This Week in Animation History: ‘Princess and the Frog,’ Mouse Couture & ‘Ryan’

One year ago this week
Mouse Couture: The Fashion Industry’s Mickey and Minnie Obsession: The fashion sphere can’t seem to get enough of Mickey and Minnie these days, and not just the expected corporate collabs like OPI cosmetics or Barney’s Electric Holiday, but actual couture showstoppers stomping the runways in fashion capitals and captured in the pages of high fashion editorials.

Five years ago this week
New footage from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: Yesterday we posted about Miyazaki’s Ponyo, and today we have some new clips—via the local ABC movie talk show Backlot Buzz—from the other exciting Disney 2D release of the year.

Ten years ago this week
A Review of Chris Landreth’s Ryan: Visually, Landreth described the film as “psycho-realism.” Aspects of the visuals are photo-real. Skin textures, in particular, are photographic and reveal pores and blemishes. However Landreth’s goal isn’t realism. He freely distorts characters, props and sets to express the inner states of the characters or to comment on them. In this way, the film is a descendant of German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) or The Last Laugh (1924). Because Landreth is creating everything on screen with software, he has the advantage of a visual continuity and flexibility that directors Wiene and Murnau couldn’t take advantage of.