Tag: 3D animation

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

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The Way Of Water

Director – James Cameron – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 192m

Immersive Cinema *****

Screenplay *

Now raising their own family on the planet Pandora, a couple flee the attacking Sky People to live among a tribe of sea people – first Avatar sequel is back out in cinemas on Friday, October 3rd

Having gone native on the planet Pandora following the events in Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), in which paraplegic human soldier Jake Sully (performance capture including voice or Pcap: Sam Worthington) was transformed into an avatar of a non-disabled, native Pandoran, in the first third of the film, Jake is raising a family with Na’vi partner Neytiri (Pcap: Zoe Saldaña): two boys, two girls. They play in the jungle forest with their friend Spider (Jack Champion), a human child who was too young to be evacuated when the other Sky People left. Spider has been raised by human scientists who remained behind, and he must constantly wear a breathing mask to survive in Pandora’s atmosphere; he is to all intents and purposes feral.

When the Sky People return to Pandora with a new remit – to prep the planet for human habitation since the Earth is becoming uninhabitable – Jake’s old commander Quaritch (Pcap: Stephen Lang), who died in the first film but is now reconstituted as an an avatar embedded with the character’s DNA and memories, is determined to hunt down and kill the Sully who, as he sees it, betrayed him.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Diplo,
The Mighty Dinosaur
(Smok Diplodok,
original title:
Diplodocus)

Director – Wojtek Wawszczyk – 2024 – Poland, Czechia – 84m

****

A young diplodocus must save the comic book in which he lives from being erased by the artist who created it – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 19th

Animation. A bookworm (English voice: Wayne Greyson; Polish voice: Tadeusz Baranowski) appears, a “respected devourer of picture stories”. His function is not exactly that of a Greek chorus, more like a comic interlude who occasionally wanders into the narrative as light relief, to leaven the whole. Not that this likeable romp, is any need of leavening, but it’s a nice touch which nicely sets the tone for the whole piece. It’s about characters in a comic book whose very existence is threatened by the originating artist’s run-in with his commercially driven but artistically clueless lady publisher.

Beyond a vast, bubbling, primeval swamp in a crater, an inventive and adventurous, male diplodocus child (English voice: Julian Wanderer; Polish voice: Mikołaj Wachowski), Diplodocus as the credits calls him, nicks snails off a frog to use as climbing suckers. A butterfly flies past. Diplodocus gets sent to his room by his essentially conservative parents (English voices: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld, Marc Thompson; Polish voices: Monica Pikuła, Grzegorz Pawlak) for wanting a life of adventure.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Savages
(Sauvages)

Director – Claude Barras – 2024 – Switzerland – Cert. PG – 87m

French with English subtitles.

*****

An indigenous pre-teenage girl stands up to loggers destroyingthe local rainforest – stop-frame animated feature from the director of My Life as a Courgette is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 1st

From its opening moments in darkness following unsettling creature noises suggesting a jungle forest, followed by jungle forest establishing shots – a frog jumping across a river via a series of stones, a snake slithering around a tree, a baby orangutan (non-verbal voice: soundtrack composer and co-sound editor Charles de Ville) swinging on a branch – it’s clear that this has high ambitions indeed. All the above would be one thing to execute in live action – a few location natural history shots… possibly library footage. In model – or stop-motion – animation, you need to physically build everything in terms of miniature model sets, so to achieve such images is a major undertaking.

Having already set the production bar high, this then pushes it up further with the rasping sound of a chainsaw, as the tree heights on which the baby orangutan and its mother (voice: de Ville again), who has just rescued the infant from the attentions of the deadly snake, are resting suddenly topples into a camp of workers who are going about their allotted task of destroying the creature’s natural habitat.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Flow
(Straume)
(2024)

Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2024 – Belgium, France, Latvia – Cert. U – 84m

*****

A cat must survive rising water levels as they engulf both the countryside and cities – remarkable, dialogue-free, computer animated feature is out now on 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD

Like his earlier Away (2019), Zilbalodis’ new CG animated movie features characters who don’t speak. The central character is a cat, and you’d be forgiven, after years of animated films about cats in which they talk, for expecting the same here, but Zilbalodis isn’t interested in anthropomorphised talking animals. He’s clearly interested in animals, and in characters, but the cat here has been derived from watching and studying cats in real life and their behaviour in the real world. There’s a long history of this in drawn animation, typified by the classic Disney films, where it was all about what you could achieve with a paper and pencil, studying from life, making drawings of characters move.

These days, the medium has moved on, and unless one is being purist and working with pencil and paper for the sake of making drawn animation the way it was made roughly a century ago (and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with doing that), you would use computers as Zilbalodis does.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Sister Midnight

Director – Karan Kandhari – 2024 – UK, Sweden, India – Cert. 15 – 110m

***1/2

A young woman in an arranged marriage discovers herself to be a creature of the night… and one of the undead – genre-bender is out on UK digital from Wednesday, June 18th

A young woman travels cross-country by train, face veiled by beaded hangings, to join the arranged marriage husband she has (presumably) never met in their new, urban home. Uma (Radikha Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak best known here from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden, 2015) don’t seem to know what to do with each other. Certainly not any sort of sexual congress as they unveil sitting beside one another for the first time. As the tale proceeds, sleeping with him comes to consist of curling up on her own on the other side of the bed from him. Later, her sleeping patterns will start to shift…

Theirs is a pretty basic home – a room with a mattress and a door out onto the bustling, main street outside. Her husband has a job, so goes out in the morning and comes back in the evening, although sometimes he goes out drinking after work and comes back later.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears
Future Reborn
(Xiong Chu Mo
Chong Qi Wei Lai,
熊出没·重启未来)

Directors – Lin Yongchang, Qu Caijia – 2025 – China – Cert. PG – 107m

**

Park Ranger Vick unwittingly releases pink spores into the atmosphere, reducing the earth to a toxic wasteland, then he and the bears time travel forward 100 years to sort it out– in a dubbed format for family audiences – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

One hundred years in the future, cities (and a cute rabbit that gets less than a minute of screen time) have been subsumed by toxic spores. This is because of one man. Flashback into the present and Park Ranger Vick (voice in the English language dub: Chris Boike), familiar from previous Boonie Bears outings, holding a cute baby, seeing the child’s beautiful mother approach them and then coming down to Earth when her tourist husband turns up behind him.

The disappointed Vick guides his charges to snow-covered mountain Crystal Peak, where a combination of awkward customers and Vick’s slipping on a banana skin causes a noise which triggers a deadly avalanche. And a wormhole opening in the sky, from which falls a boy with jetpack shoes. He perches on a high branch, marvelling as a butterfly alights on his glove.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Disney’s Snow White
(2025)

(Live action remake of animated feature, so filed under animation, among other categories.)

Director – Marc Webb – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 119m

***1/2

Disney’s new Snow White redoes the first animated feature, with its eponymous heroine, wicked queen and dwarfs, as live action – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st

There are a very small number of watershed films after which cinema is never been quite the same again. One of them is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), the first ever animated feature film, widely considered a folly until it became a huge success and helped fuel the rise of the Hollywood Studio that still bears its founder Walt Disney’s name today. Before that film, no-one made animated features. After that film, Disney regularly made animated features of a consistently high standard, and his name became synonymous with animation for the three decades until his death in 1966.

Yet, the film isn’t good simply because it was the first animated feature – it’s good for a whole host of other reasons, namely excellence in storytelling, character, visuals, and songs, elements which would similarly underscore his Studio’s output during the remainder of Disney’s lifetime.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ne Zha 2
(Nezha:
Mo Tong Nao Hai,
lit. Nezha:
The Demon Child
Churns the Sea,
哪吒之魔童闹海)

Director – Yang Yu aka Jiaozi – 2025 – China – Cert. 12a – 143m

***1/2

Two supernatural, child warriors battle a plethora of marmots, dragons and immortals – action-packed, animated, spectacular, Chinese box office juggernaut is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, March 21st

All but destroyed by the events in Ne Zha (Yang Yu, 2019), supernatural, child warriors Ne Zha (voice: Lu Yanting) and his companion Ao Bing (voice: Han Mo) are reconstituted thanks to the giant lotus of deity Taiyi Zhenren (voice: Zhang Jiaming). Their new bodies, however, are unstable.

Mistakenly believing Ao Bing dead, his father Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the East Sea (one of four dragon monarchs for each of the seas of the four compass points who live in a vast underground cavern) gives demon Shen Gongbao (voice: Yang Wei) a severed dragon’s claw capable of ripping the sky, and sends him off to the town of Chentang Pass to slash the heavens and cause them to leak lava upon it. A fiery battle ensues.

Meanwhile, after a series of adventures elsewhere including a fight with a hoard of marmots, Ne Zha goes to help heavenly immortal Wuliang (voice: Wang Deshun) as he traps Shen’s forces in a giant cauldron at what is left of Chengtang Pass.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Away

Director – Gints Zilbalodis – 2019 – Latvia – Cert. U – 75m
****1/2
From the director of Oscar winner Flow (2024), his debut animated feature Away is exclusively back in these cinemas from Friday, March 14th

A boy hangs from a tree by a parachute in a wilderness. He wakes. A strange, towering black / grey figure approaches, shining as if metallic or viscous like a solidified, smooth, crude oil or tar. It picks him up. He is in a dark tunnel, light at one end. He goes the other way, is out of the giant’s clutches, runs. It slowly turns and lumbers after him. There are occasional, giant, semicircular hoops in his path. He goes through them, eventually entering a grotto, through which fully circular hoop the giant can’t follow. Welcome to the strange, dreamlike world of Away.

Beyond an abandoned motorbike, in the middle of the grotto, is a lake bordered with orange trees and the ocean. The boy feeds, bathes and makes the acquaintance of a shy, little yellow bird. Finding a key and a map in a rucksack, the boy learns that the semicircular hoops mark a route to a harbour. His bike will furnish him the means to get there.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Lab

Director – Izzy Livesey – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 3m

****1/2

In her secluded laboratory, an obsessive woman scientist develops a powerful serum which leads to unexpected consequences – animated short accompanies the reissue of Away, back in UK cinemas from Friday, March 14th

This plays around with that old horror movie trope, the mad scientist, making that figure into a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat. The pleasures to be had here come not so much from what happens – although the twist at the end, when you see it, is likely to surprise you – as they do in the expression of its happening. What impresses are the designs of the characters (both of them!), the look of the sets, the use of lighting to create atmosphere, and – once you get into the area of kinetics, the fact that this is a moving picture – the choreography and flow of the piece. (I use the world flow deliberately, since it perfectly describes Gint Zalbalodis’ two, wordless animated features to date. The current, animated short accompanies the reissue this week of the first of those, Away (2019). Zalbalodis’ second feature is the deservedly Oscar-winning Flow (2024), out in cinemas here next week on Friday, March 21st.)… Read the rest