The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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Monday, October 16, 2023 at 9:31AM Can you guess the movie from its first and last shot?
The answer (and some Oscar talk) is after the jump...
animated films, first and last Monday, September 25, 2023 at 8:00PM by Nathaniel R
THE PEASANTS
Do you remember that painted animation film Loving Vincent (2017)? It was billed as the world's first fully painted feature film and it went on to an Oscar nomination in the Best Animated Feature category (eventually losing to Pixar's Coco). The married filmmaking team behind that picture have done it again with The Peasants, which is an adaptation of a novel about a peasant girl who causes a scandal by marrying a rich older man. Only three animated films have ever been nominated for Best International Feature Film -- Waltz With Bashir, Flee, and The Missing Picture (sort of) -- and interestingly enough all three of them can be classified as documentaries in addition to being animated. The same isn't true of The Peasants but Poland is submitting this one for the Oscar race...
Saturday, September 9, 2023 at 3:00PM 
Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron"
Hayao Miyazaki's last last picture before his latest last picture – already being discredited as such by Studio Ghibli VP Junichi Nishioka – saw him take on the model of a relatively conventional biopic. Despite its wavering between reality and dream, the now and the before, The Wind Rises represented one of the director's most straightforward efforts, doing away with the fantasy elements that defined most of his career. Had it stayed his swan song, it would have made for a career's closing chapter shaped like an intersection of culminating obsessions and stylistic disruption. The Boy and the Heron, previously known as How Do You Live?, posits a inversion of those paradigms. Oft-repeated ideas are invoked only to be collapsed, while tone and style return to the land of fantasy and dream logic.
Before reading ahead, A WARNING. This film will probably be best enjoyed by those who go into it blind, similarly to how Japanese audiences received it. If you want that experience, be satiated in the knowledge this is another masterpiece by Miyazaki. If you yearn for more, come with me down to a place that's no place within a time without time…
Asian cinema, Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, Review, Studio Ghibli, TIFF, animated films, animation, anime, film festivals Friday, June 2, 2023 at 7:30PM By Ben Miller
I am not prone to hyperbole but I'm having a difficult time not calling Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse the greatest animated film ever made. Maybe some time and distance will back that up. For now, let's call it a monumental feat of both animation and entertainment.
Following the events of Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales (again voiced by Shameik Moore) is now protecting his city and universe as its Spider-Man. He encounters a new and inexperienced villain named The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), which attracts the attention of multiversal Spider-Men...
Sunday, April 30, 2023 at 4:00PM by Nathaniel R
It's time to begin the annual April Foolish Predictions debacle. We say debacle and we call them "Foolish" not just as a pun on April Fools (even though yes, the bulk of these will be in May - shut up!) but because we know so little about the year's contenders this early in the year. After the jump the list of animated pictures that might be in play and the possibility that the two female breakouts from 2021's West Side Story may go head-to-head in this category as musical protagonists...
THE CHART IF YOU WANNA SEE IT. BUT HERE IS MORE INFO...
