Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It's been Animation Week here in the Ol' Homestead. (With a three-year old present, in a very real sense every week is animation week.) Besides the new Veggie Tales movie, new additions to our video library for Christmas included Monsters, Inc. and Ice Age, both of which we've watched in the last two days. Ice Age is the kind of movie that, had it been released four or five years ago, would have been called "surprisingly good" -- that being back in the days when animation not bearing a Disney label was usually disappointing. Nowadays, though, it seems that the best animated films are coming from the non-Disney outfits. I find it interesting that the articles in the media pondering this phenomenon seem to concentrate on the quality of the animation, postulating that Disney no longer has a monopoly on quality animators. This is true; the "best and the brightest" are no longer guaranteed to be found working for Uncle Walt and Company. But it seems to me that the secret, as is usually the case and is equally usually ignored, is the writing.

Ice Age features the same kind of literate, quirky writing that used to dominate the Disney animated features but was almost never to be found in the non-Disney films, but has recently been more elusive. (Not that Disney's films are badly written, by any means, but lately they are not as crisp as they once were.) The film is a buddy picture, in which three prehistoric animals -- a sloth, a woolly mammoth, and a sabretooth tiger -- team up to carry an orphaned cave-man baby back to its tribe. It's not an earth-shakingly original story, by any means; what makes it work is the wit in the writing, in the same way that Shrek was such a delight. There are extinction and evolution jokes galore, including one scene involving dodo-birds that verges on full-fledged black humor. The voice-over work is first-rate, with Ray Romano and Denis Leary giving their characters excellent, but distinct, airs of weary cynicism to counter-balance John Leguizamo's sloth, who is the "lazy dumb one" in the film's unlikely trio of heroes. The animation itself is fine; the computer-drawn compositions aren't as fine or as detailed as the PIXAR films like Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., but the filmmakers are still able to give Ice Age a distinctive look and atmosphere.

The other big animation event was our attendance yesterday of an OmniMax screening of The Lion King. This is a perennial favorite in our home, and seeing it theatrically was a thrill -- especially so on the gigantic screen. (I do suspect, though, that it would have worked a bit better on a flat IMAX screen as opposed to the domed OmniMax screen, which resulted in some distortion at the edges of the frame.) The Lion King is one of those movies that I enjoy greatly despite its flaws, such as a few overly-preachy speeches at the beginning of the film ("OK, Simba, time for your lesson on the Environment....") and the voicing of adult Simba by Matthew Broderick, an actor I have not found particularly convincing in any role since he did WarGames when he was fourteen or something. The film's opening number, when all the animals come to pay tribute to the new prince, has always been stunning and was especially so in the large-screen format. I hope that more Disney films are "retro-fitted" for large-screen releases, and I particularly hope for Aladdin to be done this way -- although I suspect that certain sequences of that film, especially the magic-carpet escape from the Cave of Wonders, would cause some serious vertigo.