Category: Animation

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Animation Features Movies

Wallace & Gromit
Vengeance Most Fowl

Directors – Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 79m

*****

Feathers McGraw returns to wreak havoc with Wallace’s latest invention, robotic garden smart gnomes – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, December 18th 2024, on the BBC on Christmas Day, and on Netflix from Friday, January 3rd 2025

Opening with the capture, some years ago, of notorious master criminal Feathers McGraw (voice: none) for the attempted theft of the blue diamond, foiled by simple Lancastrian inventor Wallace (voice: Ben Whitehead, doing an amazing job replacing the late Peter Sallis) and his smart pet dog Gromit (voice: none), this second feature sees Wallace inventing furiously, making next to no money and the household bills pile up.

However, all that is about to change with Wallace’s latest gadget, Norbot the Smart Gnome (voice: Reece Shearsmith) who, voice-instructed by his inventor to make Gromit’s carefully tended garden “neat and tidy”, chops down most of the put-upon pooch’s cherished, colourful flowerbeds to replace them with something resembling a Brutalist version of the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

This impresses the neighbours and passing tradesman, causing Wallace – a lightbulb sign from a stationery van (hilariously parked behind him) above his head – to realise that he has a potential business startup here.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Lord
of the Rings:
The War
of the Rohirrim

Director – Kenji Kamiyama – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 134m

****

A story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, set around 200 years before The Lord of the Rings – English language anime is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 13th

This narrative is based on one of the appendices in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, (although checking my copy of the 1979 Unwin paperback edition, it’s not there, so it’s unclear when this appendix first appeared). The Kingdom of Rohan and the Battle of Helm’s Deep are familiar from Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, as is the character of Éowyn (voice: Miranda Otto, reprising her role) who serves here as a narrator, the tale taking place around 200 years before the events in LOTR.

Wulf (voice: Elijah Tamati) and Hèra (voice: Bea Dooley) are childhood friends, sweethearts even. She is something of a tomboy, riding out of the small fiefdom – from where her father Helm Hammerhand (voice: Brian Cox) rules his Kingdom of Rohan – to feed a giant eagle, or engage in friendly, hand-to-hand, sword and shield combat with Wulf, at which task she bests him.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Interstella 5555
The 5tory
of the
5ecret 5tar 5ystem

Director – Leiji Matsumoto – 2003 – Japan – Cert. PG – 68m

**

Back in UK cinemas from Thursday, December 12th 2024

Review from What’s On in London, December 2003.

Admirers of legendary anime series Capitaine Albator / Captain Harlock, 1978), electronic band Daft Punk sought out designer and source manga artist Leiji Matsumoto (anime series Space Cruiser Yamato 1974-5, 1978-9, 1980-81, dubbed into English as Starblazers, 1979-84; The Cockpit, 1993-4) to put together images to accompany their latest project. Their resultant collaboration is the unwieldily titled Interstella 5555: The 5tory Of The 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Perfectly acceptable as a DVD release (it originally came out as such in December 2003), it doesn’t really cut it on the big screen.

5555 is basically an overlong pop promo: images put to music with no sound effects. A narrative of sorts has an evil rock manager kidnap musicians from another planet, wipe their minds clean and develop them into a huge commercial success in Earth’s music industry.

However, the script (such as it is) is very loosely constructed. Instead, what drives its 68 minutes is Daft Punk’s music upon which, almost as an afterthought, are hung Matsumoto’s images.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Blood
The Last Vampire
(2000)

Director – Hiroyuki Kitakubo – 2000 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 48m

****

Part English, Part Japanese with English Subtitles, Widescreen (1.85)

REG 2 DVD / PAL VHS review from Starburst (UK Edition), 2001.

The animation weighs in at a mere 46 minutes on home video formats, although on both you also get an informative, 20 minute Making Of documentary which goes into a lot of fascinating detail about the project’s innovative production processes via interviews with most of the animation staff involved.

Set largely on an American Air Base in Japan in 1966’s early stages of the Vietnam War, Blood’s tale cleverly employs both American English for the US military and Japanese (here subtitled in English) for the indigenous population. Sometimes, of course, the Japanese speak English to Americans and on one occasion, an American schoolgirl is told by Japanese heroine Saya (voice: Youki Kudoh from Heaven’s Burning, Craig Lahiff, 1997; Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch, 1989; Typhoon Club, Shinji Somai, 1985; The Crazy Family, Sogo Ishii, 1984) to back off in American English after attempting to greet Saya in the Japanese tongue.

Language wise, there’s therefore no need for a separate track, but the DVD includes two sound mixes of which the 5.1 scores hands down since every implement dropping to a stone floor or every bullet flying into a wall springs to life in the 5.1 mix, but sounds comparatively flat in the stereo.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
(Gojira -1.0,
ゴジラ -1.0)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – out on 4K, Blu-ray & DVD from Monday, December 2nd

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed. (Whether his guns would have had any effect in halting the creature’s advance is debatable. They probably wouldn’t have had any effect whatsoever.) The only other survivor, who had previously congratulated Koichi for a near impossible landing on a tiny runway, blames him for the multiple deaths because he didn’t pull the trigger.

In 1945, in the ruins of post-war Tokyo, Shikishima is accused by a survivor – a woman whose children have died – of being a disgrace.… Read the rest

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
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Film Festivals

Take Care of my Cat plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema

Click the links below for coverage of:

2024

Echoes in Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema (Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024, BFI Southbank, London)

Clapham International Film Festival (CIFF, although IMHO they ought to change it to CLIFF)

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF)

Art of Action (Monday, October 21st until the end of November 2024, BFI Southbank, London)

London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF)

BFI London Film Festival (LFF)

Annecy

Japan Film Festival Ireland

Glasgow Film Festival

Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Film Programme

2023

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF)

London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF)

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds Of Powell + Pressburger

BFI London Film Festival (LFF)

Annecy

Focus Hong Kong

Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Film Programme

2022

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF)

London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF)

BFI London Film Festival (LFF)

Annecy

Focus Hong Kong Making Waves

BFI Anime 2022

Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Film Programme

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF)

Focus Hong Kong Chinese New Year

2021

BFI Japan 2021

MUBI New South Korean Cinema season

London Korean Film Festival (LKFF)

London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF)

BFI London Film Festival (LFF)

Scotland Loves Anime

Annecy

Japan Foundation (JPF) Touring Film Programme

Or click any of these tags:

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Snow Leopard
(Xue Bao,
雪豹)

Director – Pema Tseden – 2023 – Tibet – Cert. 15 – 109m

*****

A monk invites a filmmaker friend to a remote farm in the Tibetan mountain region where a snow leopard trapped in a sheep pen has killed nine sheep – the late Pema Tseden’s final completed film is out in UK cinemas from Friday, November 22nd

Film maker Dradul (Genden Phuntsok) has been informed by his friend Nyima the Snow Leopard Monk (Tseten Tashi) of an incident and so sets out for the region of the Tibetan Mountains with a small crew in his car. Following roads in the freezing wilderness, the car arrives at a remote farm which consists basically of a stone farmhouse and a sheep pen where the Snow Leopard Monk awaits them, along with the old farmer and his family.

The sheep pen has been breached by a snow leopard, a rare animal that’s a protected species in Tibet, and the old farmer’s adult son Jinpa (Jinpa) is furious that it has killed nine sheep. Confronted with the camera, he argues vociferously that man must live with the snow leopard, and that a small number of kills would be acceptable, but an amount as large as nine is most definitely not okay.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Tallinn Critics’ Picks selection: Searching for vanishing corpses and disappeared people

I, the Song - Critics' Picks Best Director

Jeremy Clarke looks back at this year’s Critics’ Picks and finds some unsettling, recurring themes

Let’s Talk about the Weather

This PÖFF is going to be remembered by those of us at DMovies as the year when the weather we left behind us in the UK was colder and more wintry than the weather in Tallinn, where the average seemed to be between five and minus one degrees, very mild for this time of year. I’m checking the weather forecast over there as I write from the UK, to see that it is warmer still this week, and up to seven degrees tomorrow. Global warming is real, people.

The warmer weather had a strange effect on the festival’s annual tram party – basically, you are marshalled around and ushered onto a tram in subzero conditions, and then on the tram you drink lots of vodka to warm up. On this year, no subzero conditions as it was much warmer, so the vodka didn’t need to be consumed in massive quantities in quite the same way, so I stuck mostly to the alternative, very pleasant, local alcoholic beverage and consumed a ridiculous amount of gherkins (the only food on offer but one to which I’m extremely partial).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Godzilla Minus One
/ Minus Color
(Gojira-1.0 / C,
ゴジラ -1.0 / C)

Director – Takashi Yamazaki – 2023 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 124m

*****

Japan, defeated and demoralised after World War Two, must somehow defeat the seemingly unstoppable menace of Godzilla when it rises from the depths of the ocean – now in black & white – out in UK cinemas from Friday, November 1st

Something happens when you watch this / Minus Color version of Gozilla Minus One, which director Yamazaki has gone through cut by cut and personally overseen. You are watching a 2023 movie, yet you feel as if you’re watching a 1954 one. Because the film is about Japan, World War Two and its immediate aftermath, the film seems to play better in black and white.

World War Two, Pacific theatre. Unwilling Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) feigns engine trouble and lands on an island for aircraft maintenance, where he is grounded. While there, he notices deep sea fish curiously floating on the surface of the surrounding ocean: they presage the arrival of a huge monster, named Godzilla by the locals. With Koichi failing to fire his 20mm aircraft guns at the creature to kill it, almost everyone else on the small island is killed.… Read the rest