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      ‘The Garfield Movie’ Review: This Feels Like Too Much Effort

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      Garfield, voiced by Chris Pratt, is joined by Samuel L. Jackson as his father, in an inert big-screen adaptation that fundamentally misunderstands its protagonist.Since Garfield’s debut in the 1970s, Jim Davis’s orange tabby has become one of the most successful brands to evolve from the humble American comic strip. And fortified by a reliable stream of cartoon shows, video games and a couple of bland Bill Murray-voiced films in the early 2000s, Garfield is now one of the more enduring images of the American imagination.Even if you’ve never consumed Garfield in any prolonged form, you probably know who he is and what he represents. (Mondays: reviled. Lasagna: beloved. Effort of any kind: a fundamental misunderstanding of life.)It’s particularly odd, then, that the latest iteration of the Garfield empire, the animated “The Garfield Movie,” somehow doesn’t. The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure, — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.Instead, after a perfunctory origin story of Garfield’s life with his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), and dog companion, Odie (Harvey Guillén), the film is quickly set into adventure mode when Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a pair of henchman dogs working for a vengeful cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). Garfield’s estranged father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), quickly comes to the rescue, but it’s Vic that Jinx is really after. After Jinx demands a truck full of milk as payment for a botched job she took the fall for, Vic, with Garfield and Odie in tow, are off to find a way to pay his debt.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pixar Lays Off 14% of Its Staff and Will Stop Making Shows for Disney+

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      The animation studio, which has struggled over the past few years, will stop making original shows for Disney+.Pixar will stop making original shows for Disney+ as part of a broader retrenchment, resulting in layoffs that will reduce its work force by 14 percent.Jim Morris, the president of Pixar, announced the layoffs in an internal memo on Tuesday that was viewed by The New York Times. He cited “the return to our focus on feature films.” About 175 employees will be let go.Questions about Pixar’s health have swirled in Hollywood and among investors since June 2022, when the Disney-owned studio released “Lightyear” to disastrous results. How could Pixar, the gold standard of animation studios for nearly three decades, have gotten a movie so wrong — especially one about Buzz Lightyear, a bedrock “Toy Story” character?Pixar’s next film, “Elemental,” an opposites-attract love story, arrived to alarmingly low ticket sales in June 2023, but ultimately generated a solid $500 million at the box office.One problem: Disney had weakened the Pixar brand by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, when many multiplexes were still closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row (“Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca”) online, bypassing theaters altogether.The layoffs on Tuesday, which were reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter, acknowledged another reality: Pixar, like other Disney-owned studios, including Marvel, lost its focus when it was pushed to create original programming for Disney+. At the time — around December 2020 — Disney was pouring money into the streaming service in a wild and ultimately unsuccessful effort to attract up to 260 million subscribers worldwide. It had 87 million at the time. It has about 154 million today.Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, has since reversed course, emphasizing cost containment and quality — less can be more, if the standards are high. He has said repeatedly over the past year that the creative teams at Disney were stretched too thin by the streaming strategy.As part of the retrenchment at Pixar, “Elio,” a movie about an 11-year-old boy who is inadvertently beamed into space, was delayed. It was supposed to arrive this March. Disney pushed it to June 2025. (Pixar’s next film in theaters will be “Inside Out 2.” It is scheduled for release on June 14.)Pixar’s original series for Disney+ included “Cars on the Road,” focused on the “Cars” characters Lightning McQueen and Mater, and “Dug Days,” a series of shorts about the dog from the movie “Up.” The studio’s last original Disney+ series, “Win or Lose,” about a coed middle school softball team, will arrive late this year.Pixar will continue to make the occasional short film for Disney+. More

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      ‘Chicken for Linda!’ Review: A Comedy That Cooks

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      In this madcap film, a mother’s apology leads to a delightful misadventure that begins with mourning and ends with a father’s favorite recipe.In the animated French feature “Chicken for Linda!,” directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, a mother accuses her young daughter of stealing a ring of great and mournful value. When the mother, Paulette (voiced by Clotilde Hesme), discovers her error, she promises to do whatever Linda (Mélinée Leclerc) wishes by way of apology. Linda was an infant when her father died, so she asks her culinarily challenged mother to cook her father’s go-to dish: chicken and peppers.A general strike — Vive la France! — tosses a slapstick wrench into Paulette’s pledge, closing stores and forcing her to secure the chicken by other means. Police officers give slapstick chase. A watermelon truck and its kindly driver enter the fray. Paulette’s older sister, Astrid (Laetitia Dosch) — a yoga teacher who self-medicates with candy — is dragged into the mess. And the children and denizens of the congenial apartment complex observe and participate in the increasingly madcap antics of mother and child.For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor. “Chicken for Linda!” explores the differences in grief and memory for child and spouse with a touch as wisely light as the movie’s score, by the composer Clément Ducol’s, which lands festive, thrilling, sorrowful notes instrumentally and in songs.As the indomitable chicken makes break after break for it, and more and more people are involved in its capture, you’d be right to wonder: What about the tray of peppers one of Linda’s friends left cooking in the oven?Chicken for Linda!Not Rated. In French and Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Eli Noyes, Animator Who Turned Clay and Sand Into Art, Dies at 81

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      His innovative stop-motion animation influenced a generation of filmmakers, including the creators of Wallace and Gromit.Eli Noyes, a filmmaker whose use of clay and sand in stop-motion animation garnered an Oscar nomination and shaped the aesthetic of Nickelodeon and MTV during the early days of cable television, died on March 23 at his home in San Francisco. He was 81.His wife, the artist Augusta Talbot, said the cause was prostate cancer.Mr. Noyes made his first film, “Clay or the Origin of Species,” in 1965 as an undergraduate student at Harvard. To the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, clay model animals whimsically portray evolution in the movie, which lasts just under nine minutes.Though stop-motion filmmaking had existed for decades and clay was used in the 1950s to create animated characters like Gumby, directors and cinephiles credited Mr. Noyes’s rookie effort with reviving interest in the technique at a time when hand-drawn characters were more popular.“Clay or the Origin of the Species” (1965), Mr. Noyes’s first film, was nominated for an Academy Award.via Noyes familyThe film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short subject.“This recognition served as a tremendous boost to the credibility of clay as an animation medium, bulldozing a path for even greater works,” Rick Cooper, a former production manager for Will Vinton Productions, a Claymation film company, wrote in the journal Design for Arts in Education.Peter Lord, a founder of Aardman Animations, the English studio that used clay in the production of the “Wallace and Gromit” films, “Chicken Run” and other popular animated features, recalled seeing “Clay or the Origin of Species” on British television when he was getting started as a filmmaker.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Ball” Hero Goku Is One for the Ages

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      The creator of “Dragon Ball” helped bring anime to the world. Its main character became a cultural phenomenon.“It’s over 9,000” is perhaps the most popular line in the English dub of the “Dragon Ball Z” series. The line is beloved for its drama; it’s an exclamation referring to the unmatched power level of the main character, Son Goku. It was an ongoing joke in my middle school and became one of the internet’s most enduring memes.But Goku was always an exemplar of staying power, back from his beginnings in the “Dragon Ball” manga created by Akira Toriyama, whose death was confirmed on Friday.Toriyama is the creator of the manga “Dr. Slump” and “Sand Land” but is best known for “Dragon Ball,” which first published in 1984 and for years ran in the popular Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. It was successful from the start, but as more people around the world learned about it, “Dragon Ball” attained such levels of popularity that it became one of the standard-bearers of anime.Despite the prominence of greats like Hayao Miyazaki and the recent surge of live-action adaptations in the United States, it’s still fairly rare that a manga or anime — even given the massive scope, breadth and history of the art form — achieves crossover appeal to mainstream Western media. There have been a few big exceptions. “Pokémon.” “Naruto.” And “Dragon Ball.”“Dragon Ball” is the story of an alien boy named Son Goku who ends up on Earth. He teams up with a brilliant blue-haired teen named Bulma, and they search for seven dragon balls to summon the powerful wish-granting dragon Shenron.The worlds and images Toriyama created combined the kung fu-inspired fight sequences of old martial arts flicks with science-fiction and a fantasy-style reimagining of space and technology. The characters burst off the page and the screen: A wild-haired boy in an orange gi flying on a cloud; a whiskered green dragon whose serpentine body coils in Gordian knots in the sky; and seven orange orbs, speckled with small red stars, that when combined offer their collector infinite power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Sean Ono Lennon Helped His Parents Send a Message.

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      To keep their legacy relevant for a new generation, he worked on the short “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko.” Now it’s up for an Oscar.Three years ago, Sean Ono Lennon was asked to develop a music video for the 50th anniversary of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the 1971 protest song by his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has become a rare type of perennial — a warmhearted Christmas tune that doubles as an antiwar challenge, telling ordinary citizens that peace can be achieved “if you want it.”But Lennon, 48, was not interested in making a simple video. That “felt unnecessary” for such a well-known track, he said in a recent interview. What intrigued him more was the possibility of expanding the song’s message through a narrative film. After about two years of work, that project became “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” directed by Dave Mullins, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film.The 11-minute picture is set in a World War I-like battle zone where two soldiers on opposing sides take part in a secret chess game, communicating their moves via a homing pigeon that dodges bombs over a snowy No Man’s Land. In the story’s climax, both armies are ordered into bloody hand-to-hand combat while the opening lines of John and Yoko’s song ring out: “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?”“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said of the project. It’s aimed at “people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted.”ElectroLeagueFor Sean Lennon, who in recent years has gradually taken on the responsibility of managing his parents’ artistic legacies — his mother, 91, has officially retired — the film is part of a continual process to keep that work relevant for younger generations. He is well aware that even a Beatle’s classic can fade away without tending.“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said by phone. “You’re competing with generations of people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted. So, for me, it’s very important that the message of peace and love, which may be a trope, are not forgotten.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Stopmotion’ Review: Her Dark Materials

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      A fraying animator becomes the victim of her own creations in this visually sophisticated horror movie.There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a vacant housing block, she becomes anxious and hesitant. Accustomed to taking orders, she’s easily compliant when a strange little girl (Caolinn Springall) from a neighboring apartment suggests a darker direction for Ella’s film, one that requires mortician’s wax and a dead fox. This is exactly as gruesome as you might imagine.Weaving an eerily single-minded spell from the puppets’ squished-jellybean faces and misshapen limbs, the director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature. Like the art form it celebrates, “Stopmotion” is careful, patient and almost punishingly focused, with Franciosi bringing the same intensity that made her role in “The Nightingale” (2019) so devastating. As Ella’s grip on reality loosens and she begins to cannibalize her own body to give life to her dolls, the movie erases any distinction between the desire to create and the will to destroy.A bloody meditation on artistic agency and its submission (especially when it comes to female artists), “Stopmotion” isn’t perfect, but each element moves in lock step to forge a deeply troubling intimacy between Ella and her repellent figurines. I could have done without that fox, though.StopmotionRated R for self abuse and stolen innards. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training’

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      The popular anime returns to the big screen in a somewhat lopsided feature presentation of two stand-alone episodes from the TV series.“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training,” from the director Haruo Sotozaki and the Japanese animation studio Ufotable, isn’t actually a movie: It’s a feature-length presentation of two episodes from the popular “Demon Slayer” television series, neatly spliced together but otherwise unchanged in the transition to the big screen.It’s the second such theatrical special, after last year’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Swordsmith Village,” which combined the ending of the show’s second season with the premiere of the third. “To the Hashira Training” jams together the third-season finale and the fourth-season premiere, both of which are a little under an hour long; the fourth season hasn’t aired on TV yet. As you might imagine, the movie is meant for fans.A compilation of small-screen anime action could theoretically work as a feature film, especially when the action is as rousing and well-realized as the ultraviolent, stylized swordplay depicted here — there’s some good demon slaying in “Demon Slayer.”But the combination of finale and premiere inevitably feels lopsided, as the exhilarating climax of the previous season, in which the young hero Tanjiro (Natsuki Hanae) vanquishes the fierce Upper Four demon Hantengu (Toshio Furukawa), wraps up halfway through the running time, leaving the somewhat slow-paced beginning of the next arc to feel like a glacial denouement. Tanjiro spends the back half of “To the Hashira Training” recovering from battle in bed, while the Hashira training in question is merely teed up, to be continued in the following episodes. It makes you wish it were a real movie instead.Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira TrainingRated R for graphic cartoon violence and some strong language. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More