Category Archives: Animation

Flee

Flee                       4 ½ stars

For a remarkable achievement in storytelling and animation you won’t do better than the documentary movie from Denmark, Flee. Released at Sundance in 2021, this film finally made it to theaters at the end of last year. It has been on my list for a long time and I just viewed it recently. It tells of the unlikely years long journey of a gay Afghan refugee, Amin, who was forced to leave Afghanistan as a child in the 1980’s with his family. His story is told by combining recordings of his voice with stark animated images of the pain and anguish he and his family had to go through. There is a certain amount of unraveling of a mystery as elements of the story slowly emerge over the course of the film. The family, including Amin’s brother, mother and two sisters try to make their way to Sweden after the father is detained by the Afghan government and disappears. Amin tells his story after keeping much of it secret after twenty plus years, one that is full of persecution and suffering at the hands of the powerful and greedy. Flee is notable for having received three Academy Award nominations this year, in Animated Feature, Documentary and International Film. It is one that is truly worth watching.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On                  4 stars

The stop motion animated feature Marcel the Shell with Shoes On can be described as poignant, heartfelt and fun. This charming “documentary” follows the life of Marcel, a one-inch-tall mollusk shell who has a face with one eye and a pair of sneakers. Marcel lives in a house that is now an Airbnb with his grandmother, Connie, who is also a shell. The latest resident in the house is a man named Dean who is renting the place until he can find a new home. But Dean happens to be an amateur filmmaker and he decides to film Marcel as he goes about his business of living, finding ingenious ways to get around such as using a hollowed-out tennis ball and a bottle of honey. Marcel is quite talented, coming up with makeshift inventions and putting on a show when the time calls for it. He can make telephone calls and has a piece of lint for a pet. But he can also make plenty of mistakes and is very conscious of his shortcomings, making frequent apologies. Marcel is the creation of Jenny Slate, who was on Saturday Night Live for one season and Dean Fleischer-Camp, film director and her then husband. They made short videos of Marcel and placed them on YouTube back around 2010, creating a viral sensation. They then got the idea of making a full movie about the little guy and wrote a story for him. Jenny does the voice and Dean does the filming. Reportedly, they spent seven years making the one-and-a-half-hour movie, released in theaters in 2022. The story is expanded as we learn the house was previously occupied by a couple who fought and split up, but the man took all the other shells that are Marcel’s family with him leaving Marcel and Grandma all alone. So, Dean suggests to Marcel that he can post the videos they make and get the word out about the search for Marcel’s “relatives”. The film has a good message about the value of family and community. It was definitely more entertaining than I initially thought it was going to be. It was nominated for a Best Animated Feature Academy Award.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish        4 ½ stars

Here is another third film of a series: this time it is Puss in Boots, that Spanish speaking adventurous feline (voiced by Antonio Banderas) back to vanquish villains and seek his own glory in another animated film from Dreamworks. I missed all the Shrek and earlier Puss in Boots movies, but understand that the sidekick character got his own treatment in the prequels after the end of the Shrek movies. In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Puss comes face to face with his mortality when he is bettered by the big bad wolf. Puss is informed he is down to his ninth and final life and that he needs to retire. So it is off to the feline home, run by Mama Luna and inhabited by dozens of domesticated cats. Puss must tolerate the arrangement where he meets a new friend in Perrito (Harvey Guillen), a small dog disguised as a cat. (Follow along now.) But retirement doesn’t last long when the Crime family of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Florence Pugh, Olivia Coleman, Ray Winstone and Samson Kayo) come calling since there is still a reward on Puss’s head. Add to that Puss’s former love interest, a cat called Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), who is also a great battler and a loathsome villain in Big Jack Horner (John Mulaney) who despite having great riches wants to have all the magic in the world. The entire batch of them have learned of the existence of a lucky star that can grant a single wish, thus they are all on a quest to find it in the Dark Forest all the while fighting and playing tricks on each other. The CG animation is very colorful and has really improved in the last twenty years or so. Of course the movie is action filled and has plenty of comedy in its hour and 40 minutes running time. It can be quite a challenge to keep up with all the references to the fairy tales that show up in this story. We can see how Puss in Boots came to be such a legend. Maybe I’ll get to seeing the earlier Dreamworks movies of this collection some day. The movie is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

The Mitchells vs. the Machines  4 ½ stars

I caught up with the Netflix 2021 animated feature The Mitchells vs. the Machines which tells how a typical dysfunctional American family dealt with the great robot apocalypse of 2020. This amusing action-filled movie connects well with young and old audiences with its references to how people are dependent, even obsessed with their wireless devices and what happens when those connections go away. 18 year old Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is about to leave home to start film school in California. She has been fascinated about making her own movies and posting them on the internet, but her father (Danny McBride) just doesn’t get her. He thinks it isn’t right that the family is so involved with their handheld screens all the time. So he changes Katie’s plans to fly to California and instead make it into a family road trip with Mom (Maya Rudolph) and son Aaron (Michael Rianda, also the writer and director), who also happens to be obsessed with everything dinosaurs. Katie is more connected to brother Aaron than to either Dad or Mom. These plans are upset when the next generation AI device, a mobile robot is announced by CEO tech wizard Mark Bowman (Eric Andre), which angers the digital assistant app known as PAL (voiced by the amazing Olivia Colman). PAL takes control of the thousands of gleaming robots and sets about on her plan to capture and enslave the entire human population. (Will we never learn what happens when robots are given the capability of AI?) The movie can be described as The Fabelmans meets Terminator. Somehow the Mitchell family along with their ugly pug dog, Doug escape capture, thus it is up to them to defeat PAL and rescue humanity. Entertaining comedy and action follow as the dysfunctional family must work together and come up with plans to battle the robots and find their way to the lair of PAL. They are aided by a couple of malfunctioning robots (voiced by Beck Bennett and Fred Armison) who see something redeeming in the humans. It’s an imaginative take on our dependence on our digital devices and the importance of remaking connections with our family and friends. There is plenty of cartoon violence that can be enjoyed by all audiences.

Luca

Luca       3 ½ stars

Luca, the animated feature from Pixar/Disney and directed by Enrico Casarosa, takes the theme of The Little Mermaid and puts it on the Italian Riviera. Thus we get some Italian flavor including a seaside village, some homemade tagliatelle, and riding bicycles over cobblestone streets. We also see a friendship formed between two young boys, the younger one being Luca and the older one is Alberto. They have a secret though. They are both sea monsters who are masquerading as humans. It seems that these creatures who live in the sea are occasionally glimpsed by humans from the village but after they leave the sea and dry off they can transform into human form and have the ability to walk and speak normally. This experience creates the desire in Luca to learn all about his new surroundings including to ride a Vespa and to make friends with a local human girl, Giulia. Unfortunately, for our sea monster friends they are under constant threat of getting wet which can make them change back to monster form and be revealed to the humans. It has some other elements similar to other Pixar movies like a local bully and a climactic event like a bicycle race so is not particularly original, but should be very enjoyable for the younger audience. Luca is not Toy Story but is worth a look.

Raya and the Last Dragon

Raya and the Last Dragon             3 ½ stars

In 2021 the popular animated Walt Disney release was Encanto, the story of a magical family in Columbia. That same year Disney released the animated movie Raya and the Last Dragon which didn’t quite get the same attention in the era of Covid. This fairly typical Disney story concerns a fictional land called Kumandra, where 500 years ago a plague of sinister monsters that could turn people into stone was stopped by a race of dragons who lived peacefully with humans. But over time the humans broke up into factions leaving only one village to keep the dragon gem safe that continues to protect the people. That village is led by Benja, who has a daughter, Raya, a sort of young ninja in training. The peace is broken when another village breaks the gem, stealing pieces of it which releases the curse of the monsters again, spreading havoc across the land. The only hope is for Raya, accompanied by her pill bug friend, Tuk tuk to find the last remaining dragon who can defeat the monsters. She finds the dragon, a comical, energetic creature named Sisu who is powerful, but somewhat immature and needing guidance. Somehow, Sisu was chosen to be the last dragon after all the others were sacrificed to the magic, stone creating monsters. In classic Disney fashion, the pair and their friends must deal with many action filled dangers along the way to saving their people. The movie is rich in action and color, but was written by a team of writers so it is quite an amalgam of characters and references to Southeast Asia. It is not really a Disney princess movie but contains elements from a variety of Disney movies that we have seen before. The movie is very suitable for young audiences even including the monsters.

Elemental

Elemental            3 ½ stars

The new Disney/Pixar animated movie Elemental takes on racism and the treatment of immigrants as well as the question of whether fire and water can coexist. In the much anticipated movie released in June, a couple from the foreign land of Firetown comes to Element City, a metropolis where the citizens are made up of the four elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. They set up a shop in a rundown part of town and soon have a daughter named Ember, who grows up to be a young woman with a very fiery personality. It’s pretty clear that there are racist treatments toward the Fire citizens and that the Water inhabitants are the more privileged class in this modern land. Ember is destined to eventually run the shop, taking it over from Dad when he retires, but she has difficulty controlling a temper that can wreak havoc on the shop and the customers. When she causes a water leak in the basement, a Water city inspector named Wade appears who is overly sentimental and prone to crying spells. Wade threatens to report the shop over code violations, creating the necessary situation where Ember and Wade must work together to find the source of a water leak that endangers much of Element City. There is no bad guy here. It is just a case of decaying infrastructure, but it provides a way to show how the Fire citizens are treated and the excuse to get Ember and Wade together and find out if Fire and Water can exist together. There are some moments of great tension involving a sports arena and enthusiasm for a Wind athlete and one of his greatest fans, and then there are the inevitable meet the parents scenes. There are the usual comedic moments where we find a cute character. This time it is a young Earth kid named Clod who is destined to be a pest when he grows up. It is clear that the writers drew on some of their own experience as immigrants in developing the story, especially with the traditions from the old country and with the Fire people being excluded from certain events. The animation is first rate as expected with Pixar, but the story is a little thin in this one.

Trolls Band Together

Trolls Band Together                      3 ½ stars

Just out in theaters is DreamWorks’s third installment of the colorful candy-tone animated Trolls series based on the popular children’s toy of the sixties. This time it is Trolls Band Together with gray-toned Branch (the legendary Justin Timberlake) and pink Poppy (Anna Kendrick of the Pitch Perfect movies) returning for another popular tune filled adventure that will appeal to the kids and to adults alike. As the film opens we get Branch’s origin story finding out that he has four brothers that were part of a popular boy band called BroZone years before. (The opening performance contains obvious references to NSYNC and other boy bands of the early 2,000’s era. At one point one of the brothers says “We’ve gone from boys to men, and now there’s only one direction for us to go: the backstreets.”) Branch was in diapers at that time and was referred to as Baby B. Older brothers Floyd (Troye Sivan), John Dory (Eris André), Spruce (Daveed Diggs) and Clay (Kid Cudi) have all gone their separate ways, but John Dory has returned to seek Branch’s help on a desperate mission. It seems that the pop-star duo, Velvet and Veneer, (Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells) have been holding brother Floyd prisoner. These two stringy characters have no musical talent of their own, but they have engineered a way to extract the musical gift from the troll and use it themselves, enabling their star status at Mount Rageous. But if the trolls can “band together”, and create “perfect family harmony”, they will be able to free poor Floyd from imminent doom! Poppy insists that Branch must get the family together to rescue his brother. So much for the setup. Beyond that, there are harmonious tunes galore as we take a ride through various boy band songs and medleys of music from the seventies and eighties. It’s all done on the background of some very crafty and colorful animation with the smooth textures and troll hair we have seen in the earlier Trolls movies. And of course, there is the eternal message of togetherness and how brothers will always have one another’s backs. This may not be the best of the Trolls movies but for pure animated fluff, it may be worth an hour and a half of your time.

The Boy and the Heron

The Boy and the Heron                  4 ½ stars

A lot of movie goers were surprised at the release of The Boy and the Heron, by Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s master animator. Ten years ago, he released The Wind Rises saying it would be his final feature film. Fans of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli fondly remember his earlier classics My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. His style typically involves a fantasy world with strange creatures having human qualities, drawn in a way that evokes many emotions in the viewer. In his new final film, he bases the story on his own childhood growing up during World War II in Japan. The main character is Mahito, a 12-year-old boy recalling how his mother was killed in a hospital fire caused by a bombing attack. His father moves the boy to the country near the factory his father operates. Also in the new home are his father’s new wife, Natsuko, who is Mahito’s aunt and is already pregnant, as well as seven old grannies who tend to their needs in the house. Mahito is consumed by grief from the loss of his mother and spends time exploring the environs around the house. Only, he is routinely harassed by a persistent large gray heron wherever he goes. One day he follows the heron to a great decaying stone tower and tries to enter it to investigate but finds he can’t get inside the structure. Mahito is warned by the grannies not to go there and is told the tower was built by his mother’s uncle many years ago. Then one day Natsuko goes missing and the gray heron reveals that he is really an old, ugly gnome with a voice, telling Mahito that his mother is not dead, and she can be found in the tower. Mahito follows the heron into the tower entering a new fantasy world that is inhabited by the living and the dead. There are many strange beings there including a large flock of angry talking pelicans, a young pirate, thousands of balloon like creatures called the Warawara that float through the air, a girl named Lady Himi who protects the Warawara with fire, and a kingdom of giant parakeets led by the Parakeet king. Also, present is a version of Mahito’s great uncle who is striving to build a perfect structure out of stone blocks. He is seeking a successor to his job and wants Mahito to take his place. Some of the scenes may seem confusing and there is a lot going on here, but the point seems to be that Mahito is working through his grief and is struggling to do the right thing in his life. Like his earlier films Miyazaki uses many familiar techniques in The Boy and the Heron to illustrate certain life lessons. Here the lesson is how one is to carry on with living when weighed down by extreme sadness. This film is somewhat autobiographical and is different from most in that the main character is a boy where he usually has female lead characters. (Like in Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.) As in many of his other films it has a variety of odd characters, some likable and many with undesirable traits and questionable motives. I recommend it for animation fans, but perhaps not for the youngest of viewers because of some frightening images.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio                   5 stars

Pinocchio by Academy Award winner Guillermo del Toro is not your Disney’s Pinocchio. It is not at all like the underwhelming live action Disney version that came out the same year (starring Tom Hanks). Del Toro’s movie is done with creative stop motion animation using physical carved figures and has a very dark aspect to it. There are the same basic elements from the original 1883 story by Carlo Collodi. It opens with Geppetto (David Bradley), the carpenter losing the son he loves, only here it is due to a stray bomb dropped from a war plane during World War II. It is set during the reign of Benito Mussolini, who we actually get to meet at one point. Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) was carved by Geppetto out of grief and was brought to life by some magic spirits. He has some very bad habits, always getting into trouble breaking things and skipping school like someone with ADHD. Like the original story his adventures include joining the circus and encountering a giant fish at sea and having a tiny cricket friend (Ewan McGregor) who looks out for him. In this version Pinocchio is crudely carved and is very puppet-like, with a large head and narrow limbs so that it is obvious he is made of wood. He would not be described as cute. And since he is very gullible it is easy for a carnival master (Christoph Waltz) to persuade him to join the circus. When it is learned that Pinocchio can be brought back to life after being killed, the local Podestà (Ron Perlman) sees that he will make the perfect soldier for the Fascist cause and forces him to join the army. He goes on to meet Il Duce who is not amused by Pinocchio’s antics so promptly shoots him! Each time he “dies” he is instructed by the Blue Fairy (Tilda Swinton) about his fate and the choices he is faced with. The movie has more violence than the Disney versions but even so is still suitable for children. It still has the same positive messages of the importance of love and family like the other versions. It is a natural story for del Toro to tackle adding it to his previous dark fantasy movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. It is very deserving of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature it received.