Expelled Grey Matter

While Disney has made a number of horrible animated movies - many of the worst being in the last two to three decades - there are two movies the studio has always regretted making.  One, of course, is Song of the South , which remains locked away in their vault until the time comes that an angry mob won't burn down their theme parks if it gets shown.  The other was The Black Cauldron, the company's only attempt until requiring Pixar of making animated movies for those who have ages in the double digits.  The Black Cauldron had been in production since the early 1970s when Disney bought the movie rights to Lloyd Alexander's series of books known as The Chronicles of Prydain .  The books themselves were based on an ancient Welsh collection of prose called The Mabinogion.  The movie is a truncated and simplified version of Alexander's first two books, omitting a number of side characters and subplots.  Still, the aim of the animators was to make Disney's first...

Richard Linklater is a writer and director known largely for movies in which people wander around and talk.  What sets him apart from the current indie trend called mumblecore is that, while movies like Slackers or Dazed and Confused may not really have a plot, they have a place and time.  He typically explores the various people that live in a certain moment of time and, between scripted and improvised moments, eventually develops something solid out of all the chaos.  I have seen many directors try this, and Linklater is one of the few that is successful. A Scanner Darkly , though nominally a science fiction story, was written by Philip K. Dick based on his experiences with drugs and the effects it had on him and his friends.  While it means characters need to be developed much more than in a lot of Linklater's films, it also gives him the chance to do what he does best: film people being people in the situation they are in.  In this case it's three guys livin...

9 was supposed to be a foray into animation for adults, but from what little I remember of the advertising that would have been difficult to understand.  In all honesty I was just surprised when I watched this that it wasn't a Disney or Dreamworks film.  Instead, it was the first movie made by a studio called Focus Features, who followed this up with the more well-known (and well-received) adaptation of Coraline . Originally made as a short film by writer and director Shane Acker,  9 is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a fascist human government was wiped out when the machines they created revolted against them.  The machines didn't fare much better, and it is into this world that 9 (Elijah Wood), a mechanical ragdoll creature with parts made out of household items, comes to life.  Confused and afraid, he soon meets 2 (Martin Landau), a creature similar to him.  They don't get much of a chance to become acquainted before they are attacked by a mechanic...

I am going to make a controversial statement, and it is one that I rarely make because every slightly off-the-beaten path movie gets slapped with this moniker.  However, I will come right out and say that Lifeforce is the one movie out of the 1980s that has been denied its place as one of that decade's classic science fiction films.  It is, to use the cliché, an underrate sci-fi gem which was treated horribly by the studio, by critics and, as a result, by audiences, much like its director was.  Tobe Hooper had his first big hit with his second feature film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , in 1974.  It eventually became a major hit, earning quite a bit of a profit on its low budget and becoming a horror classic.  Despite that Hooper's career pretty much went up and down; his next movie, Eaten Alive , was another horror film, and although it has its own cult following these days it didn't have the same appeal as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre .  The latter movie...

Hayao Miyazaki is a name I have heard mentioned constantly when it comes to great animation, as well as Studio Ghibli.  His movies are praised for their artwork as well as their unique stories.  I figured I was missing out on something special by not having seen any of his films, which is about as good an excuse as any about why I would settle back to watch a story about a pre-teen girl who slips into another world and ends up working in a palliative bath house that caters to spirits.    It's a strange way of describing what the movie is about, but it is a strange film.  It was made for girls around the age of 10, but it really does not feel like that, even if Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi), the protagonist, is.  From what I understand is Miyazaki didn't really want to create a simple film with simple answers - he wanted to present a movie that spoke to children and was honest with them about the world, and so just by chance it transcends its intended audience....

While I still believe Soul is the first movie Pixar made specifically for adults, there was another one that accidentally falls into that category.  WALL-E was undoubtedly conceived as a movie for children on the cusp of and entering into their double digits, but somewhere along the line writers Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon managed to give us not just an amazingly creative bit of animation, but a solid science fiction story not confined to any one age group. They did this by doing something few movies would do these days: let the story play out visually.  We get some talking billboards giving exposition at the beginning, but it just takes one look at the dry, dusty conditions and the mountains of trash to understand why humans decided to leave their old home behind.  Once we do get into the plot, most of the dialogue is "EVE!" and "WALL-E!", as well as machine noises.  There isn't any traditional voice acting until around the halfway of point of ...

While there are other animation studios, when it comes to feature-length movies of the sort in the U.S. Disney has largely been the go-to since the 1920s.  Dreamworks did challenge them somewhat, and still does, but in the United States Disney is really the only studio that is equipped to do animation on large scale.  They have the budgets and creative talent, and, unfortunately, they also have a large population of people who think cartoons are just for kids. There have been some exceptions in recent years - Beavis and Butt-head Do America and The Simpsons Movie come to mind (it was made before Disney bought Fox), but those were already well-established television programs.  Same with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut .  They are shows for adults, but before they ever got to the big screen they had to be on television longer than most live-action shows have to be, and all of them were comedy.  Sure, there was was a sequel to Heavy Metal , but less said about...

Rudy Ray Moore is an entertainer who really should be more of a household name.  A decent R&B singer, he released a few singles in the 1960s before the reality came that he wasn't going to make it in the world of music.  Eventually he turned to comedy, combining music with his routines in a way which anticipated hip-hop.  Though independently released, and with covers and content that was guaranteed not to get radio play or mainstream distribution, his comedy records managed to do reasonably well and chart on the Billboard Top 200. One of the characters from his routines was Dolemite.  An exaggerated example of Black macho culture, Dolemite was pimp, gangster and storyteller.  It was based on older traditions and, if the movie Dolemite Is My Name  is to believed, was "borrowed" from a homeless man who used to frequent a record store that Moore worked at.  Wherever it came from it became a central theme to Moore's routines and, ambitiously, the subj...

Although Japanese imports like Voltron and Speed Racer had becomes staples of Saturday morning cartoons in the United States, they were usually cleaned-up versions with English dubbing that was barely accurate at best.  Japan, unlike the United States, had a history of comics and cartoons for adults, but they were a tough sell in a country that automatically interpreted a cartoon as being for children.   Then came Akira , a movie adaptation of a manga series that had been running since 1982.  It was one of the most expensive animation productions at the time in Japan, involving a number of different studios and animation houses to put it together.  The money was well-spent; despite having to squeeze six years of story into two hours (including an ending - the actual manga did not come to a conclusion until 1990) director Katsuhiro Otomo, who was also responsible for the manga, managed to produce an exciting, mostly coherent story out of what could easily have be...

Japanese animation has been a part of current pop culture since the late 1980s, but it has been around for much longer.  One example in the late 1960s and early 1970s was Mushi Production.  Unfortunately, their movies fell into the wrong circuits outside of Japan, giving them a reputation that a lot of anime had early on.  The problem is a much of that reputation was deserved.  Belladonna of Sadness was the last of a loose trilogy of films directed by Eiichi Yamamoto, this particular one based on a 19th century book Jules Michelet called La sorcière.  The book itself was a sympathetic account of oppression of women as witches throughout the ages, as well as supporting it somewhat as a legitimate religion.  It really doesn't have any narrative, but rather a number of stories about witch trials and oppression over the centuries.   Using this as inspiration Yamamoto along with Yoshiyuki Fukuda penned this tale of lovers, Jean (Katsuyuki Ito) and Jean...

Fantastic Planet , originally calle La planète sauvage , is an animated film directed by René Laloux and scored by Alain Goraguer.  Based on the 1957 science fiction novel Oms en série by French science fiction writer Stefan Wul, the movie version was a long co-production with a Czechoslovakian animation company, delayed in part when the Soviet Union invaded the country to to suppress the "Prague Spring" uprising in 1968.  It was an award-winning film in France, and made it to the United States courtesy of Roger Corman and an English dub featuring Barry Bostwick as the narrator.  The story involves an "Om" named Terr (Jean Valmont) whose mother is accidentally killed by a group of Draag children.  The Draag are gigantic blue aliens that live on the planet Ygam and, though technologically advanced, are slow to reproduce and spend most of their time in meditation.  The Oms, brought to Ygam from Terra, are often kept as pets, but have become a problem on Ygam becau...

Star Trek was one of those shows that grew in fame with age.  It only lasted three years and the last episode, "Turnabout Intruder", was one of the more unsatisfying endings to a series.  After two seasons, and especially the second being some phenomenal science fiction and fantasy, the third was patchy.  Still, a decade later, there was enough good in the show to make it one of the most watched in syndication.  It was revived for a year (with many of the original cast) as an animated series, and was in preparation for a new television show called Star Trek: Phase Two . The show fell through, but it was only a matter of time before the crew of the Enterprise came back in some form.  Creator Gene Roddenberry, along with director Robert Wise, were interested enough in doing so that Wise got Paramount to negotiate with Leonard Nimoy to work out their issues.  Meanwhile, Roddenberry retooled a script for the unreleased television show, stretching it into a feat...