Tag: 3D animation

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Terminator 2
Judgment Day

Terminator 2 Judgment Day

Director – James Cameron – 1991 – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A second Terminator is sent from the future to kill the future leader of the war against the machines – back out in UK and Ireland cinemas in 4K and, where available, 3D to mark its 35th anniversary on Friday, September 4th 2026

In the 1984 original, a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarznegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother-to-be of the leader of the war in the future against the machines, who are exterminating humanity.

This sequel sees a more advanced T-1000 robot (Robert Patrick) sent back in time to kill Sarah’s now-ten-year-old son John (Ed Furlong). Another Terminator (Schwarzengger) is also running around in the present (i.e. 1991).

Sarah’s recurring nightmare pictures the coming apocalypse when the machines unleash nuclear missiles on humanity. That aside, this is basically an essay on mothers and sons – and fathers and sons – wrapped up in the best chase movie you’ve ever seen.

What makes the film work is the mother and son element. Sarah is a believer in Terminators, the coming war against the machines, and humanity’s fightback in a world where such beliefs are dismissed as delusions.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Terminator 2
Judgment Day
3D

Terminator 2 Judgment Day 3D

Director – James Cameron – 1991 (3D version 2017) – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A second Terminator is sent from the future to kill the future leader of the war against the machines – back out in UK and Ireland cinemas in 4K and, where available, 3D, to mark its 35th anniversary on Friday, September 4th 2026

Painstakingly remastered in 3D, this plays as well in its current rerelease as it did back in 1991. In the 1984 original, a Terminator robot (Arnold Schwarznegger) is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother-to-be of the leader of the war in the future against the machines, who are exterminating humanity.

This sequel sees a more advanced T-1000 robot (Robert Patrick) sent back in time to kill Sarah’s now-ten-year-old son John (Ed Furlong). Another Terminator (Schwarzengger) is also running around in the present (i.e. 1991).

Sarah’s recurring nightmare pictures the coming apocalypse when the machines unleash nuclear missiles on humanity. That aside, this is basically an essay on mothers and sons – and fathers and sons – wrapped up in the best chase movie you’ve ever seen.

Unlike the 3D conversion of the same director’s Titanic (1997) which proved 3D to be a greatly improved, astonishing revelation, the improvements afforded T2 by 3D are comparatively minor (though they’re peerlessly executed).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Early Man

Early Man

Producer-Director: Nick Park – 2018 – UK – Cert. PG – 89m

*****

Ancient caveman Brits, rabbits, mammoths, dinosaurs, dastardly Frenchmen, and football – Aardman’s prehistoric, stop-frame marvel is back out in UK cinemas on Friday, 21st August

Nick Park and Aardman Animations’ epic is set in a prehistoric world of cavemen, rabbits and mammoths. For good measure it also throws in dastardly Frenchmen and football. Park coaxes great voice performances out of his all-star cast, while physical animation is in the capable hands of Will Becher (who directed the Creature Comforts TV series) and Merlin Crossingham (Creative Director for Wallace & Gromit since 2009 and subsequently co-director with Park of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, 2024).

At one point a mallard appears in the distance. A caveman hurls a small rock at it. The rock travels an awful long way. Much farther than we expected. Eventually it reaches the mallard, revealed as a gargantuan beast on the scale of a dinosaur. The giant mallard charges towards us and the hapless tribe of cavemen.

This is very much in the spirit of Early Man’s opening sequence wherein volcanoes belch fire and a carnivorous ceratosaurus does battle with a herbivorous triceratops clearly modelled on their counterparts in Ray Harryhausen’s One Million Years B.C.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Akira
(アキラ)

Akira (アキラ)

Director – Katsuhiro Otomo – 1988 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 124m

*****

Manga artist turned director Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk classic returns to the big screen in a brand new 35mm print at BFI Southbank, London from Friday 14th August until Wednesday 19th, and will be touring in selected cities throughout 2026

When Akira first appeared in the UK at the start of the nineties, Disney was busy reinventing the animated cartoon as a platform for the Broadway musical (Beauty And The Beast, Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise, 1991; The Lion King, Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers, 1994) and there were debates about whether comics (or ‘graphic novels’) could be created for adults as well as kids.

As so often in technology and media, Japan was ahead of the game. Otomo had published his long-running comic book or manga Akira in 1982 and turned it into a feature six years later, challenging widely held Western notions of what animation was. You could make SF in movies (Voyage To The Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902) and you could make serious SF (2001, Stanley Kubrick, 1968), but animation was strictly for kids, at least in the English-speaking mainstream, and that as what Disney did.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Movies

Chicken Run

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 – back out in UK cinemas from Friday, 24th July

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 Features Movies

Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
Mutant Mayhem

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem

Directors – Jeff Rowe, Kyler Spears – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

*****

The much loved comic-generated franchise gets a remarkable reboot in animation that breaks the filmmaking mould to really get under the skin of the teenage experience – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

Hollywood animated children’s films since the advent of computer animation. They all look the same. Okay, that’s not entirely fair, but with notable exceptions like the Laika films and the recent Spider-Verse films there’s a definite homogeneity to this output overall, industry wisdom dictating the production parameters and the overall look and feel. There’s a mould there, the films make money and producers are terrified to break that mould. Not so here.

The irony is that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, born out of a late night joke between two comic book artists who never expected to sell more than a one-off issue, has spawned numerous spin-offs in comics, animated TV series, video games and movies. Somehow, the previous six movies – three in the 1990s (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Steve Barron, 1990; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze, Michael Pressman, 1991), one in 2007, and two more in the last decade following a reboot in 2014 – never quite delivered on the promise of the franchise, as if everyone concerned was too focused on the moneymaking potential and trying to play everything safe, an approach completely at odds with that of the two artists who originated the property and simply thought of it as a fun idea worth developing.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Ghost In The Shell
(Kokaku Kidotai,
攻殻機動隊)
(1995)

Ghost In The Shell (Kokaku Kidotai, 攻殻機動隊) (1995)

Director – Mamoru Oshii – 1995 – Japan, UK, US – Cert. 15 – 83m

****1/2

A cybernetically rebuilt, female, government agent and her male sidekick pursue a mysterious computer hacker known as The Puppet Master through Hong Kong – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June.

Review originally published in What’s On In London in 1996.

Ghost In The Shell is the first (and hopefully not the last) anime feature to be jointly financed by America, Japan and Britain (our very own Manga Entertainment). Although superficially pigeonholeable as teenage boy’s market material (nothing wrong with that per se), Ghost is considerably more intelligent than that implies. Its plot is highly complex: suffice it to say that cybernetically rebuilt female agent Kusanagi and male sidekick Bateau are pursuing a mysterious computer hacker known as The Puppet Master through Hong Kong.

Kusanagi, who makes her first appearance stripping off her clothing, jumping off a skyscraper roof and crashing through a window below to riddle a criminal pleading “diplomatic immunity” with bullets, employs thermoptic camouflage which renders her invisible to the naked eye in a matter of seconds.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

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

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 Netflix from Sunday, May 3rd 2026

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

Goat

Director – Tyree Dillihaye – Co-Director – Adam Rosette – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 100m

***

A goat sets out to prove that despite being small he can play professional roarball just as well as the big guys who populate the sport – animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

In a world where ‘smalls’ and ‘bigs’ live side by side, Will Harris (voice: Caleb McLoughlin) is a small goat who wants nothing more than to play roarball, and is thrilled when his mum (voice: ) takes him to see his first game with local team the Vineland Thorns. Their star player is Jett Fillmore (voice: Gabrielle Union), a leopard. Like most of the played, she is huge. Much, much bigger than the comparatively tiny Will. The Thorns’ nemesis is Magma, who likewise have their own huge star player, Mane Attraction, who looks like a cross between a lion and horse. Bigs dominate the world of roarball, and keep smalls out of it with the simple motto, “smalls don’t ball.” But Will is the determined sort, not one to take no for an answer.

Other members of the Thorns include: Olivia Burch (voice: Nicola Coughlan), an ostrich depressed by fan comments on social media who deals with the problem by burying her head in the sand.… Read the rest