And none of them comes alive on the screen the way Felix did they feel like pallid imitations of humans rather than fully realized animated characters. Aki Ross, the heroine of Sony’s “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” doesn’t build anything out of musical notes neither does Milo in the current Disney release “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” nor did Tulio and Miguel in last year’s “The Road to El Dorado” from DreamWorks.

On the screen, miracles are easily performed, the most incongruous ideas can be arbitrarily associated, the limitations of time and space can be largely ignored.” Huxley delighted in the casual surrealism of Felix building a motor scooter out of the musical notes he produced with a guitar.ĭr. The plastic-looking “humans” that populate the recently released “Final Fantasy” are only the latest and most extreme example of the trend.Īudiences look in vain for the qualities that led Aldous Huxley to praise the Felix the Cat cartoons of the ‘20s in the essay “Where Are the Movies Moving”: “What cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic. Major live-action features-from “The Matrix” to “Cats & Dogs'-have grown more cartoonish: Talking animals, exaggerated movements and the defiance of gravity were once the exclusive preserve of animation.Ĭonversely, animated films, especially computer-animated films, have become increasingly earthbound, presenting realistic characters in naturalistic settings. A funny thing happened on the way to the multiplex: Animation and live action started imitating each other, to the detriment of the former.

Most realistic cartoon animation