Latest news with #Animation
The Independent
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
The Simpsons' producer clarifies Marge's death
The Simpsons executive producer Matt Selman addressed fan concerns about Marge Simpson 's apparent Death in the show's 36th season finale. Selman clarified that Marge's Death is not considered canon, stating that the show has no consistent canon due to numerous contradictory flash-forwards. The episode, set 35 years in the future, depicted Homer at Marge's grave, but Marge later appeared in a pre-recorded message and then in heaven. Selman suggested that media outlets created misleading headlines about Marge's Death to generate traffic, despite knowing it was not a permanent plot point. The long-running animated series has been renewed for four more seasons, ensuring it will surpass 800 episodes.
Geek Culture
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Culture
Netflix's 'Devil May Cry' Series Creator Adi Shankar Teases A "Very Different" Season 2
Hot off announcing his plans for a Duke Nukem adaptation, Adi Shankar, showrunner of the Netflix animated series Devil May Cry , has revealed that Season 2 will be a whole new beast compared to its predecessor, embodying more of the video game's feel that fans expect. 'Season 2 is a vvvvveryyyyy different show.' Shankar wrote on X\Twitter in response to a fan question, 'Yes, Dante levels up. His skills improve and you'll see him embrace more of the iconic badassery fans of the game expect.' 'That said, I'm still telling a story, and great characters don't just win — they grow,' he continued, 'What makes Dante compelling isn't that he's unstoppable — it's that he learns and keeps getting stronger.' Still, some fans took to the platform to express their disappointment in the series, especially regarding its portrayal of the well-known franchise side-character Lady and the changes made to its overall plot. To this end, Shankar was quick to clarify that his version of the story wasn't set up to be canon. 'Each franchise is a different beast,' he told another fan on the platform, 'It really depends on the IP. With Devil May Cry , there was already a deep and conflicting continuity across games/manga/etc — so going non-canon and creating my own AU gave me room to honour the spirit without getting trapped in the timeline gymnastics.' With his comments, Devil May Cry's Season 2 is shaping up to be quite different from the first, but it remains to be seen if this change will fall in line with what fans of the games are expecting. The series was renewed in April this year, although it has yet to secure a release date. Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise 'duds' like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3 . He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying. Adi Shankar Devil May Cry Netflix
CNA
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNA
Pint-size pioneer Dora the Explorer celebrates her 25th anniversary
Twenty-five years ago, a little girl with a bob haircut appeared on TVs in the US, speaking a mix of English and Spanish, with a spunky, can-do spirit. She had an adventure planned, a backpack, a monkey friend and upbeat songs. 'Hi, I'm Dora. What's your name?' she asked. This was, of course, Dora the Explorer, the first Latina to lead a major cartoon series and the girl who helped spearhead the rise of multicultural children's programming in the US on her way to becoming a cultural phenomenon. 'The show allowed Latinos to be depicted on TV as educators, teaching viewers how to speak our language, and yet at the same time, just teaching ordinary things that children need to learn,' said Brenda Victoria Castillo, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. Nickelodeon is celebrating Dora's 25th anniversary with the feature-length live-action movie Dora And The Search Of Sol Dorado, a third season of the rebooted animated series Dora, the podcast Dora's Mermaid Adventures, an album of songs and plenty of toys and apparel. 'The great thing about Dora is that, yes, she celebrates Latin culture through every aspect – language, food, dress and music,' says Ramsey Naito president of animation at Paramount and Nickelodeon. 'But she also empowers everybody to be their true self and to be brave. She's not exclusive. She's inclusive.' THE ORIGINAL VOICE Kathleen Herles had a special vantage point to see Dora's influence: She was the original voice of the pint-size heroine, cast in the role when she was seven and staying until she was 18 and off to college. 'It has been the longest journey and the greatest adventure of my life – no pun intended,' said Herles, who grew up in New York City to parents of Peruvian descent. On the convention circuit, Herles would see firsthand the power of Dora. 'I remember I would make kids cry, not intentionally,' she says. 'Their mind goes to a memory, to a moment, it's just incredible. It's so special, it's magical.' Herles has lately been the voice actor for Dora's mum on Dora, the reboot that started in 2024. It's a full-circle moment for the actor and singer: 'It changed my life forever, twice.' Dora The Explorer led to what Herles laughingly calls the 'Dora-verse' – the spinoff series Go, Diego, Go!, a sequel series Dora And Friends: Into The City! and the 2019 live-action feature film Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, starring Isabela Merced, Eva Longoria and Michael Peña. Dora co-creator Chris Gifford has watched his creation age up and down and take human form. 'She has been older and she has been younger and she has a hair clip now,' he says. 'Her essence, her positive spirit, her I-can-do-anything-with-your-help attitude has stuck through.' Dora is firmly part of the culture, as big as her Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. There's a reference to her in Inside Out 2, she's been mocked on Saturday Night Live and if you look carefully at the PBS show Alma's Way, you can see a Dora doll in that heroine's bedroom. TikTok users have embraced the Backpack Song. 'Those kids coming of age now – the ones who 25 years ago were just watching it as little preschoolers – they're out there and they're remembering,' says Valerie Walsh Valdes, co-creator of the original series and an executive producer on the new series and movie. CREATING A PROBLEM SOLVER Valdes and Gifford originally had the idea for a show about a little girl who was a problem solver. Like Blue's Clues, it would reward kids for figuring out answers posed by the host. 'Preschoolers are the least powerful people in our world,' says Gifford. 'They're not able to button their sweater and not able to tie their shoes, but if they're able to help Dora get to the City of Lost Toys and really feel like they helped, that's something special.' Nickelodeon suggested the girl be Latina and the creators ran with it, making her pan-Latina so no one would feel excluded. Latin representation on TV – then and now – has been a struggle. The Latino Donor Collaborative's 2024 Latinos in Media report found that Latino actors made up 9.8 per cent of the main cast in lead, co-lead and ensemble roles in scripted shows. In non-scripted television, Latino hosts made up only 5 per centof host roles. That's despite Latin people making up nearly 20 per centof the country. 'There were few programs at the time that featured Latina protagonists with Dora's skin tone or features, so from that perspective, the representation is valuable,' says Erynn Masi de Casanova, head of the Sociology Department at the University of Cincinnati. Dora was put in an animated world inside a computer, and the creators asked kids to help make the show better. They hired education consultants to tease out the skills Dora teaches, like spatial understanding and interpersonal. They brought in language and culture experts. 'We did it!' became her signature song. BILINGUAL HEROINE The series is seen in more than 150 countries and territories and translated in 32 languages on Nickelodeon channels and Paramount+. In English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia, Dora teaches Spanish; in other markets – including the Hispanic US markets – she teaches English. Samantha Lorraine, 18, who grew up in Miami of Cuban heritage, had the Dora T-shirts and backpack. She laughs that she once even had the Dora bob. In July, she's starring as Dora in Dora And The Search Of Sol Dorado, which was filmed in Colombia. 'I've been doing my audition since day one,' she says. 'It's an honour to be stepping into Dora's shoes. It's such a huge legacy,' she adds. 'It's really nice to be able to be a part of representation where it counts. And Dora is the epitome of that.' Castillo, of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, puts Dora up there with Mickey Mouse in terms of an instantly recognised cultural character and says she's relevant more than ever. 'We need more Doras,' she says. 'If people were just open to being educated in other people's languages and cultures and beliefs and not see it as a threat, we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in this country and the world.'
The National
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The National
Meet the voice of Elio: Yonas Kibreab shares his Pixar journey
Emerging star on connecting with the character, exploring the imaginative Communiverse and the emotional depth of Pixar storytelling
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Elio' Review: Pixar's Space Opera Adventure Needs More Time on Earth
Watching Elio, the title character of Pixar's latest film, it's difficult not to draw comparisons to another child hero underneath the Disney umbrella. Introduced as a shy child reeling from an unspecified accident that took his parents' life, the 11-year-old bursts out of his shell upon an encounter with an installation speculating of life beyond the stars and emerges as a hyperactive, alien-obsessed weirdo who runs around wearing a cape and metal colander helmet, speaks in a made-up language he calls 'Elio-ese,' and drives his Air Force aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) crazy. From the tragic backstory to the misfit behavior to the tense relationship with his guardian, Elio might as well be the male version of Lilo from Disney's similarly sci-fi themed 'Lilo & Stitch' — it doesn't help that plenty of people went to go see the remake just last month. More from IndieWire Danny Boyle Says He Couldn't Make 'Slumdog Millionaire' Today, and He'd Want 'a Young Indian Filmmaker' Instead David S. Goyer Says Warner Bros. Execs Were Upset It Takes an Hour to See Christian Bale in the Batsuit in 'Batman Begins' The crucial difference? In the original 2002 animated film that introduced her, Lilo won the hearts of viewers because she was such a specific, sharply written weirdo. She was rough around the edges, bratty and mean, and with eccentricities — a love of Elvis Presley, a belief that a fish on her nearby beach can control the weather — that were singular to her and her alone. Elio is a teddy bear in comparison: he's too instantly sympathetic to ever get properly annoyed at, and his obsession with aliens feels more banal and less personal, a way of acting out after the death of his parents rather than a real passion inside himself. He's easy to like, a sweet kid voiced winningly by spirited child actor Yonas Kibreab. But, like the movie that bears his name, he's a bit too forgettable to fall in love with. Any Pixar film that's been released since roughly the mid-2010s invites a perhaps unfair game of comparison, measuring how it stacks up to the studio's golden period of the 2000s, when every other film they produced was an instant classic. 'Elio' certainly is a fair sight better than much of the company's latest output, which has geared more toward regurgitating old ideas or sputtering around in shallow storylines. And yet watching it feels a slight bit depressing at the same time, a reminder that where Pixar's films once led the animation industry, taking out there concepts like rats that want to cook and robots that want to find love and bringing exquisite heart to them, they now feel imitative instead of innovative. If there were ever a version of 'Elio' that had the spark of an old Pixar classic, it got shuffled out of existence by a turbulent production process that saw original director Adrian Molina, who previously helmed the company's Oscar-winner 'Coco,' replaced by the duo of Domee Shi — whose hilarious 'Turning Red' remains the best Pixar film of the 2020s by a significant margin — and Madeline Sharafian, known for directing the short 'Burrow.' Molina based the film's original story concept heavily on his own life, and the directorial transition occurred right around Pixar head Pete Docter admitting the studio would be pivoting away from 'personal stories' driven by directors to films with universal mass appeal. Certain elements of the script directly based on Molina's life, such as Elio's mother working for the military, got rewritten entirely. The directorial change-up feels readily apparent throughout 'Elio's' 90-minute running time. That's not necessarily due to plot holes or pacing — the film clips along its standard beats at a steady pace, only lagging during one spaceship ride near the end that comes across as pure filler — but the overall feeling that it's only dipping its toes into the emotional and creative depths of this story. Elio's desire to be abducted by aliens, a reaction to his miserable loneliness on Earth, leads him to send a message via a satellite at his aunt's base to the stars pleading for extraterrestrials to come abduct him. The message gets received not just by a spacecraft but by the Communiverse, a roaming planet-like spaceship holding an international committee of representatives from across several galaxies. Getting whisked away into this fantastically technicolor world is a dream come true for Elio, enough that he's willing to go along with it when the committee reveals their misread that he's the leader of Earth. To secure his place in their ranks, he bravely/insanely plunges himself into solving a diplomatic crisis between the alliance and Lord Grigon (a suitably hammy Brad Garrett), the 'blood emperor' of a warlike race of alien worms from the planet Hylurg, who seeks revenge on the ambassadors for rejecting his bid to join them. All of this looks fantastic — while on Earth, Elio suffers a bit from that squishy, rounded animation style that's recently become more or less Pixar's house look. In space, the movie experiments more, adding splashes of 2D graphic animation and gorgeous technicolor around the stately white spaces Elio inhabits. The alien designs are suitably weird and inspired, from the mind-reading floating flatworm Questa (Jameela Jamil) to the rock monster Tegmen (Matthias Schweighöfer). One can detect sci-fi inspirations from 'E.T.' to 'Star Wars' all over the film's DNA, and in its funniest and most memorable moments it takes cues from sci-fi horror of all things, including the introduction to Grigon's son Glordon (Remy Edgerly), which has a whiff of both H. R. Giger in the character design and Ridley Scott in the blocking. But, as fun and creative as some of the individual parts of this spaceship are — from the chibi supercomputer sprite that gives Elio the ability to communicate with other aliens to the cloning goo he uses to explain away his absence on Earth — on a whole, the Communiverse is never as wondrous as you want it to be. None of the ambassadors get enough individuality for us to actually care about them, and their actual goals as an organization are too vague to grasp. Grigon is amusing as a warlord who, at heart, is really a beleaguered dad — he reminds one of Bowser in the Mario games more than any past Pixar character — but his softness is telegraphed a bit too early for him to ever be a convincing threat, even to children. This wondrous world up in the stars too frequently feels more like an amusement park for Elio to run and geek around in than a living, breathing universe. The real problem, though, might be the material that's earth-bound. 'Elio' draws clear parallels between Grigun's issues relating to Gideon and Elio's disconnect from his aunt Olga, and his desire for alien approval comes from a deeply wounded sense of pain that he no longer belongs on Earth after the passing of his parents. There's some great raw material here, and yet onscreen it never gets to compelling territory. Elio and Olga are simply too generic, stock types that can be found in plenty of modern animated films, for their friction to ever build into something as compelling as, say, Marlin and Nemo's strained father-son relationship. It doesn't help that Saldaña, whose character is meant to be the story's heart, sounds like she's phoning it in a bit in the voiceover booth. There's no specificity to Elio's circumstances on Earth — his trauma from his parents' deaths gets mostly brushed over, the isolation he feels from his peers is represented via a stock bully, even the town he lives in is a generic suburbia — which makes his yearning to escape to the stars ring hollow. So, by the time Rob Simonsen's rather generic score begins to overdo the bombast and the film gears up for an emotional decision from Elio about where he belongs that it has to take more than a few logical leaps to arrive at, the pathos falls a tiny bit flat. It's difficult not to wonder what 'Elio' could have been like, had the original concept from Molina made it onscreen, and whether or not the more 'personal' version of this story had the sharp edges and specificity needed to elevate the film from a cute kids' film to something more meaningful. 'Elio' isn't a bad time at the theaters — it's pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless. Disney will release 'Elio' in theaters on Friday, June 20. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. 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