"Hoppers" is a Delight

I got a little overhyped for "Hoppers," which is a pretty typical piece of children's entertainment when all is said and done, but it's definitely gutsier than most recent PIXAR films, and it's nice to see audiences responding so well to it.  I'll spoil the basic premise for this review, but will do my best not to get into the particulars of the plotting or give away any of the good jokes.  The less you know going into this one, the better.

Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) is a hotheaded college student who is staunchly devoted to protecting nature and animals.  She is especially keen on saving the glen and beaver pond where she spent much of her childhood with her beloved grandmother (Karen Huie), and where a new freeway extension is set to be built by the stubborn Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm).  One day, Mabel stumbles upon a secret project called "Hoppers" being carried out by her mentor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy).  She and her team have built robot animals that peoples' conscious minds can "hop" into "like 'Avatar.'"  Mabel puts herself into a beaver robot and sets out in search of the glen's missing animals, eventually uncovering a dastardly plot.  Other characters include the beaver king, George (Bobby Moynihan), an antagonistic caterpillar, Titus (Dave Franco), an intimidating bear named Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor), and another beaver named Loaf (Eduardo Franco), who is maybe a little too chill.

Initial trailers for "Hoppers" made the film look very similar to "The Wild Robot," which was also about a robot and a community of woodland creatures in the Pacific Northwest.  "The Wild Robot" even felt like a PIXAR movie more than a Dreamworks one, featuring heartwarming found family connections and meditations on parenthood.  "Hoppers" has some of this too, with Piper struggling with the loss of her grandmother, and forging new friendships.  However, "Hoppers" also has a lot of comedy in it.  And not just comedy, but zany, off-the-wall, we're-in a-cartoon comedy that isn't what I've come to expect from recent PIXAR movies. I liked that "The Wild Robot" was willing to be pretty frank about the perils of the natural world and the life cycle without sugarcoating things too much for a younger audience.  "Hoppers" goes a step further than that, mostly just for the sake of getting some surprisingly dark laughs.  And it's super effective at keeping the movie entertaining while getting its messages across.

Despite the more zany style of the humor, this still feels like a PIXAR film, mostly due to little things like the thoughtful way that the visual storytelling is executed, and the way that the worldbuilding has a couple of fantastical elements, but not too many.  The animals' character designs change depending on whether the POV character in each scene can understand them or not.  Mabel's beaver robot form looks like an ordinary beaver from a human POV, but immediately looks like Mabel, with her personality and expressiveness, from an animal POV, or when a human is using Dr. Sam's communication interface with the robots.  There are some great jokes that play around with this concept.  The editing often sells some of the punchlikes too - look out for those smash cuts.  

I also appreciate that "Hoppers" has some nuance when it comes to its eco-fable.  It doesn't just argue for the importance of nature, but also points out how the wrong kind of overzealous advocacy can end up doing more harm than good.  It would have been very easy to make Mayor Jerry an evil, irredeemable bad guy, but he's not.  There are degrees of villainy, and Mabel has to learn not to see the world in black and white.  The movie is pitched toward older kids, with some of the intense sequences pushing that PG rating, so parents should plan accordingly.  

However, this is the first PIXAR film in a while that I feel comfortable recommending without any reservations.  Some of their recent offerings have felt awfully polished and prestigious, but haven't been as entertaining as what's been coming out of its competitors.  "Hoppers" seems intent on proving otherwise, and I'm all for it.     

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"Invincible," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I'm having some trouble with "Invincible."  I've become convinced that the show probably peaked with the first season.  There's plenty of interesting stuff that happens this year, as Mark and Nolan reconnect to wage war against the Viltrumites.  There are more allies to be gathered and new villains to be revealed.  However, an awful lot of time is also spent on Nolan's apology tour, as he starts to make amends with Debbie, Mark, and Oliver.  And while I appreciate that "Invincible" is still committed to portraying all of Mark's personal relationships with something approaching realism, it still bothers me that the show has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to walk back Nolan's betrayal, arguably the defining moment of the entire show.  And the show is worse for it.

It's not that three seasons isn't long enough to pull off this kind of development, but "Invincible" is much better at being a superhero action show than it is at being a melodrama.  During the big emotional showdowns the vocal performances are very good, but visually the characters are noticeably static and there's hardly any change at all in lighting or composition or shot choice to help sell the intensity.  "Invincible" has been cutting corners with its animation from the beginning in order to keep the production timeline reasonable, but I felt it more this season.  There are several flying scenes where the limited animation is especially egregious.  It's hard not to notice that the character designs of new characters like The Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), rebel leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) and new recruit Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch) are very derivative of other characters.  

Many of the writing choices this year struck me as off.  While I liked some of the individual episodes, there's a real head-scratcher in "Hurm," which is spent exploring the Under Realm, the show's version of Hell that is populated by supernatural creatures.  It might be setting up something further down the line, but feels like a strange digression the way it's placed in the season.  The Guardians show up for two early episodes, set up a big cliffhanger, and disappear until presumably next year.  The most interesting subplot is actually about Eve having trouble with her powers, and big chunks of that take place completely offscreen.  I'm glad that Debbie gets more of the spotlight, but her wonderfully cathartic scenes with Nolan wind up being seriously undercut by where the story goes in the last episode.  I haven't read all of the source material, but I have the same terrible feeling that I had with a lot of cartoons growing up when they were about to do something that drove me crazy - moving back to the original status quo, and resetting the board even where it doesn't make sense to.  Maybe it won't happen.  I really, really hope it doesn't. 

I know some viewers are only here for the outrageous level of violence that "Invincible" regularly delivers.  I don't think this gets remotely as gory as the third season, but the action fiends should be satisfied.  There are many more Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite battles, and the premiere episode had a pretty gnarly take on an alien invasion that I enjoyed.  Those who have been waiting for a full scale Viltrumite war might come away a little disappointed, however.   Despite spending so much of the prior seasons setting up the Viltrumites as an implacable threat, when push comes to shove they almost feel like underdogs in the fight.  It was akin to preparing for the Galactic Empire, and finding out the enemy is a single terrorist cell - it's still bad, but much more manageable.  

I still like "Invincible" enough that I'm going to stick it out until the end, but I've had to adjust expectations.  That relentless sense of narrative momentum from the first season is probably not coming back.  We're never going to get a better villain than Nolan on this show because it was the family connection and the deception that really made the twist hurt.  And now Nolan is more akin to a redeemed antihero, and watching him is no longer very fun or frightening.  I still want to see where Mark and Eve's stories go, but Nolan's wearing out his welcome.  I hope to see less of him from here on out, as it's already been established that "Invincible" works perfectly well without him.

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"She Ra" With Spoilers

I finished "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power," (the 2018 Netflix series, not the one from the '80s) which was a thoroughly enjoyable action-adventure series aimed at girls.  In lieu of one of my usual top ten lists, I'm going to write up a spoilery wrap-up post to talk about some of the elements of the show that I thought were particularly novel and worthy of attention.  The best episode was "Princess Prom," by the way.

I don't think I've ever seen a kids' show where the villains aren't only well-rounded characters, but they have roughly equal narrative emphasis as the heroes.  I really enjoy Adora, Glimmer, and Bow, but all the standout characters in "She-Ra" are the ones who spend most of the series on the opposing side: Catra, Scorpia (Lauren Ash), Entrapta (Christine Woods), and Double Trouble (Jacob Tobia).  They do just as much growing and learning and maturing as any of the good guys.  Major baddie Hordak gets a redemption arc.  We even get a whole episode devoted to Lonnie (Dana Davis), Rogelio, and Kyle (Antony Del Rio), the three Horde soldiers who grew up with Adora and Catra, and mostly appear as background characters in the rest of the show.

The message is clear.  You can't write people off just because they do bad things or follow the wrong leaders.  A simple good/bad dichotomy doesn't account for the misguided, the confused, and the complicated.  Entrapta, for instance, is operating with an entirely different moral compass than the rest of the cast, valuing technology and information over human relationships.  With her prehensile hair and neurodivergent coded behavior, she's one of the show's most unique creations.  Muscle-with-a-heart-of-gold Scorpia is one of the sweetest characters and dearly values her friends, but all her friends are members of the Horde.  And of course there's Catra, who has made a habit of dealing with her trauma and expressing her insecurities in very destructive, unhealthy ways.  And it turns out that every single one of them can become a  friend and ally.  It just takes Adora a couple of extra seasons to win them over, or for them to make the decision to defect on their own.  There are also characters who stay firmly on the sidelines, only governed by their own self-interest throughout, who can still be appealed to and reasoned with. 

It's very impressive that the show manages to raise its stakes every season, to the point where the whole universe is at risk by season five.  While the violence is very mild and the relationships are kept PG, the show does go to some dark and upsetting places emotionally.  Catra spends most of the show working her way up the ranks of the Horde, and it's always ambiguous whether or not you should be rooting for her, because her villainy is so entertaining.  Then she finally finds an enemy who completely outclasses her, who she's not going to be able to manipulate, and it's time for reform.  N.D. Stephenson, who also created "Nimona," does a great job at exploring the fraught emotional lives of her characters, both bad and good, while putting on a rousing adventure show.  The only one I'm a little disappointed with is Glimmer, who becomes much more reckless and aggressive after her coronation, coming close to crossing some lines thanks to Shadoweaver's influence.  She self-corrects very quickly when the plot needs her to, and she and Bow feel a little shortchanged in the last seasons compared to Catra and Adora.

I've seen some comparisons to various anime series with similar fantasy settings, but "She-Ra" is very much a Western cartoon that is careful to serve its younger audience.  I appreciate that there's plenty of humor and fun, even in the more intense episodes, and the storytelling can provoke some big emotions without ever getting too traumatic .  For instance, while Adora and Catra are having one of their more desperate duels, Entrapa is off on a side quest, making friends with a Horde Prime (Keston John) clone she thoughtfully names "Wrong Hordak."  There are a couple of deaths that are handled very well, though this being a fantasy show, I suspect they may not be gone for good.  

This is one of the better transitional programs I've seen for middle grade kids and preteens, the ones who love cartoons but are ready for more substance to chew on.  There are not a lot of these shows, so I greatly value the ones that we've got.  And "She-Ra" is one of the best I've seen.  

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"She-Ra," Year One

Netflix's license to "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power" has expired, which finally spurred me to finish it.  I'm not going to write a post for each of the five seasons, but I wanted to single out the first one, just to put down some introductory remarks and talk about why this reboot of the old 1980s "She-Ra" series stands out from the crowd. Created by ND Stevenson, with Dreamworks Animation and NE4U, the new "She-Ra" is one of those rare animated programs that tells a complete, serialized story over the course of 52 episodes, split up into multiple seasons.  The original "She-Ra," was created to be a distaff counterpart to the popular "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe."  I don't remember much about that version, except that it featured a cast of female characters who all had the exact same Barbie-esque body type.

The new "She-Ra" is working off of the same basic premise and includes an impressive number of the old characters.  In the magical world of Etheria, the evil conquering Horde of the villain Hordak (Keston John) is at war with the Rebellion, led by Angella (Reshma Shetty), the Queen of the Kingdom of Bright Moon.  Hordak's sorceress Shadow Weaver (Lorraine Toussant) promotes a promising cadet, Adora (Aimee Carrero), to the position of Force Captain, over her best friend Catra (AJ Michalka).  However, Adora has a couple of encounters that prompt her to rethink life with the Horde.  First, she finds a magical sword that can turn her into a formidable warrior woman, She-Ra.  Then, she meets a few members of the Rebellion - Angella's daughter Glimmer (Karen Fukuhara) and her bestie Bow (Marcus Scribner).  Unfortunately, Adora changing sides doesn't sit well with Catra, who takes this as abandonment, and decides to become She-Ra's mortal enemy.

"She-Ra and the Princesses of Power" is a massive upgrade over the 80s series by every conceivable metric.  The softer, anime-inspired designs and more fluid animation are such a pleasure to look at, with Adora and the princesses being of all shapes and sizes and skin tones.  There's a lot of "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" influence here, with Adora and friends being a disparate group of personalities who have to learn to get along and work together to defeat the Horde.  They're much more obviously teenagers and young adults in this version, dealing with common interpersonal issues and anxieties, like Glimmer not wanting to disappoint her mother, and Adora trying to win over new allies.  Catra is very redeemable, but at the end of the first season she's heading further and further down the path of villainy as Adora embraces heroism.  However, a major throughline of the whole series is that Adora won't give up on her.

A lot of the buzz around the show at the time of release was that the new "She-Ra" was LGBT friendly and very diverse, but the more important thing is that it's an action show that is for girls that takes the tastes and interests of girls into account to a degree that you don't see very often.  There are pastel colors and sparkles and magic everywhere.  There's a mermaid princess character, Mermista (Vella Lovell), and another princess, Perfuma (Genesis Rodriguez), who can magically weaponize flowers and plants.  She-Ra also has a rainbow pegasus named Swiftwind (Adam Ray), like the original version, but now Swiftwind is a committed revolutionary, and can drop a one-liner like nobody's business.  The ensemble features a few male good guys, Bow and the pirate Sea Hawk (Jordan Fisher), who are portrayed as steadfast, supportive friends, and good examples of positive masculinity.  And this is never remarked upon or treated as anything novel.  

There's plenty of action, as you'd expect from a show about warring forces, though the robots take most of the damage.  She-Ra and her friends get plenty of chances to demonstrate bravery and fortitude and use cool weapons.  Because the show is for children, the fighting is never very intense, but I was surprised at how often "She-Ra" didn't pull its emotional punches.  There's quite a bit of material about childhood trauma, toxic relationships, and unhealthy coping mechanisms that get pretty dark by the later seasons.  However, we'll talk about that next time.

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"Zootopia 2" and "Wicked: for Good"

"Zootopia" is my favorite modern Disney animated film.  It's also one of the few that I thought was a natural franchise starter, being a buddy cop story, so I was looking forward to the inevitable sequel.  Frankly, I didn't think we'd have to wait this long.  Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde return, this time investigating a mysterious newcomer to the city, Gary De'Snake (Ke Huy Quan), who has something to do with the  powerful industrialist Milton Lynxley (David Straithairn).  Other characters include a conspiracy podcaster beaver, Nibbles (Fortune Feimster), ex-movie star turned politician, Mayor Winddancer (Patrick Warburton), Milton's son Pawbert (Andy Samberg), and Nick and Judy's therapist, Dr. Fuzzby (Quinta Brunson). 

Like the first "Zootopia," the sequel is about interspecies conflicts standing in for real-world issues.  This time immigrants and gentrification are the main targets, with reptiles being revealed as a hidden underclass in Zootopia.  Judy and Nick are also dealing with partnership frictions, as Judy is keen on proving to the still doubtful department that she and Nick can be great detectives, while Nick just wants to get through the case in one piece.  "Zootopia 2" follows the formula for most animated sequels, repeating many of the plot beats of the original and indulging in plenty of callbacks, while adding to the Zootopia universe.  We get to see more of the city, including a swamp neighborhood populated by aquatic denizens, and catch up with a few old friends.  Shakira is back with a new earworm, called "Zoo," and there continues to be plenty of slapstick antics for the kids and pop culture references and animal puns for the grown-ups.     

As formulaic as it is, the execution here is good enough that I have zero complaints with "Zootopia 2."  It's not very ambitious and doesn't break any new ground, but it functions just fine as a detective and mystery story, and is rousingly entertaining for the entire length of its running time.  It's not as good as the original "Zootopia," but it doesn't feel extraneous or padded out like some of the other recent Disney sequels, and I'll be happy to see more "Zootopia" sequels make their way to the big screen in the future.  

"Wicked: For Good" was exactly what I expected it to be, which is bad.  The second half of the musical it's adapting is not as good as the first half, and has none of the most famous songs or sequences.  Additional songs were composed to try and compensate for this, but it didn't help.  There's way too much story told in far too little time, and the movie still feels overlong and unwieldy.  What's worse, the first "Wicked" film did so well with family audiences, I suspect that the filmmakers felt it necessary to tone down some of the more challenging content to accommodate younger and more sensitive viewers.  The one really effective horror moment I remember from the musical is totally undercut in the film version, and all the bite and bitterness is quickly taken out of the Glinda/Elphaba hostilities.

Another issue is that the events of this film are supposed to take place at the same time as "The Wizard of Oz," so we're constantly getting bits of Dorothy's journey going on in the background, and catching glimpses of familiar characters.  The trouble is that John Chu and his collaborators can't get all the pieces to fit.  In addition to not being able to use the famous iconography of the MGM film (no ruby slippers allowed), there are so many instances of missing or muddled motivations, inexplicable behavior, and just plain mismatched storylines that I have to question whether we really needed Dorothy in this movie at all.  Then again, without her presence, the already moody, downbeat story would be even smaller scale and decidedly less spectacular.

Some things are improved - after all the criticism about the cinematography, commendable efforts have been made in that department.  The production values remain top notch, and "Wicked: For Good" looks gorgeous, if nothing else.  I also like the increased role of Glinda in the story, and the greater emphasis on her friendship with Elphaba.  Unfortunately, this isn't enough to compensate for some of the glaring, fundamental problems with the film.  There are enough good moments that I think this is still worth a watch for those who liked the first film, but expectations should be kept very, very low.

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Rank 'Em: "Star Wars: Visions," Year Three

"Visions" is back with nine more shorts, working with mostly the same Japanese studios that produced the first season that premiered back in 2021.  Three of the new shorts are direct sequels to previous "Visions" installments, and I'd say that the quality is more consistently good this time out.   Without further ado, find my thoughts on each short below, ranked from best to least.  I watched the English language versions of all the shorts.

"The Duel: Payback" - Easily the best of the collection, as the Ronin teams up with a Twilek Sith, and fights a seriously warped rogue Jedi.  The combination of Japanese brush illustrations, feudal era aesthetics, and Star Wars concepts remains fabulous to look at.  Even the Ewok bits!  This has the best action and fight scenes of this season of "Visions" by far, and characters I'd love to get to know better.

"BLACK" - The shortest short is a psychedelic, violent "Star Wars" tribute that plunges us into the midst of the endless battle between the Empire and the Rebellion, with a snazzy jazz soundtrack.  This feels more like a combination of "Star Wars" and "Heavy Metal" than "Star Wars" and anime, though I appreciate the willingness to get experimental.  It's the most un-Disney piece made for Disney+ yet.  

"The Song of Four Wings" - This is one of the more visually impressive shorts, though there isn't much of a story to speak of.  The heroine, Princess Crane, rescues a little war orphan and the two of them and the Princess's loyal droid spend the rest of the short battling the Imperials, getting into chase and fight sequences, and making some really pretty explosions.  Bonus points for the X-wing transformation.   

"The Bounty Hunters" - The visuals here aren't the best, but the characters and story won me over completely.  We've got an anti-heroine with a heart of gold (voiced by Anna Sawai!), an assassin droid with two personalities, and a jerk of a villain who needs to be taken down. It's zippy and fun, the humor works, and it's definitely a "Star Wars" story, focusing on the scruffier side of the universe.       

"The Lost Ones" - This is a sequel to the first season's "The Village Bride," following the further adventures of the wanderer F as she tries to help out refugees on a different world.  This is a much more action-oriented story that delves in the background of F and gives her a worthy adversary.  There's nothing too fancy going on with the visuals or presentation, but it's all flawlessly executed.  

"Yuko's Treasure" - Here's another one from Kinema Citrus, about a little girl named Yuko who is protected and looked after by a big, cuddly bear droid named BILY.  It's a story aimed at smaller kids, or those who like to watch cute kids doing cute things, but the execution is solid.  I especially appreciate the kawaii design work that adapts "Star Wars" elements into much friendlier anime forms.     

"The Smuggler" - Studio Trigger's contribution this year is a very charming little adventure story where a smuggler helps out a prince in disguise.  I like the Jedi who shows up in this one, but otherwise the "Star Wars" imagery here is just for window dressing.  As a fan of older anime, the style was very nostalgic.  "The Smuggler" can't hope to match up to the more ambitious shorts, but I enjoyed it for what it was.  

"The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope" - Naoyoshi Shiotani replaces Kenji Kamiyama as director for the follow-up to "The Ninth Jedi."  However, this one is much less interesting that the first installment, focusing on the character of Kara for what amounts to a generic kid-and-droid story.  It doesn't help that the English dub is pretty hard on the ears, with a squeaky heroine and a goofy droid that speaks in the third person.

"The Bird of Paradise" - I'm not a fan of the hybrid animation style, the immature protagonist, the awkward story structure, or the English language dialogue.  There are some lovely visuals, but often this feels more like a tech demo than a proper short film.  

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"Fionna and Cake," Year Two

Unlike the first season of "Fionna and Cake," the second is much more clearly part of a sequel to "Adventure Time," and involves a lot of characters that I'm not familiar with, not having watched most of the later seasons and other spinoffs of that show.  However, "Fionna and Cake" is such a fantastically weird and wonderful animated fantasy, full of characters and concepts that are so endlessly inventive that I was completely entertained and invested in what was going on anyway.  

Fionna continues to struggle with her life and relationships after saving the world, especially dealing with her feelings for DJ Flame (Manny Jacinto), and potentially disappointing her other friends.  We get a second protagonist in the universe-hopping Huntress Wizard (Ashly Burch), who is on a quest to save a mortally wounded Finn.  This involves traveling to Fionna's world and tracking down the "heart of the forest."  At this point there are so many different versions of Finn and friends running around that I can't keep them all straight, but Huntress Wizard is a distinct, memorable character who isn't quite like anyone else.  She's a mysterious magic user who has plant-based powers and is very brave, but has trouble connecting to other people.  

"Fionna and Cake" is aimed at an older crowd than "Adventure Time," dealing with more mature relationships and concerns.  Fionna is riddled with anxieties and can never quite seem to get her life together.  She wants to help, but often her efforts end up hurting her friends due to her impetuousness and mistakes in communication.  Her troubles are often tied into her mental and emotional health - jealousies, self-doubt, guilt, fear of failure, and being overwhelmed.  Huntress Wizard's adventures are more externalized, a life-and-death struggle against all manner of impossible creatures, some of whom we've met before and have history with, like the Cosmic Owl.  Nearly all the major characters from "Adventure Time" appear here, including the crew from Ooo, though their current storyline is very somber and emotionally fraught.

I don't quite know how to describe the particular aesthetics of this season, currently  being showrun by Adam Muto, based on the characters and concepts created by Pendleton Ward and Nathasha Allegri.  There's a darker, more primal sort of feel to the universe, where the rules of how the magic and mysticism work are never outright explained, but follows a crude sort of dream logic.  I always liked the way that "Adventure Time" had an undercurrent of existential horror to it, and "Fionna and Cake" leans into that vibe heavily.  Huntress's magic always seems to involve some brutal transformation or sacrifice, but abstracted heavily through the cartoon style.  Death is very present throughout the show, though revival and rebirths are common.  Some of the wordless sequences showing the origins of certain characters, or revealing past events, reminded me strongly of "Scavengers Reign" in the way that very simple animated forms convey complex systems and cycles of power.  However, the visual language is folk horror instead of science fiction.

The juxtaposition between the two storylines is very effective.  Fionna's world is essentially our own, populated by young adult city-dweller versions of the "Adventure Time" cast, so it presents a stark contrast with the other worlds that resemble fanciful variants of Ooo, or Jungian projections of the unconscious, or darkest timelines, or the backstage of reality.  Our heroines are fighting cosmic beings and nightmare monsters one minute, and trying to nail down a venue for a fundraiser the next, and both trials require comparable amounts of emotional labor.  The silliness and playfulness of the original "Adventure Time" is still very apparent, especially in the way the humor works.  However, the franchise has grown up along with its original audience, and its lessons have expanded and deepened.  I find that so miraculous and so poignant.

I have no idea who I could recommend this show to, except for the people who might have grown up on "Adventure Time" and drifted away from the franchise over the years.  In its own way it's just as inventive and involving as any dramatic prestige series made for adults that I've seen over the past year.  However, this one has a translucent giant earthworm that lives in a garden that processes people's traumatic experiences.  And he's a very good singer.  

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A Look at "Lazarus"

I admit that I was only interested in watching the newest anime from Shinichiro Watanabe, "Lazarus," because it's so obviously trying to evoke the look and feel of "Cowboy Bebop," one of the best animated series ever made.  The opening sequence in particular uses the same visual style and a similarly bombastic opening instrumental.  Several of the primary "Bebop"  voice actors also pop up here and there in smaller roles.  Another selling point is the participation of Chad Stahelski, best known as one of the directors behind "John Wick," as a consultant for the show's fight choreography.  The "Lazarus" premiere features a jaw-dropping prison escape sequence that is tremendously fun.

"Lazarus" was a joint production with Adult Swim, and it's clear they wanted another "Cowboy Bebop."  In fact, it often feels like Watanabe had an entirely different show in mind and just grafted all the "Bebop" aesthetics on it in order to get the thing made, down to every episode taking its title from a song or album, and ending with a white text fragment on a black background.  "Lazarus" takes place in the near-future, where a wonder drug called Hapuna has been created by Dr. Deniz Skinner (Koichi Yamadera).  Hapuna eradicates pain and quickly becomes popular recreationally.  However, it turns out to be a Trojan Horse, and everyone who took Hapuna will die three years later unless Skinner and his antidote can be found.  Who can get the job done?  If you guessed a ragtag group of criminals coerced into becoming a superteam team by a shady governmental figure with access to way too many resources, you're right.

So meet Axel Gilberto (Mamoru Miyano), a petty criminal and escape artist, Chris Blake (Maaya Uchida) a sexy mercenary, Leland Astor (Yuma Uchida) a teenage drone pilot, Elena (Manaka Iwami) a hacker prodigy, Doug Hadine (Makoto Furukawa), the guy in charge of keeping them all on track, and finally Hersch Lindemann (Megumi Hayashibara), the aforementioned shady governmental figure.  One of them is a former Russian spy, one of them is a former secret test subject, one is a former cult member, one is a double agent, and one is secretly filthy rich.  They have thirty days to find Skinner before people start dying, and somehow every place they look results in the team getting involved in gunfights, chases, and improbable action sequences.  Axel, a parkour expert, is positioned as our lead character and gets all the showiest scenes.  

For the most part, "Lazarus" looks pretty good.  There's a predictable drop in the animation quality after the first episode, and the character designs are incredibly derivative, but if all you're after is a slick piece of entertainment, "Lazarus" fits the bill just fine.  After the introductory episodes lay out the science-fiction premise, the show mostly falls into the pattern of a mission-of-the-week action show.  I kept wanting to compare it to "The A-team" or "Mission: Impossible" television programs, where the gang ends up in all sorts of improbable situations.  This is the kind of show where an insecure male character ends up in drag trying to suss out a drug dealer's potential connection to Skinner.  Axel eventually gains an evil psychopathic stalker, because we have to have an evil psychopathic stalker, don't we?   

The premise is a good one, but largely goes to waste.  I assumed that "Lazarus" was going to lean into its dystopian vibes, showing how the world would react to an apocalypse on the horizon.  They could have targeted the pharma industry like "Common Side Effects" or the culture of distraction, like "Paranoia Agent."  Instead, anything too serious is only addressed obliquely.  A handful of episodes have one of the main characters explain why they took Hapuna via somber opening narration, but this has little to do with the plot itself.  There's almost no attempt to have the main characters grapple with the morality of any of their actions, and the mood is always very light.  There's some material showing how Skinner gradually lost faith in humanity, but it's always kept peripheral.   

What's more disappointing is that Axel and the rest of his team stay pretty flat characters.  We eventually learn more about everyone's backgrounds, and there are a few tragic backstories, but there's never a sense of much character growth.  The characters bond as a team, but they never feel like they form individual relationships with each other.  For instance, when Elena makes a friend it's with a fellow hacker.  And when Chris gets into trouble with ex-employers, the rest of the team decide to use up precious time to rescue her, but there's next to no discussion of why.   

As a result, "Lazarus" ends up feeling generic and disposable.  There were clearly a lot of resources poured into this project, but I don't think I can recommend more than the first episode or two, and really that's just for the fancy animation.  Everything else here has been done better by other series, including the "Cowboy Bebop" homages.  

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My Favorite Ralph Bakshi Film

Fans of American animation all eventually have to reckon with the work of Ralph Bakshi.  As someone raised on the animated fantasy worlds of Disney and Hanna Barbera, I avoided Bakshi's work for a very long time.  The existence of his films, especially the early ones full of X-rated sexual imagery, plentiful vulgarity, and grotesque character designs, was something I initially wanted to write off as a fluke or deviation.  However, Bakshi proved that adult animation could be financially successful, and was massively influential on the state of modern animation as we know it.  He remains the most important example of an independent animator being able to make projects with a very personal, uncompromised artistic vision.  And that vision was daring, subversive, and often in direct opposition to the prevailing tastes and norms of the artistic establishment.  

One of the reasons I was so hesitant to explore Ralph Bakshi's work was the actual animation in his films.  With a much smaller operation and more limited funds than what the established studios were working with, the quality of the animation was always extremely haphazard.  You'd have incredible character designs, but in motion they were constantly off model.  Shortcuts were employed regularly, such as live action backgrounds and rotoscoped characters.  For a while, I latched on to the notion that rotoscoping - animation produced by tracing over live action footage - didn't count as real animation.  I got over this idea eventually, because I learned that all the major animation studios use reference footage to some extent, and the use of rotoscoping can create a very distinct, interesting aesthetic if it's done well.  And Ralph Bakshi understood how to do it well.    

One of the reasons that Bakshi survived in animation for as long as he did and got as many films produced as he did was that he evolved with the times.  He transitioned from his gritty "urban" films exploring city life to fantasy spectaculars like "Fire and Ice" and "The Lord of the Rings" in the 1980s, and helped kick off the television animation resurgence with "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" in 1988.  One of the important early transitional titles was "American Pop," an almost entirely rotoscoped animated film that played as a straight drama, and contained very little of the X-rated material that characterized Bakshi's first few features.  Instead of garish, oversexed caricatures, the film is about very down-to-earth human beings.  The story is a series of vignettes about a Russian Jew named Zalmie who immigrates to America to escape the pogroms in 1905, and the four generations of descendants who follow him, all lovers of music in one way or another, with the last finally reaching pop stardom in the present day.

I suspect that "Heavy Traffic" is probably the best representation of Ralph Bakshi's artistic style and rebellious verve, and "Fritz the Cat" and "Coonskin" have the greatest historical importance for their boundary-breaking impact.  However, "American Pop" is the only Ralph Bakshi film I truly love because I find the characters - a series of troubled, flawed men trying to find their way through different eras of American life - to be truly touching and relatable.  There are episodes of tragedy, grief, humor, and triumph that are presented with a sympathy and humanism I don't see often in Bakshi's other work.  "American Pop" feels like a very personal film, though Bakshi has claimed that the stories were based on the experiences of musician friends instead of his own life.  And you simply cannot beat the soundtrack, which features Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas & the Papas, Peter Seger, Sam Cook, The Doors, and Pat Benatar.  

The rotoscoped animation is stiff at times, but the visual storytelling is excellent, and the performances shine through the layers of abstraction.  This style felt awkward for Bakshi's fantasy features like "The Lord of the Rings," but not in "American Pop," which is designed to be a family album of a kind, and incorporates mixed media and other artistic devices, like the prologue sequence in Russia being relayed in woodcuts.  Historical events like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and WWII combat footage are recreated along with clips of the Nicholas Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, all rendered in the same rotoscoped visual style as the lives of our heroes, making them feel like they're part of one, heightened, slightly surreal animated  continuity.  I've never seen another film achieve something quite like this.   

Watching every Ralph Bakshi film was difficult, because many of the films have significant shortcomings, or have not aged well, and even the best ones are rarely to my taste.  However, the fact that they exist at all feels miraculous.  That animated movies this uninhibited, this outrageous, and this iconoclastic found an audience is downright inspirational.  And I can't think of anyone aside from Walt Disney whose work changed our understanding of what animation could and should be to such an extent, and left its mark on the industry forever.

What I've Seen - Ralph Bakshi

Fritz the Cat (1972)

Heavy Traffic (1973)

Coonskin (1975)

Wizards (1977)

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

American Pop (1981)

Hey Good Lookin' (1982)

Fire and Ice (1983)

Cool World (1992)

Cool and the Crazy (1994)

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Notes on "Ne Zha 2"

"Ne Zha 2" is currently the highest grossing film of 2025.  It's a Chinese animated retelling of events from the life of the mythological figure Ne Zha.  It's also a sequel to the 2019 "Ne Zha" film, which did very well at the box office, but nowhere near what the sequel has achieved.  "Ne Zha 2" is a bona fide phenomenon, having grossed roughly $2 billion worldwide, and the Mandarin version even took $20 million in the U.S., though the English dub flopped.  My parents, who never talk about movies, brought this one up in conversation unprompted.  So, it brings me no joy to report that I've seen both "Ne Zha" films and I don't like either.

Based loosely on the classical novel "Investiture of the Gods," this version of Ne Zha (Lu Yanting) is a bratty child reincarnation of a demon, who is born to loving human parents (Lu Qi, Chen Hao).  He and his spirit brother/best friend of Ao Bing (Han Mo), the son of a Dragon God, Ao Guang (Li Nan), were killed in the first movie and are revived by Ne Zha's master Taiyi Zhenren (Zhang Jiaming) into new bodies.  However, Ao Bing's new form is damaged, so Ne Zha's goal is to become an immortal and join the sect of the Taoist, Wuliang (Wang Deshun), to help get Ao Bing a new body.  However, the immortal Shen Gongbao (Yang Wei), a group of troublemaking dragons, and a few other enemies are going to make that very tough for him.     

If this plot sounds rather complicated and unwieldy, that's because it is.  I soon gave up trying to keep any of the characters and their motivations straight, because it depends heavily on being familiar with certain tropes of Chinese literature and mythology that the movie assumes that you already know.  It helps to just think of Ne Zha and anybody he likes as the heroes, and everyone else is probably going to be a villain for various reasons that ultimately aren't too important.  The first half of the movie is mostly humorous and farcical, as you'd expect with your average animated kids' film.  Ne Zha and Ao Bing are stuck sharing a body, and Taiyi Zhenren tries to pass off Ne Zha as a model student and candidate for immortality to Wuliang.  There's a lot of tiresome toilet humor in both of the "Ne Zha" movies in a way that is very Chinese, but not any more appealing to me than when Western comedies resort to it.   

The second half of the movie is pure spectacle, with the various gods and demons going to battle against one another.  There are lots of beautiful, large-scale fighting sequences, interesting creature designs, and big dramatic confrontations rendered with plenty of lovely CGI animation.  The Chinese animation industry has been steadily improving over the past decade to the point where the level of quality is on par with most of the Western studios.  "Ne Zha 2" significantly improves on the first "Ne Zha" visually, and the spectacle is the best thing that it has going for it.  Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough to be worth watching simply for the lights and colors, and I found the story too incoherent to be invested in.  There are so many fake out deaths and resurrections, it never felt like there were any meaningful stakes to the battles.  And did I mention the film runs 143 eye-watering minutes?

The character of Ne Zha is appealing and fun, and I understand why he's popular.  He's a naughty little stinker of a kid, but with superpowers and a heroic destiny.  I expect that the audience that will have the best time with him will likewise be children, who may not be so bothered by the movie's byzantine worldbuilding and overly busy plotting.  However, for me "Ne Zha 2" has very little that I find appealing, and too much that I found myself patiently tolerating. That's not uncommon for me with certain kids' films, but I was hoping for better from a movie with this much hype and fuss around it.  Then again, I've found very few of the big box office winners out of China and Japan to my taste, so I guess this is just par for the course.  

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New Seasons of Old Cartoons

2025 saw the return of "King of the Hill" on Hulu, and "South Park" taking off the gloves and making headlines.  We also got a pretty decent new season of "Futurama" that seems to have totally flown under the radar.  I thought I'd take a post to talk about all three.

"King of the Hill" returns after a sixteen year break, and there have been some major changes.  The characters have all aged in real time, so Hank (Mike Judge) and Peggy (Kathy Najimy) are now retirees and Bobby (Pamela Adlon) is twenty-one and running a Japanese-German fusion restaurant.  On top of that, the Hills have been living in Saudi Arabia for over a decade for Hank's work, and are just now returning to a vastly changed Arlen, Texas.  This means that the dynamics of the show have changed, with the generational divide now as prominent as the cultural one.  And yes, the cultural divide is still in play.  There's a whole episode where Hank has an existential crisis over the fact that he enjoys soccer.      

The show doesn't look quite the same - the switch to digital has taken some of the hand-drawn imperfections out of the animation, similar to "The Simpsons."  It also doesn't sound quite the same, with several recasts and some of the actors having noticeably aged.   Johnny Hardwick passed away after voicing Dale for some of the episodes, so Toby Huss fills in for the rest.  However, the important parts are still there.  World-weary Hank has to deal with plenty of new aggravations about modern life while adjusting to retirement.  Peggy continues to mangle foreign languages and struggles with keeping her inner busybody in check.  Bobby is doing great, but still has to deal with his childhood bully and is still nursing a crush on Connie (Lauren Tom), who is now a university student.  

"South Park" has been going strong for over twenty years now, despite taking a few years off here and there.  Not much has changed since the late 2000s, when I was last regularly watching, as far as I can tell.  However, after a 2024 that only offered the "End of Obesity" special, we got a full season in 2025, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone are not pulling their punches.  After years of only indirect criticisms and fairly mild lampooning of Donald Trump, the season premiere came out swinging.  There was no mistaking that MAGA and the Trump administration were the primary targets, with Trump himself in a relationship with Satan, and JD Vance rejiggered into Tattoo from "Fantasy Island."  There is also gratuitous nudity, deepfaking, and a talking penis.  Subsequent episodes tackle ICE, Charlie Kirk, Labubus, Brendan Carr, Peter Thiel, and Benjamin Netanyahu.

I appreciate that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are fighting the good fight while much of the news media feels like it's in retreat, but aside from the shock value I didn't get much out of these episodes.  "South Park" and its edgelord tactics were never really to my tastes, and I was only ever a regular viewer for a few seasons when I was pretty much watching Comedy Central 24/7.  I watched this newest batch of episodes to keep up with the discourse, and "South Park" is pretty much the same as it always was, just with updated targets.  The method of mockery hasn't changed, and the characters haven't evolved at all.  The episodes with Satan in a relationship with Trump recycle some of the same jokes from the episodes with Satan and Saddam Hussein.  And I get that that's the point, but it still feels old hat.   

Finally, I think it's worth noting that "Futurama" just wrapped up its second season on Hulu, and proved that it's still the nerdiest cartoon currently running.  Sure, "Rick and Morty" may have taken the animated science-fiction sitcom to new and disturbing places, but "Futurama" devoted an entire episode, "The Numberland Gap," to incredibly geeky math jokes.  It even brought Georg Cantor along for the ride.  There have been a few minor developments in the "Futurama" status quo - Amy (Lauren Tom) and Kif (Maurice LaMarche) are now raising three kids, and Fry (Billy West) and Leela (Katey Sagal)  are in a long term relationship, but otherwise the Planet Express gang seems to be doing well.  There were some very mediocre seasons over the years, since "Futurama" has been bouncing between platforms and revived multiple times, but this year was one of the good ones.  

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PIXAR in the Wilderness

This was a rough summer at the box office, with several notable bombs and unexpected underperformers.  Once sure bets are now no longer guaranteed to even make their budgets back, as evidenced by the shrugs that greeted "Thunderbolts" and "Fantastic Four."  However, today I want to talk about "Elio," the latest PIXAR film.  New PIXAR films used to be a license to print money, and their sequels to past hits like "Inside Out 2" can still be blockbusters.  "Elio," however, despite being well reviewed, and despite being made for the underserved family audience, had the lowest opening for any PIXAR film, not counting the pandemic era releases.

We can parse this in many ways.  First, all films that aren't part of a franchise or based on existing IP have been a much tougher sell in recent years.  However, animated family films tend to have much stronger legs, and aren't so dependent on their opening weekends.  After "Elemental" started soft, with an opening weekend total not much higher than Elio's, it managed a respectable tenth place at the 2023 domestic summer box office, right between "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" and  "Fast X."  I fully expect that "Elio" is going to perform in a similar way, especially since the reviews have been good.

However, there's no getting away from the fact that the cultural cachet of PIXAR films has been significantly eroded.  Many blame the pandemic, where Disney decided to skip theatrical releases for three original PIXAR films - "Soul," "Turning Red," and "Luca," -  and premiere them on the Disney+ streaming service instead.  However, things may have already been on a downswing.  "Onward," which hit theaters in March of 2020, only had a partial release because of lockdowns, but its opening weekend was one of the lowest for a PIXAR film at that time.  Some blame the flood of sequels that outnumbered the original PIXAR films in the 2010s or the departure of John Lasseter in 2018.  Some blame changing audience tastes and expectations.   

Because I'm an animation nerd, I can't help drawing parallels to Disney animation.  PIXAR has been in the business of making movies for a little over thirty years.  Its first feature, "Toy Story," was released in 1995.  When the Disney animation studios were at the same point in their history, thirty years after "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," it was 1967.  "The Jungle Book" was enjoying massive box office success, but Walt Disney had just died, and the studio was about to enter a twenty year period of decline and obscurity before its Renaissance.  They nearly closed down for good in the 1980s.  During this era, the original artists who were the backbone of the studio were retiring, and there was a sense of cheapness and  artistic stagnation around the projects that were being produced.

There are many differences between the two studios, of course, but the one thing I keep coming back to is that PIXAR, like Disney, was a storied pioneer of a particular form of  animation, and set the standard for what animated films could be for a very long time.  Though PIXAR always had competitors from the beginning, their movies just looked and sounded and played better than what came out of Dreamworks or Illumination or Blue Sky.  The level of quality was dependably higher, the films more polished, and the talent involved more impressive.  That's changed over time, and now PIXAR often feels like it's a few steps behind, relying on its old characters and too much nostalgia.  

Probably no bigger indicator of the trouble PIXAR is in is the changed attitude toward its familiar house style.  "The PIXAR style" used to be the default for CGI, what everyone else was trying to look like.  After "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse," now the 2D/3D hybrid styles are becoming more popular, and a film like "Elio" starts looking safe and old hat.  The big animated hit of the summer was Sony and Netflix's "KPop Demon Hunters," a streaming release that nobody saw coming.  We're far from PIXAR reaching any kind of artistic or economic nadir, but after thirty years, it also feels like the studio is overdue for a change - culturally, artistically, and maybe in other ways too.  "Luca" director Enrico Casarosa has an upcoming feature that could be the beginning of this.  "Gatto," due in summer of 2027, will be PIXAR's first "hand-painted" animated film.  

Change is not easy, however.  Again, it took Disney twenty years to get out of the wilderness, and their transition from traditional to CGI animation a decade later was also a rough one.  Everyone loves "Tangled" and "Frozen," but forgets that "Dinosaur," "Bolt," "Chicken Little," and "Meet the Robinsons" preceded them.  What's really interesting this time around is that there's a high likelihood that we're going to see both PIXAR and Disney Animation go through their next transitional phases simultaneously.  After the recent flops of "Strange World" and "Wish," Disney's in just as bad a position as PIXAR right now with its originals.

But if history tells us anything, they'll be back on top again soon enough.

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Earth to "Elio"

It took me a while to figure out why PIXAR's "Elio" felt so familiar, even though we haven't really had much children's media about aliens or space exploration in a while.  And then it hit me - the plot was taking a lot of beats from the kids' science-fiction films that were popular in the 1980s after "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" was a hit - "The Last Starfighter," "Flight of the Navigator," and "Explorers."  "Elio" often feels like a jazzed up version of one of these stories that might have been made in the '80s, if the filmmakers at that time had had the resources and technology available.  

Eleven year-old Elio Solís (Yonas Kibreab) is a lonely kid who is obsessed with getting himself abducted by aliens.  He lives with his Aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who loves him, but is at her wit's end trying to stay on top of his alien-attracting schemes and oddball behavior.  She wants him to make some friends instead of spending so much time by himself.  Eventually Elio does attract the attention of cosmic beings, and he ends up in the middle of a conflict between the Communiverse, populated by a collection of friendly alien ambassadors, and an aggressive invader named Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett).  He also does make his first friend, a tardigrade-like alien kid named Glordon (Remy Edgerly).   

  

Even though "Elio" is about space travel and aliens, it feels very small scale and very personal.  Elio went through some early childhood trauma and never really figured out how to connect to anybody on Earth, so he's looking for somewhere else to call home.  The adventure he goes on is full of beautifully designed, but completely kid-friendly aliens.  Even the villain turns out to be a concerned father whose better nature can be appealed to with the right tactics.  All the messaging is very sweet and positive, about learning to accept help and find common ground.  Though the opening sequence happens in the wake of parental loss, this doesn't play a big part in the story.  What peril there is, is pretty mild.  And I expect that all of this is the reason why "Elio" comes off as more of a film specifically made for children, and pretty young children at that, instead of a general audiences film.  The only real adult in the whole story is Olga, an Air Force major who can be called on to navigate a spaceship in a pinch, but acts like a stressed out Mom most of the time.  

I respect where "Elio" is coming from, and every intention behind it was clearly good.  However, it comes off as very bland and very derivative of other PIXAR features.  We've had a few too many earnest PIXAR kid heroes learning important life lessons lately, and a few too many premises that seem overly familiar and safe.  I kept wondering if "Elio" might have recycled some of the assets from "Lightyear," which has similar space travel aesthetics, or maybe some of the bioluminescent critters from Disney's "Strange World" to help fill out the ranks of the aliens.  I like that "Elio" incorporates a few recordings of Carl Sagan, and real world references to the achievements of the U.S. space program, but at the same time its all feels a little too nostalgic - too preoccupied with looking backwards.  The Space Race is now decades in the past, and it's been proven time and again that the current generation of kids isn't interested in what might have fascinated their parents and grandparents when they were the same age.  "Lightyear," "Tomorrowland," "The Electric State," and plenty of other bombs have made the same mistake.

Am I overthinking this?  Probably, but "Elio" often feels so much like somebody trying to recapture the feeling of their favorite films from when they were a kid, except with all the rough edges sanded off and all the scary or dangerous or inappropriate bits scrubbed out.  "Elio" feels so toothless next to similar films that have tackled similar subject matter.  I may not be happy about "Lilo and Stitch" being remade, for instance, but that one still felt more gutsy than this.  Maybe they should have gone ahead and just set "Elio" in the '80s, back when an eleven year-old boy was expected to get in much more serious trouble.  

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"Mountainhead" and "Predator: Killer of Killers"

The new Apple TV+ feature "Mountainhead" is about how tech billionaires have become the villains of modern society.  We've had plenty of films about how the rich are awful and disconnected from the rest of humanity, but "Mountainhead" is specifically about the behavior of those reprobates on the very, very top.  Randall (Steve Carell), Souper (Jason Schwartzman), Ven (Cory Michael Smith), and Jeff (Ramy Yousef) are four ultra-wealthy tech CEOs who have convened at the newly finished mountain retreat of Souper, dubbed Mountainhead, for a weekend of playing poker and manly bonding.  This happens right as Ven's social media platform is sparking social unrest around the world due to its new AI tools being used to generate large volumes of misinformation.     

The four CEOs are not based on specific people, but you can definitely tell who's supposed to be the Elon Musk and the Warren Buffet and the rising star and the low man on the totem pole.  As the apocalypse looms large, the four of them are revealed to be selfish, self-absorbed, and toxic in the extreme.  They're obsessed with status, which they measure by net worth, and fixated on how to make deals and save their own skins to the detriment of everyone else.  They have absolutely no regard for other people, and discuss the unfolding global disaster in the most callous terms possible.  The first half of the film where we watch them as they watch the world catch fire is marked by creeping dread and moments of pitch black humor.  The second half of the film is less successful because the scope narrows and the tone shifts to much broader, absurdist, and slapstick comedy.  It didn't really work for me, though there were some good individual moments.  

"Mountainhead" was written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of "Succession."  I'm generally not a fan of shows about terrible people doing terrible things, but two hours is usually fine.  I found the "Mountainhead" quartet well-observed in their immature frat-boy preoccupations, and I'm glad that there were references to topics like accelerationism and transhumanism that the Silicon Valley set get all worked up about.  However, as a comedy I wanted the plot to get more extreme, more cringey, more absurd, or more anything.  The first half was a great setup, but then it felt like Armstrong got preoccupied with undercutting his characters' egos, and showing how they really were a pack of ineffectual twits in a real crisis, and wound up removing the possibility of anything too dark or too politically incendiary.  Recent events have shown that tech gurus can do some real damage, and the last thing I want in a satire about tech gurus right now is something that plays it too safe. 

Now for something completely different.  Animated movies based on primarily live-action IP have a very mixed track record, and for every "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" there's been a "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim."  The new "Predator: Killer of Killers" anthology feature, however, is one of the good ones.  Dan Trachtenberg, the director of "Prey," returns for a collection of very violent animated tales of alien Predators doing battle with different human warriors throughout history.  The first features a Viking warrior named Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) and her son Anders (Damien Haas) tracking down a rival clan leader, Zoran (Andrew Morgado).  The second is about two brothers, Kenji and Kiyoshi (Louis Ozawa), and their rivalry in feudal Japan.  The third is about a WWII airplane mechanic, Torres (Rick Gonzalez), who tries to warn his squadron of a Predator attack over the Atlantic.    

I'm not a big fan of the Unreal Engine-produced animation, which resembles the style of Netflix's "Arcane" and the recent "Flow" animated feature.  The characters aren't very expressive, and the visuals tend to look murky and unfinished.  However, it's a good style for action scenes, and "Killer of Killers" is pretty much wall to wall action sequences.  There are elements that just look better in animation than live action, including over-the-top violence, crazy science-fiction weaponry, and plenty of stylized blood and gore, with all kinds of creative kills on display.  The three main characters are never given much depth, but there's actually more of a cohesive story here than I was expecting, and everything ties together in a satisfying way.  "Killer of Killers" is easily better than three of the five live action "Predator" movies, just on a script level.  Based on pure action, it might even be the best one.          

Trachtenberg has another "Predator" movie coming out in a few months, the live action theatrical feature "Predator: Badlands."  There's been no indication that its story is tied into "Killer of Killers" in any meaningful way, but I expect that it won't be entirely  standalone either.  And based on Trachtenberg's work with this series so far, I'm looking forward to it.  

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"Common Side Effects" and a "Harley Quinn" Check-In

"Common Side Effects" was co-created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, and shares a lot of crew with the short-lived Max series "Scavengers' Reign."  "Common Side Effects," however, takes place in the present day and has a very different style and verve.  Our hero is an eco-warrior fungi expert named Marshall Cuso (Dave King), who discovers a Blue Angel mushroom in Peru that can cure all ills, and even revive the dying.  He's constantly on the run from the DEA, specifically Agent Harrington (Martha Kelly) and Agent Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) for his possession of controlled substances, but makes his way back to the U.S. to try and cultivate the mushroom there.  He happens across his old high school crush, Frances (Emily Pendergast) and shares his discovery with her, unaware that she works for a pharmaceutical executive named Rick Kruger (Mike Judge). 

I've seen the show promoted as an adult thriller that is critical of the pharmaceutical industry, but it's actually much lighter and stranger than it seems at first glance.  "Common Side Effects" features an interesting mix of conspiracy theory what-if, ensemble comedy, and trippy tall tale.  There are certainly exciting developments as everyone fights for control of the Blue Angel, and more than a few resort to violence.  However, this is a show where death is awfully impermanent, and the big emotional throughline comes down to Marshall and Frances figuring out how to be friends again as they deal with all the chaos that they inadvertently cause with the mushroom.  Yes, there are environmental and anti-Capitalist messages in the story, but our hero is also a rotund hippie who spends a lot of time getting into and out of ridiculous situations, so the primary goal here is definitely to amuse and entertain.  Also, there are the wonderfully trippy hallucination sequences that happen whenever anybody eats a Blue Angel, which could only happen in animation.  

A note about the visuals, while we're on the subject.  The look of "Common SIde Effects" is very distinct, because all the characters have oversized heads, and oddly proportioned faces, so they all look a little bug-eyed and weird at first.  The characters include an interesting variety of types - law enforcement, business opportunists, scientists, Marshall's community of mycology oddballs, and related allies.  Nearly everyone is sympathetic and relatable to some degree,  but most have pretty skewed priorities, and react to the existence of the mushroom in foolhardy ways.  Even Marshall, who wants to use the mushroom to cure the world, repeatedly puts his trust in people he shouldn't be trusting.  However, he's also not the only good guy we meet, and I really enjoyed watching a couple of characters figure things out and end up on the right side of the fight in the end.  Also, gotta love that Peruvian flute theme.

And now, a quick check-in with Max's "Harley Quinn" series, which recently finished its fifth season.  Because we have a new "Superman" movie coming out, corporate synergy likely decreed that there should be a season of the show set in Metropolis.  Harley and Ivy use the excuse that they've thoroughly screwed up Gotham City to the point where they don't have much else to do, and move to the unnervingly perfect Metropolis, where even Superman (Clark Kent) is feeling obsolete because of how well the city is running.  New adversaries this season include Lena Luthor (Aisha Taylor) and Brainiac (Stephen Fry), with more attention on characters like Lois Lane (Natalie Morales) and King Shark's son Shaun (Kimberly Brooks).

Any show getting five seasons is an achievement these days, but "Harley Quinn" isn't in very good shape this year.  A lot of the original roster of regulars has moved on, and there just aren't compelling stakes to their adventures anymore, even though the show's stakes have always been pretty low.  We meet Ivy's ex and get into Harley's family troubles a bit, and both of the major villains this year are pretty good.  However, it's clear that our leading ladies are never going to break up and don't face any threats that are beyond their ability to handle, so there's not much excitement to be had.  It's not a bad watch as a hangout show, but way too many of the characters are now the kids or relatives of other characters, and the creators have apparently exhausted the supply of obscure comic book characters they can dredge out of the DC archives.  It may be time to let Harley and friends have one last hurrah, and bow out.  

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"Flow" and "Memoir of a Snail"

I'm usually pretty supportive of foreign and indie animated features, but the two that have gotten the most attention this awards season are just not my thing at all.  I debated with myself if it was worth writing these reviews, since smaller films like this face such an uphill battle getting audience attention, and putting forth any negativity feels kinda mean spirited.  However, just because I didn't like them doesn't mean that I can't write about them in a way that would highlight why other viewers might like them and want to seek them out.  Plenty of viewers have clearly enjoyed "Flow" and "Memoir of a Snail."  Maybe you will too.

First, let's talk about "Flow," which is a Latvian CGI film from Gints Zilbalodis and Dream Well Studio.  It stars a collection of animals, has no spoken dialogue, and seems to take place in a fantastical world that human beings have abandoned.  Our main POV character is a black cat who is caught in an unexpected flood, and must join several other animals - a dog, a capybara, a secretary bird, a lemur, and a whale - making a journey to a mysterious city.  The visuals are the main event here, creating an extremely immersive experience as we watch the cat travel through different environments, get swept away by the flood, and struggle to cooperate with the other animals to survive.  The animals behave like real animals for the most part, and are only minimally anthropomorphized.    

The CGI animation of the natural environments is lovely, and the critters are pretty cute.  Our hero cat looks almost exactly like the ones that often pop up in Studio Ghibli pictures, like Jiji from "Kiki's Delivery Service." The animators do a great job of keeping us invested in their journey, watching them work through one problem and obstacle after another.  If "Flow" had been created as a twenty minute short, I would have thought much better of it.  However, it's an 85 minute movie, and the premise just can't sustain the runtime.  Despite some standout sequences, I couldn't stop thinking of "Flow" as awfully reminiscent of a tech demo for a video game, designed to show off the impact of the gaming experience, and how cool the effects animation is.  I can understand the choice to use a non-traditional narrative, but as a result a lot of the movie feels very disconnected and arbitrary.  The character animation isn't expressive enough to suggest much actual intention in the animals' behavior, much less any motives, leaving their actions a mystery.  You don't see many animated films committed to so much realism, which is commendable, but it also negatively impacts the storytelling.  "Flow" left me intrigued, but unmoved, looking for a story to go with the lovely images.  

Now, on to "Memoir of a Snail," which is the latest film from Australian animator Adam Elliot, who made "Harvey Krumpet" and "Mary and Max."  Like his previous work, "Memoir of a Snail" is a biography of an oddball.  Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) is a snail enthusiast who endures a difficult childhood with her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) under the care of their disabled drunkard father Percy (Dominique Pinon).  Things become worse when Percy dies, and Grace and Gilbert are split up.  Grace ends up with nice, but mostly absent foster parents, and finds a friend in an elderly woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver).  Gilbert ends up with a family of terrible religious fundamentalists, and is only able to communicate with Grace through occasional letters. 

I've enjoyed all of Adam Elliot's films and shorts, but I've never really liked them much as animated media.  The stories are certainly compelling, full of miserable personal histories, dark humor, and the celebration of imperfection and eccentricity.  Grace survives so much tragedy, you have to root for her, though the soap opera twists get to be a bit much by the end.  However, my biggest problem is with the visuals.  Adam Elliot's style is instantly recognizable.  His stop-motion animation characters are all ugly-cute caricatures of average people, often with lumpy bodies and huge bug-eyes, and rendered in drab colors.  The production design is full of subversive little details and nostalgic kitsch.  The animation itself, however, is crude stuff - characters rely mostly on voiceover instead of talking, and have a tendency to sit around, staring blankly out at the audience.  

Other animators with minimalist styles like Don Hertzfeld find ways to use the limitations to their advantage, and still come up with creative, memorable imagery.  "Memoir of a Snail" does manage a few good visual gags, but only seems to be animated when it absolutely has to be, which is a mark against it. I enjoyed the film, and do recommend it to discerning grown ups, but there are so many good animated films from 2024 that this places pretty far down in the list.    

          

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