At a special event held in his honor during the AFI Dallas Film Festival last week, Henry Selick made a cryptic admission. The animation guru, whose Coraline opens in Europe next month, was asked why he chose to give The Nightmare Before Christmas star Jack Skellington a cameo in his second feature, James and the Giant Peach. “I can’t admit this for legal reasons,” Selick said, “but Jack might be in every film I’ve done.” Could that mean the soulful dead guy secretly lies somewhere within the Universal-owned Coraline, even though Nightmare belongs to — gasp — Disney?

If so, it certainly wouldn’t signal the first time hidden meanings wound up in an animated movie. Steadfast in their individualistic tendencies, animators have often embedded sly messages and cameos in their work, some more risque than others. Here are a few of our favorites.

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Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.

Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat to Aryan supremacy, became obsessed with American eugenics literature whilst in prison in the 1920s, even writing “amateur anthropologist” Madison Grant a fan letter describing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as Hitler’s “bible.” Eugenics theory first resulted in questionable U.S. laws governing the civil rights of the blind, the epileptic, the feeble minded, and the generally lowborn, and ultimately the sterilization or euthanasia of the same. “Eventually,” Black writes, these same theories “led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.”

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Lux Interior, frontman of the campy, classic horror-infused punk band The Cramps, died over the weekend. In a sort of sad/sort of fortuitous accident of timing, as Bob Westal points out at Forward to Yesterday, an animated film in which Lux had a key voice role is having a big screening via the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood tonight.

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We’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category.

But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities:
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• “If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
• Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashir with an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
• Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
• Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
• Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.

The fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition.

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It’s beginning to look a lot like 1991. A former Disney starlet is on track for a Best Actress nomination. One of cinema’s greatest villainous performances is a sure thing for an acting Oscar. And, due to a relatively disappointing crop of Academy Award contenders, an animated feature is being talked about for Best Picture. One major difference between now and 1991, however, is now there’s a separate Oscar category for Best Animated Feature. While that doesn’t mean Wall-E can’t be the first animated film nominated in the top category since Beauty and the Beast, it does potentially mean that it shouldn’t be.

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A sampling of movie events happening around town this week:

• Flaherty NYC will present its second monthly program of non-fiction shorts tonight at Anthology Film Archives. The lineup includes two pieces by Sylvia Schedelbauer and two by Alison Kobayashi. Pamela Cohn, who will moderate a discussion after the screening, describes Kobayashi as a “very young, Tracey Ullman-esque performance artist” who “does everything by herself–makeup, wardrobe, shooting, editing.” More info on the program here.
• Also tonight: Rooftop Films is putting on a free showcase of animated shorts at Chelsea Market. I can’t find info on the specifics of the lineup, but the Rooftop website promises free beer. Here’s the lineup.
• David Redmon and Ashley Sabin are bringing one of my favorite non-fiction films of the year, Intimidad, to MoMA this Friday and next Wednesday. You can read my review of the film from SXSW here; more info at MoMA’s website.

Fear(s) of the Dark opens in limited release on Wednesday, October 22, presented by IFC Films. The film, produced in France, features animated shorts by six talented graphic artists. It looks really good, and really scary. As any fan of Japanese anime will tell you, the American idea that animated content is only for children is not only false, but is in fact a tragic misconception stifling an entire art form.

Fear(s) is definitely something I want to see now, and it’s definitely something that would have scared the crap out of me as a kid. Which is why I find Guillermo del Toro’s pullquote on the film’s IFC page so funny: “Rusty alleyways and vaporous ghosts painted by the masters of dread. Razor-sharp images that will slice your eye and nest there forever. Thrilling, disturbing and haunting. Bring the kids!” Thanks Guillermo, now countless parents are going to have to let their kids sleep with the lights on at least until Christmas.

Although a really good short film can catapult a director into feature filmmaking, much like Gil Kenan’s short film The Lark led to the chance to direct the CGI film Monster House for Robert Zemeckis and the just-completed live action The City of Ember , film festivals often show short films that most audiences won’t have a chance to see anywhere else. Fantastic Fest had a shorts playing in front of many of the features, and they also had two separate shorts screenings: Short Fuse for live action shorts, and Animated Shorts for, well… animated shorts. On first glance, the long-titled The Facts In The Case Of Mister Hollow doesn’t appear to be animation, but slowly you come to realize that it’s a series of still photographs that tell a very chilling story. It was my favorite amongst the animated shorts, and hopefully it’ll be seen by more audiences soon.

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• According to Variety, four new films are competing for the attention of adult moviegoers this weekend, with The Women attracting the +25 ladies and Righteous Kill, Burn After Reading and Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys attracting the men, I guess. The prediction is that Perry’s film will win the box office, because it will attract the black audience while Righteous and Burn are expected to split their (white?) demo. And, well, women don’t actually go to the movies. Right?
• Universal and Focus have made a deal to invest in and co-produce the latest from Oldboy director Chan-wook Park. The new film, a risque vampire pic titled Thirst, is apparently the first Korean production financed and picked up for distribution by a U.S. studio prior to its being completed and released locally.
• In case you want to know more about the Gore Verbinski-Johnny Depp motion capture film, Rango, Variety has a short follow-up, which spotlights the involvement of ILM. Though it doesn’t really add much to the original news, I’m a little more intrigued now about the future of animated features and whether or not mo-cap companies like ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Animal Logic (none of which, it’s noted, develop their own projects) could soon give Pixar and DreamWorks a run for their money.
• Ray Winstone will replace walk-off Robert De Niro in Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness, which will apparently actually be good and so doesn’t fit with De Niro’s career goals of late.

Waltz with Bashir is a stunning exploration of war, memory, and the disturbingly subjective nature of truth. It’s one of the few films that can claim to be both a documentary and an animated feature, and it uses both forms to a superb end.

The film opens with an animated Ari Folman, the writer/director/star, having a drink with an old friend from the Israeli Defense Force during the war with Lebanon in the early ’80s. His friend tells him of a recurring dream in which exactly 26 vicious dogs rampage through the streets on their way to devour him. The pack seeks revenge because of an incident in which he had to kill 26 Palestinian watchdogs so as not to be detected during night patrols. This exchange leads Folman to realize that he has almost no memories from that time. In an effort to piece together what happened and how he was involved, he begins to talk to others who were there.

A conversation early in the film strays from foggy war stories and onto the topic of memory itself. A friend tells Folman about a study in which 8 out of 10 people, when showed an photograph of a fair that has been digitally altered to include themselves as a child, will claim to remember the event, even though the memory is entirely false. It’s a strange point to make at the beginning of a film which is ostensibly about reconstructing memories to arrive at a clearer picture of the truth. Ultimately, Folman’s inclusion of that bit of pop psychology is a key step in helping it rise above films with similar subject matter. While the film does communicate a requisite amount of history, it’s really about the effect of war on soldiers, civilians, and how the sketchy nature of memory plays a role.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of it as a cross between Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I do not mean to accuse of Folman of making a knock-off of either film, Waltz with Bashir is nothing if not unique. But there are striking parallels in the flowing, roto-scoped dreamscapes of Linklater’s film. Animation allows Folman to control the image to a breathtaking degree, while keeping everything one step away from reality. It might be truth, but we can’t forget that it’s an artist’s interpretation, a memory, a dream.

As the realities of a brutal massacre come to light, an interviewee points out that Folman’s memory of the event can’t help but be influenced by his knowledge of his own parents’ experiences in Auschwitz. The parallel to Schindler’s List is not simply a mingling of subject matter, but rather the way both films probe the murky question of how humanity reacts (or doesn’t react) in the face of inhuman cruelty. While Spielberg’s film approaches this subject in classic, high-drama Hollywood style, Folman’s animation allows him to illustrate, quite literally, that war is always an inhuman act.

The Wholphin Blog alerts us to the news that Carson Mell will be screening a program of his animated shorts and music videos a week from tomorrow in San Francisco. Mell is producing some of the most cinematic (in terms of narrative scope and point of view) indie animation around right now. His Chonto, a former Wholphin DVD pick, screened at Sundance this year. I saw it when I was on the shorts jury at CineVegas and absolutely loved it, but my fellow jury members had their own favorites and compromise was inevitable. You can watch a trailer for Chonto above. The Chonto issue of Wholphin was also a topic of an episode of FilmCouch.

On the same weekend that The Dark Knight surpassed the original Star Wars as the second highest grossing film in United States box office history, the most recent Star Wars film, the animated Star Wars: Clone Wars, opened in third place to a disappointing $14.6 million. How is it possible that a film produced under the banner of the most recognizable brand in the cinema history––and with all the money in the world behind its promotion––barely outgross a throwaway Korean horror remake which opened on 800 fewer screens? It’s because Russia’s at war with Georgia, silly!

Well, sort of. The Guardian’s David Cox outlines a complex theory, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of both the title of George Lucas’ franchise and the phrase “evil empire” in his 80s-era rhetoric against the Russians. Cox says that even though we’ve got another president with a “plan to plant anti-missile missiles in the very eye of the Russian Death Star,” a mix of public apathy for Bush’s Wars and Clone Wars overall suckiness has resulted in both the movie and public excitement over the political conflict generally falling flat. Excerpts after the jump; your own counterarguments are expected in the comments.

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