Thompson On Hollywood

Kung Fu Panda Writer Reveals Process

One of my Internet spies sent me this post from a writers' forum: an uncredited screenwriter on Kung Fu Panda describes the fabled Jeffrey Katzenberg DreamWorks Animation script process. Needless to say, painful as it may be, the process works like a charm. (Something tells me the folks at Pixar, who work as a team, have more fun.) In just over a month, Kung Fu Panda (which scored 88 % fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) has grossed $346 million worldwide.

I'll just watch.

Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 3:18 pm Post subject:

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I'm sure nothing Rob and I contributed ended up in there. We wrote a bunch of scenes they kept not using because we were changing too much.

My hats off to anyone that can write a Dreamworks Animation film. They have a unique process.

First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.

Then Katzenberg watches an animatic of the boards and says, surprisingly, "this needs a lot of work. You have a month."

Then they hire their first writer. And spend that month changing as much of the storyboards as they can, which is about 20 to 30 percent.

If the 30 percent change isn't the right kind of change, people get fired. Maybe the director, maybe the writer, maybe both.

Sometimes, only the writer gets fired and an additional director is hired to help out. It all depends on who is better - at pointing a finger with one hand while covering their own ass with the other.

I came in about four writers into the process. It's kind of hard to write a "better" scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.

It's harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger "bucket" that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to ...beat up... a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to...try to beat him up, because that's the prophecy. And I won't spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn't win. Because he's not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn't win, and because there's 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it's kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.

That resonates, right? We've all been in that situation. Oh, yeah, but we weren't the "panda." We were the "bad" guys, walking from Nazareth to Jerusalem, hoping to help people, only to get nailed to a fucking cross by the "good" guys. For instance, I had this job once at Dreamworks Animation...

I tried to divide my time there between the tasks of writing 30 percent of scenes, being hazed by storyboard artists because I didn't know how to do 30 percent of my job, yet, and explaining to the producers that Messianic myths (like The Matrix, which seemed to have a slight impact on their story) usually resonate because in the beginning of the story, things are bad, not good, and the good guy is usually the one overcoming insurmoutable odds and attempting to reclaim something from systems that have the magical ability to beat the living shit out of them no mater what they do.

I said, could we please dedicate this month's 30 percent change to making the bad guy be the ruler of the town, and the prophecy is that this panda is supposed to dethrone him.

Well, the prison scene is already drawn. And Jeffrey really likes it.

All right, can we make it like Demolition Man or Austin Powers or Cat Ballou, have the bad guy break out and everyone's panicking and they go and get the guy that according to legend is the biggest bad ass, but he's out of shape, out of his element and kind of a dick.

Hmmm, okay, but in that case, why is he coming up a flight of stairs, and what's in the bucket?

I don't know. There's food in the bucket, because he loves food so much, and ...he keeps his food in the basement, and he's coming up to answer the door because the stork is knocking at it and beseeching him to be a hero.

Well, the stork never knocks on a door, though. And Jeffrey likes the stork not knocking on doors.

So we quit. Actually, I believe we were fired.

Wall-E Op-Ed, Presto Goes Online

Here's a clip from Presto, the slapstick Pixar short that precedes Wall-E in theaters. Loved this. [Hat Tip: Underwire.]

The NYT columnist Frank Rich puts Wall-E to use in a presidential politics context. UPDATE: And Time Magazine asks the Big Oscar Question.

Wall-E Follow-ups

Wall-E is the topic of discussion this holiday weekend, as it cleaned up at the boxoffice, outperforming Wanted. The Pixar family pic has already crossed the $100 million mark.

One subject for debate: will it make it all the way to best picture? The answer depends on the competition, more than anything else. Wall-E played well at the Academy last week, I hear, but not overwhelmingly so. Remember, the Academy is live-action and actor-oriented. That said, Disney's Beauty and the Beast did get nominated for best picture--before there was an animation category.

Another question: why are the musical numbers in the movie from the old-fashioned musical, Hello, Dolly!? According to this A.P. interview, as soon as writer-director Andrew Stanton saw the musical, he knew the two songs Put on Your Sunday Clothes and It Only Takes A Moment were perfect for his needs:

Stanton said he knew he wanted to juxtapose retro music with this futuristic setting, but discovered "a perfect fit" to his narrative when he stumbled upon the "Hello, Dolly!" repertoire and the lyric "out there." (In the musical, it is the song that a Yonkers store clerk croons as he and his apprentice plan their New York City adventure.)

"I thought it was a perfect counterpoint to have this sort of almost naive optimism in the song," Stanton said.

"But then it seemed even more appropriate the more I thought about it, because the song is about two naive guys (who) have never left their small town."

The other quandary: how can a plant grow inside a closed refrigerator? Doesn't photosynthesis involve the magic combo of air, light and water? The answer to that one I suspect is standard: suspension of disbelief required.

Wall-E Is Best-Reviewed Movie of the Year So Far

Wall-E has earned a consensus of reviews that will be hard to beat for best-reviewed pic of 2008. Until Wall-E, Iron Man had 93 % fresh reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Wall-E has 97 %.

The tsunami of love pouring over Wall-E is leading some to wonder if the pic might not be competitive enough to go for a best picture Oscar. Pixar has had many releases in this best-reviewed category over the years. What would make this one any different?

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise for me. Going in, I didn't know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

Critics do not have to tell their readers every detail of the movie. UPDATE: Nor do trailers have to reveal every plot twist.

Another Wall-E factoid: Fred Willard is the first live actor to be included in a Pixar movie. He's on video, scratchy and wobbly, but is he technically animated? He is utterly recognizable as Fred Willard.

Wall-E: Pixar Goes Nine for Nine

Jack Lechner, an occasional contributor to this blog, wonders if anyone else has ever matched Pixar's nine-for-nine winning streak. Every Pixar movie has now opened at No. 1.

Wall-E, which earned a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and scored the third-highest opening for a Pixar picture this weekend, could even give Iron Man a run for the number-one summer blockbuster crown. (UPDATE: So far it's not pulling little kids in the numbers it would need to accomplish that.)

Here's Lechner's query. Readers, any ideas?

Having seen and loved WALL-E, I find myself wondering whether anyone else in the entire history of cinema -- a production company, a studio, a star, a writer, a director -- has ever made nine great movies in a row; nine big hits in a row; or, especially, nine great movies in a row that were also hits.

Every one of my personal cinematic heroes -- Wilder, Bergman, Altman -- had a strikeout now and then. Woody Allen never made nine winners in a row; nor did Hitchcock, Ford, Truffaut, or Godard. Even Mr. Consistency, Eric Rohmer, never made nine greats in a row, at least to my taste. (If you take "The Decalogue" as ten separate movies, then Kieslowski's streak is off the charts -- but since only two of the ten episodes can function as stand-alone feature films, I don't think it counts.) I've never seen AIR FORCE; if it's great, then Howard Hawks at least ties Pixar with a nine-film streak from BRINGING UP BABY to RED RIVER. But if it isn't, then all bets are off.

In recent years, Alexander Payne has made four great movies in a row -- but can he keep it up for another five? Rob Reiner's first seven films were all aces in my book -- but then there's NORTH. I know Armond White will readily testify on behalf of Spielberg's last nine films (which would take us back to AMISTAD) -- but I hated WAR OF THE WORLDS as much as I loved MUNICH. Tom Hanks had a twelve-film streak of massive hits from A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN to CAST AWAY, if you don't count THAT THING YOU DO -- but why wouldn't you? And then there are the actors -- Jeff Bridges snaps to mind -- who give consistently great performances in film after film, but not always in great films.

Unless you or your readers can come up with a rival, I'm betting that Pixar is having the single most impressive streak of all time.

The trick here is to recognize that Pixar thrives on teamwork, much as the old studios did. But Pixar releases one movie a year, which takes about four years to make. The entire team works on every movie, even if one or two people get director credit. Wall-E's Andrew Stanton also wrote and directed Finding Nemo. Here's animation expert Peter Debruge's Pixar story for Popular Mechanics.com.

Remember Michael Arndt, the screenwriter who delivered Little Miss Sunshine right off the bat? He went to work for Pixar because they boast the best writers of original screenplays in the film business. John Lasseter understood from the start that story had to be wed with huge entertainment value, family-friendly accessibility, great characters, as well as huge craftsmanship on the animation side.

Go up to visit Pixar--as I have several times, since my first feature in EW on Toy Story--and you see toys and bicycles and gizmos and artwork everywhere. It is a magical fun place. They work hard and play hard.

Hollywood could learn from them. The current thinking about the studios' future involves cutting back on production. Frank Price, the ex-studio head at Columbia and Universal, once said you couldn't produce and release more than fifteen quality movies a year. Disney is doing better since it cut back on production.

Lasseter has long been compared to Walt Disney. Did Disney ever have as long a winning streak? Perhaps the Disney studio in its prime under Walt?

Wall-E may replace Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar film. Maybe it's because I love dystopian sci-fi, Charlie Chaplin, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a fine musical romance. Wall-E reminds us of how much we humans have to lose. Plucky robot trash compactor Wall-E, at the start of the "silent" section of the film (sound magician Ben Burtt gives him a voice), has become the collector of human valuables after we have abandoned our garbage-pile planet.

One Variety colleague told me that she was trying to figure out why the movie moved her so much. She decided that the love between the robots was so pure, that it reminded her what love really was. When was the last time a movie did that? And the movie musical Hello Dolly! is the agent of their romance!

Here are links to past reports from Debruge:
from Comic-Con 2007, where Burtt made a presentation.

Pixar Exclusives.

[Photo Ben Burtt courtesy LAT]

Wall-E Lands Rave Reviews

Todd McCarthy wrote his rave of Pixar's latest, Wall-E, late Wednesday night. Here's MCN critic Michael Wilmington. UPDATE: And Rotten Tomatoes rates the pic 97 % fresh. Wow.

Nobody does it better than Pixar. I went to see it Tuesday night but the traffic around Hollywood Boulevard was so impenetrable that I had to give up and turn around. ARRGH! I'll see it this weekend. Fantasy Moguls predicts a boffo opening.

Here's Todd's bullet-graph:

Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder of the animated world is a simple yet deeply imagined piece of speculative fiction. Despite the decade-plus since its inception, "WALL-E" is a film very much of its moment, although in a cheeky, uninsistent way; it has plenty to say, but does so in a light, insouciant manner that allows you to take the message or leave it on the table. Adroitly borrowing from many artistic sources and synthesizing innumerable influences, Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton's first directorial outing since "Finding Nemo" walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing to indicate celestial B.O. for this G-rated summer offering.

Weekend Boxoffice: Sex and the City Messes with Zohan and Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda will hit solidly with families. (It's pretty damned good.) Panda scored great reviews Friday, with an 85% fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, while Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan nabbed a piddly 37 % rotten. It should reach a few of the poor neglected males out there.

Sex and the City should hold well based on good word-of-mouth and may even pull in a few men. (Is it a one-shot anomaly? Or can Hollywood continue to harness the femmes?) Others have weighed in: The Women's Media Center, The Philly Inquirer, Newsweek, EW Popwatch and Cinematical. [Hat Tip: Women and Hollywood.]

Here are Variety's Zohan and Panda reviews, and our weekend boxoffice report.

Fandango's ticket sales (as of 6/6/08 10:00 a.m. PT) are:

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Sex and the City “Must Go” 52%

Kung Fu Panda “Go” 23%

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull “Go” 8%

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan “Go” 8%

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian “Go” 2%

Whet Your Appetite With Pixar and 'Panda' Exclusives

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
OK, animation fans, two great images I couldn't let pass in their low-res versions. The first is an exclusive image from Pixar's “Presto,” above, in which a magician’s unhappy rabbit angles to get even (in case you missed it in the June 2 Weekly Variety). The short marks the directorial debut of character animator Doug Sweetland and screens before “Wall-E” this summer. I love that Pixar allows some of their most promising talent to stretch their wings this way.

And because our photo gallery format doesn't do the man justice, I'm including a huge version of one of Nicolas Marlet's early designs for “Kung Fu Panda.” Nico's been flying below the radar at DreamWorks Animation for years, but this movie promises to make him a star, since he's the guy responsible for all the film's incredible character designs. Click either image for a better view (and don't miss my interview with Nicolas Marlet either).

It's Yogi and Huck: A Hanna-Barbera History

This is the stuff I grew up on: Saturday morning cartoons on black-and-white TV. Sigh.

Here's a history of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

SXSW Podcast: Digital Cinema for Indies

CinemaTech blogger and Variety contributor Scott Kirsner moderates a cool and informative SXSW panel: Digital Cinema for Indies. Here's the podcast. The visuals are not visible, frustratingly.

There are other podcasts posted now, including The Porn Police: Know the Rules, Animation and Digital Effects on a Budget, Quit Your Day Job and Vlog, and the controversial Mark Zuckerberg Keynote.

Weekend Boxoffice: Horton Holds, Perry Performs, Drillbit Dies

Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! landed atop the boxoffice charts again, while Tyler Perry's latest opened well and Judd Apatow's badly-reviewed Owen Wilson comedy Drillbit Taylor did not. That's two Apatow-produced disappointments now, after Walk Hard. But the next three---Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express and Step Brothers-- look strong.

Time's Richard Corliss profiles Perry while Richard Schickel divebombs Drillbit Taylor.

[Photo courtesy Time Magazine]

Holiday Weekend Update: Good and Plenty

There's plenty to see in theaters this weekend.

While it's ingeniously improvised by likable actors at a real poker tournament, The Grand is not as funny as the last mock doc by writer-director Zak Penn, The Incident at Loch Ness. The wily Werner Herzog is the funniest thing in both movies.

My recent Judd Apatow poll shows Pineapple Express leading in want-to-see over his three other comedies, including this weekend's well-advertised opener, Drillbit Taylor. Pineapple Express's director, the usually darkly dramatic David Gordon Green, has in release Snow Angels, which played at Sundance 2007. It's well worth seeing before it disappears. So is Gus Van Sant's brilliant, stark Cannes entry Paranoid Park.

The moody period noir thriller Married Life is marred by miscasting: the estimable Chris Cooper and Pierce Brosnan are both in love with the 20-something femme fatale Rachel McAdams. Excellent actors all. But yucky. I preferred AMC's similar but more stylish Mad Men.

Among the Oscar-season holdovers, Oscar-winner The Counterfeiters and animation nominee Persepolis are hanging in with great WOM. I caught The Band's Visit last weekend, a small gem which was ineligible as Israel's Oscar entry because its Egyptians and Israelis communicate in English.

And of course, the delightful The Bank Job is showing legs.

[Photos: Snow Angels, Paranoid Park, The Counterfeiters, Persepolis]

ShoWest: Summer Preview

Every year ShoWest screens an honor reel of movies that grossed over $100-million the year before. Which of the 2008 ShoWest promo pics will be on next year's reel?

Based on what I saw and reactions gleaned, here's my best guess:

Movie that could pass $300 million: the sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which will likely improve on its predecessor with more action and more mature protagonists.

Movies that could go well past $200 million: sequels The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, starring Harrison Ford and Shia LeBeouf, Rob Cohen's China-shot Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, and Guillermo del Toro's epic-scale actioner Hellboy II: The Golden Army; plus non-sequels Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman as assassins training rookie James McAvoy, the invulnerable Will Smith as a homeless hero in Hancock, Judd Apatow's dumb male comedy Step Brothers, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Marvel's Iron Man, which boasts femme appeal via Robert Downey Jr. and co-star Gwenyth Paltrow, and animated family originals Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks Animation) and Wall-E (Disney/Pixar).

Movies that could break $100 million: a remake of Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton as a thinking man's Bruce Banner; for the femme audience, a remake of the HBO classic Sex and the City, a remake of the boomer TV show Get Smart, starring Steve Carell and Ann Hathaway, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's surrogate nightmare comedy Baby Mama, and a movie version of the Broadway musical Mamma Mia (also for musical fans); Judd Apatow factory comedies Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Pineapple Express; Ben Stiller's starry R-rated action comedy Tropic Thunder, starring Stiller, Downey, Jack Black and Steve Coogan; the frere Wachowski's adaptation of the anime classic Speed Racer, starring Emile Hirsch and Christina Ricci; and George Lucas's animated sequel Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (Am I the only one who feels a shock that the film is going out through Warners? Even though Lucasfilm controls and markets the movies and collects the lions' share of the take, I feel like all Star Wars movies are supposed to have the Fox fanfare in front of them.)

Weekend Boxoffice: Horton Breaks a Record

Fox animated feature Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! opened better than any film so far in 2008, reports Variety:

Twentieth Century Fox's "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" enjoyed a who-licious bow of $45.1 million at the domestic box office, the biggest opening of the year and furthering Fox's successful foray into the animated and family marketplace. "Horton"--toplining the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carell and produced by Blue Sky Studios--becomes the fifth-best opening ever for a G-rated toon, a market otherwise owned by Disney and Pixar. It also is the fourth-best opening ever for March, after Warner Bros' "300" and Fox's own animated PG toons "Ice Age" and sequel "Ice Age: The Meltdown."

And Summit's martial-arts actioner Never Back Down, backed by a muscular ad campaign, clobbered Rogue's Doomsday, finally: Never Back Down grossed an estimated $8.6 million, landing in third place, while Doomsday grossed an estimated $4.7 million, landing in seventh, behind Lionsgate's Bank Job, which held well on strong reviews and word-of-mouth, falling only 17 %.

Oscar Watch: Reviews of Nominated Shorts

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
2008 Oscar Animated Shorts
The trouble with watching the Academy's animated short nominees (which you can do in theaters or online now, thanks to the efforts of Magnolia Pictures, Shorts International and iTunes) is that it practically forces you to think about these five exquisite entries in competitive terms-- which is best? which will win? -- when in fact, this is the strongest and most diverse crop I've ever seen in the category. From stop motion to CG to paint on glass, the techniques reflect the full range of possibility open to animators today, and I strongly encourage anyone to seize the opportunity to see them not as Oscar-season rivals but as a diverse medium's collective best efforts.

I Met the Walrus
The wars change, but John Lennon's message remains the same: "Piss for peace, smile for peace --but whatever you do, do it for peace." It's been nearly four decades since 14-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and grilled the Beatles legend on topics ( as Juno puts it) way beyond his maturity level, but today, the pop prophet's words seem more relevant than ever.

Rather than make a traditional documentary about the event, Canadian helmer Josh Raskin edits the 40-minute interview down to a punchy, five-minute collection of soundbites, animating the session in what looks like a cross between Terry Gilliam's gonzo Monty Python style and Lennon's own doodles. Raskin's interpretation is amusing, maybe even ingenious in spots. The only problem: He seems to be doing it for laughs, not for peace, and the images frequently overwhelm the message.

Levitan, no doubt bewildered by the opportunity, is reduced to a slack-mouthed hand puppet, while Lennon's ideas explode like firecrackers around him. It's a technique better suited for parody than reverence (as evidenced by J.J. Sedelmeier's recurring "TV Funhouse" sketch on Saturday Night Live), but the essence of Lennon's message survives intact.

Madame Tutli-Putli
Of all the filmmaking arts, animation comes closest to dreaming -- a sensation I've seldom experienced with the head-over-heals delirium Madame Tutli-Putli accomplishes as it shadows a rather overburdened Virginia Woolf type on a supernaturally tinged night-train ride. That dreamlike quality comes down to creating not just hallucinatory images (in that department, Japan's anime titans reign supreme) but a certain porousness between the real and the impossible (such as the sight of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess on the luggage rack). And while the result is probably too dark for the Academy's taste, this was far and away my favorite of the entries.

The magic of Madame Tutli-Putli is in the eyes, a finishing touch Jason Walker added to Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's already impressive stop-motion work (the moving train effects are particularly astonishing). Using Adobe After Affects, Walker composited real eyes onto the mannequins' crude, hand-sculpted faces, bringing an uncanny level of performance to the title character and her fellow travelers. But Mme. Tutli-Putli's performance comes through every bit as strongly through her body language as it does in butterfly blinks and nervous glances. Not since Aardman's first Wallace and Gromit short has the medium impressed me so much.

Meme les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)
Funniest of the entries is this droll French bit about a greedy priest who rescues his careless parishioners from death, then turns around and tries to sell them an elaborate contraption that will ensure the pour souls' passage to heaven. Interesting, too, that the year's only computer-animated entry was actually designed to look like stop-motion; in fact, it may even take your eyes a few seconds to realize that French animator Samuel Tourneux rendered everything virtually. But I suspect it was the story, not the technique, that attracted the Academy to this comic parable.

Though the concept supports some amusing character animation between the crafty priest and skeptical peasant, a last-second twist makes clear that Tourneux's entire scenario exists primarily to set up its final punchline. In that way, the short reminds me of last year's Maestro (in which a bird prepares backstage for a concert performance, only to be launched from a cuckoo clock at the last minute), although Pigeons is more consistently entertaining -- not to mention more impressively animated. Even Hollywood's top toon studios haven't mastered CG humans, yet character design comes naturally to Tourneux, who claims to have taped and studied real actors to get the performances right.

My Love (Moya Lyubov)
Oscar vet Alexander Petrov returns with another stunning literary adaptation rendered in his luminous paint-on-glass style (nominated three times before, Petrov won in 2000 for his take on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea). But gorgeous as My Love appears, Americans don't know Ivan Shmelyov's A Love Story and may even be taken aback by this vintage Russian tale of a 16-year-old boy, Tonichka, torn between the shy, lower-class maid who works for his family and the mysterious, more mature beauty who lives next door.

It's easy to identify with the premise, about a youth who overlooks the suitor right in front of him for some fanciful ideal of perfection, but the key moment when he realizes his error doesn't quite translate (as it turns out, the neighbor woman's alluring blue spectacles hide a freakish deformity, the discovery of which sends Tonichka into a near-fatal fever and triggers the story's final tragedy). And yet, Petrov's artistry is simply breathtaking, like witnessing an impressionist painting come to life-- the gestures so natural, the faces so tender, I could've sworn I was watching some trick done with live-action footage rather than the crowning achievement of a master animator.

Peter and the Wolf
If I had to predict a winner, this would be it. Over the years, many storytellers and animators have tried their hand at adapting Sergei Prokofiev's classic, and Suzie Templeton's rich, textured stop-motion take is the first I've seen to do away with the narration and let the image and music tell the story. Unlike the Disney version you undoubtedly remember well (in which Peter looks more than a little like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits with his non-threatening popgun), Templeton's interpretation seems to favor the animals and even features a mushy new twist: after capturing the wolf, Peter lets the misunderstood beast go free, revealing the hunters as the true villains of the story.

Kids'll love it, and Templeton's animal-friendly instincts certainly make the central showdown engaging, as bird, duck, cat and wolf interact in perfect harmony with Prokofiev's score. She fleshes out the world with splendid detail, from her creatures' fur and feathers to the raw wood and rusty metal environments, and yet the human characters seem curiously inanimate (although big, bejeweled eyes that half-excuse the fact that their faces don't move). Still, it's a strange choice, considering what an important element body language is to stop-motion animators like Henry Selick and the Tutli-Putli crew.
Though not as consistently top-notch as their animated counterparts, Oscar's live-action short nominees still offer a more consistently entertaining experience than any feature release you're likely to find in theaters this season. The big surprise here is that none of the nominees are American, and four feature subtitles (keep that in mind when picking your seats, as big heads butted into our viewing experience), but the sheer variety is astounding. Though a better crop overall than previous years, this year's batch features no obvious frontrunner. The cynic in me can see the Academy going for At Night, although it would make my day to see France's The Mozart of the Pickpockets win.

More of Debruge's reviews of the live action shorts and documentary shorts are on the jump.

Oscar Animated Shorts

Beyond the Multiplex reviews the Oscar animated shorts.

Oscar Watch: Debate 08

For your amusement--or not. This Persepolis vs. Ratatouille debate video is a tad forced. I have to assume that Ratatouille is not going to lose the Oscar on the basis of any of these arguments.

Oscars Face the Music

The Oscar song submissions are in, all 59 of them. Which ones will make the cut? The ones with the most recognizable names--and biggest ad campaigns--natch. This is the category where pop stars like Sting, Bowie or Collins, as well as a Disney animation song or two, often land a nom.

Thus Eddie Vedder's three Into the Wild songs, Hairspray's Come So Far (Got So Far to Go) and Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz's two Enchanted entries are strong contenders. The voters are going to want to give something to the indie phenom Once, so this could be the appropriate category to reward one of the songs from the Frames' Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. And it was a brilliant move on Harvey Weinstein's part to suggest that Academy fave Clint Eastwood compose the score for Grace is Gone; he also a supplied a song.

Here's Phil Gallo's take.

The entire list of original songs is after the jump:

Oscar Watch: Foreign Film

If you're interested in the foreign Oscar race, The Film Experience, which collects info on all 63 foreign Oscar submissions, is a good place to start. And Cinemascope takes the temperature of the foreign race.

Awards Daily projects that one surefire Oscar contender will be the Austrian submission The Counterfeiters, which Sony Pictures Classics is releasing. I agree that it's a strong competitor. It's an old cliche that the Academy is susceptible to a good holocaust drama, but in this case, the movie is based on a true story with an unusual twist. A concentration camp sets up an elite unit of skilled prisoners with a mission: to print money to fund the Nazi war effort. The prisoners want to survive, but they also want the Germans to lose. The movie delivers.

Other strong contenders include the Palme d'Or and European Film Award winner from Romania, the abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (IFC Films), Mexican Carlos Reygados's pastoral Silent Light (Tartan), Italian Giuseppe Tornatore's melodramatic The Unknown Woman (Outsider Pictures), Lebanon's Caramel (Roadside Attractions), German Fatih Akin's Edge of Heaven (Strand), and Marjane Satrapi's animated French film, Persepolis (SPC).

Here's the Counterfeiters trailer:

Weekend Boxoffice: Enchanted Holds Firm

As I predicted, Enchanted continued its boxoffice surge this weekend. Here's Pam McClintock's report.

Weekend Boxoffice: Enchanted Casts Spell

The five-day Thanksgiving weekend boxoffice was flat when compared to last year, but that was good news after a dismal fall. As expected, the Disney musical Enchanted landed rave reviews and magical grosses, an estimated $50-million for the weekend. Mythical actioner Beowulf held just OK, while the Coen brothers’ ultra-violent No Country for Old Men went wide with a terrific $11-million in 860 runs.And new opener Starting Out in the Evening, which scored excellent reviews from the likes of the NYT and LAT, opened well on Friday on seven screens in NY and LA at an estimated $85, 596, and grabbed a fighting chance at pushing star Frank Langella into the best actor Oscar race.

Beowulf: Hybrid Animation VFX

Beowulf is good cheesy fun. Bob Zemeckis and Sony Imageworks and the hundreds of folks who labored to make this movie have delivered a must-see event, especially in IMAX 3-D. But it's not nearly as good as it could have been, nor did it need to be so labor intensive. I would happily watch the blue-screen/live-action/300 version of this movie, which would have cost half as much. Or I would eagerly see the entirely animated version. Why not shoot live-action and animate the non-human creatures? This performance capture/imagemotion process remains clunky and stiff.

Here's the deal: the best stuff in Beowulf is the most stylized, the most liberated from the motion-capture process--Angelina Jolie's spike-heeled demon, the monster Grendel, the golden dragon and Beowulf himself. Beowulf is an idealized Adonis-version of Ray Winstone, and the most magnificently rendered human character ever put on-screen. But the other humans, from Robin Wright Penn to Anthony Hopkins, with their plastic eyes and murky teeth, are still strange and weird. They are stiff, robotic, less human than if they had been animated. The human eye is rigged to pick out anything wrong. The closer to reality you get, the easier it is to miss it.

As for the whole Academy debate about animation vs. visual effects, Zemeckis remains hung up on being taken seriously as a live-action director who works with actors and props etc. Well, as long as this movie is 100% rendered, the Academy considers it animation, even if the process used to make the movie is the same one that created Gollum or King Kong. Those characters are considered VFX. But the VFX committee will never budge on this.

The Beowulf myth is a deep and powerful one; it goes back to the old tales that J.R.R. Tolkein was inspired by when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. I highly recommend the Seamus Heaney translation, which doesn't take long to read. But Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have gussied up the story, complicating it with sex and honor and guilt and all sorts of modern emotions that the original myth had nothing to do with. Finally, I prefer the old-fashioned action-adventure Beowulf & Grendel, starring 300's Gerard Butler.

Here's the Variety review.

I Am Beowulf!

Here are some early reactions to Beowulf, which is supposedly under a review embargo until November 12. Humph! I'll hold off a bit, but what I will say is this: in one scene when Angelina Jolie rises up out of her cave pool to seduce the mighty Beowulf, who has just killed her only son, Grendel, she walks on water, revealing that she is not only painted in gold, a la Goldfinger, but sports a tail and stacked high heels. Please. Barbie Doll stilettos in 5th century Denmark? There must have been debates about that one. I ran into Imagemovers partner Jack Rapke in the lobby of the Four Seasons Saturday.

"What were you thinking?" I asked.

He replied, "She's a demon! She's timeless." Two of the men I asked about this, intelligent film critics both, said it didn't bother them. I guess Jolie worked her magic.

Nicole Sperling lays out the VFX future in EW.

Jeff Wells writes a letter to Roger Avary.

Stephen Schaefer's early rave is mysteriously missing online:

Seeing is believing with Robert Zemeckis’ mighty, monumental “Beowulf,” which opens Nov. 16. This extravagant adaptation of the epic poem about a cursed kingdom invents a 6th century A.D. Denmark that is so richly detailed, romantic and engrossing it’s like seeing the Prince Valiant comic strip brought to blazing, 3-D life, a childhood fantasy realized in such a complete way you’re stupefied with delight. Using the motion capture technique that “Lord of the Flies” managed to create the lisping monster Gollum and that Zemeckis employed on the saccharine “Polar Express,” “Beowulf” is nothing less than an immersion into a world that is somehow familiar – they live in a harsh climate like Boston, they drink mead, get drunk and pass out, they have a wife and a mistress – and totally strange with its demons that morph into flying dragons, sea monsters that can be slain by blond Beowulf, a hero for all times. The fight scenes are startling, not the least because like “Eastern Empires” Beowulf is nude as he takes on Grendel in mano a mano to-the-death combat. The homoeroticism, a friend said, outdoes Gerald Butler’s “300” by “500.” Ray Winstone may look nothing like this sleek god-like warrior but he sounds perfect. The cast includes a brilliantly underplayed aging king by Anthony Hopkins, a Bette Davis-style villain in John Malkovich and Angelina Jolie’s siren, a shape-changing seriously seductive sylph who gets a laugh in her six-inch heels. Big Oscar Question: Is this in the running for Best Picture or Best Animated Feature?

UPDATE: And here's AICN's Moriarty. And Beowulf co-writer Neil Gaiman's blog posts a funny typographical error from transworld news:

Angelina Jolie has admitted she was got a little shy when she saw her nude scenes in her latest film “Beowulf.” The actress says although the nude scenes were stimulated, she was still a little embarrassed. “I was a little shy,” she says. “I was really surprised that I felt that exposed. There were certain moments where I actually felt shy – and called home, just to explain that the fun movie that I had done that was digital animation was, in fact, a little different than we expected.”

Bee Movie: Seinfeld Returns to Work

Jess Cagle's story about what Jerry Seinfeld has been up to all these years, and how he got back into the movie biz (with Bee Movie) by pitching Steven Spielberg at the beach is an entertaining read.

I'm not sure I want to see the movie though. I'm oddly resistant. Maybe it's because the plight of exploited honey bees is real! I am obviously not the target demo, however.

[Photo for Time Magazine]

The ChubbChubbs Return

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
Remember the ChubbChubbs, those adorable, toothy little aliens featured in Sony Imageworks’ Oscar-winning animated short? They’re baaack.

In an effort to give audiences one more reason to see Daddy Day Camp, Sony is attaching a follow-up adventure, The ChubbChubbs Save Xmas, to the Cuba Gooding Jr. comedy. Or you could wait until Surf’s Up hits DVD in October, since both ChubbChubbs shorts will be included as extras (as personal preferences go, the surfing-penguin pic remains my favorite toon of 2007).

Simpsons Movie: Groening and Brooks Do Rose

This weekend I caught up with Charlie Rose's conversation with Matt Groening and Jim Brooks, both of whom are among the smartest and funniest people I have gotten to know in Hollywood. Brooks insists upon high standards. He's a guy who observes, analyzes, improves. What The Simpsons has done, as the longest running TV show and now a movie, is pretty amazing. (Like many Angelinos, I TiVo Charlie Rose and watch the shows that appeal to me.)

I finally saw Live Free or Die Hard, which was pretty good until the preposterous effects went over the top toward the end. It's part of the formula for a summer movie. (Whoever bought the crazy assertion that there were no digital effects in the movie is bonkers; the movie combines live action with digital, which makes the effects look less pixilated and more real. That's the smart way to go.)

Die Hard is losing screens (to The Simpsons among other things) while still doing business. The single screen at the AMC sold out the 8 PM show so I bought a ticket to The Simpsons and snuck into Die Hard, feeling vaguely guilty that I would cost someone their seat, but there were a few left down in front.

The reason for Die Hard's surprising longevity after all these years?

The script was smart, crisply directed and well played by Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Maggie Q and Timothy Olyphant. The audience was frightened by the premise that the country's vital processes are vulnerable to attack by cyber hackers. They were rapt as the hacker villains brought D.C. to a halt. As is true in many films these days, the government was ineffectual, clueless, incompetent. The audience--which was largely over 25-- ate up McClane as the Luddite who uses old-fashioned physical violence to protect and serve. After all these years, while the world has changed, McClane is reassuringly the same.

Oscar Watch: Animation Tempest Over Beowulf

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
It's never too early to start debating Oscar, and over at the Gold Derby, Tom O'Neil is stirring up trouble by quoting Jeffrey Wells' thoughts on the animation category (which happens to be my beat over here in the Variety features department). Tom reports:

Jeff saw a reel of footage yesterday and it "may not, according to the Academy's 'Rule Seven,' be an animated film," he warns. "It's a real eyeball-popper and clearly something else in the realm of animation — each and every frame is, in fact, animated by the standard of digital animation — but the Academy seems to be saying that any film that starts with live action footage and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that footage (like Richard Linklater's 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly') is not eligible."

This is a non-issue. Beowulf isn't "animated over" traditional footage, the way Oscar-eligible "Waking Life" and "Scanner Darkly" were. It's a performance capture-based film, just as "Polar Express," "Monster House" and (Savion Glover's dancing scenes from) "Happy Feet" were. That doesn't mean that the animation community is crazy about motion-capture movies (the "Ratatouille" end credits featured the following quality assurance guarantee: "100% genuine animation. No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film"), but then, they resisted computers at first, too. Nor should it suggest that traditional keyframe techniques aren't featured heavily in motion-capture films (the word "shortcuts" is misleading, since more time and expense is ultimately expended in trying to translate live-action performances