Hey folks, Harry here with Exclamation Pete and his look at the same Disney exhibition that Hootie saw yesterday... but he's focusing on some of the other stuff Disney showed. So... here ya go...
Harry
Pete! here with a report from the Disney preview that "Hootie" reported in from Sydney. This time from Melbourne. Just wanted to add a couple things from the session, one was that Disney is bringing out an animated Buzz Lightyear show for TV Don't know if this is old news, but they mentioned that it starts June over there in the States and they showed the trailer for the show - it looked like fun, the animation is nice and it was interesting to the 2D Buzz going through the motions. It's worth noting that while the rest of the characters where voiced, not a word was heard from Buzz himself - maybe he hasn't been cast yet? Don't know.
On the feature animation side they showed 2 sequences from Fantasia 2000. I've been looking forward to this release for sooooo long, I thought I was going to jump out of my seat when the segments played. My enthusiasm was short lived. The sequences where well enough animated but they lacked something, they were meant to be funny but came across flat. What really put me off was what is going happen in between the segments. Apparently Disney has enlisted Steve Martin, Whoopie Goldberg, etc - to intro each sequence. They showed one of the intros, a conductor that I'm not familiar with. It started with the original animated sequence that comes right after Sorcers Apprentice, Mickey goes up to Leopold and shakes his hand. It's all in silhouette, tasteful with a beautiful use of that rich red colour. Well it's downhill from there, Mickey leaves the frame and enters the 90's, the backgrounds are this loud blue colour, Mickey himself is loudly animated, he moves more like Roger Rabbit, the lighting is bright, it's all just over the top. Some of the stills from the other sequences looked interesting, so maybe they just picked the dud ones for the preview - I hope so.
They also previewed the trailer for Mission to Mars - the De Palmer version. Egads! Talk about Kubrik envy! It even has a big white room with a monolith (laying on it's side) in it - I don't hold too much hope.
Toy Story 2 was fun, not as well directed as the first one, it fell a little flat at the beginning but it picks up and gets better as it goes along, audience loved it - heard a couple of people say it's better than the first one - no way, but it's good, I think that there is a bit of hold over from when it was a video release happening in the first 1/3 of the film. I'm probably just getting old.
That's it, they had a lot more stuff, some of which Hootie covered, but it all looked so bad that you try to push it out of your mind as quick as you can, i.e.: 102 Dalmatians, Little Mermaid 2, Hunchback 2, Mission to Mars, etc.
Pete!
