The animation is superb, there’s a cracking action scene and the Botoxed gods are great, but the plot is too fiddly for its young audience

The film-makers behind this chirpy family animation have clearly decided that what have been lacking in the hero department of Greek mythology are cute furry creatures. The star of their ancient Greece-set adventure is a brave little mouse called Pattie, who happens to live in the same seaside town as Jason, that mighty human of Argonauts fame. These days, Jason is a doddery old duffer so, when Poseidon, god of the sea, steals the golden fleece and threatens mayhem and destruction, it’s plucky pipsqueak Pattie to the rescue.

There is nothing to complain about in the animation here from French studio TAT Productions: the cobbled streets and crystal-clear waves of the Aegean sea are gorgeous, like Mamma Mia! for kids. And there is a cracking action sequence near the start involving an elite squad of highly trained ninja rats pulling off a raid on a fruit and veg market. But the plot – like so many movies aimed at young kids – is unnecessarily fiddly, with details that will sail over the heads of most five-year-olds.

A gung-ho mouse and a stagestruck cat come up against the fractious gods in an English-language French animation that looks better than it sounds…

In ancient Greece, an enthusiastic mouse named Pattie (voiced by Kaycie Chase) dreams of adventures and glory to match those of her hero, Jason. In his youth, Jason brought peace and prosperity home to his town along with the Golden Fleece. But now Jason is old, the gods are fractious and the fate of the community rests on Pattie, a stagestruck cat and a tone-deaf amputee seagull. The decent quality of the animation of this English-language French production is rather let down by some shockingly poor voice performances and a couple of ear-bleeding musical numbers.

What should be an irritating story about a tiny talking shell with shoes trying to find his family is somehow funny and beguiling

Here is a genuine oddity: a weird little hothouse flower of a film that looks as if it might crumple at the slightest breath of wind – but is actually very resilient. It’s a quirky stop-motion animation, developed from a series of online short films, whose comedy frequency takes a little time to tune into. You have to wait a bit to hear its batsqueak, and before this happens there is a real and understandable danger that you will simply find it insufferably annoying. The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

The idea is that the film’s director, Dean Fleischer Camp, is staying in an Airbnb after the collapse of his marriage; this house itself has become available for rental because the couple who own it have split up. Fleischer Camp becomes aware that there is someone else in the house: a tiny mollusc called Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) with a single, blinking human eye and dinky little human shoes. Marcel is a calm, childlike figure who talks with absolute candour in his tiny voice to Dean about his own problems and Dean’s.

How to Train Your Dragon is the latest animation to get the live action treatment, but the The Hidden World was only released four years ago. How soon is too soon?

What’s the record for the fastest remake? What is the least amount of time in which film studios have conspired to bring almost exactly the same movie back to the big screen? There was the French comic spy thriller La Totale!, which was remade by James Cameron as True Lies only three years later. And it is arguable that Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) is just a sillier remake of his own The Evil Dead, from 1981. But generally it takes a couple of decades before Hollywood is ready to hit go on a straight-up rerun of a popular movie.

Why then, are we apparently getting a remake of DreamWorks’ fabulous How to Train Your Dragon only 13 years after the original movie hit multiplexes, and only four after its second sequel, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World? Couldn’t DreamWorks just cook up another adventure for Hiccup, Astrid, Snotlout, Ruffnut and Tuffnut if audiences are desperate for more loop the looping with Toothless the Night Fury and his airborne, fire-breathing pals?

Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate’s gently absurdist Bafta- and Oscar-nominated animation is as profound as it is enchanting

At both the Baftas on Sunday night and the Oscars next month, there’s a strong chance that the award for best animated feature will go to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, an astonishing stop-motion animation that uses a beloved fairytale as a springboard for a deep dive into themes of death, fascism and Catholic guilt. Yet there’s another contender that has also been dazzling audiences with its ability to blend philosophical profundity with stop-motion whimsicality – a gently absurdist mockumentary about the inner life of a lonely shell who spends his days perambulating around an Airbnb, musing upon matters of life, the universe and everything.

“Life relentlessly goes on, and people get lost… and you continue to be alive, and you have to decide how to do that with some sort of grace and curiosity.” That’s how co-writer and actor Jenny Slate slyly described the moral of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On in a recent Guardian interview. She provides the voice of the film’s inch-high hero – a tiny carapace with scampering feet and a single eye, who film-maker Dean (played by director Dean Fleischer Camp) meets when he moves into temporary accommodation. Dean has recently split from his partner and needs a place to stay. As for Marcel, he’s been separated from his own family since the human couple who once owned this house broke up, leaving him with only his grandmother Nana Connie for company.

The Your Name director’s mythic and comic new animation is an absorbing, intriguing and bewildering work

Here is the new animation from the Japanese film-maker Makoto Shinkai, whose 2016 fantasy Your Name captured moviegoers’ imagination and led him to be thought of as a new master and perhaps even the heir to Hayao Miyazaki himself. It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) is a lonely, smart teenager, who lives with her aunt after the death of her mother. While walking one day she chances across a mysterious young man called Souta (Hokuto Matsumura), who is apparently in search of a door. Fascinated and somehow nettled by this stranger and his eccentric quest, Suzume sets out to follow him, stumbling into abandoned ruins and finding a disturbing door in the middle of nowhere.

Suzume screened at the Berlin film festival, and is released on 13 April in Australia, and on 14 April in the US and UK.

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It was made by 26-year-old film-maker Lachlan Pendragon at his Brisbane home during Covid

• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

On a stage in Hollywood last month, while announcing this year’s Oscar nominees, the British actor Riz Ahmed briefly paused before reading aloud the title of a film up for best animated short. “My Year of Dicks,” he said, to laughter and cheers, before reading out the best possible follow-up: “An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It.” Even more laughter. “No comment,” co-host Allison Williams said.

Far across the world, in his home in Brisbane, the 26-year-old student behind that excellently named film, with an equally excellent name – Lachlan Pendragon – began to laugh too.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

An orphan must perform three impossible tasks in order to find his lost sister in an earnest animation made watchable by a brilliant turn from Aasif Mandvi

‘Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it”: this is the blah-blah-bland message of this family movie, adapted from Kate DiCamillo’s popular kids’ novel. It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

The setting is a war-weary town called Baltese where Peter (Noah Jupe) is a young orphan being raised in the school of hard knocks by a gruff retired soldier (Mandy Patinkin), who has him practising military drills day and night. But Peter is a dreamer not a fighter. One day he visits a fortune-teller who reveals that the sister he has always believed died as a baby, is alive. To find her, Peter must “follow the elephant”, says the fortune-teller. That same night a crap magician (his loneliness and disappointment beautifully voiced by Benedict Wong) accidentally conjures up an elephant in the town’s opera house; the beast comes crashing through the roof, squishing the legs of an old lady.

A family of anthropomorphised eggs land themselves in hot water in a dismal film full of garish visuals and unfunny gags

With this family animation, Mexican film-making brothers Gabriel and Rodolfo Riva Palacio Alatriste put young and old alike through a gruelling ordeal of headachey hyperactive visuals and flatlining gags. This 2021 film is the latest instalment of their Little Eggs franchise, getting a UK release presumably to cash in on the Easter school holidays. Though to be honest, I’d take two weeks locked inside a soft-play centre with a class of Year Ones over sitting through it again.

The story begins on a farm in Mexico where rooster Toto has become the proud dad of two adorable eggs: a boy and a girl who pop out with legs and arms, wearing matching sneakers and talking. I was puzzled by the egg aspect of the film: is it weird that Toto’s sprogs are talking eggs, not hatched chicks? Bizarrely, other eggs in the coop are clearly adults. Has something gone freakishly wrong with embryo development on this farm?

The seductively quirky sad-serious tone of the author is evident as a constellation of characters try and save the city – including a lost cat and a giant talkative frog

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has inspired some prestigious movies, most recently Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. Regardless of whether this new Murakami adaptation (based on his short story collection of the same name) comes to be considered the best, I think it might actually capture the elusive essence of Murakami more than any other – something in it being a Rotoscope animation of elegant simplicity. It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Pierre Földes makes his feature directing debut here, having been long been a composer; his musical credits include Michael Cuesta’s L.I.E. from 2001, and he has written the score for this movie too, which brings together a constellation of characters and storylines around the recent Tokyo earthquake – to which it attributes a tonal sense of disorientation rather than tragedy and sadness. Komura (voiced in the English-language dub by Ryan Bommarito) is a quiet young man working joylessly in a bank; his wife, Kyoko, (Shoshana Wilder) suffers from insomnia and depression, ceaselessly watching TV news reports about the earthquake. She walks out on Komura, plagued by a guilty memory of having made a bizarre Faustian bargain to get together with him in the first place.

In the 1970s, giant robot cartoons sparked a love affair with French fans (including Emmanuel Macron) – now the country is the world’s largest manga importer, and home to a new Murakami film

You might say that Vincent van Gogh was one of the first Japanese pop-culture otaku (geeks) in Europe. With the 19th-century japonisme craze in full swing, he coveted ukiyo-e woodblock prints like modern-day collectors hoard rare manga. Japanese art deeply influenced his work, from his flattening of perspective to his bold lines. He went to the south of France hoping to encounter the same radiant nature and spiritual freshness that figured in his east-Asian fantasia. Upon seeing Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa– a supposed inspiration for his own The Starry Night– he raved to his brother Theo in a letter: “The waves are claws, the boat is caught in them, you can feel it.”

The new animation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by France-based animator Pierre Földes, shows that the French love affair with Japanese visual arts is still throbbing. Anime and manga are a worldwide cultural force but nowhere more so than France – an unbelievable 55% of comics sold there in 2021 were manga, according to consumer research body GfK. A beguiling mashup of six Haruki Murakami short stories set in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman emerged foremost from Földes’s own first contact with Japanese literature as a teenager. “I loved the fact the style of storytelling was so different to the west,” says the director. “It’s more contemporary, less structured. Here, everything is very structured, with a beginning and end. The story goes from here to there, through different moments of emotion. I’m not so much into that.”

Unpleasant to look at, with a chatbot-level script and phoned-in voiceovers, film-makers can’t get away with shovelling out this kind of thing

You may find yourself, as Talking Heads might have said, watching this animated feature about dead yet ambulatory mummified ancient Egyptians capering about some weird version of London. And you may ask yourself, not only how did you get here when the oracle warned you not to go, but what did you do in a past life to deserve this?

You may also ask yourself all sorts of questions about the simple logic of this very poorly written and ill-considered film. Such as: why do the mummy characters look like regular humans most of the time except in certain kinds of light which make them look like trick-or-treaters wearing bad skeleton makeup? How did they magically get back from our world to their underworld land of the mummy dead at the end of the film with such ease, given it was supposed to be so challenging in the first act? Why does the villain – a crazed museum curator named Lord Carnaby (Hugh Bonneville) – have such a weird obsession with his mother (Celia Imrie, who like Bonneville is turning a cheap voiceover trick presumably for the money)? How did the heroine, a mummy princess named Nefer (Eleanor Tomlinson), who apparently aspires to be an undead Ariana Grande with a bobbed hairstyle, suddenly learn to sing Walk Like an Egyptian? And why doesn’t she find the lyrics offensive, being a real Egyptian?

Myths about the Walt Disney classic are debunked by Prof Ian Christie

Lucy Knight claims “Walt Disney made Bambi a cutesy schmaltzfest for kids” (Gunned down and burned by the Nazis: the shocking true story of Bambi, 21 March), perpetuating the misconception that early Disney productions were made for children. The idea of a separate children’s audience didn’t exist in 1942, when Disney’s Bambi appeared and – like its predecessors Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio and Dumbo – terrified many youngsters accompanying their parents. Beatrice Ruben and I interviewed some of these for our BBC radio programme Where Were You When Bambi’s Mother Was Shot? in 2002 (repeated in 2022), confirming that the film was genuinely traumatic when seen on a cinema screen in darkness. Certainly Disney modified its source material for all the early features, but the artistry and impact of these shouldn’t be forgotten in an era when they’re rarely seen as cinema features, and Disney has indeed become a byword for cutesy schmaltz.
Prof Ian Christie
Birkbeck, University of London

• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Dream logic coexists with the crushingly mundane in composer Pierre Földes’s adult animation, a series of interlinked stories set in the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese earthquake

The writing of Haruki Murakami has inspired numerous cinema adaptations, including Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning Drive My Carand Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. But nothing, so far, as odd and inventive as the adult animation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, the feature film-making debut of French composer Pierre Földes. This surreal English-language collection of interlinked stories is set in and around Tokyo in the recent aftermath of the 2011 earthquake. A cat goes missing, a marriage breaks down, a large, extravagantly boastful frog visits a meek bank-teller and stresses that he must assist in the defeat of a destructive giant subterranean worm. Földes’s matter-of-fact approach to storytelling balances the tendency towards quirkiness in the material. Dream logic coexists with the crushingly mundane, in a picture that also showcases the director’s musical talents with an intricate and involving score.

Fantastically boring, poorly written and unfunny, this Russian animation could serve as a cinematic naughty step for any parents needing some Easter holiday discipline

Parents of small children, here’s something to keep up the sleeve over the Easter holidays. If the little ones are behaving badly, use this like a cinematic naughty step – a threat to dangle over them. One more step out of line … and I’ll march you straight to the cinema to watch this. Honestly, this Russian kids’ animation really is a punishment: fantastically boring, charmless, badly written and dubbed into English so flatly that I think a satnav would bring more energy to the characters.

It’s the second film in the Big Trip franchise, though it really would be cruel and inhuman to sit anyone – let alone a child – in front of more than one. In the earlier instalment, lumpen-looking bear Mic-Mic delivered a baby panda to its parents after a mailing error by the stork. Astonishingly it’s same again this time with the misdelivery of yet another cute little bundle: a baby grizzly bear.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first

Films or TV shows based on games don’t have to be terrible – as proved in various ways by Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves and The Last of Us. Even The Angry Birds Movie wasn’t too bad. The trick is usually to make it look as if the game was based on the movie, rather than the other way round. But this much-trailed, much-hyped new animated feature is tedious and flat in all senses, a disappointment to match the live-action version in 1993. It’s visually bland in ways that reminded me of European knockoff animations and utterly inert in narrative terms, with a baffling lack of properly funny lines.

It is of course based on the global video game phenomenon, born in the 80s, from Kyoto-based gaming giant Nintendo, with its wackily eccentric idea of Italian-American plumbers Mario and Luigi. They are called the Super Mario Bros, even though “Mario” is not their surname – like Dostoevsky inventing a videogame called The Brothers Dimitri. This movie revives the ancient and surreal quest undertaken by Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and his brother Luigi (Charlie Day), Brooklyn plumbers who only do the silly and borderline-offensive cod Italian voice for their cheesy TV ad.

The Super Mario Bros Movie’s starry cast is the latest in an increasing trend of picking the wrong kind of voice actors

The rumors of Chris Pratt’s badness have been greatly – well, maybe not greatly, but at least somewhat – exaggerated. When the first trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros Movie teased his vocal performance as the overall-clad plumber of 8-bit repute, fans began gnashing their teeth harder than a thicket of piranha plants, outraged to hear that he’d eschewed the character’s distinctive spicy-meat-a-ball accent in favor of a more dialed-back Noo Yawkah inflection. Which is fair enough, those little cries of wa-hoo! probably would’ve gotten old after an hour or so, not to mention the inevitable backlash from Italian anti-discrimination activists. The integral Mario-ness of his performance comes and goes, to the point that most of the time, he just sounds like Chris Pratt. He’s not horrible in the role, but there’s not really anything to recommend him as the right match for this specific character, either.

It’s not long before a viewer realizes that the overt presence of Pratt must have surely been the point of casting him, a notion more apparent in Anya Taylor-Joy’s minimal-effort line-reads as Princess Peach. She makes zero attempt to transform her voice, or to introduce a more animated quality to brighten up her normal speech. A charitable viewer might suggest that her slight smoker’s rasp befits the film’s baldfaced goal to present a less bubbly, more grounded take on the ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom, but all the same, she doesn’t bring much to the table in terms of individual intangibles. These deficiencies in her and Pratt’s underwhelming approach to cartoonifying themselves jump right out whenever Jack Black’s Bowser occupies the screen, a glaring reminder of what good voice acting feels like. Cannily chosen for his boisterous roar capable of turning on a dime into an absurd little tenderness, Black massages a growly undercurrent into his readings and invites the supervillain’s Broadway-caliber theatricality to run away with him. He’s varied, he’s expressive and, most of all, he’s having fun.

Familiarity replaces fun for the moustachioed Italian plumber in this joyless adaptation from the Nintendo franchise

Kids will probably love this scattershot dash through Nintendo’s most popular properties. But then kids, rarely the most discerning audience members at the best of times, will routinely mistake familiarity for fun – something that this lazy picture exploits extensively. Musical motifs from beloved games, minor characters, nods to the Mario legacy: all were greeted with shrieks of excitable recognition at the screening I attended. The Super Mario Bros Movie is a frantic Easter egg hunt of a film that does the bare minimum to please its loyal existing fanbase. Those less enthralled by the antics of the moustachioed Italian plumber will wonder which of Donkey Kong’s weaponised barrels this joyless, noisy mess was scraped from.

Families flock in over Easter despite poor reviews, helping Mario collect more than £300m worldwide to become highest grossing game adaptation and animated film over opening weekend

The animated Super Mario Bros Movie has shot to the top of the global box office, taking $377m (£304m) worldwide on its opening weekend.

The new film is an origin story about how Brooklyn plumbers Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, and Luigi (Charlie Day), fall into a rogue pipe and wind up in a world populated by Nintendo’s most famous characters.

A schoolgirl and a haunted chair waft through a land of sunsets and cherry blossom in this fleeting tale set in the wake of the 2011 tsunami

The apocalypse rarely looked so appealing as it does in Makoto Shinkai’s latest anime – a painterly coming-of-age tale that’s back-shadowed by the spectre of the 2011 tsunami. Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) is the schoolgirl heroine on a mission to close various portals to hell, wafting cross-country through a world of pink sunsets and cherry blossom. She’s on the trail of a talking cat, accompanied by a haunted three-legged chair. Her mother is dead; she needs whatever friends she can find.

Shinkai has fun with his big fantasy set pieces, but he’s brilliant with the little details too, conjuring up a vivid sense of modern-day Japan, right down to the lobster traps and the level crossings and the snaking freeways outside Tokyo. His film’s at its best when it keeps its feet on the ground. The director won rave reviews for 2016’s Your Name, a rapturous body-swap romance that tackled similar themes. Suzume, though, finally feels less nuanced, less grounded, and its winsome fairytale script doesn’t entirely add up. Shinkai casts a spell in the moment, but the magic fades away.