Animators make good directors

No wonder you've got no money left, America! Stop making shitty movies!*

District 9 was a good movie. It was directed by a guy who did a lot of 3D animation before he got to sit in the director's chair. But guess what? It's not the only movie by a former animator. Apparently there's quite a bit of crossover. Par example:

Extract



Office Space, director Mike Judge's first film, is among my favourite movies of all time and definitely on my desert island top ten picks. His followup, Idiocracy, was a Swiftian masterpiece that I think a lot of people mistake for fart joke movie. Whatever, those people are prolly 'tarded and all faggy or sumpm. Above is the trailer for Extract which is set to be released September 4th (HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOSS!).

Mike Judge, as you probably know, actually started out in animation. He was the creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, and Office Space was even based off of some SNL shorts he did about Milton, Stephen Root's character.

Mike Judge isn't the greatest animator. None of his animations are going to win any awards. However, good animation isn't really a requirement for a good animated show- it just has to be entertaining. Judge's experience making animations seems to have given him the chops he needed to pull off a good live action film. Either that or he was just always good, and he could have done Office Space a lot earlier in his career.

Legion (that's the red band trailer holmes, enjoy)



This trailer came out a little while ago and from what I've read people don't know what to think of it. It's distributed by Screen Gems, and the release date is January 22 2010, a month notorious for bad movies. I for one am pumped beyond belief for this bad boy. Burn baby burn!

Turns out that Scott Stewart's directing. Who? Scott Stewart is the co-founder of The Orphanage, who have a pretty impressive resume of CGI work (before today I would have sworn that they also did Frank Darabont's The Mist and Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, but maybe that's not true). Legion's special effects are definitely in The Orphanage's style, which is a good thing, and the performances look pretty good too. Wait... did Dennis Quaid just die? In the trailer?

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus



I almost forgot to mention Terry Gilliam, a former member of Monty Python. His cut-and-paste style of animation gave birth to South Park and all forms of Animutation. After Monty Python shit the bed, Terry Gilliam became a feature film director, with films like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Fisher King, and the superb Brazil to his name.

Imaginarium is coming out this Christmas. It's the last film we're going to see with Heath Ledger in it, who died during filmmaking. Gilliam completed the unfilmed scenes with Heath's character using not one but three different actors: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Looks pretty weird.

Outland

Michael Davis directed Monster Man, one of my favourite horror films, and some low budget teen romantic comedies. To pitch his first Hollywood big budget feature, a script called Shoot 'em up, he created a fifteen minute long animatic- all the action sequences shot for shot. Michael Davis is an experienced animator, often using animations instead of storyboards to plan out the action scenes. The satiric nature of Shoot 'em Up was, like Idiocracy, lost on a few audiences. Too bad, it was a great film and I highly recommend it. Paul Giamatti: "Fuck me Sideways."

He hasn't made a movie since but it's possible he'll be doing a remake of the 1981 film Outland which starred Sean Connery.

Michael Davis once said that "having been a storyteller, having been an illustrator, being an animator, I feel that creating a motion picture is the ultimate art form, that it combines all of the things that I like to do." This is one of my favourite quotes and probably one of the reasons why I'm interested in films today. I think it sums up why animators make good directors- the sense of composition, of images, storytelling technique and the importance of motion are all skills that become honed by animating.

And hey, in case you were wondering I do a bit of animation myself. Check it.

*I should mention that GI Joe and The Simpsons made all of their money back and can't really be considered failures. It's just interesting how much more money is spent on inferior movies.