Episode Two - 'Anti-Drumite'

Episode Two of The Movie Hour with Joe and Ethan explodes onto the 'internets' Friday, February 13.

It includes:
--Our review of Coraline - New Release
--Mailbag including 'What Movies Mean to Us'
--Our review of The Visitor - DVD Release
--and our newest segment, Living Room Film Festival. This week's theme: The Creepy Animation Film Festival

Joe and Ethan picked the films in this innaugural installment of LRFF to get the ball rolling, but we want to hear from you. Email us your picks for this LRFF (maybe we missed an obvious Creepy Animated Film) or next week's theme, The International Thriller Film Festival, to themoviehour@gmail.com.

Here are some clips from films from the innaugural LRFF, Creepy Animation.

Joe's Pick - Spirited Away - As Ethan said, all of our picks could potentially be anime entries considering the Japanese's seeming ability to tolerate creepy and violent images in their animation. In America, we just like our cutesy-poo animals singing and dancing. So my anime inclusion for the Fest is Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, the 2001 Oscar winner for Best Animated Picture. The sequence where Chihiro’s parents are transformed to pigs and the scenes of No-Face eating the bathhouse staff leap to mind. Apologies for the tribute style clip below.


Ethan's Pick - Dot and the Kangaroo - This one freaked me out as a kid. If you've never seen it, enjoy.


Joe's Pick - Watership Down - If Ethan wants to discuss his traumatized youth, I'll go toe to toe. I'm 7 or 8 years old and my parents see a cute bunny cartoon for rent at the video store. They plunk it in and, as I remember it, leave the room. It's Watership Down. Enjoy the cute bunnies below. Another tribute style clip.


Ethan's Pick - Waking Life - This one isn't creepy so much as noteworthy although Linklater and art director, Bob Sabiston use animation to spin real life situations and conversations into unexpected places--some of them creepy. I really love this film.


Joe's Pick - Hedwig and the Angry Inch - Again, not so much creepy as interestingly injected into the film. Some could find the theory of how two people find one another creepy...maybe. It plays like a music video, so no explanation really needed.


Ethan's Pick - The Triplets of Belleville


Joe's Bonus Pick - We were running long so I left this one out of the podcast, but this is one of my most memorable Jr. High-age movie experiences:


Also mentioned on the show:
Pink Floyd's The Wall
Natural Born Killers blood/snake animation
and, of course, The Nightmare Before Christmas

What did we leave out? Email Joe and Ethan at themoviehour@gmail.com