animation
Gary Naylor
Many years ago, reviewing pantomime for the first time, I recall looking around in the stalls. My brain was saying, “This is terrible, the jokes are lame, the acting execrable and the set garish.” My eyes were saying, “These kids are loving it, their parents are liking it enough, and the cast are having a great time.” There was joy everywhere in the house, so who was I to play The Grinch?That memory went through my mind standing at the box office 90 minutes before the curtain, surrounded by merch aimed at the coach parties being disgorged outside. An American family from central casting – Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.In addition, the story that Gints Zibalodis Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Having recently watched the charming animation Marcelle The Shell With Shoes On with my nine-year-old son, I was going to suggest for our next movie night we check out Memoir of a Snail. Jolly fortunate that I didn’t, as this is a very different film, recommended for viewers 16+.Please don’t confuse this with your average Pixar lest your small folk be somewhat befuddled by stop motion on themes of swingers, loneliness, fat-fetish pervs, suicide, dark religious cults, bullying, guinea pigs reproducing at a calamitous rate and other such traumas.That being said, the above is somewhat Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is a direct sequel to 1993’s The Wrong Trousers, a deserved Oscar-winner which, despite lasting just 30 minutes, has a marvellous cinematic sweep, every frame loaded with detail. Co-director Nick Park originally intended Vengeance Most Fowl to last half an hour, “but we started thinking of more ideas… it kept growing bigger.” The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical image is rent asunder. Thunder and lightning shake the heavens and torrential rain cascades down in stair rods. Spotlights flash and dance through billowing smoke while Laurie Anderson serenades the tempest on her violin and Kenny Wollesen lashes symbols and drums into a clamorous frenzy. The Apocalypse!DEATHLY HUSH.Anderson breaks the silence. “Hi, Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Is it mere coincidence or already a new trend? Animated films about the unlikely friendships between robots and animals are thriving. Earlier this year, Pablo Berger's heart-warming retro tale Robot Dreams proved that fur and metal can go a long way when it comes to creating a kids' film that is in touch with the times. In The Wild Robot, things are a little more complicated: machines and feral creatures get to learn from each other the hard way.The story starts simply enough: Rozzum "Roz" Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a service robot, designed to help people, always Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently staged in London, setting the bar high, but it’s a simpler story, a simpler aesthetic and it’s obviously an easier gig to adapt a great film rather than an all-time great film, first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Waiting for the curtain, I gulped back contradictory thoughts: I was so excited about them getting it right and Read more ...
James Saynor
As everyone knows, the two most likeable creatures in the fictional world are the dog and the robot. Who doesn’t love a waggly tail or an aluminium cranium? So putting the two together in an animated movie looks like a Bennifer-perfect match.Robot Dreams pairs them, hand in hand, for walks in the park and rides on the subway in a bright, peppy feature that combines American optimism with mounting European angst. The film by Pablo Berger is a Spanish-French production based on a graphic novel by the American illustrator Sara Varon, and is set in a faithfully drawn New York of the 1980s, full Read more ...
James Saynor
After a few years of cinema, the wow factor of seeing actual things moving about on a screen wore off a bit and showmen saw that jump cuts and stop-motion – the dawn of animation – could lift audiences some more. The liberation from gravity, in fact, is a singular pleasure of animation: being half-sellotaped to the floor is one of life’s great bores, it seems to delight in pointing out.If Disney led the tradition of smooth-as-you-like animated artwork, Europeans often fancied the jerkier joys of stop-motion mannequins leaping around. The Polish-language The Peasants adopts a new form Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.If that suggests I’m resistant to Marcel’s winsomeness, it’s not true. He's as adorable as adorable gets. As in the 2010 trilogy of shorts that made Marcel a YouTube “fee-nom" – as a human Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Shrek universe expands a little more with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, another computer-animated family film from DreamWorks, with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek Pinnault reprising their roles as Puss and his frenemy Kitty Softclaws. Directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado serve up a treat, one worthy of its Oscar nod for best animated feature.As with all the Shrek Cinematic Universe output, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish subverts fairytales and nursery rhymes while telling its story, and part of the fun is seeing which the writers Paul Fisher, Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler plunder Read more ...
graham.rickson
Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia), a 1981 Hungarian animated epic, defies easy description, Marcell Jankovics’ film blending folklore and psychedelia to startling effect.There’s violence, heartbreak, black humour and romance, all accompanied by István Vajda’s harsh but striking electronic score. Acclaimed on its original release and ranked highly on critics’ lists of best animated films, Son of the White Mare has been hard to find in recent years, making this reissue all the more welcome. You can’t help wondering what the youthful target audience made of it. Jankovics recognised that young Read more ...