Day of the Data Hoarder

A very disturbing development happened a few weeks ago that is still being processed by the film community.  The version of "The French Connection" streaming on the Criterion Channel was found to contain a very clunky edit of about six seconds, to excise racial slurs.  Soon after, it was discovered that digital copies of the film sold on Itunes and other platforms contained the same edit, including copies that had been previously purchased.  It's not clear who is responsible for this offense (probably Disney, who owns the rights to the film through the Fox acquisition), but keep in mind that this has happened to an R-rated film that contains frequent violence and profanity, something clearly not meant for family viewing.  And keep in mind that this is also the Academy Awards Best Picture winner of 1971.  If this can happen to a fifty year old, highly lauded classic, it can happen to any film.

This comes on the heels of the great Disney content purge of 2023.  Disney has become the latest streamer to tighten their belts by removing content from Disney+ and Hulu, including several titles that are inaccessible on any other platform.  Shows like "Willow," and Danny Boyle's "Pistol" don't have physical releases, and aren't available for digital purchases either.  To the dismay of the creative community, their shows and movies are in danger of disappearing into the digital ether  permanently.  "Willow" was a high profile release that was only on Disney+ for six months, and creator Jonathan Kasdan was still gunning for some form of continuation back in March.  On the other hand, at least "Willow" was actually released, unlike other streamers' shows that were completed and then permanently shelved for tax write-offs.  I'm still stewing over the second season of AMC+ show "Pantheon" that we're never going to get to see.

Fan response has been interesting to gauge.  The physical media collectors have taken the opportunity to say "I told you so."  Their collections are beyond the reach of the censors and the wishy-washy streamers.  Their digital equivalents, the data hoarders, are also busy filling drives and backups with the best copies of their favorite media that they can find.  Piracy arguments are getting heated again, with some creators conceding that if the only way to watch something is to pirate it, it's time to sail the high seas.  All the industry watchers are nervous, as the sad mistreatment of content is just one symptom of the great streaming bubble burst and further instability in Hollywood.  Disney has announced that there will be further purges, and the worst is probably yet to come.  

As for me, I feel like I might be stuck in denial.  I seriously doubt that all the pulled content is going to stay gone, especially the better titles.  I look at this situation and I think that this feels awfully familiar.  I've watched plenty of older media fall off the face of the earth, only to be resurrected later once the demand for it rises.  As an old Muppet fan, I remember "The Storyteller" series finally being released on home media a decade after the show was canceled, first on VHS tapes and then on DVD (I bought both).  The same thing happened with "The Black Cauldron," the most notorious bomb in Disney's history.  You have to pay a hefty fee to get the Blu-ray through the Disney Movie Club, but it is available.  Disney+ was supposed to be our ticket to a permanently open Disney vault, but that's clearly not the case.  The demand isn't as strong as they thought it would be, so we're all just going to have to go back to the old mindset of tracking releases and availability, the way we did before the streaming era.  Gone right now doesn't mean permanently gone.  It never has.  

Content being removed from streaming is unfortunate, but it's also not especially surprising.  It costs money for the streamers to maintain these big libraries, and if the content isn't generating revenue, it makes no sense to keep them around - just like television.  There's so much content online right now that no one could possibly watch all of it, and we've known for a while now that there are too many shows being made and too few viewers.  Cancellations always hurt, but this kind of correction was inevitable.  The media that people actually want will come back around eventually.  It may take a decade or two, but I doubt that we've seen the last of the "Willow" series.  It did have its fans, after all.  

 

As for "The French Connection," well, I guess this has been another lesson that we can't trust the studios when it comes to the fidelity and preservation of media.  If you don't have a physical or digital copy of a piece of media without DRM, you don't have it permanently.  Any digital purchase that includes DRM is only a license, and it's been demonstrated that it's an easily revocable one.  When the Ultraviolet movie locker site shut down a few years ago, users lost movies that weren't available through other platforms, or had to jump through hoops to maintain their libraries.  I'm still happy to rent via digital platforms, but I've never bought anything that I intended to keep.         

To put it plainly, I just don't trust them. 

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Trailers! Trailers! The 2023 Holiday Season

I wasn't expecting to put out another "Trailers!" post so soon, but there's been a deluge of interesting promos I want to talk about.  All links below lead to the trailers and teasers on Youtube.

Napoleon - Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby look well matched, but the real test here is going to be for Ridley Scott.  He's the only director who is still regularly making these big historical epics, and he's still terribly hit or miss.  And when he does score a hit, the audience can't be counted on to show up for them.  Good for Apple for funding such an ambitious project, but I don't think we're going to be seeing many more like this from Scott.  

The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes - I didn't realize how fond I'd become of the "Hunger Games" until I got another glimpse of its universe here.  I'm as happy as anyone that the YA dystopia wave is over, but it was fun in small doses.  The cast looks promising - it's good to see Rachel Zegler again, and Viola Davis is always a treat, but the best surprise was the appearance of Jason Schwartzman, who I totally mistook for Stanley Tucci.  

Wish - This is a milestone release for Disney Animation, meant to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Disney studio.  I'm tentatively excited about the use of both 2D and 3D animation in the film, though what little we see of it in the trailer could use some fine tuning.  The cast is great, though, and I like the premise that's been circulating about  this being the story of the famous Wishing Star from "Pinocchio" and "The Princess and the Frog."    

Killers of the Flower Moon - The long awaited reteaming of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will look at the murders of native the Osage in the 1920s, and the formation of the FBI.  I'd forgotten some of the cast who had been announced, and the sheer scope of this is impressive.  This is going to be a much bigger production than I was expecting.  The final running time is reported to be over three hours, and I honestly can't wait.  

Next Goal Wins - Finally!  Disney has delayed the release yet again, but Taika Waititi's soccer comedy is on the slate at last.  And it looks like a perfectly charming underdog story in the same vein as "Cool Runnings," with a hapless Michael Fassbender as the coach.  Waititi's been so bogged down in genre projects for Disney, it's good to see him go back to one of his main strengths - pleasantly eccentric, cross-cultural comedy.

Dune: Part 2 - This is being set up as a war film, emphasizing the grand scope of the film over interesting characters and ideas.  We get glimpses of the new characters - the  Emperor, Irulan, Feyd Rautha, and others - but there's no attempt to really introduce them.  Instead, we're being primed to follow the ascent of Paul as the Messiah, and I really hope that Villeneuve and friends can pull it off.  The source novel lost me in the second half, but the film feels like it could be a different animal.

The Color Purple - I've seen the Spielberg film, but not the stage musical version that the new "Color Purple" will be based on.  I imagine that this must be a happier version of the story than the Spielberg film, heavy on the uplift.  Hopefully it'll also be closer to the original Alice Walker novel.  Oprah's got an executive producer credit, but it doesn't look like anyone from the cast of the first film will have any significant role in the second.  

Wonka - I trust Paul King to deliver something watchable, but probably not at the level of his "Paddington" movies.  I'm not too fond of needless prequels in general, but I really disliked Tim Burton's 2005 remake, and it's oddly a relief to see something that looks more like the original "Willy Wonka" movie from the 1970s.  Timothee Chalamet sounds a little off, but he looks perfect.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this one.  

Poor Things - I still have no idea what this movie is going to be, but the trailer has convinced me that Yorgos Lanthimos will deliver his trademark oddity in spades.  The makeup work alone is unnerving as anything.  The bits of story presented here don't quite seem to match the description of the plot we have, but the mad scientist material is so out there, I guess that's no surprise.

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Crashing June Tentpoles

Some are blaming streaming.  Some are blaming the ongoing WGA strike.  Some are blaming budgets.  For whatever reason, the summer of 2023 saw some of the worst tentpole bombs in ages.  We started off fine with "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" riding a wave of good reviews to a solid $350 million domestic gross and over $800 million worldwide. "Fast X" has made nearly as much, but its budget was so high that it hasn't broken even yet.  Neither has "The Little Mermaid," though it's getting pretty close.  Early June saw the encouraging success of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," which is now the highest domestic grosser after "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."  And everything else since then has been a disaster.

"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" is currently the lowest grossing "Transformers" movie at $400 million worldwide.  "Ruby Gillman," the Dreamworks Animation film you haven't heard of, hasn't made back half of its modest $70 million budget.  "Elemental" is at $250 million, which is at least better than "Lightyear," but not by much.   The biggest bomb of the summer so far, however, is "The Flash," which "Elemental" just passed on the domestic chart, despite making half of what "Flash" did on their shared opening weekend.  Warner's massively hyped, long delayed superhero film fell completely flat at $260 million worldwide, and is projected to lose as much as $200 million.  The latest "Indiana Jones" might be in an even worse spot, but it's too soon to tell.  It opened bigger, but reportedly had a much higher budget.   

Things are looking better in July with "Mission Impossible" and "Barbie" coming up, but Hollywood is still reeling from a disastrous June, which looks an awful lot like the realization of the ominous prediction that Steven Spielberg made ten years ago, about multiple $250 million movies flopping one after another at the box office, forcing the industry to change.  There's been all sorts of doom-and-gloom predictions, especially after "The Flash" bombing, that this might be the end, or at least the beginning of the end of several major trends that have kept the summer box office going over the past two decades.  After the underperformance of "Black Adam," "Shazam," and "Quantumania," superhero films might finally be starting to ebb.  "The Little Mermaid" is the last major Disney renaissance film to get a live action adaptation, and the goodwill toward them may have also finally run dry.  And while the top two box office earners this year are animated films, PIXAR hasn't had a hit since "Toy Story 4." 

The total box office for this year is improving on last year, and the theaters have been making money even if the studios have not.  Despite so many of the bigger disappointments coming from Disney, they still have a bigger market share than any other studio.  However, only one film this year, "Super Mario," has managed to crack a billion dollar worldwide gross so far.  In 2019, five summer films hit that mark - all of them Disney tentpoles.  Disney's only managed one since: "Avatar: The Way of Water."  Universal's "Jurassic World Dominion," Sony's "Spider-man: No Way Home," and Paramount's "Top Gun: Maverick" are the other post-pandemic billion dollar earners.  In my completely uninformed opinion, the biggest reason that so many of these films flopped is that attendance levels aren't fully back to pre-pandemic levels and this may be the new normal.

There are plenty of other contributing factors.  June was over-programmed, with too many big titles crammed into too few weekends.  Budgets for some of these films have been out of control, especially with pandemic measures and costly delays factored in.  The WGA strike has shut down many late night shows and other marketing vectors, impeding advertising campaigns.  Streaming may have changed consumer habits permanently, with many opting to wait for films to become available online.  PIXAR in particular seems to have been adversely affected by so many of their recent films being released as Disney+ exclusives, and skipping theatrical runs. 

The success "Across the Spider-verse" suggests that audiences are absolutely willing to show up for the right film - even if it's the umpteenth superhero film that takes place in a multiverse, but they're getting more discerning, which means more films are getting the cold shoulder.  It'll be interesting to see how many of these flops and bombs spell the end of their franchises.  "Indiana Jones" and the DCEU are on ice for sure.  "Transformers" may finally be done.  "The Fast & the Furious" is guaranteed at least one more film, but that could be it.  

And honestly, that may not be such a bad thing.

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Notes on "Quantumania"

I feel I should start with an apology, because I wrote and scheduled my "Creed III" review before the news of Jonathan Majors' arrest came out, and promptly forgot about it.  This is one of the most dizzying reversals of fortune for a rising star that I've ever seen.  Just after Majors had two different films top the box office in successive weeks in February, he was arrested for assault.  Now multiple films are potentially in limbo, including the entire current slate of the MCU, which is built around the threat of Majors' villain, Kang the Conqueror.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," for instance, is almost entirely built around introducing and promoting Kang as a threat.  There's not much of a plot otherwise.  Scott Lang, like Adonis Creed, is enjoying fame and fortune, and everything seems to have worked out for him.  He's written his memoirs, he's still together with Hope, and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is now following in his footsteps - maybe a little too closely, as she gets herself arrested for political activism (and shrinking a cop car) in the opening act.  This might be an interesting topic to explore, but instead the two of them and the Pym/Van Dynes - Hope, Hank, and Janet - are accidentally pulled down into the Quantum Realm, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get home again.

If you remember the previous Ant-Man movies, Janet van Dyne was stuck in the Quantum Realm for decades.  We learn that she briefly befriended Kang, an exiled multiverse-hopper, who she learned was an evil conqueror.  Still trapped in the Quantum Realm, Kang has been busy subjugating the folks who live there and looking for a way to escape.  The Quantum Realm is essentially like an alien planet, full of strange creatures like the sentient slime Veb (David Dastmalchian), a guy with a flashlight for a head, Xolum (James Cutler), a telepath named Quaz (William Jefferson Harper), and your garden variety badass freedom fighters like Jentorra (Katy O'Brien).  Corey Stoll's villain from the first "Ant-Man" is back, but now transformed into a crazed, mutated cyborg named MODOK.  And for some reason Bill Murray also shows up for exactly one scene.    

If this sounds like a random mess, it's because this is a random mess.  Ant-Man has been good for comic relief in the MCU crossovers, but the last "Ant-man" film was among the weakest in the entire franchise, and "Quantumania" is at about the same level.  The change of scenery is nice, but all the interesting minor characters from the previous films have been jettisoned, so that Scott Lang and friends can go have a more cartoonish sci-fi adventure, with monsters and spaceships and big fights with too much CGI.  The size-changing schtick is so much less effective here, where everyone else is doing similarly impossible things, and there's no normal, mundane, everyday environment to contrast with. Hope is still woefully short on screen time and personality, such that the "Wasp" in the title should probably refer to her mother Janet, who has far more to do.  Aging up Cassie is a good idea, and Kathryn Newton delivers good snark, but like Hope she just doesn't get enough attention.

At least Jonathan Majors as Kang feels appropriately menacing, but we may not be seeing more of him.  So much of "Quantumania" is about building Kang up as a threat, and filling in parts of his backstory, so the movie is really more of a prequel to future "Avengers" films than anything else.  I expect that he'll end up being recast, because the rules of the MCU are so fluid that hardly anything feels like it has much weight or substance anymore.  "Quantumania" is full of pretty colors, shaped into a strange realm where buildings are sentient, Bill Murray is boring, and somebody thought that a live action MODOK was a good idea.  Swapping Majors out for a different actor feels positively pedestrian.

I'm being unfair.  "Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania" is not an especially bad superhero movie.  Hundreds of people put in a lot of time and effort to make this, and occasionally there's a good joke or a clever line or an especially weird Quantum Realm creature that deserves some admiration.  However, it bothers me immensely that "Quantumania" tried to do something different, and ended up just making a clone of a "Guardians of the Galaxy" film with more tepid characters.  The MCU has been stuck idling for far too long, and had better find the gas pedal soon.    

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My Top Ten Films of 1946

This post is part of my ongoing project to create Top Ten movie lists for the years before I began this blog, working my way as far back as I can.  Below, find my Top Ten films for 1946, unranked.

Notorious - The suspense sequences in this film still work for me, even though I've seen them multiple times and I know how it will all turn out.  In the moment, Alfred Hitchcock's cinematic magic still works as well as it ever did.  And Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, at the height of their charismatic powers, playing high stakes spy games with Claude Rains and the Nazis, is still absolutely irresistible.  

It's a Wonderful Life - It's not Christmas if somewhere, Jimmy Stewart isn't learning that one man can make a difference, and isn't on the receiving end of the generosity and heart of the little town of Bedford Falls.  Skip the first, plodding hour if you must, but "It's a Wonderful Life" is one of cinema's most enduring classics, with the happiest of happy endings I will never get tired of watching every year.   

Beauty and the Beast - Easily the most popular film that Jean Cocteau ever made, full of arresting poetic images and little moments of film magic.  Jean Marais' Beast remains the best live action Beast, a masterpiece of animal magnetism and Gallic charm.  The well intentioned remake from a few years ago, despite borrowing heavily from the original's imagery, never comes close to achieving the same wonder. 

A Matter of Life and Death - A lovely fantasy romance from Powell and Pressburger, which has one of the best examples of a film using both black-and-white and Technicolor photography in the same production.  The love story between David Niven and Kim Hunters' characters is sublime, and the opening sequence of the doomed mission remains one of the most touching things I've seen in all of cinema.

Shoeshine - Vittorio de Sica's neorealist classic is full of childish joy and crushing heartache, following the brief criminal careers of a pair of shoeshine boys.  The rawness and the purity of the characters' emotions is still instantly engaging, and difficult to forget.  The film had such an impact at the time of release, it kicked off what would become the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars.  

Panic - A French crime film that deals with the subject of mob revenge and post-war tensions.  It's very insightful about the social realities of France in this era, and perhaps this is why it was also a total failure at the box office.  Michael Simon cuts an especially tragic figure as the scapegoat, Monsieur Hire, whose only real crime seems to be that he's an oddball and a loner in a deeply suspicious, unhappy society.   

Gilda - The title character is possibly the most famous and complicated film noir femme fatale, and Rita Hayworth's most famous role.  I had a hard time deciding whether to include this film or "The Postman Always Rings Twice," on this list, but "Gilda" is undeniably more memorable and entertaining.  Hayworth lights up the screen, and a young Glenn Ford doesn't do a bad job of keeping up with her.   

The Yearling - I frequently got this film confused with "Old Yeller" when I was younger, as the plots are similar - both deal with a young boy's love for a pet, and the heartache that results when that pet becomes a threat to the boy's family.  The protagonist in this story is younger, and the fight to keep the yearling is more drawn out, which made this the more emotionally fraught viewing experience for me.

The Best Years of Our Lives - A tender film about WWII veterans reintegrating into their old lives after the war.  This has such a different attitude from the more cynical takes on this kind of homecoming story after later wars that it occasionally feels very naive and old fashioned.  However, Harold Russell's performance is still terribly inspiring, and the rest of the star studded cast isn't too shabby either.  

The Stranger - Orson Welles directed and starred in this suspense film, which serves as an early example of Hollywood grappling with the crimes of the Nazis, and was one of the first narrative films to use footage from the concentration camps.  Welles and Edward G. Robinson deliver strong performances, and the filmmaking serves the suspense very well - probably why this is Welles' only real box office hit.

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"Nimona" Lives

Netflix and Annapurna acquired the unfinished animated film "Nimona" from Blue Sky before they went under, and now it's a Netflix release.  And thank goodness, because this may have been a bad fit for Disney, but it's a perfect fit for Netflix.  It's a fantasy action film set in a medieval kingdom, but one that's been built for a cyberpunk era, and if you squint you could mistake it for "Arcane."  It's aimed at an older audience than the usual CGI animated media, isn't afraid to get dark and angry, and features major LGBT characters, along with a scrappy, bratty, irresistible antiheroine.

Newly knighted Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is framed for the death of the Queen (Lorraine Toussaint), forcing him to go into hiding, and attracting the attention of a shapeshifter named Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz).  She thinks he's a villain, and is determined to make herself his sidekick.  Her bloodthirsty plotting and eagerness for chaos initially put Ballister off, because he's trying to prove his innocence to the interim leader and head of the knights, The Director (Frances Conroy).  However, Nimona is awfully handy to have around for jailbreaks, finding and questioning suspects, and evading the guy responsible for capturing Ballister - who happens to also be his ex - Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang). 

Annapurna doesn't have the resources of the bigger animation studios, and "Nimona" is noticeably cutting some corners when it comes to its animation.  It's using a similar style to "Klaus" and "Bad Guys," with 3D mimicking 2D, which looks great when it comes to the flashy action scenes with Nimona changing into different cartoon animals in the blink of an eye.  However, there are some sequences that are noticeably a step down from the others, and the environments are especially rough looking.  "Nimona" had its original production interrupted by the Disney acquisition of Blue Sky, and subsequently much of the first creative team and pipeline was replaced.  The characters and the writing, fortunately, help to shore up the rougher patches.

Boy do I love Nimona.  She's a hilarious, rebellious, preteen punk, who has been ostracized for being a "monster" like Shrek.  But unlike Shrek, Nimona really wants to be accepted, and has a far, far harder time coping when she's not.  The film gets much darker portraying Nimona's mental and emotional state than I was expecting, though the ND Stevenson "Nimona" webcomic is reportedly even more fraught.  All but the last act is kept light and fun, though, with Nimona doing her best to win Ballister over to the side of evil and villainy.  A lot of the humor comes from contrasting her gleeful willingness to jump into trouble with Ballister's nervous caution.  Nimona enjoys thumbing her nose at authority and stirring up trouble, but when push comes to shove she still has a loving heart underneath.  

It's fascinating to watch such a  familiar story of acceptance and tolerance take place in such a diverse fantasy world.  Ballister and Ambrosius are a couple with a same sex romance that plays out exactly the way it does in every animated PG film with a straight romance.  The knights include all genders, with both the Director and the kingdom's legendary hero, Gloreth, being female.  Most of the character designs are modeled after their voice actors, a noticeably multi-ethnic bunch.  However, there's a wall around the kingdom that nobody ever ventures across for fear of monsters, and Nimona's core trauma comes from being mistreated whenever anyone figures out that she's not human.  The kingdom is pretty egalitarian and accepting, but still has its share of blind spots, and is capable of devastating cruelty.

"Nimona" is really something special.  Yet again, this is the kind of riskier animated film the bigger studios should be making, but almost never do.  Netflix and Annapurna coming to its rescue is one of the few feel-good success stories of this summer movie season, but part of me is still sad "Nimona" didn't get to be Blue Sky's swan song with a full theatrical release.  At least on Netflix, it'll find its audience quicker, and hopefully lead to more films like it.

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My Favorite Lotte Reiniger Film

The oldest surviving feature-length animated film is Lotte Reiniger's "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," technically the third ever created after Quirino Cristiani's films from the 1910s.  Instead of cel animation, Reiniger created a form of silhouette animation using backlit cutouts, filmed with stop-motion techniques one frame at a time.  This created distinctive black silhouette characters, similar to the ones used in Chinese shadow puppetry.  This style of animation is still seen today - examples include the films of Michel Ocelot, and segments of the recent "Candyman" sequel/reboot - but all of them feel like homages to Reiniger, who utterly dominated this particular form of animation for half a century.      

Reiniger's work is so visually distinctive that it's instantly recognizable.  The cutouts consist of bold black shapes and lines, forming fanciful characters and enchanting worlds against a monochromatic background.  The movements are very limited, but graceful.  The puppets are largely static, with faces that never change, yet are still wonderfully expressive.  "Achmed" was conceived of as a "One Thousand and One Nights" pastiche, combining various elements of "Aladdin," "Sinbad the Sailor," and other stories.  Prince Achmed is an original character, but he and the princess, the sorcerer, the witch, and the other characters all feel familiar.  So does the hero quest, the romance of the young lovers, and the triumph of good over evil.  Nearly all of Reiniger's films were based on fairy tales of one kind or another, full of magical creatures and storybook landscapes.    

Though rough by modern standards, "Achmed" is still impressive today for the sheer intricacy of the individual images, and Reiniger's ingenuity in creating various effects and illusions.  Transformations are common in her films, like the evil sorcerer who shapeshifts into different creatures to fight our intrepid hero.  Horses and princesses can fly, and the genie is one of the few characters who isn't a black silhouette - he's a ghostly light blue.  Reiniger used a rudimentary multiplane camera in "Achmed" ten years before Disney would develop theirs.  Even after the advent of sound and other improvements, her style largely remained the same.  She started using more complex, full color backgrounds in the 1950s, but the black silhouettes persisted.  Astonishingly, in the early years of her career, she largely worked alone on her animation - storyboarding, making puppets and backgrounds, and carrying out the painstaking animation process herself.  Her one major collaborator was her husband, Carl Koch, who served as her producer and cameraman.  The creation of "Achmed" took three years, from 1923 to 1926, and was completed when Reiniger was twenty-seven.     

"Achmed" wasn't considered revolutionary only because it was a feature length film, but because it was a true experiment in filmmaking technique and artistry.  It was considered a piece of avant garde cinema, before animated features were found to be commercially viable.  Reiniger only made one feature, but contributed to several others, and her output includes dozens of shorts and advertisements over many decades.  Sadly, her career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazi regime in her native Germany, and much of her work is considered lost.  Still, her influence has been considerable and persistent.  I'm constantly finding homages to her style in everything from "Samurai Jack" and "Steven Universe" to "Harry Potter."  And after all this time, she's still the only female animation director that most cinephiles can name.      

What I've Seen - Lotte Reiniger 

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

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