Cause celebre?!

Another day, another animated feature. Today brings us Sony's Open Season, about a bear (voiced by Martin Lawrence) and a "half-doe, half-buck" (voiced by Ashton Kutcher) trying to fend off hunters in the forest. Very nearly sounds like a pitch meeting, doesn't it? Personally, I'm not terribly interested in this film. It's not that it looks bad. It's just...I don't really care. However, it does serve an interesting purpose: it allows me an opportunity to riff on animated films of the present.

For an animated feature to be made in today's climate, the following things are apparently needed:

1) A voice cast full to bursting with the biggest names in showbiz. Granted, a lot of these people are used to acting with expressions, body language and the occasional accent, but are their voices capable enough? Who cares? It's not like people go to see these movies for their voice work. As long as there are big names in the cast, that can make up for any other flaws. If worse comes to worse, you can always design the characters to look like the people voicing them.

2) Pop culture references. After all, who really needs character and situational humor when you can just throw in references to things that the characters couldn't possibly know?

3) Animals and various non-ambulatory things as characters. Humans as characters in an animated feature? Passe! Who needs people carrying on conversations when you have a baseball and a '78 Pinto chatting away? You've got kids to market to, you know?

4) Three letters: CGI. Ink and paint? The stuff of cave paintings! Look to the future, where computers can and will become the dominant technology. In fact, one could say that it already has.

5) A strong story, with heart, warmth...oops. How'd that get in there?

Okay, so maybe I'm being a bit facetious, but you look at some of the animated features of the last few years and, well, they do fit this criteria. I'm not saying that these things can't work. It's just that you have to be smart about it. Pixar is too obvious an example of a studio smart about this, so I won't offer anything further.

Dreamworks, on the other hand...well, their stuff needs to be more like Shrek or The Road to El Dorado (hands down, their best work) and less like...Shrek 2 and Shark Tale, which were more lazy than terrible, but still...

It was a joy seeing a traditionally animated feature this year, and while Curious George was a little too geared toward kids, it still made for an entertaining feature.

Out of all the features to come out this year, the best had to be Sony's Monster House, which featured a cast of humans (!), character humor and a good story.

Here's hoping for some changes in the animation field.