Persepolis

Persepolis (Persian City) is a very entertaining film based on an autobiographical graphic novel written by the co-director of this film, Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian who grew up in the late 70s in Iran. The film traces about 20 years of Marjane's life from the beginning in Iran with the ruling Shahs, their downfall, the Iran-Iraq war, her stay in Vienna and then life back in Iran under the religious mullahs and then finally her departure to Paris.

Shot in slick, dark, powerful animation, the film starts of bright and brilliant with a young Marjane living with her parents under the rule of the Shahs. She is a fiesty young girl, curious and determined. She is a joy to watch and you root for her cause. Her narrative is smooth and appropriate as she leads you through the various different incidences that start to change her wonderful life into something quite different as the revolutionaries take over.

As the heroine grows up and out the film starts to lose some of its grip. With Marjane, the film seems to sink into some depression as well. The politics that rends Marjane's life also blunts the appeal of the film a bit and at times, in Marjane's dislocation, it looks pretty much like your routine immigration experience film. However, the film's politics is very clear in its belief that politics basically sucks.

Marjane is ultimately the classical modern immigrant: one who is as lost in their own culture as they are in the new one they try to flee in to.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille is another delicious offering from the animation collaboration of Disney and Pixar (Cars, The Incredibles, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters. Inc, A Bug's Life, et al.) The story of a chef rat is presented with flair, care and an amazing attention to detail. Ratatouille has all the elements that have made the films before it enduring. However, it suffers some, but not all, of its flaws. The self-assured, smug rat chef Remy is very true to his pedigree. He is certainly more sophisticated than his ancestors (Nemo, Mambo, Lightening McQueen (cars), Mike(Monsters inc)) but shares a very carefully constructed behavioral pattern that can be described as clinical at best and utterly affected at best. Unfortunately, Hollywood and specially Pixar, seems to have set on a winning formula for these animated films and keeps repeating it with the next set of improbable characters (incredible, cars, monsters, penguins and now a rat chef.) All the characters in the film from the bumbling hero, capricious love interest to the villainous head-chef are so well formed that they really are nothing more than cardboard cutouts.

Everything they say has been refined over and over again until it is exactly as it should be and that predictability dwarfs these films in front of the more original, if quixotic, Japanese exercises such as 'Spirited Away', 'Howl's moving castle' or even European films such as 'Triplets of Bellville.' The last one is actually a stark contrast, brilliant one at that, to the Hollywood mainstream, as it barely has dialog and thrives on an amazing soundtrack and visual splendor that no amount of CGI can really bring to life. They are stories that a grandma would tell a young one to calm them down and put them to bed whereas the Hollywood films are not unlike a crass joke a teenager would tell his new girlfriend trying to make an amorous move.

But Ratatouille has Anton Ego, probably the first true mythical character that the Hollywood machine as ever created. Anton Ego, the food critic, is larger than life but true to it; he is scary but real and he is what really 'saves' Ratatouille from being lost amongst the many before it and surely the many to come after it.

However, given that the animation film making (as against cartoon film making) is really in its infancy as an art form, these films and particularly Ratatouille are a good first step toward maturity but alas it is only a first step. If Hollywood would try to tell a good story not just a beautiful one and not just a contemporary one we might one day actually love these films as much as we enjoy them.

Toy Story

This critically acclaimed cartoon movie is about a cowboy toy that is jealous and threatened when a fancy new spaceman toy replaces him as top toy in a boy's room.

This is probably as good a boy fantasy can be filmed. Excellent effects and good storyline keep the viewers glued to the screen.

Buzz Lightyear, the new space toy, is a brilliant creation as amiable as the cowboy toy is irritable.

Toys among cruel and indifferent kids, have a life of their own. A very believable and interesting premise.

John Lasseter who later also did A Bug's life and Toy Story 2 does a very good job indeed.

A must see.