Allegro Non Troppo (1976)

It's rare for me to take a movie suggestion from an anonymous online stranger, especially when I'm sure I won't have the same opinion. In this case, someone claimed that ANT is even better than Fantasia, which it openly mimics. I discovered that it's not available on Netflix but can be watched in its entirety for free on YouTube. And it's only 85 minutes.

To be honest, I didn't even watch all 85 minutes, because I skipped most of the live-action sequences, which run longer than in F. These sequences, depicting the filmmakers before and after the animations, are typically comedic, but they're certainly not the main draw (no pun intended). Just try finding those clips separate from the rest. As for the musical parts, well, they vary in mood as well as value. I'll review each in order of presentation.

Over the Moon (2020)

This Netflix feature hasn't received great reviews, but the aesthetic in the stills drew me in. Besides, while I expect the next Academy Awards ceremony to be a nothingburger, I wanted to know what might be competition for Onward in the animation category, and A Whisker Away didn't seem mainstream enough. (Update: I was right on all counts.)

In modern China, preteen or possibly early teen Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) is an A student, which leads many to wonder why she still believes a tale of Chang'e, the woman who became the moon goddess. Her reason is personal: She learned it from her late mother (Ruthie Ann Miles). When her more science-minded father (John Cho) starts getting serious with widow Mrs. Zhong (Sandra Oh), Fei Fei feels that he must have lost faith in Mom. Mrs. Zhong's hyperactive eight-year-old son, Chin (Robert G. Chiu), doesn't make the prospect of remarriage any more palatable to Fei Fei. She gets the idea that Dad will call it off if she can just prove Mom right...by building a rocket to the moon and bringing back a photo of Chang'e.

Time Bandits (1981)

I mentioned that I would see another consecutive movie about a boy. Thankfully, it's quite different. In fact, despite the PG rating, I hesitate to count it as a family flick. IMDb doesn't. (Non-American studios, I find, are more likely to have kid-unfriendly stories starring kids.)

Kevin, 11, suffers from parents uninterested in his interest in history. One night, his bedroom is accidentally invaded by six time-traveling dwarves. They're interested in history, of course, but not for the same reason: They want to steal the riches of the past. Despite his disapproval of that plan, Kevin tags along, with nary a language barrier. He learns that they've worked for the Supreme Being himself on maintenance of the space-time continuum, and since they swiped his temporal map, they have to keep moving. (They've been around for eons but seem as vulnerable as humans.) Little do they realize that the scarier threat is from Evil himself, looking to grab the map for his own ends.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

I had been content to let Dancer in the Dark (2000) be my only exposure to Lars von Trier. Oh, I liked it well, but he has a reputation for further darkness. More importantly, he has claimed to direct under God's direction and thus be the greatest director in the world. That level of arrogance deserves scorn. Nevertheless, a Meetup group invited me to this installment of a '90s film festival, and I got curious. Now I know it to be part of a loosely defined series with DitD, called the Golden Heart Trilogy. (The Idiots [1998] gets a middling reception.)

In rural '70s Scotland, young Bess (Emily Watson) marries foreign atheist Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) despite the protests of her church elders and family, which stem in part from her past breakdowns -- possibly bipolar. She clearly didn't put much thought into it, because she feels horrible as soon as he returns to his job on an oil rig. She appears to converse with God (hmm, see the previous paragraph), closing her eyes to speak His words to herself. When a rig accident leaves Jan paralyzed and in otherwise critical condition, Bess blames her selfish wish to have him back. To make him not just feel better but recover, she indulges his wishes that she commit adultery and tell him the dirty details.