Cars 3 could be a hell of a lot worse. We know that. We already had Cars 2. To avoid the fate of joining that film at the bottom pit of Pixar hell, the filmmakers made the very reasonable distinction of simply going back over the plot of the first Cars, a movie that was universally regarded as the studio’s worst film in 2006, and which has (in my estimation) […]
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: director Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reminds us of the wide range of approaches that filmmakers have taken towards staging the Matter of Britain across the decades. It gives me great […]
If you had asked me ten years ago, when Shrek the Third was farting its way through theaters, which major American animation studio I expected to be pushing the medium forward the most in 2017, between Pixar, Disney, or the Shrekmeisters at DreamWorks, I would have frankly looked at you like you’d just grown two extra heads.* So imagine my surprise that here we are, just one decade later, and […]
Rock Dog is a low-down, no-damn-good movie. But terribly fascinating anyway, if more in theory than actuality. The film exists as a hoped-for evolutionary link between the second- and third-largest film markets in the world;* it has been 100% financed by Chinese production companies but 100% created by U.S. artists at a U.S. studio. The source material is a Chinese-language graphic novel. The cast is predominately American, speaking English (a […]
On the one hand, it’s profoundly unfair to attack a movie like Sausage Party for the quality of its animation. The whole point of the Disney-Pixar business model is that you spend a gargantuan pile of money to make an even more gargantuan pile back; the reason those studios’ films look so good is that cost well over a hundred million dollars even at their cheapest, which means they need […]
Four unfathomably long years ago, so long ago that animation studio Illumination Entertainment didn’t much seem like they’d necessarily amount to anything, particularly given that one-third of its output up to that point was the incomprehensibly awful Hop, I remember being impressed by the production design of the studio’s Dr. Seuss adaptation The Lorax. Absolutely terrible goddamn movie, you understand – but the look of it was pretty swell. The […]
Because anything is better than actually looking Independence Day: Resurgence square in the face and talking about it, we’ve got a cool little conversation starting up in the comments section of my review of same: what are the best and worst summer movie seasons in the last few years? For me, this has also raised questions of how one even thinks about the quality or lack thereof in the Great […]
Maybe it’s just me, but the month to come seems almost hilariously under-nourished. A whole wave of sequels that I can’t imagine anybody asking for, the most prominently misbegotten video game adaptation in a long while, and one particular animated picture that… we’ll talk about that shortly. At any rate, my conviction that summer 2016 is a weird afterthought is not meaningfully endangered by any of the wide releases coming […]
Now that we’ve hit film #3, and given that the worldwide box office take so far makes it seem somewhat unlikely that film #4 is in the offing (eight years later: oops, spoke too soon) we are able to speak of the “Kung Fu Panda Trilogy”. And as far as I’m concerned, we are able to speak of it in especially fond terms. Kung Fu Panda 3 is absurdly good […]
The Good Dinosaur is, in the first place, a kids’ film. That’s meant to be a categorical judgment, though there’ve been more than a few people out there making it as a value judgment. And that’s fair – it’s been a rocky few years for Pixar Animation Studios, with their first outright bad film, Cars 2 only four years in the past, and the shockingly average Monsters University reigning indifferently […]
A Bug’s Life is the most readily-overlooked of Pixar films, and I’d be lying if I pretended that I couldn’t figure out why. After a decade and a half of riches, the 1998 film (the studio’s second feature) can’t help but seem unduly modest in every aspect of its writing. The story is perfectly ordinary – it’s yet another riff on the basic Seven Samurai model – the jokes are […]
The first thing to point out, because it’s really amazing the more you think about it, it’s a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios’ 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It’s a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we’re watching as the story isn’t “actually” be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. […]
