Tag: Comedy
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The Favourite. Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2019
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite explores the life of Queen Anne and the competition between her servants Abigail and Sarah to become her ‘favourite’. The film uses comedy to provide an alternative depiction of the often idealised royal courts, creating an image of debauchery and cruelty instead. Whilst the film focuses on the relationship between these…
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Wall – E. Dir. Anrew Stanton. Pixar. 2008.
In its depiction of a film-world defined by its lack of natural life, Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) features only one animal: WALL-E’s charismatic companion, Hal the cockroach.
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Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. EMI Films. 1975.
In the opening scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1], a grassy hill is shown with the sound of horse’s hooves—only for a skipping King Arthur, and coconut-clomping servant to appear, sans horse. This sets the scene for the finest ever cinematic use of imaginary horses.
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Carnage. Dir. Simon Amstell. BBC. 2017.
What would the world be like if everybody was vegan? According to Simon Amstell’s vision of the future in Carnage, it’s a peaceful utopia in which the young vegans of tomorrow frolic in fields and enjoy food much more, knowing that nothing was taken from an animal, albeit one in which the older generations of ex-meat-eaters…
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Coco. Dir. Lee Unkrich. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2017.
Lee Unkrich’s Coco (2017) is built on similar foundations of recent Disney/Pixar releases alike Moana(2016) and The Good Dinosaur(2015); twelve year old Miguel’s (Anthony Gonzalez) dream of becoming a musician compromises his family’s ban on music and their hope for Miguel to continue the family business.[i]Yet what may feel like recognisable narrative territory, the enriched setting of traditional Mexico…
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Toy Story. Dir. John Lasseter. Pixar. 1995.
‘You’ve got a friend in me’ is the catchphrase of Pixar’s first computer-generated feature-length film, Toy Story (1995), and this perfectly captures the relationships within the film; including those between the group of toys the plot centres around. The film follows the lives of these toys, in which the mix of human and animal characters come to…
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Barnyard. Dir. Steve Oedekerk. Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies. 2006.
Steve Oedekerk’s Barnyard uses witty puns and gags in order to satirise the idea of the animal as a fixed definition, in that an animal can never truly be anything more than a representation of the attributes that humanity typically associates with its species.