RECOMMENDED

A manga series that ran in a Japanese monthly magazine for girls, circa 1980, supplies a gentle story adapted by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son, Goro. “From Up on Poppy Hill” is their second collaboration (Hayao supplied the story for 2006′s “Tales from Earthsea”) and  a lovely specimen of hand-drawn animation from Studio Ghibli. Finding a father lost at sea in the Korean War is the quest that unites two upstanding teens in 1963 Yokohama. Eleventh-grader Umi (voiced by Sarah Bolger) helps run a boarding house with her grandmother while her mother studies in America. Umi raises nautical signal flags, just as her father once taught her, hoping his ship will return to port. At school she meets Shun (Anton Yelchin), the editor of the school’s newspaper and ringleader of a crew of after-school club kids trying to save  their rickety headquarters from demolition. Umi joins the cause and the first girls set foot in the nerd enclave. Read the rest of this entry »

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SAIC faculty member Chris Sullivan’s first feature is a haunting, organic, decades-long accumulation of fearsome animation of fearful dreams. “Consuming Spirits” weaves together hand-drawn, cutout, stop-motion and clay techniques with the gossamer gloom of moldering nightmare. His Rustbelt Appalachia isn’t a  a wholly forbidding place, but it’s intensely detailed in a way that makes you glad you don’t live there. Comparisons to Sullivan’s Gothic imagination have been made to Cassavetes and the memory pieces of Terence Davies like “Distant Voices/Still Lives,” and those comparisons may not be far of the mark. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Le chat du rabbin) One of twenty-one animated features that qualified for 2012 Academy Awards consideration, the witty, sporadically inspired hand-drawn fashioned “The Rabbi’s Cat” is discernibly more grown-up and less smart-ass than the general run in multiplexes. (Violence and sexual candor, for instance.) Based on a French comic, Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux’s film also boasts a memorable, straightforward synopsis: “A rabbi’s cat learns to speak after he eats a parrot and asks to convert to Judaism.” Sfar is an established bande-dessinée artist, and this $16 million feature, set in 1920s Algiers, is based on three volumes of his comics series of the same name. Read the rest of this entry »

Often referred to as “the dead Python,” Graham Chapman, who died in 1989, led a vivid, harrumphing life off-screen as well as on in his performances as part of Monty Python, and “A Liar’s Autobiography–The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman,”  is an animated adaptation—in seventeen disparate styles!—of his scurrilous memoir of the same name. Voices of all the Python conspirators, save Eric Idle, are heard, and Chapman manages to narrate from beyond the grave, courtesy of an audiobook version of his work. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Les contes de la nuit, 2011) Six folk tales from around the world comprise the new caravan of silhouette animation from the animator of “Kirikou and the Sorceress” and “Azur & Asmar.” The genteel “Tales of the Night”‘s most striking passages evoke an endearingly imperfect variation on Indonesian shadow puppetry, but the boldly, incautiously colored animation has a flat sameness over the duration of adventures, which may not have been the case in its original 3D production format. Students of Lotte Reiniger’s painstaking films like “The Adventures Of Prince Achmed” will also find things to admire. Read the rest of this entry »

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Genndy Tartakovsky (“Samurai Jack,” “The Powerpuff Girls,”  ”Dexter’s Laboratory,” “Star Wars: Clone Wars”) directs a smart and smart-alecky screenplay by Peter Baynham and Robert Smigel about a vampire teen stretching her bat wings. She kisses a non-vampire and sucks not a corpuscle. Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez) wants to get out of gloomy Romania and go to the sunny spot where her father Drac (Adam Sandler) first met her late mother, as pictured in a faded postcard. Home-schooled with too little geography, she pronounces “Hawaii” like the “Wii” game platform. That’s typical of the popcult bits, alongside a werewolf upset at the depiction of his kind in “Twilight.” Read the rest of this entry »

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“Finding Nemo,” in memory, feels like one of the more genial of Pixar’s movies, but I was surprised to discover Newcity’s original May 25, 2003 review, was so direct and to the point: “Pixar: bottom-line behemoths who do no wrong fiscally or funnily. The top-of-the-line, terabyte-heavy animation of the comic creatures under “Finding Nemo”’s sea is a joy unto itself: an ever-undulating Lava Lamp tapestry suitable for both moppets and potheads. The voices include Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres, and both are swell, writers and directors alike adept at exploring and exploiting the contours of their comic personalities, as much for range as for possible familiarity to an audience. The jokes are terrific, families are reunited, the gags continue through the end credits, and Apple stock will remain buoyant.” Read the rest of this entry »

 This fun, if formula-bound kids’ tale employs the same snappy 3D stop-motion animation seen in “Coraline” (2009). Instead of an eleven year-old girl seeing the dead and dealing with a supernatural female, “ParaNorman” shows an eleven year-old boy doing the same. Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, “Let Me In,” “The Road”) is the typical outcast coping with all the usual character types, from an illiterate bully to his ditsy big sister. Our misunderstood hero is a horror film buff who watches lots of TV. On the couch sits the chatty, dotty spirit of his late grandmother (Elaine Stritch). Read the rest of this entry »