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So the film year of awesome carries on unbroken when I decided to sit down and watch the Dreamworks film Monsters VS Aliens. This includes, in no particular order of brilliant:
Hugh Laurie as a mad scientist cockroach.
Steven Colbert as the president of the United States.
Some wonderfully subversive gender narratives.
A cast of central character who are each of them funny, sweet and interesting.
This last one is kinda a pet love of mine in films. There is one way of making me love a film: Does it have as its main characters people who I would realistically want to meet for tea? This one? All of them. Every single one of them.
And funny, wow was this film funny. I laughed myself silly several times (and every time the President was on screen. He was wonderful but I only realised why when I saw the cast list. OMFG COLBERT!!!!!!!)
It's also one of the great films that carefully walks the line between having hilariously out of the left-field things happen, and having too many of them happen so the narrative is broken. The things that happen are either partially explained, or not important enough to warrant an explanation (why did the President play the Crazy Frog theme to the giant robot? Who knows? Who cares? It would have reacted the same way no matter what he did), while still giving the impression of each character having their own hilarious and fascinating background you'd love to know more about. It's basically a lot of Giant Rat of Sumatra moments.
So yeah, like How to Train our Dragon, this is Dreamworks aiming for Pixar and... I wouldn't say surpassing them, but I'd rather watch this than a fair number of Pixar films I could name (namely, it's closest parallel, The Incredibles. I never got that film)
Hugh Laurie as a mad scientist cockroach.
Steven Colbert as the president of the United States.
Some wonderfully subversive gender narratives.
A cast of central character who are each of them funny, sweet and interesting.
This last one is kinda a pet love of mine in films. There is one way of making me love a film: Does it have as its main characters people who I would realistically want to meet for tea? This one? All of them. Every single one of them.
And funny, wow was this film funny. I laughed myself silly several times (and every time the President was on screen. He was wonderful but I only realised why when I saw the cast list. OMFG COLBERT!!!!!!!)
It's also one of the great films that carefully walks the line between having hilariously out of the left-field things happen, and having too many of them happen so the narrative is broken. The things that happen are either partially explained, or not important enough to warrant an explanation (why did the President play the Crazy Frog theme to the giant robot? Who knows? Who cares? It would have reacted the same way no matter what he did), while still giving the impression of each character having their own hilarious and fascinating background you'd love to know more about. It's basically a lot of Giant Rat of Sumatra moments.
So yeah, like How to Train our Dragon, this is Dreamworks aiming for Pixar and... I wouldn't say surpassing them, but I'd rather watch this than a fair number of Pixar films I could name (namely, it's closest parallel, The Incredibles. I never got that film)