Category: Animated

Antz suffered from being one of those films where a similar themed one was released at approximately the same time. At the time, being a Pixar fan, I chose and really enjoyed A Bug’s Life, but now I finally decided to give this one a try. The animation in this is truly horrifying and I can’t imagine I would have felt very forgiving toward it even in earlier computer animation history. It’s very dark and the generic looking textures seem to have been placed on each object without any sense of location. The story is a bit more adult than usual animated fare with pushes toward nonconformity and breaking from the course forced upon you, but the actual plot is a bit nonsensical with one group of ants wanting to destroy the rest of their colony. None of the problems are helped by the fact that the main character is voiced by Woody Allen and treated as one of his stereotypical neurotic characters, but there is also a packed cast voicing the rest of the characters, including Christopher Walken, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Sylvester Stallone among others.

I’ve never seen an episode of Goof Troop, but I am a fan of classic Disney animation and the Goofy and Max short that’s included in Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas, so I thought I’d give this a try. Goofy, afraid that Max is going to become a juvenile delinquent, plans a camping trip to Idaho for the two of them; unfortunately Max just wants to impress a girl by being seen at aa concert in Los Angeles. I’m sure kids relate highly to Max’s character in this, but he’s full of selfish ‘it’s all about me’ teen angst and is a little jerk through most of the movie. Goofy on the other hand would literally do anything for his son and is even willing to give him decision making powers, something a lot of parents have a hard time surrendering. It ends up being a cute little father-son bonding film in the end. Who knew Goofy would make such a good parent, particularly as a single father?

Made as two specials to honor the 1980 Winter and Summer Olympics separately, the airing of the second special was waylaid because of the United States’s boycott of Moscow’s Summer Olympics. The film is a whole bunch of random vignettes featuring a whole bunch of random animals performing in a whole bunch of random sports. Instead of representing countries, the animals more or less represent their various continents with there being a special Eurasia contingent to cover Russian stereotypes. One of the few stories that lasts beyond a minute or two is the coverage of the marathon, framed as a battle between an African lion and a goat from France who toward the end fall in love. Inexplicably the female characters almost all exhibit cleavage with the lion particularly having rather large unencumbered breasts for a runner. A number of animators who worked on this project later went on to much bigger, well-known properties, such as Brad Bird, director of Ratatouille and The Iron Giant. The sparse voice cast also has a bunch of well known artists: Billy Crystal, Gilda Radner, and Harry Shearer.

The unlikely friendship of a young Australian girl and a middle-aged New Yorker is told here in stop-motion animation. It’s definitely geared towards an older audience with a no holds barred approach to being honest about all the ickiness involved with being human: bodily functions, mental illness, loneliness, and family trauma. It’s such a beautiful composition on friendship, even just re-reading the film synopsis bring tears to my eyes.