Revisiting Star Wars

And so I end my Star Wars rewatch at the beginning: Star Wars, the one that started it all. Let’s take a look. Highlights One thing I love about Star Wars is how complete the story feels and how classic of a tale it tells. Sure its a very straight forward hero’s journey, but what’s […]

Revisiting Star Wars: The Spin-Offs

I’ve now gone through most of the main films, many of which I have already seen many times. Now I’m going to look at the spin-offs, both of which I have only seen once each in theaters.  Rogue One was particularly awkward after watching it, as we saw it in a large group then went […]

Revisiting Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

And so we come to the most recent film in my Star Wars rewatch: The Rise of Skywalker.  Obviously this only came out a year ago, so my thoughts likely wont change too much from then, but I was interested to see how it works in context with the other films.  In December I found […]

Revisiting Star Wars: The Last Jedi

On to perhaps the most contentious of the Star Wars films.  The Last Jedi divided fans, though I’ll be honest that I have a lot of trouble understanding why.  Its really unfortunate, as this fan divide would shift the momentum of the new Star Wars film franchise considerably.  But that doesn’t detract from the greatness […]

Revisiting Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Remember 2015, when the long awaited new Star Wars film was released?  Such optimistic times, where everyone got on board to enjoy this new film.  Star Wars fans were united and the future of the franchise seemed so bright.  Sigh… Time to revisit The Force Awakens. Highlights: What this movie did really well was not […]

The Rise of Skywalker

“I can feel the conflict in you.” Yes you can, Luke, yes you can.  Because there are a lot of battling thoughts in my head after seeing Rise of Skywalker.  Ultimately, did I like it? I mean, yes.  Its still Star Wars after all, and I really like these characters; particularly Rey, Finn and Kylo […]

Incredibles 2

The Incredibles finally have their sequel, and it feels like the characters have all fallen right back into step even after 14 years. Which is good, because the movie starts off right after the events of the last movie, where the family battles the Underminer. They really play up the family dynamic again in this […]

The Jungle Book

I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect much from the new version of Jungle Book, but I was pleasantly surprised. Visually, I was concerned that this would be a CGI overload in which the visuals are so in your face that they become essentially meaningless, but I found they worked quite well. The realism of the […]

Zootopia

Animated movies like to take things that are not highly intelligent and suppose that they were: toys in Toy Story, fish in Finding Nemo, video game characters in Wreck It Ralph, and now the animal kingdom in Zootopia. Its a neat premise and there’s quite a bit of fun in exploring it. Zootopia runs with the […]

Big Hero 6

This turned out to be a much better movie than I expected, and I can see now why it won the Oscar. That puffy robot just killed me, I think I laughed at almost everything he said or did. “I am not fast.”  Or when the kid told him to kick the door down. Great […]

Saving Mr. Banks

Going into Saving Mr. Banks, I was wary of the Disney machine taking over, making this a predictable schmaltz-fest.  And while there certainly was some of that, the better parts of the story rose above it. In Saving Mr. Banks we see the story of P.V. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, and the struggle […]

Wreck It Ralph

Wreck It Ralph was the most celebrated animated film of 2012, though likely most of that praise comes from the simple fact that its about video games. Otherwise its a pretty regular family movie, nothing that will compete with the recent animated greats like Up or the Toy Story films. The arcade underworld works very […]

Brave

“I don’t speak bear.” Its hard for Pixar films these days to overcome the high expectations set on them by the company’s previous films. Pixar movies are not only visually beautiful and fun, but they usually have deeper themes which raise them up. WallE was about mankind’s responsibility to the earth, Up was about letting […]

John Carter

“John Carter of Earth? John Carter of Mars: that sounds better.” Lots has been said about how much money Disney sunk into their big budget John Carter and about how poorly its been doing in the theaters. So the question is, does it deserve its floppy reputation? My answer; not really, no. Its nothing that […]

The Ten Greatest Animated Feature Films

10. Toy Story (1995) To be honest, most of the reason that Toy Story is in this top ten is its status as a milestone of animation. Toy Story truly is the most influential animated film since Snow White, ringing in the new trend of computer animation. However, that is not the only reason it […]