FANTASY– tag –

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Insidious is from both the director and the writer of Saw, but don’t be misled. It’s a “things go bump in the night” affair with barely a drop of blood (although the one exception is very effective; a bl...

Clash of the Titans is a throwback to a throwback, not unusual for a fantasy film, but less predictable than the revivals of Star Wars and Indiana Jones for new generations. The first Clash of the Titans opened in summer 1981, on the sam...

(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) ...

(SFX, Future Publishing) Ant-Man starts with our hero, played by Paul Rudd, seeming hopelessly outmatched in a prison brawl with a mountain-sized convict. It foreshadows the challenges he’ll face when he’s insect-sized, dodging stamping ...

(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...

(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

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...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) 1973 and Mushi Production, the studio that propelled postwar anime with Astro Boy, is bankrupt, collapsing and dying. Its founder Osamu Tezuka has jumped ship. Just before the end, the studio releases a movie… Bella...

My review of the film for Neo magazine (Uncooked Media) is below. I also wrote several online pieces related to the film; the links are at the bottom of the review.   In Japan, Your Name is the success story of the year. Makoto Shin...

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also add further observations in an article on the AllTheAnime website.) How many anime fans are fans of animation – animation as a medium, whether it’s anime or not? There are some (just google “sakuga”), but pe...

(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 ...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The Last Airbender's title Dalai Lama-like hero automatically reincarnates each time he or she dies. Many critics would agree that Shyalaman’s career needed a similar renewal after Lady in the Water and ...

(Neo magazine, Uncooked Media) If you know the history of comics, you’ll know Little Nemo. It was a legendary New York newspaper strip, published a hundred years ago, where a little boy has strange and scary dreams. Drawn by Winsor McCay...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) The sign on the soundstage door warns, “Wolves on set.” Within, the fairy-tale forest is darkened. This is a night scene, in which scared peasants are trying to lure one of the predators into a trap. A h...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion. Apologies for the embarrassing error in the text - as every Thrones fan knows, Ned Stark is most definitely not the brother of Robert Baratheon, although the script specifies they're close _like_ sibling...

(Neo Magazine, Uncooked Media) We start with two feuding brothers in 1880s England. Then there are cursed masks, mystical fighting styles, vampires, zombies, undead knights, shipwrecks, Nazis, ancient superbeings, chariot races, family s...

(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 ...

(Judge Dredd Magazine, Rebellion) So let’s play fantasy Harry Potter. Imagine, if you will, that the seven J.K. Rowling books could each be filmed by a different director with a specialism in fantasy and a rep for quirk. Imagine a dream ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) This review reveals important plot points. In Martin Scorsese’s 3D family film, Hugo’s title character is an orphan boy, living in the hidden spaces of a fantastically stylised Paris circa 1930. For the film’s fi...