Every Animated Movie

I'm going to watch them all.

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This blog is on hiatus while I'm homeless 🤘

I wrote 90% of these reviews when I was 19 and on antidepressants, so if I seem like a complete cunt in any of them, that's why.

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510. Hey Good Lookin' (1982)

Hello everyone! It’s been a very long time. I don’t remember what was going on in my life last time I updated this blog, but who can think of cartoons when the sky is impossibly blue, the road rises to meet your wheels, there’s beautiful strangers to meet in exotic cities, bars to get kicked out of, lawns to embrace on, kisses to steal? For the sake of this blog, I wish it was me. I’ve barely been able to keep up with drawing my own cartoons, let alone writing about other people’s. (The only things I've been able to write in the last year are band flyers and love letters.)

I have a few old reviews left I never shared, but the writer in them sounds like such a different person to me that it’s hard to want to post them. For example, this was my review for Hey Good Lookin’ (1982)

“Set in New York in the 50’s, Hey Good Lookin’ is oddly juvenile and disjointed compared to the last few Bakshi movies, due to having been mostly made in 1975 and only released in ‘82. The animation is alright, and the music is pretty good, but the timing of the jokes and the pacing are a little wacky. It makes you wish you were watching Heavy Traffic or American Pop instead.”

I know at the time I was watching multiple animated movies a day, and they all blended together until none of them seemed all that special, even a movie made by one of my favorite directors. I suppose I’ll become that jaded again. It’s hard to want to, when I can watch my dog play in the sunshine with my cat instead. I’ll keep trying.

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509. Heungnyongwanggwa Bihodongja (The Black Dragon King and the Guardian) (1982)

A Korean period drama which I found to be incomprehensible, although, to be fair, the animation was so cheap I didn’t give it much of a chance to explain itself. (Even untranslated, children’s movies tend to be easy to follow, but not always.) Unless Wikipedia is mistaken, this is the first Korean animated feature to be translated and released in English, though I couldn’t find an English version.

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508. Heidi’s Song (1982)

An adaptation of the children’s novel Heidi, produced by Hanna-Barbera. I didn’t have high expectations going into this one – for one thing, Hanna-Barbera is not a company known for high quality animation, and for another, I’m not a big Heidi fan. I somehow was not aware of Heidi until the first adaptation of it I watched for this blog, which I guess isn’t that weird, since when I was a kid, getting me to read any book that didn’t prominently feature talking animals or epic fantasy was like pulling teeth.

When I reviewed the early Miyazaki adaptation of Heidi,  I remember deciding the source material must be extraordinarily dull. This movie initially follows the same basic plot as that version, but then it sort of runs off the rails with psychedelic musical numbers and talking animals. Despite almost certainly not being a very close adaptation, the story lights up under the vibrant and imaginative character animation (and not-so-terrible songs, though I won’t be buying the soundtrack album.) The designs are charming, and the sense of motion and rhythm is somewhat like Don Bluth’s work, yet still unique. It isn’t Great with a capital G, but it’s fun, easy to sit through, and even kinda trippy.

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507. Haguregumo (1982)

I had a little trouble reviewing this because there isn’t much to say about it, honestly. I guess it’s mediocre, except that I typically don’t sit through movies that are only mediocre. Maybe I’m just desperate for any new animation at this point.

Haguregumo is based on a comic of the same name, set in the Edo period. The happy-go-lucky titular character is an alcoholic, womanizing swordsman, who never seems to get into trouble for any of his misdeeds, which are portrayed as being harmlessly mischievous (even his adoring wife doesn’t mind.) A lot of the movie focuses on his young son, who has a much more serious personality. Unlike every other movie I’ve seen that touches on Japanese westernization, this movie portrays it as a positive thing, which I found to be pretty interesting. The art style is sometimes made to resemble Japanese watercolor paintings contemporaneous with the period the movie is set in, but not in a way that is particularly striking or overwhelming.

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506. Haedori daemoheom AKA The Great Adventure of Haedol (1982)

Sorry for the delay this week, I had terrible food poisoning and there was some drama with one of my friends that distracted me (details on my art/music blog.) I’ll be posting another review today because I’ll probably be too busy tomorrow.

This is another perplexing Korean movie, though certainly not the worst. It seems to be about a kid who is tormented by a fairy he meets in the woods. The most interesting part is when the bootleg I was watching suddenly cut to a random blaxsploitation movie, which I couldn’t identify, for a few minutes, and then some random military footage, while the sound of the Korean cartoon played. Then it returned to the cartoon where it left off, leaving the sound several minutes out of sync. Luckily, I don’t know a single word of Korean, so this didn’t affect my understanding or (lack of) enjoyment at all.

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505. Godmars: The Movie (AKA Six God Combination Godmars) (1982)

In the far future, humans are exploring space, which draws the attention of a race of ancient aliens modeled after the Roman pantheon (although, in the context of the story, I believe the Roman pantheon are modeled after the aliens.) These giant beings have psychic powers and advanced technology (giant robots) which they use to attempt to thwart humanity, however, one of their own stands in the way, to protect humans’ endeavors – an orphaned boy who was adopted by a human family and raised on Earth.

This anime has that strange quality of being simultaneously complex and hard to follow, and juvenile, that a lot of anime aimed at preteens has. It’s not terrible for something that I assume was made for TV - the character animation is very stiff and boring, but the spaceship fights are kind of fun. I’m going to forget I ever saw this in about a week.

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504. Gauche the Cellist (1982)

Hello, everyone! At long last, I’m finally back from the dead, though since I live in Mississippi I believe technically I’m still in hell. During my absence, a lot has happened – jail, a mental hospital, moving to Mississippi, covid, love, heartbreak, plus some other stuff I’m sure I’ve forgotten about. I moved into a Ford F-150 and found a home for my beloved cat Satan, where he’s very happy, though I miss him all the time. I’m also in two bands now, Rong and the Marlboro Pinks, which you can hear on my YouTube page, if that’s of interest to you.

Through all this I basically quit watching movies altogether, but now that I’m sleeping on the floor of our practice room, where I have wifi, and my cousin has gifted me a newer and less-fucked-up laptop than the one I’ve been using for the past six years, I figured it was finally time to toe the grindstone, put my nose to the line, and get back to work on this project.

This is the first animated movie I’ve watched to review in my new home, and other than the setting in which I watched it, it isn’t particularly memorable or interesting, save for a few trippy shots. It tells the story of a semi-competent cello player in a rural town in Japan, who suffers nightly visits from talking animals who critique his music (a malady which reminds me a little of one of my friends here in Hattiesburg.) Set sometime around the turn of the century (if I had to guess, 1920s to 1940s), a lot of the movie focuses on lingering pastoral scenes, not unlike some Studio Ghibli features. Overall it feels a lot like a Ghibli movie – not one of the cool ones, but one of the newer, boring ones.

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Where'd you see Benny’s Bathtub (1971)? I've been looking for that movie for a while.

Hit me up off anonymous and I'll see if I can upload my copy somewhere for you.

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503. Future War 198X (1982)

A speculative Japanese movie about World War III, which the writers foresaw breaking out at some point in the late 1980s. Despite the fact that this obviously didn't happen, I suppose the movie could be worse. It has decent low-budget animation in an almost realist style, but the writing is very serious and slow, and it's about two hours long, which definitely works to its detriment. It isn't strikingly violent, clever, or stylish in any way. Having grown up in a world post-Saving Private Ryan, and specifically having watched this directly after the technically flawless 1917, I think I just have higher standards for war movies than an 80's anime could ever live up to.

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I love this blog so much! it's such an entertaining read, and a fun way to find movies to check out :-D I cant help but wonder how you'll handle all the cheap 3D films that get made today, if you make it that far into film history. It feels like theres an unquantifiable amount of animated movies o_o

Thanks so much! I’m not quite sure how I’ll handle later films that had a profound influence on me as a child - it’s hard to spot flaws in stories that have been ingrained in my memory for 15 or 20 years, let alone write about them. Luckily I grew up poor and didn’t go in theaters much, so the movies I had close bonding experiences with are a few Disney and Don Bluth features that I had on VHS, and not much else. As for 3D animation, I tend not to like it much, but the technology is definitely improving to where it functions more like real animation. Early 3D films that had programmed motion look very unnatural and robotic compared to the newer programs that allow animators to manipulate the models directly. The best of those early films got around that by using non-human characters as much as possible, like Toy Story and A Bug’s LIfe. But then, the first 3D movie to really get around that and have lively and dynamic animation is (so far as I know) Hotel Transylvania, which, if I recall correctly, is a profoundly stupid and annoying movie. There’s a long transitional period between 1998 and 2012 where there was slow and steady improvement, but the majority of that time is the 00′s, which were a peculiarly terrible and hellish time for the cinema, for whatever reason.

I suppose the number of animated movies technically isn’t quantifiable because they keep making new ones, (if only they would stop until I catch up,) but I have a list of all of them through to the end of 2020 and there are  3,656 items on the list (I’ll probably have to eliminate some of them, luckily, but it’s a rough estimate!)

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502. Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All (1982)

This movie was produced by Filmation, the same team that later created the (in)famous Flash Gordon animated series for TV. Being that it was created by Filmation for TV, my expectations were much lower than usual (if you can believe that,) and I was completely and honestly blown away within the first ten seconds.

The animation is, so far as I know, the best that Filmation ever produced. The more complicated shots use rotoscoping to achieve smoother motion, which looks great on the characters I know so well from the relatively cheap TV show. The story is astonishingly well-paced - more than half of this ninety-five minute movie feels like about twenty minutes. Unusually, this movie was produced before the show, rather than cut together from the episodes like most made-for-tv tie-ins for animated series. Apparently, the movie turned out so well that the producers decided to make an ongoing series out of it, and after watching the movie I guess I believe it - some scenes from the feature were cut up and edited into the show eventually, and it was awfully fun to spot the scenes I recognized from childhood.

A lot of the jokes and scenes are more violent or sexually toned than the show was allowed to be - certainly it's still within acceptable parameters for children to watch, but I found it a bit jarring when Prince Thun, the lion man, tells Flash "You haven't lived until you've loved a lion woman, with fur so soft." (My dad, Rogan, who watched the movie with me, actually said out loud in surprise, "He just told him to fuck a lion girl!")

Despite easily being one of the best animated TV movies I’ve ever seen, Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All wasn't released on DVD with the show, and actually hasn't been distributed on home video here in the States at all, though it played on TV a few times to promote the series. There's a copy on Youtube with Japanese subtitles, which I highly recommend watching if you have the chance.

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501. The Flying Windmill (AKA Die fliegende Windmuhle) (1982)

4/10

I couldn't find an English translation of this movie, so some of the details may not be straight, but I think it's about a little girl who runs away due to having bad grades. She befriends a talking dog and horse, and the three of them are forced to take shelter in a combination windmill and house when it begins to rain unexpectedly. The inhabitants of the windmill are a wacky scientist and a talking alligator, and due to some sort of scientific mishap precipitated by the little girl, the windmill flies into space. Presumably some strange adventure ensues, but I couldn't quite get into it between the lack of translation and the somewhat primitive puppets. The animation itself is decent, but none of the characters have moving mouths except for the horse, and the style is a little strange and off the mark.

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500. The Flight of Dragons (1982)

5/10

When the evil wizard Ommadon attempts world domination, his brother, Carolinus the good wizard, must assemble a team of misfit adventurers to defeat him. On the advice of his preternatural superiors, referred to as “Antiquity,” he summons Peter, a guileless Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed scientist from the future, to lead this team, but inadvertently merges Peter’s consciousness with that of a young dragon named Gorbash, creating an endless bumbling font of comic relief.

Though featuring the interesting design you would expect from Topcraft, the studio which created The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn, and which later became Studio Ghibli, this movie suffers from a terminal case of campiness.

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499. Dr. Slump: “Hoyoyo!” Space Adventure (1982)

2/10

For a blissful five minutes at the beginning of this movie, I was fooled into thinking it might be interesting by the presence of weird sci-fi shit and spaceships. I was so, so gullible to think such a thing after reading the title. I guess Dr. Slump is a children's series, but one that is so unbelievably vapid and dumb that it's hard to come to terms with its existence. It must be just about the first show that employs the "RaNdOM!!11!!" style of humor that kid's shows dogmatically cling to now, and frankly it was just as annoying in 1982 as it is today.

The main character is supposed to be twelve, but appears to be about four, and has some sort of verbal tic/Turette's Syndrome that makes her say "hoyo" or "hoyoyo" nearly constantly, a word which is apparently meaningless and irritating in both Japanese and English. Later in the movie, she and her father wear hats with their names printed on them, in case the audience is too comatose to tell the difference between a female child and a middle aged man. I don't really feel the need to delve into the inane plot, but yes, they do go to space, and yes, it is for dumbass reasons contrived in dumbass ways.

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526. Pink Floyd - The Wall (1982)

10/10

For a movie that is older than I am to have so much relevance to the current political climate is astonishing. Everything it has to say about the authoritative structures in society that hold us back and torment us from the moment we're born, through school, government, police, religion, the military, and the economy, and how this pressure encourages and enables our own worst and most violent impulses, is as vital and relevant today as it was in 1982.

Recurring figures and archetypes in the movie simultaneously call upon current events and a evoke a vague historical timelessness. Scenes of crowded venues, filled with people waiting and ready to be urged into a violent frenzy, bring to mind the Trump rallies of the last American election (as of this writing) as readily as Hitler's rallies in Germany. The only black characters shown on screen are immediately brutalized by police. An early scene portraying the child protagonist ill in bed takes on new meaning in the modern era of the anti-vaccination movement, while also implying civilization's long history with the horror of disease. Later in his life, the protagonist's overwhelming fits of mental illness allow him to temporarily escape from the daily torture of performance as a fascist corporate icon, in exactly the same way that his childhood illness allowed him to escape from the daily torture of a school system that repressed creative expression and discouraged free thought.

In technical terms, the Wall is impressive, to say the least, employing a complex mix of cel animation and cartoonishly planned and styled live action sequences. While very little of the movie is actually animation, it gives the impression of a cartoon in a way that is both overwhelming and difficult to quantify. The animation itself is prominent and striking, with a certain evasive quality that leaves you perpetually repulsed and yet wishing for more, as grim and ugly as it is awe-inspiring and beautiful.

If you aren't a fan of psychedelic drugs, it may be bothersome that the movie lacks an ending, or anything like a coherent story with dialogue or named characters. The framework of the viewer's understanding rests on archetypes within their own life, reflected in the fleeting glimpses into the protagonist's memories, and the associative editing, which lends the impression of complex meaning not conveyed directly through dialogue.

I have many times on this blog struggled to write about movies that I feel are close to my heart, or close to the heart of consciousness and society, in some way that is essentially impossible to put to words. Though in my earliest reviews I had trouble explaining it, Fantasia was the first that stultified me in this way, and American Pop I avoided directly talking about almost entirely. The Wall is as clearly significant to the world as those movies - Fantasia portrays our basic childish joy and wonder at the world, nature, human culture and mythology; American Pop explores the way our history and culture carries through generations and inspires the way we define our lives and our creative endeavors; and perhaps more intense and introspective than either of those, Pink Floyd - The Wall is a deeply cynical and enlightening survey of the human heart, damaged and beaten thing that it is.

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I'm Viking or Lexi! I found you while looking for a movie (Princess and the Goblin) that I used to watch all the time but had since forgotten about!

Howdy! I saw that once when I was a kid. It’s coming up on my list and I’m pretty excited to see it again...