Alas, all of that jaw-dropping and triumphant artistry stands firmly behind The Wild Robot’s stirring power to massage hearts and minds with virtuous messages and an ideal balance of jovial humor. Much like how the rustic wear-and-tear discolors, dents, and dulls our shiny mechanical proxy parent over time, the sheer fortitude and kindhearted selflessness permeating The Wild Robot grows on you like the speckled moss on Roz.
Read MoreKung Fu Panda 4 is indeed a mildly maligned fourth movie going up against the aforementioned poor track record. While Kung Fu Panda 3’s culmination involved Po becoming a Grand Master of kung-fu and chi across the Spirit and Mortal Realms, no one is ranking the 2016 movie next to Toy Story 3 or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the pinnacle department, meaning a fourth movie should be reasonably welcomed without any sacrilegious blowback
Read MoreTaken for what its title represents, Wish maintains what has become the comprehensive theme and guiding principle throughout the history of the Walt Disney Company. Proudly continuing a century now after its founding, each new creative effort proves the Disney well of artistic storytelling striving for wish fulfillment remains bouyant and bottomless. Wish is a sparkling and meaningful new entry that genuflects to its history and stamps a little piece of its own.
Read MoreCombining Cumming’s lifting presence, snippets of archival TV coverage, and the animated sequences, My Old School has beguiling charm mirroring the fascinating central figure and the wry smiles on the faces of the Bearsden alumni telling their yarns. Viewers will absorb this tall tale and ask how much fraudulence is either acceptable or too much in a true-life “fake it until you make it” story. There is an irreverent delight to be had measuring that scale person-to-person and case-by-case.
Read MoreMarcel the Shell With Shoes On is emphatically wholesome to no end. Revealing so much wonderment in plain domesticity, this movie decorates the micro-ordinary in wildly unique ways worth celebrating. It may not be your children’s shiny new favorite movie for endless replay, but, when absorbed with receptiveness and appreciated for its singularity, Marcel the Shell With Shoe On will become a charming and formative right of passage experience held dear and passed down for generations to come.
Read MoreWritten and directed with a galaxy’s worth of love by Richard Linklater, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood may be one of the most rich and endearing “back in my day” yarns you will ever find. The proud Texas filmmaker has long embraced time capsule motifs and his suburban upbringing throughout his career. Bringing back his layover rotoscope animation style, Linklaker presents the point of view of a pre-teen daydreamer during 1969, one of the most influential years in American history.
Read MoreBut the “lies” work because memorable stories dazzle and impress eyes and hearts at the same time. Nestled in a completely foreign realm of magic and myth, the real-life parallels woven into the high fantasy of Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon couldn’t ring louder or truer if it stole every bell in the record-holding Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. The movie hits the premium tier of Disney+ on March 5th.
Read MoreSince Monsters, Inc., Up and Inside Out director Pete Docter doesn’t directly hide his envoys of empathy anymore. Honest-to-goodness people are once again front-and-center in his newest film, Soul, coming to Disney+ on Christmas Day. Its people may get magically spun into spectral vessels moving through a very uniquely manufactured system of the heavens, but they’re still humans being human. That said, with Soul, Pixar finally goes all the way with its streak. They evoke existentialism head on.
Read MoreOne of the classic catchphrases of the old Scooby Doo franchise is the vocalized signal, often from the eager mouth of their de facto leader Fred, of “looks like we’ve got another mystery on our hands.” The new CGI reboot Scoob! now on VOD platforms answers that rhetorical realization with both possible extremes. The movie doesn’t have one and the canyon-sized narrative hole because of it leaves us more perplexed than satisfied with a shoulder shrug and a chin rub of our own.
Read MoreAdding more weight from the original movie’s message of finding internal happiness and not changing for others wouldn’t take much. With equal simplicity and symbolism, the felt of this dreamy universe for the sequel Trolls World Tour is upped to include heavy quilts, denim, leather, satin, velour, vinyl, and more. The multiplication of said textiles matches an appreciated boost in weightier themes. What is ready and primed to delight can also move body parts other than your hips and toes.
Read MoreIn what has become a signature term and evolving metric for this writer, the “Pixar Punch” remains more undefeated than any boxer. It is the animation studio’s “uncanny ability to absolutely destroy our hearts with raw and simple emotionality in perfectly calculated amounts and moments.” On the surface, Onward is a silly quest movie for the tabletop gamer demo that has been cast into a March abyss instead of gleaming in Pixar’s annual mid-June tentpole throne. In actuality, this funnybone-slaying riot gives way to the kind of heart-rending climax that proves the Pixar Punch keeps manifesting itself in more and more unexpected places.
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