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I can vividly remember playing the first Nintendo version of “Super Mario Bros.” when I was just a boy in the ‘80s. It was at a friend’s house, my first buddy to get an NES, and I went home and had a dream about the game. The goofy, jumping plumber has been a part of my entertainment life ever since. I’ve passed my love for the franchise down to my boys, who have all played the…
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Patient and kindhearted, a painted storybook in motion, “Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds” is a lovely glimpse of what animation can be. Directed and cowritten by Belgian moviemaker Benoît Chieux (with writing partner Alain Gagnol), it’s a work that has a lot of influences, from “Yellow Submarine” and “Fantastic Planet” and “The Wizard of Oz” to Dr. Seuss and the collected works of Hayao Miyazaki, but it doesn’t do direct homages or references; it’s much too elegant…
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Born from the still unbridled creativity of children, where an empty room and a random assortment of objects can inspire the most whimsical of adventures, imaginary friends respond to each young mind’s needs for companionship. The intricacies of these invisible entities and their relationship to their human creators is the subject of Japanese director Yoshiyuki Momose’s animated feature “The Imaginary,” which he adapted from the 2014 British novel by A.F. Harrold and Emily Gravett’s illustrations…
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“Despicable Me 4” won’t win any prizes, but if you like this kind of thing, you’ll like this thing. I laughed. The dumber and more random the jokes, the harder I laughed. The kids I saw it with laughed harder. Often what’s onscreen is humor no more sophisticated than a young father pretending that he’s trying to put a sock on his son’s foot, intentionally missing it over and over, and yelling “Whoops!” each time. Gru, the reformed bad guy turned bad-guy-battler…
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Children take center stage but aren’t the real stars of “Ultraman: Rising,” a new animated superhero fantasy about absent parents, lost kids, and other Pixar-entrenched stock types. The movie follows (but predictably differs) from “Shin Ultraman,” the most recent high-profile project featuring the 58-year-old alien hero. “Shin Ultraman” was more of a retro-modern redo of the original “Ultraman” series and its serial format. “Ultraman: Rising” aims squarely for a family-friendly mass audience, one that’s probably…
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Wait. Pixar finally has a quality animated film hitting theaters? Granted, it’s a sequel. But after seeing “Turning Red” pushed to Disney+ while a lukewarm film like “Lightyear” took its theatrical place, it’s taken far too many years for the studio to have a distinguished domestically released animated adventure. Even as a reintroduction to a familiar world, Kelsey Mann’s feature directorial debut “Inside Out 2,” a zippy yet gooey animated quest about belonging and individuality…
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I missed Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s animated French escapade “Chicken for Linda!” when it premiered at last year’s Cannes, where it played the off-kilter ACID (Association for the International Distribution of Independent Cinemas) showcase. Ten minutes into this wacky yet frustratingly mournful film about a daughter’s angsty relationship with her widowed mother, a slap heard round the world lands on the bold young girl’s cheek. In that moment you can tell how this playful mishmash…
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Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is a lovely fable about partnership and imagination, a movie that uses the form of animated cinema to tell a story in a way that couldn’t be possible in any other medium. Without a word of dialogue, the director of “Blancanieves” casts a spell, crafting a film that is often truly lyrical, a creative exploration of relatable emotion that transports viewers to a world where robots dream of much more than…
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I cannot think of a single reason for another Garfield movie, and apparently, the people who made this couldn’t, either. It reminds me of the legendary comment about “Nancy,” which, like “Garfield,” was originally a comic strip known for the spareness of its design and the helium-weight lightness of its humor. When asked to explain “Nancy,” someone once said, “It takes less energy to read it than to skip it.” Those who have children pestering them…
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The conceit of a tortured and socially maladjusted artist whose obsessive pursuit of their craft pushes them into madness with grisly results is a familiar horror movie premise, one that has covered subjects ranging from beatnik sculptors (the Roger Corman classic “A Bucket of Blood,” with the legendary Dick Miller killing people and covering them in clay) to ballet (“Black Swan”) to hair styling (“The Stylist”). In “Stopmotion,” the debut feature from Robert Morgan, the…