Summer's Sleepers and Keepers
Titan A.E. (Fox) What they did right: Impressive integration of 2D and 3D animation.
What they didn't do right: The Titan Project may have had the power
to create a planet, but it ended up sinking a studio. Produced while
Fox was already considering personnel cutbacks. Chaotic creative changes
while in production backed the film up a year. Bluth and Goldman
seemed to be just a step behind the times on this one. Publicity could
have been better. Too many visual and cinematic references to other
sci-fi films. Massive market research missed the mark on teen audiences. What we learned: Nice guys can indeed finish last, and best efforts
aren't always rewarded. This film deserved a kinder fate from audiences,
but sci-fi animation features (and there haven't been many) may have
become obsolete due to VFX breakthroughs in live-action sci-fi films.
Besides, one important piece of research was missing: When did sci-fi
animated features last score a hit with the moviegoing public? Heavy
Metal? Even Bluth's first attempt at something like sci-fi, The
Secret of NIMH, only grossed about $10 million.
Current gross: $22,004,799
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (Universal) What they did right: Well, at least they didn't animate Piper Perabo. What they didn't do right: Sorry, but only Jay Ward, Bill
Scott, Lloyd Turner, Chris Hayward and Allan Burns could have pulled
this off. Unique Ward humor difficult to adapt to screen since most
of it was verbal and made up for poorly animated visuals in the original
series. Original format of "mellerdrama" serial at odds with feature-length
film concept. Fans of show tend to be fanatic, detail-oriented and
tough to please. Highly topical characters probably played much better
in 1960s; updating them posed problems. Director Des McAnuff and scriptwriter
Ken Lonergan were not animation people. What we learned: Nostalgia won't always pull them in. Stay true to
the original spirit of your source material. When doing revisionist
work, check the adaptability of the characters and the series in the
first place. Having reviewed these films, we are now ready to produce our own
animated blockbuster. A warning to plagiarists: I'm copyrighted this
time! Chickasaur Run A.E.: The Road to the First Movie 2000 This imaginative film features a herd of CGI-animated dinosaurs who
help a desperate flock of stop-motion chickens escape from an evil
cadre of cel-animated mutations called the Pokedrej. The escapees
flee Earth, escorted by a school of flying space whales who help them
reach the planet New El Dorado. There, the chickens and dinosaurs
are nearly fleeced of their meager supplies by two slacker con artists,
but they all eventually unite against the pursuing Pokedrej, who all
fall to their deaths from a great height at film's end. Or, we could just animate a single white mouse (Stuart
Little, $140,015,224....). Martin "Dr. Toon" Goodman is a longtime student and fan of animation.
He lives in Anderson, Indiana.
Current
gross: $21,754,375
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