Spider-Man:Across The Spider-Verse (2023)

First and foremost, this feature-length Spider-Man cartoon, which follows on from 2018's "Into The Spider-Verse", is art - captivating, enthralling mixed-media art that you can't take your eyes off - and then, on top of that, it is a thrilling sci-fi adventure, touching family drama, rousing coming-of-age story, love story and a superhero blockbuster against which all other superhero movies pale.

★★★★★

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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Beowulf (2007)

With the exception of Ray Winstone in the title role who is transformed into the legendary, muscly Geatish warrior Beowulf, this computer-animated version of the Old English epic poem is populated by incredibly realistic animated versions of actors like Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar and Angelina Jolie as the mother of the marauding troll-like monster Grendell whom Beowulf is asked to slay, but far from eliciting wonder, the movie mostly leaves you feeling that director Robert Zemeckis' purpose for using such ultra realistic animation and not using the actors themselves was simply to be able to stage a series of peculiar nude fight scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

Stephen King cites it as a source of inspiration and it has spawned innumerous cosmic horror boardgames, computer games, novels, tv shows and movies so it was only a matter of time before Lovecraftian horror, its psychotormented protagonists and its alien ghouls, was made the stuff of animated movies for preteens - right? - except with leaden voice acting, lifeless animation and dreary plotting that turns the Cthulhu mythos into an afternoon of decidedly unfun snowplay, this first of the Howard Lovecraft movies sucks more life out of the horror franchise than it injects new life into it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Your Name (君の名は) (きみのなは) (2016)

Japan's second highest grossing film of all time, this 2016 animated feature has a mindboggling story told especially mindbogglingly with the main characters, highschoolers Taki and Mitsuha, frequently swapping bodies and the action switching from past to present and back again, so it can be hard to know scene by scene who is who and when is when, but the animation is so spectacular, it doesn't matter — you are probaby going to be happy to marvel at the images all again to iron out in your mind the intricacies of the Back To The Future time travel slash Freaky Friday body swap plot.

★★★★☆

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Bumblebee (2018)

About a teen who befriends, educates and culturally integrates a refugee she discovers living, in fear of war aggressors, in a Californian scrapyard, this is a big dumb empty blockbuster and mildly entertaining entry in the Transformers series of movies based on the Hasbro toys, but it is hard not to also see it as a missed opportunity - what a watershed moment in cinema it would have been had it just been released as Short Circuit: Fully Loaded or, I think even better, Herbie: Dark Side of the Lovebug, a big cgi blockbuster reboot of one or the other of the two movies Bumblebee mashes together for its plot.

★★★☆☆

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Paddington 2 (2017)

This time the Peruvian marmalade-loving bear gets himself in a tangle trying to make enough money to buy his aunt a book for her birthday, even ending up in prison charged with Hugh Grant's memorable villain's theft of said book, but because Paddington looks for the good in everyone, by the end of the movie he has enchanted the whole of Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, a veritable Who's Who of the British screen playing among others Knuckles the prison cook and Dr Jafri and prison guards and inmates and newspaper stallholders and shut-ins - and of course the Brown family - who rally behind Paddington and help him with spectacularly animated, frequently hilarious, slightly overlong but ultimately extremely touching adventures.

★★★★☆

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Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

There's a positive message in this Disney animation about the young and ostracised  breaking free from the expectations of others and determining for themselves their role in life but this message is buried in such tiresome, convoluted, made-up arcade game mythology, only the most undemanding of young viewers will find any enjoyment sitting through the story of Wreck-It Ralph, an arcade game bad guy who seeks a hero's medal and so ventures outside of his own game and into other game worlds.

★☆☆☆☆

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Howard The Duck (1986)

As with the more recent Ted and Ted 2, the basic tenet of Executive Producer George Lucas' infamous box office bomb seems to be that a furry or fluffy creature doing human adult things like smoking cigars, drinking beer, and bar brawling is funny, but this Marvel comic-inspired movie about a 3 foot 2 inch and - except for his pink skin eyelids - frozen-faced duck alien who somehow ends up trapped in Cleveland, is so mundane that a more suitable title would have been Howard The Turkey or HowAwful The Duck.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Inside Out (2015)

It goes on a little bit with repetitive scenes of 'memory islands' collapsing, but Pixar's Inside Out, an animated movie-length Herman's Head about the inner workings of a depressed child's head, is surprisingly touching and a breath of fresh air for anyone who has grown weary of the positive psychology industry: the message of this film is the importance of acknowledging and sharing, and not simply blocking out or smiling through, Sadness.

★★★★☆

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Charlotte's Web (2006)

A young girl befriends a piglet and, er, saves his bacon and then a spider befriends that piglet and, er, saves his bacon, in this animatronically enhanced, treacly film version of the beloved - but for me, even as a kid, mystifying - E B White children's book: what is it the humans think is happening and why isn't it Charlotte who is celebrated?

★★☆☆☆

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Evil Dead II (1987)

Bruce Campbell, pretty much a big-jawed rubbery-faced cartoon himself, battles stop-motion-animated horror like this Evil Dead sequel is a Tom and Jerry cartoon: it doesn't matter that the back-and-forth between Ash and the H P Lovecraft-inspired horrors of the cabin-in-the-woods is senseless because the ordeal is inventive ghastly fun and is never anything less than visually arresting.

★★★★☆

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Sausage Party (2016)

Food fetishists and stoners will enjoy the antics of this brazen exercise in bad taste, an adult-themed animation about supermarket produce items searching for the meaning of shelf-life, while everyone else can marvel at how such a temporally weak premise is so creatively stretched to full movie feature length.

★★☆☆☆

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The Boxtrolls (2014)

Despite its beautiful and wildly imaginative stop-motion animation which recalls those Rankin-Bass Christmas specials of your childhood (Jack Frost, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, etc), this kids movie about underground-dwelling troll creatures who - what? - wear boxes, invent things, and raise a boy, is dreary with the voice-acting and the story hanging detached from the animation, a shame given those visuals.

★★☆☆☆

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The Book of Life (2014)

Two childhood friends, one an animal lover descended from a long line of macho bullfighters, the other the bearer of an otherworldly badge of immortality, vie for the love of the same woman in this extremely busy animation about Dias de los Muertos - a culturally interesting kids film that hits its stride in its second half. 

★★★★☆

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Heavy Metal (1981)

This instantly repulsive but ultimately captivating animation, clearly the work of an all-male team of animators having a hoot, features copious amounts of sex and violence in an oddball collection of stories about a strange glowing ball that terrorises a young woman.

★★★★☆

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The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ) (2013)

This animation from Japan's Miyazaki Hayao, the last before his retirement in 2013, is undeniably beautiful - many scenes elicit an auto sensory meridian response with the animation capturing the quiet and tactility of grass rustling or slippered feet padding around or wind blowing - but there is also something mechanical about it and not just because it's a story of historical figure Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who eventually designs the planes used by Japan in World War II.

★★★☆☆

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Hop (2011)

Cashing in on Easter but wholly unEastery, this religion-free kids movie features, would you believe, a magic candy factory on Rapa Nui (!) where a Russell Brand-voiced animated rabbit shirks his annual Easter responsibilities and instead goes to Hollywood to be discovered as a drummer on a talent show hosted by David Hasselhoff, receiving help along the way from a goofy human played by James Marsden.

★☆☆☆☆

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Zootopia (2016)

Real-world issues like racial stereotyping, our conscious and unconscious biases, and politics are cleverly packed into this entertaining Disney cartoon mystery about Judy the rabbit who wants to become a police officer, not a carrot farmer — a movie with such an important message you feel it should be mandatory viewing for all children.

★★★★☆

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The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

Marvellous to look at and full of hilarious details that kept me and my nephews laughing, this elaborately rendered animation from Steven Spielberg brings the characters of Herge's Tintin comics to amazing 3D life but while scenes are fluid and exciting like Indiana Jones setpieces, the greater story is an anticlimactic vacuum: a drunk sailor, Haddock, needs to quit the bottle in order to be able to recall vital family history which isn't actually vital at all - at last remembered, it just catches him up with what audiences pretty much knew from the start.

★★★★☆

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