This is the intro piece to the most recent animated Transformers series, aptly named Transformers Animated. I’ve been wanting to watch this for a while, for several reasons. The toys seem to be incredibly faithful to the cartoon, as far as robot mode, vehicle mode, and transformation between. This is something that’s been lacking from TF series over the years. Also, they seem to be recycling lots of old characters, but doing it with both respect and skill. Not only that, but it’s set in a not-too-far-off Detroit, which makes me very happy. The Ambassador Bridge shows up in the background quite a bit.

While the animation quality and frame rate leave something to be desired, the characters are great, the old transformation sound is used, and the characters hole up in an abandoned warehouse and use it as HQ. Did somebody give me roofies and have me write a TF cartoon without my knowledge? Four stars.

Once again, I had conflicting feelings about watching a kids’ movie. But I’d heard so many good things about it that I couldn’t resist. Somebody’s reading my mind again when writing cartoon scripts. I felt ridiculously uplifted and happy when this movie ended. I can’t say too much about it that you haven’t seen in the commercials without ruining it, but even the extra animated short in the DVD was made of giggles. We now own a copy, and I’ll be watching this again in the future. Four stars.

City of Ember is a kids’ movie, first and foremost. It feels like it’s targeted at pre-teens, the age that needs to feel like they can outsmart the adults, like they can do anything, especially what the adults can’t.

The concept behind the story is what made me want to see it. Pseudo-steampunk, art-deco, salvation-of-humanity city tucked away from the rest of a destroyed world. Pretty sure there was a horror FPS video game that had a similar idea behind it, but I didn’t have a machine to run it at the time. Anyway, the acting by the kids was good, and the adults played their sterotypical establishment roles well. Three stars.

I’m not sure if Caprica is a better stand-alone science fiction movie in the BSG universe, or a pilot episode of another complex and we’re-not-going-to-sugarcoat-this BSG series. I want to know more about this virtual world, and how it exists without being networked, if it’s contained within each individual computer sheet, or what. I want to know more about the monotheistic movement, and how far back it’s been developing. I want to know more about the racial and political tensions between the Twelve Colonies. All in all, I want to know more, which makes it a good work of fiction. I cared about the characters, which makes it a great one. It didn’t have the dramatic tension that BSG does (did?), but that’s because the poop hasn’t hit the fan yet. Four stars.