Posted on August 8, 2015 at 8:00 am
New on Netflix: Dinotrux! It’s based on the books by Chris Gall
Dinotrux are huge creatures are half dinosaur, half construction vehicle. Ty Rux is a Tyrannosaurus Trux, and his best friend Revvit is a razor-sharp Reptool. Together they fight to protect their community from the wrecker D-Structs. Episodes will be available on Netflix August 14, 2015.
Posted on August 7, 2015 at 3:26 pm
Dorothy McKim produced one of my favorite of the recent Disney short films, “Get a Horse,” which brought old-time Mickey Mouse into the era of 3D CGI with an eye-popping, with a hilariously intricate choreography that literally jumps out of the screen. She talked to me about the making of the film and the new Blu-Ray release, Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection
“Oh my golly, I love the shorts,” she told me. “I love the whole shorts program that we have here at Disney. We do them for a couple of reasons. We do it to test the director, to give a chance to the director pool, the director talent, and also to test the technology. And, it also allows a filmmaker to tell a short story in a very short amount of time. You got to get a lot of information in within 3-5 minutes, whether you do that through dialogue, through action, and also through the music. There’s such a diverse group of shorts, it just shows the kind of talent that we have here at the studio.” The old-fashioned images and animation in “Get a Horse” are all brand new footage. “Back in 2012, Disney wanted to bring back Mickey Mouse, like ‘Hey, let’s do some Mickey Mouse shorts.’ And it could be for for TV or it could be for the Disney Channel. We had about 30 people come forward with ideas. And what we did is that we culled that down to the top ten and we got those in front of John Lasseter. And what happened was that Lauren MacMullan, the director of “Get a Horse!” was pitching the idea. And we were in a room, and the pitch got to Lauren’s turn and she had one image that was up on the board and she had a black cloth in front of that and she said, ‘I have this idea for a Mickey short, but it’s a theatrical idea, it’s not an idea for TV.’ And she said, ‘I would love to take the hand-drawn characters, classic characters, keep them in black and white, and then they punch through a screen, and when they punch through the screen, they’re in color, and they’re in CG.” And she pulled down the black cloth, and it was an image of the classic characters in black and white, with Mickey’s foot punched through the screen, and his foot was CG and it was in yellow. And John Lasseter said, “I want to make that short.” It was the fastest pitch I have ever seen-—literally no more than ten minutes. It was that simple. And what we did was when we first started working on it, we thought it would be really great if we put it out into the world that we found this old footage and we wanted to build on it. And so we had that story going for us for a while, and then we started thinking, ‘Is this going to work against us?’ And I think it did a little bit with the Academy. It was all brand new footage. We had our own hand-drawn animators who worked on it, along with our CG. It was really great to watch both two groups come together on this short and it was the most fun thing I’ve ever worked on.”
It is not just the look of the characters that goes back to their original cartoons in the 1930’s. It is the way they move as well. “That’s called rubber horse animation,” McKim said. “We had Eric Goldberg, who was our head of animation, and he is just the best historian. He really brought that rubber horse animation that’s got their arms squashed and stretched. We did a lot of research. The lighting that we would use, what we did is we put the whole film through a rough patch, like going through and scratching it and making it look old. You know, back when they shot those shorts, they would do them in a little studio, and the reason why it looks like the lights are flickering was just that, their lights were flickering. We put a whole rough patch onto it and made it look like there were scratches on there and the lights were flickering. With the sound, we wanted that “Turkey in the Straw” that you hear in the beginning. We wanted the original one; we couldn’t get it because the people that made it, nobody is alive anymore, so we couldn’t find it. So we recreated it. Even with the sounds of an ocarina. Like little tiny whistles, right? We found an ocarina player and he came and put that in. So we really tried to make it authentic. As far as the sound effects, we actually used a lot of the original sound effects. We have an entire library that Jimmy McDonald built back in the day. They kept it, it’s with Walt Disney Imagineering, and we went over and actually used some of the instruments that Walt used. So it was all authentic.”
The most authentic sound in “Get a Horse” is Mickey’s voice, which was taken from recordings of the original actor who provided Mickey’s voice — Walt Disney himself. “It was really important for us to use Walt’s voice. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice. We had a screening for John Lasseter while we were making the work-in-progress, and Lauren and I were so excited. We pulled all of Walt’s dialogue from different shorts and we put it in into the short, and we’re so happy. And he’s like, ‘Oh wow, that’s so great! We’re going to use Walt, we’re not going to bring anyone else in, we’re going to use him.’ So we screened it, and John Lasseter, he’s brilliant, goes, ‘That was Walt except for the word red.’ And we kind of looked at it and we thought, ‘Shoot, we got caught.’ That one word, red, we couldn’t find anywhere in the library. We searched high and low. It took forever, about six months, to see if we could find the word red, and John found it. And we were like, ‘Oh man, you caught us,’ and he said, “’I could tell that wasn’t Walt,’ and we thought, ‘Man, he’s good.’ We really wanted to keep true to what our journey was. So we found a really great sound designer who worked with our editorial team, and they found three syllables that Walt said, an Rr, an Eh, and a Duh, to form the word red, and that’s three syllables from three different words that he used. They formed it and we put it together and they made it seamless. So that’s 100% Walt’s voice.”
McKim said that what Mickey and Disney had in common was “taking risks. He took risks. Walt, when he did his shorts and used Mickey. And Mickey took risks. Some of those old shorts, “Plane Crazy,” jumping out of a plane, you know, he wasn’t afraid. And I think that’s what we wanted to keep true to what Walt was doing with Mickey, and I felt like we really accomplished that in ‘Get a Horse!’”
Posted on August 6, 2015 at 5:07 pm
A-| Lowest Recommended Age: | All Ages |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated PG for rude humor |
| Profanity: | None |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | None |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Mild comic peril and mayhem, animal control officer, memory loss |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | August 7, 2015 |
| Date Released to DVD: | November 23, 2015 |
| Amazon.com ASIN: | B013H99VXC |
“Shaun the Sheep is another adorably quirky animated film from Aardman, the folks behind “Wallace and Gromit” and “Chicken Run.” it is a wordless pleasure about a flock of sheep who have an adventure when they get bored with their idyllic but monotonous life on the farm and visit the big city. But they miss their farmer. And when they are ready to go home, the farmer is not there. They had accidentally transported him to the big city, where he got amnesia and now cannot remember who he is or where he lives. Only the sheep can save the day.
Aardman films are made with sculpted figures shifted just one tiny movement at the time, and so lovingly hand-crafted that the audience can glimpse fingerprints on the characters. In a week, an animator may produce two or three seconds of film. And yet their movements are as fluid and intricately choreographed as a Jackie Chan stunt. And their faces are as expressive as any Oscar-winning actor.
That is especially important in this film because it is wordless. It is not silent — there are sound effects and a musical score and several well-chosen songs play on the soundtrack. Occasionally we hear a murmured mumble, a low-key British version of the adults’ muted horn sounds in the Charlie Brown shows. The kids in the audience with me loved it, laughing wildly, especially at a few potty jokes and some slapstick pratfalls. Don’t tell them, but children — and their families — will benefit from having to up their observational skills to stay on top of what is happening.
As Shaun and the flock dress up as humans to search for the increasingly bewildered farmer and evade the increasingly frenzied animal control officer and his electrified pinching grasper, their adventures are funny, exciting, and even poignant. The settings are witty and captivating, with some sly satire popping up to keep things brisk. It’s (forgive me) shear delight.
Parents should know that this film includes some bodily function humor (guy on toilet, sheep manure) and cartoon-style peril, head injury and memory loss.
Family discussion: Why did the sheep miss the farmer? Why was the haircut so popular?
If you like this, try: “The Wallace & Gromit” films, the “Shaun” television series, and “Chicken Run.”
Posted on July 15, 2015 at 8:00 am
At the end of the last “Kung Fu Panda” movie we got a hint that our hero, an adopted son of a loving father, would get his first chance to meet his biological family. In this new chapter, Po (Jack Black) finds a community of pandas and has to train them in kung fu to take on the evil Kai (Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons).
Posted on July 9, 2015 at 5:16 pm
The Minions should pay a little less attention to villains and a little more to penguins. Like “Madagascar’s” penguins, “Despicable Me’s” yellow minions were comic relief characters who took the lead in follow-up features. But the Minions are not quite up to the level of their black and white counterparts. While “Penguins of Madagascar” was one of the funniest films for any age of last year, “Minions” is a reasonably diverting entertainment with some great visuals, some good ideas, and some missed opportunities. The Minions are an adorable concept, a cross between Oompa Loompas and marshmallow Peeps. But they speak in gibberish, which is more fun in smaller doses. And while this movie selects three of them out of the multitudes to be the focus of the adventure, their characters are not especially interesting and their personalities are not especially differentiated. The same is unfortunately true of most of the human characters as well.
And “Despicable Me” had Gru, and Gru had a nemesis to best, lessons to learn, and little girls to change his life. We miss that emotional and narrative heft in this film.
What we have instead is a cute origin story going back to the earliest life on Earth, with the minions evolving out of little yellow single-cell floating creatures. By the time they make it to land, their purpose has been established. They will seek out and support the greatest villains on the planet. But, the narrator (Geoffrey Rush) informs us, in tones suggesting a nature documentary, “Finding a boss was easy. Keeping one was not.” A T-Rex. An Egyptian Pharaoh. A vampire. Napoleon. They just don’t last, primarily because the Minions’ efforts to be helpful backfire. Almost literally.
The Minions retreat to the Arctic, and that takes care of a few more centuries. But they have no purpose. And so Kevin, Stuart, and Bob set off to find a new evil genius to support. It is 1968, and they arrive in New York City, to the sound of the Rolling Stones singing “19th Nervous Breakdown.” They find out that in pre-Disney Orlando, Florida, the upcoming Villain Con (cleverly modeled after Comic-Con) will give them a chance to meet the top bad guys of the world, especially superstar Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock). They hitch a ride along the way with a smiling suburban family (Michael Keaton and Allison Janney), who turn out to have more in common with the Minions than expected. And, when they pass the test failed by all the other criminals, Scarlet takes them on and assigns them the crime of the century — she wants them to steal Queen Elizabeth’s crown. Scarlett’s husband, Herb (Jon Hamm) serves as Q, giving out the gadgets, and then it’s off to the Tower of London.
Individual moments are charming and funny, and baby boomers will appreciate the 60’s references and soundtrack, which should do for “Hair,” Hendrix, and Donovan what “Guardians of the Galaxy” did for 70’s rock. But a bedtime story about the three little pigs only reminds us more pointedly of how much better the “three little kittens” bedtime story was in the first film.
NOTE: Stay through the very end of the credits for a funny song and dance and some wow-worthy 3D effects.
Parents should know that this film has comic, cartoon-style peril and mayhem (no one hurt), weapons, explosions, chases, thong underwear, and brief potty humor.
Family discussion: How should you decide what your purpose is and why is that important? Can you understand the Minions even though they are not speaking English, and, if so, how? What made Scarlet so mean, and why do so many people admire her?
If you like this, try: the “Despicable Me” movies and “Megamind”
