SpongeBob SquarePants: Truth or Dare © Viacom International, Inc.

SpongeBob SquarePants’s been around for either a decade or ‘eleventy-seven’ years, depending on whether you go by the calendar or by the irrational number thrown around in the absorbent and yellow and porous one’s tenth anniversary special, Truth or Square.

 Scooby Doo aside, I can’t think of another TV cartoon character who’s broken into the mainstream with the same staying power as the classic Warner and Disney characters. The Flintstones and Scoob may be fondly remembered by many, but when was the last time you completely cracked up watching them? (For me frankly, never.)

Apart from laughing at the nonstop gags, I completely lost it at least four or five times during the special, which juggles two plotlines: the sponge and friends preparing for the Krusty Krab restaurant’s eleventy-seventh anniversary, and a live-action parallel story (rivaling some of SCTV’s more inspired episodes in sheer goofballiness) following Patchy the Pirate’s flop sweat-drenched attempt to put together an all-star salute to the Sponge.

Tron: Legacy. © Walt Disney Enterprises.

I haven’t been this disappointed by a Walt Disney sci-fi movie since The Black Hole.  Maybe I walked in with unrealistic expectations of seeing something as groundbreaking, and visually thrilling as the 1982 original. The trailer looked tremendous (as trailers are supposed to) and the idea of revisiting a ‘visionary’ film (the first Tron does indeed deserve that now-overused adjective) with 21^st century effects – and with the same actors playing the same characters they did in the original, only middle-aged – seemed irresistible.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Center to right, foreground: Rango (Johnny Depp) and Beans (Isla Fisher) in RANGO, from Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies. © 2011 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

I thought Rango’s character design would sink Rango, but the little lizard works. Those teeny-tiny eyes set in bulging trackball sockets are completely counterintuitive – don’t director Gore Verbinski and company know you’re supposed to give animated characters oversized eyes? Does Rango work because of, or in spite of his ocular resemblance to a real-life chameleon? Frankly, I don’t think it matters one way or the other: it’s Johnny Depp’s vocal and his ‘emotion-captured’ physical performances that brings Rango to life. I mentioned Verbinski’s cowboy dress-up strategy in my first write-up of the film: recording the actors not just reading their lines, but performing – and not in tights and motion marking ping-pong balls either, but in Wild West drag. It’s a brilliant brainstorm that judging from the final results paid off nicely.

There are ten Best Picture Oscar nominees this year? Big deal, nobody cares about Best Picture... what's really important is the Best Animated Feature, everybody knows that. Who will win?

New York’s Society of Illustrators has great shows focusing on great artists and genres – all of which I read about but never get around to seeing; dammit Joe, get thee ass to East 63^rd Street just off Lex and check the place out. (www.societyillustrators.org)

What finally lured me through the doors of the Society’s classy little townhouse: their March 10^th show of animated commercials and music videos. Can I say ‘cutting-edge,’ or has that cliché passed its sell-through date? I’ll say it anyway; the stuff screened had a very high “wow, that was amazing” quotient.

DC relaunched a Looney Tunes comic book in the mid-90 that gave up on the Barksian adventures and instead tried to replicate the cartoons’ wacky sensibility. After 15-plus years it’s still going strong, but after a couple of issues I started getting that same déjà vu feeling I experienced when watching Tiny Toons or the less creative Disney direct-to-video sequels: favorite moments shuffled, repackaged and quoted – which were better the first time around.

All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the subject at hand: Cartoon Network’s re-introduction of Bugs and company in The Looney Tunes Show.

Lord knows I had my reservations about the entire affair. Trying to do something with these characters outside of the short cartoon format where they were at their best has always been risky; with one or two exceptions (like say, Taz-mania), the less said about efforts like Loonatics Unleashed, Space Jam or Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the better.

But in brief, my personal reaction to the first episode… The Looney Tunes show works. I like this show – a lot, as a matter of fact.

Jim Cummings Ph: Eric Charbonneau ©Disney

Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

By Jim Cummings, with an intro by Joe Strike

 Disney's simply-titled Winnie the Pooh movie opens this Friday, July 15. It's back to basics for the bear with very little brain; the new Pooh takes several previously never animated A.A. Milne stories and weaves them into a tale that harkens back to the warmth and charm of Disney's 1960s Pooh featurettes.

Pooh and Disney have had a long association since the first featurette, 1966's Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. He's appeared in any number of TV series (in both puppet and animated form), direct-to-video releases and now the first theatrical Pooh release since 2005's Pooh's Heffalump Movie.

Sadly, Sterling Holloway (the original Pooh) and Paul Winchell (likewise Tigger) are no longer with us, but veteran voice actor Jim Cummings has vocalized these two inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood for over thirty years. His enthusiasm for voicing the bear and the tiger is of Tiggerish proportions, as you're about to read...

Don’t Go, a CGI/live action film from Turkey. All images courtesy of NYICFF.

The 2011 edition of the New York International Children’s Film Festival began early in March and wrapped on the 27^th with its Awards ceremony, classy post-ceremony reception and traditional goodie-bag giveaway. If the fifteen-years and counting Big Apple fixture needed any more legitimacy, its newly won status as an Oscar-qualifying festival (NYCIFF prize winners now have a shot at the Academy’s golden statue) surely kicked it up a notch.

Gore Verbinski - Rango.

Every now and then Paramount Pictures puts out a nice spread (mini-sandwiches, sliders and open bar, not to mention those killer chocolate chip cookies – there goes my diet) in their overlooking-Times Square 3^rd floor screening room. Tonight it’s in honor of Pirates of the Carribean-meister Gore Verbinski, in town to promote his premiering-in-March, Johnny Depp-starring, first animated feature Rango.

Think that guy sitting across from you on the subway looks ugly? What if he had two heads? Or horns and a forked tongue, or maybe was a fish from the waist up? And there were plenty more like him all over town? Then you’d probably be living in the imaginary New York City where Ugly Americans, Comedy Central’s new animated series takes place. The concept: “Newcomers,” a bizarre assortment of monsters and fantastical creatures have become an accepted part of the population, and a small government bureaucracy, the “Department of Integration” tries to help them fit into society. It’s the brainchild (and by the way, bodiless brains are among the Newcomers) of one Devin Clark…