I just fucking hate seeing talent people waste their time and energies on these projects. Yes, yes, Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther and all that. But those movies are still ultimately product, and the director will always be subservient to the demands of brand synergy and franchisability and the committee of…

Okay, what has happened to this site? The organization is so off now that I don’t see many articles, like, at all. This is the first time I saw this one, after spending yesterday wondering why there were no new news articles (I’m in Canada and didn’t realize it was Memorial Day in the US until the evening). This…

Thank god dead soldiers were always on the good side. Thank god they’ve always been blindly firing at the people designated by the most righteous finger. Thank god for the flags and uniforms that make you a hero by definition.

Sure, there’s a big difference between analysis and knee-jerk condemnation. Take a guess at what I think is going on in Sam’s article.

No serious people have any objections to a kiss waking up Snow White in a fairy tale that’s existed since time immemorial.

For God’s sake, Sam, can we cut this nonsense out? The “backlash” to the new Disney ride consisted entirely of one editorial on SFGate before Fox News picked it up and ran with their brand new culture war football. There is no need to play their game. I don’t care what two people on some editorial webpage have to say:…

Until Walt built Disneyland, and repurposed his short subjects library in shows like THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB and WALT DISNEY’S DISNEYLAND (yep, THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY, one of the longest-running shows on television, started out as a infomercial for the unfinished theme part he was building, with some animated and…

Technically, Cats Don’t Dance was only distributed by Warner Bros.; it was the sole full feature produced by Turner Animation before a merger absorbed the nascent studio into its new corporate parent.

Exactly. Disney managed to build their library of animated features mostly from sheer force of will, and a history of taking big financial risks that ultimately paid off (it also helped, of course, that the first, Snow White, made a lot of money and was so well received). Out of the first “great five” animated…

Indeed, none of the other major producers of animated shorts - MGM, Walter Lantz, etc. “parlayed” their success into features. Disney itself had a hard time with animated features. Many of them, though now beloved by many generations of fans, were money losers in their original runs, only showing profits after…

Well, it’s not always a question of literally hiring the same people to do the same thing, but longer. I don’t think it’s odd that Warners didn’t try making a feature animated movie in like 1948; hell, a lot of those Disney classics were substantial money-losers in their day, and they had as good a head start as…

“It’s even set in 1939 ... in an alternate Hollywood where talking animals intermingle with human stars, though they aren’t ever given leading roles.”

You lost me with: “One of the strangest longterm failures of the Warner Bros. studio is its inability to parlay its decades-long short-form cartoon success from the ’30s through the ’50s (not to mention its substantial TV animation success in later years) into a viable feature animation department.”

It doesn’t…

At one point you couldn’t even see the comments until you hit the page AFTER the final page of the slide show...

I bet if Gilliam had made Sorcerer’s Stone it would have been really interesting and the franchise would have ended there.

this reminds me of when i saw ice age in the theatre as a cynical teen with my gf at the time.

I think this is the key thing a lot of the discourse around this film tends to forget — it’s a kid’s film. Of course I, a cynical twenty-something who wasn’t that into Harry Potter to begin with, wasn’t particularly engaged with the film and can see all the flaws and joins and Chris Columbusness of it all. I’m not in…

I’m not sure this is a counterpoint, but I feel not enough people acknowledge this, so here we go: Harry Potter 1 is a kids book, and Columbus made a terrific kids movie out of it. The later books get more complex and mature and dark, and the movies try to match, but the first one is a 220 page kids book and Columbus…

I’d just started working at a cinema when this came out and enjoyed the film - but the waves and waves of children who came to see it *loved* it. Not just watching-a-film kind of enjoyment that kids get with most kids films - but proper loved it. It was magical to them in all the right ways. Sure, they stuck to the…

Sorry but I LOVE it. It contains my favourite Chris Colombus traits: he is tied by the Rowling pressure but he gets the child’s view as few others. The most important part of the movie are the kids getting introduced to an elite world that is full of surprises and difficult to grasp, and HP1 also has strong ties to…