FAMILY– tag –

My review of Kiki's Delivery Service was posted on Anime News Network.

[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) Following The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999) and The Village (2004), City of Ember returns to Plato’s fable of the cave, his allegory for how humans are sealed within a deceptive, false reality. Gil Kenan’...

(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...

(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...

(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...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Tim Burton’s diabolically tedious Alice in Wonderland is the equivalent of watching videogame cut-scenes for 109 minutes. Wonderland has been the source or inspiration of great (or intermittently great) ...

(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....

(Sight & Sound, BFI) It’s sadly appropriate that a boy robot reject from a high-tech future world is the hero of a CGI cartoon that’s already flopped in America and Japan, the two countries he might call home. Astro Boy (Mighty Atom ...

(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 Mamoru Hosoda's film Mirai for Sight & Sound is available on the BFI website. [amazon_link asins='B07LD4P4BN,B07K8ZSKVT' template='ProductGrid' store='anime04c-21' marketplace='UK' link_id='bb3bb72c-4dd0-4ac8-97f0-260016...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Following a hostile response to The Golden Compass (2007), the last big fantasy film, the fleet-footed The Spiderwick Chronicles has enjoyed a much warmer reception in America. The film is produced by the Nickelo...

(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) A parent choosing a cartoon film for his or her children may view Japanese titles with understandable suspicion. Although anime has a far family-friendlier reputation than it once did, anime films which look like...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) When Hosoda Mamoru’s The Boy and the Beast was released in Japan in summer 2015, it was at the commercial forefront of the country’s animation, even as Studio Ghibli went on hiatus. The film’s starting point – a ...

(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...