Category Archives: Animations
New Trailer for Madagascar 3!
I’m so excited for this movie – it looks as good as ever, don’t you think?
xx
Za
New Clips from The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Some great new clips have been released for the new Tintin movie! I thought I share two of my favourites:
This first one has one of my favourite scenes from the book, in which some men kidnap young journalist Tintin and Snowy, Tintin’s dog, rushes after them to save him! I remember the scene in the book vividly and they’ve done a great job with it.
The second one is a favourite of mine because it has the voice talents of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who I clearly love (Hot Fuzz is quite possibly the best movie ever), as the charmingly frazzled Thomson and Thompson.
I can’t wait to see this movie, can you?
xx
Za.
Puss In Boots 3D Competition!
ONLY AT THE MOVIES DECEMBER 8th
COMPETITION NOW CLOSED
Hi guys!
We’re really excited for the release of DreamWorks’ Puss In Boots 3D, starring Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris. It’s coming out really soon (December 8th), and it looks fantastic. To celebrate we’re offering you the chance to win one of 25 boot stockings (below) for the holiday season!
Puss In Boots – our suave and furry feline hero goes on a swashbuckling ride, as he teams up with mastermind Humpty Dumpty and the street-savvy Kitty to steal the famed Goose that lays Golden Eggs.
To enter the competition, all you have to do is answer this question in the comment section below: if you had a Goose that laid Golden Eggs, what would you do with it? The best 25 answers win!
www.PUSSINBOOTSTHEMOVIE.com.au
#PussInBoots
facebook.com/PussInBootsAU
Puss In Boots © 2011 DreamWorks Animation L.L.C.
Howl’s Moving Castle
Studio Ghibli is probably the most famous Japanese anime studio and it churns out beautiful and moving films. Howl’s Moving Castle (or Hauru no ugoku shiro) is one of my favourites from the studio and I never really get tired of it.
It’s the story of Sophie, a teenage girl who is turned into an old lady by an evil witch. She goes on an incredible journey, makes friends, falls in love with Howl, a talented young wizard, and in the end she discovers herself.
Howl
Before I start, if you are planning on watching this then I highly recommend watching it in Japanese with subtitles rather than watch it in English. The voice acting is much more accurate and I think you get a much better feel of how the director intended the movie to be originally rather than how Hollywood has aimed it at its western audience. The same goes for all anime.
The first thing teenage girls will notice about this movie is really obvious. HOWL IS HOT. I mean, really. When I watched this with my class you couldn’t hear the movie over my friends squealing. Good job there, Studio Ghibli.
If you’re not a teenage girl, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that the animation is stunning. It’s colourful and seamless and perfectly fantastical. It’s a very different style to Western animation, and it’s incredible. If you like this style, you should probably also check out Ponyo, one of the studio’s most recent and colourful productions. It’s also really wonderful.
The storyline is quite serious in parts, and can be analysed on many levels. The question of the worth of war is strung throughout it all and it’s accessible to adults, while at the same time very entertaining for children. There are bits that are really funny and bits that are sweet and magical. The Japanese approach to goodies and baddies is also really interesting. In Western movies, baddies are usually killed, but in this they seem to see the light and turn to good. I don’t want to give too much away because I think the discovery of this movie in particular when you don’t know much about it is much better.
My favourite thing about Howl’s Moving Castle is the characters. They all have their own reasons for being how they are and they’re all really complicated. They’re well-developed. It’s lovely. And the animation means that the characters can’t be ruined by terrible acting.
If you haven’t seen Howl’s Moving Castle quite frankly I don’t know why you’re still reading this. Go and buy it! Now! Shoo! A 4.5/5 from me.
xx
Za.
Ponyo
I watched my first proper anime movie last night.
D’aawwwww, cute.
So. It’s about a cute little fishie called Ponyo who wants to see the world out of the water. She goes to the surface on a jellyfish, and meets a little boy called Sosuke. She sees that he has a cut finger, and licks it to make it better. He puts her in a bucket and takes her to school and shows the old ladies at the nursing home where his mother Lisa works. Then Ponyo tells him she loves him, nawwwww, and lots of stuff happens, and Ponyo ends up as a human. I don’t want to be too spoilerish.
All in all, i loved this movie, it was heartwarming, it made me cry, and I loved it. An unequivocal 5/5.
~H
The Little Mermaid
You all know I’ve been sadly lacking in the Disney Princess department in my past – I only watched The Little Mermaid for the first time this weekend. Some people don’t see it as a REAL Disney classic like Beauty and the Beast, but certainly in the circle that I’ve been brought up in, Ariel is one of the most important of the princesses. Everybody’s seen The Little Mermaid and everybody loves it. Well, everybody except me, it seems.
Ariel is a mermaid princess, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the great sea-king Triton. Her main problem is that she loves humans and would like to explore the surface world, but her father won’t let her. She then falls in love with a human prince and a whole bunch of problems arise from this (involving the signing of her soul over to an evil witch). Eventually the evil witch is killed, the prince falls in love with Ariel, and she chooses to give up her family, world, and tail for a pair of legs and a happy marriage to her true love.
My main problem with this movie is the moral message. Let’s take a look at it – she is a weak little girl who is totally reliant on her looks and her voice, and she chooses to change the very thing that defines the basis of her character – her mermaid-ity. She does this all for her happy ending, her so-called “true love” who she has spent barely 3 days with. What is this telling our children? That it’s OK to change yourself for a relationship? That happy endings are a must? That all the relationships we have have to end happily? What message is this sending children? I have a real problem with this.
I also have a big problem with the fact that she does get married at age 16. It’s so taboo and unacceptable in today’s society for a regular girl to do that, but for a princess it seems to be OK. It also seems to be OK for her to marry her first love (probably not even true love, she’s only sixteen, for God’s sake), and after she’s only known him for three days.
Ariel also has a cruel father who crushes her dreams, but in the end it seems that all has been forgiven and forgotten bewteen the two. Just like that. The character relationships are so under-developed. I don’t know, Ariel seems so naive. It’s ridiculous. She’s also headstrong crossing King Triton without a second thought, and she’s seriously annoying. She’s flitty and silly and weak and URGH. I can’t stand Ariel. She’s everything I hate about teenage girls. Disney does get some princesses right, like Jasmine in Aladdin, who sticks up for herself and recognises that she doesn’t need a man, but Ariel is like every typical princess – manipulatable by everybody around her.
It has to be said that there are good points to The Little Mermaid - it’s full of fun and whimsy. Like most Disney classics it’s charming and colourful. The soundtrack is also wonderful, with catchy, easily recognisable songs. Ursula, the evil sea-witch, is incredibly cool too. She’s rocking. I love her. Baddie-licous.
But that’s about it.
I don’t know if I’m in a particularly ranty mood tonight or what, but I did not enjoy The Little Mermaid very much. At all. Poor. It did not suck me in.
Sorry Disney, but you’re falling very short on just 2.5/stars. Just 50%. I do better than that in Maths tests, which is saying something.
Not really recommendable.
xx
Za.
Rio. And an FYI.
First, Rio.
I loved it. It was brilliant.
Rio is the story of a blue macau called Blu (what a surprise) who was rescued from smugglers when he was just a little teeny weeny blue speck by a girl named Linda. Then we fastforward 20 years or so. Blu is a big birdy and Linda runs a bookshop in… um… Montauk. I think. =/
Anyways. One day a really weird guy comes to the bookshop and says something along the lines of
“We’ve discovered another blue macaw! Your Blu has to go to Rio di Janeiro to meet her!”
There’s some unimportant blether, and then we get to Jewel the macaw’s enclosure. Then you get to the bit in the clip. Disco ball, yada, yada yada yada.
So they escape. There are kidnappers. It’s one of those ‘DESPERATE RACE AGAINST TIME’ things. Linda and weird guy get involved and it all ends well. At the end, Blu and Jewel are released into the wild, where you see them with their bunch of cute tiny blue birdies.
4.5/5.
Now the FYI. I have a blog of my own!
hamblebamble.wordpress.com
Have fun!!
~H
Paul
Note: This movie is rated MA 15+.
I went to see Paul yesterday with my parents, and I found myself pleasantly amused. I’m glad I let them drag me along because it was a really great laugh.
Paul is the latest project from friends and funny buggers Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. It begins with two innocently nerdy blokes from the UK heading off on a road trip across America, but their course is altered when a rude alien named Paul asks them for a lift as he runs from the FBI.
Now, it must be said, Pegg and Frost do have a definite style of comedy. It’s very British and very vulgar, but it does work for them. They are hilarious every time, and although Paul maybe isn’t quite as well executed as, say, Shaun of the Dead, it is a lot of fun and so, so, pants-wettingly funny. The comedy is just ruthless.
On top of that they have managed to also pull off a sweet storyline, with a couple of nice twists towards the end. They’ve managed to fit in romance, a road trip, superpowers, aliens, and explosions, all in a movie starring a couple of typical underdogs. The whole adventure package. It’s really thrilling watching something with everything satisfying you could ask for packed in. And anyway, you know me; I really have to enjoy something when there are explosions in it.
My favourite thing about Paul wasn’t the asplodes though. It was the nerds. So often I feel like us nerds aren’t celebrated. That people don’t like us because we’re interested in things that they aren’t interested in, and therefore they’re odd. Just today I had a friend of mine roll her eyes at me and call me a nerd because she overheard me and another friend raving about the new season of Doctor Who. She meant it in a derogatory way. Which wasn’t nice at all.
But Pegg and Frost are absolute geeks, playing absolute geeks, but they’re awesome geeks. They’re funny. It’s nice to see nerds being represented in a positive way in the media.
My main problem with Paul, I’m sad to say, is that it felt a bit American. I love these boys when they’re in their natural environment: cloudy England. Take them outside of that and put them in the States, with Americans, who have a very different sense of humour? It just didn’t seem to mesh well. There was something there that sat a little funny in my belly. And on top of that, the jokes are just a tad adult. And I’m fine with that, but as a kid you have to wrestle your way through them sometimes.
So I think my verdict for Paul is going to be 3.5/5. Certainly great for escapism and fun. Definitely worth a growed-up’s money, but maybe not for you little bubs out there.
xx
Za.
Hop
I had average hopes for Hop when I went out to see it – I’d heard reviews that were not good, but I expected at least a friendly, silly, amusing but not necessarily intellectual kids’ movie. Kind of fun, you know? About the same level as the High School Musicals. But really, I should have listened to the critics and just avoided it all together. It’s safe to say Hop is the worst film I’ve seen in quite a long time.
Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
The characters are pitifully weak, which is such a shame given the fairly good casting: Hugh Laurie, Russell Brand, Hank Azaria, Kayley Cuoco, and James Marsden – all fairly notable and in some cases talented actors. Marsden plays an uninspired 30-something who still lives with his parents, has no depth and nowhere to go with his life, while Brand stars as E.B., the Easter-Bunny-to-be, who has reckless dreams of running away and becoming a high-profile drummer. They and the rest of the characters are witless, annoying, stereotypical, sexist, and to be honest I didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for any of them at any stage.
These characters do not support a just as disappointing plot. The end of the story is divulged in the very first scene, and left the rest of the story predictable. I found myself pinpointing the unremarkable twists before they even happened and wondering why I was still sitting there watching something so unoriginal and boring when I already knew what was going to happen next.
The main problem I had with the plotline was right at the end, when E.B. decided to go against the only important side of his character, his drumming ability, drop all his dreams that had set up the basis for the film, and say to his father that he was ready to become the Easter Bunny. It felt to me like the whole story was for nothing, and that E.B. was nothing but an opinionated idiot who only wanted to defy his father for the sake of being contrary.
The writing is shocking, and there are so many sore attempts at being funny, but I don’t think I laughed once. It was so sad, because I could spot so many different ways they could have taken parts of the story to make it funnier, but they kept failing to do so. The comic timing was horrendous and I just wanted to slap E.B. in his fuzzy face.
The animation is colourful and involved, which is excellent, and really helped me when I was so bored with the rest of the film that I resorted to only taking in the colour and movement of the thing. I know small children will love the adorable characters and bright, candy-filled worlds, so I have to concede that Hop probably is accessible and fun for very young kids. However, there are two animated family films out these holidays, Hop and Rio, and Rio is enjoyable for the entire family rather than just the little ‘uns. I can’t see why you would take your kids to see this instead of Rio. Parents, I beg you to consider your sanity. You will not survive Hop. You’ll want to walk out, but you know you won’t be able to. Instead, you’ll have to suffer through lame jokes and a bottom that will undoubtedly fall asleep. GO AND SEE RIO INSTEAD. IT’S FUN.
I think I’m all ranted out – for obvious reasons, I’m sorry that I have to give Hop 1/5 stars. I was expecting more, and I am disappointed. This movie is a waste of money and time.
Rio
Rio is the latest family animation from the Dreamworks team. Traditionally Dreamworks animations are not as well received as Pixar animations, and I know that I usually compare the two whenever a movie comes out. Pixar has a kind of magic that Dreamworks sometimes lacks, so I wasn’t sure about what I expected from Rio.
The story is of a domesticated, and therefore flightless, blue macaw (Blu) who is the last male of his species and needs to be flown to Rio de Janeiro to mate with the last female (Jewel). Unfortunately a band of bird smugglers want to get their hands on the pair, and the movie follows Blu and Jewel as they try to escape the smugglers and get back to Blu’s owner, Linda.
My favourite element of the movie was Jemaine Clement’s voice acting as Nigel, the evil cockatoo aiding the smugglers. Nigel was so funny, and EVIL, and easily the best thing about the movie:
The other voice actors were good I guess, apart from Anne Hathaway as Jewel. I love Anne Hathaway but I think you need to be able to see her to get the full impact of her acting. Her voice just wasn’t as interesting as the others. She’s definitely a live-action kind of girl.
I wasn’t actually aware that Rio was a musical, even though I’d seen the ad. And in fact the music seemed to take a back seat, which I found really odd. If you want a musical film, make a musical film, not a film with songs in funny places. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of effort put in and I wanted it to be, well, more.
The animation itself was fantastic and colourful, and the story was heartwarming, but it didn’t strike me as magical. Pixar has set the bar so high with animated pictures that anything that doesn’t have that same magic seems lacking.
Rio was enjoyable in the moment, and certainly a fun holiday film for the family, but I don’t have a lot more to say about it than what I’ve already said. It wasn’t striking or memorable, and I think in the long run it will probably fade into the background of animated films rather that stand out with the likes of something like Wall-E or Toy Story.
But it was a laugh and a good thing to see on an otherwise dull Tuesday afternoon, so I have to give it 3/5 stars.
xx
Za
