Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 28, 2016. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Norm of the North, Sing, The Secret Life of Pets, Finding Dory and Ice Age: Collision Course. Just a small selection of the animated films of 2016.
We notice: things are crawling and flying! Animals everywhere! Insanely cute, yes, but you can overdo it a little too, dear Hollywood.
We had a look around at what other colourful animated films await us and identified a few trends. A selection by the DP editorial team with no claim to completeness.
The major studios remain faithful to their family-friendly course.
Dreamworks catapults us back into the children’s rooms of the early 1990s with Trolls and again shows us the black-and-white martial-arts professional in Kung Fu Panda 3. Disney brings the ethnic epic Pocahontas, um, sorry, Moana, and animal overkill Zootopia with the wonderfully slow sloth Flash.
Popular: Turning Video Games into Films
The Angry Birds Movie, Ratchet & Clank, Dofus: Book 1—Julith from France, and Sly Cooper are only the best-known among the many video-game cinema hybrids.
Adults get their money’s worth too. But the films will probably not receive as much attention as those from the family genre.
Michaël Dudok de Wit enters the race as a European contribution with The Red Turtle. More demanding plots are promised by Another Day of Life about the civil war in Angola, the Van Gogh portrait Loving Vincent, and a teenage comedy called Sausage Party by and with Seth Rogen. (What on earth went wrong with him?!)
A few colourful crackers from the Far East are also coming to our cinemas. For example, Gary Wang’s Little Door Gods. (The trailer requires knowledge of Mandarin, or just watch it without sound. Nice too.)
Well then, bring on 2016! We sit eagerly in our cinema seats.