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: 3.5★
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts strip had been running in American newspapers since 1950, and by the late 1960s it had already made a successful leap to television via the beloved specials produced by Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It'
Rating: 4.5★
There are films that arrive and are enjoyed, and there are films that arrive and rearrange the furniture permanently. Neo Tokyo gave a hint of what Japanese animation was quietly building towards, but it was Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira in 1988 that brought the whole argument to a head.
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of short film that does not announce itself loudly, does not rely on spectacle or plot machinery, and simply asks you to sit with a feeling for a few minutes. Father and Daughter, made in 2000 by Dutch-British animator Michael Dudok de Wit, is
Rating: 2.5★
By the mid-1990s, Disney's theatrical animation division was riding one of the most celebrated winning streaks in the studio's history. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King had redefined what audiences expected from a Disney release: sweeping scores, polished visuals,
Rating: 3.5★
Swaziland (now officially Eswatini) sits landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, and by the mid-2010s the country was carrying one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world. The humanitarian consequences of that crisis produced a generation of orphaned children whose stories rarely made it beyond the
Rating: 2.0★
The Pokémon franchise has been producing theatrical films since 1998, and at this point the formula is about as well-worn as an old pair of trainers. What began with the genuinely affecting Pokémon: The First Movie has expanded into a long-running series of largely standalone adventures, each built
Rating: 1.5★
The short film is a curious creature in the broader landscape of cinema. Freed from the commercial pressures that govern feature production, it can take risks, experiment with form, and land a genuine punch in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Some of the most memorable pieces of
Rating: 1.0★
Robert Breer is not a name that comes up often in casual film conversation, and that is, in its own way, rather telling. Born in Detroit in 1926, Breer spent decades working at the margins of mainstream cinema, producing short experimental films that sat comfortably in the world of gallery
Rating: 1.0★
Stan Brakhage made Mothlight in 1963 without touching a camera. Working at a time when American avant-garde cinema was pushing hard against the conventions of narrative film, Brakhage collected dead moths, dried leaves, flower petals and fragments of insect wing, pressed them between two strips of clear splicing tape,
Rating: 3.0★
By 1942, Walt Disney Productions had already proved, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, that feature-length animation could be taken seriously as an art form and, more to the point, could make audiences feel things they hadn't expected to feel sitting in a cinema. Bambi arrived
Rating: 2.0★
There are certain properties that feel almost critic-proof by design, and Pokémon is probably chief among them. The franchise, born from Satoshi Tajiri's 1996 Game Boy games and the trading card craze that followed, became one of the most commercially successful media brands in history before most
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of anticipation that surrounds any new Hayao Miyazaki film, and by 2023 that anticipation had curdled into something closer to disbelief. The director had, after all, announced his retirement in 2013 following the release of The Wind Rises, only to quietly reverse course a few
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