Family cinema, at its best, refuses to talk down to anyone in the room. Films like Spirited Away and Song of the Sea handle grief, wonder and belonging with more honesty than most adult dramas dare to. Browse Macca's reviews below and find something worth watching together.
Rating: 2.5★
There is a particular kind of prestige that arrives pre-loaded, and The Red Turtle carried more of it than most. A co-production between the French outfits Wild Bunch, Why Not Productions and CN4 Productions, the Belgian studio Belvision, and, most eye-catchingly, Japan's Studio Ghibli, the
Rating: 3.5★
There are films that arrive quietly, made on modest budgets by small studios in countries not traditionally associated with feature animation, and then somehow end up nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The Secret of Kells is precisely that kind of film. Released in 2009 and co-
Rating: 2.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Walt Disney Feature Animation found itself at a crossroads it had been approaching for some years. The so-called Disney Renaissance of the late eighties and nineties, that remarkable run from The Little Mermaid through to Mulan, had produced a string of films that
Rating: 3.0★
The Muppets have a cultural footprint that is genuinely difficult to overstate. Jim Henson's original creations first found their audience on American television in the mid-1970s, before crossing the Atlantic and becoming a firm fixture in British living rooms too. By the time the theatrical films arrived,
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: 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: 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: 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: 2.5★
There are films that announce themselves as Important Events and films that simply turn up, do their job with a grin on their face, and leave you feeling better than you did before. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) belongs very much to the second category. The premise is clean
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
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