Posts Tagged ‘Finding Nemo’

What makes a movie great?

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

OscarWhat makes a movie great? Is it the actors, the director or the script? Why watch animated movies when you can watch real people acting on the screen?

Movies have been the voice of men and woman throughout their time. They are used as message carriers and entertainment for the masses. Movies can be hated and loved at the same time. They can be successful and the can be disasters, money spinners and money losers. Surely then there must be a formula for the perfect movie, a perfect way to create a perfect movie!

Teenagers seem to have a vendetta against animated movies, they feel that they are for little children and that if they watch animated movies they will be seen as babies! It’s a pity that they think in this way, some of the greatest movies have been animated movies and those movies contain the formula of the perfect movie!

The formula for the perfect movie is not simple. Many have failed to achieve the perfect magic that the formula releases when all the reactants are mixed correctly. The most important ingredient is a good script. The script of a movie is the foundation of all that is to come. No actor, director or producer can make a poor script turn into the magic ingredient it needs to be. So surely before adding any money, time or energy to a film the script should be perfected.

Story telling is what the movie business is all about, the script is the story’s heart. Action movies can be fantastic. Comedies, dramas, musicals can all be great and they can all be terrible to! So how can a script be perfected if all movie genres can be failures and successes? What must the script contain to make sure the movie is a success?

Iron Man

The answer is simple, the best movies are not specific to genre. The best movies are the ones that change your life! The best movies are unforgettable, they make you as a person want to change, and they make you want to be a better person. The best movies make you the main character, they take you somewhere purposeful and don’t waste your time! Some of my favourite movies of all time are Disney movies. The movies have heart, they makes you wish you where in them, interacting with the characters. The acting is done with passion which makes it so much better. All successful actors and actresses act with a passion unique to themselves.

Dark Knight

However, you can’t compare a made for television movie with a big screen movie. What makes movies like Peter Jackson’s King Kong of 2005, the Dark Knight and Finding Nemo so popular? They must have an element that was the same in making them a success. I think after a while the crucial elements become simple. You can watch a movie and know which are missing and which are there. The crucial ingredients are a great script, money, a passionate crew, passionate actors and actresses and a fantastic score!

Wall E

More importantly though is an ingredient that most movies lack, an ingredient that King Kong has but ‘Dude, where’s my car?’ lacks. It’s a moral story line, something that is often subconscious and goes by unnoticed in the greatest movies. It’s a sad but true fact that the world today is in a shambles, we don’t need more rubbish fed to us over and over again! What we need is moral movies encouraging the youth and the world to wake up to what is happening around us. It is not a matter of religion, although God is an important part of it for me. Any person can appreciate good values and morals if they just try hard enough!

Wall•E

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

Pixar is up to its old tricks again by pulling off the craziest and most daring thing I have ever seen in animation. They have made us believe toys could be real, taken us to worlds of monsters and cars, and made us fall in love with ants, fish and a rat. This year they are taking us into the future and through space with WALL•E.

WALL•E, or Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, is the last of his kind. Stranded on our earth long after all humans abandoned it due to extreme pollution. He spends his days neatly sorting the trash into giant towers and collecting little tit-bits that interest him as his trusty pet cockroach follows him everywhere. That is until EVE arrives. A slender and many have said iPod looking bot, sent to earth to see if life is sustainable again. Our hero WALL•E immediately falls head over heals for her, but when EVE finds what she is looking for she is called back to the Axiom space station to inform the humans of life on the trash filled earth. WALL•E follows her and his journey through space begins.

Now the really groundbreaking news is that the movie has no dialog besides robotic beeps for the first half an hour of the movie. And even from there the dialog is extremely limited. Although it is pulled off in a spectacular fashion many movie goers may be slightly annoyed by the extreme lack of dialog. Although it provides for a breakthrough in storytelling it may keep a chunk of movie goers at a distance, creating one major movie flaw. As amazing as it is to see movies as art, if the viewer can’t appreciate the art, it has been wasted.

With that in mind, Pixar have managed to pull a beautifully executed love story together, along with adventure, sci-fi, and slap stick comedy. Neatly packaged in the robot whose cute eyes and zest for life will melt even the hardest of hearts. It’s a movie that caters for kids and those who can only see surface deep, but more excitingly it caters for those who see deeper. It challenges our product saturated, over indulging, over polluting ideals. It premieres a love story that grows and blossoms as in the most classic films and takes us into a future that is not only extremely fun but visually amazing.

What worries me, although it’s hard to judge such bold and innovative story telling, is that I don’t know if movie goers are ready for a movie of this calibre, although I may be underestimating how adaptable most movie goers are. If you see this movie for the first time and it just didn’t sit right with you, watch it again there is so much to experience if you just forget about the limited dialog.

8/10

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As a side note, the Pixar short before the movie is one of the most hysterical pieces I have seen. The piece shows a magician and his rabbit that is desperate for his carrot. What follows is fast paced slap stick humour that only Pixar can achieve. It is nothing short of brilliant.