Tag: animation

REVIEW: Raya and the Last Dragon

Nellie Shih Leave a comment

Raya and the Last Dragon is Disney’s newest film, and it has a lot of firsts for Disney: it is their first film to be inspired by Southeast Asian culture, it has a unique score, and it even looks and feels like a video game at times. But, despite these firsts, the film is quintessentially Disney. It features goofy side characters and has some corny dialogue, and its overall message makes it a Disney film at heart. The titular heroine, Raya, seeks the last dragon, who she hopes will vanquish the menacing Druun monsters that have been ravaging her home. Raya belongs to one of five tribes that had previously been united under the land of Kumandra, but were divided by the arrival of the Druun. Raya’s adventures take her through Kumandra, where she witnesses the widespread effects of the very monsters that have been devastating her own home.

The overall message of the film can probably be ascertained by this premise alone; audiences have a pretty good idea of what lesson the characters will learn early on in the film. As the runtime is just under two hours, the story and Raya’s development feel very simple. Perhaps the film could have focused exclusively on Raya and her foil introducing a kind of complexity and grey area Disney does not explore as often. That being said, the film is not overly predictable, nor does lack redeemable qualities.

Most of the film’s strengths are technical. The film features a beautiful soundtrack, with whimsical themes for the fantastical moments, and also lively themes to accompany the thrilling action sequences. It’s amazing to see how much Disney’s animation has evolved over the years as this film showcases some of Disney’s most exciting fight scenes to date. There is a battle near the end of the film that is flawless – Raya’s rage comes across so strongly just from the lead-up, locking audiences in for the actual fight.

Whenever Disney is praised for their diversity, it can always be called into question. The film’s creators took great care to travel to Southeast Asia as well as hire cultural consultants, however the majority of the principal voice cast is East Asian. East Asian roles in film are already minimal, but there are even fewer opportunities for Southeast Asian actors. Though the film celebrates Southeast Asian culture, the casting can come across as a misstep. The film is streaming on Disney+, which is not currently available in Southeast Asia. However, the voice of Raya, Kelly Marie Tran, is the first actress of Southeast Asian descent to voice a lead role in an animated Disney movie. Tran was harassed online by Star Wars fans following her breakthrough role in The Last Jedi, only to be written to the side in the trilogy’s conclusion. Despite this, Tran has persevered, and her determination makes her the perfect fit for the role of Raya.

Raya and the Last Dragon is imperfect, but it is a worthy film that teaches trust and forgiveness to kids in the most Disney way possible.

REVIEW: Wolfwalkers

Nellie Shih 5 Comments

There is a certain kind of beauty to animated films, especially hand-drawn ones. The world-building is always extremely extensive, as they are not restricted to practical effects and sets, and whatever the latest advancement in CGI may be. One animation studio that has excelled in the hand-drawn art department – both in terms of backgrounds and character designs – is Irish studio Cartoon Saloon. They are responsible for films such as The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and The Breadwinner. All of these films are illustrated in a unique, very 2D and flat style, which makes up for its lack of dimension with detail and color palettes. The studio’s art style is reminiscent of what you would find in a children’s book. The studio never fails to create beautifully animated fantasy worlds with fun characters, and their newest film showcases how much the studio’s art style has advanced since 2009.

 

Wolfwalkers is Cartoon Saloon’s newest film, which follows a young girl named Robyn, who has recently moved to Ireland with her father, who has been tasked with wiping out the last pack of wolves. Robyn believes she is capable of helping her father and she feels restricted by the town’s rules and Lord Protector. After sneaking outside of the town walls, she meets Mebh, whose mother is the leader of the pack of wolves. She soon discovers that Mebh is a Wolfwalker, a human who turns into a wolf when she sleeps. The film is directed by Tomm Moore and Ross Steward, and the duo has drawn inspiration from Irish folklore in most of their feature films. Additionally, Wolfwalkers touches on the environment and extinction, and the history of the English invasion of Ireland in the 1600s. The film is set during this time, and addresses the divide between Catholics and Protestants, as well as the history behind how the English worked to rid Ireland of its wolves.

These themes are expressed not only through the story itself and the characters’ motivations – there’s Robyn who is forced to be a scullery maid by her protective father who fears the Lord Protector, all contrasted by the wild and carefree Mebh – but also through the animation. As Robyn’s world becomes more intertwined with Mebh’s, her character design evolves to resemble that of Mebh and the wolves. The character design of the townspeople is very clean and precise. On the other hand, Mebh and the wolves are designed to be more sketch-like, as the initial sketches are visible underneath outlines. The film represents magic as it has in the studio’s past films, with beautiful sequences illuminated by more abstract figures.

I would say more about the story, but due to the nature of a film that geared towards kids, I would cross into spoiler territory very quickly. However, I will say that although this is a film for kids, it’s still a beautifully animated movie that addresses themes of family that can be appreciated by audiences of all ages. The film has been well-received by critics, and I’m excited to see how it will perform during awards season.

 

Wolfwalkers is now streaming on Apple TV+.

PREVIEW: Wolfwalkers

Nellie Shih Leave a comment

Wolfwalkers is a new animated film by the studio that produced The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and The Breadwinner. The recent release follows a young hunter who comes to Ireland with her father to wipe out the last pack of demonic and evil wolves. However, the young girl saves a wild native girl who introduces her to the world of the Wolfwalkers, the very thing she and her father are sworn to destroy.

I have seen both Song of the Sea and The Breadwinner, and I love the studio’s art style. It’s been a while since I watched The Breadwinner, but I recently saw Song of the Sea and I loved the attention to the backgrounds in addition to the character designs in the film. The art is reminiscent of what you would find in a children’s picture book. From just the trailer, I’m glad to see the art in Wolfwalkers is in the same style and as beautiful as always, and I’m really looking forward to watching the film!

Wolfwalkers is now streaming on Apple TV.

REVIEW: Avatar the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra

Nellie Shih 2 Comments

Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra both explore a world created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko in which some individuals possess the ability to “bend” one of four elements: water, earth, fire, or air. The two animated series follow Aang and Korra, two incarnations of the Avatar, whose duty is to maintain balance in the world and act as a bridge between the human and spirit worlds. The Avatar has the ability to bend all four elements, and is reincarnated into a new body each time they die.

 

Avatar was added to Netflix in May, and despite it being a kids’ show that aired from 2005-2008, it quickly made its way into Netflix’s top 10 list where it stayed for 61 days, breaking the record previously held by Ozark (57 days). I didn’t watch Avatar when it first aired, but when I watched it this summer, I loved it. I think what makes Avatar so successful is that even though it’s intended for a younger audience, it doesn’t shy away from serious topics, which expands the target audience. The show addresses themes from gender discrimination to war, imperialism, and genocide. Another way the show is successful is in how it’s structured: it’s episodic, so the episodes can stand alone, but they all contribute to the overall plot. This makes the show more exciting, as each episode tells its own story.

 

Not only does Avatar have a great plot, it also has unique and lovable characters. Even the side characters have their own personalities and motivations. Since Avatar is a kids’ show, the creators did not show any onscreen deaths, and they were able to work this as a character trait into the main protagonist, Aang. Aang is a monk and also twelve years old, and refuses to kill the man who was responsible for the genocide of his people. This man, Fire Lord Ozai, is the main antagonist of the show, and when he and Aang finally face each other, the conclusion is unexpected but original, and overall very satisfying. One very popular character is the son of the Fire Lord, Prince Zuko. I believe that I can reasonably claim most people that watch the show love Zuko. He’s essentially Kylo Ren and Jaime Lannister, but actually written well, and with motivations that actually make sense.

 

Recently, there have been plans to develop Avatar into a live-action series on Netflix. However, the original creators of the show, DiMartino and Konietzko, both announced they would be leaving the show. They stated that Netflix had a vision to make the show more mature, but they still wanted the show to be for kids. I initially was 100% on the creators’ side, but after watching Korra, I’m intrigued by what a more mature Avatar show would look like.

 

The Legend of Korra is intended for a more mature audience – for the kids who watched Avatar and then grew up. The show’s villains essentially represent communism, theocracy, anarchy, and facism – and it gets pretty dark. In season 4, Korra has PTSD and spends a good part of the season in recovery, and her character isn’t the same as season 1. It’s quite sad that Korra started off as a cocky and fun-loving young woman, but in order to be humbled she had to process a great deal of trauma. The creators of the show have proved that a more mature story can successfully take place in the world of Avatar and Korra, and it’d be interesting to see Netflix’s spin on an already iconic story. However, if Netflix is going on the Riverdale-maturity route, then I completely understand why the creators chose to leave. I also understand the creators’ frustration with a lack of creative freedom, as there are reports that Nickelodeon gave the creators a really difficult time during the production of Korra – not only because she is a female Avatar, but also because she is a woman of color. The ending of season 1 is a little rushed, and the beginning of season 2 is rather slow, but Nickelodeon initially only gave the creators one season, and greenlit season 2 halfway through the airing of season 1. Then, seasons 3 and 4 – the strongest seasons of the show – weren’t aired at all and were uploaded to Nickelodeon’s online streaming service instead.

 

Overall, Korra gets a lot of hate, but I think you can be understanding of the circumstances surrounding seasons 1 and 2. Both seasons are still very good, and season 3 is on the same level as Avatar. I’m interested in seeing what’ll become of the live action show as the creators did say some individuals they hired themselves have stayed on the show. But for the time being, watch Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra on Netflix!

REVIEW: 2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animation.

niezi Leave a comment
List:
Hair Love – Matthew A. Cherry and Karen Rupert Toliver
Dcera (Daughter) – Daria Kashcheeva
Memorable – Bruno Collet and Jean-François Le Corre
Sister – Siqi Song
Kitbull – Rosana Sullivan and Kathryn Hendrickson

The Bird and the Whale (Highly Commended)
Henrietta Bulkowski (Highly Commended)
Hors Piste (Highly Commended)
Maestro (Highly Commended)

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Hair Love, Dcera, Memorable, Sister, and Kitbull are contenders for this year’s Oscar nominated shorts in animation, and The Bird and the Whale, Henrietta Bulkowski, Hors Piste, and Maestro are highly commended films also playing at Michigan Theater. Like every year, the style and media of the films differ tremendously, each with its own merits that make it an interesting watch.

The series opens up with Hair Love, a film that’s full of pastels and backgrounds that look like it’s been coloured in with pencil crayons. It’s heartwarming and sweet, and although it’s not as visually rich as some of the other shorts, the pacing in its storytelling is perfect. A father does his daughter’s hair for the first time with a little encouragement – an interaction that develops their relationship in the absence of her mother.

Although Hair Love was produced by entertainment giant Sony Pictures, it feels pretty organic. People need people, and the film does a good job capturing that spirit when the father and daughter bond and rely on each other when their family fabric is pulled and twisted by the lack of her mother’s presence.

Daughter (Dcera) has the momentum and framing of motion picture cinematography. The characters look imperfect, textured puppets with painterly faces, an expressiveness teased out with an unflinching gaze. The camerawork, jarring and claustrophobic, frames the tenuous relationship between father and daughter. Despite the closeness of the camera, there is an endless distance between the two, and the short film takes us to a quiet hospital room to reflect on the course of their relationship and the moments lost so long ago.

Daughter is beautiful and sad. The yearning for love and comfort is pinned delicately in scenes like butterfly taxidermy. There is no dialogue, but Daughter doesn’t need any to convey the emotions told through space and time, through elegantly laid out shots and a silence that stretches between father and daughter until a bird flies into the hospital window.

Memorable follows in the same vein using puppets full of post-impressionistic strokes. Louis, a painter, watches the world around him become strange, surreal, and unfamiliar. The film is imbued with the style of van Gogh in many scenes. It turns his perspective into works of art – a cellphone puddles into moving shades of gray, his family members’ faces become molded and abstract, and his wife becomes nothing more than a few brushes of paint. Life around him falls apart until he is left in an empty world with only himself in it.

The soundtrack is also stunning, just as vivid and as bright as the visuals. When the world around Louis disintegrates and the music fades, the sense of loss feels personal and profound. Memorable does a good job building up this moment. First, the details are lost, turning people and objects into broad strokes. Then the meaning is lost, the paint pooling and disappearing.

We see a different kind of loss in the short film Sister, an exploration of things that could’ve been. The film is very tactile; the textures used lends itself to the distinctiveness of the animation. In a scene, the brother pulls on his giant sister’s belly button, the cottony material used to make the puppets twisting like an umbilical cord out of her until he lets go and she deflates like a balloon. Everything looks very soft and sweet, finished with a muted colour palette of black and white and a faded red.

Despite its subject matter, Sister touches very lightly on the political aspect of China’s one child policy, alluding to it in post-film dedication. Instead, it focuses on the emotions of the narrator, the feeling of loss of not just a person, but an entire life missed because of it. Shots of mundane, every-day life are intertwined with surreal imagery to tell the story of Sister.

Kitbull is very cute, cushioning some of the gloomy undertones. It’s not as emotionally heavy-handed as a few of the other shorts nominated, but there’s a sweetness that prevails. The animation is descriptive; each expression and emotion is detailed through the movements of the stray kitten and the pitbull, even though their art is relatively simplistic. The two characters slowly grow closer together, helping each other get by in daily life, whether it’s from boredom or from hurt. It’s not ground-breaking or riveting, but Kitbull is still a solid film with a happy ending. It’s endearing and hopeful – a good note to end on.

Catch the Academy nods before February 9th.

REVIEW: Frozen 2

Nellie Shih Leave a comment

Warning: mild spoilers for both Frozen 2 and Rise of Skywalker. This warning will make sense in context.

While I was buying the tickets for this movie, my friend said “Quick q. So you’re here. I’m here. And our other friend is here. Why aren’t we watching Uncut Gems?” And I found myself asking that question multiple times throughout or viewing of Frozen 2.

Frozen 2 was an unnecessary sequel and it was confusing, and it also had the same plot as Rise of Skywalker: a young woman with mysterious powers that nobody else has and that she cannot properly control finds out her grandfather is evil. She then embarks on a solo quest to understand both who she is and how to fully utilize her powers. A young man, while waiting for the young woman to come back from her solo quest, meets someone of a similar background as him and they talk about being sensitive to/having conversations with strange forces/reindeer – things that do not actually talk back to these individuals (a bit of a reach, I know, but hear me out on this next part). During the solo quest, the young woman crosses treacherous waters to reach an abandoned wreck from a previous film.

Now, you may be wondering, which movie was better? I preferred Star Wars because I found Frozen to be quite confusing at times. I did not understand a lot of basic plot points, which I don’t think is the mark of a good movie. The premise of the film is that Anna and Elsa have to free the Enchanted Forest, but they never made it entirely clear what they were freeing the Forest from. The Forest is closed off from the rest of the world by a force field that is never referred to again, even when the curse (?) is lifted. In fact, certain characters leave the forest area at some points during the movie even though the force field should be keeping them in the forest.

I felt like the movie was, in general, unnecessarily vague. It doesn’t really feel like there’s a point to Anna and Elsa’s quest – they’re chasing after a mysterious voice that only Elsa can hear, and when she stumbles upon the truth about her powers, the truth is kind of irrelevant. The truth about the origin of her powers is not significant at all when she and Anna finally save the day. The movie tries very hard to be mysterious to keep the audience engaged, but they never explain anything, and shrug off any plot holes by trying to distract the audience with Olaf and a cute fire-breathing lizard.

Maybe I thought the first film was leagues better than its sequel because I’m not exactly part of the target audience anymore. Judging by the squeals of joy and high-pitched laughter, the kids in the audience seemed to enjoy the movie. However, I did enjoy some aspects of the film. Elsa’s two new songs, “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself” showcase Idina Menzel’s incredible talent and vocal range, proving she always fails to disappoint Visually, this film has some stunning animation, especially the scene where Elsa is crossing turbulent waters, creating platforms of ice to run across. In another scene, Elsa is exploring a dark cave-like area which is actually supposed to be an ancient river, and her surroundings are black but contrasted with blue and purple geometric ice crystals. This scene was also reminiscent of the scene in The Last Jedi when Rey falls into the pit and goes through a series of visions, but I digress.

Overall, Frozen 2 is not a bad movie. The first one is 100% the better film and there was really no need for a sequel, but if you don’t take it seriously, it can be enjoyable. The music is great as expected, and it is a very visually appealing film. Still, I wouldn’t recommend you rush to the theater right this second to watch it.