From the Future

Film: Arco
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

As I say frequently, I try to go into everything I watch with a completely open mind. I want to like whatever it is I’m watching, but there are going to be times when, for one reason or another, I’m expecting something to be good or bad, not based on hype or the trailer, but some other reason. It might be the name of the film, or the cast, or a still. In the case of Arco, it was a still. Of all the Oscar films I was slated to watch from 2025, this is one that I really didn’t look forward to: I don’t like the art. For an animated film, that’s going to be hard to overcome.

Because of this, I went into Arco feeling like it had to prove itself to me more than the average movie does. That’s probably unfair, and it’s also pretty clear that I’m in the minority when it comes to the art style. I should also say at this point that, in a rarity for me, I watched the dubbed version of this. Typically, I watch with subtitles, but this bothers me a lot less with animation. Because of this, I’m not going to go through the typical casting—there’s a decent chance that the people I mention here won’t be the voices in the version you might watch.

Kill or Be Killed

Film: Predator: Killer of Killers
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on Fire!

I went into Predator: Killer of Killers completely cold. How cold, you ask? I didn’t realize it was an animated movie for the first few moments of it. The film opens with a shot of the Earth from the point of view of the Predator and for a moment I thought, “Wow, the CGI on this is really terrible.” And then it became clear that this is an animated film, and I felt a little more prepared for what was going to happen.

There is definitely a sense of fan service of a sort in this film. Ever since the release of Prey, people have talked about the different possibilities of Predator films. How would a Predator fare against a samurai? How would a group of Predators fare against a Roman legion? Predator: Killer of Killers starts to answer some of those questions for us, but by no means all of them.

Watery World

Film: Flow (Straume)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Of the seven Oscar categories I watch every year, Best Animated Feature is one that is really special. The reason is that over and over we are treated to some really unique and beautiful films in this category, films that, assuming you could make the equivalent film live-action, would never get a moment’s consideration. Writers and directors can do some experimental things in animated films that they couldn’t otherwise do, and every year, we are treated to a film that is unique. These are the films that expand how we think about animation and about film itself. In previous years, Flee, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Loving Vincent have filled this role. For this year’s Oscars, that film is Flow (Straume in the Latvian).

Flow is a visual feast, a film that contains no real dialogue and in fact no human characters. There’s not so much a plot as there is a series of actions and events that happen to a small, black cat in a post-apocalyptic world where it appears that humanity has disappeared and where some manner of cataclysm seems like a regular event. We don’t know what happened, and we’re never really going to get that information. Whatever got rid of all the humans happened in the past at some point, but not so long ago. Many signs of human civilization still exist.

Bird Brain

Film: The Boy and the Heron(Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

My original plan was to watch The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka if you want the original Japanese) on Sunday and post the review that night. Alas, I fell asleep about 45 minutes in. My follow-up plan, then, was to skip back a few minutes to the last thing I remembered and watch after my lectures on Monday night. And the same thing happened. I fell asleep again, managing to get to about the 1 hour 15 mark before I had no idea what was happening. I’d try desperately hard to focus, and five minutes later, my eyes would be rolling back into my head.

What does this mean? It means that evidently, despite how much I really wanted to like it, I found The Boy and the Heron to be the movie equivalent of Sominex. I like Miyazaki’s films as a rule, so this came not only as a surprise but as a supreme disappointment.

Steam Heat

Film: Elemental
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on various players.

I usually am pretty good about the animated features from each Oscar year. It’s often the first category I finish. The movies tend to be easy to watch, not terribly long, and easy to access. That hasn’t been the case this year, where two of the films aren’t available to me streaming, at least not yet. For whatever reasons, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on animated Oscar films this year, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and watch the Pixar entry, Elemental.

The truth is that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Elemental, but that’s not really a lot of praise for something that came out of Pixar. We’ve come to expect great things from that film studio even though they’ve had some clear missteps. As much as I would love to heap praise on Elemental, I can’t. It’s fine, but that’s all it is. It’s just fine, and in a different year, or coming from a different studio, there’s no way this gets a nomination.

Everything Gets a Reboot Eventually

Film: Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on Fire!

A lot of people have told me in one way or another that the Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie was something I should really watch. I honestly don’t watch a lot of animated movies that aren’t specifically on the Oscar list these days, mostly because my kids aren’t hoe any more. I like animation, but it’s not necessarily a style that I seek out. Given all of the hype that I got about it, though, it seemed like it would be a huge mistake to not watch it.

I’m going to drop the take now, so that if you don’t want to read the full review, you don’t have to click the like. It’s good. I enjoyed it a great deal. The voice work is good, the characters are smart, and it’s just self=aware enough to be winking at the audience without really dancing around the points its making. It’s also a film that is very much made for a particular age—later Gen-X and perhaps early Millennials.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Film: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Format: DVD from Plano Community Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

When it comes to horror movies, I don’t typically think of Disney. I’m guessing most people don’t. Oh, certainly there are some horrific elements in plenty of Disney films; the transformation sequence in Pinocchio, for instance, is pretty traumatizing for young children. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow isn’t really that scary, but it certainly has a clear connection to the horror genre. In truth, this is only half a film. It’s the back half of a feature called The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The first half is a truncated version of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” while the second half is a musical version of Washington Irving’s story.

The two stories are very different, not just in that one is British and the other American or that one is based on a children’s book and the other a classic folktale. No, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has virtually no dialogue. Instead, the story is more or less entirely narrated by Bing Crosby. The closest we get to dialogue throughout are some songs, and in this respect, Bing is going to play both our hapless main character Ichabod Crane and his rival, Brom Bones.

Because an Eggplant Would Be Weird

Film: My Life as a Zucchini (Ma Vie de Courgette)
Format: DVD from Coal City Public Library on laptop.

I’m happy to complain about Oscar’s nominating habits all the time, but there are moments when they do it right. A film like My Life a Zucchini (Ma Vie de Courgette in its original French) is a Swiss-French stop-motion collaboration that would be virtually unheard of and completely unknown without its nomination. The truth is that a film like this has very little chance of actually winning Best Animated Feature. Even with screeners being sent out to voters, it simply doesn’t have the cachet of a film from the bigger studios. And yet, this is precisely the sort of film that should be nominated to give it greater exposure.

My Life as a Zucchini features stop-motion animation with a particular look unlike anything I’ve seen. The characters are clearly human, but somehow off. Their arms are far too long, for instance. Everyone’s eyes are rimmed with a color that matches his or her hair and everyone’s nose is a shade of red. Because of this, in many ways My Life as a Zucchini is the least attractive of the five nominees, and that is a part of how I judge films in this category.

Preemptive Strike

Film: Zootopia
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on big ol’ television.

Oscar nominations are going to be announced in a couple of days, and since there wasn’t anything I really felt like watching tonight, I figured I do a little pre-emptive viewing. I think it’s a good bet that Zootopia will earn a nomination. It’s a Disney film, for one thing, and it was pretty well reviewed. Now, it’s possible that the Academy won’t want to double up on Disney in this category and that the nomination will go to Moana instead. But hey, you rolls the dice and you takes your chance, right?

Zootopia is Disney’s take on racism through the lens of anthropomorphic animals and a plot straight out of film noir. We have a world where predator and prey animals have evolved into something like a human civilization and have the ability to live side by side without killing each other. Young rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) has dreams of being a police officer, a job that is traditionally handled by predators and larger prey animals like water buffalo. In Zootopia, a city near where Judy grows up, having a rabbit police officer is quite a novelty—she’s the first. Her police chief, Bogo (Idris Elba) is unimpressed and sticks her on parking ticket duty.

Nick's Picks: Tangled

Films: Tangled
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the sixth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Nick Jobe.

Nick likes to make me watch animation. I think that’s partly because the 1001 Movies list is pretty bare when it comes to animated film, partly because it’s the shortest of my Oscar lists, and partly because he really likes animation. Last year, three of his four films were animated, and he gave me a couple this year. Tangled is a film that is oddly missing from the Oscar list, especially considering how acclaimed it is (7.8 on IMDB, 3.7/5 on Letterboxd), and especially considering it’s a Disney film. Disney seems to get a little benefit of the doubt come Oscar time—witness the win for Disney/Pixar’s Brave and nominations for Brother Bear.

No matter--Tangled is the story of Rapunzel run through the Disney story machine, magicked up a bit, and with songs added. The basic story is pretty much the same. Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) is a (wait for it) princess kidnapped by a woman named Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy). Here, the reason is a little convoluted. See, Gothel one day discovered a flower in the forest that was literally a drop of sunlight. She used it regularly to restore her youth, meaning that Mother Gothel is hundreds of years old. One day in the nearby kingdom, the pregnant queen becomes ill. Men from the kingdom discover the flower and use it to cure the queen, and Rapunzel is born with the magic of the flower imbued in her hair. The magic only works if the hair is uncut, though, so Gothel steals the baby away and locks her high in a hidden tower where she won’t be found. Rapunzel’s hair grows and grows, and soon is long enough to be used as the method of entry to the tower by Gothel. Gothel tells her “daughter” that the outside world is too dangerous for her and so she is never allowed to leave the tower.

Evolution

Film: The Croods
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

A lot of animated features take a great deal of liberty with how they depict reality, but few take as many liberties as The Croods. That’s not always a bad thing, but I do have to wonder why the creators of this film decided to take so much liberty with the reality of the animal kingdom. It seems completely unnecessary. I get the point of the modern references in a film about cavemen, but the flora and fauna of this world are like a human prehistory viewed through the lens of psilocybin mushrooms.

So we have the Croods, a family of cave people who live in an isolated spot that gets very little daylight since they are in the bottom of a narrow canyon. They are led by the father figure Grug (Nicolas Cage) and Ugga (Catherine Keener). Their children are oldest child Eep (Emma Stone), middle child Thunk (Clark Duke), and feral infant Sandy (Randy Thom). Also with the family is Ugga’s mother Gran (Cloris Leachman). Most of the family is scared of everything, coming out of the cave only to hunt for food for a few minutes a day before retreating to the safety and darkness of the cave. Eep, though, wants something more than just life in a cave and being scared of everything.

Gotta Wonder How They'll Name the Sequel

Film: Big Hero 6
Format: Sycamore Theater.

We took the girls to see Big Hero 6 Friday night. The original plan was to hit the film on Thanksgiving, but the day got away from us. We spent the bulk of Friday cleaning and putting up Christmas decorations, and then figured we’d catch the film. I don’t go out to the movies that often, partly because I don’t always have the time and partly because I don’t like crowds of other people around me. But, now and then, it’s worth it to take the girls and have a little family time.

Big Hero 6 is a superhero origin story, although it takes us a long time to actually get to the superhero part. We start by being introduced to Hiro Hamada (Ryan Potter), a 14-year-old robotics expert who is competing in illegal robot fights (and winning). His older brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) is a student in robotics at the local university. Wanting to get Hiro on a more productive path, Tadashi takes his younger brother to his lab, introduces him to a number of people, and essentially gets his brother excited about the possibilities for cool new inventions that he and his friends are working on. In Tadashi’s case, the invention is Baymax (Scott Adsit), an inflated robot that acts as a personal medical service.

Fox in the Henhouse

Film: Fantastic Mr. Fox
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

When it comes to the films of Wes Anderson, I always wonder how much is the real Wes Anderson and how much is simply affectation. His style is so distinctive that it’s impossible not to recognize his work immediately. So when it comes to his animated feature debut, Fantastic Mr. Fox, I was curious as to whether or not that style would carry over into stop motion. It does. Let’s get that out of the way right away.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on a book by Roald Dahl, which means it will be both whimsical and quite dark in places. The meet the eponymous Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) and his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) as they are one their way home. They decide to raid a chicken far and are captured, at which point Felicity reveals she is pregnant. Flash forward a few years and Mr. Fox is now reformed (kind of), and writes a newspaper column. His son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) feels like a typical Wes Anderson misfit and is complet with quirks and OCD habits like all of Anderson’s characters. Soon, Ash’s cousin Kristofferson (Eric Anderson, the director’s brother) arrives and appears to upstage Ash in every aspect of life, including stealing the girl Ash is interested in.

ParaNorman

Film: ParaNorman
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran a poll here to determine what new category of Oscar films I should add to the blog list. Best Animated Feature won in a close race, which turned out to be something of a relief—a few of those categories were pretty large. In the interests of getting things started, though, I figured I’d knock out ParaNorman, a recent film from Laika. I expected a pretty standard “scary” kids’ movie, which is not at all what I got.

Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) can see dead people. He can also talk to them. Since he’s the only person around who can do that, it’s no surprise that he is constantly bullied and harassed at school. It’s a little more of a shock that he’s bullied at home by his father (Jeff Garlin) and his sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick). His mother (Leslie Mann) is more sympathetic but still doesn’t much understand him, which makes his real support network the ghost of his dead grandmother (Elaine Stritch).

A Pirate's Life for Me

Film: The Pirates! Band of Misfits
Format: Market Square Cinema.

Sue and Gail went to a dance performance yesterday, and I was left at home with my younger daughter, Maxine. Mack was bored and the day was rainy, which left out gokarting, so I took her to see The Pirates! Band of Misfits rather than taking her bowling. I’m a fan of Aardman Animation; I love Wallace and Gromit in their many iterations, and I’ve been of the opinion that Chicken Run should be on this list. So, while she wanted to see it, I have to admit that I wanted to see it, too.

We’re introduced early to our main characters. Leading this particular ship of crusty pirates is (and yes, this is his name) The Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant). He is nobly assisted by The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman), who also goes by Number Two. Our other pirates are similarly named: The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashely Jensen—the character wears a false orange beard made of carpet), and The Pirate Who Likes Sunsets and Kittens (Al Roker). They aren’t very good pirates, and tend to be most excited about Ham Nite on the ship. But they all agree that the best thing about being a pirate is Polly, the ship’s mascot.

The Pirate Captain wants nothing more than to win the Pirate of the Year contest. Sadly, he isn’t a successful pirate, and the bounty on his head is a mere 12 doubloons. Standing in his way of the honor are Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), and Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven). Despite the fact that he’s out of his depth, The Pirate Captain goes back to sea and a-raiding, but never has any success.

On his last attempt, he raids The Beagle, Charles Darwin’s ship. Darwin (David Tennant) is depressed because girls don’t like him, and while he doesn’t like being raided, he makes an incredible discovery. The Pirate Captain’s mascot isn’t a parrot, but a dodo, a bird thought to be extinct for hundreds of years. Darwin convinces The Pirate Captain to take Polly to London for the Scientific Discovery of the Year contest, which comes with untold riches. The problems here are two-fold. First, it’s soon evident that Darwin wants to steal Polly for himself. Second, Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) hates pirates. Hates them.

That’s our set-up, and the film follows from that. There are a couple of twists along the way which are better left to the film to reveal instead of me, because they’re pretty entertaining. That said, the actual events of the film are not really that surprising. This is a film that doesn’t quite telegraph itself, but that doesn’t do anything that is completely out of the norm. That’s expected, since this is a family film. I wasn’t honestly expecting this to go somewhere different. I knew everything would end up happily, and I’m okay with that.

The character of Charles Darwin is where I take issue with the film. I don’t have a problem with poking fun at Darwin or portraying him as something of a spineless nerd. He wasn’t, to my knowledge, but it works for the film. I love the fact that when we return to London and enter his home, we discover that he has a monkey butler named Mr. Bobo. Darwin tells us that his original theory was that if he put clothing and a monocle on a monkey, it would turn him into something like a “man-panzee.” It’s cute, and Mr. Bobo is a great character.

No, where I have a problem is how Darwin works in the film. He’s comic relief, and that’s fine, but he’s also a criminal. Darwin is a scientific hero; the man is unarguably one of the most important scientists in the history of the world. Did we need to make him a criminal? Was it necessary to essentially equate Darwin with evil? There’s already a culture of anti-science in the United States and elsewhere, and we already live in a world where kids (and many, many adults) distrust science because it doesn’t agree with their multi-centuries-old holy book. Making this incredibly important figure a weak-minded criminal isn’t going to help.

Beyond that, I enjoyed the film. The animation is beautiful and seamless, and proof that Aardman has continually learned from its past films and gotten better and better. So, the story is intentionally silly and fun, and the visuals are as good as you have seen from this style of animation. You could do a lot worse than to take your kids to this, but do me the favor of explaining the importance of Darwin to them when you leave the theater.

As a final note, I saw the 3D version. I typically hate 3D, but it was well done here.

Why to watch The Pirates! Band of Misfits: Great claymation is a rarity, and wonderful to behold.
Why not to watch: Do we really have to make one of science’s greatest heroes a villain?