Last night, I went to the theater and saw a preview for the latest Illumination film. It looked just like every other Illumination film, which all look just like every DreamWorks film, which of course all look just slightly worse than every Disney/Pixar film. There are a lot of reviews here talking about how bad Hoodwinked! looks, but you know what? It doesn't look like that. Instead, it has a strong flavor of the sorts of videos I was seeing in the Linux community around this time being touted as "made entirely in open-source software".

This was apparently made in Maya, but the realities of its creation by a small team who weren't digital animation experts is visible in every frame, in the same way that the realities of budget and physicality are visible in every frame of a traditionally-animated film. It doesn't look polished in the same way that Madagascar (also 2005) does, but it does look distinctive. When characters emote here, it doesn't look like the universal set of signifiers (such as the infamous DreamWorks face) that were already well-established by this point in time. Even the models are able to be distinctive in a way that comes off just as charming as it does strange.

In contrast with the extreme scrappiness of the animation, the cast is full of big names, all of whom do remarkably good work despite largely not being voice actors by training. The script is a genuinely fun Rashomon/crime drama pastiche, full of clever setups and background gags. There's something optimistic about this, a vision of an alternate universe in which messy little films are allowed to exist and attract real talent, and I love it a little bit for that.