It's always difficult to write honestly about films that you have an unabashed love for- particularly, one film on this list (and it shouldn't be hard to guess which). Here, I place one of the better batches of children's films- featuring a few excellent ones and a few that aren't all that bad either. If there are some you haven't seen yet, I recommend you check them out. And if not, there'll be more next week, hopefully.
1. Wall-E
Director: Andrew Stanton
Starring: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Sigourney Weaver
Release Date: June 27, 2008
Running Time: 98 minutes
Rating: 5/5
Wall-E has been considered one of the best children's films, one of the best animated films, and one of the best films of the past decade by critics and audiences alike. Back when I originally saw it in theaters, at the age of eleven, I was a bit more skeptical- the foremost of my concerns being that it seemed a bit too much environmentally preachy, and all that. And with a movie about trash covering the globe and driving all humans to leave the earth, it's hard to see Wall-E as being much more than an excuse to throw an environmental message at an audience that's heard it twenty times before. And yet, examining over and over again, the center of the film reveals itself to be far more emotional than political: what ties everything is Wall-E breaking out of his loneliness, EVE discovering that she's not made of stone, and the Captain's developing sense of wonder. And yet so much of this has to be conveyed without the use of pretty much any dialogue- a vast majority of the film is simply visual storytelling: the animators must study the pantomime of the silent film era to convey not only humor, but sadness, joy, fear, and pain. Of course, animators have pretty much always done this: the difference here is that animators have the full range to do that, and yet they don't allow the film to be dominated by silence for the purposes of being gimmicky. Like Charlie Chaplin's immortal Modern Times, some dialogue is permitted, but when it is, it's often done second-hand, through a recording or a computer. Still, the dialogue is kept sparse enough to let the sights and sounds of the film take prominence. Many say that the opening of the film, with its spacious and meditative shots of the earth as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, is the better half, while the second half's portrayal of a spaceship occupied by millions of obese and blissfully ignorant humans is comparatively a letdown. Even if you believe, as I do, that the second half is something of an intentional letdown for social commentary purposes, the spaceship sequences are visually just as dazzling as the first half, if not more so. The luxury liner in space, paired with the busy electronic textures of Thomas Newman's score, provides such a serene atmosphere, building up to such heights of beauty as can be seen through the "nebula dancing" scene, and closing off with a playful nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sometimes we walk through ruins of Egyptian, Greek, or Roman civilizations and we see only shadows of the lifestyles of others... it's difficult to imagine how there could be living, breathing people walking the old stone streets, people with the same feelings and struggles as us. But it's even more difficult to imagine how in the future, others may walk through the ruins of our civilization and think the same wondrous thoughts about us. Wall-E gives us the opportunity to envision something of what that would be like.
Director: Chris Williams, Byron Howard
Starring: John Travolta, Susie Essman, Mark Walton, Miley Cyrus
Release Date: November 21, 2008
Running Time: 96 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
From the early to mid-2000's, Disney animation was going through some pretty rough times- this is known to fans as the "Experimental Era"- when finally they came up with the successful experiment Bolt which launched them into a new renaissance. If you begin saw Bolt knowing absolutely nothing about it at all, your mind was probably blown in the first ten minutes in a brilliant twist of exposition, where we are presented with "Bolt": a dog with superpowers designed to protect Penny, a small girl whose father is a genius scientist with secrets sought after by the evil Dr. Calico... except that moments after one rollicking and explosive adventure, we're shown that it's all merely a television show, and the dog is left none the wiser, Truman-Show-style. So wonderfully is this story framed, as we must very quickly re-learn the characters and their motives, acquaint ourselves with the real heroes, the real villains, etc, etc. The teen actress who plays Penny legitimately does love the dog, but a meddling agent and an egoistic director keep her from spending any real time with him. A small mistake sets Bolt free, though- and believing Penny is in great danger, Bolt rushes out of the studio and somehow winds up getting himself shipped across the country. Hence a framework is set up for this lost dog to come across a cat from Brooklyn and a hamster from... some trailer park in the Midwest, I think? And from this point forward it's basically a road movie all across the USA... and also a superhero movie, of sorts... and also very much a pet movie. How a movie so satisfying and sweet could come out of an idea so stupidly simple completely surprises me: which may be part of the reason why I was so averse to seeing the film when it first came out- it didn't really look like anything that hadn't been done before. And yet the movie manages to pull out a lot of really good jokes and, despite using some pretty old tropes, it comes through with a strong emotional core of family and home. Bolt will mainly please kids, but it should stir something within adults as well, to one small degree or another.
Director: Sam Fell, Robert Stevenhagen
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Emma Watson, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver
Release Date: December 19, 2008
Running Time: 92 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
It really doesn't make sense to me that critics somehow disliked The Tale of Despereaux, and it makes even less sense that audiences aren't rushing to its defense. This is an underrated marvel, full of amazing visuals, charming storytelling, and a special kind of warmth of the soul. What one immediately encounters when stepping into The Tale of Despereaux is how easy it is to step into- that's not even the correct way to put it: no, this is a film that grabs you and wraps you in a particular environment- an environment that seems somewhere between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a world that subsists more on whimsy than explicit magic, and a world that is, of course, exclusive to this film and this film a world. This is the Kingdom of Dore: a land culturally centered on its culinary traditions, namely, its soup. Like the previous year's Ratatouille, The Tale of Despereaux centers on talking rodents who communicate with humans at some point, much to their own risk, and have the preparation of food as a major plot point. And yet Despereaux is anything but a simple knock-off: it's only coincidental that its literary source material, published in 2003 by Kate DiCamillio, should share so many key points with the Pixar hit- and this may be the reason that many critics mistakenly shamed it for unoriginality. But even if you do look at the two films side by side, the bizarre style of animation causes the characters Despereaux to stand out like figures in a pop-up storybook. It seems that each act in this movie has a new location to reveal to us, a new character to introduce, a new thread to unwind. There are so many places that this story goes that I'm surprised at how well it ties everything together at the end: events fall like dominoes in the anticipation of a climax. Children should easily succumb to the charm of this wonderful tapestry- and all others should easily be able to find their inner child fascinated by this film as well.
Director: John Stevenson, Mark Osborne
Starring: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu
Release Date: June 6, 2008
Running Time: 92 minutes
Rating: 4/5
For a movie with a title like Kung-Fu Panda, the greatest surprise is how seriously it takes itself. It markets itself as a comedy when really it manages to be a perfect blend between a comedy, an animated film, and an action film: seriously- this movie contains some of the greatest martial arts sequences that I've seen, and this is an animated movie. Animated movies aren't less likely to be good than live actions films, certainly, but they are far less likely to have a good number of fight scenes in them. What makes Kung-Fu Panda a good action movie is that it gives good emotional imperatives for its characters while backing up all of its fighting sequences with a simple overview of the philosophies that are so essential to most martial arts- but what makes the fighting sequences themselves good is not only the gripping story for context, but also the amount of comedy within the action itself... much of the action is so superhuman, unlikely, or exaggerated, it could never have been done in live action... not because we have a lack of effects, but because it would not be believable. Animation has the ability to get away with more in regards to the action sequence- and this isn't Road Runner and Wiley E. Coyote I'm talking about here- these are well-crafted scenes done by people who have clearly done their homework with Jackie Chan movies. Jackie Chan, himself, I believe is part of the brilliant voice cast- Jack Black slides into the panda persona marvelously, as do all of his kung-fu colleagues. This isn't the kind of film that I would go out of my way to impose upon someone, but for someone who's considering watching it for the first time, my advice is to not underestimate. Like How to Train Your Dragon, it is loaded with scenarios that walk the fine line between the cliche and the archetypal, and yet it still manages to fulfill and even exceed expectations with a proper climax and beautiful, colorful animation.
Director: Jimmy Hayward, Steve Martino
Starring: Jim Carrey, Steve Carrell, Carroll Burnett, Seth Rogen, Isla Fisher
Release Date: March 14, 2008
Running Time: 86 minutes
Rating: 4/5
I know, I know- the modern Dr. Seuss movies generally get a lot of bad flak, but the 2008 Horton Hears a Who! is one that I have a hard time really saying anything bad about. It certainly lacks the strong emotional highs and lows that a Disney or Pixar film might provide, but it makes up for that with a great deal of humor and imagination. I mean, these people brought Steve Carrell and Jim Carrey on board with the project- and I don't doubt much of the dialogue was improvised- and with pretty fantastic results. The film constantly shifts between two worlds- that of the jungle of Nool and the town of Whoville- a very civilized and ordered world suddenly finds itself at the mercy of a much larger, much more chaotic and primitive world, as the mayor of Whoville discovers, much to his dismay, that his world is nothing but a tiny speck floating around in another world. Fortunately, Horton the elephant captures the speck and places it atop a pink flower in an effort to move it to safety. And unfortunately, Horton comes across a slew of opponents who would stand in his way, opponents who believe he's crazy and is only imagining things. Of course things get a bit messy when some of the more unsavory characters begin to resemble political ideas more than actual characters, but luckily for the audience, there are just as many interesting characters as there are dull ones, and the whole movie keeps itself quite alive with a great amount of frenetic energy and a parade of shifting styles and moods. Here is a successful Dr. Seuss adaptation that, if it doesn't live up to the wisdom and poetry of the original book, at least captures its strong ability to entertain.
-Julian Rhodes
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