‘Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers’ Review: Supposed Riff on Reboots Too Self-Serious for Its Own Good

✯✯½

Amidst Disney’s own trend of live-action remakes of their most popular live action films, surely enough it took a while before they decided to go ahead and catch up with rebooting one of their own animated series. With director Akiva Schaffer taking the helm at bringing Disney’s beloved chipmunks to the screen to a completely new generation of viewers, what he brings out with Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers seems to be born out of a parody for how they’ve continuously seen their animated fare as of late – but even knowing that this is still under Disney’s own noses, they can’t fully reach the levels of lampooning that you know the material at hand would be opening themselves up to.

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Ratatouille Review: A Testament to the Artists Working on their Craft

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Brad Bird’s second animated film for Pixar may not be an action-packed ride in the same way that his previous animated films were but knowing what it is that Ratatouille stands for, it’s hard not to love the sort of experimentation that it sets out for as far as the work of Pixar has gone. But of course being the Pixar apologist that I am, I can’t help but find myself being brought into a whole other world when looking at the beautiful animated backdrops being utilized to their very fullest and Brad Bird’s touch also helps in setting that into place with Ratatouille. In coming back to the familiar and backhanded criticism that animation is recognized as being geared primarily towards children, Pixar’s films have always found a way to resonate with adult audiences over the years but in looking at the story that they are telling in Ratatouille perhaps something more is coming along the way. In this story of a rat who is doing everything that he can in order to become a cook for as unorthodox as it is, we have another tale about the way art impacts others – something that is only set to resonate with viewers of all sorts.

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The Lego Batman Movie – Review

✯✯✯½

Kind of like The Lego Movie in a sense that it would not be easy to expect something along these lines at first to be half as good as it was, but it manages to succeed in bringing good fun. The unexpected success of The Lego Movie was one among many of the decade’s biggest surprises for it managed to capture a certain playfulness in itself that in turn created a product far better than it really had much right to be, but with The Lego Batman Movie now focusing on DC characters, one can only have enough of Will Arnett’s Batman impression filling up the final product. Turns out what I got was exactly what made The Lego Movie work nearly as well as it did although probably not to the same degree of effectiveness as said film, but maybe the same sort of fun.

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The Lego Movie – Review

✯✯✯½

On the surface it would be easy to say that The Lego Movie is a horrible concept and yet Phil Lord and Chris Miller manage to make something so much better than what would ever be expected out of it. With The Lego Movie, the duo’s second foray into animation after Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, they take the beloved toy line and somehow manage to tell a story out of it with such ease. For as broad as the limits could ever be, it’s nice to see that the duo make great awareness of such with The Lego Movie and call for greater wonders by bringing them onto the big screen. First they take the improbable with Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or 21 Jump Street but something that could have easily come off as a nearly two hour long commercial ultimately becomes even more joyful inside.

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