Most Exciting Animation of the Year: Closing Credits of LEMONY SNICKET...

Strange. In a year with no shortage of animated features (computer and hand drawn and whatever the hell Polar Express was), the most exciting animation arrived in the last wheezes of an otherwise tedious movie.

The closing credits of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, as designed by Benjamin Goldman, deploy a most thrilling animation style that conveys the tale of the Baudelaire orphans with so much more style and humor than Brad Silberling's ponderously insipid direction of the feature. Goldman's credit animation blends the cut-out card looks of Indonesian shadow puppetry and Victorian memory book collage, sends them through the texture menus available to the computer animator, and the result? A darkly giddy, wryly sweet animated narrative of perilous humor. Pitch perfect for Daniel Handler's odd books. Would that Goldman could have helmed the film using this same style...

StinkyLulu encourages you to theater surf into Lemony Snicket to catch Goldman's closing credit animation. It's actually worth the price of admission, though StinkyLulu hopes to spare you the tedium of the actual film which precedes it...

and don't forget--
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