Naivety at its Finest

Blue Sky Studios’ 2011 film Rio was a beautiful film—the picture was spectacular, but the characters, the plot, and the music were just as colorful. I enjoyed the film when I first saw it, but a few flags went up in a couple areas.

Content with Content

I was reading through the comments on my blog tonight (thank you to those who have commented!) and one thing that my friend Leigh said on my post “Friend or Foe?” really stuck out to me. In response to my post on movies promoting demonic activity, she said, “I've always disliked horror movies, but I don't often sit back and analyze why I don't like them.”

Leigh hit it right on the nose.

When the Sand Runs Out

Family is important. I don’t know where I would be without my family, which consists of my parents, five girls and four boys. It is a madhouse at times for sure and as I always say, there’s “never a dull moment”. With all of our contrasting personalities and splashes of humor or attitude, something of interest is bound to happen at least once a day.

Giving Credit Where it is Due

You know what I see in animation? I don’t just watch an animated movie with the plot, characters and the music. I love to go in-depth to see how the creators of an animated movie did it with specific technologies and software that blows my mind.

Take my favorite DreamWorks Animation film How to Train Your Dragon for example. It took the animators up to four years to create every single strand of hair or fur, clothing, tree, leaf, cloud, dragon scale, etc. They worked very hard to make it as beautiful and realistic as they possibly could, and they did a pretty good job at it too.

 

Or take Disney/Pixar’s Monsters Inc. Do you know how many hairs are on Sully’s massive blue and purple polka-dotted body? Thousands. For the creators to make each hair have unique, realistic movement, they had to work on it for 10-12 hours each. That’s beyond impressive.

I know some people who don’t necessarily like a Disney/Pixar or DreamWorks Animation film. They don’t like a particular storyline or think the movie as a whole is dumb. But there is a particular reason that I prefer to watch one of these two companies’ animation films over a reality film.

There is so much time and hard work that goes into each background, every fiber of material, and every color. When you watch the making of some of these top-notch CGI films, it is insane how much work has to be done. These men and women use technology at its finest to bring us a movie that took them years of developing, molding and shaping into a fantastic product of animation.

Combined with amazing talent and thematic scores worth remembering, DreamWorks Animation and Disney/Pixar films will always be close to the top of my favorites list.

I don’t just have high opinions on movie content. I really do love movies and I do have good things to say about films. So here is my point of this post: don’t just watch an animation film and write it off as “stupid” or “boring”. You may not be a big fan of DreamWorks’ Dragons, but do you really know how much work was put into it?

If it’s not your cup of tea, fine! We’ve all got our preferences on what to watch. But just because you don’t like it, does not make it stupid. Give the movie creators the credit they deserve. To you, it’s just a simple movie; but to them, it’s their hard work that enables them to put food on the table.

 

P.S. The two How to Train Your Dragon images are from a new poster that is promoting How to Train Your Dragon 2, going to theatres in June. I posted these to point out the amazing detail (leather, skin, scales). Pretty cool stuff if you ask me! Really, you cannot enlarge these photos and tell me they don't look fantastic.

Copyright Image Fanpop.com

Copright Images Berksgrapevine.com

An Advertisement Bombshell

There are a lot of different styles of clothing out there. The typical trendy brands worn by my generation are American Eagle, Loft, Aeropostale, Gap, New York & Company, Banana Republic, A.N.A., and tons more.

A Lasting Effect

I like listening to music as much as any other person, but there are a few genres that I simply won’t listen to because of content. Rap is one of those genres. There are also a few singers whose music I will not listen to. One of those is Jamie Foxx.

Out with the Corny

My college and career leader is known to dub the classic Hallmark films as “corny.” Some of the films are alright, but for the most part I tend to agree with him. A Hallmark film might be cute or decent, but as it is directed towards the conservative community, the end result is usually with a mediocre response.

Dissecting Disney: Part 2

This post idea also came to me as a result of watching that YouTube video on “Disney’s Top Scariest Scenes.” I don’t recall which number this film was, but I definitely agreed with him on the film for being on the list—the scene was “Hellfire” in the movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”.

Dissecting Disney Part 1

A couple days ago I was bored out of my mind and decided to waste a little time on YouTube. I soon found myself watching a clip called “Disney’s Top Scariest Scenes”. As each clip played, the man who made the video commentated in the background to give us some context for each film, and to explain his reasoning for assigning that particular clip that number. A few were shown that I had forgotten about since my childhood years, but number one truly caught my attention.

The Ultimate Gift

I know it’s just barely November, but coming up in the next month is one of the world’s best holidays: Christmas! I love Christmas—my family gets together with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, we eat great food and open presents together on Christmas Eve.

Christmas morning my siblings and I will wake up our parents around nine and we’ll open presents until long past noon. Our family is so big it is quite a time-consuming project.