I loved everything about The LEGO Movie, but one of the things that amazed me the most was it’s animation style. It feels like you’re watching the largest LEGO stop-motion movie ever made, and everything you see is made of bricks. It’s crazy.

This video from fxguide gets into the nitty gritty on how Australia based Animal Logic accomplished the design and animation of the movie. It’s long and gets into lots of stuff I don’t understand, but it made me appreciate the work that went into the movie even more. And how crazy is it that they just used the consumer LEGO Digital Designer software to do a lot of their work?

Via Cartoon Brew

Holy crap you guys, The LEGO Movie is amazing. This was probably one of the movies I was most excited about this year, and I’d be very surprised if anything comes out that tops it for me. Seriously, Captain America 2 could be the best Marvel movie ever and I’m pretty sure my top movie would still go to The LEGO Movie. It’s that good.

It has everything. Top-notch writing, an excellent cast, and great pacing and action. On top of that, it’s one of the most visually pleasing animated movies in a long, long time. Even during parts where there wasn’t a joke (which was rare), I was just sitting there smiling because of how the movie looks.

I think this is going to make a bzillion dollars because I went to a 10pm screening and the audience was half adults and half kids. These kids were PUMPED to see this movie, but the adults were laughing harder. Chris Miller and Phil Lord are great at turning mediocre concepts into great comedy. There are some insanely funny jokes in this movie.
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I haven’t seen the Smurfs or Chipmunk movies because they look like horrible abominations and I feel like I have to sit through a trailer for one every other time I go to the movies. But, they seem to make a shitton of money and it looks like Disney wants to get a piece of that pie by using one of the most beloved cartoons from my childhood, Chip n Dale’s Rescue Rangers. I feel conflicted.

Pros

• Rescue Rangers getting popular again means it’s more likely for shows like Ducktales and Gummi Bears to make comebacks
• It could be really fun if done by people who loved the show
• The theme song is bitchin

Cons

• It will probably suck
• The director is very inexperienced
• It’s live action/cg hybrid
• The theme song will probably be covered by some horrible band

Seriously, why live action/CG? Rescue Rangers would look awesome as a straight CG movie. The Rescue Rangers didn’t get involved with humans much anyway, it was mostly other animals. Oh well, maybe it won’t be the worst thing ever.

Via Cartoon Brew and SlashFilm

Well, I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Everyone was expecting someone like Bryan Cranston to get cast as Lex Luthor, but today WB announced that Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, or Rio if you watch the kind of movies I do) is playing the villain in the Man of Steel sequel.

It’s…an interesting choice. I’m not upset or anything, I think he can pull it off. WB also announced that Jeremy Irons is playing Alfred, which is an equally interesting choice.

It makes sense to show Lex as a young genius and Jesse can definitely do that. The studio probably also wanted to cast someone younger than a Cranston and lock them in to a ton of sequels.

At the end of the day, I don’t really care who plays Lex as long as we get to see him in a big green and purple power suit at some point. Ammiright?

Via SlashFilm

In case you haven’t heard yet, some designs leaked from the new TMNT movie. It looks like concept art for Shredder and some design statues of the four Turtles have leaked, albeit in low resolution. Maybe the filmmakers will use this as motivation to get an official look at the characters out sometime soon.

I’ll be honest, I’m actually kind of liking these designs. The movie may suck, but I’m going to hold off any more judgement until we see a trailer. I don’t mind the Turtles having the looks they have in these images. I love that they are thick and muscular and not skinny like the CG movie.

Shredder looks a little like a cross between Super Shredder and Lord Zed, but we’ll see how he looks in motion. Honestly I was expecting way worse for Shredder so I’m sort of relieved. If this movie is at least decent, I could see it making a lot of money. Especially if they keep a few of the 80s throwbacks that were in the leaked script. That script had Bebop, Rocksteady, the Technodrome, and more. If they at least have a couple nods to the 80s cartoon while still having good CG and action, they could hit a sweet spot of people our age seeing this and young people seeing it because of Turtlemania 2.0.

What do you guys think?

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