Disney

First Look – Big Hero 6

/ / Film News & Trailers
  • Title: Big Hero 6
  • IMDB: link

Based on the comic of the same name, Disney’s first animated Marvel movie centers around a group of six superheroes are recruited by the Japanese government to protect the nation. Set in the fictional city of San Fransokyo this initial teaser gives us a look at young prodigy Hiro Hamada and his robot Baymax who hope to join the fledgling team. The voice cast includes Josh Hutcherson, Freddie Highmore, Jamie Chung, T.J. Miller, Samuel L. Jackson, and Maya Rudolph. The film opens in theaters on November 7th.

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Frozen

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Frozen
  • IMDB: link

FrozenDisney’s latest animated feature Frozen is an odd mix of old school Disney style and modern sensibilities that works better than expected. Loosely adapted from Hans Christian Andersen‘s tale of The Snow Queen, the script by Jennifer Lee certainly fits in the pantheon of Disney Princess fairy tale films but with one major difference in terms of story that it apart from movies like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and others. Although it has romantic subplots, the main love story in the film isn’t romantic love but sororal love.

Set in a port kingdom near the icy fjords of Norway, we first meet young Anna (Kristen Bell) and Elsa (Idina Menzel) as children playing in their father’s castle. Elsa has been gifted with the power to create and control snow and ice which she uses to please her sister’s love of snow. However, a tragic accident causes Elsa to hide her powers from everyone and seclude herself from even her sister’s affections.

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Monsters University

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Monsters University
  • IMDB: link

Monsters UniversityHow much do you love Animal House? I ask because the team behind Monsters University obviously holds it high regard. Over the years everything from Sydney White to Futurama has aped the story of rival fraternities battling it out on a college campus. Now it’s Pixar’s turn.

Set as a prequel to 2001’s Monsters, Inc. the story follows mismatched pair Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) and James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) as freshman students at the prestigious Monsters University. Most of the film’s first-half deals with the rivalry between the pair trying to show each other up as the school’s next big Scarer. Mike has the brains, but not the looks, and Sully’s lack of discipline undercuts his natural ability.

When the Mike and Sulley get on the bad side of Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren) and face expulsion, they have no choice but to join the university’s least popular fraternity and work together with its other members (Peter Sohn, Joel Murray, Sean Hayes, Dave Foley, Charlie Day) to win a scare competition and remain in school.

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Wreck-It Ralph

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Wreck-It Ralph
  • IMDB: link

wreck-it-ralph-posterPixar’s growing influence on Disney, particularly that of head of Walt Disney Animation Studios John Lasseter, is certainly evident in Wreck-It Ralph. The latest Disney animated feature from longtime Futurama director Rich Moore bucks the trend of most animated kids’ fare in that it’s a love story to classic video games (which skewers older) and is centered around the unlikeliest of heroes — a villain. It also doesn’t take place in our reality. Instead it’s set in a world where arcade games and their myriad characters roam about, but are connected to each other by a Grand Central-like power strip allowing them to come and go as they please.

Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) has spent every day of the last 30 years doing exactly the same thing. When the arcade opens and the first customer puts a quarter in the video game (as if a quarter would buy you a game anywhere today), Ralph sets to wrecking the digital landscape of Fix-It Felix, Jr. This, of course, allows the game’s hero (Jack McBrayer) to fix the villain’s destruction, vanquish his foe, and earn his medal.

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The Lion King

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Lion King
  • IMDB: link

lion-king-blu-ray

Following the success of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin most of the A-list animators at Disney wanted to work on Disney’s upcoming version of Pocahontas . The B-team huddled together on a small film about lions which would become the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film of all time, and the 23rd highest grossing feature film ever. Not too shabby.

The Lion King also marks the end of Disney’s late 80’s/early 90’s resurgence that gave us The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast. Over the next few years Disney would put out several films (Mulan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Hercules, Atlantis: The Lost Empire) but none of them recaptured the magic found in The Lion King, and by the end of the decade the big-budget epic animated musicals the studio was known for would be a thing of the past.

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