Nimona (2023) - Movie Review

Blue Sky Studios deserved better. I had given them a lot of flak for stuff like the Ice Age series and the Rio series, but their last two features not only showed drastic improvement from that standard, but showed that they had carved out their own niche in the modern animation market. Ferdinand had its growing pains, but still had some solid messaging, and Spies In Disguise only built on them further to make something even better. At long last, they found their (in my opinion) much-needed lane for today's family films with some strong pacifist messaging.

Then Disney bought out Blue Sky’s parent company 21^st Century Fox, repeatedly delayed their next feature, and then outright cancelled it along with Blue Sky Studios as a whole. The company that thinks digging up the graves of their previous successes, and that a new coat of CGI paint will cover the smell of stale corpse that is being paraded in front of audiences for profit, is a sound business strategy, but allowing a studio to continue operation and produce media that, just maybe, people might actually want to watch isn’t.

But out of the ashes of Blue Sky, this film still managed to take flight. Picked up by Annapurna Pictures, with animation by DNEG (who proved their salt as a dedicated animation studio with Ron’s Gone Wrong and Entergalactic), and Spies In Disguise directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane (who were originally slated for the helm before Blue Sky got shuttered) brought back in. That this whole production exists as a manifestation of hubris and spite against the conglomerate that tried to stop it from being made, quite frankly, has already earned my respect. But hoo boy, did it not stop earning it from there.

Spies In Disguise (2020) - Movie Review

After years of bewildering popularity and success, it seems like Blue Sky Studios has finally found their own lane in the modern animation market. Yeah, I easily would’ve just assumed that their raison d’etre was being entirely disposable, between the weak Ice Age films to the downright dreadful Rio films, but between this and their last feature Ferdinand, they seem to have found their niche that doesn’t involve boring the audience into a collective coma. If Disney is the standard, Dreamworks the alternative, Laika the retro haven and Illumination the home of all things villainous, then Blue Sky is the place to go for family-friendly treatises on pacifism.

Ferdinand (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: Fighting bull Ferdinand (John Cena) does not want to fight. Having escaped the ranch Casa Del Toro as a calf, and growing up on Nina (Lily Day) and Juan (Juanes)’s flower farm, he would much rather spend his days smelling the roses. However, when a day out on the town goes wrong and he finds himself back at the Casa Del Toro, he is forced to confront what society has deemed as his only purpose. As the calming goat Lupe (Kate McKinnon) and the other bulls Valiente (Bobby Cannavale), Bones (Anthony Anderson), Guapo (Peyton Manning), Machina (Tim Nordquist) and Angus (David Tennant) question why a bull wouldn’t want to fight a matador, Ferdinand plans to escape and, hopefully, spare himself and the others from a terrible fate.

 

Ice Age: Collision Course (2016) - Movie Review

The Ice Age series is little more than a relic of early-2000’s animation. Made by Blue Sky Studios, who would go on to secure their place as easily the weakest animation studio working today, the only real notable aspect of these films is how they have managed to keep a consistent decline since they started out, and bear in mind that the first film isn’t even that good to begin with. Computer graphics that have aged about as well as a puke-stain on what used to be your favourite shirt, annoying as all hell voice acting and only a couple of admittedly nice moments to help salvage it, something that would become far less prevalent in the sequels. As much as I wish I had covered this earlier on in the year when it first came out, that prospect meant re-watching all the films in the franchise so forgive me for holding it off for as long as humanly possible. But these things must be done, and it’s not as if this is even likely to be the worst film I’ve looked at recently, so let’s just get this over with.

Snoopy And Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (2015) - Movie Review

 

Is there a single character in the entirety of fiction that better represents childhood depression more than Charlie Brown? Seriously, he’s the on-again-off-again punching bag of all his peers, he is the product of a society where the children act far more like adults than the actual adults do and, for whatever reason, life as a whole seems to take great pleasure in taking a massive dump on his day for its own amusement. That skit from Family Guy where Charlie ends up as a thuggish stoner might be an optimistic expectation, all things considered. Still, even with all that baggage, he and the rest of the Peanuts canon are yet another staple of pop culture. Most of it came out before I was even born and, without seeing any of it for myself, elements of it are just that pervasive that they have always stuck with me: Charlie’s aforementioned emotional scars, the football gag, “You blockhead!”, Patty and Marcie’s ‘relationship’, the cripplingly sad songs that would show up in the TV specials and movies, “No dogs allowed!”; the list goes on. So, even though I am going into this with little to no prior experience with the series, it would be nearly impossible to go into this film completely blind.