Dracula's Best Animated Feature Gauntlet

Yeah, Shrek 2 still holds up and is a lot of fun.  But man, did the series take a nosedive after it.

This was a fun read.

The last of these movies I saw was Shrek the Third, which was abysmal.

And the Catholic Church said Nicolaus Copernicus was "objectively wrong" about the Earth orbiting around the sun... like him I shall be vindicated by history.

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)

When the Best Animated Feature category was introduced in 2001 pundits thought it’s inaugural lineup would be pretty predictable. Shrek and Monsters Inc were pretty much guaranteed to get in but the third slot was a bit less clear but most critics thought it would be filled by Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, an animated indie for adults that would represent the artier side of the medium. While movies like that would go on to have a better shot in future years, the Academy clearly wasn’t ready to “go there” on year one. Instead they filled that slot with, of all things, a glorified pilot for an upcoming Nickelodeon show called Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. Some think this snub happened because they didn’t want to muddy the waters with an R-rated movie, others think the animators voting on the nomination did not view the rotoscoping work in Linklater’s film to be “true animation.” But really there’s no excuse because even if they didn’t want to reward Linklaters film they certainly had other options. For one thing, Atlantis: The Lost Empire was right there. Nominating that would have been a nice bone thrown to the modern face of traditional animation and there certainly would have been symbolic value in pitting Dreamworks, Pixar, and Disney against each other in the first of these categories. And if they didn’t want to do that, there were some solid anime choices out there in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Metropolis and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Hell, even the misbegotten bomb Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within would have even been a more interesting choice than fucking Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.

So, looking at the film was it actually any good? Of course not, it’s barely watchable. I have no idea what the Academy animation branch was smoking when they nominated it. I’m not going to sit here and recount all of its flaws in detail but to be brief: the animation is wretched both in terms of technology and design, the story is absolutely loopy, there’s this weird streak of casual childhood misogyny in it that’s treated as a running gag, it is ostensibly about scientific genius and yet it casually ignores anything resembling scientific accuracy, and the main character is probably the least sympathetic or interesting person in the whole movie. However, I would really feel silly taking time out of my day to write any kind of review of this thing in earnest because, frankly, this is not a movie that was ever supposed to be watched by a thirty four year old man over twenty years after it was made. This isn’t a family movie; it’s a children’s movie of the kind that exists to get five year olds to shut up for five or so years and give their parents some sanity. It was made for half of Shrek’s budget and a quarter of Monster’s Inc’s budget and it was always kind of supposed to be disposable trash. Railing against it would be like railing against, like, The Paw Patrol Movie or something. I’ll save my anger for the mindless Academy voters who elevated into a position that suggests that it should be judged like a real movie by adult observers, which is a level of scrutiny it never pretended it was going to stand up to. I’m honestly not sure why they even submitted it, it certainly didn’t help the film’s reputation, though I guess it got someone twenty years later to rent it from Netflix so maybe it worked out for them.
½ out of Five

Next Up: Hopefully the final Shrek related thing I ever watch: Puss in Boots.

Drac getting savage!

Reading that plot summary of The Boss Baby...whatever those writers were on when they came up with all that must've been some good shit.

... it's the most horrid shit ever and it's a running motif through the whole fucking movie.  First we're introduced to it through the kid's parents (voiced by noted singers Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow) sing it to him as a lullabye in this barf inducing scene which makes no sense as this song (which is plainly a metaphor for the hopes of African Americans after the civil rights movement) is decidedly not a lullabye and there are no metaphorical "broken wings" in this extremely white and upper middle class kid's life, quite the contrary the point of the scene is that his life is seemingly perfect before the boss baby shows up.  He then sings the song again again while at a low point in an airport, which is a little more thematically apropos but still, not a song that belongs in this damn movie.  Finally, and worst of all it comes in the film's REDICULOUS finale where he sings the song to the boss baby after said infant briefly (and plot conveniently) reverts to non-boss infant behavior and the goddamn movie's orchestral score starts replicating it. Again, song about social change reduced to this bullshit.  What really pisses me of is now there's going to be a whole generation of young people who are going to forever associate this tender but thoughtful song with this 90 minute poop joke of a movie.  If McCartney had anything to do with licensing this he should be ashamed.  Fuck this movie.

2011 Dracula mostly did the Pixar thing because he was still deluded enough to think writing reviews on the internet could maybe result in a big enough following to become a "professional blogger" (lol, remember when those existed) or somehow lead to real film critic work and that this would eventually require the ability to review family movies if he got that assignment. 

2022 Dracula (who is referring to himself in the third person for some reason) realizes that this was folly, but he developed this skill and he's going to use it dammit!

Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon (2020)

This is probably going to end up being a pretty short review, not because there’s anything particularly wrong with this second film in the Shaun the Sheep franchise but just because I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it that I didn’t already say about the first film. The film was made by Aardman a good five years after the apparent success of the original film and four years after what was at the time the last TV episode in the franchise, so it was probably made for an audience that probably had a bit more hunger for more of this sheep’s antics than I did having just seen the first movie a couple weeks ago. This one ups the stakes a bit by having aliens land near the film’s central farm and what is essentially an alien sheep pops out of it and starts hanging out with Shaun, it’s basically a child alien sheep though and the government eventually comes looking for it so… the movie is basically E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial but with farm animals and Claymation. It does still have most of the usual charm you’ve come to expect from Aardman and the Claymation is certainly interesting to watch even if this is hardly their most ambitious project in that regard, but I guess I just didn’t feel that pressing need for more Shaun the Sheep.
*** out of Five

Next Up: The sequel you forgot about, Kung Fu Panda 2

Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)

Kung Fu Panda sure seemed like a big deal in 2008 and today it kind of feels like the animated franchise that time forgot. Had it not been for the universally beloved Wall-E that first movie almost certainly would have won the Best Animated Feature Oscar. In fact it actually did win Best Animated Feature at the Annie awards, the animation specialty awards show that is known to have a bit of a contrarian streak at times. It wasn’t exactly taken super seriously by critics but it was definitely viewed as the best work Dreamworks had done and signaled a bit of a turnaround for that studio. Hell, even I liked it when I caught up with it a handful of years later for one of my various animated movie retrospectives. But by the time the sequel came out three years later it felt like a lot of people had moved on from it, and by the time the third movie came out in 2016 people had really stopped caring… to the point where I wasn’t entirely sure there even was a third film until I looked it up today. And these days people really don’t seem to care about these movies, they seem to have been memory holed like a lot of Dreamworks’ lesser movies and I think that’s because they live in a sort of middle ground where they aren’t really good enough to stand the test of time like some of Pixar’s better movies but also aren’t stupid enough to feel like relics of the past worth laughing at like Bee Movie or something.

But watching Kung Fu Panda 2 I think the sequels might have also hurt the legacy because this thing, while hardly embarrassing, is kind of weak and lacking in inspiration. It’s pretty obvious that this is the kind of sequel that’s made less because anyone really had good ideas for where to take the story and more because the last movie made enough money so it would be foolish not to keep the IP going. The titular panda voiced had already pretty much completed his natural character arc in the first movie so this sequel mostly just needs to give him and his friends a new adventure to go on while also seeing if they can have him try to uncover some shit about his past that no one was really asking for. The character’s Jack Blackian antics feel more out of place because the panda is no longer supposed to be an underdog and is instead supposed to be this kung fu fighting chosen one and the movie kind of never really finds the balance between making him an action protagonist and making him a buffoon. That said, a decent amount of what made the first film good is still here. The animation still holds up and they do still have a knack for making martial arts set-pieces using these weird animal characters and the film does give you more weird animal characters if that’s what you’re looking for. I can’t hate on this thing too much, but I also would have been fine to have skipped it and I don’t plan on checking out that third movie.
**1/2 out of Five

Up Next: Fucking Shark Tale

Shark Tale (2004)

Well, I found a Dreamworks movie that’s worse than the Shrek movies. It’s probably not the only one (Bee Movie sure looks bad) and I’m not on the outside looking in on this opinion. I distinctly remember most people calling bullshit on this movie at the time too and it’s nomination was mostly a function of 2004 being an exceptionally weak year for animation. There were only three nominees that year; this, runaway winner The Incredibles, and Shrek 2 and unless they wanted to dip into the anime well their only other obvious possible nominees were other embarrassing failures like Home on the Range and The Polar Express. Maybe I’m overstating how much this was rejected, this was number one at the box office for three weeks after all, but this is kind of where the critics firmly decided they were team Pixar rather than team Dreamworks and however popular it was at the box office the public did not express any popular love or respect for it like they did for the Shrek movies. And the reason this was rejected is very obvious: Finding Nemo did it first and did it better. There’s been a lot of speculation that Dreamworks’ first big release Antz was made because Jeffrey Katzenberg knew Pixar was working on A Bug’s Life through insider information and ripped off the idea of a CGI bug movie. That’s never been adjudicated in court or anything so I’d normally not accept those mere rumors, but this one sort of confirms a pattern, it’s too much of a coincidence to believe they just happened to have two ripoff Pixar movies in this short of a time. But even if this is a coincidence there was a big difference between this and Antz, namely that Pixar beat them to theaters this time by over a year and unlike the Antz/A Bug’s Life duel of 1998 which was seen as something of a toss-up the quality difference this time was readily apparent.

Thing is, even if this also beat Pixar to theaters I think its inferiority to Finding Nemo would still be apparent, and I say that as someone who’s not even the world’s biggest Finding Nemo fan. Ignore its questionable content and sense of humor the basic visual design here is plainly inferior. Someone at Dreamworks seems to have gotten it in their heads that when the fish in this aren’t actively swimming forward they should sort of “stand” upright like humans and awkwardly tilt their heads forward. Why? It looks soooooo stupid. The story involves a family of sharks who are made to resemble the Italian mafia having to deal with a sibling of theirs who wants to be a vegetarian rather than an aquatic predator. That’s in and of itself stupid of course, sharks are carnivorous and no amount of willpower would allow them to survive on vegetation but it’s hardly the only cartoon to struggle with this issue, The Lion King just kind of waves off the frightening idea of a aristocratic class that literally eats its subjects and I have no idea what the predatory animals in Zootopia are eating but I digress. This vegetarian shark is tasked with eating a weird looking fish voiced lackadaisically by Will Smith who got in trouble with gambling debts and in the process of this botched hit the vegetarian shark’s brother is killed by a coincidental anchor drop, which the Will Smith fish takes credit for to the acclaim of the public while also making him a marked man by the shark mafia.

So, the story kind of resembles The Man Who Shot Liberty Vance, but instead of using that setup to explore legend and mythmaking in the west it uses it to tell a lot of bad parodies of The Godfather that would make no sense to kids. The film actually generated a degree of controversy when it came out with its use of Italian-American accents being viewed as demeaning by such organizations as The Columbus Citizens Foundation, The Order Sons of Italy in America, The Italic Institute of America, The Italian American One Voice Coalition of New Jersey, and probably several other such organizations that apparently exist. I don’t particularly care about that (Italians are plainly just white people now) but these organizations are not wrong that the movie is kind of lazily rooted in shallow stereotypes and is just generally hack work. And man, I’m sad to say that Martin Scorsese is in this thing as the voice of a pufferfish. I was aware he was involved but had assumed it was a momentary cameo, but no, he actually has a decent sized supporting role here and it’s just sad to see this master filmmaker debase himself like that. I can only hope he donated his payment to The Film Foundation or The World Cinema Project or something because while I expect this kind of shit from De Niro, Scorsese should be better than this. Anyway, does this really need more explanation? The movie’s shittiness was obvious from the second the trailer dropped and while I’m glad that good taste kicked in before this could be turned into a franchise but the fact that it got as far as it did is pretty fucking sad.
* out of Five

Next Up: We finish the series up with some mindless illumination shit: Despicable Me 2

Google has brought this Twitter account to my attention. Yikes.
twitter.com/SharkTaleFanz