Horton heard
I just came back from the movies, taking my four-year old daughter and the slightly older neighbor's daughter to see Dr Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!. It's an excellent movie, and the animation is exceedingly fun to watch. I can highly recommend it, and the young ladies enjoyed it very much.
Even more relevant for me though was the combination of the movie and the other computer-animated features offered in the previews. If the Horton movie had not made it obvious yet, the previews for Ice Age III: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Pardon their paleontological ignorance!) and the Kong Fu Panda spectacle made it clear that computer-rendered 3d animation is now an understood problem and that the directors and their animators are pushing for dreamy looks and feels that give an other-worldly quality to the visual imagery. I remember an interview with the production designer of the eminently forgettable Flintstones going on and on about how difficult it was to take a 2D movie like a Flintstone cartoon into the 3rd dimension. The current artists are getting all of the benefits of pseudo-realism and scenes that one could not have even begun to imagine how to do-compare the observatory in Horton with the awkward precision of the clock-work in The Great Mouse Detective.
In short the field that was once dominated by Pixar with ease is now busy and full of well-done competitors. Are they nipping at the jumping table light's heels? One look at Wall-E suggests that this is not so. While Horton looks like a lusher version of A bug's life, the Wall-E preview indicates a level of control over light and ambient that is effectively realistic (apparently entirely on purpose). (How hard realism still is was amply documented by the latest Wachowsky brother vehicle, Speed Racer, whose cars look like nothing so much than matchbox cars. If three-year old car fanatics could have wet dreams, this would be it.) There were moments during the WALL-E preview when I thought I was really watching the first ten minutes of the Star Wars (= Episode IV), with its light-drenched, neon-flooded white-walled claustrophobic corridors.
Now if John Lasseter only let's Rapunzel survive.