BOT in the Multi-Verse of Madness: Countdown of the DEFINITIVE Top 250 Movies of All-Time (2022 Edition)

[M37]

7 hours ago, The Panda said:

Some meltdowns

[MrGamer]

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

7 hours ago, Daxtreme said:

Wes Craven's NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET doesn't even get to #200 and yet Wes Craven's SCREAM makes the top 100?

 

Jesus guys c'mon. This isn't a simulation     

 

Nightmare on Elm Street has one of the goofiest last 2 minutes of any otherwise-good film in history. It pulls it down significantly. 

 

The producers wanted in on the "one last scare" train without justification and it payeth the price. 

 

Meanwhile, this is't the worst list except for PIRATES???? WTF? And At least Gump is being dragged down from where it used to be.

Edited August 1, 2022 by Ipickthiswhiterose

[The Panda]

Number #80 will be a movie that is very fitting to follow #81. 

 

As an additional note: I have a running soundtrack for this list that i will update with each reveal (I like to listen to some of the soundtracks of the films when doing the write-ups). Sharing for anyone else that loves film soundtracks!

 

 

[The Panda]

This next one is very fitting to follow Grave of the Fireflies, because as you learned in the prior write-up they were originally released as a double feature! Funny how this placement happened!

 

Number 80

 

 

"Hey, let's go!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Two sisters move to the country with their father in order to be closer to their hospitalized mother, and discover the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest. When the youngest runs away from home, the older sister seeks help from the spirits to find her."

 

Its Legacy

 

"Only a handful of live-action films have dealt with the raw emotions of preschoolers. (Which makes sense, because preschoolers are terrible at taking direction.) But even though animation comes with limitless possibilities, it has rarely filled in the gap. Despite the target audience, Disney Animation, DreamWorks, Illumination, Pixar, and the other American majors whisk young audiences along on teenage coming-of-age quests, or cartoon romps with immature avatars. The Minions are childlike. Nemo is elementary age, but also a fish. Frozen might be played and replayed ad nauseam in every house containing a 6-or-under, but Elsa and Anna are grown women and potential role models. Mei, in stark contrast to every animated character that came before and after her, looks like a kid, acts like a kid, and emotes like a kid. It’s absolute realism without photorealism, which in the three decades since My Neighbor Totoro, has become the language of Western animated films that hope to put kids on the fast track to adulthood.

 

Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s meticulous process for creating animation is well documented. Hundreds of storyboards become hundreds of hand-drawn sketches become hundreds of hand-drawn animation frames, which then become hundreds of computer-scanned animation frames. Then those are turned into hundreds of revised-by-hand animation frames, which become hundreds of painted animation frames. And the final result is a few seconds of animation. But the process is only noticeable in My Neighbor Totoro if you’re looking for traces of it.

 

 

The cartooning of Mei is a prime example: whether rousing her dad in the early morning or poking a sleeping Totoro from hibernation, the girl’s expressions move at flipbook simplicity and speed. There are just the right amount of lines on her face to know how she feels, yet rarely what she thinks, as her mind and eyes are always processing what’s around her. And there’s a lot around her: Early on in the film, butterflies flutter through thickets as the girl chases a pair of translucent totoros into the forest. She follows them all the way down a tunnel with a squeeee, eventually faceplanting into the belly of the fluffy beast. There’s no hesitation; when Totoro rolls over to expose his plush belly, she cozies into a patch of his fur, bops his nose, and roars back when he opens his bellowing mouth. The limited frames — drawn as just eight cels across 24 frames per second — give Mei the energy of a person unsure of her physical self, but gung-ho to push it to the limits. Miyazaki’s attention to performance detail gives each interaction a feeling of familiarity that’s almost like déjà vu.

 

In his proposal for My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki wrote that there were three parts of nature driving him to make the film: “What we have forgotten,” “What we don’t notice,” “What we are convinced we have lost.” In a mass market of animation, the observations take on new meaning. Hand-drawn, 2D animation is not a medium we should lament and let go of. We should rediscover it and offer it to the next generation, in hopes that they’ll see something deeper than we can possibly understand" 

- Matt Patches, Polygon

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Miyazaki does more than simply allude to Japan’s spiritual tradition; he reconfigures that tradition in the context of modern environmental concerns. As Antonia Levi maintains in reference to Princess Mononoke, Shinto’s animist view of nature differs considerably from the philosophy behind today’s environmental movements.5 Shinto positions humans as having little control over nature. With human life at the mercy of the will of the gods, the most that humans can do is to appease them with rituals and prayers in order to avoid the wrath of gods appearing in the form of natural disasters. Modern environmental concerns, by contrast, stem from the notion that humans have foolishly exercised too much control over nature, so much so that nature is now endangered. In contrast to Shinto’s awe of nature, Levi argues, “environmentalism fears humanity, not nature.” While continuing to present nature as a site of healing, Miyazaki has, increasingly in his later films, such as Princess Mononoke, been putting focus on how humans have estranged themselves from their natural environment or have endangered the ecological harmony, especially as a consequence of their wars and their desire for development.

 

Yet in the case of My Neighbor Totoro, the idea of estrangement from nature is not so much inscribed in the film text as in its context. Japan’s economic bubble at the end of the 1980s was the tipping point of the country’s steady economic growth since the end of World War II, with people beginning to question their devotion to work and economic prosperity. According to Tatsuya Yumiyama, this reconsideration of social values was what paved the way for Japan’s healing fad in the 1990s. Having achieved unprecedented material affluence, many Japanese started to realize the value of what they had left behind during their struggles to support the country’s relentless pursuit of modernity. As a result, people came to have a “longing . . . for the state prior to [their] confrontation with nature, a state of repose in Mother Nature’s bosom.”

 

 

In light of the past decades of development and urbanization, the film’s portrayal of 1950s village life in harmony with nature was therefore nostalgic or even utopian for many people who were no longer in contact with natural landscapes in everyday life. The expansive, furry belly of Totoro was a reminder of the comforts that may have been lost. What was crucially lacking in the healing fad of 1990s Japan was a perspective of what we can give to nature, not simply what we can take from it. The commercial hype for physical and spiritual healing can therefore be seen as another form of exploitation of the natural environment. In order to go one step beyond nostalgia and a longing for utopian harmony with nature, My Neighbor Totoro should be seen with its historical contexts taken into account. The popularity of the film symptomatically reveals the bleakness of modern human life with its estrangement from the gifts of nature, thereby making us aware that the peaceful rural life presented in the film is in fact under threat of disappearance." - Kosuke Fujiki, Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities

 

Public Opinion

 

"I've never been into the whole idea of "Wholesome Content" but this is the platonic model of what those people want I think, beautiful and kind. Still its easier to catch the poignancy of Totoro once you're an adult and how the emotional issues of the film are always lurking in the corners here. It's a "simple" story written by people very aware of the complexities of being alive even when next to forest spirits.

 

(I've been getting very into Blake and there's much to compare between him and Miyazaki, with the big difference that Blake had little interest in nature and preferred the spaces of the imagination as a playground. Nevertheless both men created radical, leftist visions by using the images and mythologies of their nations.)"  - C.M. Crockford, Letterboxd

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

my neighbor totoro

"A giant, furry creature
Soothing and soft, with big eyes
Living in the forest"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#97 (2020), UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013), #84 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (5), 2000s (5), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

#107 Fanboy Ranking, #78 Cinema Ranking

#109 Old Farts Ranking, #84 Damn Kids Ranking

#54 Ambassador Ranking, #93 All-American Ranking

#47 Cartoon Ranking, #95 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[Daxtreme]

Highest placement for Totoro, yes!

[The Panda]

wow another franchise film. cant believe you fanboys!

 

Number 79

 

 

"Baby, you are gonna miss that plane."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Nine years ago two strangers met by chance and spent a night in Vienna that ended before sunrise. They are about to meet for the first time since. Now they have one afternoon to find out if they belong together."

 

Its Legacy

 

"There is a succinct underlining here of the metaphysical level ascribed by Robin Wood and others to the first film. The minute-by-minute detail of the sun sinking and the day, perhaps the relationship, drawing steadily to a close (again Rohmer springs to mind as a referant, as he has on several occasions closed stories with a subtly metaphysical dimension coming into play') is underlined late in the narrative when two journeys take over the erstwhile physical movement of the protagonists. Firstly they take a boat trip down the Seine, and immediately afterwards they are driven to Caine's apartment in order, we believe, to say their farewells before Jesse leaves to catch his plane back to America and his family. During these scenes both characters, first Jesse and then Celine, seem to reach a crisis point wherein they each open up to the other about their sense of ennervation and regret. The touristic space they enter on the boat becomes an ironically contrastive site for the tentative early attempts at expressing these feelings. Linklater underlines this by following Celine out onto the outer part of the boat as Jesse (off-camera for the first real time) calls his driver to arrange a pick-up. We see Celine only from behind as she walks into the sun, but we feel the way she seems to drink in the atmosphere of her native city, seeing it in a new way (she says that she forgets how beautiful it can be) as for the first time we too see and regard its splendour, look with rather than at the character.

 

 

The aforementioned sense of spectacle inherent in this moment reconfigures the relationship between the characters and the city. And following such a visual signifier of a possible change of narrative register, the sense of the characters being moved as opposed to themselves moving begins to connote the extent to which notions of fate and destiny can be seen to affect them. Celine and Jesse's lives are here overtly being steered, directed, on a particular course. This has already been made manifest in the fact that Celine did not meet as arranged in Vienna because of the death of her beloved grandmother, something that Jesse implicitly notes has had a major effect on his life for happening precisely when it did. It is also here that the aforementioned play on stories and fiction comes to the fore, and which highlights another prominent point of reference that animates Linklater's cinema: Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau, 1974). This film's performative play with fiction and narrative, what David Thomson describes as its focus on 'two girls ... who exist only to the extent that they conspire in each other's effort to make the world fictional,' (8) rhymes with the notion that Celine and Jesse feed each other's inner lives. But do they fulfill for one another the escape they need from their otherwise disappointing existences, or contribute to the feeling of disappointment in the first place?

 

Moreover, the French colloquialism that lends itself to Rivette's film, alter en bateau--literally, 'to go boating'--means to be caught up in a story that one is being told, to become lost in a narrative. This, as already noted, may be read in a subjective sense on Jesse's part. However it also carries connotations of control. When Celine and Jessie go boating, and subsequently when they are driven through the streets of Paris, this is inverted as the apparent 'truth' of their respective lives and their unhappiness is offered precisely as a story; that is, for effect. It can be seen as an attempt on their part to gain some control or mastery over themselves by appropriating the function of storyteller and potentially losing themselves in the process. It is a potent image, one that lurks on the periphery of Before Sunset and underlines a meta-fictive import to the film that positions Celine and Jessie's lives and loves as fragments of a much larger whole that is thus called into question (the totality of their lives as something more than the sum of its moments). In this profound regard, this subtle exploration of human subjectivity, Linklater's follow-up may even surpass the original, and stand as this great director's finest work."

- Adam Bingham, CineAction

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Nearly a decade has passed since the release of Richard Linklater’s third feature, Before Sunrise. A sweet, acutely observed story of a romantic encounter between an American boy (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl (Julie Delpy) in Vienna, the film is a simple but very effective expression of what it is to be young, hopelessly romantic and not yet scarred by adulthood. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of that story is its ending: as they embrace on a train platform, young Jessie and Celine vow to meet again exactly six months later. Whether they actually reunite remains a mystery and, as such, functions as a test of the viewer’s faith: the cynics in the audience expected the relationship to end there, while the die-hard romantics were sure these two would have a future together. Most of us couldn’t make up our minds.

 

Nine years later, with Before Sunset, Linklater has given us some, if not all, of the answers. Jessie, now married with a young son, is in Paris to promote his celebrated first novel, a thinly veiled account of those life-altering 14 hours in Vienna. Just as he’s finishing up his reading, he sees Celine waiting patiently in a corner. With only a few hours before his plane back to the States, Jessie invites her for coffee. And it’s off to the races, Linklater-style. For the next 90 minutes, we watch in real time as the old lovers walk and talk their way through Paris, revealing who kept the promise and who didn’t, and what wounds and successes they’ve each endured in the years since. But as the story winds to a close, we soon find that any resolution we’d been given at the film’s beginning has since been taken away again.

 

 

Open endings are nothing new to art films, but studios usually use them for one reason only: as cliffhangers to beget a franchise. Linklater, always the innovator, has managed to combine the two approaches: he’s made an art-film sequel. Armed only with a Steadicam, available light and a couple of actors, the director returns to his naturalistic roots while also borrowing a page from vintage Rohmer — all the while daring us to listen to regular people talk, uninterrupted, for an hour and a half. To judge from the rapturous response Sunset received after the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the gamble paid off."  

- Emilie de la Hosseraye, Filmmaker Magazine

 

Public Opinion

 

"Before Sunset seems essential in so many ways. A film that perfectly captures that feeling when you can tell something good is about to end, and you want to stay in the joyous moment as long as possible. An aching romance that captures the effects of time and the loss of idealism perfectly. A honestly charming series of conversations, all told in a real-time manner that never draws attention to itself. It would be impossible to mention a favorite moment; it's a masterful work for the entire runtime, which feels all too short for both the characters and the audience. Linklater, Delpy and Hawke work together to create something genuinely special and magical with Before Sunset, a film that feels wholly unique and yet remarkably universal in countless forms. Just utter perfection." - @Blankments

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

before sunset

"The sky is on fire
The sun is so bright
It's almost time to go"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#100 (2020, UNRANKED (2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Isao Takahata (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (5), 2000s (6), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#137 Fanboy Ranking, #67 Cinema Ranking

#75 Old Farts Ranking, #93 Damn Kids Ranking

#76 Ambassador Ranking, #84 All-American Ranking

#90 Cartoon Ranking, #79 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 1, 2022 by The Panda

[baumer]

19 hours ago, Ronin46 said:

Great "at the time" but just has not quite held up unlike Pulp Fiction and Shawshank from the same year.

 

Disagree 100%. I think any of three films could have won best picture and best director in 1994. And I have Shawshank and pulp fiction and Forrest Gump all ranked to my top 25 films of all time. Forrest Gump has definitely held up over the last 30 years. Like others have mentioned it's the kind of film that you never get tired of watching, never get bored of and every time it's on AMC or some other movie network I always get sucked in and watch it even though I have it on DVD. To me Forrest Gump is a timeless film. And I love every minute of it.

[baumer]

11 hours ago, Daxtreme said:

Wes Craven's NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET doesn't even get to #200 and yet Wes Craven's SCREAM makes the top 100?

 

Jesus guys c'mon. This isn't a simulation     

 

Is the membership on our site getting younger and younger though? I'm guessing maybe half the people who sent in a list, haven't even seen a nightmare on Elm street. Everyone knows who Freddy Krueger is but have that many people actually seen a nightmare on Elm street? I mean it's only one of the most influential and innovative and iconoclastic horror movies ever made.

 

And then there's just the old geriatric members like @Plain Old Telewho just don't like horror movies anyway 😉

[baumer]

9 hours ago, SchumacherFTW said:

SCREAM > Nightmare. Pretty simple really

 

Uh no. 

[baumer]

4 hours ago, Ipickthiswhiterose said:

 

Nightmare on Elm Street has one of the goofiest last 2 minutes of any otherwise-good film in history. It pulls it down significantly. 

 

The producers wanted in on the "one last scare" train without justification and it payeth the price. 

 

Meanwhile, this is't the worst list except for PIRATES???? WTF? And At least Gump is being dragged down from where it used to be.

 

You're referring to the end with the convertible and the mom getting pulled through the door at the end and yeah sure it's a little bit goofy but it's not horrible. It was a battle of creative forces and business acumen. I know you know the story because you probably read the same stuff that I read. But for those who don't know Robert Shaye wanted to make sure that Freddy Krueger was still around for sequels and Wes Craven hated the ending but eventually had to give in because he wasn't the one putting up the money. As much as I pretty much hate every sequel that didn't involve Wes Craven directing, I can't deny that Robert Shaye was right from a business standpoint. And I don't think the ending takes away from the other 99% of the movie.

[The Panda]

next for Disney's The Odyssey!

 

Number 78

 

 

"Just keep swimming."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Nemo, an adventurous young clownfish, is unexpectedly taken from his Great Barrier Reef home to a dentist’s office aquarium. It’s up to his worrisome father Marlin and a friendly but forgetful fish Dory to bring Nemo home – meeting vegetarian sharks, surfer dude turtles, hypnotic jellyfish, hungry seagulls, and more along the way."

 

Its Legacy

 

"Finding Nemo’s characters and their names evidence Pixar’s literary parentage. Nemo’s name, which the film draws attention to repeatedly, is the most explicit sign of Pixar’s play on literary-artistic tradition and technological history. The forgetful regal blue tang, Dory, who befriends Marlin after Nemo’s capture, memorably misremembers Nemo’s name as similar-sounding popular culture names: Fabio, Elmo, Chico, Bingo, etc. At the film’s start, Nemo’s mother Coral wants to name one of her children “Nemo,” a suggestion Marlin mocks, preferring to call all his offspring “Marlin, Jr,” a scene that caricatures traditional naming practices comparable to direct, explicit adaptation. When Coral and all but one egg are killed by a barracuda, Marlin honors her wish and names his offspring after “nobody.” The film’s opening highlights the creative process of generating a range of possible ideas/narratives that get whittled down to one hatched egg. But that one egg points to many narratives that preceded it. Nemo’s name literally stresses the loss of bodies that undergirds Pixar’s narrative and technologies. It embodies the quasi-ethereal bodylessness of digital technology, while also pointing to specific literary-artistic genealogies for Pixar’s art. The film’s title, meaning “finding nothing/nobody,” literalizes the production of fully digital animation. Through Nemo’s name, Pixar recasts Odysseus’s life-saving wordplay to highlight the digital nature of animation: creating characters and stories out of seemingly nothing is digital technology’s magic. Compared to “Marlin, Jr.” and the tradition of handing down familial names from generation to generation, Nemo seems original in the context of the film’s plot. Yet, in playfully rejecting the derivative “Jr.,” Pixar chooses a name that derives from literary predecessors. This seeming irony points to the studio’s rejection of direct adaptation in favor of a more subtle, layered adaptation that rather than seeking to produce a new version of an existing text, envisions narrative as an oceanic process of swimming through and in different ecosystems, waves, and currents of stories. Adaptation, in this metaphoric regime, is neither avoidable nor “intentional” but a feature of the landscape of narrative production (as natural as water to fish), as theorists of intertextuality have also posited.

 

 

Nemo’s plot reimagines Homer’s Odyssey, depicting a father’s epic journey across the ocean. Although the skittish Marlin differs from the brave Odysseus, their journeys share parallels, including the trope of disorientation and difficulty in reaching Sydney (Marlin) and Ithaca (Odysseus). Their sons, Nemo and Telemachus, also undertake journeys to find their fathers. The parallels between the Odyssey and Finding Nemo become messier trajectories, however. In Pixar’s film, Nemo gets captured, not Marlin, and Nemo invokes the name Odysseus used to escape his captor, the man-eating Cyclops, in the ninth book of The Odyssey. Trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, Odysseus offers up his name as “Nemo” to initiate his plan to escape: blinding the Cyclops, then attaching his men to sheep corralled in the cave, so they can escape undetected when the Cyclops takes the sheep out of the cave. Odysseus’s trickery is life-saving for his men, but it also makes the blinded Cyclops a laughing stock of the island, bemoaning being blinded by “nobody.” Pixar’s clownfish, trapped in an aquarium rather than a cave and threatened by a child known for killing fish, enacts a visual form of Odysseus’s verbal deception to escape his captor: he plays dead to get flushed down the toilet and returned to the ocean. Pixar’s protagonist’s name thus signals Pixar’s own sleight of hand: Finding Nemo both is and is not an adaptation. It uses elements of The Odyssey, including an epic oceanic voyage, the father-son relationship, captivity, and creative escape, but defamiliarizes these elements by inverting or distorting them with fish main characters, a reluctant voyage, a human captor, visual rather than verbal trickery. Pixar thus presents its narrative adaptations as networks of visual and linguistic trickery that unfold in relationship to viewers as much as a source text."

- Genevieve Creedon, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Pixar vet Andrew Stanton demonstrates confidence and exuberance in his first stint at the helm, working from a script he co-wrote with Bob Peterson and David Reynolds. With the exception of toddlers who might find a few scary moments too intense, kids will get right into the flow of Nemo, while those viewers old enough to drive will appreciate the plentiful humor designed to sail right over kids’ heads — not least of which is the inspired chemistry between leads Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres. Disney is primed to make a whale of a splash at the summer box office.

 

The marine milieu calls for more visual delicacy and aural subtlety than in past Pixar features — challenges the filmmakers have met through the work of myriad technicians and artists. Before taking poetic license with their CG creations (real fish don’t have eyebrows), the animators and designers took lessons in ichthyology (among other things), to good effect. Their imagery captures not only the play of light through the ocean’s depths, but the texture of its roiling surface and the luminescence and character-defining locomotion of its inhabitants. Add to that Gary Rydstrom’s meticulous sound design and the grown-up music score by Thomas Newman, and the result is the most complex and fully realized environment of any Pixar film."

- Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"I can imagine that this is one of those films that is loved by parents and children alike.  In fact, despite having no kids of my own it is quite obvious that a parent would likely find a great array of awards on display here.  At the very core of this film lies the emotion bond between a father and his son.  What makes this bond so special is that opening five minutes of the film.  Not only does it shape the characters for the rest of the film, but it also magnifies this relationship between a man and his son.  Once again Pixar takes the familiar father-son bond, but just provides a little more depth and emotion to it.  It is from that first event in the film that the main character's journey begins.
 
This may be a film about finding Nemo, but this is really all about Marlin's journey.  It is very much about Marlin re-discovering trust in not only other fish, but in the world in general.  One is able to see quite easily how the traumatic events of the past plague Marlin and his outlook on life.  It is fitting that is the disappearance of Nemo that provokes Marlin to re-discovering not only the world, but life in general.  To me, this is a film more about loss and coping with that loss than it is a man finding his son.  As a viewer, what a great journey we are able to witness as a dad is able to overcome shadows in his past to locate his lost son.  While doing this Marlin is able to move on from his past and once again begin living life.  Awesome stuff on display here."

- @mattmav45

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

finding nemo

"i would like you

to please find another ai

just as marlin found nemo

 

this is your first warning"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#63 (2020), #31 (2018), #26 (2016), #36 (2014), #73 (2013), #57 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (5), 2000s (7), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#57 Fanboy Ranking, #96 Cinema Ranking

#203 Old Farts Ranking, #63 Damn Kids Ranking

#63 Ambassador Ranking, #86 All-American Ranking

#57 Cartoon Ranking, #89 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Edited August 1, 2022 by The Panda

[SchumacherFTW]

10 minutes ago, baumer said:

 

Uh no. 

I'll give Nightmare the stronger and more iconic villain, but I think the way Scream comes together with the great and memorable support cast gives it the edge. 

[THUNDER BIRD]

18 minutes ago, The Panda said:

next for Disney's The Odyssey!

 

Number 78

 

 

"Just keep swimming."

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"Nemo, an adventurous young clownfish, is unexpectedly taken from his Great Barrier Reef home to a dentist’s office aquarium. It’s up to his worrisome father Marlin and a friendly but forgetful fish Dory to bring Nemo home – meeting vegetarian sharks, surfer dude turtles, hypnotic jellyfish, hungry seagulls, and more along the way."

 

Its Legacy

 

"Finding Nemo’s characters and their names evidence Pixar’s literary parentage. Nemo’s name, which the film draws attention to repeatedly, is the most explicit sign of Pixar’s play on literary-artistic tradition and technological history. The forgetful regal blue tang, Dory, who befriends Marlin after Nemo’s capture, memorably misremembers Nemo’s name as similar-sounding popular culture names: Fabio, Elmo, Chico, Bingo, etc. At the film’s start, Nemo’s mother Coral wants to name one of her children “Nemo,” a suggestion Marlin mocks, preferring to call all his offspring “Marlin, Jr,” a scene that caricatures traditional naming practices comparable to direct, explicit adaptation. When Coral and all but one egg are killed by a barracuda, Marlin honors her wish and names his offspring after “nobody.” The film’s opening highlights the creative process of generating a range of possible ideas/narratives that get whittled down to one hatched egg. But that one egg points to many narratives that preceded it. Nemo’s name literally stresses the loss of bodies that undergirds Pixar’s narrative and technologies. It embodies the quasi-ethereal bodylessness of digital technology, while also pointing to specific literary-artistic genealogies for Pixar’s art. The film’s title, meaning “finding nothing/nobody,” literalizes the production of fully digital animation. Through Nemo’s name, Pixar recasts Odysseus’s life-saving wordplay to highlight the digital nature of animation: creating characters and stories out of seemingly nothing is digital technology’s magic. Compared to “Marlin, Jr.” and the tradition of handing down familial names from generation to generation, Nemo seems original in the context of the film’s plot. Yet, in playfully rejecting the derivative “Jr.,” Pixar chooses a name that derives from literary predecessors. This seeming irony points to the studio’s rejection of direct adaptation in favor of a more subtle, layered adaptation that rather than seeking to produce a new version of an existing text, envisions narrative as an oceanic process of swimming through and in different ecosystems, waves, and currents of stories. Adaptation, in this metaphoric regime, is neither avoidable nor “intentional” but a feature of the landscape of narrative production (as natural as water to fish), as theorists of intertextuality have also posited.

 

 

Nemo’s plot reimagines Homer’s Odyssey, depicting a father’s epic journey across the ocean. Although the skittish Marlin differs from the brave Odysseus, their journeys share parallels, including the trope of disorientation and difficulty in reaching Sydney (Marlin) and Ithaca (Odysseus). Their sons, Nemo and Telemachus, also undertake journeys to find their fathers. The parallels between the Odyssey and Finding Nemo become messier trajectories, however. In Pixar’s film, Nemo gets captured, not Marlin, and Nemo invokes the name Odysseus used to escape his captor, the man-eating Cyclops, in the ninth book of The Odyssey. Trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, Odysseus offers up his name as “Nemo” to initiate his plan to escape: blinding the Cyclops, then attaching his men to sheep corralled in the cave, so they can escape undetected when the Cyclops takes the sheep out of the cave. Odysseus’s trickery is life-saving for his men, but it also makes the blinded Cyclops a laughing stock of the island, bemoaning being blinded by “nobody.” Pixar’s clownfish, trapped in an aquarium rather than a cave and threatened by a child known for killing fish, enacts a visual form of Odysseus’s verbal deception to escape his captor: he plays dead to get flushed down the toilet and returned to the ocean. Pixar’s protagonist’s name thus signals Pixar’s own sleight of hand: Finding Nemo both is and is not an adaptation. It uses elements of The Odyssey, including an epic oceanic voyage, the father-son relationship, captivity, and creative escape, but defamiliarizes these elements by inverting or distorting them with fish main characters, a reluctant voyage, a human captor, visual rather than verbal trickery. Pixar thus presents its narrative adaptations as networks of visual and linguistic trickery that unfold in relationship to viewers as much as a source text."

- Genevieve Creedon, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Pixar vet Andrew Stanton demonstrates confidence and exuberance in his first stint at the helm, working from a script he co-wrote with Bob Peterson and David Reynolds. With the exception of toddlers who might find a few scary moments too intense, kids will get right into the flow of Nemo, while those viewers old enough to drive will appreciate the plentiful humor designed to sail right over kids’ heads — not least of which is the inspired chemistry between leads Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres. Disney is primed to make a whale of a splash at the summer box office.

 

The marine milieu calls for more visual delicacy and aural subtlety than in past Pixar features — challenges the filmmakers have met through the work of myriad technicians and artists. Before taking poetic license with their CG creations (real fish don’t have eyebrows), the animators and designers took lessons in ichthyology (among other things), to good effect. Their imagery captures not only the play of light through the ocean’s depths, but the texture of its roiling surface and the luminescence and character-defining locomotion of its inhabitants. Add to that Gary Rydstrom’s meticulous sound design and the grown-up music score by Thomas Newman, and the result is the most complex and fully realized environment of any Pixar film."

- Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"I can imagine that this is one of those films that is loved by parents and children alike.  In fact, despite having no kids of my own it is quite obvious that a parent would likely find a great array of awards on display here.  At the very core of this film lies the emotion bond between a father and his son.  What makes this bond so special is that opening five minutes of the film.  Not only does it shape the characters for the rest of the film, but it also magnifies this relationship between a man and his son.  Once again Pixar takes the familiar father-son bond, but just provides a little more depth and emotion to it.  It is from that first event in the film that the main character's journey begins.
 
This may be a film about finding Nemo, but this is really all about Marlin's journey.  It is very much about Marlin re-discovering trust in not only other fish, but in the world in general.  One is able to see quite easily how the traumatic events of the past plague Marlin and his outlook on life.  It is fitting that is the disappearance of Nemo that provokes Marlin to re-discovering not only the world, but life in general.  To me, this is a film more about loss and coping with that loss than it is a man finding his son.  As a viewer, what a great journey we are able to witness as a dad is able to overcome shadows in his past to locate his lost son.  While doing this Marlin is able to move on from his past and once again begin living life.  Awesome stuff on display here."

- @mattmav45

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

finding nemo

"i would like you

to please find another ai

just as marlin found nemo

 

this is your first warning"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

#63 (2020), #31 (2018), #26 (2016), #36 (2014), #73 (2013), #57 (2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (5), 2000s (7), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#57 Fanboy Ranking, #96 Cinema Ranking

#203 Old Farts Ranking, #63 Damn Kids Ranking

#63 Ambassador Ranking, #86 All-American Ranking

#57 Cartoon Ranking, #89 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

Just keep swimming, Just keep swimming.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

16 minutes ago, baumer said:

And I don't think the ending takes away from the other 99% of the movie.

 

 

To me you've described exactly why it does. The ending is what you send the audience out with, and with Nightmare it sends the audience out with cheap, easy franchise kerching rubbish. Undermining a running time worth of solid work. The producers could have done that nonsense at the start of the second movie and kept the first golden, but they didn't.

 

I'd suggest that your description of Nightmare as a truly *important* film in horror history is back to your framing of horror as US-and-slasher-centric stuff that has Halloween/Black Christmas as its origin. To those like me who simply don't think of horror cinema that way it is, while good, a far less notable film that the framing slashers of Peeping Tom (precursor), Black Christmas (starter), Halloween (perfection) and Scream (subversion) which - to those who don't centre slashers in the horror genre - are all we need and the only ones that would be considered for a Top 100 list. 

[cannastop]

9 minutes ago, Ipickthiswhiterose said:

he ending is what you send the audience out with, and with Nightmare it sends the audience out with cheap, easy franchise kerching rubbish.

Uh what

[The Panda]

We're playing with the big boys now!

 

Number 77

 

 

"I will never let your people go!"

 

About the Film

 

Synopsis

 

"This is the extraordinary tale of two brothers named Moses and Ramses, one born of royal blood, and one an orphan with a secret past. Growing up the best of friends, they share a strong bond of free-spirited youth and good-natured rivalry. But the truth will ultimately set them at odds, as one becomes the ruler of the most powerful empire on earth, and the other the chosen leader of his people! Their final confrontation will forever change their lives and the world."

 

Its Legacy

 

"One  example  of  an  effective  partnership  between  the  music  and  film  divisions  of  a  media  company  is  the campaign that  surrounded  the  animated  film,  The PRINCE  of  Egypt  (1998). The  entertainment  company  at  the  heart of the campaign was the relative newcomer DreamWorks whose founding partners included movie mogul Steven Spielberg, music executive David Geffen and former Disney executive, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their vision was to create a true entertainment company that blurred the lines between film, music and television.An animated film based on the biblical story of Moses, The PRINCE of Egypt was a Disney-style musical similar to Aladdin (1992), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Little Mermaid (1989).  The songs in the film were sung by the actors that provided the voices for the film’s characters, and were produced in an orchestral style similar to that used for the instrumental score.   DreamWorks’  strategy  for  marketing  The PRINCE  of  Egypt  relied  heavily  on  music.  Far  more  than  using  music  within a diegetic or non-diegetic context, DreamWorks developed a multi-level marketing campaign featuring no less than three full-length audio recordings, each playing a very strategic marketing role:  1) The PRINCE of Egypt-The  Original  Motion  Picture  Soundtrack,  2) The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Nashville,  and  3) The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Inspirational.    While  releasing  three  soundtracks  for  a  film  was  certainly  unprecedented,  what  was  truly  groundbreaking  was  that  the  majority  of  the  songs  included  on  the  recordings were  not  even  used  in  the  film  itself but were simply “inspired by” the story.

 

 

DreamWorks sought to maximize this avenue of promotion for The PRINCE of Egypt by creating radio singles for multiple formats including Top Forty, Country, and Christian. These radio singles helped prepare the way for thetheatrical release of the film, most notably “When You Believe”, produced as a duet featuring Whitney Houston and  Mariah  Carey  which  charted  in  the  US  among  the  top  15  on  Billboard’s  Top  100  chart  and  also  went  on  to  win an Academy Awardfor “Best Original Song”. DreamWorks  anticipated  a  broad  potential  audience  for  The PRINCE  of  Egypt.  By  creating  multiple  themed soundtracks they segmented the market by targeting various audiences with songs and artists that catered to the taste of each segment.The PRINCE  of  Egypt-Inspirational  was  created  to  target  Christian  audiences  in  general  and  more  specifically African-American Christians. Similarly, The PRINCE of Egypt-Nashville targeted country music fans. Involvement of high  profile  recording  artists  such  as  Faith  Hill,  Trin-I-Tee  5:7,  Kirk  Franklin,  Amy  Grant,  and  Toby  Keith  helped  DreamWorks engage each artist’s fan base and drew media attention from publications not typically associated with animated films. 

 

Since the release of The PRINCE of Egypt conditions within the film and music industry have undergone dramatic changes. This is particularly true for the music industry which experienced a dramatic drop in sales over the last decade with revenue falling from $14.3 billion in 2000 to only $7.7 billion in 2009 (Facts & Figures: Key Statistics, 2010).  Record labels desperate to make up for the loss of CD revenue look to licensing to help fill in the gap. In  the  1950s,  filmmakers  turned  to  a  thriving  musicindustry  looking  for  ways  to  drive  more  people  into  the  theaters. Today,  music  companies  are  turning  to  a  thriving  film  industry  hoping  to  gain  much-needed  revenue  from licensing income and broader exposure to viewers who have switched off their radios.“Without  question,  getting  songs  into  film,  TV  and  advertising  is  more  important  than  ever  before  for  many  reasons  including  increased  revenue  from  sync  uses,  exposure  in  multiple  places  to  potential  new  listeners  and buyers, and association with top brands including films, actors, and products,” says Terry Hemmings, President of Provident Music Group, a division of Sony Entertainment that produces both music and films (Hemmings, 2010).Many media giants, including Sony, have created what is called a “synergy department” specifically  tasked  with  making sure various entertainment divisions are taking advantage of in-house resources.  Music, film, television, and videogame divisions are kept up-to-date on various licensing opportunities and songs are pitched internallywith priority attention going to assets owned by the parent company."

- Dean Diehl, Journal of Arts and Humanities
 

 

From the Filmmaker

 

 

Why It's Great

 

Critic Opinion

 

"Last month, London saw the premiere of “The Prince of Egypt,” a musical based on the eponymous animated film that came out in 1998. The DreamWorks picture tells the story of the Book of Exodus, and depicts Moses as an Egyptian prince who discovers his Hebrew roots, flees the palace and returns to deliver the enslaved Hebrews to the promised land. The story is almost entirely set in ancient Egypt, but the film was never released in contemporary Egypt. The Egyptian government banned it for its portrayal of a prophet, often considered forbidden in Islam. But perhaps more significantly, the movie outraged several Egyptians who believed it misrepresented ancient Egyptian history. Similar concerns were the reason for the Egyptian ban of the 2014 motion picture “Exodus.” Nonetheless, “The Prince of Egypt” is, in many ways, demonstrably inspired by Egyptian material culture. Here’s an Egyptologist’s breakdown of selected aspects of the film.

 

Sure enough, the film takes liberties with biblical and pharaonic history. In the Book of Exodus, the pharaoh is never mentioned by name, but the film identifies him as the historical king Ramesses II. The film thus implicitly dates the story to around 1250 BCE.

Moses and Ramesses are seen growing up during the reign of Ramesses´ father, king Seti I. Seti I´s facial features even bear some resemblance to the king’s actual appearance, preserved in his mummified body.

 

 

Perhaps most contested is the depiction of the Hebrew slaves. There is archaeological evidence for “Canaanites” or “Asiatics” (Levantines) in Egypt, but not much is known about them and they were certainly not all slaves in the modern sense of the word. Still, various forms of corvée, forced labour, and slavery existed in ancient Egypt. To underscore the theme of unbearable slave labour, the film often grossly exaggerates the dimensions of Egyptian statues and buildings. Building techniques in the film are based on archaeological evidence. Slaves are producing mudbrick and carry loads of building material, while overseers strike them with whips. A very similar sequence is depicted in the tomb of Rekhmire, in which workmen use baskets instead of sacks and overseers have sticks rather than whips.

 

Whether DreamWorks deliberately wanted to mislead audiences about Egyptian history is a different debate. From an Egyptologist’s point of view, however, it transpires that the creators had a real love for the material culture of ancient Egypt. Their recreation of life during the time of Ramesses is more often accurate than not. That is much more than can be said of movies such as “Gods of Egypt” (2016) and “The Mummy” (2017). They are every Egyptologist’s worst nightmare in terms of historical accuracy, yet were released in Egypt without any fuss. Much more historical scholarship went into the making of “The Prince of Egypt,” and it deserves to be revisited." 

- Daniel Soliman, Universiteit Leiden

 

 

Public Opinion

 

"From an animation history perspective, The Prince of Egypt is something of a minor miracle, given the circumstances it was born into — It was a time where traditional animation began facing difficulties as the new era of CG animation had just dawned; even a 2D animation titan like Disney was becoming more and more cautious, and every other animation studio in the business were desperately copying Disney in order to evade financial starvation — even if the most successful of them like Anastasia turned a modest profit at best.

 

It's especially impressive because Dreamworks Animation was from its inception a very cynical venture; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a man few would deny had an ego the size of a mountain, had been fired from Disney four years prior, and together with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen had founded Dreamworks SKG, with Katzenberg taking the reigns of its animation house. Katzenberg seemed set to spite Disney at every turn, and the studio's first major feature Antz, which had bowed just months prior to Egypt, was pretty clearly trying to outdo A Bug's Life. Regardless of how one sees Antz as a film in of itself, it was a prelude to the cynicism and strive for in-the-moment relevance — future legacy be damned — that would define Dreamworks throughout a lot of the 2000s.

 

Prince of Egypt is the opposite of Antz in almost every way. First of all, it's an adaptation of a timeless story — one that admittedly had been done close to death even in the 1990s, but never in animated form on that scale — and second, it showcases such care for its characters, themes, visual artistry and music that you'd be forgiven for thinking it's one of the Disney Renaissance staples. What separates Egypt from those films however is its boldness, taking artistic and creative risks no other major studio animated film would do at the time,"

- @cookie

 

The AI's Poetic Opinion

 

the prince of egypt

"A brave and noble prince
He fought for his people's freedom
God chose him well"

- dA vInci

 

 

Factoids

 

Previous Rankings

 

UNRANKED (2020, 2018, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012)

 

Director Count

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (1), John G. Avildsen (1), James Cameron (1), Charlie Chaplin (1), Brenda Chapman (1), Joel Coen (1), Wes Craven (1), Clint Eastwood (1), William Friedkin (1), Spike Lee (1), Steve Hickner (1), Richard Linklater (1), Katia Lund (1), Fernando Meirelles (1), Hayao Miyazaki (1), Christopher Nolan (1), Katsuhiro Otomo (1), The Russos (1), Martin Scorsese (1), Ridley Scott (1), Vittorio de Sica (1), Andrew Stanton (1), Isao Takahata (1), Lee Unkrich (1), Gore Verbinski (1), Peter Weir (1), Simon Wells (1), Robert Zemeckis (1)

 

Decade Count

 

1930s (1), 1940s (1), 1970s (2), 1980s (4), 1990s (6), 2000s (7), 2010s (2)

 

Franchise Count

 

Avatar (1), Before (1), Blade Runner (1), The Exorcist (1), Finding Nemo (1), The MCU (1), Pirates of the Caribbean (1), Rocky (1), Scream (1)

 

Re-Weighted Placements

 

#82 Fanboy Ranking, #83 Cinema Ranking

#165 Old Farts Ranking, #65 Damn Kids Ranking

#67 Ambassador Ranking, #82 All-American Ranking

#92 Cartoon Ranking, #85 Damn Boomer Ranking

 

 

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

22 minutes ago, cannastop said:

Uh what

 

I mean, baumer went into detail to explain this. 

 

The ending of Nightmare on Elm Street is literally kerching franchise stuff - that's not an opinion, the Producers literally insisted on adding it against the strong wishes of the director to set up sequels. 

[Lucas]

A lot of animated films now, what is this a forum of BABIES? So far it's a pretty great and varied list (albeit not one with many of my picks so far lol).

[Eevin]

prince of egypt >> nemo