ANI-MOVIES, *Arthur Christmas

Arthur Christmas was the second fully-CGI animated movie produced by Aardman who started out as steadfast stop motion animators. DreamWorks had previously done a computer animated film with Aardman five years prior in Flushed Away which didn't perform well, but Sony Pictures contacted Aardman and created a more polished holiday-themed project, even though it also wasn't considered an immediate blockbuster. Sarah Smith did a fantastic job as director keeping up all the intricate features in this picture that she went on to do Ron's Gone Wrong. Arthur Christmas is a cinematic project with so much rewatch value because it maintains a plethora of particular details similar to an Edgar Wright movie. There are a finite number of the regular characters and an entire legion of elf helpers to remember about, so balancing them out was a difficult task. The CGI Aardman utilized is a vast improvement over what they did in Flushed Away, even though they've stuck with claymation films since then.

All set during a single Christmas, the gang from the North Pole deliver all the presents in a single night, except for one. Turns out, the title of Santa is birthright handed down from one generation of Claus to the other. The current one is Malcom who is well beyond the time he should have retired and normally leaves the actual Christmas operations to his oldest son Steve who has transformed their toy delivery into the digital age replacing the old sleigh with Star Trek-styled airship the size of a city complete with a Klingon cloaking device. Malcom's younger son Arthur is clumsy but well-meaning and in charge of receiving letters from all the children and one child in England has their Christmas wish unanswered, so Arthur and his grandfather Grandsanta who was Santa before Malcom set out in the old reindeer-driven sleigh to get the girl her bicycle. Along with an expert gift-wrapping elf, Arthur's quest causes UFO sighting from all over the world to the point that the United Nations send a drone to blow them out of the sky, although they do manage to finally drop off the present while all three generations of the Claus family putting aside their differences to nominate Arthur as the new Santa.

Arthur Christmas has slowly become a holiday favorite over the years, just not as memorable as some other recent yuletide movies like Klaus. The film stacks an entire wish list of British actors with James McAvoy as Arthur, along with Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Michael Palin, Robbie Coltrane, Joan Cusack, and Jane Horrock, although most of them play elves with high-pitched voices so it's hard to tell some of them apart. Another thing about the elves is that they are mostly indistinguishable from each other to the point where some viewers caused a panic thinking there was a same-sex kiss between two of them, keeping in mind that most fantasy tales have elves being androgynous. The primary message of this film is about a family learning to compromise in order to achieve their goals together which is what makes this a sterling family-friendly standard.

ANI-MOVIES, *Ernest & Celestine

Having nothing to do with Jim Varney, Ernest And Celestine is a Belgium/French independent animated feature-length production based on the children's book series by Gabreille Vincent. Premiering in 2012, the film managed to keep the spirit of Vincent's original illustrations while tweaking the character designs just enough to give it a slightly more anthropomorphic look. Most of the original directors previously worked on stop-motion pictures, so to have this 2D movie featuring watercolor animation done in flash gives it a distinct style. The movie was triumphant enough to be nominated for the Best Animated Oscar, only to lose to the indomitable Frozen. It also got a 52-episode TV series and a theatrical sequel. GKIDS provided an astounding roster for the English dub including Forest Whitaker, Lauren Bacall, Paul Giamatti, William H. Macy, and Jeffrey Wright which make for a catchy viewing experience. The film is slightly hampered by a short running time of 80 minutes, but considering it's based on a series of short stories the writers did manage to entrance the plot into a full-length plot.

Ernest is a lonely bear living in his solitary house in the woods away from the European town of bears which happens to have a civilization of mice underneath it. The mice have a racket going where they send the younger ones up to the surface to collect teeth from bear children acting as their version of the Tooth Fairy, which the mice use for either replacing their own teeth or for further construction of their subterranean facility. Celestine is an orphan mouse who isn't very lucky at getting teeth to earn her daily keep, so she talks Ernest into helping her rob a dentist with a stock of spare teeth. The two get in trouble with both the bear and mouse authorities and have to go on the lam to Ernest's house where the two of them become good friends and spend the winter together. Once spring comes, the bear police show up and arrest Celestine while the mice arrest Ernest. Oddly enough, both of the guilty parties manage to save the lives of the judges assigned to sentence them and end up going free to live together in harmony, even though there's still a large amount of classism between the neighboring animal societies.

Many will notice similarities between this film and Zootopia where talking animals coexist but in segregated areas. Even though the main characters are ultimately fugitives, they do grow to like each other for their creativity and make up for their mistakes thanks to a double-edged twist of fate. Ernest And Celestine is a delightful movie that is firmly family friendly that older audiences will find heartfully charming while it gives a fairly obvious salute to classic cartoon antics and a vignette that is a loving homage to Fantasia.

Fate/Stay Night: A 20-Year Retrospective

The world of Fate is probably the single most complex franchise in all of multi-media. Originally a visual novel that came out in 2004 from Type-Moon, Fate/Stay Night was adopted into the same reality which includes Tsukihime as well as The Garden Of Sinners all dreamed up by video game writer Kinoko Nasu in a continuity fans call the Nasuverse, even though there is little crossover between the various games. The game had three different paths for the player to follow, each focusing on one of a trio of love interests, the basic first route was labeled Fate. Because of the game’s success, an anime TV series was released in 2006 named after the title it came from. This was only the tip of the iceberg as the two other routes in the game got their own separate anime outings. The second route was covered in an abridged movie and a much lengthier TV series titled Unlimited Blade Works, afterwards the third and darkest route was produced into a trilogy of movies named Heaven’s Feel. There has been some major contempt between fans of the game and the various anime that came from this as to which is better.

The Fate/Stay Night timeline is complicated enough with three branching outcomes, but the addition of the prequel manga Fate/Zero which came out several years after the original story, so no matter what path you follow the prequel acts as a pseudo-prologue which isn’t fully compatible with the story of the game. This has made many fans accept Fate/Zero as the canonical lead-in the whole Fate/Stay Night continuity with Unlimited Blade Works or Heaven’s Feel as the only acceptable way to view anything of the primary video game adaptations. Putting aside that there are dozens of other Fate titles that take place in alternate timelines or parallel universes like Apocrypha, Grand Order, or Strange Fake, all of these are spinoffs or spiritual successors to the primary Stay Night game, making the original Stay Night anime series the main pillar holding up this nearly infinite multiverse.

A quick rundown of the main plot shows our young protagonist Shirou Emiya living in the Japanese mountain town of Fuyuki City who was adopted by his father Kiritsugu after an inferno burned down a large portion of the city a decade prior. What Shirou didn’t know about his departed dad is that he’s the cause of the disaster in a battle between mages called the Holy Grail War who summon heroic and villainous characters to fight on their behalf, sort of like picking your own historical figure to battle in a Pokemon match. The time of the Fifth Holy Grail war is upon them, and Shirou is caught up in the struggle with a servant of his own, a short blonde girl in an armored dress wielding an invisible sword calling herself Saber who protects Shirou from some of the psychopathic mages. One of these seven mages happens to be a girl from school named Rin with a servant of her own whose origins are covered in one of the other routes. Rin allies himself Shirou to gain the Holy Grail which can grant a single wish to the winner and their servant. Saber is revealed to be a gender-swap King Arthur who wants to redo her run on Camelot even though Shirou develops feelings for her. In the end, Shirou has Saber destroy the Grail otherwise it would cause another calamity, and Saber flashes back to near the end of her original life after her fatal clash with Mordred.

There was a retconned epilogue that showed Shirou reuniting with Saber in Avalon far off in the future, although this hasn’t been represented in an anime yet. This has driven many Fate fans to advocate a new retelling of the Stay Night route which incorporates the extra ending and flattening out the inconsistencies that Fate/Zero introduced to the lore. Therefore, a good portion of the fandom normally recommends completely skipping the 2006 series as the production by Studio DEEN didn’t have the more fluid animation that Ufotable included into their productions of the other two routes. The original Stay Night anime does contain certain intricacies and a genuine otaku charm that the other Fate anime lack, even though the primary series could have benefited from having a full 26-episode run that most other Fate titles had.

Some of Fate/Stay Night’s low points are pacing issues which do tend to meander while taking time out to drop expositions about the magical world all this takes place in, plus gives away a little more of the spoilers you would run into in the other Stay Night routes. The animation is also limited to characters giving speeches but their lips flapping offscreen to avoid movement, plus the quality picked up considerably for the fight scenes in later installments. The use of some CGI brought about the most criticism which looked as good as 3D animation was for mid-noughties’ television productions. Obviously when the fandom for the game and the first anime busted out that future anime would be given a bigger budget and higher quality which unfortunately makes the 2006 series nadir on most fans’ wish lists.

The advantages of viewing Stay Night before any other Fate titles or indeed at all are that it is simply the best place to start off in the nearly infinite Fate universes. The initial TV series carries over the style and storytelling that anime was known for after the turn of the century while simultaneously transitioning its urban fantasy setting into a more mature viewpoint. With titles like Death Note, GintamaMushishi, and Code Geass on the rise, Stay Night’s 2006 was the prime time to introduce this game-based anime during an era when visual novels weren’t as big among American otakus. There are plenty of standard cliches that would satisfy the occasional anime fan, but there is true sincerity behind Studio DEEN’s production despite the limited resources they were given. Not every anime studio can afford the unlimited budget works that Ufotable was blessed with.

Fate/Stay Night’s brightest example is the fact that out of all three routes that Fate is the lightest one. There is more slice-of-life comedy here than in the other adaptations which lead to the creation of the Today's Menu For The Emiya Family that has arguably become most every fan’s favorite series out of the entire franchise. There is a closer bond between the main characters and a deeper respect for each other as the shared alliance of surviving mages continues to grow.

A final selling point for the first TV series is that of the romance between Shirou and Saber. Shirou already had a long-established relationship with his friend Sakura as well as finding Rin attractive but became awestruck when he first summoned Saber. They share a deeper understanding of the other as opposed to when Shirou’s father was Saber’s master. Shirou views Saber as an equal and treats her like a genuine person when he refuses to hide her away from his friends and thinks of her as young woman who should be freed from the burden of her former life as the King of Britain so she can take on a new life with him. In the canonical original series finale, Shirou has to say goodbye to Saber after the Holy Grail Wars are over, but as further incarnations of Fate has shown that their shared future is still in flux either as friends or lovers. Hopefully, there will be a reckoning of this relationship as many other anime titles such as Ranma and Sailor Moon have enjoyed success in a remake, so a more fleshed out retelling of Fate/Stay Night is worthy of considering. Please check out the original version either on Blu-Ray from Sentai or on numerous streaming services.

MISC. MANGA, *Omega 6

Takaya Imamura started out as a character designer for Nintendo who worked on Star Fox, F-Zero, and Legend Of Zelda. He eventually left Nintendo and went on to create his own single-volume manga titled Omega 6 that was first printed in French. Following that, Imamura made a video game adaptation of it called Omega 6: The Triangle Stars which is in done in glorious retro-style pulp that brings back memories of Mega Man. The manga itself is a throwback to 80s cartoons and toy-based TV shows which tells a full story in a solo graphic novel.

Onboard the starship Omega 6, a pair of androids named Kyla and Thunder a brought out of suspended animation for their job as part-time bounty hunters looking for the terrorist Petrogaze. The duo get power-ups when they consume something called "magic fruit", the downside to which is that it rapidly ages them, so they have to spend their off time in a rejuvenation chamber. It's revealed later on that both of them contain the memories of a brilliant professor and his wife who left Earth centuries ago after their own world became overcrowded by aliens that colonized the planet, and they've been looking for a planet of their own to repopulate the human race. They happened to meet up with a race of planet-builders who offer them a world of their own in exchange for capturing criminals with a high price on their heads. While on their hunt, Kyla and Thunder learn that Petrograde was really a decoy for a deeper conspiracy.

Omega 6 is a steady readthrough, although there is a major flashback halfway through the book that the story gives no segue into. Takaya Imamura gives this graphic novel a dynamic look to it for both anime and video game fans even if the plot does tend to jump around. It's super-powered cyberpunk space action that will make you nostalgic for Silver Age anime.

ANI-MOVIES, *Onward

Disney's first Pixar release of 2020 came out just at the dawn of the coronavirus, so Onward already had an uphill battle trying to get anyone to dare coming out to the theaters. Monsters University director Dan Scalon headed this project that was an original story he had written with Keith Bunin and Jason Headley which took about three years to complete. The movie unfortunately didn't make any of its money back at first because of the pandemic although it has gone on to gain some accolades after it went to streaming. Onward is a low fantasy tale that mixes family values with a road trip comedy, but with eldritch beings instead of humans into a genre usually referred to as elfpunk.

In a version of our world entirely populated by enchanted creatures, magic was commonplace along with your standard dungeon quests with magic users. Somewhere along the line, this society gave up using sorcery with the rise of technology, so they replaced their magic wands for automatic garage doors. Set in modern day, young Ian Lightfoot is an elf turning sixteen even though he never knew his father who died before he was born. Ian's mother Laurel is currently dating a centaur police officer that is always on the case of his older brother Barley for being a slacker who is more interested in preserving the abandoned ways of magic and is ravenously into RPGs. It turns out Ian's father left a wizard's staff behind for them to bring him back to life for a single day. The staff is powered by a rare gem which is entirely spent conjuring up only their father from the waist on down, so Ian and Barley take a tip from a gaming manual to find a manticore who it claims to have another gem. Turns out the manticore now runs a family restaurant, but the brothers use a map meant for kids to locate the gem. Laurel gets wind of this and sets out to make sure her boys don't use the gem as it might unleash a curse. Along the way, Ian learns he can use magic with the staff which helps when he and Barley come across pixie bikers and other obstacles, only to find that their quest leads right back to the local high school. Barley finds the gem followed by the curse which takes the form of a dragon made of parts of the school building, but Laural manages to help stop it with the manticore's old sword. Unfortunately, the remainder of their father's time is about spent, and Ian is stuck under some debris making Barley the only one who gets to say goodbye to their fully corporeal father before he disappears. Barley relays his father's love to Ian and they help people get interested in magic again.

Onward is up to scratch as far as Pixar movies go, at least that far as not being one of their gratuitous sequels. There doesn't seem to be as much love for this film that most generic Disney fanatics have so for some of their other releases, but having it come out just at the start of pandemic lockdown really put people in a bad mood which affected the movie's overall outcome. The animation and lush backdrops are picturesque, although Pixar didn't appear to put as much effort into this like some of the other visual masterpieces like Up or The Incredibles. The premise for this might have made for a reasonable series on streaming because the standard feature length doesn't do this urban fantasy world enough justice.

ANI-MOVIES: The Mouse And His Child

The Mouse And His Child was the first full-length animated movie put out by Sanrio along with what would eventually become Fred Wolf Films who animated the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Based on the book by Russell Hobson which is a children's story that contains some mature narratives and symbolism, Fred Wolf and Charles Swenson who created Mike, Lu And Og both directed this 1977 theatrically released adaptation. The movie meanders in its own minutiae which makes it incredibly tedious to sit through, while in contrast the film is visually pleasing. This was probably one of those films you caught on cable TV in the 80s on a lazy weekend afternoon and vaguely have a hazy memory of. It was the second film for Fred Wolf Films after the adult animated feature Down And Dirty Duck, so The Mouse And His Child was a major contrast from their prior production, similar to if like Ralph Bakshi did a Saturday Morning cartoon after finishing up Fritz The Cat. Despite the fact that the film had decent enough advertisement behind it, after its theatrical release it got folded into the highest level of obscurity with only a VHS release in America with little fanfare. This isn't really a lost treasure but more of an important footnote in animated film history that was forgotten mostly because it gets caught in its own pointless philosophy.

A toy of a father mouse and his child dancing when they're wound up begin life in a toy store but are thrown into the garbage when they fall off a shelf. The mice come across a rat named Manny who runs a small rat empire with enslaves other abandoned toys to do the hard labor, but the mice manage to get help from a prophetic frog who helps them on their journey to be free of needing to be wound up in order to move. The mice's quest for self-autonomy leads them to a wise peg-legged muskrat who rebuilds them and independent of being wind-ups. The closing part of the movie has the father and son mouse freeing the other toys enslaved by the rats, and for some reason the papa mouse marrying an elephant toy at the end which no one seems to question as its one of the first cross-species weddings in an animated movie.

The Mouse And His Child does contain a reasonable quality of animation put into it, however the theoretical questions it insists on dumping into the laps of young viewers makes it a chore to sit through. The musical score is equally grating with the opening and closing theme being sung off-key by the voice of the child mouse. The only real mark for this might be its English dub cast with Sir Peter Ustinov voicing the snidely rat Manny, along with other talents like Sally Kellerman and Cloris Leachman, plus fans of Wizards will recognize Bob Holt as the savant muskrat. You might be able to track down an old video cassette copy of this if you're a compulsive collector of vintage cartoons, however the film has little staying power to make it significant.

ANI-MOVIES, *Elio

Elio was Pixar's attempt at doing an original movie since Elemental, even though on its own that borrowed heavily from their parent company's film Zootopia. This movie could however be seen as a backwards version of Disney's Lilo And Stitch to which they conveniently remade into a live-action movie that came out the same summer. The one thing I noticed from most reviews of Elio was the vacancy of any comparisons to The Last Starfighter because it borrows a metric ton from the classic 80s sci-fi flick. The concept for the movie was dreamed up by director Adrian Molina when he was CalArts which is plainly obvious as a majority of character designs look like they were out of the cookie cutter "CalArts Style" that much of the older animation fans claim to be tired of, even though you could compare them to previous shows like Steven Universe. Molina directed this along with fellow CalArts graduate Madeline Sharafian plus Domee Shi with the screenplay written by Pixar regulars such as Mike Jones. However, all this talent didn't stop Elio from being Pixar's biggest dud losing out big time to K-Pop Demon Hunters which didn't even get a theatrical premiere and went straight to streaming. The family film is on its own a reasonably decent production, but Pixar's higher-ups had watered down Adrian Molina's original prospect partially due to his vision of the title character being queer-coded. If this is another situation similar to when Disney cancelled The Owl House because it was upsetting conservative parents because of its LGBTQ nature hasn't been fully confirmed, but Pixar's unwillingness to invest in the creator's original vision adds to Elio lackluster outcome. It is visually eye-catching with Pixar's new use of lenses and lighting help sell the interstellar benevolence you might be looking for in a movie with friendly and not-so friendly aliens.

Elio has dead parents like most Disney kids, so he's now living with his Aunt Olga who is a major at an Air Force base specializing in tracking down orbital space trash. Elio is obsessed with aliens and overhears a meeting Olga has about a signal which one of the crew claims is an alien response to the first Voyager space probe which causes Elio to respond to the signal causing the entire base to lose power. Olga sends Elio to a military camp where he gets taken by a collected organization of aliens called the Communiverse who believe he is the leader of Earth and send a clone of him to take his place on Earth. Elio wants to become part of the Communiverse, but they can't except any new members after the last one they rejected declares war on them. Grigon is the warlike leader of a race of huge caterpillars who stomp around in mecha suits modeled after giant crabs, and Elio tries to establish peace between them and the Communiverse, but fails to do so and becomes a prisoner. Grigon's son Glordon meets Elio and escapes with him to the Communiverse that hold Glordon as a bargaining chip to establish peace of which Grigon agrees to, but after having a fun time touring around all the sights the Communiverse has to offer, Glordon admits he doesn't want to go back to become bonded to his own mecha suit. Elio makes up a clone of Glordon to takes his place, but Grigon is not fooled and takes over the Communiverse which reveals Elio's deception, and they send him back to Earth. Glordon accidently uses Elio's star craft to go to Earth which is secured by the Air Force base, so Elio, his clone, and Olga rescue Glordon after taking back the spaceship. Once back at the Communiverse, Elio is able to work out a peace treaty and gives up his shot as an ambassador to live on Earth with his aunt, even though he still keeps in contact with Glordon via ham radio.

Elio wasn't seen as being a failed production because of the quality Pixar put into its visual aesthetics, but instead to how few people actually went to go see the film in theaters. Disney didn't have as much confidence in this as they had for their Lilo And Stitch retread, so they didn't put any genuine advertising into it, least of all any merchandise. The premise of a boy wanting to be abducted by aliens isn't all that original, even though Pixar managed to add their own touches to make it gratifying. This wasn't Pixar's hugest departure from their former glory, however Elio suffers from poor management and a blitzed ad campaign.