True Grit fits into the Coen Brother’s expanding body of work. Their scripts are not scripts of painful labor, deadlines, script-writing programs or marketing demands but of self-amusement. At the end of their day, they can be satisfied not only with the product but the process undergone. To sit and watch one of their films is to lean forward with a combination of bemusement and apprehension. True Grit does not disappoint. It’s a lot of fun.

Without good direction, you end up with drek. Problems with sequence timing or the render pipeline can be solved with relative ease – problems of mismanagement are difficult to overcome and usually spell doom. Animation directors aren’t directing animation, they’re directing a group of people who are working in arguably the most time consuming and exacting of creative mediums. David Levy's new book Directing Animation at its heart strives to teach the reader how to keep an animation production crew happy, productive and on task.

Dr. Toon reviews the latest entry in The Looney Tunes literary canon.

The first imperative for a producing company is that a film be profitable, preferably obscenely profitable, but for a viewer and lover of films the most important criteria of a movie is to transport us to other worlds and into the lives of other people in an entertaining fashion. An American film director once said: “a film is an immensely likable group of people doing an impossible task”. The producers of TRON: Legacy failed to embrace any element of this quote.

“Think of this book as a Disney History companion filling in some of those nooks and crannies that may only be mentioned in a brief sentence or two, if at all, in other Disney history books. These chapters truly are the forgotten but fascinating Disney stories.” Through the compilation of the wide array of articles that he has written through the years, Korkis presents a work that provides his readers with little known histories and stories about Walt Disney and the empire that he created.

This animated feature from Sylvain Chomet, the director of THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, is an unsettling experience. To understand why I say this there is some background that must be known. It is based on an unfilmed script from famed comedian Jacques Tati animated in the French icon’s style. When I think of Tati, I think of the charming Mr. Hulot, a hapless Buster Keaton-like everyman. I think of sly humor in a light comedy. The sly humor is there, but there is nothing light about it.

For a Coen Brothers film, this Western is pretty straight forward. A young girl’s father is murdered. She seeks revenge. Her determination is undaunted. And yet this is a Coen Brothers’ film. The siblings love of language and dark humor color this compelling character study.

I haven’t been this disappointed by a Walt Disney sci-fi movie since The Black Hole. Maybe I walked in with unrealistic expectations of seeing something as groundbreaking, and visually thrilling as the 1982 original. The trailer looked tremendous and the idea of revisiting a ‘visionary’ film (the first Tron does indeed deserve that now-overused adjective) with 21st century effects – and with the same actors playing the same characters they did in the original, only middle-aged – seemed irresistible.

It has been nearly thirty years since the original TRON made waves with its then groundbreaking visual effects. Visual effects have caught up with the visionary ideas of the digital world of the original, making the sequel a visual treat. Unfortunately, the story is less compelling.

Albert was not born with a stammer, but developed one around four or five. He was born a prince. The former creates a great problem for the latter when public speaking is key to the job he was born to do. Making matters worse, he was prince during the boom of wireless radio and disturbing times with an older brother that had little interest in being king. He would become King George VI.

Continued from previous Narnia movies, Lucy and her brother Edmund, embark on an adventure in “The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the third film in the series opening on December 10, 2010. The journey takes them on beyond Narnia itself. Lucy and Edmond seem like ordinary kids, but they are King and Queen in the imaginary land of Narnia. Today, however, they are going to visit their cranky young cousin Eustace, who doesn’t believe fairly tales and imaginary things until he sees them come alive.

Of all the sports to grace the screen, boxing has easily inspired the greatest films. Now director David O. Russell has added another to the ranks of RAGING BULL, ROCKY and MILLION DOLLAR BABY. But like all of those films, the reason this film is great is not because it’s a boxing movie. This is a story of family and how for some they can either help them raise their arms in victory or punch them below the belt.

In the most overtly allegorical of C.S. Lewis' NARNIA series, the heroes battle the demons inside rather than white witches or evil kings. While director Michael Apted never mentions any one religion, the Christian undertones of this installment are more apparent than any of the other films. Vanity, jealousy, greed and pride are the villains here.

Ryan Woodward's film "Thought of you" offers a great look at what hand animation has to offer, and what an animator and his audience can expect from the medium.

Sensual is not a word often thought of when one thinks of a Disney animated film. But this Disney short flows with it. But this isn't just any Disney short, it originated as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. A seemingly unlikely pair of artists to work together. Disney wanted to experiment with the animation form and Dali saw animation as a perfect way to explore surrealism on film. The project started in the 1940s with Dali drawing dozens of images, but the film never came to be. Following the production of FANTASIA/2000, Roy E. Disney championed its completion using original storyboards and journals.

A close encounter with the five more YouTube Play award winners, L through N.

Arguably one of the best anime of the 21st century thus far, Eden of the East spirals like a good William Gibson novel.

While in many ways FANTASIA/2000 tries to catch lightning in a bottle and doesn't catch a full bolt, but it does catch a great deal of sparks. The film works as an homage to the 1940 masterpiece rather than a companion. Many of the sequences seem to be a reflection of one from the original. While it doesn't feel as revolutionary as FANTASIA, the follow-up touches on the same animation magic.

Read my review of FANTASIA.

Darren Aronofsky has made a darker version of THE RED SHOES. From a screenplay by Andres Heinz, Mark Heyman and John McLaughlin, he takes the basic premise of the famed ballet Swan Lake and brings it to this psychological thriller. In trying to become the White Swan, a ballerina becomes the Black Swan.