Blog Archives
Monkeybone
Monkeybone 2001
While I did put up another poll on Twitter for the movie that I should watch & review next, I haven’t had time to fit in the 3 hour cut of Batman v Superman just yet. So in the meantime, I had a little bit of time the other night and decided to toss on this film which is currently streaming on Netflix. It’s a movie that I had watched many years ago because I’m a fan of weird animation and dark fantasy movies. I remember generally liking this film, but never had a real desire to revisit it or own it. Watching it again now, I really appreciate plenty of the visuals and designs on the fantasy world, but the overarching story that drives the plot forward leaves a lot to be desired, especially everything that happens in the real world.
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Graphic Horror: Hulk: Where Monsters Dwell
Hulk: Where Monsters Dwell 2016
This might be a little bit of a stretch to call this a horror movie, but it’s a brand new, straight to home video animated movie from Marvel. They seem to be continuing the holiday theme that they started with last year’s Christmas themed Frost Fight and now continue with this year’s Where Monsters Dwell which is quite obviously a Halloween themed movie featuring Hulk, Dr. Strange, and a few other Halloween-themed heroes that most people won’t really be aware of. Similar to Frost Fight and the Heroes United movies before that, this is more of a kid-friendly film with less focus on any real scares or any complicated plot. Just a harmless little romp with a few monsters and a little bit of a lesson to it.
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Hero of the Year
DC Superhero Girls: Hero of the Year 2016
This is the first feature length movie based on the initiative that DC has started about a year ago that combines toys, a webseries, and comics that are targeted towards girls rather than boys. And since there isn’t a large enough roster of notable women superheroes in the DC universe, they add in a handful of villains into the mix to make up the full slate. One of the biggest issues that I had with the webseries was that it focused too much on the girly aspects of the concept and not enough of the superheroism, this film is much closer to the right balance with a fair amount of action, humor, and friendship without spending too much time on makeovers and costume designing.
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Zoom
Zoom 2016
This year has been an interesting one, I’ve discovered and watched more films in the past month or two than I ever anticipated coming out this year with a few more to come. This film is one of the few that found its way to me via the PR department which suggested that I watch the film via the site We Are Colony. This film is one of the few where I do stretch the definition of a “comic book movie” to include movies about comic books themselves. The comic book in question is written by Allison Pill’s character and also plays a large part of the movie via animation. I wasn’t exactly sure where this film was going, and there is one major component of the story that’s easily spoiled, and is in much of the advertising for the film but is actually better if you’re unaware of it for the first watch. There’s a lot of humor, a lot of sex and nudity without having a lot of actual nudity, and it has an interesting concept that can be surprising, but I will be spoiling in this review. One final note about We Are Colony’s site, it unfortunately wasn’t a great experience for actually watching the movie without a solid high speed internet connection, there’s very little buffering allowed and there’s no option to lower the video quality – or if there is, it’s not easily found. So trying to watch this movie with a spotty internet was more of a pain than it should have been.
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Batman Unlimited: Mechs Vs Mutants
Batman Unlimited: Mechs Vs Mutants 2016
Within a month of me finishing all of the animated comic book movies out there, they went and released two more already. Starting off with the latest entry in the Batman Unlimited series, something that I tend to think of as the “toy series” as it coincided with the release of a new toy line and overall is more kid friendly than the current Warner Premier animated movies that tend towards PG-13 to R for a more adult audience. Even when just looking at this comparatively to the other two Batman Unlimited movies that came before this one, there was a level of inconsistency with many of the characters like Penguin and even Killer Croc. But while it did take a while to win me over, the level of humor across the third act made up for a lot of nothing in the first two. At least a little.
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Top 10 (Non-DC) Animated Comic Book Movies
After finishing up a full month of animated movies, I managed to complete one of my mini-goals. I have finished watching every animated movie that’s currently on my list, as well as a couple that weren’t. So with that in mind, I thought it was time to share my top 10 list of animated comic book movies. There are a couple conditions here – one is that I decided to exclude DC Animated films just because their output is so massive that they literally make up half the total list of films that I’m choosing from, and also because I’ve already done a top 10 list of just DC Animated films so I’m not looking to repeat myself. I considered also excluding Marvel in fairness, but their animated output is still quite small, and much of it is quite lacking. I also decided to exclude superhero movies that weren’t based on a comic i.e. no Incredibles. Spoiler alert, it would be at the top of the list. But with those conditions out of the way, let’s get to the list! And FYI, you can click any of the titles to check out my original full reviews on the movies.
Turtles Forever
Turtles Forever 2009
And finally wrapping up this month of animated movies that’s seeped slightly from July into August I’ve reached another milestone. This is the last animated film that I currently have on my list. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any others out there, I know there’s plenty if I expand to foreign comics, but I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten every English one. As for the actual movie, Turtles Forever came out of an event that was done for the 25th anniversary of the Turtles and so they made this TV movie based around the current series that started in ’03 and was airing on CW4Kids. The main focus of the movie was to bring the 80’s animated series into a connected continuity with the 00’s series, and apparently to also make fun of it. There’s a ton of meta humor that often gets in the way of telling any sort of real story, but that’s ok because it is a ton of fun to watch. Especially if you’re someone who grew up with the 80’s Turtles and even if you’re like me and have never seen a single episode of the 00’s Turtles.
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Flash Gordon The Greatest Adventure of All
Flash Gordon The Greatest Adventure of All 1982
I only have one other animated movie to cover after this before I have watched every one that I’m aware of out there which gets me one step closer to my goal of watching every superhero and comic book movie ever made. This film was actually made a few years before it was ever shown. It was initially created as a TV movie by Filmation, the animation studio behind such 80’s staples as He-Man, and many of the DC shows that weren’t produced by Hanna-Barbera, but it was quickly retooled into a TV series. It wasn’t until after the show had been cancelled that they went back to the original footage and aired it as a TV movie as it was intended. It has yet to receive an official release, but it did get a home video release in Japan where it can currently be found online with Japanese subtitles. I was never a big connoisseur of Filmation shows aside from vague memories of He-Man, She-Ra, Bravestarr, and Fat Albert. Watching this I could see the appeal, and it actually felt much more adult than most of what they were known for. There were obvious cost-cutting techniques and rotoscoping, but there was a level of faithfulness that didn’t quite ever come across in the live-action movie. They were able to pull off more monstrous looking creatures within the world and overall more of a sci-fi vibe to it. For me, it didn’t quite come to the fun and campy level that the live-action movie did, it felt like it took the material more seriously, but the quality just wasn’t quite enough for it to be a truly great film.
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Turok: Son of Stone
Turok: Son of Stone 2008
It’s always interesting to me when I discover films that I previously hadn’t heard about across my nearly five years of running this site. I was vaguely aware of the Turok video game series from the late 90’s, but I never knew that it was based on a comic book. I also never knew that it was turned into an animated movie around the same time as the last installment of the game series in 2008. This film generally ignores most of the video game series and goes back to the roots of the comics to tell an origin story of sorts for Turok and his journey to the Land of the Lost more or less. It’s filled with plenty of blood and action, attempts at being culturally sensitive rather than playing into Native American stereotypes, but in the end it didn’t quite accomplish the most important thing that it should have done. It never really made Turok feel like a real character instead of an action hero stereotype.
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Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo
Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo 2006
This month of animation is almost over and with this movie I have now officially seen every single DC Animated movie ever made, not counting some multi-part TV episodes that were later released as a movie. This was the last film before transitioning into their Warner Premier made-for-home-video and it also happened to come right at the end of the Teen Titans run. I’ve only seen a handful of Teen Titans episodes, and quite a bit more of the later series Teen Titans Go, and honestly this felt a little bit like a transitional moment between the two series even though it was hot off the heels of the first series and years before the second. While the overall story was serious, there were plenty of moments that used a very anime style of comedy in the animation, something that is widely used in Go, but I don’t recall it being used much in the original Teen Titans. The movie was fun, the villain was interesting, but my biggest complaint was that it only used the Tokyo setting for a large number of cliched stereotypical jokes without any real respect to the culture.
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Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 