‘Frankenweenie’ was an overall disappointment and is definitely not meant for children. It started out strong, but the movie quickly deteriorated with how far-fetched it was becoming and finally crashed and burned in the last scene when it becomes evident that Victor Frankenstein has not really learned anything throughout his journey.

However, the movie was slightly redeemable because of Tim Burton and the voices of the actors, in addition to the references to other horror movies. Tim Burton strikes again with stunning animations set behind a stark black and white landscape. While serious for the majority of the movie, it does have its funny parts, especially when there are references to old horror flicks and characters such as Mrs. Frankenstein, Dracula, Igor, the Invisible Man, Godzilla, and Gremlins. The main characters are voiced by the talented Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Charlie Tahan, and Winona Ryder, who all brilliantly portray their characters in the movie.

The story follows elementary school kid Victor Frankenstein trying to find the perfect science fair project when his beloved dog, Sparky, gets hit by a car. Devastated, Victor decides to try to make Sparky come back to life by harnessing electricity and using the wind and lightning storm outside to his benefit. Lo and behold, it magically works and Sparky comes back to life, to Victor’s joy. However, Victor decides to try to hide Sparky. Not surprisingly, Sparky is seen by the Igor-like classmate, who demands to be taught how to bring animals back from the dead. The spreading of this top-secret knowledge brings about chaos as the race to get the best science fair project causes the kids to make less-than-wise decisions about what they wanted to bring back to life.

While the characters are interesting and vivid, the storyline rapidly deteriorates (until the audience is tempted to just get up and leave the theater) because of the immense implausibility, not to mention the depiction of the adults. The parents, especially Victor’s, never have any idea what is going on with their own kids and hardly lift a finger to help when their kids are in mortal peril. All the parents in the movie are passive to the point of absurdity, while the elementary school kids save the day and the town.

Even though ‘Frankenweenie’ is a heartwarming story of how much a boy loves his dog, the intense emotions it portrays is inappropriate for kids. The theater was filled with crying kids when Sparky died the first time and when it looked like he was going to die again. Since the majority of kids have some sort of animal, they easily connect with Victor and how they would feel if their pet died. Since Victor was able to make Sparky come back to life, kids might believe that their pet can come back to life, too. The horror sequences at the end of the movie, when so many scary animals are being brought back to life, is too much.

There is no real lesson to learn from ‘Frankenweenie.’ Throughout the movie, it seems Victor is making progress with understanding death, but he ultimately makes little progress. He is still so obsessed with keeping his dog alive at the end of the movie that kids do not really learn how to healthily cope with the loss of a pet. While ‘Frankenweenie’ is not all bad, it is one of the movies that should be questioned as a “kid’s movie.”

Rating: 1/5

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Paramount Pictures ‘Rango’ took top honors as the Best Animated Feature at the 39th Annual Annie Awards, Saturday, February 4, at UCLA’s Royce Hall. With the expanded list of categories from 25 to 28, and the addition of two new categories – Editing and Best Animated Special Production - this year’s show honored more nominees than in the past.

The newly created ‘Member’s Favorite’ award voted on by the entire ASIFA-Hollywood community also went to ‘Rango.’ Newcomer Minkyu Lee’s ‘Adam and Dog’ won for Best Short Subject while Psyop’s Twinings ‘Sea’ was selected Best Television Commercial. ‘The Simpsons’ took Best Animated TV Production and Shadow Planet Production’s ‘Insanely Twisted’ was selected as Best Video Game.

‘This was a great evening, with a lot of fun and surprises,” said ASIFA-Hollywood President Frank Gladstone.  “Annies went to a huge variety of individuals and studios. This goes directly to ASIFA-Hollywood’s vision of celebrating the best in animation across project, studio and geographic boundaries.”

Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt’s hosting duties kept the show moving at a lively pace.  He was joined on stage by animation luminaries, celebrity presenters and comedic talent including animation legend June Foray, J.K. Simmons, Judy Greer, Zachary Levi, Peter Baynham, Mace Heufeld, Weird Al Yankovic, Bruce Boxleitner, Ahmed Best, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Jim Cummings, Phil Lamarr, Diedrich Bader, Daran Norris, Tara Strong, Kelly Stables, Dee Bradley Baker, Nika Futterman, Ariel Winter, Logan Grove, James Hong, Brian Posehn, Greg & Evan Spiridellis and Jim Meskimen (Jib Jab), Bridgit Mendler,Brittany Snow, Jason Marsden and Joe Letteri.

Honored with the Winsor McCay award were Walt Peregoy, Borge Ring and the late Ronald Searle. The Winsor McCay Award stands as one of the highest honors given to an individual in the animation industry in recognition for career contributions to the art of animation.

Art Leonardi was honored with the June Foray award which is presented to an individual who has given significant and benevolent contributions to the art and industry of animation.

Often a predictor of the annual Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the Annie Awards honor overall excellence as well as individual achievement in a total of 28 categories ranging from best feature, production design, character animation, and effects animation to storyboarding, writing, music, editing and voice acting.

Entries submitted for consideration were from productions that originally aired, were exhibited in an animation festival or commercially released between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011.

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D23 devotes its entire Spring issue of Disney twenty-three magazine to the remarkable legacy and influence of Disney animated films. From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the animated classics of tomorrow, the official Disney fan club takes readers on a fantastic journey from the drawing board to the silver screen.

Available nationwide on February 14, this special issue of Disney twenty-three magazine is an extraordinary treasure trove of fascinating stories, insights and details of Disney animation’s heritage. From pre-production to music composition, every facet of making classic Disney animated features is explored—including the transcriptions from Walt’s story meetings with his animation team as they developed such classics as Fantasia, Pinocchio and Cinderella.

Plus, especially for Gold-level members of D23: The Official Disney Fan Club, this all-new issue also features an inventive, breathtaking cover that incorporates a removable replica animation cell from Snow White.

“It’s often been said that animation is the heart and soul of Disney, so we knew we needed to do something truly spectacular with our magazine in this milestone year,” said Steven Clark, head of D23. “Whether you’re interested in the first Golden Age of Disney animation or you’re looking forward to the next beloved classic, there’s something in this issue for every Disney fan.”

Fittingly, the magazine’s first story examines the legacy of Walt Disney himself and the vision he set forth even before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs hit the screen. FiIm historian and Academy-Award winner John Canemaker looks at how Disney animated films have continuously raised the bar for three quarters of a century, since audiences were first enchanted by the “fairest of them all.”  Also included in the Spring issue are:

• The Six Older Men: A revealing look at the rarely seen talented artists and illustrators who helped train Disney’s legendary “Nine Old Men”;
• Ralph’s Wrecking Crew: An early glimpse at the process of producing Wreck-It Ralph, the next feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios;
• Ballyhoo and Buzz: A colorful look at some of Disney’s off-the-wall stunts for marketing new movies before the advent of broadcast and digital media;
• Striking the Right Chords: An exploration of the memorable music written for animated features, with insight from film historian Leonard Maltin;
• Still Soaring: A touching interview with talented artist Tyrus Wong, now 101 years old, who helped create the extraordinary look of Bambi;
• A Work of Art: An introduction to Disney’s Animation Research Library, home to 65 million individual pieces of original animation art.

There’s even more to discover—including spectacular photography and artwork—in the Spring issue of Disney twenty-three, which will be delivered directly to all Gold-level D23 Members beginning in early February with the limited-edition Snow White reproduction cel as their collectible gift.

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The world famous South African artist William Kentridge was a very special guest on May 27 at MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Art located in Rome’s elegant Flaminio district. In an interview by Carlos Basualdo, curator at Large Maxxi Arte, the filmmaker and theatrical director, who is also a skilled draughtsman, spoke about his problematic view of art and, above all, life and its dependency. This was revealed to be not so far from the Ancient Greek philosophy of “panta rei”: Everything flows.

Born in Johannesburg, Kentridge gained a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and African Studies in 1976. Afterwards, he received a diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and, at the beginning of the 1980s, decided to study mime and theatre at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

He evidently took a 360 degrees training which highly affected his broad, original and sometimes strongly politically-oriented artistic production – ranging from drawing, to sculpturing, performance art, film, television, and so on. He is probably one of the South African artist who can boast the most about his major exhibitions at, most notably, the museums of modern art of San Francisco and New York, and whose six great works are displayed at the Italian MAXXI.

However, he is more widely known as a unique film animator. In fact, his distinctive technique, which consists of filming the same collages or charcoal drawings over and over again, is world renowned because it goes against the traditional rules of cell-shaded animation. He is famous for meticulously making small changes from time to time in his filming, allowing an evolution of the drawings and preserving traces of their past.

But it is not just about the simple mastery of an experimental artist, skillful at altering his drawings creating optical illusions. Kentridge has always had a deep awareness of the historical and philosophical scope of his actions as well: “In the same way that there is a human act of dismembering the past there is a natural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events.

In South Africa this process has other dimensions. The very term ‘new South Africa’ has within it the idea of a painting over the old, the natural process of dismembering, the naturalization of things new,” he argued in an introductory note to Felix in Exile, one of his famous film.

Likewise, art itself might be thought of as an infinite and varying migration never reaching any destination and basically determined by body and change: “the work has to be created with the rhythm of the body”, the creator stated at the event at MAXXI. The objects are unstable, achieving statuses which are always going to change: even meters and kilometers “are not so reliable as they seem.”

His work deals with an artistic and existential metaphor, shown at the Italian contemporary museum through some witty animated movies. One of them was about three bicycle wheels concurrently spun by three Kentridges using utensils. The Dada experiment provokingly demonstrated how wheels, out of their common usage, produce movement as well as time while their spokes was being turned.

They might become rhythm itself. Moreover, “these films are about what it is even inside the drawing: drawing is primarily a physical activity, it is about a movement of the body,” where the pencil is “a piece of chunk at the end of your hand” through which you give your rhythm depending on “the energy that comes (…) through the body,” Kentridge added. Thus, the drawing appears to be a sort of theatrical exercise due to different degrees of tension produced by the body, “which correspond, in theatrical terms, in different kinds of performance.”

Questioned by Basualdo what the movement of the wheels had to do with his drawings as far as endlessness was concerned, William Kentridge appeared without any doubt. Art is about transience: “there is a kind of promiscuous migration of images from one form to another, something that starts as a drawing coming to a film, the film coming to a piece of theatre, and the spinning wheels coming to an idea for theatre performance.”

Furthermore, according to the artist, the film itself is very much about “provisionality, the work not being fixed. It is not a photograph, it’s a photograph 25 times a second.”

Overall, like bicycle spokes or evenly maneuvered hands of a clock, man is only a fragile player repeating always the same drama over a unique piece of paper.

Just like the famous Kafka’s parable called My destination which the South African creator called attention to at the end of his event. In fact, essentially man is just “a talking clock,” he concluded.

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“I haven’t always been here. I mean before… I was normal.”

This quote is from the striking French animation short film Skhizein (2008), written and directed by Jérémy Clapin. It tells the story of Henri Debrus who departs from himself precisely ninety-one centimeters as a consequence of having been struck by a 150 tons of meteorite.

The title of the movie gives us a clue about Henri’s situation.

The term schizophrenia comes from the Greek words “skhizein” (to split) and “phren” (mind) which can be put as “split mind”. Henri has a mental disorder, but the film indicates more than that. The strong metaphor that has been used also shows us the effects of the alienation of a person to his own being. During this thirteen minutes short movie, we witness Henri’s deep loneliness because of this alienation, by being 91 centimeters from himself (and the distance gets even more with the second meteroite strike), Henri is not where he is supposed to be. Despite the fact that he is suffering from schizophrenia (and careful audiences will notice the signs that proves his delusion), the case here is not just a matter of having a mental disease, the metaphor also indirectly brings up the question of an existential matter which can also be evaluated apart from pyschological aspects. Since Henri is not “normal” anymore as he used to be, we see how he has been dragged into a crisis as well as having difficulties with keeping on his daily life. Despite his despair, his therapist claims that “there is no actual damage after all”. So we clearly see the gap between two different approches, one is experiencing the existential turning point as a facet of alienation, whereas the other is analyzing it without its philosophical depth since its only a matter of a disease that has to be cured. Not being understood by anyone, Henri is thrown into a solitude that he does not seem to overcome it.

Whether social or psychological, the concept of normality is open to discussion since the legitimacy of the authority which decides where exactly is the border between normality and abnormality is uncertain. Skhizein leads us to think about this borders as well. It is interesting that Henri actually measures the distance (precisely ninety-one centimeters) between normality and madness. By calculating the unmeasurable,  we sense a subtle irony in this film, which points out the mental, social and philosophical dephts of human mystery/misery. One wonders if this ninety-one centimeters is whether a mere symptom of a mental disorder or an existential dislocation which “normal” or not anyone may encounter.

Skhizein is an amazing film that has won seven awards. It pulls the audience into an abyss of the mental struggles by focusing on this bizarre and touching inner life of a man out of his mind. It’s an outstanding animation that definitely worths to watch over and over again!

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