(Kori Rae, Dan Scanlon, © Lindsay Bellinger) by LINDSAY R. BELLINGER   Director Dan Scanlon and Producer Kori Rae were in high spirits after the press screening of the newest Pixar film Onward, starring the ever-so-talented vocal skills of Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Octavia Spencer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ali Wong, Tracey Ullman, Lena Waithe and John Ratzenberger (Cliff from Cheers & Hamm from the Toy Story films). The journalists were fed off of Scanlon and Rae's p...

Cars 3, Review by Siraj Syed: Car-actor roles Imagine this. You are a fading racing veteran and suddenly you lose a race to a rookie? What do you do? Seek professional help and training, even dig out your late mentor’s buddies and have a go at the next race. Now imagine all these characters are cars, not human beings, and you know you are watching the new Disney-Pixar enterprise dubbed Cars 3. It’s as human as human can be, but then again, it is as automobiley as automobiley can g...

Shaun the Sheep Movie, Review: Shaun is on An animated comedy from a non Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks DNA, Shaun the Sheep could be the mouse that roared. Just above 80 minutes long, this Aardman Animations (Bristol, UK) production provides plenty of laughs in the ‘stop motion’ technique of old-style animation. Humans, animals, birds, fish, cars, buses and an entire city are all ‘cartoonised’ to come across as credible, endearing and detestable, according to the storyline. ...

Inside Out, Review: Animated emotions on a roller-coaster ride What if our emotions had lives of their own and operated like computer programmes, in their own make-believe world of fantasy and science-fiction? Inside Out personifies the feelings of a young girl and her parents and tries to manipulate their lives from inside their brains, without directly interfering, but subtly planting moods and reactions along the way. It has an interesting concept and some great technical wizardry to go wi...

by, Cameron Lui   Once again, Pixar delivered a heart-warming and thought provoking cartoon that can please any age.    The five emotions are played by Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Bill Hader, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black, which in itself guarantees a quality film. The way they intermingle is so political that it gave room for a lot of flexibility to make the story represent the cause of human behavior. What makes "Inside Out" so intriguing for adults is the evaluat...

Pixar Outdoes Itself With Inside Out Premiere On Monday, May 18th, Cannes Film Festival celebrated Animation Day to show off the talents and logistics of all things animation. The premiere movie at the Grand Lumiere Theatre was Inside Out, Disney-Pixar's new film about all of these emotions we have in our head like joy, anger, fear, sadness and disgust. It travels into the mind of a young girl named Riley, and portrays each emotion as their own person. Anger naturally shoots fire out...

Today marked the festival's Animation Day that was filled with both big screen premieres in addition to smaller platform discussions about the current environment of this sector of the film industry. Over at HorYou village, winners from Montreal's Animaze animation film festival were presented along with their works. Anima Buenos Aires won best film with a beautiful piece of work that seemed like a seemless sketch all the way through.  Filmfestivals.com's own Bruno Chatelin a...

By Liza Foreman   TOKYO - The 27th Tokyo International Film Festival got underway on Thursday in the presence of the Japanese Princess Hisako Takamado and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.   Not forgetting the country's youth culture, boy band Arashi posed on stage with the Prime Minister who spoke about Japan and the festival being the gateway to the region.   "The Gates of Asia section is a pathway for upcoming filmmakers," he said. "A...

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent In a Screenwriting Galaxy Far, Far, Away, the Writers Guild Foundation (https://www.wgfoundation.org) once held “Words Into Pictures,” a series of conferences that brightened the years 1997, 1999, and 2002, with debates about everything from character development to story-craft. Around about 1999, David Koepp (writer of Jurassic Park, The Panic Room and more) and Stand By Me’s Rob Reiner got into it over VFX vs Storytelling. &...

CBC.ca When Disney bought Pixar eight years ago, the Mickey Mouse creator was coming off such lows as the non-hit Chicken Little. That made it critically important for Pixar, which had a string of hits such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, to maintain its own creative culture, nurtured under tech genius Steve Jobs and creative director John Lasseter. But the turnaround the merger wrought on Disney’s animation house was the real surprise, says Ed Catmull, now presi...

  Intro by Quendrith Johnson Doomsday scenarios are a favorite pastime for depressives in Spring... hold on, wait a minute! That's just an alternative opening paragraph to the reality we are presented in Director Pasha Roberts' debut feature "Silver Circle." Here's the conventional opener -- Director Pasha Roberts feature debut animated film "Silver Circle" opens April, 5, at the Laemmle, NOHO.  Don't miss this missive-in-a-screed for the ...

Français From restored grand classic movies, to Pixar’s latest animated film, and not to mention a ‘Special Honor to Mexico’ showcase, there was something for everyone. The ÉCU team went to the festival to gather audience reactions. “So much action! Stimulation overload!”, “A high quality festival affordable for most people” and “10 days of REAL cinema” … were some of the reactions towards the Tuesday evening at the end of the MK2 Bibliothèque festiva...

by Marla Lewin Ed Asner was born the same year as the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman play, Once In A Lifetime, was written 1929. Ed has been a regular performer for the LA Theatre Works readings of great plays since its inception in 1985. The first live reading of this play back then had guests Steven Spielberg and Barry Diller in the audience. The producer explained that their technique and equipment for that performance had not been as good as they would have liked so they had always wanted...