Tag: toddler

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Moana 2

Directors – David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller – 2024 – US – Cert. PG – 100m

*** 1/2

The desire to connect with the people who must surely live beyond the known horizons of her world drives Moana on a new seafaring adventure – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th

Set three years after Moana (John Musker, Ron Clements, 2016), this features the eponymous Polynesian heroine (voiced once again by Auli’i Cravalho) not as a 16-year-old but as a 19-year-old. She has now become a wayfinder and the leader of her island people. Weirdly, perhaps, for a leader, she likes nothing better than going off into the middle of the island, accompanied by her two Disney-obligatory small animal friends Pua the pig and HeiHei the dim-witted cockerel (voice, or at least cockerel noises: Alan Tudyk), climbing to its highest point and blowing a shell in the hope that someone out in the world beyond the one she knows might respond. She wants to reach out and connect with other islander populations. Alas, she gets little more than Heihei blowing a shell a few yards away.

Following a vision in which she is visited by Tautai Vasa (voice: Gerald Faitala Ramsey), a wayfinder from a distant generation who sent out to sea and never came back, Moana and her small crew set sail for the lost island of Motufetu.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Fantastic Machine
(original title:
And the King Said,
What a Fantastic Machine)

Directors – Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck – 2023 – Norway, Sweden, Denmark – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

An idiosyncratic history of moving image technology and its increasingly pervasive role in human society, from camera obscura to smartphones and social media – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 19th

To understand what this movie is about, which I’m not sure I did going in, you have to understand its title. The fantastic machine in question is, in part, the camera. That might lead you to anticipate a history of photography, but that’s not quite what this is about. You’d be forgiven for believing that, though, for the first few minutes when we see a contemporary, on the street, walk-in exhibit of the camera obscura or pinhole camera, a natural optical phenomenon whereby light passes through a simple pinhole onto a surface or screen beyond to recreate an inverted image of where the light came from. As a visitor marvels of the resultant, real time moving image of people outside the exhibit walking around, “it’s upside down”. As a human guide to the exhibition explains, that’s how the human eye works. Our brains correct the upside down image so that appears the right way up.… Read the rest