animation
Sarah Kent
Robin Rhode’s animations are pure pleasure; there’s perfection in their simplicity. They are so perfectly tuned, so light on their feet, that one simply wants to enjoy them; but because they are multilayered, they offer more than momentary pleasure. Rhode was born in South Africa and, in many ways, he is the Banksy of Johannesburg. In the late 1990s he began using the scruffy walls of the city as a canvas on which to make drawings which he describes as a “dreamscape to the impossible”.But whereas stealth is crucial to Banksy’s modus operandi – he disappears into the night, leaving Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The appeal of fat, foolish, good-hearted panda Po (Jack Black) as a cartoon action hero is predictably diluted in this sequel. A fully trained and socially accepted martial arts master by the original’s end, he offers Kung Fu Panda 2 less pathos and originality. It compensates with spectacular 3D set pieces, cute and ferocious animals and gentle humour finely tuned to children’s tastes.Po is this time stunned to discover the kindly goose who raised him isn’t his real dad. Jack Black bravely resists the temptation to reprise Steve Martin’s similarly naïve adoptee in The Jerk (“You mean… I’m Read more ...
fisun.guner
This remarkable 1988 adaptation of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland opens with Alice addressing the audience. “This is a story for children,” she tells us, before adding a teasing note: “Perhaps.” And that “perhaps” is worth noting, for Jan Švankmajer’s Surrealist Alice is full of cruel and violent incident.Paring the story down and dispensing with many of its most memorable characters – the Duchess, the Mock Turtle and the Cheshire Cat among them – the story becomes a disturbing duel between Alice and the White Rabbit. We first encounter the creature not hurrying across the lawn, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Ian, who is having problems with erectile dysfunction, is freezing his wife out. Susan thinks she may be frigid which, understandably, her husband has taken personally. They’re all a lot better off than Dave, mind. He is in love with a woman who is ideal for him but he can’t seem to get past first base. It's making him suicidal. They all acknowledge there’s a problem, because they’re all in counselling with Relate. Slightly less conventionally, they’ve all agreed to have their sessions recorded and broadcast as part of a documentary. And pushing the boat out a little further, they appear on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day this Saturday, 16 April, will give vinyl a small boost. Many artists are creating special limited editions. Bands love all that. It reminds them of when people cared about music as more than "content". The Fall was originally available as a Gorllaz fan-club download last December and will be available on CD imminently but king Gorilla, Damon Albarn, wanted it first and foremost as celebratory Record Store Day vinyl - which is how I'm listening to it.While the format is retro, paradoxically The Fall was recorded primarily on iPad during Gorillaz' 2010 US tour and the inner Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sylvain Chomet’s hand-drawn animation of a previously unproduced Jacques Tati story is a delight in every way, in which the French film-maker pays homage to the great man by making him the illusionist of the title. He is unmistakably Tati - all elbows and angles, and, of course, distinctive bottom and nose.Seeing his work drying up as the incipient youth culture is taking over theatres and music halls, the illusionist leaves France (Chomet’s change to the original story) and accepts a gig in a tiny Scottish town, where he meets a star-struck young girl who follows the magician to Edinburgh, Read more ...
anne.billson
2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings. It's wicked fun, but to have included it would have been disingenuous: at the time of writing [ Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Welcome to the stinking, sprawling Bayou Mansions – the thorn in a prosperous city’s side, the “short-and-curly hair in the mouthful of sponge cake”. So cramped there isn’t even room to swing a rat (and there are plenty), so corrosive that everything here starts life as a bad smell. Forget the enchanted worlds of fable and fairy tale, this is a dystopian childhood fantasy masterminded by the select team of Kurt Weill, Kafka and the Wicked Witch from Snow White. As delicious as it is delicately malevolent, The Animals and Children Took to the Streets is a strychnine-laced gumdrop of a show, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Lovers of the beautiful game may already be familiar with the name Philippe Parreno, or at least with his best-known work. In 2006 he collaborated with artist Douglas Gordon (24-hour Psycho) on Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, a film that trained 17 cameras on the footballing genius for the duration of a game. Following Zidane’s every move, the 90-minute feature proved an especially intimate portrait: the cameras stayed close, never straying, never hinting at the 80,000 strong crowd nor bringing the other players into view. Zidane, who was also miked up, appeared oblivious to the intense Read more ...
sue.steward
On-screen kissing rarely works; even the sexiest, most practised Hollywood couples usually can’t manage it. But when the eponymous Chico and Rita turn to each other against smoochy strains of “Besame Mucho” and their lips touch for the first time, it looks - and feels - like the real thing. Even though the couple were conceived with pencil on paper and born into a digital world, their kiss actually feels erotic. Animation never was my favourite medium, but within minutes of the start of Chico and Rita, I was hooked.The Spanish directors of this sensational film are three multimedia film- Read more ...
david.cheal
Then there was the succession of guest artists, among them Neneh Cherry, De La Soul and Mark E Smith (who looked as if he had just nipped across the road from a session in the pub), who passed across the stage. Oh, and the endlessly inventive Jamie Hewlett animations that poured across the video screen.It was bewildering, and brilliant. Although Gorillaz were created by Albarn and Hewlett in 1998, it took seven years for them to make the transition from being a “virtual” band of animated comic-book characters to a proper stage ensemble, with their sensational 2005 residency at the Manchester Read more ...