable. The relationship between Rapunzel and her hero was kind of endearing and the mother/witch was a good character. Mostly I like that Rapunzel finally got a story. Her fairytale had always seemed a bit weak to me.

Hoodwinked was good. Another modernized fairytale, this particular story gives the background and lead-up to the moment when Little Red Riding Hood opens the door to Grannys cabin and finds her tied up, gagged, a wolf ready to pounce and a woodchopper bursting onto the scene to save them all. Turns out granny is an extreme sports champ. The story builds from there.

I've taken to comparing computer-animated movies to 'Up' as I really liked that movie. None of these three were as good.

Edited in a spoiler tag...

Edited, Aug 31st 2011 6:19pm by Elinda

Hoodwinked 2 came out recently, though it hasn't been as favorably reviewed. The first movie had incredibly stiff animation, very low quality for a project of that scale. However, it had quite a rare narrative mechanism for a children's movie, and I found that fairly refreshing.

Computer animated movies aren't a very surprising genre. Because of the huge budget involved very few are made, and that means that not only do just the big dogs play, but they're also less willing to experiment. It's so limited a field that I could probably name every major English computer generated theatrical movie made.

In my opinion, this is one of the best animated films of all time.

I thought How To Train Your Dragon was great. Wasn't expecting it to be but it ranked higher than some of the Pixar offerings (Cars, Ratatouille) in my book.

I had the same same "Eh" reaction to Despicable Me as Locke. Not the same hang-ups as he listed but the whole thing just failed to impress me as much as the hype had implied. It was maybe a B-

Never seen Hookwinked but I have a hard time being impressed with the "fractured fairytale" genre. "Oh ho! Actually Rumplestiltskin was always the hero! Turned it right on its head! And Babe the Blue Ox is actually a squirrel! Zany!!"