TheRetroCritic

I talk a bit about Pixar's The Incredibles 2 .

Review available on the new website .

As we patiently wait for next year's much anticipated sequel, it's worth revisiting Pixar's The Incredibles , the animated superhero comedy that makes every Fantastic Four movie to date look like a cinematic practical joke. Indeed, there are a lot of similarities between the Marvel superteam and the characters in this movie from their powers to the matching outfits, something that should have made the film dismissable as too derivative and a bit of a rip-off but, in Pixar's hands, still comes off as very fresh and original. The film first introduces us to a world where superheroes are a common thing: they are interviewed like celebrities and their good nature is taken for granted. When super-strong Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) saves a man from jumping off a building, the latter sues him for wrongful saving since he never asked to be rescued and this leads to a long court battle ending in all superheroes having to hide their powers. Cut to many years l

I talk a bit about Pixar's Coco .

Critically acclaimed and comfortably ruling the top of the box-office, it looks like nothing can stop Pixar's Coco from becoming another significant hit for Disney, not even sticking a vastly unpopular Frozen  20 minute short at the front of it. Coco is the story of 12 year-old Miguel who dreams of becoming a musician like his idol Ernesto De La Cruz except his family has firmly been anti-music for generations so when they destroy his home-made guitar and forbid him to follow that path, he runs away to prove himself by playing music during the Día De Muertos festival. As he attempts to steal the long-dead De La Cruz's guitar in a cemetery, he is somehow transported to the Land Of The Dead where he learns that he'll need to get his family's blessing in order to come back to the land of the living. Revealing any more than that would be cruel so let's leave it at that story-wise. There's something familiar about Coco from the musical skeletons ( Corpse Bride

I talk about my favourite (and not-so favourite) Pixar movies.

Released earlier this year to the sound of mass groans and facepalms, The Emoji Movie was Sony Pictures' attempt at "Pixar-ing" a very current trend despite the fact it'll probably look and feel incredibly dated only 5 years from now. The main concept for this movie, a world inside all our smartphones where emojis live and show up whenever their specific emotion is called upon, might have been original and interesting had it been done before Inside Out or even Monsters Inc. Or any Pixar movie, for that matter. As it stands, The Emoji Movie is built upon a fatally flawed idea and whatever comes next is poisoned by that. There's also the fact that emojis don't exactly lend themselves to interesting character designs: mostly, the film just adds arms and legs to them and calls it a day in the hope that the celebrity voices will somehow distract from that laziness. The cast includes T.J. Miller as Gene (the "Meh" emoji), James Corden as Hi-5 (the o

Pixar's big 2016 release was Finding Dory , yet another sequel to another one of their most popular movies. This time, it's forgetful Dory's turn to be found (figuratively speaking) somewhere beyond the sea, as she sets out to reconnect with her estranged parents. Initially, a follow-up to Finding Nemo sounded like little more than another Cars -style cash-in but, watching the film, you quickly realise that its core plot actually does have potential. The idea that someone could forget their own parents is a heartbreaking one so Dory's journey does have some emotional weight to it. Dory being kind of a one joke character in the original film, it makes sense for this sequel to show the negative impact her short term memory loss has had on her life rather than constantly make light of it. Against all odds, this movie makes us care about Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) and her journey into the unknown. The action takes us to a Seaworld-style setting where our fish heroes are w

Following  Ratatouille , Pixar tackled the science-fiction genre with WALL-E , the story of a big-eyed little robot stuck all by himself in the middle of a post-apocalyptic Earth until he meets an unexpected visitor. This was Pixar's boldest concept since Toy Story as a good portion of the film is basically silent save for music and sound effects. The human characters don't show up until much later and when they do, they never steal the focus from WALL-E or his modern robot love interest EVE who is sent to Earth, we soon find out, to look for any source of vegetation. The world the film depicts is one overcome by garbage due to the environment having crumbled under the weight of industry and commercialism. Incidentally, the weakest aspect of WALL-E is probably its environmental message, which isn't exactly subtle, but it is admittedly done quite well in that it gives the characters something to fight for and presents a uniquely comfortable yet lazy and ultimately grim

Seth Rogen's first jump into animated waters last year was met with mixed reactions, to say the least. Sausage Party 's early trailers looked like a fun and clever R-rated romp but the more critics and audiences learned about the film, the more their excitement for it decreased. Close to the film's release, some controversy surrounding the animators being overworked and underpaid surfaced. The bad press continued but even if some critics were lukewarm towards to the film, it was still a significant box-office hit with audiences flocking to see it. The good thing about Sausage Party's success is it presented studios with another convincing pro R-rated blockbusters argument soon after Deadpool which should guarantee that we'll see less and less neutered content in theatres. The film is proudly raunchy with the whole plot being centered around a hot dog wanting to slip inside a bun, every single character swearing non-stop and an end orgy that makes the puppet se

When Pixar announced Inside Out , a film mostly taking place inside a kid's head, it sounded insane but promising in that it's something that hadn't been done before and it had the potential to be the animation studio's most affecting film since Up . The film's big concept is explained to us little by little as we see young Riley's early years develop from a single emotion, Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), to several including Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). When Riley and her parents move to San Francisco, this jumbles up her emotions to the point where Joy and Sadness find themselves out of the loop completely. The film follows the latter two as they desperately try to get back into Riley's head through any means possible. This is arguably the most surreal Pixar adventure since Monsters Inc. , which was also directed by Pete Docter, and the gimmicky concept once again doesn't distract from

In the early days of Pixar's world domination, this little film about a universe where monsters harness the fear of human children which they frighten at night (through their closets) to use as energy came out and although on paper it sounds like the most terrifying thing you'll ever see, the movie was quite the opposite. Aimed at younger viewers, Monsters Inc. is closer to, say, the likes of A Bug's Life or Cars in terms of its target audience but better than both. Thankfully, it's just about charming enough to keep older viewers' interest there throughout. We follow two monsters, one voiced by John Goodman, the other by Billy Crystal, who mistakenly end up with a kid human transcending the human world into their own. This causes all sorts of shenanigans, as you can imagine, since children are seen as the monsters in this world, and it all builds up to a confrontation with Steve Buscemi's chameleon-style monster (the last part of that phrase sounds a bi