animation
Saskia Baron
Mirai made animation history when it was included in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes in 2018, the first Japanese anime feature to be so honoured. It went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Director Mamoro Hosoda, who worked at Studio Ghibli before creative differences on Howl’s Moving Castle led him to strike out on his own, has been described as the natural successor to anime master, Hayao Miyazaki. Certainly they share extraordinary artistry and a fascination with children and the fantasies they create. But for me, Mirai lacked the otherworldly enchantment of Studio Ghibli classics like Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Making it to the fourth film in a series and maintaining quality is a feat pulled off by very few franchises, (see last week’s dreary Men in Black: International). But Pixar has done it with Toy Story 4. It might not have quite as many nifty gags without its originator John Lasseter at the helm, but the quality of animation has reached new heights and the story reduced me both to tears and helpless laughter. The original Toy Story was the first animation feature created entirely digitally; almost 25 years later computer technology has made another huge leap forward. The opening Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Manga, the Japanese art of the graphic novel, took its modern form in the 1800s. Illustrated stories already had a long heritage in Japan — encompassing woodblock prints and illustrated scrolls and novels — but the introduction of the printing press by foreign visitors changed the rate at which works could be made and the extent of their distribution.Part of manga’s appeal is its restlessness — it never gets stale. While the 1950s saw distinctions crystallise between shōnen and seinen manga (respectively for boys and young men) and shōjo manga (for girls), the 70s saw the Year 24 Group of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? of the Pokémon franchise, bringing the video game’s cute critters into a live-action, film noir world, as Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) turns Holmes-hatted detective to help teenage human Tim (Justice Smith) find his apparently murdered dad. Their quest takes them through Ryme City, a utopia where Pokémon and people exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the beneficence of corporate chief Howard Clifford (Bill Nighy, whose Blofeld-like cat makes you doubt his motives early). The ensuing fight against corporate corruption of Pokémon-human relations is helped by Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Flight is a show by experimental Scottish theatre company Vox Motus, adapted from the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers. It’s about two Afghan child refugees making their way across Europe to the fabled land of “London” and is based very directly on her own interviews with asylum seekers as a journalist. So far, so narrartively straightforward but Flight is unlike anything most people will have seen. It is as much art installation as it is theatre, perhaps more so, yet it’s a tale beautifully, economically told and is profoundly moving.In a recent artsdesk interview Candice Edmunds, one Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Whenever I hear the word "cosmopolitan" I think of Europe in the 1920s: German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, Czech eccentricity, Swiss DaDa, Italian Futurism and French Surrealism. With music from Weimar cabaret and visuals by Soviet agit-prop. Let's take an imaginary train journey from Paris to Berlin to Zurich to Prague to Milan. This is the world evoked by The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. This filmic theatre show, the second created by 1927 theatre company, was first staged in 2010 at the Sydney Opera House and the Battersea Arts Centre, and since then it has not only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The author of the original Watership Down novel, Richard Adams, used to insist that it was “just a story about rabbits”, but its eco-friendly theme and warnings about the destruction of the natural environment were impossible to miss. In the 46 years since Adams wrote it, these concerns have become vastly more pressing, and his depiction of displaced rabbits wandering the earth in search of a new home could hardly be more topical. Thus, this new BBC/Netflix adaptation is aptly timed.The 1978 film version, voiced by the likes of John Hurt, Richard Briers and Ralph Richardson, was a giant hit Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After Sam Raimi’s original mixed-bag trilogy, Andrew Garfield’s all too familiar outing as the webslinger, and last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, it would be fair to say we’ve had enough Spider-Man films. Despite the potential fatigue from yet-another-origins story, we now have Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Whilst the cynic might see it as another attempt by Sony to tighten their grip on their IP before inevitably relinquishing it to Marvel, the reality is that, whatever the motivations, they’ve created something spectacular.This should come as no surprise given the talent in charge of Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 1974, a saggy old cloth cat and his rag-tag bunch of friends managed, in just 13 episodes, to influence a generation. Ask pretty much anyone who watched Bagpuss what their first experience of traditional folk music was and the answer is unlikely to be Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span. The music of Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, multi-instrumentalists with links to Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger and the London Critics Group, earwormed its way into a nation’s consciousness via a cloth cat, a rag doll, a carved wooden bookend in the shape of a woodpecker and colony of mice who were more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Zeman’s Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) was, for many years, his best-known film in the West, dubbed into English three years after its 1958 premiere as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne by an enterprising Hollywood producer. Both versions are included on Second Run’s release, and it’s striking that the English version retains most of the original’s charms. Zeman’s Baron Munchausen is a colourful romp, but the monochrome Invention for Destruction is a better work, its eye-popping visuals here serving a semblance of plot.Zeman based his plot on Verne’s novel Facing the Flag, a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, there’s considerable exhilaration to Ali Soozandeh’s animation feature Tehran Taboo. That’s due, in part, to the film’s breaking of many of the official “rules” of Iranian society, the myths of the theocracy that can’t, and don’t conform with the realities of human life. But there’s something wider as well, almost Dickensian, as the director presents his varied cast as players in a big city drama in which the Iranian capital itself becomes a protagonist, an entity bubbling with life, most of it “not conforming to Islamic virtues”.But what otherwise Read more ...
graham.rickson
Animation fans have rarely had it so good, though it’s nothing short of criminal that the mean-spirited, infantile Peter Rabbit took more money than the sublime Paddington 2, and that Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner wasn’t a popular success when released earlier this year. Redress the balance, and buy this disc today. Based on the first novel in Deborah Ellis’s Afghanistan-set series, it’s a remarkable film, at times so real, so acutely observed, that you forget it’s animated at all – as with My Life as a Courgette, you’re left incredulous that this riveting assemblage of pixels and pencil Read more ...