AFTERTHOUGHTS (83)
THE NEW KID ON THE ANIMATION BLOCK

A film that I’ve been waiting on for quite a while now has finally been scheduled. Hoorah!
I’ve been waiting for it since it was bringing together two terribly talented fellows, Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick.
That film, if you haven’t already guessed, is Coraline.
I mean, one of Gaiman’s darkest pieces disguised as book for all ages, adapted for the big screen by the man who directed not just The Nightmare Before Christmas, but also the underrated James and the Giant Peach and Monkeybone.
Where do I sign up?

Scheduled for an Oscar-qualifying run late this year, Coraline will get a wide theatrical release on February 6, 2009.
It will be the first feature for Laika, an animation studio based in Portland, Oregon, which specializes in both CG and stop-motion feature films.
Laika (for which Selick is supervising director) is backed by Nike founder Phil Knight, who is estimated to be a billionaire nearly eight times over.
That much green is fueling not just Coraline, but also a number of other potential titles, including Here Be Monsters!, based on the Alan Snow books; Paranorman, by Coraline story chief Chris Butler, whose logline involves, “…a small town under a secret curse. Only a 13-year-old boy can keep the town from being overrun by zombies, but no one will listen to him”; and another original story concerning the origins of Halloween, by Selick and Open Season writer/producer, John Carls.


According to Laika VP of development acquisitions, Fiona Kenshole, Laika’s position in the burgeoning field of animated features puts it “…to the left of Pixar and to the right of Nightmare Before Christmas.”
That sounds like just the shot in the arm animation needs with the frightening preponderance of CG cartoons featuring cutesy talking animals gamboling about in achingly familiar fish-out-of-water plots.
Best of luck, Laika!
May the Nike swoosh be with you…

Parting shot: Among the voice talents for Coraline are Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Ian McShane, and the brilliant Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French as Miss Forcible and Miss Spink.
I say again, “Hurrah!”

(Coraline OS’s courtesy of moviesbythebook.com and dakotafanning.free.fr.)

reVIEW (47)
RENAISSANCE

Paris, 2054.
Young and extremely brilliant researcher Ilona Tasuiev is abducted, and her employer, the Avalon Corporation (“Your friend. For life.”) is desperate to recover her. Enter Lt. Barthélémy Karas, a cop only too willing to bend—or break—the rules to get the job done, and you have the basic set-up for Christian Volckman’s neo-noir animated film, Renaissance.
Executed via motion capture, in the stark contrast of chiaroscuro, this is one of those gorgeously-realized sci-fi futurescapes that pulls you into its environs with startling ease. The downside of that, of course, is that the narrative has to work doubly hard to be worthy of the production’s awesome visual palette.
To be fair, there is a story here, complete with cautionary underpinnings; I’ve long believed the best sci-fi stories are the cautionary ones.
Where Renaissance fumbles a tad though is the pacing of its narrative, which is slightly uneven, making its 105-minute running time feel vaguely longish. Still, if you’re patient with your cinema, Renaissance has a nice—if not sunshiny-happy—pay-off.
Renaissance is also guilty of servicing some of the genre tropes a little too slavishly; Karas getting involved with Ilona’s sister Bislane is both painfully predictable and achieved with an off-handed and almost insulting convenience. (Though the neat reversals pulled off by that aforementioned pay-off may arguably be more than enough to balance out the script’s more clichéd moments.)

And there is the matter of Renaissance’s voice cast.
Almost always, when it comes to a foreign animated film, I will insist on watching the English-subtitled version. (With a foreign live-action film, always.)
The English dubbing on Renaissance though, is exceptional, not at all displaying the overly theatrical—and in some cases, childish—flourishes you usually find in dubbed animation.
And there are notable names here, mind: Daniel Craig, Ian Holm, Jonathan Pryce, Catherine McCormack. The talent at the other end of the mic is top-notch, certainly worthy of Renaissance’s eye-widening visuals.

Ultimately, Renaissance may be slightly flawed, but it’s nonetheless an exceptional piece of animated sci-fi that furthered the cause of stylized storytelling in modern cinema, a wave that began with Kerry Conran’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and barreled on with the mainstream success of such entries as Sin City and 300.* (Closer to Renaissance’s animated home of course, are Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.)
Renaissance also won the Feature Film Award at Annecy 2006 and the European Fantasy Film Grand Prize at Fantasporto 2007, so that should count for something, yes?

* Fans of the digitally-created artificial environs of this brand of storytelling are advised to check out the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (review in Archive), and can also look forward to Frank Miller’s upcoming take on Will Eisner’s The Spirit, opening on Christmas Day 2008.

(Renaissance OS courtesy of impawards.com.)