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: 2.5★
When a film sits in Letterboxd's top 250 animations of all time, you go in expecting something. A hidden gem, maybe. A stroke of forgotten genius that somehow slipped past you in childhood. So I finally ticked off Kevin Lima's A Goofy Movie, fully prepared to
Rating: 3.5★
What does it look like when children rewrite their own pain? That question sits at the beating heart of Liyana, and it's the reason this film has stayed with me in a way I didn't entirely expect. There is something genuinely disarming about watching a documentary
Rating: 2.0★
There's a very specific kind of tired that sets in when you're watching a film and you realise, about fifteen minutes in, that absolutely nothing surprising is going to happen. That's the feeling that settled over me watching Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the
Rating: 1.5★
A parched Earth. No oceans. Desperate pilots tearing each other apart in the sky just to harvest what little water the clouds have left. That's a genuinely cracking premise, the kind that makes you sit up and think, right, let's see where this goes. The problem
Rating: 1.0★
I'll be straight with you: avant-garde cinema and I have never really got on. It's not a prejudice I'm particularly proud of, but it's an honest one. So when I sat down with Robert Breer's 2003 experimental short What
Rating: 1.0★
Let me be upfront: I subjected myself to Mothlight as part of my ongoing challenge to complete every list on Letterboxd's stats page. Not exactly the most romantic way to encounter a piece of avant-garde history, but there you go. And having now sat through Stan Brakhage&
Rating: 3.0★
There are few cinematic experiences as universally scarring as sitting down with a bucket of popcorn, only to have your childhood innocence absolutely shattered by a woodland creature. I still remember the collective, stunned silence in the room the first time I watched Bambi. Not a word. Not a sound.
Rating: 2.0★
My kids are going through a full-on Pokémon phase at the moment, which means every spare evening involves trading cards, video games, and, apparently, me sitting down to rewatch things I probably should have left well alone. That's how I ended up revisiting Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo
Rating: 4.0★
There's a particular kind of pressure that surrounds a film like this. When a director of Hayao Miyazaki's stature comes out of retirement, again, to make the film he's apparently been building towards for decades, the weight of expectation is immense. The Boy and
Rating: 3.0★
There are films you admire enormously and films you love, and sometimes those two things refuse to overlap. Phil Tippett's Mad God sits squarely in the first category for me, and I've been wrestling with that ever since the credits rolled. It is, without any doubt
Rating: 3.0★
There's a particular kind of comfort that very few films can offer, and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is one of them. Sitting down to revisit it, you're not bracing yourself for plot twists or emotional gut-punches. You're settling in. You&
Rating: 3.5★
There are few pressure tests for a film quite like renting out a cinema for twenty-nine hyperactive eight-year-olds and hoping for the best. That's exactly what I did to celebrate my son's birthday, and I can tell you now: Toy Story 5 passed
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