If greedy, corporate studios were the only ones to blame, then all of Hollywood's films would be equally terrible. It's easy to blame money-hungry studios for this year's slate of bad films, but it's likely a slew of factors. It hails from Sony Animation, the studio also responsible for this year's equally bad Smurfs: The Lost Village and The Star.
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#ANIMATED MOVIES FROM 2017 MOVIE#
The Emoji Movie is possibly the worst movie this year, and the embodiment of the shallow, corporate-driven model that has produced this outpouring of awful animated films. A series of clumsily thrown together tropes and plot devices on loan from superior films like Inside Out and Wreck-It Ralph, The Emoji Movie is the studio-imposed formula at its finest.
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While Kubo admittedly comes from the same production studio that created hits like Coraline, this illustrates a significant disparity between the mostly generic wide-release films and the audacious, smaller films that may have made a bigger impact if not for their modest theatrical releases.Īnd are these generic wide-release films really that bad? After subjecting myself to a back-to-back marathon of The Emoji Movie, Smurfs: The Lost Village, The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature, and Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, I can confirm yes. Loving Vincent - a gorgeous rotoscope film animated in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's impressionist art - was probably the most widely-released independent animated film, opening in 218 theaters. Compare this to last year's stop-motion Kubo and the Two Strings, which opened in over 3,000 theaters and made $48 million domestically. But they were vastly overshadowed at the theaters, often barely making a blip at the local independent theater chain before vanishing. theaters - cerebral Japanese animes like Your Name and In This Corner of the World were standouts, as well as ambitious European films like the Spanish-language Birdboy - in addition to independent releases like Loving Vincent, My Entire High School is Sinking Into the Sea, and The Breadwinner. How can there be such a difference in quality in one year? Let's dive into it.Īnd there are the cases of foreign films that make their way to U.S. Now you see what I mean.Ĭompared to last year, which boasted fantastic widely released films from high-profile studios like Disney's Moana and Zootopia and smaller studios like Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings, this year's wide-release animated movies have little in the way of critical acclaim. Don't remember what came out this year? The Emoji Movie, The Boss Baby, and Smurfs: The Lost Village, just to name a few.
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Aside from Coco, Cars 3, and The Lego Batman Movie, Hollywood has had a pretty bad year for animated movies. Mainstream animated films only have to keep kids occupied while their parents run errands.īut there was something exceptionally horrible about 2017's mainstream animated offerings. That's a job for the foreign animated flicks or for the arthouse indie films. When I sat down to compile a list of the best animated movies of 2017, I realized that the selection was shockingly meager. Outside of Pixar and Disney, animation has never been the pride of Hollywood, often appealing to the lowest common denominator rather than stretching the limits of what animated storytelling can do.