Tag: Animated

I have been told by my peers that Shaun the Sheep is a pretty popular kids television show. About a sheep! And shenanigans! Sheepanigans!

So these people were excited that a movie was coming out. But much like my recent review of The Unbeatables, Shaun the Sheep Movie came out a long time ago in the UK. The delay wasn’t as extreme, but it came out in theaters in February for the British and obviously early August for America. Unlike the last animated film, they didn’t even have to replace the voice actors with Americans, because it is a movie has no words! That makes me feel like it is just petty on their part. Booo pettiness!

This is also one of those movies I knew nothing about going in. It has that classic looking stop animation that the Wallace and Gromit studio is known for, which makes sense given that it is the same studio behind this film. Hell, apparently Shaun is a spin-off character from that franchise. I am seriously behind on my stop motion British genre films.

But I am strangely up to date on my sheep based films.

How do you describe a movie like Shaun the Sheep? Well, hopefully with good grammar and real human words.

Shaun the Sheep lives on a farm! He has an owner, who raises the sheep, a cow, some pigs, and has a dog too, Bitzer. Bitzer runs things around the farm. Sometimes he herds sheep too.

Well, their life is pretty standard. Wake up, eat, get herded, go back to sleep. Not a lot changes and everyone finds it dull. Duller than a pair of kids scissors covered with tape.

So Shaun gets the idea to have a “Day off”, by sort of tricking their owner to think it is still night time, locking him away so they can do whatever they want all day! No one will get hurt, just a few tricks and sheepanigans. But of course like all well laid our plans, something goes wrong. Now Shaun and the sheep and Bitzer have to go on a journey, AWAY from the farm their home, into the big city and you know, do things. Things!

And look! A dog that is actually more dog than human! There are levels of humanization in the animal kingdom!

My review of Shaun the Sheep is going to be short and straight to the point (despite all my fluff already). Shaun the Sheep is a funny and witty stop claymation film. I am always awed by clay/stop motion work, given the extreme amount of time and dedication it takes to getting it all done and done well. One of those things I tried to do as a kid because of all my free time and getting no where fast and giving up after an hour. The camera work despite the just very small sets is also well done, given a few types of shorts I couldn’t even imagine were doable for the genre.

Given the lack of dialogue outside of human mumblings to sounds like words, all of the jokes take place as sight gags or slap stick, and it is great that it leans a lot more in the sight gag department. There is almost always something happening in the background that is interesting, making it a movie you definitely have to pay hard attention to in order to get the full experience. (Which should technically be true for all movies. It just happens to be more true in this film).

If there is one main disappointment I had it would be its length. It sort of seems too long because of the no dialogue. About a third of the way into the film I was fighting back sleep. I was entertained from the movie, but not enough variation in sound was making it hard to fight back the tiredness. After the movie was halfway through, I had no problems anymore. That is when stuff started getting hectic to appease my millennial mind that always needs things exploding to keep my attention.

Despite this, Shaun the Sheep movie will most definitely end up nominated for Best Animated film, but as of now, it will also lose to Inside Out.

The Unbeatables, aka Underdogs, aka Metegol. You might know this movie by one of its names.

It was of course first called Metegol in Argentina, where the film was made and released back in July of 2013! It had the distinction of being the most expensive Argentinian film ever at $21 million, and most expensive animated film in all of Latin America. Given the American budgets on these things, that is a pretty crazy fact.

Needless to say, it did well enough to release internationally. The Unbeatables came out in the UK in August of 2014, same plot and everything, just nice English voices to make the populace happy.

And that is why I am watching this version of the movie. Despite being available for a long time, it isn’t hitting USA theaters until mid August 2015, a whole year after the British counterpart. It was pushed back several times over a year. Well, screw that. If I can legally watch and buy a movie already out, many months before it comes out here with just more American voices instead of British voices, there is really no reason to wait.

No matter the nationality, we can all agree on their fabulous hair.

In a small village in, I dunno, let’s say Mexico, there is a boy who really loves foosball. Young Amadeo (Rupert Grint) works at a small cafe/bar where he cleans and plays foosball all day long. In fact, he got pretty dang good at it. He can score in so many ways, can flip the ball through the air, and you know, other shenanigans. Others do not share his passion, so he gave all of his players a name and personality and often puts them in their own soccer based stories.

Then he met Laura (Eve Posonby), who likes things, and likes foosball, and even maybe likes Amadeo. Then he met Flash (Anthony Head), a pompous boy who never loses and is a soccer star. Well, he sees Laura and also wants to impress her, so he challenges the loser Amadeo. And sure enough, Amadeo wins. This is Flash’s first real loss in anything, so he runs from the town.

Now years later, the town is close to dying, but Amadeo is still there playing foosball and Laura is about to leave. WAIT JUST A SECOND. Flash is back, now a world famous soccer star. The BEST star. Rich beyond imagination. Rich enough to buy his birth town and build the biggest stadium ever there.

Well, the villagers don’t want their town to get demolished. And so eventually Amadeo challenges Flash to a game. If Amadeo wins, he will leave the town forever. Great! Just they aren’t good at real soccer which is what Amadeo has demanded to enact his revenge.

If only…if only there was some nice tear magic out there, that would bring his foosball players back to life, and help him solve his many problems and save the day. If only.

Featuring the voice work of Rob Brydon, Ralf Little, Alistair McGowan, Peter Serafinowicz, and Alex Norton.

Basically, everyone is Pinocchio, but no where close to being real men.

“You can trust me I used to work with FIFA.” That’s an actual quote from this movie and it really made me laugh. I know there has been talk about FIFA being corrupt for years, with the Qatar mess, but it still feels even better to hear that joke after all of the indictments.

The trailers for the US version, Underdogs, are shit. I have seen two of them and they made me immediately hate the film. The animation was odd, the plot was pretty dumb, and, well, yeah. It was very stupid sounding, no way around those words. Surprisingly and thankfully, there was a lot more to the movie than the trailers showcased. That is usually the case, but there are also trailers who show everything and it really felt like one of those moments.

The animation at first bugged me as well, but while watching it, they had clear distinction between the foosball players and people, making them both feel unique in their world. The players had a completely different clunky style that made their existence a bit jarring, but something that made a lot of sense in the film.

Again, a lot more happens in this film than just the “play soccer for the town”, and I am a bit worried some of the other side plots or jokes will get cut from the American version of the story. I might edit this review in the future after watching the new version to see if it deserves the same grade, so as for now, The Unbeatables and not Underdogs is surprisingly worth a watch.

Me and Illumination Entertainment don’t get along. They had one of the most racist kid movies in recent history with Hop, a bad Lorax, and the Despicable Me series. I thought the first film was bad, but at least I liked the minions.

Then Despicable Me 2 came out. They heard we liked minions, so they gave us a bunch more minions. It ended up being bad as well, full of shitty humor and too much minions, not enough good story.

But that made Universal, the distributor, a shit ton of money. More money than any other film they had distributed, so of course we needed MORE. More what? More Minions of course! “Fuck Gru, give us Minions!” They are now super advertised, with tiny shorts before movies, awkward commercials, lunchboxes, pencils, everything. They are printing money by having tiny yellow creatures on them that speak gibberish and sing gibberish covers of famous songs.

This film was also pushed back, but not for delays. Originally scheduled for end of 2014 release, they went with the mid-summer release instead because it had been making them pretty dang good money.

Enough money to take down Disney World? We will see…

Minions is a prequel to the Despicable Me movies, about how the large group of minions (Pierre Coffin, all of them) came into existence and how they eventually met Gru. Turns out they are basically large single celled organisms, and never really evolved into bigger and better things. Instead they were followers. Instead of looking for just the biggest and strongest creature to protect them, for whatever reason they looked for the most “despicable” person to follow, because the minions are apparently evil as fuck, despite never doing anything evil.

The minions went throughout time, following bad guys and always pissing them off or killing them from their ineptitude. Until they had to go into hiding where they made their own minion community! It was safe, but boring. It wasn’t until three minions, Kevin, Stuart, and Bob, set off to find a new big bad boss did anything change. Aka, the 1960’s. Their travels eventually introduce them to Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock) and her husband Herb (Jon Hamm), who are about to steal the crown from Queen Elizabeth (Jennifer Saunders) and take over the country.

But if the minions want in on being her slaves, they gotta prove themselves first. You know, doing evil stuff and doing the job for her. Easy peasy. And if they fail, well, eventually they will find Gru right?

Also using the voice talents of Michael Keaton, Allison Janney, Steve Coogan, Geoffrey Rush as the narrator, and Hiroyuki Sanada as “Sumo Villain” because that is all they could give him, I guess.

If this was called Minion Pie, this scene could be the day that the minions died?

Watching the trailer for Minions, I had hope. It looked like it could actually be a funnier movie and maybe make me laugh. Not having to worry about the awkward bad guy + kids situation, we could focus on a better more interesting plot of shenanigans and tomfoolery. Tomfoolery we may have gotten, but not the kind of tomfoolery one would want.

The movie made me laugh just one time in 90 minutes, which is obviously a bad sign. The jokes weren’t clever. Their only attempt at appeasing the adult audience would be the several songs they included for the minions to gibberish sing, all of the songs older of course given when it takes place. But even that is incredibly lazy. That joke is more of a “Haha, do you get it? You know this song right? This is funny because it is something you know but minions singing!”

This is not to say that I am angry at the fact that they don’t speak any real language. That is part of their character design. But to have a movie focus so much on them talking to others and each other, feels terrible. We can assume everything they are saying, sure, due to the weird way their language works. But it feels more annoying than anything. They rely on side human characters and narrators to actually explain plot points, because for the most part their main characters cannot.

Additionally, having them focus on three random minions to give them some sort of personality just annoys me that the other dozens of characters are ignored. I would have rather seen them work as the cohesive group, going full on henchmen, not just a couple guys on a bad road trip.

I am surprised that it ended with them actually meeting young Gru. I figured it took place in the late 60’s so they could justifiably fit in 3-4 more Minion movies pre-Gru to milk the franchise more. A Minions 2 with young Gru would be annoying, because it gets rid of all of his character development (but maybe it would actually make him evil? That’d be a shocker). For now though, our next film with them would be Despicable Me 3 out in a few years, which promises more of the same, so it will probably suck.

I am a bit annoyed that this will probably make so much money, especially if it makes more than Inside Out, a superior film in almost every conceivable way. The success of the film just means that minions will still appear everywhere. Yes, that includes the strange memes going around that have the minions as the main picture, and then some random joke text, that has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with the franchise at all that old women and dumbasses share on your facebook page.

As this is my intro, instead of talking about Inside Out (and how sad I was there was no 2014 installment), I will just talk about the intro to Inside Out, a short called Lava.

Lava is about love, volcanoes, and tectonic shifts with hot spots. HOT SPOTS.

Obviously some liberties are taken, but it tells a wonderful love story, to great ukulele music, featuring real Hawaiians, and it will win Best Animated Short this year. You are hearing it first. It is better than Frozen Fever. It is better than Feast and Paperman.

It united all of my emotions into the orgasm phase of existence.

Fine, fine, back to the movie. Inside Out is really about a girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), growing up and trying to find her place in the world. She has a loving mother (Diane Lane) and father (Kyle MacLachlan), and enjoys the long winters in Minnesota where she can play the greatest sport ever made: Hockey. But all of that is about to come to a comical screeching halt, when suddenly they are moving to San Francisco for some “work reason” that is stressful and new and different.

To find out what is really going on inside Riley’s head, we have to go inside her head. Heyy brain stuff! That is where her emotions live! Right when she popped out of the womb and opened her eyes, she giggled and laughed, because Joy (Amy Poehler) was her only worker. It was almost instantly followed by gloomy as fuck Sadness (Phyllis Smith). As she got older, she gained more emotions, including Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling).

Together, working in harmony, they can make a fully functional girl. An honest girl, with friends, and family, and hockey, and a goofy side, all making up her core memories. They also work on putting her memories into long term and bring back appropriate memories when appropriate.

But with a half cross country move to a smaller house, no friends, no frozen lakes for hockey, whats a girl to do? Well, apparently have her emotions go all crazy and bad things start happening to her right when she needs them to work together the most. Of course!

And where the heck is her old imaginary friend, Bing Bong (Richard Kind)? He is important, damn it!

“Bing Bong is dead now, sweetie, so eat your imitation Chinese food please.”

Did I mention how good Lava was? Five out of four stars. I want to buy a Blu-Ray with it on it, just so I can get a digital copy and watch it with ease wherever I go.

The good news is, Inside Out was also awesome! Given its subject matter, it should come to no surprise that my emotions were all over the place. Thankfully Anger didn’t really show up, but maybe I did have a little bit of Disgust and some Fear. But hey, the Sadness came into full fruition too. I cried three times during this screening. Once for Lava, twice for this movie. Using literal emotions, it did a fantastic job of controlling my own emotions to make it an overall wild ride.

The film starts out cute, gets happy, stays happy, then gets into the sadness/fear territory, but by the end, it returns you back to the cute/aww feels by the end. A perfect journey, basically. The voice actors did a wonderful job, Lewis Black and Mindy Kaling in particular felt perfect for their roles. And of course Phyllis Smith, a wonderful choice for Sadness, who I assume they also based her design around.

The “hero” of our story in young Riley is a nice change of pace. She is a normal girl and one that most people can probably relate to. Not to mention she plays Hockey, which I must again note plays a significant role in this film. Hockey is slowly creeping its way more and more into mainstream, and I thank Pixar for doing something different.

Last but not least, this movie is for everybody. There are plenty of jokes and fun parts for the kids, but also of course a lot of higher concepts for the adults out there. When dealing with the brain, you should be prepared to use yours, for at least a little bit.

With the Penguins of Madagascar, every major animated release in the US in 2014 should now be reviewed on Gorgon Reviews. Hooray! Exciting!

Unfortunately it is the sequel/spinoff series to Madagascar, which I found to be very mediocre or bad. However, this one at least also had a TV show before it came out, so there is a lot of back stories with these characters and their adventures that I am wildly unaware of.

Bring on the penguins! They are cute I guess.

Holy, shit, we also get an Octopus? I am now ecstatic.

Skipper (Tom McGrath), Kowalski (Chris Miller), Rico (Conrad Vernon), and Private (Christopher Knights) are all penguins who make up a pretty unique fighting team. Or at least they think they are. Going on adventures, using code words, what have you. Recognize the voice actors? Exactly, because this movie isn’t sold on celebrities, it is sold on characters and people who are real voice actors, damn it.

Either way, while celebrating the 10th birthday of Private, directly after the events of Madagascar 3. While getting some sweet ass Cheezy Dibbles, they get kidnapped by Dave (John Malkovich, bring on the celebrities now!), an Octopus! Apparently Dave has had a shitty life of living in zoos all around the world, where he is always second fiddle and ignored thanks to cute animals like the penguins. PENGUINS.

So he wants to get rid of them all. Or make them ugly. Something like that. ALL THE PENGUINS MUST BE PUNISHED.

That should be enough plot for you. Spy movie guys. Lot of things happen. There is also another agent group, the North Force (Benedict Cumberbatch, Ken Jeong, Annet Mahendru, and Peter Stormare).

I will let you decide which voice should go with which character.

Shit, if you like Octopuses in movies, you are going to love this movie. Yes, Octopuses, mother fucker. It is the right way. They all reminded me of Octodad a little bit, especially since the main octopus is wearing a human costume sometimes.

In all reality, it was just an okay movie. I am glad that the penguins all had personality, but they didn’t really make me laugh all that much. I thought North Force was underutilized and the big bad guy plot was pretty lame as well.

There was one ongoing joke throughout the film, involving celebrity names and puns. They were fantastic and clever. Well done on that department.

But comparing it to other animated movies, the quality is definitely lower (although in line with the Madagascar animation, so at least they are consistent). It probably feels like an extended episode of the penguin TV show, so if you like the show, you will probably like the movie.

It could have been worse. It could have featured Firework over and over.

Where does one begin when talking about Strange Magic? Well, first of all, it basically came out of nowhere. There were two main “kid” movies out in January. Paddington, which had tons of press and was actually pushed a little bit from December, and Strange Magic which had maybe 1 poster hung up somewhere in America.

I mean seriously, I saw no trailers ever, nothing on TV, no screening events, no kiddy toy promotion with a major realtor or fast food store. Did anyone know this movie was happening? Oh, George Lucas apparently knew it was happening. It was a Lucasarts film, which is now owned by Disney, but apparently it has been in development/production for FIFTEEN YEARS.

Anything that takes that long has to have some bad moojoo on it. Remember Duke Nukem Forever? There is attempting to make sure everything is perfect and forcing a boulder up hill.

And then there is this awkwardly realistic and equally awkwardly not dude.

The movie begins with the (world?) divided into two lands, a fairy land that’s all light and happy, and a bog land that is dark and scary. Immediately you might be thinking of Epic or even Secret of the Wings, it is a popular trope. The movie then begins with a very familiar tune.

Then there is singing. Singing of old songs. What is happening. Oh, not only was this movie mysterious, but it was also a JUKEBOX MUSICAL. So many of the characters sing real popular-esque songs. However there is no theme here like in Mamma Mia and they are just all over the place.

Ugh. Anyways. Marianne (Evan Rachel Wood) is a fairy princess. She is going to get married to Roland (Sam Palladio) but finds him kissing another fairy on their wedding day. So she goes a bit gothic and swears to never love again. Years later, her sister Dawn (Meredith Anne Bull) is in love with everything and everyone, much to her annoyance. Roland is still around, trying to marry Marianne just to control the army and become a powerful ruler.

So what does Roland do? He convinces Sunny (Elijah Kelley), an elf with a crush on Dawn, to get a love potion made so that they both can use it and get what they want. The only person who can make a love potion is the Sugar Plum Fairy (Kristin Chenoweth), who was captured by the Bog King (Alan Cumming), because he hates love and love potions, or something.

I mean, he has a point. They are pretty rapey. Needless to say, shenanigans happen thanks to the Bog King also kidnapping Dawn after she gets hit with the potion. So back and forth they go, singing and dancing, and stopping overall bad stuff from happening. Hooray kids movies and learning to love again!

There is also Alfred Molina and Maya Rudolph voicing royal parents, and Peter Stormare and Bob Einstein voicing random shit.

First we battle in an epic fashion, and then we dance!

How much do you really want to hear strange covers of Sugar Pie Honey Bunch and Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)? You don’t, you are right. This movie is full of songs you might have got to sing for public school middle school chorus classes or hear all the time at karaoke bars. Not having a theme isn’t an issue. Moulin Rouge! had no theme for the songs and they kicked butt.

Honestly, this movie in a vague description sounds like something I would love. I love musicals. I don’t mind fairies. I like nice CGI movies. But somehow this movie managed to fire on zero cylinders. Nothing felt like it worked. Parts of the animation were nice, and other parts looked like complete shit. They had really good voice talent, and wasted it on one of the most boring lists I have ever seen. None of the songs are really trying, they are all super safe and lazy. I Want To Dance With Somebody? Great song. Terribly easy to put into one of these and force a context for though.

Ugh. It ended up not being funny, not looking very pleasing on the eyes, and even made me dislike singing. How that is possible, I won’t ever know. I mean, I even gave Walking On Sunshine a 2 out of 4. This one just felt like an awkward mess. Knowing that Disney now owns Lucasfilms, it must have been in the buyout that they had to help fund or release this movie, and they just tried to sneak it out hoping no one would notice.

Ah-ha! The elusive Song of the Sea! I have found it at last.

I tried to get all five of the animated picture movies ahead of the Aademy Awards, but I only reached four. Damn foreign flicks. And the only reason I got to see it finally was because of its DVD release. I can’t feel the least bit special about this, outside of completing them all.c

I don’t think I have ever seen a movie from Ireland/Wales. So this is a big first one for me! Outside of the ones with the fancy footwork. This means I am a bit excited to see what I assume will be fancy footwork in animated form.

Unless the Leprechaun movies count. Then I have seen too many from Ireland/Wales. They should stop having movies at this point.

“You guys have Rapunzel? Fuck your Rapunzel. We got /this/ guy!”

This film, like any good animated film, starts with the death of a parent. Parents! Who needs ’em!

Ben (David Rawle) lives in a lighthouse, with his dog, Co, his father (Brendan Gleeson), and his mother (Lisa Hannigan). The mom is pregnant, and they want to finish the painting of the selkie, a Celtic myth.

PLOT TWIST. Pregnancy is a bit bad. Comes early. Mom dies. Saoirse (Lucy O’Connell) is born. And it is not pronounced the way it looks. Six years later, Saoirse still can’t talk. She just doesn’t like it. And after a few close calls with the ocean, their granny (Fionnula Flanagan) takes them back to the city to live away from the sea and their life and their dog.

Well, Ben says fuck that. He is going to run away and escape back to his dog and his life. Screw the city. And I guess his sister can come too, as long as she listens to him. Oh yeah, she also found a magical cloak that can turn her into a seal. Totes cool. And a magical conch shell. And like, fairies and owls and other crazy shit.

…

I am trying to say Saoirse is a selke.

Also featuring Colm O’Snodaigh, Liam Hourican, and Kevin Swierszcz, which is the hardest last name I’ve ever had to type. I am in no way confident it is spelled right.
in

Lord of the Dance prepared me zero for this shapechanging shenanigans.

Well, first of all, I am happy to announce that the pictures above do not do this film justice. This film is pretty. Prettier than a cat in a shark costume. Was it prettier than Big Hero 6, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, How To Train Your Dragon 2, or The Boxtrolls? Well, maybe one of them. I won’t say too. Because basically everything was pretty in their own unique way. And it has its charm and simplicity that goes along with it.

Also, the main characters were cute as well. Going on their adventure, solving problems. Sure, the girl is a selke, so she has a huge important role. But Ben does his fair share of problem solving along with Saoirse. They are pretty equal. And of course the Dog.

There is only like one song, but it is decently catchy. Wish there was more.

But if I had any problem with it, it seemed to move too slowly at times. If you could imagine a person telling a story, and that person keeps getting distracted and rambling every once in awhile? That is what it felt like watching this movie. Just every once in awhile. Kind of just hoped it would hurry up and move on. Not losing complete interest, just a little bit.

I can see why this one was nominated, but also, I definitely don’t think it was the best overall.

I have written many times about how disappointing DreamWorks has been in the animation department. The TL;DR is that all of their movies are terrible, bad, or average, unless they involve Training Dragons or Fighting Pandas. They have two good series right now, but everything else has been pretty bunt or miss. I liked Shrek too, sure, but not really anything post Shrek in that series.

Going in to see Home, I was already biased. Mostly because DreamWorks made a short called Almost Home that wasn’t too exciting. It premiered last year, and was kind of shitty. They showed it before at least two of their movies too, so I had to see it a second time and go “Yep, still don’t like it.” So when I found out it was a tiny prologue to a movie coming out this year, I of course was not excited.

I definitely wasn’t excited when I found out about the voice casting. Well, one person was exciting. The rest seemed to be the now standard big names for big names sake in order to make money.

Seriously. This movie has almost nothing going for it ahead of time.

Can’t even give me a full mustache to be excited about.

The Boovs are known for only a few things: Their color changing based on mood, their tentacles, and their ability to run away. They are great runners. They run from any threat and go based on probability. If something has less than a 50% chance of a success, the run. Captain Smeck (Steve Martin) is their leader because he is the smartest and best at running away. He was even able to get them to run away from the Grok (Grog? I really don’t remember) alien race. But now they are running from this big bad enemy, and they think they have finally found a place to hide.

Earth!

So they put all the Humans in one big colony in Australia, leaving the rest of the planet for themselves! Unlikeable Oh (Jim Parsons) isn’t the same as all the Boov. He likes other things so he is weird and makes many mistakes. Including inviting the entire galaxy to his new apartment warming party. Including the evil alien race by accident. Whoops. So he is now on the run, having a big bad mistake.

And while on the run, he runs into Tip (Rihanna), short for Gratuity. Yeah. Apparently they were able to get every human except for one little (old? hard to tell) girl. She says middle school, but her voice screams 20 year old. She wants to find her mom (Jennifer Lopez), he just wants to escape and make things better.

So they work together! Traveling with a slushie based car hover craft and running away from everyone else, who also wants to run away. Especially when the big baddies come along too.

Jeez. What a mess they have made. Also there is Kyle (Matt Jones). Fuck you, Kyle.

Tip was named as such after her friends gave her a helpful hint on living life to the fullest.

Yeesh. So Rihanna didn’t fit that character at all. DreamWorks tends to have that issue though. The Croods was 100% awkward because of Voice Choices. So Rihanna made her girl sound way too old. Jim Parsons worked as our main character. It was pretty great. Jennifer Lopez was pointless as crap. She had very few lines, overall maybe three scenes technically. No reason to have a big name in such a pointless role. (Or, maybe that is the best place for a big role?). Martin did pretty good at his Captain, reminding me a bit of Sgt. Bilko, but more shitty of a character. And I am actually happy for Matt Jones, getting to be top listed as the only other character with any significant lines.

It is quite obvious why they brought in Rihanna though. She made a whole damn CD for this movie. Half the songs were song by her, J-Lo threw in one as well. And they all sounded kind of the same as a result. It became accidentally funny by the end, hearing the same different song, one after another.

And finally, I got really annoyed by some minor inconsistencies. They had some poor plot decisions to make the movie move forward, their reason for Tip not getting taken was silly, and then other small things like, taking all the pointless toilets away from the area, and then still having houses with toilets. Just minor, rookie movies at the end.

But guess what. This movie was actually still entertaining. It was funny on numerous occasions, and you really do grow to like Oh and Tip by the end. Odd voices aside, Tip is great in that she is a strong independent black woman who don’t need no Boov in her life, for the most part.

The animation was also spectacular at times. Dreamworks has always tended to make some pretty movies, and this one is no exception.

I am able to see through all the poor choices that this movie made in production and with the plot. The movie itself, as an experience, visually and character wise, is much better than the cover would make you seem. Yay for a movie changing my mind! Well done DreamWorks. Now I don’t feel so bad about having to wait so long to see Inside Out.

I was just as shocked as everybody else that The Book of Life and The Lego Movie didn’t get nominated for Best Animated Film. But also, I did give the former a 2 and the latter a 3, only. The two I gave 4’s made it and the other was a 3. So clearly, I was really on my game with the Academy.

But how was I to suspect that some foreign animated films would make it?! Crazy talk!

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a Studio Ghibli movie, which tends to mean quality. I didn’t even know they did movies without Miyazaki, but there ya go!

I would describe this animation style as “moving painting.”

The story begins with an old bamboo cutter (James Caan), being in the forest, cutting bamboo. He sees a glowing plant, and from it drops a tiny little princess girl that can fit in his hands. Shit that’s weird. He obviously brings it back home to his wife (Mary Steenburgen), and bam. That tiny thing turns into a regular sized baby. And hey, his wife suddenly has milk inducing boobies!

That stuff is crazy. The baby grows quickly too, so the local village kids nickname her Little Bamboo. Soon, the princess (Chloe Grace Moretz) is running around with all the kids, singing songs, playing games, going on adventures. Her best friend is Sutemaru (Darren Criss).

But her dad takes her away from the forest to the city. They get a big house with clothes and someone to teach her how to be a real princess (Lucy Liu). That means being a super obedient girl, basically. Seen but not heard. Never showing emotion. Never doing fun things. Terrible.

Kaguya doesn’t want that, no matter how pretty she is. She will avoid suitors at all cost and fight the good fight. You go Glen Kaguya.

Excitingly, the art matches the emotion really fucking well.

The story is actually based on a famous Japanese folk tale, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. Clearly western influence made them focus more on the princess than the boring old wood cutter. It is very close to the main narrative, but in all honesty, this version is probably way better. I see there are tons of movies based on this tale already, mostly live action. But again, this is one is probably way better.

Because this one was fucking awesome!

Like, incredibly. I talked about how crazy The Wind Rises, using “Traditional 2D Animation” but feeling like a 3D CGI wonderland. This one instead felt like a living painting, like I was watching an artist make each individual scene in front of me. Just super quick. I guess actors were hanging around too to talk as the characters. The metaphor isn’t perfect, but the animation is.

Here I thought I was done with animated kid movies for the year. Outside of The Penguins of Madagascar, I had every major release!

Nope. There was another film. The Hero Of Color City. Very limited release, but it decided to release the dvd before Christmas, so I figured I would give it a shot.

And just for more science, I watched it with a three year old who clearly is the target audience for this type of movie. Because if I am going to pay a dollar to see it, I might as well make sure someone has a good time.

A moment of silence for the man with no mouth.

This movie is set in a crayon box. Belonging to a boy! He was drawing some strange creatures but his mom made him stop. And he didn’t even get a chance to color them! Sketches, with no color! Sad times.

He also doesn’t clean up his crayons. They have to clean themselves up and return to their box. Because in their box is a portal to a crayon based world! Of course, every color has a personality trait associated with said color. Yellow (Christina Ricci) is a coward and is late to getting back to the box. So when the two sketches of the boy come to life and demand to be colored, she lets out a secret of where she is going and runs away!

Great. Now the sketches are in the color land, demanding to be colored, and threatening their way of life.

So now a small band of crayons are going to have to save the day. Including Yellow. She doesn’t want too but accidentally comes along. She joins Blue (Wayne Brady) who is so cool, Red (Rosie Perez) who is bad ass, Black (David Kaye) who is basically just Eeyore, Green (Jess Harnell) a nerd, and White, who I can’t find the voice person for, but just wants to be used really.

They also have voice talents from Owen Wilson, Sean Astin, Tom Lowell, and Jeremy Guskin who basically recreates Professor Frink from The Simpsons.

They are so jolly because they aren’t broken. They embody the YOLO.

Early on in this movie, it was clear that it was terrible. Of course each crayon is just an extreme stereotype. But while going through it, it was getting a bit better. And then the ending was downright terrible for so many reasons.

It featured extremely lazy conflict by the end. Aka, a character couldn’t explain their actions and put up no effort to really say the one or two sentences to make people understand. So their friends turned away and they were “powerless” to make them listen. But it was some of the worst attempts at talking that I have ever seen. Not only that, but once they realized how to stop the creatures from ruining their way of life, they were like, “Oh shit, it is because we judged them and didn’t try to talk to them to figure out what they wanted!”

Bull. Shit. Right when they get to the city and even before then they literally say all they want to do is get colored, and instead, the crayons who have one sole purpose in life, don’t realize this and don’t listen to them and almost get wiped from existence. Which makes sense really, because if a crayon won’t color, who gives a shit about that crayon.

This movie might have been a 2 if they could have done anything average with the ending, instead of a manure fest. It had some okay songs in it that the kid enjoyed and the story was beyond simple. But it was also very lazy.