If things look a bit different around here, it’s because I just switched to a new web host. All of my old entries should still be intact, but the visual themes didn’t come along for the ride. I’ll be updating the graphics and other visuals as I find the time.

I don’t understand the “business” part of the movie business. Astro Boy recouped about 11% of its total production cost during its opening weekend, which makes it a massive failure by Hollywood standards. Disney and ImageMovers’ A Christmas Carol made back about 15% of its budget, which makes it only “disappointing,” but not devastating. Somewhere in that extra 5% is the difference between “disaster” and “disappointment.”

Is it because $30 million is a lot more than $7 million? Seriously, business guys, it doesn’t actually matter if your movie made 4 or 5 times as much money as someone else’s movie when your movie cost three times as much to make. Still, animated movies tend to do very well over the holidays, and holiday-themed movies do well on DVD because of their perennial appeal. I doubt that anyone will lose money on A Christmas Carol, unlike Astro Boy. Other predictions from more reputable (but apparently not more accurate) sources than myself guessed that it would gross approximately $40 million in its first weekend, which would have been a 20% return, so someone is probably losing sleep — but not their job — over this.

So how did I do on my predictions?

Box Office
As I already said, A Christmas Carol pulled in a little over $30 million in its opening weekend, which is actually quite a bit of cash. It was plenty to put it in the number one spot for the weekend, which I correctly predicted, and more than twice as much as the #2 film, Michael Jackson’s This Is It (in its second week — in its first week, it made $34.4 million).

As much as I like to gloat, I must admit that I predicted the movie would “during its opening weekend and throughout the holiday season.” While I could technically count that as a successful prediction based on the #1 slot and sound drubbing of the competition, I did make judicious use of weasel words to hedge my bets. I gave myself plenty of wiggle room to declare victory as long as the movie finished #1, but the spirit of the prediction was that it would be a significant financial success. On the contrary, the lukewarm box office returns are below industry predictions and weaken my “absolutely kill” prediction.

Critical Response
Here is a sampling of my predictions:

I can predict with confidence that this movie will also feature creepy, dead eyes… but not as creepy as [in Zemeckis's previous films].

…the GLORIOUS 3D will be the main attraction in any review written about this movie.

I expect that the critics who aren’t too blinded by [the 3D effects]… will yawn their way through their reviews and dismiss the movie as an inoffensive and ultimately forgettable version [of A Christmas Carol].

Here is a sampling of the reviews that support my prediction, gathered from RottenTomatoes.com:
(note: I took all of my excerpts from “Top Critics” this time, to lessen the temptation to cherry-pick reviews that make me look good)

Zemeckis captures all the story’s terror, but its pathos has always been the real challenge, and it mostly eludes him.
- J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader

The motion capture animation is top-notch and it’s hard not to be impressed with what Robert Zemeckis has wrought, even if there’s the occasional sense he’s pandering to an audience that can’t get through a 90 minute story without a few yuks and a chase.
- James Berardinelli, ReelViews

Favors thrill-ride effects that are more often the star than the servant of the story. It’s like “Silent Night” played by Led Zeppelin.
- Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

There are also a number of reviews that subvert my prediction nicely. To my surprise (and the critics’ credit), most of them were not taken in by the 3D effects, and made what seems to be a concerted effort to avoid emphasizing the graphics in their reviews. Instead, most focused on what they liked or didn’t like about this particular interpretation of the story. The opinions are mixed, with only 55% of all RT critics and 46% of “top critics” giving it a positive review overall. By reading the reviews and excerpts, I determined that these percentages were unusually close to the overall sentiment of each individual reviewer: most of them straddled the fence between positive and negative, with the most common observation being “It was pretty to look at, but the story…”. Interestingly, the second most common seemed to be the opposite: “It was a nice retelling of the story, but the graphics and camera moves were nauseating.”

Miscellaneous Predictions
I also predicted that I won’t bother to go and see A Christmas Carol. I’ve seen nothing to change my mind, so I’m counting that as “correct.” My remaining prediction, that the movie will do well throughout the holiday season, remains to be seen. I may post an additional follow-up if the results are surprising.

Since this trailer is officially labeled a “Teaser,” I’m going to wait on the full “official” trailer to write up my predictions. Still, I can’t help but make some observations.

First, the voice acting is just not working for me. If the human characters were goofy caricatures, the comical delivery of the main character might fit, but I have a hard time believing that that voice won’t wear really thin by the time an hour or so has passed. And forget about any real pathos. This movie had better be comedy through and through, or else the protagonist is going to sink it.

I do like the dragon design, though. It’s original.

This is a post about Mac computers. Well, it’s actually not so much about the Mac computers themselves as it is about the changing computing landscape surrounding them. Actually, it’s not so much about the computing landscape as it is about my perception of that landscape and how it has changed in the past decade or so.

What I’m saying is that it’s very specific. But if you like computers you’ll probably like it anyway. If you just came here for trailer predictions and don’t care about anything else, you can see a nifty, “Trailer-Predictions-Only” version of this blog by clicking “Trailer Predictions” under the Categories box in the sidebar, or follow this link here.

I was born born into a Mac household. That’s totally untrue, since the first Mac wouldn’t be released until I was three years old, and my dad wouldn’t own one until 1993, but it certainly feels true. I played around with a Commodore 64 when I was a kid, but I didn’t really learn computers until that glorious Macintosh IIvx (which would become obsolete within months when its 68030 processor dropped off the bottom of many applications’ “minimum requirements” specifications). From the first time I loaded the demo CD-ROM into its 4X optical drive and started playing the game demos and promotional video (!) clips on its 640 x 480 13 inch (!!) monitor until I graduated from high school in 1999, I was a genuine Mac addict. Sure, I never played with the system settings or anything crazy like that. It was Dad’s computer after all. But the operating system was like an old friend, and whenever I was forced to wander in the Windows wilderness at school or a friends’ house, the sense of relief at returning to that welcoming “happy mac” icon was palpable.

During those six years, I also developed half-formed but passionate opinions about computers that bordered on political. I was like the Glenn Beck of Apple, the Keith Olbermann of OS 7.5.  If Windows was superior in any way, I didn’t want to hear about it, and I’d tell you why you were wrong even (especially?) when I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.

Despite all my bluster, at the heart of this superiority complex was a sense of insecurity. If people didn’t support the Mac, it could die out! I needed to evangelize, to bring the lost into the fold, and bolster our numbers so that the platform would stay alive. Through it all, the thing that angered and frightened me the most was developers who didn’t support the Mac, especially game developers. The vicious cycle was evident, even to my addled teenage mind: nobody develops for the Mac, so nobody uses the Mac, so nobody develops for the Mac. You want to play Doom on a Mac? Have fun waiting an extra year. Want to play Fallout? Tough luck there, bud. I was left standing on the questionable platform that PC games weren’t important, and that the only games that mattered were available for the Mac anyway. This was woefully untrue in 1993, and it continued to be untrue until at least 1999, when I stopped using Macs.

I didn’t turn my back on the platform, but someone gave me a Windows 95 PC as a high school graduation gift which I soon upgraded to Windows 98 using my college discount. My loyalty to the Mac ran deep, but it crumbled in the face of a computer that was mine. I could do anything I wanted to this computer, and nobody would be upset. I could tweak it, install applications, uninstall applications, try those Windows-only game demos I’d been longing to try, and just generally make a mess of things with no serious consequences (except that time I messed with the bootloader and couldn’t figure out what I’d done). A couple of years later, I bought a new computer with my own money. Once again, it was a PC. I needed a PC to run the software I was using for school, and it was much cheaper anyway. My dad made the joke that the PC was dragging me into Windows much like marijuana drags people into harder drugs. It was like a “gateway” drug, except that it was a “gateway computer” instead. The joke sort of fell apart when we all remembered that it actually was a Gateway computer, with the cow logo and everything.

As most Mac fans probably know, 1999 may have been the best possible time to switch operating systems. In 2000, Apple released OS X, the most significant change to the Mac experience ever. Although it would ultimately lead to the company’s salvation, for the first year or so it was a mess of bugs and incompatibilities as Apple and the developers who wrote applications for the Mac all worked to figure out how this new system was going to work. There were layers of emulation, and plenty of old programs that were supposed to “just work,” but instead had to be run in a dual-boot environment (kind of like Boot Camp today, except that both OS’s were Mac OS). It was a headache that wasn’t fully resolved for most existing Mac users until years later. Those were the years I missed.

After I graduated from college, I finally bought a Mac. It was a G4 Powerbook, and it was beautiful. During my years in the Windows wilderness, I’d grown pretty comfortable with the Microsoft way of doing things. I’d actually started to believe that maybe, just maybe, the Mac way wasn’t really “better,” just “different.” It only took about a week with my new laptop to change my mind. I won’t elaborate on how the Mac was better; many people have written on this subject in more detail than I ever could. The important thing is that I felt like I was home, even though the interface was almost completely different from the OS 8.5 desktop I’d left behind four years earlier.

But something else was different, too, and here is where I finally get to the point of this article. The anger against Windows was gone. It wasn’t because I’d grown familiar and comfortable with Windows. If anything, switching from Windows XP to OS 10.3 made me even more annoyed with Windows in hindsight. No, the anger was gone because the insecurity was gone. While I was looking the other way, Apple had put together a serious operating system that was better in ways that the old Macintosh OS never was. All of those claims I’d made back in high school to defend the Mac against Windows were finally true, and they were so self evident that I didn’t have to preach them from the pulpit anymore.

Developers have started to take the Mac seriously, too, because the percentage of home computer users with Macs continues to grow. Business software is still focused on Windows because corporations mostly stick to large numbers of cheaper computers, but developers of quality software for single users, like games, are taking notice as Apple dominates laptop sales quarter after quarter.

Just the other day, I was looking at a website for a game that looked interesting until I noticed that it was Windows-only. That’s when I realized how much things had changed because I wasn’t mad at the game company. I was barely even irritated. Instead, I felt sorry for them. Why? Because they obviously didn’t have the resources to develop for two platforms. They had to pick the one with a greater user base (and which still has a disproportionate number of the serious PC gamers), but in the process they abandoned a potentially lucrative section of the market. They made the same decision that a game company would have made in 1999, but my perception of that decision has changed. I no longer assume that they ignored the Mac market, but rather that they had to choose to not develop for it. Presumably, they wish they could afford to support both Windows and Mac, but they just can’t.

It also helps that most of the really significant PC games make it to the Mac fairly soon after their PC release, and my favorite game maker releases them simultaneously. There are a handful of PC-only games that remain relevant for a long time, but for the most part, the most long-term successful games either focus on consoles or release their games for both PC and Mac.

It’s amazing how much things have changed, and I for one am happy with this new software landscape. I’ll still go on and on to anyone who will listen about the virtue of the Mac, but it’s a lot less religious now. After all, if someone doesn’t switch to a Mac today, it will be their loss, not mine, and certainly not all Mac users’.

Bam! I hate to say I told you so, but, well… there it is.

I try to avoid being too gleeful when I’m right about a movie failing. The reality is that I’d love every animated film to be great and to do well at the box office. It’s not good for anyone in my business (animation) when a movie tanks, and schadenfreude is in bad taste when the movie was made by good people who never did me any harm. Even more upsetting is that this poor showing will probably doom the troubled Imagi Studios (warning, link is very Flash-heavy), and at the very least will lead to major cutbacks for them, likely including the shuttering of their LA studio as they regroup in Hong Kong.

So with that in mind, I’d like to do a mostly factual post-mortem (seems appropriate) breakdown of my prediction and the reality.

I basically made two predictions while spending most of my article being snarky about Astro Boy’s status as a not-so-hot property with kids today.

Prediction 1: Astro Boy will be derivative and boring.
Outcome: If the 48% rating at RottenTomatoes.com doesn’t tell the whole story, here are some quotes from reviewers.

There’s very little that the filmmakers haven’t borrowed here, making Astro Boy feel as copied as its title character.
— Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times

Astro Boy ultimately fizzles when it should be flying.
— Todd Gilchrist, Sci Fi Wire

Lacklustre design and rudimentary storytelling sink Astro Boy…
— Jason Anderson, Toronto Star

Not all of the reviews were bad, but there are some telling trends even in the reviews that come in positive:

A visually stunning sci-fi movie that occasionally drags and could have used more imagination as well as some exploration of its provocative themes…
— Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

I found it all pretty exciting, except for the middle, and only as much as I’m interested in CGI based on manga, but still.
— Fred Topel, Can Magazine

…the familiarity gives it the elemental power of a fairy tale. The animation is serviceable but nothing special; what makes the movie work is the brisk pace and the engaging characters.
— Jim Lane, Sacramento News and Review

Those last three quotes are from reviews the Rotten Tomatoes deemed “positive.” I’m cherry-picking, of course, but I did pick quotes that I felt were representative of the overall critical reception. Hardly any of the critics are skewering it or wishing for their money back, but very few are singing its praises either.

Prediction #2: Astro Boy will tank at the box office.
Outcome: Boy-howdy, was I right. Astro Boy cost $65 million to make, and it pulled in less than $7 million on its opening weekend. I haven’t been at this long enough to predict its final returns based on its first weekend, but it seems like it will be hard-pressed to break even, even with DVD sales factored in. On the other hand, kids movies seem to do better on DVD relative to their theatrical earnings than movies aimed at adults, so Astro Boy’s salvation may lie in Netflix and Blockbuster.

What I find so frustrating about this whole thing is that everyone who bothered to have an opinion of this movie before its release was optimistic. I’m not talking about the filmmakers. Of course they would say they were optimistic, and I suppose they really were. I wouldn’t expect them to diss their own film in any case.

Forbes magazine published their own predictions in advance of this weekend, guessing that Astro Boy would make $13 million and place #4 for the weekend. They probably thought they were being conservative, but it actually came in with about half that much, and two places lower. Even the lackluster Couples Retreat, now in its third week, beat it by nearly $3 million. Steve Hulett, blogger and business representative of The Animation Guild (a Hollywood-based union for people in the animation industry) thought the movie would do better than $13 million, and had been making optimistic comments about the film and Imagi studios for some time prior to its release.

Maybe I’ve just been keeping cloistered company, but part of the reason I started this feature was to combat the seemingly hopeless naivete and baseless optimism about upcoming animated features. There’s nothing wrong with a little fanboyism (I’m particularly prone to it myself when it comes to superhero movies or Pixar features), but some of us are supposed to be professionals with an ability to evaluate animation professionally. That means the two questions we should be asking are “will it be good?” and “will it make money?” If your answer to either of these questions starts with “I want” or “I hope,” you are already in trouble.

[Follow this link to YouTube version if you can't view the embedded trailer.]

My prediction for this film’s box office success hinges on one question: does anyone give a flying squirrel’s pinky toenail about Astro Boy anymore? The answer is, of course, “Who the flip is Astro Boy?”

Astro Boy was a Japanese manga (Japanese graphic novel) series that began in the 1950s and was made into an anime series in the 1960s. The titular Astro Boy was wildly popular in Japan, and his real-life creator, Osamu Tezuka, is regarded by many as the father of modern manga and anime. The character was introduced to America in the form of English-language translations of the anime series back when everyone still called anime “japanimation.” A new animated series was released in the 1980s, which was also fairly popular. Since then, there have been a few attempts to revive the character with mixed success.

The point of this history lesson is this: although Astro Boy was once extremely popular, nobody has had much interest in him for about 20 years. Today, his main value is his historical significance to fans of animation and Japanese entertainment. If you’re reading my blog, there’s a good chance you fall into the first category, and you may think that people still care about Astro Boy because you still hear about him in animation circles. Let me be perfectly clear: Nobody in America cares about Astro Boy.

Nobody

cares

about

Astro Boy.

Least of all the intended audience for this kind of film, most of whom were not born until Astro Boy had been off the air for more than a decade in the U.S. Compare this to the last Teenage Mutant Nija Turtles movie. TMNT is a much more active franchise, with healthy merchandising that started in the late 1980s and continues to this day. Even that movie didn’t exactly set the box office on fire.

“But wait!” I can hear you thinking (that’s right, I can hear you thinking!) “Astro Boy doesn’t have to sell tickets based on fans of the old franchise. Kids and families will go to see it based on the strength of the film as a stand-alone piece!”

Which brings me to the trailer.

The trailer is boring.

The only people I know who are excited by this trailer fall into one of two camps: anime fans who want to see a renewal of interest in Astro Boy and animators who want to see Imagi succeed because it would be good for the industry. The relevant commonality between those two groups is the phrase “want to see.” They aren’t excited because they think the movie will be good, they are excited because they want the movie to be good. They have invested part of themselves in the idea of this movie, and that has blinded them to the reality that the trailer and all of the promotional clips are…

…boring.

He’s a fighting robot who looks like a kid! He has a brave and resourceful female friend who makes up for her lack of powers with, um, bravery and resourcefulness! Look, she bumped her head and fell on some scrap metal. Humor! Hey, there’s Nicolas Cage’s voice! That’s… something. And there’s a robot dog… and a big generic robot… and an evil military guy who wants to use Astro Boy for evil. Oh, and here’s the funniest thing they could find to put in the trailer. Astro Boy has guns in his butt! And the joke is that he recognizes this fact and comments on it. Ummm… ha ha?

Astro Boy also has some stiff competition. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs remained #6 for the weekend before Astro Boy’s release. To recap Cloudy’s box office placement, it opened at #1, held it for another weekend, then came in at #2 and #3 for the next two weekends before dropping to #6 this past weekend. I still haven’t seen it, and if I go to see an animated movie this weekend, it’s definitely not going to be Astro Boy. Meanwhile, the re-release of Toy Story & Toy Story 2 in 3D is entering its fourth weekend in theaters, and it’s been performing pretty well, staying in the top 10 for the past 3 weeks.  And let’s not forget the Where the Wild Things Are juggernaut for the slightly older kids and families. That’s a movie with strong pull for the tween boys who otherwise might have wanted to see a fighting robot kid this weekend.

Look, I can’t make you not be excited about this movie. And animators? I don’t want it to fail any more than you do (except so far as it bolsters my prediction reputation). If this movie does well at the box office, that’s a good thing for animators.

But Jeeze Louise! This trailer has flaws, and I hope most of the animators who’ve watched it can recognize that. Animated films will not be profitable for studios who cannot see the flaws in their movie ideas before they stake their company’s reputation on them. If you watched this trailer and thought “yeah, that looks like a movie I’d be proud to make,” I really hope you aren’t in charge of getting movies made. And if you are, don’t expect most audiences to care about the movies you do make, no matter how many classic characters you license, and no matter how hard you try to make the story generic, safe, and broadly appealing.

In the course of my daily blog-trawling, I came across this great mini-lecture about how to increase your skills as an animator and increase your ability to finish more seconds of animation per week (or day, or hour if it comes to that). Even though the speaker is addressing animation specifically, the information can apply to ANY field, no matter how mindless the job may seem.

Go watch the lecture (it’s only 4:10) and come back.

http://animationsalvation.com/free_tips/animation-hell/256

Finished? Good!

To review what is, in my opinion, the most important part: to be your best at what you do, you must balance education with experience. That means any time you learn something new, you should apply it, and every time you do something new, you should try to learn more about what just happened. The original author didn’t give much in the way of examples, so I’d like to elaborate a bit, using some of my non-animation work experience.

I worked in pre-press graphics at a print shop for a couple of years after college. My job was to take artwork or ideas for artwork from clients and make it ready for print. I was one of three employees who shared this responsibility, and when I started working at the company, they were just making the transition from Quark XPress (one of the two dominant page layout applications) to InDesign (the other one). In some sense, I had an advantage over the other two artists because I had never used either program, and I had nothing to UN-learn. Still, the learning curve of this professional-grade software was pretty steep, and I had to learn it on the job. My attitude towards learning the new software was what made me different from my co-workers.

I was all about the education / experience balance. During my downtime, I would read tutorials about InDesign and the other software that I used on the job. Then I would find excuses to apply what I’d learned, creating mock-up projects if necessary. That was how I applied the new knowledge I learned. On the other end of the spectrum, every time I worked on a project, I asked myself the same question at the end: “Was that the best way I could have done that?” Then I would investigate the capabilities of the software until I had an answer. Usually, the answer turned out to be “no,” and I learned a new, better way of doing a common task. I then applied that new method, and the cycle continued. I applied this philosophy not only to the company graphics software, but also to the printers, the photocopier, the film processor, and the backup servers. Suffice it to say that I became very fast at my work.

My co-workers were different. Their process for learning was heavily weighted towards the “experience” end of the spectrum. They had little interest in seeking out new techniques, and they were fairly quick to say “we can’t do that” before investigating the options. Where I asked, “was that the best way I could have done that,” they asked, “did it work?” If the answer was “yes,” that was the end of the process. They were likely to continue doing things exactly the same way for the rest of their lives until they encountered a situation where the answer was “no.”

I respect these people. They were very competent workers, and they had responsibilities outside of graphics, such as sales and support, that I couldn’t begin to match. But when it came to increasing their skills, we had very different attitudes.

Disclaimer: You should take this anecdote with a grain of salt, however. After I’d been on the job for about 2.5 years, business started to suffer. The boss let only one person go: me. Clearly increasing your job skills is not equal to increasing your job security. Still, I don’t regret any of the time I spent learning new skills and applying them on the job.

The results are in: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs made $30,304,648 in its opening weekend according to Box Office Mojo. That put it in the number one slot for last weekend, with nearly three times the earnings of the second place film, The Informant. The current Tomatometer rating is 84% positive out of 97% total. Rotten Tomatoes now includes an “average rating” feature, which is a more useful metric to me, and Cloudy has an average rating of 7.2/10.

So how did I do? Put briefly, I correctly called the box office placement (#1 or #2, I said). I underestimated the positive critical response, but not by a whole lot. Numerically speaking, my first prediction turned out to be pretty close when put to the test.

Nevertheless, I feel like I bombed it. Box office aside, my personal predictions for the movie placed it firmly in the realm of mediocre animated fare like Madagascar 2 or Robots — pretty to look at, but not very entertaining overall. A sampling of blurbs from the reviews (“delightful and hilarious,” “wonderfully inspired,” “pure fun, start to finish”) reveals attitude of “pleasantly surprised” from many of the critics.

I also assumed that the relatively bland animation featured in the trailer was representative of the entire movie’s style. I’m not going to try it. Let’s give it to John K. (creator of Ren & Stimpy). He won’t like it — he hates everything… he likes it! Hey Johnny!

Nothing surprised me more than a positive review from John K. The man has not had anything positive to say about an animated feature since, well, I can’t remember him every giving a positive review to an animated feature. His review isn’t completely glowing. He thinks the story is bland and pointless and the character design is mostly uninspired. But the fact that John K., professional animation curmudgeon, was moved to write an article for his blog to say (I’m paraphrasing) “I’m as surprised as anyone, but this movie is much better than the trailer would lead you to believe” — that completely blew me away.

So I consider this a lesson, and a necessary stepping stone in my path towards accurate trailer prediction. Sure, I could say that the trailer gave a poor representation of the movie as a whole, and that’s true. But that’s exactly the point of this feature. My job is to use my experience, research, and instinct to see past the trailer itself and find the real movie hidden behind it. This time, I let my cynicism get the better of me, and I made too many assumptions based on other movies from other studios. In the future, I’ll do well to remember that feature animation is a rapidly changing scene, and fresh blood and fresh ideas can generate a great product from a historically lackluster studio (see Horton Hears a Who! and Kung Fu Panda).

There is one prediction remaining from my original article: that Cloudy will drop below #3 by its third weekend. That’s a softball, though, and it won’t be much of a victory if I get it right. What really interests me is the movie’s second-weekend results. All of this positive word of mouth could drive the doubters (like me) into the theaters to see what all the fuss is about.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs opens tomorrow, but reviews are already coming in from critics who pre-screened it. As of 8:30 AM on Thursday (EDT), the reviews are more positive than I anticipated in yesterday’s prediction. Rotten Tomatoes has 13 posted reviews, and currently reports them as 92% positive.  I’m withholding final judgment on my prediction until the end of opening weekend, but I want to set an early precedent on this feature that I won’t try to sweep my incorrect predictions under the rug. In fact, I intend to keep some rough statistics on my success rates and post them on my site once I have enough results to measure.

In the meantime, Joe Lozito’s review at Big Picture Big Sound is pretty much in line with what I expected to see from a majority of critics. A quick perusal of the available reviews shows that only three of the 13 available made any mention of Pixar, which bodes well for the film. Any computer animated feature that can avoid every review beginning with “well, it’s not Pixar, but…” is on the right track.

[Follow this link to YouTube version if you can't view the embedded trailer.]

When I first heard that Sony Pictures Animation was making a film adaptation of the classic children’s book, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, I was enthusiastic. I loved the book as a child, and I thought that the pen-and-ink style of the original illustrations could make for a groundbreaking departure from the “business-as-usual” computer animation style that has dominated the box office since Toy Story. I was disappointed, therefore, when the earliest teaser trailers emerged and revealed that the look of the film would be yet another variation on the “Pixar look,” with its careful use of soft shadows and ambient occlusion (I threw that in there for computer graphics geeks like myself… Don’t ask).

So the graphics won’t be the main draw of the film (though it is being shown in GLORIOUS 3D). How about the story? I am wary of judging movies based on children’s books ever since my biggest prediction failure to date: Horton Hears a Who! I incorrectly guessed that the film would be extremely weak, basing that prediction on the difficulty of expanding a very short and simple story into a feature-length movie and on the track record of the studio producing it, Blue Sky, who had previously made two Ice Age films and Robots. It turned out to be a pretty big hit, and more importantly to me personally, I absolutely loved it. Despite all of that, I’m going to risk repeating my mistake and say that Cloudy will not translate very well to the big screen. Cloudy is different than Horton in two important ways. First, the thing I loved most about Horton was the whimsical imagery. Elephants tiptoed across rope bridges, Whos rode down twisty streets on unbalanced unicycles, and there were constantly beautiful and/or entertaining things going on in the background. Blue Sky was able to adapt the illustrations of Dr. Seuss, always known for his delightfully strange characters and settings, and bring them to life in cool ways. Cloudy on the other hand, is based on a book that is illustrated in a lovely but conservative style. Rather than adapt the style for the movie, which would not have led to a lively-looking film, they threw it out entirely and created their own. As I mentioned already, the style they came up with is pretty generic. Second, the Horton movie took its story directly from the original book, and they were pretty faithful to the original themes and characters even though they had to expand them to fill the alotted time. The book version of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, on the other hand, really had no story at all. It was little more than a premise (a land where food falls from the sky, which turned out the be bad in the long run) expanded to 32 illustrated pages. This left the writers of the Cloudy movie to come up with the plot and characters from scratch. They wrote an explanation for the meteorological food (a mad scientist, who is also the main character) and apparently are devoting most of the film to spoofing disaster films, according to the creators. In other words, they had to write an original story, but were bound to make at least some connection to the original book.

All of that is a long way of saying that the original storybook will in no way contribute to the quality of this movie. Still, the story may be good on its own mertis. I’m not optimistic, though. In this entire trailer, which is full of sight gags and various jokes, I only chuckled twice: once at the “Mamma Mia!” reference and the giant fortune cookie joke at the end. The rest was just… ok. I will give them credit for the complete lack of fart and poo jokes, and I’m especially impressed that there was not even one belch in the trailer considering the food themes involved. Still, if this is the best they have to offer in terms of entertainment, I remain uninspired.

The critics will not hate this movie. A few will love it, calling it “charming” and “clever.” Most, however, will probably spend most of their reviews yawning about its plot and characters, and more than a few will describe its premise as being too thin to support a movie of its length. In the end, even the unimpressed critics will recommend that you take your kids to see it because, honestly, what else is there right now? 9, maybe? Only if you have older kids, probably boys, who like science fiction.

For that reason, Cloudy will also clean up at the box office. It won’t be one of the highest grossing films of the year, but it just might be the highest grossing film of the weekend of September 18. Its competition is made up entirely of films for adults, and even among those I don’t see many big box office draws. Matt Damon will bring star power to The Informant, but the fact that he’s playing a pudgy schlub with a moustache and glasses will probably cancel that out. I predict that Cloudy will either place #1 or #2, depending on whether Tyler Perry’s latest crowd-pleaser, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, can hold onto the top slot or not.