D23 Expo

[Dan]

They already bought the 14-acre land about a month ago. I think it's the lot near California Adventure.

[EricJ]

Though, I'm not sure where Disney's gonna find 14 acres to put a Star Wars Land onto, in Anaheim .. short of buying-out an adjoining hotel property, or chopping Frontier Land in half, or something.

Rumor has it that much of Big Thunder Ranch (which they never really knew what to do with, and most East Coast guests never knew existed) will make way for the expansion.
By which point, oh, I'm afraid it will be quite operational.

Oh, and EricJ:

You Rebel scum.

[EricJ]

Lasseter then noted that they were now in production of their Dias de los Muertos project, with the title being Coco. It will be directed by Lee Unkrich and Lee came out to explain a bit of what the film will be about.

Namely, that it WON'T be like "Book of Life". Had us all worried there for a while.

[EricJ]

There were a lot of excited fans for Alice Through The Looking Glass and I think the footage they presented showed some promise. Mia Wasikowska was present to introduce the clip and talk briefly about reuniting with the cast after roughly six years. A nice set up for the film.

With Sascha Cohen (well, this is a Tim Burton film, he was in Sweeney Todd, and Christopher Lee's dead) as the character of Time.

At which point I was going to say, "Okay, that does it, Linda, now you're just blue-skying this crap up out of your head, aren't you?", but no--
I looked it up, and yes, Carroll's Mad Hatter actually does make a reference to Time ("If you knew Time like I did...") on one page of the first book. The smartypants can get her literary-precedent justification after all...Sheesh.
(In the book, Hatter says, "Now he's made it so it's always tea-time, and there's never time to wash the dishes"....Okay, you can practically write where Wolverton's going to take that one ball and run to the goalposts with it.)

Oh, and can someone merge posts? Kept hitting New post instead of Edit.

[Ben]

Technically, Alice 2 isn't a "Burton film"...

[James]

As much smack as people talk about Cars 2, Brave, and MU, I don't think hardly any other studio (besides Disney) has put out three films that are as good or better since June 2011. And to go further, if you made a list of every film that has come out since then these three would probably at worst be in the top half.

Once again, as I keep trying reiterate, people think these are bad because they're comparing them to the Pixar standard, not to every other animated film out there.

I have a theory about all this.

Most people are selective about what movies they pay to go see in theatres, due to time and expense mostly. Because of that they tend to try to pick the best ones to go to. So if the last five animated films you've seen are How to Train Your Dragon 2, Frozen, Inside Out, The Lego Movie, and Cars 2, then yes, Cars 2 does seem pretty bad.

But if you're like me, who tries to review as many animated films as possible for AV, you see almost all of them on opening weekend. I've actually sat in a theatre and had to watch films like Strange Magic, Rio 2, The Nut Job, and Turbo. Cars 2 looks pretty good from that point of view!

Why take the time to type all this? As someone who has had to sit through actually bad movies, it bothers me to see these pretty good films lumped in with them!

(That said, I personally thought MU was great, Brave good, and Cars 2 fun.)

[EricJ]

Technically, Alice 2 isn't a "Burton film"...

Ah, yes, noted, it's James "Muppets Most Wanted" Bobin hired from Former Disney Hit Directors R Us to direct a Burton film on demand.

I have a theory about all this.

Most people are selective about what movies they pay to go see in theatres, due to time and expense mostly. Because of that they tend to try to pick the best ones to go to. So if the last five animated films you've seen are How to Train Your Dragon 2, Frozen, Inside Out, The Lego Movie, and Cars 2, then yes, Cars 2 does seem pretty bad.

No, the correct theory is that it had just come out after two consecutive--three, if you count the sentiments for Wall-E--attempts to nominate Pixar for Best Picture.
We weren't looking back at Cars 2 as a bad film, we were looking at the films Cars 2 was directly following on.

By that point, we were assuming that anything Pixar would be Oscar material just for showing up, because the studio was Magic. (Sort of the way we started feeling about Marvel after Ant-Man, so consider how we reacted to Thor 2.)
And while yes, Cars 2 was not bad, for the Lightning plot and Caine's spy parody, and nowhere near good, for the relentless Mater merchandizing, if you listen to the howls of rage from the fans, it seemed to fall into either or both of the two camps of:
1) "How DARE Pixar make a bad film! We're supposed to nominate this one, I don't think so!"
and
2) "We thought they were special, and going to teach the other studios how to make movies! Now they've turned against us and joined the enemy; they've become just an icky old Hollywood studio just like ALL THE OTHERS, and they're going to be lazy and make sequels and stuff Cars 6 and Planes 3 (sic) down our throat just like Dreamworks!"

Pixar's output had been so good up to that point, other studios and columnists, who didn't believe in Santa Studio and wanted to show that they were all cynical and human like the rest, had been drooling to see the mythical Pixar's First Flop since the beginning. (Some even leaped on the chance to say that the Incredibles had been a "flop" just because it hadn't done Nemo's numbers, and dogpiled with sadistic F4-like glee on the first Cars when it bragged that it would and didn't...Hence Iger's insistence on a Cars 2 in the first place.) Not out of malice or jealousy--well, maybe for the other studios, and some disgruntled Guild animators who wanted to work for that nice easygoing Katzenberg--but just because, well, it should be happening by this point in the script! We've got Pride, now where's that freakin' Fall goething, darnit, hurry up and drop the other shoe!
Nobody understood that Monsters U was just another Circle cleanup like TS3, so when Brave came out and we got ourselves used to the idea of Mediocre Pixar Films existing in the world, we even convinced ourselves that MU was a bad film (which it wasn't) and said "Oh well, time for us to leave our childhood behind, they're not going to make anything but sequels forever, now that they've turned lazy and betrayed our sacred trust. "

[James]

Maybe shouldn't have used Cars 2 as the example, because I was talking about all three equally, I get that they may not be Pixar's best, but calling them "bad" films seems a little overboard.

[Ben]

I love how Eric has a way of putting everything forward as "fact"...if only he truly understood *how* the movie business worked...!

[Dan]

Here are some brief flashes of the animation and live-action programs courtesy of Clevver Movies.

[Ben]

Very cool promo spots!

Nice to get a real feel for what the event was like along with Aki's write-ups.

[Dan]

The ceremony inducting George Lucas at the Disney Legends Awards on Day One.

[Dan]

There was a singing competition throughout the Expo weekend with the winner on the last day getting to do a duet with Brad Kane, the singing voice of Aladdin. The winner, a girl whose name I believe is Jessica Ordaz, got to perform "A Whole New World" with Brad on the showfloor's Center Stage.

[Randall]

Love that song.

Kinda prefer the original performers, though.

(But these guys did okay.)

It definitely helps get me jazzed to see the new Blu-ray.

[Dan]

Kinda prefer the original performers, though.

You mean that Brad had performed with Lea Salonga instead of a fan?