[7] Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor provide the voices of two brave mice who volunteer to rescue a kidnapped orphan in this surprisingly dark and scary offering from Disney’s animation department. I love the atmosphere this movie creates, especially around a wrecked riverboat tucked away in a spooky bayou. That’s where our villainess, Madame Medusa (voiced by Oscar-winner Geraldine Page), holds a little girl named …
[8] Disney’s 50th feature-length animated movie is their best in many years. Tangled recaptures the charm, humor, and spirit of the studio’s second renaissance, the late 80s/early 90s period that saw such hits as The Little Mermaid and Aladdin. Quite simply, I laughed and I cried, thoroughly engaged with the characters and the storytelling. And when I thought I had Tangled figured out, it gave …
[8] Disney’s Frozen borrows ideas from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and follows closely in the footsteps of Tangled before it, but it’s also a bit more. For one thing, there’s an interesting sister dynamic at play here. One royal daughter, Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), is the care-free sort, while the older daughter Elsa (Wicked‘s Idina Menzel) is born with a curse – …
[9] My favorite Pixar film features two robots who say little more than each others’ names, but somehow, as if by magic, WALL-E manages to convey more emotion than films that try twice as hard to do so. There’s a charming purity in the characters of WALL-E and EVE, who to differing degrees struggle against their ‘directives’ to form a bond. The fact that these …
[9] “What if a gun had a soul?” That’s how director Brad Bird pitched The Iron Giant to Warner Bros. Animation. The gun in question is The Iron Giant himself, a robot of unknown origin that crash lands on Earth in 1957, at the height of the atomic scare. He dents his head and can’t remember where he’s from or why he exists. He befriends …
[9] A terrific script and loveable characters send Toy Story soaring. At the heart of the simple storyline are two toys with character arcs as compelling as any of their live-action counterparts. Woody (Tom Hanks) is a pull-string cowboy who’s afraid of being replaced as his owner’s favorite, and Buzz (Tim Allen) is the new, gadget-enhanced astronaut who doesn’t accept the fact that he’s a …
[9] To save her sick child and move her home from the path of the farmer’s plow, a timid field mouse seeks out a colony of hyper-intelligent rats who are the product of medical experimentation. The Secret of N.I.M.H., based on Robert C. O’Brien’s Newbery Award winning novel, came along during a great Disney dryspell, when the most profitable animated films were a couple of …
[9] Under the precious veneer of the Disney name lie some pretty damned spectacular pieces of motion picture art and Bambi is one of the best. With relatively little dialogue and an abundance of montage, Bambi plays out like a tone poem on rites of passage, death and rebirth. Many a child has been traumatized by Bambi, and rightly so. The death of Bambi’s mother …
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