Board 8 > Board 8 Watches and Ranks Animated Movies 4 - The Results Topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

For this fourth incarnation of the animation genre, nine brave users watched 30 animated films of a wide variety, ranging from deep French art films to Chinese blockbusters to kids movies based on mobile phone apps. I hope it was a (mostly) enjoyable experience and you all saw some movies you liked that you would have never thought of seeing otherwise.

Anyway without further ado lets get right to the point.

The Rankers:

PrinceKaro
Inviso
Johnbobb
Silver_Ermine (Zigzagoon)
Red13n
Evillordexdeath
Plasmabeam
Suprak_the_Stud
Mythiot

The Movies:

Yellow Submarine (1968)
The Hobbit (1977)
Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
Waltz with Bashir (2008)
The Little Prince (2015)
The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
The Girl Without Hands (2016)
Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2017)
The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales (2017)
Early Man (2018)
Ne Zha (2019)
Marona's Fantastic Tale (2020)
The Willoughbys (2020)
Encanto (2021)
Flee (2021)
Ron's Gone Wrong (2021)
Sing 2 (2021)
Vivo (2021)
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022)
DC League of Super-Pets (2022)
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
Lightyear (2022)
My Father's Dragon (2022)
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Strange World (2022)
The Bad Guys (2022)
The House (2022)
The Sea Beast (2022)
Turning Red (2022)
Wendell and Wild (2022)

The Point Totals:

33
69
72
83
89
93
94
111
118
118
124
132
136
137
137
141
143
145
153
160
165
169
174
179
188
191
194
201
215
221

First ranking will be later this evening!

Wowza!

Vegas where are you I need my fix.

Disappointed (in myself) tag. If me not being motivated enough to watch the other half of the films is the reason The Last Wish doesn't win I will close my account.

One of my pokmon accounts that is

GenesisSaga posted...

Disappointed (in myself) tag. If me not being motivated enough to watch the other half of the films is the reason The Last Wish doesn't win I will close my account.

One of my pokmon accounts that is

Considering the difference between 1st and 2nd is over 30, I don't think your list would have made any difference on that front =p

oh geez, yeah, first place is far away from the rest, and I'm really not sure what it'd be

Yeah I didn't expect this level of domination again.

I dont know what is finishing where here at all.

Zigzagoon posted...

Considering the difference between 1st and 2nd is over 30, I don't think your list would have made any difference on that front =p

Sorry ermine i ruined everything.

Johnbobb posted...

oh geez, yeah, first place is far away from the rest, and I'm really not sure what it'd be

Im not surprised to see Strange World alone at the top

Given like, half the rankers are who we are, I would be surprised if number 1 isn't super obvious.

VEGAS IS BACK, BABY!!

For those of you who haven't gambled before, here's how this works:

• Simply post your prediction for the movie you think will be next to drop
• If you're correct, you win money based on the current Oddsboard (see below)

Vegas Odds on #30:

+500 Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
+700 Yellow Submarine (1968)
+700 The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
+700 Early Man (2018)
+800 Sing 2 (2021)
+800 Vivo (2021)
+1000 The Hobbit (1977)
+1000 Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2017)
+1000 Lightyear (2022)
+1000 Strange World (2022)

+200 ANY UNLISTED MOVIE (+2000 if guessed correctly)

Vegas Hall of Fame:

• 2010s Horror: Inviso
• ABCs of Death: Tom Nook
• Organized Crime: fortybelowsummer
• Satire: Pokewars

Angry Birds

Give me Sita or give me death.

early vegas odds are always interesting

money on angry birds

LMAO some of these predictions. ?!?

I'm going Full +10000 on Girl Without Hands because I expect you all to have made the correct decision.

Johnbobb posted...

early vegas odds are always interesting

Hahaha you always get me nervous when you say this... But things are gonna be very interesting this time because of the wide range of genres.

I'll guess Girl Without Hands alongside Ermine.

I like playing Vegas but I haven't seen a single one of these movies and haven't even heard of a lot of them.

I could always throw out some wild guesses but I'll probably wait until it's whittled down if I do

30. The Angry Birds Movie

Plasma: 14
Ermine: 17
Inviso: 22
Suprak: 26
Karo: 27
Evillord: 27
Red: 28
Johnbobb: 30
Mythiot: 30

Total: 221

Plasma: Enjoyed this more than I ever expected. The three core characters have solid chemistry, the humor hits at times, and the animation is smooth and vivid. Not a bad effort for adapting a mobile game into a feature-length story.

Ermine: I did not expect I'd be placing this movie this high! I fully expect this film to place in the bottom 5 and it probably deserves to go there but hey, there were actually a few enjoyable things in this film for me, at least compared to a few other films that I have below it.
The movie is an incredible SLOG to start and only really starts picking up once Red makes his new friends. Red and his friends have decent chemistry and are really what keeps this movie from being like bottom 5 for me as well. I dunno it's just a really inoffensive flick for the most part. Like, this isn't some shit like Minions are most Despicible Me movies where you want to rip your eyes out every second. There are a couple of funny moments, got a few chuckles. It could have been a hell of a lot worse, that's for sure.

Inviso: As of writing this write-up, Ive only watched six movies, and still, I feel very bad about ranking this as high as I have. The problem is that, as shameless of an advertisement/cash grab as this movie isat least it does feature a plot and structure that work like a movie should. Is it a GOOD story? Hell no. But you have a plot that has a beginning, middle, and an end, and characters that were at least meant to give a shit about, even if thats extremely misguided. That being saidits not great. Red is a fucking asshole the whole movie, yet he barely seems to grow or change, simply staying the same grumpy guy, only with the rest of the world growing to accept his grumpiness, so he feels less outcast as a result. But yeah, hes a complete jackass, but hes right about everything, so everyone has to go groveling to him to save the dayand then the back half of the movie turns into a big game of Angry Birds (Ive never actually played before, but I assume thats how it works). Its just really dumb and feels in the same vein as The Emoji Moviebut even thats too harsh, because this again followed logical plot progression.

Suprak: *no writeup submitted*

Karo: Yes, this is a feature length adaptation of the mobile phone app, because there is clearly a compelling story to be told about pissed off avian ammunition blowing shit up. Like, I can't imagine even people who love the game wanting to sit down and watch an hour and a half of story about these feathered freaks. It's an idiotic concept mitigated somewhat by a good cast who do their honest best to give characterization to characters who basically didn't have any previously.
So basically the story is an envoy of pig people land on bird island, and our protagonist immediately goes on a paranoid bigoted tirade against the newcomers... which turns out to be justified? What the fuck guys? Is this the message we want to be giving kids, 'people different from us are sinister and evil and will destroy our way of life... oh and they also want to eat our children'. That's got to be the QAnon stamp of approval right there.
Though the film is dubious throughout, it is the last third of the movie is when it becomes utter trash where all plot and logic is thrown out the window so we can smash birds into buildings for 30 minutes as the pig civilization is genocided off the face of the planet. Remember kids, violence solves everything and indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilians is a-ok so long as you are really really ticked off.
The production quality is on the midline of typical childrens' CGI movies, and it tries to make the best of the stupid hand it was dealt. But the messaging is just too deplorable for it to even be appropriate for the young audience that might enjoy the film, and its very existence makes me as angry as its feathered cast.

Evillord: I could've gone my whole life without watching the Angry Birds movie yet here we are. I mean this is one of the least adaptable licenses in pop culture, why would anyone make an angry birds movie? Oh yeah, money. Even the fact that they gave all the birds limbs, which is understandable but gets rid of an iconic aspect of their visual design (which is all they are, really), speaks to how it doesn't really make sense to try and turn such a simple, storyless game into a film. Still, there are two ways you can approach a challenge like that: use it as an excuse to go hog-wild with a creative idea and not care about following the license (like say, the Lego Movie), or just slap on a bunch of clichs and over-rely on "adult" jokes like having a character suggest "bird control" for a family with a lot of bird children. Or having one of the birds piss of a cliff for like a full minute. Of course this particular scene would've been gut-bustingly funny if it weren't for the fact that BIRDS DON'T EVEN HAVE A URINARY BLADDER, SONY, YOU FUCKING HACKS!!!

Red: An annoying bird with an anger problem teams up with a bunch of misfit birds to save their town of completely idiotic and ignorant flightless birds from a bunch of obviously evil pigs. No one in this movie has a brain. There is no redeeming characters here, the plot is atrocious and relies on believing every character is horrible. We can't decide on if the main character has an anger problem or if the whole town being morons has driven him insane. Best we could say is that the movie is partially saved by somewhat clever implementation of dumb mobile game mechanics into a terrible movie.

Johnbobb: hey that part where they just made loud random noises for like a straight three minutes that was super funny right

Mythiot: *no writeup submitted*

a deserving last place! but admittedly better than some of the last places we've gotten in the past

looking at you Pound Puppies

Johnbobb posted...

looking at you Pound Puppies

That wasn't the last place in that project, it was 80's MLP.

Boo

Yeah I figured Angry Birds would be a movie that everyone could agree was not very good, while most others might be able to muster at least one strong defender.

Evillordexdeath posted...

Yeah I figured Angry Birds would be a movie that everyone could agree was not very good, while most others might be able to muster at least one strong defender.

Oh there are a few on this list that I hope to NOT see defenders for!

PrinceKaro posted...

That wasn't the last place in that project, it was 80's MLP.

oh, well it shouldve been

80 mlp is worse than angry birds too though

Well even #30 had a couple mid placements. I think the next couple will have a similar distribution to Angry Birds, mostly bottom 5 with a few mid placements, and then you'll start to see films that are near the bottom on almost everyone's list but at least cracked the top 10 with one or two people.

Zigzagoon posted...

Oh there are a few on this list that I hope to NOT see defenders for!

100% chance you'll be disappointed

This one was actually a rewatch for me!

...I have kids, alright guys.

The more embarrassing thing to admit is I actually don't mind the sequel, at all. Like it is shockingly competent. My oldest watched that movie roughly 20 times during COVID quarantine and I'd actually say I'm nostalgic for it.

This one less so. Like...it isn't terrible. It is sort of replacement level kids animated film to me. The kind of movie they'd watch and I'd watch along for like ten minutes before going on my phone. This was the first time I really watched this one and you know what? It isn't the worst. It isn't good but it isn't like Emoji level egregious. The cast is shockingly good and this is from the era where Jason Sudekis was in everything and was pretty good in the everything he was in. I didn't hate it but I also wouldn't ever watch this again.

Johnbobb and Exdeath have nothing to be angry about after cashing in for $700 apiece. Amazing what JB can do when he's not betting on Not Another Teen Movie.

Vegas Odds on #29:

+500 Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
+650 Early Man (2018)
+800 Yellow Submarine (1968)
+800 Sing 2 (2021)
+800 Vivo (2021)
+1000 The Hobbit (1977)
+1000 Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2017)
+1000 Lightyear (2022)
+1000 Strange World (2022)
+1200 The House (2022)

+200 ANY UNLISTED MOVIE (+2000 if guessed correctly)

Vegas Leaderboard:
1) Johnbobb $700 (The Angry Birds Movie 700)
1) Evillordexdeath $700 (The Angry Birds Movie 700)

Girl without Hands. Again.

Lightyear

Are we doing Outliers this time? I'm excited that I'm currently winning (losing?).

plasmabeam posted...

Amazing what JB can do when he's not betting on Not Another Teen Movie.

the audacity

from here it gets hard, but I'll go Sing 2

plasmabeam posted...

Are we doing Outliers this time? I'm excited that I'm currently winning (losing?).

You got this, Plasma!

Oh wow, the film I put last actually got last! That's a first.

I'll admit that the animation is pretty and they did a pretty good job translating the game characters from simple balls to creatures resembling actual birds and pigs, and I chuckled at the "bird control" joke.

But man, this film was obnoxious. Couldn't stand a single character, (Red particularly fails at being a sympathetic protagonist) the jokes fell flatter than a badly aimed bird, (Did we really need that peeing scene that's an offense to both avian anatomy and good taste?) and it tries really awkwardly make the theme of them being "angry birds" into a message of "anger is good," which isn't entirely wrong, but fumbles it as awfully as possible.

PrinceKaro posted...

So basically the story is an envoy of pig people land on bird island, and our protagonist immediately goes on a paranoid bigoted tirade against the newcomers... which turns out to be justified? What the fuck guys? Is this the message we want to be giving kids, 'people different from us are sinister and evil and will destroy our way of life... oh and they also want to eat our children'. That's got to be the QAnon stamp of approval right there.
Though the film is dubious throughout, it is the last third of the movie is when it becomes utter trash where all plot and logic is thrown out the window so we can smash birds into buildings for 30 minutes as the pig civilization is genocided off the face of the planet. Remember kids, violence solves everything and indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilians is a-ok so long as you are really really ticked off.

I don't really buy this reading of the movie, since the pigs were technologically advanced colonizers rather than poor refugees, but it really didn't help that Red's only reason for distrusting the pigs for most of the movie was "they're weird and different from us," and it came out in 2016 when fearmongering about immigration was at its peak.

Knew I was forgetting something

Outlier:

Plasma: 16
Ermine: 13
Inviso: 8
Suprak: 4
Karo: 3
Evillord: 3
Red: 2
Johnbobb: 0
Mythiot: 0

Suprak_the_Stud posted...

The more embarrassing thing to admit is I actually don't mind the sequel, at all. Like it is shockingly competent. My oldest watched that movie roughly 20 times during COVID quarantine and I'd actually say I'm nostalgic for it.

Don't be embarrassed, the sequel is shockingly good. I honestly can't think of a more transformative jump in quality between franchise installments. Helps that they got Thurop Van Orman to direct it.

I'll stick with guessing Girl Without Hands again.

29. Sita Sings the Blues

Evillord: 12
Johnbobb: 21
Mythiot: 21
Red: 21
Ermine: 25
Inviso: 26
Plasma: 29
Karo: 30
Suprak: 30

Total: 215

Evillord: Animator Nina Paley contrasts her own breakup with her husband against the story of the Ramayana. There is definitely some cringe to be had in watching a white American in 2008 make the profound observation that a religious myth from a completely different culture, written thousands of years ago, doesn't conform to her personal beliefs about gender. On the whole though, I thought the film was fun to watch. It experiments with quite a few different low-budget animation styles and often plays around with just how sparse its animation is, using musical timing to accompanying jazz songs from the 20s. Sometimes it made me laugh just through the visuals, and the unscripted scenes where three "shadow puppets" discuss their differing memories and interpretations of the story are fun and chill. Its strengths wear out as the film draws toward the end, you've already seen all the different animation styles a few times, and the Annette Hanshaw recordings start to feel kind of obligatory since they retell events already covered by the other styles and start to happen really often. I like the idea of Nina juxtaposing her small personal story against a world-recognized religious epic, but the modern day narrative ends up feeling too under-developed to really let the viewer feel with Nina, because the sections that deal with her story are few, short, and far between.

Johnbobb: Sita is one of the most interesting films on this list, largely because it is so drastically different from anything else. There's a lot to criticize about it, not the least of which is the idea of a white woman making an entire movie to compare herself to a Hindu goddess, but it's nothing if not ambitious. Special note: I still really don't know how to fully separate the art from the artist (particularly in cases like this) but I tried to watch this as objectively as possible. That being said, 100% fuck Nina Paley and everything she stands for.

Mythiot: *no writeup submitted*

Red: Meet Sita, the character with undying devotion to her husband that will spend her entire life never learning that hes a fucking asshole. I'm not sure what intent they were going for here, there isn't a whole lot of messaging here other than "Sita is devoted stupidly and then gets eaten to prove what everyone should have been able to see already" but that is fine I guess. It is pretty horrible, interesting in a horrible way, but mostly horrible.

Ermine: The only slightly interesting thing about this film is when the three people are talking about Sita and the story itself. There are a few funny bits there and the dialog is fun. Maybe I have this too low because it's honestly not too offensive, but at the same time god I was bored out of my mind. It doesn't help either that I really didn't like any of the songs, that style really just isn't for me, and I didn't enjoy the art style either.
Also, I felt like the plot with the wife and the guy was awful and unneeded. It felt completely out of place and I hated it. Disgusting art style for these segments and it served zero purpose. I really don't get what they were going for here and it did nothing but drag this film down.

Inviso: This wasnt exactly my cup of tea. I dont know if the animation style (well, several of them) were just off-putting, or maybe the visuals described in the folklore lent themselves to being off-putting, but this just wasnt an entirely fun watch for me. Ill say in its favor, I appreciate the fact that the movie does a solid job of telling a mythological story for a culture that Im not familiar with. While I think they didnt need four different framing devices (and four different animation styles to accompany them all), I think the explanatory sections kept things simple for a western audience, and the stylistic choice of tying the story to bluesy jazz was well-executed. I dont know if the interstitial scenes added much in regards to these two, as they were more straight-forward narrative, which really added to a sort of choppiness to the movies plot. Also, the poorly-animated modern-day story? Wasnt needed. Not at all. You couldve cut that and lost nothing from the film, in my opinion. So yeah, this was an okay plot, but just not entirely for me. Also, it didnt need an intermission break. Its less than 90 minutes for fucks sake.

Plasma: I can appreciate what the writer was trying to do here. Juxtaposing the goddess story of tragic romance with a contemporary story of tragic romance isnt a bad idea, but I hate the execution here. Too much wacky commentary, too many obnoxious songs, and too many intermissions (one is too manyand in a <90-minute movie? Cmon.).

Karo: Ok, so this is where someone thought a jukebox musical about the Hindu Ramayana with vintage American music was a good idea, and I hope they can find help for their mental illness.
So the main story sections are narrated by a trio of Hindu gods or whatever that can barely even remember their own religion, and every line that comes out of their mouths makes me want to punch something. Stuck in between these are scenes where Sita randomly sings songs from this white American girl from the 1920s, and also a bunch of stuff about the director venting about her love life which is supposed be analogous with the story of Sita but in reality there are really no parallels other then both of them having husbands that didn't pay them enough attention. It has this weird pseudo-feminist message that is basically just hey did you know old religious stories are just so sexist? Ha-HA! Well, gee no shit Sherlock, they are over 2000 years old.
There is just this sense of mean-spiritedness that permeates the whole movie as the director mocks a religion that has no connection to her culture or upbringing just for shits and giggles, and spews passive-aggressive hatred towards the whole male gender just because her relationship ended with her getting dumped (this may or may not have had something to do with her advocating for the genocide of the entire human race, but I digress).
The songs in the film are okay, and will certainly be enjoyed by those who like old-timey music, but the informational parts of the movie are presented in a way that is boring as a textbook and the plot is not only as thin as a Mario game, but pretty much IS just a Mario game. Like seriously, just imagine all the characters as their Mario universe analogues and you wont be able to unsee it.
But the real problem lies with the animation, which is so cheap and half-assed that it makes South Park look like the Disney Renaissance. Everyone is an awkward cardboard puppet with jerky cycling movements that are repeatedly copy pasted throughout the film, sometimes even multiple times on the same screen. Mind you, and that is when the characters even move AT ALL. Because sometimes everyone just stands around with only their mouths and eyes moving like Chargeman Ken or that old Spider-Man cartoon.
What uniqueness the style has gets old by the time Sita is done with her first song, and nothing really changes for the rest of the film save for a small scene a little over halfway through where some very interesting things were going on visually. But a mere 3 minutes is not enough to counteract an hour of dull repetitive dreck that often feels like someone tried to submit some of Weebl's meme Flash animations to a film festival as a joke and it accidentally got accepted.
There is nothing to sing the praises of here, only an extremely pretentious art film with a little musical appropriation and a lot of cultural appropriation.

Suprak: *no writeup submitted*

Outlier:

Evillord: 20
Plasma: 16
Ermine: 17
Inviso: 11
Red: 10
Johnbobb: 8
Mythiot: 8
Suprak: 5
Karo: 4

Idk why I didn't predict that one, I knew that was going to be bottom tier

Ps: fuck Nina Paley again

Wow, if you all hated Sita this much, you would absolutely loathe Nina Paley's other film, Seder-Masochism, which is basically a crudely animated Spotify playlist that tries to comment on vast amounts of history and Jewish religious tradition and can't say anything more profound than "men bad."

That said, I did find Sita Sings the Blues somewhat charming, although the rapturous reviews from when it first came out are pretty baffling. I won't deny that Paley is a talented animator and it's pretty remarkable that she did this mostly single-handedly. The film works best when it's sardonically retelling the Ramayana with old blues music and is at its worst when it's stretching to tie its ancient myth to Paley's personal life. Say what you will about Harry Potter but at least the monstrous bigot who created it had the decency to stay in the background.

That's all.

I just looked up this Nina Paley person, and yeah...definitely sheds a new light on the film that makes it even grosser in retrospect. Like, I didn't get the point of the modern day sequences and thought this was made by an Indian director...so learning this is some white woman trying to make connections to her life (while mocking the Indian culture, given the tone of the film)...not a good look at all.

after reading up on Nina Paley I had sympathy for her husband running away to India

Wow The Angry Birds Movie is one I actually watched back when I believed I could complete an entire ranking for this project. I ended up actually enjoying it more than I thought I would (of course, I thought I would enjoy it none so there's that). Of the 15 I watched, I ended up ranking it...

12. The Angry Birds Movie

Please enjoy this brief writeup I'm making up off the top of my head:

What can you really expect from a movie made to promote a flash in the pan game that was already past its prime by the time it even hit theaters? Well apparently you can expect a fun, if bit brain dead popcorn flick you can use to distract your kids with for 80 minutes and maybe get a chuckle or three to escape from you in the process. I was honestly impressed the writers of this film managed to take a handful of characters with a sole personality trait: angry, and manage to craft them into creatures that feel like actual people, and yes the irony of colorful cartoon birds feeling like real people has not been lost on me. Was it the most nuanced take? Absolutely not, but over the course of the movie I did manage to sympathize with Red and his inability to fit in even amongst his own kind due to his anger management issues. Apparently the movie actually did well enough to get a sequel that I also didn't see in theaters so maybe eventually I'll check that out too. Who am I kidding? I wasn't even motivated to watch Sita Sings the Blues, ain't no way I'm watching something with a 2 in the title!

Guessing Girl No Hands again. Come on you guys.

Sticking with Girl Without Hands as my Vegas guess as well. I'm trusting Ermine's read of the situation.