Archives August 2024

Disney and Pixar return to their world of thought and emotion with Inside Out 2, this time with four new emotions and puberty added.

Disney and Pixar we kind enough to send us a copy of their latest film, Inside Out 2 for the purpose of our review. The story continues with Riley becoming one of the stars of her hockey team and along with her two best friends are invited to a hockey camp. There she will be learning from the coach of the team she hopes to join in the next year. On the way she learns she won’t be attending the same school or team with her friends as she first thought. This causes a spiral of feelings and emotions to reveal themselves as she decides between her current friends and her future teammates.

With the addition of puberty, several new emotions join, Anxiety quickly taking over Riley’s console. Refusing to give up control, Joy questions and argues against each decision. She is then removed from the control room along with the original emotions, leaving only the new four alone and in control. As the original emotions work to restore Riley’s sense of self, Anxiety works to change her entire personality, eventually spiraling out of control.

The team did a fantastic job with this one. The original film took me a few watches to really start enjoying it but this one, they really knocked it out of the park. Between animation quality, the writing and performances, from start to finish this film far exceeded my expectations.

Furiosa follows the story of how she became the badass heroine from Mad Max: Fury Road and stars Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy.

Furiosa is the latest, or fifth, installment in the Mad Max franchise from Warner Brothers and features Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy. The story follows her from being a child through rising up through Immortan Joe’s ranks. It even covers how she lost her arm as well. The world of Mad Max is responsible for inspiring, or helping to inspire, so many other properties. My own novel I published years ago being one of them. The world has basically gone to hell. As far as anyone can tell, it is all wasteland in every direction. The remnants of society have banded behind blood thirsty leaders that promise to provide them with the best the world has left to offer while maintaining uneasy alliances. Due to Fury Road, we know how her story ends but not see how it truly begins with her abduction from her paradisical home.

The team did a fantastic job making a truly believable wasteland, leaving me curious about where they could have filmed everything. The effects were over the top, but in a great way and the cast was amazing. During Fury Road, Furiosa was my favorite character and this film  further reinforced that feeling. Overall it was a great film for fans of over the top action, fiery explosions and absolutely brutal combat.

Parents grab your children, children grab your blankies, this is not a test! Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 3 is finally here!

The team at Warner Brothers were kind enough to share Part 3 of Justice League Crisis On Infinite Earths for our review. The film starts with the death of the Monitor and pulling the Earths they could save into a realm between life and death called The Bleed. The protection of The Bleed has become increasingly unstable and incursions begin to happen across multiple Earths. First is a wave of dinosaurs attacking Metropolis and followed by Nazis armed with the weapons of Batman’s rogues gallery in Gotham. Both sequences were great.

The film does a great job of not just telling the conclusion of the story but explaining why the multiverse even exists. It even explains how the Anti-Monitor is a hero to the multiverse. Even having read the novel, my memory is that the Anti-Monitor was the ultimate villain. I loved seeing cameos from some of the other animate DC universes, like Batman The Animated Series including Mark Hamill as the Joker of that world. Overall it made for a great ending to the story and told in a better way than I had seen previously for this story.

I just hope that we get to see Batman Metal receive this same treatment because start to finish the team crushed this story!