71 reviews in this category.
Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki's 1997 animated epic set in the late Muromachi period of Japan, where a young prince named Ashitaka is cursed by a demon boar god and must journey west to find a cure for a wound that grants him supernatural streng…...
Spirited Away is Hayao Miyazaki's Oscar-winning masterpiece about a ten-year-old girl who must work in a spirit-world bathhouse to save her parents from being served as the main course.…...
Get Jiro! is the kind of show that could only have come from Anthony Bourdain. Adapted from his DC Vertigo graphic novels and brought to Adult Swim by showrunners Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, the series drops viewers into a post-apocalyptic …...
Forgotten Island is DreamWorks Animation's most culturally specific film since the Prince of Egypt, and it shares with that earlier work a genuine reverence for its source material that transcends the typical kids'-movie treatment of folklore as exot…...
South Park is the hardest show on television to score ideologically because it is the only show that genuinely does not pick a side. Parker and Stone are equal-opportunity offenders operating from a first-principles libertarianism....
Aardman Animations remains one of the last studios in the world making films for everyone, not for a demographic, not for an algorithm, and certainly not for a political checklist.…...
Your Letter is a small, gentle film with a big heart, and it arrives like a reminder that not everything made today carries an agenda.…...
Monsters, Inc. is a film about a creature who discovers he would rather protect a child than frighten her, and that single instinct upends an entire industry. That is as traditional a story as Pixar has ever told.…...
Parents of young children already know whether PAW Patrol lives in their house. If you have a child under seven, the theme song has been stuck in your head since 2013 and you have opinions about whether Marshall or Chase is the better pup.…...
Batman: Caped Crusader Season 2 arrives on Prime Video with ten episodes that deepen the show's commitment to 1940s noir.…...
Mike Judge and Greg Daniels have done something remarkable with King of the Hill: Season 15: they brought back a beloved animated sitcom after more than a decade and made it feel like it never left.…...
Pixar's first feature is not just a landmark of computer animation. It is a deeply traditional story about the things that matter most: loyalty, sacrifice, and earning your place in the world....
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act is a cultural phenomenon wrapped in a genuine creative achievement. That combination is rare enough to deserve serious analysis, even for an audience that will find real objections in the content....
The opening four minutes of Up contain more emotional truth than most films achieve in their entire runtime. You know the sequence. Carl meets Ellie. They share a dream. They build a life together. They plan to go to Paradise Falls. They don't.…...
WALL-E is one of the most technically and emotionally ambitious animated films ever made. It is also one of the most ideologically complicated films Pixar has produced.…...
Finding Nemo is twenty-three years old. It still works....
Twenty-five years after Shrek changed what an animated film could be, the 25th anniversary theatrical re-release gives audiences a chance to measure the original against its cultural legacy.…...
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the most beloved animated series ever made. That is not opinion. It is measurement. Three seasons, 61 episodes, and a cultural footprint that has only grown in the eighteen years since it concluded.…...
Tolkien spent decades building a mythology. Peter Jackson spent a decade turning it into cinema.…...
Illumination is reliable. Not always great, sometimes very good, occasionally exceptional, but reliably delivering what it promises.…...
Toy Story 5 is Andrew Stanton's meditation on childhood, play, and the siege of imagination by algorithmic entertainment.…...
George Orwell's Animal Farm is arguably the most powerful conservative text ever written. It is a thesis statement against totalitarianism, collectivism, and the betrayal of revolution by elites.…...
Invincible remains the best superhero show currently in production. That verdict still holds in Season 3. It also holds a few progressive elements that cost it points on this scorecard. Both things are true, and they're both worth understanding....
Let us be honest about what Pixar made here. Hoppers is a genuine return to form for a studio that had been coasting on nostalgia sequels and misfires for nearly a decade.…...
Here is what Stephen Curry apparently remembered about the sports movies that shaped him: the underdog does not win because the system is fixed for him. The underdog wins because he shows up every day, gets better, and earns it.…...
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is the sequel to a $1.36 billion phenomenon. It delivers exactly what made the original successful: kinetic fan service, Jack Black's scene-stealing performance, and a clean adventure that never lectures.…...
The Lion King is Disney's masterpiece and one of the most traditional films ever made by a major studio.…...
The Incredibles is the most explicitly conservative major studio animated film since The Lion King.…...
The original Bad Guys was a pleasant surprise: a DreamWorks animated film that used French New Wave aesthetics and a genuinely clever premise to deliver one of the more entertaining family films of 2022.…...
Fantastic Mr. Fox is Wes Anderson's most straightforward moral tale and his most entertaining film, which is not a coincidence.…...
Zootopia is the most technically polished Disney has ever been. It is also one of the most ideologically explicit animated films a major studio has released.…...
There are animated films that earn their reputation and animated films that coast on it. Coco earns every bit of its 97% Rotten Tomatoes score, its two Oscars, and its place in the conversation about the greatest Pixar films ever made.…...
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is one of the best anime films in years and also one of the most conservative-unfriendly Pixar-alternative entertainment options of 2025. That tension is the whole point....
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a mess. A watchable, occasionally charming, utterly cynical mess. It is the clearest example of a studio film that exists to serve an IP portfolio rather than tell a story, and it did not even bother to hide that fact....
Soul is the rare animated film that asks a genuinely adult question and answers it with honesty rather than sentiment. The question: is having a passion you dedicate your life to the same thing as having a reason to live? Pixar's answer is no.…...
There are filmmakers, and then there is Hayao Miyazaki. The Boy and the Heron is his final film, if we choose to believe that this time, and it is a work of art in the fullest sense: personal, symbolic, emotionally demanding, and visually unlike anyt…...
Let me tell you what nobody expected in December 2022: that an eleventh-year sequel to a DreamWorks spin-off, featuring a talking cat from the Shrek franchise, would turn out to be one of the best animated films in a decade.…...
Here is the thing about Flow: it should not be this good. A Latvian animated film made by one person over five years, using free software, with no dialogue, no human characters, and a $3.5 million budget going up against Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks…...
Here is the most charitable reading of Toy Story 4 I can offer: it is a technically brilliant film that makes a catastrophic moral choice in its final fifteen minutes....
Moana is the Disney princess film that refuses to be about a princess, which is either the most Disney thing imaginable or a quiet act of subversion, depending on your perspective. Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) is the daughter of a Pacific Island chief.…...
Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the most technically ambitious traditionally animated film since The Lion King, and it earns every frame of the $778.9 million it grossed worldwide....
This is the film our audience has been waiting for....
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the highest-grossing animated film of 2023 at $1.36 billion worldwide, and it earned that number honestly. It is not a great film by any measure of ambition or craft.…...
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the best animated TMNT film since the 2007 theatrical entry, and one of the most visually distinctive studio animated films in years.…...
Across the Spider-Verse is the most technically ambitious animated film ever made. That is not hyperbole. Director Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K.…...
Migration is Illumination doing what Illumination does best: a fast-moving family comedy built around a strong emotional hook, driven by a celebrity voice cast, and produced to a standard of visual polish that justifies the theater experience.…...
Kung Fu Panda 4 is the franchise equivalent of a talented athlete playing a slightly lesser sport: the fundamental skills are on display, the performance is creditable, but something of the original intensity has been traded for management comfort....
Pixar's Elemental arrived at the box office to an unexpectedly rocky opening weekend and then quietly became one of the most audience-beloved films of 2023. The critics gave it a middling 74%. The audiences gave it a 95%. That gap is not accidental.…...
Coyote vs. Acme has the most dramatic behind-the-scenes story of any film in 2026, and it hasn't even been released yet....
KPop Demon Hunters is the kind of cultural event that forces you to evaluate it on two entirely separate tracks: as a piece of entertainment, and as a vehicle for ideas. On the first track, it is an unqualified triumph.…...
Angel Studios just proved that faith-based cinema can compete with the big boys, and they did it with a 3,000-year-old story about a shepherd kid with a sling....
Elio is the most politically interesting Pixar film in years - not because of what is on screen, but because of the firestorm around what was taken off it.…...
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. Full stop. The first film was a surprise phenomenon.…...
Inside Out 2 is the movie Disney desperately needed. After a string of underperformers and culture war disasters (Lightyear's same-sex kiss controversy, Strange World's commercial implosion, Elemental's slow start), Pixar went back to basics.…...
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling.…...
Frozen II is the rare Disney sequel that takes bigger ideological swings than the original, and it connects with roughly half of them.…...
Disney's Frozen is both less radical and more subversive than its reputation suggests.…...
Disney's centennial celebration is a fitting monument to everything wrong with modern Disney. Wish is technically competent and thematically empty - a film that cost nearly $200 million and made audiences feel absolutely nothing....
Turning Red is a technically brilliant, emotionally effective Pixar film that is also one of the studio's most ideologically loaded projects.…...
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, an…...
Strange World is the movie where Disney finally stopped pretending and went full ideological accelerator.…...
Lightyear is a mediocre Pixar film that became a cultural flashpoint for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its quality.…...
Encanto is that rare modern Disney film that actually earns its emotional payoff. Set in a magical Colombian valley, it tells the story of Mirabel Madrigal, the one family member without a supernatural gift, who must figure out why the family's magic…...
The name alone carries enough weight to sell tickets. Mufasa. The great king. The father James Earl Jones voiced into immortality. The ghost in the clouds.…...
The Wild Robot might be the most subversive film of 2024, and not in the way Hollywood usually means that word.…...
Zootopia 2 is exactly what it looks like. It is a Disney animated buddy cop sequel with gorgeous animation, sharp voice performances, a cracking mystery plot, and a progressive allegory that does not hide behind the fur.…...
The short version: Moana 2 is fine. Better than fine for fans of the original. Not as good as the original.…...
IF is John Krasinski's most emotionally ambitious film and his most uneven one. But when it works, which is more often than its mixed reviews suggest, it works because Krasinski trusts the audience to feel something genuine....
Despicable Me 4 is the franchise at its most comfortable and its most predictable. That is not entirely a bad thing....
