Take me away to Neverland

I'm somewhat in the habit of streaming random animated movies that catch my eye every now and then, usually ones that I can tell right off are going to be extremely cheesy because I have a high tolerance for that sort of thing anyway- actually it's outright a soft spot, to be honest. So here's me attempting to sum up some I've seen over the past year or so and what my general impressions were.

A Monster In Paris:
I think I was vaguely aware of this movie around when it was coming out- there was interest in it for its potential monster boyfriend aspect, but my own interest at least waned when it came out that "actually the main heroine winds up with someone else and the monster character is more of a younger brother figure." Once I actually got around to watching it though, I did find it pretty charming- Raoul The Actual Human Male Lead is an entertaining jackass and I overall liked how all the main group played off one another. I think my main complaint would be that I felt it had some pacing issues.

Ballerina/Leap!:
This film is usually called Ballerina in most markets as far as I can tell but is sometimes called Leap! instead for some godforsaken reason. Probably the same sort of logic that made Disney call their Rapunzel movie "Tangled" instead of "Rapunzel." Anyway, the plot concerns a young orphaned girl named Félicie in approx. 19th century France who runs away from her orphanage along with a friend to travel to Paris and sneak her way into joining a prestigious ballet academy. Félicie's relationship with her mentor, a former dancer who had to quit after an injury, and with the other students including her snooty rich rival are enjoyable, but the film kind of suffers from an extremely tedious bunch of romantic drama which also makes Félicie's final love interest come off as irritatingly Nice Guy(TM). Should have focused much more exclusively on Félicie's career ambitions okay, little girls LOVE that kind of stuff.

Despicable Me:
Pretty Good, Actually. The franchise is mostly known for it's overmarketed mascots but the movie itself is very sweet and silly and by the climax I was very invested in Gru and his three adoptive daughters. There's a sincerity to it which is the sort of thing that can make or break a movie like this.

Freddie As F.R.O.7.:
This was a movie I first heard about a long time ago but wasn't able to find on youtube at the time after reading a review and thus mostly forgot about until I stumbled upon it while looking for a movie to watch with thethrillof . Thus they got to be subjected to it as well! It's a... very weird movie that is mostly a James Bond parody and it's supposedly based off of stories the writer/director used to tell his kid so it definitely has that "someone is making this shit up as they go" vibe going on. There are a couple of interesting elements but on the whole it's mostly an only-semi-coherent mess, not helped by the version we watched being obviously a low quality VHS rip. On the whole, perfect for showing people you want to make go "what the fuck."

Horton Hears a Who!:
Kind of suffers from the problems one might expect when one takes a kid's picture book and expands it into a full animated movie and you pad out a lot of that run time with manic humor and end the film with a sudden musical. Which isn't to say it's unenjoyable, just parts of it kind of drag a little in a trying-way-too-hard-to-make-you-laugh kind of way. Pretty cute overall though.

Igor:
I complain a bit later about The Tale of Despereaux being a 2008 CGI movie but this is more of a 2008 CGI movie honestly. Anyway, the plot is that there exists a Kingdom called Malaria that is under a perpetual violent storm, so the economy runs on bribes from other kingdoms to not be destroyed by the many devices the Malarian mad scientists create. The mad scientists have assistants called Igors, who are all uniformly hunchbacked people named Igor. One Igor works for a mad scientist named Dr. Glickenstein but aspires to become a mad scientist himself, so he secretly cobbles together a female Frankenstein type character named Eva. Unfortunately for Igor, Eva is not at all villainous. The movie's... kind of okay but the whole thing is a little off, somehow, in a way that I think is probably best exemplified by the running gag about Igor's sarcastic rabbit friend Scamper's repeated suicide attempts. Y'know. Kinda offputtingly dark humor for a kid's movie with a very silly plot.

Storks:
The plot of this film is that the storks used to deliver babies but have since remodeled into becoming a package delivery service. This has lead to a lot of people commenting on the movie asking why humanity isn't going extinct or whatever but there's a line between a kid and his parents that indicates that babies still happen through sex, it's just you used to also have the option to write a letter to the Storks and they'd make a baby with their magic babymaking machine and deliver it. Anyway, the plot centers around Junior, a stork with major career ambitions but also kind of an anxious personality, and Tulip, a human woman who's been raised by the company ever since the identity of her human family was lost. A small boy wanting a baby brother writes a letter to the storks, it accidentally winds up in the magic babymaking machine and hey, presto, there's now a baby to deal with! Junior and Tulip must then drop the baby off without getting the attention of the higher ups, who do NOT want the storks to start delivering babies again, and along the way learn a lesson about friendship or family or smth. I found the whole thing genuinely funny and cute, honestly.

The Day of the Crows:
French movie with very pretty visuals. The story concerns a nameless boy who lives in a forest with his ogreish, mad father. The two live an animalistic existence as hunter gatherers, with the boy's primary friends being the spirits who live within the forest. As far as the boy is concerned, the forest is all there is to the world- until his father injures himself in a storm and the boy is forced to seek help outside the forest. The film is primarily a bittersweet parent/child story and it's probably my favorite movie in this list. 

The Scarecrow:
This movie is based off of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story albeit changed around to be more of a feel good fairytale narrative- Polly is now a young woman working to pay off the debt of her and her three adoptive children at the factory of the local baron, a dance obsessed asshole who wants to force Polly into marrying him. Polly hides her savings in the garden where the Scarecrow lives and often talks to him, unaware that he's alive, and the Scarecrow falls in love with Polly and eventually stumbles upon a way to become human and help her. The end result here is a movie that is very frustrating for me, personally, because we've got a couple of tropes at play that normally work well for my id but the film itself is really poorly paced and generally questionably written. It's at least kind of interestingly ridiculous, though.

The Tale of Despereaux:
Based off of the Kate DiCamillo novel, kind of suffers from a case of being a 2008 CGI film visuals wise but at least is stylized enough that you stop noticing after the first few minutes. Gets most of the basic plot beats down from the novel though it changes around Roscuro's story a lot (in ways that I don't really find better or worse than the novel for the most part), condenses a few details, adds in an unnecessary food genie who contributes nothing of substance to the plot. It's not a bad product overall but I feel it loses something from the book. 

We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story:
Another film I heard of due to it being Weird and decided to subject thethrillof to. The story is about a bunch of dinosaurs who are turned into intelligent and civilized beings by a time traveler called Professor Neweyes. The dinosaurs are brought to New York 'round about the 1990s to meet children at the museum of natural history but they get sidetracked by a pair of runaway kids they befriend, MANY ZANY HIJINX, and then an evil circus run by Professor Neweyes's evil twin brother Professor Screweyes. The latter guy is generally what people seem to remember best about this movie, particularly his weird death scene where he's apparently eaten alive by a bunch of crows. The movie isn't as weird or incoherent as Freddie as F.R.O.7. but it does have this almost constant manic energy that can be a bit grating.

The Martian is a science-fiction movie about Mark Watney, an astronaut/botanist who winds up stranded on Mars after his crew mates mistakenly believe he died during a deadly sandstorm. The movie centers around Watney's attempts to survive on Mars until he can be rescued, something the people on Earth are desperately trying to coordinate.

The film was intense in places- one of the earliest scenes involves Watney having to do surgery on himself. And frequently, just as Watney and the others are making real strides towards his eventual survival, something disastrous will happen to set them back, usually injuring Watney in the process. My adrenaline was pretty high after I left the theater.

It's also funny, which was something I was not aware of after watching the trailer the first time. (Though did later have some expectation of it, based off of book snippets like this.) Watney is one of those smartass dude characters, but unlike a lot of smartass dude characters he isn't really annoying at all, a fact I chalk up to a mixture of "doesn't use misogynistic humor" and "this man is stranded on a planet that is doing his level best to kill him so he's entitled to some swearing and snark."

Actually re: misogyny stuff. This film is pretty good on that point? There are several named female characters who all work at NASA ( some spoilers clarifying that point ) and they're all competent at their job, and don't exist for sexual gratification and/or damsel-in-distressing. There are also several non-white characters working for NASA ( related to the previous spoiler ) so yeah, bonus points for diversity, guys.

Also, science! I am not very knowledgeable about scientific anything, but I could follow along with what the characters were doing pretty well, and apparently Neil deGrasse Tyson approves of how things were portrayed. It's very much a Man Vs. Nature story, so there's a lot of the characters using their knowledge of physics/chemistry/robotics/etc. in order to figure out How To Make Mark Watney Not Die And Get Off Of Mars.

So yes, it's a pretty enjoyable movie overall and I thought it was well worth the ticket fees. ( More spoilers for a tidbit at the end. )

Strange Magic is an animated jukebox musical about two lands living side by side- the bright and warm world of the fairies and elves, and the dark forest, home to goblins and bog creatures. Primrose flowers grow at the border of the two lands, the petals of which the Sugarplum Fairy can use to make love potions. However, the Bog King, ruler of the dark forest, has put a ban on love and regularly sends his minions out to destroy the primrose flowers, as well as imprisoning the Sugarplum Fairy in his dungeon.

Meanwhile, in the Fairy Kingdom, there are two hopeful suitors in desperate want of a love potion. Roland, a handsome warrior who broke the heart of the Princess Marianne on their wedding day and still hopes to reconcile with her and become King, and Sunny, an elf with an unrequited love for Marianne's boy-crazy sister, Dawn. Roland convinces Sunny to enter the dark forest and bring back a love potion, something that does not please the Bog King. Before too long there's a missing love potion, a princess that needs to be rescued, and an army being assembled.

( Spoilers/thoughts )