Moana (2016)

Moana Waialiki is the young heir to the Polynesian island of Motonui. When a spreading sickness begins to affect the island, she sets off alone on a quest to find the demi-god Maui and force him to return a stolen gemstone to the island goddess Te Fiti. It is a perilous quest, packed with dangers including an army of coconut warriors, an avaricious giant crab, and the fearsome lava demon Te Ka.

The Walt Disney Animation Studios owe a hell of a lot to Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors who arguably more than any others came to define the tone and style of the studio's feature film output from the mid-1980s. Their directorial debut The Great Mouse Detective was something of a warm-up, but with their second feature The Little Mermaid they knocked Disney's animated films into a commercial and critical stratosphere. The film kicked off what is widely referred to as 'the Disney Renaissance', an unparalleled string of high quality and hugely successful films that ran from The Little Mermaid in 1989 through to Tarzan in 1999. During that period Clements and Musker also directed Aladdin and Hercules, and subsequently they also delivered the underrated Treasure Planet and the excellent The Princess and the Frog. To a large extent Moana may be seen as the culmination of their directorial careers.

The Small One (1978)

A young boy is ordered by his farmer father to take their old donkey, named Small One, into town to sell him at market. The boy struggles to do what he has been commanded: Small One is a beloved pet, and is very old, and the only person who wishes to buy him is a tanner who wants to kill Small One for his leather.

The Small One is an odd little curiosity in Walt Disney history. It is a 1978 animated short feature, running 26 minutes in total, and was paired in cinemas with a re-release of Disney's popular classic Pinocchio. Pairing new short features with pre-existing animated films was a cost-effective way for Walt Disney Pictures to get people into cinemas: some would be attracted by experiencing an old favourite again, others would be attracted by the new film attached to it. The company attempted it again in 1983 with the pairing of Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Rescuers, as well as Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore and The Sword in the Stone.

The Small One also stands out among Disney's long back catalogue because it is an overtly religious film: the town in which the boy attempts to sell his donkey is Nazareth, and its eventual buyer is Joseph father of Jesus.

The Iron Giant (1999)

I have always maintained that 1999 was one of the best years ever for American cinema. It was a year that saw the release of The Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, The Matrix, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, American Beauty, The Insider, Office Space, Election, Ride with the Devil, Any Given Sunday, Man on the Moon, Galaxy Quest and a bunch of others. One of the very best films of that year was an animated feature produced by Warner Bros, which was released without much advertising or promotion and failed at the box office: Brad Bird's The Iron Giant.

At the height of the cold war, a boy named Hogarth Hughes stumbles upon a giant alien robot in the forest outside of town. While he initially relishes the chance to make friends with this unique creature, its arrival has already raised the suspicion of the United States Military and the authorities are closing in.

This is one of those rare perfect films: perfect in the sense that it has a clear creative objective and it fulfils that objective without any qualifications or visible flaws. There isn't a bad scene, nor one weak characters. It is entertaining from beginning to end, and hugely effective. I am a pretty easy cryer when watching movies; this film makes me bawl every time. It's an emotional masterpiece.

When Marnie Was There (2014)

Anna Sasaki is a disenchanted 12 year-old girl in Sapporo who has lived with foster parents ever since her own parents died. When she suffers a severe asthma attack at school, she is sent to the coast to spend time with her foster mother's relatives. Once in the town she becomes fascinated by a dilapidated mansion on the edge of a salt marsh. When the mansion turns out not to be as abandoned as she assumed, Anna forms a friendship with the secretive blonde-haired girl named Marnie who lives there. Finding out Marnie's secret has a profound effect on Anna's own life.

When Marnie Was There is a 2014 anime feature directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for the noted production company Studio Ghibli. Following its release, and with the retirement of company mainstays Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, Ghibli has gone into a production hiatus. This makes When Marnie Was There the final studio production for the immediate future - and very possibly forever. That is a shame on two fronts: it's sad that such an exceptional company may be closing shop for good, and if so it's sad that it is closing out on what is a fairly underwhelming film.

It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Don Hertzfeldt is one of the most singular talents in American animation. His short films, including Billy's Balloon, Rejected and Wisdom Teeth, have been a constant and joyful surprise. They blend deliberately primitive, near-stick figure designs with a wonderful sense of the absurd and a gleefully dark, bleak sensibility. He has established a strong reputation with them, including awards, Oscar nominations, and even an invitation to create a couch gag for The Simpsons (it was weird).

Between 2006 and 2011 Hertzfeldt completed a series of three animated shorts - Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You, and It's Such a Beautiful Day. In 2012 he edited them together into a single 62-minute animated feature, sharing its title with the third of the three shorts. It is an incredible work, managing to be in turn wonderfully silly, charmingly absurd, deeply depressing and ultimately quite transcendent. It is a film that gives the viewer so much more than they might expect upon first seeing it. I am still rather struck by just how profoundly moving it turned out to be.

Zootopia (2016)

Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is the first rabbit to be made a police officer in Zootopia, a sprawling city in which anthropomorphic animals of all species live together in comparative harmony. When a group of random citizens go missing, Judy decides to investigate - roping in a con artist fox (Jason Bateman) named Nick Wilde along the way.

Zootopia is the latest animated feature from the Walt Disney Animation Studios. WDAS has been on something of a winning streak in recent years, scoring great hits with the likes of Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6 and their pop culture juggernaut Frozen. Zootopia offers much of the same as recent non-musical efforts, with gorgeous animation and character design, quality voice acting and a storyline that has been worked over to within an inch of its life for optimum thematic resonance, foreshadowing and character development. To an extent it is very much more of the same, but as the company is running on such a creatively strong line of attack that is not a bad thing.

Stand by Me Doraemon (2014)

Since 1969 Doraemon has been a permanent fixture in Japanese children's entertainment. Originally the star of his own serialised manga, he soon graduated to TV animation. The first series was not so popular, but the second ran for a jaw-dropping 1,787 episodes between 1979 and 2005. A third series was on television before 2005 was out. In addition to the TV anime, there have also been 35 animated feature films since 2005. Nobita's Dinosaur was the first. Stand be Me Doraemon is the most recent, and marks a striking change in the long-running franchise. Rather than form part of the annual hand-animated series of films, Stand be Me Doraemon is the first CGI Doraemon film, and retells the key storyline of the original manga on the big screen for the very first time.

Nobita is a lazy and foolish fourth grader living in Japan. One day he is visited by his great-great-grandson, who reveals that the mistakes Nobita will make as an adult will bankrupt his family for generations. To ensure a better future comes to pass, and that Nobita will stay on the road to success, his great-great-grandson leaves behind Doraemon: a blue atomic robot cat armed with a four-dimensional pouch containing a wide variety of technological gadgets. In other words, Doraemon is essentially The Terminator for Japanese primary schoolers.

Inside Out (2015)

For about 15 years the title Pixar Animation Studios was effectively a synonym for quality in film. Animated hits like Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and The Incredibles presented stunningly creative stories and characters. It's not simply that the animation was good and the design work beautiful either: the screenplays and storylines of Pixar's films were just perfectly sculpted and composed. It was an unparalleled run of movies, really only broken by Cars in 2006.

Then there came the Disney buyout, and the sudden new focus on making sequels to earlier hits. Cars 2 (2011) was Pixar's first - and thankfully only - all-out stinker, and Monsters University (2013) was a decidedly mediocre and unnecessary prequel. The one original Pixar film between 2010 and 2014 was Brave, and while it was a wonderfully enjoyable film it did seem considerably scrappier in terms of plot and structure than earlier classics.

All that in mind, it's a tremendous relief to watch Pete Docter's Inside Out. It's a fantastic film - one of the best I have seen this year - and it returns Pixar to doing precisely what it does best: making beautiful and imaginative all-ages films that use strange and fanciful ideas to explore very universal themes and emotions. This is a must-see film.

The Book of the Dead (2005)

Nara, Japan: 750 CE. Iratsume, a young noblewoman, becomes obsessed with the Chinese religion of Buddhism that is spreading across Japan. When she transcribes one thousand copies of a particular sutra she has a vision of the Buddha between the peaks of a nearby mountain. When she follows the vision she discovers a mountain temple - and learns that her vision may not be divine at all, but instead is the apparition of a long-dead Prince whose soul cannot rest.

The Book of the Dead is an animated feature film directed by Kihachiro Kawamoto. I suppose it could be described as an anime, being as it's both Japanese and animated, however it's not like any other Japanese animation I've seen. This film employs not hand-drawn animation but rather stop motion. Its story plays out via elegant theatricalised puppets against miniature sets.

I have no idea whether Japan has a particularly rich history of stop motion animation or not. I know Europe does, starting with Ladislaw Starewicz and running through the past hundred years. Kawamoto even went to Europe to train in the field, working underneath the Czech master Jiří Trnka in Prague.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

Generally speaking I am not hugely fond of DreamWorks Animation. I liked them at first, with their excellent cel-animated features The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado demonstrating some willingness to push beyond their Disney origins. Their hugely successful CGI-animated Shrek, however, seemed to overthrow that particular apple-cart, leading to a long-running series of bland, weakly designed films packed with celebrity voice casts and unnecessary pop culture references. Films like Bee Movie, Shark Tale, and The Croods seemed to be about the most boring animated films coming out of America in the past 20 years.

The one massive exception to this trend seemed to be Chris Sanders and De DeBlois' 2010 fantasy film How to Train Your Dragon. Here was a film with strong design, beautiful animation and a well-considered, very well-crafted storyline. It wasn't perfect - there never was a satisfactory explanation for why all of the adults in the film sounded Scottish and their children like Californian teenagers - but it really did stand out as something really special.

Last year DreamWorks released a sequel, because if nothing else sequels appears to be the company's raison d'être. I initially resisted watching it, since the risk seemed pretty high that the studio would ruin what made the original so effective. Thankfully they've avoided that risk, and presented an excellent film. It is not quite a solid as the original for a number of reasons, but does a fairly strong job of expanding the self-contained first film into an ongoing franchise.

Princess Iron Fan (1941)

Princess Iron Fan is a Chinese animated film, produced and released in 1941. That makes it the oldest animated feature in the history of Chinese cinema. It was the 12th animated feature film produced anywhere in the world, animated by a team of 237 artists in war-time Shanghai under near-impossible working conditions.

The film was directed by the Wan brothers, Guchan and Laiming, who had been creating animated shorts in China since 1926. Seeing Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939 inspired the Wans to create their own animated film with a specifically Chinese flavour. To this end they selected a brief section of Journey to the West and adapted it to the screen. The monk Xuanzang (or Tripitaka) is forced to pause his journey when the path ahead is blocked by magical fires. To remove the flames he requires a magical fan owned by the Princess Iron Fan, and to this end he dispatches the Monkey King to ask to borrow it for a short while. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Fire and Ice (1983)

The early 1980s were a boom time for American fantasy cinema. While the period only inspired a few genuine hits, such as John Milius' Conan the Barbarian, that didn't stop a whole raft of directors and studios from launching their own potential fantasy blockbusters. One of those directors was independent animation legend Ralph Bakshi, who teamed up with his friend - and noted fantasy illustrator - Frank Frazetta to create Fire and Ice, a deliberately pulpy fantasy saga of warriors, scantily-clad princesses and evil wizards.

The film focuses on war between Icepeak, ruled by Queen Juliana and her sorceror son Nekron, and Firekeep, ruled by the stern warrior king Jarol. Jarol's daughter Teegra is kidnapped by Nekron's soldiers, and it is up to a barbarian named Larn and a mysterious warrior named Darkwolf to rescue her - and to defeat Nekron once and for all.

Oh boy. The clichés. The clichés - they burn.

Wonderful Days (2003)

By the mid-22nd century, environmental pollution has all but wiped humanity from the face of the Earth. Now two communities remains: the rich, powerful elites of the city Ecoban and the "diggers" outside, who are exploited to mine for the resources needed to keep Ecoban's high-technology paradise working. Childhood friends Shua and Jay meet one another for the first time in a decade - only this time she works for Ecoban security, and he leads a growing revolution agains Ecoban's control.

Wonderful Days, released in some markets as Sky Blue, is a 2003 animated feature film from South Korea. It tells a fairly familiar science fiction story, and certainly keen fans of anime are unlikely to see any kind of story here they haven't already seen before - although it is well-expressed. Where animation fans are likely to find more worth is in the astounding manner in which the film has been animation - a process that involved traditional cel animation, computer-generated graphics and physical model work.

Nostalgia Time, 23 February 2015: Nightbreed, The Band Concert

Let's celebrate two pop culture anniversaries today: one turning 25 years old, and the other a sprightly 80.

25 years ago Clive Barker's dark fantasy film Nightbreed was released into American cinemas. The film was adapted from his own novel Cabal, and got pretty mercilessly cut and edited by Morgan Creek Productions before it saw released. A rediscovered director's cut has recently been released, and I look forward to checking it out. Even in its original compromised form I have always had a lot of time for Nightbreed. It's an imaginative, atmospheric movie with an early Danny Elfman score, some stunning prosthetic make-up work and an unexpectedly great turn by director David Cronenberg as the film's villain.

Some films you love because they're great. Some films you love because, despite all their flaws and compromises, you can see the great movie looking out from inside. Nightbreed is the second kind of film.

A Town Called Panic (2009)

A Town Called Panic is a 2009 stop-motion animated film directed by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar. It is a spin-off from the popular Belgian TV series of the same name, which was produced in 2000. There are a lot of other animated and comedy shows I recognised in A Town Called Panic. It felt a bit like The Magic Roundabout, also The Mighty Boosh, South Park, and that plasticine-based cartoon from the late 1970s, The Red and the Blue. It reminded me of a lot of other things, but more than that A Town Called Panic also felt kind of unique. It’s like those other shows in that strange way in that each of those shows don’t feel like any other shows. Does that make a lot of sense? Probably not. That’s OK, however, because neither does a A Town Called Panic.

Horse, Cowboy and Indian – they’re played by small children’s toys of a horse, a cowboy and an indian – live together in a house in the two-house village of Panic. The other house is owned by a farmer who shouts all the time with a herd of animals who take music lessons from another horse who lives in the next town. When Cowboy and Indian discover it is Horse’s birthday, they decide to build him a brick barbeque as a present. They order bricks over the internet, and an unfortunate typo sees them accidentally receive 50 million bricks. They try to hide them from Horse by balancing them on the roof, which only serves to demolish their house, and when Horse tried to rebuild the house, he finds the walls keep getting stolen by fish people.

That’s about the first 20 minutes. There’s another 50 minutes after that, which involve journeys to the centre of the Earth, more fish people, parallel universes, mad scientists and snowball-throwing giant robots shaped like penguins. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of movie, I think you need to loosen up a little in your life and watch a wider range of movies.

Nostalgia Time, 3 February 2015: In the Mouth of Madness, The Three Caballeros

It's Nostalgia Time, where we celebrate pop culture anniversaries like nobody's business. Today sees the anniversary of two films that probably couldn't be any further apart: John Carpenter's 1995 horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which turns 20 today, and the Walt Disney animated film The Three Caballeros, which turns 70.

In the Mouth of Madness is a Lovecraft-inspired horror movie directed by cult favourite John Carpenter. Shot in Toronto on a budget of just $7 million dollars, it represented a fresh hit for the Carpenter, whose career had been slowly falling into the doldrums after a string of early smash hits including Halloween and The Thing. The film starred Sam Neill as insurance investigator John Trent, who is dispatched to investigate an author who has gone missing without filing a copy of his latest novel with his publisher. Once in the strange town of Hobb's End (previously thought to be fictional) Trent is sucked into a nightmarish apocalyptic world.

Nostalgia Time: 6 January 2015

Last year I highlighted a bunch of anniversaries for pop culture-related characters, films and TV programmes. I figured it was worth continuing it this year, only in a more standardised column - so please enjoy Nostalgia Time, your semi-regular guide to the geek-related anniversaries of 2015.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Warner Bros cartoon character Pepé Le Pew, who made his film debut on this day back in 1945. In Odor-able Kitty, a ginger cat attempts to turn the tables on his tormentors by disguising himself as a skunk and thus frighten away all of the bullies who make his life a living hell. Unfortunately his disguise attracts the attention of a French-accented amorous skunk named  Pepé Le Pew, who spends the six-minute short making unwanted romantic overtures towards the panicked cat.

It's an odd cartoon in the context of  Pepé's canon of animated shorts, because it's the only time that his attentions are directed towards a male character instead of a female. The remainder of his career, another fifteen shorts between 1947 and 1962, was spent harassing female cats (and one female dog).

Tatsumi (2011)

Tatsumi is a wonderful oddity. It's an animated film, made in Singapore and Indonesia in 2011, although it's performed entirely in Japanese. Part of it is an animated documentary on the life of noted manga writer/artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, narrated by the artist himself. That documentary, however, is regularly interrupted by a series of five animated short films based on his works. The result is a strange project that straddles a line between fiction and fact, or drama and documentary. It feels unique, and due to its unusual format it presents a more wholly rounded and insightful look at an artist's life and works than a more traditional documentary could ever achieve.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the noted creator of 'gekiga', a specific form of mature-readers manga that he developed in order to separate his works from the more popular, child-friendly stuff getting sold at newsstands around Japan. His gekiga became enormously successful, and he was instrumental in expanding the medium into new genres and readerships. His works have a specific melancholic and rather bleak tone, and that tone is all through Tatsumi, which is both a respectful documentary and faithful adaptation.

The 14 best films of 2014

Unless you're a professional film critic, and can dedicate much of your working year to seeing every major and independent film release, compiling a 'year's best' list is a problematic task. Inevitably there are going to be critically acclaimed films that you miss, turning any amateur list into essentially a 'year's best... except for all of those other movies'. I missed quite a lot of films in 2014 that I expect could have made my list, including Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Wind Rises and The Raid 2. I'll catch up with them all in due course, but for now they're out of contention for the list.

Take the list below not as some attempt at an authoritative 'best', but simply 14 films released in Australia for the first time in 2014 that I think are well worth your time in tracking down and watching.

Big Hero 6 (2014)

In the city of San Fransokyo, teenage super-genius Hiro Hamada is invited to apply to an advanced school for robotics - but when tragedy strikes he turns to fighting crime instead, with the assistance of his fellow students and a white inflatable medical robot named Baymax.

The Walt Disney Animation Studio has been on a bit of a roll in recent years with a string of critical and commercial hits including Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph and Frozen. It's pretty easy to assume Big Hero 6 is going to join those films: it's beautifully animated, has immensely appealing characters, and tells a slick, well-paced three-act story in the most deft manner imaginable.

And yet it's very slightly disappointing. It's not the fault of Big Hero 6, its directors Chris Williams (Bolt) and Don Hall (Winnie the Pooh), or the multitude of Disney artists and technicians who made it. It's just that it's the 27th superhero movie of the past five years, and by this stage the tropes and archetypes of the genre are getting pretty god-damned stale.