An older review of this film can be found here. It is not demanding more of The Tree of Life than it can withstand to call it the defining film of Terrence Malick’s whole life. From the moment he first began drafting the script to what was then called Q, in 1978, it was fully […]

There are more than a few bastard stepchildren in the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation; setting aside the projects like Victory Through Air Power and Pete’s Dragon, movies with significant content produced by the Disney animators, that for this reason or that didn’t get tallied up in the official WDFA canon (e.g. the first […]

The war for dominance in American animation between Don Bluth and the Walt Disney Company had gotten a bit more intense with their dueling mouse movies in 1986, but that had nothing on the pissing match the two studios engaged in late in 1988. Both companies released a new feature on November 18 of that […]

That Pinocchio was a significant commercial failure is something I can sort of get my head around, but it ultimately seems pretty hard to believe that something so beautiful and heartfelt could be so soundly ignored. I have no such difficulty believe the same thing of the other Disney feature released in 1940, of unquestionably […]

The good folks at Blue Sky Studios have done it again: yet another brilliant short film starring the bedraggled, hungry Scrat, a sabre-toothed squirrel living in the Pleistocene Ice Age some ten or twenty millennia ago, an unspeaking slapstick comedian whose single skill is hunting for acorns, something he does with great enthusiasm and virtually […]

Take the loudmouthed idiot shtick of Will Ferrell, mix it with a family-friendly action adventure, force the combined concoction into a PG-13 frame that doesn’t do any favors to anyone, and just for fun, overlay the whole project with in-jokes referring back to a 1974 kid’s TV show that is only fondly remembered by the […]