by Jeremy Clarke. Back on the big screen in a welcome one-day outing fifty years after its original 1968 release, The Beatles: Yellow Submarine remains one of the most remarkable animated feature films ever made. It turned the medium on its head in the English-speaking world, eschewing Disney’s dominant visual style and children’s audience for […]
by Jeremy Clarke. Portrait of the artist at age 66. A new documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda finds musician Ryuichi Sakamoto working on a new album following a third degree throat cancer diagnosis and time off work for treatment. At the same time, it presents a select chronological appraisal of his career from Yellow Magic Orchestra […]
by Jeremy Clarke. Nick Park and Aardman Animations’ latest epic, out on Blu-ray and DVD, is set in a prehistoric world of cavemen, rabbits and mammoths. For good measure it also throws in dastardly Frenchmen and football. Park coaxes great voice performances out of his all-star cast, while physical animation is in the capable hands […]
by Jeremy Clarke. Three recent Hirokazu Kore-eda movies I Wish (2011), Like Father, Like Son (2013) and After the Storm (2016) finally arrive on UK BD/DVD. Most of his art-house feature work has secured a release here, much of it (including these three titles) initially in cinemas. Kore-eda has been described as one of the […]
by Jeremy Clarke. Set in an unnamed provincial town in South China, director Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day is a bleak vision of a brutal society fuelled by naked self-interest. It’s hard to think of anything in animation or the wider world of cinema quite like it. The plot suggests a gangster film, but […]