A LEGO movie isn't a real LEGO movie when the minifigs happen to be looked at from one angle only and the bricks from a distance. I know it's direct-to-DVD, but jeez, TT actually put some effort into making their legs look hollow and the bricks look official. Neither did they mention LEGO non-stop up until The LEGO Movie Videogame, which is based on Animal Logic's movie where none of the LEGO characters are flexible and everything about it is amazing. Hell, that movie didn't even feature the official logo. Technically, LEGO Batman: The Movie is the first actual LEGO movie, even if it's video game cutscenes with rubber minifigs and then some. This is an imposter from the creators of Foodfight. Jeez.

A studio has become so powerful that they've expanded to a hotel, faked actors who don't want to take the roles they expect with the latest technology, opened up laboratories in Japan that produce surrogate drugs and placed their image almost everywhere. Disney in a nutshell.

Ari Folman's script could use some better translation, but with a clear influence on Ralph Bakshi and the likes of Paprika, it's a thoughtful film that just might be the most anti-Hollywood movie to date.

Though it's easy to tell when they couldn't fit enough hand drawn animation into the budget and stuck with Flash/Toon Boom puppetry, and it coincidentally shares some similar themes with AninA, it is nevertheless quite a delightful surprise from the French that's heartwarming enough to make up for its animation dilemmas.

Though John Lasseter has flaws, he made a point recently that hyper-stylized animation can distract from any form of substance. That's exactly the point with this movie, where stylish animation gets in the way of wit.

Not even Genndy Tartakovsky can put the Happy Madison bunch to good use, as what are admittedly an intriguing concept and the cartooniest CG animation of the year are botched by predictable gags, basic scripting, insulting attempts to cash in on Shrek's brand of gross-out humour, musical numbers that bring out the worst of modern music and edginess that has potential and reason but feels out of place in a movie where a sponge sucks up werewolf pee in pure ecstasy.

Despite its strong cult following, I cannot recommend this movie unless you're a die-hard fan of Tartakovsky's work (I know I am). It's evident that without Aardman or Lord/Miller, Sony Pictures Animation is the most style-over-substance animation studio in the Pixar/DreamWorks rivalry era. It's not Smurfs (or Eight Crazy Nights) terrible so if you really want to watch it then go ahead. Just thank me for warning you if you can't get that sponge gag out of your head.

It's a surprising refreshment from the typical "girl survives" horrors (before you tell me it's a true story watch The Reef), but that doesn't stop it from being so badly made and executed by such hammy actors. If Avatar pleased you then God knows what you're going to think of Sanctum.

Ever since his death, Jay Ward’s cartoons haven’t been treated very well. Brendan Fraser made Dudley Do-Right an insult to Canada, Rocky and Bullwinkle turned CG (while a weasel remains 2D for some reason) and tried to be witty but only ended up with middling success, and the Flash-animated George of the Jungle series is even less like the original than Disney’s movie. As I speak, some condom ad director is planning to turn Chip ‘n’ Dale into a complete plagiarism of the Alvin movies, as if The Smurfs wasn’t obvious enough.

There’s no chance a live-action cartoon adaptation will ever be more than just an excuse to cause pain on Jason Lee. And now DreamWorks Animation has bought all properties of Classic Media, from Richie Rich to VeggieTales, and have made a CG movie out of Ted Key and Jay Ward’s Peabody’s Improbable History. For some reason its release date in the UK was scheduled a month earlier than America, when these two characters are 100% American. So I went into the advanced previews and what did I think? Well, my answer will surprise you.

As a few of you may know, the original cartoon was about a time-traveling, highly intelligent dog who raised a cross-eyed boy named Sherman as a pet after finding him bullied outside an orphanage. Every cartoon is about them talking to historical figures who don’t seem to take any notice that they’re talking to a dog with a bow tie and sorting out iconic events in history their way, having them end up as they describe it in the history books. In this movie, Peabody has pretty much invented everything, grown-up or completely modern, and adopted Sherman as a son finding him lost in an alley as a baby. The two also have hair that sticks up and their WABAC is more than what they could draw in the cartoons.

This movie is why you never see them anywhere else in the present day but their laboratory - Sherman is an outcast because his father is a dog, which matters more than Peabody being the most intelligent being in the world. A girl from his class named Penny Peterson picks on Sherman, treating him like the puppy he would have been. Peabody is very protective of Sherman, but after inviting the Petersons over to discuss the matter, Sherman cannot help but let Penny into the WABAC. This upgraded version makes it clear how they are able get back to the present day. So when Sherman apologises to Peabody, they must get Penny and go back home, but this journey is not without mishaps in time travel. Eventually, all hell breaks loose when Sherman’s curiosity rips a hole in the space-time continuum, resulting in a scenario beyond Bill and Ted. Bogus.

Peabody figures things out Sherlock Holmes style, bearing in mind they were originally going to pick Robert Downey Jr. to play the part. Ty Burrell does a darn good job at pulling off Mr. Peabody’s voice, his tone of voice and everything. Max Charles charms as Sherman and Stephen Colbert and Patrick Warburton’s voices steal the show. The plots of the cartoons are captured very well, especially when they meet Da Vinci. Thanks to PDI, the animation is still cartoony, perhaps even more so than the original cartoons, both in physics and cuter character design than you’d usually see in this kind of traditional-to-CG conversion. And I won’t spoil too much, but yes, they even have the janitor.

It’s also very funny, not to mention touching. The heart works in Peabody and Sherman’s new father-son relationship - they even go as far as to include a montage of the things they’ve done in the past, going back in time itself to when Sherman was just a tot. The jokes mostly stay true to the original, perhaps even funnier than they used to be, but they also have a mind of their own, which is saying something because previous Jay Ward adapations tried to copy his sense of humour but failed quite miserably. There may be typical modern rude or Shrek-like humour, which DreamWorks haven’t done much of since Shrek Forever After, and often they come from Sherman’s mouth, but you know how little boys are like these days. Otherwise, it’s a surprisingly fun and smart script from someone who has never had experience with writing a cartoon or a movie in his life.

Having last directed an action film which I hear is pretty bad, it makes sense that Rob Minkoff would return to animated family entertainment, and here this return is worth the 12 year wait. I can’t say anything about the Rocky and Bullwinkle short because they didn’t play it, but this movie just might be the best thing Jay Ward’s cartoons ever got in years. It’s a wise decision to turn such a cartoon into a movie, since it’s something a small amount of kids would have heard of, unlike Scooby-Doo. We’ll wait and see how it turns out when America gets it a month after The LEGO Movie, but even though it doesn’t reach the heights of How to Train Your Dragon, Mr. Peabody & Sherman is another delight in a line of better-than-average DreamWorks films that started with Megamind. And yes, I’m also talking about Turbo. Judge me like they judged Sherman.

There are skits that are really funny and skits that aren't. To be honest, it's overall just not nearly as entertaining as Our Footloose Remake, which managed to be a vast improvement over Kevin Bacon's version, or the original RoboCop, relying more on dick and toilet jokes than OFR (although some of the dick jokes were funnier than all the toilet jokes). Eh, at least it's better than Movie 43 in terms of shock humour anthologies.

Scenes that save the movie from being as mundane as the remake I ain't bothered to see:
SC-03: Wade Randolph (2:03)
SC-03: Matt Fruend & Kate Freund (6:38)
SC-08: Dan Riesser (8:05)
SC-09: David Codeglia (9:34) (Definitely this scene)
SC-13: Aaron Moles (18:09)
SC-18: Team Tiger Awesome (23:47)
SC-19: Matt Wyatt (26:25)
SC-27: Fatal Farm (40:04) (If you have the, well, balls)
SC-36: Mike Karnell (57:38)
SC-37: The Olde Money Boyz (1:00:52)
SC-56: Brad Conlin (1:32:29)
SC-57: The Indie Machines (1:34:53)
SC-58: Hand Friedmann (1:37:14)