Jason and the Argonauts

A re-viewing of a classic from childhood. There is so much about this movie that is thoroughly impressive. The film’s most famous elements, the Ray Harryhausen effects, are worth the effort to watch it alone. The script is remarkably faithful to the original Greek myth, unlike so many other adaptations that play fast and loose with a well-known story. Even the acting is quite good here, which is unusual for many of your b class mid-century swords and sandals epics. Special props go to Honor Blackman as Hera (you remember her as Goldfinger's Pussy Galore); she gives the story a lot of its vibrancy, especially early on. Todd Armstrong is convincing as well as Jason; you believe him as a guy who combines both brawn and brains and can pull off a dazzling feat or two. Mostly, though, the stars of this show are those effects: the skeleton soldiers, Talos the living statue, the Harpies and the Hydra. It’s one hell of a show, the sort of flick that could make a young boy understand just how awesome movies can be. This is no serious study of suburban angst, and thank goodness! It’s more like what cinema was made for: a great story told with fabulous visuals and exciting action. If you too are on a quest for a great treasure, this is where you’ll find it.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Well, it’s not every day that you get to watch a hundred-year-old movie. Nor does it happen that the film in question is as beguiling as Lotte Reiniger's silhouette stop-motion animation work. There are scenes in this movie that are so creatively expressed that the viewer is left wondering exactly how they were done—even in this time of digital filmmaking and realistically rendered visuals. It’s pure creativity and imagination that went into the making of this film, which tells a tale from the Arabian Nights that contains much that is familiar to most audiences—the famous story of Aladdin—blended into a second story about the titular character and his own world spanning deeds. It’s a lot of fun to watch and the story is not too difficult to follow despite the need for English sub subtitles of the German subtitles (in an otherwise wordless presentation. The current fashion is to be highly concerned with the last five minutes and to concurrently ignore everything that came before, but that is a dreadful mistake—a conclusion proved by looking at this postcard from the far ago. The light and magic here come not from a genie or a lamp, but from the continuum of human creativity and consciousness.

Zootopia 2

The best part of this movie is the visual jokes and puns. Some of them are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. And some of the verbal jokes hit the mark as well. But a lot of the rest of this film comes across as very boilerplate animated feature: not especially clever, not particularly innovative in terms of its visuals, and built too much around presenting bland homilies at the end of the story. You get the sense throughout the running time that the point of this exercise from the start was to preach to the audience, and to make the sermon more palatable by wrapping it up in a number of revved up action sequences. In that sense, it’s kind of like how you give a pill to an animal (appropriately enough): you stick the pill into some squishy treat and hope the creature will swallow it whole. To be sure, the film is not boring or without entertainment value; you can watch the movie and stay mostly engaged from start to finish. You might find yourself straying a bit here and there, and you might consider the plot to be low stakes and slightly nonsensical—but most of those watching it will be children anyway, and we all know how uncritical they can be. So it’s mostly harmless amusement, though hardly anything more than that, and certainly nothing particularly memorable. It’s not all happening at this zoo, but I do believe there’s just enough here to make do. 

Despicable Me

I resisted this movie for a very long time. It just never seemed like a work that had much to offer me and my taste in films. Maybe that had something to do with the over the top marketing tie ins etc. well, I can now report that…I wasn’t entirely right, but I wasn’t entirely wrong either. The movie is at its strongest when it is focused on individual elements: sight gags, one-liners, slight satire. There are good moments sprinkled throughout its run time. But the overall story is weak and utterly predictable. Worse, in a story where the main characters are villains, every outcome is soft and pulls the punches. No-consequence cartoon violence is one thing, but this stuff here is for babies. Despicable? More like docile. That may fly with the toddlers (both actual and mental), but not with me. 

Robot Dreams

Alternately sweet and brutal. But mostly brutal. Frankly, I’m not quite sure what to make of this movie. Generally, I like my movies—including my animated movies—to come with a healthy dose of snappy dialogue, so this mostly wordless work operates at a disadvantage right there. The story of friendship found and then lost and then (kinda sorta) found again has its effective moments, but most of those are the joyful instances when the main characters are building their relationship. When things go south, that’s when the brutal comes in, and it is difficult to accept the notion that the sorrows are ever truly overcome, despite an ultimately upbeat denouement. Upbeat is a good term here, considering that music plays a major role in telling the tale—somewhat naturally, given the lack of spoken language; the filmmakers, to their credit, have some excellent taste in tunes, and that helps a lot of this flick to go down a bit easier. Still, one cannot help but see the sorrowful side ultimately winning out; perhaps it’s my own lived experience speaking, but I think the biggest takeaway from this film is that, even in their dreams, losers are losers, and thus they just simply lose. That’s a hard nut to crack. Beyond story basics, the movie presents some good animation, with very representative depictions of ‘80s New York City (except for having a Mets game at Yankee Stadium, for some reason), with the old cityscape beautifully rendered in many scenes, as well as offering a wide range of literally well-drawn animal characters throughout (the better to doll up the story’s harder edges). Certainly, this is a well crafted work and deserving of attention—I just can’t escape the feeling that it ultimately comes across as a bit of a downer. And, the lack of dialogue is probably why the film seems longer than it is; not that the story drags, but it begins to feel drawn out after a point. So watching this movie presents some challenges as well as rewards. give it a look, but don’t expect a standard animated laugh riot. 

The Little Prince (2015)

Repeat after me: you’re not better than. No, you’re not. This should be an obvious thing, and yet, again and again, we see stuff like this movie, where someone takes an acknowledged classic and tries to “improve” upon it by telling the story their own way, or even their own story piggybacked on top of the original tale. It never really works, and while this film represents a valiant effort, and one where a certain reverence for the original material is evident, the effort is not entirely successful here, either. The movie is at its best in the scenes where, in expertly rendered stop-action animation, it relates the core of Saint-Exupery’s fairy tale. In the CGI animated frame story, the work is less effective, probably because that part of the proceedings looks and feels too familiar (the character and world designs are straight out of the now-standard computer animation playbook) in contrast to the older yet somehow fresher look of the stop action, which hews more closely to the style of the original author’s “decorations.” That’s not to say the frame is without any impact; certain aspects of the more modern tale hit home with the viewer. But it just doesn’t compare to the creative vision that lies at the heart of the fable. The wind, sand and stars are, indeed, essential elements of the world, and you just can’t improve upon them—even if you think you’re so much better than those who walked the earth—or any asteroid—before you. 

Moana 2

Part of the problem is quickly apparent: this story feels rushed, like it was not given any chance to develop organically. Instead, the tale is presented more as a “plot accompli” based on presumed prior knowledge, clumsy explication, and prioritizing cultural instruction. Indeed, a lot of the early part of the movie is like the world’s most highly-produced sensitivity training workshop video. You get the feeling that, unlike with the first movie, where the cultural consultants were there to give input, here they were allowed to go nuts—and not to particularly entertaining effect. So the proceedings begin with something of a deficit. Does the film turn it around? Yes, to an extent, largely through the efforts of Auli’i Cravalho, who still brings great presence and charm as the title character. Among the supporting cast, Dwayne Johnson is still mostly entertaining as Maui, while the rest of Moana’s fellow sailors are a hit or miss bunch. The musical numbers fall within a range, from solid to middling; a few advance the story well enough, though none are really standout pieces. All in all, this is a decent outing, nothing to be ashamed of but not really anything spectacular. Apparently, this will be one in a chain of islands, so to speak, so any review of this flick will hardly be the last word; maybe we’ll have to experience the voyage in total before we really know where it goes. 

Cryptozoo

This is weird. I mean, my thoughts in composing this review are weird, in that I hardly know what to say about this movie—but “weird" also simply applies to the film itself. It’s an animated story about bizarre creatures, bizarre humans—who are perhaps even weirder than the cryptids of the story—and a series of events that comes across as the product of a truly stoned-out-of-one’s gourd mind. The story is strange to the point of being ridiculous, the animation style is, to put it mildly, eccentric, and the whole thing comes across as a senior thesis from someone who is a film major at the most absurdly liberal college in the solar system. So it’s unexpected, to say the least. I don’t want to be cruel, because clearly someone put a lot of effort and creativity, of a sort, into making this movie, so I won’t give it a HISS. But you have to be pretty stoned to see this thing ascend to even MEOW territory. Maybe, as the movie itself suggests, there’s a reason that mysterious creatures remain obscure and mostly unseen. Make of that what you will. 

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Oh, so that’s why I never got into anime. The plain truth is, with animation, no matter how pretty are the pictures you draw, at the end of the process the characters are simply cartoon characters. That’s fine for certain types of stories, but for others the animation treatment trivializes the project. So it is here. This telling of the Tolkien substory simply lacks the gravitas that Peter Jackson’s original trilogy brought in spades. This should hardly have come as any surprise, as earlier animated versions of the main LOTR story had the same problem, and were largely confined to the memory hole until the iconic live-action movies came along and revitalized interest in the old man’s masterwork. So this deck of drawings was stacked against itself from the start, regardless of the visual innovations brought by the Japanese masters of the form. On its own terms, this flick plays it relatively straight—there aren’t too many of the physical absurdities typical of anime, especially as regards to the fight scenes—which is a good thing, and tells a tale that contains a solid amount of interest, even if it is at best tangential to the main story of Middle-Earth. (Not that the script doesn’t make at least token [Tolkien?] efforts to tie this piece into the overall story thread.) One major plus is the depiction of the main (and made-up for this movie) character of Hera, not just as a story persona but also because she is presented as a smokin’ hot redhead (those anime artists definitely know their way around drawing females). Still, this script is otherwise fairly true to its source material, so a fan can’t complain too much. As noted, there was once a time when the idea of a major movie release based on LOTR would have been absurd, so best not to look a gift Hobbit in the mouth. (Sorry, no actual Hobbits here, though one young character of the Rohirrim tries to fill that void.) Maybe future efforts will learn from this piece’s flaws and offer an improved effort. Or maybe they can just stick to live-action productions, since those are the true, proven winners. That, then, really would be something worth blowing your horn about.

Luck

The big problem here: the viewer can never quite shake off the feeling that he's watching a knockoff Pixar piece. It’s a through line that conveys a sense that every detail of this work is just a little off. For instance, it’s a tiny bit weird that a movie that rather consciously adopts certain touches of very modern life—not just cell phones and other tech, but even certain characters displaying the execrable habit of wearing excessive numbers of earrings—also uses a forty-plus-year-old song as its key piece of soundtrack. Yeah, I get that it fits lyrically, but still. And many of the characters (trinketed and otherwise) are just a little bit off in their depicted forms; you have to believe that the artists on the Disney side of the street would have gotten them just right, down to the tiniest character-defining details. And, perhaps most crucially, the story seems to be a little too complicated; there are too many machinations to work through to get the audience to follow along with the plot; too many actions require too much explanation. So the whole production gives off something of a secondhand vibe throughout, like the merchandise you get cheap at the discount store rather than the name brands at your usual market. Add to all that the fact that casting is not a strength here—no one among the principals gives a standout performance—and it’s really only the prominence of a cat in the story that lifts the thing even up to MEOW status (and that character actually shows very little in the way of catness; his felinity is mostly a plot convenience). Overall, I suppose this is an object lesson that the animation genre, despite being highly developed and mass produced for decades now, still is not so easy to get fully right. Maybe you can have on your side the luck of having a major studio or tech company to back your project...but you’d better bring an awful lot of skill to the show, too. Don’t just rely on fortune, in all that word's meanings.

Flow

Enigmatic hardly covers it. This movie is one of those pieces of work that people who are really into New Age stuff will decide is Super Profound and Meaningful. Me, I’m not so sure. Everything in the production screams award-bait intentions, from the consciously lilting score to the unfinished looking rendering of the animal characters—despite the rest of the visuals being presented in lush, hyperrealistic detail—to the almost-referencing of various cultural (Noah’s Ark) and political (climate change) touchstones in the story elements, to the fact that the film is made by a swarm of foreign studios and agencies (the logo drops at the beginning take up about a reel's time on their own) but the lack of dialogue means English speaking audiences can easily digest it...everything strikes as specifically fashioned to gain highbrow attention. I’m not sure, however, that that actually translates into an important movie. The animal cast, through the course of the story, ultimately show no less amounts of anthropomorphism than your average Disney flick characters—they just do it more subtly, without the singing and wisecracks. And you can’t help but have scientific considerations butt into your assessment of the happenings (example: shouldn’t these creatures be starving to death by now?). Still, there’s enough visual, emotional and action depth to hold the viewers interest throughout, even if the journey winds up being a somewhat circular ride. Gush if you must, but I expect my breathtaking works of staggering genius to wow me a little more than this. Even with a cat protagonist, I can only muster a MEOW here; I’ll save the PURR for something that doesn’t insist upon itself so much.

The Wild Robot

The hype that surrounded this film upon release does it a disservice. While it does look good from a visual standpoint, it’s nothing so great that audiences can be truly wowed by it. Seemingly, we have reached the limit of animation's state-of-the-art, at least as far as realism or naturalism in motion or appearance goes. You can’t get more real than reality. So the visual side of this flick only takes the viewer so far. Then the story has to do the rest of the work, and here that story is surprisingly mundane and reliant upon familiar tropes, if not outright cliches. It’s cute and occasionally funny, but, again, it is hardly groundbreaking, and in some instances—particularly the ending—it is mildly disappointing and even somewhat baffling. Indeed, much of the story’s setup had me asking questions—Is this supposed to be the far future? A different planet?—that only served to distract me during the early scenes. I wouldn’t call this movie bad by any stretch, but as noted, it isn’t exactly paradigm-shattering either. Like most animation that comes out of the major studios today—at least in this country—this will satisfy children, but leave the rest of us wishing for more. That seems to be the plan most of the time. Task partly, but by no means totally, completed. 

Inside Out 2

This movie is kind of unfair. How can the viewer watch it with a critical eye when Riley is exactly the kind of girl whom the viewer wishes could be his own daughter? It says here the scale has a thumb on it. No matter—you watch the movie they show you, and in this case, as with its predecessor, you get a pretty good one. Anyone with an ounce of human spirit has to feel sympathy for a young person suffering the pangs of puberty—we’ve all been there—so we can all laugh, cry and cringe as our girl stumbles through one particularly fraught weekend. The Emotions are back and their usual selves, though now augmented by the addition of several newcomers—perhaps even one or two too many new characters, though the story is dominated by Anxiety, so the plot doesn’t really get too crowded. Again we have some very clever visual metaphors for the inside of the human mind, many of which are highlights of the film's mostly gentle humor,  plus at least one visual pun that is, in its place, laugh out loud funny. The only real flaw may be that the characters, who are personifications of Riley’s emotions, do not always stay true throughout to their essential selves (by the end Lewis Black's Anger is uncharacteristically happy and practically gushing). I guess it’s impossible to fully carry the metaphor all the way through, but that’s really just a quibble. You will be okay if you keep this one in the front of your mind; it just might help you build a better you—something a lot of us could work on.

Elemental

Never, perhaps, has there been a movie so contrived in its concept. And that grand devotion to concept gets heavily in the way for the audience, almost to the point where the viewer is willing to give up on the thing. I say almost, because if one makes a conscientious effort to push through that superficial conceptual barrier, as well as the sense of indoctrination and being taught a lesson, you can strip things down to the story basics, which are well done and resonate with the viewer. Once you start paying attention to the characters as fundamental people, you can find the universality of the feelings and conflicts they act out, and the ham-handed metaphors for immigrants and parent-child conflict fades into the background. It helps, too, that the visuals present a certain amount of technical wonder, even in an era of an exceedingly refined state of the art in animation; you start to give credit to these characters for being real and alive and tangible, even as they are simply a highly digitized form of puppets. Distilled to its, shall we say, basic elements, this is a movie that I wanted to hate, but ultimately had to admire for its artistry and heart.

The Reluctant Dragon

Back in the desperate days of the famous 1941 animators strike, Walt Disney put out this bowl of cinematic hash, in hopes of bringing in a bit of money to save the studio. I guess it did, since the studio stuck around (and is a going thing today), but the fact that Walt’s remaining crew could do no better than this shows how much impact the labor action had. Most of this movie consists of documentary footage of author Robert Benchley’s purported visit to the Disney studio to pitch Kenneth Grahame’s titular short story, in a series of hokum setups that run the viewer through the animation process. The individual production process scenes reveal numerous aspects of the cartoon assembly line, but show little about how the actions are done; mostly, the presentations give a superficial view of the workflow. What garnered more attention, for this viewer, was the revelation that Benchley was such a soft touch. Who knew? Maybe the most revealing item in this picture comes when Benchley finally meets up with Disney himself. Walt, who in today’s retrospect exists as man of middle age on the cusp of being senior citizen (Disney was 65 when he died), looks shockingly young here; he would have been 39 when the movie was filmed, but seems more youthful than that. It is a reminder of how often those who achieve greatness do so at a remarkably young age. As for the embedded cartoons, it is notable that while there is still some of the studio’s magic touch to be seen in some of the shorts, it is also notable that the cartoons show the beginnings of the deterioration of the studio’s animation quality that would become so glaring in later films. There is a Goofy short that shows some of the old style, but is also rather boring, too. The Baby Weems segment—a cartoon composed entirely of storyboard-style drawings—is clever enough, but is also purposely not high in artistry. Finally, the title piece, while somewhat amusing, is also a distinct step down towards more abstract (more cartoonish, you might say) artwork than the studio was producing even a year or two before. The final impression is one of a work that was jumbled together in haste, and that focus on alacrity over artistry hampered the creative process. As it is, this film survives as a snapshot of a moment in history when the most innovative studio in the animation business found itself in a state of flux, a disruption that had ripple affects that, in some ways, are still felt to this day. It’s one for the archive, for sure, a film that those with a nose for the turning points in history will want to examine and ponder, even if casual viewers can probably skip it in favor of more rewarding fare.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

For what is supposed to be “the greatest animated film of all time,” it sure does have a lot of flaws. Many of the songs aren’t exactly toe tappers; indeed, for every “Heigh-Ho,” there are several insipid numbers with the title character singing about nonsense. And indeed, Snow herself is one of the weak spots; frankly, she’s kind of a dipshit. More problematic still are several of the dwarf sequences, which tend to run long in the service of generating a lot of slapstick but serve little to advance the story. The queen’s sequences, in contrast, are tight and move the plot along. And finally, a great deal of the story is told through onscreen exposition; we jump ahead via title cards where a simple explanatory scene would have done better. So why then does this movie merit such respect? It must be remembered that a great deal of what happens on screen here was original innovation; many of the techniques of animation and characterization may have had their debuts in earlier Disney shorts, but they came to full flower—and were viewed by the broadest audience in this, the first feature length animation. It is still a wonder to watch the artistry that went into this work—character representation and movement, rich background art, impressive visual effects—and appreciate the immense talent of those who made this creation possible. Some of this tale may seem to today’s audience to be hopelessly dated, but it is still a monumental achievement in motion picture history. One final interesting note, that also touches on the difference between today and yesteryear: unlike many of today’s oh-so-carefully ethnically balanced endeavors, in the service of (depending upon your perspective) diversity and equality or indentitarianism, this movie is squarely the product of a Eurocentric and decidedly uniform cultural viewpoint—and, from this viewer's vantage point, it’s much better for that singular frame of mind. The vision remains focused and true to itself, while not trying to serve any greater agenda. The success here strongly suggests that, instead of trying to shoehorn a DEI checklist into every production, maybe it would be better to just let particular works have their own focus, without trying to serve a societal master plan, without forcing everyone to toe a sociopolitical line. Just a thought. But this movie is now a relic from another time and place, and perhaps there really is no going back. At least we still have this work, through which we can occasionally visit that foreign land ... and witness some brilliant artistry in the process. Happily ever after indeed.

Turning Red

An under-the-radar effort, made so due to its direct-to-streaming debut caused by the pandemic, that actually has much more going for it than some other recent products of the Pixar studio. For one, the movie’s main character, Meilin, is adorable, in both of her manifestations. Another solid attribute: this flick leans heavily into the comedy, rather than trying to ladle on the sentiment or delve for deeper meanings. When the sentiment does come, it feels earned. And as befits the story’s comedic slant, the renderings of the characters, settings and action are stylized and cartoonish, rather than the usual showy and ostentatiously realistic visuals; here, the dialed back appearances serve the humor well. Also, the filmmakers made a keen decision to set this story in Toronto, where the various ethnic elements of the tale seem less like the product of relentless identitarianism and more the outgrowth of the actual facts on the ground in that most cosmopolitan of cities. Indeed, the story is presented so well that the viewer can ignore the fact that the whole thing is a rather ham-handed metaphor for a young girl reaching puberty (even given the numerous instances where that notion is made fairly explicit). I for one probably could have done without the boy band element, but given the movie’s girl focus, I suppose that’s on-point, too. Indeed, practically all of this work was done right, and the result is a surprisingly amusing and entertaining film. I say, give this bit of red a big green light.

Luca

First astonishing fact about this film: the main character’s parents aren’t dead. Second...well, there really isn’t anything else astonishing about this flick. It’s cute, reasonably entertaining—my attention did not wander at any point in its running time—visually impressive (though that hardly counts at this point, so refined is the state of the art) and at least a little bit heart-tugging. I doubt this one will ever enter into anyone’s pantheon—the somewhat similar Coco is substantially more memorable—but watching this work can hardly be considered a waste of time. And if you take it as an oblique homage to Italian cinema in general, then that adds a further dimension of pleasure to the experience. Like many a visit to the shore, this is enjoyable but ultimately ephemeral.

Soul

Depending upon who you are, and how you feel about your life, some of this story may hit a little too close to home. In a more general view, a lot of this movie may be difficult for viewers to get traction with, as a sizable part of the concept here involves characters who are abstractions, and abstraction is notoriously difficult for many people to relate to. Or perhaps that’s just this viewer trying to grasp at reasons why this film stayed somewhat at arm’s length from him, despite there being plenty of relatable emotional content herein. Maybe it’s due to the fact that I personally have never really appreciated jazz that this flick fails to completely crack my exterior. What also doesn’t help is the ending—it reeks of falsity; it seems like a decision was made to tack on a final note that was added on in order to make the ending “happier,” even though the honest ending would not have been all that sad, and is even hinted at in the earlier dialogue. I don’t know; there’s a lot of plus and minus here, all mixed up—but I’m conscious enough of my own personal failings here that I will give this work a pass, count it as a guarded MEOW, and leave it at that. Other than that, you’ll have to find this work's purpose for yourself.

Onward

From the first moments, I kinda hated this movie. And then...well, I didn’t exactly grow to like it; more like it got more tolerable as it progressed. While the film’s heart might be in the right place, there are simply too many elements that come across as grating and never really do enough to earn validation by the end. The setting of a magical world populated by fairy tale creatures seems contrived; you can’t help but wonder, while viewing early scenes, if this choice was made for any reason other than the crucial use of magic to make the story work—and that comes across as not very creative, perhaps even lazy, storytelling. Tom Holland’s voice, whiny and and annoying under the best of cinematic circumstances, is like a dentist's drill throughout much of these proceedings. Other elements that have become de rigeur in late-period Disney works only serve to elicit eye rolls here. Simply put, none of this ever truly clicks here; the viewer waits in vain for moments of actual cinematic wizardry. This work, combined with the disappointing production of Toy Story 4 immediately proceeding, marks the real beginning of a steep decline in the quality of Pixar movies, one that has yet to be reversed as of this writing, now four years after this piece made its debut. Geese do not lay golden eggs forever, I guess. Let’s see them try to scare up some movie magic like they used to make; that’s the real quest the studio needs to focus on.