The recent onslaught of computer-generated 'toons is expected to stir interest in stories over technique.
By David Germain
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - Prancing penguins. Rascally rodents. Sociable squirrels. Saber-toothed tigers. The Hollywood hills were alive with talking critters in 2006, possibly the biggest year ever for movie animation.
With the barrage of ads for flicks about cute, fuzzy wildlife and other cartoon creations, are audiences having trouble telling one from the other, and, more important, are they getting overloaded by animation?
"There's definitely an overload, and I think everyone recognizes that," said George Miller, director of the latest animated adventure, the Warner Bros. penguin romp Happy Feet, which opened Friday and was No. 1 at the box office for the weekend.
In the decade since Disney and Pixar's Toy Story revolutionized the industry with computer-generated images instead of hand-drawn cartoons, first DreamWorks with Shrek and then other major studios leaped into the animation business.
As with the initial novelty of talking pictures nearly 80 years ago, computer animation's early appeal resulted partly from its fresh look. Now, CGI films have become the standard, so commonplace that the story - not the style - is more crucial than ever in a movie's success or failure.
"What's happened is, no longer will people go see CG animation simply because it's CG-animated, as they did when they first saw Toy Story. Everything will have to work on its own merits," Miller said. "Sure, when The Jazz Singer came out, people turned up to see sound pictures. In a handful of years, people no longer turned up to hear movies. They just turned up to see a movie they thought was good. The same thing is happening with animation."
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