The Annie Awards: An overview and analysis

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…

Boys Like Girls: The Best and Worst of Emo-Pop

Boys Like Girls (2006) – 2.5 stars Love Drunk (2009) – 4 stars   In the mid-to-late 00s, Boys Like Girls have piggybacked onto the pop-emo scene trail-blazed by bands like the (more talented) All-American Rejects.  Their genre, emo, has now almost completely abandoned its intense, uncompromising Rites of Spring roots, now coming to rest somewhere in that spectrum between Jimmy…

What was the greatest decade for animated films?

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…

Children of Men: Beauty amidst chaos

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…

The Top 20 Most Influential Animated Features of All Time

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…

Despicable Me (2010): It’s so fluffy!

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…