Tag: eating

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

A Couple Clucking Chickens Were Still Kickin’ in the Schoolyard
(Niwa ni wa
Niwa Niwatori ga ita,
庭には二羽ニ
ワトリがいた。)

Director – Seishiro Negaya – 2025 – Japan – Cert. tbc – 19m

*****

Aliens love eating humans, and two humans avoid being eaten by disguising themselves as chickens – plays in the Annecy International Animation Festival 2026 which runs from Sunday, 21st June to Saturday 27th June

It’s just another everyday schoolday for Yohei (voice: Kazuki Ura). He gets out of bed. His mum (voice: Emi Shinohara) makes breakfast and tells him not to keep the cute girl Moemi Kaneda (voice: Kimiko Saito) waiting who wants him to walk her to school. She is twice his height. He’s on animal duty, which means that he must ensure the chickens kept in the schoolyard get fed.

This might sound like nothing out of the ordinary, but Yohei’s strange blue skin and odd face tells a different story, as do Moemi’s mandibles. They are aliens who defeated the humans when they invaded Earth in 2019. And they ate most of the humans, who were particularly tasty to aliens. They would love tto eat more, only, apparently, they’ve eaten all the humans.

Somehow, however, two humans Yuto (voice: Kensho Ono) and Ami (voice: Shin Sakurai) have survivived by disguising themselves as chickens, which aliens don’t like the taste of so much.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Sasquatch Sunset

Director – David & Nathan Zellner – 2024 – US – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

As recreated by actors wearing primate suits, a family of Sasquatches are photographed in the wild over the course of a year – on Blu-ray and Digital from Monday, August 26th, packed with more than three hours of UK exclusive special features

In the US and Canada, the Bigfoot or Sasquatch is a staple of American folklore; a primate alleged to live in various American woodlands habitats, an assertion supported by such dubious artefacts as the Patterson-Gimlin film, amateur footage of a Bigfoot female walking through a forest. It’s far from conclusive, and could well be a man in an ape suit.

There is, however, no doubt whatsoever that the four Sasquatches in Sasquatch Sunset are human beings wearing ape suits. The film doesn’t try to pass itself off as anything other than actors playing a family of the creatures, and uses no narration voice-over to tell the audience what to think. Rather, it follows its creatures through a year of their existence in the wild, from Spring through Winter. It isn’t attempting to prove the existence of these creatures one way or the other; rather, it’s an attempt to imagine what they might look like and how they might behave if they were (or are) real.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Very
Hungry
Caterpillar
And Other Stories

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Director – Andrew Goff – 1994 – UK – Cert. U – 35m

*****

VHS tape review from What’s On In London sometime back in the mid-1990s, republished here to coincide with the sad news of writer / illustrator Eric Carle’s death at 91.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Other Stories is based on the stories of German writer / illustrator Eric Carle and genuinely manages to make infant learning a fun experience. The title story, for instance, traverses days of the week, basic numeracy and simple sentence structure at the same time (“On Monday, he ate one apple, but he was still hungry. On Tuesday, he ate two pears…”) aided by a Roger McGough voice over that would stand up pretty well as a pre-recorded audio cassette in its own right.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The film has further fun still with the animation medium. The caterpillar is cleverly reconceived as a series of joined-up flat shapes, while the cut-out animation techniques used prove not only the perfect vehicle for Carle’s material, but are imaginatively used which renders them watchable over and over again by adults and children alike.

Other Carle stories featured include The Very Quiet Cricket and I See A Song.… Read the rest