TheRetroCritic

In France, The Little Prince is a true children's classic, one of those iconic fairy tales that's so perfect as it is that every adaptation since has paled in comparison. This month, Netflix brings us this animated film loosely based on Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novella. Bizarrely pulled from theaters a week before its 3D cinema release, the film was instead distributed on the popular streaming network and it's done well with critics and audiences alike. A very loose adaptation of the book, the film focuses on the story of a little girl and her mother as they move into a new house and the latter plans her daughter's entire life before she enrolls into a prestigious school. The little girl befriends an old man who lives next door as he introduces her to the story of The Little Prince. The parts of the movie that tell the classic story, I must admit, look beautiful: the stop-motion work is impressive and the paper-themed visual style proves to be a perfect matc

Another Disney animated classic gets the live-action treatment as, surprisingly soon after Into The Woods , we get another interpretation of Cinderella . This time, the Mouse House is taking a more traditional approach by telling the story without updating it too much or adding too many surprises. Unlike last year's Maleficent which felt the need to turn one of the studio's most iconic and frightening villains into a misunderstood hero (urgh...), this Cinderella is basically a straight-up retelling. Minus the talking mice, though they do sort of talk throughout. While this means very little in the way of new elements to talk about, it's also somewhat refreshing to see a classic fairytale told without any forced irony or lame attempts at modernising a story as old as time itself. This is the Cinderella tale at its most earnest and, admittedly, this makes parts of it pretty darn corny and predictable. The opening 5 minutes where Ella's youth is so crazily happy all

After Tarsem Singh's "attempt" at a Snow White movie, the odious-looking Mirror Mirror , this instalment looked amazing. The trailers promised a stylish, exciting, dark, moody epic sort of like Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland but grittier and actually probably better. For the most part, Snow White & The Huntsman delivers. I was afraid the film would go down the Alice In Wonderland route and trick its audience into thinking they were about to watch the classic Snow White story when in fact giving them some weird, stand-out sequel but this one does stay surprisingly close to what you'd expect from a Snow White movie. You get the evil queen, the creepy brother, the mirror, the dwarves, gloomy forests... it's pretty much all there. It's almost like the film tries to hide its Snow White-ness wanting to be something altogether darker and more twisted but restraining itself for the sake of the fairy-tale. The cast is hit-and-miss with Charlize Theron&

After Disney's big comeback  The Little Mermaid , it was now the dawn of a new era and the opportunity for the studio to think big and stop just making animal versions of things, for a little while at least. So here we have Beauty And The Beast , another classic fairy-tale being given the Disney treatment, and if you watched it growing up then you probably know there's not much to whine about: it's definitely one of the good ones. The film looks fantastic, the score is excellent, the story is timeless. You've got some great voice acting from the likes of Robby Benson (Beast) and Paige O'Hara (Belle), not to mention Angela Lansbury as... a talking teapot. The songs in the film are celebrated, the title song even won the Academy Award, but they're arguably not quite on the level of the songs in The Little Mermaid, Aladdin or even The Lion King . This is one of those rare Disney movies where the score is actually way better than the songs themselves. "Be

Before Disney had the mega-hit it was looking for with Frozen , there was an attempt to nail the non-Pixar 3D animation formula with  Tangled , a new take on the classic Rapunzel fairy-tale.   With The Princess and the Frog , it looked like Disney was ready to be Disney again, bringing back a unique style of 2D animation now long dormant. Sadly, Tangled isn't another hand-drawn effort but rather a quality, polished-looking 3D treat which looks about 10 times better than any of the Shrek films yet still very 90's in spirit... in a good way. Tangled looks modern but it's very much a throwback to the likes of The Little Mermaid so your enjoyment of the film will probably depend on whether you like that type of Disney film or if you hate it with a passion. The story of Rapunzel, like the Frog Prince, is an inevitable, safe choice for Disney but both stories have clearly been handled with a lot of heart and with 80's kids in mind. Now the film itself, it should be