The best 5 animated films based on their expert cinematography and their elegant and stylish animation are: The Croods, Epic, How To Train Your Dragon, Wall-E and Finding Nemo.
The Croods offers a refreshing take on the life of cavemen. This is a truly beautiful film which mixes comedy with impending doom expertly. It highlights the importance of storytelling and family. The best scene is when Guy shows The Croods the stars. Dreamworks use of contrasting colours brings the entire screen to life.
Epic takes a general theme based on traditional fairy tales and gives it new resolution. It is a film based on dimensions. The forest is fuelled by a magical community whose people is involved in an ongoing war between dark and light, life and rot. Beyonce voices the forest queen who is gentle yet strong, much like nature. This film is again, beautiful, it reminds you to appreciate nature.
How To Train Your Dragon sees Hiccup, the Viking chief’s son, discover a rare terrifying dragon but soon bonds with the playful animal, calling him Toothless. In no universe would the real life acting correctly captivate the audience. Without CGI and animation, this lightening spitting dragon couldn’t exist yet animation gives it real emotive facial expressions which make you react instantly whether it is to gasp at his cuteness or recoil at his love of fish. The greatest scene has to be the flight through the clouds as sunset falls, capturing the entire Viking severe yet beautiful landscape before dark shadows emerge from the clouds – breathtaking.
Wall-E targets contemporary issues of our modern world such as our slow destruction of the planet and global warming. Wall-E, a cute retro robot is anthropomorphised and falls head over tracks for Eve. The most beautiful scene from this film has to be their outer galaxy dance where the use of contrasting colours and fluidity aids the delivery of the message, which is what cinema is all about.
Finding Nemo brings the marine world to life with new colours and fish species people didn’t know about previously. The best scene cinematographically for Finding Nemo is a scene in the deep ocean where again the animators creatively used light to illuminate the attack of the angler fish, it is brilliant.
Animation and CGI give life to ideas primarily stemmed from imagination. But what we forget is that these stories we experienced is governed by clever cinematographic techniques that make the experience wholly magical – never underestimate the impact of animated cinema or the effort that goes into casting their spells.
