Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) Is The Town ‘Heat meets The Departed,’ as the ads portray? No—it’s better. Is it Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s scintillating first directorial effort? Not quite, although comparing anything with a Dennis Lehane adaptation (hello, Mystic River and Shutter Island) is unfair. Should it put the final nail in…
This article is part of animation month. The Annie Awards are essentially the Oscars for animation. Since 1992, they’ve been handing out awards in the category of Best Animated Feature. And, much like the Academy Awards have a bunch of categories I don’t care about (Best Documentary, Best Makeup, anything involving a short film, etc.), The…
Edit: You’re probably better off reading Grant’s excellent review of Inception than this rambly mind dump. Proceed at your own peril — this is a wordy post. Taking a break from my month of animation posts, here is a semi-review of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Inception. Before you read on, I should warn you that…
This post is part of The Month of Animated Features. Without thinking too much about it, what’s your gut answer to the headline? Once you take a close look at the catalog of animated features released over the years, the answer becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly. First, let’s examine this question in terms of rigid numeric…
Rating: 4 stars (out of 4) “With Inception hitting theaters, we take a look at movies that take a dark view of the future.” So declared the Rotten Tomatoes website today, and in the same spirit, I revisit 2006’s criminally underappreciated sci-fi classic. Every once in a while, a movie comes out that puts together…
Although I’m primarily concerned with the lasting creative merits of a film, I do find it fascinating and valuable to observe the “influence” on a film. When I use this term, I mean its effect on future animated features (to date, that is; I tried to not include projection into the future), as well as…
This post is part of The Month of Animated Features. Rating: 3 stars (out of 4) It never brought tears down my face the way Up and Toy Story 3 did. It never soared away with my heart the way How to Train Your Dragon did. But Despicable Me’s manic silliness, unmatchable cuteness, and comedy-powered…
This post is part of The Month of Animated Features. Read part one of Disney’s Golden Age historical overview here. Following the 1942 release Bambi, the next several years were not a kind decade to Walt Disney’s animation studio. With a limited staff and limited funds, they produced only six “package films,” only one of which…
This post is part of The Month of Animated Features. While the Golden Age overview highlights the role of Snow White in the history of animation, this post takes a look at Snow White in terms of how creatively valuable it is as a film viewed today. Film Focus: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,…
Though it’s hard to imagine it today, cartoons existed long before the television. In the late 1920s, feature length animation was nothing more than a radical experiment, but silent cartoon shorts were relatively common and shown in movie theaters. This infancy of American animation would shortly give way to one of the style’s most creative periods. According to most film historians’…