Tag: transformation

Categories
Dance Movies Animation Features

Ana, en Passant
(Ana, en Passant)

Ana, en Passant (Ana, en Passant)

Director – Fernanda Salgado – 2026 – Brazil, Portugal, France – Cert. tbc – 90m

*****

A woman from Paris travels to Belo Horizonte, Brazil where she hopes to unearth something of her family history – from the BFI London Film Festival 2026 which runs from Wednesday, October 7th to Sunday, October 18th in cinemas and on BFI Player

This opens with a profusion of images and a child’s voice asking: “mummy, what is a map?” The images are moving images treated in painterly ways, animated postcard-like holiday snaps putting themselves into order, flashes of memory as if printed on an unusual under-texture. Then an image of a baby scanned in the womb. More images – fish in the ocean, talk by the little girl of whether fish follow maps too – then we settle into the film proper.

Which is to say that, rather than the film’s form constantly shifting, it suddenly settles into a more formal, less abstract, fixed form of 2D animation as Ana (voice: Jéssica Pierina) – the little girl asking the questions earlier, perhaps? – leaves the Paris Metro with its familiar Hector Guimard art deco, wrought iron entrance, wanders satisfyingly along the bank of the Seine and finally enters her apartment, where she tidies broken pieces of china off the floor, binning them.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Animation Features Live Action Music

Disney’s Snow White
(2025)

Disney’s Snow White (2025)

(Live action remake of animated feature, so filed under animation, among other categories.)

Director – Marc Webb – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 119m

***1/2

Disney’s new Snow White redoes the first animated feature, with its eponymous heroine, wicked queen and dwarfs, as live action – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st

There are a very small number of watershed films after which cinema is never been quite the same again. One of them is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937), the first ever animated feature film, widely considered a folly until it became a huge success and helped fuel the rise of the Hollywood Studio that still bears its founder Walt Disney’s name today. Before that film, no-one made animated features. After that film, Disney regularly made animated features of a consistently high standard, and his name became synonymous with animation for the three decades until his death in 1966.

Yet, the film isn’t good simply because it was the first animated feature – it’s good for a whole host of other reasons, namely excellence in storytelling, character, visuals, and songs, elements which would similarly underscore his Studio’s output during the remainder of Disney’s lifetime.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

The Substance

The Substance

Director – Coralie Fargeat – 2024 – US – Cert. 18 – 140m

****1/2

An aging movie star takes a wonder treatment which splits her into her current self and a much younger version – in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 20th.

Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) hosts a network TV keep fit show, but she’s getting on in years – and so is her audience. The show’s producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) has decided that younger talent is needed in order to attract a younger audience, and gives her the elbow. By a quirk of fate or screenplay, a mailshot about something called The Substance arrives in her penthouse apartment. It’s some sort of beauty product, although the high-end design of the blurb doesn’t explain exactly what it is or what it does. There’s a phone number.

Elizabeth’s identity is bound up with the former show. She calls the number. She engages in conversation with the unseen voice on the other end of the phone. She decides to give The Substance a try. She is told to write down an address. Later, she is sent locker card key number 503 and instructed to collect her package from that address.… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

Transformers
Rise
of the
Beasts

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Director – Steven Caple Jr. – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 127m

*

A giant, planet-eating entity comes to earth in search of a mysterious key which the Transformers must prevent him from obtaining – out in UK cinemas on Thursday, June 8th

The posters for this latest Transformers instalment promised something a little different: a group of animal robots made up, like the original Transformers, of disparate parts. What was their purpose? Would they transform into vehicles? Well, the answer is, no, they just run around like big robotic animals and never transform into cars or anything else. Why bother?, you might ask. According to the press handouts, they convert from less conspicuous animals, but if that occurred in the film, I must have missed it.

These robotic animals, who include the gorilla Optimal Prime (voice: Ron Perlman), whose name echoes that of series regular Transformer Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, who has voiced this character through all the movies and the original TV series), the eagle Airazor (voice: Michelle Yeoh) and the cheetah Cheetor (voice: Tongayi Chirisa)…

…belong to a race whose planet is threatened by the villain of the piece, a larger than planet-sized Transformer villain named Unicron (voice: Colman Domingo) – does he transform into anything?… Read the rest

Categories
Movies Features Live Action

Warning
From Space
(Uchujin
Tokyo
Ni Arawaru,
宇宙
人東京に現わる,
lit. Spacemen
Appear
In Tokyo)

Director – Koji Shima – 1956 – Japan – Cert. PG – 87m

***

Out on Arrow Blu-ray

The first Japanese science fiction film to be made in colour, Warning From Space (1956) features peaceful, star-shaped aliens, one of whom transforms herself into a nightclub singer to make contact with Japanese scientists. Not that the aliens possess any discernible gender themselves, but the human likenesses into which they are transformed most definitely do. If you watch the original Japanese version, the aliens’ transformation into human form doesn’t take place until a third of the way in. When the Americans got hold of the film, they not only dubbed it into English, but also did some deft re-editing to create new opening and closing sequences so that the film now both starts and ends inside the alien ship. The closing sequence is basically the transformation sequence backwards. [read more…]

The full review can be found at All The Anime.

Trailers: