Bobby is turning four years old. It’s his birthday, and he’s having a party. A clown is coming. It’s 1992.
Category: Revision Candidate
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Hotel Chevalier (2007)
Hotel Chevalier is best known for 1) being better than The Darjeeling Limited, the feature film it ties with, and 2) the one time Natalie Portman got naked in front of the camera.
I consider this grating little sketch to be a turning point in the history of western animation — even moreso than the actual Shrek movie.
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WALL·E (2008)
I’ve always had a hard time figuring out just where to place WALL·E in the Pixar pantheon for a couple reasons, the biggest of which is that WALL·E is a rare masterpiece that gets steadily worse across its runtime. The more the movie focuses on the fat humans and environmentalism parable, the more it feels like a run-of-the-mill good movie; and the less it feels like a generationally profound piece of cinema.
I have yet to see a Winnie the Pooh TV or direct-to-video special that is anything other than dire, though this one might be the least dire of the bunch. The problem, as with any of these cheap Pooh specials, is that the A.A. Milne brand of whimsy is so perilously difficult to nail. The Walt Disney Animation Studio Winnie the Pooh features (1977 and 2011) are either directly inspired by Milne or sufficiently well-drawn as a facsimile to correctly capture the spirit, but it’s not easy.
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Lava (2014)
In much the same way that short stories allow for bizarre, unsustainable scenarios that would never sufficiently fill out a novel, so Pixar’s short films provide an outlet for not-quite-a-story-but-not-quite-not-a-story premises: An old man playing chess against himself? A living lost and found box? Personifications of day and night? Sure, it works for five minutes.
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Luzzu (2021)
One thing that Luzzu gets indisputably correct: Water is beautiful. Alex Camilleri captures in his debut film, with the help of cinematographer Léo Lefèvre, about 37 shades of blue, some bubbly, some murky, some bright, etc. I just wish the film spent even more of its runtime at sea.
I ended up watching this movie twice in short succession to prep for a podcast recording. This turned out to be the right choice as it effectively doubled my appreciation for the film; every visual pattern, every subtle cue of dialogue, every delicate and luscious composition comes in sharper relief once you know exactly what to look for. And it does so without compromising the elliptical, sensuous storytelling texture of the film.
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Steamboat Willie (1928)
It’s amazing to me that such an early example of sync-sound cartoon did it so well. The character animation is so energetic, curves bending and colliding and creating larger-than-life entities at cartoonish proportions. And all of that visual energy perfectly matches the sounds so that there’s never any doubt in the viewer’s mind that the action we’re seeing triggers the exact sound we’re hearing.
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Serie Noire (1979)
Serie Noire is a bizarre French neo-noir of a man’s life flying off the rails when he connects with a teenaged prostitute.