The 2. 5 All- TIME Best Animated Films. Everett. It’s said that when he first watched a rough cut of his studio’s next feature cartoon, Walt Disney absolutely disapproved of one scene: when the Cocker Spaniel Lady and the roguish mutt Tramp dig into a plate of spaghetti on a romantic night and catch ends of the same strand, their faces coming closer to a kiss as they nibble. This, of course, is the moment — played to the strains of Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke’s Neapolitan ballad “Bella Notte” — that immediately entered the DNA of millions of moviegoers and is still cherished more than a half- century later. Disney’s 1. 5th animated feature, and its first released in Cinema. Scope, was one of its more modest productions in a decade when the studio had mixed results with its ambitious adaptations of such famous tales as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty. Returning to the core Disney values of humor and heart, veteran directors Clyde Geronimo, Hamilton Luske and Wilfred Jackson gave Lady and the Tramp the pedigree of a winner that delights every new generation of children. Get this movie. Everett. Stop- motion animation is exacting, exhausting work: building puppets, placing them on a miniature stage and moving them one frame at a time — tens of thousands of times. Harder still is bringing insouciant life to this arduous process. That's what director Wes Anderson and animation director Mark Gustafson managed in this delightful version of the Roald Dahl children's classic about a dapper, larcenous fox (voiced by George Clooney) who aims to pull off one last, impossible heist. The vibe of Fox and his wife (Meryl Streep) and rebellious son (Jason Schwartzman) is as comically tense as it is in families from earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and co- writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale). But the brood soon bonds, revealing its humor and humanity, its intrinsic and intoxicating foxiness. Watch it now. Everett. Intended to take the songs of the Beatles into the medium of animation — and to cash in on the 1. I made some cute chocolate cupcakes for you today. And they’re mini, too. It’s hard to tell in this picture I know. But because the cupcakes. Showing my darker fierce side. Shot by Kaylum Dennis. Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) Giant panda at the Ocean Park Hong Kong.
Yellow Submarine somehow found a sense of humor and sophistication worthy of the Fab Four. To translate the group's groovy, borderline- psychedelic spirit to pictures, Canadian animator George Dunning assembled a writing team that included Erich Segal, soon to be famous as the author of Love Story, and Roger Mc. Gough, Britain's foremost punster poet. They came up with a free- form, mostly underwater narrative that sent the lads (voiced by soundalikes) swimming backward and forward through the Sea of Time, getting lost in the Sea of Nothing and fighting a vacuum- cleaner beast in the Sea of Monsters, all while fighting off the evil Blue Meanies on their trip to Pepperland. Some sequences were their own short films (Charles Jenkins created the poignant . A G- rated head trip, the movie appealed to kids, their stoned older siblings and their hip parents. As A Hard Day's Night and Help! Could the movie, so indelibly a part of its era, speak to ours? Robert Zemeckis thought so: he planned a 3- D version for release in 2. But after the box- office failure of his animated Mars Needs Moms, his sponsoring studio — Disney — killed the project. Get this movie. Everett. In the Jungle of Nool, something foreign — the nearly infinitesimal planet of Who- ville — lands on a piece of clover, and Horton the elephant (voiced by Jim Carrey) detects cries from the clover speck. He can't see the little Whos, but he deduces, believes, knows they're in there; and his caring instinct tells him that they must be protected, against the collective protestations of other jungle creatures. Who- ville's microscopic mayor (Steve Carell) has the same problem convincing his constituents that some giant unseen creature wants to help them. Ted Geisel's 1. 95. We're all in this together, Seuss says; everyone's important. Or, as Horton puts it: . In the feature version from Blue Sky Studios, directors Jimmy Hayward (a veteran Pixar animator) and Steve Martino elaborated on the TV show's designs to develop a dense, gorgeously goofy Who- ville — a town whose bright colors and sweetly tilting towers might have been dreamed up on a peyote- munching jag by Antonio Gaudi and Red Grooms. Though there are enough clever gags to entertain the most demanding media- savvy toddler, Horton remains faithful to the Seuss spirit, 1. 20 Designs 5 Girls and 5 Boys 10 Fit the 4x4 Hoop 10 Fit the 5x7 Hoop. Buy this set for $1.99. See this set Vote for a design Print Stitch charts. Blue Sky produced the Ice Age franchise, whose first three films have earned nearly $2 billion in movie houses worldwide, and this year's color- and- comedy riot Rio, but Horton is still the studio's peak achievement. Watch it now. Dream. Works Animation LLCPo (voiced by Jack Black) dreams of martial- arts glory: defeating the legendary Furious Five kung fu masters in mortal combat. When he wakes, though, he's just a doughy panda who works in the village noodle shop run by his father — who happens to be a goose, but never mind that for now. Po unaccountably is declared the region's savior and put under the tutelage of the sage Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) — not to battle the Furious Five but to team with them to defeat a Voldemorty beast who'll be breaking out of prison any day now. Taking as their source the same Hong Kong martial- arts films that inspired both Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the oaf- becomes- a- hero plot of Stephen Chow's 2. Kung Fu Hustle, directors John Stevenson and Mark Osborne devised a master course in cunning visual art and satisfying entertainment: the best and ultimate Dream. Works feature. If Pixar is the ring bearer of the classic Disney style and uplifting temperament, Jeffrey Katzenberg's Dream. Works Animation studio is an update of the zany Warner Bros. Pixar films might aspire to (and achieve) universal art; Dream. Works reminds the movie industry that . Dream. Works' vaudeville vibe, first paraded in the Shrek series, directly infiltrated animated films from Ice Age to Despicable Me and plenty more. Panda seasons the Katzenberg recipe with a splendid kinetic elegance in the fight scenes — kung- furious panda- monium — and trumps it with the contemplative message that strength and discipline can't be taught but instead must be discovered within. A wise heart matches the movie's art. Watch it now. Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan. Anime, the Japanese form of cartooning, has yielded far more animated features in its 4. From this teeming, often dark and astonishingly sophisticated output, Satoshi Kon's last completed film is one of the most forbidding and beguiling. It's an R- rated psychological detective story about a machine, the DC Mini, that offers the key to unlock the meaning of dreams — even as animation is, in a way, the key to unlock the feeling of dreams. A police detective hopes to solve a murder by telling his dreams to the sexy Paprika, who is also a staid researcher named Atsuko. They are aided or threatened by the usual sci- fi- noir suspects, but the plot is so complicated, it's best not to worry about parsing it and just go with the seductively somnambulist flow, which is where the movie finds its true life. Paprika alternates dream with reality, or abruptly fuses the two, until the detective, and the viewer, can't tell them apart. Kon, whose earlier films included the sado- thriller Perfect Blue and the movie- crazy Millennium Actress and who died in 2. And the most fluid form of movies is animation. Paprika is both an argument for and a demonstration of animation's power to put us into a state of alert hypnosis. Watch the images that float by, the impulses that pass from the characters to you. From Snow White and Cinderella to Ariel, Beauty, Pocahontas and Mulan, girls were the focal characters who could be expected to come of age, triumph over adversity and, in general, woman up. When Pixar's John Lasseter took control of Disney's languishing animation unit, he green- lighted two femme- centric features: 2. The Princess and the Frog (a hand- drawn film of spectacular . She can swan around as long as her victim stays locked up. Gothel could be many modern American parents who think that confining their teens in enforced preadolescence helps them feel younger too. The character design of Disney veteran Glen Keane frees Rapunzel from visual stereotype and gives her poise and spunk. Oh, there's a Prince Charming (Zachary Levi), but Tangled, like The Princess and the Frog, is a rallying cry for girl power — and an indication that the studio that created the princess- musical animated feature can still give the format vibrant life. Watch it now. Everett. Disney animated features had two great periods: the . Supervised by Jeffrey Katzenberg before he left to form Dream. Works, these latter films revived Walt's formula of comedy, heart and hummable songs. The blockbuster of the renaissance phase was this majestic epic, which added the element of high melodrama. Not since Bambi had so much been at stake in a Disney tale. There are kingdoms to be sundered, deaths to be atoned for. The father of a prince is killed, his conniving uncle seizes the throne, and the father's ghost instructs him to seek honorable revenge. Put it another way: a boy leaves home, escapes responsibility with some genially irresponsible friends, then returns to face society's obligations. On the grasslands of Africa, Hamlet met Huckleberry Finn. With Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane and Cheech Marin lending their vocal talents to the enterprise, and with a sheaf of hit tunes (. Yet the film was also the beginning of the end of traditional, hand- drawn animation. Subsequent Disney features like Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were more ambitious but less successful at the box office. And a year after The Lion King, along came Pixar's Toy Story. The first full- length film made on computers showed audiences a new look, technology and attitude. Within a decade, 3- D animation had almost totally replaced 2- D, and The Lion King would find its most lasting popular appeal as a Broadway puppet show.
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