The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2024)

Seemingly coming from nowhere and seemingly unexpectedly wonderful THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP is a glorious feature film starring Porky and Daffy, who along with Petunia, end up fighting an alien invasion.

And when I said this is a feature film, I meant it. The film is not a series of black out sketches but a genuine feature film with a beginning middle and ending. There are blackout pieces but the film is entirely focused on a narrative thrust. Honestly the film shouldn't work, you shouldn't have eleven people credited its writing it and still have it work...and it does...pretty much flawlessly.

What makes the film work is that the film gets the characters dead on right and expands them. The film charts Daffy and porky's friendship from when they were kids to now. It lets them grow and be real people and yet the same characters. When the farmer who raised them essentially dies, we are moved. There are other deeply emotional moments, say Porky discovering and being frightened by Petunia, that bring out genuine emotions that you never really felt with any Looney Tunes project previously.  I never teared up with Looney Tunes before.

The best thing I can say is that this is on the level of the best animation being turned out today. It stands shoulder to shoulder with most of the great animated films of the last decade. Watching the film I was struck that the film would make a brilliant co-feature with WALLACE AND GROMIT VENGEANCE MOST FOUL, the film from Aardman and Netflix because it's a film that takes classic characters and breathes new life into them. There are emotions and complexity in both films that raise the stakes.

This film is one of the best film in the Looney Tunes canon and it is a film that probably would have delighted Chuck Jones, Friz Freling, Bob Clampett and the other animators because it shows how the creators of today built on what they did and went in directions they could only have hoped to go.(Warner studio heads would never have gone for a feature, never mind one with this much complexity and emotion.)

This is one one of the great films  and great finds of 2024. I honestly had little hope for this and instead founf myself completely blown away.

Highly recommended.

It's on the festival circuit and it's going to be released early next year- go.

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (2024)

In the wake of the death of her friend, Grace Pudel relates the story of her life and her obsession with snails.

Another home run from animator Adam Eliot, and another film I never want to see again. A film filled with humor and the darkness of life, what happens to Grace and her brother is largely terrible,  it's a kind of weird parable about finding light and hope where you can. The problem is that so many terrible things happen it becomes overwhelming. I wanted to check out several times during the film and kept wondering if it wouldn't be better to just eat poison.

Don't get me wrong, I love the film, but the bleakness of it all is almost too much to bare.  It's so over powering that I kind of have mixed feelings about the ending, the happily ever after turn feels more like an attempt not to have people killing themselves in the aisles than anything that would follow. 

Honestly my quibbles about the darkness aside it's a great film, and is recommended, just don't see it if you're having a down day.

Flow (2024) Animation is Film 2024

FLOW is one of the great films of 2024. It’s probably one of the greatest animated films ever made. I suspect in five years it will be hailed as a classic.

A kind of fable, the film is the story of a cat who ends up on a boat with some other animals raveling across the world during a flood.  It’s a tale of life on a grand scale told without dialog.

This is a a grand adventure. Set somewhere else at some other time and place where people are no longer around the film creates a world where anything is possible. Animals that should be together are. There are references to places here on earth, but nothing concrete. There are some magical creatures, and fantastic turns but it all makes absolute perfect emotional sense. 

I know that everyone is going to have their say about the film. Countless podcasts and You Tube videos explaining a film that doesn’t have to be explained, but simply experienced, will be popping up soon. That we live in a time where everyone has to put out pieces where they explain what the director, whom they never met, meant, or more likely saying how their take is the only right one, is a sad one. Everyone should be able to have the film mean what ever they want it to mean. FLOW needs to thrive however it thrives in the hearts of everyone who sees it.

As a work of art, this film is of the highest order. The images and storytelling are near perfect, not always in a brain logic sense but in a dead on heart sort of way. This film moved me viscerally and I wanted to to stop the film several times just because I was so overwhelmed that I wanted to just cry at the beauty of it all. (Several people behind me at the screening were loudly sobbing)

Cinema does not get much better than this.

Similar in some ways to director Gints Zilbalodis’ earlier AWAY, which is about a mystical journey, this is a vast jump in quality. This is film is a film where the student becomes the master. Everything here is nigh on perfect with the character design and animation being of a quality that few animators ever achieve. All you need to is watch  the eyes of the cat, or any of the characters and you’ll be amazed. Its so good that you’ll wish that the filmmakers could get special Oscars for their work- or compete in the best performance category. I’m serious-the best performances of the year are all computer generated.

In some ways the film may remind you of some questing computer games. Some games like MYST came to mind (and one person I spoke with after the screening listed others).  And while I can see the influence perhaps in image referencing, I can’t say that the it is more than an influence. I say that because films are not games. We do not have control. The questing structure is as old as humanity. Additionally I have never been as invested and connected to a video game story or game characters as I am here. There is a realness here that makes FLOW something greater than it’s influences. 

In a weird way the film also feels like Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld. I can't say why, largely because it's been years since I last read the stories, but there is still something haunting me.

This film is any, and every, superlative you can think of. It is a film at the highest level of cinematic art. It will move you in ways you didn’t think were possible.

Highly recommended.

Look for FLOW to have  a long life.

(And it should be noted that the film does have a post credits sequence. It’s brief but explains what happens to one character)

Sultana's Dream (2023) Animation is Film

Isabel Herguera’s feature debut was inspired by the 1905 fable by Rokeya Hossain, which imagines the utopian country called Ladyland, where women hold sway and men stay at home. Here we follow a young woman as she deals with her place in the world, discovers the original book and goes on a quest to find a real world Ladyland.

This is a cinematic work of art of the highest order. The differing look of the film will remind you of the work of some the world's greatest artists as well as the work of animators such as Lotte Reininger, Cartoon Saloon, Marjane Satrapi, Richard Williams and others, while at the same time giving all the borrows it's own slant that makes it something truly unique. Frankly the images and the story telling here are so unique that the referencing of other artists is merely an attempt at trying to explain the visual wonders contained inside.

What this film does visually will make you sit wide eyed and slack jawed at the beauty of it all.

AT the same time this is a film that I never fully emotionally connected to. Very much a film with a great deal on its mind, it often puts it's ideas ahead of it's feelings. This is a film that wants to win us with ideas more than it does emotion. I can't blame director Herguera she has a lot she wants to say, rightly so, but at the same time some of the emotion is lost. It's not fatal, but so much here is so good I wanted to love it not just like it.

My reservation aside, this is still a film you will want to see, especially on a big screen. 

Recommended.

Ghost Cat Anzu (2024) Animation is Film 2024

Karin is dumped at the home of her grandfather, who is a monk at a Buddhist shrine, by her father who is being hunted by loan sharks who already broke his arm. She is intrigued by the Anzu, the giant talking cat. As she settle in to her new home he meets the boy in the neighborhood, some spirits and some other supernatural beings.

This is a film that could never be made in the US. Life isn't neat and perfect, bad things happen and things don't go as expected. The result of the messiness of life creeping in is a film that ends up delighting the audience.

While the film is going to seem gruff and perhaps a bit low brow early on, Anzu loves to fart, the film quickly makes up for it with a cast of characters and situations that worm their way into your heart. You like everyone on screen and they become friends quickly because for the most part no one in this film is like any other character in any animated film. I couldn't help but smile and lean in because these were not people I knew or second guess.

Wonderfully its own thing, sometimes to the detriment of the pacing, GHOST CAT ANZU is film that stands out and warms the heart with real people and real emotion. Yes, some of the character design may remind you of other films, but the truth is the story and the way it unfolds is not like anything else you've really seen in Japanese and especially American animation. The plotting is not really conventional inspite of it being weirdly perfect.

Truthfully this is a film I wish had a real shot at getting at least an Oscar nomination. While I would be hard pressed to call the film the best animated film of the year (the pacing is random and there are some odd tonal shifts), it is special enough and different enough that it should take one of the Oscar slots, especially since the rest of the slots are going to be filled with Hollywood retreads of piss poor cookie cutter formulas.

You need to see this film because it will open your eyes to what can be done with the animated medium.

Highly recommended.

The Colors Within (2024) Animation is Film 2024

Coming of age film about a young girl who can see the "colors" of people who is staying in a Catholic school. She hooks up with two other people and together they form a band.

This is a film that is going to surprise a great many people. Outside of the colors, this is not a mystical anime tale, nor is it a film with contrived narrative peaks and valleys. This is a film about growing up, trying to find friends and deciding what you want to do in life.  Things happen as they normally do. There is no grand tragedies afoot or aliens or bizarre turn. There is simply life.

In a weird way that's a novel concept....

...on the other hand it makes for a uniquely compelling movie. Yes the use of animation allows for the enhancement of mood and feeling, but the fact that we are just seeing life animated is something special. Naoko Yamada has fashioned a film that sneaks up and works you over because the medium of animation draws us in.  We go in expecting something special and we come out feeling that is exactly the case. We see life as lived, which is something we not only almost never see in animation, at least that which gets a wide release, but also it is not something we see in most live action films since most filmmakers feel the need to spruce things up with an unnatural turn.

Never mind the animation, which is wonderful, I love this film simply as a film. This film stand up well with many of the live action dramas I've seen this year.

This is absolute proof that animation is not a genre but a medium for telling a story.

Highly recommended

Maybe Elephants (2024) Newport Beach Film Festival, , Animation Is Film and AFI FEST

MAYBE ELEPHANT has animator Torill Kove continuing the story of her family. This time it’s the story of how her parents eventually essentially abandoning her and her sisters.

This is another winner from Kove. As always she uses animation not for cute and cuddly characters but because the medium allows her to do things that would never work in a live action film (one of the final images has Kove and her sister wandering across maps of their own making.) It’s a stunning film that doesn’t conform to the way we think life should go, but more toward the weird turns that life actually takes.

I really liked this film a great deal.

If you are on the West Coast of America you have three opportunities to see it at Newport Beach Film Festival, , Animation Is Film  and AFI FEST 

Animation is Film Festival starts this week

I wish ANIMATION IS FILM was in New York because I could get to go. One of the best programmed animation festivals it has bumped uncomfortably against both the New York Film Festival and Doc NYC so I can't make time to fly out.

I have been covering the festival in one form or another since it starts and I've had a blast. The festival is a great look at the films that are going to be big in the final months of the year. This year the fest is running FLOW, MEMOIRS OF A SNAIL, INSIDE OUT 2, COLORS WITHIN and THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP A LOONEY TUNES movie all of which are potentially in the running for an Oscar.  It's a one stop shop for Oscar an animation junkies.

As this posts I'm trying to get access to those and other films. I'm trying to work out what I can get to here in NYC (I have press screening invites) and what I can wrangle other ways. I hope to have more coverage coming.

For now I've seen two of the films screening:

I saw REDLINE in 2012 and it blew me away. My brief reference at Unseen back then was as follows: "the Madhouse produced anime Redline. Its a wild and weird science fiction race film,that is just so wonderfully over the top I can't recommend it enough." It's a great deal of fun- and even more so on a big screen.

BOYS GO TO JUPITER was a film I saw at Tribeca earlier this year. It's a low fi animated film with its own bent view of the world (it feels like something from a couple decades back). I had a number of discussions at Tribeca about the film. It split audiences, some people loved it, some people were less enthused. I had a long discussion with an animator who saw the film multiple times at that festival and he said that the director is well aware it's not for everyone, but he is okay with it because it's the film he wanted to make.

For now if you are in Los Angeles or can get there go buy some tickets and go. The website is here.