Tag: magic

Categories
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

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Alienoid
(Oegye+in 1bu,
외계+인)

Director – Choi Dong-hoon – 2022 – South Korea – LKFF Cert. 12 – 142m

*****

In Part One of a proposed double feature, aliens incarcerate prisoners in human brains and time travel between present day and fourteenth century Korea and mayhem ensues – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2022;

Part Two Alienoid: Return to the Future plays in LKFF 2024

The first film of a two-part adventure, which would be more sensibly released as Alienoid – Part One (which may already be the case in some territories), this revolves around multiple protagonists in two separate timelines divided by six or seven centuries. In the fourteenth century, Guard, who morphs between true robot and fake human appearances not unlike the T-1000 of Terminator 2 Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), and his even more confusing companion Thunder, who is sometimes a car, sometimes a flying pod and sometimes any number of human manifestations (both / all played by Kim Woo-bin), fail to save a woman from dying after an alien escapes incarceration within her brain, however Thunder rescues the woman’s baby.

The pair travel forward in time to raise Lee Ahn (Choi Yu-ri) in the twenty-first century where she sees what she’s not supposed to: the impregnation process whereby alien prisoners are incarcerated in human brains, a memory wiped immediately afterwards from the humans used for this purpose, meaning people wander around not knowing there are aliens trapped inside their heads.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Rebellious

Director – Alex Tsitsilin – 2023 – UK, Cyprus – Cert. PG – 94m

***

Her true love must rescue the princess before three rival princes after a dragon abducts her on behalf of an evil wizard – fairy tale animation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th

A dad reads his small daughter a bedtime story, a fairytale about a kingdom where an evil dragon carries off innocent princesses, sometimes as they are about to be married. I’d never stand for that, intones young Mina (voice: Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld), who is herself a princess, and her father a king (voice: David Wills).

Jump forward to her as a young woman hanging out with architecture graduate boyfriend Ronan (voice: Dan Edwards), despite the fact that her more traditional father thinks she ought to marry a foreign prince for political reasons. As Ronan points out, he can handle all the design stuff like strategy, construction and weaponry while she is better at hands on combat, so they make a good pair to rule the kingdom.

There are three princely candidates in the offing: strong but brutish Eastern European Rogdai (voice: Matt Giroveanu), vain Indian ladies’ man Kezabor (voice: Pete Zarustica), and overeating, obese, Oriental Fa Chan (voice: Brian Kim) who is in thrall to his Mommy Dearest (voice: Jennifer Sun Bell).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hellboy
The Crooked Man

Director – Brian Taylor – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 99m

**1/2

Hellboy must confront a dark labyrinth of hills, the Crooked Man who tricks people out of their souls, and some unresolved family matter from his own past– latest franchise reboot is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

1959. Hellboy (Jack Kesy), his assistant Jo (Adeline Rudolph) and an FBI man are transporting a deadly spider in a boxcar across the Appalachians to a lab where Jo can subject it to further study when the creature goes berserk, busts out of its crate, precipitating a terrible struggle in which the FBI man is killed and their boxcar is thrown down a steep embankment. They have arrived in a place where, we later learn in dialogue, a network of mining tunnels acts like veins to the living creature that is the hills, and the authorities have built a church atop the hills in the exact place where a portal used to connect a world of demonic forces with our own world.

The area is frequently visited by the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), who carries with him numerous coins, each one representing a soul he has tricked into selling him- or herself to the Devil.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Young Taoism Fighter
(Ying Yang Qi Bin,
阴阳奇兵)

Director – Chen Chi-Hwa – 1986 – Taiwan – Cert. 15 – 84m

***1/2

A lazy martial arts student experimenting with magic finds himself helping a girl warrior against a sorcerer and his master – on Blu-ray from Monday, September 23rd

At the Taoist martial arts training school Ying Yang Hall, two students are wont to skip rigorous training to hang out with the drunken sorceror in the

It’s probably a mistake to attempt to describe this in terms of its plot, because while it borrows lots of staple generic ideas from all over the place, it frequently abandons one to go off and develop another. It’s ostensibly a story about students from a martial arts school confronted by an evil sorcerer, but it’s nothing like as coherent as, say, the Mr. Vampire films. In fact, it’s just an excuse to throw together fight scenes, special effects and knockabout humour, all of which, against the odds, somehow cohere into some sort of whole to prove spectacularly entertaining.

Two slacker students bunk off to hang out with a drunken master in the kitchen, in the course of which he momentarily sets one of them on fire while the other one pulls a live snake from his trousers, and prepares it as a culinary delicacy.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Exhibitions Movies

LAIKA
FRAME x FRAME

Pic: Toby Lewis Thomas, courtesy LAIKA and BFI

*****

Exhibition shows at BFI Southbank from Monday, 12th August to Tuesday 1st October 2024 (free to visit, but booking essential – click here) accompanied by the Stop Motion animation season including all five LAIKA feature films and much, much more

In the best part of two decades, US-based Laika Studios – named after the first dog in space – has carved itself a niche as arguably the foremost producer of stop-motion animation puppet films. That’s distinctly different from the other leading company in the stop-motion field, UK-based Aardman Animations, who specialise in plasticine animation. The difference is that plasticine is a malleable substance that can be reworked and remodelled one frame at a time, whereas although puppets can be moved a frame at a time, they can’t be remodelled.

Laika have consistently (and deservedly, in this writer’s opinion) picked up Oscar nominations for each of their five features, a remarkable achievement that speaks of the high quality of their work. Their five features (with a sixth forthcoming) are:

  • Coraline (2009): A young girl is lured into a darker, parallel world.
  • Paranorman (2012): A boy who can speak with the dead, ostracised by his local community, must save his town from dark forces by righting centuries-old wrongs.
… Read the rest
Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Orphée

Director – Jean Cocteau – 1950 – France – Cert. PG – 112m

*****

Acquitted by mirrors! Rereleased two thirds of a century on, Cocteau’s reimagining of the Greek legend of Orpheus remains as magical as ever – out in the UK on Friday, October 19th, 2018

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.

Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.

So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Wish

Directors – Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn – 2023 – US – Cert. U – 95m

**

The ruler of a kingdom where wishes can come true, undone by assuming the role of gatekeeper, morphs into a tyrant – latest Disney animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 24th

A believer in the idea that wishes can come true, a man trains himself in the art of sorcery and, with his wise and faithful wife at his side, sets himself up as King Magnifico (voice: Chris Pine) of the Mediterranean island of Rosas with his wife Queen Amaya (voice: Angelique Cabral). The king wants to create a land where wishes truly can come true, and to that end he has his subjects hand over their most heartfelt wish for safekeeping on their 18th birthday, after which the wish is erased from the wisher’s mind. He examines the wishes for himself, decides which ones would benefit society, and periodically has ceremonies where a citizen is granted their wish.

It’s a heavy workload, though, and now he’s advertising for a new assistant. Soon to be 18 teenager Asha (voice: Ariana DeBose) applies, although the King is rumoured to be difficult to work with.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Green Knight

Director – David Lowery – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

***1/2

A retelling of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Arthurian mythology – out in cinemas on Friday, September 24th

This immediately sets out its stall with a woman leading a horse out of a courtyard and Gawain (Dev Patel) being awoken by a bucket of water on Christmas Day thrown by his lover Essel (Alicia Vikander) in a building which may or may not be a brothel. He attends mass with her, then goes back to his mother (Sarita Choudhury) who is going to pass attending the King’s court this Christmas Day.

The colour blind casting here has the good sense to cast Gawain and his mother in a similar ethnicity, which is certainly consistent and avoids the problems it produced in The Personal History Of David Copperfield (Armando Ianucci, 2019).

Whatever expectations of straightforward narrative the unwary moviegoer might have had from watching the trailer have been dashed. Much of the rest of the film is similarly oblique. While there is a basic underlying structure of a quest, what happens in the course of that quest comprises serial events and incidents en route that seemingly bear scant relation to the quest itself.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Zu Warriors
From The
Magic Mountain
(Shu Shan
– Xin Shu Shan Jian Ke,
新蜀山劍俠)

Director – Tsui Hark – 1983 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12 – 98m

*****

One of the greatest special effects action movies ever made, this groundbreaking epic delivers non-stop, near unbelievable, visually entrancing vistas of Chinese mythology – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th and available on Blu-ray

There are films which seem almost single-handedly to define cultures. There are plenty of elements in Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain that can be found elsewhere in Hong Kong cinema – martial arts stunts, flying wire work, period costumes, stock figures, airborne drapery – and yet the precise way this mixes these elements up then adds in others and adds in lots of 2D effects animation makes it a unique work, even by Tsui’s extraordinary standards.

With the ancient world in which he lives in a state of chaos due to constantly warring human factions, a man gets swiftly out of his depth when he sidesteps all that to follow a hero in the hope of becoming his disciple as the hero battles the forces of evil. If this sounds very highbrow… well, perhaps it is. Or perhaps it’s just an excuse to put together a series of truly extraordinary special effects action set-pieces that transport the viewer to mythological otherworlds the exact like of which have never been seen onscreen before or since.… Read the rest