animation

The whole point of Scrabble for word nerd devotees, though, is the game's extreme nerdiness. Instead of going out on a Saturday night, you hang out with friends and/or a sweetie and string together words unrelated outside of their common letters. In this Ogilvy ad from France, animators imagine a whole array of creatures borne of these disparate words that meet up in a colorful cartoon set to punk music. Preaching to the choir — but pretty cute.

Just as we're getting a Three Stooges movie for a new generation of moviegoers, The Wizard of Oz will also be reappearing on the big screen — in CG animation. The $25 million project is backed by a French production company and will be based on Frank Baum's original novel.

The Variety article adds, "The English-language adaptation maintains the tale's main characters and settings. Unlike the MGM classic, however, it's not a musical."

On the one hand, with today's animation technology, the possibilities are limitless for what Oz might look like, and that could be awesome. On the other hand, do we need another Wizard of Oz movie? Is this messing with a classic? What do you think?

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We've been hearing about Disney's first black princess for a while now, and today they've released a brief teaser trailer that introduces us to both princess and frog in the animated Princess and the Frog. The story is described as "a fairy tale centered on a young girl named Princess Tiana who lives in New Orleans' French Quarter during the Jazz Age." Tiana is voiced by Dreamgirls's Anika Noni Rose.

Tiana was dreamed up after several rewrites of the original concept for this princess, and the animators have quite a while to continue working on the movie; The Princess and the Frog will open December 25, 2009. For now, you can check out the teaser trailer (which is strange to watch — yet kinda refreshing — after so many Pixar-y movies) if you read more

When a flying snowball pelted the dude below, one of the lenses in his glasses took the hit and broke. Whoops! Not only did nerd boy take this super serious flyby snowballing case to court, he made an animated 3-D reenactment of the "crime" to give the judge and viewers at home some sense of the pain and trauma he endured that dreadful day. (Cuz a one-sided snowball fight is hard to visualize, you know.)

It didn't happen very long ago, but Tyra's "big" beauty giveaway already warrants a flashback. She gave every member in her audience — wait for it, wait for it — a crystal bedazzled jar of Vaseline. You're jealous, I'm sure. But Tyra went wild, her audience went wild, and I wouldn't be surprised if the producers had to bring in stink bombs and taser guns to halt the nonsensical madness that followed. Watch the real deal here and then check out the animated interpretation below.

Turning a classic children's story into a mass-market, big-screen movie is always a risky proposition. So many never live up to the promise of the original — or, worse, change it into something unrecognizable. But luckily, Horton Hears A Who is on the other end of that spectrum. 20th Century Fox's animated adaptation balances Seuss's sweet story with stunning visuals, deftly sharing its message ("a person's a person, no matter how small") with only brief interludes of cheesiness.

In case you were more of a One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish fan, here's the story of Horton in a nutshell: In a magical jungle, there lives an elephant named Horton, who one day spots a little speck on a flower. Thanks to his big ears, he can hear the noises coming from the speck and finds a way to communicate with the Whos of Whoville, who have lived their entire lives unaware that their universe was nothing more than a precarious resting spot on a flower somewhere. Horton wants to get the Whos to a safe place, but the jungle's bossy kangaroo doesn't believe Horton (and certainly doesn't want all the other jungle creatures imagining there are worlds on their flowers, too) and tries to thwart his mission. Meanwhile, the Mayor of Whoville — the only person who can communicate with Horton — has some doubters of his own who want to make a fool of him for suggesting their universe is merely a speck. Will the two worlds ever find common ground? Well, it's Dr. Seuss, so I suppose it's no spoiler that the answer is yes — but the way it plays out on film is fun to watch, so read more

I'm generally of the opinion that everything Pixar touches turns to (shockingly well-animated) gold, so I'm excited that a full trailer has been released for Wall-E, the studio's upcoming release. The film, from Finding Nemo director Andrew Stanton, follows a robot named Wall-E who's been left in a post-apocalyptic world for 700 years, sorting trash all alone. Alone, that is, until a probe sent to check on Earth brings him Eve, a darling girl robot with whom he falls in love.

At first, I was a little worried about Wall-E; the concept for the movie was developed around the time of Toy Story, and I thought the lonely-robot idea was showing its age. But I've steadily gotten more confident about it, first because of this ingenious Web site for Buy n Large, the company that owns everything in the future, and now because of the trailer. There's very little dialogue in the movie — Wall-E just makes mechanical noises — and I'm curious to see how that holds up over a full feature, but if anyone can do it, Pixar can.

Plus, this trailer is worth a look just for the adorable bit with Wall-E and Pixar's Luxo Jr. mascot at the start. The movie is out in June 2008, and to watch the trailer, just read more