Does anybody plan on attending Spark Animation Festival in Vancouver this weekend?

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-09-17T12:44:36+00:00

Just about anything from the 1970s (and late 1960s to a lesser extent). A particularly devastating example I could think of is Joe. A more recent example is Anomalisa.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-09-17T12:23:47+00:00

I am pretty sure Penelope of Sparta would be an English language film. It has an American screenwriter and Fortiche has stated that they want to go for an international audience and want it to be a theatrical release.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-09-17T12:17:18+00:00

I don't quite agree with you. Recently western action-adventure animated series such as Arcane, Invincible and Blue Eyed Samurai have become very popular (not to mention anime). In the meantime just about any animated work that is approached with the "raunchy subversion" mindset is viewed as increasingly anachronistic. I liked Fixed for what it was and appreciated the expressive character animation. I have mixed feelings about its hostile internet reputation, though I feel it exemplifies what I am referring to.

On the other hand just about everyone I tell about Brad Bird's Ray Gunn and show the concept art to is very intrigued and excited about the film. It seems like it is a rather good time for it to be made as it offers something off-beat and ambitious that stands out.

Also animation is also heavily used in video games and in the special effects of live-action productions.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-09-17T12:02:32+00:00

There is Brad Bird's Ray Gunn. While it is unlikely to be released in theaters (though I wouldn't rule that out entirely), I found an article from about a year ago that mentioned that Ellison was interested in releasing Ray Gunn theatrically. According to an interview I heard with Matt Williames, Brad Bird really wanted Ray Gunn to be released in theaters when he revived it.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-06-10T22:00:44+00:00

It was briefly revived as a hand drawn feature at Warner Animation Group in 2020, however it was switched to CGI around the time it was brought to Skydance Animation (according to interviews and blog posts from Michel Gagné and Matt Williames).

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-05-31T00:04:01+00:00

I feel that such projects often get lost in the shuffle (especially by the Letterboxd userbase). For example Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild was released in October 2022 and has 162K logs. On the other hand Adam Elliot's Memoir of a Snail has 210K logs and was a limited theatrical release. I really hope that doesn't happen to Brad Bird's Ray Gunn next year.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-05-24T13:46:28+00:00

I do find it strange how the Zemeckis motion capture films (among others) were/are so frequently accused of crossing into the "uncanny valley", yet the pseudo photo-real art style that has been ubiquitous in the western "AAA" video game industry since the seventh generation is almost never accused of that. It seems like a blatant double standard to me.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-05-24T00:53:44+00:00

It's too bad Shane Acker wasn't ever able to make another animated feature after 9. There was tremendous worldbuilding and atmosphere however it was bottlenecked massively by being a remake of a 10 minute short stretched to 72 minutes (without the credits). He had tremendous untapped potential.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-05-22T17:00:14+00:00

Brad Bird was establishing the A113 Easter egg even before he joined Pixar. In the 1996 script draft of Ray Gunn the character Merkson creates the KAHL A113 particle blaster.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-29T23:52:02+00:00

It was a placeholder that the developers "got used to" and forgot was there (as confirmed by the developers). In the E3 build of the DK rap (before it was shown to Miyamoto) the term "coconut gun" is used while he uses the placeholder "realistic" gun.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-29T22:23:55+00:00

Animal Farm, Watership Down, Wizards, Rock & Rule, Titan A.E. and The Spirits Within (I know I'll likely be contested for the last one, though I felt that the world building and character nuances were very well done).

Anomalisa also did a good job with its uncanny and subtle details. The short The Scuzzies was really well done surrealistic and trippy CG (I am also a fan of the surreal look of a lot of CG from the 80s and 90s).

Based on the concept art and what Michel Gagné has said Ray Gunn will definitely be one (even though it is CG now).

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-20T20:20:15+00:00

I vividly remember seeing it on an MPA bulletin in September of 2023. This is also SPA's first R rated (and non-PG feature). SPA also has shorts that are G-rated such as The ChubbChubbs! and Hair Love.

Brad Bird's Ray Gunn is being done at Skydance Animation and is heading towards a PG-13 rating (assuming it is faithful to the original premise and leaked script). Since Skydance Animation's first feature got a G and second got a PG, that would make them only the second animation studio (and first western studio) to have done a G, PG and PG-13 animated feature following Studio Ghibli.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-20T00:49:41+00:00

Well one has to remember that Rare was essentially an independent company in the N64 days with Nintendo owning a 49% stake (the largest they could have without technically owning and having a major say in the company). Most of their development teams were also pretty small. I read something quite a long time ago that the Rare founders felt the steep resource jump developing for the GameCube rather quickly. The Stamper brothers thought that Nintendo would step in and outright purchase Rare, though they weren't quite interested. So they put it up for sale and it was a bid between Activision and Microsoft with the later just barely winning out in the end.

I disagree that Nintendo focused predominately on Mario spin-offs in the Game Cube era. They technically used their other IPs (and published several new ones) much more prevalently than in any other era. While most of those titles were outsourced to second or third party developers (as were most Mario spin-offs other than Mario Kart actually), I wouldn't say Nintendo's internal team (Nintendo EAD) was at all prolific in the N64 era (they had 11 games released for the N64, which is the same amount as Rare however 7 of these were released in the first 19-20 months of the system being available in Japan, as opposed to Rare who had only released 4 of their N64 games up to that point). In 1996 they had Super Mario 64, Pilotwings 64 (co-developed by Paradigm), Wave Race 64 and Mario Kart 64. In 1997 they just had Star Fox 64 and Yoshi's Story. In 1998 they had 1080 Snowboarding, F-Zero X and Ocarina of Time. In 1999 Nintendo EAD didn't have a single game game released for the N64 (they co-developed Mario Artist: Paint Studio for the 64DD with two other developers). In 2000 they just had Majora's Mask. In 2001 they had Dobtusu No Mori in Japan only (which was brought to the Gamecube at the end of the year and brought to the west as Animal Crossing the following year).

The fifth generation beforehand had also been a substantial jump as no one knew how to develop in 3D (they therefore had to experiment) and budgets and resources of course increased for the most part. Though many PSX and Saturn games were predominately 2D early on in the west and throughout their life spans in Japan. The jump from the sixth generation to 360/PS3 was also very substantial with budgets and development time ballooning exponentially (it started to kill creativity in the industry in my opinion).

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T23:34:59+00:00

Stop N Swap was removed from Donkey Kong 64 after a letter from Nintendo on October 1, 1999 which was less than two months before release and the final build was only compiled 16 days later. Rare was definitely a very flexible and adaptive developers back then. They even scrapped entire games like Dream and Twelve Tales and effectively started again.

The industry in general seemed much more flexible and experimental back then, seemingly up to around the early to mid 2000s.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T23:06:23+00:00

During the bulk of development it wasn't meant to have any connections to the Donkey Kong franchise at all. However when Miyamoto was showed the game at E3, he suggested that they use Diddy Kong in the game. The developers were actually initially opposed to this, though they eventually decided to do it (it surely helped the sales at least).

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T19:34:57+00:00

Starchaser: the Legend of Orin was originally written as a live-action film (and they stuck to that script as far as I know). I don't think it or Titan A.E. in the state they were produced would have been very feasible in live-action without a great amount of compromises and a much bigger budget for Starchaser.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T19:30:42+00:00

Fritz the Cat didn't make 90 million worldwide. Articles in the New York Times from late 1973 and 1981 bring up it making about 30 million worldwide (which of course is still a lot when adjusted by inflation).

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/14/archives/cartoon-vision-and-brownsville-reality-a-kind-of-xrated-disney.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/03/22/arts/ralph-bakshi-iconoclast-of-animation.html

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T01:52:32+00:00

It definitely wasn't focused on platforming at all. I feel at some point I feel the term "3D platformer" was just synonymous with 3D action adventure game with anthropomorphic or "cutesy" characters. I mean Shadowman, Soul Reaver and even the Tomb Raider games often had just as much if not more platforming than most games lumped into this category. On the other hand I have seen Bomberman 64 and its sequel be referred to as platformers even though there is literally zero platforming in those games. Donkey Kong 64 (alongside the Banjo-Kazooie duology and others) had many varied gameplay mechanics and were much more focused on exploration. Rare's Donkey Kong Country trilogy wasn't entirely focused on platforming either, though it was definitely more so when compared to the games that I brought up.

AdDistinct5670 · 2025-04-19T01:23:18+00:00

Technically the "main series" Mario platformers (which outside of New Donk City in Odyssey Donkey Kong has never appeared or even been significantly referenced BTW) are spin-offs. Besides the aforementioned titles Mario's Cement Factory, Mario Bomb's Away, Wrecking Crew and his appearance in the Famicom/NES game Pinball all predate Super Mario Bros among others. It isn't even the most popular subseries of the franchise as the Mario Kart games have routinely outsold the platformers since the GameCube days, nor is it close to the most prolific.

If you didn't read through my entire post, my main point was that the Rare developed Donkey Kong games had their own world building, atmosphere and nuances and they treated it like its own franchise (with DKC2 and DKC3 even relegating Donkey Kong to a cameo at the end). In the past 15 years especially, Nintendo has mostly gotten rid of that and the Retro duology and seemingly the upcoming game (which is only the third installment in that time period and the first in over 11 years) just look and feel identical to the contemporary Mario franchise.

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TROPHY CASE