Under Appreciated disney movies

15. Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Strangely for a Disney flick, I think Atlantis’ strongest point was actually its design. For just about the first time, Disney made a radical departure from house style, adopting the dark and angular stylings that they used on Atlantis. Based on the work of comics superstar Mike Mignola (the man behind Hellboy), Atlantis was filled with deep sea monstrosities, brooding statues, and shadows like ink. Unfortunately, it didn’t sit to well with the usual princess set, and the lack of musical numbers didn’t help the case. Its performance was lackluster, and marked one of the last times that Disney would experiment so significantly with format.

14. The Black Cauldron

Despite what people think about Disney creating sanitized stories for children, almost all of their movies have some deeply scary bits, and villains that terrorize a fresh year of youngsters with every release. The Black Cauldron, however, deserves special mention. The titular cauldron could be used to create horrific, unkillable zombie warriors. You can imagine how dark and pants-shittingly scary that would be to kids. It’s also rare in that it was based on a modern novel rather than a classic tale. The story was so pitch black that the movie was vaulted for a very, very long time — and it was the first Disney animated movie to be rated PG.

13. The Sword in the Stone

The last Disney film released while Walt was still alive, the Sword in the Stone has fallen by the wayside in recent years. It’s one of the titles that sits between the old, old classic and the modern success stories, and is often forgotten because of that. It’s not the same vintage as Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella, it’s not one of the perpetually well selling Princess titles, nor was it part of the 90s-era best sellers. And none of that changes that it’s a beautiful, joyful animated story that is too often forgotten.

12. Treasure Planet

I’m going to blame the failure of Treasure Planet on one thing: Marin Short as that horribly goddamn annoying robot B.E.N. Honestly, he was crap. Okay, that’s an oversimplification — Treasure Planet struggled for a number of reasons: it was made when Disney’s 2D department was already floundering, there was a shortage of female characters and romance roles, and was perhaps too adventurey. Where it excelled was visually, with a stunning melding of traditional pirate garb and space opera — and those incredible space vistas! It debuted on IMAX as well as normal theaters, and on that huge screen, the deep space stuff was amazing. Unfortunately, the visuals and design were stronger than the script, which was severely wanting.

11. Bolt

Disney’s original forays into CG were utterly abysmal (see Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons), but Bolt? Bolt was actually surprisingly good. Sure, it had no chance against the incomparably wonderful WALL-E, but it marked the first time a Disney CGI movie was actually…you know…worth seeing. Reviewers widely considered it a throwback to the older age of Disney, one which delighted both the old and the young with family friendly but still smart and funny action — and didn’t rely on hackneyed pop culture and celebrity voices (DreamWorks, I’m looking at you…)

10. The Great Mouse Detective

Another slightly odd choice for a Disney movie in that it was based on a relatively contemporary book series, rather than an established classic. The Basil of Baker Street novels were published through most of the second half of the 20th century from 1958-1982, and Disney decided to pick them up for their 26th animated title. It was an early work by the man who went on to direct Aladdin and the Little Mermaid, and its success staged the way for the Disney Renaissance of the 90s. Even though it has been overshadowed by those later works, the Great Mouse Detective is still a remarkably fun movie, and one that is too often forgotten.

9. Emperor’s New Groove

I was really, really not expecting to like the Emperor’s New Groove, because David Spade is one of the most annoying human beings on the planet. Casting him as an equally annoying character? I can live with that. With John Goodman, Eartha Kitt and Patrick Warburton rounding out the cast, those three actors managed to elevate the movie into the comedic genius that it was. Seriously, Warburton is absolutely fantastic. New Groove was a critical and box office success, not breaking any records, but doing seriously well for a non-princess, not-very-musical Disney title, but for some reason it was soon forgotten.

8. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

You know, I completely missed the sequel Winnie the Pooh movie that came out this year. I guess I really just wasn’t paying attention. Anyway, 1977’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is an interesting case of a Disney movie, because it’s constructed of three little featurettes, strapped together into a full length title, produced this way to keep costs down. This title proved to be a remarkable success, spawning off TV shows and merchandising the likes of which had not been seen by Disney before, but in recent years it has lost a lot of its lustre. Hopefully 2011’s sequel will respark interest in the classic original.

7. Pinnochio

Pinnochio was just the second Disney full length feature, after the classic Snow White. Watching it, it’s astonishing to think it was created while the world was embroiled in war, yet one of the most technically advanced and incredible pieces of animation ever crafted was put together. Pinnochio’s animation is absolutely stunning, and compared to today’s often outsourced and poorly made cartoons, the fluidity and detail is just mindblowing. Sure, the animators probably worked for slave wages, but they cared, damnit! Another classic that doesn’t seem to have received quite as much attention as it deserves, without Pinnochio, Disney would never have become the powerhouse it is today.

6. The Rescuers

The Rescuers (and to a lesser extent, its sequel, Rescuers Down Under) were major critical and commercial success, and marked the end of the silver age of Disney, but remain very separate beasts in their own right. The Rescuers was one of the first Disney movies to use star actors for voice roles, something they used frequently ever since (but never to the pop culture level that you see in many CG flicks). Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor played the roles of Bernard and Miss Bianca, agents of the Rescue Aid Society, off to stop the evil Madame Medusa. It was the first successful animated film that Disney himself had not animated, and was the legendary Don Bluth’s first time as animator rather than assistant animator. The film was a smashing success when it was released, but has since been mostly forgotten.

5. Tangled

One of Disney’s more recent released, Tangled marked the move of the traditional princess comedy into the world of 3D and CGI — yet despite having almost infinite potential to go horribly and tediously wrong, Tangled ended up being a heartwarming and hilarious tale. It also has some of the most wonderful CGI ever seen, with environments looking like paintings in an obvious nod to Disney’s roots. Because of its long development time, Tangled ended up costing $260 million to make, making it the most expensive animated movie of all time, and the second most costly movie ever. As enjoyable as it was, I can’t help but feel that there was a bit of a DreamWorks pop-culture influence.

4. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad

Created during WWII when animators and supplies were scarce, the Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad was a package film made up of two separate shorts — a retelling of Wind in the Willows, and the decidedly dark Sleepy Hollow. That Sleepy Hollow short film would continue to be in rotation for years, and I’m pretty sure that every Halloween it still gets shown — and is a dark and disturbing story if ever there was one. With its uncharacteristically downbeat ending, it’s seen a lot less frequently these days, but if you can get it, it’s great for scaring the kids on dark nights.

3. 101 Dalmatians

The 1961 animated 101 Dalmatians (not to be confused with the 1996 live action version with a bumbling Hugh Laurie) was a landmark Disney film — the first to be set in a contemporary setting, and was a major technological leap from earlier films. It was universally loved, and has been reissued more times than I care to think about — yet at the same time it has never seen quite the level of respect of some of Disney’s other titles. You can still easily track down the DVD, and it has been one of the most long term profitable movies of all time, thanks to its classic status.

2. Three Caballeros

Arguably horribly stereotyped, if you can look past that the Three Caballeros is an incredibly fun old film, considering it was only Disney’s seventh. It also offered a mindblowing technological innovation: a mix of live action and animation, which had never before been seen. The loosely connected set of short segments were put together as a propaganda package to improve relationships between USA and Latin America, hence the large number of latin stars who popped up in the film. It also marks one of the few times an existing Disney character appeared in a feature Disney film.

1. Fantasia

When I was younger, I found Fantasia to be one of the most mind-numbingly boring Disney cartoons in existence. I mean sure, the dinosaurs and the demon were awesome, but everything else was just dull. It wasn’t until later in life that I came to appreciate just how incredible Fantasia was — and I’m sorry, but Fantasia 2000 doesn’t compare. It’s astonishing to think that this was only Disney’s third full length feature, and that it was such a blatantly experimental piece — telling stories to nothing but classical music. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a profitable venture at first due to the cost of installing the high quality sound systems needed to play it properly, but in the years after, it has become a firm favorite — and has been re-edited and released more times than I care to mention. It’s beautiful, touching, adventurous, and everything else you could want from a Disney film — without a word of dialog.

Voldemort hugs Draco

Out of all the classic moments that populate the final battle at Hogwarts, the latest Harry Potter film created a few new ones that weren’t in the book, and will stick with me ahead of the others.

By far, the most hilariously awkward moment of the film (besides Harry and Ginny’s kiss) was during Voldemort’s victory party where he decided to give Draco Malfoy a bony hug. It was supposed to be a solemn scene, but made everyone in the theater burst out laughing with how out of character and strange it was, and I still say it was a misstep on the part of the film.

But now we can see how that scene COULD have been, with this extended version that turns up the awkward dial to eleven. Watch it for yourself above.

3 Ways To Wow Your Audience With A Killer Live Presentation

Pitt Patt was founded in 2004 as a spin-off firm built upon a decade of research into object recognition by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Now it's a Google property. What will the Net behemoth be able to do with Pitt Patt's technology? Almost anything to do with advanced face recognition, from video to Picasa's popular images to photos uploaded and shared via Google+. This really could change web-based everything.

Pitt Patt (for Pittsburgh Pattern recognition) developed a highly successful system for recognizing people's faces. At its core are two algorithms that recognize faces--one mostly front-on with a yaw angle of 18 degrees and one that can ID people who've tilted their faces up to 36 degrees from head-on. It's also capable of tracking people and objects--meaning it's good for video feeds, too--and has a complex API to allow for sophisticated integration into different products.

What does this mean for Google? Pitt Patt's newly refreshed front page highlights that "computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image search, YouTube, Picasa and Goggles)" so we can take it that the Pitt Patt algorithms will be quickly adapted into Google's tech to aid with the accuracy of face and object recognition, for things like landmarks in Goggles. 

That's all well and good, but what if Goggles was wired into your Android phone's camera so it automatically tagged your friends in the metadata, using a remote look-up like Goggles' system--boosted by Pitt Patt's tech? How about highly reliable face-recognition log-ins for Android phones, tablets, or Chromebooks?

Instant, reliable face recognition could also dramatically affect the services in Google+, with automatic linking of people's profiles to images and video uploaded by other users. And here we see the germs of a novel idea to quickly create a social graph that's as complex and smart as Facebook's is: By encouraging users to enable face recognition, and working out who's most often in photos and videos together, Google could almost certainly map a complicated network of friendship relationships by inferring them, and thus "steal" Facebook's biggest jewel without any actual theft.

There's a massive buzz kill (pun intended) underlying all these suggestions, however. And that comes from Google's own Eric Schmidt who has recently revealed that Google's shied away from face recognition primarily because it has too many implications for privacy abuses (and, presumably, lawsuits aimed at Google). But what if Google's taking some of the lesson's it's learned about user privacy since the Buzz and Wave fiascos--and subsequent success of Plus--and is now ready to take a limited leap into more ubiquitous automatic face recognition with privacy lessons intact? Wound throughout Google's extensive tech offerings, face recognition could become everything from a key (if your face is tied to your Google profile) to a powerful search booster. It's also tech that Apple doesn't have provision for on the iPhone or iPad--and so it could give Android a big advantage if consumers like it.

How movies mirror our mimicry??

Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction is packed with memorable dialogue — 'Le Big Mac', say, or Samuel L. Jackson's biblical quotations. But remember this exchange between the two hitmen, played by Jackson and John Travolta?

Vincent (Travolta): "Antwan probably didn't expect Marsellus to react like he did, but he had to expect a reaction".

Jules: "It was a foot massage, a foot massage is nothing, I give my mother a foot massage."

Computer scientists Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, see the way Jules repeats the word 'a' used by Vincent as a key example of 'convergence' in language. "Jules could have just as naturally not used an article," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. "For instance, he could have said: 'He just massaged her feet, massaging someone's feet is nothing, I massage my mother's feet.'"

The duo show in a new study that such convergence, which is thought to arise from an unconscious urge to gain social approval and to negotiate status, is common in movie dialogue. It "has become so deeply embedded into our ideas of what conversations 'sound like' that the phenomenon occurs even when the person generating the dialogue [the scriptwriter] is not the recipient of the social benefits", they say.

Mirroring reality

"For the last forty years, researchers have been actively debating the mechanism behind this phenomenon," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. His study with Lee, published in the proceedings of a workshop¹, has not pinned down whether the 'mirroring' tendency is hard-wired or learnt, but it shows that this tendency does not rely on the spontaneous prompting of another individual and the genuine desire for his or her approval.

"This is a convincing and important piece of work, and offers valuable support for the notion of convergence," says Lukas Bleichenbacher of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, a philologist and specialist on language use in film.

The result is all the more surprising given that movie dialogue is generally recognized to be a stylized, carefully polished version of real speech, serving the dictates of fiction, such as character and plot development.

"The method is innovative, and kudos to the authors for going there," says Howie Giles, a specialist in communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"Fiction is really a treasure trove of information about perspective-taking that hasn't yet been fully explored," agrees Molly Ireland, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "I think it will play an important role in language research over the next few years."

But, Giles adds, "I see no reason to have doubted that one would find the effect here, given that screenwriters mine everyday discourse to make their dialogues appear authentic to audiences".

Dialogue deluge

That socially conditioned speech becomes an automatic reflex has long been recognized. "People say 'oops' when they drop something," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil explains. "This probably arose as a way to signal to other people that you didn't do it intentionally. But people still say 'oops' even when they are alone, so the presence of other people is no longer necessary for the 'oops' behaviour to occur — it has become an embedded behaviour, a reflex."

He and Lee wanted to see if the same was true of convergence in conversation. To do that, they needed a seemingly unlikely situation in which the person generating the conversation could not expect any of the supposed social advantages of mirroring speech patterns. That's precisely the situation for movie scriptwriters.

So the researchers looked at the original scripts of about 250,000 conversational exchanges in movies, and analysed them to identify nine previously recognized classes of convergence.

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lee found that such convergence is clearly evident in the movie dialogues, although less so than in real life — or, standing proxy for real life, in conversational exchanges held on Twitter. In other words, the writers have internalized the notion that convergence is needed to make dialogue 'sound real'. "The work makes a valid case for the use of 'fictional' language data," says Bleichenbacher.

Giles remarks that, rather than simply showing that movies absorb the unconscious linguistic habits of real life, there is probably a two-way interaction. "Audiences use language devices seen regularly in the movies to shape their own discourse," he points out. In particular, people are likely to see what types of speech 'work well' in the movies in enabling characters to gain their objectives, and copy that. "One might surmise that movies are the marketplace for seeing what's on offer, what works, and what needs purchasing and avoiding in buyers' 

own communicative lives," Giles says.

Not all movies showed the effect to the same extent. "We find that in Woody Allen movies the characters exhibit very low convergence," says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil — a reminder, he adds, that "a movie does not have to be completely natural to be good".

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil hopes to explore another aspect of this blurring of fact and fiction. "We are currently exploring using these differences to detect 'faked' conversations," he says. "For example, I am curious to see whether some of the supposedly spontaneous dialogues in so-called 'reality shows' are in fact all that real."

Light at the End of the Racetrack: How Pixar Explored the Physics of Light for Cars 2

Although the stories told by Pixar Animation Studios take place in richly realized fantasy realms, the science and technology required to create those worlds have distinctly real-world origins.

For Cars 2, set for release in late June, the minds behind such films as Toy Story, Upand WALL-E had to study the complex ways in which light reflects off cars. The movie leaves behind the sleepy desert town setting of the original and takes place in the world of in­ternational racing, which meant having to depict many cars moving through varied tracks and racing surfaces. Producers quickly realized that Pixar’s existing 3-D lighting system would need significant upgrading.

“Cars are designed and painted to have a unique relationship to color and light,” says Pixar lighting team member Sudeep Rangaswamy. “So we needed to explore how light plays off of fast-moving vehicles—and how their movement and reflective qualities play off of the surrounding environment.”

A research team at Pixar studied the light-absorbing qualities of auto paint, carbon fiber and chrome, as well as the darkness-penetrating intensity and reach of standard and LCD headlights. The results were programmed into algorithms that calculate and render in real time the frequency and temperature of light and color on reflective,
absorbing and distorting materials.

That research was then integrated into a new lighting engine—software that allows animators to create scenes that appear to be illuminated from any angle, just the kind of effect a real-world director of photography would aim for. The lighting engine integrates with a virtual camera system, which allowed director John Lasseter to create scenes from any camera perspective. “The new engine allows lights from the scene to interact correctly with the characters the animators place within it,” Ranga­swamy says. “For example, we re-created downtown Tokyo for the film with all its neon lights. The engine created those lights with its [artificial intelligence] and maintained them—automatically, creating the correct lighting relationships.”

Thus, as Lightning McQueen races, the track lights and neon signs reflect off of his red paint, and that red glow can now reflect in a puddle as he passes, which alters the color of the car next to him—­all without the animators needing to render these effects “by hand” from scene to scene. The new lighting technology will remain in Pixar’s proprietary software toolbox for future films long after Cars 2 rolls over the horizon.