Freeza spent a long time writing the post below in last week's thread which should probably be left to die.
Moving it here so it doesn't get buried.
wait, how do you know I spent- *looks at time between posts* goddammit. I really need to learn how to type faster. Then again, it keeps my shitposting ratio down by a ton.
Honestly I went straight from user cp to that thread instead of checking for the new one. Probably should do that in the future.
I disagree with some of your points. There are still a lot of R-Rated films, and a good number of them still push the envelope each year. I think the major difference is that none of these films are Top 10 of the year material like they might have been in the 1970s or 80s. American Sniper was so surprising because we don't expect adult films (even if you consider that a sanitized adult film) to make blockbuster money any more.
Agreed, but that was kind of wrapped into "intellectual fringes", under the assumption those don't enter the BO very often. But just using the top 10 is a better metric to go by, obviously. I have not seen American Sniper though.
I also think that there have always been sanitized children's films with easy to digest messages. We just tend to forget a lot of them over time.
One of my favourite films as a little kid was the Original Land Before Time. The film is now 28 years old, but there's nothing in it that requires a child to think anymore than they would when watching Finding Dory.
Also fair, but it would take a lot of effort to compare this kind of movie specifically for each year. Especially with that particular franchise (and those like it) switching over entirely to home releases so it's very hard to assess how big and far-reaching that underground ocean is. I don't have kids, so I don't have an immediate insight into that.
But I also feel that the Don Bluth movies have a certain lack of efficiency to them, and that's not a negative point. Obviously being hand-drawn is a huge factor in that, but there is both space and time in them for something that is not a well-oiled efficient story progress shot. The sequence of flatfoot and his dying mother for instance would be waaaaay shorter today to not have kids wallow in the event (compare with the attack sequence in Finding Nemo, for instance). Except of course that this what happens in real life anyway. Death is heavy on the heart. A clean, short, efficient shot would never have that verisimilitude to life that filmmakers look for. So ironically a very efficiently delivered story can actually diminish the depths of that story, in my opinion (and going by that now removed interview with James Cameron, James Cameron with his two second longer cuts versus the average). You can often feel that in how clean the environments in CG movies are, where even though they have abundant details and denseness, they still are 'productive shots' in the sense that they are a little 'too' overdesigned. Dreamworks animations in particular are ridden with this disease. Like watching a pie-chart in an PowerPoint presentation in a boardroom. The kind of room you walk by and instantly know you should not enter it at any cost. Pixar tries to avoid this (particularly in Wall-E), but can never get away from it entirely because they have to be efficient in how they present their story. What I think gets lost in there is the mind's eye, the feel(-ing) of things if you will. Not a feeling that is given (productive shot), but a feeling that has to be found and can be multiple choice and multiple at the same time.
And that's where Roald Dahl stories are very different from other kids novels at the very least, and where I can maintain that when we grew up we were not yet entrenched in a continuous production of these types of movies, or its type of delivery / presentation. I didn't see Dahl movies, I read the books, including BFG where I believe the term 'BFG' was actually a plot element for the main child character to figure what it meant or get the giant to tell him (her? Was it a girl? Seriously, it's been nearly three decades since I read it, I don't recall) what it meant. So the title of the movie at least makes sense, despite its rather unfortunate overlap with DOOM as it exists in our culture now.
Btw, I completely forgot that Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of his too. Anderson's movie (who tends to have busy / dense frames, which is worth pointing out in this context) is a wonderful adaptation too. And it also, according to BoxOfficeMojo, barely made more than its budget (46 mil BO to 40 mil budget). I don't think my intuition is (all) wrong on all this, even if I can't really express it correctly.
One of the reasons I love the film Coraline is it reminds me of the films I enjoyed as a kid, such as The Secret of NIMH and The Dark Crystal. Those films were very dark - they had teeth, I like to say - but Coraline is evidence they still happen. Just not quite as often.
To quote Samurai Cop: "Bingo."
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