Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first full-length animated movie, and to my mind still one of the best. Composed of cells painted by hand, the film achieves a richness of animated effect that has not until recently been equalled (I especially enjoy watching the shadows move with the characters). The visual beauty of the rhythmic movement of the forest animals adds to the movie. As important is the richness of characterization - the dwarfs are all fully individual personalities. The great soundtrack doesn't hurt either. Snow White contained 1,500,000 individual pen-and-ink drawing and paintings, done by dozens of graphical artists and animators
"The golden age of animation" was reprised by Robert Zemekis' and Richard Williams' Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), a tour de force of combined animation and live action, the animation once again being done by hand. Characterization is equally important to the success of the movie, which deals with skulduggery and murder in a 1940s Los Angeles abutted by a completely animated "Toontown".
What has revived animation, however, is the maturation of Computer Generated Imagery, or CGI. Based on massive computing power, CGI had been criticized on the basis of being "too" real, with a consequent loss of some of the subtle charm of Snow White. Leaders of the CHI revolution have been Pixar (1995's Toy Story was the first fully computer generated film), and DreamWorks.
Pixar's most successful films (at least for adults) are Ratatouille (2007) and Wall-E (2008). Ratatouille follows the adventures of a rat born with a sensitivity of taste and smell that makes him a natural cook (his mentor, Gusteau, has written a book called "Anyone Can Cook"). Remy is, visually, rat-like, as are his family. Part of the brilliance of the movie is that he is nonetheless a loveable character.
Wall-E (2008) has as unlikely a hero, a trash-compacting robot living 700 years in the future on a deserted and ecologically exhausted earth. Wall-E saves mementoes of a happier Earth, wrapped in Christmas lights, and when a spaceship of Earth people arrives to examine the planet, finds, improbably enough, true love.
DreamWorks' successes include Shrek (2001) and Antz (1998). Shrek concerns an ogre who values his privacy because he's sick of being told how ugly he is. With a hip-talking donkey companion, he is dragooned into saving an enchanted princess and in the process recovers his soul. Antz concerns an ant whose needs go beyond those of the colony. He (voiced logically enough by Woody Allen) asks his psychiatrist, "What about my needs?"
A word should be said about recent successes in stop-action animation, most famously represented in the original King Kong (1933). Tim Burton has two deliciously creepy stop-actions, The Corpse Bride (2005), and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). The first concerns a young man, slated to wed an heiress, who finds himself married to a dead (and partially decomposed) woman instead, and the second with the effort by Jack, the Pumpkin King of Halloween, to expand his franchise to Christmas as well. Both have wonderful scores by Danny Elfman, and present characters who are creepy, funny, and loveable at the same time.
All these movies are available at the Port Moody Public Library. A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Martin Boughner works at Port Moody Public Library.
