Animated Films of 2021: Worst to Best

[Music] not to be crass but this sucked ass this was a show as usual the worst is relative not just for my subjectivity but from what i bothered to watch now that streaming is a completely legitimate form of distribution for your film but i'm not going to watch every single netflix babysitter well at least a completion no one cares about rock dog 2 but surprisingly most of the ones of those i did glance at didn't even make it to this tier these are mostly about disappointment i can't be that mad at a bunch of earnest international attempts or kitty vhs equivalents well i can be a little mad at this how to train your dragon rip off because it's supposed to be based on an actual original book that actually exists but i can be mad at more established studios wasting their time and talent with entries that look about on the same level and nothing was a bigger fall from grace this year than earwig and the witch from studio ghibli a studio whose reputation is heavily tied to its visual beauty rooted in lush natural detail now full of blocky dated cgi even in ghibli's weaker entries they were usually saved by how visually accomplished they were but even if you wanted to give the visuals a pass for being the first time the studio has used this medium its story is a dull mess too now i can't imagine how hard it must be to be hayao miyazaki's child but all the same i really can't feel that bad for goro miyazaki because in what other situation would he have been given the opportunities that he's had for how not good he seems to be at it maybe not terrible but really it was the decision to choose this book to adapt because supposedly it's a pretty loyal adaptation but a very prominent example of the strength of individual mediums because when a story involves this much non-action i'm guessing that most of the book's written content is spent describing the house and expressing the inner thoughts of the protagonist both of which are virtually nullified in a visual medium perhaps something that could have been overcome with creative visuals or more interesting direction but alas and on top of it all earwig is an insufferable protagonist and imagine how unlikable she'd have to be when the premise is that she's an orphan that gets taken in by a witch and a demon to be a servant that is a gift-wrapped sympathetic backstory and then the story really doesn't go anywhere she struggles a bit she whines a lot has a bit of vengeance and then it's just over this is just such a nothing movie the demon guy is kinda cool but that's basically it then the other disappointment that drags a well-liked title through the mediocre mud is of course adam's family too i've admitted to being a little harsh on the first one i may not have liked the direction it went with the addams family but at least it was a direction and not even a terrible one and it was still able to retain a certain amount of the franchise's dark humor but this is just the 10 billionth chaotic family vacation with barely anything adam's family about it i can't say that it's as frustrating to watch as earwig i mean at the very least it does feel like a complete story but it does do the worst thing you could do with the addams family make it boring and ordinary it just makes me mad and i just dislike it so much and aligned with disappointment while pretty much everything about the animated diary of a wimpy kid alludes that it's meant to be tv it has probably been one of the most disliked animated works of the year from people within its own fanbase the 3d doodle designs are ok in concept but the final animation is pretty underwhelming and awkward now i have never read or watched anything wimpy kid related before and otherwise i just disliked pretty much every character and the story i found deeply unpleasant i don't need to be reminded about how terrible middle school was i remember i apologize to the fans many of whom agree this is a really bad first impression of the series and from what i have seen of the live action film they do indeed look funnier and even more animated than this and i'd throw in tom and jerry as an honorary worst but that's not exactly fair because as an animated films list the animated parts of that films were easily the best parts but it's honorary in my heart and that's what matters [Music] it's true that i didn't sit through every netflix or streaming babysitter but i did sit through a number of them for some goddamn reason well these are the ones where i'm willing to acknowledge their existence extinct is a chinese canadian co-production about a donut looking species called the funnels called the flunnels called the flummels and if you think that there is a more significant plot related reasons for why they look like donuts nope it's just for a handful of visual gags two flummels spontaneously end up falling through a time vortex and find out that in the future their species has gone extinct so they try to figure out a way to stop it assisted by a dodo a tasmanian tiger and a triceratops it's kind of exactly how it sounds hiko's journey is a mexican fantasy where a group of kids try to protect a magical mountain from a group of evil businessmen the art is very irregular but it has some nice fantasy designs out of the outback is your quintessential animals break out of a zoo into the wild story only this time it's a collection of some of australia's most venomous dangerous creatures who are tired of being told how ugly and dangerous they are this reminds me a lot of an illumination entry an incredibly basic but functional story an unlikable antagonist the movie almost could have functioned better without but ultimately carried by its super adorable character designs which is completely detrimental to the theme of the film about how unliked they are because they are ugly thematic hypocrisy is also extremely illumination now river dance the animated adventure i have been waiting for this oddity as someone who was practically raised in a renaissance festival i knew i was at least going to like its celtic soundtrack and i do as it was composed by the same man who did the original riverdance run in the 90s but the story ended up playing a little bit too straight to be interesting it's a movie where the words light and dark are used a lot so you already know what half the dialogue's gonna sound like conceptually i do appreciate a celebration of irish dancing the dance numbers are kind of neat especially if well-endowed bipedal deer is your thing but aside from being technically competent and well synchronized and choreographed and not you preferably want to give animated dancing a little something extra to match the appeal of live dancing where what's impressive is seeing real people in real time sink their timing perfectly like machines i mean it's still pretty it's just not quite the same when the movements are copy and pasted programs i do like the scene where she river dances on the river and of course the sequence where the animation gets much more 2d and creative it's just very well this movie exists tonight or tomorrow if you happen to be free lower those expectations for me arguably a lot of movies have only one or two scenes that are truly worth watching but if that scene is as effective as an isolated youtube clip without the context why would you waste the hour with the only drawback being that the isolated clip gives the impression that the full movie is more interesting than it is which is certainly the case for america the motion picture or what if a bunch of frat bros made a vaguely revolutionary war themed mad libs where the only thing they know about the revolutionary war is the names of some famous people while also on enough drugs to kill an elephant dende knows how lord and miller came to be producers on this which does not automatically insinuate how much they were actually involved but the finale does feel like it embodies their signature chaos and there are a couple well animated completely insane visual spectacles in this that are certainly funny to describe that they happened like the double-decker bus at at walkers thomas edison is a chinese woman with super lasers king george has a pet soccer ball named manchester that eats people and i have made this sound way more fun than it actually is because outside of the things i just said and again it's insane finale watching this in full is exhausting because i highly dislike most of these characters and the comedy largely falls flat it's 90 tired frat jokes tired british jokes tired puns tied with tired historical references so congrats sing two you are technically more enjoyable than a robot chicken sketch that refuses to die and yes as i basically predicted the final performance and even some of the other dance sequences are relatively enjoyable to watch as they are well animated and decently performed just imagine if in this space opera they wrote they had songs that actually made sense to its narrative but you do not need to sit through an hour of blah to get to it in fact here the story context might make some of the performances worse okay except for johnny who is the closest to having a full arc with payoff when his vindictive dance teacher tries to one-up him on stage but newcomer porsha has the gall to taunt her father during her performance like this is a big moment for her when it was her whining to her father that got the show cancelled in the first place and callaway's performance is fine but it's really disheartening how he was basically coerced in a performance he didn't want to do because always the great khan arsene liar buster moon used his song without permission then lied about promising to get him as a musician in his show so he trespassed on his property just to save his own ass wow good thing he conveniently needed closure for his late wife and the antagonist turned out to be an actual murderer or else buster's actions would have made him look like the i know for many the spectacle of the music and the animation outweighs the underwhelming narrative but it's not enough for me and last minute throw in i don't really know where to put this but speaking of gimmick movies because last year the last minute shutter exclusive ended up being one of my favorites of the year not so much this year spine of the night is a project by the guy who made love death and robots who notoriously was a big fan of heavy metal so he decided to make heavy metal but fantasy so he made bakshi's fire and ice with the trappings associated with it the rotoscoped animation and lots of gore and nudity and that's really the draw of this movie it's for people who have a soft spot for this style plus the rotoscoped animation with the digital coloring it just looks very paint by numbers it does technically have a story that's pretty dense on exposition and something that sounds like philosophy admitting that i do like its style during the big exposition dump but ultimately it's pretty style over substance adequate adequate delayed and delayed again until it kind of collapsed on peacock in december kaiju wrestling is certainly a fun idea to play with with its potential for exciting fights and variety of designs of which tentacular is easily the best of the film and for its premise rumble is a perfectly adequate by the numbers sports movie but it also feels like there was a lot of potential here that wasn't fully realized for a city where kaiju and humans live together it doesn't look that different from a human city and there's no real structural consistency addressing how the humans in kaiju deal with the differences in size the humans just kind of appear on high ledges except for some gravity hovering vehicles which i guess are only used by coaches and no one else in the city there's also never any addressing where or how the kaiju live or just go when they're not in an arena i know that these details aren't absolutely necessary but it's reflective of the kind of things i was thinking about because the movie itself just didn't seem to be doing anything that interesting i can say that i think the main duo have a nice bond i also wonder if maybe rumble's sense of scale might have come off a bit more impressive if it had been shown in theaters even though obviously a good movie would still play well outside of them i mean just on a computer screen there are so many shots where the kaiju are massive and the humans are almost invisible the fights are fun though not being a wrestling person i have limited frame of reference as to the quality of the fights seal team is the kind of movie that basically exists because the pun exists but this was surprisingly kind of fun opening with one of the most shocking first act deaths that i did not see coming because it wasn't a parent character and it was shot in a fairly clever way this propels the protagonist quinn to seek out j.k simmons the old seal war veteran to gather a team of seals to fight back against carnivorous sharks yeah it's silly but it's a fun silly it is a very sharp snappy animation style with that tweaked frame rate to remind audiences of stop motion and pulls off some really great comedic timing this was made by triggerfish which is a studio based in south africa and while this is no masterpiece i am interested to see what they'll make for their future series they'll be making for disney plus and oh my god why do i have so many of these this year here's the latest my hero academia movie for some reason though honestly what i liked about the prior here academia movies was watching class 1a actually get to do stuff because just watching midoriya be the bestest out of everyone is just called the show and even though the terrorist group of anti-quark human purists was conceptually interesting of course they didn't go into that philosophy in any substantial way and even though anime folks may have the highest tolerance for that should have killed them believe suspension man there were a whole lot of times when characters really should have died when part of your main character's entire gimmick especially in his establishment is that if he goes too hard he breaks his body that makes the finale of this feel a little excessive plus even bakugou got impaled multiple times but cool fight scenes [Music] last year i checked up on some recent popular entries from chinese animation in naja and white snake both of which were fairly good and then this year we had green snake the white snake sequel about her sister and naja reborn not connected to the box office hit but done in the same studio as white snake and somebody decided for both that we were gonna move these iconic god figures from their historical settings to brown post-apocalyptic factories where someone else was really into motorcycles so i was instantly less invested though others have been grateful to the change up from the hundreds of historical fantasies and for naja at least the industrial shinier steampunk aesthetic is a nice change of pace apparently there are a number of narrative parallels to the original naja mythology eluding that this movie is really trying to evolve the original story and apparently critically it went over really well but angry boy protagonists are not always the easiest to root for granted lee has several things to understandably be angry about but he's the kind of character where every time he does anything against the warnings of everyone around him he just makes everything worse thankfully making up for past mistakes is a theme in the film and of course a lot of magic beat em ups but a major point in naja's favor was that it had a plot that i could reasonably follow i didn't like very many of the people in it but i basically got it whereas in green snake i liked the character of green snake but i had no idea what was going on green snake gets killed i think gets sucked into an alternate dimension that has no excuse for looking like an abandoned modern city except that it gives them an excuse to use motorcycles she spends a bunch of time trying to figure out where they are with a character that will not matter in the second half until they are exposition that um not a hundred but i guess if your parents sent a monster into your room to get you out of their house then there's this whole thing with faces i don't know but the real confusing bit there is this mysterious mass figure that saves her and then there's this shocking moment when their face is revealed but then it turns out they weren't that person but then later in the movie they are that person but then it's treated like a massive shocking revelation again and i i just don't really know what you were doing with this but it's it is still very pretty now a movie that i didn't see but was one of the biggest stories out of chinese animation was a movie called i am what i am which received some controversy because of its eye shapes since some people thought it was a little bit too close to animated stereotypes of the colonial era now i may not be a great person to judge and sure in some screenshots it looks not great but when you see it in motion it looks way better the producer said that this was an attempt to give a chinese animated film a distinct design because for too long they've merely been imitating a lot of western animation and anime not to mention that this is a very rare contemporary non-fantasy animated film and it turns out that this movie was very critically and financially successful but again haven't seen it yet [Music] now loud house hasn't always sold me on its music but the songs in its movie are decent toe tappers while it is certainly acceptable as another loud house entry to me it's a pretty low one mostly because of what i've enjoyed of the loud house is taking turns to focus on all of the siblings but for this one it's mostly about lincoln kind of moping about not being special and what is both a plus and a negative this movie feels very 90s to me in its sheer convenience and preposterousness we just happen to have a family castle in scotland and it's just happened to have been kept empty for hundreds of years waiting for our family specifically with an uncomfortably clingy simping royalist voiced by david tennant who only reminds me to be sad because duck tales is over and a supernatural evil caretaker and caps it all off with ghosts and a dragon this is just such a fanfic it's kind of hilarious it certainly has its moments like the scottish ghosts but for one reason or another it's just not my favorite in fact in another surprising turn i might have actually liked its live-action christmas special better like i was genuinely impressed how it still felt like a quintessential loud house episode arlo the alligator boy was an original entry where i like its songs and its visuals more than i like its story which i can still respect as a very classic feeling misunderstood weirdo searching for lost family and finding found family just that its characters didn't leave that strong an impression still almost every single one of its songs i thought was lovely with really fantastic visuals attached but more or less everything that works in this is done much better in centaur world maybe it was the year but for as many times an ending felt rushed and contrived this year low expectations made a number of average looking films take me by surprise there are a few things i think people wanted this year less than a boss baby sequel predominantly due to the bad taste left by its previous nomination which while in retrospect was not a terrible film but really for how it revealed how flawed the nomination and award system was for people who already didn't blatantly know that a debacle that by now has been thankfully overshadowed by the golden globes nominating emily in paris which was so unbelievable that it prompted an investigation but this year far from expecting a masterpiece even though the chase sequence is still a chaotic fever dream even though their adult faces are just mildly stretched out versions of their baby faces and even though jeff goldblum's voice very much does not equal the energy of that character boss baby 2 proved to be an average good time and for personal taste a mild improvement on the first while i can take any instance of pseudo-dad jealousy and chucking into a trash fire his relationship with his boss baby daughter was incomprehensibly adorable as is her connection with her uncle the educational setting gave me at least something to mildly judge and snark and even admire at times but my biggest issue with the first film was how the two never truly felt like brothers whereas in this one it was much more believable even if that was due to a lifetime of development that was all off screen had a much more engaging final conflict as well between two decent sequels of their honestly less acclaimed franchises plus how hyped people are for bad guys dreamworks has been showing signs of a slight resurgence well i guess that will ultimately depend on how the inevitable shrek 5 turns out technology cautionary tales these days are to be expected but thankfully this time even though it featured another rogue ai rather than another robot rebellion ron's gone wrong appropriately keeps the villain on who deserves it the exploitative data mining ceos and the algorithm as well as pointing the finger at hypocrite parents we are way past the point where anyone can say oh these kids these days spend too much time on their phones yes just kids though i like the emphasis on the algorithm of friendship being on give and take still weird about it being asked of our ipads but i guess we're at least a couple years away from that being of any serious concern but more relevantly i found the bond between ron and barney to be completely endearing which by itself is ultimately able to keep the film afloat with barney being a very grounded well-written modern kid character and ron being another cute funny robot that is not overtly obvious that he's being played by a celebrity and without combing through the entire movie i'll just repeat broadly that these writers get how to do subtle consistent setup and payoff really well however the one thing about the reception for this film that confuses the hell out of me is how people are comparing this less to mitchells versus the machines than netflix's next gen which i do not get at all but also admit i don't remember that well i mean yes i know it's another kid robot team up and i believe that the robot had some sort of damage memory problem and probably yet another evil tech ceo but that was uh kinda it for similarities the girl's sentiment was initially incredibly anti-robot but then that movie turned into another action robot uprising but the real connection i bet is that next-gen probably felt a little bit closer to ron's gone wrong tonally because it's not a bizarre comedy like mitchell's no hate on next gen they're just very different movies [Music] every year amongst anime features there's usually one or two teenage romances and historically they haven't always done well with me this year there were four significant ones not counting tie-ins and in a surprising development i kinda liked all of them keyword liked not loved nothing as personal as ride your wave but nothing as aggravating as a whiskers tale hey remember last year where i was like the cat movie sucks unlike her blue sky it's automatically better because it was written by mariokada and then people were like uh okuda also wrote the cat movie yep that was stupid anyway love me love me not about the relationship complications between four school friends might be the weakest of the four for having a common affliction of a lot of anime films based on manga feeling like it's composed of individual chapters or subplots so technically it feels closer to an anthology or miniseries which honestly wouldn't be that much of a detriment the problem is is that the relationship i was the most invested in the friendship between the girls is the main story in act 1 but then doesn't play a huge role again still as school romances go i appreciate a story that features multiple characters being able to change their minds particularly one couple i like for how they grow closer by communicating but after they got together i had completely forgotten about the other couple that i didn't care about and then the movie had to last about 10 minutes longer than i needed it to to resolve their whole thing oh and then there was a step sibling thing because anime words bubble up like soda pop features a bond between an influencer who's ashamed of her buck teeth and a boy who loves to write haikus but is bad at saying them out loud it's a very low key slice of life sentimental story with a striking saturated color palette where most of the story has the two working together to locate a discontinued record as a favor to a friend because it's the last known voice recording of his dead wife which is honestly where the most genuine romantic energy comes from the ending has the expected heart field proclamation but it also loses me a bit because it is the titular example of a movie that has a last-minute conflict pop-up just so we can have our elevated climax where the boy has to make a mad dash against the clock japan's record with animated same-gender romances is and by that i mean the venn diagram between representation and entertainment seems to overlap very rarely so it's more about what you're looking for debatably stranger on the shore leans on the former rather than the latter it is one of the few that admits that orientation exists but it's a sweet relationship in a relaxed island setting it also has the manga adaptation thing where the plot feels like it's two stories that have been duct taped together but here i like that choice because it allows us to see the gradual progression of the relationship before and after the two become official as per uge i tend to be more invested in how an existing relationship grows rather than watching two people pine repeatedly for an hour unrelated how josie tiger and fish works as representation for wheelchair users i will leave to the appropriate demographics to say but the journey josie goes through regarding how she feels about her condition dreaming of being a mermaid and channeling her feelings into making a picture book i all thought was lovely the romance part of it was okay it was a very run-of-the-mill anime romance they hate each other then they like each other a third party no one cares about shows up just to complicate things but then there's a more compelling third act turn for the worse for both characters all of these are fine not favorites but worthwhile for anime romance people to check them out and because it's tenuously connected in theme this is also generally where i'd put the violet evergarden movie serving as the finale for one of kyoto animation's most insanely gorgeous and emotionally devastating series however the surprise that is not remotely surprising finale hook of the movie has been a little divisive amongst its fans and i was on the side that wasn't crazy about it not for being wrong necessarily for just being kind of a basic story development it still functions well enough as a decent violet evergarden entry as long as it fills the requirements of looking pretty and tugs at heartstrings but honestly i like the special with the sisters better [Applause] hey remember the person who said they weren't gonna do series tie-ins what happened to that person because i know people are gonna ask i see hilda and the mountain king as the finale of season two but of course yes it's very good go watch all of hilda whereas demon slayer mugen train itself was a weird cultural anomaly talking about how it became the biggest anime movie in the world is largely talking about factors that have almost nothing to do with its story personally i'm in the camp that while i do greatly admire its animation narratively demon slayer doesn't really do a lot for me because when you get down to it demon slayer is pretty much a series of very pretty battles and i get action fatigue pretty easily and believe that it is ultimately the power of its animation that gave it a leg up so it gained a lot of fans that usually aren't shonen or even anime people maybe it's being the rare shonen hit that looks distinctly japanese a lot of the others do tend to look very western plus a lot of it is really just timing the momentum of the anime series plus the movie coming out right around the time the series was ending and premiering in 2020 and being one of the only things in theaters but it's also significant that move-in train was unlike a number of other shonen movies not filler it was continuing the story left off by the anime which again was very popular and of course the animation is as great as it ever has been that the movie had spectacular action and then ended with a soul-destroying tragedy probably helped even as part of a series it was a bit more accessible to new viewers because it involved tanjiro re-experiencing his origins but clearly given that it isn't a standalone story its power and relevance is pretty much as powerful as how much you like the series it's a part of but speaking of dreams bombay rose features the stories of various people struggling to live in bombay and how they use dreams or fantasy to cope both with personal dreams and fiction stories that of course includes at least one forbidden romance because i just assume that's in every indian film each frame has been digitally painted and the film contains some creative ways to illustrate its fantastical touches even though you can clearly see the restrictions in its rough movement i like the very frank way it injects its fantasy elements in a way that blurs the lines between diogesis to show just how important fantasy is to their reality and naturally i'm sure that i'm missing a lot of cultural and historical context but i'm still really glad i was able to see this i don't know what to say the monkeys won't do don't know what to say vevo was the second drop in the sony netflix partnership but i can't quite figure out who's at fault for not dropping a trailer until two weeks before its premiere did sony not give them a trailer were they not sure when it was going to release or did netflix drop the ball either way it's a interesting year for sony with both great successes but also clumsy handling of some of their smaller products but for whom it clearly was a great year was lin-manuel miranda with three big movies featuring his music and this time voicing the protagonist just be careful there lin you're starting to get that overexposure backlash as expected the music is lovely and full of his now recognizable style but is the least memorable of the three soundtracks the story starts off with a unexpected tragedy and then continues into the more or less fairly standard temperamental unlikely duo going on a journey evading dangerous animals and karen's in training vevo is plenty cute but with manuel's voice being so identifiable now calling him vevo is about as effective as calling any schwarzenegger role by any name other than schwarzenegger but then reiterating how much i don't love overly friendly genki girls who callously shove their baggage into other people's business but she did grow on vevo and the audience over time unsurprisingly my favorite bits were the 2d animation sequences and as a story ultimately about grief it had a very adorable heart-tugging conclusion ultimately making it a fairly satisfying film [Music] all you avatar raya comparisons have been playing on easy mode you hacks where clearly the most apt comparison is raya to my little pony next generation a story taking place in a fantasy world where there is significant tension between various cultures theorized to be motivated by the world some time ago losing a magical element of sorts and after losing her father and obtaining a bubbly comedic sidekick protagonist goes on a journey to fix conflict by way of searching for parts of a magical macguffin and along the way accumulates a party composed of representatives of each of the various cultures that get to know each other and start to overcome their biases and understand each other the conflict is ultimately solved via sparkling mcguffin fueled by emotional epiphanies and there's one character who's much more in the wrong than everyone else that probably originally wouldn't have gone this far if they hadn't been spurred on by their authoritarian mommies but by the end everyone just kind of moves on without them apologizing for how much literal damage they caused and yet because these two are so complete opposites in visual aesthetic atmosphere and genre they feel like completely different movies but where raya has its beautiful grandiose setting its cinematic ending and ryan and mari's intriguing yet agonizingly vague dynamic mlp i think is better paced much more consistent in tone and is genuinely funny on top of many of its songs being bops but where i really want to emphasize credit to my little pony aside from the wise choice to focus on only three fantasy countries and not five granted at mlp they were kind of pre-packaged i have a good grasp on the cultural psychology of each of the fantasy races in mlp the stereotypes and assumptions they project onto the other races and their fears and fixations i know nothing about the cultures in raya except for what i can infer from their topography and the tagalongs don't disprove raya's initial stereotypical assumptions about them only that that's not all what they are which would be okay except it also doesn't tell us much about what else they are except that they have all also lost families but for as much as raya's ending was controversial if not mishandled or unsatisfying on just a filmmaking level the finale at least had compelling dramatic stakes and namari was treated as a threat that needed to be dealt with kim jong turns into a literal crazed invading dictator again but after sparkle sparkle happens no one cares mlp loses a lot of energy in the third act so it totally depends on what you want out of this kind of story but otherwise mlp comes out a bit ahead in this or race you pronounce it sorry or legend of deification is part of 18's naja's cinematic universe though there's not much of a narrative connection and no current signs of any follow-up but i was excited for this movie if only for the dumbest of reasons the famous work of chinese literature that the character is from also inspired one of my first favorite anime series that is admittedly super weird and hasn't aged well with a bizarre filler ending and yet is still better than the speedrun reboot they gave at 19. but the character like naja is an icon in chinese culture recognized for his fishing pole with a straight hook representative of the ideal relationship between gods and humans touching the lives of the beings below without severely impacting or harming them an ideal of course that the gods break all the time but what made this exceptionally hype was how it was also going to feature the character that inspired the villain the nine-tailed fox demon that became a powerful concubine of the emperor who did a bunch of murder and torture well the story kind of fast forwards to after the fox demon is captured but right before zhang can execute her she teases him that she still has someone captive so he allows her to escape for which he is banished from the land of the gods then for about the first half of the film it's your quintessential grumbly old traveler has his ragamuffin annoying child tagalong which is not my favorite trope in the world but it's fine until nine tails re-emerges and makes it fun again but the funniest thing about all of this is that the ending of the film is spiritually the exact same twist ending as the filler ending of the first anime which isn't me saying that it directly copied it it's actually a pretty standard third act twist but i was amused by it as a film it is not as compelling as naja the characters are not nearly as interesting but it is definitely similar in how it manages to feel very grand and epic in scale and also a very pretty one to look at oh and by the way remember that 2d chinese animated clip that's been hanging over my head for years that i thought had some connection to what ultimately became this film i was right because it was directed by the same person [Music] sometimes movies that hit it off really well with you in the first viewing don't always age well wish dragon is not one of those movies y'all slept on this mostly on the power and charisma of long alone having the genie be the elitist a-hole sincerely urging for the shallow witches of money and materialism as well as having a unique lore but with the consistent comedy snappy animation and adorable predominantly platonic bond of the main duo this was easily able to exceed its average narrative and i still champion this as one of the underrated gems of 21 but it was still baffling to see how many people wrote this off as an aladdin ripoff aside that that word gets thrown around way too much but yes it was clearly supposed to be a modern take on aladdin that was the point and it did an amazing job and even if there were some slight direct nods to its disney counterpart ooh first time anyone's referenced a disney movie before and if i have to remind anyone disney does not own aladdin though one of my comments did mention the coincidence of the sanji gangster wishing for the midas touch and the hand of midas as the treasurer and aladdin and king of thieves probably not deliberate but that was kind of cute now on occasion i've been confronted with the question of what's the point of making a more grounded realistic story like a documentary or a biography animated but in the same way as almost any other story there's literally tons of artistic and practical reasons for it from we had a pandemic an animation was the medium that could be worked on during lockdown but when talking about real stories personally i think an artistic depiction can be a more genuine representation of the real person than hiring a body devil and that's on top of all of the unique visual creativity and style you can give that depiction flea is an animated interview with some recreated scenes of a min by his high school friend though multiple names and details have been changed to protect identities he talks about various details of his life including struggles with his sexuality and his upcoming marriage but mostly about his history of his family becoming afghan refugees hiding in russia and trying to smuggle their way into denmark the animation is rough in fact it's often closer to an animatic that nonetheless is effective at conveying the powerful emotions of the scenes the medium and style feels apt for a min trying to recall his memories especially the moments that are expressed in rough sketches to illustrate hazy memories or a traumatic moment summit of the gods is based on a manga by giro takahuchi about a mount everest climber habu joji and the young reporter makoto who wants to follow him and cover his story the film dives into the minutia of what everest climbers go through from the mundane like getting permits and even rivalries with other climbers through the process the strategies the roots and naturally the struggles both physical and mental especially the question of what drives these climbers to pursue the summit in the face of so many hurdles this movie is largely very quiet and methodical much like taking a walk through nature and then all of a sudden we'll get these really tense life or death confrontations and hey being animated meant that no one had to almost kill themselves climbing the thing wish i could be part of that luca isn't pixar's best film it might not even be in its top 10 but this somewhat ghibli-inspired italian set homage to stand by me was frequently referred to as the epitome of a relaxing summer movie which is an accomplishment considering how its themes include prejudice and child abandonment and either way it's interpreted luca and alberto's relationship is the embodiment of touching and wholesome and one of the quickest believable friendships as well as just being really well written kid characters and julia is a joyous ball of plucking enthusiasm its ending still does feel a little hasty and alberto's possessiveness over luca is completely comprehensible and great for his character but third act breakups triggered by jealousy do tend to be overly frequent and exasperating but at least he didn't throw luka under the bus this also proved my point from this video that even though this entire setup was basically one big liar revealed it didn't feel like it because julia understands in this moment that it is not about her but it also helps that it wasn't done out of greed or malice if there is one thing i was grateful for during the lockdown it was the apparently temporary virtual film festival trend i mean it seems obvious right to not have to fly to la or new york many people are willing to give that money directly to the film festival but no i guess we have to go back to flying now still i was grateful to see a number of great films from the new york international children's film festival most of which now are available to watch on vod but one that isn't yet is not well in the magic book classic childhood fantasy adventure complete with a macguffin and an unambiguously evil wizard villain another was calamity a completely fictional childhood origin story for frontiers woman calamity jane from the director of long way north and i substantially like this one more if only because i have a soft spot for the oregon trail but i do like the quicker pace and the childhood adventure feel of this film martha jane has to navigate taking care of her family the harassment and jeers their family receives from the rest of their wagon train deceitful confederate soldiers and has to pretend to be a boy while handcuffed to another boy boy there's a gif wrap fanfic premise but my favorite that i saw there was the legend of hey from china about a small cat demon named hey who becomes the center of a struggle between two groups of immortals fighting about whether or not they should live alongside humans or the opposite of that of course i'm grateful to see another style of 2d animation it's really funny oh hey there's naja again and the fighting in this is so fluid and hey is adorable oh sorry he has a bean mouth that means we're not allowed to like it so mentally i shot myself in the foot with belle because i wanted this movie to be my favorite of the year and being directed by mamaro hasoda who made two of my favorite anime films of all time and belle semi going back to the world of summer wars not literally with his take on the beauty and the beast story but with social media i was very excited and it's easily my favorite thing he's done since wolf children and what does carry over from summer wars is a rare optimism in stories taking place in internet space where suzu uses her bell avatar to express herself and work through a very difficult time in her life he also exceeds at combining visual spectacle with human drama his internet world is vast and chaotic and contains an immense amount of glorious detail and visual innovation it's one of the few times i've seen an anime person's mouth move correctly and while his human world is quieter and natural the subtler and less subtle human interactions are just as capable of commanding your attention a static shot of an awkward stumbling conversation is just as gripping as a swiping overshot of this chaotic wonderland suzu's bff is arguably the true mvp of the film however while it's very likely the least important part of his movie his use of beauty and the beast feels a little surface level it's not like it needs to follow the original fairy tales narrative disney after all changed a lot of it and i like having a version that doesn't involve imprisonment what it does do is use the motifs of a beauty and a beast to show how internet virality can turn ordinary people into divine entities that of the angel and the devil but both are still very similar in the way that they both have their supporters and detractors hasoda has said in interviews that he doesn't just love the disney film seeing that kept him on the path of being an animator but the moments that feel like references don't always feel like they're gelling with the story being told it kind of feels like they're there because hasota wants them to be there not that they aren't very pretty i do like how this movie's titular relationship is technically not romantic but then tying these moments visually to a story that is famously romantic there's a clash there technically a minor point but a substantial personal irritant oddly the element that carries over from beauty and the beast the best is the stand-in for gaston feigning like he's the self-righteous superhero backed by his army of sponsors but it really just means that the movie is at its best when it's telling its own story which still bell is utterly gorgeous fantastic soundtrack a great story about working through grief and the value of connecting with people certainly deserves to be nominated over raya by a large margin but i am way past the point of being surprised or caring in any way what can you see [Music] yeah this one took me by surprise too evangelion is one of the most iconic and influential series of the anime medium though it hasn't been a personal favorite and its endings do have a reputation but nutshelled because of a combination of creator hiriaki anno struggle with depression possibly a recent terrorist attack by a cult and the studio's budget ended with more or less a powerpoint presentation of the main character breaking through his emotional barriers but not in the context of anything else happening in the story that ultimately were still unresolved i can attest i can remember seeing that ending and being very confused by it fans reacted the way angry fans do with death threats so anno retaliated with a movie-length alternate ending where everyone died and he made the audience surrogate how he now felt about his fan base whiny misogynistic and impotent so naturally a lot of them loved it well maybe not at the time it aged on them but it has left somewhat of a bad tastes in people's mouths including anno's so in the 2000s he opted to reboot evangelion as a film series which have been releasing over the past 15 years with this being the final entry and not every evangelion fan loves this there's plenty that still love the end of evangelion for its edge lordiness or even just for the story behind it but to me this end truly feels complete even amongst all of the giant robot science jibber that i will never understand shinji still has to work through his self-loathing and shock but this time comes out the other end a shinji none of us have ever seen before or maybe even thought we would see giving him a much more uplifting conclusion not just to him but the entire cast while still conveying the essence of its original intent the struggling but still doing your best in the worst of situations the lengths we will go to to protect ourselves from being hurt by other people but also how important and powerful those bonds can be even the metaness that's existed in every ending i really feel like this ending is a triumph but also because it's catharsis for two decades you're simply the best [Music] better than all the rest better than anyone another year of me being frustratingly indecisive but both of these movies in their own ways represent what i hope for the future of feature animation they're both movies about family and both break the usual standard of just two central character allowing for the story to play with multiple relationships and dynamics which in encondo's case also made its structure a bit wonky but i think ultimately it was to its benefit by making it refreshingly unpredictable which could apply to the rest of it because i think deviating from disney's norms was really a big secret to its success especially in regards to its themes of family expectations manifesting into emotional burdens and how it all exacerbates the longer it goes unspoken the things you can get away with as long as you're a fun and pretty musical that breaks let it go's record as for mitchells lord and miller usually have our backs though it is dangerous to rely on any icon 100 of the time and no this was no spider-verse and even though i have had my words about the overabundance of robot apocalypses this was some joyous dysfunctional family comedy cartoon chaos that was much more on my level than something like meatballs mostly by avoiding a lot of the aspects of these stories that i tend to have a beef with like having a father-daughter conflict about something grounded and relatable and not some creepy possessive streak against a love interest and the robot apocalypse not sending a message about being anti-technology but anti-technology monopolies every single family member was an absolute hilarious blast probably my favorite villain of the year and its scrapbook visual style and humor worked excellently in tandem it's only held back a bit by the whole third act emotional betrayal part of the mainstream formula but otherwise the premise was a fantastic setting for celebrating animated excess and one thing's for almost certain between spider-verse mitchells arcane and the up and coming bad guys this cg 2d hybrid aesthetic is growing into the go-to style of this decade and my 2010 self could not be more ecstatic about that and that was 2021 let me know your 21 ranking and let's continue with our fantastic trend of the 2020s [Music] you

Channel: CellSpex

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Id: oYiYwNH8YjE

Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022