My criteria for a movie, animated or not, is the same. I have a raging hard-on for animation due to my opinion that animation is a far superior medium for storytelling than live-action. That is a whole other discussion, tho.

In my opinion, the most important element of a story are the characters. Characters are what makes the rest of the story happen if you've written your story correctly. The motivations of the characters and the clashing of the characters makes everything else in a movie happen. The movies I mention have, in my opinion, superior characters and relationships. Princess Mononoke is a really good film, I will admit, and deserves to be listed as one of the absolute best of the ghibli films and therefore as one of the best animated films of all time. Miyazaki's other movies are a bit more fluffy and loose with their characters and their motivations and actually lie to you about the motivations to a certain degree. You go through most of Spirited Away with a very negative portrayal of the villainess, but at the end of the movie I had a completely different opinion of her and she felt much less of a threat to me. I'm still not sure what her motivation was throughout the film, aside from just "I'm the bad guy, I have to make things hard for this girl". The girl was actually doing her huge favors for most of the movie, but the villain continued to harass her, neutered as she was by the end.

Mononoke is a great film, tho. I won't even try to argue. There's only one part that I think isn't utterly brilliant, and it's a stupid little trivial thing that no one in their right mind should care about.

The three films I mentioned are all extremely character-oriented stories, and I find that those films that emphasize character over plot end up with the most engrossing stories. Ghibli has always emphasized character more than most other studios - live action or animated - but I think Kondo and Takahata were/are better at it than Miyazaki. Not to say that Miyazaki isn't damn good at it - he is - but I would say those three films I mentioned are better than any of Miyazaki's films.

Just my opinion, tho.

Sorry for length, I'm a little drunk at the moment and it's making me possibly ramble more than usual - which is significant for a guy who tends to ramble even when he's not drunk.

Akira, for instance. They'd probably make a lot more money by just putting a couple million dollars into marketing a theatrical release of the animated film, rather than blow $60 Million on making some crap americanized live-action flick. Akira is going to be a disaster in live-action. They will lose money, even if they shot it at half that much money. It will be another Dragonball.

The animated film, tho...  I'd cut off my pinky finger Yakuza-style to see the animated film in a theater. I would probably see it multiple times.

I think the trailer only really shows the first parts of the movie. They don't go into any supernatural aspects in the trailer, aside from the little blue lights in the woods. I have a feeling there's more to the movie than the Disney Princess™ plotline they're showing us. I'd be willing to bet that that's mostly a misdirection.

The trailer does suck, tho.

I wish they hadn't bailed on Newt. That movie looked promising.

hilarious.

In somewhat related news, Arrested Development is going to get a new season on FOX as a way to lead into the movie which is currently being hammered out, and most recently Netflix has signed a deal to start producing new episodes in 2013. I'm not sure if that includes the season that's supposed to lead up to the movie, or if the deal will be for additional shows.

Netflix had previously stated that they were going to look into producing shows and possibly movies for their service. It would be interesting to see how well they do, or if they plan on creating new series or just set up deals to produce some of these cult-popular shows from other networks.

I would think that the web would be an ideal format for series. You wouldn't have to worry about pacing for commercial breaks, you could go as short or long as you wanted, etc. I remember when I first heard about Channel 101 and I thought it was an awesome idea and would be 'the future' of internet media distribution. Turns out it was mostly teenagers shooting bad comedy shows in their backyards. It would appear that their latest shows are a bit better produced, tho it still looks like it's mostly comedy oriented. Such a waste of an idea.

The community looks really really popular if you're only paying attention to the internet. If the opinions of people on the internet were the norm, we'd be somewhere in the fifth or sixth season of Firefly right now, Minecraft would be the highest selling game of all time and sites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks would be revered and not demonized in the media.

Besides, The Community isn't exactly an unpopular show. It's the #3 show in it's time slot. It's only slightly less popular than "Let's Misrepresent Nerd Culture For Mass Consumption" and "Stupid Human Tricks". How is that bad?

If anyone is upset about The Community getting canceled, you can blame the same people who gave Transformers 2 a billion dollars and decided that Rebecca Black deserved a million bucks for effort. IE: the 99% of the US population who will cock their head like a confused puppy if you try to explain to them how the internets work. The 99% of the population who just don't give a shit and only want to watch something that will amuse them for an hour in between eating and sleeping and pooping and working and screwing. The 99% who have no idea in the slightest that "the 99%" is a thing on the internet.

You know, if Peter had just left after talking to the Sandman at the end and not gone to talk to Harry, Harry would have never died. He only died because Peter showed up. He was waiting for Peter.

They should have made aunt may venom.

They put Gwen Stacey in this movie and then didn't kill her. What the hell?

I wanted Mary Jane to die, and every scene in this movie with Mary Jane I was waiting for something to kill her. I don't really know why.

Why did they put her astronaut boyfriend in the previous film and then not follow that up by having him get the symbiote? Was that not the reason they put him into the second film?

The thing about these movies is that they dangle these cool things at you and then don't do those cool things. "Hey, here's Venom! Look at Venom guys! OOOOh what are we gonna do with Venom!?" And then they gave Venom about five minutes of screen time and no real motivation at all. Sandman's character starts out with an interesting motivation and goal, and then they totally ignore all that crap so they can have him hit stuff a lot. They take the - granted, very flimsy and stupid - tension between Harry and Peter and throw it out the window for most of the movie due to amnesia. All the character stuff they could have done there was just thrown out because they literally made him forget his motivation and goals for half the movie.

The movie as a whole was a huge mess of setting up potentially cool stuff and then saying "nope, we need to totally ignore all that stuff we just set up, so let's change all of this and establish a new scenario". It's not even like it's 2nd act "upping the ante" type changing. It's full on changing the goals of all the characters and then moving into the second act. Except Sandman, whose goal they just ignore, really. Venom doesn't even show up until well into the second act, just before they go into the third act / climax. I guess that's upping the ante, eh? Just throwing in a new villain at the end? Hrmm...

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It's like they started off the script and said "OK, we've got these two or three good ideas for what we want to do with this story, let's do it like this", and then they got thirty pages in and thought "no, this is dumb, let's just add a scene or two to undo all that crap and set up these new ideas instead" and then they spent about 80 pages doing that and thought "no no no, this isn't working...  let's just go back to the first ideas we had...  just add a scene or two to undo the changes we already made before...  and... good..."

But then someone said "hey, wait...  people will probably get pissed off that we just wasted like 90 minutes of screen time with plot stuff that we just threw out..." so someone else said "I know! Let's just add this other character to the end and we can pretend like it was all building up to this the whole time!"

And then they all had a congratulatory party where they all got drunk as hell before they sat down to finish writing the last bit of the movie.
</EDIT>

Something to add to the money-making discussion at the end: the thing that gets these films to make a buttload of money is the fact that it's something that a family can go see, and kids - older kids - will want to go see these movies. A lot of the audience for these movies is the 8-14 year old kids that have families that all go to the movies together. That's why they keep trying to make every movie PG 13 now, cause parents won't take their 8 year old to go see Watchmen cause it's R-Rated. Why do you think Watchmen bombed? Wasn't cause it was bad. It was cause there was naked blue guys and dirty sex and people getting brained and stuff like that in there. While the 10 year old kids out there might see a preview for that and say "wow, I wanna go see that movie!" their parents are gonna say "That's R-rated, so it's probably violent and full of boobies" so they won't take their kids to see it.

I KNOW there are a lot of people who will drag their 5 year old kids into a theater to see se7en, but those are the truly retarded people of the world. The people who give Monies to Spiderman 3 and Transformers 2 aren't really stupid, they're just trying to give their kids a good time, or they are themselves teenagers and thus just kinda dumb in general.

The book "Maus" has some interesting insight into Nazi Germany and the holocaust as well. I highly recommend it. I've wanted someone to make an animated film or series out of it for some time, but the author seems to be 100% against such a thing. I can understand why, but at the same time I think it would bring the story to a much wider audience than it has now. Most people won't read a comic book, even if it is the only one to have ever won a pulitzer prize (and it will remain the only comic to ever win one, as they changed the rules shortly after Maus won because some 'serious' authors got all butt-hurt when a lowly comic book won).

Yeah, that movie looks pretty fun, and the few lines she did have were delivered well enough. Kinda surprised I haven't seen the trailer on the sites I go to. I must go to the wrong sites.