thu 28/03/2024

cartoon

Gotham, Channel 5

Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale and (coming soon) Ben Affleck have all had a go at playing the fully-formed Caped Crusader, though for some Adam West's ludicrously campy Sixties incarnation remains the score to beat. But...

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Arena: Whatever Happened to Spitting Image? BBC Four

“You can never embarrass politicians by giving them publicity.” Michael Heseltine’s verdict on Spitting Image – he claimed, of course, he never watched it – was surely one of the truer things said in last night's Arena memorial Whatever Happened to...

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Landes, Aurora Orchestra, Collon, Kings Place

May this be a New Year sign and a symbol of a revitalized concert scene to come: an eclectic programme of dazzling range to draw in the new pick-and-mix generation, full of segues that worked and executed with the right balance of poetry and in-your...

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DVD: A Cat in Paris

As a refreshing change from Disney-style hyper-tech 3D animated blockbusters, A Cat in Paris offers a modest story of adventure and intrigue on a pleasingly human, as well as feline, scale. The titular character is a faintly sinister black-and-...

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Top Cat: The Movie

The last time racial stereotyping (or at least, its cross-species equivalent) could be passed off as shorthand for a certain kind of slapstick humour was probably back in 1962 - coincidentally, the year that the last of Hanna-Barbera’s 30 episodes...

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Timeshift: The Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley, BBC Four

Declaring that “everything in the world exists to end up on a postcard” is pretty courageous. But after watching the charming, gently funny Picture Postcard World of Nigel Walmsley you begin thinking that maybe, just maybe, everything was created to...

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TeZukA, Sadler's Wells

Edit, edit. Inside TeZukA there’s a charming, elliptical, hugely stylish piece begging to be sliced and trimmed into focus - just as the manga master Osamu Tezuka must have daily occupied himself with as he prepared his graphic cartoons. The visuals...

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How Manga Comics Became A Dance

A new production opens tonight at Sadler's Wells based on the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, Japan's master of manga art. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and composer Nitin Sawhney shared a love of comics as a boy that turned into the more...

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Super

If you had a quid for every time a nerdy character in a contemporary comedy made reference to Star Wars, in particular to the gnomic wisdomous utterances of Yoda, you’d be richer. Maybe not as rich as George Lucas. But it happens. It happens a lot....

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Così fan tutte, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

“I’ve seen an asp, a hydra, a basilisk”, Fiordiligi sings as she tries to ward off Ferrando in the second act of Mozart’s cynical dissection of true love. Benjamin Davis’s new production for WNO converts these beasts into a crocodile, a dragon,...

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The Ricky Gervais Show, E4

A show that began as that hippest of 21st-century technology, a podcast, gains new life in a transfer to the dinosaur of television having been given a makeover with old-school Hanna-Barbera-style cartooning. The Ricky Gervais Show started life on...

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Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if...

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