This is certainly the worst of all the Toy Story movies, yet Toy Story 4 still continues the series’ tradition of revolutionizing the animation industry with its technological breakthroughs. The toy characters of course all have their familiar toy-like ways of moving, with the new challenges added from the new set of characters, including Bo Peep’s elaborate stunts, the awkward Forky, the plushy Ducky and Bunny, the creepy Gabby Gabby, and her ventriloquist dummy henchmen. But the animation achievements are far more ambitious than that: The lights from the sun and the carnival all look scarily realistic, which in turn makes the textures on the toys, with all their minuscule scratches, look more lifelike than actual live-action does.

​When creating the antique store, over 10,000 items were built with varying degrees of aging; to complete the atmosphere, new software was developed to create the cobwebs. The camera further pushed for the photorealism by using filming techniques previously only used in live-action; this doesn’t just include the handheld camera system used in previous Pixar films, but also the imitated look of an anamorphic lens. These techniques mean in the near future, the line between animation and live-action could blur to the point where the two sides become indistinguishable from each other. These ambitious strides in utilizing the computer to recreate the real world prove how much more room for growth this beloved franchise has potential for still.

​G
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 43 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.

It had been eleven years since the second movie, meaning the target audience of the first Toy Story, that being kids born in the early 1990s, were now ready to start college, just like Andy in this movie. Although Toy Story 3 still carries the same old issues of having no logical sense from the past two movies, there are still plenty of wonderful merits at play. For starters, the technology finally passed the point of creating realistic human characters that didn’t appear uncanny, with more controls in each character model than ever before. Yet even with this freedom of giving an impressive range of facial expressions, all the characters, particularly Spanish Buzz and Lotso the teddy bear, still presented their own unique animation challenges.

​Better still, Pixar revolutionized a new system for creating the fabric for clothes, which was important because this movie had three times as many toys as the very first movie. Even the use of lights, camera, and audio was quite ambitious for an animated film, seeing how they all stylistically harkened back to other more mature Hollywood genres, such as prison movies or film noir, while still keeping the playful, adventurous, at times dangerous tone that a Toy Story movie should have. The finished product ended up making multiple generations of people cry, because, in a way, the series had truly grown up with its original audience, and it was time to say goodbye.

G
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 40 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.

Toy Story 2 had to preserve what made Toy Story an instant classic, which wasn’t easy considering the first movie already shook up the entire animation industry. Yet this sequel became an excellent showcase of how much the CGI technology had improved in only four years. The scope is much greater this time around, with the toy characters now going through an apartment complex’s air vents, into a toy store, and on airplane tires! Also noteworthy is the video game-based opening scene where Buzz Lightyear goes on a mission to another planet—a sequence containing multiple lighting and rendering effects the first movie couldn’t achieve.

​Then of course there’s the animation of the toys; every new toy character moves in a way that’s true to the material they’re made from while also matching their personality, the Barbie dolls perhaps being the most hilarious example of the animators’ talent! Though even that wasn’t as tricky as animating the humans, especially since there were more that had to be created in the backgrounds, and with more detail. As a bonus, the adventurous music adds some unexpected emotion backed up by the heart-wrenching song, “When She Loved Me” by Sarah McLachlan. All these components ultimately helped this sequel surpass the quality of the original in virtually every way, proving that animated films could be just as mature as a live-action movie made for adults.

G
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 32 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and SAD.

It’s the very first fully computer-animated motion picture, but Toy Story mostly sticks out for its wonderful appeal to anyone of any age. With this movie being the first of its kind, the animators only could do what was possible with the technology available, meaning the architecture had to be made mostly from straight lines touched up with lights and texture. As far as making these toys move, it was tricky for the animators to find points of reference, since toys can’t move in real life. So one of the ingenious techniques they used to help figure out the movements of the green army men was to nail shoes on boards and film themselves walking in them—just a taste of Pixar’s immense creativity.

​​Yet even that wasn’t nearly as difficult as animating the humans or the dog, which looked impressive for the time, but the technology still wasn’t quite ready to create appealing humans or animals. There clearly was a lot that Pixar had to prove in this revolutionary motion picture of theirs, but the real reason it became so beloved immediately was because the story always came first in the production. Since the computer was used as a tool rather than the centerpiece of the film’s existence, everyone can now enjoy the privilege of laughing and crying from this lovable warm-hug of a movie that in turn shook up the animation industry forever.

G
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 21 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.

While John Krasinski originally didn’t plan on a Quiet Place sequel, he still picked up on the success of his horror smash-hit by building on all that it had the potential for, including the possibility of this concept turning into a franchise. The expansion of this world devastated by an alien invasion is such a keen exercise in allowing the setting to dictate what the characters’ personalities and struggles are like, particularly in how others outside the movie’s main family were affected. The family by the way is now deprived of their familiar resources at the farm and is stretched beyond their limit, the deaf daughter, Regan, most of all. While this sequel isn’t nearly as focused on silent communication as the first movie, Regan takes on more of a protagonist role to inspire other girls, women, and the entire Deaf community.
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This form of entertainment is accessible to everyone, with large action set pieces that required a lot more hands-on work than the first movie. The open-endedness of the finale likewise proves that there’s still more room for this concept to grow into a third installment, or perhaps even a television series. But even if those don’t ever happen, A Quiet Place Part II shall solidify its legacy as an ideal blockbuster to set the standards for how to create effective popcorn entertainment while also crafting a narrative that delves into the psychology of loss and survival.

PG-13 (V)
Horror/Sci-fi
1 hr. 37 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to feel AFRAID.

A Quiet Place only has 2-3 minutes of dialogue, with a screenplay of only 67 pages, but it still works tremendously as a blockbuster that continues to challenge what defines popcorn entertainment. Its post-apocalyptic world is built with some frightening sound effects, dark lighting, and a slow-moving camera that are masterfully implemented to generate a sense of urgency. It’s a genius work of utilizing ambiance instead of dialogue to tell the story, and it had proven so effective that the audience in the movie theater was reportedly too afraid to eat their popcorn, thus making noise, while watching the movie.
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When John Krasinski was brought on to direct, write, and star in this groundbreaking exercise of orchestrating thrills, he pulled greatly from his own experience raising his newborn daughter. His efforts with this hefty project grew even more personal when his casting decisions relied on instinct rather than auditions, as his decision to cast his wife Emily Blunt to play his character’s wife added to the impact of the film’s major events. Also in this cast was Millicent Simmonds, a deaf actress who played the deaf daughter, and she along with a deaf coach on set ensured that all ASL communication between the family was clear and accurate. Ultimately, no movie exists quite like this one, and no movie may ever be quite like it either. Except of course, for its sequel.

PG-13 (V)
Horror/Sci-fi
1 hr. 30 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to feel AFRAID.

Under the wing of DreamWorks, The Bad Guys pulls off the miraculous task of taking role models that would come off as horrible by another animation studio and yet somehow making them into positive influences on kids. Yet there’s just as much heart to please the grownups as well as professional animators, starting with its opening scene that is a continuous shot focused on a casual conversation in a diner, like in Pulp Fiction. There are also fun car chases similar to those found in The Blues Brothers and elements found in heist movies like Reservoir Dogs.
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As for the animation, the refreshingly bright backgrounds are made from splotches of paint while the special effects tricks create 2D smoke with lines drawn on the computer graphics to resemble a comic book illustration. The eyes of the characters are intentionally given no lighting or texture, yet still glow brighter than anything else in the frame. The way the city skyline is rendered with its haze and sun flares are intentionally meant to resemble an instantly recognizable look for Los Angeles, the city this movie takes place in. The animators furthermore had the challenge of translating live reference footage of dancers into anthropomorphic animals who had to do those same dances. With all these elements brought together into a satisfying whole, DreamWorks Animation created an exciting little movie that parents and their kids can have fun watching together.

PG (DV)
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 40 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.

It was first a 2010 short film, then shortly after, it became a children’s book, and now, it’s the most adorable stop-motion movie ever made, as well as the most technologically ambitious. While films in the past have put hand-drawn animation over live-action before, and CGI characters are currently everywhere, never before has stop-motion puppetry been used to this detailed of an extent with technology that’s well ahead of its time. This medium of animation is known for being such an enormous task, and sure enough, this little movie was so complex that it took the storyboard artists three years to create the animatic.
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When creating the props for the film shoot, anything that the cute little shell interacted with had to be either rigged with materials that could be animated or remade from scratch with bendable materials. These props included plants, a couch, and even the dust on a table while these little characters were ice skating on top of it. The animated components in each frame had to be filmed separately from the live-action environment, meaning before they were combined in post-production, they had to match one another perfectly in light, composition, and even camera focus. No other movie exists like Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and in time, it should pick up momentum and go on to inspire other special effects artists as they acquire a plethora of brand-new tools in their toolkits.

PG (D)
Comedy/Fantasy
1 hr. 30 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and SAD.

It demanded an immense amount of technology to create… to fit a vision that had never been done before in cinema, yet Titanic defied all odds to become the most successful movie ever made, pushing the medium forward with its use of old and new visual effects tricks. For the ship itself, a 775-foot-long replica of the exterior was built and broken into three segments that could be tilted at different angles. Some of the elements in the replica were actually made of rubber for the scenes where people were falling during the ship’s destruction, and if it couldn’t be made of rubber without looking totally fake, human dummies were used for padding instead.

​There also were several miniatures of the ship, and for the extreme-wide shots, mocap actors created some people to populate the decks, making this one of the first movies ever to use this technology. But besides just the immense innovation of digital effects, this movie formulated genius approaches to old-school effects too, such as breath created practically by actors against a black background and then added in post-production to make the actors look like they were out in the cold. So while the movie’s love story is groanworthy, the main character is a selfish brat, the message is preachy, and the historical accuracies are numerous, James Cameron’s ultra-smash-hit motion picture deserves its reputation for making blockbusters today so extravagant.

PG-13 (DLSNV)
Historic/Romance
3 hr. 14 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.

Everyone knows it as the rare event when a sequel surpassed the quality of the original, but Terminator 2: Judgment Day particularly made its mark in film history as one of the absolute earliest uses of CGI—perhaps the first movie to prove the technology’s full potential. After James Cameron’s successful use of CGI in The Abyss two years earlier, this felt like the natural next step, and the VFX crew, sure enough, made the most of it. These artists took the time to study the movements of actor Robert Patrick, paint a grid on his body, and use a new laser scanning process on his face so they could replicate him entirely on a computer to animate his character, who was made of liquid metal. 

​Even without this revolutionary digital technology, every single special effects trick imaginable was used in the making of this movie. The opening war scene created the terminator endoskeletons with complex mixtures of puppetry, animatronics, and stop-motion animation. The course of a Los Angeles river was changed so they could film the canal chase. A whole four-story office building was blown up. The main cast went through military combat and weapons training. There’s so much that went into this enormous motion picture that shook up the entire filmmaking industry, and at the end of the day, it still can just be enjoyed simply as a thrill ride that gets better after every repeated visit.

R (DLV)
Sci-fi/Action
2 hr. 17 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.