Animated Movies Throughout the Years: 2007

Animated Movies Throughout the Years: 2007

Note: Blue Sky Studios did not release a single movie this year.

January saw the release of Vanguard’s second film, which is also regarded as one of the worst animated movies ever, Happily N'Ever After. It was a Shrek rip-off with horrible animation, an uninspired plot, and annoying side characters.

On March 23rd, the popular pizza-loving reptiles from the 80s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, appeared in an all-new CG adventure called TMNT. While it had excellent animation, the film will confuse those unfamiliar with the Ninja Turtles.

On March 30th, Disney released their first animated movie as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Meet the Robinsons. While it may not look like much, 'Robinsons' would eventually pave the way to hits like Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia.

In May, the popular ogre had his third big-screen adventure with Shrek The Third. While it got mostly negative reviews, with only 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, the film managed to gross over 798 million dollars worldwide!

There were two animated movies released in June. The first was Sony Pictures Animation's next feature film, Surf's Up. It actually got better reviews than Open Season, and even got the Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.

The second was Pixar's eighth feature film, Ratatouille. While not as successful as Shrek the Third, Ratatouille got very good reviews and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

In July, after nearly twenty years, America's favorite non-prehistoric cartoon family finally made their feature-film debut with The Simpsons Movie. The film got good reviews and managed to gross over 500 million dollars worldwide! Too bad neither Troy McClure* or Maude Flanders appeared in the movie.

October saw the release of another attempt at adapting the story of Moses into an animated feature, The Ten Commandments. Instead of having both hand-drawn and computer animation blended beautifully like The Prince of Egypt, The Ten Commandments was all CGI, but the animation looks like it came from 1997. The film became a box-office flop, grossing only a million dollars on a 10 million dollar budget.

In November, DreamWorks released their next CGI feature Bee Movie. While it got mixed reviews, the film managed to gross over 293 million dollars worldwide. Also in November, Robert Zemeckis released his third motion-capture film, Beowulf. What makes this film different from The Polar Express and Monster House is that the motion-capture animation is hyper-realistic, plenty of excessive violence, some strong innuendo, and disturbing imagery.

And finally, in December, the French-produced and adult-themed Persepolis was brought to the US. It got great reviews and even got the Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, but lost to Ratatouille. *Troy McClure was a character on The Simpsons. He was a movie actor who would say lines like "Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from beloved educational short films such as 'Paint: Delicious But Deadly' and 'Here Comes the Metric System.'" He would change his quote every time he appeared. Troy McClure was voiced by the late but great Phil Hartman. Troy McClure was featured throughout Seasons 2 through 9 (1991-1998) of The Simpsons and has become a fan favorite character. Unfortunately, Phil Hartman died in 1998, so McClure no longer appears on the show. The last Simpsons episode to feature Troy McClure was 'Bart the Mother', in which he gave a lecture on how to raise chicks. That's all I have to say for this week's Animated Movies Throughout the Years! Tune in next
week when we talk about animated movies from 2008, in which Disney went back to basics with Bolt, DreamWorks taught an overweight panda bear new tricks with Kung Fu Panda, Pixar told a love story with robots with WALL-E, and Blue Sky faithfully retold the story of a big-hearted elephant with Horton Hears a Who!