Dreamworks bastardizes Aardman??

[gigi]

@Shirley Ujest

I am very excited about this movie. It’s not going to be a Wallace & Gromit, but you know the characters will be fully fleshed out.
When is the release date, she asked excitedly.

November 3. Let me know if you miss the clay.

[NoCoolUserName]

@Shirley Ujest

…the characters will be fully fleshed out…

Uh, I think that should be…(wait for it)…fully FLUSHED out.

[mobo85]

@MrDibble

While you are somewhat right about signature style and such (although Morph looks nothing like Wallace, BTW), you do make what I like to think of as the “Jethro Tull” mistake - there is no person called “Aardman” at Aardman Animations .

Rather, Aardman was named after a hand-drawn character created by one of Aardman’s founders.

[Miller]

@MrDibble

While you are somewhat right about signature style and such (although Morph looks nothing like Wallace, BTW), you do make what I like to think of as the “Jethro Tull” mistake - there is no person called “Aardman” at Aardman Animations .

:smack: Gah. I knew that. I meant Nick Park. Or possibly Aardman as a corporate entity. Or something.

[commasense]

FYI, “Claymation” is a registered trademark of Will Vinton, an American animator with no connection to Aardman. He is probably best known for the California Raisins commercials.

So from a technical POV, it’s incorrect to call Aardman’s work “claymation,” and I’ll bet Mr. Vinton pretty damn tired of it. Of course, people are no more likely to stop than they are to stop saying they’re “xeroxing” when they use some other manufacturer’s copy machine.

But I thought you should know.

[MrDibble]

@commasense

FYI, “Claymation” is a registered trademark of Will Vinton, an American animator with no connection to Aardman. He is probably best known for the California Raisins commercials.

It’s really sad that he isn’t best-known for the PJs, IMO. I can take or leave Motown, but damn, Eddie Murphy can be real funny when riffing on ghetto stereotypes.

[GuanoLad]

I am rather annoyed that Dreamworks is responsible for another stealing of concepts from Pixar (who are doing Ratatouille)

[Dewey_Finn]

Like no one ever thought of doing a rat movie before Pixar? And how do you know that Ratatouille was developed first?

[mobo85]

@MrDibble

It’s really sad that he isn’t best-known for the PJs, IMO.

I enjoyed The PJs when it was on, but it wouldn’t really be a good example of Will Vinton Studios (now Laika Entertainment) Claymation®- as it wasn’t animated in clay. Rather, they used a process they called “foamation,” as the characters were made of foam rather than clay.

@GuanoLad

I am rather annoyed that Dreamworks is responsible for another stealing of concepts from Pixar (who are doing Ratatouille)

Wikipedia can’t always be trusted, but according to them, the original plot for Flushed Away involved pirates, not rats. Besides, as one of my favorite Simpsons quotes of all time points out, animation is based on plagarism. There have been a number of films in the past that have taken unique views on similar subjects (Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, DreamWorks’s Antz, and Warner Bros./DNA’s The Ant Bully; Pixar’s Finding Nemo and DreamWorks’s Shark Tale). Of course, it isn’t really a case of plagarism per se as that both Pixar and Aardman both had ideas for a film about rats. This is nothing new in animation- one of my favorite animation stories of all time is about the 1946 Oscar and the two cartoons with a similar plot that went up for it- Warner Bros.'s Rhapsody Rabbit vs. MGM’s The Cat Concerto. Rabbit was made first, but Cat was shown first and ended up winning the Oscar. (Both involved a character- Bugs Bunny or Tom- playing Lizst’s Second Hungarian Rhaposdy in concert while fighting a mouse.)

[rjung]

@mobo85

There have been a number of films in the past that have taken unique views on similar subjects (Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, DreamWorks’s Antz, and Warner Bros./DNA’s The Ant Bully; Pixar’s Finding Nemo and DreamWorks’s Shark Tale).

A Bug’s Life/Antz is a bad example, because the latter was rushed specifically to beat the former to the theaters:

Antz vs. Bugs: The inside story of how Dreamworks beat Pixar to the screen

…Given a standing invitation to drop by, [John Lasseter] and [Andrew] Stanton visited Katzenberg in his offices at Dreamworks in the fall of 1995 while in Los Angeles to do post-production work on Toy Story, which came out that November. “We told him all about Bugs,” says Lasseter. After all, Lasseter had been pushing for more than a decade to get computer animation on the map as a respected medium. And given his high hopes for Toy Story, he was telling friends throughout the tight-knit computer-animation business to get cracking on their own movies. “If this hits, it’s going to be like space movies after Star Wars” for computer-animation companies, he says he told various friends.

…Sometime later, Pixar learned it had been “betrayed,” to use Lasseter’s words. Pixar sources say PDI chief Carl Rosendahl set up a lunch with Lasseter to tell him some news that was weighing on him: that Katzenberg had agreed to do the deal with PDI only if PDI committed to deliver Antz before Pixar’s Bugs came out.