Animation · Animators · New Genres · New Media
The film may appear gamer oriented, but general audiences should find it accessible and entertaining based on its fright factor alone. It’s simultaneously a boon to content-starved TF2 diehards and[…]
Animation · Essays · Fairy Tale · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Looking back to the original Toy Story series, it seems obvious that one of the things that really helps Buzz accept his child’s toy nature is that he is good[…]
Animation · Experimental & Underground · Horror · Splatter & Gore
There is no question of suspending our disbelief watching Kahlert’s films, but there does emerge a bizarre unease in the inescapable doom of his scenarios. Unburdened by the need to[…]
#MeToo · Animation · Animators · News · Production History · Societal Trends
Docter and Lasseter were part of the Pixar Braintrust, a group of aging white men that held creative control of Pixar’s productions. The original members – Lasseter, Docter, Andrew Stanton[…]
African American · Animation · Franchises & Series · Sports
The implication is that fun is what is ultimately being played for – that fun is freedom’s goal, the reason that liberty is desirable at all. Michael knows that if[…]
“Revolutionaries need an oppressive establishment to thrive, just as governments need hidden enemies to justify stricture.” – Peter Chung, creator of Æon Flux * * * From 1991 to 1995,[…]
Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality
In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]
While it’s always difficult to make such a claim with assurance – for decades Disney’s 1937 Goofy feature Hawaiian Holiday was confidently thought to hold that honor – Bobby Bumps[…]
Animation · Comics · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has infinitely more in common with the psychic quest for one’s identity, the yearning for belonging and friendship, and the no-rules imagination – sometimes[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
IBM releases a movie starring actual atoms, on a screen you can’t even see with an ordinary microscope.
Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical[…]
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc] I think this is one of the greatest short films ever made. Containing not a word of spoken dialogue. Not only is the stop motion animation exquisite and amusing,[…]
The Avatar hype continues. There was a front-page piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of[…]
When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. – Stevie Wonder * * * In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their[…]
Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a[…]
There are three basic types of spy stories: 1) the one about the ultra-skilled professional spy who is almost always successful, e.g., James Bond; 2) the one about the civilian[…]
If almost any director or screenwriter other than Richard Linklater had been given the opportunity to make Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly into a movie, I think their immediate[…]
