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Soul (2020)
Soul (2020) is a perfect way to get your mind away from the craziness of the year. The film is about a middle-aged Joe Gardner, who has been struggling for years to break into the world of Jazz, which he is passionate about. How he discovers himself while helping a girl in the out-of-the-body world forms the story. The film is available on Disney+ Hotstar. I liked the fact the protagonist was shown as an African-American, a rarity in animation films and a first for Pixar (as per Wikipedia). Though the film reminded me of earlier Pixar works like Inside Out (2015) and COCO (2017) I found it thoroughly enjoyable.…
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I Lost My Body (2019)
How to take an ordinary love story of an orphan boy falling for a beautiful girl, and, turn it into an unforgettable work of art? Watch this one. We have seen with animated films like Grave of the Fireflies (1988) or The Good Dinosaur (2015) the power to bring out human emotions of love, loss and joy, better than many of the live-action films. I Lost My Body (2019) is one such animation film. While “I Lost My Body” is described as a film where a right-hand severed from the body, travels across Paris in search of its owner, it is more than that, a love story actually. It starts…
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Klaus (2019)
The greatness of folktale or mythology is in the variety of its retelling, varying across the culture, language or region. Klaus (2019), an animation film from Spain is a reimagination of the famous legend of Santa Claus, about how it all started? The tradition of kids writing letters to the big fat grandpa in the red suit, who then delivers gifts to children around the world. Klaus (who becomes Santa Claus later) is a retired carpenter living alone, outside an unruly village in Smeerensburg on a remote island. To that chaotic village, comes a postman Jesper, who hails from a wealthy family. Jesper’s father has expelled him there, with a condition…
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Asterix: The Mansion of Gods (2014)
After a tiring day, what better way to unwind and relax, than a good comic book. Today, I did the next best thing, which was to watch an animation film featuring the Asterix and Obelix, the fearless Gauls in the Asterix: The Mansion of Gods (2014). As usual, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar schemes a way to get rid of the Gauls from Brittany. This time he comes with a cunning plan of surrounding the Gaul village with huge apartments and having hundreds of Roman civilians to move in. Initially, due to the obstructions created by Asterix and Obelix, the construction goes awry, but as the Gaul shopkeepers discover the economic…
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The Lion King (2019)
It was fun to watch The Lion King in Tamil (தி லயன் கிங்) in Tamil. The story and the characters were (almost) the same as in the original animated film that released in 1994 and became a super-hit for Disney. The photorealistic animation in this release was unbelievably good. Hearing Simba, Scar, Nala, Zazu and other characters speak in the voice of famous Tamil film stars Siddharth, Arvind Swami, Aishwarya Rajesh and Manobala added to the entertainment. Go for this film, enjoy it with your kids.
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Toy Story 4 (2019)
Unbelievable it was almost twenty-five years that the first instalment in this franchise, Toy Story (1995) got released. That film catapulted Pixar and the whole category of animated movies to new levels. The next two instalments Toy Story 2 and 3 that came in 1999 and 2010, kept the excitement alive of watching Toys being able to walk and talk, anthropomorphism in short. There is only so much you can extend a franchise with sequels, so I was sceptical about Toy Story 4. Surprisingly, Disney has succeeded in producing a great film that people of all ages can enjoy. Toy Story 4 has the simplest of a story line and…
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Oswald (TV Series)
There is a timeless beauty to simplicity. More than a decade ago, when my son was a few years old, I remember watching a TV series for kids on Cartoon Network. Originally made by Nickelodeon, “Oswald” was about a fun-loving octopus living with his friends in a neighbourhood of a big city. The main characters apart from Oswald, are “Weenie” which is Oswald’s pet dog, and Oswald’s friends – “Henry” the Penguin and “Daisy” is a tall daisy. Seeing the characters, I wished my life was as simple as Oswald’s. Each episode is brief at 12 minutes and nothing unpleasant happens – everyone is nice and helpful. There are 52…
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) was fun and more enjoyable on an IMAX 3D theatre. This is not a sequel to The Amazing Spider Man 2, but a parallel narration. Spider-Man (2018) is an animation film about Miles Morales, a teenage boy of African-American race, accidentally becoming a spiderman and tasked with saving the entire universe he is living from being destroyed by the villain Kingpin. Kingpin is building a particle accelerator to access parallel universes to bring from another dimension his (deceased in this dimension) wife and son. This causes multiple dimensions to collide with each other and potentially risking of destroying the world in the current dimension. To save this, Spider-Man…
