Inside Out (2015) ***/*****

Pixar’s movies have a great reputation for putting just as much focus on character and emotion as they do comedy or adventure, which generally allows them to be a cut above the other animated features that hit the multiplexes. Their characters are deep, three-dimensional, and they develop over the course of the film. Their plots spring out of character, rather than the other way around. The newest movie to come from the studio, Inside Out, adheres to these unwritten rules. This time around, however, the focus on character is so great that a little bit of tunnel vision appears to take place, and the film suffers as a result. Here, the internal life of the protagonist is all that the filmmakers seem to be concerned with, so things like story and humor fall by the wayside to the point where you start to wonder if the studio as a whole isn’t starting to split into two extreme approaches—making either vapid sequels to their big hits like Cars 2 or Monsters University, or original works like this that are going to become increasingly dour to the point where you can’t imagine kids enjoying them at all.

Of course, that sort of defeatism is definitely a reactionary response to the fact that Pixar hit a high with the back-to-back-to-back release of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up that they’re likely never going to be able to live up to again, and there’s a certain disappointment that always comes from the realization that any magic in the world isn’t going to be able to stay. In truth, Inside Out is a perfectly acceptable animated movie that wouldn’t be viewed as a disappointment if it came from any other studio. It tells the story of a young girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) whose young life reaches a crisis point when her very acceptable life in Minnesota is interrupted by a sudden move to San Fransisco, which isn’t a burg that gels too well with her sensibilities. Well, that’s half of the story. 

Cinderella (2015) ****/*****

What reason would Disney have for making this live action version of the classic Cinderella story, when they’ve already got a beloved animated version of the tale in their catalog that pretty much everyone considers to be a classic? Likely the reason is that live action versions of fairy tale stories are having a moment right now, so chances are a live action Cinderella is going to make them a ton of money. And, really, when a movie has a talent as strong as Kenneth Branagh in the director’s chair and he’s being backed by a boatload of Disney money, aren’t we going to want to see what he comes up with anyway, even if he’s telling a story we’ve already heard? You don’t just bring in Branagh to make an empty cash grab.

It should be noted that you very much have seen this story before though. What Branagh and his screenwriter, Chris Weitz, have come up with is a dutiful and faithful adaptation of the classic Disney interpretation of the story, just tweaked a little bit to accommodate the switch from animation to live action. Are there singing mice in this movie? No, but Cinderella does hang out with a posse of mice that are not quite anthropomorphized, but certainly personified, and far more intelligent than any group of mice that have ever existed in the real world. The basic story that you’re used to is here, beat for beat, with just a little bit more care taken here or there to ground things in a slightly less heightened, but still fairytale reality, and with a bit more emphasis put on the backstories and motivations of all the main players. If you were expecting something more fresh, that might come as a disappointment, but most people will likely greet this film as comfort food rather than stale bread—Disney’s take on this particular fairy tale is a pretty great one, after all.

Paddington (2015) ****/*****

Sometimes the people who make “family films” forget that they’re supposed to be making something that the whole family can enjoy, and they fall into the trap of thinking that making little kids laugh is their only job. There’s also the mistaken notion that making little kids laugh is a simple matter of being loud and silly, and as long as you slip a few “adult” jokes into the abrasiveness in order to appease the parents who have been dragged to the theater, you’ve done your job. That’s lazy. Making movies that appeal to people of all ages in a legitimate way is possible, it’s just hard to do. It takes engaging storytelling, the creation of memorable characters, and humor that’s clever without being alienating and broad without being obnoxious. That’s what we’re dealing with here. When, in the first five minutes of Paddington, you’ve already been made to care about a couple of talking bears and you’ve already had a good belly laugh, you know that you’re in capable hands.

Paddington tells the story of the title character (who’s voiced by Ben Whishaw), an orphaned young bear from “Darkest Peru” who travels to London thanks to a promise a British explorer made his aunt and uncle long ago that, if they should ever find themselves in London, they would receive a warm welcome. You see, despite the fact that they are very much bears, Paddington and his family are a special kind of talking bears, who seem to be just as cultured and intelligent as humans. Why this is so is never really explained, which is one of the best things about the movie. Instead of coming up with a reason for why bears can talk, Paddington just assumes that the world is an interesting and magical enough place that it’s possible. Setting that kind of tone works great for drawing kids in and getting them excited about the possibilities a movie is putting before them, and it sets the stage perfectly for Paddington’s rocky road toward assimilating himself within the new human family he meets in London. You see, even when bears are smart, they still tend to break a lot of stuff.

Short Round: Big Hero 6 (2014) ***/*****

Disney Animation’s recent delving into video game-themed adventure, Wreck-It Ralph, proved that they’re a studio who could step outside of their princess roots and make animated movies that appeal to both boys and girls alike. And Marvel, the super hero factory who they teamed up with to make this movie, Big Hero 6, are the last people who need to have their credentials once again listed. In theory, Big Hero 6 looked like it represented the perfect marriage of content and creators—a surefire home run if there ever was one. In practice, however, it doesn’t quite manage to get there. If we’re going to stick with baseball metaphors, we’ll call it a solid double.

Big Hero 6 is a loosely adapted big screen version of an original Marvel comic that told the tale of the forming of a team of Japanese superheroes. This being mainstream Hollywood moviemaking though, we’re not getting the stories of Japanese-speaking people this time around. Instead, the film has created the city of San Fransokyo as it’s setting—an immersive metropolis that mixes San Francisco with Asian iconography and then pumps itself full of visual steroids. The story told is that of a troubled young genius named Hiro (Ryan Potter) and his loyal and lovable robot Baymax (Scott Adsit), who outfit a team of science-obsessed grad students with high tech weaponry in an effort to solve the mystery around and avenge the death of Hiro’s older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), and inadvertently create the world’s newest team of superheroes in the process.

Big Hero 6 is a solid film, the kind that is likely to be enjoyed quite a bit by children, but, in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table that would allow it to stand out from the rest of the animated pack. It’s frequently amusing, but never legitimately funny. It’s packed full of action, but it’s never legitimately thrilling. And, most of all, the things that it does manage to do well are things that too closely resemble aspects of other movies that already did them better. The Iron Giant did the boy and his robot story better. The Incredibles did animated superhero adventure better. Things like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or ParaNorman told the story of the sensitive and intellectual outsider better. Big Hero 6 never makes any major missteps, but in a world that’s so inundated with great animated family films as well as great superhero adventure movies, it needed to find a more unique angle to attack these storytelling forms from in order to not feel like such an also-ran. Baymax is cuddly and cute, but not enough to support an entire feature.

Muppets Most Wanted (2014) ***/*****

Back in the day when Jim Henson and company were making Muppet movies, the stories of each film often had little or nothing to do with one another. Co-writer/director James Bobin’s new film, Muppets Most Wanted, is very explicitly a direct sequel to his 2011 hit, The Muppets, though—so much so that it opens immediately after The Muppets calls cut on its final scene, and then it goes straight into a musical number about how audiences liked The Muppets so much that the studio has now ordered them to do a sequel. At first this approach seemed to be a welcoming one for those of us who were fans of the Muppets’ return to the big screen from a few years ago, but after the opening song starts making Meta jokes about how the sequel is never quite as good as the original, the feeling that maybe this movie isn’t going to be able to live up to expectations starts creeping in pretty quickly.

The story this time around is kind of a heist film, kind of a road trip movie, and kind of a prison break flick. The basic gist is that a duo of evildoers played by Ricky Gervais and a Kermit the Frog lookalike named Constantine have hatched a plan to steal the Crown Jewels and to frame the Muppets for the crime. The particulars of the plan involve replacing Kermit with Constantine in the performing troupe, leaving Kermit to rot away in a Russian gulag, hitching along with the gang on a tour of Europe that will allow them to steal a series of priceless art pieces that have a series of items necessary for the acquiring of the Crown Jewels hidden in them (National Treasure style), and then eventually ending the tour in London, where the climactic robbery will take place. That description kind of makes the film sound more intense and involved than it really is though. At its heart, Muppets Most Wanted is still just a silly movie where the Muppets and a handful of human guest stars engage themselves in absurdist hijinx. You know, for kids.

The Lego Movie (2014) ****/*****

At this point in their joint careers, co-writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller seem to have made taking on projects that sound utterly unwatchable on paper their specialty. I say this because every movie they’ve made so far (except for their sequel) has sounded absolutely awful to me going in, and then they all end up being surprisingly delightful experiences nonetheless. With Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs they made a children’s movie with a ridiculous premise about a world that rained food something that adults could enjoy. With 21 Jump Street they turned a remake of a cheesy TV show from the 80s into the funniest comedy of its year—without going the lazy route of embracing cheese and making it a parody. And now, with The Lego Movie, they’ve taken what is essentially a 100 minute commercial for a line of children’s toys and turned it into the most entertaining and affecting animated family film to come out of Hollywood since at least Rango.

What exactly does a movie about little plastic building blocks look like? Lord and Miller have turned the various Lego play sets that have been sitting on toy store shelves for years into dense, expansive worlds, and have populated them with little plastic people who have been brought to life with some kind of souped up and CG-assisted stop-motion animation aesthetic. The living mini-figures include a wide array of characters, from generic everyday folk to Lego’s various licensed characters like Batman, Gandalf, and Milhouse Van Houten. Given the fact that Lego’s product line contains play sets for modern cities, medieval castles, old west towns, pirate ships, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and who knows what else, you’d think that a movie that tries to cram in as much of the company’s commercial offerings as possible would be a bloated mess, but under the pen of Lord and Miller, The Lego Movie not only creates a mythology that allows all of these different set pieces to co-exist alongside of each other, it also manages to tell a pretty effective adventure tale.

Frankenweenie (2012) ***/*****

Frankenweenie started out as a short film that Tim Burton made for Disney in 1984. Though this live action tale of a young boy resurrecting his dead dog worked as a good indication of the director’s slightly askew view of the world, it proved to be too morbid and creepifying for Disney’s sensibilities at the time, and it led to Burton being fired. That’s not the end of the story though. Many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Burton films have earned for Disney later, the studio has decided to give the director another chance to revisit the Frankenweenie concept, this time as a feature length animated film.

The story here is fairly simple: Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) isn’t your typical child. He spends most of his time making monster movies in his attic with his loyal canine pal Sparky, and he doesn’t have many friends of his own species. That’s not really a problem though, because the kid seems pretty content living in his own world and hanging out with his dog. Things turn tragic though, when a run-in with an automobile ends Sparky’s life prematurely and some lessons in science class about lightning and the nervous system give Victor the idea that he might be able to bring his best friend back to life. Miraculously, the experiment works, but subsequent meddling from one of Victor’s classmates, Edgar ‘E’ Gore (Atticus Schaffer), leads to the project spinning out of control. Turns out, the act of reanimating corpses is not without its complications, and it’s not always the best idea to play God.

ParaNorman (2012) ****/*****

Norman isn’t exactly the coolest kid in his school. His hair sticks up, his ears stick out, and everybody thinks that he’s kind of a weirdo. But you’d probably come off as being a weirdo too if you were the only one in town who could see and talk to all of the ghosts that haunt the place. When Norman isn’t watching horror movies with his dead grandmother, he’s playing in the yard with his friend’s dead dog, or having public freak outs due to visions of ancient evils and witch’s curses. Heck, the kid’s behavior is so erratic that even his parents are getting impatient with him. But there’s something to be said for those witchy visions. It turns out the whole town has been cursed, and if Norman can’t figure out how to put a stop to it, then the dead will rise from their graves and it’s going to be hell on Earth. If only he wasn’t such a spastic dork, maybe he could get somebody to give him a hand.

ParaNorman is the second feature film from stop-motion animation studio Laika, and though I’ve yet to see their first, Coraline, the level of the artistry on display here has convinced me that I need to fix that as soon as possible. ParaNorman, quite simply, is a breathtaking example of a strong artistic vision surviving from concept to execution. The town of Blithe Hollow that has been created for this film is so well realized, so expansive, and so lived in, that it’s an absolute wonder to behold. And the same goes for all of the creatures, living or otherwise, that inhabit it. There’s something so delightful about how asymmetrical the design of everything in this film is. All of the characters, all of the sets, they look hand-crafted and charming, but are still unmistakably the work of immensely talented individuals. The design sense, and the stop-motion technique in general, goes such a long way toward separating this film from the usual crop of photo-real, artificially exact, computer generated animation that come out these days. It makes ParaNorman stand out from the crowd; kind of like its protagonist.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012) ***/*****

If you’ve seen Chicken Run or any of the Wallace and Gromit stuff, then you probably have a good idea of what to expect from The Pirates! Band of Misfits. But, if not, expect a family film that feels like a throwback to movies of the past and that stands out like a sore thumb when placed next to recent kiddie fare. Band of Misfits doesn’t look like the slick, CG movies that today’s kids are used to seeing. And it relies on dry presentations of absurdity and historical references to give the adults in the audience things to smirk at, not the hidden raunch that modern family films often resort to. Given how alien things like claymation, dry humor, and references to scientific texts must feel to modern film audiences, I’m left wondering who this film is for. Other than some surface level slapstick, I could see everything this movie has to offer flying over not just the kids in the audience’s heads, but the heads of their parents as well.

No, Band of Misfits might be the kind of film that plays best to a hip, college-aged audience. To the sort of people who pick up on jokes about Charles Darwin, but are still happy to go to the theater and see a movie that’s supposed to be for kids. If that sounds like the sort of demographic you fall into, then you could do a lot worse when it comes to afternoon diversions than The Pirates! Band of Misfits. But, if that doesn’t sound like your sort of thing, stay far away.

Mirror Mirror (2012) **/*****

The big thing that‘s going to separate Mirror Mirror from other tellings of the Snow White story is that it’s so visually interesting. In fact, that’s pretty much the first thing everyone always notices about Tarsem Singh’s (The Cell, The Fall) movies. They’re full of strange imagery and intricate production design, and you can really lose yourself while taking in all the imagery. For about ten minutes. Then you start wanting things like memorable characters or an engaging story to creep into the production as well. And, unfortunately, I’ve yet to see Singh paired up with material that accomplishes this.

Seeing as Mirror Mirror is little more than a kitschy re-telling of the Snow White fable that seldom takes itself seriously, this isn’t going to be the film that makes me turn the corner on the guy as a director, either. What this movie seems to strive to be is a safe for kids adventure that adults can smirk along with because of its quirky sense of humor and self-aware references. But what it ends up being is a boring, self-satisfied chore that is occasionally interesting to look at. If I wanted to watch something like that, I'd probably just rent Shrek.

Hugo (2011) ***/*****

Hugo’s opening goes on for quite a while without giving us any dialogue at all. Most of the first fifteen minutes is just director Martin Scorsese’s camera swooping through the Parisian train station where most of the movie takes place, rocketing us down the long platforms, through the bustling crowds of people, and behind the walls and into the clockworks of the old building where our protagonist Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives. It’s pretty much pure visual porn sprinkled with tiny setup moments that give us hints at who the station’s inhabitants are and what their daily routines look like. Scorsese must have been pretty confident that what he created was stunning in order to stick this long with a wordless approach to storytelling. Not giving us any opening narration, action, or dialogue was a huge risk. But Scorsese was right, and it paid off. This world that he has created is so immersive, exploring it is so enthralling, that I could have watched Hugo go about his business wordlessly for quite a while before I got bored. The fairytale version of Paris in winter that this film creates is a world that I want to live in so desperately that I found myself pricing Christmas trips to the city on my way out of the theater. In visuals, setting, and mood, Hugo soars.

The Muppets (2011) ****/*****

Jim Henson’s legendary creations, the Muppets, were crafted from one part felt, one part google-eyes, and one part pixie dust. For a couple of decades they were the rulers of family entertainment, with their madcap dedication to progressive humor and extravagant song and dance numbers leading to them being featured prominently on both television and in movies. To this day they are pop culture icons. Show a kid a picture of Kermit the Frog or Miss Piggy and they will know exactly what they’re looking at. But something strange has happened in the last decade or so. The Muppets have all but disappeared. The last movie they had in the theaters was 1999’s Muppets From Space, and other than a couple one-off specials they’ve had no presence on TV either. It begs the question, in this age of video games, mobile computing devices, and the Internet, does anybody care about the Muppets anymore?

This new film, written by Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segal and Nicholas Stoller, and directed by The Flight of the Conchords’ James Bobin, doesn’t just test out whether or not there is still a place for the Muppets in this world, it makes a very strong case that there is. From pretty much the first frame, this movie just feels right; like the spirit of The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie has been recaptured, perhaps for the first time ever. And, with respect to legends of family entertainment like Henson and Frank Oz, this is probably the Muppet creative team with the strongest comedic sensibilities ever. There is certainly something to be said for the nostalgic magic of watching The Muppet Movie, but The Muppets is the funniest that felt has ever been. And by the time you get through the first big music number, “Life’s a Happy Song”, any bad memories of the non-funny, non-singing and dancing atrocity that was Muppets From Space will be the furthest thing from your mind. The Muppets doesn’t just introduce Jim Henson’s creations to a new generation, it sees Kermit and friends scooping a new generation up in their arms and sweeping them along on a joyous ride.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) ****/*****

A lot of people compared Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 to a camping trip from hell. The characters were lost, scared, without a plan, and spent most of the film sitting around in a tent and sniping at each other. Personally, I liked Part 1, and thought it worked great as a tension-building precursor to a big finale. But whether you agree with that or not doesn’t really matter; everyone should like Part 2. This second half of The Deathly Hallows is the raging yang to the first half’s sober yin. We get an opening scene full of dialogue to help us reconnect with the characters and remember the stakes, but from that point to the film’s epilogue we’re off and running, never stopping to catch our breath. We’re breaking into banks, riding dragons, fighting battles, solving mysteries, dying deaths, and watching everything around us explode. Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is the grand finale to an eight-part series of films; it had a lot to accomplish in order to be satisfying. It had to be huge, it had to give all the important characters moments to shine, and it had to create appropriate closure for the deep relationships we’ve built with them over time. Aren’t we lucky then, that instead of dropping the ball, director David Yates and his cadre of collaborators picked it up and ran with it? Err, but maybe not ball… snitch.

Cars 2 (2011) **/*****

I wasn’t one of the early members of the Cult of Pixar. I had seen the first two Toy Story movies and liked them well enough, but if they were the best that the studio had to offer, then I didn’t get what all of the hype was regarding the Pixar mystique. That changed when I heard that Brad Bird was directing The Incredibles, his name and the super hero subject matter got me to check a Pixar movie out when I had previously avoided things like Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, and Cars. I really liked The Incredibles, and after that the studio went on to make Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up; what I consider to be maybe the best run of three films a studio has produced in film history. So it happened, I’m now a Pixar convert. And because I’m such a fan of their creative power, I find myself sort of disturbed when they act like every other movie studio out there and make sequels, even if I am sort of a fan of the Toy Story franchise. I was reticent about Cars 2 for a couple of reasons, firstly because of its status as a perhaps cynically and financially motivated sequel, and secondly because the original was part of that more kiddy looking era of Pixar films that I’ve been too chicken to delve into after falling so deeply in love with the mature, layered splendor of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up. I tell you all of this so that you’re aware of how much salt to take my review with. This is a part 2, but I haven’t seen the original. This is a movie that I wasn’t very excited about seeing, because I saw it as a threat to my image of Pixar as an untouchable creator of modern classics. So you might not want to believe me when I say that I absolutely hated the experience of sitting through Cars 2. You might have to venture into the movie theater and experience all of the stupidity for yourself.

Rango (2011) ****/*****

To hear it explained in a couple sentences or less, it would seem like Rango was a pretty typical entry into the modern, computer animated movie about talking animals genre. It tells the tale of a pet chameleon who finds himself separated from his owners and alone in the desert. He wanders into a small town of other animals, gets made their sheriff, and embarks on an adventure to save the town’s water supply. In addition to sounding like it could fit anywhere in the DreamWorks or Pixar catalogue, Rango also has a lot in common with the archetypical western. It tells the story of a stranger who comes to town, runs afoul of the criminal element, and ends up changing the lives of the townsfolk for the better. But this isn’t a movie that’s about its story. Rango is a film that’s about cultivating a unique personality. It’s about mood, character, and quirkiness. It has an interesting look, off the wall characters, and quick, clever dialogue. Despite being built on a solid, standard structure, the thing that you remember most after seeing Rango is that it was really weird. Often delightfully so.

Toy Story 3 (2010) ****/*****

Toy Story 3 cold opens on the top of a moving train.  Woody is in a struggle with the Potato Heads back in the old west.  It’s the type of scene that calls back to the opening of an Indiana Jones movie.  Before things end up settled there’s laser beams, jet packs, pig shaped space ships, and gigantic explosions.  The sorts of things that when placed beside each other might seem like they were part of some sort of fever dream, some sort of Gilliam-esque visual collage of insanity.  Before you’re able to actually start theorizing that Terry Gilliam might have taken over a Pixar franchise, however, you realize that all of this action is being played out inside the imagination of Andy, the kid from the first two films.  The real scene is just a couple of inanimate, plastic objects being thrown around on a bedroom floor.  And that’s what the Toy Story franchise has that sets it apart from everything else out there, it’s ability to take you back to your beginnings and let you see things through the eyes of a child.  It reminds you of those days in your youth when beds substituted in for mountains, carpet for oceans.  GI Joe battled right alongside Thundercats even though one was a four-inch tall human and the other a nine-inch tall space-cat.  They knocked down Lincoln Log cabins and used matchbox cars as super powered roller skates.  These things can only make sense to little kids.  If a little kid tried to explain the stuff going on in his imagination to you right now you would respond with a fatigued “yeah, yeah” pat the kid on the head, and tell them to move along.  Toy Story, on the other hand, is able to somehow make you listen to these stories with interest; it makes you care about them.  It’s able to take you away from whatever your real world concerns are for two hours and sweep you up into some sort of ludicrous adventure that’s just supposed to be kid’s stuff.  And while the formula is starting to wear pretty thin at this point, Toy Story 3 is made with just as much care and skill as the first two films in the series and is well worth your time.

The Karate Kid (2010) ***/*****

What was your reaction when you heard that Will Smith was trying to put together a Karate Kid remake starring his son?  Did you even hear about this before the film started getting advertised or is that the sort of thing that only film obsessed weirdos become privy to early on?  My reaction was one of clear derision.  Remaking The Karate Kid?  Unnecessary, blasphemous even.  Using it as a vehicle to launch your son’s movie career?  Egoist, nepotistic, how could anyone get behind this?  For a generation of people my age and a little older The Karate Kid is an essential part of the DNA of our childhoods.  Sure maybe it comes across as a little hokey, a little sentimental, and idealist to modern eyes, but is it dated?  Did it need to be remade?  I’m sure the original is a film that looked a little hokey and lame to adult eyes all the way back in 1984, but kids loved it.  Does this new take on the original film’s proceedings offer a better avenue into modern children’s hearts than sitting them down with a DVD copy of the original would?  I don’t think so.  As a matter of fact, after viewing this 2010 Karate Kid, I think modern kids would still be more into a viewing of the first film.  That’s not to say that this new The Karate Kid is a bad piece of filmmaking when looked at on it’s own, however.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) ***/*****

When it was announced that Tim Burton’s next project was going to be a live action version of Alice in Wonderland, I’m sure it came as a surprise to no one.  The surreal, mind bending scenery as described by the original Lewis Carroll story and as depicted in the Disney cartoon that this works as a pseudo sequel to seem right in Burton’s visually extravagant wheelhouse.  The fact that he would re-team with long time acting staple Johnny Depp to fill the role of the mischievous Mad Hatter seemed to be a no brainer.  As a matter of fact, it almost feels like we’ve seen Depp play this role before.  Like, a lot.  And thus, we have my first complaint about Burton’s new version of Alice: it feels like we’ve seen it all before.