According to Jim Tharp, DreamWorks' head of distribution, Sinbad's failure at the box-office over the holiday weekend "indicate a continuing downtrend in popularity of non-comedy traditional animated movies."

Uh, no, Jim - you can't lay the blame at the audience's door. It's simply that your movie wasn't what they wanted.

A blanket statement like the one above ignores the fact that there are filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki who make very, very popular non-comedy traditional animated movies. True, neither Spirited Away nor Princess Mononoke did particularly well at the North American box-office, but that has more to do with bad marketing and distribution than with the fact that they're "non-comedy traditional animated movies". If Disney and/or DreamWorks made a cel-animated movie with as much focus on story and characters as Japanese studios - and made sure people knew about it - they'd have a hit on their hands. No question about it. Like I said yesterday, it's about the content, not the medium...and there's certainly room at the box-office for more than computer-rendered animated movies.

Of course, that's from someone who's been madly in love with the art and craft of hand-drawn "two-dee" animation all his life. I studied animation at NYU (and was lucky enough to have John Canemaker as a teacher), and though I'm a lousy illustrator/animator myself, I have a true appreciation of the form. I even bought last summer's Spirit: Stallion of Cimarron (notice the word 'tradigital' - you just can't stop 'em) on DVD - not exactly a classic, but hey, I even enjoyed that. So, okay, maybe I'm not completely objective, but I do think that Mr. Tharp's statement is not only damaging - it's also very, very wrong.  ¶ 21:47