June Eris of the Month 2017: DreamWorks Eris

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (watch on Amazon Video) is a 2003 animated film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures featuring Brad Pitt as Sinbad, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Marina, Joseph Fiennes as Proteus, and (most importantly for Discordians) Michelle Pfeiffer as Our Lady of Chaos, Eris!

The animation is amazing and the story is pretty solid. According to Sinbad‘s IMDb listing, this film was the last hand-animated DreamWorks production and their first use of Linux OS for the computer-animated parts.

(How this wraps back-around to the publishing of the Principia Discordia as the inspiration for the origin of the CopyLeft, FreeWare, Creative Commons, and Open-Source computer movements will be revealed in later posts. Stay tuned!)

The mix of hand and digital animation gives the film a rare style and stunning looking sequences not seen before or since in animated movies.

Roger Ebert’s review of Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas gave it Four-and-a-Half stars, saying “That it works is because of the high-energy animation, some genuinely beautiful visual concepts and a story that’s a little more sensuous than we expect in animation.” And he’s right, there are gorgeously animated moments in the film that marry hand-animation with the digital animation in strikingly unique ways. And the story is smart and well written for all ages to enjoy.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s voicing of Eris as the film’s main antagonist is pure seduction.

Here’s the opening sequence of the Sinbad with Pfeiffer as Eris that sets up the story… be sure to embiggen the video for best viewing of the animation:

As with all things Eris-related, look for the chaos. According to the Wikipedia entry for Sinbad: The Legend of the Seven Seas, the film grossed “$80.7 million on a $60 million budget, DreamWorks Animation suffered a $125 million loss on the film, which nearly bankrupted the company and caused it to abandon traditional animation in favor of computer animation.”