Ron's Gone Wrong (2021) - Movie Review

A new contender has entered the ring for family-friendly animated films… kind of. This is the first feature release from UK-based Locksmith Animation, although the actual animation is courtesy of Double Negative, the rendering wizards behind a lot of Christopher Nolan’s bendiest works like Inception and Interstellar. They don’t usually dip into full-on animated works, usually just accompanying live-action films, but this shows them in pretty solid territory as far as visuals go. The animation quality is up to the mainstream standard as far as lighting and the like, the character designs are just goofy enough to work on the kiddie level without being distractingly stylistic, and the design for the titular robot is simplified in a way an actual tech company would engineer, and he's quite adorable the longer he stays in-frame.

Coffee & Kareem (2020) - Movie Review

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Some chucklehead really thought they were being clever with that title, huh?

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017) - Movie Review

Back in 2015, after the monumental disaster of Home, I was about ready to completely write off Dreamworks as an animation company worth any amount of my time. Even compared to films I’ve seen beyond the lists, it still holds up as one of the single worst things ever designed for juvenile consumption. Well, not only did they collectively waste no time in proving my assumptions wrong, they have done in the most unprecedented of ways.

 

Kung Fu Panda 3, a film from a critically-acclaimed series that both felt short of the franchise’s pedigree and held up alongside its predecessors. Trolls, what should have become a legendary failure of toy-driven marketing in actuality was a simplistic but still amazingly resonant family film with some truly inspired musical decisions. The Boss Baby, a film that I actively had to be convinced was a genuine product and not just a work of Internet parody that went too far, turned out to have a lot of merit to its name and some very relevant things to say, for both kids and adults. 

 

I would normally question the studio’s decision to bring one of the most wholeheartedly sophomoric children’s books into a feature film with today’s feature, but after that track record, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Love The Coopers (2015) - Movie Review

Even with how Christmas is extolled as the season of cheer and goodwill, it’s also a notorious time of year for families to just explode at each other. To be fair, it does make sense for this to happen: Gather a bunch of people you only see once a year in a single house, and all those grievances they haven’t had a chance to air out before in person suddenly bubble up to the surface. Considering this, it is understandable for there to be a sizeable market for Christmas films involving dysfunctional family shenanigans. Probably the best example of this would be National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, a film that showed our capacity for both love and hate while still keeping that Yuletide charm. The closest I’ve gotten to reviewing this brand of film before would be with last year’s This Is Where I Leave You, which followed the family dynamics of the sub-genre only set them during a different religious event. Given how grouchy everyone can get when that time of year gets closer, this is just the kind of film to help bring families together… usually.

The Day I Watched Vacation (2015)