Dasheng, once imprisoned for 500 years for defying Buddha, must learn how to help children not get eaten by monsters in this PS2-esque Chinese tale. Monkey King: Hero is Back is a simple, entertaining movie tie-in game which feels like a lost PlayStation 2 title, with all the benefits and detriments that statement contains. Based on the Chinese animated […]
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Fourteen years ago, Pixar came out with the superhero “The Incredibles,” an animated film about a family that has superpowers when the government forbids them for being different, hides in a suburban environment. The movie won an Oscar, which means the long-awaited most-wanted sequel, released in theaters ten days ago, had a lot to live […]
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Over the course of the 15 years between Toy Story and Toy Story 3, Pixar Animation Studios underwent a monumental evolution from a computer firm taking its first steps into animation to an industry-changing powerhouse. Over the nine years between How to Train Your Dragon and the new trilogy-capper How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, DreamWorks Animation went through […]
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Real science takes as much of a beating as Scrat, everyone’s favorite sado-masochistic rodent, in “Ice Age: Collision Course.” So much so, the filmmakers behind this fifth character-jammed and decidedly jumbled outing in the glacial animated franchise felt the need to recruit astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (both as a narrator and in weasel guise, complete with […]
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A somewhat unlikely animated megahit in 2010, the first Despicable Me took a great concept and watered it down just enough to make it family-friendly. The supervillain protagonist, Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), looked the part, with his Blofeld-like bald head, circular torso, and spidery legs, but the villainy itself was mostly abstract, almost poetic — Gru […]
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A popular topic that has been bobbing about the internet these days: Will the summer of Hollywood’s sequel and prequel box-office discontent bounce back with the arrival of “Finding Dory,” Pixar and Disney’s double-dip back flip into the same animated pool of undersea beings that propelled 2003’s wondrously endearing “Finding Nemo”? Therefore, it is a […]
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When my family and I decided to see Ralph Breaks the Internet on Thanksgiving, I was excited. I really liked Wreck-It Ralph for being a love letter to old-school gaming while also having a heartwarming story of friendship, selflessness, and learning to accept with grace that which you can’t change. Now the sequel takes the same colorful characters to […]
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My favourite part of any new Pixar release is the short that comes with it. To me, each short displays the best of the company’s inventiveness in both animation and story telling. Alan Barillaro’s Piper, the short that accompanies Finding Dory definitely does not disappoint. As much as I enjoyed the larger film, Piper was by far the best part […]
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Blink and you may miss the sly joke that sets “The Good Dinosaur” on its enchantingly eccentric way. It begins with a near apocalypse 65 million years ago and an asteroid racing toward Earth. And while that’s around the time, more or less, that science hypothesizes the dinosaurs bit the dust, the wizards at Pixar have […]
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My Neighbor Totoro [Tonari no Totoro] is Hayao Miyazaki at his very best. Subtlety is clearly Miyazaki’s friend, even though Totoro presents a typical mix of his eco motives and fantastical creatures the film feels light as a feather. It’s the ideal children’s film (it even works when they can’t understand a single word that’s […]
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