Film : Up
The economy, grace and restraint of Up's four-minute "Married Life" montage, at the very start of the film, may alone be one of animation's finest achievements. At the peak of their flawless streak in the mid-00s, Pixar dared to follow that up with the tender, energetic and boundlessly adventurous story of Carl Fredricksen and Russell, the unlikeliest pair of South American explorers. Up is sillier and more committed to spectacle than some other great animated films, but it's told with Pixar's famously rigorous storytelling, along with precise animation that brings it all from perfectly cartoonish humans to dramatic vistas to roaring life.
Up is a story that couldn't exist outside of animation, with a flying house and talking dogs, but even the most realistic moments prove the value of the medium; Carl's weary movements through his creaky house, the vibrant colors the balloons cast on the ground, the cliffs of South America made that much more crooked and wild by being drawn. The film walks a taut line between fantasy and reality, so that the canine fighter pilots feel as important and authentic as Carl's grief. The emotional climax comes as the house is perched at the top of Paradise Falls the sacrifices and joys of marriage and age made powerfully literal.
Number #2
Film : Fantasia
The popular view of Walt Disney is that he was a pragmatist; even the recent quasi-biopic Saving Mr Banks, released by his own company, shows the animation legend handing out pre-printed autographs at his theme park. Yet at the height of his popularity, Disney set out to make a high art concert movie inspired by the abstract films of New Zealand artist Len Lye that would take the Silly Symphonies series of the 1930s to a place where "sheer fantasy unfolds". He knew the risks he was taking, telling the New York Times that "if someone didn't break loose with new things, the movies wouldn't be where they are today… Somebody's got to be a damn fool."
Even with today's resources the 1940 Fantasia is a remarkable undertaking, mixing the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Schubert and Beethoven with hand-drawn animation from his 700-strong team, using an innovative sound system Fantasound that would give the illusion of a full orchestra in the cinema. But Disney's plan was not for the music to accompany the images but the other way round, in perhaps the film's most extraordinary sequence we are invited to Meet The Soundtrack literally, the film's white magnetic strip gets its own surreal solo as it responds to various instruments.
This movement by movement approach made the studio's distributor, RKO, nervous, so Disney released the film in the roadshow fashion of the silent days, moving from city to city, which proved to be a costly mistake. Regular Disney fans didn't get the non-narrative aspect, and classical music experts hated its literal-mindedness. Over time, though, Disney's intent sank in; once known as his flop, it is now his high watermark. Indeed, its most famous section Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice isn't simply a great piece of 20th century populist art, it is also the apotheosis of its creator's thinking: whoever would have expected Uncle Walt to bring Goethe to the masses?
Number #1
Film : Waltz With Bashir
This extraordinary, hallucinatory animation by Israeli film-maker Ari Folman is the story of what he sees as his nation's willed amnesia at the Sabra and Chatila massacres during the Lebanese civil war. The "Bashir" of the title is Lebanon's internationally admired Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel who was engaged in a tricky diplomatic and strategic dance with Israel, appearing to connive at the Israelis' invasion of his country in 1982 to help drive out the Syrians and the PLO.
Gemayel was assassinated by pro-Syrian forces three months after Israel's invasion, but the killing was wrongly blamed on Palestinians. In the sinister atmosphere of fear, anger and revenge, Israeli troops helped close off the camps in Beirut's Sabra and Chatila districts to facilitate a horrendous retaliatory massacre by Lebanon's Christian militia: up to 3500 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered. Israel was not held directly culpable for this proxy bloodbath; its Kahan Commission accepted a partial or indirect guilt; and this, Folman suggests, is why the historical fact has never been entirely resolved or absorbed in the nation's collective consciousness, and is always threatening to break the surface of memory. It is evidently why he has chosen the medium of animation for the movie, digitally derived from live-action video like the Rotoscoping techniques of Bob Sabiston.
It starts with the director's appearance as himself: in middle age, having a beer with a guy who did military service in the Israel Defence Force with him. His friend tells him that he is plagued by a recurring dream about being pursued by savage dogs and says that he believes it has something do with the 1982 Lebanon war. The director himself realises that he has suppressed much of his memory of his own participation of these events. It is all a blur.
So he sets out to track down his old comrades, to ask them what they remember, and so the animation surreally assumes something of oral history and psychoanalysis as well as personal drama. They tell him bizarre and horrifying episodes which pulse out onto the screen: sometimes it is not entirely clear if these episodes were real, or if they are the traumatised dreams which are, however, nonetheless telling the dreamer something important.
And still the director does not know what he remembers about Sabra and Chatila or even if he himself was actually present. As his investigations proceed, he gets nearer and nearer to the truth, and the experience becomes more and more painful, and disorientating.
Waltz With Bashir appeared in 2008, seven years after Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which employed a similar animation technique; it did not become widespread or popular, like the style of Pixar and Dreamworks in their golden decade of digital animation, and it did not become a personal signature, like the "hand-drawn" work of the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. But it is distinctive and compelling and uniquely suited to a unique film.
Gemayel was assassinated by pro-Syrian forces three months after Israel's invasion, but the killing was wrongly blamed on Palestinians. In the sinister atmosphere of fear, anger and revenge, Israeli troops helped close off the camps in Beirut's Sabra and Chatila districts to facilitate a horrendous retaliatory massacre by Lebanon's Christian militia: up to 3500 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered. Israel was not held directly culpable for this proxy bloodbath; its Kahan Commission accepted a partial or indirect guilt; and this, Folman suggests, is why the historical fact has never been entirely resolved or absorbed in the nation's collective consciousness, and is always threatening to break the surface of memory. It is evidently why he has chosen the medium of animation for the movie, digitally derived from live-action video like the Rotoscoping techniques of Bob Sabiston.
It starts with the director's appearance as himself: in middle age, having a beer with a guy who did military service in the Israel Defence Force with him. His friend tells him that he is plagued by a recurring dream about being pursued by savage dogs and says that he believes it has something do with the 1982 Lebanon war. The director himself realises that he has suppressed much of his memory of his own participation of these events. It is all a blur.
So he sets out to track down his old comrades, to ask them what they remember, and so the animation surreally assumes something of oral history and psychoanalysis as well as personal drama. They tell him bizarre and horrifying episodes which pulse out onto the screen: sometimes it is not entirely clear if these episodes were real, or if they are the traumatised dreams which are, however, nonetheless telling the dreamer something important.
And still the director does not know what he remembers about Sabra and Chatila or even if he himself was actually present. As his investigations proceed, he gets nearer and nearer to the truth, and the experience becomes more and more painful, and disorientating.
Waltz With Bashir appeared in 2008, seven years after Richard Linklater's Waking Life, which employed a similar animation technique; it did not become widespread or popular, like the style of Pixar and Dreamworks in their golden decade of digital animation, and it did not become a personal signature, like the "hand-drawn" work of the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. But it is distinctive and compelling and uniquely suited to a unique film.
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