Halloween is gone, the election is over, the sky is getting grayer by the day, and the holidays are still a ways off.
So right now might be feeling like the perfect time to check out of the real world for a bit and live instead in an animated fantasy where the rules don’t apply and the future can still seem as bright as the color palette.
No matter how bleak and cold things get out there, you can always turn to the best cartoons and animated features for an oft-needed escape and the fleeting fun or heightened emotions that the best animations offer.
Well, theaters across Oklahoma City have just what we all need right now, with animated picks covering action-packed robotic adventures, an emotional stop-motion memoir, and even a groundbreaking behind-the-music documentary told entirely in Lego.
Each is an exercise in the limitless creativity of animation, and each is playing in OKC theaters right now.
‘The Wild Robot’
Based on the first book of author Peter Brown’s bestselling “Wild Robot Trilogy,” the newest feature-length offering from DreamWorks Animation is an eye-popping sci-fi romp through a climate change-ravaged future Earth and the struggling wilds that remain.
After a lone personal assistant robot is lost to a shipwreck and washes up on an island uninhabited by man, the local animals befriend it and teach it how to care for an orphaned gosling.
But everything from wildlife rivalries to the impending threat of humans finding the island stand to disrupt the only purpose that this “all-purpose” robot has ever found, and it moves to protect its new island home and animal friends.
Director Chris Sanders imbues the film with the same beating heart, richly colored spectacle, and unique, personalized design that he brought to films like “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon.”
This time around, the look is all about capturing the watercolor-painted storybook aesthetic, and the result is gorgeous.
Reviews have already been massive for this one, with practically every critic calling it the best animated film of the year and some even praising it as one of the best ever. So you can get an early jump on your Oscar ballot right now because this one feels like a lock for a Best Animated Feature nod.
‘Memoir of a Snail’
Far from your usual animated fare and worlds away from the family-friendly stop-motion stories of classics like “Wallace & Gromit” or “Coraline,” writer/director Adam Elliot’s newest feature “Memoir of a Snail” is an honest, un-sanitized look at growth in 1970s Australia.
Largely pulled from Elliot’s own experiences and past, “Memoir of a Snail” hits a lot of decidedly mature issues – alcoholism, swinging, foster care, mental health disorders – but uses the exaggerated aesthetics and endless possibilities of stop-motion to cast them all with a kind of distorted goofiness and playfulness.
That’s par for the course for Elliot.
Anyone lucky enough to have seen his incredible “Mary & Max” from 2009 knows that he’s capable of some of the most powerful, affecting, hysterical, and outright, heart-shatteringly emotional storytelling of anyone in the animation space.
“Memoir of a Snail” looks to accomplish many of the same emotional feats, but this time, pulled even more from the filmmaker’s own life story.
‘Piece by Piece’
By now, we’re surely all familiar with the well-trod formula of typical musical artist documentaries.
But producer/rapper/songwriter extraordinaire Pharrell Williams just refuses to do anything typical.
So when it came time for him to spearhead a feature-length documentary look at his real life and career as a modern musical iconoclast, he decided that it shouldn’t look like real life at all.
Instead, Williams’ entire life is given the “Lego Movie” treatment, not only casting the dramatizations of his past in the colorful brickwork, but even the interviews and testimonials as well.
The result is a look into an irrepressibly creative life that’s actually depicted with all the free-flowing creativity and unhinged imagination with which he remembers it.
Of course, as you’d expect from any Lego movie, it’s aimed primarily at kids, young creatives, and the still young-at-heart, so prepare for it to be gloriously wacky, openly ridiculous, and even endearingly heavy-handed.
‘Transformers One’
Alright, so you might be wincing at yet another “Transformers” movie shambling into theaters, but rest assured, this one has nothing to do with Michael Bay’s obnoxious, interminable CGI noise-fests.
The all-animated “Transformers One” actually reaches way back in the franchise’s timeline to tell – for the first time on film – the story of how the heroic leader Optimus Prime and the sinister arch villain Megatron actually began as friends and comrades on the Transformers’ home planet.
Obviously we know that won’t last, and so the story unfolds to show how the rifts of war and the allure of power drove apart these two soldiers and broke their bonds of brotherhood.
But, you know, they’re also laser-firing robots that turn into stuff, so you probably shouldn’t expect Shakespearean tragedy so much as an action-packed, joke-laden adventure romp through computer-animated space and battle scenes.
This time around, the character designs are pulled from the original styling of the 1980s toys and cartoons, so longtime fans of the “robots in disguise” should be delighted just by the look alone.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
