Favorite animated films that aren't from Disney

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^

Was't that made by Fox though?


I guess I'd have to say Titan AE, I mean it is a cartoon written by Joss Wedon!

Balto
The Brave Little Toaster
The Land Before Time
We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story
An American Tail: Fievel Goes West

The Iron Giant
The Brave Little Toaster
The Thief and the Cobbler
All Dogs go to Heaven (Don't think it was Disney, but I love dogs!)
Pretty much anything by Miyazaki
We're Back
Afro Samurai (Not really movies, more like a mini-series)
Also, this one anime I forgot the name of. There was a repressive government... Took place in an urban area, Japan I think... these people, including the main guy, were essentially turning into gods through some injected serum... Main guy was constantly spazzing out, having terrifying hallucinations... repressive government was keeping an eye on him... There was some scientist reading papers before space/time restarted or something... The main guy's friends were trying to stop him cause he went mad with power... I think the main guy's name was Kaneda or something... anyway, it was pretty sick.

God, is there some reason why we're all saying practically the same things? Maybe these are pretty much the only good non-disney movies out there

You're right, it wasn't Disney. It was Don Bluth.


I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but I think you're referring to Akira.

There are plenty more Japanese films worth seeing besides Studio Ghibli productions and Akira IMO (I've listed a few others), though just looking at feature-length anime is really just scratching the surface with all the TV series productions.

From England Martin Rosen adapted two Richard Adams novels as animated films, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, both very good. The former is a faithful adaptation of the novel's unforgiving nature-folk story, and the latter is reportedly bleaker and more violent than the book itself, so both have earned a sort of notoriety from people expecting them to be G-rated films. There are many acclaimed animated films from Europe, but I have not watched these yet so I won't give an opinion on them.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker

If you like Ghibli films, chances are you would like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, it is rated quite high, but the problem is that it is not as well known as Ghibli films and Summer Wars which is made by the same company is even better once it gets a proper release as it has got a lot of attention at the places it has screened.

Titan A.E.

Grave of the Fireflies
Heavy Metal
Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I remember when I was little I really liked the movies Anastasia, The Swan Princess, The Princess and the Goblin, Little Nemo, Cats Don't Dance, and The Thief and the Cobbler. I haven't seen any of these movies in a long time, but I'd like to rewatch them some time.

I also enjoyed The Iron Giant and Spirited Away.

Nausicaa of The Valley of The Wind, Akira Anastasia, Spirited Away, Watership Down(Based on a book of the same name. An extremely violent allegorical movie with bunnies killing each other. It's still really good though.), Plague Dogs(based on a book by the same author wrote Watership Down. It's about vivisection and is almost as violent as Watership Down.)

Those last two are extremely, extremely violent as another Hector said. I heard that children who made the mistake of watching Watership Down back in the 70's had nightmares. Luckily, Plague Dogs was rated PG-13. Both are based on books by Richard Adams and both coincidentally have John Hurt as a main character. If you'd like to get an idea of how violent these movies are, watch the videos below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPBck3xcUJc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp5mcc47xD8&feature=related[/Youtube]

I don't think they have spoilers. The Watership Down one does, but the clips are cut off at parts so I don't think you'll get much info out of it. Much of the movie is predictable, so spoilers aren't much of a problem. Both movies are on youtube. Plague Dogs was cut by 20 minutes in America, so you have to watch it on youtube to see the full movie unless you live in the UK.

Last edited by ShenLong on 07 Jun 2010, 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Although the movie version of Plague Dogs had a happier ending than the book.

No, the book has a happier ending. This ending was ambiguous while the book ending had a contrived happy ending because Adams felt that it was too grim.

Well, it's been 31 years since I've read the book and I had heard something about it being changed with an addendum, like what was done to the novel "Clockwork Orange" but I read the original Clockwork Orange and then years later read the altered version and was so upset by it that I never wanted to read another changed book like that again. So I have no idea what the new addendum is like because I've only read the original Plague Dogs (I think my copy is even a first edition . . .) and it ends with the dogs dying and it's pretty grim and tragic.

It's been 25 years since I saw the film, but as I remember it, it ended with the dogs disappearing into the mist, swimming away to an island where humans couldn't hurt them any more. You see the island they're headed to and the credits roll, leaving you to assume they find happiness there.

I liked the book ending better because the story was so grim and gritty all the way through that the only way to end it was with the dogs dying. Some happy island paradise was not in keeping with the rest of the story.

*Spoilers for those who haven't read or seen Plague Dogs. The page ends here on my post, so just go up and go to the next page*



































Oh, the happy ending was for the subsequent editions? I thought it was for the first edition as well. In the second version, it ends with them finding Snitter's former owner. He takes both in and they live happily ever after. In the movie, it's kept open. They swim out to sea escaping the military and it closes with them swimming through the fog. Snitter says that he's getting tired and doesn't believe they'll reach anything, but Rowf tells him not to give up hope. So it's left ambiguous.

Last edited by ShenLong on 08 Jun 2010, 9:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

*spoilers ahead*

I haven't read the book, but in all the sources I've read the book has a deus ex machina ending whereby the dogs are rescued and returned to their previous owner.

Watership Down may be marginally more violent in terms of the level of blood shed, but watching it as an adult I found it more to be a brutally "real" than just dark. It's sort of like, these are vulnerable mortal characters, they can be killed. The Plague Dogs had that, but the dogs also had severe disadvantages of their own and no pack to go to and no prospective family or legends to immortalise them unlike some of the characters in Watership Down. For me it was, all-in-all, darker and more depressing, but I think by the time that film came out the director had earned a sort of notoriety that ensured that parents would be warned - the book was also not quite as well-known and wouldn't have created the same audience.

Watership Down was sort of the exception to the rule in adaptations of children's literature. Many books that were read by children and young adults were violent, but children reading them would be less affected by their own mental impression of the violence than what would happen if it was explicitly reproduced on screen. Something like Pinocchio would be highly tamed down (I still found it disturbing as a child, but for other reasons) but Watership Down was faithful and I think that took people by surprise.

Some of my favorites :
-- Shrek (the first one)
-- Ghost in the Shell
-- Castle in the Sky
-- Watership Down
-- A Scanner Darkly
-- Who Framed Roger Rabbit
-- Cowboy Bebop : the movie
-- Wallace & Gromit (the first three)