Category Archives: Animation in film

‘Irreplaceable’: will Hayao Miyazaki, Japan’s animation auteur, ever retire?

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The Boy and the Heron’s Oscar win has prompted debate over whether the 83-year-old could put down his pencil

It could have been the perfect send-off – recognition at the Academy Awards of the artistry of Japan’s peerless animator Hayao Miyazaki.

The moment The Boy and the Heron was named the winner of best animated feature in Los Angeles last weekend gave Japan a chance to reflect on Miyazaki’s towering influence, and contemplate whether the 83-year-old is truly finished making films.

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The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s last film, wins Oscar for best animation

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Master Japanese director wins his second Oscar for story of a young boy searching for his mother during the second world war

The Boy and the Heron, supposedly the final film from Japanese master director Hayao Miyazaki, has won the Oscar for best animated feature film at the 96th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Inspired by Genzaburō Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, The Boy and the Heron is the loosely autobiographical story of a young boy during the second world war, searching for his mother in a mysterious fantasy world; on its UK release it was described as “a mysterious and charming fantasy that circles back to Miyazaki’s classic themes of childhood pain and grief” by the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw.

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Jennifer Lopez to produce Bob the Builder movie

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The artist once known as Jenny from the block is spearheading an animated feature about a Latino construction worker voiced by Anthony Ramos

Move over Barbie: the latest Mattel property set for cultural domination has been unveiled as Bob the Builder, the chirpy construction worker who debuted 25 years ago on CBBC and is being belatedly brought to the big screen by booty-shaking multi-hyphenate Jennifer Lopez.

In something of a spin on the original series, the film’s plot will see Roberto (AKA Bob) travel to Puerto Rico for a major construction job, where he “takes on issues affecting the island and digs deeper into what it means to build”.

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Ana Ofelia Murguía, Mexican actor and voice of Disney’s Coco, dies aged 90

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Murguía, who voiced titular character in Oscar-winning animated Pixar film, appeared in more than 100 roles spanning cinema, stage and television

Ana Ofelia Murguía, the Mexican actor who voiced the titular character of Disney and Pixar film Coco, has died aged 90.

Her death was announced “with deep sadness” on social media by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, which said Murguía’s “artistic career was vital for the performing arts of Mexico”. Her cause of death was not given.

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Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘final’ film The Boy and the Heron hits No 1 at North American box office

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The Japanese director’s animation beats The Hunger Games prequel and Godzilla Minus One on its opening weekend in the US and Canada

The Boy and the Heron, reportedly the final film from Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki, has taken the number one spot at the box office on its North American release, as well as achieving record figures for the director.

Preliminary box office returns report that The Boy and the Heron took $12.8m in the US and Canada on its opening weekend, putting it a significant distance ahead of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which managed $9.4m. In third place was another Japanese film, the monster movie Godzilla Minus One, on $8.3m.

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Studio Ghibli to release Hayao Miyazaki’s final film with no trailers or promotion

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The director and veteran of Studio Ghibli plans to retire after the release of How Do You Live? which will forgo trailers and marketing ahead of its Japanese release next month

Hayao Miyazaki’s next and apparently final film will be released with no trailer, marketing or other new promotional materials, it has been revealed.

In an interview with Japanese magazine Bungei Shunju, translated by the Hollywood Reporter, producer Toshio Suzuki said the film, titled How Do You Live?, would be released with “no trailers or TV commercials at all … no newspaper ads either.” He added: “Deep down, I think this is what moviegoers latently desire.”

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Makers of Lightyear flop among Pixar job cuts by Disney

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Director and producer of Toy Story spinoff lose roles after $200m production brought in just $226.7m in global ticket sales

Walt Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios has eliminated 75 positions including those of two executives behind the box office disappointment Lightyear, sources said on Saturday, the first significant job cuts at the studio in a decade.

The cuts included Lightyear director Angus MacLane, a 26-year Pixar veteran who was part of the senior creative team on such acclaimed films as Toy Story 4 and Coco. Galyn Susman, producer of Lightyear, also departed. Susman had been at Pixar since the release of the original Toy Story movie in 1995.

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Wallace and Gromit maker warns UK animators may have to move abroad

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Exclusive: head of Aardman studio blames Brexit as UK falls behind on skills and tax relief

The head of Aardman, the Oscar-winning British studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, has warned that the nation’s animation productions for children’s television will have to be made overseas because acute challenges are taking their toll on the UK sector.

Sean Clarke, Aardman’s managing director, said the company is struggling with everything from serious competition from other countries on tax relief to a dire skills shortage.

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Chinese censors alter ending of Minions: The Rise of Gru film

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Viewers mock addendum explaining Gru’s family values and arrest of thief Wild Knuckles

Censors in China have changed the ending of the animated film Minions: The Rise of Gru for its domestic release, according to viewers in the country, in yet another example of China altering a popular Hollywood film.

According to posts and screenshots of the film, shared on Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, there is an addendum by censors showing that Wild Knuckles, a main character in the heist film, was caught by police and served 20 years in jail.

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Pat Carroll, voice of Disney villain Ursula in The Little Mermaid, dies aged 95

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The comedy actor, who started out as a regular on variety shows and became a prolific voice actor, died at home on Saturday of pneumonia

Pat Carroll, the Emmy award-winning actor and voice of the memorable Disney villain Ursula in The Little Mermaid, has died aged 95.

Carroll died on Saturday of pneumonia at her home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, her daughter Kerry Karsian told the Hollywood Reporter.

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Saudi Arabia bans Pixar’s Lightyear over same-sex kiss

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The Hollywood film has been banned in a number of countries in the Middle East because of a kiss between space ranger Alisha and her partner

Toy Story spin-off Lightyear will not be released in Saudi Arabia due to the inclusion of a same-sex kiss, the latest in a string of Hollywood films that have been banned in the Middle East over LGBTQ+ content.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the scene in question involved a space ranger called Alisha (voiced by Uzo Aduba) and her partner who greet each other with a kiss on the lips. Variety reports that Lightyear was not submitted to censors in Saudi Arabia, as it was anticipated it would not pass due to the country’s total prohibition of same-sex relationships. However, the Pixar film was submitted to censors in the comparatively more liberal United Arab Emirates, but the film’s licence was revoked after complaints on social media.

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Kapow! Our writers pick their favorite Batman movie

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To celebrate the release of The Batman, Guardian writers have written about their all-time favorite Caped Crusader films from Adam West to Ben Affleck

Of all the superheroes, DC Comics’ Batman is now endowed with the most Dostoyevskian seriousness. It wasn’t always like this. And, in my heart, my favourite Batman is the first movie version, from 1966, which grew out of the wacky TV show in the era of Get Smart and I Dream Of Jeannie and Mad magazine. As kids, we watched the program religiously on TV, which is where I caught up with the film about Batman and Robin taking on Joker, Penguin, Catwoman and Riddler – never dreaming that it was anything other than deadly serious. I watched it in the same spirit as I now watch Michael Mann films. I was thrilled by the (genuinely) propulsive and exciting “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner” theme tune (how I resented the vulgar playground joke about what Batman’s mum shouts out of the window to get him in at mealtimes) and quivered at the brilliant, psychedelically conceived title-cards for fights: BAM! I also fanatically pored over the novelisation tie-in – Batman vs The Fearsome Foursome.

The show-stopper was the famous, entertainingly tense sequence where Batman can’t find anywhere to dispose of a smoking bomb, something that surely inspired the later Zucker/Abrahams comedies. Adam West played the sonorous Bruce Wayne and Batman and Burt Ward was Robin (confusingly, his alter ego Dick Grayson was often described as Wayne’s “ward”). Their costumes, with luxuriant silk capes, were gorgeous. Brilliant acting talent lined up for the villains: Latin lover Cesar Romero was the Joker; veteran Hollywood character turn Burgess Meredith was Penguin, Lee Meriwether fused glamour and comedy as Catwoman (replacing TV’s Julie Newmar) and impressionist and night-club comic Frank Gorshin was Riddler. Much is said about the campiness of this show – and yes, there is a case for retrospectively re-interpreting this Batman and Robin as a covert queer statement. (In fact, it was Cesar Romero who kept the press guessing about his sexuality.) But in a way, it was more about goofiness as part of the Sixties Zeitgeist: being silly, even at this level, was countercultural seriousness. I suspect that every single Batman director, from Joel Schumacher to Christopher Nolan, measures their work against the addictive Day-Glo potency of the ’66 Batman. Pow! Peter Bradshaw

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Belle review – anime that makes for an intriguing big-screen spectacle

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This weird postmodern drama sees a lonely teenager join a virtual world where she becomes a hugely successful singer

There’s some amazing big-screen spectacle in this weird postmodern emo photo-love drama from Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda, whose previous film Mirai elevated him to auteur status. Suzu, voiced by Kaho Nakamura, is a deeply unhappy and lonely teenager at high school, who lives with her dad. Her mum died some years ago, attempting (successfully) to save a child from drowning and Suzu can’t come to terms with the zero-sum pointlessness of this calamity: a total stranger was saved but her mother died. Or not zero in fact: while her loss increased the sum-total of unhappiness, the most popular boy in school – a friend since they were little – is tender and protective towards Suzu.

Her life is complicated further when she is persuaded to join a virtual reality meta-universe called U, a glittering unearthly city like a next-level Manhattan or Shibuya. (Presumably entry into this fantasy world needs a VR headset, although oddly this is not made plain.) Participants have their biometrics read and get an enhanced avatar of themselves and Suzu finds that she is now “Belle”, an ethereally beautiful young woman with quirky freckles and a wonderful singing voice. To her astonishment, Suzu finds that Belle is becoming a colossally famous singer – but at the very high point of this meta-success she comes across the Beast, who disrupts one of her concerts: a brutish, aggressive outcast figure loathed by the self-appointed vigilante guardians of U.

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Flee: inside the film about a Kabul boy who finds happiness, cats and a husband in Denmark

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He escaped death, fled across the Baltic, and eventually found love and a new life. Jonas Poher Rasmussen describes how he turned Amin’s often harrowing story into an uplifting, award-winning animation

When the Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen was 15, an Afghan refugee moved to his small village. Rumours circulated about how the boy, Amin, had got there. Some said he had walked all the way from Kabul, others that he had seen his whole family slaughtered. Rasmussen became the newcomer’s friend and confidant – Amin even came out to him as gay when they were teenagers – and their closeness endured into adulthood. When they both suffered bad break-ups in their 20s, for instance, Rasmussen went to stay with Amin; they refer to that period now as “the heartbreak summer”. He still didn’t know the truth about how his friend came to Denmark, though, so he did what any documentarist might do: he proposed making a film about him. Amin refused to reveal his identity on screen – but what if the film were animated?

The result is Flee, which alternates between scenes of Rasmussen interviewing his friend, dramatisations of Amin’s perilous journey to Copenhagen via Moscow, and present-day interludes showing him househunting with his boyfriend in which the concept of settling down presents unique challenges for someone who has spent his life running. Aside from the occasional excerpt of archive footage – the war-scarred streets of Kabul, the unruly waves seen from a boat smuggling people across the Baltic – every frame of the movie is animated, most of it in a simple, straightforwardly realistic fashion that matches Amin’s narration.

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‘Thematically richer than the Bible’: what I learned at the first annual Boss Baby symposium

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Academics gather online to explore the philosophical underpinnings of a movie about a baby who is also a boss

In the middle of a question and answer session at an academic symposium, an audience member wearing a Boss Baby shirt showed off the Boss Baby lunchbox he takes to work every day.

“Obviously I eat cookies for lunch,” he explained, “because that’s what Boss Baby fans do.”

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‘It’s absolutely insane’: the US-based camp where Jews guarded Nazis

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Semi-animated Netflix documentary short reveals the secret story of the Jewish soldiers who watched over prisoners of war on US soil

Too vast in scope to be contained within war drama, the Holocaust movie constitutes an entire genre unto itself, collecting a potentially infinite number of tragedies great and small. The history of the 20th century’s most massive atrocity comes with thousands of footnotes now gradually expanded upon by media depicting the unsung courage and untold evil. Israeli documentary film-makers Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy singled out one such extraordinary tale for their latest joint project, Netflix’s short film Camp Confidential, drawing attention to a highly covert military operation only recently released from behind redaction-marker bars. “The first thing is, when producers Benji and Jono Bergmann approached us with this and told us of the story, we didn’t believe it,” Sivan tells the Guardian. “It was just so out-there.”

The black-op facility tucked away in northern Virginia’s Fairfax county sounds like something out of a pulp paperback: Jewish soldiers, many of them refugees from the devastation in Europe, watched over Nazi prisoners of war in a surreally domestic setting. Known as PO Box 1142, it housed such notables as spymaster Reinhard Gehlen and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. But those in charge of the base were also tasked with maintaining a baseline quality of life for the inmates, leading to bizarre scenes such as a department store outing with former members of the Third Reich to purchase unmentionables for their wives. Bulldozed after the war and buried in secrecy until the National Parks Service unearthed some remnants in the early 2000s, the clandestine camp now doubles as a cautionary tale for modern Jews and a memorial for those who came before them.

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Josee, the Tiger and the Fish review – beautiful-looking anime takes a trip to the zoo

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This romantic animation about a paraplegic woman’s relationship with a marine biology student suffers for its sweetness

This gorgeous-looking, swooningly romantic anime feels like it could win over YA audiences: it’s heartfelt, unthreatening and rather lovely. Its representation of disability does feel a bit iffy in places, though: presenting a 24-year-old paraplegic woman, Josee, as fundamentally in need of fixing or rescue. Near the start she meets Tsuneo, a dreamily gorgeous diver and marine biology student, who saves her hurtling out of control down a hill in her wheelchair. She is a helpless victim – and not for the last time in the movie.

When Tsuneo walks Josee back to her apartment, her grandmother hires him as a part-time carer. The job involves spending a couple of hours with Josee every day. The one rule is that he can’t take her outside. At first, Tsuneo can’t stand his petulant and demanding client, who calls him “my servant” and orders him around. But slowly he’s smitten and develops something worryingly like a saviour complex. It turns out that Josee’s overprotective grandmother has kept her confined at home to make sure she is safe. As a result, she is childish and emotionally immature, but a fiercely talented artist.

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Cotton plantations and non-consensual kisses: how Disney became embroiled in the culture wars

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The company has been addressing its historical racism and sexism, adding disclaimers to films and altering theme park rides. But these moves have stirred contempt as well as approval

Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.

“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”

Matters escalated quickly and predictably. Within 24 hours, the review was reported across Twitter and conservative media. Fox News ran 13 segments on the story in one day: “Cancel culture going after Snow White”; “The woke movement taking aim at Disneyland”, etc. Senator John Kennedy was brought on to express his disdain: “We are so screwed … I don’t know where these jackaloons come up with this stuff.” The UK’s Sun chimed in: “Snow White may be CANCELED” [sic]. As did Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail: “Leave Snow White’s Prince alone, you insufferable woke brats.” Then Fox News reported on that: “Piers Morgan slams consent criticism over revamped Snow White ride.” And so forth. All of them triggered by a single paragraph in an online review.

Disney increasingly finds itself caught in the crossfire of these skirmishes. Understandably, to some extent, since it is the biggest target. Already a byword for family entertainment, Disney is now the dominant purveyor of popular culture following its gradual acquisitions of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Avatar, Alien, The Muppets, The Simpsons and numerous other household-name properties. But having successfully captured entertainment’s centre ground, Disney now finds itself under attack on both flanks. From one side, it is criticised for its old-fashioned and bigoted legacy; from the other, it is criticised for being too “woke”. What’s an unprecedentedly powerful media corporation to do?

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Ned Beatty: the good ol’ boy who made playing the ordinary guy look easy

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From his breakthrough in Deliverance to a memorable turn in Toy Story 3, the authenticity of Beatty’s middleman gone bad made him the perfect co-star – and often stole the show

If ever a character actor personified the “good ol’ boy” archetype of Hollywood’s new cinema of the 1970s it was Ned Beatty from Louisville, Kentucky, whose broad, open, good-natured face seemed so often to be covered with a sheen of sweat – either from suppressed guilt, or tension, from discomfort in whatever sweltering southern clime he happened to find himself. His was a smiley face bounded by its prosperous double-chin and nascent combover, a face that lent reality and approachability to the movies: an authentic and worldly presence.

Ned Beatty had the hardest role to play: the middle-ranking ordinary guy: lawyer, cop, official, politician and maybe, effectively, the wingman to the conventionally better-looking male leads, and in his 70s movie heyday this tended to mean Burt Reynolds, with whom he starred in six films, including, of course, Beatty’s brilliant and brutal breakthrough: Deliverance (1972), written by James Dickey and directed by John Boorman, in which Reynolds’s sinister alpha male businessman leads his buddies Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox on a vacation canoeing trip through the deepest Georgia wilderness only to come into horrible contact with hillbillies playing banjos and bearing grudges.

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Historic wins for Nomadland – and surprise victory for Anthony Hopkins – at odd Oscars

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Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of colour to win best director with her drama about van-dwellers as Hopkins and Frances McDormand won top acting honours

During an unusual Oscars ceremony, on-the-road drama Nomadland triumphed with a win for best picture, best actress and a historic victory for Chloé Zhao, becoming the first woman of colour to be named best director and only the second woman ever.

The film, starring Frances McDormand as a woman living out of her van and interacting with real-life nomads, took home the top trophy near the end of a delayed night and a delayed season amid the pandemic. The ceremony played out in person but with safety precautions and a modest guest list.

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