Animation

Azur and Asmar: The Prince’s Quest - interview with Michel Ocelot

31 Jan 2008

Name Michel Ocelot Born Villefranche-sur-Mer, France in 1943 Background While Ocelot spent much of his childhood in Guinea, West Africa and his teenager years in Anjou, he now lives in Paris. He made his name by writing and directing the Kirikou…

Bee Movie

Animation/comedy

13 Dec 2007

The buzz about Bee Movie is that it’s a cute animated fable for children that also showcases popular comic Jerry Seinfeld, who developed the project with the writers from his titular sitcom. The sting in the tale is that, while vaguely palatable to both…

Beowulf

15 Nov 2007

(12A) 114min Beowulf is being released on four formats: 35mm, digital, digital 3D and IMAX. This review is based on the IMAX version, Beowulf being the first mainstream film to successfully employ this technology. Much of the initial wow factor is…

Creature Discomforts to highlight discrimination

12 Nov 2007

The creators behind popular animated figures Wallace and Gromit and the Creature Comforts series have unveiled a spin-off campaign to help raise awareness about disability. Aardman Animations - working with the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity…

Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox destined for big screen

12 Nov 2007

Director Wes Anderson is finally getting to grips with a project he claims has been eight years in the making - bringing his favourite Roald Dahl story to the big screen. An animated version of Fantastic Mr Fox, in which George Clooney will voice the…

Princess

1 Nov 2007

ANIMATION (18) 90min This feature-length cartoon, made by the multi-talented Danish daily newspaper strip cartoonist, children’s book illustrator and kid’s television director Anders Morgenthaler, is a genuine shocker. Essentially, it’s a tirade…

Ratatouille animation sparks French rat craze

4 Oct 2007

The recent feature from Pixar Studios about a Parisian rat working as a chef has sparked a boom in sales of the rodent. The film Ratatouille has prompted the number of rats being kept as domestic pets to soar by 40 per cent. The animated adventure…

Wallace and Gromit in return to the small screen

3 Oct 2007

Wallace and Gromit will return to our television screens for their first half hour adventure in 12 years, Aardman Animations has revealed. The animated duo’s next outing will be Trouble at’ Mill, which will be shown on the BBC next year. It will…

Ratatouille

16 Aug 2007

The adventures of an aspiring rodent chef whose gastronomic endeavours make him the toast of Paris is hardly a conventional dish to serve up to audiences. But Pixar’s attention to character and detail has already created such unlikely characters as…

Surf's Up

9 Aug 2007

A reasonable improvement on the heavy-handed environmentalism of last year’s hit Happy Feet, Ash Brannon and Chris Buck’s animation is a colourful parody of surfer movies and Stacy Peralta’s 2004 documentary Riding Giants in particular.

Tales from Earthsea

1 Aug 2007

The familiar Studio Ghibli look is there, but Tales From Earthsea, based on the books by writer of speculative fiction Ursula K Le Guin, is directed not by the great Hayao Miyazaki, but by his son Goro.

Happily N'Ever After

1 Aug 2007

Although its makers claim they conceived Happily N’Ever After long before that big green ogre Shrek took over the box office swamp, animation filmmakers Paul J Bolger and Yvette Kaplan’s procrastinations mean that this contemporary take on olde fairy…

Pixar

MOVING PICTURES

27 Feb 2007

In Toy Story, which reached our screens an astonishing 12 years ago, the only things on the screen which look animated are the humans. Woody the toy cowboy, despite his name, is human, endearing, attractive. Buzz has the chin and charm of a Hollywood…

Arthur and the Invisibles

(U) 93min

29 Jan 2007

If Luc Besson (The Big Blue, Leon) is to be believed, this, his tenth film, will also be his last as director. In adapting his own children’s book, Besson mixes live-action and CGI animation with decidedly patchy results. It’s heavy on style but light…

Aardman's Darkside - DVD

Aardman's Darkside

2 Oct 2006

ANIMATION As a company renowned for the sweetly naïve, homely fun of Wallace and Gromit, Morph and Creature Comforts, it’s something of a jolt to the system to discover Aardman’s adult entertainment wing. Like the Sooty pregnancy episode or…

Hoodwinked

18 Sep 2006

Like a bedtime story told by an amiable drunk, Hoodwinked is a hackneyed narrative redeemed by great creative embellishment of the telling. Writer/directors Corey and Todd Edwards have come up with a noir setting that’s equal parts Raymond Chandler…