Category: Animation

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Wonka

Director – Paul King – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 112m

Movie ****

Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa when he eventually appears*****

How the youthful Willy Wonka became the world’s most celebrated maker of chocolate – musical based on one of Roald Dahl’s best-known characters is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Willy Wonka is familiar to generations of children through both the book in which he first appeared, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and its two film adaptations Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton, 2005). Rather than remake the novel a third time, Warner Bros. have taken the bold step of creating a Willy Wonka origin story. Who was Wonka before he became the innovative and eccentric chocolate factory owner that book and movie audiences know and love? It’s a great idea for a film.

Paul King, who previously breathed cinematic life into another well-known figure from British children’s literature in his two Paddington movies (2017 and 2014), has, together with Paddington 2 co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby, come up with an original story which feels like a Dahl adaptation – although it isn’t.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Chicken Run

Producer-Directors: Nick Park, Peter Lord – Producer – David Sproxton – 2000 – UK – Cert. PG – 84m

*****

Which came first – the chicken or the egg? Plasticene stop-frame animation house Aardman Animations’ debut feature film reconceives The Great Escape with chickens – review originally published in year 2000

Aardman Animations’ A Close Shave (1995), the third half-hour outing for Nick Park’s popular Wallace & Gromit duo, exhibited several danger signs – specifically its close resemblance to brilliant, immediate precursor The Wrong Trousers (1993). Clearly aware of such pitfalls, Park and founding Aards Sproxton and Lord shrewdly signed a five-picture deal with Dreamworks but refused to rush into a first feature. Their caution has paid dividends: this first full length Aardmovie proves an unexpectedly wondrous odyssey.

It’s The Great Escape reconceived with chickens: familiar WW2 prison camp is reconfigured as North of England chicken coop with impenetrable fencing, rows of huts and a motley assortment of portly hen inmates. Ginger (voice: Julia Sawalha) wants to escape, but several disastrous attempts lead to solitary confinement (where she bounces a ball off the wall Steve McQueen style). Other chickens can’t see a problem – Bunty (voice: Imelda Staunton) simply keeps on laying eggs, while Babs (Horrocks) busies herself with constant knitting.… Read the rest

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Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

Film Festivals

Pelikan Blue premieres at PÖFF.

Click the links below for coverage of:

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 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
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Shorts

The Picks that spoiled our film critic!

Tallinn viewed from the Nordic Hotel Forum.

Jeremy Clarke returns to the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in order to cover the Critics’ Picks section (which is now on its second year); he encounters what’s probably the strongest section of the event

Some people have a fear of flying. I don’t, but dislike of all the bureaucratic paraphernalia that surrounds airports. Not to mention London’s transport system, which is good most of the time, but not so much when it goes wrong. Coming home from the Festival last year, I got caught up in a tube strike. That didn’t happen this year. Indeed, the travel to and from the airport worked better for a number of reasons.

One was that the Festival’s hospitality team were kind enough to book my flights to and from Heathrow. This meant I could use the Elizabeth Line to travel to and from the airport. I currently live on the Victoria Line, which connects directly with three major rail terminals (Kings Cross, Euston, Victoria) but not the Elizabeth Line. The Elizabeth was all a bit too new last year, but Londoners who frequently travel into the centre of town as I do have got rather more used to it, and the Oxford Circus (Victoria Line) to Bond Street (Central Line) to Heathrow (Elizabeth Line) is reasonably easy to navigate.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Pelikan Blue
(Kék Pelikan)

Pelikan Blue (Kék Pelikan)

Director – László Csáki – 2023 – Hungary – Cert. none – 79m

****

How three friends wanting to travel to the West after Hungary opened up in 1985 stumbled onto a lucrative scam forging rail tickets – innovative documentary employing animation premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This talks about Hungary opening its borders and allowing its citizens to travel beyond the iron curtain for the first time in 1985. The problem was that for most school students and ordinary working people, travel was too expensive. 1987-90 was the best time, says one man. Owing to peculiarities in the exchange rate system, it was possible to change East German marks into West German marks and triple the value of your money.

One man was in a queue at a counter with a man named Atos who had enough to clear out that particular counter, but he took pity on the other punters behind him and only took half what he could have had. Petya and another grateful friend of his in that queue later found themselves on a plane to Berlin, then sharing a hotel room with Atos.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Mars Express
(Mars Express)

Director – Jérémie Périn – 2023 – France – Cert. none – 85m

*****

In the 23rd Century, a private investigator and her resurrected robot assistant go to Mars to investigate the murder of a cybernetics student – from the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The difference between humans and machines is one of the great themes of science fiction from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995). Mars Express takes its name from an Earth-Mars shuttle which, following a bravura action / chase sequence early on, not unlike the one at the start of Ghost in the Shell, is used by private investigator Aline Ruby (voice: Léa Drucker from Custody, Xavier Legrand, 2017) and her assistant Carlos Rivera (voice: Daniel Njo Lobé) to transport a captured suspect from Earth to Mars where, it transpires on arrival, the relevant paperwork to detain their prisoner has been wiped from their on-person devices and internet-accessible office, meaning they are forced to release their prisoner. The narrative is littered with cleverly thought out ideas like this.

The setting is the 23rd Century and mostly Mars, where the pair are hired to search for a second year cybernetics student who has gone missing.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

PÖFF’s
Critics’ Picks Competition:
pick me again

Pelikan Blue

Jeremy Clarke anticipates his return visit to Tallinn to cover the second year of its Critics’ Picks strand

Last year, I was privileged to be invited for the first time by DMovies.org’s publisher-editor Victor Fraga to attend the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. This year I’m back again, the major difference being that I have some idea of what to expect. Superb, superfast broadband while I’m there, for a start. Clean air and near- or sub-zero weather conditions (although I confess I haven’t yet checked the weather forecast). And great hospitality.

As for the films, the titles in the Critics’ Picks section were generally an impressive lot, and it grieves me to report that apart from the one British film in there, Carol Morley’s sublime Typist Artist Pirate King – a favoured director as rising star here in the UK and an obvious shoo-in – not one of the other films in the strand has made it into UK distribution. These include Dito Tsintsadze’s superb German / Georgian gangster thriller Roxy and Çigdem Sezgin’s arresting, Turkish feminist drama Suna, both of which some enterprising UK distributor ought to snap up and put out as soon as possible.

I generally dislike writing about films before I’ve seen them: we’ve all seen those films which looked great upfront and turned out to be duds, or films which look the sort to be avoided at all costs which turn out to be masterpieces.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Giant’ Room

Director – Kim Si-jin – 2012 – South Korea – 11m

***1/2

A man enters a mysterious room and eats a cooked chicken… – in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th

A man enters a room he should probably not have entered. Inside, on a table, is a cooked chicken under a protective metal lattice net. Periodically, the net rises and he eats some of the tasty chicken. He’s devoured maybe 80% of it in several binges of consumption when it starts moving of its own volition, recalling the moving chicken dinner in Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977).

Then the situation changes as a giant arrives and sits at the table, and our protagonist finds himself under the protective metal lattice net.

All this gains a strange, otherworldly, surreal quality through being wrought in stop-frame animation with striking puppets.

Giant’ Room plays in the KAFA Shorts: A Midsummer’s Fantasia programme from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2023 which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 2nd to Thursday, November 16th.

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Snow Leopard
(Xue Bao,
雪豹)

Director – Pema Tseden – 2023 – Tibet – LEAFF Cert. 12 – 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 plays in the Official Selection at the 2023 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which ran from Wednesday, October 18th to Sunday, October 29th

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