With the aid of Leo Leigh (son of Mike), I’m making films for a series called Rule Britannia which is a warts and all love letter to a country that I love but which is quite unwell at the moment. I just made a thing in Liberia about child soldiers and warlords and that’s out in October. Otherwise, mainstream Hollywood is really really bad at the moment. Everything’s made with marketing and big names and CGI in mind and it makes me feel sad.
I’m really looking forward to Where The Wild Things Are by Spike Jonze. It’s going to use minimal CGI; the same for Fantastic Mr Fox by Wes Anderson, which uses a totally different kind of animation to all this Pixar crap that’s out. Avatar looks like the worst film ever. As I write this I’m making plans to go and see Final Destination 3D and District 9.
Perhaps catching wind of this ‘hand-made’ trend, Disney’s latest animated feature (“The Princess and the Frog’) returns to ‘traditional hand-drawn animation style’ – - it’s first in nearly six years.
In 2003 Disney announced that it was abandoning traditional animation in favor of computer-generated imagery. What is interesting is Disney’s sense that this is a ‘retro’ movement as opposed to a new attention to ‘soulfully-rendered art’.
Rest of the article here.