Treasure Planet (2002)

Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
Studio: Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Feature Animation

Watched on 09/05/20

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for Treasure Planet

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
6		5	5	6	7

So much potential but completely misused. It would be difficult not to recommend this film, because it does (almost by default) still have all the warm, fuzzy goodness you'd expect from a Disney feature film. However, it gets so completely lost between the various identities it tries to have that it ends up being none all at once. It's a mess. The prevailing feeling you get is that it wasn't necessarily ahead of its time; it just caught Disney at a bad time.

The most obvious example of this is in its art and animation. I have to say right off the bat, where traditional animation was used, it was absolutely amazing. The character animators must have had so much fun working on this film, especially with the hundreds of varied character body types and unique ways of moving. If they had a) completely commited to this style and b) applied it everywhere, the film would have looked incredible. But they didn't. I say they didn't commit because the animation seems half-baked in terms of finishing and more importantly shadow and lighting. Characters and objects cast shadows but don't create any shading on their own faces, bodies and clothes. Line weight is inconsistent and characters overall just appear a bit flat (similar to Atlantis). This would be okay but they compound it by adding strange, gradiented ambient light to characters as a whole. Not to shaded areas, but to the characters' entire bodies. It looks bad.

Have a look at this. Where is the light supposed to be coming from? Why does it affect all 3 characters in shot in completely different ways? Also the colour and line weight on Jim and and Jim's Mum's outlines respectively genuinely make them so disparate that this looks like an edit of two characters from different films.

I believe the reason this was done was to try to create some kind of harmony between the character animation and the film's unquestionable weakest point - the 3D animation. Granted, the film was made in 2002, so probably early doors for CGI but the assets in Treasure Planet look raw, untextured and uncanny. They sometimes even get fused with paintings but I think this makes things worse. Maybe the effects looked great at the time and I imagine they're quite important in terms of development for the industry but they haven't aged well. Even worse, they look absolutely horrendous when mixed wth the 2D images. The best example is the scene with those weird as fuck space whales. There's also some level of modelling and rotoscoping that takes place with Silver's arm and BEN's body that comes out a little but clunky.

Seriously wtf it that???

Even Jim's hands on the ship don't look quite right.

The storytelling is another place where you can see this film getting its wires crossed. It comes just after the Disney 'Golden Age' and was likely part of the transition period into modern Disney. However it still has remnants of the old Disney methods. Those guys talk about how much inspiration they took from broadway/musicals - this film was crying out for songs, particularly an 'I want' song for Jim. Instead, we got montages set to strange rock/punk music instead, similar to Tarzan and Phil Collins. And going back to Jim's 'I want' song, not only do we not connect with him emotionally, we actually have no idea what he wants. The idea of him needing a father is lightly drizzled in in the beginning but only really introduced after he and Silver start to form a relationship. Similarly, we get very little information on who Silver is and what he wants. This makes the conclusion of the film pretty unsatisfying. Did Jim yearn for... a place in the military? A dad? Did Silver want to find a son? A family? Also certain things just didn't really work, e.g. not showing how Delbert and Jim get the crew together means there isn't really any setup for later plot points. We're just told Captain Amelia isn't happy about it.

Speaking of the plot, it was kinda weak. It did lack an underlying character story as mentioned above but also just didn't have many moving parts to it. There were also some things that were either very weak or completely pointless. For example, what was the point of having the map be left on the ship? The only thing that happens when Jim and BEN go back to get it is they kill the Spider Guy but that wasn't very significant and could easily have happened anywhere else. Also towards the end, the crew could easily have jumped Jim or even just shot him dead after he opened the map - there was absolutely no reason for the 3 captives to go with. Some things however did work. I really liked that Silver didn't make a complete face turn. He stays bad, which makes perfect sense, and Jim makes his peace with it. Great. Also, the main character doesn't have any romance storyline at all which is nice. The film's one romantic storyline is in fact done very well. No questionable power dynamics nor stereotypes. In fact, that was ahead of its time.

Lastly, characters. Glad to say that's one of the positives of the film. Silver is a great, believable anti-villain (if that's a word), BEN is an excellent example of how good it can be to introduce a character late on in a story and Morph is a little legend. Captain Amelia is also pretty much as good a female character as you could ask for given the time and target audience. Admittedly though,there are only 3 female characters in the whole thing, which ain't great. Character design is unbelievably good. Jim's design is undeniably cool and one of the few things in the film that did age well and as mentioned earlier, the dozens of different species were all designed so well. The crew for example are all designed thoughtfully and carefully, each fitting their purpose perfectly (Spider guy is creepy/scary, Flatula guy is funny/disgusting). Development is pretty good too. Sadly though, one last case of identity crisis is Silver's accent. It's part Scottish, part Irish, part Yorkshire. Sounds bad.

So yeah, I'm glad I've seen Treasure Planet now. Would maybe recommend it but probably not a must-watch. 6/10.

Paprika (2006)

Director: Satoshi Kon
Studio: Madhouse

Watched on 26/04/20

***SPOILERS***

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
7		6	6	8	6

This film is fucking gorgeous. If I accept a world in which no film will ever again have the commitment nor the budget to be Akira, Satoshi Kon and Paprika are the next best thing. The art and animation are beautiful. Everything else about it is allllright but I'd still definitely recommend this film to people purely because of its brilliant hand-drawn animation

The art style of Paprika transcends the industry it comes from. It doesn't draw 'anime' faces, it draws its own symbols for eyes, noses and mouths, with each one being thoughtfully adapted to suit its character - as they should be. The animation is fluid and fast-paced, yet meticulous, detailed and evidently well-researched. It's incredibly realistic, despite dealing with some of the most trippy, wacky subject matter you can imagine. It does an amazing job of not losing the principles of good animation. The occasional shortcut is taken here and there, which is understandable. How the hell else would you animate someone pushing through a ciema screen with a film playing on it? The other disappointing thing was the way speech was animated. Here, there was a bit of falling back onto industry standard, with the still-head-moving-jaw approach, as opposed to full-body acting in most cases. Still really great though.

With the animation being such a clear focus for Kon and his team, to me it felt like the other aspects of the film were given way less importance. They were decent, nothing special. Definitely didn't detract from the experience but that's it. For example, the story isn't so much a story as it is a rough outline of a story to carry you from one visual experience to the next. It makes sense and is kinda interesting but it's neither very satisfying nor purposeful. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of hidden meaning and symbolism or whatever but pretty much all the plot points are low-stakes and quite uninspiring. What does this Mr. Chairman actually want? And how on earth does he achieve it? A good example of not necessarily needing the science explained but at least the mechanics.

Similarly, the characters are all sort of interesting but I didn't find myself connecting with any of them particularly. They aren't very compelling and I'd argue only one of them (the police officer) even has a personal journey. The rest were so surface-level that any of them could have made any decision at all and it probablt fit with their character. As for the story-telling, it's actually pretty good but as I've said before, there's only so much you can tell a non-story.

The part where Paprika rides the nimbus cloud was fucking cool too. That whole scene/sequence was amazing. Also loved Satoshi Kon giving his own movie 'Tokyo Godfathers' a shout out lmao. Good film. 7/10.