Tag Archives: Animated

Movie Review – The BFG

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TL;DR – Beautiful, touching, funny, heart-warming, if you go you will have a good time

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

The BFG. Image Credit: Disney.

Review –

I grew up during the Disney Renaissance, in a time of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Mulan. It was a great time for fairy tales … but they all have that Disney-fication about their stories that removed a lot of the weird, I mean have you ever read the One Thousand and One Nights, or the original Hans Christian Andersen version of The Little Mermaid, that stuff be messed up. So when I was growing up the were two sources of weird that you could come across, the first was Paul Jennings which was adapted into the Australian mainstay of Round The Twist, and the other was Roald Dahl. His work was wired and wonderful, books like The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, were irreverent, weird, wonderful and full of heart. Now, movie adaptions of Roald Dahl’s books have been hits and misses, and Roald Dahl himself had been generally really negative about all the movie adaptions of his books. So with this in mind we have The BFG, a book I loved as a child, but with movie adaptions of books being such a mixed bag, how does this one go? The BFG is one of the best I have seen.

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Movie Review – Warcraft (Warcraft The Beginning)

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TL;DR – A film with a lot of promise, held down by too many competing demands.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Warcraft (Warcraft The Beginning). Image Credit: Legendary.

Review –

So there is this stigma about movies based on Video Game franchises, that they simply will never be good, indeed Good Game did a whole episode on this very issue. To be fair, at best we have only ever got passable Video Game movies, and the only good film in this genre was Wreck-It Ralph and it only used Video Games as a setting, and of course the less said about Pixels the better. So with all this, is Warcraft the movie that will break the curse? No, no it won’t. So before we go on I should qualify that I never played World of Warcraft, so I am coming to this movie with only the knowledge that you get from being on the Internet, Alliance and Horde and all that jazz. That being said, for a movie to be good I should be able to understand everything without playing the source material, and a good adaption would make that happen.

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Movie Review – Kung Fu Panda 3

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TL;DR – A beautifully animated film with real heart and warmth, that elevates it above most ‘kids’ films that you see in cinemas.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Kung Fu Panda 3. Image Credit: Dreamworks.

Review –

Before we start, let’s be honest for a moment, it is not that hard to make a successful kid’s film. Kid’s love simple slapstick humour, vibrant colourful characters, and hey chuck in a sing-along CD and a toy line and you’re set. Indeed parents like anything that they can sit their kid’s in front of so they can have a moment of peace to clean up the carnage that kids leave in their wake. This is why Angry Birds will be a financial success and parent’s cabinets are filled with DVDs of whatever Cars knockoff is going at the moment. Making a successful kid’s film, not that hard, making a good kid’s film, well that’s another thing entirely. However, after last week’s Zootopia and this week’s Kung Fu Panda 3 we can see that it is possible to create a kid’s film that is both successful and in fact really quite good. Indeed it is a really good time for animated films at the moment, and kid’s films in general, because people are actually taking the time to create thought-provoking quality work, see Inside Out, Wreck-it Ralph, Big Hero 6, How To Train Your Dragon, literally anything by Studio Ghibli and indeed today’s film Kung Fu Panda 3.

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Movie Review – Zootopia

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TL;DR – A beautiful movie that is well acted, well animated, and has a very thought provoking story, whilst still being amazingly funny.

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Zootopia. Image Credit: Disney.

Review –
For a while it seemed that the only good movies coming out of Disney were from its partnership with Pixar, but then something changed and we got Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Big Hero 6 which have all been outstanding, and now we have Zootopia which we can add to this esteemed group.

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Movie Review – Inside Out

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TL;DR – Pixar at its best

Score – 5 out of 5 stars

Inside/Out. Image Credit: Disney/Pixar.
Inside/Out. Image Credit: Disney/Pixar.

Review –

In my younger years, Pixar was a company that could do no wrong, every film they put out was a masterpiece or at the very least amazing. Also, they were risk takers, dealing with issues such as mortality and death in children’s films. To this day the first 20 minutes of Up are some of the most heart-wrenching moments in cinema, but also a masterclass in how to tell a story with minimal dialogue. Then something went wrong, Brave, while interesting was more good than great, then Cars 2 streamed in, and Monsters University, and it looked like Pixar had burnt through all its good ideas.  Well if Inside Out proves anything, it proves that Pixar still has it.

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