Skip to main content

Posts

#36 Madagaskar

  Story At the  Central Park Zoo , Marty the  zebra  celebrates his tenth birthday but has grown bored with his daily routine and longs to experience the wild. Marty's best friend is Alex the  lion , who enjoys showing off for the public and his celebrity status as "the king of New York". Alex attempts to cheer Marty up, but Marty, still unsatisfied, learns that the zoo's  penguins —Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private—are trying to escape, and follows them out. Alex, Melman the  giraffe , and Gloria the  hippopotamus  pursue Marty and attempt to convince him to return. The four, along with the penguins and two  chimpanzees  named Mason and Phil, converge at  Grand Central Station  where the authorities sedate them using  tranquilizer guns . Under pressure from anti-captivity activists, the zoo is forced to ship the escaped animals by sea to a  Kenyan  wildlife preserve. During their travels, the penguins es...
Recent posts

#36 Spirited Away

  Story Ten-year-old Chihiro and her parents are traveling to their new home. Her father, a man who loves to take shortcuts, ends up in front of a tunnel leading to what appears to be an abandoned village, which Chihiro's father insists on exploring despite his daughter's misgivings. While exploring, Chihiro finds an exquisite  bathhouse  and meets a boy named Haku, who warns her to return across the riverbed before sunset. However, Chihiro discovers too late that her parents have transformed into pigs, and she is unable to cross the now-flooded river. Haku finds Chihiro and advises her to ask for a job from the bathhouse's boiler-man, Kamaji. Kamaji asks Lin, a bathhouse worker, to send Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse. Yubaba tries to frighten Chihiro away, but Chihiro persists, and Yubaba hires her. Yubaba takes away the second  kanji  of her name, Chihiro ( 千尋 ), renaming her Sen ( 千 ). Haku later warns her that if she forgets he...

#35 How To Train Your Dragon

  Story The  Viking  village of Berk, located on a remote island, is attacked frequently by  Dragons , which take livestock, damage property and endanger lives. Hiccup, the awkward fifteen-year-old son of the village chieftain, Stoick the Vast, is deemed too scrawny and weak to fight the dragons, so he instead creates mechanical devices under his apprenticeship with Gobber, the village blacksmith, though Hiccup's inventions often backfire. During one attack, Hiccup uses a  bolas  launcher to shoot down a Night Fury, a dangerous and rare dragon of which little is known, but no one believes him, so he searches for the fallen dragon on his own. He finds the dragon in the forest, tangled in his net, but cannot bring himself to kill him, and instead sets him free. Stoick assembles a fleet to find the dragons' nest, and enters Hiccup in a dragon-fighting class taught by Gobber with the other teenagers, Fishlegs, Snotlout, twins Ruffnut and Tuffnut, and Astrid, a ...

#34 Despicable Me

  Story Longtime supervillain  Gru  has his pride hurt when an anonymous rival steals the  Great Pyramid of Giza  and replaces it with an inflatable replica. In retaliation, he, his elderly assistant  Dr. Nefario , and his army of  Minions  concoct a plan to shrink and steal Earth's Moon. Nefario worries they cannot afford this, so Gru applies for a loan from Mr. Perkins, the director of the Bank of Evil. Perkins asks Gru to impress him first by stealing the necessary shrink ray. While at the bank, Gru meets young supervillain Vector, and learns he is the mastermind behind the Pyramid heist. Gru and his Minions successfully steal the shrink ray from a research base, but Vector intercepts them and steals it for himself. Gru tries to break into Vector's fortress to get the ray back, but cannot penetrate Vector's many defenses. He notices three orphan girls, Margo, Edith, and Agnes, gain access to Vector's fortress because they are selling cookies fo...

#33 Kung Fu Panda

Story In the Valley of Peace, a land in  Ancient China  inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, Po is a fan of kung fu, and idolizes the Furious Five–Tigress, Monkey, Crane, Viper, and Mantis–a group of kung fu masters trained by Master Shifu. However, Po is unable to pursue his dream of learning kung fu while he helps his adoptive father, Mr. Ping the goose, in his noodle restaurant. Grand Master Oogway, Shifu's mentor, has a vision that Shifu's former protégé, the evil Tai Lung, will escape from prison. Oogway fortells that Tai Lung will return to the valley to exact his revenge for being denied the dragon scroll, which is said to hold the secret to boundless power. Panicked, Shifu sends his messenger, Zeng the goose, with a request for the prison to tighten its security. He then holds a tournament for the Furious Five so that Oogway can identify the Dragon Warrior, the one kung fu master worthy of receiving the Dragon Scroll. Po arrives too late to enter the arena; desperate ...

#33 ICE AGE

  Story Scrat, a saber-toothed  squirrel , attempts to find a place to store his acorn for the winter. Eventually, as he tries to stomp it into the ground, he inadvertently causes a large crack to form in the ice that extends for miles before setting off a large avalanche which nearly crushes him. He barely escapes but finds himself getting stepped on by a herd of prehistoric animals migrating south in order to escape the forthcoming  ice age . Sid, a clumsy  ground sloth , is left behind by his family and decides to move on by himself, but is attacked by two  Brontotheres  after ruining their meal and making them angry. Sid is soon rescued by Manny, a cynical  woolly mammoth  heading north, who fights the rhinos off and continues on his path. Sid joins Manny, not wanting to be alone and unprotected. Manny is annoyed by Sid's outgoing demeanor and wishes to migrate on his own, but Sid nonetheless continues to follow Manny. Meanwhile, Soto, the lea...

#32 Epic

  Story Seventeen-year-old Mary Katherine, or M.K., moves in with her eccentric  scientist  father Professor Bomba, who has been searching for tiny humanoid soldiers called Leafmen. They protect the forest that Bomba lives near from wicked creatures called Boggans and their malevolent leader Mandrake. An independent young soldier named Nod decides to quit, much to the ire of the no-nonsense Leafmen leader Ronin. The fairy queen of the forest, Queen Tara, must choose an heir to her throne and goes out to a field of leaf pods on board her flying barge and escorted by the Royal guards, arriving at the field guarded by a laid-back  slug  named Mub and a wannabe Leafman  snail  named Grub. Immediately after she chooses a pod, the Boggans attack. Tara flees the area with the pod, and though flying Leafmen bodyguards do their best to protect her, they are soon overwhelmed by the sheer number of Boggans. Unable to reach the barge and the safety of the Guards, ...