Oh my God...I just endured the single most excruciating 59 minutes of my entire movie-watching life and I say that without any sense of hyperbole. I thought I'd squeeze in something relatively short, so I picked Eclectic Shorts to stream from Netflix. Here's their synopsis:

Liars! Deceivers! There's very little animation, for starters. It opens with a stop motion short with some bird skeletons running amok, so I thought I was in for some animation. I would conservatively say 95% of the rest of what followed was live action. Otherworldly? I spent a solid 20 minutes just watching handheld footage of a rocky mountainside near a waterfall that moved so quickly that much of it was a blur. It was like they tied the camcorder to an inebriated dog and turned him loose.

Seriously, this was like an hour long [adult swim] parody of things like Sans Soleil in the Criterion Collection, only it forgot to deliver a punch line. There was one short film about Psalms that featured a guy walking around in a desert and all I could think about was how inferior this thing was to "Assisted Living Dracula" from early Aqua Teen Hunger Force. At least "Assisted Living Dracula" had some semblance of a narrative.

So, in conclusion, do not allow Netflix to deceive you into watching this god-awful mess under the guise of being animated short films. It is a lie. I'm counting it on my list because that misconception of what it really was is the entire reason I watched it, but I would greatly discourage anyone else from doing so. In fact, I hated this so much that when I added it to my Rank 'Em list, I created a new section just for "Hated It" movies.

^ While I completely trust your review and am sure I'd hate it too, your comments make me want to watch it. If I still had Netflix I'd be streaming it right now. Guess I'm at least partly masochistic.

You know, combining this with your recent confession to having a "slightly creepy fascination with serial killers" is really making me wonder if your fiancee quite understands what she's getting herself into. And to be honest, it's your interest in subjecting yourself to Eclectic Shorts that particularly disturbs me.

Now that I don't have to worry about the surprise proposal being spoiled, I actually want her to see my "real life" here on the forum. During this engagement/counseling/verification phase I want to make sure she knows what she's in for.

Back on task, did we decide last year that rubber suit monster movies count? Or that MST3K because it has puppets through the whole running time? Or both? I'm pretty sure of at least one of those, so I'm counting my MST3K Gamera films.

You wouldn't think, but maybe there's no money in these and that's too big of a financial hit

Thanks. So maybe I'll look into the first disc rather than looking on demand or whatever.

I'd count for the robots but dressing up in a suit is as much animation as putting on makeup and whoring yourself out on the corner.

Hey! It was only for that one weekend to get enough money for the ring! Besides, you promised you wouldn't tell.....

I watched Justice League: New Frontiers which was the last unwatched animated superhero film in my collection. I really enjoyed it - especially the Lovecraftian overtones and the style. This will mark the third adaptation of Hal Jordan's origin story that I have seen this year, and it was interesting seeing the whole story condensed down to five to such a short amount of time.

I've been watching quite a few short-lived anime series on Netflix streaming this go-around. And while I'm really starting to get into anime more and more, there's always been one reoccurring theme I find extremely obnoxious and that's when it turns to what I call sloppy animation. I'm referring to when a character overreacts to an emotion (ie embarrassment with an overly red face) and they start flailing their arms around wildly, talking a mile-a-minute and the animation becomes very crudely drawn. It's almost the equivalent of a Saturday morning kids cartoon character suddenly jumping into the picture. Just what the hell is that?

I watched The Crazies motion comic yesterday and then today I got in a few episodes of the Captain America cartoon from the '60s. I just realized that those old Marvel cartoons are basically motion comics but they're done right. The voices are better and don't sound like they're recorded in a bathroom and when people talk, it doesn't look like someone is using a computer to just stretch the mouth.

The Crazies was about the most I could take from a motion comic. It helped that each episode was just a new story and not some 6 hour Watchmen marathon.

It's not sloppy animation, it's a gag device to show, as you note, overreaction, and is a convention of certain anime genres (usually those set in high school) and is meant to be funny. Sometimes characters turn into little kid versions of themselves in such moments--I think the term used for that is "super deformed." That can get annoying to me when they're in a realistic setting, but it's something the TV audience in Japan is accustomed to and accepts.

Yeah, his reading as Laurie Juspeczyk was grating to say the least.



I might try a few more episodes but so far the only one I enjoyed was the Watchmaker.

Due to previous discussion in this thread, I watched Beowulf, which I had forgotten I owned, and two episodes of Scooby-Doo Mystery Inc, both for the first time.

Beowulf was better than I expected. Honestly I'd avoided it, and I wasn't crazy about the animation, but it was pretty interesting. I even put my phone down to watch the ending.

Scooby-Doo was good! Definitely a lot of winking humor.

They totally were! I still have some of those on VHS.

now that's funny to remark

I consider that high praise

iTunes has several free animated episodes for download right now.

Saturday Morning Cartoons includes an episode from each of the following: Ghostbusters (not The Real Ghostbusters, for those who understand the distinction), The Littles, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra, Princess of Power, Inspector Gadget, Super Mario Bros. Super Show, Rocky & Bullwinkle and Friends and Madeline.

Heroes of Anime includes an episode each from: Death Note, Vampire Knight, Hero: 108, Blue Dragon and Buso Renkin.

There's also '90s Are All That assortment of Nickelodeon shows. Three of the four are live action, but there is an episode of Doug in there.

You can also root around the Free Episodes selection for some other animated episodes, like the first episode of G.I. Joe: Renegade and Transformers: Prime.

I've downloaded most of these. I watched Transformers: Prime months ago and I've really gotten into that series. Yesterday morning I watched the free Inspector Gadget. Lots of facepalm moments watching it as an adult! Some of these episodes are even available free in HD. And don't forget, you can watch from your computer so you don't have to use, or even own, an iPod or iPhone. (You will need an iTunes account, though, which requires you to file credit card information with Apple, but they don't place any kind of hold or charge you anything.)

I've didn't have to add a card until I first bought something had a cost. I did free stuff just fine. It did complain that I didn't add a card when it wanted me to but I did get around that.

Well, there ya go. You might not need to file credit card information after all.

I just watched the free episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! Wow. That hasn't aged well at all! The live action portion ("Mama Mia Mario") was cheesy, but okay. The animated part ("The Great BMX Race") was pretty thin, though I did laugh at a couple of the lines.

What surprised (and, I suppose, disappointed) me most was that this was made in 1989. I started this morning off with the DVD of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero "Arise, Serpentor, Arise!" It was the 5-part Season 2 premiere story that introduced a ton of new characters and vehicles (essentially, a commercial for Hasbro's second wave of toys). It's 3 years older than the Mario episode I just watched. The kindest I could say is that the animation was comparable, but the truth is, the G.I. Joe animation was superior. Then I mentally contrast it with Batman: The Animated Series, which premiered three years after Mario and I wonder just what kind of progression there really was from G.I. Joe to Batman. I don't know, but I can tell you this: Mario wasn't part of it.

Nope. It's actually fairly easy to set up a iTunes account with no CC or Gift Card. Here are the directions I used a while back when I needed this for work but didn't want to link any of my CC info to a work account. Now you'll not get *any* accidental charges. If you ever want to actually purchase anything you can just buy a gift card and use that.

That pretty much settles it, then, doesn't it? So, um, yeah...go download the free stuff. Or not. Whatever, you know?

And don't forget about the iTunes stuff that's link in the first few posts. I believe that will get you some of the earlier checklist decades since at least some of it is silent.

Man, I must be getting old or something, but I was about to DL the free Transformers and GI Joe then thought about hard-drive space and declined. I did get Rocky and Bullwinkle, though, and had gotten the He-Man and She-Ra earlier.

So I decided to recommit to the Spider-Woman motion comic just so I could numeralize that entry, and it's pretty good, I guess. Watching #5 now.

I have a lot of placeholder partial entries in my list that are keeping me from numeralizing so I'm going to try to fill those out for the end of this challenge.

Finally watched Halo Legends as well. Interesting to see the styles of animation, and it the stories were OK, but it didn't really grab me. I watched it in pieces, which would theoretically work for the anthology format, but it kept it kind of disjointed. I've played the games for a long time (it's how I entered the console generation after never having one as a kid, then playing PC games for a while), and it was kind of cool to see some of that stuff on screen, but it was also a little pointless because modern games are like movies anyway.

I could just count my FLCL as a 1/4 entry and move on because I'm not really interested in watching more, but Trevor's OCD must be rubbing off a little because I'm trying to fill it in with some more anime.

Lots of selections in my collection and on Netflix, but I've decided to try Darker than Black, for no other reason than Yoko Kanno writes kickass theme music.

EDIT: Though I just saw that the actual theme was written by someone else . That actually makes sense since I'm familiar with Kanno for writing jazz, not rock, but there is some distinctive incidental music within the episodes.

Well, I finally re-read the "Metropolis" manga (small format paperback, only 162 pp.) and then re-watched the movie, for the first time since I saw it in a theater in 2002. I have two VHS copies, one a fan-sub and one an English dub. I tried watching the fan-sub, but the image was soft and the subtitles were really sloppy, so I put in the English dub, which had a much sharper image, and watched that. The manga was less focused on the sci-fi trappings and political machinations and more focused on the relationship between the boy and the robot who thinks it’s a human. (In the manga, the robot has a button inside its mouth that can change its appearance to that of a boy or a girl. In the anime, it’s unambiguously a girl.) As a result, the manga was more character-oriented and built up to the moment where the robot learns it’s a robot and decides to rebel against humanity, leading a mass uprising of robots. It’s pretty powerful stuff. This is only hinted at in the anime, which instead foregrounds a revolution by human workers, which wasn’t in the manga.

Very little of the story in the manga, in fact, has survived this translation. The manga was apparently just a departure point for the filmmakers’ own ideas about the future. Director Rintaro has treated this theme quite often (e.g. X THE MOVIE and the two GALAXY EXPRESS 999 movies) and screenwriter Katsuhiro Otomo has as well, as seen in AKIRA, which he both wrote and directed, and which also has a mass uprising by disgruntled workers and students.

Too much attention is paid to the intricate retro-futuristic backgrounds of the city, Metropolis. A lot of it is created with CGI which creates a jarring contrast with the 2-D animation of most of the film. I didn’t have a problem with the character designs because they were so closely based on Tezuka-style designs and I’ve been on such a Tezuka kick lately, it seemed quite comfortable to me. The backgrounds bothered me, though, because they tended to overwhelm the story. Also, the animators are more interested in thriller and action elements and staging chases through the city against elaborate backdrops than in exploring the relationship between Kenichi and Teema, the boy and the robot girl, which was the focus of the manga and which included them going to school together. I would have preferred simpler, more suggestive backgrounds, of the sort we got in “Astro Boy.”

The jazz soundtrack threw me off and so did the Ray Charles song. It just took me out of the movie, which I was finding a chore to sit through by that point anyway.

For the record, the manga, published in 1949, was a virtual rough draft of “Tetsuwan Atom” (Astro Boy), which Tezuka began drawing a year or so later. In an afterword in the manga, Tezuka describes how he was inspired to do this story upon seeing a single still in a film magazine showing the female robot in Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS and that he liked the word, “Metropolis,” and decided to use that as his title. That’s the only conscious connection to the Lang film. I think the Lang film inspired the animators here more than it did Tezuka, including the scenes in the film of the workers and robots toiling underground to keep Metropolis functioning.