RECOMMENDED

Pixar’s playful “Day & Night,” which was the opener for “Toy Story 3,” is one of the two best of this quintet, directed by Teddy Newton, a conceptual coup, a hand-drawn treat after the fashion of late caricaturist Al Hirschfeld that in its first iteration exploited 3-D to rich result. The teach-it-to-kids CGI “The Gruffalo,” about a nut-hunting mouse in the woods who faces a fox, an owl and a snake, repeats itself, but at least boasts narration by Helena Bonham Carter. From the U.S., Geefwee Boedoe’s “Let’s Pollute,” a salute to all-American waste keeping the economy strong, is a keen parody of stentorian educational films. (Boedoe designed the title sequence of “Monsters, Inc.”) “The Lost Thing,” an Australian short about a boy’s hope for a home for a weird creature he comes across on the beach while scavenging for bottle tops has a grown-up absurdity and sadness, largely from explaining neither beast nor boy. Perhaps best in its sculptural form and dimensional delight is “Carnet de Voyage,” a travel diary in scrapbook form that comes to life as a European who encounters the traditions of Madagascar’s Malagasy people. Bonus shorts include Bill Plympton’s “The Cow Who Wanted To Be A Hamburger.” 85m. (Ray Pride)

“The Oscar Nominated Short Films 2010 Animated” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

RECOMMENDED

Sylvain Chomet’s debut animated feature, “The Triplets of Belleville” (2003) is one of the great eyefuls of recent animation, an inundation into an eccentric, overstuffed and very specific world. His first feature since then, “The Illusionist,” based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, is a bit more subtle and dry as the story follows a tall Hulot figure, “Tatischeff,” across mid-century Europe as the days of music hall die off. Tatischeff winds up in a dusty Glasgow (where Chomet himself works as well), which offers such modest asides as kilted Scots cutting a rug to a pub’s jukebox, until he meets a young girl, Alice, who believes in his potential as a magician. Near silent and nostalgic in a dusty and pleasant fashion, Chomet is a master of finding expressiveness in faces both human and rabbit, man and girl, and they’re well worth gazing into. Chomet’s framing echoes both the proscenium of music hall and the middle distance framing of Tati’s own great films. A combination of hand-drawn and computer work set “The Illusionist” apart from the 3-D cruise ship-luxury-liner-scaled productions of DreamWorks, but its genuine satisfactions are on a much gentler scale, as in Tati’s own impeccably scaled and timed comedy. Is this aficionado of hand-drawn animation making a portrait of his own place in the world of film in that of an “illusionist” at the death of his trade? Yes, and more. Chomet scored the film as well as adapting and directing. 82m. (Ray Pride)

“The Illusionist” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger’s “My Dog Tulip” unreels fourteen years in the life of man and dog. Man has the murmuring voice of Christopher Plummer; dog has an owner who finds “touching that she should find the world so strange and wonderful.” The minimal, stylized watercolor and pen-and-ink animation is melancholy in a way that suits bittersweet reminiscence. (The film was hand-drawn on a computer.) Based on J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of sharing a dog’s life of food and shit and sex and affection, the words are wise and playful and Plummer’s sometimes plummy delivery wonderful, and I know at least one dog-lover who will surely heave with sobs upon seeing “My Dog Tulip.” The gorgeous animation will sate others’ appetites. With the voices of Isabella Rossellini as a veterinarian who knows the central source of Tulip’s ills, Lynn Redgrave, Peter Gerety, Brian Murray, Paul Hecht, Euan Morton. 83m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“My Dog Tulip” opens Friday at Siskel.

RECOMMENDED

That fake look of a lot of 3D fits the cyberterrain of the totalitarian realm in this sequel to “TRON.” The exceptional computer graphics do not eclipse the quantum up-bump seen in the 2D original from 1982, although its visual adventurism is upheld here, coded with traces of Russian Constructivism and Italian Futurism. Except for framing scenes shot  in overcast British Columbia, “TRON: Legacy” is set in an endless nightscape as dark as “Dark City” and “Blade Runner.” All that’s insubstantial  melts into something or nothing with 3D seamlessness. Check out the sparkly detritus marking every death. Read the rest of this entry »

Warner Bros. Pictures puts two TV cartoon characters owned by Hanna-Barbera Productions into an awful live-action 3D comedy made for very, very young children. The nothing-there-ness of “Yogi Bear,” shot in New Zealand, is signaled by its title appearing in the black absent bottom of a plundered picnic basket. Yogi (voiced by Dan Aykroyd) is a gabby bear wearing a necktie and hat who steals “pic-a-nic” baskets, as he calls them, from visitors at Jellystone Park. If he’s a yogi, he’s fixated on the stomach chakra. Eric Brevig (“Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D”) directs a screenplay by Jeffrey Ventimilia and; Joshua Sternin (“The Tooth Fairy”) and Brad Copeland (“Wild Hogs”) with the line “I’m like a genus without a phylum” and a recurring gag about an adult blocked by a childproofed car window. To balance the town budget and launch his run for governor, Mayor Brown (Andrew Daly) plans to sell the park to loggers. Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanagh) and documentary filmmaker Rachel Johnson (Anna Faris) try to thwart him by wielding the lone specimen of a resident endangered-turtle species with an elastic, elongated tongue evolved for 3D effects. The unoriginal ending has the good guys leak gotcha video of the bad guy for all the townsfolk and news media to see. Shame and handcuffs follow instantly. Justice and a kiss come next. As for life lessons, three twosomes—Yogi and his bowtie-wearing sidekick Boo Boo (voiced by Justin Timberlake); Ranger Smith and his backstabbing deputy, Ranger Jones (T.J. Miller); and Mayor Brown and his obsequious chief of staff (Nate Corddry)—are dubious role models for siblings with status issues. With narrator David Stott, Greg Johnson, Christy Quillam, Patricia Aldersley. 83m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Blissful. The fanciful and fantastic “Summer Wars” (Samâ wôzu, 2009) starts with a social network and swiftly moves to social breakdown, as a “virtual world on the internet,” Oz, goes mad, kind of like Second Life gone amok. Bright, bold and dense, this overstuffed entertainment by director Mamoru Hosoda—a protégé of Hayao Miyazaki and reportedly the original director of “Howl’s Moving Castle”—shuffles dozens of characters, a half-dozen themes, and myriad movie influences and references from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Tron,” from “A.I.” to “War Games.” (Yes, also “The Matrix” and “Speed Racer.”) He’s keen on depicting generational difference, from elders telling legends in their traditional houses to grandkids to the grandkids whose imagination pinwheels through dazzling visual scenarios, at computer screens but also in bustling cities and streets, in offices and on highways and traffic control centers to vast urban landscapes. (There’s a menacing tenor that Hosoda gets from his exteriors and landscapes that’s reminiscent of “Cure” and “Charisma”-era Kiyoshi Kurosawa.) There are a raft of characters, not limited to hackers and games-players, arrayed with delicacy and style. The sentimental scenes, atop everything else, may be the most effective. It’s anime, but it’s also simply awesome pop storytelling. The eclectic, effective rush of a score is by Akihiko Matsumoto. 114m. (Ray Pride)

“Summer Wars” opens Friday at Siskel. Some shows are subtitled in English; others are dubbed. The Japanese trailer is below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Can we talk about an acquired distaste? Contemporary technology allows independent filmmakers with a name the tenacity to self-distribute their work to their most enthusiastic fans, and animator Bill Plympton would likely make a fine illustration. If you care for his work. If you get his work, which I don’t. His latest hand-drawn noir fable-or-something-or-other, “Idiots & Angels,” left me as slack-jawed as anything else of his I’ve seen. I just don’t engage: his pencil-rough sketch style moves in front of me, characteristic enough, and… his unpleasant caricatures of an unpleasant world leave me looking at the dance of light on the ceiling above me. I salute Plympton’s enterprise, even with this leaden, word-free gangster nightmare. The stop-motion artists’ credit at the end is sweet-hearted. Among this week’s releases, his stump-headed everyman figure joins “Black Swan”‘s Nina Sayers in imagining himself or herself growing bristle on the shoulders toward full-flown wings. Darren Aronofsky’s grue grows into something more troubling than whimsy. The deeply aggravating music selections include Tom Waits and whistling. Homely whistling. Abrasive whistling. 78m. (Ray Pride)

Opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Tom McGrath (the two “Madagascar” animated features) directs smart kid stuff with Hegelian super-heroics and a get-the-girl saga. The first 3D effect comes with the Dreamworks Animation logo of a boy fishing upon a crescent moon: he casts his line straight into the audience, as if to snag our eyeballs with his hook. The rest of “Megamind” imagines spectacular civic spaces for Metro City. The 3D seems designed to enhance instead of hammer. Two interstellar babies with superpowers crash on our planet. The white one rolls through the gates of an estate and gets a privileged upraising. The other one, with blue skin, lands behind bars at a prison “For the Criminally Gifted,” where he’s adopted by convicts. They later meet at ‘Lil Gifted School, where the former uses his superpowers as a show-off do-gooder and the latter is a chronic failure at mainstreaming, so he repurposes his super-human cerebellum for inventive villainy. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Gorgeous imagery and restrained use of 3-D mark Zack Snyder’s hoot of a foray into children’s animation. “Legend of the Guardians: The Owls Of Ga’Hoole” is adapted from the first three of fifteen young adult novels by Kathryn Lasky, with a story that seems likely to frighten the short pants off any kids who see it: a rank of good owls versus bad owls, the good owls battling genocide and the bad ones wreaking all manner of militaristic mayhem. There’s a full nest of voice talent, drawing largely from a who’s-who of Australian actors—the film received Australian film production credits—including Geoffrey Rush, David Wenham, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Helen Mirren, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel Edgerton, Richard Roxburgh, Deborra-Lee Furness and Abbie Cornish. Snyder’s knack for painstaking production design, seen in earlier movies like “300″ and “Watchmen,” enlivens a story that eventually becomes near-impossible to follow, with feathery fiends with myth-heavy names being hard to tell apart. Talking to Snyder last week, he told me the style of filmmaking wasn’t so different, requiring about the same amount of preparation as his live action-CGI hybrid filmmaking. But, exposition of the book series’ invented backstory thunders instead of flutters. The Lisa Gerrard song that accompanies a key montage sounds weirdly like The Postal Service, but the score does all it should do in the intense action sequences. And the owls’ flight through storms at sea soar. A new Road Runner cartoon precedes; it’s awful in every possible way, dull, unimaginative, unfunny and with an unappealingly stylized Wile E. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

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 »