Have you ever fallen in love with someone you know you couldn’t have? Just ask Humphrey. In Lion Gate’s new 3-D animation “Alpha and Omega,” Humphrey is a lowly Omega wolf in his pack, and he falls in love with Kate, the stunning and skilled Alpha female of the pack...

Due to its subject matter, this film should be called sci-fi. But its tone is far closer to a somber period piece. Mark Romanek, whose only other feature film was the sad thriller ONE HOUR PHOTO, has kept the same straightforward tone of the book from Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel REMAINS OF THE DAY was adapted into a somber film as well. Romanek never sensationalizes the material into some kind of conspiracy thriller. He asks one philosophical question and spends the film answering that question in an emotionally powerful way.

Many critics put this as one of the lowest, if not the lowest point, in Disney Feature Animation history. While it's not as big a failure as a film as so many say, its financial disaster has put an extra pall over its history. Getting crushed by THE CARE BEAR MOVIE at the box office will do that. The straightforward fantasy adventure is undercut by weak characters mainly.

I heard a story once about Melvin Van Peebles going to see his SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG on opening day with only one other person in the theater, a Black Panther. He went to a later showing and the house was full. That one Black Panther had come back and brought all this friends, who loved the film. I can see the same scenario playing out with this film, only replacing the Black Panther with an illegal immigrant.

This isn't a thriller in the American sense of the term. It certainly has more in common with meticulously paced French thrillers, which were as much character studies as they were genre pieces. Director Anton Corbijn has no intentions of making this film for the ADD crowd accustomed to lightning fast editing and adrenaline-fueled action sequences at regular intervals. He is certainly asking his audience to be patient.

One of the most fun experiences on the Wii ever! Sin and Punishment: Star Successor is all about old-school fun and cheesy dialogue!

A Houdini artist test drives the latest edition from Side Effects for efficiency and other improvements.

Fathers and sons – both onscreen and off – figure in Studio Ghibli’s Tales from Earthsea. Onscreen, a teenage prince kills his royal dad and makes off with the man’s sword; offscreen, Goro Miyazaki, the son of Japan’s best-known animation director takes over a project his dad initiated but never found the time to direct. Wish fulfillment or mere coincidence? Does a sword equal a man’s career? You be the judge…

Best videogame adaptation ever! Wait, but it's adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel. This send-up of videogame culture is frantic and funny. It uses videogames as a style with wit and ingenuity. Director Edgar Wright, the maker of SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ, has taken a simple, quirky love story and blown it out into a grand cinematic spectacle that had me smiling form the moment the 8-bit version of the Universal logo came up on the screen.

It has been reported that Ursula K. LeGuin granted Studio Ghibli the rights to her EARTHSEA series largely based on her love for Hayao Miyzaki's work. When Miyazaki was not available to direct the film, the studio hired his son Goro instead. Hayao publicly said his son was not ready to write and direct his first feature film. They should have listened to the master.

I have mixed feelings about this buddy cop comedy. I went in hoping for a satire of outlandish cop flicks. For the most part that's what I got. Then the film hints at something more, dealing with desk cops doing "boring" police work to catch the biggest thieves like Bernie Madoff. I really wish this area had been developed deeper instead of focusing on unconnected and very broad character moments. Then again some of those moments are really funny. But then again some of them aren't.

The XSIbase.com founder test drives the latest version of Softimage 2011.

This episode 15 of the Frenzer Foreman Animation Forum will shock and anesthetize your extra cognition of the outer workings of the inner minutia of the broad specifics of animation. Alan Foreman straps the very Joel Frenzer into the special guest hot-seat to scour the depths of his animation teaching philosophy, artistic process, and his thoughts on his thoughts. The easiest to book and most self-reverential episode in the FFAF archive to date!

Crackdown returns to the Xbox 360, now with multiplayer! Hit the jump to see the review of Crackdown 2!

Henry Selick's children's film is dark in both its tone and look. That is translated over into the new 1080p release from Disney. The color palette is muted, so one doesn't get the pop that animation often brings to Blu-ray. The images don't have the same depth as other animated films on Blu-ray do as well. I believe this is certainly more to do with the source than the transfer. Just looking at the standard definition trailer you can see a huge improvement. The picture is much clearer than the murky DVD transfer. There is noise throughout, especially in the live-action sequences, but no artifacting or banding. I'm not convinced this is the best the film could look, but it's the best available for home viewing to date by far.

Based on the Roald Dahl’s book, director Henry Selick made this project his follow-up to the successful NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Bookended by a live-action opening and closing, this stop-motion feature is generally an episodic adventure following a classic tale of a young boy dreaming beyond his circumstances.

The 2010 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery has done away with the old phrase “look but don’t touch.” The 14 juried pieces exhibited this year absolutely require human interaction with a focus on haptics (touch). Richard Elaver from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has taken the cross disciplinary theme of Leonardo and applied it to the selection process for the exhibits on display. Leonardo is a journal that has a philosophy of combining science, technology and art. Leonardo can be explored at www.leonardo.info.

Preston Smith began with SIGGRAPH as a volunteer 15 years ago and is the current Chair of the Emerging Technologies section. Preston is a network administrator. When he graduated from college, he thought seriously about getting involved in CG. The more he watched what the kids in this industry were doing with technology, the more he became interested in supporting that technology. Today, Preston is the Linux administrator at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research. He supports the fMRI, or function Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine.

Jim Morris, General Manager and Executive Vice President of Production at Pixar Animation Studios has over 23 years experience as a producer and production executive in the motion picture industry. He came to the 37th Annual SIGGRAPH, his 20th time in attendance, with a message. Jim posed the rhetorical question, “Who comes to SIGGRAPH?” It is the people who, at some point early in life, watched a movie that lit a spark in them. For Jim, it was stop animation in some of the older movies like Jason and the Argonauts.

This character-driven animated feature reminded me of the landmark BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. The production from Warner Premiere takes the "Under the Hood" story arc from the comics and creates the best filmic treatment of the relationship between Batman and Robin.