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In a world drenched with all kinds of short-form animation, from YouTube to Adult Swim (not to mention Pixar’s deadly pre-feature shorts), it’s a sweet surprise that Spike and Mike can move beyond “Sick and Twisted” and with “New Generation Animation” find twenty shorts from the past few years to showcase in a fairly cohesive program of work from around the world (plus Bill Plympton). To describe the premise of most of the short-short work (which is short on the violence and gross-out and higher on the artful scale) almost gives away the punch, but I was impressed by the lived-in city details in “Pigeon Impossible,” in which a bagel-craving pigeon could possibly cause an international incident. In another short, a forest-animal jazz trio wails endearingly while a cartooned black-and-white nun suffers all kinds of indignities and dismembering in Juan Pablo Zaramella’s “Lapsus.” There’s what is likely the first Key lime-pie noir, and Arthur de Pins’ very French, mirthfully murmorous “The Crab Revolution,” also boasts scrappy, scratchy pen-and-ink imaginings. My favorite beast of the bunch may be Mike Roush’s “The Hidden Life Of the Burrowing Owl”: cruel perfection as a quiet bird plots tragic violence against lovely desert sunsets. 73m. (Ray Pride)

“Spike and Mike’s New Generation Animation” plays Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box. The trailer for the program and full listing is below. Read the rest of this entry »

An evil cat conspired to unleash a virus that would make humanity allergic to dogs in “Cats & Dogs” (2001). In “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” another evil cat conspires to broadcast an audio file via satellite to radios, TVs and cell phones that will drive all dogs mad so mankind will put down this “man’s best friend” business. “I will enslave mankind,” cackles the hairless, pointy-fanged Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler). Tactical inter-petdom detente ensues as Cold War-style secret spy organizations of cats and dogs team up—”a first in our political history”—to take down this power-crazed cat before forty-eight hours go by. For this interminable PG-rated mixed-breed of live action, puppetry and computer animation, Ron J. Friedman and Steve Bencich write laugh-free riffs on James Bond and Hannibal Lecter films, along with lines that only connoisseurs of pet-food ad copy will get. There is an abject lack of wit about four-legged friends in this sub-Saturday morning kids fare directed by Brad Peyton. With the voices of James Marsden, Nick Nolte, Christina Applegate, Katt Williams, Neil Patrick Harris; and the voices and bodies of Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes, Michael Clarke Duncan, Fred Armisen. Reviewed in 2D; 3D in some theaters. 100m. (Bill Stamets)

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Directors Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin, and writers Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio animate a fun PG-rated story with enough clever details to keep adults awake. There’s more than tossed-off signage for Bank of Evil (formerly Lehman Brothers). At the same time, in different places, kids can feel let in on ways grown-ups really see little ones when off-duty from good parenting. Calling bedtime storybooks unbelievably bad literature is the endearing meanie, the character cited in the self-aggrandizing title of “Despicable Me.” The villain Gru (Steve Carell, voicing his “Middle European” accent) conspires to acquire a gizmo belonging to a younger villain named Vector (Jason Segel). Pleasing his soul-stomping mom (Julie Andrews) keeps Gru going. This people-hating overcompensator thinks that kidnapping a miniaturized moon will impress the known world. He adopts a trio of orphaned sisters once he sees these plucky cookie pushers can furnish a tactical cover for penetrating Vector’s lair and grabbing his miniaturizer. But the crusty Gru falls for the tykes and an unlikely family takes form. The largely gratuitous 3-D CGI is an opportunity for a gag at the end wherein Gru’s impish, chirping minions compete at constructing bridges further and further towards the audience. WIth the voices of Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling. 95m. (Bill Stamets)

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An exponential increase in peril faces a community of toys who talk and walk when  people aren’t around. In 1995, the American boy Andy who owned the toys was only moving to a new house. In 1999, when Andy went off to summer camp, a collectibles dealer preyed upon toys destined for a Tokyo museum. Lee Unkrich directs the third Disney/Pixar G-rated animated adventure, and ratchets up the stakes for toy solidarity and survival. Read the rest of this entry »

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

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Experimental filmmaking lives and thrives. Here are highlights of the opening night of the 22nd Onion City festival. School of the Art Institute alum Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” began that project with the short, “A Letter to Uncle Boonmee,” an atmospheric piece set in a small Thai jungle village.  Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby’s found-footage-animation hybrid, “Beauty Plus Pity,” makes witty play of hunters-vs.-animals and ends with an animated musical number by animal “gods.” Janie Geiser’s “Ghost Algebra” is lovingly treated animation about a woman’s mysterious voyage. Daïchi Saïto’s “Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis” is hand-processed 35mm film of a forest scene, scored by violinist Malcolm Goldstein. The flicker of its color variations is enhanced by the bold, sawing score. Sharon Lockhart’s “Podwórka” is a gorgeous portrait of the battered courtyards between apartment buildings in Lodz, Poland. Children play, dogs sniff, the sounds of the city are more distant than birdsong. Striking compositions and rich color add to the hypnotic effect. Jia Zhang-ke’s gentle “Cry Me a River” is as elusive as his recent features, as a quartet of thirtysomething former students meet to celebrate a professor’s birthday. Their exchange of memories since their parting is, in the director’s words, his attempt to  “see if I could tell a story that spanned ten years in fifteen or twenty minutes.” Visually beautiful and emotionally tender, comparisons to Ozu and Hou Hsiao-Hsien are instructive but do not convey its delicate, memorable fragrance. (There’s even a joke about Hou’s muse, the actress Shu Qi.) Program 105m. (Ray Pride)

This opening night program plays Thursday, June 17, 8pm. The festival continues at Chicago Filmmakers through next weekend.

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What comes after “Happily ever after”? Apparently, a midlife crisis. DreamWorks Animation’s fourth installment of the Shrek franchise opens on the domestic life of Shrek, his wife Fiona and their three kids. (Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz repeat as the characters’ voices.) The repetition of daily life shows its wear on Shrek early on, and an inevitable meltdown occurs at his children’s first birthday party. Longing for bygone days when villagers feared him, he enters into a contract with Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn) that will trade him one day as a feared ogre, for one day in his life. As with most impulse buys during a midlife crisis, buyer’s remorse comes quickly. Rumpelstiltskin chooses to trade the day Shrek was born, placing him in an alternate land of Far Far Away where no one knew he ever existed, and once the day was over? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tomm Moore’s medieval-era fantasy “The Secret of Kells,” mingling Celtic myth and the history of the four gospels, the underdog of the 2009 Oscar animation race (won by “Up”), is a beautifully designed Irish eyeful. Produced on a larger scale than Nina Paley’s hand-crafted “Sita Sings the Blues,” “The Secret of Kells” is still a similar celebration of styles of illustration that have been neglected in the rush to expensive computer-generated animated feature films. I’ve grown increasingly fond of “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” another of the nominees, but there’s a lack of pop-culture gewgaws and gentleness and all-round glow to the doomed forest of “Kells” that satisfies in this luminous, swirling treat. Curlicues unite! With the voices of Mick Lally, Evan McGuire, Christen Mooney, Brendan Gleeson. Among the producers’ credits are “Kirikou and the Sorceress” and “The Triplets of Belleville.” 75m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“The Secret of Kells” opens Friday at Siskel. Read the rest of this entry »

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Once again, an ostracized motherless boy with insecurities–and inquisitive and inventive streaks–defies local custom, outsmarts close-minded bullies, wins over a plucky female peer and emerges a hero for saving the day. “How to Train Your Dragon” is a wonderfully imagined animated PG-rated tale that advocates extra values beyond the genre’s usual uplift for outcasts. Hiccup the Useless (Jay Baruchel) is the first Viking teen in three centuries not to kill a dragon for his rite of passage. Opting for interspecies empathy, he undertakes an ethological study that yields four nonlethal ways of dealing with dragons. Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Burton confects a lesser landscape of adolescent angst. His fans and Lewis Carroll’s may find this “fantasy adventure” with “political allegory” and “avant-garde visuals” in Disney Digital 3D not their tea or party of choice. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s adaptation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871) stars Mia Wasikowska. This 19-year-old Alice flees a garden party, tumbles down a rabbit hole, imbibes elixirs, converses with animals and consorts with scheming queens. A parchment scroll foretells she will behead a dreaded resident of Underland. Wasikowska here recalls Dakota Blue Richards playing the 12-year-old adventurer in “The Golden Compass” astride a fantastic galloping beast, and the 14-year-old sojourner played by Saoirse Ronan in “The Lovely Bones,” for whom a subterranean playroom was the portal to another dreamy realm. A charter member of a clique of the mad, the open-minded Alice entertains advanced ideas about propriety, arranged engagements and mercantile expansion in China. On the centenary of Carroll’s birth, G.K. Chesterton lamented: “Poor, poor little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others.” The Alice of our time is assigned duty as a role model for girls nudged to think about finance rather than fiancees. There ought to be more wordplay, like Alice’s disquisition on the use of the word “secret” that anticipates the ordinary-language school of philosophy at Carroll’s Oxford. Burton fails to make her plight nearly strange enough. Her odd new world is insubstantial and its inhabitants are uninteresting. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a major letdown, compared to inspired loons he’s played in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Sweeney Todd.” Helena Bonham Carter, though, is superb with her digitally-ballooned noggin as the Red Queen. With Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas and Tim Pigott-Smith in the flesh; and in voice only Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor. 109m. (Bill Stamets)

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(Hausu, 1977) “House” is so much stranger than “The Room.” “The Room” may be from another planet, but Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hallucinatory House” is from another universe, or, it’s like “an episode of Scooby Doo as directed by Dario Argento” as distributor Janus Films inventively suggests. Attempting to capture the fanciful imagination of his 11-year-old daughter, Obayashi’s pop-art haunted-house freak-out featuring seven teenage girls manages to be both compulsively watchable and completely indigestible. It’s a buffet of strangeness, grape bubblegum meets sashimi meets Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Banana Splits.” The detached fingertips picking out tunes on a very hungry piano are one of the inspired nightmare images you’ll be repeating for weeks. Disembodied kung fu-kicking girl’s legs? The bursts of animation, including a demonic cat (seen on the stunningly bold poster) and tragically sweet pop are equally random. It’s glorious delirium and downright nuts. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“House” opens Friday at Siskel. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »