A more-than-worthy successor to the first film, full of fun, drama, and spectacle.
I won’t talk specifics, but this is a sequel that is at least an equal of the first film, possibly its superior.
By having a commitment to a third film, the creative team could lean into richness of characterization, and creating a cast with depth and texture. Presumably the production was all of a continuum (the third film comes out next year), and that allowed some powerful development to be teed up and fulfilled.
Visually, the film is stunning, playing with color, texture, medium, style, focus and orientation. The animation is amazing in its variety and quality, truly cinematic in everything from quiet dialogue scenes to crazy four-dimensional action sequences.
Writing-wise, the story arguably more complex than Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — again, leaning into having two films to follow up from that first film. But the through-lines are strong — growth, autonomy, destiny, truth, lies, identity. All the primary characters (and there are several) face challenges and conflicts, sometimes with each other. The dive into Spider-Man lore and creating a meta-narrative out of is brilliant.
At the same time, as serious as things get (and they do get damned serious), there is also a tremendous amount of fun, playing with a vast array of Spider-folk (many from canon, many invented for the purpose), as well as others people and places. That contrast between fun and wonder and gut-wrenching drama makes this a pretty special movie, even without its merits as animation or as a super-hero tale.
The music isn’t necessarily my personal cuppa, but it works with the imagery and the action. The voice talent, as with the first film, is top-notch.
All in all, I couldn’t ask for anything better, other than that “To Be Continued” at the end.
This review first appeared, in an earlier form, on Dropbox.
A couple of things I’m interested in, plus an annoying non-movie advert.
I always fine fascinating the question of what’s advertising before which film.
House of Gucci — Gee, a shame they couldn’t find any decent names for this film. But seriously, this is definitely a movie I will not be seeing, but I very much look forward to reading all the articles about it and the story behind it.
Clifford the Big Red Dog — I will likely not go because it is waaaaay too cute, but it looks like a great film for the kids. Even if it doesn’t have The Song.
Morbius — Never one of my go-tos in Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, but this looks nicely dark and creepy. Unlikely to go, as it’s not my wife’s cuppa, but it’s definitely a fresh, horror-tinged leaning into that tormented anti-hero vibe. Better than, alas …
The Batman — I confess I am sooooooo tired of Batman as tormented, anti-hero, insane, vengeance machine, out-grim-grittying-teeth-grinding each previous version in some weird attempt to turn him into an actual villain. Frankly, I think the trend has been out of control since Batman: The Animated Series wrapped up. So, no, I don’t think I’ll be going.
Sing 2 — I did not see the first one, but, damn, if this ad doesn’t make me want to see this one.
[Regal Theaters … why the hell is there a freaking crypto.com commercial in the middle of my movie previews? Also, “Fortune Favors the Brave” is not an investment strategy, no matter how buff Matt Damon looks.]
The King’s Man — Same ad as we saw last going. Looks fun, more so than the original Millar outing.
Encanto — I feel a bit like I am seeing the entire movie, bit by bit, as Disney keeps revising the commercials. But … I will still probably go, because it looks soooooo good.
This bloody take on four-color teen heroes is even better, and bloodier, on-screen.
Yeah, there are spoilers here. Sorry. TL;DR: Bloody, but good.
I was a big follower of Robert Kirkman’s Invincible from Day 1 to its conclusion, and I have a complete set of the graphic novels. So I was both looking forward to, and prepared for, the animated series airing on Amazon Prime.
Sort of.
On one level, Invincible is the tale of a high school kid who finally inherits the super-powers he expected from his dad, a Superman-type called Omni-Man. The tale is full of teen angst, learning capabilities, trying to mature, dealing with girlfriends and best friends and having to duck out (yet again) to save the world. It’s conventional in a lot of ways, but well done for all that.
It’s like Riverdale, only with super-powers
The other level is a darker story, of nothing being what it seems. The various other heroes we meet are full of egos, short tempers, and bad personalities. The Global Defense Agency, run by Cecil Stedman, is big picture enough that it engages in sketchy behavior to maintain world order. And, after a relatively idyllic first episode of Mark gaining and learning about his powers, training with his dad, and getting both a costume and a code name …
… his father, Omni-Man, ambushes and kills the Justice League-esque Guardians of the Globe.
And not in a “ha-ha, secret death gas that quietly and cleanly makes them softly collapse” kind of way. It’s a bloody, brutal, flesh-crunching, ichor-spattering, dismembering sort of battle. Superman taking out the Justice League, any way he can. Which Kirkman’s original comic did, but which has a greater impact in animation than on the still page.
Omni-Man has a bad day
That sets the tone for Invincible — a lot of “normal” comic book action, but, when violence occurs, a brutality that is hypothetically realistic (what would it look like if Superman punched someone in the face with all his strength?) but also shocking in its gore factor.
This is a comic book series not for kids. R-rated, at the very least.
That said, it all works, at least for me. The tension between that juxtaposition, the mystery of why Omni-Man killed those super-heroes, and if, and how, his guilt will be unveiled, and what that will mean for his marriage and to his son, Mark — that’s hanging over the season like a sword, and when it finally drops, it is utterly a game-changer, and about has violent as you can imagine a fight between a really pissed-off Superman and an equally angry Superboy could be.
The show all also a rare opportunity for a creator — Robert Kirkman (of Walking Dead fame) — to collaborate on redoing a major opus of his for a new medium and to clean up and improve his story. Which he actually does. As I got into the series, I went back and reread those early graphic novels. Kirkman maintains all the dramatic beats and characters and challenges, but he largely improves on them, tightens them up, makes them work as a coherent tale. Distractions get trimmed. Core development gets better focus. Time frames are accelerated/compressed. Some ethnic diversity gets introduced in some key roles (on screen and in the voice work). It’s overall a better tale in this retelling.
Mark’s sometimes-girlfriend Amber gets recast to add diversity. She’s also rewritten as a better, stronger character.
Invincible is not for everyone. My sainted wife dealt with the series gamely until the final installment. Graphic super-hero violence is on display — not gratuitously, nor incessantly, but, like real-world violence (and this is sort of the point) slamming onto the scene just when you least expect it. Kirkman wants to address what it means when someone throws a bus full of people, or demolishes a building, or what happens when an alien invasion lands downtown and those aren’t convenient “disintegrators” they’re wielding.
And not all stories have happy endings.
But he also wants to give us coming of age tales, teens with power figuring out what those abilities mean, how they should or shouldn’t use them, and why, and what sort of codes of morality they’re going to adopt as they get faced with life-and-death decisions. Mark, as Invincible, is the focus here, but there’s a large cast, and everyone has moral and ethical dilemmas they have to face.
Some of the (large) cast of Invincible. Kirkman does great names.
The animation, from Korea, is top-notch, and very much in line with the original artwork by Ryan Ottley and Cory Walker. The voice talent is good (even if some of the casting doesn’t altogether work for me), and the story fully engaged me, even knowing where things were leading.
Invincible and Atom Eve, comic artInvincible and Atom Eve, animated. They did a great job with the clean style from the comics (except that Eve’s chest logo usually looked like it was a Venus symbol with an X on it, not with an electron cloud).
Looking forward to Season 2. If you have Amazon Prime, and don’t mind some impactful (but meaningful) gore, it’s highly recommended. Rating:
For all the pain and angst, the joy Mark has while flying is always a great thing to see.
Sheldon was a noteworthy trumpeter, as a number of his other IMDb credits show. He was part of Jack Webb’s stable of actors for Dragnet and Adam-12, and served nearly two decades as Merv Griffin’s music director and “sidekick”.
Thank you, Mr. Sheldon, for your talent and for the many memories you left us, especially those educational earworms.
That is, besides the fact that it will make Disney massive amounts of money. Which I don’t begrudge them because, well, they’re making something that people will spend money on because they want it.
I just don’t quite get it myself. I like the original just fine. The trailer shows some (mostly) very impressive CG, and looks to be a faithful rendition of the “original,” but … nothing that makes me want to shell out theater prices. Or, honestly, even video prices. Maybe, at some point, streaming prices, but nowhere near the top of my list.
I guess what I’d like to see with these live-action remakes, if not a shot-for-shot of the original (purely from a technical perspective), is something that actually reshapes the story along the way. Gives it a new perspective. Alters the tone, or the focal lesson, something. Justifies a remake artistically, not just financially.
That’s likely the last thing Disney would ever do, because changing things artistically would possibly endanger that financially part of the equation. It would just make me feel better.
Still, pretty. They’re still struggling with having animals “talk” in a consistently non-uncanny-valley fashion, but pretty.
I was, um, very big into Ingress when it kicked off and for several months thereafter. I'm curious as to what this series will look like, and also what the revamped game will do with lessons learned both from the original and from Niantic's Pokemon GO augmented reality game (which I dabbled with but never quite got into in the same way).
Which is not the sort of thing we usually do in this household, but was relatively easy to do in an evening, because it's only seven whole episodes.
But it's seven whole great episodes. And while there are some story threads I could imagine expanding into more time than given, it rally didn't feel like they compromised on the overall story they were trying to tell. Indeed, they had enough time to include a truly delightful done-in-one ep that deserves to be a trope in many other shows. Or maybe its own series.
I won't spoil anything, but there's some fine cuing up for Season 7, which apparently is a thing, thank heavens. [1]
Our family is big fans of the original Incredibles movie. After a 14-year wait, can even Brad Bird and Pixar give us something that could live up to expectations?
In short? It was worth the wait.
1. The movie, plot-wise, manages to echo the original’s themes (family, family roles, supers in society) in a way that expands on them, not repeating them.
2. The artwork / animation is also clearly an evolution from the original — nothing radical, but with a lovely increase in detail and texture. This is a successor, but with 14 years of improvement in CG animation.
3. As with the art, the story, too, is more finely textured than the original. It’s a more complicated tale, with many more characters to work with. And yet it still works, and remains understandable. The complexity doesn’t lose the core of the story — this very special family and their friends and their dreams of both normalcy and greatness.
I’m very impressed, because there are so many ways this could have gone wrong — a repeat of the original, or shooting off in an odd or different direction, or (the fatal flaw of so many sequels) an exaggeration of the “best” parts of the original (cranking those elements up to 11, and discarding the rest).
Bird and Pixar have managed to avoid all of that. This could have actually worked as the first movie in a series. Good stuff.
4. As I mentioned, there is a raft of new characters, and we get just enough detail from enough of them to make them feel fleshed out. That, too, is a delicate balancing act, and one that works.
5. The movie is much more real-world in its setting than the original’s focus on Nomanisan Island. And it’s beautifully done, with a dazzling modern take on Mid-Century Modern style.
6. In some very real ways, Frozone is the most demonstrably bad-ass character in the movie. At the same time, I am very ready to meet his wife, Honey.
7. There is some remarkable heroism in this movie. There’s one that comes up late in the film that I won’t detail, but that was noteworthy in its difference from the original.
8. There are some media properties used as background — again, some fine representations of mid-century aesthetic — that I very much appreciate.
9. We saw the movie in 3-D. I was intentional about this, because I thought that the style would make good use of that third dimension, and it did. I’m sure it’s also fine in 2-D, but 3-D was quite nice.
10. There is no end-of-titles tag scene, but not only are the credits nicely enhanced all through, but there are some musical elements late in the credits that are definitely worth sitting there for.
Excellent movie. Very glad we went.
. . .
Okay, the elephant in the room: Did I like it better than the original?
Nope. But I like it nearly as much, and I could see resetting that conclusion upward in a few years, after I’ve had a chance to see it several more time.
For those who wonder why I am how I am today, I blame Saturday Morning Cartoons. This crop is from when I was in kindergarten or so, and (aside from Casper) I was an avid viewer of most of these at one time or another.
Welcome to Star Wars Resistance, set in the pre- Force Awakens universe.
StarWars.com is thrilled to announce that production has begun on Star Wars Resistance, an exciting new animated adventure series about Kazuda Xiono, a young pilot recruited by the Resistance and tasked with a top-secret mission to spy on the growing threat of the First Order. … Featuring the high-flying adventure that audiences of all ages have come to expect from Star Wars, Star Wars Resistance — set in the time prior to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — will feature the beloved droid BB-8 alongside ace pilots, colorful new characters and appearances by fan favorites including Poe Dameron and Captain Phasma, voiced by actors Oscar Isaac and Gwendoline Christie, respectively.
Though David Filioni and a bunch of other Clone Wars and Rebels folk are in charge again, there’s no word (yet) about the dangling Rebels story lines that remain out there. Still, given the folk involved, I’m definitely on-board.
So the general zaniness seems there, and the art style a modern equivalent to the Jay Ward animation of that early 60s era.
What the film clip doesn’t show is whether they’ve managed to slip in the sort of political commentary that the original had in abundance. That might seem more difficult in this era of polarization, but it would be a shame if that element were missing.
It looks like they’ve successfully spanned the difference between the CG of the original and the stuff that can be done today. It looks very nice, but also clearly an Incredibles movie.
More Elastigirl! Woot!
The problematic:
I didn’t see anything that really surprised me. Family sitcom, in both situation and comedy. Granted, it’s a short little trailer, and I really don’t want massive spoilers. But I’ve been worried about what they’ll do here, and the answer seems to be “When the wife gets the big important job and the husband has to stay home to watch the kids, hilarity ensues!” — and while that can (and, from the look of things, will) be funny, it’s also not exactly ground-breaking.
Not that anything is going to keep me out of the theaters the weekend of June 15th, but I’m not feeling quite as optimistic as I’d like.
[No spoilers, I hope, but I can’t speak for the comments.]
The kid and I watched the final six episodes of Star Wars Rebels last night, which were tremendously fine, lots of fun, wrapped up a ton of plot points, set up some new ones for a future David Filoni production, and revealed the secret behind the voice of Chopper.
When Rebels started up (in the premature ashes of Clone Wars), I enjoyed it but was a bit disappointed for the narrower scope, the focus on the kid, the apparent Disneyfication of the tale. But even if that was an accurate description at the time, the saga grew substantially over the years into something really, really cool, pulling in elements from Clone Wars (and other bits of Star Wars lore) and making a something quite enjoyable.
I’ll miss it, but I’m glad it had an awesome wrap-up.
At CPAC (the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference), Ted Cruz said in his speech, “The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge.”
So the Dems are a mature, intelligent, agency-filled, loving girl, and the GOP are the generational icon of a doofus, his juvenile delinquent son, his pacifier-sucking baby, and his confused, enabling wife?
Welp, that’s going on the Christmas list … in 2018. There’s discussion in the comments about what the Blu-Ray release will improve from the DVD box sets — the picture should be crisper, and the sound quality likely better. For me the big bonus is freeing up about three inches of video shelf space.
I just posted the other day about some of the history behind BTAS. The article quoted there, plus this announcement, are part of the 25th Anniversary (!) of the show, which was a ground-breaking super-hero animation effort in style and substance. Glad to see it’s going to be getting a more convenient format with better quality.
At Long Last, Batman: The Animated Series Is Coming to Blu-Ray
Batman: The Animated Series turned 25 this past September, and while it’s one of the most beloved animated shows of the past three decades, it’s been confined to DVD box sets for years. That’s about to change, because the animated Dark Knight is finally coming to HD.
BTAS was groundbreaking, a revolutionary taking of super-hero cartoons as something potentially serious and cinematic, not “The Justice Friends Meet the Harlem Globe-Trotters” kind of 2nd Grade low-quality silliness.
This lengthy article has quotes from the major creators of the series — producers, writers, artists, and voice actors. They emphasize how special BTAS was — and still is.
I don’t necessarily agree with this force-ranking (who ever does?), but it’s a great reminder of some fantastic (and a few not-so-fantastic) animated series of decades past, and it’s worth it just for that.
If you don’t want to page through show by show, here are their rankings:
22. Teen Titans Go!
21. Beware the Batman
20. The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Hour
19. “Various Sixties Batman/Superman Shows”
18. The Zeta Project*
17. The “Super Friends” series
16. Superman (1988)*
15. The New Adventures of Batman
14. Krypto the Superdog
13. Legion of Super-Heroes
12. Justice League: Action
11. The Batman
10. Green Lantern: The Animated Series
9. Batman: The Brave and the Bold
8. Superman (1940s)**
7. Batman Beyond
6. Static Shock
5. Teen Titans
4. Superman: The Animated Series
3. Young Justice
2. Justice League / Justice League Unlimited
1. Batman: The Animated Series
[*] Never encountered this one before.
[**] Yes, that’s not a DC animated TV series
I’d probably reshuffle things most in the middle — LSH and Brave and the Bold both need to rise in the rankings a few steps, IMO — but +/- 3 in any given case I’d agree with pretty much everything here.
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke is one of the most iconic graphic novels in the DC catalog, a psychodrama between Batman and the Joker that drags Barbara and Jim Gordon in as tortured victims. Controversial (as so much of Moore's work is, and not without some justification in this case), it's still a remarkable work in my opinion.
This new animated feature is, based on the trailer … interesting. On the one hand, with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill back to voice Batman and the Joker, there's a lot of faboo going on along the audio front. On the other hand, I hope this is an early version of the animation, because the frame rate seems awfully choppy.
And it's rated R, which — well, we'll see. I've seen some pretty violent animated DC features in the past that didn't carry that rating, and while the graphic novel is by no means kiddie fare — well, like I said, we'll see.
By having a commitment to a third film, the creative team could lean into richness of characterization, and creating a cast with depth and texture. Presumably the production was all of a continuum (the third film comes out next year), and that allowed some powerful development to be teed up and fulfilled.
