Children’s animation films draw me to the cinema more often than live action films these days, not for eye candy, but because they’re frequently better scripted, more multi-layered and more intelligent. In the past two years many of my favourite releases have been childrens 3d animation films … Wall E, Toy Story 3, 9, How to Train Your Dragon and now Despicable Me. All five are classics.
But something else that draws me to these films is that several of them are richly symbolic in a way that isn’t far off the work of Stanley Kubrick. Despicable Me and Wall E have enough overlapping themes to each justify at least a ten chapter analysis. I won’t go into detail here, but if you’re into film analysis then I highly recommend you get hold of a copy of each and study them.