Today’s Saturday Short was suggested by a reader, Nina. Our protagonist in this short, Gustafer Yellowgold, is an alien from the sun who only dreams in green. In the midst of all those kid shows that encourage children to dance around and shout out answers to questions comes one that actually has a [...]
DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze
FEATURING: Max Records, voices of James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara
PLOT: A troubled, rambunctious boy travels to a land where wild beasts anoint him
their king, but discovers that socialization is a struggle even in his imagination.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jonze slips a couple of odd visions into this ersatz [...]
AKA Young Sherlock Holmes and the Pyramid of Fear
DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson
FEATURING: Alan Cox, Nicholas Rowe, Sophie Ward
PLOT: Young Watson meets prodigy schoolboy Sherlock at a British boarding school;
together with Holmes’ girlfriend, they solve a mysterious rash of bizarre murders plaguing London.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Noteworthy for some dark and intense hallucinatory scenes, [...]
DIRECTED BY: Shane Acker
FEATURING: Voices of Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer
PLOT: Nine robotic ragdolls fight killer machines in a post-human, post-apocalyptic
world.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: 9 is a visually thrilling movie set in a unique, humanless universe; with a more careful and detailed exploration of that world, the flick could have struck a mildly weird [...]
DIRECTED BY: Victor Fleming (credited), King Vidor, Mervyn LeRoy (uncredited)
FEATURING: Judy Garland, Margaret Hamilton, Frank Morgan, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley
PLOT: A cyclone carries a Kansas girl (and her little dog, too) to a magical land over the
rainbow.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: In creating a list of the 366 best weird movies of all [...]
“…Gilliam fearlessly brings the logic of children’s literature to the screen. Plunging headfirst into history, myth, legend, and fairy tale, Gilliam sends his characters—a boy and six good-natured if rather larcenous little persons (i.e. seven dwarves)—careening through time-twisting interactions with Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon (played, respectively, by Ian Holm, John Cleese, and [...]
DIRECTED BY: Hayao Miyazaki
FEATURING (AMERICAN DUBBED VERSION): Noah Cyrus, Frankie Jonas, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Betty White
PLOT: In this Japanese variation on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” a
goldfish with a human face escapes from the undersea lair built by her wizard father and decides she wants to become human when she washes ashore and [...]
DIRECTED BY: Henry Selick
FEATURING: Dakota Fanning (voice), Teri Hatcher (voice)
PLOT: A petulant little girl finds a parallel universe behind a hidden door in an
old house, a world where her parents are more attentive, her neighbors more fascinating, and the entire universe seems set up to pamper and delight her; she can stay there forever, but [...]
“Headmasters never sing!” –line sung by the headmaster in Help! Help! The Globolinks
DIRECTED BY: Joachim Hess, from a production of composer/librettist Giancarlo Menotti
FEATURING: The Hamburg State Opera
PLOT: In this children’s opera, the world has been invaded by bizarre alien creatures named Globolinks, who are allergic to music. A bus full of children returning to boarding school breaks down [...]
