Tag: kids’ movies

Ballerina aka Leap! (2016)

Work hard, believe in yourself, and your artistic dreams will take flight… Great idea, poor execution. For a movie about poise, it’s not very well balanced.

Arguments can be made that every “follow your dreams” movie is unrealistic. I enjoy the well made ones, but Ballerina stretches the imagination too far. The ballet lessons Felicie weasels her way into, even combined with extra training, don’t span enough time for a real transformation from total beginner to top of the class. Passion is not a substitute for experience.

Worse, perhaps, the story was not emotionally well modulated; for example, the song at the very beginning is triumphant rather than wistful. A character who starts off confident has nothing much to learn.

Do you like subplots? For antagonists, we’ve got two different people who run the orphanage, the ballet rival, and the rival’s mother. There are two helpers: the mentor and the ballet teacher, plus the inspiring deceased mother in the backstory. Then there are two romantic interests: the childhood friend, and the Parisian. Got that?

Don’t watch this movie if you’re afraid of heights. I’m not bothered by flying contraptions or people walking on roofs: I think that stuff is great—even if it’s just as unrealistic as learning ballet in a week. Go figure.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/leap/id1271027079

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

This ambitious film adaptation of a ground-breaking children’s sci-fi novel was faithful to the book in fits and spurts, and in some ways it was better. Still, I agree with the box-office receipts on this one: not a winner.

I’m biased towards the book because I read it growing up and remember it vividly. Since screenplays can’t accommodate as many details as even the shortest of novels, liking this movie was going to be difficult in any case. That being said, the movie has some real flaws, about which, more below.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/a-wrinkle-in-time-2018/id1353642886

See below for some comparisons with the book and a list of reviews as well as a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

The Lego Movie (2014)

The Lego Movie looks like a transparent marketing ploy, but there’s more to it than that. It is surprisingly good. (So is The Lego Batman Movie, but reportedly The Lego Ninjago Movie isn’t.)

The Lego Movie is chock-a-block with jokes, only some of which are of the unsubtle variety, but it has a message, too: we all want to feel special, and in some way or other, we probably are, if we choose to see ourselves that way.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-lego-movie/id805178535

I liked the playfulness of the script and inventiveness of the visuals in the fights and chases. I am choosing to overlook the overly didactic name of the villain.

See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading The Lego Movie (2014)

Coco (2017)

I thought I disliked Olaf the snowman because he falls apart all the time, but I didn’t dislike Miguel’s skeleton ancestors in Coco when they fell apart (over and over again) in the oddly godless land of the dead, so it must be something else about Olaf that rubs me the wrong way. Sadly, the creators of Frozen made him the central character in the animated short Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which played before Coco.

Coco was totally worth the wait, however. The storytelling was crystal clear, emotional, and well-structured, with appropriate foreshadowing, lots of call-backs, and some stunning visuals. I couldn’t believe that a couple of adults next to me in the theater found it hard to stay awake; I found it hard not to cry.

Coco is the story of Miguel, the youngest in a long line of Mexican shoemakers. Coco is Miguel’s ancient great-grandmother. Coco and her mother were abandoned by an aspiring music man, so no one in the family is allowed to sing or play an instrument. They’re all fine with that… except Miguel. He wants nothing more than to be allowed to develop his musical talent. Eager to prove himself, he tries to steal the guitar from the tomb of a famous local musician so he can enter a competition being held as part of the town’s Day of the Dead celebrations. The theft doesn’t go as planned, and Miguel finds himself on a quest that teaches him about the dangers of ambition and the value of family.

Watch on Amazon

See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Coco (2017)

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure

It was pretty weird seeing a story about European winter traditions in a theater in tropical Southeast Asia, where Chinese New Year is a more important family holiday than Christmas. Here, if Christmas is commercialized, it’s at least partly because many people aren’t actually Christian.

This Christmas featurette stars Olaf, who I never liked, being just as annoying as ever. His broken-fourth-wall deadpan comments failed to amuse. Meanwhile, Anna and Elsa were so perfect as to be utterly boring, and Christoff was milked for awkward gross-out humor. I didn’t like the feature film Frozen much to begin with, but Olaf’s Frozen Adventure was terrible.

I’m not the only one who didn’t like the short. The reasons mostly seem to be that Pixar usually produces shorts that are surprising, cute, and clever, whereas this one was dull and obviously commercially motivated, and not even all that short.

I did catch Elsa saying “I’m sorry”—which she never does in the entire movie where she’s kinda (but not really) the villain. So there’s that.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/olafs-frozen-adventure-includes-6-disney-tales/id1318611806

“This special collection also includes 6 winter-themed tales (46 min) featuring classic Disney characters—Donald Duck in The Hockey Champ, Goofy in The Art of Skiing and Mickey Mouse in the holiday treat Pluto’s Christmas Tree—as well as Once Upon A Wintertime, Winter and Polar Trappers.”

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

Silly? Absolutely, but it’s also clever, amusing, and deep.

Why deep? Lego Batman is successful and proud, but isolated, lonely, and feeling more and more rejected as he realizes that his time has passed. It’s no longer cool to be a vigilante; justice has to be dispensed democratically. Lone heroes are old hat; today’s heroes need to leverage teamwork. No man is an island, not even Lego Batman, who lives on one.

Seriously, this cartoon beats Dawn of Justice hands down.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-lego-batman-movie/id1197505667

Despicable Me 3 (2017)

Thankfully, the minions were relegated to the second subplot, and the plot and first subplot had interesting things to say about brotherhood and motherhood, respectively.

Despicable Me 3 was silly, very silly, but fun. The villain was a grown-up 80s child star resentful of his fall from favor in his teen years, and still embodied the fads and styles of his best years. I’m an old millennial, and I buy movie tickets… bring on more of this 80s nostalgia, I say!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/despicable-me-3/id1247589650

The Boss Baby (2017)

I was expecting a terrible comedy, but this Dreamworks cartoon explores some emotional family themes and has a fantasy premise that is inventive yet strangely logical: the corporation in charge of sending babies to Earth is concerned that humans are starting to prefer puppies to babies, so they send down the Boss Baby as an undercover agent, with the result that the baby’s older brother gets jealous, discovers that the Boss Baby isn’t really a baby, and then has to help save the world from indifference to newborns.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-boss-baby/id1216954198

Big Hero 6 (2014)

This was at least the second time I have watched this movie. Here are some scattered thoughts about it (no spoilers).

I like it. It’s fun. Some young people get superpowers because science! (Cue the Arthur C. Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced technology and magic.)

I liked the alternate universe of San Fransokyo.

I keep wanting to call the inflatable healthcare robot “Betamax”, even though his name is “Baymax”.

The scene where Baymax emerges in Hiro’s room for the first time really made me laugh.

The whole movie dances knowingly on the border between parody and wry self-reference: not only does the audience know that the characters are in a superhero team’s origin story, the characters do, too.

The choice of bad guy was a pleasant surprise, and the motivation they gave him made a lot of sense. He wasn’t just evil for the sake of being evil.

Hiro goes on a believable emotional journey. The movie has real heart.

Anything with an airborne joyride in it gets a thumbs up from me.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/big-hero-6/id929423754

Cars 3 (2017)

I was wondering what the core idea would be for this movie. Cars 2 took the racers around the world. Where would Lightning McQueen go next? What was bigger and better?

The moviemakers obviously had a very different idea. They didn’t go bigger and better, they went deeper. The second sequel to Cars is about the passage of time and the passing of the torch; it’s about generations past and future, and the changing roles we play in our lives.

The settings include a gorgeous montage of roadside scenery across the US, plus nostalgic vignettes of a fictional sleepy town thought to be located somewhere in the Carolina mountains.

It was sad, it was happy, it was very American… and it was good.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/cars-3/id1242569993