Migration (2023) - Movie Review

While Illumination managed to pull themselves out of their recent funk with the success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I was still a bit sceptical about whether that would be a fluke or not. It’s highly unlikely that the studio would be able to keep bringing back the geniuses behind Teen Titans Go! To The Movies for every release going forward, and given their previous track record of trying to relive past glories, there’s just something about how generic this film comes across on first glance that had me worried. Well, that and being written by Mike White, whose last animated venture was with the generation-defining disaster of The Emoji Movie. However, not only does this manage to keep up with that Mario-mentum (oh shush, I liked that one), but it taps back into what I originally started liking about Illumination Studios specifically.

Wonka (2023) - Movie Review

Even for a year where filmmakers have been trying extra hard to swing for the fences, this is arguably one of the biggest ones. And honestly, if it were made by literally anyone else, any and all conversation surrounding it would be dominated by the age-old question of “Why is this a thing?”. Ignoring the previous attempt to revivify Roald Dahl’s classic story with Tim Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (and whatever the hell that Tom & Jerry movie was supposed to do), the 1971 film is such an ingrained nostalgic classic that it’s basically untouchable. A film announcing itself as the origin story for pop culture’s most famous chocolatier, on its face, feels like a doomed idea.

But as I wrote above, it would be if it were made by anyone else. In this case, it’s the director and writers behind the Paddington movies, two little confections that defied all preconceptions on first release and have garnered (arguably) a similar untouchable status in modern cinema. They are such pure creations, full of wonder and whimsy and yet perfectly palatable, that they represent an ideal when it comes to making family films that… well, hits at my heart of hearts. That it is possible to tap into that same sense of delight that the best kinds of children’s films bestow on their audience, but as an adult, and without any of the cultural framing that one is ‘too old’ to enjoy things anymore.

Pinocchio (2022) - Movie Review

While Snow White And The Seven Dwarves may have been where Disney’s animated film history started, along with their canon of Disney Princesses, their 1940 film version of Pinocchio is arguably where Disney as an artistic aesthetic began. The iconic soundtrack, to the point where When You Wish Upon A Star has essentially become the official anthem for Disney, the elegant use of metaphor in its depiction of a child self-actualising, the timeless animation, that horrifying donkey transformation scene (which likely gave birth to an entire generation of Cronenberg fans); it’s a well-deserved classic.

And it is also the latest film to get pulped and sifted in the modern Disney remake machine, and between the icy reception it’s garnered already and me losing all hope in these things being good anymore after Aladdin and The Lion King, I was fully expecting to hate this. Guess I’ve found my big dissenting opinion for the year, because I actually quite liked this.

Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022) - Movie Review

After the third film managed to bring everything full circle, I was quite certain that that would be the end of the Hotel Transylvania movies. And I don’t say that out of some sense of relief or anything like that; I’ve been a fan of this series since the first film, and beyond their fantastic and consistent animation style, I think they do well with their re-examination of the old-school Universal monsters and what it means to be Othered. As such, when this for-realsies finale snuck its way onto Amazon Prime all the way back in January of this year, I was a bit taken aback but willing to give it an honest shot. And what I got was… well, it’s still fun, but for the supposed finale, it’s also unequivocally the most lightweight of all these films.

The Bubble (2022) - Movie Review

The words ‘satire’ and ‘irony’ can put some strange ideas in people’s heads. Under the right circumstances, they are the bedrock for attitudes behind some of the greatest works of art across many mediums. But under the wrong ones, they’re just an excuse for utter laziness. The Internet is basically a carwash that scrubs all manner of context from whatever is placed on it, and in that scrubbing, there is all manner of satirical humour that operates under the impression that, if you just admit that you’re lazy or just being a dick, that magically makes it okay and “the point” of doing so. But it’s one thing when the average layman tries their hand at something like this, which is usually embarrassing but nothing more than that; it's quite another when Hollywood money is being thrown at it.

Wendell & Wild (2022) - Movie Review

 

As much as I want to try and keep my expectations in check with this one, I can’t lie: It’s another team-up between a director and writer that I have immense respect for as creatives. Henry Selick, as I imagine he was for a lot of alternative kids out there, was my gateway drug when it comes to stop-motion animation, and his work on Coraline is what got me to fall in love with the works of Neil Gaiman. And while he’s also in the writer’s room here, he’s sharing it with Jordan Peele, one of modern horror’s most vital mainstream voices, and someone who has already got a certified winner under his belt this year in Nope. With how much import I place on names whenever looking at films on here, I went into this hoping for a ‘two great tastes’ situation, and honestly, that is definitely what I got… although it took me a bit to lock in with it.

The Prom (2020) - Movie Review

James Corden really, really, really needs a new agent. His choice of scripts is getting out of hand. The Emoji Movie, Peter Rabbit, Cats, even the British dub of Norm Of The North; whatever potential he may have had in Hollywood, he has pissed away entirely by contributing to some of the absolute worst movies of the 2010s, and dragging down the few good ones he gets (like being the biggest sticking point in the otherwise-excellent Smallfoot). He is a walking warning flare for any movie he’s attached to, but his presence within those movies is only a symptom of much larger problems with those productions. And the same is true for this one, to the point where watching this brought something… ugly out of me.