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 […]
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On could be described as a “reprieve.” This is a kind, gentle, barely-feature-length fable that asks exactly two things of the viewer: find the one-inch-tall talking shell cute, and hope that the one-inch-tall talking shell is ultimately reunited with his lost shell family. I did what I was asked, feeling […]
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 […]
First, the positivity: the direct-to-Disney+ film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a sort of update-reboot-remake of the 1989 cartoon TV show of the same name, is so much better than I expected it to be. It’s still bad in many ways and good in virtually none, but the standard of comparison here is 2021’s Space […]
Studio 4°C doesn’t have the same name recognition of the best-known and best-loved Japanese animation studios in the West, which I imagine is at least in part because its best and boldest work is at this point well over a decade in the past. But it have some irresistibly interesting credits to their name, with […]
Why make a feature film based on a TV show? Sometimes, it’s an act of resurrection: Star Trek, Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars all got movies inviting viewers to spend more time in their respective worlds (though David Lynch gave casual fans much more than they bargained for). If the show is ongoing, a big-screen […]
I have mentioned more than once that DreamWorks Animation has become the most stylistically interesting of the major American animation studios,* more or less out of commercial necessity: their films make less money so they have lower budgets, and since they have lower budgets they can’t rely on raw processing power to put things over, […]
The genre in which the intermittently great American filmmaker Richard Linklater most consistently demonstrates his greatness (outside of “Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke walk around a city having epistemological debates”) must surely be “Richard Linklater revisits a very particular slice of Richard Linklater’s own life”. And as far as that goes, he’s perhaps never gone […]
The biggest reason to be temperate in one’s praise of Belle, the newest film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, is that this is extremely similar to a different film by the great animation director Hosoda Mamoru, 2009’s Summer Wars (and Summer Wars, in turn, has a reputation for being extremely similar to Hosoda’s […]
Netflix may be emblematic of the accelerating death of culture and the transformation of motion pictures from one of modern society’s dominant art forms into an endless churn of impersonal “content”, but every now and then they use their powers for good. To wit: the new three-part anthology film The House, in which four terrific […]
There’s no reason that Sing 2 had to be better than 2016’s Sing. Illumination has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into their movies, and their sequels have generally been the worst of a sorry lot. Not that I assume that the development meeting for Sing 2 started out […]
There’s no reason other than arbitrary numerology to compare the 2010 animated feature Tangled with the 2021 animated feature Encanto: the first is Official Disney Animated Feature #50 (a number arrived at with some corporate fudging, since it includes 2000’s Dinosaur, which really shouldn’t count; on the other hand, 1943’s Victory Through Air Power really […]
