The Other Side of Animation: Cam's Eye View's Animation Reviews & Editorials

Well, I guess you can say it’s better to tackle a terrible movie sooner than later. I mean, I wish I didn’t have to, but that would mean that films like Peter Lepeniotis’s The Nut Job would have to be good, which it isn’t. You would think movies by now would be amazing, and animation studios and teams would know what they should do. Sadly, that isn’t the case. The Nut Job was the first animated film released in the states in 2014 on January 17th, and while it was rightfully panned by the critics, it was a financial success and is unfortunately getting a sequel next year. I think I shouldn’t waste any more time since I need to actually talk about the movie. Let’s get nutty with The Nut Job . The film follows the exploits of Surly Squirrel, voiced by Will Arnett. He is a rebellious squirrel who has conflicting ideals with the animals that live in the park, that are led by a raccoon voiced by Liam Neeson. After accidentally blowing up the tree, Surly is banished from the park never to r...

When Disney and Dreamworks announced that 2D animation was a dead art, I was sad, since 2D animation has created some of the best imagery that we have ever seen on the big or small screen. Hearing that the art form that brought us Fantasia , Beauty and the Beast , The Prince of Egypt , Spirited Away , The Rescuers Down Under , and etc. was dead and not profitable, wasn’t really true. If we are being honest, this statement from the two big animation studios came out around the same time Dreamwork’s Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas , and Disney’s Home on the Range came out, which was the 2003/2004 era. By the way, this was also the same time Disney released Brother Bear , which critically and financially flopped. So, in a cynical retort, they brought it upon themselves for making traditional animation not profitable. The problem wasn’t that the stories were told in traditional 2D animation, the problem was that the stories and characters weren’t good. It’s like any film, the movie didn’...

  For the first review for The Other Side of Animation, I struggled to pick the first film to talk about. I could have talked about one of my recent favorites, Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea , which was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Disney’s Big Hero 6 . I could have also talked about the vibrantly beautiful Azur and Asmar: The Princes’ Quest by famed French writer and director Michel Ocelot. However, while I will get to those movies in due time, I wanted this first review to be special. This Oscar-nominated film, Ernest & Celestine, was directed by Stèphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, and French cartoonist Benjamin Renner. If you have heard of the first two directors, Aubier and Patar, that is because they made a stop-motion animated film called A Town Called Panic back in 2009. The film was produced by Didier Brunner, who has been around the French animation scene with collaborations with Michel Ocelot on Tales of the Night , Sylvain Chomet’s The Old Lady and the Pigeons an...

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Other Side of Animation. Now, what is this you might ask? Well, let me ask you a question. You have all probably watched or read about award shows for films and TV shows. These are your Golden Globes, your Oscars, the Razzies, and you get the idea. Now then, you ever see the awards that go to the best animated features/shorts? You see the nominations and they are usually filled with films from Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks. You then see one or two nominations for films that you have never heard of. My reaction when I see that is, “Wait! What’s that movie?” These are the films that you always see get limited theatrical releases before awards season, and always get overlooked and ignored by the mass public since Dreamworks, Pixar, and Disney are much bigger names. Unfortunately for those people that have never heard of these smaller films, they are usually of higher quality, depending on the year they were released. For example, during the 2014 Oscars, I th...