Animation's greatest trick is making you forget it has any tricks at all: Grave of the Fireflies breaks you with pencil and paint in ways live action rarely manages. From Studio Ghibli's luminous worlds to darker, stranger work like Perfect Blue, the form earns every ounce of serious attention it gets. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive with a straightforward pitch and deliver more or less what they promise, and then there are films like Mad God. Phil Tippett's feature debut as director is something else entirely: a stop-motion nightmare three decades in the making, resurrected from a shelved
Rating: 3.0★
There are certain corners of the Disney back catalogue that feel less like films and more like shared memories, and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh sits comfortably near the top of that list. The bear of very little brain first appeared in A.A. Milne's 1926
Rating: 3.5★
There are few animated franchises that carry as much cultural weight as Toy Story. When Pixar released the original film in 1995, it did not merely launch a series, it reshaped the entire landscape of feature animation. The three films that followed (and the various shorts, such as Toy Story
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with watching a film get quietly buried at the box office, especially when that film carries the weight of one of the most beloved fictional worlds ever committed to paper. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim arrived
Rating: 2.0★
Mauritius is not a country you typically associate with feature animation. The island nation has built a modest but real screen presence over the years, with productions like Tany Mena offering a glimpse of local filmmaking ambition, yet a fully animated family film aimed squarely at the global streaming market
Rating: 2.5★
There are certain films that loom large in the collective memory simply by virtue of existing at the right moment in history, and Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a fairly textbook example. Based on the centuries-old fairy tale made famous by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm,
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular breed of low-budget independent animation that arrives with almost no fanfare, earns its reputation entirely by word of mouth, and ends up outlasting films that cost a hundred times more to make. On-Gaku: Our Sound is squarely in that company. Based on Hiroyuki Ohashi&
Rating: 3.0★
By 1950, Walt Disney Productions was in a complicated position. The studio had spent much of the 1940s producing package films, anthology features stitched together from shorter segments, largely as a financial necessity born out of the Second World War disrupting overseas markets. Features like Dumbo had shown the studio
Rating: 2.0★
There are franchises that have earned their place in the cultural furniture, and then there are franchises that have simply refused to leave the room. Transformers belongs firmly in the second category. What began as a Hasbro toy line in 1984, quickly spun into a Saturday morning cartoon series that
Rating: 3.0★
Animation from outside the Hollywood and major European studio circuits has had something of a quiet renaissance over the past decade or so, with films like Josep and No Dogs or Italians Allowed demonstrating that hand-crafted, personal animation can carry real emotional weight without the backing of a nine-
Rating: 3.0★
Some film properties feel like they have no business working as feature-length cinema. The Trolls, those wide-eyed, neon-haired plastic dolls originally designed by Danish woodcutter Thomas Dam in 1959, spent decades as a toy-shelf curiosity and occasional cultural shorthand for gaudy kitsch. By the time DreamWorks
Rating: 3.0★
February 1939 marked one of the most desperate mass movements of people in modern European history. As Franco's Nationalist forces closed in on the last Republican strongholds in Catalonia, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Spanish civilians and soldiers crossed the Pyrenees into France in a matter
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