Western Animation– category –

My interview with the director of the outstanding French adult animation I Lost My Body is available on the Animation For Adults website here, while my article on the film is available on the AllTheAnime website here. The film itself is ...

My obituary of the Roger Rabbit animation director Richard Williams is on the Sight and Sound magazine website here.

My review of the Netflix series Love, Death and Robots is on the AlltheAnime website (although the series itself isn't an anime).

(Sight and Sound Magazine, BFI) The recent Toy Story 3 featured an opening fantasy sequence in which various oddly assorted toys starred in a madcap adventure that began as a Western train heist and ended with forcefields and porcine spa...

[Whereas I have an entry on the original Kung Fu Panda film in my 100 Animated Feature Films book, here's my review of the third film for Sight & Sound magazine, published by the BFI. I also wrote an article on the film's significanc...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) It’s common wisdom among animators that humans are the hardest species to simulate realistically, because we know the true articles so well. Director Robert Zemeckis takes up the challenge using the same CGI tech...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Denmark, AD 507. The ageing Norse King Hrothgar holds debauched revels in his drinking hall. These disturb a monstrous giant in the hills above, who attacks the hall and slaughters many of Hrothgar’s people. Hrot...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) Song of the Sea was among the contenders for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this February. It didn’t win, but now we can finally see it, it’s clear why it was nominated. This is a lovely, crafted fi...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Shrek Forever After is the fourth, and apparently final, computer-animated film to feature the grumpy green ogre who’s been the unofficial mascot of the Dreamworks studio since the first Shrek nine years ago. The ori...

(I interviewed Lilo and Stitch's directors, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, for the Animation World Network website; I also interviewed Lilo's animator Andreas Deja. Additionally, I wrote a piece on the Japanese TV version of Lilo and St...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The Story of Ferdinand was a picture book published in America in 1936, with a story by Munro Leaf and illustrations by Robert Lawson. Amusing and pleasing, it’s the story of a gentle bull, Ferdinand, who loves f...

(Sight & Sound Magazine, BFI) New England, the present. In the town of Blithe Fell, eleven year-old Norman sees ghosts wherever he goes, while his family and schoolmates think he’s deranged. Norman is pestered by his eccentric uncle ...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) A century ago, some of the first stop-motion cartoons were goofy caveman comedies by Willis O'Brien, who later animated King Kong. Now Britain's favourite stop-motion colossus, Nick Park, offers a plasti...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Disney’s new version of The Jungle Book remakes a 49 year-old cartoon – the 1967 Jungle Book – using post-Avatar technology. Directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man), the film was largely made in CGI, with the live-act...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Jack Frost is an ageless boy who delights in freezing the world at winter, but is frustrated that no ordinary people can see him. He’s bundled off to the North Pole to meet the Guardians, protectors of children: ...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) If you saw the Frozen trailers and thought, “Meh, a Disney princess film,” then think again. Frozen is flawed but it’s Disney’s boldest cartoon in ages, sometimes more Stephen King than Snow White. Altho...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Paris, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. Friends Raoul and Emile make a delivery to the greenhouse/workplace of an eccentric scientist. While there, they accidentally mix potions; the explosive...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Ted is a boy in the plastic, highly polluted city of Thneed-ville, which he accepts as the normal world. However, he’s hopelessly smitten with an older girl, Audrey, who says she dreams of having a real tree in h...

(Sight & Sound, BFI - I also wrote an article on the film's production for the MangaUK blog.) I saw Disney’s CGI cartoon Big Hero 6 when it premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival, promoted under its Japanese title Baymax....

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) This amiable French cartoon is part paranormal fantasy, part Batman and Dick Tracy pastiche. In Manhattan, a little boy is hospitalised (his bald head suggests leukemia). But he has a power - he can proj...

My review of the first ten-part season of Matt Groening's Netflix series Disenchantment is on the AlltheAnime website. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp_RnJcb8Ig

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Up is a 3D CGI Pixar animation by Pete Docter, who previously helmed the studio’s Monsters Inc. (2001). There’s an obvious analogy between Docter’s two films, in that they both have an adult-child odd co...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Amid the confusing array of computer cartoons, the Illumination studio stands out through its mascots – the yellow-skinned “Minions” from Despicable Me (2010), Despicable Me 2 (2013) and Minions (2014). Apart fro...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) [This article was written in 2009. Both interviewees - Dickie Jones, the voice of Disney's Pinocchio, and puppeteer Bob Baker - died in 2014.] As Disney’s classic Pinocchio is released on DVD and Blu-Ray, Andrew ...