The season of animation is upon us. The hotly-anticipated new feature 9, not to be confused with the upcoming musical Nine nor the German negative “Nein!” arrived yesterday in theaters on 9/9/09, making it the most numerologically apt release date since the June 6, 2006 unleashing of the Omen remake.

And after 9, the deluge. From now until the end of the year we’ll be seeing an unprecedented avalanche of animation hitting mainstream American cinemas, and one that demonstrates just how many formats can huddle in under the medium’s single umbrella. We’ll see a not-so-classic adaptation of a much-adapted classic, an eagerly awaited return to form, the ambitious realization of a long-gestated original vision, and a live-action auteur’s first foray into animation, among many others, brought to us via CGI, stop-motion, traditional hand-drawn cel, and the latest performance-capture technology. It’s a good time for animation fans.

9

Focus Features and Starz Animation
September 9

In between putting finishing touches on orcs and trolls for the Lord of the Rings at Peter Jackson’s famed Weta Workshop, Shane Acker worked for over four years on a short film that would eventually be nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. Now, another four years later, his meticulously imagined world of ragdoll protagonists, apocalyptic malaise and an entire mechanical ecosystem of things that go bump in the night, is coming to the big screen. 9 is produced by Tim Burton, a man who also likes his fairy tales on the darker side, and Timur Bekmambetov of Wanted fame, and features the voices of Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer and John C. Reilly. Expanding on the mythology established in the 11-minute short and giving vocal cords to the once silent characters, Acker follows nine sentient dolls as they try to unravel their own existence as well as the terrible fate that has befallen humanity, both of which might be tied together in what Acker has dubbed “a Geppetto/Oppenheimer figure.”

Expect the film to be dark and genuinely scary. I had the opportunity to speak with Acker a number of months ago and he emphasized his desire to lend the film a genuine aura of fear and peril: “What I’m trying to evoke here is fairy tales, the real ones. They were moral tales and there needed to be severe consequences to teach those lessons. (In) some of these animated films nowadays, you don’t feel like there are any stakes. It’s set up so much as a series of gags. You don’t really feel the nature of the threat. But I tried to make that threat present in 9.” The TV ads have warned that 9 is “definitely not your little brother’s animated movie,” which sucks for my little brother, because he, like myself, thinks it looks totally badass.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS

Sony Pictures Animation
September 18

The following week, we trade in 9’s muted tones and shades of black for J-ELLO greens and spaghetti sauce reds, and instead of the ash of a nuclear winter falling from the sky, we have meatballs. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is another in a series of films stretching a much-loved, but pamphlet-thin, children’s book into a full-fledged feature. SNL stalwart Bill Hader voices a zany but less-than-respected inventor who succeeds in transforming everyday precipitation into food, leading to a sharp decline in world hunger but a marked increase in the number of giant pancake-related deaths. The film also features the voices of James Caan, Anna Faris and Bruce Campbell, as well as music by Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh, who also scored the upcoming Fantastic Mr. Fox.

ASTRO BOY

Summit and Imagi Animation Studios
October 23

Astro Boy has come a long way since his black-and-white origins. For instance, now, during dialogue scenes, he can move parts of his body other than his mouth. The pointy-haired Japanese icon is on its way back thanks to Imagi Animation Studios, the Hong Kong-based company responsible for another update on a classic, TMNT. The film features voice work from Freddie Highmore, Kristin Bell, Bill Nighy, and Nicholas Cage as Astro Boy’s creator Doctor Tenma. And the best thing is, since it’s animated, we won’t have to see Cage’s hair.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Disney and ImageMovers Digital
November 6

Robert Zemeckis has got his hands on a classic work of literature that somehow, amazingly, has never been adapted into a film. It’s called A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, and apparently it’s just been sitting on the shelf of history gathering dust, waiting for someone to finally put it to celluloid.
Ok, so maybe it’s been done a couple (thousand) times already. But this time it’s with Jim Carrey instead of Alastair Sims, Bill Murray or a bunch of Muppets. It also co-stars Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey, and Gary Oldman. Through the magic of Zemeckis’ performance-capture technology, Carrey will be playing not only the timelessly tightfisted Scrooge, but all three ghosts who teach him the true meaning of Christmas (well, except all that Jesus stuff.) Also, in an interesting move, it appears that Oldman will be playing, among other characters, Tiny Tim. That popping sound is the WTF cortex of your brain short-circuiting. But on the positive side, it seems that Zemeckis’ tech has gotten better, and we may no longer have to fear our nighttime visions of sugar plums being invaded by the frightening blank-faced unreality of robo-Tom Hanks from The Polar Express.

PLANET 51

Tristar and Ilion Animation Studios
November 20

The idea of human beings playing the role of the alien invaders is well-used: from this year’s Battle for Terra, to the upcoming Avatar (from what I can tell), all the way back to that classic Twilight Zone episode with Agnes Moorehead. And now it’s being played for laughs in the Anglo-Spanish collaboration Planet 51. When an astronaut from Earth, played by Dwayne Johnson and not The Rock, thank you very much, lands on the idyllic titular planet he discovers an entire civilization of picket fences and aproned mothers seemingly modeled off of old episodes of Leave it to Beaver. The film also stars Jessica Biel, Justin Long and John Cleese.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX

Fox Animation Studios
November 25

At some point you might have thought to yourself that director Wes Anderson’s painstakingly constructed aesthetic and color-coded characters would fit in nicely into the world of animation, and someone must have told him that too, because he’s adapting his distinctive talents to a new format in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Coming from one of the few yet-unadapted Roald Dahl books, Fox features the voices of George Clooney and Meryl Streep, as well as those of Anderson veterans Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson. It was originally conceived as a joint venture with Henry Selick, who instead went on to make this year’s stop-motion gold standard Coraline. Judging by the trailer, it appears that Anderson’s humor will remain as dry as a bone, although I’m slightly worried by the fact that the animation looks a bit like a taxidermist’s fever dream. In any case, it’s exciting to see a well-established director stepping outside of his comfort zone to blend his artistic mentality with the unique offerings of animation.

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

Walt Disney Animation Studios
December 11

It seems like an eternity since we saw the last 2D Disney movie, but it’s only been five years. Well, longer since the last good 2D Disney movie. I’ve got my fingers crossed for The Princess and the Frog, despite the fact that the production has had its fair share of controversy, manufactured and otherwise. Tiana is the newest addition to the Disney Princess stable, and the first African-American one, which is great, albeit somewhat sad that it took nearly 70 years to get to here from the shuck-and-jive crows in Dumbo. Along the way there’s been a flurry of anxiety over ensuring that everything is handled correctly: Tiana’s original name, Maddy, was changed over worries that it was unbecoming to Disney royalty and too close to “Mammy;” there was fear that her position as a maid would be racially demeaning, despite the fact that it was the same occupation held by Snow White, the Whitest of Them All; and there was even worry by some that the choice of New Orleans as a setting was “insensitive.” But the production survived all this as well as a change in songwriters (Alan Menken was dropped in favor of the slurred N’awlins drawl of Randy Newman) and we’ll finally be able to see it in wide-release on December 11th, and a few weeks earlier if your lucky enough to live in New York or Los Angeles. All I can say is thank you John Lasseter for fashioning some glasses for those myopic Disney execs who ok-ed the closing of the traditional animation division years ago. A fan cannot live on CGI alone.

AVATAR

Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment
December 18

What can I say about Avatar, James Cameron’s long-awaited, uber-hyped vehicle, that hasn’t already been said? Well, nothing that wouldn’t be completely made up. Everyone who is in the film-making industry seems to think that this is going to be the technological revolution that Cameron touts it to be, and everyone I’ve spoken to outside the industry seems to think it looks a bit like watching your little brother play his new Xbox game. But judgment should be withheld until we can see it in its entirety and in any case it raises an interesting question: should this be considered animation? If more and more film-makers continue down this path (as Spielberg appears to be with his Tintin film) it might become increasingly difficult to distinguish between live-action and animation; heck the definition of “movie” might even need to be rewritten. Guillermo del Toro seems to think that films will be interactive experiences before long, kind of like a grand-scale choose-your-own adventure book. Maybe cinema as we know it will be as outdated as magic boxes and zoetropes in a few decades. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: maybe we should wait to see whether Avatar’s oversized Smurfs are really all they’re cracked up to be.

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: THE SQUEAKQUEL

Fox and Rhythm & Hues
December 25

I believe this one is pretty much self-explanatory.

The Goodes are the blue-state analogues of the Hills, Mike Judge’s venerable Texas-twangers who will soon be packing up the propane after a staggering 13 seasons. A bespectacled father voiced by Judge, an overweight son, a midriff-baring daughter, a cantankerous old coot of a father, and a dog named after a political figure; Judge’s creations for his new series The Goode Family, which premieres Wednesday May 27th (9:00-9:30 p.m., ET) on ABC, are the cultural and political negative images of his previous ones. Rather than chugging beer on the front lawn, the Goodes are more likely to be found swigging soy milk in their solar-powered home and then painstakingly recycling the containers.

Here’s a few clips from the pilot:

The pater familias here is Gerald Goode, a poncho-wearing member of the liberal academe. His wife is a local activist with whom he has two children, one adopted and one biological. The dog is an unwilling vegan and they shower outside in a home-made rainwater catchment system. They drive a hybrid with the word “HYBRID” written in big letters on the side. In short, they embody every well-intentioned but ill-thought-out element of the liberal Left, with a capital L.

But where the stereotypical redneckishness of King of the Hill seemed secondary to crafting the Hills as believable characters, this new family is groaning under the weight of their own premise. The Goodes’ efforts to reduce emissions and buy organic don’t really feel, well, organic and at this point they seem more like a collection of recognizable parts than a cohesive whole. One of the main cast members is quite literally a one-off joke, whose punchline is mined minutes into the pilot, and if there is one thing the short, unhappy life of Sit Down, Shut Up taught us, it’s that good comedy falls flat when put into the mouths of walking, talking clichés.

Thankfully, much of this is offset by some very strong writing and the fact that, even in the pilot, the jokes and the characters are clearly trying to hoist themselves up and out of the constrictions of a one-sentence studio pitch. Judge is smart enough to know that if he wants anything near the shelf-life of his previous series, the characters will have to outlive the premise. Eco-suburbia and political correctness are fertile grounds for comedy, but ones that have already been harvested endlessly. Acute observations about environmental one-upmanship or the fact that hybrid drivers are rarely as quiet as their car’s whispering engines are welcome, but they inevitably feel a bit reused and recycled. Even references to cultural timestamps like Obama and Octomom can’t shake the sneaking feeling of been-there done-that.

Here’s a few clips of Mike Judge commenting on the series:

That being said, I actually have high hopes for this show. There is plenty of potential here, once they cycle through the requisite Al Gore jokes, for it to become another genuinely funny and endearing part of Judge’s multifaceted examination of this country. Throughout his career, he has been one of the few voices continuously turning an introspective eye on American culture, whether it is corporate, conservative, television-obsessed, or even future. To crib from the title of the Beavis and Butt-Head movie, Mike Judge does America. Hopefully, at a time when The Simpsons have become lost in their own caricatures and Family Guy has turned pseudo-Dadaist, The Goode Family will shed this early awkwardness and step up to take the place of King of the Hill as one of the few places on network television where we can see characters, animated or otherwise, that bear some semblance to actual human beings. A real American family, both good and bad.

Directors: Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
Runtime: 104 minutes
Rated: PG
Distribution: Walt Disney Pictures

Pixar has always been in the business of telling human stories. Woody and Buzz were toys, but their struggles with friendship and their fears of obsolescence were instantly relatable. The Incredibles may have been superpowered but their insecurities were all too real. Ratatouille‘s Remy the rat embodied every underappreciated artist, Marlin the fish every overprotective father, and WALL-E every hopeless romantic.

In their latest venture, Up (in theaters May 29th), Disney/Pixar finally sheds these anthropomorphic and archetypical avatars to tell the story of Carl Fredrickson, an old man who lived a very average life. After his wife passes away, he decides to realize their dream of moving to the wilderness of Venezuela, and so attaches a kaleidoscopic squadron of balloons to his house to float up and out of his urban environs. Of course, unbeknownst to him, he has himself a stowaway in the form of a chipper young Wilderness Explorer named Russell.

They make it to South America, but must trek through the jungle and mountainous terrain to make it to Paradise Falls, on top of which Carl and his wife always hoped to live. On the way, they find themselves embroiled in scads of adventure of the deliciously pulpy variety, with sneering villains and giant dirigibles, but even as the story gets increasingly outrageous and the action more intense, the characters remain firmly grounded in reality. They are beset by packs of vicious dogs, dangerous thunderheads and a series of precipitous heights, but the real obstacles they must overcome are those of loss, abandonment and fear. Carl is one of the most three-dimensional 3D-animated characters ever put to screen. That, plus the fact that much of the violence is surprisingly un-cartoony, provides the film with quite a few moments of genuine peril.

The odd couple humor and the never-too-late moralizing one would expect are there, but, as per usual with Pixar, things are much more complex and satisfying than at first glance. The house, at first a symbol of untethered possibility and hope, quickly becomes a burden, loaded down with nostalgic and metaphorical weight as Carl gradually realizes that achieving his lifelong dream may not be as important as the life he spent dreaming it and the people he dreamt it with. Co-directors Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and Bob Peterson provide some emotional moments, but they always feel more genuine than saccharine, and while it is easy to identify early on the talismans that will later be reaped for full sentimental effect, by the time it reaches that point, it’s been earned.

Up is above all a film that revels in visual storytelling. Like Pixar’s previous robotic protagonist, the young Carl at the start barely speaks, and an early wordless montage guides us through his entire life with tremendous poignancy and economy. The premise and locales allow for some breathtaking imagery of the helium-buoyed house floating across azure skies and over jutting geological landscapes. Once people start talking, the humor is enjoyable and the voice-work all top notch. Ed Asner imparts his character with a Lou Grant lovable gruffness, while Jordan Nagai’s lack of professional experience helps to give the young Russell an endearing layer of believability.

Admittedly, some of the action scenes are not as exciting as, say, those in The Incredibles, but that is kind of the point. Here, a life of exploits and derring-do is no more valuable than one of picnics and morning rituals, and if you are so focused on what you are going to do, you tend to lose sight of what you’ve already done. Up is a vibrant and adventurous film that, all the while, advises us on the unexpected beauty of mundanity and the fact that home has little to do with location.

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Apart from being my favorite deadly sin, Sloth is also the protagonist in Daniel Cardenas’ web series aptly named Sloth. Here’s the third episode, titled Perfecta:

Produced by WonderGlen, a faux internet production company that began as a sprawling inside joke by The Colbert Report writer/producer Ben Karlin and grew from there, the series follows the adventures of its sluggish hero as he is experimented on in an animal testing facility. Cardenas was kind enough to talk to us about his three-toed creation.

KEITH STASKIEWICZ: How did you get started working on Sloth?

DANIEL CARDENAS: I started when I was in school. I did a sloth short because I always thought sloths were really funny. It was the thing I worked on the least but I showed it around and everyone liked it a lot. Then I did these 30 second spots on MTV 2, and after that I pitched the idea to WonderGlen.

KEITH: WonderGlen has an interesting format, as a sort-of fake-real production company. How did you get involved with them?

DANIEL: I got referred to them a long time ago. I was going to do some animation work on stuff that they had already written, but that fell through so they asked me if I had any ideas. I pitched them a bunch of things and they liked Sloth. The WonderGlen guys like to push the jokes to get the most out of them, so they usually come back to me with changes to make to the animatic.

KEITH: I love the Sloth logo.

DANIEL: Thanks.

KEITH: Your show seems really marketable in a Paul Frank sort of way, and I noticed that Lance Freeman, the character in your online comic strip, is a graphic designer. Do you have a lot of experience in that field?

DANIEL: I started out in that field. I started at 16 doing flyers and stuff like that and then kept doing it. It paid for the majority of my schooling. I only really started commercializing my animation stuff after I started working at a motion graphics company called Panoptic. I designed the logo for Slothvision, and I think that Sloth through the nature of who he is, as a constantly changing figure, could be interesting as a marketing tool. I could see Slothvision as a brand. It has some sort of recognition from the animal, at least. People always say, “I love sloths.” I actually have a website address that people can remember, and that’s not something that’s that easy to get.

KEITH: Are there any plans to move this off the web to another medium, like TV?

DANIEL: I’d definitely be open to it. If it went to TV, the characters would have to start talking, because right now it doesn’t have any dialogue. But I definitely think there’s enough to maintain a full show. There’s stuff we could do with the hippies that come to rescue him in the second episode. They’re already going to be back in the fourth episode to try to rescue him again.

KEITH: Who works on the show besides you?

DANIEL: I have an animator that helps me on the in-betweens named Henry Thurlow. He’s helped me on the past three episodes and the upcoming one. The next one after that, I think it might just be me doing it. That’s why it takes so long to make them, it’s pretty much just me sitting at the Wacom for hours. It usually takes like a month to do the boards and the animatic and two weeks or so to animate it.

KEITH What else are you working on?

DANIEL: I have a pilot script and a show bible for a show about hoboes. Do you know about the 700 Hoboes Project?

KEITH: No, what is it?

DANIEL: It’s from this book by John Hodgman. He has 700 names for hoboes and people started drawing them. I contributed a few to a Flickr group and it grew into this idea for a show. I’m working on a mini-comic as well, sort of like a 12-13 page mini-comic about my brother tricking me into thinking that there’s a magical dimension.

KEITH: If you were to do another Sloth-type project, but with another animal, what animal would you pick?

DANIEL: I like lemurs, they seem like jerks. They just look like assholes, I don’t know why. So I think that a bunch of dick lemurs would be pretty interesting.

Formerly a writer for shows that have appeared on Nicktoons, Cartoon Network and AOL, Keith Staskiewicz is currently a student at the Columbia School of Journalism where he is working on an animation-oriented Master’s thesis.