THE GOOD DINOSAUR

(Peter Sohn, 2015)

The Good Dinosaur plays almost like the Pixar equivalent of a b-movie. That is to say it is made with all the care and craft lavished on each Pixar film, but it feels like more of a genre piece than most. It is an adventure film for 6-year olds, basically a quest Western with dinosaurs following young Arlo as he seeks to find his way back home to his (Apatosaurus) family ranch after  being swept away in the nearby river. Along the way he encounters various oddball characters in the wilderness, including a family of T-Rexs led by Sam Elliott who ranch buffalo, some cultish hyena-like Pterodactyls (led by Steve Zahn) and a human boy who he names Spot. They bond as they go, of course. For a Pixar film, this is surprisingly light on gags. Instead, it focuses on visual spectacle, and a couple of scenes of appealing oddness - the "trip" sequence is something I never thought I'd see in a children's film. The action scenes are intense and exciting, with nature itself as the big bad. It is classy, beautiful, and it works.

INSIDE OUT

(Pete Docter, 2015)

Pixar returns with the first Pixar film to feel like the way we used to see Pixar films in an age. That is to say that Inside Out is beautiful, and incredibly cleverly-conceived and moving without ever once becoming cloying. Its a Pixar film, in other words.
It explores some profound ideas with an incredibly light touch, and manages to remain a fun and colourful adventure through the beautifully-realised landscape of a little girls mind while also addressing the importance of sadness to growth, the way we process the end of childhood, the difficulty of abstract concepts like "bittersweet" and "nostalgia" and what elements actually constitute our personality and how and when they change.
It is lovely; sweet, imaginative, touching, full of great ideas, brilliant gags and nicely-executed drama.

THE LEGO MOVIE

(Phil Lord, Chris Miller, 2014)

The Lego Movie is the most satisfying kids film since the period a few years ago when Pixar was still reliably great. It manages to be hilarious, bitingly satirical, exciting, thought-provoking, epic and consistently visually inventive throughout. Considering it's based on the brick construction system toys, that is an impressive feat.
Writer-directors Lord and Miller see the potential in the property to craft an ambitious, energetically tangential story which is full of references to other movies, in-jokes, post-modern gags and lots of nods to the adults in the audience.
At heart, its a remake of the Matrix, with its "chosen one" story focused on Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker who is happy to conform, and ardent in his desire to be just like everyone else. He follows the "instructions", a book informing residents exactly how to live (buy overpriced coffee, listen to popular music - "Everything Is Awesome" is a horrific earworm after a single viewing of this film). These brief scenes are a dazzlingly paced, brilliantly funny satire on conformity and consumerism, and they quickly give way to a brilliant action scene after Emmet stumbles across a mysterious artefact which bonds to his body, is questioned and one the verge of execution at the hands of Bad Cop (Liam Neeson) before he is rescued by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a "master builder" who can create lego vehicles in seconds.
She explains the plot to him (in a scene which typically, cheerfully thumbs its nose at the very idea of such expository scenes): President Business (Will Ferrell) is set on destroying the Universe with his ultimate weapon, the Kangle (a tube of glue) which can only be stopped with the artefact stuck to Emmet's back. With Bad Cop on their trail, Emmet, Wyldstyle and her boyfirend Batman (hilariously characterised as a bit of a jockish dick, in love with his own dark and mysterious image and beautifully voiced by Will Arnett) jump across zones in this odd Lego Universe, from the Old West to "Middle Zealand" to Cloud Cuckoo Land, meeting a collection of recognisable pop culture characters and lego figures along the way.
From there it only gets more ambitious and epic, until a final act revelation which recontextualises and deepens everything we have seen suggests that this is actually that rarest thing; a transcendent kids film.
Besides that it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, fantastically exciting, and truly beautiful in its inventive use of the possibilities of the lego-verse.

MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

(Dan Scanlon, 2013)

It's pretty good, Monsters University. It's funny, its characters are well-drawn and sympathetic, its plot is gripping, and it is chock-full of beautiful images and knockout set-pieces.
But this is Pixar, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that for Pixar, pretty good isn't good enough.
That is another way of saying that this might be the formerly infallible animation studio's safest, tamest, laziest film yet. Even the mostly-reviled Cars 2 took risks - it was an outright delirious rainbow-hued piece of toddler-bait, with fewer concessions to parental entertainment than any previous Pixar production.
But Monsters University feels somewhat painted by numbers. It has all of the requisite Pixar ingredients, but they never quite combine into the dazzling Pixar classic people have been awaiting since Toy Story 3 ended.
Underlining the fact that this film (just like Cars 2) is a blatant piece of advertisement, devised mostly to sell toys and merchandise, the story is a prequel, introducing us to Mike and Sully during their college years in the Scare School at Monsters University. They hate each other at first, but are forced together by circumstance, and the film then pits them against various other characters in a long intra-sorority competition, allowing it some of the suspense of a sports movie. As such I think it has more montages than any other film I've ever seen, each of them nicely scored by Randy Newman, lots of great sight-gags slipping by. The montages never hold up the sentimentality you always know is coming, and it comes in a double-barrelled climax, which, like every Pixar climax, somehow manages to be thrilling, beautifully choreographed, touching and funny.
But beyond that, that other dimension so often present in earlier Pixar work is absent, and this film, more than any other, makes me worry that its never coming back.

EPIC

(Chris Wedge, 2013)

Epic feels almost randomly generated. Taking a bunch of predictably appealing elements from various sources in its adaptation of a William Joyce book and applying the formula which has by this point come to absolutely dominate American Animated cinema, it succeeds in being utterly mediocre in more or less every regard.
A young girl (voiced by Amanda Seyfried), mourning the loss of her mother, comes to live in the country with her semi-estranged, work-obsessed father. His work involves attempting to prove that his theory - that the natural world is home to a society of miniature beings - is correct, and this gives him little time for parenting. Their reunion goes badly, and just as she is about to leave she is miniaturised and finds herself in that society of tiny beings, who, it turns out, ride upon birds, talk to insects and are at war with a race of lizard-like beings named Boggins. The Boggins spread decay while the Leafmen, led by Ronin (voiced by Colin Farrell) battle them mainly using the power of their Queen (Beyonce Knowles) who can spread and control plant life. So the girl becomes involved in their battle, and learns the ways of the Leafmen, in the process flirting with the cocky and irresponsible young warrior Nod (Josh Hutcherson), bantering with a stock comic relief slug and snail double act (Aziz Ansari and Chris O'Dowd) and - of course - coming to realise what is truly important in life. This is interspersed with a series of variable action set pieces involving aerial battles, fearsome field mice and generic martial arts, a few attempts at visual poetry (a ride upon the antlers of a deer), and some telegraphed messages about responsibility and family.
While it's never bad, it's never particularly good, either; too much of it seems familiar, too much of it formulaic. For all that the animation is brilliant, that really isn't enough anymore. Pixar and Studio Ghibli have set the bar far too high for animation in the last decade or two for something like Epic to be seen as anything more than solid.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

(Peter Jackson, 2012)

There's a particular sort of shot that Peter Jackson mastered with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its a sweeping view of an epic action sequence, the camera looping and perhaps turning too as it approaches  the heroes - generally in a group, in motion - and they move through a space, the geography of which is  established by the vertiginous action of the camera. Theres a lot of cgi involved in these shots. Cgi figures throng, and the landscape - the mines of Moria, the tunnels inside a Goblin stronghold, an ancient Elvish citadel, whatever - is generally mostly created inside a computer too.
In the first and best Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are only a couple of these shots. Jackson was working, then, with restrictions. The film had not yet become the critical and commercial smash it eventually was. It was still a huge risk for New Line, the studio financing it. But after that, Jackson could do what he wanted, really. With success, his vision bloated and expanded. The films swelled on dvd with extra scenes and longer episodes. The Hobbit, a story which could make a good three hour film, has been cut into three episodes of over two hours each, and the result, in this opening episode, at least, is almost unbelievably tedious and mannered.
The story is set decades before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular hobbit with an unusual thirst for adventure, after he joins a band of dwarves on a long journey back to their ancestral lands in order to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. They are accompanied by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and after an extremely slow, talky opening hour or so, encounter a series of creatures and perilous situations, including Orcs, Goblins, trolls, Wargs and Elves. This all feels thoroughly samey - reams of CGI, familiar creature design and the usual dynamics governing the set-pieces ensure that these are sequences resembling many other sequences in other such movies beyond Jackson's own.
Aside from that, it is strangely unengaging. The characters are that peculiar Tolkein mix of tweeness and pomposity, the comedy is excrutiatingly unfunny, and the pacing is so leisurely it feels almost insultingly padded out. The cast do their best with these strange collections of tics they are playing; Freeman is a winning lead, McKellen is solid and Richard Armitage is charismatic in the Viggo Mortenson role as Thorin, leader of the dwarves, but the whole thing only feels like its anything more than an exercise in stalling with the arrival in the last act of Andy Serkis (by way of CGI) as Gollum.
His scenes with Freeman in the caves beneath a mountain are by a long way the most compelling in what is otherwise a pointless, even painful, affair, so bloated and obsessed with its own mythology it feels like it represents much of what is wrong with modern blockbuster cinema.
Oh, and those swooping shots I mentioned earlier? The Hobbit is full of them. Only where they were once exciting, even thrilling, now they just feel like Jackson repeating himself, like another set of failures of the imagination in a film stuffed with failures of the imagination.

THE SORCERERS APPRENTICE

(Jon Turteltaub, 2010)

The makers of The Sorcerers Apprentice don't seem to know quite what they want it to be.
It's a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Summer Blockbuster, but despite the tens of Millions of dollars lavished upon the many special effects sequences and the location shooting in New York City, somehow it never quite feels like one. It is a kid-friendly action-fantasy, but it has a strange setting, seemingly borrowed from Spider-Man comics. It's hero Dave (Jay Baruchal, whose wonky charm works surprisingly well surrounded by so much nonsense) is a geeky Science whizz at a Manhattan University, with no girlfriend or social life. That all goes back to the traumatic episode in his childhood when he encountered Balthazar (Nicolas Cage, in relatively restrained mode) a powerful, ancient sorcerer, who revealed that Dave is himself destined to be a powerful sorcerer before the appearance of Horvath (Alfred Molina doing his stock villain routine) led to a destructive magical battle and Dave's humiliation before his entire school class, including a girl he liked.
The plot resumes a decade later, with Dave engaged in mad scientist experiments (channelling his sorcery into science, you see), that girl from school, now revealed as pretty Becky (Teresa Palmer) reappearing in his life, and Horvath and Balthazar suddenly freed from the urn in which they have been sealed together for the last ten years. They both seek a Russian Doll which imprisons Morgan Le Fay, Horvath to free her and destroy the world, Balthazar to ensure she remains trapped, and Dave, of course, gets caught in the middle while Balthazar tries to teach him how to become the sorcerer he is destined to be.
That makes it sort-of-a-superhero film, since it deals with the origin of a young hero with supernatural abilities, but despite all the magical battles in the streets and skies of New York, it has no iconography, no costumes, no secret identities. Baruchal and Toby Kebbell (as Horvath's apprentice, a celebrity Magician who lives like a Rock star) both seem to play much of it for laughs, but Cage is, well, Cage, all loony intensity and odd delivery, and the tone is all over the place.
Turteltaub is an odd director, a successful hack who has made romcoms, big family blockbusters, and semi-serious dramas, all without ever evincing any particular personality or great talent beyond efficiency, and he might be the problem with the Sorcerers Apprentice. Despite a nice cast (also including Monica Bellucci and Alice Krige as Sorceresses), some interesting elements, particularly some of the clever ways magic in the modern world is manifested, and several good moments, it all feels quite anonymous and tired and the last act is a bit of a trudge to the inevitable ending.

WRECK-IT RALPH

(Rich Moore, 2012)

If you have children and watch a lot of the many animated films produced by Hollywood these days,  then the emotional arc they invariably follow can become wearyingly repetitive. That stock formula wherein a character learns a valuable lesson about what really matters to them while being led astray by their own basest desires or a dangerously attractive bad influence: that seems central to every kids film I see. And I see just about all of them, these days.
Still, some can deliver that formula beautifully, and some cannot. That depends on a number of different factors; the storytelling is crucial, the strength of the characters, the wit, the tightness of the plotting. Well, Wreck-It Ralph is excellent in just about all of those categories.
Set in the world of a 1980s arcade game, the film centres upon Ralph, the bad guy in a game called "Fix-It Felix Jr", a Donkey Kong rip-off. After the arcade closes each night, the video game characters live on inside the dormant machines, and it is the richly imagined world of their lives which is perhaps the film's strongest single element. Ralph, fed up with 30 years of being shunned inside his own game, decides to head off in search of some heroism. His quest leads him through violent Space Marine Sci-fi First Person shooter "Heroes Duty" and then "Sugar Rush" a candy land-set Kart Racer game, where he meets Vanellope, a "glitch" and fellow outsider. Meanwhile, Fix-It Felix, the hero from Ralph's game, is desperately searching for him so that he can return and stop the game from being declared out of order, and the Commander of the Space Marines is also in Sugar Rush, hunting an escaped Cy-Bug which Ralph unwittingly took with him.
Thats quite a lot of plot to cram into under two hours, and it means that Moore's movie zips along like one of the video games it depicts, stuffing in countless sight-gags and references to games for the adults without ever stinting on the slapstick and toilet humour for the kids. The multi-socket adaptor powering all the consoles is here revealed to house a Game Central Station, where "homeless" Q-Bert avatars beg for change and off-duty combatants from Street Fighter go to drink. There are cameos from characters from Mario, Pac Man, Frogger and many more in these scenes, and the way flashbacks are rendered in different resolutions, and some characters flicker like older game pixels are the sorts of details that give Wreck-It Ralph a feeling of a richly textured, deeply imagined world most reminiscent of the one seen in the Toy Story films.
All of that - and the sensitive, nicely judged voice work from John C Reilly and Sarah Silverman - helps immeasurably when it comes to selling that familiar emotional arc in the somewhat overstuffed, hyper-frenetic last reel.
Feeling much more like a Pixar production than any Disney film in recent memory, Wreck-It Ralph is a an immensely entertaining family film with layers and laughs in equal measure.

JURASSIC PARK

(Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Here is one of the oddest blockbusters Spielberg has made; a mix of compromise and genius which soars in parts and limps along in others.
The first act is all exposition. Characters are introduced - and by the standards of the modern event film, these characters are finely drawn, with actual personalities and motivations before dinosaurs mean that there is only one appropriate motivation: survival. The cast, composed mainly of grown-up character actors, certainly helps. That is another quirk of this film, produced when the summer blockbuster season was only about a decade old and still establishing its own rules; the cast seems relatively ancient. If this was made now, chances are the principals would all be in their late teens or early twenties. But here we get Sam Neill in the Harrison Ford role as the reluctantly dashing palaeontologist Dr Alan Grant, Jeff Goldblum as the awkwardly witty refusenik mathematician Ian Malcolm and Laura Dern as paleobotanist Dr Ellie Satler. The supporting cast is filled out with classy character faces like Samuel L Jackson and Bob Peck, and they handle much of the expository heavy lifting, telling us all about the Island, setting up the carnage to come.
Spielberg balances out all the maturity on show with two children at the centre of the story. They are Billionaire Richard Hammond's (Richard Attenborough, distractingly trying a twee, almost comic Scottish accent) grandchildren, come for a preview ride around his amazing new attraction; a safari park where genetically engineered (cloned, in effect) dinosaurs replace standard animals. The trio of doctors are there for the same experience, but their visit coincides with a terrible storm and an attempt to profit from some corporate espionage by a disgruntled employee which deactivates power - and electrified fences - at just the wrong moment.  Dinosaurs - including a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a pack of terrifying, cunning Velociraptors - are now on the loose, and any mammals in the park are fair game, including Dr Grant, on the run through the tropical forest with the two kids.
The exposition is such a demand here that Spielberg even sets aside five minutes to have the Park itself deliver it. We witness the educational part of the tour, wherein a cartoon character gives a presentation on how the dinosaurs were created. Through all this, it's hard not to grow impatient. We want to see the dino-mayhem we know is coming, and these scenes don't create tension, they just set the scene efficiently.
The effects, though a little dated, remain stunningly impressive, and Spielberg uses them with a sense of organic storytelling and timing that is possibly his greatest gift as a filmmaker. He integrates the cgi superbly, giving us glimpses of dinosaurs before a sweeping awed shot allows them to dominate the frame, John Williams' euphoric theme rising up as audience and characters are joined in a sense of wonder. And then, he begins to up the tension in the first scene depicting the T-Rex. That is a masterly construction of suspense, beautiful choreography of elements and terrific direction which has lost none of its power to thrill, terrify and amuse. And Spielberg is one of the few directors capable of crafting scenes which do all three at once. It is testament to his skill that he is able to make a film aimed squarely at families so scary; there is no gore here, but the chase and stalk scenes are genuinely tense and gripping, especially once the film ramps up in its last act. In that portion of the film, the Velociraptors take centre stage, and there is much Jaws-like suspense as the children (especially) hide and flee. In these scenes Spielberg feels fully engaged. You can almost feel his mind working, figuring out the best ways to drag audiences wherever he wants them to go, and the cuts and compositions are incredibly consistent in their skill and quality.
It's just that so much else feels so rote; where Jaws feels tight and measured in its pacing and timing, Jurassic Park feels slack and flabby. Individual scenes thrill and crackle, but the film bumps along awkwardly, some of its character beats too blatantly inserted as if in response to preview screening comments. The most interesting character - Goldblum's hilarious oddball - disappears halfway through and is rarely seen thereafter (the sequel seems aware of this, positioning him as the lead character). That is a structural flaw the film fails to repair; it peaks with the T-Rex sequence, and while the Velociraptors are fun and frightening, they don't quite match the impact of that cinematic monster or that awesome scene.
Even then, the whole thing rather peters out into a bit of an anticlimax, and it may be relevant that Spielberg made Schindlers List - a far more personal film - in the same year, stretching even his formidable talents.

PARA NORMAN

(Sam Fell, Chris Butler, 2012)

Another in the 2012 mini-wave of animated films for children utilising horror iconography and even, to some extent, plotting, ParaNorman is an outstanding piece of work, affectionate in its approach to the material to which it pays tribute, clever, exciting and engaging throughout.
It tells the story of Norman, a young boy who is a necromancer - he speaks to and sees the dead. Everywhere, all the time. For this he is bullied in school, fighting with his parents and sister at home, and a little bit lonely too. When his hermit of an uncle reveals that he has the same power, and that Norman must take over his duties, fighting off a prophesised Witches curse on the same day every year, Norman grudgingly agrees. Only he is too late, and his town is suddenly invaded by a mob of zombies as Norman and a ragtag group of his friends search desperately for a way to save their home.
Suffering from one of the usual problems affecting children's films - a need to hit too many bases with regularity, so that an action scene follows a scare, then is interrupted by a gag, all topped off by a moment of obvious character growth - ParaNorman has its own distinctive look and feel, which makes it play like a really original and refreshing piece of work. It lacks the fuzzy perfection of a Pixar product, and its top-motion style is utterly different from the approach of either Aardman or Tim Burton's school.
Instead, its design is quirky, even a little gritty, with a caricatured quality to the characters that allows the horror to work without ever becoming too frightening for the young target audience. There are a few neat references to various horror films, and some tremendous character work. It is reminiscent of the adventure films of the 1980s which were aimed squarely at teens and children; meaning that it feels almost as if it could have been written for a live action treatment, and benefits from that emphasis on a solid emotional base for Norman in his everyday life. The fantastic material then feels like a colourful extension of that world. The finale - Norman's final confrontation with the Witch - is beautiful, atmospheric and even a little moving.

BRAVE

(Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, 2012) Only a few years ago, Pixar appeared possessed of some sort of magic formula. Film after film rolled off the factory line there; each of them technically wondrous, splendidly entertaining for both adults and children, and yet almost mythically resonant and charged with an emotional power many narratives never quite access. The consistency was staggering, the breadth of vision - from the ecologically-minded dystopian sci-fi of Wall.E to a clever retelling of the Seven Samurai with insects in A Bugs Life to the epic comedy drams of the Toy Story films, each with profound thngs today about mortality, ageing and family - remarkable, and the ability to marry big laughs with pure thrills seemingly effortless. That has changed since the critical and commercial triumph of Toy Story 3. Last years Cars 2 was a fun kids film, but it had few pleasures for adult audiences, and Brave is perhaps the studios most generic, least distinctive film yet. Which isn't to say it's bad. Its good, solid family entertainment, telling the story of young Scottish Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly MacDonald), who lives in the Medievel Highlands and loves riding, archery and generally un-Princessly pursuits, and her battle with her mother the Queen (Emma Thompson), who wants her to follow custom and marry the heir of one of the other local clans. Desperate to keep doing the things she loves, Merida visits a witch (Julie Walters) in the forest, procures a spell to "change" her mother, then watches in horror as that literally happens, and the Queen is transformed into a huge bear. It just so happens that the King (Billy Connolly) is obsessed with killing bears, having lost a leg to one when Merida was a child.. All of that means a film with the traditionally Disney-ish themes of being true to yourself, learning to trust family etc. None of that and none of the emotional beats are remotely new or even particularly interesting. The design and visuals, however, are predictably excellent, albeit far darker, both visually and tonally, than in past Pixar productions. Indeed, the intensity of some of the scarier moments in the second half of the film may be a bit much for some children, and the comic elements are more muted (and, honestly, less funny) than in just about every other Pixar film. But then this is mostly a drama, following a female protagonist (another first for the company), with pronounced horror elements and a heavy use of voiceover. That is sometimes indicative of a film with problems with narrative clarity, which may be the case here - the first act is full of exposition and explanation, talky scenes establishing motivation and mythology, and the action doesn't really kick in until half an hour in, a stretch in a childrens film. The problem is probably one of expectation. Brave is a perfectly fine animated film for children, but it lacks that glow of inspiration that seemed to light previous Pixar triumphs from within. It even compares poorly with a recent production with similar themes and setting from a different company; How to Train Your Dragon was funnier, wittier, more exciting and looked just as impressive. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable to suggest that a Dreamworks Animation would be better than a Pixar Production. But that, unfortunately, is no longer true.

HUGO

(Martin Scorsese, 2011)

If you love cinema, its hard to see how this film will fail to move you. For here is one of Scorsese's hymns to the power of cinema itself, a celebration of the magic of movies, the power they possess to bring dreams to life. Usually he infuses his documentaries on film - one on American Cinema, one on Italian - with his wonder and enthusiasm, but the subject matter of Hugo allows him to fill this film with the emotion of his own relationship with the medium, and in doing so the last act acquires a thrilling, almost awed sense of excitement as Scorsese does away with framing devices and simply shows us some of the work of George Melies, that pioneer of early fantasy cinema.
The framing device is a kids film; the story of Hugo Cabret, a young orphan living in a Paris Train Station in the 1920s. He resides in secret quarters in the ceiling, moves around inside the Walls, spying on the merchants who man the shops and keeping the clocks running. While trying to fix an automaton as a way to reconnect with his recently-deceased father he becomes involved with the mysterious and grumpy old man who owns the toy kiosk, which eventually leads to the magic of cinema and Melies.
In many ways this plays like the sort of thing Tim Burton would make. Slightly less gothic, perhaps, yet set in a detailed fantasy-world version of the past, with an overtly stylised aesthetic evident in the design, costumes and photography which - together with the need for a Steady supply of 3D effects - means Scorsese indulges in many pointless vertiginous swoops of his camera through space. The pallette is a little familiar; all rusty yellows and marine blues, and the editing is often sloppy, the entire film overlong.
It does feature some superb cinematic storytelling from Scorsese, in the scenes where we see the life of the station from Hugo's point of view in sequences reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window. There are plenty of laughs here, many of them courtesy of Sacha Baron Cohen, who finds just the right pitch between realism and cartoon comedy for his character, the villain of the piece for so long, yet one who remains complex and sympathetic.
Yet Scorsese ensures that the comic tone and the derring-do necessary in a Childrens adventure don't prevent the hefty emotional kick of the climax, which plays upon themes of memory and creativity and rests upon the invention of Melies for its visual quality.
The cast, peopled mainly by strong British talent - Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Ray Winstone - in even the smallest roles are generally strong, though the young lead, Asa Butterfield, overacts horrendously throughout.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN

(Steven Spielberg, 2011)

For all that Spielberg and Peter Jackson's spectacular and expensive adaptation of Herge's popular creation has it's many pleasures, it never quite feels right. It never quite feels like Tintin. It feels as if they sought to make a Tintin film, were denied the rights by Herge's estate, and instead made a blatant knock-off in which everything is extremely similar, but nothing is really how it should be. Given that they weren't denied the rights and that most of the details of Tintin's distinctive fictional world are here recreated with painstaking detail and love, that's something of a major worry.
Part of the problem is the animation. Using the near photo-realistic motion capture and cgi technology beloved of Robert Zemeckis allows for massive invention and precision in so many of the visual particulars that it's easy to see why it appeals to filmmakers. But it also means that the "uncanny valley" is a problem throughout, one only complicated by the decision to render many of the characters - Captain Haddock, most obviously - in a sort of realist-caricature style. It also has its drawbacks in the areas which seem initially like Pluses. Athmosphere seems like something that can be painted into the corners of a scene, augmented by accenting the detail of the objects in a room, sharpening the colours of a palette, softening the lighting, allowing shadows to run longer. But it's more complex than that. The scenes of exotic North Africa and the middle East in the Indiana Jones movies are effortlessly, pungently atmospheric in a way simiiar scenes in this film are not. The Indiana Jones films were made on location, in ancient towns and baking deserts. Here, most everything feels hermetically sealed, without any grit or soul. The same problem afflicts the many, often brilliantly conceived, thrillingly "shot" action sequences. The level of detail and inventiveness is truly incredible, but that somehow only emphasises our distance from such patently made material, and is indeed even a distraction.
The screenplay, by the dazzling trio of Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat, is solid, working a traditional Tintin mystery and a Spielbergan set-piece roller coaster into the same film and making it work, and seamlessly for the most part, though there are a few clunky lines scattered throughout. The cast is impressive, everybody nailing the spirit and personality of hs character. And there are some nice visual gags and slapstick here, together with many beautiful images. But the whole thing, which is breathlessly paced most of the way, ends in a horrendous anti-climax, followed by the inevitable threat of a sequel. And while it may work to some degree with its target audience of 10 year old boys, as Spielberg adventure films go, this is strictly second rank.

KUNG FU PANDA 2

(Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

An obvious and largely winning attempt to replicate the success of the original film by slavishly recreating every element that made it so popular, Kung Fu Panda 2 settles for efficiency rather than inspiration. That isn't a criticism; it works marvellously at extending snd deepening the world and characters of the first film whilst recreating the mix of faithful homage to Chinese Wuxia cinema and knockabout Jack Black comedy. Black is key to the tone here, always undercutting the intense drama or the sentimentality but allowing enough of it to remain that the film always has some emotional interest. The animation is fine, the action scenes thrilling, often beautiful, and well-conceived and choreographed in such a way that no live action film could possibly match, nicely mingling slapstick and action.
Gary Oldman is the villain, a role he could play in his sleep, and the whole thing races along from one set piece to another before an appropriately massive finale and the inevitable set-up for another sequel.

RANGO

(Gore Verbinski, 2011)

A true oddity, this Spaghetti Western for 8 year olds feels thrillingly original and bold in a cinematic genre (the animated Childrens film) as filled with mediocrity and outright trash as any other. While it may feature a quite slavish devotion to Joseph Campbell's "Heroes Journey" principals, much of the finer detail here is marked by genuine eccentricity. The character design is bizarre; sometimes ugly, often beautiful, occasionally hilarious, these fascinating animal players look like no other cast.
The hero embodies the films oddness. Voiced brilliantly by Johnny Depp, Rango is a chameleon-fantasist, with a thriving inner life and a highly developed sense of drama. He hams his way through the story and it's perils until forced to take it all seriously in the final act, and is introduced by an almost daring monologue interrupted by a sudden and violent event which provides instant context and begins the plot.
Verbinski's experience with big set-pieces is a boon here, where he can let his imagination go and orchestrate absolute mayhem, but this film has more wit and originality than all of the Pirates films combined.
Not that it's all originality; the plot is lifted from Chinatown and there are references to numerous Westerns throughout (a ghostly Clint Eastwood - voiced by Timothy Olyphant - even appears to Rango as the "Spirit of the West" during the films long, imaginative fantasy stretch), but they are at the service of the narrative rather than driving it.
Visually, the film is rather extraordinary. Master cinematographer Roger Deakins repeats the work he did as "visual consultant" on How to Train Your Dragon last year with even more impressive results. This pitiless desert sun is precisely evoked, the various textures of life in a frontier town indelibly, precisely captured. Drought is a key plot point, and Rango made me thirsty, no small achievement.
Most importantly, Rango works. As a Western, as a comedy, as a film for children and adults. And it needs no 3D gimmickry to sell itself.