DreamWorks Animation, once the unlovely home of such crimes against animation as Shark Tale and Bee Movie, has been quietly handing Disney and Pixar their asses on a platter for so long now that it should no longer come as a surprise when it happens, but it still feels like Puss in Boots: The Last […]
When the Walt Disney Company dabbles in family-friendly science fiction, catastrophe follows. Around the turn of the 1980s, they tried to get in on that Star Wars action, with The Black Hole and TRON in 1979 and 1982. Soon after both flopped, the company was taken over in a hostile coup, as the animation division […]
There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first […]
A review requested by Harold, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! We cannot say of the 2002 miniseries Dinotopia that it has small ambitions. Packed into its three parts, […]
I’m not exactly sure how it is that directing a critically-acclaimed Oscar-nominated film that helped create an animation studio and remains the highest-grossing film in that studio’s history sends a fella to Director Jail, but that’s where Henry Selick has been for the thirteen years since making Coraline, still one of the best animated features […]
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is not a good film, which comes as absolutely no surprise whatsoever. It is surprising, perhaps, that it isn’t much worse – and “much worse” is, to be fair, in the eye of the beholder. Nothing could be more understandable than somebody subjecting themselves to this film and declaring it an unmitigated […]
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]
I think the fair thing to do is to regard Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank not with contempt that it exists, but with amazement that it survived to be released. Though I think you could temper that amazement with a little bit of contempt. That would be fair. Still, let’s not get too […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]
To begin with, I find the very title of DC League of Super-Pets unpleasantly provocative. Not the League of Super-Pets part; that’s mostly just describing the content, though I might wonder why the film bothered to so subtly rename the comic book Legion of Super-Pets. Probably because Warner Bros. assumed (and with reason) that movie […]
Five films into a series that hasn’t really shown any signs of losing its audience is an odd time to decide to course-correct for quality; even less so when the series is the signature franchise of Illumination, an animation studio that has never yet indicated that it feels terribly worried about quality in any meaningful […]
A review requested by Devin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! “It’s sophisticated enough for children, simple enough for adults!” reads the tagline on the poster for the 1970 […]
