Minions: The Rise of Gru

And They Were All Yellow

I have a confession to make: until now, I had never seen a Despicable Me movie.  As a millennial, my animation touchstones were Toy Story and Shrek, and at 18 I was too old for the original Despicable Me when it came out.  But sometimes the universe (along with an aggressive marketing campaign) gives you a sign.  I couldn’t stop watching the original #gentleminons video on social media, and for the past month three yellow faces have stared at me from a poster at my subway stop.  When Minions: The Rise of Gru was the most convenient option at the theater, the time had come to stop resisting and succumb to the meme fever.

Continue reading

Onward

onward

Day of the Dad

As others have observed, the overall trend of Pixar’s releases has been a gradual decline in creativity, with the freshness of Toy Story giving way to the banal likes of Cars and Inside Out.  The conceit of Onward is on the trite end of the spectrum; its serviceable and shallow fantasy-creatures-meet-modern-technology setup feels like it could have come from any one of Hollywood’s anonymous computer animation factories. Continue reading

Sonic the Hedgehog

sonic

Blue Streak

After a rocky production that saw the special effects team rebuild the title character from scratch, no doubt increasing the budget in the process, it’s a minor miracle that Sonic is not only a success, but a good movie.  Not a great one, by any stretch, but I’ll take what I can get. Continue reading

Zootopia Is Good, But It Lacks Bite

Zootopia56554cc533bea-1-1
The Fast and the Furriest

Despite its considerable media hype, I wasn’t planning on seeing Zootopia, at least not in theaters.  The last animated movie forced on the public like this was Inside Out, which turned out to be depressingly average.  As a result, I went in to Zootopia with lower expectations. Continue reading