But, the fantasy worlds are always very clearly demarcated visually, using the strong graphic flatness and bright colors I mentioned above. After all, the literal first thing that Tim tells about himself (the grown Tim is narrated by Toby Maguire, with marvelously light-touch irony) is that he's particularly adept at placing himself into fantasy worlds. We're never completely sure whether any of this story is actually taking place, or if it's all just the fantasy that 7-year-old Tim Templeton (Miles Bakshi, grandson of indie animation legend Ralph Bakshi) concocts to help emotionally cope with the trauma of losing his privileged status as an only child. That's despite having an amazingly awful premise: you know how newborn babies come along and they so thoroughly control everything that happens in the household, that they're basically like the boss of the family? Well, what if one was actually a boss? Y'know, wearing a trim little business suit and tie, and was voiced by Alec Baldwin, doing a pandering riff on his Glengarry Glen Ross performance that leaves a really glaring question as to who this movie's target audience is supposed to be.įirst, the good news: The Boss Baby has the good sense to treat its central metaphor like a metaphor. The Boss Baby is the best film made by any of the big animations studios (the above three, Illumination, and what the hell, let's throw Blue Sky in there) since Pixar's Inside Out.
The film's aesthetic is the biggest draw for me, but I get that it's not going to be that way for everybody, so let me go bigger. The clearest comparison I can make is that if The Powerpuff Girls was redone as 3-D animation, it would look awfully like what the creators of The Boss Baby have come up with. Even at its most sedate, the film has a surprisingly bold low-fi approach to backgrounds and character modeling, one that would look cheap and easy if it wasn't so snugly fitted to the film's emotional POV and at it's least sedate, the film is having a field day mixing 3-D characters and flat, heavily graphic backgrounds made up of slabs of dramatic color. And now The Boss Baby makes three, to my utter surprise. Trolls was nothing less than eruption of creative energy, bringing the spirit of midcentury cartoon character animation back to 3-D CGI production, playing around with camera angles, and having a complete blast with playful arts & crafts-style texturing.
Kung Fu Panda 3, while mostly content to build on the previous Kung Fu Pandas, has that breathtaking, painterly spirit realm. DreamWorks, since the start of 2016, has been on quite a hell of a run of doing stuff with their movies. Still, Disney and Pixar films are aesthetically safe: just keep iterating ever closer towards photorealism and call it a day. Not that "interesting" is the same as "best" - at the basic technical level of making animated movies, nothing DreamWorks has is up to the level of Disney's Zootopia and Moana, and even when they're being as blatantly lazy as in these sequel-obsessed days, nobody can match the power of Pixar's computers (meanwhile, I'd say that none of the three are telling particularly groundbreaking or complex stories, certainly not with Laika sitting right there, but that's a different complaint for a different time). * So imagine my surprise that here we are, just one decade later, and I think I'm ready to officially declare that DreamWorks is by far the most interesting American animation studio. If you had asked me ten years ago, when Shrek the Third was farting its way through theaters, which major American animation studio I expected to be pushing the medium forward the most in 2017, between Pixar, Disney, or the Shrekmeisters at DreamWorks, I would have frankly looked at you like you'd just grown two extra heads.
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