FINDING NEMO (2003)
Among the animation directors whose names are on the Pixar Hall of Fame, Andrew Stanton's may not have quite the same degree of luster as that of John Lasseter (who made the Toy Story pictures and A Bug's Life and who is now, oh yeah, the fuckin' head of Disney animation) or Brad Bird (who even before directing The Incredibles and Ratatouille for Pixar had distinguished himself with The Iron Giant and the classic Amazing Stories episode "Family Dog"), but that can only be because his titles have been piling up slower. This year's Wall-E confirms that the wit and warmth of his little-lost-fish story were no fluke, and also that his plan seems to be to keep getting better. (Mention of his forthcoming Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation John Carter of Mars has been known to cause Screengrab writers to flap their front flippers together and lie down on the floor and spin around while going "Whoowhoowhoowhoowhoo" in merry anticipation. Is it any wonder that we don't get a lot of dates?) In director Eduardo Coutinho's remarkable documentary Playing, there's an amazing scene where an educated, middle-aged Brazlian woman tears up a bit while discussing the movie before cogently explaining that she sees it as a metaphor about her relationship with her own grown daughter.
CHICKEN RUN (2000)
This parody of The Great Escape and other military POW films (with gray, overcast English skies that serve as a memento mori) was the first feature from the mighty Aardman Animation studio, best known for Nick Park's films featuring Wallace and Gromit and other claymation shorts. (Park co-directed Chicken Run with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord. The project was reportedly seen as a test run for the more recent Wallace and Gromit feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: a way for Park and company to see whether their talents could sustain a full-length feature without taking a chance on tarnishing the W & G brand.) Not surprisingly, the jokes are stretched thinner here than in the shorts, which pop like firecrackers from beginning to end, but the project demonstrated that the sheer beauty of the visual craftsmanship of the claymation masters was enough to make up for that. The movie has a special historical interest now as the last recorded evidence of a time when Mel Gibson's brain cells were still happily alive and arranged in the desired order.
TWICE UPON A TIME (1982)
This experimental cut-out animation film, a sardonic sort of fairy tale with a cast that includes such improvisational comedians as Marshall Efron, Lorenzo Music, and Hamilton Camp, was executive produced by George Lucas in one of his periodic attempts to throw a lifeline to the independent filmmakers he'd known as an aspiring director and since moved past on the career ladder. It was directed by John Korty, whose '60s indies (The Crazy Quilt, Funnyman) once had a frisky reputation and are now very hard to find, with an assist from Charles Swenson, who credits as an animator include a section of Frank Zappa's 200 Motels and a movie version of Bobby London's scabrous underground comics character Dirty Duck. At its best, Twice Upon a Time is one of the rare movies that captures some of the termite-gnawing wisecracking feel of Jay Ward's TV cartoons, but it ran into problems getting seen at all: first the Ladd Company, which had the distribution rights, went bankrupt, and then Korty and producer Bill Couturié got into a pissing match over which dialogue tracks to use, which ended up costing it a steady life on cable TV and delayed its release to home video. It was finally issued on videocassette, but at this time no DVD release has planned. However, clips and audio tracks are all over the Internet, the movie's cult status having been greatly enhanced by both its unavailability and the fact that there are so many possible versions from which to choose, and to argue over. (The war over the dialogue tracks stems from the fact that the cast members were encouraged to make up their own lines, which resulted in some versions that are less family-friendly than others.)
THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (2003)
Sylvain Chomet's wildly funny, outrageously cariactured farce about an old woman's efforts to rescue her grandson from the clutches of the villains who use his bicycle-hardened calves to power their gambling den is the most imaginative animated entertainment to emerge from Europe in recent years. Grand in scale, meticulously detailed, weirdly suggestive, and deranged in the friendliest way possible, it's that rare picture that makes you wish that people still went to midnight movies. Chomet's next film, The Illusionist, an animated feature inspired by an unproduced screenplay of Jacques Tati's, is eagerly anticipated: Tati is something of a presiding spirit here as well.
SPIRITED AWAY (2001)
Rumors that this would be Hiyao Miyazaki's final film before retiring have since turned out to have been premature, but that doesn't make it any less of a career apotheosis and a superb capstone to his career. This ever-expanding fantasy about a little girl's passage to maturity while serving time in an alternate spirit world and looking for the opportunity to be reunited with her lost parents brings together elements from his previous epics (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke) and his smaller scale classics about the magic that co-exists with the beauty of regular life (Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro). As a puny Westerner, there are nuances and touches here whose full meaning I suspect that I will never fully grasp, and God knows that's my loss, but Miyazaki delivers more to audiences that can only half-understand his work than most filmmakers who draw you a scorecard while sitting in your lap.
Click here for Part One, Part Two, Part Three, & Part Four