Animated Films

I loved computer animated films. Every time a new one came out, I would go see it, fascinated by the technological innovation behind them. So it was for many years, when computer animation took so long that the writers had time to make the story really good. I was enamored with this innovative new type of filmmaking, with really great stories. Until Shark Tale came out.

Shark Tale was what I always dreaded for computer animated films; pretty crap. I don't mean the movie was pretty crappy, but that it became so easy to make computer animated films, that Dreamworks was now able to pump out really attractive looking weak scripts. Shark Tale was absolute pop culture garbage designed to make a quick buck.

Since then, it's been all downhill. The movie industry, smelling insane profit, has spilled out poor computer animated movies every month. The recent dearth of computer animated films set to come out is set to destroy the glitz of the computer animated industry.

Which is why I had really low hopes for Hoodwinked, which is an independent computer animated film distributed by the new Weinstein Company. It looked like a bad version of Shrek, but then why would the Weinsteins touch it? So I went to see it, thinking it couldn't be so bad and at least entertaining. I was right though, the animation was bad.

But that's where the badness ends. It seems that when you have a tiny budget and poor animation, you really need to make a story worth watching. So the story is very funny, and quite interesting. It is another fractured fairy tale, but it has a lot more twists than Shrek and doesn't rely so heavily on the fairy tale characters. Instead, it mixes in more interesting characters and has a good plot. I was very impressed by Hoodwinked. It brought me back to those older days where Chicken Little and Madagascar didn't exist. Check it out.

By the way, Munich wasn't nearly as funny as I thought it would be.