Animating Hiroshima: An Interview With Sunao Katabuchi
This expressive war epic from the assistant director of Kiki’s Delivery Service handles the toughest of topics with art, skill and grace. I spoke with director Sunao Katabuchi for Cartoon Brew.
animation that matters
Niko and The Sword of Light Illuminates Amazon
The fact that Amazon chose to invest a healthy budget in Titmouse and Niko, in search of staying power and cultural relevance, should be a warning shot to the animation business as usual. After all, as Titmouse told me, we’re in a cartoon gold rush.
Looking Back at Animation’s Future, With Ralph Bakshi
I’ve spoken a few times with animation auteur, Ralph Bakshi, who pioneered the pathways of underground and overground cartoons for decades. This time, we analyze the live-action/animation merge of Cool World, which like its foundational forebear, Lord of the Rings, created the CGI universe we take for granted today.
Nuclear Cinema: Hiroshima’s War-Torn World
An assistant director on Hayao Miyazaki’s sublime, stunning Kiki’s Delivery Service, Sunao Katabuchi has since made his name well-known in anime film and television. But his impressive new film, the award-winning Hiroshima epic, In This Corner of the World, might make him a household name worldwide.
Bong Joon Ho’s Okja Animates Cli-Fi
Revolutionary filmmakers are shaping the future of cinema by analyzing our destabilized planet. Snowpiercer director Bong Joon Ho’s new vision Okja, out today from Netflix, was inspired by biodiversity at the mercy of capitalization and extinction.
The Girl Without Hands (Re)Draws The Line
Sebastien Laudenbach’s The Girl Without Hands will likely confound artistic and cultural convention, even though it’s based on a tale from The Brothers Grimm.
It’s Hard To Be Utopian: Director Matthew Rankin On The Tesla World Light
When I first learned that Matthew Rankin was crafting a surreal short about Nikola Tesla, I knew I soon would be picking his fertile brain about free energy, bird love, and why dystopians are marching to the sixth mass extinction.
Cli-Fi: The Breadwinner Patiently Arrives
An international collaboration directed by Cartoon Saloon’s Nora Twomey, and co-produced by Angelina Jolie, whom you may have heard of
Cli-Fi: Tesla, Reanimated
The National Film Board of Canada is responsible for some of the finest animation the world has ever seen. It has also created world-changing documentaries exploring and analyzing how and why our world changes as it does, for better and worse.
Capitalizing, Commemorating Wonder Woman
In our world of perpetual war, creator William Moulton Marston’s subversive, aspirational Amazonian intertext has returned to the battlefront, with mainstream audiences and Wall Street earnings in mind.
Cartoon Saloon Schools St. Patrick’s Day
From director Tomm Moore’s Oscar-nominated masterpieces The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, to director Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner and beyond into the great unknown, the indie studio that was once international animation’s best-kept secret is a secret no longer.
Dark Or Light, Batman Is Our Mythic Cipher
Batman is more than capable of meeting demand across social, economic, political and cultural divides.
Shaun the Sheep Hits the Streets
A wordless wonder in the tradition of Chaplin, with an eye to rural labor and love, Aardman’s stop-motion masterpiece is for everyone, everywhere.
At Last, Samurai Jack Returns
Last year, I once again interviewed Samurai Jack creator and animation auteur, Genndy Tartakovsky, who told me the samurai’s arrival was imminent. Now here he is, in all of his glory and wonder, when we need him most.
Cli-Fi: Paco Roca Goes To The Lighthouse
Paco Roca’s Wrinkles was one of the most moving graphic novels, and animated films, in recent memory. His promising new comic charts a path through the destabilizing territories of war and healing properties of the natural world.
Halloween Scene: Edgar Allen Poe Vs. Little Tibia And The Fibias
Let’s turn back to the greatest jam band on the bones, and a master of literary horror, reanimated.
Cli-Fi: Director Remi Chaye Breaks Down Long Way North’s Arctic Animation
One of those rare films, especially in animation, that analyzes the dizzying complexity of life on Earth using what John Muir called the “glacial eye.”
Cli-Fi: Long Way North Gets Lost At Sea
The North Pole beckons to an overheated world in the feature directorial debut of animator Rémi Chaye.
The Myth of Kubo and the Two Strings
From the phenomenal Laika, makers of Coraline and The BoxTrolls
MorphToons: The Little Prince Lifts Off
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s timeless tale finally lands the feature animation treatment
MorphToons: GKIDS Signs Miss Hokusai
The peerless animation distributor GKIDS acquires another sublime award-winner
MorphToons: Phantom Boy Takes Flight
From the phenomenal GKIDS and makers of A Cat in Paris.
Cli-Fi: Angelina Jolie Joins Cartoon Saloon’s The Breadwinner
GKIDS teamed up with Song of the Sea‘s Cartoon Saloon — and Angelina Jolie — to bring Afghanistan’s terrorized tale of the Anthropocene to our poor kids.
MorphToons: January 2016
I finished my run as associate editor with a thinker on Herzog, an interview with stop-mo innovators The Quay Brothers, and more.
Forest 500 Animates Reality of Rainforest Destruction
Can an earnest but alarming cartoon help stop the 500 companies, investors and governments deforesting the Earth to crisis?