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★
The Great Escape, but with chickens. I'll be honest: that is not a bad pitch at all. And in the hands of Aardman, the studio that built its reputation on meticulous, lovingly hand-crafted stop-motion, it should be an absolute home run. The result is good. It
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There are films you watch and films you remember, and The Jungle Book is firmly in the second camp. I couldn't tell you the first time I saw it, because it feels like it was always just there, woven into the furniture of early memory alongside the smell
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There's a quiet melancholy beneath the surface of Lilo & Stitch that I wasn't quite expecting when I first sat down with it, and it's that melancholy that lingers long after the credits roll. Not the big, showy emotional beats that Disney tends to
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That opening shot. The sun cracking over the horizon, the savannah waking up, every creature on earth making its way to Pride Rock while Hans Zimmer and Lebo M fill the speakers with something that feels genuinely ancient. I've seen The Lion King more times than I can
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There are films you remember seeing as a kid where you can still feel the exact sensation of watching them for the first time. Aladdin is one of those. The magic carpet soaring over the clouds, the Cave of Wonders roaring to life, and then Robin Williams opening his mouth
Rating: 3.5★
Some films impress you. A few make you sit up and wonder how on earth they were made at all. The Tale of the Fox is firmly the latter. This is a stop-motion feature very nearly ninety years old, the painstaking puppet work of Władysław Starewicz and his daughter
Rating: 2.5★
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Rating: 4.0★
I have found myself falling hard for Iranian cinema of late. Alongside the Japanese and the Korean, it has become one of the national traditions I most look forward to exploring, and the films keep rewarding the attention. So many of them are built around revolution, or quiet defiance, or
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with a film being bad, and everything to do with realising, somewhere around the halfway point, that you have walked into the middle of someone else's conversation. That is more or less where I found myself
Rating: 2.5★
Taking Beatrix Potter's genteel little watercolours and turning them into a wisecracking, action-scored family romp was always going to be a gamble, and Will Gluck's Peter Rabbit lands somewhere in the awkward middle. Not a disaster, not a triumph. Just a very expensive, very polished
Rating: 3.0★
The best children's stories tend to be complete things. They say what they have to say, and then they stop. That is what made the original The Gruffalo so satisfying when it landed on BBC One that Christmas a couple of years earlier: it was tight, funny, structurally
Rating: 4.0★
If you've had a small child in the house at any point this century, you will know The Gruffalo more or less off by heart, whether you meant to or not. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's picture book is a fixture of British bedtimes, and there&
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