Scenery Porn/Animated Films

Dammit, where's my camera?

• Disney Animated Canon is prone to this, especially during the early films, and "Disney Renaissance" that started with The Little Mermaid (1989):
  • Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937): Especially during an early scene (just before the nightmare fuelish forest scene) of Snow picking flowers in the forest.
  • Pinocchio (1940): What a pretty town!
  • Bambi (1942) was pretty much entirely Scenery Porn, with a little bit of story thrown in.
  • Sleeping Beauty (1959). Not only are the backgrounds meticulously and beautifully painted, the animation is flawless and the foregrounds are no less breathtaking. There's a reason this movie almost bankrupted Disney.
  • The Little Mermaid (1989).
  • The little-remembered The Rescuers Down Under (1990) had some amazing shots of the Australian Outback, and the New York scenes were pretty stunning as well.
  • The ballroom scene in Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) is a brief bit of Scenery Porn. The background was done digitally, while the characters dancing were hand-drawn. As a rule, when the camera flies backwards in a widening spiral with a rotating viewpoint through a massive and detailed candelabra while the room is spinning in one direction and the dancers spin in the opposite direction and there are no mistakes, you know two things: 1) this was done with computer graphics, and 2) this is goin' on the ol' résumé. Disney still uses this clip to blow the socks off of viewers.
  • Aladdin (1992) is full of Scenery Porn, drawn from reference photos of actual Islamic architecture. Not actual medieval Arabic architecture, mind you, but actual Islamic architecture.
  • The Lion King (1994)
  • Pocahontas (1995) - literally painting with all the colors of the wind.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) made medieval Paris look absolutely beautiful.
  • The shots of Chinese countryside in Mulan (1998) were fabulous, especially during "A Girl Worth Fighting For".
  • Tarzan (1999) had a lot of it.
  • Atlantis the Lost Empire (2001) is conspicuously guilty of this -- although there are plenty of us who would have died to see more. Do you have a dollar?
  • Brother Bear. Just look at it! Makes you wish it'd never become civilised.
  • Treasure Planet (2002) begins with a shot of a spaceport shaped like a crescent moon, displaying every building and ship, and when zoomed in enough, the inhabitants. The visuals build up from there.
  • Just from the trailer, you can tell that Tangled is continuing the tradition. For those curious, this is a real-life example of the film's lantern scene.
  • Even Disney's Deranged Animation looks awesome; there's a reason Disney is the trope namer for Disney Acid Sequence.
• Every production released by Hayao Miyazaki (and Studio Ghibli by extension) manages to pull at least a long sequence of very pretty scenery. (Given Miyazaki's love of flying, it's no surprise that every work has at least one extended aerial sequence.)
• Most of Makoto Shinkai's work. Shinkai, in fact, will focus the camera on the Scenery Porn in the middle of important scenes with his characters. Five Centimeters Per Second is the epitome of cloud Porn.
• The animated film Patlabor 2 has a large amount of Scenery Porn. The apex of this is the "boat scene" in which two characters have a long, extremely philosophical conversation while riding a small boat down a waterway. As the conversation goes on, the camera view focuses on old buildings, factories, and other features of a near-future Tokyo.
• While The Original Series had its moments, Rebuild of Evangelion takes this to non-stop, Nerdgasmic levels of Scenery Pornography. Seriously, just watch the second movie's trailer.
• The 2004 Appleseed movie, particularly the flyby of Olympus in the beginning. The Sequel Ex Machina does this better still.
• Steamboy. The film took sixteen years to make, and boy does it show.
• The 2009 Uchuu Senkan Yamato film is a mixture of this and Technology Porn, with grand Space Opera battles and detailed spacecraft interiors and exteriors.
• Much of The Sky Crawlers is devoted to featuring the beautiful vistas of Ireland and Poland, as well as the incredibly detailed indoor settings.
• Angels Egg is Yoshitaka Amano's and Mamoru Oshii's visual poem. With only about five minutes of dialog in its seventy minute run time the absolutely gorgeous visuals carry the film's elegant, surreal and poignant "narrative".
• Coraline is this trope mixed with Plot. The garden and mouse circus scenes in the other world are beyond breathtaking, especially in 3D. All done in stop-motion.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Berk is gorgeous.
• Disney's Dinosaur is this with a little story thrown in. In fact, just ignore the storyline and concentrate on the stunning visuals.
• Every Animated Films by René Laloux, director of obscure French weirdness like Fantastic Planet, Gandahar, and Time Masters. Bizarre but beautiful alien worlds that look straight out of a Salvador Dali painting. Fantastic Planet is a particularly bizarre example; wallowing in strange crystalline structures and surreal images. It's Scenery Porn on drugs.
• Pixar is very good at this:
  • The vault where the doors and stored in Monsters, Inc.
  • WALL-E. Earth as a desolate wasteland is ironically the most beautiful looking thing in the film.
  • Cars has a long scene at the start and finish that is pretty much all Scenery Porn.
  • And its Sequel, Cars 2, takes it Up to Eleven with new settings and colorful environments. At some points it looks a little too realistic for a universe made of Cars.
  • In The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible's second arrival at Syndrome's island pretty much existed to show off how awesome the island was.
  • Finding Nemo has some very impressive underwater scenes.
  • A Bugs Life and Toy Story 2 both feature the same tree (to different levels of detail and mood).
  • Up has some amazing shots of the jungle, ranging from rocky terrain to lush foliage and everything in between. But it's not only that -- even the cityscape and the sky can be counted in this trope.
  • Brave has this from the freaking poster. And it's set in the Scottish Highlands, meaning there will be more to come.
• Edinburgh has never looked so lovely as from The Illusionist.
• Final Fantasy VII Advent Children has the settings of Edge and Midgar for the battles with Bahamut Sin and Sephiroth, respectively.
• Kung Fu Panda. Even if you don't count the opening two minute dream sequence storyboarded and overseen by the respected and famous James Baxter (whom you may have been introduced to via The Lion King), just about every shot of the Valley of Peace counts as this... and the Jade Palace... and Chorh-Gom in the Mongolian mountains... and the suspension bridge where Tai Lung fought the Furious Five. Talk about luscious!
• The Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland animated movie perfectly captures the jaw-droppingly virtuoso style of artwork that made Winsor McCay's original comic strip so memorable. Even the movie's infamous Nightmare Fuel is rendered lushly, with a large amount of fine detail.
• The "Plagues" sequence in The Prince of Egypt is the wrath of God made manifest. It looks awesome. Most of the movie falls into this category, honestly. From simple dialogue scenes showing the vast majesty of the Egyptian empire, to Moses walking out his front- er, tent flap to be greeted with sweeping mountain landscapes, to the crossing of the Red Sea, the movie is pretty much a scenery porn extravaganza.
• The Irish/Belgian/French film The Secret of Kells. It toys with perspective masterfully in some scenes, and others are simply jaw-dropping.
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has some very elaborate backgrounds made entirely of food.
• Rio is FULL of this. There are gorgeous scenes of the jungle, but then you get to the flight scenes where we see them overhead, and oh boy! The parade also looks amazing, with dancers in great costumes and beautiful floats. A float featuring a scarlet macaw stands out in particular.