Animation

DVD review: 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition

One Hundred and One Dalmatians marks one of the few occasions on which I read the book (a childhood favourite that I still revisit every few years) before seeing the Disney film. Consequentially, perhaps, when I finally did see Disney’s interpretation, it was something of a letdown, maintaining the plot of its source material but transposing a number of its most cherished moments. It’s still a cracking film, though, endlessly rewatchable and constituting a welcome change of pace from Disney’s previous string of folktales and fairy stories.

Better late than never, I’ve reviewed Disney’s Region 1 Platinum Edition release of 101 Dalmatians, a feature-packed 2-disc presentation of one of the studio’s most enduring films.

You must see Wall-E!

After 13 years of producing hit after hit, I’ve learned to trust Pixar to deliver gold. To date, they haven’t made a single bad film (not even Cars, which for some reason seemed to attract a comparatively heavy amount of criticism from certain circles), and I think it’s safe to say that whatever magic formula they have tucked away over in Emeryville works.

I still wasn’t expecting their latest film, Wall-E, to be as good as it is, though. For me, it’s the best film I’ve seen this year… which, admittedly, isn’t a particularly high accolade when you consider that the only other 2008 release I’ve seen so far is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (not counting films made earlier but released in the UK in 2008 like All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and The Orphanage). However, I’d go so far as to say that this is the best film I’ve seen since The Incredibles in 2004: the last film to which I awarded the coveted “10/10” rating.

In comparison with warmer fare like last year’s Ratatouille, Wall-E is a rather sombre affair, something it shares with director Andrew Stanton’s previous film, Finding Nemo. The subject matter is unusually grim for Pixar: in the distant future, humankind has ruined Earth, turning it into a smouldering wreck of garbage and pollution. No long inhabitable, the luckier humans boarded a giant spacecraft and took off into the ether to wait until the clean-up of the planet has been completed and it is once more inhabitable. Alas, as time has passed, it has become increasingly clear that it will never be cleaned up, and the humans aboard the spacecraft, who, several generations down the line, have evolved into overweight, tiny-boned, borderline retarded bags of flesh, have all but forgotten about Earth. The only form of life that now remains on earth is a robot named Wall-E, tasked with cleaning up the planet - a monotonous task of collecting and compacting garbage which he has been performing non-stop for centuries, and centuries, and centuries.

I think a film like Wall-E is the perfect example of what makes Pixar’s output so different from, and so much better than, that of their competitor, DreamWorks. Whereas DreamWorks’ animated features are usually based around a one-note joke (Bee Movie, anyone?) or the latest celebrity actor they’ve snared to do a voice over (look - a talking fish who looks and sounds exactly like Will Smith!), or an endless cavalcade of sub-Family Guy pop culture references, boogers and farts (the Shrek franchise), Pixar builds their films around solid characterisation, with the rest flowing naturally. The last thing Wall-E is about is famous voices; actually, for a good two-thirds of the film, there is no dialogue whatsoever. Given that Wall-E can only make a few primitive speech sounds (which are provided by veteran sound designer Ben Burtt), and his only interactions are with a silent cricket and a fellow robot, EVE, whose vocal range is even more limited than his, his emotions have to be conveyed entirely through pantomime and the expressions made by his eyes.

There’s a lot of talk of Wall-E being 2008’s first contender for Best Picture as next year’s Oscars. That’s right, Best Picture, not Best Animated Feature. If an animated film can actually win the most prestigious of the Academy Awards, then perhaps it will finally break the long-held stigma against the medium.

See it!

Daylight robbery

I was recently violated by the well-lubricated member of HM Thieves & Excise. As is commonly known, buying an item worth more than £18 from a non-European Union country and importing it into the UK incurs a fine quaintly described as a “customs charge”. Generally I’m careful to avoid going over the limit, or if I am buying something with a value of more than £18 to order from a store with a means of slipping the package under the radar, so to speak.

Unfortunately, neither of these safety measures were worth a damn when, on Monday morning, I received a card through my door from Royal Mail informing me that they were holding on to an item of mine with a £11.36 charge on it. Knowing that I hadn’t bought anything from outside the EU in the last few months that could possibly have such a charge, I was confused to say the least. Needless to say, I was even more confused when I handed over the cash at the sorting office only to be handed a copy of the Blu-ray release of Persepolis, ordered from DVD Pacific for the cost of £13.82.

You opportunistic little shits

Not only that, but, despite selecting the premium shipping option in order to ensure that the order reached me in time for my birthday, it failed to arrive in the UK until after it had passed - July 8th, according to the attached HM Thieves & Excise sticker. Of course, mail ordering is hardly an exact science, and there are an infinite number of variables that come into play when you have to send a package from one country to another. That doesn’t explain why the item reached Customs on July 8th and I wasn’t informed about it until July 14th.

So there you have it. Not only was I charged extortion money on a package that shouldn’t have been eligible, either Thieves & Excise or Royal Mail then held on to it for a further week for the privilege. I shall of course be claiming the money back, but, given that the charge is split between £3.36 of VAT (paid to Thieves & Excise) and a ludicrous £8.00 “handling fee” paid to Royal Mail, I can see this going on forever. I first have to claim back my £3.36, which will no doubt take an eternity, and only once that has been accomplished can I then get on to the robber barons at Royal Mail to get the other £8 back.

The moral of the story? Even when you’re on the side of the law, you still get buggered by the authorities. So, if you happen to dodge the odd customs charge or fiddle the system in some other way, I see no reason for you to feel bad about it.

A game everyone can play

Source: Spumboard

The dream is over

It looks as if Hellgate: London developers Flagship Studios have finally bitten off more than they can chew. After numerous rumours of employees leaving in droves and customers dissatisfied with the quality of the game and/or the support being provided with it, the final nail has been hammered into the studio’s creaky coffin, with Flagship apparently closing its doors following the laying off of the entire staff. Financial support from Korean distributor and co-owner of the intellectual property HanbitSoft has reportedly dried up, with the implication being that HanbitSoft will, from now on, take full control of the franchise and continue to develop it themselves:

HanbitSoft states that the reason it is pursuing this course of action is because “It is hard for us to accept Flagship Studios’ requests for continued support in capital and funding any longer and because Flagship was being difficult”, and because it co-owns a direct stake in the IP, it therefore “has a say in reviewing and determining any course of action to be taken with Hellgate: London.”

HanbitSoft is expected to take full control over the IP. HanbitSoft goes on to state that in doing so, it will be able to “properly manage and develop Hellgate: London into a good game with proper content”, with its own in-house team of developers.

Ouch.

I’m not entirely surprised, but I’m disappointed nonetheless. I would have liked to see Flagship Studios succeed. The games industry is coming ever closer to mirroring the movie business in the sense that all the power these days is in the hands of a small number of megacorporations, and something about the idea of Flagship striking out on their own as an independent developer appealed to me. Theirs was a worthy attempt to deliver a triple-A game as an autonomous company, but ultimately they failed to pull it off. I still like Hellgate: London, in spite of its myriad flaws, and I genuinely hope that HanbitSoft are able to salvage something from the wreckage, but it’s a damn shame that its creators will no longer be involved with the project they poured their heart and soul into, whatever you might think of the end results.

No creator, regardless of the medium in which they work, likes to see their baby dragged away from them, particularly under circumstances such as these (shades of the 1992 Nickelodeon takeover of Ren & Stimpy, methinks), and I can only hope that the Flagship people are able to bounce back from this in some form or other. Hmm, I suspect they’re probably greatly regretting walking out of Blizzard Entertainment back in 2003.

The smell of blandness

Have you ever looked through one of these “The Art of…” books put out by Disney for their animated films and wondered why the conceptual drawings look some much more interesting and full of life than what ended up in the film itself? I certainly have, and I’m still at a loss when I try to explain why this happens. At a push, I might hypothesise that the bean-counters at the studio are afraid of straying too far from tried and tested formulae and end up ordering the artists to water everything down into insignificance, but I wouldn’t like to stake anything on it.

Occasionally, something ends up slipping through that shows a spark of creativity. Most recently, Lilo & Stitch, the brainchild of co-writer and co-director Chris Sanders, and by far the best Disney film since, oh, say, Aladdin, felt like a breath of fresh air with its distinctive visual style and offbeat sense of humour. Lilo & Stitch didn’t look or feel like any other Disney movie, and so, when I heard that Chris Sanders was working on a new project for the studio, American Dog, I was understandably excited to see what he’d do with the idea. Certainly, the first concept drawings and test footage looked extremely impressive, marrying Sanders’ distinctive illustrative style with 3D technology.

Then, bad news struck. Apparently, new Disney animation chief John Lasseter was unhappy with the direction in which American Dog was headed and ordered major changes to be made. This led to Sanders leaving the studio and handing the reins over to Chris Williams and Byron Howard, with whom he previously worked on Lilo & Stitch and Mulan. The project was given more or less a complete reboot, receiving a new storyline, a new art style and even a new title: Bolt.

Recently, the trailer for Bolt was released, and it looks as if my worst fears were well founded. While this may turn out to be a mildly enjoyable film in the long-standing Disney tradition, it completely lacks the charm and originality of the early images that were released a couple of years back. Perhaps worse still, as many people have pointed out, the plot seems almost word-for-word identical to a Disney cheapquel, 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch’s London Adventure.

So, returning to my original unanswered question, how can it be that this

becomes this?

DVDs I bought or received in the month of May

• 30 Days of Night (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Enchanted (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Golden Compass (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Mrs. Doubtfire (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Orphanage (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Waking the Dead: Series 6 (R2 UK, DVD)

Definitely a very Blu month for me, which I have no complaints about whatsoever. I was going to post a bit about the various titles listed above, but for some reason I only managed to get an hour and a half of sleep last night, and as a result I’m absolutely knackered. Therefore, I’m off to get some serious shut-eye now, if I can. Laters.

Swoon

Three months after announcing their intentions to break into the Blu-ray market, Blue Underground have provided a tantalising glimpse at some of the titles we can expect to see from them. While no release dates have been announced, these titles alone should be enough to whet the appetite of any serious cult cinema fans:

- The Final Countdown
- The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
- The Stendhal Syndrome
- Maniac
- Vigilante
- Fire and Ice

The brief preview trailer, available on their site, also shows material from Two Evil Eyes, Dead and Buried and Uncle Sam. We’re being promised 50 GB dual layer discs, 7.1 Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio tracks, plenty of extras and (contain yourselves) D-Box Motion Code support.

Ringo Starr was in The Simpsons once…

Now that I have a Blu-ray drive in my main computer, I’ve been taking the opportunity to look through some of the discs I haven’t provided screen captures for yet. The Simpsons Movie is a title that immediately leapt out at me as a prime candidate for the PrintScreen button, mainly because it’s one of those discs that many reviewers have praised to the heavens, describing it as “perfect” and “flawless”, and other such hyperbolic nonsense. In actual fact, Fox’s encode of The Simpsons Movie features quite a lot of unsightly ringing, as a result of having been filtered.

(Lyris and myself, by the way, have all sorts of wacky names for the various artefacts that plague digital video. Ringo Starr, as you can probably imagine, refers to ringing. Stick around and you may get to meet Dusty Springfield, Billy Brickwall, Waxy O’Connor, and our old favourite, Mega Bloks.)

Why would anyone filter high definition content in the first place, especially material as basic-looking as Homer Simpson and his bland family? Well, I can’t say for sure, but it looks suspiciously like a technician left his or her software at the default settings and popped out for a leak, leaving the encoding software (or hardware) to wreak havoc. It’s not just that there’s ringing: for some reason, several shots show a bunch of errant hues showing up in the ringing, especially visible when you zoom in (Shot 3 is particularly affected by this).

The Simpsons Movie
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC)

Paramount, Criterion go Blu

I’m sure everyone else has already reported on this by now, but Paramount have, not particularly unexpectedly, relaunched their support for Blu-ray with the announcement that Face/Off, Next and Bee Movie will be coming to the format on May 20th, followed by Cloverfield and There Will Be Blood on June 3rd. No word yet on Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which was initially announced for HD DVD at around the same time as There Will Be Blood, but disappeared along with that and several other titles when Toshiba turned off the ailing format’s life support machine. Presumably it will materialise before too long - I hope so, because, out of all of these, it’s the one I’m most interested in seeing.

Paramount also plans to re-issue its entire back catalogue of Blu-ray titles, starting with eight titles on May 20th.

The real news, however, is that, after spending a considerable amount of time umming and erring from the sidelines, the mighty Criterion has finally announced its intention to get with the winning team and begin releasing in high definition. Announced via their most recent email newsletter, Criterion states that it will begin rolling titles out in October, with each released priced the same as its standard definition counterpart and porting over all the bonus content from the legacy release. Currently announced titles include:

- The Third Man
- Bottle Rocket
- Chungking Express
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
- The Last Emperor
- El Norte
- The 400 Blows
- Gimme Shelter
- The Complete Monterey Pop
- Contempt
- Walkabout
- For All Mankind
- The Wages of Fear

Now, here’s hoping they have the sense to do away with their nonsensical pictureboxing practice for their Blu-ray titles.

Turn that frown upside down

A couple of days ago, if you’d told me I’d enjoy Enchanted so much, I’d probably have laughed. I must admit that the idea of an intentionally saccharine Disney fairytale spilling over into the “real” (i.e. live action) world didn’t really sound like a bundle of laughs, but, all the same, reports of stellar image quality and some very nice hand-drawn animation piqued my curiosity, and I picked up the Blu-ray release.

I watched it on Friday night, and I honestly don’t think I’ve got so much pure enjoyment out of a film in a long time. If Disney fairytales aren’t your cup of tea, you’ll probably hate this, but in that case you, sir, are Scrooge McDuck and have a heart of stone. This film has its head lodged firmly in the clouds, and frankly I’m not complaining. A little bit of escapism now and then is a very good thing, especially when it’s executed with this degree of panache. I still haven’t decided whether Amy Adams is intensely charming or intensely irritating, but she and the rest of the cast have a level of enthusiasm that is incredibly infectious and lets me overlook the script’s shortcomings.

I found the live action material more appealing to look at than either the traditional animation or CGI elements, which is quite a feat indeed. Then again, given the bland (albeit slick) look of the hand-drawn elements and the overall shoddiness of the CGI (including the worst talking dragon this side of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Graduation Day episode), perhaps that’s not entirely surprising. Anyway, I thought I’d do a bunch of screen captures to show just how far Disney managed to hit their Blu-ray release out of the park. Feast your eyes on these:

Enchanted
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC)

Animation:

Live action:

Greetings from Vista

I’m back inside Windows Vista again, this time permanently, I hope.

Why? Well, it all started when my brother put together a new computer, a quad core system with 4 GB of RAM to enable more efficiency in his DVD projects (the first of which I hope will be announced before very much longer). Among the components he picked up for it was a new video card, an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro, which gave him access to the advanced deinterlacing and other hardware video acceleration technologies that weren’t available on his previous Radeon X800. As I previously explained, problems in the hardware video acceleration department were responsible for me crawling back to Windows XP with my tail between my legs. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered that he was getting perfectly good deinterlacing, with subtitles, in Vista using Windows Media Player.

A reinstall of Vista later and I discovered the reason for my video problems. It seems that installing the ArcSoft TotalMedia TV recording software that came with my TV stick buggered up Vista’s EVR video decoding, to the extent that, even when I uninstalled TotalMedia and removed all references to it in the registry, it still continued to be borked. Completely reinstalling Vista was the only way to solve the problem, and solve it it did. (I don’t need TotalMedia anyway because Vista Home Premium comes with the very slick Windows Media Center, which has its own TV viewing and recording capabilities.)

So, here I am, just about as happy as I can possibly be with Vista. There are still some niggles to be worked out - it looks as if EVR video playback, at least on this video card with these drivers, suffers from blocky chroma upsampling (see the image above, from Pocahontas) - but the situation is much better than it was before.

Update, May 2nd, 2008 02:42 PM: Well, slap my face! It turns out XP’s handling of chroma upsampling (in PowerDVD, Media Player or Media Player Classic - take your pick) is identical to that of Vista, and I can’t say it’s bothered me unduly before. It just goes to show the things you spot when you’re in nitpick mode. Ah well, at this point I can’t claim that XP offers anything that Vista doesn’t give me, so I suppose you can officially call the earlier operating system dead and buried as far as my system is concerned.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of April

• 101 Dalmatians: Platinum Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Aristocats: Special Edition (R1 USA, DVD)
• The Black Dahlia (R2 UK, DVD)
• Bonnie and Clyde (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• The Frightened Woman (R0 UK, DVD)
• Holby Blue: Series 1 (R2 UK, DVD)
• Juno (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady from Shanghai (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Maltese Falcon (R2 UK, DVD)
• Mother of Tears (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (R2 UK, DVD)
• An Unsuitable Job for a Woman: Series 1 & 2 (R1 USA, DVD)
   

Naturellement la version panoramique

Yesterday, I received a copy of the new R1 USA Special Edition DVD of Disney’s The Aristocats via DVD Pacific. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to have to report that this is yet another “cropped to 1.75:1” atrocity:

I’m sorry, but would someone like to explain to me why this is being done? I don’t care that this was how they would have been projected theatrically (the chances of finding a cinema equipped to display 1.33:1 material in 1970, when this film was released, would be small in the extreme) - anyone can take one look at the image above and instantly tell that something is not right about the framing. It was nice to see this trend reversed for 101 Dalmatians, but that doesn’t change the issue of several other titles having been bungled and continuing to be bungled.

This release, incidentally, seems to have been done on the cheap. For a so-called Special Edition, you really don’t get much that’s all that special, barring a pointless Virtual Kitten game, a brief piece on the Sherman brothers, some image galleries and a deleted song. Additionally, a sure sign of a rush job, the film’s original mono mix is no included, instead porting over the 5.1 remix from the older European release (the previous US disc featured a 2.0 surround remix). On the plus side, the image hasn’t been subjected to the same level of excessive grain reduction that has resulted in most Disney re-releases since Alice in Wonderland looking as if they were shot digitally, but at the same time the compression is pretty damning.

I know The Aristocats is far from a shining example of what Walt Disney Feature Animation was capable of (it and Robin Hood are, in my opinion, the studio’s weakest animated features this side of Pocahontas), but that’s no excuse for a second-rate DVD release.

R.I.P. Ollie Johnston

Cartoon Brew reports that Ollie Johnston, the last survivor of Disney’s Nine Old Men, died today at the ripe old age of 95. This definitely marks the end of an era in the history of filmmaking, and he leaves behind a truly impressive legacy in terms of character animation.

DVD debacle

Tomorrow, my film noir crash course will begin in earnest, starting with a morning viewing of The Maltese Falcon, which I picked up today during my lunch break. I also snagged The Lady from Shanghai and The Postman Always Rings Twice, so a sincere word of thanks to everyone who suggested titles for me to look into.

I also decided to nab The Black Dahlia to give me a flavour for a more recent take on the noir framework. I’ve heard mixed reports about it, but I figure I might as well give it a whirl.

I got home to find a package from DVD Pacific waiting for me, containing the Blu-ray release of Bonnie and Clyde and the recent Platinum Edition DVD release of Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. I’ve always had a strange relationship with the latter, since it’s one of the few Disney features where I actually read the source material before reading the film, and, perhaps for that reason, the adaptation never really stood up for me. It’s a very enjoyable film, don’t get me wrong, and Cruella De Vil is one of the greatest screen villains ever created, but the book, for me, just paints a much richer and more appealing image in my head.

An interesting point about this release is that, whereas the recent re-releases of The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Robin Hood (and the upcoming The Sword in the Stone) were all matted to an aspect ratio of 1.75:1, 101 Dalmatians retains the open matte 1.33:1 format favoured by every prior home video release, something which pleases me greatly considering how borked The Jungle Book looked when matted. The behind the scenes documentary for 101 Dalmatians, contained on the second disc, mattes the image to a widescreen ratio, with disastrous results, and watching it made me thankful that Disney have opted for a full-frame presentation for this release. I mean, take a look at the image below and try to imagine how you might matte it without completely destroying the composition:

Hopefully there will be a full review at DVD Times in the near future.

How Blu are you?

Concluding my Blu-ray Trilogy of Terror™ for today, I thought I’d take a look at upcoming releases that have been announced for the format and put together a list of titles I intend to pick up:

Out now:
- Enchanted (Buena Vista)

March 25th, 2008
- Bonnie and Clyde (Warner) (ORDERED)

April 8th, 2008
- The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Sony Pictures)

April 14th, 2008
- A Tale of Two Sisters (Tartan)

April 15th, 2008
- Juno (Fox) (REVIEW COPY REQUESTED)

April 22nd, 2008
- The Orphanage (New Line)

April 29th, 2008
- The Golden Compass (New Line)

May 26th, 2008
- Lady Vengeance (Tartan)

July 1st, 2008
- Gangs of New York (Buena Vista)

October 7th, 2008
- Sleeping Beauty (Buena Vista)

DVDs I bought or received in the month of February

• Almost Famous (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• American Gangster (R0 USA, HD DVD)
• Astérix et les Vikings (R0 France, HD DVD)
• The Brave One (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Gone Baby Gone (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• The Lady Vanishes: The Criterion Collection [2007 re-release] (R1 USA, DVD)
• La Môme (R0 France, Blu-ray)
• The Night of the Werewolf/Vengeance of the Zombies (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Run Lola Run (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Volver (RA USA, Blu-ray)
   

In memoriam: HD DVD

Well, it’s been a fun year and a half, and I hope you’ll join me in remembering HD DVD’s brief but promising life. I picked up a scant few discs - 68 - in comparison with some people, but it’s a nice little collection, with some truly great titles in it, and here they are:

2006

#1: Million Dollar Baby (Warner, USA)
#2: Constantine (Warner, USA)
#3: The Bourne Supremacy (Universal, USA)
#4: Sleepy Hollow (Paramount, USA)
#5: Unleashed (Universal, USA)
#6: Red Dragon (Universal, USA)
#7: Land of the Dead (Universal, USA)
#8: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Universal, USA)
#9: The Machinist (Toshiba, Japan)
#10: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Warner, USA)
#11: Corpse Bride (Warner, USA)
#12: V for Vendetta (Warner, USA)
#13: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner, UK)
#14: Serenity (Universal, UK)
#15: An American Werewolf in London (Universal, USA)
#16: Wolf Creek (The Weinstein Company, USA)
#17: Miami Vice (Universal, USA)
#18: Casablanca (Warner, USA)
#19: Basic Instinct (Studio Canal, France)
#20: The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner, USA)
#21: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Warner, UK)

2007

#22: Brokeback Mountain (Universal, USA)
#23: Babel (Paramount, USA)
#24: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Constantin Film, Germany)
#25: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (Paramount, USA)
#26: Children of Men (Universal, USA)
#27: A Scanner Darkly (Warner, USA)
#28: The Game (Universal, USA)
#29: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Universal, USA)
#30: HDScape: Antarctica Dreaming (DVD International, USA)
#31: HDScape: Visions of the Sea (DVD International, USA)
#32: The Fountain (Warner, USA)
#33: The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner, USA)
#34: Lost in Translation (Universal, USA)
#35: The Skeleton Key (Universal, USA)
#36: Mulholland Drive (Studio Canal, France)
#37: Brotherhood of the Wolf (Studio Canal, France)
#38: Dawn of the Dead (2004) (Universal, USA)
#39: Black Snake Moan (Paramount, USA)
#40: La Haine (Optimum, UK)
#41: Syriana (Warner, UK)
#42: Being John Malkovich (Universal, USA)
#43: Blood Diamond (Warner, USA)
#44: The Bourne Identity (Universal, USA)
#45: Mr. Bean’s Holiday (Universal, UK)
#46: Silent Hill (Concorde, Germany)
#47: Underworld (Concorde, Germany)
#48: 300 (Warner, USA)
#49: Mission Impossible III (Paramount, USA)
#50: Seed of Chucky (Universal, USA)
#51: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Warner, USA)
#52: Les Triplettes de Belleville (France Télévisions Éditions, France)
#53: A Clockwork Orange (Warner, USA)
#54: Eyes Wide Shut (Warner, USA)
#55: The Shining (Warner, USA)
#56: Full Metal Jacket (remastered) (Warner, USA)
#57: Pan’s Labyrinth (Optimum, UK)
#58: Wolf Creek (Optimum, UK)
#59: Inside Man (Universal, USA)
#60: Blade Runner: Ultimate Collector’s Edition (Warner, USA)
#61: The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, USA)
#62: Running Scared (EMS, Germany)
#63: Tideland (Concorde, Germany)

2008

#64: Cat People (1982) (Universal, USA)
#65: Eastern Promises (Universal, USA)
#66: Pan’s Labyrinth (New Line, USA)
#67: Astérix et les Vikings (M6 Vidéo, France)
#68: American Gangster (Universal, USA)

As they say, it’s been a good life.

The rat that got the cream

Ratatouille may have been denied a Best Picture nomination by the Academy, but there can be no doubt it absolutely owned the animation industry’s own equivalent of the Oscars, the Annie Awards, on February 8th. Nominated for virtually every category in which it was eligible, and winning most of them, this is a success that seems to have been matched only by Brad Bird and Pixar’s previous collaboration, The Incredibles.

Ratatouille’s wins were in the following categories: Best Animated Feature, Character Animation in a Feature Production (Michal Makarewicz), Character Design in an Animated Feature Production (Carter Goodrich), Directing in an Animated Feature Production (Brad Bird), Music in an Animated Feature Production (Michael Giacchino), Production Design in an Animated Feature Production (Harley Jessup), Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production (Ted Mathot), Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production (Ian Holm), and Writing in an Animated Feature Production (Brad Bird).

The short piece, Your Friend the Rat, included on the Ratatouille Blu-ray and DVD releases, also won Best Short Subject.

In addition, animation historian John Canemaker, Ren & Stimpy creator/director John Kricfalusi and veteran Disney animator Glen Keane were honoured with the Winsor McCay Award (for career contributions to the art of animation), while historian Jerry Beck picked up the June Foray Award (for significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation). Flash creators Jonathan Gay, Gary Grossman and Robert Tatsumi, meanwhile, received the Ub Iwerks Award for technical achievement, while a Special Achievement Annie Award went to Edwin R. Leonard for “promoting the Linux open system for animation in animation studios and gaming software development”.

For a full list of the nominees and winners, see here.