For last post, I will be talking about Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009). I think Ice Age 3 is a movie catered to everyone ranging from children to the elderly who are young at heart and don't mind a slap-stick movie. The movie does not have a complicated storyline and does not make any sense since dinosaurs and wooly mammoths lived at least 60million years apart. The characters in the story have human like expressions and feelings.

 Look at the finger of the Opossums, either Crash or Eddie since they look similar. The right hand is pointing with one finger at the bird in front the way humans do and animals never do. I remember from my Secondary School Literature that the word for this is anthropomorphic which means giving human traits to animals. In animation this is big money. For example Kungfu Panda is also a franchise that makes a lot of money. The artistic works of Satoshi Kon or Hayao Miyazaki don't have the box office success of  this type of entertaining block busters with cheesy sentimental moments.

How did this film that cost 90 million to make have a box office gross of nearly 900million?




The story also has a 2 side-plot characters, Scrat and Scratte who loosen up the audience with funny stuns and a fight over an acorn. Scrat has been a recurring character in all the Ice Age Franchises. He always manages to get his acorn in every scene but inevitably loses it. He is basically the adorable loser. He is the comic relief in every film and has his own plot line. I think Scatte was added to spice up things a little like she this romantic feel around her and they make the two side-plot characters fall in love to make it funny for the older audience. Scatte was like the wall between the acorn and Scrat.  I guess it is also educational because they went to research on many species of dinosaurs. In fact, a fossil of the saber-tooth squirrel was identified in 2011 after the release of Ice Age and it resembled Scrat.

                                                                     We Existed!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/101102-saber-toothed-squirrel-fossils-paleontology-dinosaurs-science/


" "When [the movie] Ice Age came out, we thought the squirrel character in it looked ridiculous, but then we found something like it," said study leader Guillermo Rougier, a paleontologist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky."

Before 2011, the existence of this Saber-tooth squirrel was not known! Basically the people at Blue Sky Studio predicted the existence of a Saber-tooth creature.

Certain things like the wire in the carnivorous plant made the movie seem like it was a mix of modern and historic time.

This weasel named Buck is the only mammal to live with the dinosaurs in the dinosaur world and he is the main character who helps the other ice age creatures survive in the dinosaur world. Here he has to cut the wires of a plant that is going to digest them all. This fuses modern bomb detonating scenarios with the jungle theme of the dinosaur world.

The dinosaur world and the ice age world are clearly distinquished by the colour used. The dinosaur world as shown above is filled with saturated colours and greenery while the ice age world is in shades of whites and blues.

The dialogue is very modern such as when Manny says to Sid, " Do you want a birth certificate" when Sid is not sure if the female T-Rex is the mother of Eggbert, Shelly and Yoko the baby T-Rexs.


Eggbert, Shelly and Yoko were created by Melvin Tan, a Senior Animator at Blue Sky Studio
Read more here.: http://business.asiaone.com/Business/SME+Central/Prime+Movers/Story/A1Story20090708-153505.html




He also worked on Sid and Manny. Best of all he is an alumnus of Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
He says in the interview that he concentrate on observing the behavior of things to see if they are real.






 Rudy is the main villian of the film. Of course he does not do anything mean because this is a film where no one really dies, everyone is saved at the last second, animal who are eaten are spat out or manages to escape from a stomach such as Buck escaping from Rudy's stomach. The most amazing thing i found out about Rudy, who is an albino Baryonyx,is that that species is fish-eating! So despite the fearsome red eyes, sharp teeth and threatening claws, Rudy is essentially harmless!

 On the topic of food though, the animals all seem to get by pretty well without eating.  The only time when the animals eat is when the baby dinosaurs feed on a mysterious leg that comes from no where and did not seem to belong to any living creature.

Showing the animals eating each other up would have ruined the picture perfect sweet and absolutely inaccurate image of wild animal behaviour in any era. These are animals created to sell cuddly soft toys (merchandising as started by Walt Disney).

Personally I prefer Spirited Away, because it brought out the most emotions in me and the art was more interesting. There was a lot of hand animation which I prefer. And Hayao Miyazaki has a very surreal and unforgettable style. Money and art are two different things This movie  is entertaining but also feels run off the mill. But who am I to judge Ice Age 4 came out this month and has already made 400 over million.

Today, I am blogging about the movie called, "Waking Life". It is a movie about a guy trying to understand dreams connection with real life. The movies starts off with him at a young age playing a game with a girl and he picks the number which leads him to the reply "dream is destiny". This sparks an idea in the main character's mind about dreams and reality. The director uses rotoscoping to give the movie a dreamy element.

Max Flesicher invented rotoscoping in 1915 and used it in Koko the clown. Leon Schlesinger Productions which produced Looney Tunes used it occasionally and Walt Disney also used it for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). This cartoony feel to the movie makes it seem less of a serious film and also gives some space for comedy.

                                                                     " I rather be a gear"

This is in Chapter 6 - Free Will and Physics where the real life Philosopher professor  David Sosa is talking about, " trying to solve  the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuallity" ( from wakinglifemovie.net/Transcript/Chapter/6). A lot of people will be very drained by the amount of content and will fall asleep. So what the director does is that he makes the character's faces turn into what they talk about.

"the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws"

A man is driving down a street and he is very angry about many things.

As he continues ranting, his face turns red with fury.
The scenes are quite disjointed like in a dream and there is no conventional plot.

In the scene above 2 people are talking in a bar and he said "he has not used his gun in a long time and doesnt know if it works. The other guy says why don't you pull the trigger and find out." so the guy dies and the bar tender in the picture gets shot. The splat gives a comic style to this dark scene which turns out to be another dream of the main character.

                                                Can you recognise the 2 characters?

Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke. They acted in the film, "Before Sunrise" by the same director.
Here they play Jesse and Celine who are talking about reincarnation.

I think overall this film is bearable because the rotoscoping makes the film more interesting. The conversations are quite long  and is the most wordy film I have ever seen. My mind was like the main character in the last scene.

I like how the end and the begging of the film mirror each other. This time it is the adult that is floating away.