Zootopia

[EricJ]

Slightly better first Full Trailer up at YouTube (and likely showing with Good Dinosaur):

(Well, nice to see that the Disney folk still remember Bob & Ray routines. )

And, in the tradition of Baymax kicking the soccer ball and Olaf and Sven fighting over the carrot, they're going to ignore the forest for the trees, and just beat the one or two money-isolated "cute scenes" into the ground completely out of context, because they're worried they can't sell the main plot.
Frankly, I'm not worried, it's starting to have more of a Pixar-influenced Lasseter-WDFA vibe, to help us get over those fears of....you know, when "Wisecracking CGI animals" are mentioned, and have some actual appealing characters and story.

(And I can't be the only one who kept flashing back on the "Cute intermittently-hyper sloth" from Rio 2...Or maybe I am, since I didn't see that one either, just an AMC turn-off-your-cellphone ad.)

[James]

If you want to look at the good side to these types of trailers, it is that they don't give the entire plot away as so many trailers today seem to.

[EricJ]

And also that it microcosms the audience issue to would the individual scenes actually be funny if you sat through them, as opposed to how thin or derivative they might sound like on paper?
Wreck-It Ralph was a hard movie to describe in twenty words or less, but focusing almost the entire marketing on the "Support group" scene sold the concept--Although, of course, that scene also pretty much captured the idea of the movie in one, so that's probably too good an example.

[Dacey]

Seriously, the animation of that smile was like perfect.

[Dan]

At D23, we were DYING with laughter over this scene. And the timing of Flash smiling... priceless...

[Dacey]

After this trailer was shown before The Good Dinosaur, the kid behind me eagerly said to his father "I want to see that." So, I think Disney probably has an early spring hit on their hands here.

[Vernadyn]

At my showing of Good Dinosaur, they showed this trailer first, then Finding Dory, Secret Life of Pets, Angry Birds, and that polar bear movie, which looks just wonderful. So they basically diminished in quality as we got closer to the feature. And while Finding Dory got some murmurs when the characters first appeared, Zootopia was the only one that received a significant (and positive) reaction.

[Ben]

Would have been interesting to see how it fared if the trailer lineup had been reversed...

[Dacey]

Well, it was also the only one of those trailers that was actually new. Even the one for Finding Dory came out several weeks ago.

[EricJ]

At my showing of Good Dinosaur, they showed this trailer first, then Finding Dory, Secret Life of Pets, Angry Birds, and that polar bear movie, which looks just wonderful.

(I was disappointed that it wasn't the Bernard movie --of which we already have one import on Netflix--but with the Lionsgate name on this, I suspect this is another case of a third-string company trying to open their little generic CGI "wide" because the coast is clear and they thought they didn't have any family-film competition.
Owie....This is how "to Delgo" became a verb in the movie industry, when applied to Legends of Oz and the Oogieloves.)

So they basically diminished in quality as we got closer to the feature. And while Finding Dory got some murmurs when the characters first appeared, Zootopia was the only one that received a significant (and positive) reaction.

At my showing, they showed EVERY SINGLE DANGED trailer of a CGI movie from now till summer--
Including the five named, plus "The Little Prince...oh, Wait, Sorry, the Poor Little Big-City Yuppie Girl Who HEARD the Story of The Little Prince From the Old Guy".
(Which will likely have animation geeks fawning Fantastic Mr. Fox-like false praise over it for the artsy Laika-esque stop-motion scenes of the book, interspersed with the standard CGI scenes of the girl and her big-city mom, but that doesn't make it the 70's Richard Kiley/Gene Wilder version.)

But yes, Zootopia got the biggest actual laughs. (And showed near the end, in case Ben wondered.) And long-term laughs, not the ephemeral short-subject gags from SLoP.

[Dacey]

Delgo came from Freestyle Releasing, which is a much, much smaller production company than Lionsgate (although they did have a solid hit back in 2006 with the well-received The Illusionist). It's a little hard to call Lionsgate a "third string" studio these days when they own two of the biggest franchises in the world.

[EricJ]

It's a little hard to call Lionsgate a "third string" studio these days when they own two of the biggest franchises in the world.

Okay, then, a major indie distributor without their own house studio trying to take their minor third-party CGI acquisition wide like the Weinsteins did with Hoodwinked 2. Still pretty much adds up to the same thing.

[Vernadyn]

And long-term laughs, not the ephemeral short-subject gags from SLoP.

I wonder who didn't see that final gag with the poodle coming as soon as it was set up--and it kept going far past when its humor value (which wasn't that large to begin with) ran out.

[Ben]

If The Illusionist is the Sylvain Chomet film, wasn't that Sony Pictures Classics? Not an independent in the true sense of the word (if it's that film).

[Dacey]

It's the magician movie with Edward Norton. It came out a few weeks before the similar Christopher Nolan one.