Under the wing of DreamWorks, The Bad Guys pulls off the miraculous task of taking role models that would come off as horrible by another animation studio and yet somehow making them into positive influences on kids. Yet there’s just as much heart to please the grownups as well as professional animators, starting with its opening scene that is a continuous shot focused on a casual conversation in a diner, like in Pulp Fiction. There are also fun car chases similar to those found in The Blues Brothers and elements found in heist movies like Reservoir Dogs.
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As for the animation, the refreshingly bright backgrounds are made from splotches of paint while the special effects tricks create 2D smoke with lines drawn on the computer graphics to resemble a comic book illustration. The eyes of the characters are intentionally given no lighting or texture, yet still glow brighter than anything else in the frame. The way the city skyline is rendered with its haze and sun flares are intentionally meant to resemble an instantly recognizable look for Los Angeles, the city this movie takes place in. The animators furthermore had the challenge of translating live reference footage of dancers into anthropomorphic animals who had to do those same dances. With all these elements brought together into a satisfying whole, DreamWorks Animation created an exciting little movie that parents and their kids can have fun watching together.

PG (DV)
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 40 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.

It was first a 2010 short film, then shortly after, it became a children’s book, and now, it’s the most adorable stop-motion movie ever made, as well as the most technologically ambitious. While films in the past have put hand-drawn animation over live-action before, and CGI characters are currently everywhere, never before has stop-motion puppetry been used to this detailed of an extent with technology that’s well ahead of its time. This medium of animation is known for being such an enormous task, and sure enough, this little movie was so complex that it took the storyboard artists three years to create the animatic.
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When creating the props for the film shoot, anything that the cute little shell interacted with had to be either rigged with materials that could be animated or remade from scratch with bendable materials. These props included plants, a couch, and even the dust on a table while these little characters were ice skating on top of it. The animated components in each frame had to be filmed separately from the live-action environment, meaning before they were combined in post-production, they had to match one another perfectly in light, composition, and even camera focus. No other movie exists like Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and in time, it should pick up momentum and go on to inspire other special effects artists as they acquire a plethora of brand-new tools in their toolkits.

PG (D)
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 30 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and SAD.

It demanded an immense amount of technology to create… to fit a vision that had never been done before in cinema, yet Titanic defied all odds to become the most successful movie ever made, pushing the medium forward with its use of old and new visual effects tricks. For the ship itself, a 775-foot-long replica of the exterior was built and broken into three segments that could be tilted at different angles. Some of the elements in the replica were actually made of rubber for the scenes where people were falling during the ship’s destruction, and if it couldn’t be made of rubber without looking totally fake, human dummies were used for padding instead.

​There also were several miniatures of the ship, and for the extreme-wide shots, mocap actors created some people to populate the decks, making this one of the first movies ever to use this technology. But besides just the immense innovation of digital effects, this movie formulated genius approaches to old-school effects too, such as breath created practically by actors against a black background and then added in post-production to make the actors look like they were out in the cold. So while the movie’s love story is groanworthy, the main character is a selfish brat, the message is preachy, and the historical accuracies are numerous, James Cameron’s ultra-smash-hit motion picture deserves its reputation for making blockbusters today so extravagant.

PG-13 (DLSNV)
Historic/Romance
3 hr. 14 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.

Everyone knows it as the rare event when a sequel surpassed the quality of the original, but Terminator 2: Judgment Day particularly made its mark in film history as one of the absolute earliest uses of CGI—perhaps the first movie to prove the technology’s full potential. After James Cameron’s successful use of CGI in The Abyss two years earlier, this felt like the natural next step, and the VFX crew, sure enough, made the most of it. These artists took the time to study the movements of actor Robert Patrick, paint a grid on his body, and use a new laser scanning process on his face so they could replicate him entirely on a computer to animate his character, who was made of liquid metal. 

​Even without this revolutionary digital technology, every single special effects trick imaginable was used in the making of this movie. The opening war scene created the terminator endoskeletons with complex mixtures of puppetry, animatronics, and stop-motion animation. The course of a Los Angeles river was changed so they could film the canal chase. A whole four-story office building was blown up. The main cast went through military combat and weapons training. There’s so much that went into this enormous motion picture that shook up the entire filmmaking industry, and at the end of the day, it still can just be enjoyed simply as a thrill ride that gets better after every repeated visit.

R (DLV)
Sci-fi/Action
2 hr. 17 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.

James Cameron’s motion picture directorial debut, The Terminator continues to define the action/sci-fi genre thanks to all that the production crew exploited using their minimal resources. Even nearly forty years after its release, it’s incredible to see the different techniques used to make the near-invincible T-800 scarier than anything from a horror movie, right down to the shark-like way he prowls around in search of Sarah Connor. These techniques included the human-lookalike mechanics that were built to resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head, which even then weren’t as ambitious as this one brief shot where the Terminator’s hand punches through a windshield; that was actually the first time a mechanical arm was used for a stunt like this. Furthermore, the elaborate Terminator endoskeleton puppet took almost a year to create.

​​To make the production requirements even more stressful, there were numerous miniature sets that had to be built, and for the future scenes, those miniatures had to include smoke on the set so the cutouts in the back couldn’t be as noticeable. It’s wild to think of how much was done to really test the limits of the budget, even the night scenes were immense leaps of bravery for the production crew! Yet it all paid off, as had they not done all this under James Cameron’s direction, other creators of action/sci-fi movies today wouldn’t be as brave to attempt going all out with a minimal budget.

R (DLSNV)
Sci-fi/Action
1 hr. 47 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.