Animation Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

January 30, 20242023, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Japan, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit
directed by Jeff Rowe

by Walter Chaw There’s a flair to the design of Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (hereafter Mutant Mayhem)–a joy, an edginess, an energy that reminded me instantly of those halcyon MTV days of “Liquid Television”, when things like “Beavis & Butthead” would give way to “Aeon Flux”. It’s outlaw stuff, verging on the experimental, and the images are so vibrant they occasionally feel as if they’ll bounce outside the edges of the screen. I love how the colours behave like they’re refracting through a prism, like neon off the wet pavement of New York City, where the film is set. For as fresh and as the animation feels, as innovative, it’s not so ostentatious as to deviate from considerations of physics and space. It doesn’t draw attention to itself at the expense of character and story. Its hyperreality, its gloss on the new, merely lends urgency to the picture’s quotidian reality. Consider an early scene in which our heroes watch a public screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in the middle of Brooklyn. Taught to be afraid of the prejudice of others, they’re hidden in the dark of a rooftop across the way. Seeing Ferris perform in a parade, they dream of what it must be like to go to high school, even of the simple camaraderie of sitting with friends on a humid summer night with a future laid out before them full of possibility rather than a life’s sentence of paranoia and rejection. Having had their fill of longing, they leave the scene, pausing before their descent into the sewers to take in the full tableau of a flickering image on a screen illuminating the crowd gathered before it.

Wish (2023)

November 24, 20232023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore
directed by Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn

by Walter Chaw It’s possible to catch the zeitgeist express and still suck, and here’s the proof: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck’s flaccid, disturbing, Les Miz-for-kids Disney flick, Wish. On the verge of giving her fondest wish to the autocrat King Magnifico (Chris Pine) in exchange for his beneficent magical protection, 17-year-old Asha (Ariana DeBose) discovers that Magnifico is actually a fanatical, power-drunk, authoritarian zealot. His greatest fear is that one of his people in the kingdom of Rosas may nurse a fond wish that leads to his downfall, so he hoards them, extracting them during a ritual from his people as they grow from childhood to the rest of their wish-less lives. He keeps them as bubbles of blue smoke in a glass observatory in his castle. Why doesn’t he just destroy the ones he deems dangerous?

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

Lightyear (2022)

June 26, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane’s handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it’s unfortunate it can’t quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar “heartwarming tearjerker” Pixar formula. There’s not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear‘s awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing–maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley’s previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can’t elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could’ve hit him up for a quick joke polish.

Turning Red (2022)

March 12, 20222022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

October 9, 2021****/****, 2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the “infernal method,” and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the “soul-giving” sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there’s a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but it’s stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

Luca (2021)

June 16, 20212021, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa’s Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called “Porto Rosso” in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki’s Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca‘s message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn’t, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they’re afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It’s tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it’s clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It’s there if you want it.

Tom and Jerry (2021)

March 11, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Streaming, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost, Ken Jeong
written by Kevin Costello
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw I want to say right off the bat that Hanna-Barbera’s “Tom & Jerry” cartoons were in constant syndication when I was a kid. I watched them every day after school, like all my friends did, and we agreed that we liked it best when Tom and Jerry were friends. We weren’t peaceniks; honestly, I think all the unleavened brutality of the cartoons got tedious after a short while and we were starved for something that suggested creativity beyond how best to murder a cat. Thinking back, I wonder if these cartoons had anything to do with how cat abuse is still played for comedy in movies–I mean, you can’t hurt them, right? The thing that’s tempting about reviewing the new Tom and Jerry is to not take it very seriously. There’s enough to skewer, after all, without bothering to engage it. Yet real people worked on this, an entire animation company’s creative capital was spent on doing everything they could to honour the questionable source material (and they do a really good job), and now here it is, the second attempt at a feature-length Tom and Jerry movie in almost 30 years, ostensibly landing as some sort of family entertainment designed to make your kids docile and pacific for 100 minutes. Honestly, I don’t think it’s worth the damage it potentially does. I mean, you can feed your children paint chips, too. And it’ll fill ’em up! But the cancer is something to consider.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

March 4, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, VOD

****/****
screenplay by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim
directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

by Walter Chaw I’ve thought a lot lately about quitting, and seriously, this thing I’ve done over the last twenty-some years–this thing that started, ultimately, because I was a kid who couldn’t speak the language and wanted desperately to belong to something that would never have me on my terms. I’ve thought about quitting, and it’s a dangerous thing for someone like me to think that way. Movies were a thing I loved that never betrayed me, never abandoned me, whenever there was pain or confusion, or something I needed to work through; this was the art form that was primary for me as a catalyst for introspection. There’s literature and music and poetry, of course, yet film could encompass all of those things. It’s saved my life a time or two. I thought I had a place among others who loved it like me, but no one loves it like me–people love it like they love it. Or they just use it because they’ve failed at everything else and don’t have the introspection to feel despair. When you give yourself over to an idea of affiliation through the appreciation of objects, you’re doomed to disappointment and loneliness. When a person like me thinks about quitting, he’s thinking about cutting the line that connects him to his life. I’ve been thinking about quitting, because what’s the point of any of it when your rope is tied to a quintessence of dust? I don’t trust this anymore.

Sundance ’21: Cryptozoo

February 2, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Sundance

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here’s graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better–or at least more focused–My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What’s clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha’s hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn’t successfully ported over is Ujicha’s kineticism–that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha’s films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That’s Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer’s day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by “and then and then and this and also this” narrative exposition.

Soul (2020)

December 22, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Music, Pixar

***/****
story and screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, Kemp Powers
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) teaches middle-school band to a group of largely-disinterested kids and dreams of becoming a big-time jazz pianist like the one he saw in some smoky bar his dad dragged him to one time when he was a kid. His dad was a musician, see, and made a little name for himself. Joe’s mom, Libba (Phylicia Rashaad), is a seamstress who owns her own business. She funded Joe’s dad’s “career” because the world is hard on small things. (Artists and their dreams, too.) Joe is offered a full-time teaching position on the same day he scores a gig with the great saxophonist/vocalist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett)–the same day, as it happens, he gets into a terrible accident that will result in his death unless he can convince the superintendents of an A Matter of Life and Death-esque afterlife to give him a second chance. That second chance comes in the form of 22 (Tina Fey), an “unsparked” soul needing to find that certain je ne sais quoi in order to be “born” in, I presume, a human host body on Earth. The rules are diaphanous, with no great expectation to ever cohere. It doesn’t matter. Pete Docter’s Soul isn’t that kind of fantasy. It isn’t about the metaphysical, after all; it’s really only about something as simple yet as difficult as the importance of living in the moment. Gathering ye rosebuds whilst one might, if you will. It’s not deep. I guess it doesn’t have to be.

Onward (2020)

March 6, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Walter Chaw Onward is notable not because it features Disney/Pixar’s first LGBTQ character (a cop–Jesus, you guys–voiced by Lena Waithe), but because it’s the family-friendly studio’s first stoner comedy. Dan Scanlon’s follow-up to his middling Monsters University is an unholy amalgam of Detroit Rock City and Weekend at Bernie’s that finds two elf brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), going on a quest to resurrect the top half of their dead dad’s body for the one magical day they’ve conjured for him via an ancient spell and a “phoenix crystal,” the double for which serves as the film’s exhausted MacGuffin after they squander the first one. The setting is an industrialized world where there was once magic; as technology became easier than memorizing spells and perfecting belief, magic was left to lie fallow, just waiting for a winsome young elf with father and confidence issues to reintroduce it to the world. You can read this a few ways. The way I’m choosing to interpret “magic” is as a metaphor for the American progressive movement, which died at the end of the Sixties with a series of assassinations. If we lay this over Onward, then the film becomes a call to action for progressives in this country to rally after decades of being buried under the inequities of late capitalism.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

June 19, 20192019, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton
directed by Josh Cooley

by Walter Chaw Much like AI, Steven Spielberg's similarly fascinating, similarly imperfect spiritual collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 asks questions about creation and the responsibility of the creator to the created. Toy Story 4 is itself the product of a chimeric parentage, this being the third sequel to a franchise that is to Pixar what Mickey Mouse is, or once was, to Pixar's parent company, Disney. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is a modern archetype of the sort described by Barthes: an image, a sign, encompassing an entire history of meaning for members of a sympathetic culture. It means one thing by connoting a multitude of things. The Toy Story films rely on the shared human experience of creating totems in the endless fort/da exercises we engage in as children. Inanimate objects are imbued in that way with our expectations of our parents and our disappointments with them, too, as we re-enact events real and play out dramas imagined. They are practice and we invest them with the payload of our souls; the root of the term "animation," after all, is that literal investment of a soul, and so many of our creation mythologies–Prometheus, Eve, the Golem–consider the lives of the lifeless. The Toy Story films are disturbing because they occasionally cause us to question our moral responsibility to things we gift with life only to abandon emotionally, if not always physically. (A quick scan around my office finds it to be a plastic chapel of toys I couldn't buy as a child.) They are disturbing because they speak to ideas of free will vs. predestination that apply to us–created beings, perhaps, programmed along certain paths and predilections certainly. Toy Story is epistemological theology.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 19, 2019****/****, 2018, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It’s American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett’s quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It’s a manifestation of optimism. There’s hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don’t, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there’s a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he’s proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It’s perfect.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

December 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen, Theatrical

Spidermanintothespiderverse

****/****
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It's American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it's breathtaking. More than kinetic, it's alive. And more than just alive, it's seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett's quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It's a manifestation of optimism. There's hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don't, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there's a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he's proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It's perfect.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

November 7, 2018****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

Hot Docs ’18: The Night of All Nights

May 6, 20182018, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Die Nacht der Nächte**/****directed by Yasemin Şamdereli and Nesrin Şamdereli Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Basically the interstitial interviews from When Harry Met Sally... writ large and given an international twist, The Night of All Nights sees four elderly couples reminiscing on their marriage--though as the film opens Americans Bill Novak and Norman MacArthur, who've been together since 1962, are only finally getting to tie the knot. Germans Hildegard and Heinz-Siegfried Rotthäuser are probably the most sitcom-perfect subjects,…

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 20182018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There's a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson's whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there's about to be a joke at Sumo's expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It's like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we're about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there's not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it's that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it's those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film's depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It's not "okay," I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola's erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don't think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don't know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I'm also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

Telluride ’17: Loving Vincent

September 21, 20172017, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Mystery, Poland, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

*/****
written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Jacek Dehnel
directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

by Walter Chaw I love stop-motion animation. William Blake referred to the "infernal method," talking about etching plates with acid and how each print of his work would be touched by him, the artist, to better imbue it with life. Stop-motion animation to me is evidence that there's something to the idea of a transference of vitality through human contact. It's why I was curious about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's insane Loving Vincent, a feature-length film composed of over 65,000 hand-painted oil paintings, animating Van Gogh's most famous paintings and making characters of his subjects. It's a fascinating experiment, the product of one of those late-night bull sessions fuelled by cigarettes and whiskey where aspiring artist-types and freshman cosmology students get profound with one another. Consider Loving Vincent to be the cold reality of the morning after. Over 100 artists laboured over 10 years to essentially make a tedious rotoscope cartoon held together, barely, by an embarrassing screenplay dependent on loads of exposition and a repetitive flashback device. It's an endurance test of rare sadism.

Cars 3 (2017)

June 20, 20172017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Kiel Murray and Bob Peterson and Mike Rich
directed by Brian Fee

by Walter Chaw I don't understand very much about the Cars universe. I don't understand its rules. Do the sentient cars feel pain? What part of them needs to "die" in order for them to die? The implication is that the voice actor needs to die, but even then the Paul Newman-voiced "Doc" is resurrected (along with Tom Magliozzi's "Rusty") in Cars 3 through the miracle of old voice outtakes and flashback sequences. It raises questions about sentience in a Blade Runner sort of way. It invites speculation that this is all a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which our "smart" cars have either outlasted, or outwitted, their primate creators. I wonder, too, about how they reproduce, as these films have always been clear that there are "children" in this universe. Or are they like child vampires: wizened monsters trapped in infant chassis? When I look at a sentient ambulance in this one's central "Flesh Fair" demolition-derby sequence and how its patient bay is built for a human-sized customer and not a car, well…it raises questions. And let's talk about the idea of a demolition derby in a film populated entirely by thinking, feeling cars. What would the human equivalent to this be? Thunderdome? It's worth a conversation, though it's not the conversation Cars 3 wants to have.

Bambi (1942) [The Signature Collection – Anniversary Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD|[Diamond Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

June 5, 20171940s, 2017, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family

***/****
2011 Diamond Edition Blu-ray – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
2017 Anniversary Edition Blu-ray – Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
story direction Perce Pearce and story adaptation Larry Morey, from the story by Felix Salten
supervising director David D. Hand

by Bryant Frazer Bambi is just 70 minutes long, but it's one of the more versatile features in the Disney canon. It's a cute circle-of-life story, sure, populated by talking rabbits, nominally sweet-smelling skunks, and wise old owls (not to mention the adorable chipmunks that the owl, for some reason, hasn't preyed upon). But look what else is going on in this slice-of-wildlife film: an attempt at an animated nature documentary; a tract in opposition to sport hunting; and the impetus for generations of children to weep in terror at the prospect of losing their mothers.

Moana (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 13, 20172016, 2017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, DVD, Family, Musical

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney’s new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa’i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We’ve seen her before, is what I’m saying, but she’s neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I’ll take it. There’s even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I’ll take that, too. What’s unfortunate is that for everything that’s very good about the film, there’s something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.