Category: animation
“The greatest show time” | Perfect Blue (1997) and Paprika (2006)
‘It’s the greatest show time!’ announces a clown as he impossibly squeezes out of a tiny automobile. A circus ring seems like an incongruous place to begin a science fiction film, but before long we are following a middle-aged police officer from circus to corridor to train and beyond, without explanation or logical sense. We ...
REVIEW: Spirited Away (2001)
En route to her new home, Chihiro reluctantly follows her parents through a decrepit tunnel and to an abandoned amusement park. When her parents begin eating a mysterious buffet of food left out at a restaurant, they are magically transformed into pigs - and Chihiro finds herself contracted to work inside a magical bathhouse that ...
REVIEW: King of Thorn (2009)
A viral contagion known as the 'medusa virus' sweeps across the globe, causing its victims bodies to spontaneously fossilise and shatter. A select number of the infected are cryogenically frozen inside a special facility on the Scottish coast, to be revived when a cure has been found for the disease. When the infected wake, they ...
REVIEW: April and the Extraordinary World (2015)
In an alternative 1941 the world's scientists have been progressively kidnapped by unknown assailants, leaving the world in the steam age and rapidly running out of burnable resources. Any remaining scientists are hunted down and forced to work for their governments. In Paris lives April, the adult daughter of two scientists who were killed escaping the ...
“We’ll go for a jolly ride!” | The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (1949)
A wealthy but impulsive toad squanders his estate purchasing the latest in high-speed recreational vehicles. A cowardly school teacher is pursued through the night by a terrifying spectre. Two highly disparate stories, both based on classic works of literature, and both put together into one single animated feature film. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr ...
“It’s tough to be a god” | The Road to El Dorado (2000)
In August 1994 the Walt Disney Company was responsible for the number one feature film in America (The Lion King), the number one CD in the Billboard charts (The Lion King’s soundtrack), the number one musical on Broadway (Beauty and the Beast) and the highest-rated comedy series on television (Home Improvement). All four achievements were ...
“Trees and people used to be good friends” | My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Japanese animation turns 100 years old in 2017. The art form initially flourished in 1917, as animators including Oten Shimokawa and Seitarou Kitayama produced short comedic films that ran for only a few minutes each. While the vast majority of those early animated shorts are now lost – due variously to time, humidity, earthquakes and ...
“Kill da wabbit” | What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)
‘What’s Opera, Doc is one many Europeans adore,’ said animated film director Chuck Jones. ‘They call that my “masterpiece,” which it may or may not be; I didn’t think about it at the time.’[1] It’s not a surprise that Jones didn’t dwell excessively on What’s Opera, Doc (its title includes a question mark at the ...
“Let her be mine and mine alone” | The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
In 1831 Parisian publisher Gosselin released Notre-Dame de Paris, the first full-length novel by author Victor Hugo. It is a dark, overtly sexual tragedy set in 15th century Paris, in which a gypsy performer named Esmerelda becomes the target of Notre Dame’s conflicted and laviscious Archdeacon Claude Frollo. He sends his adopted son, the orphaned ...
