KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters is approximately exactly what you think, with a glitzy K-pop soundtrack, fabulous animation, and scary demons. As the story goes, generations of female K-pop acts have secretly been demon hunters, running down the dark creatures with great ferocity and protecting their fans and humans generally. Now it’s the fictional girl group trio Huntrix picking up the mantle. The specific narrative arc here is that one of the singers in the group—Rumi, the one with the stupendous coil of hair—is secretly part-demon and must learn to come to terms with it. Awww... The animation is mainly what makes the picture work as well as it does, wild, vivid, expressive, verging on the psychedelia of the Spider-Verse movies. Besides Huntrix (with Rumi, Mira, and Zoey), there is a five-piece boy band, the Saja Boys, who are under the control of the Satan figure here, Gwi-Ma. Gwi-Ma is in the business of buying up and consuming souls. Jinu is the leader of the Saja Boys. Naturally he and Rumi fall in star-crossed love. Rumi must learn to accept and love herself for who she is while Jinu is trying to work through a lot of well-deserved bad karma. But he’s not so bad himself. Awww... Out here on the K-pop tip I don’t know much so my expectations (and hopes) were more for something in perhaps an EDM vein, rhythmic and seductive sexy and romantic for the dancefloor, but as I should have known what I got was a lot of pop warbling about self-help self-esteem self-care, with selfies for the fans etc. Huntrix’s songs are explicitly written in the sessions we see as messages of hope and strength for their fans. Awww... The animation does not fool around with these demons—I can believe they would be quite scary for little kids. Some 13 minutes are reserved for the end credits and include live-action shots of the main voice artists singing and carrying on—it’s as fun as the best parts of the rest of it, so think about sticking around awhile. If the music would have been better (the Saja Boys are no better than Huntrix but there’s no reason to expect them to be), and the story a little less on-the-nose inspirational, KPop Demon Hunters might have been something special. As it is it’s reasonably entertaining, not that I mean to damn with faint praise.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Tonari no Totoro, Japan, 86 minutes

Director/writer: Hayao Miyazaki

Photography: Mark Henley (English version), Hisao Shirai

Music: Joe Hisaishi

Editor: Takeshi Seyama

Cast/voices (English version): Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Pat Carroll, Lea Salonga, Frank Walker, Paul Butcher

My Neighbor Totoro, a Studio Ghibli production written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke), has been steadily growing in critical regard over the nearly 40 years since its release. Entering the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? in the lower echelons of the top 500, My Neighbor Totoro has risen steadily since then to its present position at #161. It is well ahead of another Ghibli movie released the same year, Grave of the Fireflies, which is presently at #462. That’s nearly that movie’s high point on the list, when it leapt up from #750. I think Grave of the Fireflies is the better picture overall—I tend to give extra points to movies that make me cry as hard as it does—but it's easy enough to see why Totoro is the more beloved picture.

I’m not even sure Grave of the Fireflies is entirely suitable for kids in the first place, whereas Totoro most assuredly is. It’s a gentle fantasy that focuses on two sisters, Satsuki age 10 and Mei age 4, and it’s emotionally grounded the way old ‘60s US sitcoms used to do it—the mother is mostly offstage, either dead or, as in this case, in the hospital with an unexplained, long-term, and possibly life-threatening condition. She’s supposed to be home soon, but this family has heard that before. The father is an archeology professor who moves the family to the country to be closer to the hospital. He’s a great Dad, always in a good mood and trying to help his kids any way he can, but his job is demanding even without the single-parent pressures. Fortunately, the neighbors in their new digs are supportive, helpful—and unusual.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

USA, 76 minutes

Directors: Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Paur, Dan Riba, Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm

Writers: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, Michael Reeves, Bob Kane

Art direction: Glen Murakami

Photography: Song Il-Choi

Music: Shirley Walker

Editor: Al Breitenbach

Cast: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Dana Delany, Stacy Keach, Abe Vigoda, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Marilu Henner

This animated feature—officially the first by Warner Bros. Animation, rising out of the ashes of Warner Bros. Cartoons—was intended to capitalize on the Batman franchise, then blowing up, lately fortified with “dark knight” intimations out of Frank Miller and, kinda sorta, Tim Burton. Mask of the Phantasm is based on a TV series, Batman: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 until 1999, and followed the second Burton picture, Batman Returns, a second big hit after the 1989 Batman. Phantasm was intended originally as a direct-to-video release but, because the Burton pictures were making big money, it was rushed into a theatrical release and flopped. But time has been kind to this one, which features Mark Hamill as one of the better Jokers and Kevin Conroy sounding a lot like Adam West, a subtly comforting element.

Unlike the Burton pictures, which worked the dark-knight thing but always kept one foot (or maybe three toes) planted in the campy exercises of the ‘60s TV show, Mask of the Phantasm is all in on the gritty nighttime crime-fighter who strikes terror etc. The giveaway on the serious Batman pictures remains how much hay they make out of the origin story, often including Bruce Wayne’s parents Thomas and Martha as characters but at least making a point of visits to the cemetery. Phantasm also retcons a new girlfriend for Batman/Bruce Wayne, one “Andrea Beaumont,” who has since gone on to further appearances in Batman stories. But let’s pause a moment on “retcon” because it’s an idea unique to continuing series in both the comics and TV and an important key to deciding whether or not such stories work.

Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

Pinocchio (1940)

USA, 88 minutes

Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen

Writers: Carlo Collodi, Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Bill Peet, Frank Tashlin

Music: Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Frank Churchill, Edward H. Plumb

Animators / editors: numerous

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Cliff Edwards, Evelyn Venable, Walter Catlett, Frankie Darro, Charles Judels, Mel Blanc, Walt Disney

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of Pinocchios have been showing up around here lately. There’s a Disney remake starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto and a long-in-the-making version by Guillermo del Toro, both of which came out just last year. Haven’t seen them yet. This 1940 fully animated Disney version is the first of a long line of movie and TV adaptations. It has felt like the original to me most of my life, but the wooden puppet—pine, if you please, source of his name—and wannabe boy actually goes back to a series of stories by the Italian author Carlo Collodi published in the 1880s. Among other things, Collodi’s Pinocchio is something of a reprobate and in fact ends up hanged from a tree by the Fox and the Cat. The scene as reported by Wikipedia is desolate: “[A wind] beat the poor puppet from side to side, making him swing violently, like the clatter of a bell ringing for a wedding.... His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.”

There’s nothing quite so bleak or explicit in this 1940 picture, where the Fox is known as J. Worthington Foulfellow, or Honest John, and the Cat is called Gideon and set up to be a version of Harpo Marx. The best cat in Pinocchio belongs to the craftsman Geppetto, who builds Pinocchio. Its name is Figaro and it is a feisty, charming tuxedo cat who almost steals the show for as long as we are in the Geppetto household. But I digress. Of course, no one is going to be hanged to finish a Disney cartoon (I think?) but, in 1940, when there was much less inclination to acknowledge sensitivities, you could still have Pleasure Island and the fate of the lost boys who are kidnapped there. It’s enough to give one pause for thinking about it too much, not least because it invokes the specter of missing children.

Finding Nemo (2003)

For once the celebrity voice talent in a modern animated feature—Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, some others—worked pretty well for me in Finding Nemo, although I kept hearing DeGeneres as Kristen Wiig for some reason, which may or may not speak to cross-influences there. I don’t know. Director Andrew Stanton is also surprisingly good as the voice of a surfer dude sea turtle named Crush. As with Up (or the Pixar flagship Toy Story for that matter), the main story in Finding Nemo is built to contain a lot of natural resonance and emotional touchpoints: after a family tragedy has left the fish named Marlin (Brooks) with only his son Nemo (Alexander Gould) he is unnaturally protective of Nemo, but then in another accident they are separated. The movie is about their search to reunite. Marlin is joined in his quest by Dory (DeGeneres), who has a short-term memory disorder. Nemo in turn is also disabled, with an underdeveloped fin on one side. Representation of disability is thus another strength of this picture. But also like Up for me, I was ultimately more entertained, surprised, and cheered by the comedy. The chemistry between Marlin and Dory, between Brooks and DeGeneres, is rich, sharp, funny, and executed well. Another good gag is the depiction of those airborne bottom-feeders, the seagulls, whose relentless drilling screeching is reduced here to calls of “Mine! Mine!” So Finding Nemo has a lot of good laughs and that should not be missed about it. Still, with that said, it also made me cry so mission accomplished on that front too. It is working pretty well on all its intended emotional levels. I missed Finding Nemo when it was new and by the time I was more aware of it and Pixar (let’s say around the time of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up) it looked a little too sicky-sweet sentimental for me. Yes, even for me, or so I told myself. But while Finding Nemo is indeed guilty of all these feel-good elements it is never particularly cringey. And it can also be very funny. And you know the animation is going to be first-rate. Plus the story is tender in many nice ways. Now I’m taking the position that I’m officially dubious about the 2016 sequel, Finding Dory. If that’s a good one too, somebody please let me know so I don’t have to spend the next 13 or whatever years avoiding it.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

So in September I decided to subscribe to Disney because all signs were that a movie I wanted to look at was there (Amelie), but then when I did subscribe in October it was already gone. Why do streaming services do this peekaboo thing? Sometimes I feel like I could waste the rest of my life running down Criterion Channel “Leaving Soon” titles and still would never catch up. Attempting to make lemonade, I decided to spend my month of Disney looking at Pixar pictures I still hadn’t seen. The first and main thing about Monsters, Inc., not surprisingly, is the excellence of the animation, which is stylish and always fun. Then I noticed for once I could recognize the voices of the main characters without having to look them up. John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Billy Crystal—well, Crystal was merely vexingly familiar, and I did have to look that one up. The Monsters, Inc. premise is all pro forma but reasonably clever. There’s a place where monsters live, called Monstropolis, and the energy there is powered by children’s screams. A whole factory system has been worked up for monsters to get jobs going into children’s bedrooms at night by way of their closets, do scary things, and collect the screams. It turns out the monsters are as afraid of children as children are of them. Ultimately one little girl makes it into Monstropolis and various hijinks ensue. Among other things our main monster, Sullivan (Goodman), finds that she is too adorable to destroy (admittedly, she is quite adorable) and he works to protect her. Sullivan is a pretty good character overall, furry and blue with purple highlights, but I have to say he reminded me of Shrek from another animated movie that also came out in 2001—both the kindly affection and the ogre-like oversized body. I know animated pictures have long lead times, so I doubt anyone was copping anything off anybody else. Monsters, Inc. is the better picture if the IMDb Top 250 Movies list is anything to go by—it’s on it whereas Shrek is not, at least when I looked just now (in October). Monsters, Inc. reminded me again how starved we were for sophisticated animated pictures like this in the ‘70s, where the hardest-core among us lived off the old Disney features and Fleischer cartoons in revival houses with folding chairs. Those old Disneys are masterfully done, I can admit now, but I had a beef with Disney back then that lingers on. I prefer what came in the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the animation fully funded (unlike, say, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You! TV series, which is charming and everything, maybe even culturally revolutionary, but cheap). I also like scripts that are full of sly jokes for the grownups. But that is something someone who loves Daffy Duck and Bullwinkle would think. Monsters, Inc.? Yes, absolutely, if you like a cartoon show don’t miss it if you can.

Perfect Blue (1997)

Director Satashi Kon’s first feature is old enough now (25 years!) that, in the story, the internet is still a novelty that must be explained to people. The story concerns a singer who is successful in a J-pop singing trio. She decides under influence of ambition to break away from the singing she has been trained for (against the advice of some in her management) and try her luck at an acting career. The movie is even too old to be about Destiny’s Child and Beyonce, let alone Lady Gaga, but it’s a classic story, with old roots and echoes of A Star Is Born. Or maybe Phantom of the Opera in a kind of sideways manner. Mima Kirigoe (voiced by Junko Iwao) is stalked by an obsessive fan, forced to do sexualized scenes as an actor, and haunted by an image of herself as a pop singer who shows up and taunts her. It’s a thin line, as the old song goes, between love and hate, but in this movie it’s also a thin line between reality and hallucination. Mima is breaking down in front of us but she has other problems as well. In addition, Kon has a strange way of telling a story, which would be more perfected in Paprika, from 2006, as well as a 2004 TV miniseries, Paranoia Agent. I didn’t get a lot out of the various backstage dramatics in Perfect Blue, which are never very original, nor out of the tensions of the stalking thread either, which is more merely pro forma. Kon’s strange narrative style, however—somewhat in the manner of manga, with surprising tactics and approaches—is both engaging and intriguing and keeps everything moving along at good pace. Perfect Blue is also geared to work at the level of horror, earning an R rating with surprisingly graphic scenes of violence and fetishy sexualizing of its main character in somewhat wanton and unpleasant ways. It all serves the story, little here feels gratuitous, but Mima’s hard life is never shrunk away from and not easy to watch, even if she is supposed to be a glamorous star of pop music and, later, TV and film. Perfect Blue flirts with cliché in any number of ways but has many hooks to counter that. It is always strange and interesting, if slightly underdone. Paprika and Paranoia Agent remain the go-to work in Kon’s sadly abbreviated career but Perfect Blue, with its connections to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream and to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” remains worth a look.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

USA / UK, 104 minutes

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Writers: Gary K. Wolf, Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Ted Osborne, Ali Taliaferro

Photography: Dean Cundey

Music: Alan Silvestri

Editor: Arthur Schmidt

Cast: Bob Hoskins, Charles Fleischer, Kathleen Turner, Stubby Kaye, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Cassidy, Amy Irving, Lou Hirsch, Mel Blanc, June Foray

Who Framed Roger Rabbit deserves a fair amount of credit along with Studio Ghibli for launching this golden age of animated feature movies in which we now live. No point going into the doldrums that animation suffered from the 1960s on, when cost-cutting and merchandising to the death was the name of the game. Whatever anyone thinks of its entertainment value now—my take is that it holds up remarkably well—Roger Rabbit came along and shook things up, making the case an animated or mixed live action picture could do bank and win Oscars. In the name of nostalgia as much as anything it loaded up with vintage greats, from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to Donald and Daffy Duck, along with Betty Boop, Yosemite Sam, Droopy Dog, Woody Woodpecker, and many others. They're all part of the extravaganza—for once, money was no object in making an animated picture.

I am also struck by how it works an idea that Frank Miller and Alan Moore were playing with over in the comic book world at about the same time: what if, in the 1930s and 1940s, superheroes were real—what would they be like? Just so, Roger Rabbit imagines a world where a "toon" is a life form with specific properties living in the world with us. Because of what cartoons are and can do, the result is infinitely more surreal than anything anyone got to in the comic books with superheroes. Roger Rabbit can be surprisingly disturbing right down on the profound levels, like the best surrealism, particularly Toontown proper, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. It doesn't hurt, of course, that executive producer Steven Spielberg was on board this project with his production company, which in turn brought in one of Spielberg's most gifted proteges to direct, Robert Zemeckis, a special effects aficionado with a knack for making his movies work like finely tuned clocks (Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future).

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

It's one thing to tell big immersive stories, but comic book narratives for decades now and increasingly TV shows too inevitably run into continuity problems. You want to have your cake and eat it too. You want the drama and gravitas of killing off an important character, for example, but you don't want to lose the character forever. And you don't have to! Haven't all the major DC and Marvel comic book franchises "erased their work and started over" numerous times now? Silver age DC used to solve this with the "Imaginary Tale" (and Marvel eventually followed with its "What If" series) but nobody liked this solution. Lately the vast reaches of outer space and potentially infinite "other" dimensions have offered another possibility. This Spider-Man treatment takes a page from the Green Lantern plot, in which it was eventually revealed that Hal Jordan is not the only Green Lantern, there is a virtual army of them across the universe, patrolling home planets and vulnerable to the color yellow (which—isn't green an amalgamation of yellow and blue?). Now we learn, in this dazzling animated feature of a few years ago, that Peter Parker is not the only Spider-Man but there is an army of Spider-Beings across parallel dimensions (full disclosure, I can't speak to any sources in comic books because I don't follow any comic book anymore, not even Spider-Man, an old favorite but from a long time ago). Into the Spider-Verse is here to yuk it up over an existential crisis across a widening dimensional gyre portal opened up thanks to the Kingpin (so massive his head appears to be mysteriously located on his sternum). There's a host of fancy web-slingin' and some nice coming-of-age notes too as a Black kid from Brooklyn, a new Spider-Man in an alternate dimension, assumes the mantle and learns the ropes, so to speak. It's quite entertaining, bursting at will into impossibly fast pinging comic book action, and also capable of some impressive psychedelic effects to suggest interdimensionality and such. There's also approximately one metric fuck-ton of wisecracking, random comic book graphic devices such as splashy sound effects words, a Stan Lee cameo (albeit animated and note not "reanimated" as he was still alive at the time this movie was made), and some ingenious reimagining of Spider-Things, including Great Depression noir, anime, and Warner Brothers cartoon versions. Example of wisecracking: Spider-Ham (the WB version, which attacks with a giant wooden mallet), near the end: "That's all, folks." Peter B. Parker: "Is he allowed to say that? Legally?" Ha-ha-ha. On the nose again! Sometimes I think the entire Marvel universe was derived from one performance by Robert Downey Jr., but let's not get started on the MCU. I'm not even sure exactly what I'm doing here. Everyone else has no doubt already made up their minds about this picture and the MCU franchise at large, not to mention specifically Spider-Man. You don't need me telling you Into the Spider-Verse is worth a look even if the continuity is obviously too much for newbies to fathom. It's like dropping into an episode in the middle of a TV series. Everything may seem intensely great but you obviously don't understand everything; much is over your head because you haven't done your hours and hours and hours of TV-watching homework. I say never mind how this one fits into the Spider-Man universe. Enjoy the psychedelics and another good nod to Black culture.

Fantasia (1940)

USA, 125 minutes
Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen
Writers: Joe Grant, Dick Huerner, Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid, Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg, William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John McLeish, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peet, Vernon Stallings, Campbell Grant, Arthur Heineman
Photography: James Wong Howe
Music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Amilcare Ponchielli, Modest Mussorgsky, Franz Schubert
Animators / editors: numerous
Cast: Deems Taylor, Leopold Stokowski

Is anyone still alive who saw this when it was new? It seems unlikely, as the release of "this new form of entertainment, Fantasia," is 80 years past now, a full lifetime. The pompous words are from the dweeby Deems Taylor, standing uncomfortably in formalwear he doesn't belong in, who is our host, master of ceremonies, and all-around Robert Osborne guy for the movie. He's really not wrong about "new form of entertainment," as the vast collaboration of Fantasia arguably produced the template, if not indeed the ultimate refinement and pinnacle, of what we'd later call music videos. Taylor, continuing, "Now, there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake."

As it happens, the third kind tends to be my favorite here and it seems to be what gets Taylor most amped up himself, as when, after the intermission (Fantasia is also old-fashioned in many small comforting ways), he carries on a conversation with "the soundtrack," represented by psychedelic symmetrical shapes and colors corresponding to musical instruments playing. In many ways it's the forerunner to computer screensavers and those hypnotic visualizers digital music players used to have.

Missing Link (2019)

Director and writer Chris Butler has done a few animated features I liked (Corpse Bride, Coraline, and Paranorman, plus Kubo and the Two Strings, which I still haven't seen but hear is good). Also, the marketing for this one reached me through my kindle—I already knew that clownish feathery Big Bird look of the monster on first sight, so maybe my unconscious was manipulated into the choice. Missing Link is a Bigfoot story, set in the late 1800s, but the twists on the various aura of Sasquatch legends come early and often. This hairy eight-foot-tall monster (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) speaks English and is a sensitive, mild-mannered, timid soul, charming but almost fawning. In the right mood he can roar frighteningly, but more often he's like the polite restless smart kid who's been traveling in the car too long. He reads a lot and wants to join the yeti in the Himalayas he's read about. He's the only one of his kind in the Washington state forests (nice to see Washington!) and he's lonely. So he sends a letter to lure the great explorer and possible crackpot, Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman, having the time of his life). Frost is a bit of a Sherlock Holmes type and a preening egotist who fancies himself the world's unrivaled discoverer of monsters. The first scenes feature an encounter with the Loch Ness monster, for example. He wants to join an exclusive explorers club that won't have him without firm evidence of his claims and even then probably won't have him. He's disreputable by his very interests and beliefs. Bigfoot's letter works, he and Frost strike the deal, and they're off to storied Shangri-La. Along the way they pick up an old flame of Frost's, Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana), and a would-be assassin, Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant). It's a long way from Washington state to the Himalayas. Frost puts Bigfoot in a ridiculous outfit and names him Mr. Link (evolution is a side issue here). Later Mr. Link chooses Susan for his first name. It's all light-hearted and actually a lot of fun—Galifianakis stealing scenes at will, aided and abetted by animation that harks to a cleaned-up buffed-up Jay Ward style for Frost and Adelina, reminiscent of Snidely Whiplash and Nell, with flat heads, jutting chins, poufy lips, and razor-sharp angular lines. Mr. Susan Link is wonderfully expressive, toothy and bubbly. I liked it best when they were all clowning around at their ease, even in danger, but there's a big action-packed climax too. The whole thing is compact and clever enough that it adds up to a fun time.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Director Wes Anderson offers up a strange dystopian Japanese future for his latest, which is also his second stop-motion animation picture after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Doing the cartoon thing seems to bring something out of Anderson that I like in spite of my general misgivings about him. As usual these days—Anderson looking more and more like a candidate to replace Woody Allen and keep some casting director in steady work—the roster alone is a fireworks display of star talent. And remember, we're only talking about voice talent here: Bob Balaban, Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Yoko Ono, Liev Schreiber, and many more famous names. To tell the truth, I didn't always recognize their voices and actually I prefer it that way in animated pictures (happier, for example, to be unaware that Chief was Cranston). But you still have to be impressed with all that talent in one place. Someone somewhere pointed out that Isle of Dogs is phonetically equivalent to saying "I love dogs," which twists my brain a little but it's helpful to know because the realities in this movie are harsh as well as ironically whimsical. This is one case where "a dog's life" looks as sad and hard as it's supposed to. In fact, in the future of this movie, the entire species has been exiled from Japanese society to a place called Trash Island, which is where the garbage goes from the Japanese archipelago (the map views didn't look like the Japan we know so I presume they're filling the ocean with garbage and building on it or something like that). Trash Island looks a lot like Wall-E. There I said it. Are there problems in this movie? Yes, there are problems in this movie. The cultural appropriation of Japan and Japanese culture is bold and not politically correct but for those reasons it is also annoying and can seem a little thick-headed. But I love dogs. Who doesn't love dogs? And these dogs are quite adorable—Chief, Spots (Schreiber), Rex (Norton), King (Balaban), Boss (Murray), and Duke (Goldblum) are making lives the best they can in the trash. There's a really great chemistry between them, a kind of free-flowing Tarantino-like camaraderie reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs, where they talk things over with ease, crack wise, and carry on. The plot is unnecessarily byzantine and Anderson has some strange ways of moving the story along, such as Japanese without subtitles. But it all sort of fits, I think. And it's funny—I was the only one in the theater the day I saw it and I still laughed. I'm no authority, because I generally don't like Anderson movies that much, but I liked Isle of Dogs and look forward to seeing it again someday down the line.

The Lego Batman Movie (2017)

The Lego Batman Movie looked like a decent chance for escapist laughs, all things considered, and bearing in mind I still haven't seen the galactically successful first Lego movie. What do I need to know? It's a cartoon with a Lego toy overlay in terms of visual textures. A preview I happened to see made me laugh. Take it as DC's attempt at the ingenious comic book movie parody of Marvel's Deadpool—which it more or less is, case closed the end. I may be a little more of a DC partisan over Marvel, but I know how much DC can flop at their own game when they start chasing what other people do. As usual, they come up short. But that doesn't mean the movie isn't fun or worth a peek. I mean, come on. The Batman (with or without the definite article) is a target-rich environment for parody by any standard. A lot of creative, inventive, and funny people are busy in this movie deconstructing the enterprise for the last 50 years or possibly more, along with other features of the DC universe. They reach over into the Superman bag of tricks for the Fortress of Solitude and the Phantom Zone. In fact, practically everybody gets a cameo in a quick Justice League of America reunion scene to which Batman wasn't invited. The problem with the antisocial Batman, you see, is nobody likes him. Next thing you know, everybody in a certain legal silo of the entertainment universe is there: the Wicked Witch of the West, Godzilla, King Kong, gremlins. Something about the Phantom Zone. You'll want to score the disc when it's released because there's a whole series of regular freeze frame fests for the cameos alone. The animation is a dazzling mixed bag of primitive stop-motion, CGI, and I don't know what all, straying at will into Transformers territory too with big complicated machines that change shape at lightning speed. Wowza! And often quite surprisingly beautiful. But ultimately it's a Batman movie (with Lego toy textures), paying respect to the heritage even as it sends it up. In one flashing eye-popping montage the style of every Batman movie is riffed on, concluding with the '60s TV show. Mostly they make fun of the darkness of the Batman but they also have a lot of obvious fun with the Robin story. It's all good. This Batman turns out to be a preening, whining, aging narcissist who takes credit for battling evil even as all his arch-villain enemies get away and nothing gets better. At one point he brags that he doesn't pay taxes. He is like the most foul grizzled Clint Eastwood imaginable—he keeps the mask on most of the time—and he is insufferably, bunglingly macho. This movie among other things is on a mission to fix these character flaws, mostly with song and dance and happiness. Commissioner Barbara Gordon, succeeding her retiring father, is all about law and order and raising everyone up with community service: Stronger Together, you might say. Or, as Commissioner Gordon actually says (twice), it takes a village to stop crime. That's the problem with escapism. You just can't get away from what you're trying to escape. Even so, The Lego Batman Movie is a pretty good comedy and not a bad Batman movie. Great soundtrack too.

WALL-E (2008)

USA, 98 minutes
Director: Andrew Stanton
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Jim Reardon
Production design: Ralph Eggleston
Art direction: Bert Berry
Music: Thomas Newman
Editor: Stephen Schaffer
Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Fred Willard, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger, Kathy Najimy, Sigourney Weaver, Kim Kopf, Garrett Palmer

As I got ready to look at WALL-E again for the first time practically since it was new, I was overwhelmed by an unfamiliar feeling: nostalgia for the era of Barack Obama. Strictly speaking, of course, the Obama era is not over quite yet. And, for that matter, released on June 27, 2008, the movie isn't even technically of the Obama era anyway. But the spirit is there, the sense we can come together, acknowledge and address our common problems, and solve them, however illusory or delusional that may now appear to be. The sense that the problems we have brought on ourselves are ridiculous and should be resolved immediately because they can be.

The reason for my reaction is obvious. In fact, the Obama era is ending, and we appear to be embarking on a period that's going to make Bush/Cheney look like a Sunday ride to the hounds. WALL-E, an animated cartoon movie rated G ("nothing that would offend parents for viewing by children"), operates from the premise that our unsustainable lifestyle has finally caught up with us as a species. Earth is no longer habitable—plant life is extinct, only adorable cockroaches are left, and the surface is piled high with trash. Human beings have been hurled into space on a five-year luxury cruise (with corporate sponsorship from the ubiquitous BNL, or Buy 'n' Large) while robots are left behind to clean up the mess and monitor for signs of returning life. In other words, it's a neoliberal nightmare.

Bugs Bunny vs. Cecil J. Turtle: The Tortoise and the Hare Trilogy (1941-1947)

Tortoise Beats Hare (1941), Tortoise Wins by a Hare (1943), Rabbit Transit (1947), USA, 22 minutes
Directors: Tex Avery, Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng
Writers: Aesop, Dave Monahan, Warren Foster, Michael Maltese, Tedd Pierce
Animation: Charles McKimson, Robert McKimson, Ken Champin, Gerry Chiniquy
Music: Carl W. Stalling, Milt Franklyn
Editor: Treg Brown
Cast: Mel Blanc

The World War II years marked the crucible for the Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny. That's when he solidified into the sassy, confident rabbit we know today, picking up his Brooklyn accent, his catch phrase, his carrot, and all his winning ways. Others foolishly think they can take advantage of him—he's just a rabbit, right?—but in fact he's the unassuming wise guy who never loses—never, ever loses. He became a kind of model for America in the world during the war years and after—unassuming but skeptical and jeering, and always a winner. More than anything he was about minding his own business, and that business was about being left alone, another long-term yearning of the American soul. But when dumbass hunters, ducks, and other miscreants come along, the rabbit's only choice is to rid himself of them. And he is always successful—no one loses to Bugs Bunny. He is faster, smarter, and more funny than anyone who challenges him. That's his way.

In the Aesop fable, by comparison, it's the rabbit who is doomed to fail, and only the rabbit. So the decision to create not one but three cartoons based on the story is an interesting one. Yes, a steady wellspring of cartoon makers in the '40s were fables and fairy tales, they are scattered all through the Warner Brothers catalog, made to be seen before feature films in theaters. In fairness, Bugs does have his struggles in some cases, but he is really thrust into an impossible situation this time. The tortoise wins that race—you can look it up. But the hare, the rabbit, is—Bugs Bunny. It's the famous case of the irresistible force and the unmovable object. But three times? What punishment must Bugs endure, and how can it possibly be resolved?

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Hotaru no haka, Japan, 89 minutes
Director: Isao Takahata
Writers: Akiyuki Nosaka, Isao Takahata
Production design: Ryoichi Sato
Art direction: Nizou Yamamoto
Music: Michio Mamiya
Editor: Takeshi Seyama
Cast/voices (English version): Rhoda Chrosite, J. Robert Spencer, Amy Jones, Veronica Taylor

Currently ranked at #110 on the user-voted list of the IMDb Top 250, with an average rating of 8.3/10 as of this writing, I suspect Grave of the Fireflies needs little introduction. Conceived originally as the historical/educational half of a double feature and paired with another early and popular effort from Studio Ghibli, My Neighbor Totoro—yes, the two could only be seen in the company of one another in their original release—Grave of the Fireflies has since gone on to occupy its unique position in cinema and animation history as one of the saddest and most powerful features of its kind. Nothing comes close unless you start to consider live-action pictures and even there it stacks up pretty well.

I like it too. The temptation always is simply to erupt with superlatives, but in terms of its cultural impact I'm not sure it can be overstated. Without Grave of the Fireflies you don't get the incinerator scene in Toy Story 3, for one example (or, also from Pixar, the first 10 minutes of Up). The closest analogue might be Art Spiegelman's Maus, which similarly took a vastly underestimated medium (comic books, as opposed to cartoon features) and made practically unprecedented strides in legitimizing it once and for all. Interestingly, they both accomplished this feat by grounding their stories in that great legitimizer of the 20th century, World War II.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

USA, 83 minutes
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Writers: John Musker, Ron Clements, Hans Christian Andersen, Howard Ashman, Gerrit Graham, Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell
Art direction: Michael Peraza Jr., Donald Towns
Music: Alan Menken
Editor: Mark A. Hester
Cast/voices of: Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Buddy Hackett, Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paddi Edwards, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Ben Wright

The Little Mermaid is likely best known today as the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance, marking a return to form for the studio of a certain level of charm and brio. Following the deaths of co-founders Walt and Roy Disney in the '60s and '70s, the company had spent years wandering the deserts of mediocrity. After The Little Mermaid would come Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and many others through the '90s, most of them massive moneymakers. It may be tempting to locate the start of any such renaissance back one year, to the studio's collaboration with Steven Spielberg in 1988 on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In many ways, that's the picture that restored interest among mainstream audiences in feature-length animated entertainment (or semi-animated, as it mixes live action with the cartoons). But Roger Rabbit, for all its many impressive virtues, is hardly in the Disney style.

That would be the job of The Little Mermaid. No doubt there are volumes of behind-the-scenes corporate backstory to this movie, involving industry players, gutsy business calls, and various career-making and -breaking maneuvers. It's also easy enough to pick out various elements and call "formula"—yet another princess story based on yet another Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, yet another musical, and, as always, damnably cute more than 70% of the time. But in the end that's incidental to what ended up on the screen. In the watching, The Little Mermaid is one of those happy accidents where all pieces fall together and the result is something close to an ideal, achieved seemingly effortlessly.

Shrek (2001)

USA, 90 minutes
Directors: Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
Writers: William Steig, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, Roger S.H. Schulman, Cody Cameron, Chris Miller, Conrad Vernon
Production design: James Hegedus
Art direction: Guillaume Aretos, Douglas Rogers
Music: Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell
Editor: Sim Evan-Jones
Cast/voices of: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow, Vincent Cassel

What surprised me most about a revisit to Shrek is how dated it has become. (Full disclosure: though I saw Shrek when it was new, I have not since taken advantage of any of the offerings of the subsequent franchise, which include three sequels, five video games, various TV spinoffs, a comic book, and a Broadway musical.) I say this also acknowledging that many of its strengths are still there: taking a page out of The Princess Bride, it's as smart and knowing as ever about its sources, operates at both adult and kid levels, and tells its story with clarity, uncluttered by distraction. It's just complex enough to be interesting, it never cheats, and it is witty more often than gross (and even when it is gross, it is tame by today's standards).

One of the most obvious ways Shrek shows its age is also the one to be expected, which is the state of the art of the animation. I recall that the CGI here was considered one of its strong points on release, but now it just looks 12 years old—12 years that encompass a whole lot of innovation and development in the industry. Though it was conceived at one point in 3D, Shrek now seems to present-day animation somewhat as Hanna-Barbera of '70s TV was to it. But I don't make the finest distinctions among animation. The dated qualities of the Shrek CGI were enough for me to notice, but not enough to annoy. I would call Jay Ward one of my favorite animators and he's nothing if not primitive, so partly that's a matter of my own aesthetic. But another quality that dates Shrek is a bit more of an obstacle for me.

Spirited Away (2001)

Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, Japan, 125 minutes
Director/writer: Hayao Miyazaki
Production design: Norobu Yoshida
Art direction: Yoji Takeshige
Music: Joe Hisaishi
Cast/voices of (English language version): Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden, Susan Egan, David Ogden Stiers, Lauren Holly, Phil Proctor

In our 21st-century world of revitalized animated features, impresario Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli have arguably risen to the top of the heap (with Pixar leaving tooth scars on their heels), and Spirited Away has apparently earned the consensus distinction as being the best of the best of all its (and/or Miyazaki's) many impressive pictures. Spirited Away is indeed a fine adventure yarn, with a winning heroine, inventiveness by the pound, and a moment of overwhelming poignancy when the true nature of one of its most important characters is revealed—a truly inspired, even cunning revelation, which is fully appreciated only by paying the picture another visit in order to better grasp the nuances and intricacies in light of it.

At which point, for me, a funny thing happened. I was left more underwhelmed than I had been prepared for. It felt hollow and a little too long on subsequent viewings. Objectively, the movie is everything it was before—looks good, moves well, surprises often, with a spunky heroine you can't help rooting for up against unsettling, tough, and mysterious foes. It's just weird enough that I like it—but just conventional enough that I didn't love it. That helped me remember my main ongoing problem with the fantasy genre (where I don't even like Lewis Carroll, the most obvious source for this): it tends to require too much memorizing. And, in turn, that reminded me of my problems with so-called YA (young adult) literature, which has enjoyed a huge vogue in the past 20 years.