One of the biggest surprises in recent Oscar history was surely the elevation of an unknown French-Belgian-Irish co-production, made by the little-known Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, into the ranks of Best Animated Feature nominees this past spring; thank God for it, too, because without being able to splash “Oscar Nominee!” across the posters, I doubt […]
Around these parts, the history of the Disney Animation Renaissance – the studio’s slide into irrelevance following its founder’s death in 1966, bottoming out in the tremendous box office implosion of The Black Cauldron in 1985, rebounding after the critical and commercial success of The Little Mermaid in 1989, and culminating in the immense popularity […]
Following Spirited Away, Miyazaki Hayao didn’t immediately start upon another feature film. Between 2001 and 2006, he directed a cluster of short films meant exclusively for the Ghibli Museum just outside of Tokyo; shockingly, that exclusivity seems to have held firm, even in this day of widespread internet piracy, and despite my best efforts, I […]
There is one respect in which the 2010 edition of Clash of the Titans absolutely lords over its 1981 predecessor: no Bubo. Have you not seen the 1981 film? Then you have been spared the sight of master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen wasting his talents on a little mechanical owl that flies about helping the […]
By the mid-1980s, the zombie films of George A. Romero had been ripped-off from virtually every imaginable angle, and attached to any number of bastardised “sequels”; this was mostly thanks to the efforts of the Italian horror movie industry, which had produced a truly inspiring number of awful hangers-on to Dawn of the Dead, known […]
The films of Noah Baumbach are extremely divisive: between those who find the characters in his scripts so vile that you can’t stand watching them, and those who find the characters so vile that it’s brave and bracing. Do please note that there is no phantom third variety of people who find his characters pleasant […]
Of all the signs and portents that we are drawing near to the end of human civilisation (floods! earthquakes! economic strife! global unrest!) none has scared me more than this: at last, DreamWorks Animation has made a great animated film; a Pixar-quality film, if I dare say it, despite fear of my blasphemy bringing down […]
