Of all the stories of Disney Feature Animation in the ’00s, one of the saddest to me is the fate of Chris Sanders – all the sadder because it is lacks drama or operatic tragedy, but is just a little example of the meanness and pettiness of corporate filmmaking. Sanders was a character designer on […]

The Blind Side is the kind of movie that by custom I absolutely hate, and I sort of vaguely, not at all to excess but distinctly and undeniably, enjoyed watching it anyway. That is your rave for the evening. It’s one of those movies that uses the phrase “based upon a true story” like a […]

Here are the facts: Peter Schneider, the President of Feature Animation at Walt Disney Pictures since 1985, and therefore the man who oversaw and to some extent engineered the successful execution of the one-film-per-year plan, was promoted to being president of the whole film division of the Walt Disney Company in 1999. At that time, […]

In adapting a text as well-worn as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to the screen, it’s not enough just to be faithful to the material and capture its essence; particularly when that task has been done so many times, sometimes quite well. It is occasionally the case that a producer will decide that the material […]

I’m skipping ahead. The actual entry at No. 39 in the Disney animation canon is the 2000 summer film Dinosaur, an ambitious and hugely expensive computer-generated imagery cartoon with live-action backgrounds that represents the studio’s first step into so-called 3-D animation that looked so awful to me back in the day that I still have […]

Piranha II: The Spawning may have been a wretched, cheap monster picture, but it had one benefit for the young first-time director James Cameron: it put his name out there, and got him in a position that any young filmmaker would have committed some of the most wicked sins to achieve, namely, he found himself […]

The official line is that the Disney Renaissance ended with Tarzan in the summer of 1999, for that film was the last outstanding financial success in string of hits; it was also the last $100 million Disney picture for a while; and it is implied often though not always stated outright that Tarzan was also […]

Customarily, it is an unpromising sign when you do not know how to correctly punctuate a title, because it has so many different parts jangling about. My current operating guess is The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, which runs afoul of rules about serial colons, but then again, nobody – not even the […]

1999 was a rather special year for English-language cinema, an annus mirabilis in which every new weekend seemed to bring a new film that threatened to redefine the language of the art form or simply to perfect the language that already existed. Of course it wasn’t really that packed with revolution film masterpieces, but even […]

Held back from an intended 2008 Oscar season release for the usual vague “editing” reasons, director John Hillcoat and writer Joe Penhall’s adaptation of the highly-fêted Cormac McCarthy novel The Road has finally revealed itself to the world, and as expected, “editing” turns out to be a code word for “we tried really hard to […]

The Florida arm of Walt Disney Feature Animation opened in 1988, to provide additional support for the massive production of The Little Mermaid. But its true purpose was as a tourist attraction (it certainly didn’t make things more efficient to split the work load between the two coasts!), one of the centerpieces of the brand-spanking-new […]

With Fantastic Mr. Fox, the notoriously fussy Wes Anderson has I think found the ideal medium for his stylistic preoccupations, not just for his sake but for his audience’s. I know that I’m not the only person to love both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, only to find The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and […]