Isle of Dogs /犬ヶ島 / Inugashima

Wes Anderson's animations have developed their own very unique style. It's partly the ugliness of the stop-motion, but it's mostly the rhythms. The comic timing is the most charming thing about these films, established firmly in The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The deadpan humour is absolutely brilliant, delivered by a stellar cast including the likes of Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and Bryan Cranston. This may be the most entertaining thing Yoko Ono has ever done, beside perhaps interrupting John Lennon and Chuck Berry’s duet with her weird croaky noises. 

This film is a strange one. Japanese dogs are sent to a trash island after paranoia spreads about canine flu. However, one little Japanese boy, ward of the mayor who masterminded the doggy exile, sets out to rescue his dog. 

Oddly, there's a lot of hilarious Japanese in this film, which is probably funny only to Japanese speakers. I loved the little montage of the scientific analyses. On the other hand, the film is mostly a somewhat condescending free-wheeling depiction of Japan, all sumo wrestlers, yakuza and taiko drummers. I don't know why they didn't bother to ask for some Japanese names - the main boy is called 'Atari' for some reason, and there's a bunch of Rexes and Spots but not a Pochi in sight. A bit bizarre given these are meant to be Japanese dogs.

I absolutely loved the adventure of the boy and the five main dogs, with their deadpan storytelling interrupted by getting each other's ticks off or sneezing. Their tendency to look at the camera sometimes is marvellous, and dogs are just inherently funny. The exchange student with the big blonde afro is much less entertaining as a subplot. The ending is also random and confused, but it's not as though the plot was the main purpose of this film.

I can't see this being a big hit. Anderson fans will of course watch it and a few animation fans will be interested, but it's probably way too weird and ugly to get a new audience on board. At least Fantastic Mr. Fox had some degree of cuteness. Well, this one does have the most adorable little puppies, in fairness. And I guess some of the other doggies are cute. Probably all Anderson's animated films will eventually become cult classics in some circles. But whether they'll be able to recoup their costs enough that many more can be made I do not know.

The Boxtrolls

I could already tell from the way it was marketed, but it’s already obvious that The Boxtrolls, a likeable and funny film, will not do anywhere near as well as Laika’s previous films. While I can see there being life after Selick for the studio, what hooked people before was associations with Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman. What The Boxtrolls needed was the kind of concept that immediately hooks people in, like Wall-E or Happy Feet. They needed something that kept the dark edge but still seemed accessible. A grimy film about ugly trolls who live underground with a hermit crab-like relationship with cardboard boxes may have a lot of gems in the actual execution – and indeed it does – but I am completely sure that fewer people will give it a chance than it deserves. If they had marketed it with the human characters more to the fore, as the main point of identification and even with some cute factor highlighted, it could have attracted more of a crowd. But the trolls themselves were very much where the campaign centred, and that felt to me like trying to sell Frozen on those funny little rock troll things. They may have an important place in the plot, but they’re not what an audience identifies with.

And that gets in the way of a cracking story full of very well-executed characters. It has a neat set-up that both gives us our hero and sets the antagonist’s actions into motion – though we have to assume the evil Mr Snatcher works extremely slowly for it to really work.

In the rather wonderful towering fantasy-English town of Cheesebridge, the curious little Boxtrolls live a nocturnal existence scavenging for bits of technology to put into their rather steampunk-ish lair. 

When a respected inventor vanishes and his son is taken by the Boxtrolls, the community begins to fear them – egged on by the nefarious Mr Snatcher, something of a tribute to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s child catcher, and voiced with as much evil camp as Ben Kingsley can muster. Snatcher is the most dangerous kind of social climber, desperate to join the elite of Cheesebridge, who wear white hats and mingle to discuss governing the town over all the finest cheeses – and he will do anything for this goal. He is aided by three henchmen who are rather brilliantly rendered – one is utterly unhinged, but the other two, played by Nick Frost (for once having a larger role in a film than Simon Pegg) and Richard Ayoade (star of The IT Crowd), wrestle throughout the film with questions of morality and the ever-dwindling chance that they are in fact the good guys.

The child taken by the Boxtrolls, however, was not snatched away. He was given willingly by his father (Pegg), who was attacked by Snatcher, demanding he invent a killing machine. Adopted by the Boxtrolls, he grows up believing he is one of them, even getting a name like theirs, based on what is on his box – ‘Eggs’. Eggs is joined by the likes of ‘Fish’, ‘Shoe’ and, indeed, ‘Fragile’. When he is somewhat grown but Snatcher has succeeded in capturing almost all the Boxtrolls, he has a chance encounter with Winifred, daughter of the highest-ranking official in town. Winnie (Elle Fanning, spirited as ever) has something of a fixation on blood and gore, a character quirk that sits just on the right side of contrived, and resents how her father is much more interested in cheese than in her. Together, they put together a plan to rescue Eggs’ adoptive family – but ultimately it is Snatcher’s own plan reaching fruition and then finally him getting everything he ever wanted that proves his undoing.

Some of the scenes here are the funniest in any animated film I’ve seen in a very long while. Eggs trying to pass in high society is just the right balance of embarrassing, disgusting, adorable and humbling. I loved the henchmen’s banter, and while I don’t usually like that kind of humour, I enjoyed the closing stinger of Ayoade’s character musing about his existence. Snatcher was animated with such grotesque relish, and I very much enjoyed the steampunk elements. Laika also seem to be the only American animation studio alongside Dreamworks-in-serious-mode who seem to be able to get adolescent characters right these days: Eggs and Winnie are not only a very enjoyable odd couple, they are both very sympathetic in their own right, and Eggs in particular I found extremely cute – helped by a natural sort of performance with an estuary twang from Isaac Hempstead-Wright, better-known as Bran from Game of Thrones.

For a film animated in Portland, this was a remarkably British sort of a film, from its setting to its cast, and with that comes something of an appreciation for the dirty and grimy, as well as a celebration of quiet, unassuming hard work and a dislike of those who pull others down to advance themselves. That this also has a neat story with likeable characters attached to it, as well as some really stunning visuals and incredibly smooth stop-motion, and you have a highly enjoyable film. But I can’t help but feel it just wasn’t the film Laika needed just yet: they needed a couple more to really make themselves a household name with more obvious ideas first, and then this could be a follow-up. 

Fantastic Mr Fox

I very much wanted to see Fantastic Mr Fox when it was in cinemas, but somehow it slipped by without my managing to get my bum in a seat. And then it wasn't until five years later, after having seen director Wes Anderson's latest - The Grand Budapest Hotel - that I remembered I wanted to watch it and finally got hold of a copy. 

And this is exactly the sort of film I'd expect the maker of that film to make for children. Highly idiosyncratic, understated, oddly-paced and thoroughly modern, it may be irreverent to Roald Dahl but it is also a wonderful tangent for an auteur to go off on given a strong starting point. And if, somehow, you didn't notice the fixation with the centre line and how symmetry can draw attention to it in The Grand Budapest Hotel, I'd certainly hope you'd see it here. 

I mentioned Dahl, and indeed, this was one of the books I read in my childhood. I can't say that I ranked it as one of my favourites, though - it was no BFG, or Matilda, or either of the Charlie books. There's not much of an emotional arc to the book, though it had Dahl's trademark nasty streak, which is largely replaced here with the theme of how awkward communication can be that Anderson seems to very much enjoy. Other than that, really, what Anderson takes from Dahl is the setting - fox vs three nasty farmers - the symbol of contrition that is a tail being cut off and, in a way, the ending. What comes in the middle is all Anderson, and even more than a highly disciplined mise-en-scene, what seems to be his calling card is glib, naturalistic dialogue in which people often don't really listen to each other and often want to talk about their problems in a way that makes other uncomfortable. Very distinctive - and very bizarre to see in an animated film, which is partly what makes this so enjoyable. 

Somehow, there's just a slight edge of absurdity added to an awkward young boy who thinks he can't live up to his father's expectations feeling upstaged by the taller, more athletic cousin who has come to live with them being foxes rather than humans. There's a really amusing surrealist spark to the inclusion of mundane family issues into this film, only for the foxes to wildly attack their food and remind you of what they are. On the other hand, the dryness of the dialogue and the somewhat drab aesthetic probably make this an animation that adults will enjoy more than kids do. 

The film is somewhat unique and stands alone. I find myself wondering what would have been different had Henry Selick stayed on this project rather than going to work on Coraline, but equally I'm glad both exist and have the fingerprints of their makers all over them. Fantastic Mr Fox is an oddity, and isn't necessarily one for the Dahl aficionados, but I find it rather an enjoyable companion piece.  

Chicken Run

Ahhh, Chicken Run. The moment when the world outside England came to recognise the national treasure that is Aardman Animations – who had honed their craft on the brilliant Wallace and Gromit shorts (this being before The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) and the inspired Creature Comforts, netting a batch of short-form Oscars. With Chicken Run, they partnered with Dreamworks and were thus able to reach a much wider audience, and in the process reminded the world that clay animation was still feasible and didn’t have to be as clunky as Pingu or as outright creepy as Mark Twain. Helped along, of course, by the stop-motion success that was The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Sadly, the success of this and the Wallace and Gromit film led to Aardman then going into CG, which started with attempts to recapture their clay style with Flushed Away and then a more halfway measure in Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! before early work on The Croods, which ultimately ended up a very long way from signature Aardman. Since becoming just another CG studio, they have rather lost their charm, their financial opportunities and, well, their way. Sure, their Shaun the Sheep mini-episodes probably keep them well afloat, and every Christmas sees plentiful re-runs of all their films – which is why I’m rewatching Chicken Run for the first time since its 2000 release – and mostly things are very quiet on the Aardman front now, with the latest project being Peter Lord’s Kickstarter for new episodes of Morph that may not even fall under the Aardman banner, and just possibly a big comeback in 2015 with a Shaun the Sheep feature film.

Treading similar ground to Leafie but with a lot less melancholy seriousness and a lot more silly fun and escape-movie themes, Chicken Run is about battery hens who know that when they stop laying, they face the chopping block, so plot to escape. The possibility of getting away suddenly becomes real when into the coop flies a brash American rooster named Rocky – in a stroke of genius casting played by Mel Gibson – who has been promoted by a travelling circus as able to fly. His wing is injured, but a plot is hatched – so to speak – to get him to teach the rest of the chickens to fly so that they can get out. Unfortunately, the time of his arrival also coincides with the sinister farm owner Mrs Tweedy deciding that it’s time for her chickens to stop being egg-layers, and start being slaughtered en mass.

The thing Aardman used to get so right was their humour. What is brilliant about the writing of Chicken Run is that every single sympathetic character can be taken seriously or can be very funny. Main characters Ginger and Rocky are mostly the serious, smart ones on the cast, but their prickly relationship provides some great laughs, and behind Rocky’s façade he’s a guy that will fall into every pie. Wise-cracking rats played by Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels echoing the TV roles that made them famous are in the traditional annoying-comic-relief role, yet are just the right mixture of wise-cracking and ending up the butt of the joke that they are actually appealing. The chickens themselves are a great bunch, with broad stereotypes aplenty yet – again – the chance for the writers to make each of them serious. Jane Horrocks and Imelda Staunton obviously have a great time as two very silly chickens, and Mr Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, Benjamin Whitrow, is the moody old military rooster who when he shows his soft side gets one of the finest scenes in the film. And then there’s Miranda Richardson being deliciously evil as Mrs Tweedy, with another comic foil in the form of Mr Tweedy, very hard to write as non-annoying but who works thanks to the good joke of him constantly seeing the most outlandish things without anybody believing him.

So for all this praise, why have I not wanted to rewatch Chicken Run in over a decade, or consider it alongside The Wrong Trousers as amongst the best of Aardman? Well, the thing is…I think it’s just the chickens. They’re well-written, they’re likeable, they’re funny…but they’re still rather funny-looking plump chickens with teeth and silly googly eyes…and while I’m amused by them, that’s not the extent of the connection I make with most beloved animated characters – including, yes, Wallace and Gromit.

But on the rewatch, I think I’ve probably been mistaken. This is a film that does everything it can right, given the concept, and it’s such a very Aardman concept that I really don’t feel I can complain about that. Ultimately, the only real shame about Chicken Run is that the place it put Aardman doesn’t feel like where they belong. 

Corpse Bride / Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride

After the success of The Nightmare Before Christmas and before his remake of Frankenweenie, Tim Burton had another tale to tell as a feature-length stop-motion animation. Corpse Bride was his first attempt at directing a stop-motion feature, Nightmare having been helmed by James and the Giant Peach and later Coraline director Henry Selick - though Peach stalwart Mike Johnson took a co-director’s credit here and presumably showed Burton the ropes ahead of his solo Frankenweenie.

I have to say, it doesn’t seem like seven years since The Corpse Bride came out, though thinking back I remember seeing cosplay of it at a convention in 2006. I missed it when it was in cinemas and always intended to catch it at some point, but the opportunity didn’t come until today.

And I have to say, it rather deserves the plaudits and minor cult status it has earned. It’s no Nightmare Before Christmas, and doesn’t really tug at the heartstrings enough to really stand out even in the stop-motion animation world, but it was an excellent watch because it does everything right. The songs are done right. The animation is done right. The designs, done right. The script and the pacing – right. And yet it still has that odd B-movie quirkiness Tim Burton does best to give it an edge.

A sheltered young woman of noble stock and a rather wet young man from a nouveau riche family of considerable wealth are betrothed, though they have never met. On the eve of their marriage, young Victor and Victoria finally meet and hit it off, Victoria finding Victor’s piano-playing and diffident nature quite charming. However, an overbearing pastor makes him lose his nerve at a rehearsal for the wedding and he goes into the forest to practice. However, putting his ring onto what he thinks is a branch as he speaks his vows is a ‘grave mistake’ – as the poster jokes – for in a shallow grave is a pretty recently-deceased corpse, and the misunderstanding fuels the rest of the drama. The only slightly dodgy point is the baddie, Lord Bittern, who not only is coincidentally (and very obviously) linked to the Corpse Bride, but for a clearly intelligent conman misses the very transparent reason the aristocratic child of very snobby parents is marrying into a wealthy but middle-class trading family.

It’s a small-scale story that intentionally or not has a nice contrast between the limited cast of the living world – essentially the betrothed, their amusing grotesque parents, their staff, a love rival, the pastor and a town crier – and the exuberant and populous purgatory, where most scenes are crowd scenes and every little creature seems to talk except for the ghost dog right out of Funnybones. The characters in the living world are hilarious caricatures while those in the land of the dead are very quickly-defined bit parts where just about anything is possible. It makes for a grimly comic mood that keeps the pace brisk.

The vocal performances here are excellent – while Tim Burton’s usual stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter provide mostly functional performances that nonetheless are immediately sympathetic, as does Emily Watson, a cast of British comic and horror talents are clearly having an excellent time here. Christopher Lee’s gruff pastor has all the expected gravitas, and Albert Finny tries hard to out-gruff him. Harry Enfield and Fast Show fixture Paul Whitehouse (who Depp has expressed great admiration for) plays multiple roles, and Jane Horrocks crops up as a spider. The late Michael Gough, another Hammer actor and the Alfred in Burton’s Batman films, has a charming wise man role, and Richard E. Grant is his usual wonderful snarling posh bad guy. But stealing the show every time she speaks is Joanna Lumley, with a rich voice like no other. 

Then there’s Danny Elfman singing, and sounding like he’s having more fun than anyone else.  

I have to say, I was also probably more impressed by the stop-motion animation here than in any other Burton film. It wasn’t the spectacle – it was the small details. If that fabric rippling in the wind was done frame-by-frame, it was done by consummate masters of their craft. It looks fantastic. Spiders’ legs can’t be easy to do in this sort of medium, but they look great. And that pleasant creepy-but-still-soft aesthetic that persists in Frankenweenie looks rather nice here.

In some ways I feel like this is the purest form of Tim Burton’s style – everything is his vision, and hung on a good, classic, B-movie premise without the need to make it in some way metatextual or ironic. And it’s entertaining to boot. Great stuff.

Frankenweenie

Tim Burton’s latest attempt to get back into critical favour – after slipping considerably in the past few years – is a self-homage to a time of homages. Burton has gone back to his 1984 short live-action film Frankenweenie – his second-ever live-action work – and his early propensity to pastiche schlocky old films. I do understand this – his best films had an excuse to revel in his love for B-movies, Ed Wood in particular – and aside from the dodgy last few minutes, Frankenweenie actually was one of his best and most heartfelt bits of filmmaking. But going back to it now, as well as gathering a whole lot of cast members from his previous works, smacks just slightly of cynicism and artifice – a little like when a rich, middle-aged band try to recapture the sound of when they were young and hungry and it all sounds a bit false…I’m looking at you, KoRn.

But Burton having fun and paying tribute to the things he loves is the best Burton – and this is definitely a good film. I recommend it and I definitely enjoyed it. It just wasn’t quite what I had hoped it would be, and I think part of the problem was that I have seen the original and was therefore aware of the bits that were added – and whether or not the additional material fit in. And while much of the transition to the big screen made a lot of sense – I loved the fleshing-out of the heavily-accented Vincent Price-like teacher, for example, and his brilliant scene at the PTA meeting – others were just awkwardly tagged-on.

The overall structure is the same in this stop-motion remake. Lonely young Victor likes making monster flicks with his dog Sparky as the star. When Sparky is in a traffic accident, Victor is inspired by a science lesson showing a frog’s legs twitching when electricity is supplied to re-animate Sparky’s corpse. His experiment is a success, but he has to keep Sparky hidden, because people won’t understand.

This is where there’s a bit of a divergence, one of the more awkward ones. In the original, Sparky gets out of the house and runs amok in the neighbourhood. There are some amusing scenes were he’s mistaken for something hideous. This is in the animated version, but goes nowhere and oddly gets dropped, ultimately seeming a bit random. Instead, Victor’s schoolmates learn his secret and emulate his successes – only they do not act out of love, meaning what they raise is more terrible. The end result of it is the same, though – Sparky is mistaken for a monster and a mob chases him with flaming torches.

In the original, the climactic action amusingly takes place in the windmill of a crazy golf course. Here, that’s replaced by the large windmill symbolic of ‘New Holland’s Dutch heritage, which is amusing mostly because I know it’s an alternative to the golf course. There is more action in this version, but the ending is largely the same, and thankfully with animation, you don’t have the problem of trying to pretend an almost weightless puppet is Bastion from The NeverEnding Story.

My problems here are the way things just seem to have been tacked on to the bare bones of the old story. Winona Ryder’s character is the most obvious one – she just seems totally extraneous and barely interacts with the other characters. Her father is good for plot impetus, but there’s nothing to him. Burton – or his scriptwriters – made the decision to change the parents from the slightly unsettling, kooky normal people they were in the original (thanks largely to Shelly Duvall’s peculiar performance) into generally rather normal people, and instead has the very normal kids in Victor’s class become a series of nods to horror tropes. There’s the boy who looks like Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster and has a great scene or two resurrecting ‘Colossus’, but little else. Then there’s the boy in the Igor role, who is quite adorable. There’s the wide-eyed, staring, creepy girl with a psychic cat who I was a little sad didn’t get closure to her story, especially since she lost her constant companion. There was the fat boy who brings sea monkeys to life, which seem to be a Gremlins tribute. Then there’s the somewhat offensively-stereotyped Japanese boy, who the makers have clearly attempted to distance from tokenism by making him talented in a variety of fields, but really only has that thick accent so that there can later be a Godzilla/Gamera parody. It makes sense, given the fleshed-out story, but somehow the slightly unsettling home life set against a very ordinary school life gave just the right atmosphere of weird-twee-suburbia that Edward Scissorhands gets so right, but this now lacks.

Also, strangely, the visuals just aren’t as striking. The film nails shadows on walls – there’s no doubt about that. The Corpse Bride-like designs for the puppets work, but are often a little stiff, and the more grotesque characters have distractingly brilliant mouth movements. But somehow, the angle of that shot with pet graves on a hill doesn’t ring as true, and the cuts with the angry mobs and the fire don’t quite seem to evoke the old Hammer films. It’s all almost perfect, but not quite there.

But this is a harsh review, mostly because I had high hopes. It remains a very enjoyable and well-made film. It just wasn’t quite all I hoped it would be. 

ParaNorman

ParaNorman is just so much better than its goofy title and trailer made it sound. Marketing it like a zany comedy was a huge mistake – this stop-motion animation is less Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and more The Iron Giant. It’s quirky, it’s funny but it has a lot of heart, considerable scale and the vital spark of charm. The characters are much more visually appealing than they look in still images, the animation is the finest stop-motion has ever seen and the story is witty and fun.

Norman sees dead people – and I bet many, many reviews started with that sentence. As a result, he is considered a freak at school, stared at on the street and despaired of by his own family. However, when his crazy uncle dies, it transpires a ritual has been holding a dark force in place, and if Norman cannot take his uncle’s place, a witch’s curse will cause the dead to rise. When the inevitable happens, it falls to Norman, his airheaded new friend Neil Downe, their big siblings and the school bully to save the day, and Norman is unique in being able to not only see dead people but communicate with them no matter their form – but of course, Norman thinks he is better-off alone.

The story is not terribly original at its bare bones – the tragic underlying story owes much to the story of the Paisley Witches, or at least fictional descendents of that same history – but the way it is put forward is both unusual and compelling. The pacing becomes unconventional but the final act is so impressive – so like the climax of an RPG game, in fact – that every decision leading up to it seems cleverly-done. And the characters are very likeable – Norman himself is both vulnerable and strong, his family situation makes perfect sense and the characters who are meant to be funny actually are.

I was struck how the film was so explicitly of its time. Norman uses his phone screen to light a dark room. The bully tries to be street in a very up-to-the-moment way. The script gently pushes the envelope using the word ‘sex’ and having some racy jokes, and the moment some critics are making much of where a character reveals he is gay plays into modern sensibilities. In my view, the latter was the ideal way to have the first explicitly gay character in a children’s animation – funny because it is unexpected but not patronising, excitingly deviant for the young teens in the audience who giggled away and yet everyday and throwaway, as it should be. Neatly done in a film that contains some very clever dialogue, brilliant gross-out humour and genre subversions, most prominent when it turns out the zombies don’t want to kill or eat brains, but only to be helped.

I ended up really growing attached to Norman, with his big eyebrows (that perhaps are inherited from many generations ago…), uncombable hair (for that classic visual gag) and expressive face. Stick around until after the credits to see just how complex the puppets used have become – though there’s something slightly more admirable about Aardman’s pre-Pirates plasticine puppets that don’t use 3D printing, the sheer beauty of this film is a marvel, and those funny octagonal pupils in the puppets’ eyes could only be more expressive using the creepy effect in Madam Tutli-Putli, which would of course ruin the look!

With a cast that, John Goodman aside, is made up of actors most will recognise from somewhere but will have to look up (the dad character’s voice drove me crazy until I Wiki’d his work and saw he’s a Pixar stalwart), the performances are heartfelt and powerful, and the humour is delivered deftly. The emotional range here, and particularly the stunning final confrontation which surely contained a fair bit of CG, show that Laika did not suffer overly from Henry Selick’s post-Coraline departure.

Overall, a fantastic film, that left me with just one question – without the curse becoming real, without the undeniable proof of what he had been saying all along, what would have happened to Norman? Would he be accepted? Or just become his uncle?

Madame Tutli-Putli

The eyes are the windows to the soul. And it’s incredible what an effect putting live-action eyes into stop-motion puppetry can accomplish. Madame Tutli-Putli, the breakthrough work from Clyde Henry Productions – commissioned as a result with the expertly-crafted puppetry short Higglety Piggelty Pop! – is unforgettable in aesthetic terms. A real labour of love, it involved not only the laborious process of stop-motion animation, but live-action actors then matching the puppets’ movements so that their eyes could be digitally mapped to the models. And what an effect it has! Not only do the puppets gain an uncanny, unsettlingly realistic quality, but they are able to show emotions in an unprecedented way. A stunning experiment, it is no surprise that this short was nominated for an Oscar in the same year as another astonishing show of hard work, My Love by Aleksandr Petrov, though the winner that year was the Peter and the Wolf Prokofiev animation.

The story is both simple and open-ended: a character we assume is the eponymous Madame Tutli-Putli boards a train with what seems like all the baggage of her life. The other occupants of her compartment are strange – men in the luggage rack watching a chessboard as the movements of the train make the moves for them, a little boy with an adult face reading a book with an unsettling title, and a famous tennis player who makes obscene gestures at her. In the night, the train is boarded and a strange gas fills the air. The last thing our protagonist glimpses is a corpse-like face shushing her as the tennis player’s organs are harvested.

What follows is entirely open to interpretation – did she simply wake to an empty train? Did she die and run to the afterlife? Is the whole thing symbolic of leaving behind a sad life to embrace an exciting new one through metamorphosis, as symbolised by a moth? It is left to the individual – and while some enjoy that depth, my honest reaction was that it was a lazy and disappointing way to end the short, and I certainly wanted more definitive answers after such a beautifully-crafted beginning.  

The Nightmare Before Christmas / Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas

Some of the impressions I’ve been writing lately have been a long time coming because it’s taken me ages to finish watching things. This one is overdue just because I haven’t gotten around to it, deciding I wanted to wait for a repeat viewing – which is also the case for director Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach.

What’s that? Henry who? Wasn’t the director here Tim Burton? Well, as a matter of fact, no – it wasn’t. Yes, it has his trademark atmospherics, his cheerfully grim style, music from Danny Elfman (vocal performances too) and even says ‘Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas’ in the posters. But while he was the creative force behind the project’s inception, served as the producer and came up with the story (based on a poem he had written), he neither directed the piece nor wrote the screenplay. After all, he is a director of live-action films, not a creator of stop-motion – though he did go on to co-direct The Corpse Bride. The credit here, however, goes to Selick, later to gain more recognition as the director of Coraline and currently under the employ of Pixar and working on a new film before being lined up to adapt a Neil Gaiman novel.

This is not a case of either-or, however: both men deserve considerable credit for creating this very fine piece of work. Along with Aardman, this 1993 work sent new life coursing through stop-motion animation, which had been foundering since 1986’s creepy but iconic The Adventures of Mark Twain. Its brilliantly distinctive aesthetic showed that CG was not going to entirely replace this branch of the art form, and in every way – concept, characters, music, pacing, believable antagonist and even progression of its romance – it is a good, solid, memorable film. And while Burton has always come down heavily on talk of a direct sequel, the world has remained an attractive one, appearing, for example, in the Kingdom Hearts games. For while this was seen as a little too risky to be released as a Disney animation, it comes from the studio’s Touchstone imprint – which probably helped it at the time, for while Disney was making excellent films like The Lion King, they weren’t exactly associated with quirky, edgy, dark work at the time, and if anything the stigma of Disney being safe and cute could have lost Nightmare a chunk of its audience.

The story is based on one of the more popular modern takes on Christmas: someone who is not a typical Christmas figure intruding onto the joy and brightness of Christmas and ruining it. Unlike a Grinch or a rampaging South Park snowman, here Jack Skellington has mostly good intentions. He is The Pumpkin King, leading the horror-themed inhabitants of the gleefully German Expressionist Halloween Town, and once he glimpses the gaudy holiday happiness of Christmas Town, he is infatuated and wants to be able to do the same thing – even going so far as to kidnap Santa himself to take his place. Of course, things don’t go to plan and as it turns out, you can’t just usurp Father Christmas – especially with the chaotic madman Oogie Boogie setting his eyes on Santa and Jack’s love interest Sally. His motivation is ultimately a little dubious, but he’s so charismatic and visually striking that this can only be considered a minor quibble. He is cruel for the sake of cruelty, because that’s the sort of character he is.

Brilliant visually, clever in how it can make characters at one repulsive and appealing to look at, and delivered with great belief and a fantastic aesthetic, it’s no wonder it was such a hit – and has become a neatly alternative Christmas classic. 

Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out / A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit

I remember that my thoughts on A Grand Day Out were pretty negative when I first saw it. This was when The Wrong Trousers was all the rage, and this 1989 short was shown retrospectively. With Creature Comforts by then widely-known and being used for the Heat Electric adverts and Nick Park becoming ever more famous, The Wrong Trousers and then A Close Shave were big successes for Aardman. The likes of Chicken Run and the currently-running The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists owe their greenlighting to the popularity of 90s Aardman, and they built upon the success of this.

And it was a success. It was Oscar-nominated, and the short that it lost out to was actually Creature Comforts. It has that distinctive Wallace and Gromit charm and silliness with a feel-good factor, and some pretty ambitious shots for low-budget clay animation. So why was I less than enthused? Well, really because the two sequels set my expectations too high.

That’s the problem, really, with going back to the first film when you’ve seen the excellent sequels made with more funding and buoyed by the confidence success brings. This first effort just doesn’t look as good, nor does it tell as interesting and amusing a story. The models are notably less visually pleasing than their more developed versions from the other films – Wallace’s head is rather an unappealing shape, and Gromit looks…a bit dirty. The cooker is a funny little idea and brings along a good way to have a satisfying ending, but beside the antagonists of other Wallace and Gromit shorts rather pales in comparison. And I just didn’t feel like the moon actually being made of cheese fit into the later Wallace and Gromit world.

Rewatching it on this fine grey Easter Sunday, though, I found it much more charming than my cynical younger self had led me to remember. By the time I was watching, Wallace and Gromit were known to all, and I never appreciated the stroke of genius that is introducing your principle characters having them sat in a little living room wondering where to go on holiday and talking about having some cheese on crackers. That Yorkshire accent is instantly both likeable and a bit daft, and it’s interesting that one of the first things that happens is that Gromit makes some noise. The story, despite the enormous distance it covers, is charmingly small-scale and simple.

Undeniably both the technical side and the writing would improve very rapidly for The Wrong Trousers, but there’s still much to be said for A Grand Day Out, and it led to some excellent things. The world would certainly be a poorer place without Aardman’s work, and I hope that they will at some point soon make their feature film masterpiece.

And this film always makes me want to listen to Penguins on the Moon and hope one day it gets set to animation. 

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists / The Pirates! Band of Misfits

While Aardman’s latest feature film is a definite hit and a good, solid film, it falls a little short of brilliance by lacking a little vital spark of warmth and heart. Really, though, these are problems not with Aardman but with the source material.

A lively but inept pirate crew love their captain. However, he’s destined for embarrassment when he sets his sights on the Pirate of the Year award, which is based on how much booty each captain brings in. However, a chance encounter with a young Charles Darwin reveals that not is all as it seems with the ship’s parrot, and a harebrained scheme to get rich on a scientific prize is formed. However, lurking in the shadows is the dastardly Queen Victoria – who loathes pirates.

Pirates are of course a firm favourite with kids and show up everywhere in animation, from old adaptations of Treasure Island to One Piece. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the biggest movie successes of our times and there are ever more stories about space pirates, steampunk pirates and fantasy pirates. The themes are nice and broad, there will always be motivations for every character and yet the violence is always on the cartoonish side. You’re on safe ground with pirates.

And Aardman are nothing if not masters of the little touches. This film is a rapidfire succession of brilliant visual gags and jokes – in three successive shots, there’s a joke about the coin slots on pool tables (to get cannonballs out), a joke about bowling alleys (as the cannonballs appear) and a joke about when dogs put their heads out of car windows. There is lots of very British silliness (how many outside these fair lands recognise that Blue Peter badge?) and the dialogue and characterisation has the air of a pantomime. The plot is simple but funny, with Polly just skirting being called a MacGuffin, and the voice acting is superb – Hugh Grant and David Tennant play off one another expertly and without ever drawing attention to themselves as actors, so that it’s easy to forget they are not simply the clay characters on the screen. Cameos from Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and especially Brian Blessed are a hoot, and the main crew have an excellent dynamic. Imelda Staunton’s voice couples with a simply brilliant model to make a perfect villain who can look both threatening and hilarious depending on the situation.

The main issues I have are very small, but build up to keep the pirates all at arm’s length. One is the book’s notion that the crew should all lack names. So we get The Pirate Captain, the Pirate with Gout, the Albino Pirate and the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (who is of course in the Mary Read vein). It all gets a bit laboured and strained and reminds the audience constantly that these are cardboard figures, and awesome scenes about ham can only go so far to redress that. Then there is the way so much of the humour revolves around hurting random stranger by dropping anchors on them and suchlike. Plus making a plot point of ‘Mallet space’ (here, in a luxuriant beard), again preventing the audience forgetting they are watching animation. Finally, I just don’t think the monkey talking through cards in his hand works. It never raises more than a vague smile and isn’t worth the cost in believability. Obviously, these are all individually minor matters and I don’t think that what Pirates! really needed was to be terribly realistic – but the little niggles as I said prevented me from ever really relating to any of the crew, and thus about really caring about any of them. Even the most emotionally accessible member of the crew was known only as ‘Number 2’ or ‘The Pirate with a Scarf’.

This is not to say this isn’t an excellent animated film. It is. I just know Aardman can do much better, and want to see them make something that will touch people, not just tickle at their funny bones. 

Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Aardman are now established on the international animation circuit, where once they were a very British phenomenon. With Chicken Run, their appealing, wide-mouthed claymation style was introduced to a wider audience, most notably in America, while this film cemented their reputation, so that today the upcoming release of Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is quite an event, and their 3D branch, while less of a stand-out, is a moderate success too, with Arthur Christmas and Flushed Away at least on the radar of most parents and animation fans. Every 3DS owner in the UK, and for all I know far beyond, is getting new 3D cartoons of Shaun the Sheep, Wallace and Gromit have been parodied on The Simpsons and Hayao Miyazaki has professed himself a fan and had an Aardman exhibit set up for a time in the Ghibli museum.

It was really this film that was the pivot: it had much to prove at the time. The quite brilliant The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave were still very much obscurities outside England, and Chicken Run had just made the world sit up and take notice. On the other hand, I’d hold this film up as an example of a studio in the right place being able to have a misfire but still garner much praise, as though they could do no wrong; much as I love Aardman and especially Wallace and Gromit, which has buckets more charm than Chicken Run or Arthur Christmas, I was disappointed when I saw this, back on Hallowe’en 2005.

After mentioning affectionately that my dear ole mum mixed up the name and called it ‘Grommarsh and Wurzel’, I wrote that the film ‘follows Wallace and his loyal, bizarrely sexualised canine life partner as they attempt to protect the town’s vegetables from a terrible furry menace. It was fun, but not quite as good as I’d hoped – not as witty or as affecting as Chicken Run, The Wrong Trousers or A Close Shave, and rather harder to swallow than any of them. Still, it made me smile throughout, and [was full of] funny references.’ I would probably have left out that part about Gromit being sexualised if I wrote today, despite the van scenes, as it’s an observation that lends itself to endless academic overanalysis and conjecture, as well as painting the duo in what may seem like a disparaging light when actually I adore them. The film has a great cast – Ralph Fiennes hamming it up, posh Helena Bonham Carter being extra-posh as ‘Totty’, and of course Peter Sallis providing Wallace’s wonderful Yorkshire accent. Like many light comedy animations, much of its humour comes from pastiche, with the title making it clear that the subject here would be horror, undermined by the fearsome creature being a bunny. A plethora of terrible rabbit-related puns ensue, the worst being ‘24-carrot bullets’, as well as the staples of the series: impressive action scenes with Gromit – one of the great mute characters of animation – having to work very hard, silly Rube Goldberg machines and a sweet obsession with silly things like cheese and vegetable competitions. It’s all delightfully English, daft and charming and pandering only very slightly to a wider audience. (Supposedly accents had to be toned down a little.)

My problem was not that it was bad – only that I had hoped it would be much better. It simply isn’t up there with the sheer brilliance of The Wrong Trousers, which remains the best outing for the characters. I wanted the concept to be on a grander scale (while of course retaining the tweeness), and there to be less viciousness about dispatching the baddie. Essentially, I think Wallace and Gromit would be much more widely-known had the film been a longer version of The Wrong Trousers. That said, I hope Nick Park gets another shot at a Wallace and Gromit feature. Indeed, many more shots – the more the better!

For all I may have felt it was underwhelming, though, it was critically lauded, and of course was an Oscar winner. I’ll leave you with what I wrote on 06.03.06, the morningafter the ceremony: ‘Fond as I am of Wallace and Gromit, I don’t think Were-Rabbit should have won against Howl’s Moving Castle. Neither of them were my favourite films from their respective makers, but Howl was certainly the better film. Then again, Spirited Away won last time, and the Academy always seems averse to rewarding the same people consecutively.'

The Adventures of Mark Twain

Reasons why I watched this. Well, there were several, in fact. First amongst them was that the trailer for the film used to play before some of the videos I had as a little child. I’m sure there were a great many of them, but the one I remember is this one, the weird hallucinogenic claymation visuals and the iconic imagery: steamboat-airship hybrids, a drama mask that shifts and changes, faces in the clouds…And then I was just looking through lists of animated films and there was the title, staring at me. Growing more interested in steampunk made me think of the imagery from that trailer, the way Mark Twain is often listed beside Jules Verne as the big influences on the playful little niche…

And I’m glad that I decided to watch it, all these years later, because it was an excellent little piece of animation. It’s a shame that it’s fated to obscurity because of an animation style that, Aardman aside (and this doesn’t look as slick and polished as Chicken Run, that’s for sure), has become ever more unfashionable, especially in the wake of CG (admittedly, I’d love to see a Pixar-standard remake, or even a live action version), because it is remarkable in many ways. Conceivably the 1985 film would have been a bigger hit if it had designed better-looking main children, and possibly if it had pulled some punches (a scene with little Morph-like clay people having their civilisation devastated is, remarkably and for me at least, very impressively harrowing in a surprisingly genuine way). That title smacks of a studio overruling the creative team, but this film can certainly appeal to adults.

And at the heart of this is Mark Twain, and the vast majority of the brilliance in the movie is the brilliance of Twain, with plenty of quotes of some of the man’s superb one-liners. The great writer takes to the skies in his riverboat-zeppelin, while his creations Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher stow away. Along the journey, through amazing contraptions and mysterious doors, various other of Twain’s creations are seen, showcasing both his superb sense of humour, as in the witty diaries of Adam and Eve, his darker side with a few well-observed indictments of mankind, we see the man himself swinging unpredictably from wise storyteller to authoritarian brooding madman playing a great moulding and remoulding pipe organ.

Symbolic, allegorical, clever and showcasing a variety of styles, both in animation terms and storytelling terms, it’s remarkably well done. It’ll be a shame if this is forgotten.

(originally written 1.9.08)

Coraline

I was very impressed by Coraline. Stunning animation, witty character design, great humour and tension, some wonderfully creepy imagery and strong voice acting made for a great movie, and the 3D effects for once actually elevated the film they were applied to, rather than cheapening it.

There were some plot issues, but apparently they were the changes from Gaiman’s original: why, for example, take so long to raise the issue of the buttons, making it seem like they were all Coraline objected to, as well as making it confusing that the Beldam (a term I remember from studying Keats and having to differentiate from ‘Belle Dame’!) wanted to keep them hidden? Why lock Coraline in the place she’s bound to discover some ghosts if you are still hoping to convince her how pleasant her life can be?

Minor niggles aside, this was a great story, pure idiosyncratic Gaiman. I was also happy with the casting: Fanning was great, Hatcher perfect and French and Saunders were fun as ever!

Critically lauded and successful, I found Coraline's success to be gratifying.

(originally written 12.5.09)