Crisis In Cartoonworld

Animated movies are treated as cinema lightweights in terms of providing an entertaining experience for both children and adults. Not including the mostly brilliant Japanese anime, American cartoons are always surrounded with an air of novelty with their cutesy but cliché characters to draw kids amidst their mindless and hokey plotlines.

However, if done right (The Beauty And The Beast, the almighty Fantasia), animated movies are not merely a feast for the eyes, but are also capable of drawing realistic plots and high-brow storylines to impress even the harshest of critics. With the help of advanced technology used in film nowadays, animated movies can scale greater heights with its endless possibilities of providing entertainment to moviegoers of all ages.

Despite all that, we are still seeing shitty cartoons about animals saving their kind, and satirical comedies where the funniest part occurs while paying for the movie, not knowing that you’re wasting your $10 to something so crappy.

One of the biggest things that suck about the recent animated movies is their proclivity to be as mediocre as possible. Most of the major animated movies released these past few years (Happily N’ever After, Everyone’s Hero, Open Season, Over The Hedge, The Wild, The Ant Bully) have been considerable failures and enjoyed only a couple of days worth of success before fading away to movie oblivion, possibly due to their lack of breadth in the storytelling department. You are simply watching a collection of characters without a sense of purpose and passion just because their cute, fuzzy, and talking animals.

Only a handful of animated films have done it right, one of them being Ratatouille, perhaps the best animated movie since the Oscar-nominated French animation The Triplets of Belleville. As expected from Pixar, Ratatouille delivers with all the elements that made their previous works compelling and entertaining (with the exception of Cars), but only made even more striking with a fantastic musical score, chilling voice-acting (bravo, Peter O’Toole), and an endearing ending not usually seen in animated movies.

Still, the splendor of animation seems to have been lost and forgotten. No more are Sword In The Stone, The Fox And The Hound, Cinderella, and their ilk of animated movies that respects the art of captivating the audience with fine images and charming storylines.

Hopefully, someone will break the mold of Hollywood’s fancy for bestiality.