CEL Mates

This month sees the release of Early Man, the seventh feature-length offering from Bristol's own Aardman Animations. As you'd have every right to expect from the studio, Early Man is a heart-warming and...

The Book of Life bears more than a passing resemblance to Pixar’s Coco, out this week. Obviously, both are based around the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead, and involve protagonists going on a...

There are certain stories that only animation can tell properly: the tale of a roomful of toys reuniting with their owner, a clownfish’s journey to find his son, or a version of Hamlet featuring lions. Now...

If you haven't done so before, we'd recommend watching each of these brief shorts as you go through. The shortest is 2:32 and the longest is around eight minutes.  Writer-director Michaël Dudok de Wit...

It is difficult these days to associate Hollywood with pleasant surprises. Releases are so aggressively micromanaged and carefully marketed, pre-marketed, and teased out that even when a blockbuster you...

Anomalisa is one of the the scariest films you'll ever see. It is also one of the most human films you’ll ever see. It is 100% concentrated existential dread with a layer of unsettling psychological disorder...

Here's one to make you feel old: Wallace and Gromit's debut feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit turns ten years old this month - but instead of sitting and pondering the fleeting nature of time, what...

“Oh, yes, I think South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is just terrific, and the numbers in it are wonderful” - Stephen Sondheim South Park is often written off by people who have almost certainly...

Don Hertzfeldt is a one-of-a-kind genius. While his contemporaries balance on the cutting-edge of animation technology or push to preserve the retro charm of hand-drawn styles, he stands proudly in a niche of...

Miyazaki who? Upon the 2013 retirement of visionary director and Studio Ghibli head honcho Hayao Miyazaki, filmgoers could have been forgiven for wondering whether the impossibly high standards the studio...

Waltz with Bashir is a 2008 Oscar-nominated Israeli animated documentary written and directed by Ari Folman. The film follows the director in his search to clarify to himself his role during the 1982 Lebanon...

If there's one thing that unifies this year's stellar crop of Oscar-nominated animated shorts, it's that each one is wildly different to the others. Hailing from all around the world, dealing with a...

Consisting of three 20-minute animated shorts, animator Don Hertzfeldt’s 2012 masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day packs more pathos and melancholy into its one-hour tale of a stick man than most films...

The Secret of Kells is a 2009 Irish-French-Belgian animated film starring Brendan Gleeson, Evan McGuire and Christen Mooney, directed by first-time Irish director Tomm Moore, for which he received an Academy...

Sita Sings the Blues is a 2008 film written, produced and directed by Nina Paley, who also features in the film. In a rather unorthodox fashion, the entire film is created using the Adobe animation program...