The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Animation refers to films in which the films are drawn individually by hand, each frame moved slightly to give the impression of movement. Animated films from the mid-1990s onwards have been increasingly drawn by computer to the point that today the art of hand-drawn animation is a dying art form.
The first animated film was Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and the success of this has spread until animation now covers a sizeable percentage of contemporary box-office earnings.
Animation in the American mainstream is almost always sold as being for family audiences (although there is a reasonable amount of animation for grown-ups, particularly outside the US, this has by and large not been financially successful). Content frequently deals with fantastic topics such as fairytale adaptations, the lives of anthropomorphic talking animals or adventures featuring young protagonists.
See also: For animation from Japan see Anime. Films in which animation is blended with live-action are discussed under Toons. For animation using three-dimensional models see Stop-Motion Animation, for animation that uses models molded in clay see Claymation. For films that remake prior animated works in live-action see Animation in Live-Action.
Though Marvel Comics have had massive success with their big screen adaptations in the 00s, they have been far less successful with their attempts to spin off animated films. An okay but unexceptional animated prequel released at the same time as the first Thor live-action film
Animated film from Don Bluth, an insipid adaptation of the fairytale that eventually bogs down as a comic picaresque (*)
Sequel to the earlier Barbie animated film Barbie Fairytopia. Extremely colourful but essentially a fantasy version of a teenage girl high school drama that quickly slips into pre-packaged formula
The first in a series of Disney video-released films based around the Peter Pan fairy who is now reconceived as a contemporary Can Do girl
Here the Barbie films turn to Mark Twain’s classic (non-fantasy) tale of rags and riches and spins it as a fairytale This has the same blank, plastic style of the early Barbie films and is otherwise bland
Another of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as a desert island castaway accompanied by a retinue of talking animals. Visually colourful but slight
The second of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as the title character in the popular Brothers Grimm fairytale, which has been considerably embellished. This suffers the glassy plasticity of the early Mainframe films
Animated film that is gore-drenched and certainly not for children. Imagine The Belko Experiment conceived as a videogame where the heroine has to survive an office of people trying to kill her while aliens bet on the outcome
Disney animated film that proved a flop, this lazily remakes Treasure Island set in space. The result is bad science-fiction with sailing ships in space, Ben Gumm as a malfunctioning robot and so on
An animated Marvel films released at the same time as Iron Man Three. With action scenes that kick every Marvel animated film out of the park and lots of Marvel fanservice cameos
Amiable animated film about a juvenile inventor that only serves to show how more polished Pixar’s films are by comparison
A clone of Donald Trump battles The Illuminati and the Egyptian god Anubis on Mars before travelling to Hell to sort out The Devil. The sheer dementia of the premise alone has one sitting down to watch
Animated film based on a book by Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White about a trumpet-playing swan
A theatrical film version spun off from The Jetsons, the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series about a space age family. Not too much has changed since the 1960s
The 24th film from DreamWorks Animation – the studio that once offered a reasonable challenge to Disney is now starting to slip into the bland formula of competitors like Blue Sky. While passable, this feels like a film substantially lacking in originality and where you can predict its every move
A French animated film where a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart goes on a quest for love through a surreal quasi-Steampunk world. With cameos from Georges Melies and Jack the Ripper
Animated film based on the popular comic-books co-directed by the comic-book’s creators René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo,. This is disappointingly weak animation that substitutes slapstick cartoon gags for the comic’s more sophisticated humour
An adaptation of the fairytale from Martin Gates, a largely unknown British animator. This embellishes the traditional telling of the story considerably
A CGI animated film based on the popular comic-book character Asterix. After numerous other adaptations, this was the first of the Asterix films to be written directly for the screen
Follow-up to the previous animated Marvel Comics film featuring The Avengers, this serves to introduce Black Panther to the screen for the first time
Animated film based on the popular fantasy wargame. The set-up is a fascinating mix of SF and mediaeval religion but the plot rehashes Aliens without much payoff and the animation is B-budget
After Ron Howard’s over-produced version of the Dr Seuss story, one looked to Illumination Entertainment, the animation company behind the Despicable Me films, to do the story right
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, an animated homage to the 1960s Batman tv series reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward, was a quirky delight. This is a sequel in the same vein, although more a case of a joke that tires in the retelling
The title is misleading as this features no Bigfeet but is an animated film about a family that sprouts all-over body hair and big feet. This quickly falls into the usual formulaic inanities of the modern animated film
Animated venture into Midwestern Gothic that has been a fifteen-year work for one-man band Chris Sullivan. A film that is at once brilliantly original but also tedious where its focus on the minutiae of character’s lives seems to go on forever
Disney bases an animated film on the historical character but warps the story considerably. It feels that this is a Disney animated film made more to adhere to Political Correctness than it is a good one
Anime based on an autobiographical manga that leaps off into a variety of styles and comes filled with madcap surrealistic visuals
An anime from Satoshi Kon that tells the story of an actress and become a surreal journey through Japanese cinematic history
Superheroes have overrun screens. It is starting to seem a little too much when we now get an animated film about animal superheroes who form their own Justice League
Anime where a mysterious other-dimensional stranger aids future rebels. This has a wonderfully ornate Gothic feel but an entirely confusing plot
An animated film based on a popular series of children’s books about a mischievous monkey. Amiable but a film mostly intended for the pre-school set
The Predator series continues. Dan Trachtenberg, the director of Prey, makes an animated offering that tells three stories of encounters between human and Predator in different eras of history
Spanish-Argentinean animated film about the miniature players of a table football game come to life. The animation is not the high-end quality of most theatrical releases but passable; everything plays out to to fairly predictable sports movies cliches
The feature film spinoff of a cult anime tv series
Animated film designed for the US Thanksgiving holiday. With a completely insane plot involving turkeys travelling back in time to stop turkeys being served at the first Thanksgiving
Disney animated film that supposedly adapts Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, although Andersen wouldn’t recognise it. This often feels like a ramshackle assemblage of formula elements rather than the classic it was hailed as
The incomprehensibly manic antics of the Minions have a cuteness appeal that has overspilled the Despicable Me films and seemed like it is in danger of taking over pop culture in the last couple of years; here they get a film all to themselves with amiably lightweight results
Fifth in a popular series of satiric Hong Kong animated films. Kicks in with an amusingly sarcastic bite that resembles a Beavis and Butt-Head in its story of a talking animal children’s choir but alas by about the halfway point takes itself seriously and starts to get mawkish and sentimental
French-Belgian adult animated film in the gonzo trippy vein of Ralph Bakshi and Bill Plympton – a visually madcap satire of science-fiction tropes and 1980s East-West tensions, full of wackily surreal visuals
An obscure animated version of the classic fairytale that comes with excruciating puns, much slapstick and has clearly been animated on a low budget
Film spinoff from the popular anime tv series that seems caught between a film and a tv episode. While the film reaches for epic scale, the usual run of power blasts, there is nothing that we haven’t seen before
An Arthurian legends fantasy adventure made as part of the animation renaissance of the 1990s. Anything serious aspirations are wrecked by the insertion of inane popular culture in-jokes
One of the Disney animated portmanteaus of the 1940s featuring stories about a circus bear and a retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk starring Donald, Mickey and Goofy
A Disney animated film whose classic stature has been overrated. The fairytale is too familiar to hold much interest, while the cutsie talking animals get to take over proceedings
Animated film based on the popular computer game. On screen, this emerges as essentially an instantly forgettable variant on one of the Star Wars prequels retooled for the Under Tens with the emphasis all on frenetic slapstick and visual eye candy
H.P. Lovecraft is a cult horror writer whose work brims over with a sense of cosmic dread. One of the most bizarre Lovecraft film adaptations is this work of children’s animation featuring a young Lovecraft
Really odd, even at times touching, Japanese film about a man’s thwarted attempts to have sex with his android maid
The final film of French animator Rene Laloux, a planetary adventure set on a world where Laloux delights in creating exotically trippy aliens and landscapes. Released in English as Light Years with an Isaac Asimov script
Anime that has clearly been modelled along the lines of Neon Genesis Evangelion Initially, the animation is conducted with a dazzlingly realistic textured look but once the giant robot action scenes take over, these seem increasingly absurd in their anthropomorphism
The cutely nonsensical Minions have become a pop culture phenomenon. Here we get more of them, although this is more as a Gru origin story
The second of the Resident Evil anime films. This is set before the release of the T-Virus and focuses on origin stories for some of the characters
An animated version of the epic Chinese legend Journey to the West that was overshadowed by the hit live-action film that came out some months earlier that retold the tale with CGI
Whose bright idea was it to give us kid versions of The Avengers (ostensibly their children)? While Marvel have had an unparallelled string of hits on the big screen in the 00s, their attempts to replicate the successes that rival DC have had in animation have been a dismal failure
A remake of the original zombie film Night of the Living Dead conducted in animation
The animated films of Blue Sky Studios (the people behind the Ice Age sequels) have become so formulaic they have been drained of any spark of originality or creativity. This feels more like a series of test-marketing cues than a film
Third of the Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot films. These films are frustrating – filled with stunning scenes of mecha battling cryptic alien machines but baffling as to what is going on
The second of the Mortal Kombat animated films, this continues into another tournament, introducing a bewildering array of characters from the games amid a high degree of violence and bloodshed
This was the fourth film in the Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot film series and concludes the saga. Rather than offering any answers or solution to the cryptic world we are in, this opts for a major letdown of a wrap-up
An animated film that bizarrely speculates that the emojis in your text messages are actually living entities that have lives inside the phone. A not-too-well-thought out concept that leaves you with strange questions about its world
Pixar’s creative decline has been the point they started making these sequels to their hits. This is a disappointing prequel to Monsters, Inc. that largely recycles the cliches of the Revenge of the Nerds films and seems lacking in any of the wacky humour or moments of cuteness we expect of a Pixar film
Passable animated film from Sony Pictures Animation, although the story arcs too closely resemble every other animated film for it to have much in the way of notability
Disney’s sequel to Fantasia comes weighted with a sense of its own self-importance – the first theatrical release of the new millennium. However, it fails to produce much that has the stature of the original
Animated film where fairies face the threat to their forest posed by a logging operation. Preachy message-making that is all but a recruitment film for Greenpeace and the Sierra Club
Not an adaptation of Bram Stoker but an anime based on the Marvel comic-book Tomb of Dracula (the same title that gave birth to Blade)
The second of Disney’s spinoffs from Pixar’s Cars films featuring talking anthropomorphic planes. Like the first film, this is amiable and occasionally cute but lightweight. This is beginning to feel like a franchise that is spinning out thinning ideas solely for its own sake
Despite being a huge box-office and critical success and being nominated for an Academy Award, I am in a minority in disliking this. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that it appropriates the culture from my neck of the woods and only spins it out as a series of glib jokes and one-liners
The comic-strip Peanuts is a wryly whimsical depiction of childhood. The movie version has been taken up by Blue Sky Studios, the ones guilty for the repetitive sequelitis that most modern animation has descended to – somehow you suspect that Charles Schulz’s intention wasn’t to reduce it to a series of slapstick set-pieces
Film spinoff of a popular children’s animated tv series Doug about a kid and his observations on life. The film’s story has the title character befriending a local lake monster
One among a handful of animated films based on Marvel Comics properties, this conducts a passable telling of the origin story of the Sorcerer Supreme
DreamWorks animated film based on an old Rocky and Bullwinkle segment about a time-travelling genius dog and his adopted human son. This takes a relentlessly content-free approach to history that strips it down to no more than a series of giddy 3D slapstick gags for the single digit age groups
Australian animation about a boy’s adventure on an island amid pirates, inventors and magic creatures that in its better moments suggests a collision between Peter Pan and Pufnstuf. Unfortunately, the film is made with a budget that must have been well within four figures
More from the world’s cuddliest super-villain and those manic ritalin-deprived kids that are the Minions. Is there are life and creativity left in a franchise that has been milked for six films now?
Despicable Me was a delightful debut for Illumination Entertainment but has come close to making the studio a one-hit wonder they have milked that one hit for all they can
Another of Disney’s Tinker Bell spinoff adventures. This has some slickly produced animation and does some occasionally cute pieces of fanservice that tie in to Peter Pan but is ultimately fantasy being produced for the single digit age groups
Despicable Me was a charming lightning in the bottle hit. Here Illumination Entertainment merely recyclethe familiar and already the cute sweetness and gags of the original are starting to feel like processed formula
This attempted to do something different to the usual formula US kiddie animation film and creates its own fantasy world. Unfortunately, while the ambition is admirable, the film flopped badly
Animated film spun off from the Garfield comic-strips in which Garfield emerges out into the real world. A cute premise that the film fails to develop
Zootopia was one of Disney’s freshest animated works in a decade largely marked only by mediocrity. This is a sequel where the fantastically original world of the first film slips into being just another Disney IP
The first in a series of anime films that were produced by Capcom, the creators of the Resident Evil videogames, and intended to run parallel to the live-action films. I was never a big fan of the live-action films. The question is – does Resident Evil work better in the anime format?
Sequel to Gnomeo & Juliet, which retold Shakespeare with garden gnomes. This for some reason adds a garden gnome Sherlock Holmes to the mix. The high speed whirring you hear is probably Arthur Conan Doyle rotating in his grave,
One among the series of cheap video-released sequels to their classic animated films made during the 1990s/2000s, this is a prequel that offers up a Little Mermaid origin story
The third of the Care Bears film conducts a crossover with Alice in Wonderland, although it is an adaptation that is liberal in its treatment of Lewis Carroll to say the least
Shrek was a fresh and original hit. The first of four insipid sequels, this seems to merely coast by on our liking of the characters while upping the fairytale parody
The second entry in the ultra-annoying animated franchise spun off from the animated tv series that only seems to centre around poo and pee jokes, this is marginally more enjoyable than the first film
Green Lantern is a classic comic-book character but his screen presence were damaged by the Ryan Reynolds film. This conducts a severe reset of the character’s continuity
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman books are space opera classics. Here they are given the anime treatment, which abandons much adherence to the source material and ends up more as a copy of Star Wars
Video-released spinoff of the Toy Story films featuring Buzz Lightyear in an adventure. Although released under the Pixar name, the animation is all cheaply produced by a Chinese studio
Film spinoff from the long-running animated tv series. The familiar gags are there but show feels awkward extruded out to a full-length plot. You keep feeling the film should have been more than it is.
Earlier less well known adaptation of the C.S. Lewis book made for tv. This is faithful to the book but is badly hampered by primitive animation and an exceedingly simplistic rendering of the story
Mamoru Hosoda conducts the bizarre notion of an anime version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is a Hamlet that Shakespeare would barely recognise, following a heroine as she makes a journey across the afterlife
The concluding chapter in the trilogy of Godzilla anime films. This reintroduces two familiar monsters but takes a long time to build to the monster bash we have come to see
An animated film revival of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? This also makes an misguided attempt to build a shared universe among assorted Hanna-Barbera characters
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
The 30th Japanese Godzilla film, this is the first anime Godzilla film and the first in a trilogy. More disappointingly, it is more a space opera and planetary adventure than it is ever a Godzilla film
Surely the most outlandish film premise ever slung together for an animated film – a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet conducted between talking garden gnomes in rival backyards
The third of the Shrek films settles in with a formulaic blandness where the characters turn up more because everyone expects them to than the film finds much for them to do
An early CGI animated film conducted on a cut-price budget that tells further adventures of Sinbad
Anime film based on Winsor McCay’s celebrated comic strip about a boy’s adventures in dreams. Despite a script from Ray Bradbury, the film waters the comic-strip down to the formula of the modern children’s film
Animated sequel to The Wizard of Oz that proved a charmless flop that misses the magic of the original by a mile. The familiar characters are run over with a gratingly modern sense of humour
Lightweight British animated adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale made for children