Showing posts with label laika. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laika. Show all posts
Saturday, March 5, 2022
Triple Feature: Smallfoot (2018), Missing Link (2019), Abominable (2019)
When I realized that I could watch all three of these dueling movies on one flight, I couldn't resist. They all came out within a year of each other and are animated adventure comedies involving humans who discover that bigfeet of some sort not only exist but are hardly monsters. Now I would know my personal preference among them.
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Oh look, LAIKA again. For once, I felt like seeing their work in a theater, and so did my dad. Maybe that's because the stop-motion animation studio is trying something different this time: a setting in feudal Japan. You can't really tell from my past reviews, but I'm kind of a sucker for entertainment set thereabout.
A woman, Sariatu (uh, Charlize somebody), and her eye patch-wearing baby barely survive a stormy sea voyage and then make a home in a cave. There is a village nearby, but they have no money for better lodging. About a decade later, Sariatu spends most of the day catatonic, but son Kubo (Art Parkinson) has grown precocious, making a name for himself by telling stories of his samurai dad Hanzo fighting the Moon King's forces -- while illustrating them with moving origami controlled by his magic string instrument, which nobody identifies by name, but I determined it to be a shamisen.
Little does he know how much truth there is to his stories, until the day he neglects his mom's rule to come home by nightfall. The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, once again playing a main villain in a family feature) is Sariatu's father and can now detect Kubo. The king and his identical other two daughters (both Rooney Mara) will stop at nothing to bring Kubo into their celestial kingdom, which pretty much requires that they blind him and make him learn to enjoy killing Earth mortals.
A woman, Sariatu (uh, Charlize somebody), and her eye patch-wearing baby barely survive a stormy sea voyage and then make a home in a cave. There is a village nearby, but they have no money for better lodging. About a decade later, Sariatu spends most of the day catatonic, but son Kubo (Art Parkinson) has grown precocious, making a name for himself by telling stories of his samurai dad Hanzo fighting the Moon King's forces -- while illustrating them with moving origami controlled by his magic string instrument, which nobody identifies by name, but I determined it to be a shamisen.
Little does he know how much truth there is to his stories, until the day he neglects his mom's rule to come home by nightfall. The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, once again playing a main villain in a family feature) is Sariatu's father and can now detect Kubo. The king and his identical other two daughters (both Rooney Mara) will stop at nothing to bring Kubo into their celestial kingdom, which pretty much requires that they blind him and make him learn to enjoy killing Earth mortals.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
The Boxtrolls (2014)
This must be the first time I've taken Netflix's up-front suggestion for movie streaming. Now I've finally seen all the most recent Best Animated Feature nominees, ending with the one least widely welcome on the list. Personally, I can't blame the Academy for passing over the commercialism of The Lego Movie, but I'll have to check out The Book of Life for another possible replacement.
The Boxtrolls wastes no time (which there's never much of in stop-action) establishing a conflict: In a British town circa 1900, few humans have any love for the trolls who live underground, wear old cardboard boxes, and steal various objects off the street at night -- mostly inexpensive or even trashed. When loutish Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley gone Cockney) reports that the Boxtrolls have abducted a baby, supposedly for food, he persuades the mayor to authorize him and his three assistants to annihilate the menace by any means necessary. Ten years later, the former baby, dubbed "Eggs" due to his box, makes contact with a curfew-defying girl around the same age -- the mayor's daughter. Together they strive to dispel the false rumors about Boxtrolls, but Snatcher has his lordly ambitions as well as his influence....
The Boxtrolls wastes no time (which there's never much of in stop-action) establishing a conflict: In a British town circa 1900, few humans have any love for the trolls who live underground, wear old cardboard boxes, and steal various objects off the street at night -- mostly inexpensive or even trashed. When loutish Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley gone Cockney) reports that the Boxtrolls have abducted a baby, supposedly for food, he persuades the mayor to authorize him and his three assistants to annihilate the menace by any means necessary. Ten years later, the former baby, dubbed "Eggs" due to his box, makes contact with a curfew-defying girl around the same age -- the mayor's daughter. Together they strive to dispel the false rumors about Boxtrolls, but Snatcher has his lordly ambitions as well as his influence....
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