Opening in exclusive release today in New York and Los Angeles is Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. If you’ve seen it, please give us your thoughts in the comments below.

I was at the CTN Expo last weekend and completely forgot to see Planet 51. Am I missing something? If you saw it, I’d love to read your comments below.

Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox opens today in New York and Los Angeles. The mainstream movie critics love it. Rotten Tomatoes is saying 91% Fresh on the Tomatometer based on the 77 reviews garnered so far.

The film has stirred debate among animation fans. Those who have seen clips or the trailer are not thrilled. However, most who have actually seen the film, love it. I loved it.

I love that this stop motion film is as far away from Coraline (which I love equally), Mary & Max and A Town Called Panic (two incredibly strong films) as it can get. I love Anderson’s take on the story, the performances of the voice cast …and even the intentionally funky character animation won me over.

What did you think? If you’ve actually seen the film, post comments below.

Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol opens today to a chorus of negative reviews and a rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A particularly harsh assessment comes from Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal:

To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney’s 3-D animated version of “A Christmas Carol” is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey’s voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen other roles. “Why so coldhearted?” Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, asks the old skinflint. The same question could be asked of Robert Zemeckis, who adapted and directed the film, and of the company that financed it. Why was simple pleasure frozen out of the production? Why does the beloved story feel embalmed by technology? And why are its characters as insubstantial as the snowflakes that seem to be falling on the audience?

And that’s just the first paragraph of his review. I watched this short clip from the film, and it is sufficiently inept enough to prevent me from wanting to see any more. What did it for me is the scene at about 1:15 in which a ghost floats rapidly towards Scrooge and knocks him backwards. Scrooge then does a backroll and pops up off the floor in a way that is so comically devoid of the laws of physics and inappropriate to the physical movement of a realistic human that all dramatic impact is instantly drained from the scene. This film may technically qualify as animation, but good animation it isn’t.

Zemeckis’s desecration of this holiday classic comes at a reported cost of $180 million, and box office projections range between $35 to $45 million this weekend.

Flying into 3,014 U.S. theaters this weekend, the kiddie-skewing Astro Boy movie could gross anywhere from $10 million to… who knows? If you’ve screened it, tell us what you thought. The comments section below is open only to those who have actually seen the film.

UPDATE: The actual opening weekend box office gross for Astro Boy was $6.7 million.

Saw Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs last night – and it’s hilarious. It’s 3 for 3 (or 4 for 4 if you count Monster House) for Sony Pictures Animation. Phil Lord and Chris Miller made a real “cartoon”, loaded with laughs and filled eye candy (the 2D end credits are especially gorgeous). See it in a theatre this weekend! The 3D effects are outstanding, and the directors really fill the wide-screen with all sorts of Kurtzman/Elder “chicken fat”. I loved it.

How about you? If you’ve seen it (and only if you’ve seen it), post your opinion here in our comments section.

Shane Acker’s feature version of his UCLA short – “9″ – opens today in theatres nationwide. What did you think? This talkback is set up for our readers to discuss the feature. Only those who have seen the movie should comment below.

The Oscar winners were announced tonight. The winner for BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM was Pixar’s WALL•E. For BEST ANIMATED SHORT, the winner was: La Maison en Petits Cubes – Kunio Kato. Jennifer Anniston and Jack Black presented the awards, and introduced an confusing montage of clips from animated features released in 2008 (which included scenes from Space Chimps and The Clone Wars, two films which their producers deemed unfit to submit for Oscar qualification – had they done so, five animated features would have been nominated instead of three).