Trailer: Big Hero 6

Walt Disney Animation's latest animated feature Big Hero 6 is coming to NZ theatres on Boxing Day and it looks freakin' awesome! Based on a lesser-known Marvel comic character, this superhero flick, about a young tech-geek prodigy and his cuddly inflatable robot buddy, looks to combine all the slam-bang blockbuster action we've come to expect from the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Pixar's gorgeous state-of-the-art CG animation and smart, all-ages humour (the city design looks stunning). Fatso will be hosting previews in Auckland and Wellington on December 21 -- stay tuned to find out how to win tickets. In the meantime, check out this fantastic trailer below:

Teaser Trailer: Inside Out

Oh Pixar, you tease!! Just so no one out there gets TOO excited, the first trailer for the next film, Inside Out, contains about 30 seconds of footage, and the rest is made up of clips from their previous films. Still, it feels like it's been way too long since we've had an original Pixar movie, and this one definitely looks promising (it's more appealing to me than say, Brave, anyway). Being partially set inside the mind of a 11-year-old girl, and with Monsters Inc. and Up director Pete Docter at the helm, there's plenty of potential for going wild with the premise. June 2015 couldn't come sooner...

Trailer: The Wind Rises

Celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is back with his first film in 5 years, The Wind Rises, a historical piece that looks to be a departure from his beloved fantasy-oriented works like Spirited Away and How's Moving Castle. An avid plane enthusiast, Miyazaki was inspired to make this film by the real-life stories of WWII aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi. The footage in this subtitled trailer released by the Toronto International Film Festival suggests Miyazaki in "heavier" mode, but it's as beautiful a production as you'd expect from Studio Ghibli. No NZ release date announced yet -- would be great if NZIFF's Autumn Events picked it up for a screening at the Civic!

Trailer: The LEGO Movie

Okay I'm so DONE. The LEGO Movie trailer is here. The Hollywood machine that's obsessed with turning every established toy/board game into a movie will delight us next year with this feature-length version of the popular brand, which believe or not was first manufactured way back in 1949 (thanks Wikipedia). However before we prematurely declare "RIP Hollywood", the dudes tasked with directing this project offer a little hope that it'll be a wee bit more than a blatant toy commercial: Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who did Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street, two movies which definitely did not suck and were surprisingly good and funny.
For those who need to jump on the LEGO bandwagon now, we do have a selection of DVDs that might answer the niggling question of how you can actually transform interlocking plastic bricks into something narratively watchable.

Iron Man in 60 Seconds

Iron Man compressed into 60 seconds in sweet old-school 8-bit animation!

For the Star Wars Fan with Everything #26

The entirety of Episode IV: A New Hope animated in 1 minute!

Trailer: Despicable Me 2

Steve Carell and his cast of button-cute orphans and mischievous minions are back in the sequel to the 2010 animated hit. The plot has Gru (Carell) being hired by the Anti-Villain League to stop a new - unseen - baddie from destroying the world. This bubbly trailer promises more silly Bondian gadgets, and once again those adorable minions appear to be stealing the show:

Short Film: Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee

The talented guy behind that cute Dragon Baby short last year returns with a similarly fun action short pitting Bruce Lee against Iron Man. Why not? This will be the most entertaining 1 minute you'll have today.

Animated Short: Paperman

If you caught Wreck It-Ralph at the movies, you would've probably been charmed by Paperman, a gorgeous animated short from John Kahrs and Walt Disney Animation Studios that harks back to the era of silent storytelling. But for those who missed it, it's now available to view on Youtube and totally worth six minutes of your day. The music swells a bit too much at the end for me, but that doesn't take away from the fact this is one of the most beautiful things Disney has produced lately and I hope to see more of this exquisite blend of hand-drawn and CGI animation from them in the future.

Trailer: Frankenweenie

In 1984, Tim Burton made a live-action short film called Frankenweenie for Disney but was fired because they thought it was too creepy and weird. Fast forward 27 years and many box office hits later - including that billion dollar money-machine Alice in Wonderland - Burton's returned to the short again for Disney, but has done a stop-motion animated feature length remake. The first trailer's hit the web, and it looks pretty darn cute in a macabre, Burton-esque way. Apparently it'll be the first stop-motion movie to be shown in IMAX 3D.

Liquid Television is Online!

Not sure how many of you out there remember MTV's Liquid Television from the '90s, but it's one of my fondest adolescent TV memories and I've just discovered that a sizable collection of shorts from the show are now available to watch online! Featuring heaps of wild, seriously screwed-up cartoons (some like Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux would later achieve cult status), it's a one-of-a-kind programme that I'd religiously set the VCR to record weekly when it aired on TV3 late at night. I've never seen anything like it, with that kind of anarchic creative freedom, on TV again. Browse the archives here.

Old School Pixar

From 1972, this really neat video shows one of the earliest CG 3D animations ever, made by Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. It eventually found its way into a sequence in the movie Futureworld. Read more about it here.

Cars 2: A Pixar Wreck

I guess it had to happen sooner or later, and it's perhaps not surprising that Pixar's golden track record has been tarnished by Cars 2, an unnecessary sequel to one of their lesser films, its existence made only possible by the franchise's apparently lucrative merchandising. It's currently sitting in the mixed yellow zone at Metacritic, and I tend to agree with the comments at the negative end of the spectrum. As you can expect from Pixar, the film is stuffed with dazzling action sequences, faultless animation, etc. Unfortunately there's little that's emotionally engaging about any of it here: not the waffly, cliched Bond-riffin' spy plot, not buck-toothed tow-truck lead Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) whom you want to clobber constantly, and as already proven by the first film, not its distancing human-less, all-vehicle world. Cars 2 feels like an aberration from Pixar, a hollow, exhausting, shrill, blatantly studio-ey product. It's also the first Pixar film that's ever given me a headache. Boo.

The Bombing of Robert Zemeckis' Mars Needs Moms

Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture animated film cost $150 million to produce but earned only $6.9 million in its debut at the domestic box office.

Ouch, that's gotta sting...

I'm really no fan of the creepy motion-capture animation technique Rob Zemeckis has been doing for a last wee while, so maybe he'll return to making live-action movies after this dismal result. I haven't loved everything the guy's done, but he's got some serious filmmaking chops (at least one hopes he still does) that have produced terrific, dazzling work - Back to the Future, Contact and particularly, Cast Away - and it would be an utter shame if he never made another film with flesh-and-blood humans again.

Here's the trailer:



PS: I wrote this under the impression that Zemeckis had directed the film, but he actually only produced it.

Wylie E Coyote does 127 HOURS

This hilarious 127 Hours parody is from Brooklyn-based animator Rob Yulfo. I guess its not long until someone does The King's Speech with Porky Pig!

Death by Pixels

End of the world, pixel-style. Instead of tsunamis and earthquakes, Tetris and Space Invaders! File under: Worth 2 Minutes of Your Day.


PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Arts and animation videos.

Combo: A Collaborative Animation by Blu and David Ellis

I know zilch about Blu or David Ellis, but this animated vid blew me away at my desk yesterday - check it out, it'll make your day!