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’…
This post is part of The Month of Animated Features Before I spend a month writing about it, I figure I should explain what animation means to me and why I find it so appealing. “Animated movie” is often regarded as a genre, much like comedy or drama. In reality, animation is a style rather…
As I revealed in my previous post, I’m focusing my efforts during July on learning and writing about animated films. I’ll probably start with some overview and history of animation, then shift into some features and analysis, and finish the month with a few culminating posts, with reviews mixed in. You can use this post…
Rating: **** (out of 4) Sorry, Shutter Island. Toy Story 3 is my favorite movie I’ve seen this year, and it’s not even close. I’m an unashamed Pixar fanboy, so you should probably take my reactions with a grain of salt. But here is my attempt to persuade you to see Pixar’s latest masterpiece, in…
Arcade Fire, EP (2003) – 2 stars Funeral (2004) – 4.5 stars Neon Bible (2007) – 4.5 stars Within seemingly 5 minutes of breaking onto the music scene, the Arcade Fire lost anonymity. David Bowie immediately proclaimed himself a major fan, festivals like Lollapalooza snapped them up, and U2 not only asked them to share…
Americans today don’t give a hoot about progressive rock. Our parents grew up on Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the lucky ones collected vinyl from Kansas, ELP, and King Crimson. Those heirlooms have clearly not trickled down yet here the way they have in experimental music havens scattered around Japan and Northern and Western Europe.…
I have a little sister who’s about to graduate from pre-school, so my mom has seen the whole spectrum of kiddie TV shows. When I asked her to describe Yo Gabba Gabba in one sentence, this is what she said: “It’s what I imagine LSD flashbacks must be like.” The surreal Nickelodeon show is about…
This is part 8 of the Relient K retrospective (I wrote a review of Forget and Not Slow Down about a week ago. Since then, I’ve been doing some research on the album’s origins, and I believe the results make it much more interesting.) I generally like to keep my nose out of other people’s business,…
The Spider-Man reboot is currently casting, and director Marc Webb is on record as going for an actor much lower profile than Tobey Maguire to take the titular, masked role. Sci-fi blog io9 suggested that the next Spidey be a non-caucasian. Some commenters threw out the name Donald Glover from the TV show Community and…
Culminating the recent stretch of graduation/high school/transition period movies reviewed with the best film of the ‘Your whole life is ahead of you, but what do you do?’ genre I’ve seen. Rating: 4 stars (out of 4) Garden State was the first movie I ever loved. It was the first film I remember seeing that…