Blog Archives
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2018
It’s been a long year and while I have been to the movie theaters a few times to see movies that I would have normally reviewed for this site, only the first couple actually worked out that way. But I had heard such great things about this movie that I just had to see it. And everything I heard was true and more. The visual style of this film is gorgeous and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before. The sheer amount of Easter Eggs and references that only a major comic book nerd could fully catch was astounding, and the way it opened up the Spider-Verse to someone only knowledgeable via movies and TV series was fantastic. And to top it all off, it had a great story, great action, hilarious comedy, and fully formed characters with interesting and believable choices. Just a great way to round out 2018. And since this is a very recent movie, I always discuss the movie in full so this is your spoiler warning.
LEGO DC Superhero Girls: Super-Villain High
LEGO DC Superhero Girls: Super-Villain High 2018
I’m still working my way through the movies of the past couple years including the many DC animated features and this one seems like a sub-genre within a sub-genre as there have been a few Superhero Girls webseries and movies and there have been a few LEGO DC movies and this combines the two into something else. I also felt like I was missing a little something having not seen the previous Brain Drain. But it wasn’t exactly too difficult to follow. And when I compare it to the previous similar properties, it falls right in line with the other LEGO DC movies and it’s on the higher side of the previous Superhero Girls that I’ve watched. It’s fun, it’s somewhat self-aware, and it’s important just to exist as a superhero property with a significant amount of positive female characters.
Batman and Harley Quinn
Batman and Harley Quinn 2017
When this movie was first announced, I was actually quite excited for it. I would consider Harley Quinn to be my favorite comic book character. I love her aesthetic and her unpredictability, but when the first trailer came out I sensed trouble despite the fact that it was clearly modeled after the designs of the 90’s Batman the Animated Series. And while the animation style and several of the voice actors are from that series the tone and content of the movie is much more adult than the original series ever was. Unfortunately the idea of more adult is just plenty of jokes and references to sex and some blood including a character death. It just felt completely out of place and while a few of the jokes did make me laugh quite a bit, it never really felt right and never came together as a whole.
Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom
Howard Lovecraft and the Undersea Kingdom 2017
Last year I decided to take a chance on the first Howard Lovecraft movie. At the time, I thought it was just a low budget knock off film that somehow was trying to trade in on the HP Lovecraft lore and was also based on an indie comic. This year I did a little bit more digging and discovered Arcana Studio spun off of Arcana Comics. They do seem to be a low budget animation studio, but the majority of their films are adaptations of their comics which I think is a great concept. I wasn’t a huge fan of the first Howard Lovecraft film, it seemed like a fascinating world, but there wasn’t much of a character arc and the tone seemed like a weird childish goth with mediocre voice actors except a couple token cameos. The sequel works much better with an overall darker tone with less kid-centric humor, bigger roles for the notable voice actors, and more of a character arc for Howard himself. I actually quite enjoyed this one and am curious to see where things end up in the third movie coming out in a couple weeks.
Batman vs Two-Face
Batman vs Two-Face 2017
One of the most difficult things about falling behind over the past year is the continued break-neck pace that DC puts out their animated direct-to-home-video movies. There’s 3-4 in their regular animated line, 2-3 Lego versions, a couple Superhero Girl movies, and occasionally a few others like this one. This is the sequel to the previous year’s Return of the Caped Crusaders, an animated continuation of the Adam West Batman series from the 60’s with Adam West, Burt Ward, and Julie Newmar returning to voice their characters. This time around they also add William Shatner as the voice of Two-Face and the Batman movie’s Catwoman Lee Meriwether. This also happens to the be the last film of Adam West before he passed away. Similar to the previous film, this was a lot of fun. It also took a slightly different direction to not overly homage previous incarnations and simply tell a new story in a similarly comedic fashion to the 60’s series with a more modern sensibility.
Vixen: The Movie
Vixen: The Movie 2017
One of the last shows that I actively covered over on my sister site Channel: Superhero was the first season of an animated series set in the Arrowverse and airing on the CW app/website CW Seed. One of my biggest issues in the webseries is that it felt more like a movie/full episode that was chopped up into episodes rather than an actual webseries. And while I didn’t continue in on watching the second season, they were cut together with a few extra scenes into this animated movie that falls right alongside the typical DC Animated movies. I do find that it’s somewhat appropriate that I’ve waited this long to review this film as it is Black History Month and in general, that’s where I’ve reviewed most Black superhero movies. I will also be updating my top Black superhero movies of all time list once I’ve watched Black Panther in just a couple week’s time. But as for the actual quality of this movie, it falls somewhere in the midrange of the average DC Animated movie. Vixen is an interesting character, but the movie itself doesn’t really do anything to make itself stand out as anything other than just another superhero origin story, just with a little African folklore flair to it.
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Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues
Red Sonja: Queen of Plagues 2016
There’s a few reasons why I haven’t covered any motion comics on this site before now. The biggest reason is that every motion comic that I’ve looked into is presented more like a TV season, with each issue of the comic that it’s adapting is its own episode and there tends to be a half dozen to a dozen episodes. Queen of Plagues is presented as a single movie that runs just over an hour, but the animation style is still much more like the typical motion comic style where the comic book art is translated almost exactly to screen with only minor changes to remove text boxes and animation based on moving and stretching the original art elements. While the voice work and animation – specifically the lip synch – fall in line with my limited experience with motion comics, it is much better than some of the lower budget ones that I’ve heard about with only a single voice actor and no lip synch animation at all. The film itself was a nice story even though it took a little while to get going.
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Teen Titans: The Judas Contract
Teen Titans: The Judas Contract 2017
It actually feels like a fairly light year for DC animated movies when compared to last year when there were quite a few movies from various different DC properties while this is only the fourth animated movie counting the theatrical Lego Batman movie and the latest DC Superhero Girls movie. Even so, I feel like I’ve fallen behind on these as this came out a couple months ago and I’m only just now getting around to watching and reviewing it. I did quite enjoy Teen Titans vs the Justice League and this movie does feel like a step up from that one. This also seems to do a good job of including more social relationships within the story instead of just focusing on the plot and action which helps differentiate itself from other superhero stories to a certain extent. There were a few too many attempts at maturing the story by including sex jokes, but overall this was an enjoyable continuation of the animated Teen Titans storyline. And as usual with all my reviews and especially recent releases, I will be discussing the movie in full including any potential plot spoilers.
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Gantz: O
Gantz: O 2016
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to keep up with anime. There was a time when I was a big fan and would keep track of every new release and would follow certain series releases on DVD. Nowadays, there’s too many for me to keep track of, but every once in a while something comes my way that piques my interest. Gantz was one of those series that I followed on DVD. It’s a bizarre series about people who have died and are then resurrected by a giant black orb and sent out on missions slash games to kill aliens with high tech weaponry where they will most likely die. After the anime series came a few live action movies, and this most recent film is a CGI rendered anime that follows likely a few months to a year after the series left off. It’s been a while since I’ve watched the original anime and even a while since I watched the first live action movie (and haven’t gotten around to the live actions sequels), but while this was so different that it barely felt like it was still Gantz, it’s still a bizarrely enjoyable ride.
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Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom
Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom 2016
I’ve never been a huge HP Lovecraft fan, essentially the only things I know about his writing are that it involves a lot of madness and tentacle creatures and gave some inspiration to the first Hellboy movie and In the Mouth of Madness. It seemed quite unusual that these kinds of stories would translate to a comic book made for kids and that comic would then be turned into an animated movie complete with the voice of Hellboy in a small role even. When I initially saw the box art for the film several months ago, I dismissed it as one of those cheap knock-off movies that tend to mimic a popular movie from a few years earlier like Karate Panda or Dragon Flight School. And to a certain extent, that’s exactly what this is only there’s not really any movie that it’s trying to cash in on, it’s just a lower budget animated film that managed to get a few medium profile actors to lend their voices. It wasn’t a horrible experience by any means, but there also wasn’t much enjoyment to be had outside of a couple brief laughs.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 