non-Pixar computer animated feature films

Seen a surprising number of these. How To Train Your Dragon gets my vote. Sadly not that difficult of a decision.

first Ice Age

was meaning to do this exact poll. really has to be cloudy meatballs but i like ice age very much as well.

i always meant to see 'bolt' but i never got around to it -- i don't even remember if i liked the first 'shrek' or not

Bolt for the John Travolta/Miley Cyrus song.

one of the worst bits of parenting is the flood of this crap

Despicable Me just cos i love the little girl who says "It's so FLUFFY!". Meet the Robinsons wasn't terrible.

genuinely entertaining: 9, Despicable Me, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

not bad: the Ice Age movies, Kung Fu Panda, Monsters Vs. Aliens, Surf's Up

omg fuck this shit: the Shrek movies, the Madagascar movies, Happy Feet

saw but can't remember much about: The Tale of Despereaux, Beowulf, Planet 51

lol i can't believe how many indistinguishable talking animal flicks came out in 2006: The Wild, Over The Hedge, Barnyard The Original Party Animals, Open Season

trailer looked promising, kinda wanna see: Meet The Robinsons, Rango, Monster House, How To Train Your Dragon

you couldn't pay me to watch this shit: Rio, A Shark Tale, Antz, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Polar Express, A Christmas Carol, Tangled, Gnomeo And Juliet, Bolt, TMNT, Final Fantasy, Jimmy Neutron

i think usually nowadays somebody designs the McDonald's toys and then they make up a film to go with them afterwards

i LOVED antz when it came out. i went to see it like eight times. it was how i discovered woody allen.

surprised by how few of these i have seen!

Tangled by a mile

I wanted to like Tale of Desperaux because it was a genuine kids movie without any of the pandering bullshit secret jokes and winks for the parents. but jeez it was tedious. soppy as fuck too.

wow, so "gnomeo and juliet" is really just "romeo & juliet" w/ a gnome, huh

How to Train Your Dragon by a mile

i don't think i've ever been as disappointed in a comedian as when i heard Chris Rock saying things like "crack-a-lackin'" as an animated zebra

Seriously guys, How To Train Your Dragon is probably the only one of these that rivals Pixar. Simple story well told plus Roger Deakins consulting on the lighting really pays off.

wow, so "gnomeo and juliet" is really just "romeo & juliet" w/ a gnome, huh

― J0rdan S., Saturday, June 11, 2011 3:43 PM (51 seconds ago) Bookmark

we really need a better phrase than "high-concept"

anyway i just watched "9" which is really good and the inspiration for this poll, so i think i'll vote for that -- looks really great, interesting story, and it was the 49th highest grossing movie here, so it just barely made the cut

its funny how Antz has gotten left behind by history, i remember it getting really positive reviews when it came out - i have no idea how it holds up, but its even weirder to me today than it was then that Woody Allen is the lead in it

you couldn't pay me to watch this shit: Rio, A Shark Tale, Antz, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Polar Express, A Christmas Carol, Tangled, Gnomeo And Juliet, Bolt, TMNT, Final Fantasy, Jimmy Neutron

― some dude, Saturday, June 11, 2011 11:39 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

tangled is really a cut above the rest of this crap, dude

yeah, Tangled is solid.

Tangled was ok too, but too typical Disney to be real contender. The songs were rather zzzzzz too.

just remembered i enjoyed Monsters vs Aliens a fair bit

Coraline wasn't Pixar was it? That was pretty good.

it's not computer animated is it?

coraline was stop-motion and also not pixar

i think Jay Baruchel overload has made me warier of How To Train Your Dragon than i should be

the bad guys in antz are played by gene hackman AND christopher walken.

i really just did not like the look of Tangled, visually speaking. is it really funny or something?

holy shit, Tangled is "is the most expensive animated feature film and second-most expensive film ever made, behind Disney's 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." how the hell did that happen?

Johnny Depp iirc

I think Tangled had a really troubled production history, like most of Disney's animated output over the past decade.

no i understand Pirates, i meant how did Tangled cost so much

my friend kept telling me how badass 9 was and when i finally sat down to watch it i was like :| - probably would've dug it when i was a kid and there's a neat sequence or two, but it just felt kinda tired to me

Tangled was ok too, but too typical Disney to be real contender. The songs were rather zzzzzz too.

― Kim, Saturday, June 11, 2011 11:46 AM (11 seconds ago) Bookmark

Tangled's songs werent that great by mencken standards, but i think that was really a thematic decision (for better or worse)

'typical disney' can be outstanding when done right, and it actually does a few things to change up the formula without going into Shrek territory; a back-to-basics princess story is actually refreshing at this point

human hair is still probably the hardest thing to pull off in computer animation, so a Rapunzel movie was probably a bad idea from the jump

i somethinks Pixar are over-rated but when you consider that even their lesser movies crap all over most of this list from a mile above then it's a testament to their game i guess

i really just did not like the look of Tangled, visually speaking. is it really funny or something?

― some dude, Saturday, June 11, 2011 11:50 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

its just really charming and snappy and fun with some of the best-animated CGI humans ive ever seen (pixar has yet to really crack this nut outside of maybe ratatouille)

re: budget, it started out as one movie and became another due to disney politics, so the giant price tag is probably taking into account its super long production history - the budget of the movie that it eventually became was probably lower

The animating of Max the horse and Pascal the chameleon are about 90% of what's good about that movie.

the hair animation is outstanding

In the dark days of the early Aughts, when Disney animation was at its lowest ebb since the 1970s with critical and commercial washouts like Atlantis: The Lost Empire dragging the brand name down into the muck, everybody had an idea to save the company. Throw out Michael Eisner; re-commit to the most beautiful possible traditional animation; get the hell away from traditional animation; copy DreamWorks and Pixar; stake out a third way as far as possible from those companies; all in all, things were in the kind of chaotic panic that only the nightmarish disintegration of an iconic film studio could bring about.

Into all this confusion, legendary animator Glen Keane - the first member of the Disney Renaissance generation to attain superstar status, as early as his amazing work animating the bear in The Fox and the Hound in 1981 - went to his bosses with the most obvious idea ever: the films that people LOVE, the ones that first leap to mind when the word "Disney" is spoken, are the fairy tale movies. Every time a new Atlantis or Emperor's New Groove came out, that was the sigh of a significant portion of the audience and critical community: what Disney does best are folkloric princess stories, and why oh why don't they adapt another one? Keane's idea was glamorously simple: make another fairy tale movie.

Of course, it's a canard that Disney = fairy tales. Though the count depends on how you define "folklore", and even "based on", it's nevertheless impossible to plausibly defend more than about a third of the Disney features as based on folklore, and some of the most historically popular - Dumbo, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Lion King - are the farthest removed from that alleged Disney ideal. But nonetheless, Keane came at the executives with a solid enough concept - not just "make a fairy tale movie", but "make a movie based on Rapunzel, the most prominent Grimm story we haven't touched"- that he got the go-ahead to take the film into active development; it would be his first film as director. With one single proviso: Rapunzel Unbraided, as it was then called an irreverent, ironic adaptation in the Shrek vein, had to be a CGI picture. Sorry. But didn't you hear, we're killing traditional animation?

Unconvinced but willing to try, Keane - whose work in Treasure Planet on John Silver was the most innovative marriage of two generations of animation technology ever accomplished - gathered a symposium of 50 animators, partisans of both the computer and the paper pad, in April, 2003, and they discussed in detail the positive and negative aspects of what each technology offered. The end result left Keane feeling comfortable that CG animation had great storytelling potential, that it was not different from hand-drawn animation as he'd feared, and that Disney had computer-savvy artists who could create imagery with the impressionistic softness of painting and the environmental depth of a computer game. He committed himself to making Rapunzel Unbraided as a marriage of the two disciplines: the most advanced technology with the design mentality and expressiveness of pencils and pens.

A happy ending for all, except that in 2003, when this discussion happened, the technology needed to achieve Keane's vision didn't exist; and if it was ever going to exist, Walt Disney Feature Animation had to invent it. Which they did, and the years stretched on with Rapunzel Unbraided always popping up in stories about Disney's future even as films like Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons and Bolt came and went. Many changes happened: Keane was joined as director by animator Dean Wellins in 2007, and in 2008 they stepped down for story artist Nathan Greno and animator/writer Byron Howard; Keane stayed on to executive produce alongside new Disney poo-bah John Lasseter, while Wellins moved on to other projects. The snarky Shrek tone was diluted in every subsequent draft. Rapunzel Unbraided became simply Rapunzel, and its presumed company-saving resurrection of the classic Disney fairy tale princess got sniped when The Princess and the Frog zipped in and out of development and brought back the traditionally-style animated feature.

The grimmest effect that The Princess and the Frog had on Rapunzel's fortunes, however, was not to steal its thunder - as the rebirth of 2-D animation, it probably had the greater moral claim to bringing back the princess film anyway. Sadly, TPatF did only middling box-office at best, snuffing the 2-D Renaissance in its cradle, and the executives had one explanation for why: the word "Princess". The all-important preteen boys didn't want to see a girl movie, went the thinking; and it's sad to wonder if they might be right (the two highest-grossing Disney films of the 1990s, after all, were Aladdin and The Lion King). So Rapunzel was re-named again; this time given the unpromisingly sterile name Tangled, under which it was finally released. By the beginning of 2010, months before the film's committed starting date, it was too late to massively rejigger the plot - which was as old-school as any Disney film had been since the early '90s - but the admen did their very best to pretend they had, stressing the film's male lead and all the snotty modernist humor they could take out of context in what were surely among the most ill-considered and inappropriate trailers in several years.

http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2010/11/disney-animation-its-warm-and-real-and.html

I really enjoyed Princess and the Frog

Couple of Tangled songs were pretty great, I really dig the opening, and the film wasn't BAD. But it felt like in the endless to-and-fro process of finding a visual style and other technicalities they lost some of the movie's character. It's the best traditional Disney movie in quite a long time, but it lacks warmth, the character are uninteresting, it's too innocuous. I'm happy it was a straight-up Disney tale and not an ironic smirk, though.

Lantern scene was amazing.

enjoyed: Kung Fu Panda, Surf's Up

decent enough: meet the robinsons, bolt

disliked: shrek, final fantasy, happy feet

how did they get away with this?!: beowulf

score on HTTYD is pretty classic and affecting in that Star Warsy epic theme type of way - which is rare these days. should have won the oscar imo.

I have seen way too many of these given that I don't have kids. Will probably vote Dragon, but also enjoyed Cloudy, Robots (ish), Despicable Me

also I think Megamind was OK but it's kind of blurred into Despicable Me in my head what with being a less funny take on the supervillain-as-protagonist idea

I haven't seen 9 and it looks promising; maybe I'll watch it before the poll closes, as long as mr spacecadet doesn't realise the voice is Elijah Wood

otm about the horse and the chameleon being the best thing about Tangled by some distance

I have only seen Shrek and Antz from this list (and yet i've seen all the Pixar films). Not much of a choice but i despise Shrek so it's gotta be Antz.

[tangled]'s just really charming and snappy and fun with some of the best-animated CGI humans ive ever seen (pixar has yet to really crack this nut outside of maybe ratatouille)

yeah i was surprised by how much i enjoyed tangled, songs were a little forgettable but it was a good movie.

how to train your dragon is probably the best of these ive seen but i liked kung fu panda & hoodwinked ok, both had solid lols.

liked a lot of films on this list, especially:

over the hedge (best comedy animal movie of '06. steve carrell's squirrel ftw)
flushed away (miss the claymation, it's no chicken run, but still an entertaining ride)
bee movie (thought i'd hate this due to lack of seinfeld love, but it was pretty damn funny)
horton hears a who ("expanded" and sappy, but still the best seuss adaptation since the old grinch cartoon)
monsters vs aliens (mostly for the 3D and the 50-ft woman)
cloudy w a chance of meatballs (GREAT! my vote)
how to train your dragon (GREAT! runner up)
despicable me (bugged me at first, but dug it on a rewatch)

I liked Kung Fu Panda 2 a lot (in 2D) and Tangled a lot (in 2D). And ...Dragon, too. Plus the totally forgotten mo-cap Monster House. But Happy Feet and in particularly the clever Surf's Up are underrated, due to penguin prejudice, I imagine.

this is not very likely but i'm really hoping the Shrek movies get zero votes, i really hate those. i remember having so many arguments with a college roommate who thought Shrek had better looking animation than Pixar.

am watching HTTYD tonight. I've only seen four or five of these, so maybe I'll watch a few of the better sounding ones & put off voting for a little while.

Not sad that Igor isn't on this list as it is the worst movie I've seen in the past five years by a stinking, shitty mile.

yeah coraline was largely stop-motion, tho it might have been aided by cgi. according to wikipedia they hired someone specifically just to knit eensy sweaters for the clay puppets.

i'm with some dude. After the second Shrek I realized they were Pixar's dark half and I swore I'd never see one of their cash grabs again. then I reluctantly caught up with Kung Fu Panda on dvd and my head exploded.

is anyone going to stan for ga'hoole on this thread

Coraline was stop-motion.

http://wpsmedia.latimes.com/image/backlot/2008/9/15/Coraline_teresa_drilling/Coraline-633.jpg

They did smooth together the little joins in the character's faces with computer effects. They tried to make as much of the stuff in it by hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVOAq__q9-8

iirc Corpse Bride was more computer-enhanced than Coraline but don't ask me to explain how.

haha xp!

I voted Ga'Hoole btw.

good:

how to train your dragon
rango
monster house
tangled
cloudy with a chance of meatballs

would cars walk with this if it were on the ballot?

nahhh

good, just checking

I have seen...Shrek and Final Fantasy. Will vote for neither.

9, i think, but i was pleasantly surprised by all of tangled, 1st ice age, cloudy with meatballs and despereaux

want to see how to train your dragon, haven't heard a bad word yet

1st time i saw shrek i thought it was great, every other time that scottish accent has hit my ears since, either in catching the original again or in any of the sequels, it's like nails/blackboard.

btw on the box office rankings of computer animated movies, Pixar has spots 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 23 and 27. biggest non-Pixar non-Shrek movie is, kind of surprisingly, Despicable Me: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=computeranimation.htm

Isn't that ... accurate?

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, June 11, 2011 6:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

is it? well there you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IQcMeNh7Hc

xp Worldwide, Toy Story 3 is no. 1 grossing animated feature. Then Shrek 2.

9 had some great animation/design, and an interesting premise, but for some reason it never quite measured up to it's potential.

― textbook blows on the head (dowd), Saturday, June 11, 2011 6:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

9 felt to me exactly like an experimental 15 minute short that was blown up to feature length and suffered for it

― (.づ☀‿☀)づ ~da post-modernist struggle~ (.づ☀‿☀)づ (Princess TamTam), Saturday, June 11, 2011 6:39 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

fwiw i don't disagree w/ these posts, but i did like it and the premise/look went a long way for me

i dno't even remember 9 being in theaters. I remember seeing a commercial for it and a trailer maybe once?

didn't it have the misfortune of coming out just before "Nine" ?

yeah they came out 3 months apart, which was very weird. 9 did moderately well at the box office, opened at #2 behind a Tyler Perry movie.

fwiw i don't disagree w/ these posts, but i did like it and the premise/look went a long way for me

Yes, totally, for me too - I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I just thought it had more potential.

gonna vote HTTYD but 9 and Horton deserve a vote

I remember the original Ice Age having some quality, and some good gay jokes

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Shrek Forever After has been on HBO this past week. Boy is it terrible.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Good tie at the top. Agree w these results.

Yes, two very good and very different films.

worst genre ever maybe

mr spacecadet reports that he has seen it already and it is "terrible" (later amended to "looked quite nice but had no plot")

― sambal dalek (a passing spacecadet), Saturday, June 11, 2011 2:56 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

yeah, a bit shocked by all the 9 love itt. complete waste of potential.

lol @ 3 votes for final fantasy the spirits within

i guess that was the most obvious lol vote? i mean were they serious?

hey, ebert gave it three-and-a-half stars

Cloudy w a Chance of Meatballs is superb. But sad to see no votes for the surprisingly sharp and well-constructed Hoodwinked.

I though that Cloudy went on maybe 30 minutes too long. Even my daughter kept asking me when it was going to be over. Dragon has heart, though.

ebert gave final fantasy one of his "there are new places in this film -- new kinds of places" reviews.

I though that Cloudy went on maybe 30 minutes too long.

Agree that it might overstay its welcome, but the animation and voicework was good enough to forgive that imo.

will someone please tell me the title of the song that goes "I like to move it move it"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YcXEBU0Uac

Of course it's Will.I.Am. My daughter walks around singing more Will.I.Am songs than even Taylor Swift songs, yet she has no idea who the former is. As far as she knows, he just writes all the Kidz Bop songs.

the will.i.am is a cover, the original by Real 2 Real was a chart hit in 1994:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyx4v1QFzhQ

i watched How To Train Your Dragon and i dunno, it was good but i don't really get all the love -- wasn't especially funny and i didn't really care for the look of the whole thing

lol @ 3 votes for final fantasy the spirits within

― little dieter wants to FUCK (Princess TamTam), Friday, 17 June 2011 00:40 (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i guess that was the most obvious lol vote? i mean were they serious?

― Mr. John Scatman (some dude), Friday, 17 June 2011 00:55 (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my vote was real in a 'bestleast worst movie i've seen on this list'. it truly is a beautiful film to look at, much like avatar, even if what inside is actually a dung heap, much like avatar. would not watch again, but will happily vote for it over shrek 3.

yeah maybe it is good, i just got scared off by the uncanny valley effect

it truly is a beautiful film to look at, much like avatar, even if what inside is actually a dung heap

you don't think this balances out more as criticism?

Delgo's got a competitor: Foodfight!, with a supposed $65 million budget; made less than $100,000 in theatres.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/supermarket-brands-sponsored-case-file-34-foodfigh,93033/

And there's a viewer-annotated version on youtube.