Sunday, March 12, 2006

Oscar again



In my previous post I had commented about the Academy award going to Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit instead of the two other competitors,namely Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's moving castle.Recently I procured the dvd of Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and I watched it yesterday.Before I start talking about that I will point out two things.I had already seen Corpse Bride and I had seen around one-third of Howl's moving castle without any subtitles.So needless to say I did not have a very good understanding of Howls' storyline.But Howl's animation was quite simply breathtaking.During the oscars I was more or less sure that either Howl or Corpse Bride would win.I had also seen a 5 minute clip of Wallace and Gromit and didnt find it to be very interesting.So when Wallace and Gromit trounced both these contenders and took the award I was very disappointed.Now that I have watched it I can safely say that the decision doesn't seem so unfair now.You see,Wallace & Gromit had something which I thought Hollywood cartoons had lost a long time back.A healthy dose of fun filled adventure.The great thing about this film was the non stop fun i had watching it.The jokes kept coming and coming(and not lame cultural references) and although admittedly the storyline was nothing unexpected(the twist being plain in sight) but that didn't stop it from being a non stop rollercoaster of fun(I also happened to find out that since this was clay animation,it took them 5 years to animate this film completely.Apparently a productive day would be when they could manage to get 10 seconds of usable footage.Thats a lot of hard work.After they had finished,their entire setup was lost due to a fire in the studio warehouse).Did i mention it was fun??I did??While the film wont make you roll over and fall off from your chair, you wont be able to wipe the grin from your face for more than 10 seconds. Corpse Bride's main theme was dark humour which most people won't appreciate in a cartoon.As for Howl,i may not know about it much but since it's a Miyazaki film,it can be safely said that it would have had a complex layer of plots.I can understand now why Wallace & Gromit would get more preference over those two.I was sure that Wallace & Gromit did not deserve the Oscar but now I am not so sure.I am willing to contend that the choice was extremely difficult.So Tamal says two thumbs AND both feet up!When you are down and out and need cheering up buy/rent this-this is just what the doctor ordered.

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