Lightning McQueen: Mater, you ARE the bomb. Never have truer words been spoken in a movie, and never have I had the displeasure to pronounce a Pixar film a failure — until now. Cars 2, the sequel to the 2005 runaway animated hit “Cars,” misfires on so many cylinders, it becomes a huge lemon long…
Origin stories aren’t just for Marvel or DC superhero movies anymore — DreamWorks Animation Studio’s Puss in Boots is taking a page from its hero brethren. With the closing of the cash cow that was the “Shrek” film series, it was only natural for the studio to spin-off one of the more memorable characters. The…
With “Cars 2” right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to drop a tease as to what Disney Pixar (although the Pixar name is ominously missing from the trailer) has in store for us in the next few years. On tap, Planes. From an animation standpoint, it’s nothing more than replacing the cars from…
A late-2010 picture delivered by the DreamWorks animation factory, Megamind can best be described as Pixar’s The Incredibles meets Despicable Me. See, Megamind is a clever dissection of superhero movie conventions which functions as a character study of the supervillain. In the realm of superhero movies, there is always one given: The hero always wins….
The premise for 2008’s Kung Fu Panda was conceptualized by a DreamWorks Animation executive, Michael Lachance, and has been around since the early ’90s. When it finally released, the production (directed by John Wayne Stevenson and Mark Osborne) slowly became a financial and critical success for the studio. In fact, the story of Po (voiced…
You can’t keep a good penguin down (especially one that saved the Emperor penguin population and made Warner Bros. Pictures a lot of money in the process). In Happy Feet Two the savior in “Happy Feet,” Mumbles, is all grown up with a wife and son. The issue at hand this time around isn’t that…
Fa la lalalala fa lala la laaa — the smurfy blue creatures from our 19080s Saturday morning cartoons are coming to the big screen in The Smurfs. In a 3D (2D too) offering from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation, Papa Smurf, Smurfette, Grouchy Smurf, Jokey Smurf and a bunch of other adjective named Smurfs…
