animation
Among the animation giants of Disney and DreamWorks, it’s good to recognize directors who have perfected their craft outside the western sphere, and we’re not talking Hayao Miyazaki here (although he’s but a stone’s throw away). Satoshi Kon is a Japanese anime director known for his blending of fantasy and reality in his slickly edited films. In contrast to the magical animated realities of Studio Ghibli, Kon’s realities are completely grounded in the modern era, their subject matter rooted in the intertwining of identity and technology.
It is always nice to visit the short films that people work so hard on but you never really think about viewing. It is not until the Oscars that these films get any mainstream attention, and that is one of the best things the Oscars provides to filmmakers. This year’s nominees are strong, featuring sad bears, old men who desperately want hand-drawn animation to survive, clumsy cosmonauts, Hindu superheroes, and some brilliant sci-fi.
Like a variety of genres in Hollywood, animation is a growing field that has been significant in various forms of media. There have been successful corporations across the globe that are not only skilled in putting hand-drawings and computer graphics to motion, but are also creative in their storytelling. Pixar Animation Studios is a vital example of an exceedingly successful animation company with an abundance of projects that have become cultural favourites.
Is it selfish for adults to demand more from children’s entertainment? Adults have access to a wealth of different mediums of entertainment to enjoy, so should we crave animated films, mostly intended for a younger audience, to cater towards adult audiences? Indicators of these include dealing with deeper and darker themes, adult-only jokes/pop culture references and generally being an entertaining film that doesn’t go for the lowest common denominator.
How to summarise Hayao Miyazaki in a few words? Brilliant, magical, ecologist, fantastic, cultural, wise, a true master of his art: animation.
Well, this was inevitable. After the huge success of Despicable Me 1 & 2, (both films generating a combined total of over 1.5 billion dollars at the US domestic box office) further expansion of the Despicable Me franchise was bound to happen.
Design studio Art & Graft have injected a welcome sense of humour into 1150 Canyon Road, a dark and stylish crime animation. The London-based animation team, led by creative director Mike Moloney, have done a stunning job of throwing together a narrative and several brilliant characters in just two and a half minutes and a single shot. Combining the paranoid, ’80s crime caper themes of L.
Inside Out is the latest in a long line of Pixar films that deal with the personification of something that you may have thought to be emotionless. Rather than bugs, toys, or fish this time, though, it is dealing directly with emotions themselves. What if the inner workings of our head were similar to an operational business, where our emotions literally guide and influence the actions in our daily life?
There is no formula for making a perfect kids film, yet studios have set up entire animated devisions that churn out movies under the tried-and-tested “jokes for the parents and jokes for the kids” formula. The twin assumptions that filmmakers don’t feel children are sophisticated enough to understand certain jokes in a movie tailor-made for them and that parents also need to be pandered to in order for them to enjoy the film are relatively new. After all, back in the early days of silent cinema, most movies were experiences for the entire family, with everybody (no matter how young or old) being catered to equally.
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya tells the folklore of a Japanese princess born from a bamboo stalk in the heavens and raised as the child of an elderly agrarian couple. She lives and grows up rapidly right before our eyes, just like the bamboo from which she was bred. She was meant to live a more “normal” life, though, and is soon thrust into a lifestyle that contradicts her humble upbringings.
At this year’s Oscars ceremony, five worthy films vied for the coveted Best Animated Feature award. Of course, we all know the winner, but there was one nominee in particular that no one seemed to have even heard of, let alone seen. It was the outlier.
An animated film that is targeted towards young children should be colorful, with lots of movement and hopefully an outlandish character or two. Most importantly, though, it must have heart. It should tackle themes that are important to kids, and provide lessons that they can take away from the cinema and begin to apply to real life, not just in the way that they behave but also in the way that they understand the world around them.
Pretty much every big screen reboot of a beloved childhood TV show has been terrible. Yet for people with a certain nostalgia for it, they will end up loving it regardless of quality. I never watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was growing up, which is why I can recognize that the recent Michael Bay-produced reboot is terrible, but a worrying amount of people I’m friends with can’t see it as anything other than an extension of what they loved when they were younger.
The only thing missing from Dreamworks’ new film Penguins of Madagascar is sanity. But we don’t go to watch a film about characters set in the Madagascar universe expecting logic. So when an octopus yells at his harmoniously compliant servants:
Big Hero 6 takes the cultural stereotypes of the East and West, smashes them together to a fine powder, and fabricates from it a 100-minute ride that is so eye-poppingly pretty, so gently moving and so explosively inventive that it’s the most unabashed, jolting fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Even after turning out two very strong features like Wreck-it Ralph and Frozen, Disney proves once again that its capability to push boundaries of imagination is strengthening by each passing endeavor. Disney at its absolute peak Based on a Marvel comic, directors Don Hall and Chris Williams gather the immense arsenal of talent at Disney to conjure up on screen the beautiful cherry-bomb of a city called San Fransokyo – a hybrid mash-up of the architectural sensibilities and culture of San Francisco and Tokyo.