My Neighbor Totoro: 30th Anniversary Edition (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray)Batman: The Complete Animated Series (Warner Bros., Blu-ray) Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws […]
“I’m the luckiest kid in the world,” cheers adolescent Hogarth, halfway to sci-fi heaven in the hand of a friendly ten story robot— a clanking metal man who acts like a combination little brother, big brother, and playful puppy dog all rolled into one magnificent structure who looks like he stepped off a vintage cover […]
With The Illusionist (France, 2010), animator Sylvain Chomet (of the delirious The Triplets of Belleville) transforms an unproduced script by they great French auteur Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle) into a tender tale of a French magician and a Scottish girl in the theater-folk society of London as the old world of stage performance gives way […]
Sausage Party (2016) – From the studio that produced Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustler, and Foxcatcher comes the junk foodie fantasy that stirs American Pie, Toy Story, Logan’s Run, and every torture porn horror of the last decade into a raunchy paean to hedonism with more food puns than a Catskills grocer. It is the […]
Finding Dory (2016), Pixar’s sequel to its gorgeous animated aquatic masterpiece, can’t shake off its sequel-ness—it plays like a variation on the theme rather than an original take on the familiar tale—but it’s a Pixar picture with all the care and love and storytelling magic that the studio brings to every project. Which makes this […]
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (Japan, 2017), the magical fantasy by Japanese animator and filmmaker Hiromasa Yonebayashi (director of the marvelous When Marnie Was There), based on a children’s novel by British author Mary Stewart, follows the adventures of a schoolgirl who receives magical powers for a day from a magical flower that blooms once […]
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016) is a different kind of animated superhero film, a flashback to the tongue-in-cheek approach of the 1960s Batman TV series. It isn’t really a theatrical feature—it was produced for Warner Bros.’s DCU Original Animation unit for VOD and home video—but perhaps thanks to the nostalgic pull of the […]
The Complete Superman Collection (1941-1943) – “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The infant of Krypton is now the Man of Steel: Superman!” The 17 animated shorts produced by Max Fleischer between 1941 and 1943 were the first big screen incarnation of […]
Marvel Comics has DC beat when it comes to bringing their characters to the big screen but in the realm of animation DC rules, from the 1990s cartoon noir of Batman through the great array of Cartoon Network shows to the direct-to-digital DC Universe Original Animation productions of the past decade. They now number over […]
In This Corner of the World (Japan, 2016), adapted from the acclaimed manga by Fumiyo Kono, charts life in Japan from 1934 through 1946 as seen through the eyes of a young woman. Suzu is a teenage schoolgirl in Hiroshima when we meet her, a budding artist with a bullying older brother and a spritely […]
