It’s a reasonably safe bet that anyone who records a Christmas album is in love with the festive season and all its multitudinous warm-and-fuzzy trappings. That’s certainly the case with indie pop artist Ingrid Michaelson whose holiday album Songs for the Season released on 26 October. In a recent Continue Reading
How Hanna-Barbera used simple animation to highlight music, dialogue and sound design
SNAPSHOT The difference between what we did at Warner Bros. and what’s on Saturday morning is the difference between animation and what I call illustrated radio. If you can turn off the picture and still know what’s going on, that’s illustrated radio. (synopsis via Laughing Squid) Hanna-Barbera was very Continue Reading
Dr. Tenth Christmas Surprise! Or how to deal with a man in red and white and a lively snowman
Let’s be fair – Santa, stripped of all his promise of toys and red-and-white clad jolliness is a bit weird. I say this as a man very much-enamoured of Christmas and its many and varied feel good trappings, who rightly regards Santa Claus as a fairly good guy who Continue Reading
On 1st day of Christmas … I decorated my tree with 11 new pop culture ornaments
I am not a Christmas traditionalist. Well, I am and I am not, said as I pivot, rather precariously on the fence of what sounds dangerously like festive decorating ambivalence. What I mean is that while I love all the warm-and-fuzzy, bright-and-shiny trappings of the season so much so that Continue Reading
Christmas movie review: The Holiday Calendar
If you are to believe Hallmark, and frankly who are we to disagree, Christmas is the ideal time to fall in love. Movie after movie – 33 this year in total, up from last year’s Grinch-ly paltry 28 – extols the wonder and magic of a time of year Continue Reading
Happy Christmas from Sesame Street: Bert and Ernie Exchange Gifts
Ernie and Bert’s friendship is one of the many delightful things about Sesame Street. They are devoted to each other in the way only the truest of friends are, willing to sacrifice something that makes them happy if it means their dear friend will be even happier. Especially at Continue Reading
Book review: The Single Ladies of Jacaranda Retirement Village by Joanna Nell
Getting older, as with most things in life, is a double-edged sword. For all the wisdom accrued and knowledge secreted away there are aches without number and ailments without number; every longstanding friendship is matched with the disappointment and loss of a relationship lost to enmity or mortality, every Continue Reading
Mary Poppins Returns is almost here! Watch 73 questions with star Emily Blunt
I know Vogue’s 73 Questions series is simply part of a big publicity push for a film, an actor and yes, the magazine itself, but they are so much fun and done so very well, that I just can’t help loving them. For a start, while they make excellent Continue Reading
Christmas movie review: Babes in Toyland (1961)
At first glance, Babes in Toyland, Disney’s 1961 aspirational attempt to create a movie as magically transportive and musically-rich as The Wizard of Oz – they didn’t but that was a pretty tall order anyway – doesn’t come across as a Christmas film of any stripe. (The festive angle Continue Reading
Trauma and healing in Welcome to Marwen
SNAPSHOT Welcome to Marwen tells the miraculous true story of one broken man’s fight as he discovers how artistic imagination can restore the human spirit. When a devastating attack shatters Mark Hogancamp (Carell) and wipes away all memories, no one expected recovery. Putting together pieces from his old and Continue Reading