For this project, I dove headlong into non-English animated films, finding some hidden gems and catching up to some blindspots. Here are the films how I would rank them, with links to my reviews. I'd love to hear about others I haven't seen or your thoughts on any of these films. Coming up next in The Tens: The Hathaway Path-a-way, looking at ten selections from Oscar winner Anne Hathaway's filmography. 10. Bubble Bath (1980) Too crass for me; when subversive has no message,

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com/ MacGuffin, per Wikipedia: an object, device, or event necessary to the plot and to the characters’ motivations, yet insignificant or irrelevant in itself. Is the bag of cash here one of those? It kicks the story into motion and everyone wants it, but somewhere along the way it stops mattering. People are simply greedy, and nobody cares who gets hurt or whether there’s any real payoff at the end. In an unnamed industrial city, a low-lev

image courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com This movie rules. It’s a Czechoslovakian film, but the language the characters speak is just gibberish. And it’s amazing. If Rankin and Bass spent an evening guzzling whiskey and taking downers, it might just result in this. The handmade animation is so meticulously done, like an entire world carved into an elaborate cuckoo clock that moves with a rigid perfection. The characters have no names; they don’t say any actual words. But the w

image courtesy of ifccenter.com Satoshi Kon has an unfortunately short filmography - he died of pancreatic cancer at 46. I haven’t seen his TV work or Tokyo Godfathers, but Perfect Blue is a masterpiece. If you want a more in-depth discussion of his work, check out the podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David for their series on him. But the work I have seen tells a story of how much more he could’ve done. This film premiered the first year of the Best Animated Feature Osca

image courtesy of mubi.com Conceptually, social media is supposed to be "good" for people. The idea of a utopian society where anyone can be whoever they want without fear of ridicule or persecution, because everyone is supposedly starting from the same level ground. Obviously, that isn't the case, and never has been. I'm an elder millennial, so early social media platforms like AOL Instant Messenger, early Facebook, and MySpace were essentially built for me and my generation

Image courtesy of mubi.com Animator Ralph Bakshi spent the 70s and 80s as animation’s id to Disney’s fledgling superego, hitting theaters during the studio’s weakest creative stretch with raw, adult work Disney wouldn’t touch. Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated animated feature, kicked things off with raunchy countercultural satire, followed by the gritty urban grotesques of Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. He then pivoted to rotoscoped fantasy with Wizards and The Lord of the Rings

Image courtesy of gkids.com First - and I should’ve said this at the beginning of this series - subs over dubs. If you can watch an animated film in its native language, do it. My youngest son watches a lot of anime, but mostly the Westernized stuff you see on Netflix, like Naruto or whatever else. I don’t watch any anime tv shows and haven’t seen a lot of anime movies. I’ve seen most of the big ones - Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue, all the Miyazakis if that counts.

Image courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid. So, of course, I watched it all the time. This was when MTV still played mostly music videos, and some of my favorites were the animated ones - music videos that took the song’s central theme and developed an entire story that, at its heart, wasn’t exactly a narrative interpretation of the lyrics, but spring-boarded into something creative and weird. One of the most memorable of these was the song

image courtesy of mubi.com You ever go to a children’s pageant? Fewer events are entered with lower expectations. You just hope it’s cute or quick or, at the very least, nobody starts crying in the middle of it. Every so often, something crazy will happen - some kid has the voice of an angel, some little girl goes viral with an incredible dance number, or, more likely, the show just stays together. This film feels like one of those latter shows. This film came out in 1926. Th

image courtesy of nytimes.com I recently caught up with HBO’s 2020 miniseries The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of the same name (which I have read). I also just began reading It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. Needless to say, I was already primed for a “tyranny can happen anywhere” movie. Enter Marjane Satrapi, her graphic novel (the source material for this film), and co-writer/director Vincent Paronnaud. Persepolis follows “Marji” from childhoo

image cortesy of animationisfilm.com First off, the Hungarian title of this film - Fehérlófia - is much cooler-looking than the English one, and it's a shame that's the version most people will never get the chance to mispronounce. It's tough to figure out where to start here, because there isn't really a frame of reference to lean on, no neat shelf in the video store of the mind where this one slots in next to something familiar. I would love to meet anyone who has heard of

Every year in the Best Animated Feature Oscar category, there are one or two movies from other countries that most American audiences have never seen. Alongside the Pixars, Disneys, and Aardmans (not American, but still English-language), you'll see a Ghibli (Japan), a Cartoon Saloon (Ireland), or a Folimage (France). Every so often, one of these foreign-language films takes the prize: