Midnight Ramblings

Wow! According to blogger, this is my 300th post!

I remember about two years ago, when I was reading the announcement about Ellen DeGeneris doing a voice in Finding Nemo. I was curious to the point of obsession about that, mainly because DeGeneris is one of those last people you'd think of to do a voice in an animated film. I've got a similar curiousity right now about The Incredibles, and View Askew mainstay Jason Lee doing the voice of the supervillain Syndrome. They've been keeping his voice out of the new trailer, so I guess I'll just have to wait until November. I finally saved it to my hard drive, so I've been watching that trailer over and over and over....

And when I grew tired of it, I downloaded the trailer for Shark Tale. Shark Tale is the next animated film from Dreamworks (the Shrek gang) and it comes out in October. It's a spoof of mafia films, only starring fish. Will Smith does the voice of Oscar, a small time hustler fish who rockets to the top of the underworld when people think he killed a mafia boss/shark. Something about the trailer seemed off.

Mainly because they've attempted to make the fish resemble the big name actors who do the voices.

I mean, Oscar looks like they grafted Will Smith's head onto a fish body. Angelina Jolie does a voice, and they made her character look like her. And Rene Zellwiger. And Martin Scorcese. Their fish counterparts are all made to look like them, and it destroys the illusion of being underwater. This is how CGI is going to ruin animation. They're going to start making the animated characters look like the celebrities who voice them and it'll bring you out of the story.

It reminds me of what Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles said: "In most animated films, they'll get a celebrity to voice the character, then hope what ever personality the celebrity brings carries over to the character. What I'm trying to do is create the personality first, then find the right voice for that personality."

And wow! It looks like one of Michael Moore's future projects might have lots of nasty things to say about Disney. In an interview with Moore at the Cannes film festival, Moore said that "[he has] a lot to say about Disney, and there's a lot that hasn't been reported." And the hunt for a new distributor for Farenheight 911 continues. The short list right now is Lion's Gate Films (who served a similar service for Miramax with Dogma), Focus Features (the indie and documentary arm of Universal), and Newmarket Films (who made a name for themselves when they distributed The Passion of the Christ).

Next Issue...Cat Tale