Check Out the Trailer

This animated adventure goes the furthest away from the DreamWorks brand as any of their films. Directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders bring a bit of the heart from their LILO & STITCH. This film isn’t interested in spoofing anything, only telling a compelling story about an awkward boy and his new pet.

Hiccup (Jay Baruchel, MILLION DOLLAR BABY) is a scrawny Viking, who’s the son of the brawny Viking leader Stoick (Gerard Butler, 300). His prospects of becoming a dragon killer are slim. So, he devises a contraption to take down a dragon and it works. But when he finds the black salamander-like beast, he can’t kill it because it looks as scared as he is. Injured, the dragon can’t fly out of a hidden valley where Hiccup slowly builds trust with the dragon, which he names Toothless. Meanwhile, his father asks dragon trainer Gobber (Craig Ferguson, THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH CRAIG FERGUSON) to take in his son.
Read the rest of this entry »

Check Out the Trailers & Clips

Walt Disney built his namesake company on animation, but by the early ’80s the company was contemplating abandoning it all together. But at the lowest point in the company’s history, a collection of factors came together to bring the studio back to great heights with films like BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and THE LION KING. The producer of those films, Don Hahn, directs this documentary that takes us on a personal journey behind the scenes to meet the personalities that made it all happen and the tensions that undid it in the end.

The story is told primarily through archival footage, most notably home video filmed by Disney artists themselves. For fans of Disney animation, it’s a collection of snapshots into the lives of today’s prime artists when they were first starting out and working still with some of the old guard like Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. The talent was always there, but projects were not inspired and the studio didn’t have their backs. The animators were moved off the main lot where they worked in the same building Walt worked and moved off site to a run down facility. They believed they would be losing their jobs soon. One of the most devastating blows was when Don Bluth left the studio and took many of the artists with him to work on projects such as AN AMERICAN TAIL.
Read the rest of this entry »