Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s animated motion-capture 3D “The Adventures Of Tintin” (known on its October release in Europe as “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn”), from several of Hergé’s graphic novels, may perplex the unacquainted and confound the devout. (It did not go over as a treat in Blighty.) It made me thirstier than a Haddock. I feel winded even reaching toward my notes. While the intention may have been to explore what’s possible in live action, in a new vocabulary of unattractive animation at the kind of headlong pace that would match today what “Raiders of the Lost Ark” accomplished in 1982, the end result is more winded than winding, a dispirited ragbag of faux-naiveté and unlikeable, weird-looking, strange-moving characters. Read the rest of this entry »

"Please Say Something"

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A whiz-bang rush of visual delight, “Nine Nation Animation,” compiled from entries that were programmed in Cannes, Berlin, Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand, is one of the best compendia of contemporary animation I’ve seen in too long. There’s nothing hit-or-miss from the latest assembly from The World According to Shorts, a program initiative from Brooklyn’s BAM. Read the rest of this entry »

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This lovely fare for the read-to-me set teaches a life lesson: illiteracy can lead you to needless fear, yet crafty arranging of the letters of the alphabet can build a ladder to freedom for your pals in peril. Walt Disney Animation Studios preserves the interplay between screen and storybook page found in 1977′s “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” where the narrator intervened at one point to wake up the title’s dozing bear, a small-brainer with an endearing oral fixation on honey. This time the narrator (John Cleese) tilts the page to slide slumbering Winnie along the edges of paragraphs. One of the toy animals belonging to the boy Christopher Robin, whose misspelled and misread note triggers the plot, will ask what happens next. “If I told you that, I’d ruin the rest of the story, wouldn’t I?” chides the storyteller. Also reprised is the gentle hand-drawn style of animation. Instead of three episodes that comprised the earlier seventy-four-minute film, this fifty-four-minute morsel bears the heading “Chapter 1, In Which Winnie-the-Pooh Has a Very Important Thing to Do,” phrased in the manner of author A.A. Milne’s original chapters in 1926. Co-directors Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall share story credit with six others. Tender ears will detect the quaint imprecation “Oh, bother” during the winsome adventures of Tigger, Owl, Rabbit, Piglet, Kanga, Roo and Eeyore. With tunes by Zooey Deschanel and the voices of Jim Cummings, Craig Ferguson, Tom Kenny, Travis Oates, Bud Luckey. 74m. (Bill Stamets)

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

Cherish your friends and do not try to change them, no matter how much they embarrass you. That’s the message of this animated G-rated adventure about automobiles with eyeballs in their windshields and teeth in their grilles. Jets, boats and buses all share those anthropomorphic features in this sequel to “Cars” (2006). Unlike “Toy Story” and “Transformers,” there are no humans in this Pixar 3D tale. This time the main character is Mater, a buck-toothed hick-town tow truck (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) from Radiator Springs. On his first trip to Tokyo, he thinks wasabi is pistachio ice cream. That gaffe and other eye-rollers turn off celebrity race car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson). The first film’s interstate race is upgraded here to an international one designed to hype a new “renewable” fuel. There is a corporate evildoer, a James Bond-like spy and uplift bits for “lemons” with low-esteem. Overdone action sequences unfold in London and on the Italian Riviera, but none match the kick-ass kinetics of the opener on an oil rig in the ocean. Writer-director John Lasseter and co-director Brad Lewis do not win a victory lap for this lesser model. The kids at the press screening did not squeal with delight. If your line at the concession stand is slow-moving, for the first twenty minutes you miss only overlong Pixar trailers and shorts. With Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson, Brent Musburger. 112m. (Bill Stamets)

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(Mia et le Migou, 2008) Jacques-Rémy Girerd’s “Mia and the Migou” has bright, spritely passages in its reported 500,000 hand-drawn frames, but the storytelling seems unsure whether its fabulizing is for kids or grownups. The search for and protection of a Tree of Life (see also: “Avatar,” “Charisma,” “Flipped,” “Tree of Life”) guarded by the monstrous Migoo (Wallace Shawn). The character work is distinctive and often gorgeous, the story a didactic drag about eco-responsibility and global warming. The magic of Hayao Miyazaki’s great embraces of the planet isn’t in evidence. Still, the handcrafted look appeals enough to recommend the film. Other American voice talent includes Matthew Modine, Whoopi Goldberg, John DiMaggio and James Woods; Modine is one of the producers of the English-language version. 90m. (Ray Pride)

“Mia and the Migou” opens Friday at Siskel. The U. S. trailer is embedded below.

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As part of its ongoing exploration of foreign film, the Logan Square International Film Series (http://tinyurl.com/squarelogan) is showing animated movies from around the world this month.

Peter Kaplan’s series proves that you don’t need big backers, big names or even a big screen to get a film festival off the ground. Started in January 2010 as a way for Kaplan to meet new people and see foreign films, the series is screened in his Logan Square apartment, either on his TV or using a projector. Next month, the series will be moving to Comfort Station on Milwaukee Avenue. Josh Samuels became a regular attendee and eventually the series’ curator after seeing a flyer at a Logan Square coffee shop. “I was like, wow, whoever is doing something like this out of their apartment is probably an interesting fellow, plus I like avant-garde film,” he says.

The animated films on offer this month include both feature-length and short works, and hail from Japan, the USA and France. Nina Paley’s Flash-animated “Sita Sings the Blues” weaves together episodes from the artist’s life and snippets from the Ramayana. The film garnered wide acclaim on its 2008 release, including a long rave by Roger Ebert on his blog. The Academy Award-nominated “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” director Sylvain Chomet’s first feature, is a wildly inventive homage to Jacques Tati and Jazz-age Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. Samuels compares the month’s last feature, “Paprika,” to a darkly Lynchian version of “Inception.” Each screening includes shorts selected by Samuels. (Benjamin Rossi)

The Logan Square International Film Series screens at 3421 West Medill every Sunday at 7pm.

(Ha Evangerion shin gekijôban, 2009) Hideaki Anno’s sequel to 2007′s “Evangelion 1:0,” and the second installment of four planned anime re-imaginings of the 1990s Japanese TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” places huge, destructive angels battling humanoid robots called Evangelions at the center of a saga about an apocalypse striking Japan. Yikes, the timing of the release. (Japanese exhibitors pulled Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which opens with the destruction and deaths after a tsunami, from release.) On one level, the furious pace of the story of teen-geek heroes and heroines battling to save their nation and the world is dazzling and visually kaleidoscopic, if confounding for a non-aficionado of the source material. In the context of the tragic events of the past week, it gains painful resonance. Then again, any Japanese viewer who knows the history of earthquakes, atom bombs and other forms of destruction loosed upon the islands of their country would have felt the same pull, even before tsunamis and nuclear plant meltdowns. If memory serves, “Evangelion: 2.0″ is more pungent and ever so slightly less daffy than its predecessor. 109m. (Ray Pride)

“Evangelion: 2.0 – You Can (Not) Advance” opens Friday at the Music Box.The trailer below offers a brisk slice of “Evangelion: 2.0″‘s style and pace.

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Welcome to Dirt. Paydirt, I’d bet. Gore Verbinski’s first animated feature, “Rango,” promised to be strange-o after early teasers offered cryptic, semi-lysergic glimpses of the journey of a scrawny, tomatillo-headed chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp. But a spaghetti western that’s “Yojimbo” meets “Chinatown,” with splendid, not always slangy references to other movies and art? Highly unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable, and of a more toothsome sort of quirk than the last installments of the Verbinski-Depp “Pirates” trilogy.  A lizard with no name is cast from comfortable terrarium life into the parched desert, and finds his way to a tiny town filled with tiny, parched animal citizenry in the desert. The city’s buildings, sometimes only glimpsed for a flash, are crafted from trash you’d find along the side of the highway: the post office a red-flagged US MAIL home delivery box; a frontier shitter fashioned from a Pepto-Bismol bottle. Depp’s awed-by-the-world vocalizations of Rango’s unstemmable interior monologue, externalized, are inspired throwaways, with lines like “I appreciate the puttanesca myself but I’m not sure a child would” referencing both the pasta source of the movie’s key genre as well as the adult gags that will sail over the heads of children, after the fashion of good, classic Warner Bros. cartoons. What do you do with lines like “I’m actually one of the few men with a maiden name” or “You missin’ yer mama’s mango?” Or “What’s a aquifer?” “Well, for aqua.” Laugh, or wait for the next one that will make you laugh. Read the rest of this entry »