When I was little, playing in the family room of my grandmother’s house, there was usually 1 of 5 movies on in the background: My Girl, Sister Act, Curly Sue, Ghost Dad or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After so many years though, movies you watched when you were little start lumping together into a kind of sub-category. They actually start to become their own nostalgia and you maybe take for granted that anything you used to watch back when you were a kid was just that–a kid’s movie, corny and classic but never actually any good.

That’s how it went with me, anyway. Until I came across Roger Rabbit on TV one night years later and kept it on for the memories. I was shocked to find it different than I remembered, different than I left it. This wasn’t just a simple nostalgia pick, this movie was awesome! This weird and incredible stylistic mix of film noir and colored pencil. Heavy shadows and cigar-smoking babies. Weasles in double-breasted trench coats and a hard-boiled private eye. Fedoras and gin together with a “bad guy” who’d kill cartoons–literally kill them–by lowering their bodies into toxic vats of what he called “dip.” And this would disintegrate them, wisps of steam from their dematerialized carcasses wafting from the bubbling green slime.

Even at 22 it scared the hell out of me.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit to me is one of those true pieces of rare movie magic, capturing a sense of everything that cinema is capable of similar to ways The Wizard of Oz did or Willy Wonka, of stealing you, just for an hour or two, showing you something unbelievable but making you believe it. And there’s a grown-up quality about all of it, too. So much of what they get away with would never fly in a more modern animated film geared at least in part toward children.

So a sequel. The great innovator Robert Zemeckis, with titles like Back to the Future, Beowulf and the upcoming A Christmas Carol to his credit, has announced that recent advancements in animation have given him a good idea for a second installment of RR, one that doesn’t rule out the use of 3D motion capture. The characters from the original won’t be dimensionalized, he says (thank God), but maybe others will, or maybe the 2D models will be animated through motion capture? For a fuller look at Zemeckis’ hinting go HERE.

The point is, it’s in the works, with original writers Peter Seaman and Jeffrey Price working on a script even as we speak. And there’s definitely a lot to be excited about. A sequel like this could very well set another standard for what’s possible in animation, incorporating these new elements. But lightning…it usually doesn’t strike twice. Back to the Future II is kind of barely passable, so is Ghostbusters II and so many other second attempts at real, inspired life. And if the edge is taken away from something like this to make it more PC, if the bad guy stops melting toons and starts just locking them up, if you take away the drinking and the smoking and the sex jokes, then all you’d have is annoying Roger Rabbit and some cutesie CG talking animals. And that would be bad, the dead returning to life but with bolts in its neck, loose stitching barely keeping it all from falling apart.

But hey, as long as the sultry Jessica Rabbit’s in the picture I’m on board. What a fox. That she would ever waste her time with that Roger character is simply laughable, I’m sorry. Talk about unrealistic.

Enjoy the trailer for the original embedded below and keep your fingers crossed for #2. Here’s to novelty.

The first picture has been released showing the animation style of Ricky Gervais’ upcoming HBO comedy based on his radio show. Take a look below. (I love how Karl looks like an older, more aloof version of Charlie Brown. That round-headed chimp.)

Here’s what we know:

• The Ricky Gervais Show is the most downloaded podcast of all-time.
• This won’t be the first time Gervais and his partner Steven Merchant have worked with HBO (check out Extras if for some ungodly reason you haven’t already)
• The show will be “based” on the podcasts (as in using original TRGS recordings)
• And Karl Pilkerton will be the star (how you could have a “star” of an unscripted cartoon radio-based show, I have no idea)

Here’s what we don’t know:

• Really, everything else.

I honestly don’t know how this show is going to work, how it’ll make sense and seem worthwhile, but I trust Gervais. And I trust his excitement for the project. Here’s something he wrote about it on his slice-of-celebrity-life blog:

“It’s weird. I’m really excited about The Invention of Lying and Cemetery Junction and the tour and the Flanimals movie and everything else I’m doing, but when I watch a new animatic or talk about the press campaign for the HBO thing I actually get an adrenalin rush. I want it to be a success like I’ve never wanted anything else to be successful. It’s partly because I love working with HBO. It’s partly because it started out as a laugh – a labour of love. It’s partly because the animators have done an amazing job. And it’s partly because there’s nothing quite like it.”

And here’s something else he posted. If you’ve never seen or heard Karl, the famous idiot-savant-ish character he is, this will give you an idea of what he’s all about.

I’m so ridiculously on board for this. Expect it after Christmas.

I found this trailer and these amazing stills literally over half a month ago and still haven’t posted them. Don’t ask me why. I could tell you I was busy, sorting out old student loans or tuning up my car, but the truth is that I probably just didn’t know what to say about them. And maybe I still don’t.

On a personal level I could tell you that I always imagined animation getting dark and serious one day. And not like Coraline dark. I’m talking depressing, no-irony dark. I envisioned the style serving as some kind of metaphor for maybe the falseness of a character’s life, how, to that character, everything might feel forced and fabricated, plastic–pixalated. The image I had–and don’t ask me why–is of a gritty cartoon man sitting on the edge of his bed, shirt off, his sheets tangled and crumpled behind him. He’s slumped over with his head in his hand. He’s looking around, examining the dim yellow light leaking from his closet door, the blue glow of the blocky numbers on his alarm clock. The silence. The fibers of who knows what in his carpet.

I don’t know. This is just always what came to mind when I thought about animation’s new breed–Animation: The New Class–when a big-time director would take on an animated film and everybody would be shocked.

To be fair, animation has changed, is really always changing. Digital design obviously redefined everything when it came along, and then there’s claymation, and stop-motion, and rotoscoping, semi-big names like Richard Linklater using it to wax philosophic in things like Waking Life. Or just look at the beginning 10 or 15minutes of Up, just how surprising and powerful and sad it is. Check out Wall-E, with its jaw-droppingly impressive visuals and more mature and risky dramatic techniques (like how much in the movie is expressed through wordlessness). And then there’s the raunchiness of something like a Team America: World Police, or the relentlessly depressing nature of a Grave of the Fireflies.

So this is me acknowledging the other side of the scale. Changes have been made. They have. But still…not the changes I’ve always kind of wanted. You can say all day that something like Wall-E isn’t strictly a “kid’s” movie–and I’d probably agree, maybe it’s not–but it’s not an “adult” movie, either. And that’s what I’m talking about. The change I’m waiting for is one that will make animated films not just “adult enough” but “adult – period,” something that will stop me from always lumping animated movies, no matter how much I love them, in with other animated movies. Stop me from thinking about them differently.

I’ve always been of the mind that anything can be good, that if you don’t like an entire genre you just haven’t seen the exception yet, that the idea of girls liking “chick flicks” and guys liking explosions is bogus. So why then do I still have a faction set up in my mind, animated movies on one side and everything else on the other?

This big tonal change I’m thinking of, it’s not just about something being deadpan or cynical, either; I don’t need an ending to go all existential on me, suggest that morality and God and love don’t actually exist, or for a script to explore human consciousness for me to qualify a cartoon as “adult.” But if something did go that way, it’d be a total paradigm shift for the genre (if you could call animation a genre), and I’d be taken back. And there’s nothing like being taken back at the movies. That’s when material really sinks in.

So I do think there is a place for Bergman themes and Gilliam surreality in animation. And I don’t know if Metropia will be the one to find that place, make us believe that the content really does warrant the form, but I’m hoping. Because, really, these screenshots are just incredible.

I know I really didn’t say much about this particular movie, but what’s there to say? It’s from Sweden; it features voice acting from Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis; it has an adult rating; it’s set in a dystopia. But it’s the pictures that are important. Just look at them; they articulate far more than I or any description ever could.

Here’s the trailer. Despite voice work from American actors, no US release is set.

A 24-year-old contestant on the show, Simonova tells a story through a series of portraits she paints on sand canvases with her fingers. And the pieces are just incredible. But what’s maybe most fascinating is how they’re created while we watch, brought to life then destroyed with every turn of Simonova’s hand, something new and equally stunning forming from what’s left of the scene before it. These aren’t finished products hanging on a wall, but interactive ones, changing and growing as we watch, organic and living.

I gotta give credit to RowThree.com for posting these videos. Incredible stuff. Really. And the keen observer might notice a certain METALLICA tune transposed through violins scoring part of the show. Because when people think emotional performance art, isn’t METALLICA always the first that comes to mind? Sand and metal – more like peas and carrots, am I right?

Anyway, on that note, enjoy the shoreline.