Animation Films
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Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal (Not Rated)
The premise of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, a five-part animated series that aired nightly this past week, sounds like something that might have been cooked up by middle school boys during a slumber party: “Dude, wouldn’t it be awesome if a caveman teamed up with a T-Rex?” And yet, it is probably the most interesting cartoon […]
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Toy Story 4 (G)
About midway through, Toy Story 4 tosses out a 2001 joke, which is only mildly surprising — what is Pixar known for, after all, if not their magically synchronous grasp on both rich maturity and wonder-instilling innocence? Their artistry has always extended past the typical fifty-fifty split between fart jokes to keep the kids drooling […]
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The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (PG)
The LEGO Movie is the best American animated feature film of the last decade. The LEGO Movie 2 is not. It’s not even the second best – that crown probably goes to Toy Story 3 – but I would put it in my top five. Stylistically, the sequel is just as strong as any of the other LEGO releases, which is […]
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (PG)
I love Spider-Man. To be more specific, I love Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. That isn’t to say I don’t love any other iteration of the character but it is the standard with which I judge all other iterations. Perhaps it isn’t the most objective, and it certainly isn’t the most ideal. While I think it is the […]
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Ralph Breaks the Internet (PG)
I would probably do well to confess up front that I am not really the right person to review Ralph Breaks the Internet. I harbor no fondness for its predecessor, Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw once upon its release in 2012 – and, while I’m being frank, I have not really enjoyed a new animated […]
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Incredibles 2 (PG)
In the last 40 years, American theaters have received around 70 superhero movies with lead characters recognized and known by audiences who’ve never even picked up a comic book. Their rate of release has gone from 4 openings a decade in the 1980s to 5 or more a year since 2016. The question for many […]
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Bambi (G)
Bambi needs no explanation, no grand thesis or deep thematic explication. It can be understood immediately, not only at the cognitive and emotional levels, but at the most basic: from within the unconscious. It is a story about growing up and coming of age that can be understood by anyone immediately. It is a basic […]
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Brother Bear (G)
I’ll begin with the bold claim that Brother Bear is one of the finest animated films Disney has produced in the past quarter century. At least, it is one of their most underrated and unappreciated. Granted, I tend to favor a handful of Disney’s supposed flops over a number of their “canonical” hits. I tend to root for underdogs, and perhaps I’m too loyal to films that left a deep impression on me in my childhood.
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Inside Out: The Problem of Sadness (PG)
In his iconic work, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” […]
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Song of the Sea (PG)
The first words of the Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea are a quotation from Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child”: Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. In the poem, a group of fairies […]
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Song of the Sea (PG)
Come away, O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy, hand in hand For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. This quote from Yeats fittingly opens Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, which seeks to understand a world full of weeping through the eyes of a human […]
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Big Hero 6 (PG)
A group of misfits band together to stop an evil, mysterious villain and become an unlikely team of superheroes. No, that wasn’t a one-sentence description for this summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy; it’s a one-sentence description for this fall’s Big Hero 6. Big Hero 6 focuses on child prodigy Hiro (Ryan Potter), who is encouraged […]
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Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (PG)
In The Odyssey, Homer tells the story of the great Wanderer, Odysseus, crossing the nations and oceans of the Mediterranean to the small island of Ithaca, his own kingdom. Having fought for Helen, Odysseus spends the next decade scattered across the Greek islands. Towards the end of his journey he comes to the island of […]
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Wall-E (G)
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have been driven from the earth […]
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The LEGO Movie (PG)
I experienced the collective cringe we all felt at the announcement of The LEGO Movie. Does their avarice know no bounds? They’ve made billions of dollars, saturated childhoods for generations, moved into video games. Nobody doesn’t know what Lego is. Do they need the marketing? A movie at this point seems cynical, doesn’t it? It’s […]
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A Charlie Brown Christmas (G)
“Show, don’t tell” is the oldest law of storytelling, that thing which frustrated short fiction profs shout, mutter, whisper, beg and plead over and again in student workshops. “Don’t tell me Pat is angry. Show me. Did he lower his voice? Did he take deep breaths and shake his head? What?” And yet, the oldest […]
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Frozen (PG)
In the first minutes of Frozen, the older of two sisters nearly kills the younger, making it the rare Disney Princess Movie initiated by a brush with mortality. The principle concerns of the movie fall out around this life and death incident. We learn: That the older sister has the power to create and control […]