Jennifer Yuh Nelson
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A huge part of this is down to the excellent casting, with Stenberg (The Hunger Games, the upcoming The Hate U Give) delivering a very strong performance that promises many more excellent turns to come.
It’s the latest aspiring young adult franchise to follow in the footsteps of “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” though it would be a surprise if “Darkest Minds” makes it anywhere near that far.
It's hard to say how teens today will receive The Darkest Minds when The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner are already at their fingertips, but it is worth noting that it's refreshing to see one of these films feature a main cast predominantly consisting of people of color.
Releasing August 3 in the States and August 10 in the UK, this Fox offering will hope to cater to the same audiences that sought out The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and Harry Potter.
Certainly, Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds, the source material for a new movie of the same title, fits in a similar dystopian category as The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner series.
Coming on the heels of The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and countless others, it takes an exceptional entry to stand out.
Star Wars (1977)
Directed by George Lucas
influenced Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016), The Darkest Minds (2018)
Plot Themes
Tampoco ayuda que Gwendoline Christie, Brienne en Game of Thrones y malvada en los dos nuevos episodios de la saga de Star Wars deambule por los escenarios.
In case you didn’t get enough recycling of the original “Star Wars” trilogy in “The Force Awakens” try “Kung Fu Panda 3” or “Luke Skywalker Is a Dumpling-Devouring Giant Panda.”
When chi is described, it is explained to be an awful lot like the Force; however, it only makes sense for them to rip off “Star Wars” considering George Lucas was basically ripping off eastern religions when he wrote his script.
Beginning in the surreal Spirit Realm, through fluid graphics recalling manga comics and Asian paintings, through battles with the splendidly realised "jombies" (jade zombies) and finally ending in homage to Seven Samurai, the inventive visual side is stirring, dazzling and vibrant, an exemplar of creative grandeur and finesse.
And when its own climax does arrive, it's handled like a charmingly cartoonish riff on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai .
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Directed by Mark Osborne
influenced The Darkest Minds (2018), Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)
Plot Themes
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who helmed two of the “Kung Fu Panda” sequels before this, takes on her first live-action feature.
Making her debut behind the live-action camera after directing the Kung Fu Panda sequels , Jennifer Yuh Nelson botches the action scenes, including a car chase so incoherently staged that it becomes difficult to track the movements of only three vehicles on a desolate stretch of road.
Still, you’d be forgiven for feeling like we’re covering old ground early on in The Darkest Minds, especially when it features such familiar story elements as “every kid gets put in a group” and it’s all very X-Men, but it’s worth sticking with because Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s (the Kung Fu Panda films) live action debut has visual imagination, energy and an awful lot of heart.
Animator (“Kung Fu Panda”) turned director Jennifer Yuh Nelson treats us to some “Maze Runner” level dystopia — a half-ruined entropic country (the story is set in Virginia), abandoned malls (No kids, no need for malls, right?), legions of locked-up kids paraded, by color, into detention camps.
Nelson, a former animator who has previously directed the Kung Fu Panda sequels, handles the gentler moments more successfully than its ugly ones; when government troops inevitably find the camp, we have to suffer through an unfortunate climax of fire and brimstone before reaching an intriguing ending.
Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“ Kung Fu Panda ” series) isn’t able to elevate the kids’ fight for survival above its melodramatic trappings.
So…did people stop being able to have kids after this child-specific plague hit, Children of Men-style?
Assembled in a one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B way from far better stories, Minds — based on the novel by Alexandra Bracken and the live-action debut of Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson — borrows from Children of Men and X-Men , among other fanciful properties, without any interest in actually examining the ideas it steals.
Plot-wise, it’s about 40 percent X-Men, and 35 percent each of The Hunger Games and Children of Men—only without a hint of what made those movies work.
“Kung Fu Panda 3” is more in line with the first film in terms of tone, which makes sense; even George Lucas knew that it would be foolish to follow “ The Empire Strikes Back ” with an even darker movie, hence ewoks.
Shen's invention is the same one that polluted Eden in " Princess Mononoke ," and, like King Herod, the psychotic peacock tries to fend off fate -- defeat by panda -- by means of wholesale murder.
Scenes of kids in camps and a late shot referencing Triumph of the Will are supposed to be enough to provide the emotional and moral weight that the scriptwriters forgot to include in their drafts.
Call it The Golden Compass rule: No multi-part movie series should be started without a reasonable certainty that the story will be told in full.
The final image of the movie — a child’s hand held high in warring defiance of a villain we still don’t quite understand — isn’t so much a cliff-hanger as a “dot dot dot” for a sequel that will never get made, trailing off into the dustbin alongside such open-ended fantasy movies as “City of Ember,” “Ender’s Game,” and “The Golden Compass.”
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009)
Directed by Paul Weitz
influenced The Darkest Minds (2018)
It’s also apparent that the study and the filmmakers were hoping their film would be the start of another popular YA fantasy series, ending things on a cliffhanger that, while not as annoying as the one in that first Maze Runner or 2009’s Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant proved to be, is still rather obnoxious and unsatisfactory.
Her direction here reminds me so heavily of when Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”, “Wall-E”) ventured into directing live action with “John Carter” but the script was so damn bad that the movie left a negative mark on his name.
The only other franchise I can think of to achieve this three-peat would have to be Toy Story.
By the third movie in any kid vid franchise, you’re likely to be more The Land Before Time than Toy Story.
(Only “Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich and writer Michael Arndt had the guts to kill off a couple of old characters to keep the numbers down.)
That same emotion carried “Toy Story 3” to its hankie-clutching finale.
The only other franchise I can think of to achieve this three-peat would have to be Toy Story.
By the third movie in any kid vid franchise, you’re likely to be more The Land Before Time than Toy Story.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
Directed by Eric Darnell
influenced Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)
Characters
Una de las marcas de la casa Dreamworks ha sido una histeria expresiva que ha encontrado sus afortunados contrapuntos en momentos puntuales: el Po del primer Kung Fu Panda, el león Álex de, especialmente, Madagascar 2 (2008).
By the third movie in any kid vid franchise, you’re likely to be more The Land Before Time than Toy Story.
But Po’s time away is costly, leaving the home front vulnerable to a literal raging bull, chi-stealing baddie Kai (J.K. Simmons, not quite getting “Whiplash”-nasty material this time).
Simmons is a natural as the vengeful Kai, having perfected his ominous baritone in everything from HBO’s prison drama “Oz” to his Oscar-winning performance as a tyrannical music teacher in “ Whiplash .”
He puts a humorous spin on his Whiplash heavy as the voice of Kai, a bullish beast of vengeance who’s stealing the chi of all the Chinese martial arts gurus and turning them into an army of jade soldiers.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)
Directed by Kelly Asbury
influenced The Darkest Minds (2018)
The director of this movie is Jennifer Yuh Nelson who is primarily an animation director (“Kung Fu Panda 2”, “Kung Fu Panda 3”) and story artist (“Kung Fu Panda”, “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron”, “Madagascar”) at Dreamworks animation and this is her live action directorial debut.
It's hard to say how teens today will receive The Darkest Minds when The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner are already at their fingertips, but it is worth noting that it's refreshing to see one of these films feature a main cast predominantly consisting of people of color.
Releasing August 3 in the States and August 10 in the UK, this Fox offering will hope to cater to the same audiences that sought out The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and Harry Potter.
Certainly, Alexandra Bracken’s The Darkest Minds, the source material for a new movie of the same title, fits in a similar dystopian category as The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner series.
Coming on the heels of The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and countless others, it takes an exceptional entry to stand out.
The movie feels a lot like The Hunger Games , Divergent, and The Maze Runner .
Although “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” are the more obvious points of comparison, this mixed-race, believe-in-yourself parable bears no small resemblance to Disney’s far bigger-budgeted “A Wrinkle in Time” from a few months back — and believe it or not, this is the better movie.
Perifel has spent most of his career as an animator; some of his first films were Curious George and The Illusionist , he did some CGI work on Monsters vs. Aliens and Shrek Forever After , he did some traditional animation work for Kung Fu Panda 2 and the Lord Shen character specifically, and he was also the supervising animator on Rise of the Guardians .
He worked on the animated films “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Rise of the Guardians,” so has familiarity with animal characters.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)
Well, it worked for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade .