Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne & John Stevenson, 2008)
Sometimes a title is its own review. Certainly Kung Fu Panda is about what you’d expect. There’s a panda. He likes kung fu. Everyone doubts the panda can do kung fu. The panda triumphs by doing kung fu. And at the end, they play “kung fu fighting” over pictures of pandas. So if you like kung fu, and like pandas, there’s a fair bit going on here for you.
Bee Movie (Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith, 2007)
Nearly a decade ago, in 1998, Dreamworks released Antz. It marked the emergence of the first major competitor to Pixar in the field of computer animation, a rivalry highlighted by its superficial similarity to Pixar’s release for that year, A Bug’s Life. While both were good films, the Dreamworks offering was exciting for the alternative perspective it offered: where the Pixar film advocated a comfy theme of community solidarity, Antz satirised the hive / mob mentality and offered a more cynical voice than the Disney-backed Pixar studio could. This diversity of approach seemed an eminently healthy start to the computer animation boom. It’s a little disheartening, then, to now be confronted with Bee Movie, a lightweight and mediocre retread of Antz that sees almost everything of interest leached from the Dreamworks recipe. Pixar are still making interesting (if uneven) films, but Bee Movie is a telling example of the mediocrity that has characterised their competition.
Shrek 2 (Andrew Adamson, 2004)
Every so often, when the accolades and box office seem to overrate the merits of a film, I find myself suffering a backlash against a movie despite having liked it. For example, Dreamworks / PDI’s original Shrek was a slick, fast, funny film, and I enjoyed it immensely, but from some of the reviews of it, you’d think nobody had made a send-up of fairy tales or Disney movies before. Shrek was, of course, far from the first such movie: it is the latest in a very long counter-Disney tradition that goes back at least to Tex Avery. And despite the reflexive assumption that the Disney studio could never make such a film, it came only the year after Disney’s manic The Emperor’s New Groove, a film I think is superior as a straight-out comedy. Indeed, there are many recent animated films I would rate above Shrek: the aforementioned Groove, most of Pixar’s films, The Iron Giant, even PDI’s earlier film Antz.
