If you count the five prior movies that feed into the “mythologies” of “Marvel’s The Avengers,” it must be the most expensive, if not the most accomplished, feature film of all time. (At least until James Cameron surfaces a couple more “Avatar”s in the next decade.) To take ten or eleven hours to build up to writer-director Joss Whedon’s new movie follows the pattern of quality television series since the past decade or so, that the two-to-two-and-a-half-hour theatrical feature format can’t fit all the chewy goodness of the amazing and beautiful and literary and emotional imagination at hand. That, of course, refers to “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” and should not in any way be attached to “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which is more like a plastic pumpkin at the front door filled with bite-sized, slightly mooshed and maybe a little melted candies that children would never eat unless there were a big plastic pumpkin filled with them at the front door. It will make a mint—it will buy the mint, tear the mint down, and fill it up all over again—which will help pay down Disney’s $4 billion-plus acquisition of Marvel, but which will only encourage them to make more meshuggah mayhem with an ever-attenuated attention span. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Lord

By Ray Pride

Beaming fifteen-inch figures stand at rubbery attention in front of a roaring fake fire in a cleared-out hotel bar. Peter Lord, director of “The Pirates! Band Of Misfits” and co-owner of Aardman films, is not impressed.

“It’s a rubbish fire,” he says, “Rubbish,” as we sit before the audience of the Pirate Captain, various cohorts and a squishy little Dodo, the most agreeable of the lot from “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” the animated eighteenth-century-set seafaring send-up from Aardman. During the 3D stop-motion action, which was produced on actual scale sets, I wondered if there would be a squeezable bath toy based on this little fellow. Now I make the mistake of reaching for the Dodo, and neither of us can get it back on its extinct feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Reb finds he belongs on Planet Red. Andrew Stanton’s most peculiar “John Carter,” which was produced as “John Carter of Mars,” and appears as the film’s end title, is a boy’s dream story come true, if you’re Andrew Stanton grown tall. Adapted from a novel in an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series about a Confederate soldier transported to Mars, “John Carter” makes a mix of live action and animation into something deluxe but dinky, neither “Cowboys & Aliens” nor the original “Star Wars.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Oscar-winning Spanish director Fernando Trueba turns to animation in the Oscar-nominated “Chico and Rita,” a grown-up entry in hand-drawn style that even boasts sexual interludes and ladies without clothes. While his 1992 “Belle Epoque” evokes pleasant memories of goofy period-set romance, Trueba and co-director Javier Mariscal’s “Chico and Rita,” a musical set in 1948 Cuba, is largely blah. (His Oscar acceptance speech for “Epoque” is memorable: “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder… So, thank you, Mr. Wilder.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

For all the wise artistry in select U.S.-made animated features, typically from Pixar, most screen product targeting our kids and grandkids is too noisy and busy. The saccade-style framings, yabbering dialogue and over-pumped decibels aid and abet ADD. With a gentler velocity and volume, “The Secret World of Arrietty” is a happy alternative from Studio Ghibli, which brought us “Ponyo,” “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi worked on all three of those Japanese tales before making his 2010 directing debut with “Karigurashi no Arrietty” that is now released in an English-voiced version. The supernatural quotient is turned down here, though. Read the rest of this entry »

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"

RECOMMENDED

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 »

RECOMMENDED

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 »