Zemeckis basically admitted he's working on a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel, which if it happens, would keep the 2D toons in 2D.

I'm eager to see more of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which takes elements from both the Lewis Carroll classic and Through the Looking Glass, including lines and imagery from The Jabberwocky (a poem I know by heart) and "weave it into a story that had movement and emotion to it," Zemeckis said. The 3D footage was stunning, but was basically the same material that already hit the Web. They ran it three times. It was Burton's first Hall H panel; he came six times in the 70s as a fan. The director was anxious to get back to the editing room and finish the movie. He was crawling out of his skin. He's clearly wrestling with all the CG effects--more green screen than he's ever dealt with--"it starts freaking you out after a while" and said this was so far "the most difficult" movie he's ever done. (He's still in the thick of it, listening to a "ticking clock") He doesn't do much mo-cap, mostly "pure animation and using actors in mysterious ways," he said.

Disney orchestrated their Big Reveal and got a HUGE ROAR when Johnny Depp popped onto the stage. He plays the Mad Hatter with red hair and lots of Tammy Faye makeup. Stephen Fry voices the Cheshire Cat.

I'm on the fence about the sequel to Tron, a movie I actually saw and loved when it came out in 1982. Does anyone remember that it was ahead of its time? It was the first film to use CG, when there were no PCs, and was a boxoffice dud. "I feel like Rip Van Winkle," said Steve Lisberger, who worked on the new one too. (Disney launched a viral campaign at Comic-Con.)

Disney & co. have cooked up some nifty looking updates, but why would racing cars on the grid be accompanied by loud motor roars? This makes me nervous. The movie wrapped principal photography last week--using the Phantom Camera at 1000 fps for some shots--and has another year of VFX work to go. Jeff Bridges is back, playing his old and young selves. "This looks so new and fresh," he said, "I guarantee they'll get some pop for this."

Comic-Con 2009 is front-loaded. Most of the key movie stuff happens on the first day, Thursday July 23, and Friday, with Iron Man 2 the main play on Saturday. (Here's the EW Iron Man 2 cover-preview.) The trick is to balance the crowded Hall H panels, trawling the exhibition floor, backstage interviews, screenings and parties with actual blogging. Yikes.

Last year I took the Fox City of Ember train down to San Diego, which worked great, actually. I loved not having to worry about a car, but I was staying at the Omni, right across from the Convention Center, so I was spoiled. This year I'm farther away, so I'll drive down at the crack of dawn Thursday to get my pass in time (!) to start off the day with the 11 AM Disney 3-D panel. Tim Burton (Alice in Wonderland) returns to the Con for the first time since college, while Bob Zemeckis (A Christmas Carol ) is coming for the first time. Burton will stay to do some press, Zemeckis will not.

The combo of Disney's 3-D animation panel and James Cameron's Avatar pushed the Comic-Con folks to install 3-D in the 65,000-square-foot Hall H. The Titanic director will attend the Con for the first time to show the first U.S. 3-D footage of Avatar, along with stars Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. (Exhibs in L.A. screen the 20 minutes already shown in Amsterdam at Cinema Expo on Thursday July 16.) Sam Worthington, who debuted at The Con last year with Terminator: Salvation, is stuck in Wales playing Perseus in Louis Leterrier's Clash of the Titans. (Check out the photo: Gerard Butler, watch your back.) Fox will also promote off-site Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama's horror comedy Jennifer’s Body , starring Megan Fox.

Cameron is participating in another Thursday panel on The Future of Filmmaking with Avatar's VFX czar, Weta chief Peter Jackson, who is also coming for the first time--he usually beams video to Hall H from Wellywood. Attendees are expecting to see Adventures of Tin-Tin footage. Jackson is also pushing his production of the sci-fi thriller District 9 on Friday. He's not involved in LOTR fan site Onering.net's side panel on pre-production of Guillermo del Toro's The Hobbit, which Jackson is also supervising in Wellywood. UPDATE: Word from Jackson's people: it's way too early for a Bilbo announcement.

Another Comic-Con virgin is Disney/Pixar animation czar John Lasseter, who will host an animation panel Friday with Japanese master Hayeo Miyazaki (must-see Ponyo screens Wednesday night), Disney's John Musker and Ron Clements (2-D The Princess and the Frog), and Kirk Wise (Toy Story 3). This is my idea of Heaven.

Thursday's crazy madness will be the Twilight: New Moon panel. Heartthrob Rob Pattinson will appear (reminder: must pack earplugs) with co-stars Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner and director Chris Weitz, but lovelorn vampire Edward Cullen isn't the main character in the movie, so Pattinson won't participate in any backstage interviews. Summit is screening Twilight for the fans with cast members on hand. Summit is scheduled to film the third installment of the Twilight Saga, Eclipse, from August 17 through October 31 in Vancouver with David Slade (30 Days of Night) directing Melissa Rosenberg's screenplay.

To promote Park Chan-wook's vampire movie Thirst (which played well in May's Cannes competition), Focus Features mailed the press a pouch of blood in advance of the Thursday panel, and will screen the intense horror film Friday night.

Some films won't be rating panels at this year's Con, although they may have some viral or off-site happenings or displays on the exhibition floor. Universal, for one, is skipping Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood. Disney is ignoring the live action Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Surrogates. Cash-strapped The Weinstein Co. passed on promoting Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Rob Zombie's Halloween II, The Road (starring Viggo Mortensen), Youth in Revolt (starring Con-friendly Michael Cera), and Piranha 3-D.

Warner Bros. probably isn't bringing Joel Silver's long-delayed screen adaptation of the graphic novel Whiteout because it was promoed last year. Also missing are Ninja Assassin and Zack Snyder’s animated 3D Guardians of Ga’Hoole. It's early days yet for MGM to promote the Joss Whedon/Drew Goddard horror comedy The Cabin in the Wood, but Whedon fans can catch the first three webisodes of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Thursday night.

Brian Lowry vets Comic-Con on the TV side.

I was going to leave Saturday, but David Tennant is showing up for a Dr. Who panel on Sunday morning. I may have to stay on.

After a lazy holiday weekend, I herewith share with you my gleanings of what's been going on.

At the boxoffice, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs battled nasty reviews to virtually tie with holdover Transformers:ROTF over the five-day holiday weekend. UPDATE: Transformers 2 barely won the weekend with a preliminary $42.4 million over Ice Age's $41.6 million in slightly fewer runs.

Public Enemies proved that Depp as Dillinger is a solid b.o. draw. Sandra Bullock vehicle The Proposal dropped only 31% and has grossed $94.2 million. Kathryn Bigelow's intense Iraq thriller The Hurt Locker continued strong in limited release. So far agitprop Food Inc. is outperforming costume romance Cheri.

Here's the first eight minutes of The Hurt Locker.

Todd McCarthy favorably reviews the sixth Harry Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The most grown-up and thrilling of the bunch, the film will be one of the highest-grossing of the year, he predicts.

Here's the trailer.

Cynthia Littleton tributes The Hollywood Reporter's late international reporter Steve Brennan.

Marc Andreessen is starting a venture capital fund. UPDATE: All Things Digital talks to him about going to the dark side..

Beleaguered The Weinstein Co. is pushing its animated feature Escape from Planet Earth back to 2011, reports the LAT.

Beatles and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein died at age 77 after fighting Alzheimer's.

One's Japanese, the other isn't. And there's the rub.

While John Lasseter's Disney animation division and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall have supervised the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's latest anime film, Ponyo--already a hit overseas--the film is still magical and yes, very Japanese. (It closes the LAFF June 28; Miyazaki will appear at Comic-Con in July before the film opens in North America on August 14.) Lasseter is banking that with proper handling from Disney, the movie could break out to family audiences in a way none of Miyazaki's imports ever have, even with one Oscar nomination (Howl's Moving Castle) and one win (Spirited Away). Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon and Betty White are among the stars providing voice talent on Ponyo.

Fast Company lists Miyazaki as one of the top ten most creative people in film and TV. Wired lists the best anime coming out this summer.

I've been a huge Miyazaki fan, from My Neighbor Totoro through Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and beyond. Ponyo is also sublime. Like all great movies it whisks you effortlessly into another world. And it's old-fashioned, hand-drawn 2-D (not an ounce of CG in it), stylized animation. Miyazaki has always been able to capture the forces of nature and the great outdoors, in this case, the ocean that menaces the Japanese coast in the form of a tsunami. The movie lacks violence or anything urban: nature provides the story's threat and drama. Don't miss this one.

The Seattle Film Fest debuted another movie from a Japanese source. Hachi: A Dog's Story is a remake of Hachiko, based on a famous true story from the 20s. Loyal Akita Hachiko met his beloved master every day at the train station, and after the gentleman died of a stroke and never returned, escaped each of his new homes to wait for his master, faithfully every day, through heat, rain and snow, until he died ten years later (sob).

Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog) took on the American remake with Richard Gere in the role of the professor who bonds with his dog. (The two men are friends and neighbors and worked together on Hoax.) But the movie twists itself into a pretzel explaining how a Japanese dog named Hachiko came to America, met the professor, got into the habit of waiting for him at the train every day--and kept waiting. There's a wife (Joan Allen) and a very slim family narrative. The movie doesn't work. Yet the bones of the story are still so powerful (which is why Gere and Hallstrom wanted to do it), that the Seattle audience and I were all in tears.

The movie's financeer, international sales co.Inferno Distribution, has a pact with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group for North American and Australian ancillary rights to its movies. Inferno is negotiating with service distrib Consolidated Pictures Group (led by Bottle Shock filmmaker Randall Miller, who’s releasing I Love You Phillip Morris), which is looking to raise some P & A for a fall release.

But the movie really belongs at Disney, where the family label would mean something. Gere's agent Ed Limato showed the movie to Disney's Dick Cook, but the studio passed. Inferno's Bill Johnson changed the title from Hachiko to Hachi because he was afraid it would put off American audiences. "Hachi is more reminiscent of Benji," he said.

Check out the original Hachiko. Like Ponyo, it's the authentic real deal.

First the media touted the uptick in 2009 theatrical business, now they're pointing to a downturn compared to last summer's b.o., a few big flops and the absence of blockbusters. "Through Sunday, summer B.O. revs stood at $1.46 billion, compared to $1.47 billion last year," reports Variety.

Hold on folks, it's early days yet. Everyone knows what the blockbusters will be (besides Up): Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Disney's pairing of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal should yield strong returns with the femme demo. But word is that neither Universal's Bruno nor Public Enemies will break out huge. And Sony's Year One and Paramount's G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (which had a disastrous preview) look soft indeed.

Here are some summer lessons:

2. Origin myths sell. Star Trek skipped behind the other ten movies and went back to the beginning. Director J.J. Abrams found the right balance for Trekkies and newbies alike. Gross to date: $233 million so far.

3. Smart R-rated dumb male comedies sell. Always have, always will. The Hangover is the summer's sleeper hit, grossing more than $110 million in its first two weeks. The best news for Warner Bros: no talent profit participants. The bad news: they have to share with partner Legendary Pictures.

4. R-rated dumb male comedians don't sell in family movies. Universal miscalculated by starring Will Ferrell in $100-million remake Land of the Lost. The studio pulled the second weekend print ads on the picture, an unusual move. Gross to date: $36 million.

5. Eddie Murphy without makeup doesn't sell. I rest my case with Imagine That. Put Murphy under pounds of makeup playing a character, and they show up. Give him a role playing someone close to himself and audiences stay away in droves.

6. Lackluster sequels sell--but don't break out big. The key with these tentpole franchises is keeping up the quality.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which cost $150 million, opened huge and dropped off drastically. That means Fox's massive marketing budget pulled the core comics fanbase, but the movie failed to broaden. Gross to date: $176 million domestic, $353 million worldwide.

The sequel to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, also scored big overseas ($415 million) but did middling business stateside ($124 million). To my mind Ron Howard delivered a better E-ride this time. But the book and the movie lacked the compelling Christian scandale that the first one had. This movie was (expensive) standard-issue.

Despite McG's $200-million budget, Terminator Salvation failed to improve on its predecessors and seemed oddly retro. The highlights were not Christian Bale, who seemed to be channeling Batman, growl and all, but supporting performers Sam Worthington and Anton Yelchin. Gross to date: $115 million, plus $100 million overseas.

Every once in a while I am reminded that my taste is not the same as the mass audience. I can usually call a blockbuster like 300 or Star Trek--in other words, I ignore the tracking and opening weekend predictions to insist--THIS MOVIE IS SO GOOD IT WILL DO BUSINESS. Sometimes, thank God, word-of-mouth counts for something, so that a movie becomes A MUST-SEE.

But occasionally I really like something--often beloved by critics as well--that just doesn't catch moviegoers' fancy. Take, say, the two-part Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse. Both movies were simply too arcane, too close to their pulpy cinephile roots. But what was arcane about Drag Me to Hell, which earned a whopping 83 on Metacritic? But opened to $16 million? And is getting creamed by the competition? What makes this Sam Raimi movie a tweener? Well, the fact that it's a horror/comedy hybrid, for one. (See Slither.) It looks like you can't have a fun scary gross-out E-ride rated PG-13: that way you lose both the family and the horror crowd. (And there's a Fright Night remake in the works.)

That's Dennis Cozzalio's theory (scroll down). He hosted a fun gathering at the Mission Tiki drive-in last Saturday night, complete with hearse and Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule T-shirt giveaways. Was this film freak gathering a bad sign for the movie? Well, most of the drive-in's business that night was over on the side showing Pixar's Up. Other folks have criticized Universal's marketing, which failed to distinguish Drag Me to Hell enough. Debuting it at SXSW was the right move, but the message that the movie was really fun somehow didn't come across.

It's easier to recognize a smart-house tweener that isn't going to do any business. Focus Features' Away We Go, which has all the indie cred bonafides in the world, from Dave Eggers and Sam Mendes to TV comedy stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph and movie actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, just doesn't cut it. Mainly the two rom-com leads are not interesting enough, forming a warm mushy bowl of boredom in the middle of the film. We know they love each other. So?

Secondly, the film is a road movie, always a risky narrative structure (see: My Blueberry Nights, also with a non-pro, Norah Jones, at its center). Third, beware of smart sophisticated filmmakers who are making fun of US for being one or more of the following: idiotic, alcoholic, leftie, bourgeois, self-involved, or lousy parents. The movie might as well be called BOOBS ARE US. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows one couple saying to some pals, "Did you see Honky Tonk Freeway? It ruined our August." That ill-fated 1981 John Schlesinger comedy also looked down on ordinary American folks who weren't as cool as the filmmakers. IFC's David Hudson rounds up Away We Go's bad reviews; 56 on Metacritic isn't going to get this pic very far.

James Cameron made an appearance at E3 to promo the videogame for his 3-D performance capture epic Avatar. The game is scheduled to come out concurrent with the movie's release on December 18. IGN interviewed Cameron primarily about the 3-D third-person game, which is crammed with even more creatures, gadgets and weapons than the film--all approved by Cameron himself-- but he reveals a few Avatar nuggets along the way.

Worthington plays paralyzed ex-marine Jake Sully, who travels to faraway planet Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na'vi tribe. He explores the planet via a remote link that controls the body of a powerful 10-foot blue alien/human hybrid Avatar. In the deep Pandora jungle, he encounters many exotic creatures, including a gorgeous Na'vi warrior, voiced by Zoe Saldana.

Here's Cameron's E3 Q & A.

UPDATE: The BBC and HitFix's Drew McWeeny visited the videogame presentation.

I'm excited about Avatar and Worthington, clearly the best thing about Terminator Salvation--which is a summer disappointment, although McG accomplished his goal of establishing his action bonafides. Cameron suggested Worthington to McG, who had offered the role to Christian Bale, who preferred to do the John Connor part, which was a mistake. Worthington landed the juicier role, and if Bale was seeking another franchise (greedy), this one's over. Finally, the movie was too confusing (the time line was a mess), you weren't invested in the characters and the outcome, and this sequel didn't advance and reinvigorate the franchise.

Cannes master promoter Thierry Fremaux knows what he is doing: the photo taken from the Debussy stage of the Cannes press corps wearing 3-D glasses will be seen everywhere. (They had to be returned.) I started out the morning in tears during Up , which as Disney chairman Dick Cook puts it, is Pixar's "most emotional film." Co-writers Bob Peterson and Pete Docter took the idea of an old guy who travels in a house carried aloft by balloons to find a lost South American paradise, and worked it over for a good two years before it passed enough muster to go into voice casting and animation.

Whenever I listen to John Lasseter talk, I wish that everyone in Hollywood would take some of his wisdom to heart. The Pixar approach is to never produce anything unless it will stand the test of time as a good movie. And they haven't delivered one dud yet. They're ten for ten. This one challenges conventional wisdom about subjects (an old man and a chubby boyscout), killing off beloved characters, and lingering over slow moments. Lasseter paid homage to Japanese anime auteur Miyazaki for inspiring him to occasionally take it slow.

Lasseter and Docter admitted that on every Pixar film there are scenes that get worked over and over until they finally cohere--and others that are smooth as butter from the start--at Pixar they call them tentpoles on which to hang the rest of the movie. In Up they include the magical opener covering the history of the marriage of old man Carl (Ed Asner), and the sequence when the balloons pick up the house and sail over the city.

When the Pixar team finally licked their most troublesome scene in South America, which was crucial, they went back and planted details and plot points to lead up to it. Doing a shot over 30 or 40 times is not unusual.

After the press conference, the Up group appeared on the Carlton Pier for a photo op that went awry when the special effects guys who had rigged a 40-foot house attached to a giant air balloon (covered by colored balloons) decided that it was too windy to risk having the flimsy house crash and break apart on landing. So the house and the balloons stayed put. The movie itself will not be so grounded and should take off nicely all over the world on May 29. Cook says Disney is aggressively chasing after all audience quadrants. (The segment that might resist is teenage girls.) It wasn't the most glamorous opening nighter, but Up was the best movie the fest has programmed in that slot for a long while. And Cannes can also count on the film being an Oscar contender.

Here's Variety's Up-themed opener. And here's The Wrap.

On opening night, young ballerinas in pink tutus lined the Palais red carpet steps as Cannes president Gilles Jacob and fest director Thierry Fremaux stood at the top of the stairs to greet their guests (see Life Magazine's red carpet photos), including Ashwarya Rai and Elizabeth Banks, Isabelle Huppert (who has had an amazing 17 Cannes entries) and her jury (among them Asia Argento, Hanef Kureishi, Robin Wright Penn, Shu Qi) plus Pixar's Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and famed singer Charles Aznavour, who voices Carl in the French version of Up, and officially declared the 62nd Festival de Cannes "open."

I'm out of my element in Vegas for my first-ever National Association of Broadcasters convention. Monday I did a Q & A with stop-motion auteur Henry Selick, who ran some nifty clips from Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and the surprise $74-million hit Coraline, which is starting to open in Europe. View this photo.

Coraline's peformance was hurt by too many 3-D movies fighting for not enough 3-D screens, Selick admits. (He's hoping for a rerelease this summer with the DVD, which will be in 2-D, he hopes, as 3-D DVDs are still cheesy). But he also thinks that Coraline's careful crafting of a story enhanced by the combination of lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion, CG effects and 3-D made the movie more of an event for moviegoers. He'll return to Laika in Portland, Oregon for his next stop-motion film, he said, and looks forward to building on what he learned on this film, as he has all along.

Selick is always wowed by Pixar films (he studied with many of the Pixar gang, and old collaborator Tim Burton, at Cal Arts), including what he's has seen of the upcoming Cannes opener Up. But he is not a fan of performance capture--which doesn't mean that James Cameron's Avatar won't be spectacular, he said. 3-D, even holograms, are the wave of the future.

Members at a later NAB panel, while admitting that 3-D cinemas are well ahead of 3-D in the home, touted the imminent future of alternative 3-D. A rep from BSkyB screened some impressive 3-D footage of soccer, boxing, gladiator-style Rocketball contests, ballet and a Keane concert broadcast via satellite with existing HD technology: they used two side-by-side HD cameras, a 3-D processor and HD encoder and transmitted up to satellite and down to the set top box.

Shooting in 3-D, several panelists agreed, requires less cutting and more lingering so that the audience can find their own focus. At a basketball game, said NBA Entertainment's Steve Hellmuth, you could watch the play as if you were sitting in Jack Nicholson's courtside seat, in an immersive experience.

The most impressive footage came from Brazil's TV Globo Network, which shot, edited and broadcast almost instantly live 3-D footage of the Carnivale in Rio. It was stunning--but what made advertisers sit up and take notice, not surprisingly, was the spinning 3-D can of beer popping out in the foreground. The sponsors wanted that on air the next day, said Jose Dias Vasconcellos de Assis, who points out that there are already 3-D-ready sets available from Mitsubishi, Samsung and Hyundai, which has a set that can turn 2-D HD into 3-D.

For now, said BSkyB's Gerry O'Sullivan, the trick is to shoot in 2-D and 3-D formats at the same time. NYT moderator Eric Taub wound up saying, "We're not just creating a new technology, but a new aesthetic."

I can't wait to see what they do here with the Thanksgiving Day Parade and The Rose Bowl.

Here's Variety's David Cohen on another 3-D in the home panel.

Here's a taste of Glenn Kenny's rave of the new Disney Blu-ray Pinocchio 70th anniversary DVD:

For borderline boomers such as myself, Pinocchio never played as an "old" movie when we saw it, or bits of it, on the color version of "The Wonderful World of Disney" on our households' first color televisions in the early '60s. But to look at this version is to look at something not just not old, but brand new. The colors, the detail, the almost preternatural absence of smudges, scratches, and whatnot...this does, I think, inarguably, honor the intentions and the labors of the filmmakers in a way that even they themselves could not have envisioned.

When GQ film critic Tom Carson read this, he felt compelled to grab this DVD and re-watch Pinocchio for the first time since he was a wee lad. The impact on him was devastating. As far as Carson is concerned, Disney's Pinocchio is one wacked out nasty movie, brimming with sex, innuendo, a nose like an enlarging penis, and adolescent jack-asses.

Kenny responds here.

One of the surprises of the year so far is how well Henry Selick’s 3-D animated gothic fairy tale Coraline lasted at the b.o.; this weekend brings DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens and a spate of 3-D offerings are on the way. Even the venerable Cannes Film Festival, which has made an annual tradition of unveiling the latest animated fare, will for the first time open the 62nd fest on May 13 with not only an animated movie but Disney/Pixar’s 3-D balloon adventure Up, which opens May 29.

Time Magazine talks to 3-D boosters Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Spielberg is collaborating with Peter Jackson on 3-D performance capture movie Tintin. Some industry insiders wonder if Cameron will further delay Avatar's December 19 release date so that more 3-D theaters will be available. EW rounds up the 3D future. UPDATE: The LAT interviews Captain 3-D, Phil McNally.

(EW's list of upcoming 3-D pics is on the jump.)

[Photo courtesy of Time Magazine.]

[Posted by David S. Cohen]

It’s a happy accident for fans of comics and sci-fi pictures that Watchmen and Monsters vs. Aliens open within a few weeks of each other, because in some peculiar ways, they’re two sides of the same coin.

Granted, in some ways the two movies could hardly be more different: Watchmen is an R-rated, hyper-violent, serious-as-a-heart-attack deconstruction of the superhero genre, based on a graphic novel that has garnered praise as a serious work of literature. MvA is a joke-a-second kid pic created by DreamWorks Animation that pays affectionate homage to cheesy sci-fi movies of the 50s and 60s. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone working on MvA was in any conscious way influenced by Watchmen.

But the superhero and sci-fi genres have always overlapped, and the comics Watchmen deconstructs are rooted in the same pulpy pop culture as those old sci-fi pictures. It’s not shocking there are some overlapping ideas. But to an extent no one could have anticipated they’re also mirror images of each other.

In a nutshell, Watchmen shows that “heroes” can be monsters, while Monsters vs. Aliens shows that “monsters” can be heroes. (Spoilers follow.) To be sure, superhero comics have long grappled with characters who flip-flop between good and evil or at least can be morally ambiguous. Movie fans have seen that in the X-men and Punisher movies, not to mention The Dark Knight. But Alan Moore’s graphic novel took the concept to another level.

Similarly, the idea that monsters can be heroes is nothing new to horror fans. MvA isn’t even the first picture to make the notion explicit. Godzilla, to name just one example, started out as a menace that destroyed Tokyo, but over the life of the franchise protected Japan from worse menaces and became a kind of hero. And the monster-as-hero is the whole gag in King Kong. Kong is the scourge of Skull Island – and Manhattan Island -- but turns out to be a big lonely ape who sometimes is as much Anne Darrow’s protector as her tormentor. By the 60s he was deemed cuddly enough to have a Saturday morning cartoon show and a kid buddy, like an overgrown Lassie. (Speaking of Saturday morning cartoons, by the way, here’s something to make Watchmen author Alan Moore’s head explode: Saturday Morning Watchmen Be sure to click “Watch this movie.” But I digress.)

Beyond that, MvA and Watchmen have some odd similarities. Both start in a world where the protagonists are despised outcasts. The masked vigilantes of Watchmen are despised by the public, and as a result are outlawed or working for the government; the monsters of MvA are feared by the public and therefore are prisoners of the government. “Watchmen” has one true super-hero, Dr. Manhattan, a brilliant scientist who is transformed by a experiment gone wrong into an indestructible blue human demigod. MvA has Dr. Cockroach, a brilliant scientist transformed by an experiment gone wrong into a nearly indestructible human roach. It also has B.O.B., a lab experiment gone wrong that turned into an indestructible blue blob.

Remarkably, on its fourth weekend, the well-reviewed Coraline is still hanging in there--it grossed more than $5 million and placed eighth on its way to some $70-million in total domestic gross--even though new opener Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience took over its 3-D theaters.

Writer-director Henry Selick likes the movie in 2-D, too. But it's not 2-D hand-drawn animation. Perfected by Selick on such films as Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, stop-motion animation involves filming puppets in miniature environments, one frame at a time, with flexible still-camera-size digital medical cameras (two, for the Stereoscopic 3-D effect). In whatever mode, if you haven't yet, make sure to see this magical gothic fairy tale, which writer-director-designer Selick takes way beyond anything done before with stop-motion.

Amazingly, very little of Coraline's Fantastic Garden set piece--which is not in Neil Gaiman's original novel—was aided by CG. The scene was impeccably hand-crafted by artists over months of painstaking production with hand-made manipulated puppets and thousands of paper flowers. "I really wanted to have a lot of atmosphere, which is a hard thing to do with stop-motion," says Selick. "I wanted the world and the characters to feel alive."

Miserably lonely in her family's ramshackle new house in the country and neglected by her workaholic parents, 11-year-old Coraline seeks refuge in a parallel universe where another set of fantasy parents play and cook and cultivate a fabulous garden. (Of course all is not as it seems.)

I've already sent out a couple of valentines from Fox's Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs site promoting the latest CG comedy from Chris Wedge's Blue Sky. This one is not only 3-D, but Scrat falls in love.

Here's the official trailer: the movie is due July 4.

UPDATE: Carrie Rickey recommends her fave Valentine's Day DVDs.

Neil Gaiman's original 2002 story is as old as the hills, from The Secret Garden to Pan's Labyrinth: lonely kid in old house finds fantasy world through keyhole. Coraline has a sinister edge, though.

Long-time Tim Burton collaborator Henry Selick (here's my feature on James and the Giant Peach) adds ecstatic visual effects and immersive 3-D to the tactile pleasures of his signature miniature stop-motion. Selick has finally brought Gaiman's charm intact to the screen, after several failed attempts, including Stardust. Coraline is stunning. A must-see.

Add buttons to your eyes at the v. cool Coraline website:

Here's John Horn's LAT feature plus reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum and Justin Chang:

“Coraline” may benefit from the added synergy of an upcoming Off Broadway musical (slated for a May 6 world premiere) and a videogame (released Jan. 27) featuring voicework by three of the film’s thesps: Dakota Fanning, Keith David and Robert Bailey Jr. The captivatingly creepy yarn also has inspired an Italian short film, an Irish puppet show, a Swedish play and a P. Craig Russell graphic novel -- not bad for a book that sprung from a series of bedtime stories Gaiman told his daughters in the 1990s.

In a surprise turn at the International Animated Film Society Awards (Annies), DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda won the top prizes. This comes as a shock to those of us who just assume that Pixar's Wall-E is the frontrunner for the animation Oscar. What does this mean? Has Pixar ruled the roost too long? Even though the Annies tend to be a good indicator of where the Oscars are going, I suspect Wall-E will still get the love from the entire Academy. I was actually predicting that Andrew Stanton could win the Oscar for original screenplay.

Full list of winners on the jump.

My flight from LAX to Salt Lake City was delayed. Every seat was taken, many of them by industry folks heading to Park City for the Fest which launched Thursday night. I enjoyed a pleasant sunset drive up the mountain with Robin Schorr, who recently left River Road to put together a new development company with funding from a private investor. She told me to see Big Fan, from writer-turned-director Robert Siegel (The Wrestler). The voice behind Ratatouille, Patton Oswalt, breaks out in this one, I hear.

I missed the opening press conference and the opening night movie, Mary and Max, an Australian claymation feature that Variety's Justin Chang did not like:

Maudlin sentiment, miserablist humor and scatological sight gags are affectionately but awkwardly molded together in the Australian claymation feature "Mary and Max." A glum tale of friendship between two very unlikely pen pals, writer-director-designer Adam Elliot's follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2003 short "Harvie Krumpet" has its share of deadpan amusements, but its combo of mordant whimsy and tearjerker moments winds up curdling in an unappetizing fashion. A strong voice cast headed by Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman could buoy the toon's otherwise uncertain prospects beyond Oz.

At a civilized dinner at Black Dog with a bunch of film critics, we talked, naturally, about newspapers and mags slashing salaries and/or jobs. The New Times chain is down to two critics: Scott Foundas in LA and Jim Hoberman in New York will service the entire chain, with freelancers, now including ex-LA Weekly film critic Ella Taylor. Andy Klein was let go from L.A. CityBeat. Time Out New York lost its lead film critic, Melissa Anderson. The gloomy drumroll drones on.

And we talked hot fest titles:

I had been tipped on Burma VJ, which HBO scooped up before the fest. John Anderson has seen it and raved.

He also liked We Live in Public, the doc about New York dotcom millionaire Josh Harris in the early 90s that bears some resemblance to The Truman Show. A bunch of CAA agents raved about this. And Jeff Wells also liked it.

UPDATE: Word is, The Greatest is a four-hankie breakout for writer-director Shana Feste and Brit actress Carey Mulligan, who stars in another hot fest title, Lone Scherfig's An Education. Producer Lynette Howell (Half Nelson) has high hopes.

Here's the Variety special Sundance section with list of Hot Titles. Ken Turan runs down all the films he's seen in advance of the fest. The NYT is running a Sundance page. And check out the revamped IndieWire, which is running a constant feed of Sundance stories along with its own reporting.

Here's the We Live in Public trailer:

RottenTomatoes has posted winners of its Golden Tomato Awards for 2008 for the best and worst-reviewed movies on the critics aggregation site.

No surprise on the winner of the best-reviewed wide release-- Wall-E: 96%. More than any other company, Pixar has won this honor five times.

Man on Wire grabbed best-reviewed limited release: 100%. Only one other film has earned this score: Pixar's Toy Story 2.

Worst-reviewed film is One Missed Call at 0%, the lowest-ever Tomatoes score.

At this stage, Man on Wire is the film to beat for the best feature documentary Oscar. And Wall-E will likely score best animated feature, plus some nominations for writing, sound editing, sound and score, the same ones earned by last year's animated winner, Ratatouille. Will Andrew Stanton add director to the list? That is the burning question.

According to our VFX honcho David Cohen, the two movies left off this short list of 15 for VFX consideration for the Oscars are Speed Racer and Wanted. In January, the members of the Academy's visual effects branch exec committee will narrow the list to seven--which will be presented and voted on by the committee at the annual bake-off on January 15, where they will pick the final three to be announced January 22 on nominations morning.

Just because Speed Racer was ahead of the curve and a bad match of visual effects and story --I fervently believe that the Wachowskis should never have attempted a family film--doesn't mean it shouldn't be rewarded by its peers for its technological virtuosity. I guess this means the VFX committee doesn't believe that it worked, finally. And Wanted had great, innovative effects, but they were done outside the Hollywood/San Francisco Beltway by Russian director Timur Bekmambetov. (That doesn't stop Peter Jackson's Weta from getting nominations.) But honestly, don't those two films deserve more consideration than Australia, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, or The Spiderwicke Chronicles?

The films in alphabetical order are:

"Australia"
"The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"
"Cloverfield"
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“The Dark Knight”
“The Day the Earth Stood Still”
“Hancock”
“Hellboy II: The Golden Army”
“The Incredible Hulk”
“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”
“Iron Man”
“Journey to the Center of the Earth”
“The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor”
“Quantum of Solace”
“The Spiderwick Chronicles”

Let's call the final three:
Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

What's great about the L.A. Film Critics and Time Magazine's Richard Corliss voting Wall-E as best film is that not only is it among the best-reviewed movies of the year (93 % on Metacritic), which means that most critics adore it, but it's an underdog. I've gotten into trouble for suggesting that critics groups ever vote with an eye on other upcoming awards votes. But perhaps the critics' desire to help Wall-E helped knock out its stiffest competitor, The Dark Knight, which doesn't need any help at this point. Wall-E was also a huge boxoffice success, but what it needs is respect. This is the first time the critics' group has awarded its top prize to an animated film.

I like the way the LA critics reveal their runner-ups. Slumdog Millionaire continues to do well, with prizes for director and score, and Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky snagged major wins for screenplay and actress Sally Hawkins. Frozen River's Melissa Leo was the runner-up in that category, which makes me wonder about Kristin Scott Thomas's chances to break into the Oscar Top Five; maybe not everyone has seen I've Loved You So Long. She needs some wins to get there.

In the best actor race, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke solidified their front-runner status, leaving Frank Langella as an also-ran; Frost/Nixon was shut out by the critics, as was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which had to settle for runner-up for Alexandre Desplat's score. For supporting actor, Heath Ledger will be tough to beat. The critics awarded Penelope Cruz supporting actress for her perfs in two films, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Elegy, leavng Viola Davis in the runner-up spot for Doubt. Israeli Waltz with Bashir won not only best animated film but runner-up for best documentary, a category for which it is ineligible for the Oscars.

Here's the full list:

Picture: "Wall-E" Runner-up: "The Dark Knight"

Director: Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire"
Runner-up: Christopher Nolan, "The Dark Knight"

Actor: Sean Penn, "Milk"
Runner-up: Mickey Rourke, "The Wrestler"

Actress: Sally Hawkins, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Runner-up: Melissa Leo, "Frozen River"

Supporting actor: Heath Ledger, "The Dark Knight"
Runner-up: Eddie Marsan, "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Supporting actress: Penelope Cruz, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and "Elegy"
Runner-up: Viola Davis, "Doubt"

Screenplay: Mike Leigh, "Happy-Go-Lucky"
Runner-up: Charlie Kaufman, "Synecdoche, New York"

Disney's animated Bolt nabbed good reviews (85% Tomatometer), while the vampire romance Twilight did not (48% Tomatometer ). It won't matter. There are plenty of excited teenage girls and their moms to keep the theaters noisy the opening weekend. (If you don't want to be distracted by screaming hordes, wait a week.) The movie works for what it is, and Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson are strong leads. Ken Turan's review gets it. So does Kim Voynar.

UPDATE: Twilight is outperforming even the most exuberant projections at the boxoffice, proving yet again that yes, women can open a movie. And Summit is greenlighting a film version of the second novel in Stephenie Meyer's vampire series, New Moon, they confirmed Saturday.

Here's the latest trailer for Henry Selick's stop-motion Coraline, from the novel by Neil Gaiman.

[Posted by David S. Cohen]To date, other than James Cameron's Avatar, there have been no announcements of a major franchise installment in live-action 3-D. No 3-D Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Die Hard or Pirates of the Caribbean. We hear from people who've worked on live-action 3-D that there's a learning curve involved, and that a company or studio should make a 3-D movie before diving into the format.

With that in mind, though, we can't help but notice that 1) Disney is heavily invested in 3-D, including live-action. 2) Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp are making an animated 3-D movie together, Rango. and 3) Jerry Bruckheimer is making G Force in 3-D.

Disney, Bruckheimer, Verbinski, Depp... Nobody at Disney is talking, but we wouldn't be surprised to hear a P4 3-D announcement one of these days.

Posted by Peter Debruge]
You know the animation sector is healthy when four major studios each release two toons a year (Disney had Wall-E and Bolt, DreamWorks Animation opened Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa). Factor in another dozen potential contenders from smaller distributors, and you have more than enough to grow the category from the customary three slots to a far-more-interesting five (the cutoff for three is 15).

So why didn't it work out that way this year?

The animated feature category depends on who submits, and at least six films declined to compete this this around (you can familiarize yourself with the 14 that did enter here). To lift an observation from an Oscar Animation Preview story running tomorrow:

Consider how this year's race might have been different if Fox had submitted Space Chimps and Universal had entered The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie -- neither film was likely to be nominated, but they would have pushed the total submission count to 16, boosting the chances for the studio's more polished contenders: Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! in Fox's case and The Tale of Despereaux for U.

Other 2008 toons sitting out the race: IFC's Fear(s) of the Dark, the Weinstein Co.'s Azur and Asmar, Roadside Attractions' Chicago 10, Lucasfilm's Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Indian toon Roadside Romeo from Yash Raj Films.

It's a shame, really, since there were more than three great toons this year -- including some quality work among the films that declined to participate. And with Pixar's well-reviewed Wall-E virtually assured one slot (the studio's never been passed over before), it leaves a lot of great movies fighting over the remaining nominations.

I suspect what happens is that "the little guys" decide they don't stand a chance against big-studio toons and simply don't submit. But they're wrong. At the nomination stage, the animation category isn't about promotional muscle but quality. To vote, the nominating committee must screen at least 80% of the entries (that's 12 of the 14) fresh at the end of the year, then rate each one. Every film stands an equal shot, and the three with the top scores advance.

That's how such exceptional films as The Triplets of Belleville and Persepolis have broken through in the past, and it's the very reason philosophical toon documentary Waltz With Bashir, stop-motion meaning-of-life inquiry $9.99 and elegant anime parable The Sky Crawlers were right to enter this year. If the shorts category is any indication (and why shouldn't it be, since the same voters nominate in both?), the Academy frequently bypasses big-budget CG contenders for personal, sincere stories.

If no small films get in this year, it won't be the Academy's fault, but rather that of the half dozen indies who didn't submit. Widen the race, and the mix gets really interesting.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
Get this: Of the 14 animated films vying for Oscar, seven have yet to be released in the U.S. (another six that opened earlier in the year simply weren't submitted, which keeps the category from growing from three to five slots). Going by the films you already know, you can get a pretty good idea of what the final ballot will be, but don't put it past the Academy to pick a film you haven't heard of.

Like $9.99, a stop motion toon for grown-ups, based on the very short stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret (some of them no longer than a sneeze, but evocative enough to set your imagination running). That might seem like a shortage of material on which to base a feature, but consider that (a) most blockbusters can be reduced to 25 words or less and (b) director Tatia Rosenthal has gathered up a handful of Keret's ideas and packed them into a single film (by making his characters neighbors in a disaster-prone Australian apartment building), and you've got more than enough story to deal with.

As for its Oscar chances, the Academy just loves stop motion. Maybe it's the fact that you can see the work (fingerprints and everything), as opposed to all those new-fangled CG films where the computer does the heavy lifting (I jest, of course, since $9.99 might also have been the budget for this modest indie). Still, every stop motion toon submitted since the category was introduced has gone on to be nominated (that would be The Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit), and the Academy awarded last year's animated short award to Suzie Templeton's Peter & the Wolf (which bodes well for Coraline and The Fantastic Mr. Fox going forward).

But it's a curious entry, not as polished as Aardman. I don't dare spill any of the plot, except to confess that $9.99 is easily the least predictable film I've seen this year, as the characters' various existential musings prove a decoy for the surreal plot twists in store. The movie itself opens Dec. 12 in Los Angeles. In the meantime, feast your curiosity on this exclusive poster:

What was New York critic David Edelstein thinking when he disclosed the big reveal in the doc Dear Zachary, which I knew going in was a tear-jerker about a guy who died, but did not have the sordid details. (He has apologized and posted SPOILER ALERTS online.) As you watch the movie, the lack of professional distance on the part of the filmmaker is obvious, and somewhat disconcerting---until the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction plot twist. The movie is devastating. (Metacritic ranks it 81%.)

I'm not driven to see the new mainstream Hollywood pics this weekend. Now that Nora is in college, I don't have to go see animated movies unless I want to. And Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa just doesn't lure me like a Pixar movie would (it's getting 62% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). Jeff Katzenberg knows how to play for the wide audience better than anyone. But he doesn't always add that extra poetry for adults. I did like Kung Fu Panda.

The guys seem to be going for Role Models, which is 74% fresh. I'm not convinced. Didn't David Wain make The Ten? I loathed that movie. I'm not eager to see Soul Men (44% Tomatometer) either, fond as I am of the late Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson.

So I will catch up on screeners for foreign films. Friday night some pals and I watched Otto Preminger's hugely entertaining black and white drama Advise and Consent, based on the 1959 bestseller, which we read in my book group this month. That's yet another movie that wouldn't get made any more. Here's New Yorker critic David Denby's splendid profile of Preminger.

I've been taking a wait-and-see approach on the Oscar race. You really don't know until you screen all the pictures. But enough other people are seeing them, now, for me to take a stab at where the race is right now. And nobody I know of has seen Australia, Seven Pounds, The Reader or Gran Torino.

The movies are falling into five categories.

Best Picture frontrunners with likely deep support:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight (but Warners has to delicately calibrate this campaign)
Doubt
Revolutionary Road
Slumdog Millionaire

Likely acting nods, but the pics need critical support and awards recognition:
Changeling (Angelina Jolie)
Defiance (Liev Schreiber)
Frost/Nixon (Frank Langella)
I've Loved You So Long (Kristin Scott Thomas)
Milk (Sean Penn)
Seven Pounds (Will Smith)
W. (Josh Brolin)
The Wrestler (Mickey Rourke)

Little Indies that Could:
Frozen River (Melissa Leo)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Sally Hawkins)
Rachel Getting Married (Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie Dewitt)
The Visitor (Richard Jenkins)
Wendy and Lucy (Michelle Williams)

Best Animated Feature:
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E (could go all the way if it lands enough noms)
Waltz with Bashir

Best Foreign Film
The Baader Meinhof Complex
The Class
Everlasting Moments
Waltz with Bashir

[Posted by David S. Cohen]

Industrial Light & Magic is letting out only a few details of its first foray into feature animation, Rango, which it will be animating for Paramount and director Gore Verbinski. ILM president Chrissie England told us it would be "a hybrid, a mix between photorealistic CG visual effects and animation," adding "With Rango we are in the unique position to take advantage of this convergence and do something truly groundbreaking."

Here's a little more on what that means:

Cinemascopian posts the animated short that has evolved into $9.99, the stop-motion feature that will have its world premiere in Toronto next month. It looks like the first two theatrical animated features produced in Israel are premiering in Toronto at the same time (Waltz With Bashir and $9.99).

Here's the Waltz with Bashir trailer. It's a cool movie that will have influence, I think, on future animation style--especially its use of videogame-style immersive POV.

One of my fond memories is a 1996 trip to San Francisco when I worked at E.W. to visit the set of stop-motion director Henry Selick's James and the Giant Peach.

His building housed room after black-draped room with exquisitely crafted and lit miniature sets surrounded by stop-motion cameras and animators who carefully moved the puppets one frame at a time. Such patience! Craftspeople huddled inside rooms full of tiny props and parts and costumes; it was like being part of a giant dollhouse.

Selick's next, Coraline, is a collaboration with fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, who so far has not been adequately adapted on-screen, in my view. No one has yet captured his charming whimsical style.

Here's hoping they get it right this time. Focus Features will release the pic in December.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]

Looks like a change of tone, pace and style with DreamWorks Animation's latest, Monsters vs. Aliens. When earth is invaded by a bunch of indestructable E.T.s, the President and his top advisers hide out in the situation room trying to hatch a defense plan. Their best idea: Unleash the monsters they've captured over the years. Sounds like a recipe for Mars Attacks-style zaniness, with a nod to such '50s classics as Godzilla and Attack of the 50-Foot-Woman. While it lasts (or until DWA can post the official version), MovieTrailerTalk.com has a leaked teaser online.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]

These days, my favorite thing about Pixar is the way each new idea they announce sounds even farther afield than the last, then the movie comes out, and it charms the pants off everybody: Rats in a restaurant? A robot love story?

Last week at Comic-Con, Pete Docter unveiled footage from Pixar's next curve ball, Up, in which an 78-year-old geezer (voiced by Ed Asner) fulfills a promise to his late wife, setting out on a great adventure to Paradise Falls, Venezuela. In the clip, the old guy pulls a fast one on two retirement home employees sent to collect him, attaching hundreds of helium balloons to his house and drifting away (with a hyper 9-year-old wilderness explorer named Russell unwittingly whisked along for the ride).

It was a gorgeous sequence, full of humor and sheer zen wonder -- the teaser only touches on it, since much relies on subtle character moments as old-timer Carl engineers his take-off (best of all, the presentation assured me Pixar isn't veering into Danny Deckchair territory here). That semi-surreal vision of so many multi-colored balloons against a clear blue sky reminded me of one of my all-time favorite television spots, the brilliant not-a-lick-of-CG ad for Sony's Bravia set:

But Docter lost me a bit when things flash forward to the jungle, to find Carl and Russell dragging the house by garden hose to its final destination: one of the unseen-by-human-eyes mountains that looms above the Venezuelan jungle. Is there really enough material here for more than a short film?

Then again, if we've learned anything from Pixar, it's that plot isn't nearly as important as character, and Docter made clear on the panel that his inspiration for Up was the personal revelation that old folks have led interesting lives. It's an intriguing thought: Could building a movie around a septuagenarian prove to even riskier than rats or robots -- and every bit as rewarding? (Don't forget, Pixar struck gold in this territory once before with the Oscar-winning Geri's Game, left.)

Joss Whedon isn't the only writer taking things into his own hands on the Internet these days. On the City of Ember train, screenwriter Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) told me about her new short film distribution website small & creepy films, which she launched two months ago with her partner, producer Steve Nicolaides.

The duo invested some of their own money in it, though it wasn't "arduous," Thompson said. "Having worked in this industry so long, and given so much away psychologically, I wasn't willing to give anything more away. I'd look all day on the Internet where there are so many interesting things to see. We lack gatekeepers for outsider art."

Their first production (in partnership with Chiller TV) is the 28 episode web series The Hills Are Alive, produced and co-written by Nicolaides and Thompson, which they shot on their ranch in Ojai over many years.

Their goal is to collect and show "weird, genuinely out-there stuff," said Thompson, whose friends at film fests are sending them material. Small and Creepy is also sponsoring a young animator, Evan York, who records people's dreams and animates them with a Sharpie. For now the site shows shorts. "People don't have the patience or bandwidth to do otherwise," Thompson said.

Her goal, not yet met: "I will make a cell phone feature," she said.

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

I'll just watch.

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pixar Exclusives.

[Photo Ben Burtt courtesy LAT]

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

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

Here's Todd's bullet-graph:

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

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

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

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

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

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Sex and the City “Must Go” 52%

Kung Fu Panda “Go” 23%

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

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan “Go” 8%

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

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

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

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

Here's a history of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

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

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

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

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

[Photo courtesy Time Magazine]

There's plenty to see in theaters this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Multiplex reviews the Oscar animated shorts.

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