By Andrew Osmond. Happy Christmas, Pixar fans! The studio’s new CG animation Soul debuts today on the Disney+ platform. It’s an afterlife fantasy, in which Joe, a New York jazz pianist takes a tumble down a manhole and ends up as a disembodied, well, soul en route to the Great Beyond. But our ghostly hero […]
By Andrew Osmond. Onward is Pixar’s twenty-second feature animation and the studio’s fourteenth original film – neither sequel nor prequel – and it officially opens in cinemas today after sneak previews last week. Like an earlier piece I wrote on Pixar’s Inside Out, this article isn’t a review, but more an “anime eye” on a […]
By Andrew Osmond. Earlier this month, there was a snippet of news in the film press about the Oscars. At first glance, it seems a technicality, but it could be serious, very serious, for any fan of animation beyond Hollywood. It’s about the way the nominees for Best Animated Feature Film are chosen – the […]
By Andrew Osmond. The Animated Oscar nominee list was announced yesterday and – in the main headline for most anime fans – Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name wasn’t on it. It was a disappointment, though not very surprising. While the film’s astonishing box-office in Japan and China got it some press coverage in America, it’s unlikely […]
By Andrew Osmond. Pixar’s new film, Inside Out, has had some localised changes in Japan, where it opened a week ago under the name Inside Head. In the English version, for example, there’s a gag that turns on kids’ dislike of the noble vegetable broccoli, which is rather popular in Japan. (Japan, remember, is the […]