The Pokémon have been with us since 1996, long enough to have entertained a couple of generations of fans. The mythical beasties have a history in video games, anime, TV series, manga, and, importantly, feature films. None of them, however, have been quite like Detective Pikachu. The film is based on the Nintendo adventure game […]

With Toy Story 4 warming up for release, UglyDolls may be the least anticipated animated release of this Spring. More’s the pity. Although this film has taken a critical drubbing (and some aspects of it deservedly so), My own take is that STX Family UglyDolls is an underrated work that deserves better than the barbs […]

In America, animation is rarely used for action or adventure films. Because it’s still largely regarded as children’s entertainment here, studios are usually reluctant to tell stories where the danger is real and the hero can be killed. In contrast, Masahiro Ando’s Sword of the Stranger (2007) is an action-filled samurai adventure that echoes the […]

The first thing noticeable about this film is that its title is a clever play on words; the main character, originally called “Mr. Link”, is missing a home, a family, and his entire species. There is also a second meaning. Missing Link is an evolutionary (and revolutionary) link in the craft of stop-motion animation. Before […]

A gentle melancholy hangs over the anime feature Penguin Highway (2018), setting it apart from similar fantasy-adventures. Fourth-grader Aoyama (voice by Kana Kita) is almost too precocious and self-possessed. Never at a loss for a reply to a bully or an interfering adult, he says what viewers may wish they’d thought to say in school. […]

For decades, “animation” meant drawn animation in America. Except for George Pal’s Puppetoons, stop-motion was a minor variant, used for movie monsters, Alka-Seltzer commercials and the occasional holiday special. But in recent years stop-motion animation has enjoyed an unprecedented efflorescence. One of principle creators of that flowering is the Aardman Animations studio. The found dialogue […]