Winnie the Pooh

A-

Old-style tribute to older tastes, adorned modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and cute 2-dimensional use of printed words.

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Disney's first animated feature based on the Winnie the Pooh tales of AA Milne (The Many Adventures of WtP), issued in 1977, combined three existing featurettes. Consequently, the 2011 "remake" is effectively the Pooh's first dramatised animated feature. Mistakenly, at little more than an hour long, it's not a full-length movie. That surely partly accounted for its relatively poor gross box office takings: only US$33 million globally, barely covering half its reported budget cost of US$30 million.

It's a sweet movie, fittingly for the ever-hungry honey-loving bear. The hand-made drawings are the usual old-fashioned Disney delight, the cels creatively given CGI visual enhancement through the cute device of using the books' printed words, paragraphs, letters and pages as film-stage props.

English accents are rightly maintained for all the characters, from Christopher Robin (a very characterless schoolboy) to Pooh and his pals. Jim Cummings voices both the bear and Tigger, while John Cleese enunciates the narration well, without histrionics. Other voices remind the audience that Eyeore, Piglet, Kanga and Roo are very thin characters and boring fall guys.

Adult jokes or wordplays are rare, though long, big words remain the semi-comic speciality of pompous Owl. Overall, this is a simple tale designed for pre-teens. There are minor potential threats from a forest setting and a comic yeti-like Heffalump (whose appearance at the end suggests a putative spin-off that won't happen).

The short duration of the film, and the relatively small budget, indicate a lack of fully-funded confidence in the old product by Disney's animation team (now headed by Pixar's John Lasseter). They created an old-style tribute to older tastes, adorning it modestly with golden honey scenery, childish songs and an appropriate two-dimensional use of printed pages in honour of Milne's original book and its classic characters. More likely, their primary intention was to create advertising material for valuable Pooh merchandise.

Princess and the frog

A+

Delightful dialogue and rich plotting made this a cartoon adults could admire, a non-stop pageant of appropriate animation conceits.

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When Disney fully merged its animation business with that of Pixar, there were concerns that its distinctive hand-drawn artistry might vanish into an ocean of CGI. The Princess and the Frog was cheering proof that old-fashioned techniques were still in effect in 2009 and still brilliantly effective.

A poor black girl dreams of fulfilling her dead father's goal to open a niterie of fine fare and happy jazz in old New Orleans. Her mother worked for a rich white family, whose happy-go-lucky tomboyish daughter remains her best friend (voiced with glorious self-mocking nouveau riche joie de vivre by Jennifer Cody).

An irresponsible outcast young French prince arrives in the city with his plump put-upon manservant, planning to marry the rich man's spoiled "princess". The voodoo conman Dr Facilier makes pacts with the two men, tricking the prince and turning him into a frog.

He accidentally transforms the black girl into a frog too; together, the lazy male and tomboy female amphibian must defeat the evil Shadows and achieve their dreams. Helped, naturally, by a typically Disneyish crew of bizarre characters - a romantic glowworm in love with the Night Star, a cowardly obese alligator who's a jazz sax maestro, and a cantankerous old voodoo lady (Oprah Winfrey) with a loyal versatile snake.

Delightful dialogue and rich plotting (mostly credited to Disney's experienced writing-directing duo of Ron Clements and John Musker) made this a cartoon adults could admire, and it's a non-stop pageant of appropriate animation conceits. Although the overall drawing style evokes old-style New Yorker magazine sketching, the usual tricks of the Disney trade are displayed in colourful and convincing swirls of smoke, fire, bubbles, water and shadows.

The Broadway-style comedy musical's songs (two nominated for the Oscar) were typical Randy Newman delights, and the animation's socio-political colour-blindness (featuring Disney's first black princess) was admirable, probably made more acceptable in some US states by its "foreign" setting and prince. A sequel, and a further US$100-million investment in hand-drawing would be welcome.

James and the giant peach

A

Director Henry Selick maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

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Tim Burton co-produced James and the Giant Peach and it sports similar styles to his live action fairy tales (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland) and his clay or other animation fantasies (Corpse Bride, The Nightmare Before Christmas). It's a UK-based 1996 production and a successful adaptation of yet another Roald Dahl comic horror fable for intelligent children.

Dahl's young heroes are always troubled by evil grown-ups; orphan James's are two spiteful spinster sisters (Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margoyles) merrily sneering at the surreal scenery of their seaside hilltop.

James was a first-time boy actor, Paul Terry, who appeared in a few children's TV episodes, played in a band at uni and never returned to the entertainment industry. The only other major human being in the scene-setting intro is an elderly mystery man (Pete Postlethwaite) who gives the ill-used lonely lad a bag of crocodile tongues, one of which turns into the titular Giant Peach.

The enormous deus ex machina has no personality per se. Instead it is home for a wrangling group of animated insects with a variety of powers and personalities: star-voiced by Simon Callow, Richard Dreyfuss, Jane (later Frasier TV regular) Leeves, Susan Sarandon and David Thewlis. When James flees his horrible aunts and enters the peach, he becomes a stop-motion animation figure too, as a charming accidental hero leading the peach and his new friends on their flight to NYC courtesy of spider web strings attached to a flock of seagulls.

Their trip is packed with fearsome adventures and several insect songs and dances (cue the ubiquitous Randy Newman). Infant viewers may gyrate, adults will ho-and-hum: the material is better than children's TV, but it isn't old-style hand-drawn Disney cartoon quality. It has a grittier less homely quality.

All ends well in NYC, except for the aunts; and director Henry Selick (Nightmare with Burton, and Coraline most recently) rightly maintained the acerbic edge that was Dahl's distinctive edge as a children's writer.

Kung fu panda 2

A+

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, a successful extension into the 3D dimension.

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The most favourable comment on Kung Fu Panda 2 is that it looks (in 2D) as if it's an unusually effective if over-busy usage of 3D effects.

The original CGI cartoon movie's creatures reappear (with the same megastar voices). The colourings are lovely to look at, and one new creature (a China-threatening peacock) has a much more expressive face and character than the bland "Famous Five" heroes helping the obese and mildly comic panda anti-hero perform his predestined duties.

The peacock's finely boo-able voice is that of yet another Brit-accented gift to conniving cartoon-world villainy (Gary Oldman, channeling moments from Jeremy Irons et al). Jack Black is inoffensively easy to listen to as the bumbling hero. Dustin Hoffman self-effaces well as the divinely patient kung fu master. Less admirably, James Hong's characterisation of the panda's father figure, a noodle-shop-owning duck (Mr Ping), sounds almost racially offensive, depicting the obsequious creature as a whining maudlin Chinese hand-wringer.

Director Jennifer Yuh might claim that character is true to human life. She surely deserves great credit for her debut feature, having been promoted by Dreamworks from her leading artist role on the first Panda. For that she composed a bewitching sequence of Chinese-style shadow puppetry, which is utilised well again as the intro to the fast-paced CGI saga.

More action-packed than the first, if less character-driven, this is a successful franchise extension into the 3D dimension and good ocular entertainment. That's all, folks, and that's good enough.

Smurfs

The Smurfs was a 1958 Belgian creation, a comic book (Les Schtroumpfs) for a nation that possibly needs a big sense of humour in order to contemplate itself. Their world of teeny blue comic creatures, featured in an animated series on US TV from 1981 to 1990, was finally licensed for a big-budget (Sony Animations) Hollywood production. Issued in 2011, scorned by the critics, it scooped up half-a-billion US dollars globally at the box office. The sequel, quickly green-lighted, will appear in 2013.

By then, a new generation of 6-10-year-olds (the cute, coy and cuddly creatures' natural market) will be ready to drag their parents off to premium-priced 3D cinema seats for depressingly derivative CGI-figure-populated live-action farce. By then, Neil Patrick Harris, a TV sitcom and Broadway stage star, may regret having accepted the lead human role, even if his bank account is healthier. The producers will have decided whether huge-nosed shaved-head Hank Azaria should be allowed to reappear (with his CGI-manipulated ginger tom accomplice) and again overact madly (as any other self-respecting comic actor would do to keep his sanity in such a film).

Director Raja Gosnell was already a known talent for his pedestrian (and occasionally commercially successful) directorial efforts on seven other comic efforts: Home Alone 3, Drew Barrymore's Never Been Kissed and Beverly Hills Chihauhua, Martin Lawrence's Big Momma's House, two Scooby Doos, and Dennis Quaid's Yours, Mine and Ours.

This time too, he didn't have much to work with. The lookalike bug-eyed pug-nosed Smurf characters have one-note traits revealed by their names (a la 7 Dwarfs), their world is threatened by an evil wizard (a la Tolkien etc), they have a portal to NYC (a la Enchanted), and the self-proclaimed screenplay-writers shall be nameless: a few wordplays winked in the direction of parents don't justify paying dutiful attention to the petty plot and trite dialogue.

Kids loved it, Drew must love Raja, and that's Hollywood reality.

Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]

Hop

An Easter cinema confection for 2011, Hop was conceived by the team that produced the above-average Despicable Me animated comedy. Blending live action and animated figures, Hop is a below-average, flimsy tale of the Easter Bunny heir apparent's desire to get out of the family business.

He (sporting Russell Brand's irritatingly self-pitying voice) has set his mind on being a drummer in Hollywood, where he escapes to and accidentally lands up the life of a layabout human house-sitting in Beverly Hills. He's played by James Marsden, a sweetly comic Prince Charming in his support role for Amy Adams in Enchanted. Now in his late 30s, the actor looks too facially ravaged to portray an irresponsible, cute dropout who ends up running the Easter Bunny empire (an underground candy factory with a workforce of Easter Chicks on, of course, Easter Island).

With technically competent CGI work and likable cartoon characters, the movie might appeal to very young viewers. They were transported to it in box-office-topping numbers for two weeks in the USA, and their parents may still be wondering why the Easter Bunny was English, as was his fretful father (Hugh Laurie). The jealous chief chick flatters and fumes with a Mexican accent (Hank Azaria's voice going south of the border again a la Birdcage, muy macho this time).

In 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit created a high bar for comedies putting actors and cartoon characters on the same sets. Hop's producers should have at least tried to reach the same heights of narrative development and clever characterisations. Sadly, the even older generation of Disney family movies appear to have had a stronger and more crippling influence on the storyboard. Its lead pair of writers (Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio) had adapted Dr Seuss's Horton Hears A Who! and Sergio Pablos's Despicable Me successfully, but this original effort fails to shine on any level.

Sammy's adventures

Belgian producer-director Ben Stassen specialises in making movies for IMAX and 3D screens. A few shorts led to his first feature-length animation, the little-seen Fly Me To the Moon 3D (2008), which was followed in 2010 by Sammy's Adventures: The Secret Passage, whose English-language version was released in the UK in 2011 with new British voices. It hasn't gained American distribution despite also being given new voices for that market (including Melanie Griffith and Ed Begley Jr).

Sammy, a green turtle (Dominic Cooper) is born, meets and accidentally rescues the love of his life (Gemma Arterton), meets and accidentally loses a hyper-talkative life-long friend hatched on the same day, and travels the world encountering all manner of evil and foolish man-made disasters. As a 50-year-old grandfather, Sammy is a wise old turtle (John Hurt) teaching his next generation to put its best flipper forwards.

Presumably designed to be acceptable eco-entertainment for school parties in the USA, the agents and vessels of human wrong-doing sport English-language names (signposting oil spills, plastic flotsam, whalers, sewage). By contrast, the unpolluted oceans provide gloriously coloured images of marine paradises, decked with dazzling coral and tropical fish.

Sammy pals up with various fauna on his way to the end of the eco-fable, which is a bland statement that humans will have to do more to help turtles survive. The kindergarten style of the screenplay is highlighted by the frequent fading to black between episodes illustrating this or that aspect of mankind's ecological sins. This is a hi-tech 3D slide show.

The lack of a driving narrative flow and strong characterisations is excusable if the movie is viewed simply as a meaningfully pretty lesson for young children. Its 3D setpieces are enjoyable conceits even in 2D, and the CGI craftsmanship is admirable in the animators' usual testing areas of water and shadow effects and movements.

However, inevitable comparison with Pixar's Finding Nemo is not so favourable for Stassen's team's dramatic skills. There was just one noticeable improvement, to my ears: the non-presence of the whining voice of klutzy Albert Brooks as the tedious voice of Nemo's father.

Cars 2

Larry the Cable Guy (or LTCG, real name Daniel Whitney) is a "Redneck" comedian, a member of the American "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" foursome, the star of the LTCG: Health Inspector movie, and a former radio personality. His pseudo-Southern accent and grating vocular style apparently enchanted Pixar, which designed a self-glorifying comic vehicle ("Mater") for him in Cars, the 2006 movie co-written/directed by John Lasseter.

The least satisfying of all Pixar's profitable productions, packed with only a few good gimmicks (such as racing enthusiast Paul Newman's voice) rather than the usual well-rounded animated characters, Cars was a noisy, colourful bore. Lasseter, clearly passionate about automobiles and grass-chewing hicks, gave the go-ahead for a TV series (2008-10) of ear-grinding mind-numbing one-joke shorts pun-painfully entitled Cars Toons: Mater's Tall Tales.

Getting back into a director's chair, the Pixar/Disney mastermind has now churned out Cars 2, also in 3D and IMAX versions. Its major virtue is its revelation that even Pixar is not an infallible movie-making genius. Technically, its 12th production is great to watch, but the concept's inherent CGI mission impossible is making a car's lights and grill represent an interesting, touching animated character. Working with similarly limited "faces", Pixar succeeded with robots in Wall-E; on Cars, not.

Rango

Why do audiences gleefully accept ugly heroes in animated films? Perhaps because handsome or beautiful cartoon figures look bland and unamusing? The Shrek series has ended, but the ogre and Fiona (and Donkey) have a worthy successor in Nickelodeon's Rango.

All the movie's characters are grotesquely, brilliantly and lovably spotty, peculiar or deformed, starting with the pet chameleon who's the anti-hero, Rango. For his first animated movie, director Gore Verbinski wisely worked with the actor who'd made his tongue-in-cheeky Pirates of the Caribbean such an exceptional action-adventure loving parody, Johnny Depp. This time, Depp weaves a dozen different tones into his enchanting vocal fireworks display.

Lost on a highway in the Mojave desert, he meets a nearly-halved, wise old armadillo, Roadkill (Alfred Molina) who leads him to his quest for himself. Near the Wild Westerly frontier town of Grit, Rango encounters a bug-eyed iguana, zanily-abrupt Beans (fine vocal work from Isla Fisher, Scottish-Australian comedy actress wife of Sacha Baron Cohen). The town's humanoid desert creatures and their water supply are manipulated by sly tortoise Mayor John (Ned Beatty) abetted by outlaw gila monster Bad Bill (Ray Winstone) and Rattlesnake Jake, a huge and vicious diamondback (Bill Nighy).

Pretending to be a valiant hero to save his skin, succeeding by accident, Rango is appointed sheriff by the Mayor who's buying up the surrounding land and is thwarted only by Beans. The Spirit of the West, a shadowy human, appears to Rango in the desert in the shape of a Clint Eastwood look- and sound-alike Man with No Name (Timothy Olyphant). Haggard thirsty walking cacti join the anti-hero's search for water (evoking Tolkien Ents), and well-characterised odd-shaped, scaly-skinned, warty extras enrich the intricate sets and brain-tickling verbose screenplay, including a cheerfully morbid quartet of Mexican owl guitarists acting as a recurring chorus of woe.

They all populate a movie that's unusually entertaining for eyes and ears. For a movie buff's memory cells too, especially when the animation team (George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, making their first animated feature) create scenes of aerial thrills a la Star Wars.

German-born Hans (Lion King, Gladiator) Zimmer adds aptly spectacular music, and major kudos is earned by first-billed writer and story creator John Logan, a playwright (RED) with an impressive screenwriting portfolio (including Any Given Sunday and RKO 281 in 1999, Gladiator, the Last Samurai, The Aviator, Coriolanus). Verbinski (who also voices four minor characters) is the second credited writer; the third is James Ward Byrkit, the key storyboard artist and credited creative consultant for Verbinski's three Pirates movies.

Verbinski and his team, including British producer Graham (Aviator, Tourist) King and the director's ever-present Australian editor, Craig Wood, could triumph in animation industry awards, and win the Oscar and Golden Globe races this year. Luckily for them, Pixar released its first ho-hum critically-assaulted feature (Cars 2).

A friend said he hadn't left a cinema in such an ebullient mood for a very long time, and that was my feeling: Rango is a top-rated movie experience worth seeing at least once more to catch and admire more of its references and in-jokes.

Rio

It's almost sad to be cavalier about computer-animated 3D comic movies such as Rio. It proves that a movie-goer can feel that he's had too much of a good thing. Blue Sky's production, from the director of two Ice Age adventures (Carlos Saldanha), is an accomplished U$$90 million investment with an instant global box-office gross of four times as much (and counting), and 20th Century Fox will be a happy distribution company.

Saldanha's "original" story featured a penguin but, that species of cartoon fun being over-exposed in the past decade, his comic hero became an endangered macaw, Blu (voiced in typical US cartoon character with bashful adolescent charm by Jesse Eisenberg). A fully domesticated pet/pal, he's in Minnesota, looked after with TLC for 15 years by eco-friendly Linda.

A Brazilian researcher requests the services of Blu, as the world's only known male Spix's macaw, in Rio to work with the world's only known female Spix's, Jewel (Anne Hathaway, also in stereotypical mode as a bold, bright and brassy US-style teenager). This narrative contrivance may explain why the whole movie was initially rated PG (parental guidance) and only given an unrestricted G (general) rating on appeal (only the third time such a bizarre MPAA situation arose, after the Babe sequel and an Air Bud movie, thus indicating that many of the US movie industry's censorship panels inhabit an unknown religious cloud-cuckoo-land).

By now, our audience/readership knows what will appear next. A gang of lovably bumbling smugglers. An evil animal with a psychological case history (Nigel, a former TV-star cockatoo, voiced with furious glee by New Zealander Jemaine Clement, from Flight of the Conchords). On-off-on-again spats and romance tween the cartoon leads and their human handlers. Swooping scenic 3D panoramas in Rio skies, the lurid Carnival, lush jungle. There's a needy black boy who turns good for no reason, and supposedly comic freaks of nature who perform magic with saliva, flight training and marmoset mayhem.

What's next, pussycat? Yep, it's Puss In Boots. The season's good news is the failure of Mars Needs Mums: there clearly are limits to the CGI audience's tolerance level and movie-going budget. There may also be a limit to audience toleration of so-called 3D cinemas' viewing glasses, which need greatly-increased user-friendliness. Currently, they diminish the brightness level of movies significantly, and that's not acceptable to eyes now accustomed to the vivacity of HD TV transmissions. I'll watch the DVD of Rio with interest, because I expect its exuberant brightness and consequent appeal to be much more enjoyable in 2D.

Gnomeo & Juliet

Animated movies now have such high production standards to live up to that, unlike other major movie genres, their success depends critically on the depth, wit and overall audience appeal of their screenplay. They cannot rely simply on star voices, glitzy locations or 3D effects. Inevitably, there will be therefore be more ransacking of the classics, as with Gnomeo & Juliet, an attractively reworked version of Shakespeare's play.

This time, the Capulets and Montagues are clans of red and blue garden gnomes, backed up by various other garden figurines, in neighbouring semi-detached English houses. Lord Redbrick (voiced by Michael Caine) is over-protective of independent-minded Juliet (Emily Blunt); Lady Blueberry (Maggie Smith) is the vengeful mother of bold Gnomeo (James McAvoy).

The production was headed by the partnership of Elton John (recycling some of his songs and Bernie Taupin's lyrics playfully) and David Furnish. The lively original score incorporating themes from many other John hits was composed by James Newton Howard. Director Kelly Asbury had previously made Shrek 2 and Spirit: Stallion, and the cast of voices includes many unexpected stars (from Lady Gaga to Hulk Hogan, Dolly Parton to Keith Statham, Ozzy Osborne and Matt Lucas) for the unusually ambitious non-US Disney (Touchstone) package, crafted by Toronto's Starz Animation (makers of 9), flourishing their CG skills on leaves, smoke, water, reflections and, uniquely, stone/cement surfaces.

Maybe there are just a few dozen too many cute word plays with Shakespearean and/or garden furnishing origins, and for sure the characters are too cute for comfort. Yet the movie achieves the impossible mission of making garden gnomes look and sound likeably cute. There's a host of visual comedy from plastic flamingos, lawn-mowers, a mute and loyal sniffer mushroom and a statue of Shakespeare (Patrick Stewart). The whole movie is colourfully wild and wacky, albeit going nowhere near the magical reality qualities of a Burton or Gilliam fantasy.

Kung fu panda

In 2008 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Dreamworks Animation pulled off a brilliantly brazen Hollywood heist, one so in-your-face that the Weinstein brothers must have doffed their caps in salutation. The company bought sufficient voting memberships in the Animated Film Association to ensure that its Kung Fu Panda swept the board in Annie awards and completely shut out Pixar's Wall-E (which won that year's Oscar and Golden Globe). The rules have been changed since then, but Dreamworks did a cruel disservice to its charming animated feature. It can stand in its own right as a good animation film.

It has an attractive hand-drawn opening sequence, and the whole sequel has been entrusted to its acclaimed director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson. Her inspiration (other than the all-inspiring Fantasias, of course) was Chinese shadow puppetry, and the CGI in the main film are also clearly drawn from recent Chinese action-adventure martial-arts movies as well as the older generations of kung fu and wuxia classics. The foremost influence, for the comic tone, was Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle.

Jack Black voiced (inoffensively) the bumbling obese panda, Po, who works in the noodle cafe of his father, a goose (James Hong), and is a kung fu aficionado. Eager to watch the selection of the Dragon Warrior by the local temple master (a wise-headed old tortoise), Po lands up being chosen by ordained accident and sent to train with Master Shifu, a red panda (Dustin Hoffman, playing it straight).

Shifu already has a traditional team of trained Masters: Tigress (self-effacing Angelina Jolie), Golden Langur (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Green Tree Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross). His former protege, Tai Lung, a snow leopard (Ian McShane), had tried to be Dragon Warrior and ended up in chains, guarded by rhinocerosi (led by Michael Clarke Duncan). When he escapes and seeks revenge, Po must learn the secret ingredient of the Dragon Warrior's power, which proves to be a mirage just like his father's secret noodle recipe.

Being five very varied sizes and shapes, the five Masters cannot be given detailed characters, and much of the storyline and banter is borne by the tortoise and two pandas. The fast-paced energy of the film is provided by a barrage of animation effects that leave few moments of uneventful visuals during which audiences can notice the relative 2D flatness of the characters. The customary Hans Zimmer soundtrack completes the captivating cinematic package.

The usual mix of animation tricks is unusually rich, taking good advantage of Chinese motifs (lanterns, bamboo sticks, bowls, dumplings, noodles and more) while showing off many arts and crafts of special animation effects (water, smoke, mirrors, shadows, fire). Big-screen close-ups are effective too, and it will be interesting to see how the sequel incorporates the by-now obligatory 3D and IMAX systems.

Dreamworks is reuniting the chorus of well-paid voices for Kung Fu Panda 2, adding a quintet of extra star voices, including Gary Oldman as the new Brit-voiced bad guy. Guillermo del Toro is its executive producer (also his role for the studio's Puss in Boots spin-off), and the budget will be astronomical. So was the profit on the first film: no wonder six sequels have been talked of by Katzenberg.

Astro boy

One of the multi-million-dollar failures in the rush to produce CGI-animation 3D movies was 2009's Astro Boy. Maybe there'd recently been too many similar plotlines (e.g. Jimmy Neutron, A.I.), but why didn't such an action-packed sweetly-comic sci-fi morality tale gain a bigger audience, sequel and franchise potential?

Astro Boy, aka Mighty Atom, first appeared as a Japanese comic book (manga) action boy-hero in 1952, created by Osamu Tesuka. The do-good-feel-good character's first 1963 TV appearance marked the start of the anime genre of cartoon animation, and the bright-eyed baby-fatted hair-quiffed black-panted rocked-shod mighty little hero became a global children's favourite.

By the time American creative consultants had finished tweaking his representation for their home market, Astra Boy had gained a more Occidental face, trimmer body and shorts that weren't big Speedos. The project ended up with animators in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the direction and major re-write were finally handed over to David Bowers, a British co-director of the Aardman-Dreamworks Flushed Away.

Astro Boy (voiced by Freddie Highmore) thinks he's Toby, the son of a top Metro City scientist (Nicolas Cage). He learns that he's really a Blue Core-powered robot clone designed by his father and another boffin (Bill Nighy) to replace the human boy who'd died in a battle with a robot packed with Red Core.

Rejected by his father after accidentally realising his unknown strengths, the robot boy lands up down on the scrap-world of Earth, along with all other redundant machines and unwanted children. A gang of them, including a lost girl (Kristen Bell), forage for their adopted Faginesque father-figure, Hamegg (Nathan Lane), who organises lethal Robot Games and welcomes Astro Boy's revitalisation of a century-old construction machine, Zog (Samuel L Jackson).

Meanwhile, the harsh vain ruler of Metro City (Donald Sutherland) needs to recapture Astro Boy's mighty Blue Core, while the plot's also amplified by other interesting characters (most cutely, Trashcan the belligerent robot dog and Mr Squeegee and Mr Squirt, ugly-fairy robot cleaners) and star voices (Charlize Theron, Eugene Levy, Matt Lucas). Most amusing (and amazing, for an American movie) are the comic trio of Robot Revolutionaries (Sparx, Robotsky and Mike the Fridge) waging fruitless war on Hamegg in defence of their exploited fellows.

All that plotting, and more, might have worked wonders if there had been a similar richness of visual gags, and if the star voices had been allowed to emote. Cage and Nighy are especially tediously muted, and there was clear indecision from the producers about the age, sexual awareness and girl-friendliness of Astro Boy. The Red Core foe is an imposing Transformer-like monster, but his final battle with Astro Boy mostly illustrates the flat 2D appearance of the sketchy cityscape of Metro City.

Astro Boy looks and feels like a rushed effort. As Pixar has proved year after year, a lot of time and effort - much more than in most movies - are needed to make CGI box-office bonanzas.

Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet created one of the wackiest and most wonderful animation movies, Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003), aka Belleville Rendez-vous in the UK, gaining Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature as well as Best Song. The Frenchman's debut, a delightful short film (La vieille dame et les pigeons, 1998), earned him his first Oscar nomination, and in 2011 he was up against the best of Hollywood again (Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon) with L'Illusioniste.

He couldn't win, of course, but the publicity should have helped attract more art-house attention and a better chance of getting a return on the 72-minute film's US$17 million budget. It's a charming small-scale animated presentation of an unproduced live-action scenario written by the French mime and comic actor, Jacques Tati. A love-letter to one of his daughters, the simple tale shows how an ageing French vaudeville magician meets a girl and finds his own peace of mind amid the naturally magic beauty of Edinburgh.

Chomet's brightly sketchy style of artwork looks as exquisitely old-fashioned as a Victorian book's illustrative drawings, and ideally suits the wispy storyline. Little happens in action terms, and much of any live film's impact would have depended on Tati's physical and facial antics. These are rendered well, without exaggeration, by the animated character, but the naive young woman's expression and character are less well articulated.

She doesn't realise she's exhausting the magician's funds by expecting him to produce all her clothing desires by magic. When the funds are gone, and work is no longer available in decrepit music halls or rowdy private parties, he tries to hide from her his work as a department store window attraction. His ventriloquist colleague has pawned his puppet and become a fulltime alcoholic; fearful for his own future, the magician resolves to leave the girl with her new boyfriend. He strides off, telling her there are no magicians, releasing his irritable rabbit.

Such a pensive tale can verge on the maudlin and melancholy (as did previous Oscar outsiders such as Australia's Mary & Max). Chomet avoids that danger, and keeps his audience's attention by always having one or more of animation's visual treats on display as a side-feature of the main action: clouds, lights, mirror and window reflections, shadows, water and smoke. Only the latter will have marred the movie's acceptance by many parents - the Tati character is depicted as a virtual chain-smoker.

A short and slightly-bitter-sweet movie, this is animation magic at its art-house best.

Megamind

In its manic effort to not be viewed as a complete rip-off of The Incredibles, Despicable Me et al, Megamind has a plethora of assumed, stolen, lost and confused identities. Keeping up with them is child's play for children, frustrating for adults when the born-good gone-bad ET (Megamind, voiced by Will Ferrell) and his piranha-like lifelong Minion, encased in a fish tank, (David Cross) kills arch-rival born-good ET, Metro Man (Brad Pitt).

Having gained control of Metrocity (cutely mispronounced), having no foe or purpose in life, Megamind is encouraged to cheer himself up by a female TV news reporter (Tina Fey) who loved Metro Man. He transforms himself into a humble city librarian, Bernard (Ben Stiller, who co-exec-prodded the movie), who then becomes a new evil character, Titan aka cutely as Tighten (Jonah Hill), formed from the body of Hal, Roxanne's cameraman and unrequited lover. Meantime, Minion has become warden of the prison (JK Simmons) where Megamind was raised, while Metro Man hadn't died, merely retiring from the unfulfilling task of doing good, compelling Megamind to take on the role himself. I have no recollection of any morsel of screenplay that explained when and how the two ETs went to school together.

The first credited co-writer, Alan Schoolcraft, had been a production executive (1998-2001) for three Coen brothers comic movies - The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn't There. His next credit, and first for writing, is this film. His co-writer, Brent Simons, is also a first-timer, which is no excuse for the screenplay's lack of originality.

Nevertheless, the film is frothy fun, probably exciting fun in 3D, and much credit must go presumably to director Tom McGrath, who made the two Madagascar cartoon comedies and learned his craft on TV's Ren & Stimpy Show in the mid-90s. Another experienced pair of hands brought on board was that of composer Hans Zimmer. Justin Theroux (an actor/writer who'd worked with Stiller on Tropic Thunder) is one credited "creative consultant"; director Guillermo (Pan's Labyrinth) del Toro is the other (and he's now working on a handful of other Dreamworks Animation projects).

Major credit, as for any animated movie, goes to the hundreds of specialist talents who managed to make this Dreamworks copycat effort fun to watch. One hopes they got their fair share of its mega-mind-numbing US$130 million budget.

Tangled

Walt Disney Pictures took a massive gamble with the company's 50th animated movie, Tangled, its version of the classic Grimm Brothers story of Rapunzel. With total costs reportedly reaching a $260 million, it was the second most expensive film ever made to date (exceeded only by Avatar). Within two months, its global box-office gross was nudging $400 million, and the gamble will pay off handsomely.

Kudos will go to John Lasseter, the Pixar chief executive and movie director who began his career as an animator at Disney and now also runs the corporation's animations division. His Pixar record as an unfailing creative and quality control genius surely persuaded Disney's board to risk a large chunk of the farm on an old-fashioned fairy story with no super-star voices.

Assuming that the quoted cost is not an accounting souffle, inflated wildly for taxation or other advantages, one has to wonder where the money went? Giving a film 3D effects accounts for a lot, and a lot of funds must have been spent paying for a small army of CGI animators to design, draw and light scenes that looked like hand-drawn paintings. The traditional show-off tricks of their trade are the usual delight to see: shadows, water, reflections, hair, movement, lighting, emotional eyes. When an audience just accepts them and concentrates on the story, Disney has achieved its traditional magic.

The scenario was written by Dan Fogelman, an award-winner for Cars who also wrote Bolt. He maintained the Grimm Brothers' outline, which Disney rightly assumed could be a winner. There were precedents galore: Rapunzel, a naive princess (Princess and the Frog, etc) kept away from the outside world (ala Little Mermaid, etc) by an evil witch (Cinderella, etc) is introduced to reality by a cheeky intruder (a sexily goateed Aladdin with Errol Flynn cockiness). She will have a cute animal friend (animators' dream creature, a chameleon) and there'll be a mock-villainous animal thwarting the hero (this time, pompous guardhorse Maximus).

The horse is delightful; a little disappointingly (but wisely for the story) the chameleon isn't allowed to play a distracting role. The key animation challenge, and success, is Rapunzel's multi-metred head of magic hair. It can cure lethal ailments, and be used as a rope, elevator and whip. It never looks lanky or bulky and is rightly featured like a co-star in some advertising. Equally masterful are the hundreds of floating lanterns launched to mark the lost princess's birthday.

The voices of the teenage princess (singer-actress Mandy Moore) and her young saviour (Zachary Levi, Broadway musical and TV series star) could have been heard in any other Disney modern classic: clear, sassy and very American. Ditto for the music and songs from Disney stalwarts Alan Menken, the leading living Oscar-winner (eight by 2010) in his specialised category, and lyricist Glenn Slater.

Donna Murphy (Tony-winning Broadway actress and Sondheim singer) is the voice for an under-stated evil character (Mother Rothel), whose dependence on Rapunzel's magic isn't scorned, and she merrily sings my favourite song in the movie, Mother Knows Best. There seemed to have been a conscious decision to downplay her character and not exaggerate it in the style of Little Mermaid or 101 Dalmatians. The usual Disney musical extravaganza, in the exuberant OTT style of a Busby Berkeley choreography, is a happily fast-paced scene in a thugs' character-full forest bar, the Snuggly Duckling.

A Christmas release and 3D-premium seat prices helped Tangled do well with its customary family market. After six years in expensive pre-production, it needs to gross close to a billion dollars to convince Disney that a 51st old-style animation should be greenlit. One hopes so because such movies are pure entertainment.

My dog Tulip

J.R. (Joe) Ackerley is usually described as a "man of letters"; he worked for the BBC for 31 years until 1959, as arts editor of its Listener magazine from 1935. He's also well known for having been openly gay and long seeking an "Ideal Friend". He found her in 1946, when an occasional gay lover asked the 50-year-old bachelor to take care of his Alsatian bitch while he was in prison.

Ten years later, he wrote about his experiences with the dog in My Dog Tulip (a new name his publisher recommended using, as Ackerley's friend had actually named his dog Queenie). It's been filmed, brilliantly, as a computerised and hand-drawn animation by Americans Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, mainly employing New Yorker-style sketches.

British film buffs may recall that Ackerley's only novel, We Think the World of You, was filmed in 1988. It told the story of a working-class gay (Gary Oldman) who asks a middle-aged acquaintance (Alan Bates) to look after his dog. Thus immortalised twice in his books, Queenie/Tulip was indeed the real love of the writer's life, the Ideal Friend to whom he devoted his loyal attention until her death in 1961.

She was a socially-clumsy, over-enthusiastic lover, wildly determined to protect her saviour and owner, always ready to bark at and attack any threats to their relationship. After struggling comically to cope with her toilet training, he then needed to find a vet whose handling she would accept. Her struggles with, and victory over, his sister (one of Lynn Redgrave's voices in her last film) during a year of shared residence produced Ackerley's next set of canine misadventures. Her disaster-prone behaviour provided another series of comic tableaus when they went to stay with an indolent old army colleague on a small farm.

The writer imagines a sequence of wry explanations for Tulip's failure to mate with any of the chosen Alsation studs, whose owners are delightful vignettes of middle-class English manners. He'd wanted Tulip to know sex and maternity, and ended up having to let her let the next-door mongrel runt do the deed and present him with eight puppies to handle. The whole set of humourous marital tales is mostly portrayed in a primitive hand-drawn stick-figure manner, its crude artistry discreetly diminishing the images of sexual activities.

Such a parade of animal bodily functions is very unlikely material for a cartoon movie, one that could only expect to be appreciated by adults and dog-lovers. Ackerley's wry, dry, very English and misanthropic (and naturally misogynist) comic style is conveyed perfectly by the commentary voice of Christopher Plummer, reading directly from the adoring memoir. The book is reportedly a minor classic, and I'd like to think its animated version will also become a cult classic.

Metropia

Movies are like all other arts, either commercially exploiting consumer tastes or non-commercially exploiting official funding organisations. The former sink or swim in the big hard capitalist world, the latter gain lifebelts that support their creative visions. Terry Gilliam struggles with reality, reaching such heights as Brazil (and various loss-making nadirs), while a Turkish graffiti artist he reportedly inspired, Tarik Saleh, obtained Europe-wide funding for his debut computer-generated animated movie Metropia.

A Swedish writer, Fredrik Edin, cooked up the scifi idea of a grim and grimy Europe in 2024, its cities' subway lines linked by an all-powerful corporation and its citizens increasingly connected secretly to a central thought-control system via call centres (and a potent shampoo). Stig Larsson (a namesake of the Millennium author) co-wrote the screenplay with Edin and Saleh, and the fund-dispensing agencies didn't cavil at the idea of re-making 1984, Kafka and Brazil.

They must have been enchanted by Saleh's concept of animating edited and deliberately deformed photographs of ordinary people and settings, and adding real actors' voices. It's not an innovative concept, and it's not attractive when the animated heads (big) and bodies (shrunk) sport minimal movements and are stuck in stiff posed positions in spooky gloomy settings.

In addition to the Swedish soundtrack there's an English-language version, employing some vocally distinctive offbeat movie stars (with Vincent Gallo, Juliette Lewis and Udo Kier in lead roles). Their talents are not well used, with bad syncing highlighting the animated characters' lack of screen presence and action. The predictable story of a bald average Joe (Gallo) meeting the shampoo model (Lewis) and battling a global conspiracy takes far too long, far too slowly, to unfold and moments of magic animation effects are too few to justify the movie's funding.

Legend of the guardians

Legend of the Guardians probably broke even within a couple of months of its 2010 opening, reportedly grossing close to US$140 million worldwide (against a budget of US$80 million). It's a pleasant surprise that the computer-animated feature made US$55 million in North America, where enough movie-going families were not put off by its plot's many dark moments, the lack of human characters in an owl saga, its Australian voices, and an Irish-sounding subtitle, The Owls of Ga'Hoole.

The saga is derived from a set of popular children's books written by Kathryn Lasky, under the subtitle brand name. That may have brought in much custom, as did the 3D/IMAX formats and the track record of Australia's Animal Logic animators (Babe, Happy Feet). Word of mouth among parents would have been the best advertising, for this must have an enchanting 3D movie experience.

Bursting with true flights of avian fancy and glorious colour composition, the movie is a marvelous collage of animation skills. Owls have the biggest eyes of all birds (the equivalent to humans having eyes the size of large oranges, a DVD extra notes) and they are used to good effect to convey the various characters' emotions. As saga go, however, and as Ms Lasky's books presumably did, the characters and their action adventures are standard fare.

Two young Barn Owlets, Kludd and Soren, are abducted by evil owls, the Pure Ones, led by masked Metal Beak (Joel Edgerton) and his white-feathered queen (Helen Mirren). Soren escapes, together with a small female Elf Owlet. They meet a Burrowing Owl (David Wenham) who's called Digger, naturally, and his pal, a Great Grey (Anthony LaPaglia). Soren's family nursemaid snake, Mrs P (Miriam Margolyes), goes along for the ride, and they all reach the secret home of the good Guardians, where an old Whiskered Screech (Geoffrey Rush) and a treacherous Great Grey (Sam Neill) debate the best way to meet the external threat.

Lord of the Rings performed by a typical Hollywood band of oddball creatures? It could have been, but first-time animation director Jack Snyder was wisely asked to give the saga his distinctive action-packed big-screen-filling surround-sound style (as in 300, Watchmen and the next Superman). The net result is a movie whose looks and sounds, special effects and pace deserve a storyline that's stronger. Most comic moments seem contrived, with stereotypical characters such as a pair of bumbling baddies and a poet-warrior with a lute and off-key songs.

More credibly, the wayward brother is allowed to die (after trying to trick his sibling once more) and the moral lessons can be easily explained to their youngsters by human parents. They won't need to explain why the evil queen is allowed to flee with some survivors, and the newly qualified Guardian Owl utters warnings. A sequel was hoped for, but I suspect we'll see Happy Feet 2 first.