Blue Sky Studios have a spotty, but profitable resume with films like the Ice Age franchise (currently at its fourth entry) as well as Robots, Rio and Horton Hears a Who. Outside of the Looney Tunes inspired sabretoothed squirrel bits in their tentpole series (which all added together might start to approach feature length), their best feature is certainly the Dr. Seuss one for capturing of the size and earnest, but slightly subversive tone of Geisel’s creations. For much of the teaser trailer (below) for their 2013 featre, Epic it looks to be a straight up ‘war going in the deep forest that people do not know about,’ well, epic. But then the darn thing includes a bit of dialogue at the end, and well, not so epic.
“Epic tells the story of an ongoing battle deep in the forest between the forces of good and the forces of evil. When a teen age girl finds herself magically transported into this secret universe, she must band together with a rag-tag team of fun and whimsical characters in order to save their world…and ours.”
Do you consider Pixar to be the still-undisputed-king of the latter-day animated feature, or are you looking to DreamWorks Animation (How To Train Your Dragon, Rise of the Guardians), Blue Sky (Ice Age, Rio), Sony Animation (Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, Pirates!), Nikelodeon (Rango, TinTin), Animal Logic (Happy Feet, Ga’Hoole) or any of the other CGI animation (or stop Motion, or 2D cel) house to offer the next great animated classic?
I saw this movie the first time it came out when it was called ‘FernGully: The Last Rainforest’.
Aw, man!
I actually haven’t seen most of the Blue Sky movies (the first two Ice Age‘s, which were almost unbearable except for Scrat, who is awesome), but a lot of what turns me off of them and a lot of other modern kids’ movies is the tendency, in spades in the Rio trailer, to have all this “hip”-sounding dialogue. I was really enjoying this trailer until the end showed this isn’t actually anything different.