animation
Saskia Baron
A man is caught up in a storm at sea; giant waves like Hokusai crests throw him onto a deserted tropical island. Over the next 80 minutes, his struggle to survive occupies the screen. Curious crabs provide a little company, but not enough to stop him trying to make a raft only to have his attempts at escape thwarted. While he is eventually blessed with some human companionship, there is no dialogue throughout the film, just music and sound effects.The Red Turtle features many beautiful sequences set in bamboo forests and thrilling underwater scenes, but it's a slow watch and at a couple Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies. Now Hollywood has clambered aboard, though this live-action version, finally helmed by British director Rupert Sanders, has taken 10 years to reach the screen.There’s been some controversy about the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the central character, The Major, with some onlookers contending that it’s an outrage to hire a Caucasian superstar instead of a Japanese actress. Others (including Mamoru Oshii, who directed the 1995 Japanese anime Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is, as the voiceover has it, “a tale as old as time” – or pedantically one that goes back to 1740, when the French fairytale was first published – so maybe it was time for a modernising reboot. The stars – Emma Watson as Beauty and Dan Stevens as the Beast – have been keen to dismiss any psychology 1.01 readings of this Beauty and the Beast as a presentation of Stockholm syndrome, but the film’s makers, Disney, have been more than keen to trumpet it as having the first openly gay character. Of the latter, more later.So what is it? Well, foremost it’s a wonderfully lavish live action/ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Conveniently released as the nights get darker and the shadows lengthen, Inner Sanctums is a package to give nervous viewers nightmares. Stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay moved from Philadelphia to London in 1969 after winning scholarships to study at the Royal College of Art. They've been here ever since.Some of this material was included in a previous BFI compilation, but among the new extras is a beautifully shot mini-documentary directed by Quays fan Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s camera shows the twin brothers at work in their Southwark studio: a cramped, dusty marvel of a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The midlife crisis, the one-night stand in another city, the younger woman and the honeyed words that turn to dust – they happen all the time, in life and therefore in stories. In Anomalisa they are seen miraculously afresh thanks to Charlie Kaufman, that tireless cinematic frontiersman, and his co-director, animator Duke Johnson.The novelty of Anomalisa is that stop-motion figurines play out the life of Michael Stone, an inspirational self-help guru who can inspire everyone but himself. As he lands in Cincinnati to give a talk, his marriage has turned to dust, he is tempted by the siren lure Read more ...
Ed Owen
When Marnie Was There is the latest production by Japan’s animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli, and the first since the retirement of its creative genius Hayao Miyazaki. An adaptation of the Joan G. Robinson novel of the same name, it’s a confident and powerful account of a young girl’s search for identity.The book, written in 1967, is infused with the growing public interest in psychology. R D Laing’s classic text The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, which puts forward the idea that madness stems from people living in an insane world, was published the same year, and Robinson's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Girls just wanna have fun," or so we're told in the exuberant signature song from Cyndi Lauper making a surprise appearance midway through Anomalisa. But try telling that to the sad-eyed folk who move through Charlie Kaufman's dazzlingly sorrowful 2016 Oscar nominee, as if in a sort of hushed-voiced haze.Funny in parts but dead serious in its view of that deadening thing we call life, Anomalisa offers up so singularly eccentric a world of blankness and despair that it has a contradictory effect on the viewer, sending one back out onto the streets ready to embrace their shapes, sounds and Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the lessons we consistently learn from the makers and creators featured in We Made It is that necessity truly is the mother of invention. By negotiating their way around unfamiliar media and techniques, fighting against their limitations, and expressing creative urges by any means necessary, our subjects have as often as not pushed through into unexplored territories and found unique modes outside of standard categories.This certainly goes for Tiff McGinnis, aka Grande Dame. Formerly the electro-rock one-woman-band Crazy Girl, her methods of expression have expanded into print, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Who says satire is dead? After this, I would imagine just about everybody. According to Jon Culshaw, one of the prime movers in ITV's new puppet-CGI farrago Newzoids [*], this isn't just Spitting Image revisited because "the puppets have got more of a spikiness, more of an edgy exaggeration to them." You think? One other difference he forgot to mention was that Spitting Image was often really rather good.Where did it all go wrong? Of course, Spitting Image profited hugely from being the product of the Thatcher era, when the political battle lines were starkly drawn and the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team.Based on a little known Marvel comic series and directed by Don Hall and Chris Williams, Big Hero 6 is set in the fictional mash-up city San Fransokyo – a pleasing blend of ornate Eastern- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The name of Czech director Karel Zeman is far less-known in the English-speaking world than it deserves to be. He began working during World War Two, establishing a name for himself in the rich Czech animation school (and proving a later influence on that movement’s master, Jan Švankmajer), and thus is a decade or two earlier than that country’s celebrated New Wave cinema movement of the 1960s. His later work often combined animation with the feature format in distinctive, and different way: among his fans is Terry Gilliam, who has acknowledged Zeman’s influence, especially in his treatment Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Hayao Miyazaki's final film The Wind Rises is grand, sweeping and bursting with the kind of beautiful animation we've become accustomed to from Studio Ghibli (which celebrates its 30th birthday next year). Miyazaki delves into Japanese history with a soaring autobiography of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi, which also acts as a tribute to the writer Tatsuo Hori - who penned the original short story "The Wind Has Risen".The freedom and highs of creative expression and following your dreams are stylishly rendered through breathtaking flight sequences - first in Jirô’s fantasies Read more ...