It’s always hard to assess a children’s film. I suppose it is easy to lean too far toward the lenient end of the scale when we are saying to ourselves, “oh, well. It’s just for children.” But I still think I’m being unbiased when I say that Timescape was quite good as children’s films go: […]
Read more "Timescape (2022)"(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"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)"I’ll admit it, I was mildly puzzled by Masters of Venus. Or perhaps I should say by that great British institution, the Children’s Film Foundation. Now I knew that the CFF made dozens of children’s films (six a year at their peak) which were shown at Saturday morning matinees. What I couldn’t understand, however, was […]
Read more "Masters of Venus (1962)"I liked this one a lot better when I first saw it. That happens. Astro Boy started life as a manga created by the man who is perhaps the most highly respected Japanese cartoonist of all time, Osamu Tezuka. Astro — or “Tetsuan Atom” (“Mighty Atom“) as he is known in Japan — was so […]
Read more "Astro Boy (2009)"(aka, Mission to the Unknown) Those of you familiar with Doctor Who — or at least, those of you familiar with Classic Doctor Who — know about the catastrophic destruction of most of the early episodes of the show at the hands of the BBC. It was one of those classic bureaucratic cost cutting decisions: let’s […]
Read more "Doctor Who: Mission to the Unknown (2019)"(aka Revenge of the Defenders, Daitetsujin Wan-Sebun. Literal Translation: Iron Robot 17) It was such an Eighties thing. Take a Japanese children’s TV series and distill all its weirdness into an hour and a half so you could sell it as a movie. Simple, right? Even when it is 35 half-hour episodes. Well, it’s actually […]
Read more "Brain 17 (1982)"(aka, Message from Outer Space, Space Ninja) One of the first cloned copies of Star Wars which came out after the release of the George Lucas classic was Message from Outer Space, a strange and colorful Japanese film whose most memorable element was its spaceship in the form of a square-rigged sailing vessel, complete with […]
Read more "Swords of the Space Ark (1981)"Parallel Evolution. That’s the only explanation I can find. Here we have two movies with a remarkably similar story, which came out the same year and only three months apart: the first, Joe Dante’s shaggy dog of a science fiction epic, Explorers, and the other a little-seen Czech children’s film. There’s no way they saw Joe […]
Read more "Tretí sarkan [The Third Dragon] (1985)"
rivets on the poster 