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.
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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 »

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)

RECOMMENDED

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)

RECOMMENDED

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

RECOMMENDED

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.