I’m still on the fence about whether I’ll subject myself to Monsters vs. Aliens, but I’ve been getting a kick from reading other people’s thoughts about the film on Twitter. The usefulness of a service like Twitter is in its aggregation of opinions, while its 140-character limit forces users to boil down their thoughts into a clear opinion. You can keep up with a steady stream of average moviegoer’s thoughts by looking at the following search results: “Monsters vs Aliens” and “MVA”.

Here is a random selection of Twitters about MvA:

gobzero Saw Monsters vs Aliens tonight. It was pretty damn funny!

jttiki MvA was better than I thought it would be, but it ain’t Pixar.

mattholley Went and saw Monsters vs Aliens…hilarious! I love a good animated flick

michaelkwan Just got back from Monsters vs. Aliens. The 3D made for a fun movie experience.

hownottowrite MvA: The real sad thing is that the jokes in the trailers are funnier than they are in the movie. Dang, and I thought I was a bad writer…

kmvassey Back from MvA. It was great, and the 3D was really good. Definitely the best 3D I’ve seen from any film or ride yet. Good stuff. :)

FyodorFish Glad I saw MvA at a advance screening then. Don’t know if I’d pay that much to see MvA.

linuxrebel MvA was so funny at so many levels kid and adult. You gotta go.

Ske7ch MvA was cute. Superb animation but character development was lacking. Oh well, it’s just a kids’ movie.

shdowchsr Monsters vs. Aliens was fun. I suspect that most people had no idea why what they were laughing at was funny.

KuraFire Monsters vs. Aliens is fun, but not very polished. Lip sync was mediocre; lot of missed opportunities for jokes; too high a Disney factor.

crossstreet monsters vs aliens. good movie. lots of geek reference, esp liked part with a missile saying “ET go Home” soundtrack at the time was from ET

dylanthunter MvA gets my seal of approval, very entertaining… the last 5 mins were sorta wtf but sshh… that’s just b/w me and the internet

jesusnerd4ever really enjoyed Monsters vs Aliens. I totally think everyone should see it!

fynesy Dreamworks latest movie (MvA): good fun. Seeing it on IMAX in 3D.. Amazing…

And, of course, our very own jerrybeck: Saw MvA. Here’s my first impression. The good news: The art direction is superb. The bad news: There are no laughs. A major disappointment.

Can’t wait to check this one out! Tatia Rosenthal’s stop-motion drama $9.99 has its New York premiere this weekend. It’s playing at 7pm on Sunday, March 29, at the MoMA, followed by a screening next Wednesday, April 1, at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. For additional info, including online ticket purchases for either screening, visit the Film Society of Lincoln Center website. The Film Society also has an article about the film on their blog.

Roger Ebert offers thoughts about 3-D after watching Monsters vs. Aliens:

I will say this first and get it out of the way: 3-D is a distraction and an annoyance. Younger moviegoers may think they like it because they’ve been told to, and picture quality is usually far from their minds. But for anyone who would just like to be left alone to see the darned thing, like me, it’s a constant nudge in the ribs saying never mind the story, just see how neat I look.

[I]f this is the future of movies for grownups and not just the kiddies, saints preserve us. Billions of people for a century have happily watched 2-D and imagined 3-D. Think of the desert in “Lawrence of Arabia.” The schools of fish in “Finding Nemo.” The great hall in “Citizen Kane.” Now that flawless screen surface is threatened with a gimmick, which, let’s face it, is intended primarily to raise ticket prices and make piracy more difficult. If its only purpose was artistic, do you think Hollywood would spend a dime on it?

Ebert also disliked Monsters vs. Aliens, although he suggests that kids might enjoy it, “especially those below the age of reason.” Ouch!

Decidedly not animated, but based on a beloved Maurice Sendack illustrated book, and once-upon-a-time optioned by Disney, I couldn’t resist posting this delightful live action trailer:

Artist Christopher Panzner is promoting a new animation technique that he has dubbed Re:Naissance, which is essentially rotoscoped key frame drawings with traditional in-betweens. He plans to use this technique to create “homages” to older live-action films. This interview with the website Eye For Film offers more details about his process. Panzner says:

“Re:Naissance can be succinctly defined as ‘the re-creation of live-action films in animation’. It’s a new spin on adaptation and the remake. For the first time ever in the 100-year history of animation, Re:Naissance is going to invert the adaptation process by taking existing live-action films and faithfully reproducing them in animation, in a totally original graphic style unique to each film. We use a process known as ‘rotomation,’ which is a combination of rotoscopy and traditional animation. Our goal is not merely to rotoscope the original film – we are creating an entirely new film while remaining faithful to the original; an homage to the source film. The end result is an original animated feature film, meaning the stars in the live-action film will be caricaturized in some form but the movements and expressions (and original dialogue) will remain true to the original actors, although the animated characters will be completely new original graphic representation.”

The first live-action feature that Panzner is adapting via his Re:Naissance method is George Romero’s cult classic Night of the Living Dead. Below is a line-test based on the French film La Traversée de Paris that gives some sense of what the finished product will look like. The animation was created by Hong Ying studio in Shanghai. Panzner has a blog LicenseToIllustrate.blogspot.com that offers progress updates on the production of his first feature.

Last night I had a great time catching up with one of my favorite animated features of all time, Max Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels (1939). However, it was not to the newly released Koch restored version we mentioned in this post last month.

I started watching the Koch DVD (they sent me a review copy) and I must admit, for a minute or so I was delighted with the crystal clear soundtrack and the brighter picture. But right away, during the opening shipwreck sequence I could tell something was wrong. I pulled out my one-dollar public domain copy to compare — and upon examination here’s what I concluded: #1 The Koch version squeezed the original 1:66 screen ratio to a 1:85 “letterbox” picture. All the picture information is there, but flattened – all the characters are squat, fatter. #2 The Koch restoration removed frames from the animation. The characters move less fluid in the Koch version. This is particularly noticeable in any fast moving action or dancing sequences. Like the Ladd “colorization” shorts, it must have been cheaper to “clean up” less frames, and digitize the movie “on threes” (to keep sync with the soundtrack). #3 The DVNR has softened the picture, particularly blurring the elaborate background paintings.

I don’t have a perfect copy of the film to compare this “restoration” to – but I do have production stills (in black & white). These are photographs of the original cels and backgrounds, released for publicity purposes in 1939. Below (click thumbnails to see enlarged images) compare the black & white still of a cel (center, below) with a color frame (left, below) from the Koch DVD. Note how everything in the color frame is now squat and fuzzy.

If you want to see more frame grabs and the technical specs from the Koch version, head on over to DVDbeaver/HD Sensei, or get a second opinion over at The Blu-Ray Blog. Me – I’ll keep enjoying the copy I bought for a buck, and hope that someday the original neg is restored by the corporation that holds it. In the meantime, while I’m in my Gulliver mood, I’ve taken the occasion to post an excellent four page publicity story from Good Housekeeping (click thumbnails below to read). Enjoy!

Sony Pictures Animation released the trailer today for their next feature, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Watch it here. The eyes on the characters are bigger than in most Pixar/Dreamworks-style CG features so I suppose they’re going for a “cartoony” aesthetic.

One of the items on my infinitely long to-do list is to write some thoughts about the exquisite artistry behind Coraline. While the film is flawed, it still ranks as one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had in some time watching a mainstream animated feature. It pleases me to no end to see that the film has been a box office success (as far as stop-motion animation goes at least). It currently ranks as the third-highest grossing stop-motion feature of all time, trailing only Chicken Run and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

A large reason for the film’s financial success has been the deep pockets of Laika owner Phil Knight. As much as I’d like to believe that audiences will discover good films if they’re made, the truth is that despite a film’s quality, investing money into its promotion is a necessity lest one ends up with an Iron Giant. I’m not sure that Knight even understood what he was doing when he put his fortune behind this film, but I can’t think of a recent debut film by a major animation studio that has been bolder, riskier and more imaginative. Laika has the opportunity to carve out a niche as a truly unique animation studio, and I sincerely hope they continue following this path that they’ve embarked upon with Coraline.

In today’s Variety, Laika took out a two-page ad thanking the people who made Coraline. The first page was dedicated to the film’s crew, the second page thanked individuals. My digital photo of the ad is a bit funky looking but at least you can see what it looks like. Click on it for a bigger version:

In other Coraline news, a stage musical will open this May at the MCC Theater in Manahttan. This musical has been in the works long before the film came out so it has little to do with cashing in on the success of the movie. Not to mention that it’s opening at a smaller off-Broadway theater that prides itself on taking “risks on plays that the commercial theater often ignores.” The musical version features music and lyrics written by Stephin Merrit (Magnetic Fields) and direction by Leigh Silverman(Yellowface, From Up Here, Well).