Earwig and the Witch, the first feature made by the reborn Studio Ghibli after it seemingly closed up shop for good with 2014’s When Marnie Was There and the 2016 co-production The Red Turtle, finds the company trying to create a new artistic identity for itself. I would say that I am uncertain of how stable […]
A review requested by David, 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! In the interests of having some way to start talking about FLCL (pronounced, because why the hell not, […]
Part of the appeal of animation is that it can depict anything that can be imagined outside of the bounds of physical reality, but in practice there tend to be limits on just how creative any given film can be: the hard limits of labor and money mean that, in general, the boldest, most radical […]
2020 has been a complete disaster for movies, on top of all the other things it has been a disaster for, but it managed to scrounge up a miracle in its last days: Pixar Animation Studios is alive and well. It was far too easy to wonder if the studio, a full decade after its […]
2013’s The Croods is a pretty comfortably average effort from DreamWorks Animation, with the rather serious caveat that DreamWorks’ average is low enough that this is neither an impressive nor a promising bar to clear. So the existence of a seven-years-later sequel is certainly not the kind of thing that fills a body with optimism, […]
At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st Century, I for one am ready to anoint Cartoon Saloon the finest animation studio in the world outside of Japan. The studio’s wonderful first three features – 2009’s The Secret of Kells, 2014’s Song of the Sea, 2017’s The Breadwinner – might have been enough […]
Since erupting into the world with the exquisite Oscar-nominated 2000 short Rejected, animator/director Don Hertzfeldt literally hasn’t made anything that isn’t at least great, and in that time span he has produced multiple candidates for the title of the most important, medium-redefining piece of animation made by an American in the 21st Century. But the […]
“The feature film directorial debut of former superstar Disney animator Glen Keane” cannot possibly help but be a big deal, even if it’s not a big deal. Apologies for trying to be cryptic right out of the gate, but I’m doing it with a purpose: the unfortunately reality is that Over the Moon – the […]
The films of Don Bluth have been a much more reliable source of franchise than I would have ever imagined. The Secret of NIMH got a sequel, though it took 16 years; An American Tail got three sequels, one of which played theaters; All Dogs Go to Heaven, despite being wildly perceived as a failure, […]
The dream of Sullivan Bluth Studios, later Don Bluth Entertainment, came to a miserable end late in 1994. Over the previous nine years, the company (the second one co-founded by Bluth) had ascended as high as An American Tail in 1986 and The Land Before Time in 1988, the first two animated features ever to […]
It would comfort me, somehow, if A Troll in Central Park felt like the people who made it didn’t care. The unacceptable trashiness of the end results might be more tolerable if it felt like they knew they were throwing it away. Alas, this film, the second animation released by Don Bluth Entertainment in 1994, […]
The drastic tumble that animation director and producer Don Bluth took in the 1990s is shocking and even a little bit sad. His career in the 1980s was dedicated to the idea that there was a better way to do animation than the clunky kiddie junk that Walt Disney Feature Animation had been reduced to, […]
