Cry Baby Cry, Make the Devil Sigh

 By Salim Garami

What's good?

Yuasa Masaaki is going to have a really good 2018 year. Earlier last month, North American animation distributor GKIDS announced they had acquired distribution rights to his two works from 2017, Lu Over the Wall and The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, as well as his 2004 cult hit Mind Game. The acquisitions can promise no less than a breakout in recognition in the U.S. for the 52-year-old animator and his studio Science Saru. And yet, it's only apparently going to be riding on the tail of Yuasa's latest release, the Netflix anime series Devilman Crybaby, inspired by Nagai Go's tragic action-horror manga series...

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Coco Rules Over the Annie Awards

by Nathaniel R

In one of the least shocking events of this awards season, Disney/Pixar's Coco swept the Annie Awards this weekend, winning in every category in which it was nominated. 2017 was widely seen as an underwhelming year for animated features but we should face facts: Coco would have been a strong contender for Oscar gold in many other years, too.

The complete list of winners (Coco wasn't eligible in every category) and a few more comments after the jump...

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Producer's Guild Nominations: Wonder Woman is this year's Deadpool

by Nathaniel R

The Producer's Guild, by "virtue" of the fact that they have more nominees than Oscar each year, often get fairly close to "predicting" the Best Picture list. This year they've chosen 11 titles. Recency bias surely helped give Molly's Game a winning hand and the PGA's love of the blockbuster delivered for Wonder Woman which is a good call here since it did help define the year and superhero movies are very much producer events. Last year Deadpool was nominated at the PGA and was the only film to drop off on Oscar nominaiton morning. The other 9 pictures selected are all then looking strong as Best Picture possibilities for the Oscar nominations on January 23rd. Nominations and more commentary after the jump...

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A New Grinch on the Block

Chris here. Perhaps now that Christmas has ended and the holiday afterglow might prevent some from shouting "blasphemy!", it's safe to tell you that next Christmas will bring us a new animated Grinch. This retelling will be coming from Illumination Studios, which turned the minions of Despicable Me into a cash cow - so you can safely expect sturdly box office and cute goofiness. 

The Grinch will be voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose dulcet tones are a fair choice if this film will be chasing the sound of Boris Karloff's original animated narration. Our first peek of the mean green one is above, and while it promises a "meaner" Grinch, he's looking awfully cuddly to me.

The 2017 Animated Contenders: "Birdboy: The Forgotten Children"

by Tim Brayton

For the finale of our five-part tour of some of the more obscure films competing for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, we turn to a film that premiered over two years ago, but has only just opened in the U.S. this very weekend: the Spanish psychological horror cartoon Birdboy: The Forgotten Chidlren. The film is based on the comic Psiconautas by Alberto Vázquez, who co-writes and co-directs with Pedro Rivero; it's the duo's second film based on these characters, following the 2011 short Birdman, which serves as the new feature's backstory (the short is available online).

The basic hook here couldn't be any more direct or nasty-minded. This is a silly talking animal film warped into a portrait of the world as bleak, hopeless hell. "Psychological horror," I called it, because I'd be hard pressed to name any better category, but that's not really enough to communicate the sheer, visceral nastiness of this film. It's a mere 76 minutes long, and even that's almost too long to spend with the film's altogether putrescent depiction of a world that has died, with the survivors still tottering around in the corpse of that world, forced to confront some truly cruel moments. Also, they're fuzzy critters.

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