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What to watch
140 Essential Animated Movies To Watch Now. The origins of the whiz-bang animated wonders we see today in the likes of Toy Story, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and How to Train Your Dragon...
- 140 Essential Animated Movies
Critics Consensus: Kung Fu Panda has a familiar message, but...
- Best Animated Movies 2021
Best Animated Movies 2021. Let’s be honest here: Disney kind...
- 140 Essential Animated Movies
- Soul (2020) Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a pretty good jazz musician—but the high school music teacher’s life hasn’t been quite all he dreamed. At least until he falls down a manhole, dies, and discovers what it really means to have soul.
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) Danny McBride voices technophobic Rick Mitchell, who teams up with his movie-obsessed daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) to save the world in this smartass-yet-heartwarming animated movie.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Peter Parker is a supporting character in the best Spider-Man movie of them all, with Miles Morales reluctantly learning to become a hero with a little help from Spider-people from across the multiverse.
- Nimona (2023) Based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a heartfelt, joyful, and very funny fantasy set in a futuristic world full of medieval trappings.
- Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
- The Adventures of Tintin
- Ghost in The Shell
- Fire and Ice
- Heavy Metal
- Akira
- Ninja Scroll
- Princess Mononoke
- Redline
- The Incredibles
Adapting the Medium
Despite the fact that “cartoon” can refer to sequential illustration on the printed page or in animated form, most “comic book movies" go the live-action route. Over the years, quite a few films have emulated various comic styles: Warren Beatty upped the saturation in Dick Tracy to capture that vintage four-color newsprint vibe, while Robert Rodriguez did the opposite with Sin City, aping Frank Miller’s high-contrast monochromatic inks. For Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright cherry-pic...
Performance Capture
What constitutes live-action at this point? Considering how much CGI is in your average 21st century blockbuster movie, many of them are basically animated features with a splash of flesh and blood. Then again, it goes both ways. Thanks to performance capture technology, we’ve seen human actors physically playing the parts of animated characters. One of the best action movies to take this approach is a frustratingly underrated popcorn flick that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun in conventiona...
Influential Anime
Modern Hollywood action movies likely wouldn’t be what they are today without the influence of The Matrix, and The Matrix wouldn’t exist without taking heavy influence from what is unquestionably one of the finest anime films ever made: Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell, the movie, is a sublime intersection of style and substance. The manga of the same name was written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow, whose visuals, with all due respect, considerably outweigh his storytelling - like l...
Performance Capture Before It Was Cool
The fact that animation is seen as a second-class medium to live-action filmmaking is especially infuriating when you consider cartoons were the first motion pictures, taking the form of phenakistoscopes and zoetropes long before Edison staked his claim to the kinetograph. Performance capture - the digital kind with the jumpsuits covered in ping pong balls and triangles - is new technology. However, the underlying principle of using actual human movements as the basis for animation is not. It...
Cartoons That Weren’t Just For Kids
Much in the same way that Into the Spider-Verse feels so authentically like flipping through a superhero comic, there’s another piece of animation that feels like it’s sprung from the mysteriously sticky pages of another iconic periodical: Heavy Metal. Much like the magazine of the same name, Heavy Metal is an anthology of vignettes presented in jarringly different aesthetics and tones. The common thread is an all-powerful villain/otherworldly McGuffin, the Loc-Nar, which is somewhere between...
...This Heading Is Just Called "Akira"
Akira, at the time of its production, was the most expensive animated feature film ever produced, and it’s singlehandedly responsible for making anime the global phenomenon it is today. I could sit here gushing over how much of a singularly brilliant piece of media it is, and how the animators literally had to invent a new color palette to bring it to life, or how practically every frame is packed with detail and if you watch it in 4K you can actually identify the kinds of liquor behind the b...
Ani-Mainstream
Speaking of awkward formative years, in the early to mid-'90s, anime began trickling into the mainstream from the murky depths of stores like Suncoast Video and Tower Records. There, you’d usually find a shelf of something called “Japanimation,” a wall of mysterious tapes, many of which were adorned with phrases like “Parental Advisory Suggested” or “For Mature Audiences.” This of course made them all the more enticing to the burgeoning proto-weeaboo community. In hindsight, a lot of the movi...
The Whole Miyazaki
Curmudgeonly godfather of Japanese animation Hayao Miyazaki has had harsh words about the more pervasive tropes in anime, and his work typically veers in a non-violent direction. Many of his films manage to have conflict without a conventional villain. In My Neighbor Totoro, the bad guy is either tuberculosis, or the goat that tries to eat Mai’s corn. That said, when Miyazaki has decided to flex on the action front, he doesn’t disappoint. His feature directorial debut, The Castle of Cogliostr...
Speed, Dammit. More Speed
In pop-culture, the term “action” is usually synonymous with violence, be it swordfights, shoot-outs, explosions, fisticuffs, etc - but there’s also speed, which is possibly the purest form of action in filmmaking. Edward Muybridge’s "The Horse in Motion," is debatably the first film ever made - and it conveys a sense of speed. It was just a guy riding a horse, but that’s a non-stop thrill ride compared to some of its snoozefest contemporaries, which included telescope footage of planet Venus...
Computer Animation
Enough has been said about how much Pixar's use of computer animation revolutionized the entire animation industry and gave Disney a run for its money. Er, it would’ve, if Disney hadn’t scooped the company up right away. Generally, Pixar movies have a simple, high concept hook like what if toys came to life when no one’s looking or what if fish were negligent parents or what if a movie with a talking dog made adult men weep uncontrollably, but the studio’s first superhero movie is what earns...
- Jeremy Urquhart
- Feature Writer/Senior List Writer
- 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse' (2018) Letterboxd Rating: 4.4/5. It's unsurprising to see 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse stand as the highest-rated animated action film on Letterboxd.
- 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' (2022) Letterboxd Rating: 4.3/5. Plenty of great animated movies were released in 2022, with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish being one of the best of them all.
- 'Akira' (1988) Letterboxd Rating: 4.2/5. Akira is primarily a dystopian science-fiction movie with a plot set in the futuristic city of Neo-Tokyo. It's a film that follows a biker gang that unexpectedly clashes with scientists working on a top-secret military project.
- 'The Incredibles' (2004) Letterboxd Rating: 4.1/5. While The Incredibles is ultimately a family-friendly movie about a superhero family in hiding, it's far from just a kid's movie.
Sep 5, 2023 · 2D and 3D Unite: The 17 Best Movies That Combine Live Action with Animation. An infectiously fun phenomenon, the merging of live-action cinema and animation on the big screen can be a thing...
Jun 1, 2024 · From Ghost in the Shell to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, these movies are the perfect blend of stunning animation and thrilling action.
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