Zootopia 2 (2025)

 

Zootopia 2 (2025)

8/10

 

Starring the voices of

Ginnifer Goodwin

Jason Bateman

Ke Huy Quan

Fortune Feimster

 

Directed by: Jared Bush and Byron Howard

 

Zootopia 2 is fun, it has a lot of mushy mushy touchy feelings in the end which kinda dragged for way too long, but it was fun and it was so amazing to see Flash the sloth again. It is not as good as part 1, but it is good enough that I will watch a part 3 if it drops.

So the Hopps energy is back. This Disney animated sequel does not play around, right from the start the jokes start flying in with many references to old films for the adults to laugh at and enough color and action to keep the kids entertained. There are no words to describe how it feels to see these two working together again in this wonderful animated return to the world of Zootopia, and you can see that Disney kept the animation just as fluid as the first while introducing new characters with new voice actors to keep the juice fresh, so it was like I never left.

It was nice to have Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman back as Hopps and Nick, both give fantastic voice acting performances that make you forget you are watching an animation and they pull you into this world of anthropomorphic animals until you feel like you are witnessing everything from the passenger’s seat.

This is Zootopia 2, a sequel to the 2016 classic in my books, and we have the return of the buddy cop duo Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. As you would expect the two do not start the movie sitting down, no, we have already done that in the first part and their story continues from where the first one stops.

Zootopia 2 sees former con-artist and rabbit-cop duo Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde working together in the ZPD, but their partnership is on rocky ground as they are sent to a partner training program, and of course they do not finish the training before they jump on their next case. The case revolves around the arrival of a mysterious reptile, Gary De'Snake, who is the first snake seen in Zootopia in over a century.

Judy puts together that the arrival of the snake has something to do with a priceless old journal belonging to the founding Lynxley family, so she convinces Nick to join her undercover at the event, and sure enough Gary appears and steals the journal. But the two are not praised or celebrated for uncovering this because during their encounter with Gary the chief gets injured, and they end up as the prime suspects.

Now the two must unravel a dangerous conspiracy involving family secrets, a secret reptile community, and clear their name while learning to trust each other again. The character dynamics and how they play off each other still give off that predictable rookie cop duo and angry chief vibe we all know, and how they get on the reptile case lines up with the same detective duo stories we have seen before, but the fun here is how these characters handle these predictable situations.

So fair warning, some aspects are predictable, and do I recommend you see this, yes because I will be doing a rewatch as well.

 

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018)

  

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018)

4/10

Starring the voices of

Mahiro Takasugi

Lynn

Yukiyo Fujii

Yuma Uchida

 

Directed by: Shinichiro Ushijima

 

 

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is manufactured emotion pretending to be profound and I did not feel any of it.
The animation is decent, clean, bright and soft with no headaches like the movie Mind Game which I saw before it, but I feel the voice casting did an average job and there is this failure on their part to capture my attention and make me want to drop everything I am doing to sit and listen. Like Mind Game and a lot of other anime movies, I saw this in Japanese with subtitles so I can watch and not be tempted to skip ahead, but this still failed to capture me.

The movie plot is too straightforward and it does not give me a reason to have a second take, no wait what moment, just me sitting in manufactured chaos and emotions. It is about a quiet boy who reads a girl’s diary and finds out she has a terminal pancreatic illness and they become friends and she teaches him how to live, the formula we have all seen like a thousand times before now.

And because the film starts by showing her funeral, there is no tension and we already know she will die, this is not a spoiler, so with a lack of mystery or emotional bait you know exactly where it is heading.

The one thing I will give this movie is the twist of Sakura getting murdered instead of dying from the illness and I did not see that coming, but I felt they wasted that twist because it could have been a sharp cut that should have caused everything to change and force a new direction. Instead, the movie does not use it that way, it uses that twist to drag the grieving process even longer.

Now we must meet her family and her friend and discover her special gift, and the whole thing turns into grief tourism, structured sadness like the makers are holding a board saying cry here everyone.

Some films use emotion to make you look inward, an example is A Silent Voice which hits you because Shoko’s suicide attempt forces you to question the signs you missed, and Your Name hits you because the timeline twist makes you re-examine everything you thought you were watching, and Look Back hits you because the murder happens fast and sharp and only ten minutes and the film refuses to drown you in grief because it trusts you to feel without being dragged.

This film does the opposite and every emotion is stretched and every moment is designed to instruct you to react.

This movie is wasted potential wrapped in manipulation and that is the biggest problem with it and why I do not recommend you seeing it.

Mind Game (2004)

 

Mind Game (2004)

4/10

Starring the voices of

Koji Imada

Sayaka Maeda

Takashi Fujii

 

Directed by: Masaaki Yuasa

I saw Mind Game and honestly felt like… hmmm.

One good thing about this movie is, I prefer this to Masaaki Yuasa’s other work Devil Man Cry Baby.

There is a lot happening in this movie, and it is saying everything so loudly, that I kept wondering why it needed over 100 minutes to do it. The message is simple, and you must be blind to miss it. It is saying, you are going to die someday, so act now, live the best life and don’t waste moment.

But here is my question, isn’t every guru saying that?

Almost every blog post or TikTok video has such if you scroll for like 30 minutes, I did not think I needed a whole movie, with a swallowed by a whale thingy to get the same message splashed at me.

Now, the animation, and the psychedelic style I did not like, I know it is intentional, but for me, it was distracting. Same with the voice acting, instead of it pulling me into the story, it pushed me out of it.

The movie follows Nishi, a 20-year-old manga artist who reconnects with his childhood crush Myon. They go to her family’s yakitori shop to hangout when two Yakuza show up, one of them starts to lose it and tries to rape Myon and Nishi freezes in fear and balls up.

This panic action got the attention of the rage maniac, who then shoots Nishi in the backside, and he dies.

It is from here, the movie went on a serious psychedelic visual chaos, when the God character continued to morph and change voices, telling Nishi all is done, head of and be nothing, as you are now dead.

Nishi refuses to be nothing and heads back to earth, escaping God and decided to this time seize the moment. And from here, the movie jumps into absolute chaos, he rescues Myon and together with her sister the three of them get swallowed by a whale and are trapped inside trying to escape. It is Jonah, it is Disney’s Pinocchio, all wrapped in one long stream of madness.

I understand the craft and ambition Masaaki Yuasa is trying to do, but I found myself constantly aware of how strange everything looked and sounded. It felt more like someone tapping my shoulder every five minutes saying, “Hey, look at how artistic I am,” instead of letting me sink into the moment.

This film felt like one message over too much visual noise, or like Bilbo Baggins said, like butter scraped over too much bread.

I think people like to praise Mind Game because it makes them sound niche, made by the same guy who made the nonsense Devil Man Cry Baby.

For me, Mind Game works as a technical showcase and not a film that is supposed to reshape your view of life. I do not recommend it.

 

Predator: Badlands (2025)

 

Predator: Badlands (2025)

7/10

Starring

Elle Fanning

Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi

 

Directed by: Dan Trachtenberg

 

I liked Predator: Badlands, this movie changes the perspective of this franchise. Usually, we have seen it from the prey’s view, as they are being hunted by these alien predators, now we are seeing it from the alien predator view.

This movie has some good fight scenes, and the main character is not a human, but a synthetic being, played by Elle Fanning.

The movie shows us that the Predator clan is very focused on strength, and we see there are some emotional arcs to them, it is not just hunting. Elle Fanning in this movie is amazing in her dual roles as Thia and Tessa, making up for the lack of humans in the movie with her performance.

The way she balances her emotions with the pure focus of this Predator alien is what drives this movie. I will let you know, this movie does drag in places, especially when Thia tries to connect with the Predator whose name is Dek. All that talk about the wolf pack and trying to make him form a family unit made me tired sometimes.

The plot starts on the planet Yautja, where we see Dek, a runt Predator, trying to best his brother Kwei. Since he is smaller than all the other Predators in his clan, he is considered weak. Kwei was sent by their father, the leader of the clan, to kill Dek. But Kwei did not want to, so he told Dek to go hunting to prove himself. Dek then chose to hunt the Kalisk, an unkillable apex predator on the lethal planet Genna.

Before he went on his hunt, their father showed up and killed Kwei for his disobedience, with Dek heading off to the planet hoping to kill the creature and gain respect.

On the planet is where he meets Thia, a synthetic who lost her legs to the Kalisk and is separated from her friend and companion, Tessa, another synthetic.

In the end, this was a good ride for a movie, looking at things from another perspective. You can also see where it crosses paths with the Alien franchise, when we discover the Weyland-Yutani team arriving to capture what they believe is theirs to experiment on.

It was a nice time at the cinemas with this movie, and I recommend you take the time to go see it, it is fun. You can see where this movie is heading, probably a crossover later on in the future, but the short runtime makes it an easy watch in the cinema.

Frankenstein (2025)

 

Frankenstein (2025)

5/10

Starring

Oscar Isaac

Jacob Elordi

Mia Goth

Christoph Waltz

 

Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro

 

I did not like this movie.

The Frankenstein book by Mary Shelley is dark and has a lot of tragic incidents, which made the whole situation of Victor creating the creature itself a form of pride that came back to haunt him. The book placed Elizabeth in a more tragic position, and her death due to Victor’s hubris of creating this creature and then denying it a mate was very painful.

Now, this Guillermo Del Toro Frankenstein is visually stunning, wonderful acting all around, but it painfully missed the point of the book’s portrayal of Elizabeth. Here she is the soon-to-be wife of Victor’s brother, which Victor tried but failed to win her heart. In the book, they are together, and it was her death at the hands of the creature during her wedding night that caused Victor to come full circle with the thing he had created.

This movie made Victor out to be, right from the start, selfish, cruel, and scheming, all in the name of trying to paint him as a complex character, and for me, killing the idea of the book. In the book, Victor was not innocent either, and you can call him all those things, but you can see the pride that drove him.

I do not get why there is a bonding between Elizabeth and the creature in this movie. I get what it was to represent in the movie, I do not get why Del Toro felt it was needed, the book did fine without it.

This is Del Toro, I went to see this hoping to have my mind blown, but in the end, all the changes made me feel he took something that was not broken and tried to fix it.

The movie was also, in my opinion, thirty minutes too long. We did not need two viewpoints of what led to the two (Victor and the creature) to be at the arctic circle. One version would have been enough. I know Frankenstein’s lonely path in the film is a bit similar to that in the book, but I felt the movie could have done better if it summarized that.

Well, if you do not know the story, this is the story of how Victor Frankenstein created the creature we call the Frankenstein Monster. We see how he grew up with a stern dad and how the death of his mother made him want to cheat death. When one day a wealthy benefactor, who is the carer of Elizabeth and who is to be married to Victor’s brother William, came across Victor’s work, he bankrolled him, and Victor created the creature.

This creation did not play out the way Victor wanted, and his jealousy of wanting to have Elizabeth darkened his view of things, and he ended up making the whole thing worse for himself and everyone around him.

I wish I loved this movie, I wished I liked it more than this, but sadly I do not.

Good Fortune (2025)

Good Fortune (2025)

6/10

Starring

Seth Rogen

Aziz Ansari

Keke Palmer

Sandra Oh

Keanu Reeves

 

Directed by: Aziz Ansari

 

Well, I have gotten to the end of the film, and it is not bad, it is not great or superb, but it is not bad, and it took a different path to get the same predictable ending we all know movies like this go. Acting-wise, everyone delivered, I have no complaints, and I think Keanu Reeves did a nice job playing an angel who just wanted to do good and be respected and then messed everything up.

Story-wise, I think Aziz Ansari, who also directed, wrote, and starred in this flick, did a nice job. I would have loved if the character Jeff, played by Seth Rogen, went back to being himself, that would have surprised me, but like I said, movies like this round things up in a perfect predictable circle.

The comedy is a miss for me, this is more like drama and see-what-happens when a body swap goes wrong, the whole idea is. Imagine a body swap meant to show the character Arj (Ansari) that his life would not have been better if he switched roles with Jeff. Well, the swap happened thanks to an angel named Gabriel, who was hoping to save a lost soul, the one in Arj.

Problem, Arj, now living the life of Jeff, liked it. After a week of being Jeff, never having to actually worry about money, he did not want to go back.

Gabriel, who was hoping that this swap would teach Arj, a man who just lost his job and is living in his car, that his future would always be a struggle, wanted him to see that life is not always greener on the other side. But Arj was now living the life of a millionaire, he happy.

Now, another problem for Gabriel, he cannot send Arj back, Arj has to want to go back. So to guilt him, he returned Jeff’s memory of his life, but Jeff telling Arj he wants his life back did nothing to guilt Arj. Even the girl Arj wanted, he got. Money was actually a solution to all his problems.
So Gabriel gets demoted until he can solve this issue.

So that is what this movie is about, we are watching Gabriel trying to solve a problem he has caused. Now, Gabriel the angel was actually an angel of texting and driving. His job was to alert people who are texting and driving so they do not get into an accident, this whole problem he caused, he did on his own and was not sent.

Well, the other issue with this movie is that it is not rewatchable. It is a good watch if you have a lazy Sunday, but not one I will run back to go see after seeing it. So it is watchable, but just the once.

Look Back (2024)

 

Look Back (2024)

8/10

Starring the voices of

Yuumi Kawai

Mizuki Yoshida

 

Directed by: Kiyotaka Oshiyama

 

Look Back is one of those movies that actually cuts deep when you get to the end and see that the way it starts up is not the way you would have hoped it will end.

I hoped the two girls would later be great together, I hoped it would be one of those fine endings where it is all tied up in bows and they run away into the sun happy together.

But sadly, this wonderful, well-written, fantastic artwork animation with wonderful voice casting does not end that way. I give the voice casting a lot of honors for the way it carries Kyomoto’s mannerisms to make it more convincing, and it worked for the immersion into the story.

The story is about two girls, Fujino and Kyomoto, who love to draw manga strips for their high school paper. Fujino was very talented and used to do this drawing by herself, and she was very popular. Then Kyomoto joined. Kyomoto has social anxiety and does not leave the house, so she and Fujino in the beginning never met.

When Fujino saw how good Kyomoto’s work was and how much attention it was getting, she decided to stop drawing and actually focus on finishing high school. After graduation, she was asked to take Kyomoto’s certificate to her, and that was when the two met. That was how they formed a partnership, where they created manga for years and were successful.

Their partnership broke when Kyomoto wanted to go to art school. Fujino’s reaction to this was selfish, and their friendship parted.

How the story carries on from this is something you will need to watch this anime to enjoy. The fun thing about this anime is that it is not long, it is just 60 minutes, and in that short time, it takes you on a journey, one where we see the challenges of drawing manga and the challenges people with social anxiety face.

The anime showed the problem of not forgiving and the issue that comes when you try to hold on to someone who wants to fly. My problem with this anime is, I felt there is a lack of emotional connection to Kyomoto and her social anxiety issue. Yes, it is well voiced and shown, but because the movie is easily from Fujino's view, her own character development seems overlooked.

Kyomoto's character development is, one day she just goes I am going to art school, there is no proper build up to this.

I wonder if the ending would have been different if Fujino was a better friend to Kyomoto, we will not know. Although the movie hinted at that possible alternate ending, it then pivoted back to the path it started on when these two did not run away into the sun, holding hands.

I do recommend you see this movie, it is worth your time.