BUSTER KEATON COLLECTION, THE
There's an extra coat of hot wax on Pixar's vibrant, NASCAR-influenced comedy about a world populated entirely by cars. Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is the slick rookie taking the Piston Cup series by storm when the last race of the season (the film's high-octane opening) ends in a three-way tie. On the way to the tie-breaker race in California, Lightning loses his way off Route 66…
Gerald McBoing Boing won the 1950 Oscar for best short subject cartoon, but what's more amazing is that kids today are still intrigued by this fun program. Based on the unlikely premise that a young boy named Gerald speaks not in words, but in sound effects like "boing," this simply drawn and animated series appeals to every child's sense of the ridiculous. Gerald is reprimanded for his inab…
Despite its talented staff, the Van Beuren Studio, which existed from 1928 to 1936, never rose above the level of a "B" cartoon house. Their talking version of Felix the Cat, who appears in "Bold King Cole" (1936) and "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg" (1936), has none of zest of the silent character animated by Otto Messmer. Their original characters, Molly Moo-Cow and Cubby Bear, are a…
Ub Iwerks was one of the greatest animators of the silent and early sound eras: he animated "Steamboat Willie" and other early Disney shorts virtually by himself. But the films he produced at his own studio after breaking with Walt Disney in 1930 lack the vitality of his earlier work. During the '30s, the animators with Disney, the Fleischers, Warner Bros., and MGM developed a new style of …
From director Brad Silberling and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment comes a live-action fun house ride filled with laughter, excitement and ghostly surprises. "Ghost therapist" Dr. James Harvey (Bill Pullman) and his daughter Kat (Christina Ricci) arrive at drafty, old Whipstaff Manor. Its greedy owner, Carrigan Crittendon (Cathy Moriarty), has hired Dr. Harvey to exorcise the house's app…