Although Disney-Pixar’s Cars led the weekend U.S. box office, its $60.1 million take fell short of expectations, causing shares of the Walt Disney Co. to dip on Monday before rebounding.

Analysts apparently had predicted $70 million or so, putting Cars on par with the debuts of Pixar’s wildly successful The Incredibles ($70.5 million) and Finding Nemo ($70.3 million).

Did they honestly think it would do Incredibles numbers? Because, really, Cars doesn’t look very good. And by “very” I mean “at all.”

Christopher Kelly of the Fort Worth, Texas, Star-Telegram agrees with me. Of course, he’s actually seen the movie. “A distinct sense of boredom settles in,” Kelly writes. “For the first time ever with one of the famed studio’s films, you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve seen all of this a million times before.”

And with that, he begins to wonder whether the bloom is off the computer-animated rose:

Considered in light of the last few years’ worth of computer animated movies — including DreamWorks’ Madagascar and Over the Hedge, Fox’s Ice Age: The Meltdown and Robots, and Disney’s Chicken Little, Valiant and The Wild — the enormous disappointment of Cars seems to speak to a larger matter: Our astonishingly fertile era for computer animation may finally be drawing to an end.

True, these movies still show no signs of slowing down at the box office — certainly not when borderline- unwatchable efforts like DreamWorks’ Shark Tale are able to soar past the $160 million mark. But the stories all feel very similar; so much so that even the enjoyable pictures — like the current suburban satire Over the Hedge – tend to float in one ear and straight out the other.

And with only a very few exceptions (the dirt-smudged pastels of Robots, for instance, or the cartoon modernism of The Incredibles), the visual appeal of these movies is also starting to wane. How many bright blue skies, weirdly realistic-looking shadows and adorably cuddly talking creatures can animators conjure up before they inevitably start repeating themselves — and before audiences finally start to cry uncle? Instead of pushing cartoons into brave new directions, the very form of computer animation now seems to be nothing more a rigid blueprint, as tired and predictable as the one Hollywood uses to manufacture its latest superhero blockbuster.

Kelly goes on (and on) to address the movies’ storytelling, which “has turned inept,” and “the steady stream of snarky one-liners and hipper-than-thou pop-culture references that now routinely sinks children’s entertainment like weights on a balloon.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Animation, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.