The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
In almost all cases, Talking Animals refers to the numerous species of animals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, dinosaurs and the like that feature in Animation. The bevaviour of these animals, while incorporating the characteristics of the animals in question, has been anthropomorphised along the lines of human behaviour and the animals allowed to talk. The first of these appeared in the animated shorts of the 1930s and 40s with characters such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety and Sylvester, and others. These spread over to feature films and have become a staple of animation ever since.
The majority of films about Talking Animals films are animated, although there are some occasional live-action equivalents – the most well-known examples being The Muppets and Planet of the Apes franchise, or the assorted CGI talking animal films from Babe (1995) onwards.
There are two different types of animated talking animals. The first type are those that inhabit their own world. In these films, animals are anthropomorphised. That is to say, they gain human-like features, walk upright, wear clothes and speak, while in many cases they are seen holding down human jobs and living in homes. Or else the film is a work where everyday animals in regular farm or pet situations have a secret life where they speak. This is usually a fantasy world removed from the real behaviours of the featured animals – a world free of predators, while those animals that are predators by nature are never seen eating other animals, and where different species live in harmony.
The other type of film is when talking animals interact with humans. This can happen through some magical means, or where the animal is a companion such as the Donkey in the Shrek films. Some science-fiction works show species gaining the capacity of speech due to science (in particular genetic-engineering) or Evolution. In works of fantasy, talking animals occur with regularity in fairytales and Fantasy Otherworlds where they will live alongside humans – a perfect example being Narnia.
The discussion will also group a small subset of these films – the most popular of these being a number of Aardman Animation films – dealing with anthropomorphished animals that displays human-like behaviours but do not talk.
Enchanted in which Amy Adams played an animated fairytale princess entering the real world was a reasonable hit. This is the long-planned sequel that reunites the principals but feels like a joke that belabours in the retelling
This gets the nonsensical absurdity of the original Doctor Dolittle stories far more than the Eddie Murphy version. On the other hand, this was the era of Mary Poppins and this is made as a lumbering musical
Complete and utter bastardisation of Hugh Lofting’s charming Doctor Dolittle stories, which are turned into a modern comedy with Eddie Murphy and talking animals doing lots of pee and poop jokes
A sequel to the Eddie Murphy Dr Dolittle remake. This is still an insult to the original stories but under director Steve Carr at least proves a more amiable comedy than the first film did
Sequel to the Eddie Murphy Dr Dolittle films without Murphy where the title role is inherited by Kyla Pratt as his teenage daughter. The humour is pitched at an excruciating level of inanity
The second of the video-released Dr Dolittle films featuring his teenage daughter Kyla Pratt. This is marginally better and less excruciating in its humour than its predecessor Dr. Dolittle 3 was
Animated film spun off from a popular French online gameworld, which had also previously spawned an animated tv series. The results are amiably engaging with a sense of humour that makes the show
This revival of the classic children’s character who can speak to animals took a critical battering but I kind of liked it. It has a completely madcap slapstick tone and more crucially returns to the stories and banishes any bad memory of Eddie Murphy
Head-scratchingly odd fantasy film produced by John Boorman and family where a young boy is transported to a world where he mingles with characters from fiction
Beautifully made and written Hallmark tv mini-series directed by Steve Barron that brings to life a variety of different Native American myths and legends
One of the classic films from Disney’s Golden Age, a beautiful piece of anthropomorphism in the tale of an ungainly elephant that flies with its oversized ears. Considered controversial in more recent years.
Charming anime from Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro about a young girl adopted into a witch’s strange household. The occasion where Studio Ghibli made the switch over to computer animation
Excruciatingly awful take on Cinderella, which overruns the fairytale with hip contemporary in-jokes and pop culture references, shredding any suspension of disbelief in its desire to appeal to a modern teen cool
When 20th Century Fox began their Planet of the Apes reboot series, director Mark Polonia quickly jumped in with his own Z-budget mockbuster take. Several sequels followed
Disney film where an animated fairytale princess emerges into the real world to become Amy Adams. This becomes the opportunity to wittily puncture the unreal world of the Disney fairytale
An autobiographical film from music video and film director Phil Joanou, this comes with a number of surreal fantastical touches
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
Probably the worst of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer witless and painfully unfunny films – this just consists of a series of vulgar gags run over a bunch of scenes from films that came out in the last twelve months
Entirely charming French animated film from the directors of A Town Called Panic. This is a children’s film that comes with a beautiful simplicity, a duo of winning characters and some side-splitting visual gags
Third of the original Planet of the Apes films. This is an enjoyable take that brings the talking apes back in time to the present-day and where the emphasis is more on comedy
Based on a popular children’s book, this is a simplistic animated film for very young children about a toy mouse that goes on a quest to find freedom
Aardman Animation return with a sequel to Shaun the Sheep Movie. More of the same absurdly nonsensical capers and gags, this comes with much in the way of homage and in-jokes to classic SF films
The best animated film Disney ever made, created as a work of art with animation set to classical music. The segments vary between abstraction, comic eccentricity and evocations of nightmare. The results are magical.
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
Wes Anderson makes a delightful detour into stop-motion animation in this Roald Dahl adaptation, a droll caper comedy enacted by talking animals who are all characterised with typical Anderson eccentricities
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
Pixar have never been the same since giving in to sequelitis but this sequel to Finding Nemo does recapturing some of their heyday. Not perfect but this has a winning array of new characters and some delightfully madcap comic set-pieces
An unabashed delight among the Pixar films about a fish parent on a quest to find his missing son. This comes with an extraordinarily vibrant palette of colours and a line-up of winningly eccentric characters
An animated film from Genndy Tartakovsky, director of the Hotel Transylvania films, that is a really quite filthy and hilarious story of a dog about to have its testicles removed who goes on one last adventure
A delightful animated film from Latvia made entirely without dialogue, following a group of animals fleeing as their territory is flooded. The winner for my top film of 2024.
A beautifully made adaptation of a non-horror James Herbert novel in which a dog realises that is a reincarnated Matthew Modine and sets out to reunite with his human son
Aardman Animation abandon Claymation for regular animation in this story of a pet rat thrown out of his comfort zone down into the sewers. Alas, this only serves to make it just another talking animals animated film
Cultishly bizarre, deliberately offbeat and wacky film that was made as a vehicle for the band Oingo Boingo. More a film you admire for its determination to be strange than anything else
Disney animated film from the fallow period of the 1970s/early 80s. This concerns the friendship between a talking fox and a hound tempered by the knowledge they will grow into enemies. An okay effort if not up the heights of the studio’s classics
This was the first in a series of excruciating comedies that pairs hapless Donald O’Connor with Francis, a talking mule. Six sequels followed
The second in a surprisingly popular series of comedies about Francis the talking mule, this involves Donald O’Connor and Francis in a series of hijinks set around horse racing track
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
The first X-rated animated film. Ralph Bakshi’s first film, taken from Robert Crumb’s cartoons, this is hilariously raunchy as the titular talking cat takes a strung-out but often sharply politicised journey through 1960s counter-culture
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
Oddball and whimsical – welcome to the world of Miranda July who serves up a quirky relationship drama peopled with talking cats, conversations with The Moon and time-freezing abilities
Imagine a Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible spy caper played out with talking guinea pigs. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, no less, this offers appealingly energetic silliness
Where the first live-action Garfield film approximated the original comic-strip and its focus on a cat delivering sarcastic lines, this sequel pitches everything down to the level of an inane children’s film
Big screen version of the massively popular Garfield comic-strips in live-action with a CGI talking Garfield. Here Garfield has been tacked onto a plot that feels assembled from every other talking animals film
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
Likeable live-action adaptation of the animated series, which was construed as a parody of Tarzan. The sight gags work well and the creature effects are accomplished
The attempt to create another Lord of the Rings went astray with this adaptation of Philip Pulllman’s fantasy series, which cut many of the core elements of the books so as not to offend religious conservatives
A modernised version of the Goldilocks fairytale, which now comes with the addition of an environmentalist subplot and where the bears are made into an endangered species
An infuriatingly inane film about a boy discovering that all dogs can talk and are alien visitors from Jim Henson Pictures. No sooner is the dog talking that it is tossing off smartass one-liners
Pixar have never been the same since they slipped into the easy familiarity of sequelitis. This is essentially a boy and his dog story but played out with a dinosaur and a caveboy, but also an alternate history tale
A really cheaply made and nauseatingly cute ripoff of Babe about a boy who discovers he can talk to a pig
One of the most delightful films produced during the 1960s-80s lean years of Disney animation. This was not a success but delivers a film of winning charms about a mouse equivalent of Sherlock Holmes
The second of the Muppet films made when Jim Henson was alive and one of the best, this bubbles with a double level of sly grown-up humour that many of the later post Henson entries miss
A X-rated, West German-made film that blends together several fairytales in a very adult adaptation. The result should be seen for its sheer bizarreness
A triumphal Marvel Comics adaptations that manages to mainline the spirit of the original Star Wars, while in in its wryly, self-deflating culture savvy suggesting a Star Wars rewritten by a 14 year-old Quentin Tarantino
Guardians of the Galaxy was an audience winner with its eccentric humour and effortless charm; this sequel feels buried under bloated production overkill where the charms of the original remain thinly drawn
Third of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, this successfully recaptures the nature of the goofy ensemble comedy caper that made the first film such a winner but seemed to be missing in the second
Guillermo Del Toro offers up his dark, more adult take on the classic children’s story in this beautifully made stop-motion animated film. Winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
George Miller of Mad Max fame makes a motion-capture animated film about a young penguin who sets out to fulfill his dream of tap-dancing. This ends up being a film of unexpectedly winning charms
George Miller had a charming and delightful hit with his dancing penguin film Happy Feet. He returns to make a sequel here that merely tries to repeat the same
Okay if never standout Danish-made attempt to copy a Disney animated film concerning the underwater adventures of three children transformed into fish
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a multi-media phenomenon that has developed a cult. The tv series with a less-than-stellar BBC budget was not the most effective incarnation of these but still hits the wittily absurd nerve of Douglas Adams’ humour
A Disney live-action film that engenders no believability in its basic premise. Much of the show is regarded as an opportunity for Bette Midler to steal the limelight and play to over-the-top excess
The last hand-drawn animated film from Disney and one of their few flops, but by no means unlikeable. The premise of talking cows setting out on a quest gives this a madcap eccentricity
Animated film that offers a revisionist take on Little Red Riding Hood. Everything is played in a manic barrage of pop culture gags and level of inanity that is seriously mind damaging
A wholly unnecessary sequel to Hoodwinked!, this again runs the fairytale characters over with modern quips and pop culture references
A film about the Easter Bunny that comes remarkably devoid of any significance of the meaning of Easter and only consists of the usual smartass talking animal antics
The 30th film from Pixar, a strange take on Avatar where a young conservationist enters a robotic beaver body in order to venture out among the animals. Directed with a good deal of likeably snappy humour
Animated adaptation of the Dr Seuss book is an amiable effort that captures a certain zaniness but ultimately seems to be forcing Seuss’s slim original to inhabit the formula of the modern animated film
An excruciating comedy built out of the basics of Mr Ed where Bobcat Goldthwait gives an imbecilic performance as an idiot who inherits a talking horse
An anthology of stop-motion animated shorts set around the same house. Each episode is quite different but all three stories strike an admirably dark and absurdist tone and are beautifully made
This adaptation of the cult Marvel comic-book from Lucasfilm should have been a classic but went tail-feathers up in a big way such that it became the term used for a film that bombs for years afterwards
In the vein of the Scary Movies films, this offers the amusing idea of a mash-up between The Hunger Games and The Hangover where the characters are forced into a death match against characters from other media franchises
This begat an interminable number of tedious sequels. However, the original is a still likeable and appealing animated film about a group of prehistoric talking animals migrating with the onset of an Ice Age
The first in a series of interminable sequels to Blue Sky Studios’ animated prehistoric adventure. Everything has a tediousness that feels as though it is created by a script generating computer
Another of Blue Sky Studios’ interminable animated sequels to its likeable original about prehistoric talking animals. This has little substance beyond a kinetic rush from one gag to the next
This is not a film, it is a money-making machine in the guise of a film aimed squarely at undiscerning family audiences that plays to familiar characters and comic routines and has minimal difference to the preceding three Ice Age films
I hate the Ice Age films and their tediously extruded adventures. The opening sequence here and its ignorance of even basic science is the most inane thing in the entire series
An appealingly silly blend of live-action and animation where Don Knotts plays a downtrodden clerk obsessed with fish who falls into the ocean and becomes a porpoise
David Lynch’s last theatrical films and probably the most divided of Lynch’s films. Another delve into cryptic surrealism that arrives at no clear plot destinations or clues about what is going on
A lumbering, stagebound adaptation of Stephen Sondheim musical that lamely dips into the fairytale parody that Shrek and other films tapped far more engagingly over a decade ago
Wes Anderson is at his best when he does stop-motion animation as in Fantastic Mr. Fox and here. Essentially a Disney talking animals animated film where the animals talk like real people, this comes with considerable charm
An adaptation of the fairytale from Martin Gates, a largely unknown British animator. This embellishes the traditional telling of the story considerably
TV mini-series co-produced by Hallmark Entertainment and The Jim Henson Company that offers an intriguing deconstruction of the fairytale that reverses the traditional sympathies
Henry Selick’s follow-up to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a Roald Dahl adaptation filled with enormous visual creativity as a boy and several talking insects set forth on a sea journey in a giant peach
A bizarrely off-the-wall film in which Jerry O’Connell obtains a cheap apartment in New York City only to then find that he is sharing it with singing cockroaches
Phantasm series director Don Coscarelli makes a mind-expanding effort that seems a conceptual collision between Donnie Darko, Limitless, a slacker version of Supernatural and Dr Strange
From the late 90s/early 00s period where Disney were churning out cheap sequels to their animated classics of yesteryear, a wholly unnecessary continuation of The Jungle Book
Lush and beautifully produced live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories. In comparison to the studio backlot Tarzan films of the era, this is in colour, builds entire jungle sets and even goes on location in India
The Disney animated version of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales, the one that everybody remembers, a lively affair with talking and singing animals
Live-action remake of the Disney film that gives the animals life through top of the line CGI effects. The results are impressive aided in large part by near-perfect voice casting
A fairly blatant copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories – even more so of the then recent 1994 live-action Disney remake – all having been conducted on a B-budget
One of the loveliest of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, the story of a young witch who creates a parcel delivery service using her broomstick. As always, Miyazaki gives the film a simple beauty and an adult emotional complexity
NOT the Hayao Miyazaki film but a live-action version based on the same books, made by Takashi Shimizu of the Jun-on/The Grudge films fame. Replicating Miyazaki in live-action is a futile endeavour
A classic French animated film that remained unseen for over thirty years. A fairytale about a cruel king and two lovers aided by a mockingbird, it emerges with an impressively epic sweep
A fourth entry in the Planet of the Apes reboot saga. The previous two entries hit incredible heights in terms of motion capture performances but this still a solid entry that holds up well
Beautiful stop-motion animated feature from Laika. This takes a big bite and tells an epic adventure. The only flaw is that the stop-motion is so flawless that audiences cannot tell the difference between regular animation
Massively successful animated film for DreamWorks, a comic riff on the martial arts training film that proves amiable and crowd-pleasing without ever being riotously funny
Sequel to DreamWorks hit animated film, this does little more than repeat its predecessor. The detail and texture is amplified to a work of art, although you cannot help but wonder if the under tens care about this
The Kung Fu Panda series are films for couch potatoes – martial arts films with a hero who proclaims the virtues of laziness, overeating and goes into combat with an self-inflated sense of his own awesomeness
The fourth entry in DreamWorks popular animated series, which by now is just another entry in the series that is coasting by on recognition factor, while offering minimal difference