6 Animated Intros That Complimented The Live Action Film Of Which They Preceded (as opposed to trivializing it in some way)

"You know what this movie needs? A cartoon!"

- lotsa people I guess

Hey, that's no way to start a film. Well, tell that to Saul Bass because however separate these informative little vignettes are, the true trick is to not make them feel disjointed from the entire tone of the picture. But to go out of your way to include an entirely different flavor at the beginning of your movie is a bold choice and its own art form. A movie like Grease or Catch Me If You Can don't necessarily require some expository graphics to explain their otherwise simple synopses, but they're so fucking good because they actually set the tone rather than merely trying to match it. Cartoons often indicate whimsy - perhaps you're about to see a Comedy. In the case of movies like Christmas Vacation or City Slickers the intros are so ridiculously lowbrow and irrelevant that they nearly derail the entire operation. This is risky business folks, so you'd better know a little bit about your movie before you go ahead and tack an animated short onto your story. 

Here are 6 that hit the mark for me in various ways that I'm gonna explain to you. 

- Paul

Weekend at Bernie's II

The Bernie movies are live action cartoons anyway (especially the sequel) so this is one of the easiest examples. Heck I'd go so far as to say that there should've been a Saturday Morning spinoff series, right in between Tales From the Cryptkeeper and Marsupilami. I want this to be a reality for two reasons: I want more adventures with Larry, Rich, and Bern, but I also wanna see how this initial premise would work in children's programming (because it absolutely would).

Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead

The only reason this works is because of how abstract it is; it's a sparse, disorienting doodle that lasts about 30 seconds - giving the cartoon babysitter nearly as much screentime as the on-camera one. But I'm discovering a trend: corpse-handling stories are best prefaced with animation. 

Night of the Demons

It all depends on the film: these intros are capable of dumbing a movie down, or giving them some class. Night of the Demons is easily the most glossy, professional looking movie of Kevin Tenney's filmography, and that's partly due to the fact that they pulled off an animated credit sequence - not to mention one so stylistically on-point that it could intro a Tim Burton movie. 

Four Rooms

I have incredibly strong feelings about this movie (both positive and negative) that I won't get into here. One thing I will point out is how jumbled and jagged it is (as anyone who's seen it knows) but if one thing unifies it into the nostalgic Screwball Comedy they were going for, it's the pitch perfect opening credits (which were originally twice as long). 

Nashville

One could argue that this doesn't count as an animated intro. That don't worry me - illustrated depictions of the entire cast presented as a legitimate trailer to introduce the film is more than suitable for this list (and one of the most exhilarating parts of the whole movie).

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Fincher takes his titles seriously - and they're seriously hit or miss. He'd done the grotesque graphic treatment on Fight Club and it looked dumb. That was meant to be more of a stylized transition - this one feels like a standalone surrealistic deconstruction of the tone of the film while resembling nothing aesthetically in the film. Typically I would hate a big slab of CGI dropped in for no reason, but somehow I find it refreshingly bold.