New Gods: Yang Jian (2022) - Movie Review

Time to take a trip back into Light Chaser Animation’s universe of steampunk mysticism with a new New Gods feature. And this one actually made it into cinemas over here, instead of going straight to Netflix, and with the kind of visual aesthetics Light Chaser are chasing after here, that is one hell of a good move on their part.

New Gods: Nezha Reborn (2021) - Movie Review

Well, it looks like it’s going to take a bit longer before we get the next addition to the Fengshen cinematic universe that has already given us Ne Zha and Jiang Ziya. But a film along those same lines did come out this year on Netflix, itself also based on Investiture Of The Gods. However, where the Fengshen films went full period-setting in their reworking of the story, Nezha Reborn goes several steps further. Gone is the feudal ancient Chinese setting, and in its place is an industrial, mystically-tinged steampunk setting based on 1920s Shanghai. And instead of the cheeky demon child that used anywhere and everywhere as his own public toilet, we have motorcycle racer and courier Li Yunxiang (voiced by Yang Tianxiang), who must discover the power of his reincarnated heritage in order to save his town and the ones he loves.

Cats (2019) [No, not that one] - Movie Review

Why do I keep doing this to myself? My habit for checking out every new film I can get to, intended audience be damned, frequently puts me in the position of acknowledging that, yes, I am actively putting money and time towards something that wasn’t made with someone like me in mind. But I happily go through with it, partly because being that open with new releases sometimes puts me in front of genuinely good films that I wouldn’t have even noticed otherwise, and partly because even if a given film is bad, it still gives me some much-needed venting and usually decent material to write about afterwards. Over the last few years, the sub-genre of animated family films about talking animals has served as one of the bigger examples of all of the worst-case scenarios listed above, and we have a particularly bad one today.