dropzone, I was trying to think of the name of the cartoon Krusty played when Itchy and Scratchy were replaced. Good call.
Hanna Barbera produced some awful stuff. I remember liking Bakshi’s LOTR, but I was 10 when I saw it. And I still remember liking “Wizards” an awful lot, so I take come exception with those claiming these are the worst. His work since then has not been the best, but my fond childhood memories are surely accurate, aren’t they?
And I do not get Japanese animation. I’ve watched some on Adult Swim and Tech TV, and i just do not understand it. So I’m going to put the whole of anime on my top 10 worst. So there.
dropzone, I was trying to think of the name of the cartoon Krusty played when Itchy and Scratchy were replaced. Good call.
Hanna Barbera produced some awful stuff. I remember liking Bakshi’s LOTR, but I was 10 when I saw it. And I still remember liking “Wizards” an awful lot, so I take come exception with those claiming these are the worst. His work since then has not been the best, but my fond childhood memories are surely accurate, aren’t they?
And I do not get Japanese animation. I’ve watched some on Adult Swim and Tech TV, and I just do not get it. So I’m going to put the whole of anime on my top 10 worst. So there.
Stuff like Titan AE and Final Fantasy deserves a mention. They’re not intrinsically bad, but there was an obvious potential for them to be a lot better and the filmmakers just didn’t bother. In Titan’s case, they had an interesting script and likable characters. But when you have mind-blowing backgrounds and Hanna-Barbera characters, you’re setting up an unfortunate comparison between the artists on top of their game and the artists who aren’t.
Final Fantasy was torpedoed by having figures that looked hyper-realistic, but didn’t move in a way that matched. They had these exquisitely-rendered commandos who ran like they had a load in their Depends.
As for Eastern-bloc animation: I’ve read about it but haven’t seen much of it. Was Gene Dietch, on balance, a good thing for them or a bad thing? I have fond memories of “Gerald McBoing Boing” and that thing he did with Jules Feiffer.
Land Before Time 2
Land Before Time 3
Land Before Time 4
Land Before Time 5
Land Before Time 6
Land Before Time 7
Land Before Time 8
Land Before Time 9
Land Before Time 10
Eight Crazy Nights
Don’t get me wrong, I loved those movies as a kid.
I think that one of the reasons that they seem so poor in retrospect is that the material they were both working from was of such high quality.
Heavy Metal magazine delivered fantastic art every month. Sure, it was increasingly “Boobies! Boobies! Boobies!” but they were generally beautifully rendered boobies. It really hurt to see them cheap out with the limited animation and inept rotoscoping. That whole business of not bothering to secure licensing for that rocking soundtrack underlines a miserly philosophy that permeated the whole project.
Similarly, Yellow Submarine was done for the freaking Beatles at the height of their popularity. It’s unexcusable that it comes off looking like an art-school dropout’s basement project.
My strong sense of Canadian nationalism (uh, just go with me on that one,) makes me really want to say nice things about these projects, but they just stink too darned much.
I lay most of the blame at the feet of my compatriot Gerald Potterton. You’ll note that, in addition to, (or apart from, if you insist,) Heavy Metal and Yellow Submarine, every single thing he’s laid his hands on has been a big stinking heap of mediocrity.
I’m sure that there were high hopes that The Real Story of “Happy Birthday to You” was going to turn it all around for him, but…
Rotoscoping, I believe, is making a film of a live actor, then drawing each frame directly on top of a printout of the frame from the live-action film. Examples of rotoscoping can be found in Bashki’s Lord of The Rings and Fleicher’s “Out of the Inkwell”/“Koko The Clown” series.
Regarding what Bosda said, the Lion King thing is up in the air. We’re not really sure. For a fair and ba…um, view from both sides, here’s Cecil’s opinion.
I don’t know which side is correct, but the debacle lead to a great Simpsons line.
“You must avenge my death, Kimba…I mean, Simba.”
Heavy Metal 2000 definitely belongs up there, I watched like half of it because I heard Heavy Metal was good, but man was this crap. Kind of disappointing because there were some pretty big names on the credits.
Rotoscoping, when introduced by Fleischer in the 30s, was a great technical advancement, but too often the artist/animator will end up depending on it as a crutch and overusing – the properties of real-world physical motion will look “unnatural” in an animated drawing if you just trace them straight out (specially if soem parts of the final shot are NOT rotoscoped).
BTW, some of the old Eastern-Bloc animated shorts were astounding stuff. Alas, then you’d get the hyper-“artistic” obtuse crap thrown in, and some of the political stuff that was necessary so that the studio remained open.
As for Yellow Sub looking like art-school-dropout material, well, IIRC a few of those involved WERE art-school dropouts. But it really was a time in the whole Beatles phenom when things were getting done w/o much pondering – their prior “creative” film project was the trainwreck known as Magical Mystery Tour, a slapped-together collage of song clips; at least Yellow Sub had a sort of continuing visual theme.
What I could never understand is that Cecil’s article depends on the word of the animators’ union, who starts out by saying he has no vested interest in defending Disney. Um, who employed most of his people at that time?
But with the quote from Roy Disney now found, http://www.kimbawlion.com/transcript.htm , in which he refers to the character in the Lion King as Kimba, the “Lion King was intended to be a remake of Kimba” theory seems to hold more water.
