Ruby Gillman’s not flawless: The plot feels a bit too close to Turning Red (though not nearly as earnest), and you may come away from it wondering who signed off on the illogical joke that everybody believes that the blue, wiggly-armed sea creatures living among humans are just “from Canada!” But it makes up for it elsewhere, with beautiful underwater sequences and a final mermaid-kraken showdown set to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Burning.” The animation and character designs are rubbery and noodly, in a good way, and the voice cast led by Lana Condor, Toni Collette, and Jane Fonda is excellent. She has to tap those powers and overcome her awkwardness around fitting in at school as she gets caught in a multigenerational war between her race and the mermaids. The competition for that distinction isn’t very strong, of course, but Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is nonetheless a fun little sea-monster mash about a young kraken whose powers awaken just as she tries to work up the courage to ask her crush to prom. Incomprehensibly, this is the summer’s best mermaid movie. But the way the film foregrounds the friendship between the ever-fluid Nimona and her gay bestie Boldheart, voiced respectively by Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed, is what makes it beautiful. Nimona’s action is staged in a stylized blend of 2-D and 3-D animation, which crescendos toward a kaiju-size climax. When she meets a knight, Ballister Boldheart, who is falsely accused of killing the queen, the two team up and take a stand against the repressive order that previously employed him. Based on the comic by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a queer parable about a shape-shifter who refuses to adhere to society’s rules for what she should look like or whom she should present as. Two and a half years later, the film is finally out, after a rescue by Annapurna Pictures, DNEG Animation, and Netflix, and it is far better than anyone could have hoped. In 2021, years into the film’s development at Blue Sky Studios (the animation shop behind Ice Age), the staff of Nimona got tragic news: Its new owners at Disney were killing Blue Sky after acquiring its parent company Fox, and the film - reportedly after Disney execs whined about a same-sex kiss - was to be buried along with the studio. Rusty Venture, as well as the bond between Rusty’s sons, Hank and Dean, but like all of Venture Bros.’s best button endings, it will keep you yelling for more. By the end, the film impressively delivers closure to the relationships between the obsessive Monarch and his archenemy, Dr. It’s also a story with many intentional misdirects, red herrings, and undercuts of the audience’s expectations. Like that finale, whether you want more or whether you think it’s just right, Radiant packs ideas and symbolism galore into its 84 minutes. Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart may be a direct-to-video release, but for fans of the show - which aired its sprawling, often cryptic, highly self-referential story over seven intermittently released seasons - it’s Tony sitting down in the diner at the end of The Sopranos. Not because it’s a slog, but because you simply won’t want the movie, and the 20-year franchise as a whole, to end. film might take you a couple of sittings to get through. Did I mention the soundtrack is full of incredible hip-hop, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did the score? Turtles forever. The movie’s origin-story plot sends them gallivanting across New York to battle Superfly, a gang leader and fellow mutant with designs on ruling the world. The second is the script, which foregrounds the raucous dynamic between Leo, Raph, Donnie, and Mikey (“Do we not have last names?”) and their relationship to Splinter (“Dad” to them - be still my heart), and fills the rest of the screen time with Gen-Z-aware jokes about TikTok and Attack on Titan. The first thing you’ll notice while watching is its indelible art style, awash with gouache-infused paints and textures (apparently inspired by school-notebook doodles). If Mutant Mayhem’s single test was to distinguish itself within the various canons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle–dom, it passed with flying colors. Photo: Courtesy of Paramount Pictures./B)2023 Paramount Pictures.TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES is a trademark of Viacom International Inc.
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