Tag: animation
-
Toys buy happiness in the cloying The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
Cloying, saccharine, and worst of all, painfully obvious. Mike Mitchell’s The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part emblematizes my biggest gripe with most contemporary animated features: that perhaps the purest form of cinema is so often overwritten to the point of death. With animation, everything must be literally created from nothing, and anything is possible. […]
-
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 traps superheroes in motels and courtrooms
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 sure went down easy when I saw it in a theater a few months ago, but it suffers on rewatch on the small screen. And needless to say, it was shortly rendered wholly obsolete by the best animated superhero movie of all time, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. While the real […]
-
Snausage Fest: Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
I was rather astonished to find Isle of Dogs defeat my expectations and become one of my least favorite Wes Andersons, if not the least. Anderson is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers (I know, I know, join the club), but like a lot of my faves, I have significant reservations. It’s no great insight […]
-
The dreadful Jack the Giant Slayer is soullessly engineered escapism
Director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer is almost unbearably dreadful. It continues a recent trend in the fantasy genre: fairy tails used as raw material for soullessly engineered all-ages escapism. See also: Snow White and The Huntsman and Tim Burton’s appalling Alice in Wonderland. It’s hard to understand how Singer could demonstrate the ability […]
-
Batman: Year One copies the comics but doesn’t capture what made the them classics
The film buffs at Criterion Cast recently took a break from their usual discussion of the likes of Ozu, Godard, and Cox for in their year-end podcast review of the 2012 year in movies. Rather surprisingly to me, they talked up Batman: Year One and Dredd as two underrated 2012 releases. I had been happily […]
-
An Act of Journalism: Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir could easily be filed away under any or all of the following genres: documentary, autobiography, memoir, journalism, and nonfiction. If there’s one thing all of these have in common, it’s that none make for natural cartoons. The exception that proves the rule is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which began life as […]
-
George Lucas Cedes Control, in Star Wars: The Clone Wars
After writing and directing three Star Wars prequels between 1999-2005, it’s easy to forget that back in the 1980s, the series’ godfather George Lucas opted out of directing The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Now Lucas appears once again to be ceding control over his most famous baby. He’s back to shepherding […]
-
The Only Child: Neil Gaiman and Henry Selick’s Coraline
I saw Henry Selick and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline on its opening day in my favorite movie theater, the best possible venue to see any remotely visually ambitious movie: the Clearview Ziegfeld in New York City. Fittingly, my tickets were misprinted “Caroline,” a misnomer that is a recurring plot point. Coraline was written and directed by […]
-
Brad Bird Steals His Own Movie in Pixar’s The Incredibles
Like writer/director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, The Incredibles is a virtually perfect movie. Bird’s astonishing one-two punch for Pixar builds on the animation studio’s reputation for deep emotional resonance already earned by Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo and later reconfirmed by Wall-E. But Bird’s films add a welcome maturity that proves the medium of animation can be, […]
-
A Memoir in Pen & Ink: Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis
Named after the ancient Persian city, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis is a memoir of her life in Europe and Iran after the Iranian revolution. This animated feature joins the growing ranks of comic book adaptations that prove that comics are not only about superheroes that dress up in animal-themed costumes to battle crime. Hopefully […]