The Nightmare before Christmas - 1993

 

Wow, it’s still adorable even after all these years. The songs are great and even greater in Italian because Renato Zero is amazing.

The story is simple: In the Land of Halloween, everything is Halloween-themed, of course, and that’s what they are and what they do. Still, Jack Skellington, pumpkin king, is not satisfied of doing the same thing over and over, and feels kind of lost, you could say.

One night he stumbles into Christmas Land and is shocked  by what he sees, because he has never seen anything like it. There’s snow and lights and colours and joy.

He starts talking about Christmas to his whole town, he tries to understand what it means via scientific methods, and then he wants to try experiencing it, so he has Santa Claus, that he thinks is called Santa Claws, abducted. He asks Sally to sew him a Santa costume, and has the town prepare presents for the children, and the doctor Finkelstein makes him some skeletons reindeers. He flies over the town and leaves his own presents for the poor children, who get attacked by them. After many reports like this, people start blocking their fireplaces and ultimately shoot him down. Finally Jack realises that although he did his best, it was not for him because he’s not Santa Claus, he’s Jack the Pumpkin King, and so he goes back home to get the real Santa so he can put things right. First he has to save him from the Bogeyman, and then Santa is very quick to put things right taking away the monster-presents and replacing them with real ones.

Then Santa flies over Jack’s town yelling Happy Halloween and making it snow.

Jack and Sally finally get together.

Sally is adorable, she’s been created by Finkelstein like the monster of Frankenstein, but she’s more of a rag-doll, her pieces sewn together. She’s also restless like Jack and understands how he feels; being restless, she often puts nightshade in the doctor’s soup so he sleeps and she can run out of the house. When he locks her in, she jumps out of her room, like a Rapunzel in her tower, only she falls down and smashes on the floor, pieces everywhere, but she keeps thread and needle on her just for times like this: she sews herself back together. She tries to stop Jack from his crazy plan, but he won’t listen to her, so sure and obsessed by this new idea.

When Jack is shot down and the mayor thinks he’s dead, Sally hurries to find Santa and free him so he can put things right again, and her idea is quite ingenious, she has one of her legs lure the Boogeyman away from Santa, then she sends her hands to free him from those ropes, and she throws him a rope ladder but before he can get out, big as he is, the Bogeyman sees what they’re doing and captures them. Jack will be just in time to save them.

Jack is adorable too, from his figure like a skeleton to the way he feels lost.

Honestly, I don’t really care much for the rest, the other monsters, the mayor with two faces, the witches, the vampires, or even Jack’s ghost dog, Zero, who will play Rudolph for Jack.

Jack and Sally are the main characters, though, they dominate the film so it doesn’t matter much about the others.

At the end, after he’s been saved, Santa scolds Jack for what he did and tells him to listen to Sally next time he has a crazy idea like this.

Finally Jack notices her, she was really shy with him and never approached him, but she put herself at risk to help him, and he sees that now. They would have maybe kissed but are interrupted by the town finding that Jack is back safe and sound.

At the end, Jack sees that the doctor made himself another one, a woman better dressed who pushes his wheelchair, and he maybe feels bad for Sally who now probably has nowhere to go, so he follows her, and it ends when they kiss.

Like most of animated movies, or probably I could say all western animated movies, it is a musical, they often break into song to express their feelings, but it is really ok because they’re great, really.

崖の上のポニョ (Ponyo)- 2008

 I usually love all of Miyazaki’s movies, and this one won some stuff too, but I don’t like it. Well, I like the graphics, the drawings of Risa and Sosuke, but that’s it. I don’t like much the story, it’s not clear to me who this Fujimoto is now and what he does, or why Ponyo was the only big goldfish among hundreds of very small one, or if everyone saw her like me, a fish with a human face (one woman said so, but only one, the paranoic one), and honestly a goldfish with a human face was very creepy to me, not sweet at all. 

Sure, the animation is great, the colors are delightful and the town is lovely, I love Risa and Sosuke as characters, but but I didn’t much like… all the parts about Ponyo. Sorry.

Sosuke finds a little red goldfish trapped in a jar and rescues her, names her Ponyo and takes her with him to the kindergarten. Ponyo grows fond of him as well, but her ‘father’, a bizarre man who was once a human, takes her back to the sea with him. 

Sosuke cut his finger when he broke the jar to free her, but the fish licked his finger and it healed, and now she refuses the name the man calls her, wanting only to be called Ponyo and go back to Sosuke, so she uses her magic to grow legs and arms. He draws more magic and puts her back the way she was, and traps her with the other smaller goldfishes, but they help her get free and she basically makes a huge mess, flooded the ‘ship’ completely, draining all the magic he was cumulating, breaking a window and going out. With her magic she also causes big big waves that help her reach Sosuke’s house, only this causes the sea to get big and stormy and all ships are now in trouble, as well as all humans on land. 

She reaches Sosuke and stays with him and Risa, his mother. She’s worried for her husband at sea, but also for the old ladies at the house where she works, so she leaves them at home to go check on them. In the morning the water has reached outside his home, but Ponyo enlarges a toy-boat and they sail to go get his mom.

They meet other people and finally reach where Risa left her car. 

Fujimoto took Risa and all the old ladies under the sea where they are all happily waiting for him. Ponyo’s mother appears like a huge woman-like sea creature that Koichi says is the Goddess of Mercy, although how does he know…

They are almost there when Ponyo becomes too tired and falls asleep, then she slowly turns back into a fish. Sosuke carries her all the way to his mom.

She says that they could make Ponyo human though a sort of test, and if Sosuke manages it, she’ll be a child like him, otherwise she’ll become seafoam. Fujimoto called her because her magic was causing huge troubles to the human world, tsunami and moon changes and stuff, and now she tells Sosuke that someone must accept Ponyo for who she really is, a fish, and a human-fish, after she drank his blood, but he knows all versions of her and is fond of everyone. Ponyo accepts to give up all magic, so the lady puts her in a bubble and gives the fish back to Sosuke.

Now the old ladies can walk again even on normal land. Risa sees her husband’s ship arriving and runs to call out his name. Sosuke sees him too, and inadventently throws the fish in the air, who lands on his face kissing him and immediately becoming a five-year-old child like him.

ITA Ponyo sulla scogliera

Over the moon - 2020

 It was… nice, but not great. I like the animation and the characters (sort of) while they are on Earth, then it becomes bizarredly absurd once she gets on the moon. I mean, every animated movie is somehow absurd and one needs to leave logic behind, but here it’s really going too far… I didn’t like all the part where the kid makes her own rocket and gets to the moon.

The songs were good though.

Anyway, details.

FeiFei has a perfect life, with a father and mother who love her very much, and their little shop where they make moon-cakes, living in a nice little town, it’s all very idillic. It doesn’t last long though, because her mom gets sick, and after a long illness she dies. Still, FeiFei has her father and they go on, year after year, keeping up with their work at the shop, like an unbreakable team, until dad brings home Mrs Zhong, so she can meet FeiFei. It’s pretty obvious that dad is romantically involved in her, so much so that the woman’s son, Chin, already calls her sister.

FeiFei is annoyed with the little kid - he’s only eight. I don’t know how old she is, she acts like something in between a child and a wanna-be-adult, probably 12, 13, 14 or 15 tops.

FeiFei doesn’t like Chin and his mother, she doesn’t give them a chance because she doesn’t want them near her family, she doesn’t want her father to replace her mother. He tells her that sometimes he felt lonely, but she’s like ‘he has me!’… a child, but a petulant one.

When she was younger, her mother told her the story of Chang’e, the moon goddess, who became a goddess when she ate a pill of immortality, thus leaving the mortal world and her true love Houyi, and since then she’s all alone on the moon, thinking of him and waiting for him. Quite a sad story, if you ask me, I don’t see why she loved it so much and why they laughed about it.

At the moon festival, all her relatives join them and her aunts start talking about the goddess, and one of them says Chang’e took both pills to leave Houyi behind, and when FeiFei started protesting, she was mocked for still believing in that old story.

FeiFei thinks that her father should do like Chang’e, believe in true love and wait for it for eternity (the poor man) so she decides that if she shows him proof that Chang’e is real, everything will be as before between them, with no more Mrs Zhong and her son.

She starts studying for a way to build a rocket that will get her on the moon, and after various attempts she finally manages to build a good one. Chin joins her hiding inside, and his added weight almost makes them fail, but two flying space dogs rescue them and land them on the moon.

Craziness ensues.

It’s an explosion of colours and bizarre creatures, everything is bright and colourful. The goddess is like a super pop star, and insists FeiFei brings her The Gift, and in exchange FeiFei will have a picture to show her father.

A crazy, all too long race starts, FeiFei against all the creatures of Lunaria because whoever will give her The Gift will have a wish fulfilled. FeiFei goes back to her rocket, but has no idea what it is she’s looking for. She sees a Chang’e-doll, given to her by her mom as a gift, so she thinks that’s it. Some space chickens steal it and she tries to get it back but it gets destroyed.

During all this, Chin keeps trying to help his ‘sister’ in any way he can, poor child.

FeiFei thinks all is lost, and a creature tries to brighten her mood by letting her know how Chin helped her and they eat something. She finds a mooncake in her bag, given to her by Mrs Zhong, and inside it there’s a piece of jade, a half circle that is the missing piece of a pendant of Chang’e’s necklace. That’s the piece she needed, so now she can summon Houyi and be reunited with him, only it doesn’t last, because he’s dead, been dead long years at this point.

Chang’e is devastated, she falls into depression obscuring the whole moon, and FeiFei tries to talk to her. She’s the only one who can easily reach her because she has the same sadness inside, and she becomes a victim of the same depression.

Only now the goddess shows herself for the kind good person FeiFei’s mother talked about, and she talks to her about moving on and having her loved ones always with her and the usual stuff.

Chin breaks the barrier to reach his ‘sister’ , and the other creatures of Lunaria finally reach their goddess to show her that she’s loved as well, she’s not alone.

Now FeiFei has her photograph and can go back to Earth, with the help of space-creatures since her rocket is now destroyed.

The pictures burn when they reach the atmosphere, despite the fact that her fingers don’t, but it’s ok, apparently FeiFei has gotten over her little fit and is ready to let her father have a bit of a life.

At the end we see the family at another moon festival, maybe a year later, and now Mrs Zhong has married her father, and Chin is officially her brother, but it’s ok, the woman is very sweet and kind, and they are a beautiful family together.

ITA Over the moon - il fantastico mondo di Lunaria

小门神 - 2016

AKA The Guardian Brothers, or Little Door Gods.

Not bad, it’s interesting, not boring, it’s nice and the little girl is nice, but it’s a movie more for kids than adults I’d say. Nothing I’d watch more than once.

Details:

There were once two spirits who protected anyone who would put their images on their doors (or something like that) but the world changed and people forgot about the spirits, and now the spirit world is in chaos. Only Rain’s grandma still believes in them, and keeps the images on the doors of her old diner place. But Grandma died, and Rain and her mother Luli kept the place going. 

The new mayor in the spirit world wants a radical change, wants to totally cut any dealings with the humans, and he bans old Beckett because he helped an old human lady who had fallen down.

He remembers when many many years ago there was an evil enemy called Nian, and spirits and humans had to fight together to seal it away. Now one of the brothers thinks that if they freed the Nian, humans and spirits would work together again.

Nobody wants to eat in that old place and even the kids are mean to Rain, and she is very unhappy now. 

The slim brother is tired of these new rules and upset when he’s ordered to destroy the images that are portals to the humans world, so he crosses over. YuLei saves Rain against angry dogs, then he leaves. YuLei breaks the first seal to free the Nian, and the dragon takes his powers and his youth. That was easy, Colossus was a friend and didn’t fight him, but the second is guarded by Bloom and she stops him, but then she sits to talk to him and he sneakily breaks it, and she’s sucked away, and YuLei ages a bit more. There’s still a third seal. Despite all the troubles he’s causing to humans too (no water, no rivers) he goes on. His brother ShenTu tries to stop him. 

When they got no more water, Luli got some from their neighbour, who put something in it and they got in trouble. Then they accidentally put petals in it and their soups were now magical, but now there are no more petals. Rain and Luli decided to try on new ingredients and got more popular, and Rain finally found some friends to play with.

Still, YuLei is going on, and losing a bit of his spirit each time, and he almost breaks the third seal but ShenTu stops him in time (well, he had sort of stopped himself already, he had destroyed the statues/images of himself, but couldn’t bring himself to cut his brother’s) but then ShenTu accidentally finishes what he started, and breaks the third seal. Now both worlds are in trouble but Rain finds out that fireworks keep it at bay. 

In the spirit world, the brothers and the flying kids defeat the evil tree Nian (nooo, I love trees, couldn’t it have been an evil insect? :p)

Now YuLei is young again and the brothers open a restaurant for the spirits in their world, and the humans now believe again in the spirits and feel safe knowing that they are watching over them.

P.s. What happened to Bloom though? Is she alright?

Inside out - 2015

I liked it, of course I did. I liked how the ‘emotions’ looked like, as in a bit undefined, but artistically so, and I loved that Anger was reading on his newspaper what was happening in Riley’s life :-) . At moments it’s a bit boring, because cartoons must be for children too so they are also filled with little things for children, I could have done without all those silly things inside her head, but after all the protagonist is ten years old, so yeah, there was that too. 

What matters though is the moral, for once it is indeed what matters: the thing is, when Riley was little, a child, what mattered the most was Joy, of course, with only the sporadic interference of Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, but as Riley grows up they all become important. At first the console they use to ‘give Riley directions on what to do’ was rather small, there was space mainly for Joy alone. Riley had two loving parents, a best friend, a house in Minnesota with a lake she could go skating on, she played hockey and was generally a happy little girl. Until they had to move to San Francisco when she was ten. She tried to be positive about it, but the fact that all their stuff had ended up who knows where since the truck never arrived didn’t make it easy on any of them, and she had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor... on her first day in the new school, when she got up to introduce herself to the class, she started crying remembering all the nice things she left behind, the place she loved so much... Joy turned to look at what had happened and saw that Sadness had touched a memory (the memory of her time in Minnesota), and Joy got really upset as if it was all her fault, upset that the beautiful memory had turned blue, sad. That experience was, for Riley, a ‘basic memory’, but unlike all the previous ones (the one that created the Family island, Friendship island, and all other islands of personality) this was a sad memory. Joy was shocked, she refused to accept a sad basic memory and tried to stop Sadness from putting it with the others, and fought with her over that, causing the big mess: Joy, Sadness and all the basic memories were all sucked out of ‘headquarters’. Sadness is the first to point out that without Joy in headquarters, Riley will never be happy again. They need to get back there. 

Meanwhile, without them, Disgust Fear and Anger are the only emotions for Riley, so her answers to her parents are different, she shows attitude, and we get to see the ‘emotions’ in her parents’ heads, which was a moment I loved :lol: The father had Anger in command acting like a general giving orders to the others, while the Mother actually had Sadness in command, but with all the others very close and working very well together, I loved her head :-D

Joy thinks of trying the ‘quickest way back’ but they should walk over a line and if they fall they’ll be forgotten... so that doesn’t work and they try another way. Walking through the long-term-memory maze is dangerous, they could get lost, Sadness has read the manuals but the place is huge and they walk all night without getting any closer. 

When Riley’s friend talks to her about the new girl on their team back home, Riley becomes angry and Friendship island falls down...

Along the way they meet Bing Bong, Riley’s old imaginary friend (and when he asks her what they’re doing down there, Joy implies that it’s all Sadness’ fault :-/ which is not at all, as we know). 

He suggests taking the ‘train of thoughts’ and also suggests a shortcut to get to it. Sadness advices them against the dangerous shortcut but Joy doesn’t listen to her of course and they almost get vaporised (well, they become abstract then dismembered than bidimensional... but they get out in time, which I thought was quite a complex thing for a child’s movie, I liked that). 

They miss the train and go through a land of imagination, meanwhile Riley tries to get in the hockey team, but gets frustrated and angry and leaves very soon, making the Hockey Island fall as well.

Bing Bong’s ‘rocket’ gets thrown down among the forgotten things and he’s feeling very down, and Joy’s attempt at making him laugh don’t work, and when Sadness talks to him Joy is all ‘don’t make him feel worse’ but she’s not, she’s actually listening to him, understanding him, which actually makes him feel better, and Joy is surprised at that. They find the train, but it stops when Riley falls asleep. Sadness suggests waking Riley up, and Riley accepts the idea only turning it into her own idea... the only way to wake Riley up is by entering her dreams of course, and Sadness suggests scaring her awake, but Joy strongly opposes the idea choosing another way because ‘she knows Riley’ and she wants to make her so happy in her dream that she’ll wake up happy... which is absurd, of course.

They actually interrupt a bad dream trying to make her laugh, until things go down and it turns again into a bad dream. They are found out and dream-production-security arrests Bing Bong. He has the basic memories so they have to free him. They finally use the gigantic scary clown to scare Riley awake. The train moves again now, but then Anger decides to take action and plants an idea into Riley’s head, to go back to Minnesota to make new happy basic memories since she was happy there, and he makes Riley steal mom’s credit card to pay for the ticket. Joy finally has a nice work for Sadness, telling her scaring Riley was a good idea. 

When Riley steals the credit card, Honesty Island falls down making the train fall too. They make it out alive, and then they have the new idea of using the ... ehm... recall-tube or something: Joy gets in but when Sadness tries to go with her she touches the basic memories and Joy leaves her behind saying Riley needs to be happy and she’ll make everything sad... so Joy goes alone but the tube breaks and she falls down among the things to be forgotten, and Bing Bong falls with her. 

She sees again the sad basic memory and takes it with her, and also watches again the happy memory connected to hockey that she loved so much, and discovers that before she was happy, she was actually sad that they had lost the game, she became sad so her parents and friends went to her to cheer her up, it’s thanks to Sadness if she had that happy memory...

She refuses to give up, and decides to use Bing Bong’s ‘rocket’ to get up there again, but they fail every time, until Bing Bong jumps out of the rocket-cart at the last moment, so not to weight her down, and she makes it. He’ll be forgotten, of course, but he’s the imaginary friend of a very little girl, so it’s normal, you know. 

Riley goes to the bus station, refusing every call from her worried mother who didn’t find her at home. The Family Island falls too. Joy starts looking for Sadness but when she finds her Sadness runs away crying because she doesn’t want to make Riley sad like Joy always told her... but now Joy knows that Riley needs her too, and manages a way to get both of them to headquarters again (I don’t know why but I find quite disturbing the scene when Joy piles up in her magic bag a lot of imaginary-boyfriends that keep piling up one over the other after she takes away the bag... I don’t know why, but that disturbs me on a physical level :-/

Riley gets on the bus, Fear Disgust and Anger now try to stop her but the console doesn’t work anymore and they don’t know what to do and are unable to get that idea out of Riley’s head. 

When Joy and Sadness are back, Joy lets Sadness take control, saying that Riley needs her, and indeed she’s able to get that idea out of her so that Riley hurries off the bus and heads back home. She’s the right one to help her now, and Joy even gives her all the five basic memories she had been carrying around, because it is right after all for Sadness to touch them: indeed when she does they turn into sad memories, but that’s what happens sometimes, that’s what happens now in Riley’s heart, because those memories remind her of home, of the friend she left there, of all the things she left behind, so thinking about all that now makes her cry while she tells her parents that she misses home. Well, they hug her and tell her that it’s normal, they miss it too, and her parents both hug her, comfort her, and then Sadness takes Joy’s hand to get her close so that Riley smiles among the tears being hugged by her loving parents, and a new basic memory, part-sad-part-joy comes out, and a new Family Island comes up.

Next thing, we see that they all have a bigger console, with space for all of them. Riley is now twelve, she plays in the local hockey team, and new friends, and is happy again. 

To end the movie, we get a peek of other people’s ‘emotions-inside’: she bumps into a boy and in his head there’s a ‘girl-alarm’ sending everyone into frantic panic. During the credits we see the teacher’s head, really looking forward to the end of school, then a couple of girls, a clown, a dog, the bus driver (in his head there are five Anger-looking emotions :-p) then a cat, where there’s no one at the console until one of them leisurely walks on it moving something that makes the cat jump and run away..... :-p

Despicable me - 2010

I liked it a lot, it’s funny and also very sweet because this ‘despicable’ man who wants to be the greatest of all villains (meaning thief, this is a cartoon and there is no death) finally falls in love with three little girls, three orphans who for a while show him what does it mean to have someone who loves you, to never be alone again. 

The three children are lovely because they have different ages, different personalities, they want a home and a father-figure but they also know how to depend only on the three of them, there are no temper-tantrums, no loud crying, only ‘four people’ that learn that being together is better than being alone. 

And then there are the minions :lol: they all look like the container inside the kiinder-eggs, all yellow, all making strange noises, strange but somehow adorable, and they are all cheerful and funny.

Details:

It starts with a group of tourists in Egypt, when a little brat escapes his mother’s leash and runs away eventually falling on a pyramid... which turns out to be fake, an inflatable one, and the news spread all over the world, someone stole a pyramid!

Gru lives his life threatening his neighbour’s dog’s life, using his freezing-ray to avoid the queue at the bar and making children cry and stealing... and when he hears about that pyramid he sets off to become again the greatest villain by stealing the moon! He asks the help of doctor Nefario and asks the bank for a loan... a special one, the Bank of Evil: he explains his project but the loan is denied because he doesn’t have the shrinking-ray yet - he plans to build a rocket to go near the moon, shrink it and steal it. 

A younger new villain, Vector, is the one who stole the pyramid, and when Gru manages to steal the shrinking-ray with the help of his minions, Vector immediately steals it from him !

So now Gru tries in any way to steal it back, but he can’t even enter Vector’s super-guarded place.

When he sees that three little girls are allowed entrance, he has a plan: to adopt the children long enough to steal the ray.

Margo is the older one, then there’s Edith always with her pink cap on her head, and little Agnes. They live in an orphanage and go around selling biscuits hoping to sell enough so not to be put inside the ‘box of shame’ ... :(

He’s totally not prepared to deal with little girls - he even put bowls on the floor with food as if they were pets. He puts them to sleep in three bomb-beds ... and has to take them to dance-class..

He asks Nefario for bisco-robots but at first he gets disco-robots because the old man misunderstood... then finally it’s cookie-selling-time, and the girls are immediately allowed to enter because Vector likes their cookies, and the cookie-bot that Gru put in there help him to steal the ray back. 

On their way back, the girls asks for a day at the luna-park and he agrees thinking he could leave them there, but of course they are too little and he has to stay with them... and they play and he has fun I guess because the four of them get home together and full of toys and cotton-candy and Gru even has the face all painted like a cat or something.

The loan is still denied and he has no money to go on with his plan, but the little girls give him all they have - a few coins - and the minions follow enthusiastically giving him all they have, plus Gru instructs them to sell everything he has to get money, and so they go on with the plan. 

The children are so cute and sweet, and they like each other now.

We see that Vector is the son of the bank’s director who refused the loan. 

The launch is scheduled the same day of the dance-recital, and Gru wonders what to do because he’d like to go see them, but Nefario is against it, saying that he’s losing focus and ruining the plan, and even arranges for the children to be sent back to the orphanage.

He is sad but lets them go. He moves on with the plan, but without enthusiasm now. He puts on his pink space-suit (after he put it in the washing-machine together with the girls pink-tutus).

The launch goes perfectly, he reaches the moon, shrinks it and takes it. He rushes back hoping to get there on time for the recital, but he’s too late, everyone’s left. He finds a ransom note, though. Vector has taken the girls away.

He asks for the moon (literally I mean) in exchange for the girls, and Gru yields immediately, goes to his place and surrenders the moon. Vector is the real villain though, and he takes his word back, doesn’t release the girls and instead flies away with them and the moon. 

Nefario warns him that everything that has been shrinked will soon return to its original volume, and the bigger it was the fastest it will be to return normal. 

Gru, Nefario and the minions chase Vector to rescue the girls. The moon becomes bigger and bigger until it destroys Vector’s ship and goes back up to its original place, with Vector on top.

This is a cartoon, it doesn’t matter that he takes away the moon and nothing on Earth happens (other than surfers being unable to surf anymore), or that the moon goes back to its original place by itself... of course it doesn’t make sense, that’s part of the rules, this is like a fairytale, it’s not like a girl could really sleep for a hundred years before waking up and still be a teenager. Those things don’t matter in this movie, of course. 

Now both the moon and the pyramid has been given back, Gru is again together with the three little girls and they are so sweet together. He reads for them a bedtime story he wrote himself based on their own story, and gives them a goodnight-kiss - first Agnes, then Edith, and when it’s Margo’s turn she jumps up and hugs him tight. Outside their room, a long line of minions awaiting for their goodnight kiss too :-))

So sweet.

The movie ends with the girls dancing for a private recital, for Gru, Nefario, all the minions and Gru’s mother (who looks totally like Red’s grandma in Hoodwinked).

ITA cattivissimo me

Hoodwinked! - 2005

It’s rather silly but it’s also fun and entertaining, the Red Riding Hood story told as a mystery...

It starts with an interesting voice saying that there’s more to the story we all know.. then we move to grandma’s cottage, when Red arrives and the wolf is in bed wearing a granny-mask, but she doesn’t fall for it and he reveals himself. She’s ready to defend herself and he’s ready to take her down, when granny hops out of the closet all tied up, and the hunter jumps through the window wielding an axe. The police arrive, and chief Grizzly wants to arrest them all when long-legs-frog Flippers arrive. The chief has a case of recipe-thieves that’s upsetting him, and he thinks his trail ends right here in granny’s cottage. Still, Flippers wants to hear their stories. Red (who is called so because of the hood she wears; Flippers “what about when you’re not wearing it?” “... I usually wear it”)   is the first: she was making deliveries for her granny’s goodie shop, and on the road she saw many goodies shop closing for good because of the recipes-bandit, and she phoned her granny to see if she might know what to do about it. She didn’t, but Red was still concerned and thought she should bring granny her book of recipes for safekeeping (...why?). Even if her granny told her not to, when someone threw a stone into her house warning she’d be next, she took the book and rode to her granny. In the woods she met the wolf who wanted her goodies and the book, she sprayed him and ran away, and he shouted “I’ll get you and your little granny too”. She asked directions to a goat cursed by a witch to sing everything he says, and she finally reached granny’s cottage up the mountain and found the wolf who attacked her and then the woodsman burst in screaming “like a maniac”.

Next, Flippers hears it from the wolf:

it turns out Flippers remembers him, he’s a reporter, an investigative journalist apparently, and he thinks Red might be the goody bandit so he explains that he followed her and heard bits of her conversation with her bunny friend, but only the suspicious bits not the whole thing, so he followed her and questioned her. He’s the one who blows up the rollercoaster-mine after his squirrel friend decided to light up a whole bunch of dynamite ‘candles’. I liked that when he read the name Dynamite and said ‘it must be Italian’ it’s because he actually read it with the Italian pronunciation :-)  When he finally reaches granny’s cottage, the wolf finds it empty and doesn’t even notice that there’s a tied-up granny in the closet. He disguises himself as granny to get Red to talk and get his answers. 

Next up is the woodsman, who turns out to be an actor; he drives a schnitzel-on-a-stick truck, and while he was singing with the children his truck got robbed; the director called him saying he had to come back the next day and audition again, only better, so to go into the woods and practice, be a real woodsman! Find an axe and swirl it around! And so he did, he started chopping trees down :-( even a nice, very big tree that then fell down towards him so he started running downhill and fell through the window inside the house...

It’s now granny’s turn, and Red is surprised to find out that they don’t tell each other everything after all, and that granny has a closet full of sport-trophies, she likes to snowboard and sky jump and skateboard and surf... so when she told Red not to come it was because she wanted to go to the “extreme dream snow sports competition” . There were four bad people there who tried everything to get rid of her, but she got moves that not even Neo in Matrix dared and when they said they’d go after Red next she got worried. She’s the one who caused the avalanche to get rid of them, or at least slow them down, and after winning the competition she parachuted herself off and flew home. She entered by the chimney and got entangled in her own chute. 

Red is sad her granny lied to her, and did all these things while at the same time demanding she stayed home safe, and so she walks out alone for a bit under the soundtrack ‘now Red is blue’.

Flippers makes a recap: the actor is guilty of cutting down the red trees but he points out someone robbed him first; maybe a competitor like granny? to which she replies: “I may lead a double life full of secrets and deception but that’s no reason to be suspicious”, or maybe they were all victims of a hungry wolf who says he simply followed the little girl... and now Red and the book are gone... and now Flippers says it may have been someone who was always present at anything that happened.. the bunny! Flippers sends the police after the bunny! Red tries to fight him but the bunny’s stronger and with the help of the four evil skiers they trap her. Granny, wolf and actor Kurt go after them and save Red and the police arrest  all the baddies.

When it’s all over Mr Flippers asks Red, granny, Wolf and the squirrel if they want to work for him on undercover, impossible missions in far away places, for his “happily ever after agency”, and they agree..

ITA cappuccetto rosso e gli insoliti sospetti

Red-Anne Hathaway

Granny-Glenn Close

Woodsman-Jim Belushi

Wolf-Patrick Warburton

Flippers-David Ogden Stiers

Woolworth-Chazz Palminteri

Twitchy-Cory Edwards

Zootopia - 2016

Loved it! So cute ! The animals act like humans (there are no humans in this world) but it’s very nice, they’re not really humans, they’re civilized animals who stopped killing each other :p although it’s not specified of course what lions and such eat...

It’s about little bunny Judy who wants to become a police officer, but there are no bunnies in the police force ... she doesn’t give up, she grows up and joins the police academy, and is good at it. Officially become an officer, she goes to Zootropolis full of hopes and dreams. At first, she’s on parking duty , but that’s not what she wants to do, she wants to be a real police officer! So at the first opportunity she promises an otter that she’ll find her missing husband. Her boss only gives her 48 hours to find him, although many other animals have disappeared and the department hasn’t found them after two weeks.... she starts investigating, and she can only start with fox Nick Wilde, the only one she knows that was near the scene when the otter went missing. He’s a hustler, but she records him saying how much money he’s ever made and she blackmails him into helping her or he’ll go to jail for evading taxes... they manage to find the plate of the car he was in, then go to find the owner of the car, but all the workers are sloths and when she can finally get the name it’s night already... they finally find the car, and it shows clear sign of battle. They meets Mr Big, the mole who owns the car, and he looks like a mob-godfather... he’s about to ‘ice them’ but it turns out that his daughter is the little one Judy saved earlier, so dad helps them instead, telling them that the otter became suddenly wild and attacked the driver himself... they go talk with the jaguar driver but suddenly he becomes wild too. They look at the traffic cameras thanks to the help of sheep-assistant mayor. They see that some wolves took the jaguar away, out of town. They go there and find all the missing animals, and also the mayor himself trying to keep it a secret, with staff trying to figure out what happened to them. All the victims, the animals that went wild, were predators, and since the mayor is a lion he didn’t want everybody to know that. Judy arrests him, and the case solved... it seems, but it’s not, yet.

Judy has to talk at a press conference, and she’s very nervous. Now friends, she tells Nick that he could become a police officer too and work with her, but then she tells the journalists that all the wild animals were predators only, and that it might be a genetic thing, that it might be something in their dna... she keeps on talking, not realising that she’s creating big trouble... silly naive girl...

Nick is hurt by her words, and leaves. The city becomes divided, preys start being scared/suspicious of predators, and she feels really bad for ruining the city. Now the sheep-assistant-mayor is the new mayor, but Judy quits her job, thinking she failed, she wanted to make the world a better place and instead she made it a worse one. 

She goes back home, to work with her parents.. to discover that she actually got to them with her ideals on all animals working together, and they are actually in business with a fox ! The same one that was a bully when they were little kids, is now a better fox (from how he talks I’d say after a good therapy..) and makes cakes. From him, she learns that a certain kind of blue flowers is called ‘the night howlers’, and that a rabbit went savage after eating them... so she goes back to Zootropolis and finds Nick, apologises and they keep working together :-)

They find a weasel that stole night-howlers and he says he sold them to a ram.. they find him, and discover that he’s using the flowers to make a drug that, when it hits an animal, makes him go wild... later on it turns out that it was all a plan by sheep-now-mayor who hates predators and framed them. 

She’s arrested of course, and Nick becomes a police officer and starts working with Judy :-) 

All the animals that were affected by the serum are cured, and Zootropolis is back to normal :-)

I liked it a lot, the moments the characters showed signs of acting like the animals they are were adorable... although at the beginning they had a fox acting like a feline... when Judy was young, fox-bully Gideon took out his claws and scratched her face.. like a cat... but foxes are of the canidae-family, they are not feline, can they really act like that?? Not for nothing when later on Nick pretends to be wild and to kill her, he bites her, that’s much more natural.

ITA Zootropolis

The Boxtrolls - 2014

It was nice, I wouldn’t mind watching it again but I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Boxtrolls are basically small trolls that cover themselves up with boxes. A timid race, they like to build things and they steal little objects from the city, things that men have thrown away. For some reason, here “cheese” is what distinguishes the rich, I mean that our ‘let’s drink champagne’ here becomes ‘let’s taste some cheese’.

It starts saying that Boxtrolls are kidnapping babies, and therefore are a threat to people. A sinister man, Snatcher, blackmails Lord Portley-Rind to get a huge reward after he’ll have exterminated all Boxtrolls to keep all children, including the lord’s daughter, safe.

When we see the boxtrolls coming out at night to steal things, they don’t seem threatening at all, but the exterminator keeps catching more and more of them. Those who manage to escape, retreat to their world below, where we see the supposedly-kidnapped baby. A troll brings him gifts, calls him Eggs, they all eat insects, and the baby grows up as one of them, cared for and loved.

When he’s a boy, he is seen at night by Winnie, Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter, but when she tries to tell others nobody listens to her. All her father seems to care about is his White Hat, a prestigious symbol of his status. There are not many boxtrolls left anymore, most of them have been captured by Snatcher, but when Fish is taken, the trolls that Eggs considers to be his father, he goes out during the day to find him. He hears the story of how ten years ago the boxtrolls took a baby and that’s why now humans fear and hate them, and lock doors at night. 

Snatcher likes to eat cheese to emulate the rich people in town, but he’s extremely allergic to it, and the three men with him must always save him before it’s too late. Pickles and Gristle don’t seem evil like Snatcher, they think they’re doing the good and right thing actually, but the third man Trout seems to be enjoying his work a bit too much, I say. 

Eggs finds out that all the boxtrolls are still alive, kept as slaves working for Snatcher. Winnie followed Eggs, so she sees everything and says that she’ll tell her father all about it, so of course they take her prisoner. 

Eggs saves her and they all escape to the troll-land below. Only now he learns that he’s a boy and not a troll... but he was not stolen. He was given to Fish by a nice man who liked trolls because he was a builder too.  When Snatcher killed him and tried to take the baby, he gave his son to Fish and shouted to run, so they took him away and raised him. 

Now Eggs asks Winnie’s help, they plan to explain everything to her father. She makes proper boy-clothes for him and takes him home, but her dad never listens. Eggs goes back down below, but Snatcher finds them even there; Eggs shouts for them to run, to do something, but they simply hide, meaning they stop where they are and hide inside their box... so Snatcher catches them all. 

We see that the boy’s birth-father is still alive, he’s been a prisoner for ten years, hanging upside-down, but he’s alive. Snatcher doesn’t need them anymore, and intends to kill all boxtrolls. The boy’s father tries to help him, and Eggs makes a good speech but it’s sad when it seems not to be working, because the boxes don’t move. Eggs thinks they’re still ‘hiding’, so when all boxes are crashed he thinks that they all died, and when his father laughs he thinks he’s gone mad after all those years hanging upside down...

Snatcher tells everyone that all boxtrolls have been exterminated, and therefore there’s no more curfew. Now he wants his white hat as promised, and he wants Lord Portley-Rind’s hat!

When Snatcher tries to kill Eggs publicly, Winnie convinces Pickles and Gristle to spare him. 

Trout won’t stop though, but here we see that the trolls are indeed not dead, they escaped out of their boxes without being seen by anyone but the boy’s father. That’s why the man laughed.

The trolls, with Eggs and Winnie’s help, destroy Snatcher’s machine, but then he captures Winnie to force the lord to give up his hat for her. He loves her after all, and so he yields to Snatcher.

Finally with the white hat, Snatcher wants to take his place into the cheese-tasting-room, to taste cheese as is the ritual among lords, and Eggs makes a speech to convince him that he doesn’t need white hats and cheese to change who he is, that things don’t make who you are, only you can make you, but in Snatcher’s mind that’s what he’s doing, what he is, he has made himself and thinks that’s who he is, so he eats cheese and his face starts growing in an unnatural, sick way, until he explodes.

This is their happy ending, and now everyone can live happily, people and trolls together, no more hiding, no more curfew, no more fear on both sides.

During the ending credits there’s a son in Italian that names a lot of cheeses saying that they’re the best thing in the world - it can’t name them all but it names quite a few.

ITA Boxtrolls - le scatole magiche

Frankenweenie - 2012

I liked it enough, because it was scarysweet, because the core of the film is the love of a solitary boy for his dog. Also because it shows how ordinary, close-minded people react to what they don’t understand in an aggressive way turning themselves into the real bad guys.

I never find animation scary, so I’ll say that it is ‘scary’ in an entertaining way, not in a scary way. I know what I mean now, I wonder if I’ll still know what I meant in years to come..

Anyway, the details:

Victor’s only real friend is his dog Sparky who stars in all his movies and plays catch with him. He sometimes talk with his neighbour Elsa who also loves her dog Persephone. His father wants him to interact more and play baseball with other children, so he does, but when he hits the ball Sparky breaks free and runs after it. Sparky gets hit by a car and dies. Victor is devastated: “I don’t want him in my heart, I want him here with me”, and truer words were never spoken.

When he learns from the school’s new science teacher that a body responds to electricity even after death, he chooses to try his own science-project :-p he digs out Sparky’s body and revives him in his attic. At first it seems to him that it didn’t work, but then “you’re alive! you’re alive!”, but Victor must keep it a secret so Sparky can’t go out and can’t leave the attic. Sparky does though, he seems to have a habit of breaking free, and Edgar sees him and confronts him “your dog is alive, you did it!” and “show me how or I’ll tell everyone”. Edgar buys a dead fish and wants Victor to show him how he did it. The goldfish swims again now but is also invisible. Edgar promises that he won’t tell anyone but then he goes straight to Toshiaki and Bob. They both want to win the science fair prize, and when Bob falls off the roof troubles start. The mayor says that the new teacher “endangers” the children and is a menace. When given the chance to defend himself, the teacher says “the confusion here is that you are all very ignorant, I mean ‘stupid’, ‘primitive’, ‘unenlightened’, you do not understand science so you are afraid of it”. He gets fired of course, and the gym teacher takes his place :-/

Edgar tells the other kids about Victor bringing back Sparky. Victor’s parents find out too and Sparky runs outside, towards the town’s country-fair. While everyone’s out, Edgar takes the other kids to Victor’s attic to show them how he did it. 

Sparky goes to sleep over his grave.

Toshiaki digs up his dead turtle Shelley, Nassor his dead hamster Colossus. Edgar finds a dead rat and Bob uses a whole packet of sea-monsters, while the girl uses a dead bat.. they all want to try Victor’s experiment. 

When lightnings hit, the girl’s living-car Mr Whiskers had the dead bat in his mouth so he becomes a half-cat half-bat flying monster, Shelley becomes a gigantic turtle, and there’s a whole army of sea monsters. Bob asks for Victor’s help, and Toshiaki too: “I asked him first” - “My problem bigger” and they all see Shelley walking by. 

Victor stops the sea monsters with popcorn and Shelley and the rat with electricity. Mr Whiskers abducts Persephone and Elsa runs after her dog. Victor runs to help, and Sparky calls for help but as they see him, the mayor and everyone else is like “monster!” and they start saying “he killed Elsa!” and “kill it!” . Victor saves Elsa, and Sparky runs in to help him. The windmill is on fire because of the mayor’s torch but Sparky brings Victor out, but then Mr Whiskers brings Sparky back inside. 

Mr Whiskers dies then the firemen bring out Sparky’s body. They are all touched at how the undead-dog saved his life, and they attach the body to all the cars’ batteries, and Sparky is ‘recharged’. 

Hotel Transylvania - 2012

Nope, sorry. I liked the idea and I liked the beginning, but then it became too loud and most of all they  reverted to the usual thing: the first guy the girl sees in her life is her true love.. :-/ I liked the idea of the story where the protagonists are the ‘monsters’ , I liked the father-daughter relationship, specially while she was growing up and he was a single father, and I liked how he wanted to protect her keeping her at the hotel... what I didn’t like was Jonathan, always so loud, and silly stuff like the battle with the floating tables, but generally everything involving Jonathan.

The beginning was really nice, starting in 1895 when this little vampire girl is born. We see that she has no mother growing up, and since her father wants to protect her he never lets her go out and has a big castle built in a remote place surrounded by a forest of ghosts and a cemetery of undead, where nobody, that is no humans, will ever go... the sweetest scenes of the movie were of Mavis growing up. :-D

We move to our time, when Mavis is about to turn 118, which they treat as 18. Her dad Dracula plans a big birthday party, as he does every year. The castle is a hotel, a refuge for all supernaturals away from the cruel and scary humans. 

The funniest scene of the movie was here, when all the guests arrive; there are all the usual ‘monsters’: there are skeletons and blobs and many others, and there is Frankenstein’s monster, but since he doesn’t really have a name and they can’t call it ‘monster’, in the movie he ‘is’ Frankenstein. There’s the wolf with his family, which consists in a lot of little wolves running around making a mess and eating everything. When the invisible man arrives, Dracula plays a little trick on him: he hands him a piece of bacon, the other wonders why until a lot of little wolves jump on him :lol: 

Dracula had promised his daughter that she’d be allowed to go outside the castle, and he pretends to agree, but when she reaches the nearest village she doesn’t know that it’s actually a fake village, full of fake people - played by the zombies - because he wants her to believe that all humans are cruel and only want to burn her and kill her, so that she might lose her desire to go away.

Unfortunately for Dracula, a young human reaches the hotel, a boy who likes adventures and travels everywhere with his backpack, and everything is cool and funny to him, so when he heard of ghosts in the forest he couldn’t wait to go and see. He comes in and he thinks everything’s normal, that they all wear costumes and stuff, until he realizes they’re for real. He’s scared only for a moment, but as soon as Dracula explains that he doesn’t drink human blood he’s not scared anymore but excited for the new adventure now that his life is no more threatened. He walks around pretending to be a distant cousin of Frankenstein, and Mavis likes him. He tells her he’s 121 years old (so can we guess he’s actually 21?), and that he’s been everywhere, to ‘live the life’, blah blah blah. In this movies everything’s simple and money don’t matter, of course. The usual stuff.

The cook and his mouse understand there’s something wrong with him (meaning: he’s human) and they kidnap him (Johnny) but Dracula saves him and then tells him of his great love and of the humans who killed her, and Johnny understands and wants to go away, but Dracula says that he must go after the party or she’ll be disappointed and the party ruined.

During the party Mavis insists on going back to the village so he confesses that it doesn’t really exists. The cook reveals that Johnny’s human, and Mavis says that it doesn’t matter, she wants to be with him, but Johnny says that he hates monsters and goes away. 

Mavis is sad, she thinks she’s in love with him - really, the only living thing her age in 118 years and she thinks she loves him - so Dracula asks the others for help and they try to bring Johnny back :-/

The little wolf-girl helps them: by sniffing Johnny’s shirt or something she can even say which plane he’s on... - the wolf eats all the sheep on the road to clear the path, and when they get into town.. well, they are in Transylvanya, so there’s a Monster Festival, everybody’s dressed up as one of them, everyone loves them and they clear a path for Dracula so he can move quickly, even raising their capes so he doesn’t have to fear the sunlight. 

Johnny’s plane is already in the air, so Dracula has to fly in daylight, he apologises to him and has the plane turn around. He’s a little burned up but not much, considering that as a little bat he was almost on fire.

Johnny is his gift for Mavis (oh my) and it ends like this, with everybody happy. I guess after the party she’ll be allowed to go around the world with him :-/ she’s a vampire too though, does she has to avoid daylight as well? and let’s not forget that when he’ll be 90 she’ll still look like a 30-year-old :-/

The first new face she sees in maybe 100 years and she falls in love with him :-/

They exchanged only a few words, and yet she says that they ‘zing-ed’ and therefore he’s her true big love, even though they don’t really know anything about each other :-/ the usual stuff :-/

Tinker Bell and the secret of the wings - 2012

I liked this of course, it's one of those children's movie where all fairies are beautiful and perfect and happy :-D It's very nice and light and pretty and magical :-) I would have absolutely loved it as a child.
We see them all working together to make baskets that owls will fly to the winter fairies. Tinker Bell is very curious to see the winter woods and when it's time for rabbits and other animals to cross the border she helps so she can see, but it's not allowed to cross the border for fairies, apparently it's an order of the winter lord Milori. She does anyway, just for a bit, and her wings sparkle. Her friends take her to the doctor to warm her wings immediately, and then she looks for answers in books, but the bookworm ate the page about sparkling wings. Tinker Bell makes a winter coat for herself so she can go to the winter woods and ask the Keeper, the one who writes the books. She hides in a basket and the owls fly her there. She hides from the winter fairies and follows one of them to the keeper.
Everything's frozen there. Another girl comes to see the keeper for the same reason, sparkling wings, and now that they're close they sparkle again. "two fairies born from the same laugh" (of a baby). They're sisters and their wings are identical, that's why they sparkle. Periwinkle is a frost-fairy, she frost things. They talk a lot "Terence and I barely escaped the pirate ship" etc. They spend a day together and Periwinkle wants to see her world, the colours, the bugs...
Tink can't fly because her wings are safely warm inside the coat.
Back home, Tink tells her friends and they help her make a snow-machine, well, the winter fairies provide a big block of ice and they use a grater so it rains ice in front of them. Peri loves all the colours, the flowers, the butterflies.. they wanted to go talk to the queen but they run out of ice and have to bring her back quickly. Lord Milori is there to help Periwinkle. He is sorry but the rule is there to protect them, their wings might break. The queen comes flying (he always travels by owl) and she says that this is her rule. Tink and Peri talk to their respective rulers and hear the same story: once, a winter fairy and a warm fairy fell in love and met at the border but they wanted to be together more, until one of them broke a wing "for which there is no cure" so she made that rule and he agreed. When the lord tried to destroy the snow-machine it got stuck near the ice and started blowing ice all over.
The warm fairies un-stuck it but the balance between seasons have been broken and their land starts to freeze. They try to protect the pixie-dust tree because without it no fairy will fly again. Other fairies protect  the bugs and birds. Tink understands that a frozen cover could protect their tree so she flies to the winter woods to ask Peri's help. Peri and her friends go there to help: it's all frozen anyway, so they can go without risk. They spread their frost before the ice reaches the tree, but it's too big and they worry they won't make it in time but then the lord and his fairies come to help, the keeper warned him. The ice comes and all the warm fairies hide inside the tree to keep warm. The dust flows again, they made it, hooray :-)
The ice starts melting, the sun is back again. When Peri calls Tink to fly with her, Tink reveals that one of her wings broke - just like Lord Milori has a broken wing and can never fly again - but when they join their identical wings, her wing repairs itself. The lord decides it's not good to keep them apart, so now all the warm fairies can cross the border with warm coats and frost over their wings - to keep the warm inside and the cold outside.
Tink and Peri can now spend time together, and the queen and lord Milori too :-) As well as all the other fairies of course.

The secret life of pets - 2016

It was nice, but more suited for children than for adults, because it follows the usual nonsense that we’ve seen hundreds times: enemies, huge obstacles that are absurd, but I get it, it’s much easier this way than to find a reasonable plot for animal characters. This way it’s easier because you follow the same old story: the two enemies that fight side to side and become friends, the big enemy to defeat so that Good can prevail.. it’s what they always do, which is fun if you’re a child, but becomes rather boring if you’re no longer one and would like to see something that actually makes sense - what I mean is, I know it’s a cartoon, but one thing is to accept that all animals talk to each others while their humans are at work, another is to accept that they can drive a taxi.. 
It starts in a lovely way, in an adorable way, when you meet Max and his human Katie, and learn how happy they are together and how much they love each other. You also meet other animals: other dogs, a cat, a bird, a guinea pig.. I wished they hadn’t made the cat so fat, in animated movies cats are always dangerously fat or dangerously thin..
The scene when the dogs went all crazy after a little ball, and the cat looked at them as thinking “silly dogs” but then she saw a light on the floor and started jumping at it, it was adorable, and so true :lol:
One night Katie brings home a new dog, Duke, a rescue dog, and Max is jealous. 
Troubles start, slow at first, with Duke taking Max’ bed, and getting angry when he hears that Max wants him out of the house; Duke eats his food too, and Max retaliate blackmailing him: he has to do everything Max says or Max will make so many troubles in the house that Katie will send Duke away, thinking it was him. Angry at this, while at the park with a dog-sitter, Duke takes Max far away where they meet a lot of street cats who take away their collars, so they’re taken for stray dogs and captured by god-catchers. 
Now the craziness starts: the van is attacked by a rabbit, a pig and a chameleon. They free another dog, and to be freed Max and Duke tell them that they hate humans too and even killed one. The bunny is the leader of a gang of animals living in the sewers after being abandoned by their owners. Believing that they killed their owner, the bunny takes them along; when they are confronted by Viper, a huge, half-blind, one-toothed snake about to bite them, Duke fights and Viper is accidentally killed. Duke and Max escape but the bunny and his gang want revenge. 
Gidget, a cute female dog secretly in love with Max, seeing that he didn’t come back with the others - because the dog-sitter didn’t even notice he was two dogs short - wants to find him, and becomes friends with a hawk living on the roof. She also asks the help of other animals that are Max’ friends and together they search for him. They too have to escape the bunny’s gang.
Max and Duke find themselves far away, feed themselves entering a sausage-factory, try to find Duke’s old home, only to find out that his old owner died, and are again found by the dog-catchers who trap Max. Duke saves him but is captured in his place. Max follows the van, and when the pig is captured too, he joins forces with the bunny. When the van falls down on the bridge, Max goes in to save Duke but loses the keys. The bunny dives into the water to bring them the keys, so they all get to safety. The pig comes driving a taxi to bring everybody home. 
Max and Duke, along with all their friends, go back to their homes where the owners come back finding them waiting as if nothing had happened. 
The bunny is seen by a little girl who hugs him and takes him home, and despite all his words of hate and revenge, he’s not fighting back anymore, and lets her take him. 
Max and Duke are at peace now, and live happily together with Katie.
Now, it was a nice movie, specially if you love animals, because it was nice to see that every animal had its own personality, and it was adorable to see them acting like real pets, and the cat’s lines were funny - the “never mind the random cat identity” was hilarious; also New York was very well rendered in my opinion of someone not-at-all expert on New York.
I think it was very well done, I simply wish it had been based on more normal animal stuff instead of creating the usual absurd adventures. 
The poodle who loves hard-rock was also adorable :-p
ITA pets-vita da animali

キャプテン ハーロック (Harlock)

(which reads something like kyaputenn Harokk in katakana)

It was disappointing, and yet it was good and I liked it. Fact is, there isn’t enough Harlock in it. Animation or not it doesn’t matter, if I watch a movie called Harlock I expect him to be the main character, and not just a figure - as important as it might be - merely in the background. That’s the mail problem with this movie. The lead is not Harlock, is Yama. 

The movie is otherwise well done and spectacular to see, but it could have been more interesting. This feels more like a sequel, a passing-the-crown kind of thing. 

The story is a bit complicated but ok. It starts with a few men boarding the Arcadia hoping to be accepted as part of the crew. They need to pass a test, saying why they want to join them: those who say honor or money get thrown out, but Yama says ‘freedom’, so he’s accepted in. We learn right away that he’s a spy sent to kill Harlock, and he knows it too.

Humanity is under the control of the Gaia Coalition, far away from the Earth who is considered the fabulous home where they want to return. 

Yama’s older brother Isra is an important man working for the Gaia Coalition; when they were children Yama caused an accident that forced Isra on a wheelchair and almost killed their friend Nami. We see Isra and Nami talking, but only later in the film see that she’s a holoprojection, her body is unable to move, inside a medical chamber that keeps her alive.

Also later in the film we learn the story of what happened to Earth and Harlock: when humanity decided to go back to Earth, they were now so many that they started the war of Homecoming, until a peace-treaty was signed when the Gaia Coalition declared Earth a sacred place to be left alone,  so nobody was authorized to land on Earth. Obviously not everybody agreed with this, so a fleet was sent to defend Earth: Harlock was the fleet captain! He believed in it, but also believed in equality and didn’t accept the fact that a condition for the treaty was that powerful men on either side were allowed on Earth. Harlock didn’t accept that, he thought of it as a betrayal, as a tyrannical act I guess, so he turned against them destroying the ships that had landed on Earth and of course battle against any other fleet ship that tried to stop him. He had just one ship, so in his desire to protect Earth from ‘everyone’, he asked Miime to protect the Earth covering it in Dark Matter, but the experiment went terribly wrong and the Earth was seemingly ruined, all life on it destroyed. 

The Gaia Coalition kept the real conditions of Earth a secret from humanity. Being given immortality by the Dark Matter that also covered his ship, Harlock has devoted his life to change what he did, planning to use some sort of time-bombs to restart things over, whatever that means… they don’t know yet that Harlock wants to destroy their timeline and have a new one start over.

Harlock’s power comes from Miime, a member of the dying race of the Nibelung that he saved - so I guess there are other Nibelungs in the universe? Or is she the last one? I was not clear on this point; anyway, she joined the Arcadia and it was through her that Harlock knew about Yama’s secret mission. When Yama first lands on some place to place one of the bombs, it seems like he’s going to die, with no way of coming back on the ship, but Harlock throws himself out of the Arcadia joining him down there, to work together to save themselves. He’s not surprised when Yama points a gun at him, and he simply states that if he wants to do it he should have a good reason, a free choice, because he’s all about freedom. Yama was doing it only for his brother, but now he’s not sure anymore that that’s the right thing to do. Joining forces, they manage to get back to the Arcadia. Isra is sent to destroy the Arcadia and he’s told to use the Kaleidostarsystem against Harlock, and it’s a big battle that brings them to Earth. This is where they all learn the truth about it, because they see its condition, it looks like a dead planet. At first the Arcadia prevails because Yama knows Isra battle plans, and Isra understands that Nami gave them to him and is terribly jealous. He always loved Nami and never got over what happened to her. All this time she thought that he was angry at Yama for putting him on a wheelchair, but when she realizes that she’s the source of his torment she decided to free him. You can clearly see in her face that she’s lying, that she’s only trying to provoke his reaction when she tells him that she loves Yama, always have, and that she never loved him (Isra).

Isra is furious and pulls the plug of her chamber, killing her, not realizing the truth because blinded by his rage and jealousy.

He even lies to Yama, saying she caused her own death when she tried to record a message for him, causing some problem that destroyed her chamber, or something. 

The Arcadia crew is taken hostage, but Yama frees them (it was so annoying when Yattaran questioned if they should now believe him after he betrayed them… I mean he has reason to be angry but it’s not like he has any other choice, he’s in a cell and Yama is opening it for him, so…) when he sees some flowers on the surface. He takes one as proof to show them all that the Earth is not yet dead, it’s fighting back, starting to live again. He tells Harlock that he doesn’t need to reboot the universe (as the Doctor did :lol:) because the Earth is slowly healing itself. Now Harlock has a new mission, to exposure the lies of the Gaia Coalition and reveal the truth to humanity. He has Yama sends a message to all of mankind, destroying the holo-emitters that showed a paradisiac planet, thus showing to everyone how Earth really looks like, but also speaking about the flower. 

At this point, the Gaia leader orders Isra to use a supermegaweapon to destroy the Arcadia and the Earth who is so close to it; Isra doesn’t want to destroy Earth, his mission had always been to protect it. 

He battles the Arcadia, they board each other’s ships in a big battle; when face to face, Isra shoots Yama in the face, leaving a scar very similar to Harlock’s. When Isra is about to kill him, behind him comes Harlock that shoots him instead. When the first test of the superweapon fails, it is clear that with his maneuvers Isra had the Arcadia move from its position, in order to save the Earth. Harlock tells the dying Isra that at least he was coherent to the end. 

To protect both the Arcadia and Earth, I think, Harlock asks Miime to convey all the Dark Matter to the outside, for some reason. Result is that now Harlock is no more immortal. 

Having  for now defeated the Gaia fleet, it is stated that the Arcadia will keep defending freedom and Earth, and that Harlock is a necessary symbol of that freedom, so the figure and idea of captain Harlock must go on forever. It ends with Miime back on the Arcadia bridge, saying that she devoted her life to the Arcadia and that she’ll die with it; we see Harlock sitting on his big captain chair while Yama is at the helm, with the same scar and wearing the eyepatch that Harlock gave him to look exactly like him. Basically Yama will be the new Harlock when this Harlock will die. 

The end.

So, there were some very cool scenes, and the animation was spectacular, but there was not enough ‘Harlock’ in it.

Harlock-space pirate

ITA Capitan Harlock