Messages

Speaking of cars again. It really grinds my gears when a car is closing in on you at night and don't switch off the full headlight (not sure what the name for that is in english. Driving beam?) removes your vision completely!

Speaking of cars some more, it grinds my gears that some people have their headlights on when it's a bright and sunny morning...

Are they Volvos, by any chance? I'm sure I'll be corrected but I heard Volvos always have their headlights in because they are from Sweden, where the sun don't shine.

To be clear, Volvos don't have always-on high-beams, because that would be insane.

Actually, what they have are always-on "daytime running lights", which have been mandatory in Sweden for almost 40 years (and for decades in the rest of the Nordic countries, as well as Canada), a rule that has recently been adopted all over Europe. It used to be that manufacturers could choose whether to add separate lamps or just always leave the low-beam lights on (which I guess some Volvos did?), but under the new rules it has to be a separate set of lamps.

And this is a good thing, because lights improve visibility and safety even in daytime, as long as they're not excessively bright.

It's hard to rationalise sometimes why you love a movie that you have loved since you were a kid - also whether you have read the book before or after seeing the movie makes a big difference.  I've always loved Phil Harris' voicing, Louis Prima's singing, the songs in general and the personality clash of Baloo and Bagheera.  Perhaps not the best if you look at it analytically, but it will always have a special place in my heart.

Sure, and as far as I can tell it's pretty well regarded (as demonstrated by the live-action remake); my opinion is probably in the minority. The film does have some great songs, strong character design, fine animation and beautiful backgrounds.

Nothing beats The Jungle Book for me!

That's one of my least favorite Disney animated features! I hate how it completely ditches all the coolest bits from the Jungle Book stories, how it's all just a long sequence of "and then Mowgli runs into some other wacky characters", the utterly underwhelming ending (with Shere Khan just running away after a short squabble) and the lazy recycling of the same animation over and over within the film (particularly egregious with Kaa and the elephants).

Lilo and Stitch did the sister dynamic before, and Brave was also about the relation between two female family members, albeit a mother and daughter.
Even the rejection of Prince Charming and critique of Love at first sight was done before in Enchanted (Just compare this clip to Elsa/Hans meeting!).

True, Lilo & Stitch deals with sisterhood, but Lilo and Nani are much further apart in age, so it becomes something quite like a parent-child relationship. The Frozen version is pretty different.

There are definitely some parallels to Enchanted, but I don't count (mostly) live-action movies like that as part of the Disney animation canon.

Was "The Princess and the Frog" in 2009 the last 2D animated movie Disney did?  (That one was very good, but I can't remember any others since then.)

There was a Winnie the Pooh movie after that. It flew under the radar for some reason.

I think you guys are overlooking some major elements of Frozen to say that there's nothing original in it. For example, that bit where one of the main characters goes pretty far down the road to become a villain, while the other tries to redeem her? You'll have to stretch quite a bit to find that in earlier Disney movies (Pinocchio and Lilo & Stitch probably come closest). The focus on sisterhood and rejection of Prince Charming are also firsts in a Disney movie, I believe.

My main beef with current Disney movies is simply that I wish they would go back to 2D animation, or at least animation with more of a 2D look. Ever since Tarzan and its Deep Canvas system, and then later with the Meander system used in "Paperman", they've had tools to do really nice painterly stuff that allows them to put hand-painted/drawn things into a 3D scene (though I didn't think "Feast" worked very well: basically just looked like cel-shaded 3D), but all feature movies have this cheap videogamey 3D look. I had hoped Moana would be 2D, since the Polynesian setting lends itself beautifully to more loosely painted backgrounds. Ah well.

I've read about the Hayes Code before, though I doubt that it's solely to blame since it applied to cartoons and live-action alike.
I'd say this also has a lot to do with media technology as well, since the introduction of daytime TV created a huge demand for family-friendly content, and the loosened restrictions of recent times goes hand in hand with internet becoming big and many people being able to share content without relying on studios and tv-companys.

The death of cinematic cartoon shorts came about largely because a Supreme Court antitrust ruling forced the separation of cinema chains from movie studios. In the old days, studios like Warner, MGM, Paramount, etc. owned the movie theaters and controlled the programming (so a particular cinema would show only films from a particular studio). The ruling meant they had to sell them off, and that there had to be an open market in deciding what each cinema would show. The court also started to enforce an earlier decision that it was illegal to "block-book" short films along with feature-length films (i.e. sell them as a package). This made them much harder to sell, since people didn't usually buy movie tickets for short films but for main features, so they were an obvious target for cinema chain cost-cutting (the movie business went into a major decline around this time). Within a few years they were all but gone.

[ONE DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE OTHER! THE US IS CLEARLY BOTH!]

People who say "The US is a republic, not a democracy." ONE DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE OTHER! THE US IS CLEARLY BOTH!

Holy Motors?

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Along the same lines, the whole 'First world problems' thing is starting to get old.

Annoyed at Internet meme. #FWP

Murderball?

Jason and the Argonauts?

The Long Ships?

[as]

Here's a petty pet peeve: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" is fine as a general expression of fed-up-ness, but it's wrong as a quote from the movie Network. It should be "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

"Entschuldigung, are you scammers? Ja/nein"

Eastern Promises?

Pan's Labyrinth isn't with Nazis. The bad guys there are Falangists.

The Great Escape (regular bike version)?

Dazed and Confused?

Sure is!

Errr... no. How about this?