I have decided to break up the honorable mentions for my Top 100 Everything countdown into two parts: half to come one third into the list, half to come two thirds into the list. Well, we’re now a third of the way into the countdown, which means it’s time for the first half of honorable…
2009 was the best year ever for animated movies (2010 is the runner-up, but more on that later), and one of its highlights is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. The movie was created by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, whose career credits are now 1) cult hit Clone High, 2) the second season of…
100 Film Favorites – #17: Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999) “When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful. Every hour we spent together lives within my heart.” And so we come to the highest-ranking (fully) animated film of the Countdown. Let me be clear: I love animation, and could talk at length about many animated…
100 Film Favorites – #30: WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008) In today’s entry, Pixar does post-apocalyptic. I think I was in love with this movie from its opening instant. A shout of “Out there…” from Michael Crawford (the original Broadway “Phantom”) accompanies the sudden appearance of a spectacular stellar panorama. The song “Put On Your Sunday…
100 Film Favorites – #63: “Wreck-It Ralph” (Rich Moore, 2012) This is the most recent film selected for the list, but it definitely belongs here. I’m going to make a somewhat controversial claim now, so excitable nerds get ready. I hereby declare Wreck-It Ralph the best “video game movie” ever made (though honorable mention is…
In the past I have analyzed and criticized the Annie Awards. Here is an update on the situation. Hey, I guess someone out there is listening to me*! Less than a month after I discussed the flawed voting structure, ASIFA-Hollywood elected a new president and vice president. The outgoing president — Antran Manoogian, who, though…
In the past I have praised the Annie Awards for providing a lens into the most important animated features from each year of the past couple decades. The largest mark against the awards came in 2008, when Kung-Fu Panda won Film of the Year against Wall-E, which was by far the most recognized and important…
Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4) Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers. The show’s opening sequence explains 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…
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…