Inside Out (2015)

After a dip in quality – “Monsters University” was only cute – Pixar returns with their very best effort yet: An instant classic that resets the bar in how stories can be told to and of children, and for adults. “Inside Out” – directed by Pete Docter, who made “Up” – is joyous, funny, and heart-crushing. The death of a beloved character: I wept. (Michael Giacchino’s score pushed me.) Plot: We follow the emotions -– joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger -- inside the mind of a pre-teen girl as she moves from Minnesota to San Francisco -- all the hope, wonder, turmoil, and disappointment. I had a major move at 12. “Inside” hit me. Docter and his writers dare focus on the theme that Walt Disney hid in his own films: Heartbreak is as central to our childhood as happiness. They are intertwined. We bounce from inside our girl’s head to the outside world, and then into the brains of side characters: Parents, a teacher, a dog! – and Docter dazzles us again. It’s Pixar gold: The animation and voice talent (Amy Poehler!) is superb. But this gem has a vibrant life that takes hold of our heads, and our hearts. And shatters. A+

Penguins of Madagascar, Big Hero Six, Earth to Echo, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (all 2014)

“Penguins of Madagascar”  … I saw it to take my niece and nephew out. Ehh. Have you seen the “Madagascar” films from DreamWorks? The zoo animals who ditched the Bronx for Africa? Pretty funny, the first one. Since then? Yawn. Snooze. Get me out. This fourth entry and add-on to a TV series focuses on sidekick comic-relief characters of wise-ass penguins who muck about in the Marx Brothers vein. New Yorker humor abounds. This is their origin tale. Cause we need that. The Penguins join a MI6 type group led by wolf Benedict Cumberbatch to take down power-mad octopus John Malkovich and we get jokes that play on actor names: “Nicholas, Cage them!” and “Helen, hunt them down!,” and oh my God, an hour in I pled for it to end, and it would not, and my nephew and niece loved it and I Give Up! C- 

Meanwhile, Disney, with no small help from Pixar, has CGI animated film “Big Hero Six,” based on a new-to-me Marvel comic for youngsters that pings “Scooby Doo” with boots, capes and robots. Our lead hero is Hero (Ryan Potter), a teen living with his aunt and older brother in a futuristic mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo. Hero is a budding roboticist with a punk-rebel streak who graduated high school at 13 and takes on college at 14 after a minor scrape with the law for amusing back-alley robot fights, only to suffer a devastating personal loss. Brother dies in a fire. Ouch. With the help of a cute puffy robot nurse named Baymax –- who looks like Shmoo on steroids and full of air and built by the dead older sibling -– Hero investigates the fire and finds himself a super villain right out of a four-color comic book. The simple story aims young with some edgy humor (there’s a stoner kid who’s far more a stoner than ever was Shaggy) but its charms are strong and its “Stargate” references worthy of fan-fiction tribute. B

Speaking of childish films, “Earth to Echo” is a fast-paced, found-footage jumpy cam version of “E.T.” meets “Goonies” as a group of school kid pals find a robotic alien near their housing development. The one their being forced out of. (That was the kick-off of “Goonies,” recall?) Using iPhones and video cameras to record their every moment to save Echo -– he’s metallic, bur cute, chirping, and a bit void of personality -– the kids run up against Big Brother villains, find a female pal along the way, and in a funny moment, find the cool older brother asleep in a bathtub as a party. They take his car. Harmless and sweet, I think my young self would have grooved to the film’s adventure. Even if the stomach and brain of my current body fell camera seasick. One of the boys, Reese Hartwig, eerily reminds me of a school friend. B

Another flick I took the niece and nephew to is “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third and apparently final entry in the comedy-adventure series with Ben Stiller –- he once long ago of grungy grown-up films -– as a guard at the New York Museum of Natural History. You know the drill, right? Sun goes down, the exhibits come alive, Easter Island head, dinosaur, Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), and cowboy (Owen Wilson) included, all mucking about, making “education” fun. And action packed. Here, the magical stone that powers our heroes is dying, and Stiller must zip away to London’s history museum to save the day. Why? Um, up ticket sales in Europe? It’s only mildly funny, despite a great M.C. Escher gag that plays like a classic 1980s A-Ha video and a cameo from a winking X-Man. Dan Stevens (“Downtown Abbey”) impresses as Lancelot. Williams? My heart breaks again. RIP. B-

The Book of Life (2014)

Trailers for “The Book of Life” promised a gloriously animated supernatural vibe from King of the Weird and producer/writer Guillermo del Toro. The film delivers. Maybe not to the heights of “Pan’s Labyrinth” or animated siblings “Up” or “Coraline,” but enough that I left the cinema awed. Heavy on the wood and stone art of Mayan and Spanish cultures, “Book” has a literal bookend story of ragtag school kids visiting a museum and through a hip tour guide (Christina Applegate) learn of the feisty Mexican beauty Maria (Zoe Saldana) who becomes a coin in a bet between gods Xibalba and La Muerte, the after-life rulers of the Land of the Forgotten and the Land of the Remembered. Maria, see, is chased after two men, a reluctant bullfighter (Diego Luna) and a seemingly invincible soldier (Channing Tatum). The story is deep and wondrously dark and riffs on Radiohead’s “Creep.” Huge sticking points: Our gal still is made to choose her hubs to be. Ice Cube as God is so very Special Appearance By Ice Cube, the film’s magic bear breaks. B+

The Lego Movie (2014)

Nearly a week after seeing “The Lego Movie” with my niece and nephew I’m still on a buzzy high of nostalgia for the hundreds of hours I spent playing with the famed building blocks as a child -- especially during those long Philly snow days –- and the endless clever wit and deft satire that filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (both of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) bring to this 90-minute blast. 

Face it, this movie could have been a shallow toy ad hawking nonsense, I’m looking at you, “Smurfs.” In a playful trick, though, our story instead spoofs mass-commercialization, all those “The Matrix” knock-offs with the savior complex, “Nineteen Eighty Four,” and the legendary (and outright silly) debate between those who see Legos as high-art engineering tools and young children who just want to mess about and play and not worry about rules or constriction. 

(I will not touch the Fox News controversy over the plot and story. Some folks truly need to not make everything on earth a political target, a bit of scotch in a glass, buy a puppy, smoke some pot, the choices are wide and plenty.) 

Our hero is blank-slate construction worker Emmet (Chris Pratt) who gets swept up in a massive adventure as “The One,” the Neo-like hero who can save Lego humanity from its destruction and the walls that separate metropolises from western towns. 

The twist: Emmet really is just a guy, and a dork at that, perplexing and outright pissing off all the real “heroes” around him, Batman -– in a legendary vocal turn by Will Arnett, a squabbling Superman and Green Lantern (Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, respectively), and a good lot of heroes from “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings,” and -- most impressive “Star Wars,” all toys that have their own Lego worlds. 

This bit could fall into toy ad here, but it doesn’t: Gandolf and Dumbledore squabble, and Billy Dee Williams (!!) as Lando still is sleazy as ever. (The Millennium Falcon bit alone is worth the price of three admissions.) All these guys could be the hero, but it’s Emmet, following the sage advice of Moses/Morpheus do-gooder prophet Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) who is finally – finally, we get to see this –- full of shit. 

The beginning is shaky, oddly sudden, and the end -- which smashes open the fourth- and fifth- and sixth-walls may be so daring and “out there,” I’m still wrapping my head around it, but I think I loved it. (I saw it coming, but man curve balls are thrown.) It sure as heck is different than anything I have seen come down the pike.

The visuals are amazing as every frame pops and my 11-year-old nephew reached out countless times to “grab” the screen and the plastic “toys” before him. Visual gags come fast, including entire Lego play sets from my youth, and even the cast knocks their own career, none better than Liam Neeson as a two-faced bad cop with a dangerous Irish accent and a squeaky clean voice on the other side. 

Inside jokes are fast as well: The Lego part numbers get a lot of play, a detail even I had forgotten about. An absolute delight and a real high mark from Warner Bros., especially after the rut of so-so CGI animated fare we have seen from normal kings of the block Pixar and Dreamworks. 

“Lego Movie” is amazing endless fun, and puts children center. It also is one of the rare films that excels at 3-D. See it, guys and gals, now. I plan to again. Without the niece and nephew. Just me and *my* 11-year-old self, the one buried deep inside. Still there. A

The Croods (2013)

In “The Croods,” Dreamworks’ sticks a Griswald-like family in the Stone Age, cave people still moping around with no fire and staring helpless as the land mass known as Pangaea breaks apart to form what we now recognize as Earth. (Try explaining this to your 4-year-old.) Plot: Ignorant dad (Nicolas Cage) is scared of all things new, while teen daughter Eep (Emma Stone) is ready to explore and push pop’s rules off a cliff. So, yes, it’s “Brave” B.C., with the inevitable scene where grumpy dad admits he’s wrong, and spunky kid is right. A genre staple as old as cave drawings, for sure. We’ll see it again. But even “Croods” cannot carry its story to the finish, switching midway from Eep’s perspective to the father’s. (It’s all so beware-climate-change liberal heavy-handed, even I blanched.) Much of the animation surprises, though: Prehistoric pets are imagined outside the box and will delight children and adults, and a gag involving early photography got this shutterbug laughing. The rest: Forgettable. C+

Frozen (2013)

Disney’s “Frozen” -– adapted from the Hans Christian Andersen’s book “The Snow Queen” -– is a solid piece of Disney Princess entertainment with catchy music. It might not stand aside instant-classic “Beauty and the Beast,” but it’s nice to see a throwback to that early 1990s era. Plot: A princess (Kristen Bell) vows to save the older sister (Idinia Menzel) she was once so close to as children after the latter unintentionally puts their perfect kingdom into a literal deep freeze. See, the sister/queen can create X-Men-style ice and snow with her hands, but has little control of the power. The townspeople seek vengeance, but our princess pleads forgiveness. Toss in a macho man, his BFF reindeer, and a singing snowman, and we have an adventure. Not all the pieces fit -- I love that little snowman (voiced by Jonathan Groff) with his ode to summer song, but he whiffs of tacked-on comedy relief. Ditto rock trolls. I dug, though, our female leads and the genre-tweaking dig at instant love and charming princes. The computer animation is flawless, naturally. But watching this old-school story, I longed for the nuance of hand-drawn animation. Flawless often can be … cold. B+

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Walt Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” takes a nod and a rip from Pixar gem “Toy Story” and takes us inside the world of arcade games, where characters see the slide of a quarter as a call to work, and party when no one is looking. Oh, flattery. Story: Ralph (John C. Reilly) is the human wrecking ball villain of the 1980s game “Fix It Felix Jr.,” but he longs to be the hero. Ralph commits a no-no and crosses wires for his chance at glory, first to a shoot-’em-up alien game, then over to a racing game called “Sugar Rush.” Much mayhem ensues as Ralph wrecks. He can’t help himself. Now, this is not Pixar. It’s run-of-the-mill Disney. So, the score already is lower. The wit and heart, too. But this is flat-out great fun. The “Felix” game is so exactly rendered Atari retro-style, the characters blink when they move, I thought it was a real title from 30 years ago. It’s not. That and the ridiculously hilarious side characters (Alan Tudyk as a kooky king) make me game to play again. The myriad shrill corporate promos … not so much. B+

Mars Needs Moms (2011)

Walt Disney picked up the 3D motion-cap CGI animated pic “Mars Needs Moms” from Robert Zemeckis’ own studio, and released it with much fanfare. It became one of the biggest box office bombs ever. The stunner: It’s not a bad film. It’s an hour-long story stretched to 90-plus minutes, so sight gags are repeated 10 times rather than three times, and many a badly sketched character need not exist. The story: A bratty boy must rescue his mother from aliens who have taken her to Mars, intent on sucking her good motherly instincts from her body. A wicked way to spook a child. Critics derided that, as if “Bambi” never existed. “Mars” is in line with other Zemeckis fare “Polar Express” and “Christmas Carol,” but bouncier and better animated. But, shorter is better. B-

Puss in Boots (2011)

Antonia Banderas as Puss in Boots was the best gag in the latter “Shrek” films, boring affairs that smelled of hastened scripts and all eyes on boosted 4Qs at Dreamworks. Luckily, the stand-alone film of “Puss in Boots” – the Latin Lover kitty stars, with no ogres or talking donkeys about – stands on his own four legs despite the studio curse of all jokes and flimsy story. Puss teams with Humpty Dumpty to score the golden goose from “Jack and the Beanstalk” fame. Salma Hayek voices a femme fatale, and Billy Bob Thornton and Amy Sedaris play a redneck Jack and Jill. A flashback is dull, Jack and Jill are after-thoughts, and Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) is a shell, but the writers clearly love cats, and they pitch gags galore as Puss breaks his cool to chase a light or give himself a bath at the most dramatic moment. The “camera” has fun as we weave around this CGI world, over a bridge, and later up a beanstalk. Cat nip for feline lovers. B-

Bambi (1942)

How many of us really remember “Bambi”? Sweet animals. Bright and sunny forest. Young deer finding his legs. Thumper and that restless foot. So lovable. Memory is fickle. Walt Disney’s classic tale a dark coming of age story that is cute, yes, but also visceral, and quite intense at the climax. The story: Bambi is born and grows up among friendly rabbits, birds and skunks in a forest. He matures. Winter hits hard. Man comes. A gunshot. Mother is no more. Then later the fire, set by man. There is no tongue-in-cheek satire here, yes, some laughs, but mostly hard truths. Its theme: Growing up is hell, but you eventually will find happiness. The details are exceedingly rich, from every hand-drawn character to creeks and leaves. No perfected CGI film will exceed even the beautiful errand lines created by men and women. Check out that fight scene. Or Thumper thumping. “Bambi” rightfully holds its place as one of the greatest animated films out there. And, yeah, Bambi’s momma’s death put a lump in my throat. Maybe. A+

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Walt Disney Studios broke ground with “The Princess and the Frog” – a fantasy tale focused on an African-American girl with the big Disney Dreams™ and the handsome guy to go with them. It felt about damn time, after how many decades. Seven? Eight? Alas, this hand-drawn animated tale never took off in theaters. Racism? No. It’s the film's plot and tone. Our not-a-princess princess (voiced by Anika Noni Rose) wants to open a restaurant of her own, and running after her dream, gets mixed up with a young prince who’s now literally a frog (that’s Bruno Campos) and a local New Orleans con man/master of dark arts (Keith David.) I’m not quite sure any child dreams of opening a restaurant, so there’s that, and some of the animation involving “The Shadow Man” is quite spooky – skulls and wicked ghost shadows, etc. Not for the babes. All that said, this is one great-looking flick with some clever side characters and surprises along the way. It’s not Disney’s best, but even off-center Disney can be wonderful entertainment. B+

Yogi Bear (2010)

Confession: I had a Yogi Bear lunchbox as a child. I loved that tie-wearing bear and his little depressed pal, Boo-Boo. So I’m pleased to say the live-action/CGI hybrid that is the “Yogi Bear” movie is better than any most recent talking cartoon animal movie has a right to be. Of course, these are low standards. “Marmaduke” hurt. I hated “Garfield.” This is cornball fun. Here, pic-a-nic basket thieving Yogi and Boo-Boo must help Ranger Smith (Tom Cavanagh in the flesh) save Jellystone Park from a self-serving mayor (Ayn Rand-follower perhaps?) with his eyes on higher office. The plot is lame. The CGI solid. Dan Aykroyd (Yogi) and Justin Timberlake (Boo-Boo) nail the characters’ voices. Timberlake has great one liners on the First Grade Scale of Humor. The jokes are scatological, but most are of the pie-in-the-face variety. Not bad. C+

A Christmas Carol (2009)

“A Christmas Carol” is the second-most popular story concerning December 25, behind the whole Christ-Savior-manger thing. This version of Scrooge's awakening gives us Jim Carrey lording with wild amusement over an all-CGI animated spectacle from director Robert Zemeckis. The former Ace Ventura spins gold as the miser and his three ghosts, saying otherwise would make one a ba-humbug. As well, the animation is far better than Zemeckis’ other animated efforts, the “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf,” but that ain't saying much. Yes, eyes finally sparkle, and skin has creases and sags never seen before in this fare. But we are still talking mannequin herky-jerky inhuman bodies. A couple years worth of Christmases went into this flick, the best effects Disney can buy, and with that, the beautiful simplicity of Dickens’ tale is buried under razzle-dazzle fairy dust. Here’s hoping Zemeckis leaves the birth of Jesus alone. B-

Toy Story 2 (1999)

“Toy Story 2” may not quite top its predecessor. But it’s pure Pixar joy. Here, after toy owner Andy leaves for summer camp, well-loved Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) finds himself accidentally included in a (horror!) yard sale. Before one can say, “Ride ‘em cowboy!,” this plastic poke is swiped by a fat bastard bent on selling Woody to a museum in Japan. Buzz (Tim Allen) and the gang go to the rescue, with hilarious results. That’s it, basically, for plot. But there’s so much heart to this sequel: The film rests on the fact that children will reject their toys as the former grow up, with no need for the latter. But the toys remain committed nonetheless, knowing time is not on their side. Take it as you will: Rejection of parents by newly independent children, or just a fun, brilliant animated story. Bonus points to the creators for allowing Woody to become a jerk, and a full-rounded character, midway through. Best scene: The old man from the short film “Geri’s Game,” gives Woody a spit and polish. The scene is pure art. A