News broke recently from Nintendo that they are partnering up with fellow Japanese company DeNA. They will be developing games on smart phone platforms based on Nintendo properties such as Mario and Donkey Kong.
I prefer bad news first, so let’s begin with Frozen Fever. This 7 minute short that precedes Kenneth Branagh’s masterpiece retelling of Disney’s 1950 animated classic, Cinderella, is just annoying. Pandering, cheap, ridiculous premise (Elsa sneezes and snow babies pop out of her), cliché song and overall, just an obvious attempt at selling some new Frozen merchandise in the form of teeny stuffed snowmen and an Elsa dress that’s the same–but now in green! I pray this short is not indicative of what Frozen 2 is going to look like, but if the snowshoe fits…run away. Luckily, this brief, gratuitous sequel is not 90+ minutes long (yet) and the film that follows it is magical enough to almost make you forget Elsa singing, “a cold never bothered me anyway” (Get it? Cause she’s got a cold! And that’s also a line from “Let it Go.” Get it? Insert gun emoticon.) Almost.
It may be unfair to rank animated characters from television on the same list as those from film. A long running cartoon series has so much more time to develop the character. This character has had over fifteen years, four hundred episodes and two full length feature films in which to pique our fascination. However, I believe that SpongeBob Squarepants won this spot on the top ten most fascinating characters from the first moment we met him in episode one, “Help Wanted,” which aired on Nickelodeon on May Day of 1999.
Animation Fascination 