There's unnessecary and unfunny talking, inappropriate music and hideously silly voice acting only capable of making its characters sound excited even when others have died all the way through, and it won't stop. Neither did I shut up about what torture it was to watch this thing.

Clearly the directors, who had solid reputations up until this point, were aiming for something unique and true to the series, but at the last minute Fox, who seem to think "family film" means "kids only", did a Harvey Weinstein and hired Tim Hill to give everyone's hopes up, strip the whole thing of its heart and reason and turn it into one of the most braindead, most tasteless, most insipid, most irritating, most confused - in short one of the WORST fucking movies ever made.

The Book of Life is adequate in my book. While Jorge R. Gutierrez's style shines throughout, being his labour of love and all, the problem is that it's muddled. It's infested by needless narration and comic relief that doesn't work too well, and its music could have been not only original but better all around - it attempts at being a Mexican Moulin Rouge with all-too-familiar choices for musical covers, like the work of Elvis. The climax is the least inspired of it all, with a battle scene that mixes every CG cliché imaginable.

But despite of these flaws, Gutierrez did put his heart and soul into this project, so I can respect that. With all this invention to spare, it didn't disappoint or insult me quite as much as other CG films that would fall into the "style over substance" category, like Sony's Hotel Transylvania or Cloudy 2. While Carmen Got Expelled looked like it could have been a better way to follow up El Tigre, and Lee Unkrich could have captured the spirit of the Day of the Dead far better, The Book of Life, problematic as it is, is acceptable enough to make up for Free Birds. There's just so many animated films out there without a remarkable style that boast more believable storytelling.

See, the thing about Stan Lee and Kevin Fiege is that when making a superhero movie, they know why people will rush in opening weekend. They know what it's like to read a comic and see flying people punching criminals. It's fun. Even when the movies they make are dark, they're still fun. Even when they have political/social commentary, they're fun. Even when they have flaws or are just plain bad, they're made with the intention of being fun. Marvel doesn't just want cash, Marvel wants us to smile.

DC, on the other hand, has a policy that only makes their superheroes feel like they were treated by Christopher Nolan, without the subtlety or any relation to the Dark Knight trilogy. They will just pick any director that will make the movie a winner in audience attention but not audience reaction, and make anyone who isn't Batman grittier than they were meant to be. Gone are the days when Superman would use his heat vision to heat up a BBQ or turn into a baby repeatedly in his life, but that surely can't mean he should be this corrupted. DC doesn't want us to smile, DC just wants cash.

Okay, so in this film, people suffering from heartbreak are being turned into cartoonish, anthropomorphic animals of the lousiest kind possible by a cursed smog, while a wizard named Merlin is turned into a roll of toilet paper who appears whenever somebody "needs" him. The closest anyone can get to transforming into something awesome is a satellite that turns into an Astro Girl after falling in love with an aspiring musician who looks younger than he is and owns a surreal dog but has been turned into a milk cow (which means he can be milked). They must stop a giant, walking incinerator from consuming every heartbroken person, as well as a guy who transports through mirrors and plunges out their livers. Rarely have I seen an animated film that doesn't care.

I mean, come on, this is Korean animation. I've been intrigued by the last two Korean animation films I've seen, Yobi the Five-Tailed Fox and The House (The Nut Job is too Hollywood to count), so I knew just what to expect from this. While it's no better than other animated films I've seen at the LFF, there is freedom written all over this movie. The editing is clearly nothing extraordinary, with lots of commercial break fade-outs. Much of the animation looks like it came from last decade, or worse, the 90's. But the whole thing overall is enough fun to overcome these problems. Numerous jokes will also appeal to a mainstream audience, if not the whole premise, and while there is toilet humour (always a call for Merlin), Koreans are obsessed with it more than any English-speaking country so it's nothing to get too angry about.

This and Monsters 2 are my guilty pleasures of the LFF. Perhaps this whole experience of going to the London Film Festival is making me like everything, but take it from me, it's a better experience than giving Michael Bay more money. This movie has explosions and stupidity and doesn't care what you think, but it's cute and doesn't care about money either. It's just a love story in which its two title characters are having difficulty in telling if they are made for each other for not, but the point is that their lives have both been changed by strange, identical dilemmas, so they bond together and embrace their weirdness, which is exactly what Korea is doing here. Go right ahead.

Moomins on the Riviera is the first actual Moomin film in 22 years; between these two are a couple of compilations of bits from the stop-motion TV series. This return is in no way a masterpiece. But it's about the Moomins going on holiday, why should you expect it to be? This charming adaptation of the comic strips gets everything right - Snorkmaiden's still a double-crosser, Little My still loves a bit of chaos and the urchins are still misunderstood. There is no gross-out humour in any form - the worst it can do is gambling, smoking and alcohol, all of which were in the original story. It's one thing for this to happen in the 50's, but in a family film completed in 2014 it's really something else. I was amused.

Like the Japanese adaptation of Comet in Moominland, the family brings Little My and a few other familiar characters with them, resulting in a couple of new subplots and especially more mischief to make them useful. While the whole thing's not entirely hilarious, adults are sure to get some of the chuckles from their children at times, including one of the characters doing a Prince and the Pauper routine as an excuse to stay in the Riviera. The voice cast in the English dub is full of Brits; with a story like this, I can't hear them speaking in any other accent. After all, our heroes are humble, simple folks who find themselves in aristocrat hell. There's no better place than simplicity, and given that I had to travel through the city to see this, I can relate.

Clearly this film had to be seen - it's the most hand-drawn film of the year, with absolutely no CG effects, and its characters have the kind of recognition the Smurfs have and look what happened to them. Perhaps I'm being a bit overenthusiatic with this whole festival experience, but I can assure any hardcore Moomin fans that this movie was made for you - it may not top Comet in Moominland, but is it really trying to? It's a refreshing film to watch in a time where familiar characters are getting the treatments they don't deserve, even during anniversaries, and that's all that matters.

Wild Tales, produced by Pedro Almodóvar, saves anthology comedy film from future disaster. It's everything Movie 43 wasn't; while Movie 43 got a gratuitous number of directors to waste their talents on following the same type of humour, the movie I just saw is all done by one director, and some of the jokes are disgusting yet all six segments are funny in just the right ways. They have actual storytelling. They start off serious for more or less than a few minutes, but then a joke comes and each story becomes a romp, and it's some of the smartest comedic timing I've seen in a foreign film.

What makes these stories even better is that they are all original. They don't parody other works directly, they go for feels other than the whole thing's "black comedy" approach and they are never, ever predictable. Their environments are realistic and their humour is universal and never out-of-the-blue raunch. Oh, I'm a sucker for certain raunchy comedies, but I highly reccommend this movie if you want a break from stoner jokes; it's the finest anthology comedy since Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

Yellowbird is about a(nother) bird voiced by Seth Green who as an egg fell out of the nest and wandered his way into a ruined house, and since then has been too nervous to explore the world like the ladybird who raised him tells him to. At an adult age, he finds the leader of a flock of blue birds in pain, dying as a matter of fact, so this convinces the ladybird to get the Yellowbird to lead the flock, which includes a love interest, a chick who has to be carried around and a jerk who sounds and even acts like Benson from Regular Show with extreme doubts about Yellowbird's lead, and it doesn't help that Yellowbird has no experience at all in directions.

Yellowbird may be something you'd expect to see on Netflix, but surprisingly......it isn't bad. With cute visual development by Benjamin Renner, who made the adorable Ernest & Celestine, an exceptional score by Stephen Warbeck and direction by Christian de Vita, who's helped on artwork for Wes Anderson's last three films, it feels less Hollywood than its cast and tone seem.

The script has some goof-ups in its appeal (a character says "Oh my God" instead of "Oh my gosh") and the humour doesn't always work but when it did I could tell that the creator of the overlooked Hoodwinked got it in there. It's almost completely tame, as apart from one joke about confusing a plane for a bird and going "into its behind", there is no toilet humour that you'd find in other CG bird flicks, like Free Birds or Rio 2. Is it post-2007 Disney or post-2010 DreamWorks quality? Nah, but it is a very neat-looking and charming start for TeamTO.

Monsters: Dark Continent was a better experience than I expected. Is it a very good film? Well, it’s not perfect, but it does serve as a worthy and clever successor to the original, a survival drama with giant octopi. This movie is Aliens to that film - it builds on its own world with a completely different focus, it’s gritter, it has more action and yet it still looks at the state of the world today, as the story follows two comrades finding each other with opposing views on their whole mission.

The script doesn’t resemble anything the Academy would approve of, and not everyone is a completely convicing American, but while it’s not as good, this movie is CG monsters and action fused with social commentary and grit, and Hollywood should take note because it’s this year’s District 9.