All right, I am abandoning any pretense of being an impartial reviewer. Yee Haw! Now I love — with all the passion of the five-year old me that still burns in my heart — movies with spaceships, and aliens and large model cities which get blown up. Throw in a lot of energetic practical effects […]
Read more "Psychon Invaders (2006)"I never had the slightest doubt, when I first learned about Trava: Fist Planet, that I would have to watch this short anime OVA. . Or that I would have to watch it soon. After all, this was a dry run, a warm-up — or, if you would, a test drive — for what would […]
Read more "Trava: Fist Planet (2003)"If you missed my review of Václav Mergl’s “Krabi,” you will need a brief catch up. At a time when you could find a lot of talented and innovative animators behind the Iron Curtain, Václav Mergl still stood out. He wasn’t much like the animator most of us who are familiar with the era will […]
Read more "Laokoon (1970)"(aka, Two Year Vacation) Honorable Mention Of all the wacky and inventive comedies made by Czech master animator, Karel Zeman, I think The Stolen Airship may have been his wackiest and most inventive. And that is saying a lot. Zeman is perhaps best remembered for his film The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, where he […]
Read more "Ukradená vzducholod [The Stolen Airship] 1967"Ahhh. Fertile ground. I’ve been digging and searching for Soviet Era animated films — particularly the science fiction ones — for a long time now, and it never fails to amaze me that I can still uncover films and even talented directors I’ve never heard of before. For whatever reason, animation followed a very different […]
Read more "Krabi [The Crabs] 1976"I’ve written extensively about Soviet era animation, which is full of surprises as it never had any of the constraints American animation has: not only did they make films in all sorts of strange styles instead of the standard American Disney romantic realism, not only did they experiment with different technologies and styles, but a […]
Read more "Khorosho zabytoe staroe [No such thing as new ] (2003)"I’ve written extensively about the animated films made during the Soviet Era (and watched even more of them than I’ve written about), but curiously enough, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a feature length film made in Soviet Russia. I’ve written about a few Czech and Hungarian efforts, but no Russian features. In fact I […]
Read more "Klyuch [The Key] (1961)"I don’t know… There’s so much to like here. And then there’s the rest of this heavily Kids-centric anime take on the classic Japanese Movie Monster. It sounded so promising: we haven’t had any new Gamera projects for a very long time, except for that all-too-brief Fiftieth Anniversary short film which was so stunning that […]
Read more "Gamera: Rebirth (2023)"How did you spend your time during the Covid lockdown? I suppose a lot of people played endless games of solitaire or bingeing TV series or chatting on social media, but not Ryan Braund. Instead, he created an animated film entirely on his own. This is actually a remarkable feat because of the mind-boggling number […]
Read more "Absolute Denial (2021)"(aka, Proving Grounds, Polygon) I’ve never seen an animated film which looks like this before. And, what’s more, I have no idea how they did it. You might think it had been rotoscoped. That’s the only way it would seem possible in the pre-computer age. But not only doesn’t it look rotoscoped — it lacks […]
Read more "Poligon [Firing Range] (1977)"
rivets on the poster 