Tag Archives: Animation

The Nut Job

17 Jan

‘The Nut Job’: As animated film noir with gangsters, ‘Gangnam Style’ is a mixed bag

By Tom Meek
January 16, 2014

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Who knew that in the city parks across America, all the furry vermin who scuttle, forage and burrow exist in a grand interlocked society built around the process of collecting a communal hoard for hibernation season? As nutty as that might sound (or not), it’s the crux of Peter Lepeniotis’ richly animated misadventure with shades of “The Wind and the Willows” if funneled through a rigorous round of urban planning.

011614i The Nut Job

Much salt and seasoning is added to the archetypal recipe and, as a result, “The Nut Job” is an energetic, yet mixed bag. The impressive 3-D effect adds subtle, enriching depth, and the parallel human story about a bunch of no-neck thugs and their pet pug trying to pull off a bank heist is done with an odd noirish flair. I’m pretty sure that anyone one in the film’s target market of 4 to 10 years old has no idea who Jimmy Cagney was or what a noir is and will be totally wigged out by the vintage cop cars and milk wagons zipping about. Sure, that thing worked with Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes, but their heyday overlapped that of American film noir.  Continue reading →

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Walking with Dinosaurs

18 Dec

Published at 1:38 PM on December 17, 2013

BY TOM MEEK

<i>Walking with Dinosaurs</i>

Walking with Dinosaurs yields an alluring mashup of divergent facets, a cinematic Frankenstein that engrosses with vigor as it repels with inanity. Even the project itself is a hodgepodge of odds and ends. Produced by the BBC Earth team that created the similarly named documentary series that aired on U.S. educational outlets like NatGeo and the Discovery Channel, the film, which cost north of eighty million, almost didn’t get made as studio problems threatened to kill the funding, but aggressive ticket pre-sales carried it through. How great is that, a film that has paid for itself before even hitting theaters? And that’s probably why we’ve been seeing the trailers for it since mid-summer. 

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Free Birds

1 Nov

‘Free Birds’: Taste of this Thanksgiving item is a bit off, even if you like it dark

By Tom Meek
November 1, 2013

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Poultry and tradition, that’s what’s on the menu in this animated butterball about America’s family holiday and the secret lives of turkeys. You can’t argue with the film’s angle about the big birds wanting to live – after all, how would you feel if all you did was gorge out on death row and pray that your number doesn’t get called as the calendar flips from October to November each year? But rescripting history and featuring death and violence prominently in nearly every frame, that’s a fairly big miscalculation for a kiddie flick.

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Not that “Free Birds” is all stuffing and no trimmings. The 3-D animation is crisp and vivid and there are some quirky touches wittily infused into the script by writer/director Jimmy Haywood (”Horton Hears a Who” and “Jonah Hex”), the most cheeky and rewarding of which is the inclusion of Facebook humor sensation and former Enterprise crew member George (Sulu) Takei as the voice of S.T.E.V.E., the Space Time Exploration Vehicle Envoy, a top-secret military time machine. Adding to the fun is the presidential first daughter as a willful and rambunctious tyke who suffers bouts of narcolepsy.  Continue reading →

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