disney

A SECOND OPINION: Beauty and the Beast

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Lauren Luckett

The worst part about being married to a chef, I imagine, would be losing the ability to eat your favourite foods — the new, more experienced, palate would make old favourites feel bland.

The same goes for being married to a film critic. The cheesy flicks you once loved are now ruined because your darling spouse has pointed out the lacklustre script, the bad lighting, or that crew member standing in the background of the eighth scene. Chris can spend two hours watching a movie, then another two telling me what was wrong with it.

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REVIEW: Beauty and the Beast

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Not even including Beastly or The Beautician and the Beast, there have been no fewer than nine film adaptations of Jeanne-Marie Leprince du Beaumont’s Beauty and the Beast. Does the world need another?

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REVIEW: Moana

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Pixar and Disney’s own in-house animation studio have had a constant battle for decades, going back to the golden renaissance begun by The Little Mermaid.

Disney held the crown until Pixar came along with Toy Story, usurping the throne and sitting cockily through 2010 with Toy Story 3.

But in-house Disney was banging on the gates since launching its own computer-animated division with Chicken Little in 2006. When Pixar fell into the stagnation of sub-par sequels, Disney swooped in with Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen, resurging once again and staying there.

Pixar made an admirable attempt last year to stage a comeback, but the goodwill of Inside Out was eroded somewhat with The Good Dinosaur. The House of Mouse, meanwhile, has followed their winning Zootopia this year with their best animated movie in over twenty years.

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SPECIAL: The 25 Greatest Computer-Animated Movies

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Image: Buena Vista Pictures

Image: Buena Vista Pictures

Chris Luckett

In the late ‘90s, it was hard to discern why exactly the golden renaissance of Disney, going so strong in 1994 with The Lion King, dissipated so suddenly. With the benefit of hindsight, the biggest reason was the release of the first feature-length computer-animated movie in 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story.

In less than a decade, computer-animated movies had become so advanced and such a box office draw, even Disney shuttered their hand-drawn animation studio down in 2004 and switched to 100% computer-animated fare.

As the cost of computer animation has decreased, more and more computer-animated movies have flooded movie theatres, with fewer being any good, but great ones still exist. Some even outshine that first Pixar feature from 21 years ago. These are the best examples of what modern animation can achieve.

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REVIEW: Finding Dory

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Artwork: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Artwork: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Every Pixar movie is compared to those immediately before it.

A Bug’s Life? “It’s good, but it’s no Toy Story.”
The Incredibles? “Even better than Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.!”
Brave? “Hey, at least it’s better than Cars 2.”

Finding Dory, the animated studio’s 17th feature and their fourth sequel in five years, isn’t as good as last year’s Inside Out. Compared to Pixar’s other recent efforts Brave, The Good Dinosaur, and Monsters University, however, the sequel succeeds adequately enough to make for a fun, forgettable film. Continue reading →

CORE STORY: Disney sets new box office record thanks to Captain America: Civil War

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

After a slightly disappointing opening day — if you can fathom $75-million being a disappointment — Captain America: Civil War wound up pulling in $181.8-million over Mother’s Day weekend, the fifth-largest (domestic) opening weekend of all time.

That’s not the big reason Disney’s celebrating today, though. That $181.8-million pushed the studio’s domestic grosses for 2016 past the $1-billion mark — faster than any studio in history. Continue reading →

REVIEW: The Jungle Book

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

Less than a decade ago, “live-action Disney” meant The Game Plan, College Road Trip, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Then the success of 2010’s Alice in Wonderland taught the studio they could dust off an animated classic, give it the live-action treatment modern CGI afforded, and rake it the big bucks. The six years since have brought about live-action adaptations of Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and now, 1967’s The Jungle Book.

Of course, long before The Jungle Book was Disney’s nineteenth “Animated Classic,” it was a cherished collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling. To its credit, Jon Favreau’s take on Kipling’s tales mostly goes the latter as its source whenever a choice is called for, resulting in a tale with a more suitably dark tone. Unfortunately, rather than be allowed to become its own creation, The Jungle Book too often gets needlessly muffled by paying tribute to its animated forebear. Continue reading →

REVIEW: Zootopia

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Artwork: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Artwork: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

After Disney’s renaissance 25 years ago, the animation titan lost its magic touch and spent the latter half of the ‘90s trying to get it back. Their movies remained very good, but just seemed a bit less in the wake of masterworks like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.

If that golden period consisted of the lustrum between 1989 and 1994, their more recent renaissance was the hat trick of Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen. 2014’s Big Hero 6 was an enjoyable romp in the moment, but lacked the imaginative spark of its immediate predecessors. It’s still too early to tell whether Zootopia marks the best of a run of “less-thans” or the beginning of a new return to form. Continue reading →

RANKED: Post-Renaissance Disney

/ Chris Luckett / Leave a comment
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Chris Luckett

There are some animated Disney movies that everyone agrees are modern classics. Movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King are universally considered irreproachable. Where the Disney Renaissance period gets fuzzy is after that. While some would say the era continued until Mulan or Tarzan, I would argue that The Lion King was the pinnacle of the period and 1995 marked the beginning of Disney’s Post-Renaissance period.

Firstly, there was Pocahontas, the first Walt Disney Animated Classic of the ‘90s that lost the perfect alchemical formula. Secondly, there was Toy Story; coincidental or not, when Walt Disney Animation Studios lost the magic touch, Pixar found it. Lastly, there was A Goofy Movie, which introduced contemporary humour and sarcasm into Disney’s animation, the ripples of which have continued through everything from The Emperor’s New Groove to Wreck-It Ralph. Continue reading →

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