Damien Chazelle's last film, Whiplash, was one of my favourite films of the last 5 years. Its intensity and atmosphere stuck with you long after the drumming faded from your head. His new film, La La Land, is a completely different beast, but every bit as affecting. If Whiplash put you off learning the drums, La La Land will make you want to take up the piano instead. And maybe also tap dancing.

A lot has been said in reviews about the opening scene, which apparently had early audiences applauding before the main characters are even introduced. And it is a fantastically well made piece of cinema, filmed in one long and incredibly elaborate take as a traffic jam on a California freeway gradually transforms into a colourful musical number. An opening caption tells us this is winter, but the song is all about the sun glinting off polished cars and brass instruments as twirling summery dresses light up the screen. It sets the tone for the film as well as the setting - the Hollywood of La La Land is a place where the sun is always shining and everyone is full of life and happiness, even when they're in a situation that would normally make the rest of us miserable.

We are then introduced to the leads, Emma Stone's aspiring actress Mia and Ryan Gosling's struggling pianist Seb. Neither of them is where they want to be in their lives, but after a few chance encounters they start to help each other realise their potential. Both Stone and Gosling are brilliant - subtle and delicate in their more emotional scenes, but throwing themselves into the song and dance numbers like they've been dancing together all their lives. I would be very surprised if they don't both get Oscar nominations for their efforts.

The real star here though is Chazelle. The craftsmanship with which this film is made really shows in every scene. It is at once a love letter to the classic Hollywood musical, all soft lighting and tapping feet, and to jazz music. It's obvious that he loves jazz, not just in the fact it's held such a prominent role in both his films, but in the reverential way he commits it to film. When he shows someone playing an instrument, the framing and editing are carefully crafted to match the tone of the song - high tempo tunes are made more exciting by fast cuts and close ups, whereas slower numbers are allowed to fill the room with wide shots and gentle camera movements. At one point Seb describes jazz as a mixture of conflict and harmonies, but that can equally be applied to Chazelle.

The musical genre is perfect for portraying a romance story, and the connection between Mia and Seb builds through a combination of synchronised dance routines and magical realism that will make you wish that sort of thing happens in real life. Yet it also feels completely natural and realistic - the highs and lows of their relationship, despite the Hollywood glow in the background, strike a very recognisable chord. This is a love story like any other, but in its visuals and tone it's also a realisation of love as a concept. Without wanting to give anything away, the ending is a beautiful and perfect way to round off the film.

Despite my high expectations, the only disappointing bit was when I left the cinema and found that nobody was spontaneously bursting into song and dance in the street.

It's the Oscars tonight, which seemed like a good excuse to get back on here and do another predictions blog! As before, I'll list the nominees in each category with a star by the ones I've actually managed to see. Then I'll say which film I think should win and why.

Best Picture
Nominees
* The Big Short
* Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Martian
* The Revenant
Room
* Spotlight

Winner
The Revenant

I would be very surprised if anything other than the Revenant wins the big one this year. It's swept up the top awards in most of the other awards ceremonies that build up to the Oscars, such as the BAFTAs and various Guild awards, and with good reason. Everything about it is completely different from any other film in recent memory. It's intense and exciting, but also character driven and emotional, and at the same time beautifully and artfully shot. The special effects, especially in the bear attack scene, are so flawless that you barely even notice they are special effects. The Academy likes filmmakers to suffer for their art, and the various stories of the actors and crew submitting themselves to the real harsh conditions in the North American wilderness will play into that well. The other nominations are all great, but Revenant is the clear favourite and the one to beat.  

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Nominees
Bryan Cranston - Trumbo
* Matt Damon - The Martian
* Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant
* Michael Fassbender - Steve Jobs
Eddie Redmayne - The Danish Girl

Winner
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Revenant

When the first picture was released of Eddie Redmayne in costume for the Danish Girl almost a year ago, I thought he was a shoo-in for this category. He won it last year, and everything about the character is almost custom built to appeal to the Academy - a period drama about a historical figure overcoming adversity was bound to get a nomination. Then I saw Michael Fassbender in Steve Jobs, which was an outstanding performance. He managed to make Jobs completely unlikeable, yet at the same time sympathetic and impossible not to root for. It's great to see Cranston and Damon getting some well deserved recognition too, but this has to be Leo's year. His performance in the Revenant was incredible. Every moment of physical and emotional pain played out over his face as if Tom Hardy was standing just behind the camera holding a knife to his actual children. Plus of course, his lack of an Oscar to date has become a running joke. If he doesn't win it this year, after putting himself through so much in filming the Revenant, the Academy might inadvertently break Leonardo DiCaprio. And probably also the internet.

Best Actress in a Leading Role
Nominees
Cate Blanchett - Carol
Brie Larson - Room
Jennifer Lawrence - Joy
Charlotte Rampling - 45 Years
Saoirse Ronan - Brooklyn

Winner
Brie Larson - Room

To my genuine shame and regret, I didn't manage to see any of the films in this category, so I'll have to base my prediction purely on past success. Cate Blanchett and Jennifer Lawrence both have some serious Oscar pedigree - Blanchett's been nominated six times and won twice, and this is Lawrence's fourth nomination in the last six years, winning one of them. Saoirse Ronan is also a fantastic actress - she's only 21 and this is already her second Oscar nomination. I don't know so much about Brie Larson, but she seems to be the one to beat this year. She's already won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards and it's very unlikely that the Academy will vote any differently. 

Actor in a Supporting Role
Nominees
* Christian Bale - The Big Short
* Tom Hardy - The Revenant
* Mark Ruffalo - Spotlight
* Mark Rylance - Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone - Creed

Winner
Mark Ruffalo

This is a much harder one to predict. I think with the controversy about the 'whitewashed Oscars' this year, the Academy wouldn't dare give the award to Sylvester Stallone, given that it would highlight the fact that they snubbed Michael B Jordan in the same film. That said, he did win the Golden Globe. Any of the other four nominees would be deserving winners though. Mark Rylance won the BAFTA which I think probably makes him the favourite, Tom Hardy was incredibly horrible in the Revenant, and Christian Bale was so good in The Big Short that he actually managed to make his eyes move independently, which I was probably more impressed by than I should have been. I would love to see Mark Ruffalo win it though, and I'm going to go with my heart and make him my prediction. His furious speech in Spotlight as he tried to comprehend why they should wait to print a story that would stop a priest from victimising children was magnificent and really stuck with me long after I left the cinema. I would be quite happy to see any of the nominees whose films I saw win though. 

Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Nominees
* Jennifer Jason Leigh - The Hateful Eight
Rooney Mara - Carol
* Rachel McAdams - Spotlight
Alicia Vikander - The Danish Girl
* Kate Winslet - Steve Jobs

Winner
Kate Winslet

When I saw Steve Jobs, I genuinely didn't recognise Kate Winslet, and spent a large part of the film thinking 'they've managed to find a really good Polish actress here.' She was so good that I actually thought she was Polish (which, incidentally, is a really hard accent to try and impersonate). That aside, her performance was brilliant, lending the film some moments of heightened emotion that perfectly offset the impenetrable calm of Fassbender's Jobs. Winslet has already won the BAFTA and the Golden Globe which has to make her the favourite here too. Alicia Vikander stands a good chance as well though - she won the Screen Actors Guild award and has had a fantastic year between Ex Machina and The Danish Girl (with a fun role in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. thrown in the middle), but I think on balance this will probably go to Kate Winslet. 

Animated Feature Film
Nominees
Anomalisa
Boy and the World
* Inside Out
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There

Winner
Inside Out

It's very unusual for me to have only seen one of the nominations for animated film this year, but I would be very surprised if the one that I saw doesn't win. Inside Out was a masterpiece, and a strong contender for the best film Pixar have ever made. It was not only one of the most intelligently thought out animated films of all time, but possibly one of the most intelligent films of the year, animated or not. The characters were all beautifully written, the music was wonderful, and everything about it brought me back to my own childhood in a way that very few films have ever managed. There's lots of bright colours and neat little gags for kids to appreciate, but there's so much more that adults will understand on a really deep level. The film's about the loss of childhood innocence, and how embracing negative emotions like sadness can help you lead a fuller life. It then helps you to embrace sadness by making you cry uncontrollably over a pink elephant-cat-dolphin hybrid called Bing Bong. The credits scenes were also the funniest thing I've seen all year. I'm sure the other films were great - Aardman (Shaun the Sheep) and Studio Ghibli (When Marnie Was There) are both fantastic animation studios that completely deserve any praise and awards they get, but Pixar really are the masters of the medium and they really achieved something special this year. 

Cinematography
Nominees
Carol
* The Hateful Eight
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Revenant
* Sicario

Winner
The Revenant

It may start to seem a bit repetitive that I am predicting everything for the Revenant, but this is arguably the category where it most deserves the award. You could take any frame of the film and it would work as a piece of art. The lighting is beautiful, which is even more impressive given that they used only natural lighting, limiting their filming to a few hours a day when the Sun was at the right angle. Equally impressive is the camera movement. The clip above in which Leo rides away from the Native Americans has the camera following Leo next to his horse, glancing back as he does, and dodging arrows and axes. It's as frantic and nerve-wracking as the action itself, and throws you right into the film in a way that the other nominees don't manage half as well. The Hateful Eight and Mad Max were both beautifully shot too, but this has to go to the Revenant. It's worth noting as well that if it does win, this will be cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's third win in a row, after Gravity and Birdman.

Costume Design
Nominees
Carol
Cinderella
The Danish Girl
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Revenant

Winner
Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max won this at the BAFTAs and deservedly so. The costumes in Cinderella looked like they were great (it almost looked like the film was built around them), and obviously the plot of the Danish Girl means the outfits are a big theme for the film, but I think it's brilliant to see steampunk gas masks and warrior leathers winning out over pretty dresses and period outfits this year. Plus the Academy might want to try to redress Stephen Fry's controversial bag lady gag from the BAFTAs...

Best Director
Nominees
* Adam McKay - The Big Short
* George Miller - Mad Max: Fury Road
* Alejandro G Iñárritu - The Revenant
Lenny Abrahamson - Room
* Tom McCarthy - Spotlight

Winner
Alejandro G Iñárritu - The Revenant

For all the reasons I've already gone on about, I'm pretty sure this will go to Iñárritu for his work on the Revenant. His artistic vision is incredible and for every other award this film inevitably wins he deserves this one even more for bringing it all together. If he wins, having won for Birdman last year, he will be the first director to win back-to-back Oscars in 66 years. He has already won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Directors Guild Award so is clearly the favourite here too. 

Editing
Nominees
* The Big Short
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Revenant
* Spotlight
* Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Winner
Mad Max: Fury Road

This could just as easily go to the Revenant again, but as it took the BAFTA I'm going to predict Mad Max again for this one. Max's visions of his past haunting him made for some very well put-together sequences which really helped justify the name of the film. The editing was used, as it should be, to add to the mood and tone of the film, making it claustrophobic and frantic in the fortress, yet free and open on the road in the calmer scenes, and tense and exciting in the chases and fights. 

Music - Original Score
Nominees
* Thomas Newman - Bridge of Spies
Carter Burwell - Carol
* Ennio Morricone - The Hateful Eight
* Jóhann Jóhannsson - Sicario
* John Williams - Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Winner
John Williams - Star Wars - The Force Awakens

John Williams and Ennio Morricone are two of the greatest film composers of all time. Williams' scores for so many films, including the original Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, E.T., Harry Potter, Jaws, and so many more, are about as classic as they come, whereas Morricone's incredible theme for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly will always be one of my absolute favourites. Morricone won the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for the Hateful Eight this year, and has every chance of winning the Oscar too. And he would deserve it - the Hateful Eight's soundtrack was every bit as tense and atmospheric as the rest of the film. But again, I'm going to go with my heart and say John Williams should win this. Star Wars has one of the most iconic soundtracks of all time, and the score for the latest film manages to hold onto many of the original themes as well as adding some lovely new ones. Rey's theme is particularly beautiful, full of mysterious atmosphere and playful riffs, but hearing Han and Leia's theme again after so long is also a highlight. I suspect the Academy will probably give it to Morricone, but for me it has to be Williams. 
​

Visual Effects
Nominees
* Ex Machina
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* Star Wars: The Force Awakens
* The Martian
* The Revenant

Winner
Star Wars: The Force Awakens

This is potentially quite a tough one to call. Ex Machina's humanesque android is a beautifully rendered and believable CG character. Mad Max used practical effects as much as possible to incredible effect. The Martian had some brilliantly realised otherworldly landscapes and space scenes. And the bear attack in the Revenant was a seamless blend of the CG bear and live action landscape and actors. Star Wars though had all of those advantages - CG characters were perfectly blended in to a world created using practical effects as much as reasonably possible, with exotic landscapes and space shots in abundance. On top of that, there were lightsabers, spaceships, blasters, monsters, quicksand, battles, explosions, and all sorts of other effects heavy moments that merit this award.  

Writing - Adapted Screenplay
Nominees
* The Big Short
Brooklyn
Carol
* The Martian
Room

Winner
The Big Short

The Big Short has a lot of nominations this year, and I think this is its best chance at a win. The screenplay was fantastic - it was funny and entertaining and you really get behind the characters, feeling elated when things start to go their way, only to be brought crashing back down to Earth when someone turns round and reminds you that their victory means the destruction of the world's economy. It also takes a very difficult subject to understand, i.e. the complexities of investment banking and economics, and explains it in a way that the average cinema-goer can follow. If it takes Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to do that, then that just adds to its genius...

Writing - Original Screenplay
Nominees
* Bridge of Spies
* Ex Machina
* Inside Out
* Spotlight
* Straight Outta Compton

Winner
Spotlight

Like The Big Short, Spotlight has a lot of nominations this year but if it only goes away with one win, it will be for the writing. Again, it takes a very serious subject - the institutional protection of paedophile priests by the Catholic Church - and tells it in a way that is both respectful and very entertaining. Also like The Big Short, you find yourself wanting the protagonists to win, by uncovering this story and blowing it open for the world to see, but at the same time you know that the more success they have, the worse the situation really is. The fact that it's based on a true story makes it even more poignant. I would love to see Inside Out win this award, and the other three nominees would also be worthy winners, but I think it's going to go to Spotlight and I am very happy for it to do so. 

...And the rest

I don't have time to write about the others in so much detail now, or I'll still be going when they start reading out the winners. So, just quickly, here are my predictions for the other categories:

Documentary (Feature)
Nominees
Amy
Cartel Land
The Look of Silence
What Happened, Miss Simone
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight For Freedom

Winner
Amy (the only one I've heard of, so I can't easily predict this one!)

Documentary (Short Subject)
Nominees
Body Team 12
Chau, Beyond the Lines
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
Last Day of Freedom

Winner
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (I know nothing about any of these, but judging by the posters this looks like it has the most poignant subject matter, which tends to score well in awards season)

Foreign Language Film
Nominees
Embrace of the Serpent
Mustang
Son of Saul
Theeb
A War

Winner
Theeb (I remember this doing well at the BAFTAs and it looked like an interesting film that was made well on a shoestring budget. That said, Embrace of the Serpent has a much better name...)

Makeup & Hairstyling
Nominees
* Mad Max: Fury Road
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
* The Revenant

Winner
Mad Max: Fury Road (the look of the characters in this film was extremely striking and the makeup and hairstyling was a big part of that. You could tell a lot about the world the characters were from just by looking at their faces)

Music - Original Song
Nominees
Earned It - Fifty Shades of Grey
Manta Ray - Racing Extinction
Simple Song #3 - Youth
Til it Happens To You - The Hunting Ground
* Writing's on the Wall - Spectre

Winner
Manta Ray - Racing Extinction (probably my favourite having listened to a quick excerpt of each on Youtube. Writing's on the Wall is good as well though)

Production Design
Nominees
Bridge of Spies
The Danish Girl
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant

Winner
Mad Max: Fury Road (The look of the vehicles and settings was incredible - the rig with the flamethrowing guitarist alone deserves to win the production designer this award)

Short Film (Animated)
Nominees
Bear Story
Prologue
* Sanjay's Super Team
We Can't Live Without Cosmos
World of Tomorrow

Winner
Sanjay's Super Team (Beautiful bit of Pixar loveliness that was shown ahead of The Good Dinosaur. Heartwarming, well animated, and takes me back to watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid)

Short Film (Live Action)
Nominees
Ave Maria
Day One
Everything Will Be OK
Shok
Stutterer

Winner
Not a clue - I know nothing about any of them. Lets say... Stutterer.

Sound Editing
Nominees
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Martian
* The Revenant
* Sicario
* Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Winner
The Revenant (Lots of nicely layered sound creating the atmosphere of the wilderness)

Sound Mixing
Nominees
* Bridge of Spies
* Mad Max: Fury Road
* The Martian
* The Revenant
* Star Wars

Winner
Star Wars (lots of special effects and some iconic sounds to go with them)

Unfortunately I forgot to request tomorrow off work and I won't be able to stay up to watch the Oscars without knowing I can recover my sleep the next day, so I'll have to wait til the morning to see how well I did...

One of my favourite authors passed away the other week. Terry Pratchett's books have been a huge part of my life growing up - not just as hugely entertaining and beautifully crafted stories, but as a world that has genuinely helped to make me the person I am today. 

I always enjoyed reading from a very early age. I particularly loved the Chronicles of Narnia, Willard Price's adventure series, and series such as Animorphs and Goosebumps. Around the time I was approaching the end of primary school I was looking for something new to read, and my Mum recommended Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy - Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny & the Dead, and Johnny & the Bomb. I don't remember a huge amount about them (I haven't read them since), but I remember thoroughly enjoying them, and one of them had what I still hold to be the best running joke in any book I've ever read ("dinner, dinner, dinner..."). Once I'd finished them I moved on to the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), which was also a fantastic series of books, about a community of nomes trying to find their home. Both series were perfect for younger readers, but by the time I finished them I was ready for something a bit more mature. I had borrowed the last two Bromeliad books from the high school library, and every time I'd been in there I'd seen the slightly daunting array of Discworld books sat on the shelves next to them. 

Rather than read them in order to begin with, I went first for Witches Abroad, I think probably just because I liked the cover. I fell completely in love with the story, which was a parody of various fairytales as well as a story about the power of stories themselves. It also had a brief throwaway passage in which a vampire is hit by a "ballistic garlic sausage" and then caught by Nanny Ogg's evil cat Greebo - "It seemed to Greebo's small cat brain that it was trying to change its shape, and he wasn't having any of that from a mouse with wings on...". I can remember reading that passage in the changing rooms waiting for my Friday night swimming lesson and not being able to stop laughing. My Dad was there with me, and after that he started to get into the Discworld books too. 

After Witches Abroad, I couldn't get enough of the Discworld. I borrowed them from the library to begin with and read them voraciously at home, in school, and wherever I could. One Christmas Dad bought me a whole load of the ones I hadn't read, including several of the earlier ones, and knowing that I had so many weeks or months of reading to look forward to was the best present I could possibly have had. Other series I'd only really read before bed, on holiday, or when I could have a lie in at the weekends - Pratchett's books were the first where I was actively finding time to sit and read, and choosing to do so over watching television or playing computer games. I even got on better with some of my teachers because I learned that they were Discworld fans.

Like with Witches Abroad, the Discworld books were great because they took stories that were already well known, went back to the deepest, darkest roots of those stories, and then re-crafted them around the world and characters that Pratchett had created. Like Neil Gaiman, Pratchett always had a beautiful understanding of what it was about a story that makes it so memorable. He knew what parts could be messed with and was able to do so in a way that was both sharply satirical and deeply respectful. The nature of stories even became a part of the magic of his universe - Pratchett referred to this as 'narrative causality', meaning that in certain situations something would have to happen because that's how the story goes. Million-to-one shots will always hit their mark, and a wheel will always roll out of a flaming wreckage. 

One day in my early high school years, I was out shopping in Norwich and went into an interesting looking, vaguely hippy type shop in the Royal Arcade. Whilst there, I noticed in a display cabinet a number of resin models that were undeniably characters from the Discworld. Most of them were massively more expensive than my pocket money would allow, but I spotted some smaller pewter models and bought a few more recognisable ones (I think it was the Librarian and the Luggage), and took them home to show my Dad. They turned out to be part of a large range of collectible models by a company called Clarecraft, and Dad and I both quickly fell in love with them. 

We used to seek out the shops that stocked them to see if we could find some of the rarer pieces (inevitably these shops would be wonderful little quirky places that we would never have found otherwise, of the sort that would also sell gemstones and incense and books about tarot cards). Around the same time, my brother started collecting Pocket Dragons which would often be on sale in the same shops, so the three of us would go out together with our own mental list of what we were looking for. Dad found out where the factory was and would take me there on tours, which would culminate in a paint-your-own section where we could spend a couple of hours painting the colour into our favourite characters and personalising them a little to our own imaginations. 

Clarecraft also ran annual conventions, closely tied in with the Discworld fan community, which Dad and I went to for several years. As well as whole tents for painting the figures, there would be various events culminating in the Masquerade, in which prizes would be given to people who had brought the best Discworld costume. One man in particular would always go all out, and my memory of his colossal Detritus the troll costume, complete with glowing eyes, was one of the things that inspired my own love of elaborate fancy dress. Pratchett himself turned up every year to do book signings and judge the contests, along with other Discworld personalities like Stephen Briggs, who wrote the Discworld plays, and Paul Kidby, the illustrator who created the books' cover art after the death of the brilliant Josh Kirby. There was also Terry's secretary Rob, who legend has it was a former MI6 agent and an Olympic standard rifleman.

At one of these events we met Bernard Pearson, the founder of Clarecraft, who had a shop in Wincanton called the Discworld Emporium where he sold all sorts of Discworld merchandise. Dad and Bernard got on well together, and we went to visit him and his shop a number of times - Bernard actually took us to the pub and bought me my first ever pint on one of these visits. He had a little studio at the back of his shop and would let me sit in there to paint some of his models while he and Dad discussed work. Bernard was the sort of person who loved collaborating with people with different skill-sets, and he ended up commissioning my Dad (a graphic designer) to create a set of Discworld stamps which were used on the inside of the front cover of Going Postal, a book about the re-establishment of the Ankh Morpork postal service. 

Dad even went to Pratchett's house at one point for a meeting, which was tremendously exciting. The pictures on the stamps were drawn by my Dad's old illustrator friend Alan Batley, who Bernard also commissioned to make an Unseen University cutout book. In one of the Discworld novels, there is a reference to a wall at the back of the University where students have carved their names over the years, and Alan included mine and my Dad's names on that wall, almost making me part of the Discworld universe. That was something I am hugely proud of and grateful for.

Unfortunately Dad and Bernard fell out not long after the UU cutout book was released, but the Discworld stamps still turn up on eBay every now and then and some of the rarer ones have sold for quite a lot of money. My Dad has since then started making his own cinderella stamps (i.e. stamps made purely for artistic and collectible purposes, with no postage value), and has become quite well respected in the philately community for the quality and detail of his work.

Since the Clarecraft factory closed and Dad and Bernard parted ways we've drifted away from the Discworld community a bit, but we still bought and read the new books as they came out and we were as saddened as Pratchett's other legions of fans to hear of his alzheimers. The work that he did to raise awareness of the disease in his later years was hugely admirable, even if he did look a little out of place on that advert singing I'll Get By With a Little Help From My Friends with the likes of Simon Pegg and Lily Allen (prior to his diagnosis he had also done a lot of fundraising for the Orang-Utan Foundation, which I also used to respect him for). 

I was on the train on my way back to Norwich for Mother's Day weekend when I heard of Pratchett's death. I picked up my old copy of Hogfather while I was there to read on the train on the way back to Birmingham, and despite the fact that I hardly ever get time to just sit and read nowadays, I found that I was as unable to put it down as I was 12 years or so ago when I first picked it up. 

Pratchett's books, and the devoted community of people who came together to celebrate their love of them, were a bigger influence on me than any other book, film, musician or TV program before or since. They helped me bond with my family, especially my wonderful Dad, and informed my love of reading, fantasy, art, costumes and comedy. I literally don't know who or where I would be if I had never discovered them. And I know that there are hundreds of other people out there that have been just as affected by them as I have. 

As Death says in Hogfather, "HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."

RIP Sir Terry. You were awesome. 

It's Oscars night again tonight. There's been some fantastic films out this year and so I thought I'd post a quick blog again about my predictions for the winners. I've put a star next to the ones I managed to see...

Best Picture
Nominees:
*Whiplash
*American Sniper
*Birdman
*The Grand Budapest Hotel
*The Imitation Game
Selma
*The Theory of Everything
Boyhood

Prediction:
Birdman
It's a very strong set of nominees and there are a few that would be worthy winners, but I suspect it's going to be down to Birdman and Boyhood. I haven't managed to see Boyhood yet, but I wish I had - it had universally great reviews and won best picture at the Baftas as well as several other awards, plus my housemates have recently shown me a couple of other Linklater films (Before Sunrise and Before Sunset), which were beautifully made despite their quite simple plots. It sounds like Boyhood has gone with a similar theme of taking something relatively mundane and making it into something beautiful, and the conceit of filming the same actors over a period of 12 years is genius. 

However, I think that the Oscars are more likely to vote for Birdman. It's a fantastic portrayal of the battle between commercial viability and artistic integrity that so many people in Hollywood constantly have to struggle with, which I think will strike a chord with many of the Academy voters. The way it was shot was stunning - the majority has been made to look like it was all done in one take, and whilst it clearly wasn't, there must have been some very long takes involved in the shoot. Combined with the quick pace and lengthy, emotional tone of the dialogue, the skill that went into making it all work was extraordinary. It's also a very self-reflexive film - Michael Keaton's former superhero-portraying actor trying to reestablish some meaning and creativity into his work is a reflection of Keaton's own life as a former Batman now performing in an artsy Oscar contender. The layers, workmanship and resonance of Birdman should help it win out, and the fact that it is fresher in the Academy's heads than Boyhood should help too.

For the record, I would also love to see Whiplash win this. I suspect Birdman will have the edge again - Whiplash is a bit more intense than the usual winners in this category. That said, they voted for the insanely tense Argo a couple of years ago, so there's a chance they might go for this too...

Best Actor
Nominations:
*Michael Keaton - Birdman
*Eddie Redmayne - The Theory of Everything
*Benedict Cumberbatch - The Imitation Game
*Bradley Cooper - American Sniper
Steve Carell - Foxcatcher

Prediction: 
Eddie Redmayne - The Theory of Everything

Redmayne was fantastic as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Everything about the performance was absolutely perfect - the subtle mannerisms, the gradual emergence of Hawking's ALS, and the emotional interactions with the other characters were all handled in a mature and realistic manner. Keaton and Cumberbatch would be worthy winners too, but I'm pretty sure this will go to Redmayne.

Best Actress
Nominations:
*Felicity Jones - The Theory of Everything
Marion Cotillard - Two Days, One Night
Reese Witherspoon - Wild
Julianne Moore - Still Alice
*Rosamund Pike - Gone Girl

Prediction:
Julianne Moore - Still Alice
This is a very difficult one for me to predict. Of the two nominations I've seen, I wasn't too bothered about Jones' performance - she didn't feel realistic enough for me, and was completely overshadowed by Eddie Redmayne. I loved Gone Girl and Rosmund Pike was brilliant in it, but I suspect it was a bit too weird and sinister for the Academy's tastes. I would love to see Pike win it but I don't think she will. 

Of the others, it's a very close call. Cotillard is everything that the Academy love and she has won this award before, but she wasn't nominated at the Baftas which is usually a bad sign, and Two Days, One Night is a French film so there is a chance that not enough of the voters would have seen it. I'm predicting Julianne Moore mainly because she has already won the Bafta, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, so she seems to be the frontrunner. I know Wild has been getting some very good reviews though largely on the strength of Witherspoon's performance, so it could still go either way...

Best Director
Nominations:
*Morten Tyldum - The Imitation Game
Bennett Miller - Foxcatcher
*Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu - Birdman
Richard Linklater - Boyhood
*Wes Anderson - The Grand Budapest Hotel

Prediction:
Richard Linklater - Boyhood
The premise of Boyhood is the key to its success, and Linklater not only had the idea but also the commitment to follow through with it, assembling and producing his work a little at a time over the course of 12 years. It sounds like he managed to coax some great performances from his cast, several of whom were very young children at the start of the process, and this all points to someone who really knows what he's doing. Birdman will be the biggest contender, but I think this one will go towards Boyhood. 

Best Foreign Language Film
Nominations:
Timbuktu
Wild Tales
Tangerines
Ida
Leviathan

Prediction:
Ida
Again, I can't really make a proper prediction for this category as I haven't seen any of the nominations, but Ida won the Bafta so I'm gonna go for that. I kind of want Leviathan to win it, but that's mainly because I like the name...

Best Supporting Actor
Nominations:
Mark Ruffalo - Foxcatcher
*Edward Norton - Birdman
*J.K. Simmons - Whiplash
Robert Duvall - The Judge
Ethan Hawke - Boyhood

Prediction:
J.K. Simmons - Whiplash
This is a very easy one for me. Simmons was a force of nature in Whiplash - tyrannical, overbearing, ambitious and unpredictable. I loved every second he was on the screen and can't imagine anyone else playing that part so well. The beauty of it was that, despite his horrible personality, you felt like you could understand why his students idolised him so much, and why they got behind him despite having every reason to hate him. Edward Norton was fantastic in Birdman and I'm sure the others were great too, but I will be very disappointed if this doesn't go to Simmons.

Supporting Actress
Nominations:
*Emma Stone - Birdman
Patricia Arquette - Boyhood
*Meryl Streep - Into the Woods
Laura Dern - Wild
*Keira Knightley - The Imitation Game

Prediction: 
Patricia Arquette - Boyhood
Of the nominated films that I've seen, I would definitely give this to Emma Stone. Knightley fitted perfectly into the Imitation Game and Streep was one of the better things in Into The Woods, but Stone was far more multifaceted in her portrayal of a recovering drug addict and her love/hate relationship with her father. I want her to win it, but from the clips I've seen of Boyhood I think the Academy will prefer Patricia Arquette. It looks like she has a more relatable emotional range, and she beat Emma Stone to the Bafta. 

Best Original Song
Nominations:
I'm Not Gonna Miss You (Glen Campbell...I'll Be Me)
Grateful (Beyond The Lights)
Glory (Selma)
*Everything is Awesome (The Lego Movie)
Lost Stars (Begin Again)

Prediction:
Everything is Awesome (The Lego Movie)
OK, there might be a bit of wishful thinking here and more than a bit of bias, but Everything Is Awesome has been one of the most iconic and memorable songs of the last year and everyone loves it. Plus this category has been won by a children's movie the last couple of years in a row (Let It Go from Frozen last year, and Man or a Muppet from the Muppets the year before), so the voters clearly have a sense of humour and a bit of a big kid in them. Plus Lego Movie wasn't nominated in the Animated Film category, which was one of this year's biggest snubs, so awarding them Best Song might be a good way of apologising. That said, there is tough competition in the form of John Legend (Glory) and Glen Campbell (I'm Not Gonna Miss You). John Legend is John Legend - his music is so likeable that it feels like he should have won an Oscar already just for the sake of it - and Glen Campbell's song was written for the documentary about his alzheimers, which gives it a bit more emotional weight than a song with the line 'I feel as awesome as an awesome possum' by the guys who sang I'm On A Boat...

Best Original Screenplay
Nominations:
Foxcatcher
*Birdman
*The Grand Budapest Hotel
Nightcrawler
Boyhood

Prediction:
Birdman
I suspect this will be another battle between Birdman and Boyhood, although Grand Budapest Hotel and Nightcrawler will probably be strong contenders too, and for me Birdman thoroughly deserves to win. The script was full of long, quickly delivered speeches about grand themes and personal character notes, which made the film feel more like a theatre play (almost certainly deliberate, and another way the film managed to reflect its own content). I'm sure Boyhood would have had a great screenplay too but I really want to see Birdman win this.

Best Animated Feature Film
Nominations:
The Tale of Princess Kaguya
*How To Train Your Dragon 2
The Boxtrolls
*Big Hero 6
Song of the Sea

Prediction:
How To Train Your Dragon 2
HTTYD2 was one of my favourite films of 2014. I've already written a separate blog about how wonderful it is so I won't go into too much detail here, but it really is a beautiful film. The quality of the animation in places is breathtaking - the way the clouds billow under the dragons' wings, the way the light reflects on the sea - but it also has some incredibly subtle details in the interaction between different characters, like Astrid absentmindedly playing with Hiccup's hair as they talk, which make it feel human and realistic. It also has the advantage of the ageing of the characters since the first film reflecting the ageing of the characters in Boyhood. I loved Big Hero 6 too, and the other three all look beautiful, but for me it has to be How To Train Your Dragon 2. 

Best Original Music Score
Nominations:
*The Grand Budapest Hotel - Alexandre Desplat
*The Imitation Game - Alexandre Desplat
*Interstellar - Hans Zimmer
Mr Turner - Gary Yershon
*The Theory of Everything - Johan Johansson

Prediction:
Interstellar - Hans Zimmer
I would have liked to have been able to say How To Train Your Dragon 2 should be winning this as well. The first one was nominated for an Oscar and lost out to The Social Network, but I'm going to go with my heart again and say I want Hans Zimmer to win. I saw him in concert last year and it was one of the most incredible gigs I've ever been to, so I want him to win as many awards as possible. And Interstellar did have a cracking score - the way it was edited into the film was fantastic, and the music itself was as grand and ambitious as the rest of the film. The Theory of Everything and The Grand Budapest Hotel also both had excellent music, and realistically it will probably go to one of them, but I'm going to stick with Interstellar.

Adapted Screenplay
Nominations:
*Whiplash
*American Sniper
*The Imitation Game
*The Theory of Everything
Inherent Vice

Prediction:
The Imitation Game
Again, I would love Whiplash to win this one, but I think it's more likely to be a fight between The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game. Of the two, I much preferred The Imitation Game - Redmayne's performance in Theory helped it to stand out, but overall the film was a lot less compelling than the Turing biopic. The writing was a big part of that - when Turing cracks the Enigma Code you can't help but get drawn into his excitement and relief. 

I'm a bit pushed for time now, so I'm just going to rush through the other categories with my predictions...

Best Cinematography - Birdman (for the one take premise)

Best Visual Effects - Interstellar (or possibly Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - those are some damn realistic chimps)

Best Makeup - Guardians of the Galaxy (Drax's tattoos definitely beat Steve Carell's prosthetic nose)

Best Animated Short Film - Feast (played ahead of Big Hero 6 so the only one I've actually seen, but it was very sweet)

Best Documentary Feature - No idea, I know nothing about any of them, but lets say Citizenfour (I think I've heard the name before)

Best Live Action Short - as above, I don't know enough to guess. I'll say Boogaloo & Graham, mainly because I like the name...

Best Film Editing - Whiplash (it's like a 2 hour music video)

Best Costume Design - Grand Budapest Hotel (another tough one, it could just as easily go to any of the nominees)

I've never entirely understood when people say they hate 3D. It's how we see the world and if cinema is meant to be a fully immersive experience, it should reflect the world as we see it. If we were actually there in the film, we would see Spiderman swinging over our heads, or planets suspended in space, or arrows flying past our heads. There are problems with the technology at the moment, and by all means hate those problems, but don't take it out on the format itself. 

From an artistic point of view, 3D has a lot of potential that, unfortunately, hasn't been fully exploited yet. Most 3D films at the moment seem to be either gimmicky, with things flying at your face to provoke a reaction, or big budget blockbusters that just want to capitalise on the box office boost that the more expensive cinema tickets bring. Things flying at your face can work well artistically, especially in genre films like horrors that are meant to give you sudden shocks and make you flinch, but the real artistic merit in 3D is in watching it stretch away ahead of you. It should be like looking through a window. 

Part of the reason, I think, for this problem is that there hasn't been what I like to call a 'not in Kansas' moment for 3D. Many other significant advances in cinematic technology have had a film that introduces the new medium in a smart way that really highlights the potential for what it can do. For example, the first film to fully use sound was the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. A few other films had managed to play sound effects and musical performances, but the Jazz Singer was the first to use synchronised dialogue. The film starts out with just the sound effects and songs being heard, and the dialogue shown with place cards as it always had. Then half way through the film, Al Johnson finishes a song, puts up his hand, and says 'Wait a minute, wait a minute - you ain't heard nothin' yet.' 

The first line of dialogue ever heard by a cinema audience was literally showing off the fact that sound had arrived, and the effect of that stayed with the viewers far longer than it would have if the dialogue had been used from the start. 

The other big example is the introduction of colour in The Wizard of Oz. Again, the film starts off in black and white (or slightly sepia, if you want to be picky), which is what the audience were used to at the time. It would have felt familiar and not particularly exciting. The idea of colour is introduced thematically first in the song 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'. Dorothy sings about escaping her drab life to an unknown place that exists over the rainbow - somewhere separated from the real world by a barrier of pure colour. Then the tornado hits and carries her over the rainbow to Oz, and she opens her front door to a world of glorious technicolour. The audience is led through the portal into the cartoonishly bright primary hues of Munchkin Land, where every colour is richly accentuated to make the transition as overwhelming and magical as possible. 

Colour continues to be a theme throughout the rest of the movie, as Dorothy has to put on her ruby slippers and follow the yellow brick road to Emerald City in order to get home. By using colour to embellish the story and working it into the language of the film, the filmmakers were showing the rest of Hollywood that this was more than just a gimmick to show an audience something they hadn't seen before and sell more tickets in the process - this was an aesthetic tool with real artistic merit and integrity.

3D hasn't really had a moment like this. It started out as a gimmick, being showcased for its own sake rather than as a device to assist in the plot or art of the films it was used in. The best attempt I have seen was Coraline, which has some similarities to the Wizard of Oz - both are about a young girl who is not satisfied with the mundanity of her own life and escapes into another world that mirrors reality but ultimately has a more sinister edge. Coraline finds the other world by opening a small door in her house and crawling through a long tunnel. The filmmakers chose to make the 3D effects 4x deeper in the other world than the real world, and the tunnel is used to show that transition, so when Coraline first opens the door, we see the tunnel literally stretching away into the distance. The effect is deliberately unsettling and makes us as an audience instantly understand that the space we are moving into is not part of our world. Just like colour in Wizard of Oz, the 3D helps distinguish one space from another and helps us understand in a subtle way which world we are in at any one time. This becomes useful later on in the film - initially, Coraline is able to return to the real world by falling asleep in the other world, but when things start to go bad she tries to escape this way and it doesn't work. The audience can tell something is wrong when she wakes up because of the depth of the 3D, despite the fact that her bedrooms in the two worlds are relatively similar. The Wizard of Oz is actually undergoing a 3D re-release at the moment, and if they didn't use this technique in the conversion then they're definitely missing a trick.

Unfortunately, despite critical acclaim and reasonable box office success, Coraline did not have the impact that it needed to have in order for the effect of its Oz moment to resonate in the film world. Other films have gone a lot further to show that 3D can improve a movie on an artistic level, most notably Avatar, Life of Pi and Gravity. All three have been quite rightly recognised as technical and visual masterpieces, with the latter two cleaning up quite nicely at the Oscars. Gravity was particularly impressive, using 3D to show both the vastness of space, with the curvature of the Earth stretching away into the distance in the background, and the threat of the shrapnel that flies at lightning speed past your eyes. It has also been used to great effect in animation, with films like Up, How To Train Your Dragon and the Lego Movie, which can be created in 3D from the start without the need for expensive specialised cameras. 

I think part of the problem with 3D, which wasn't such an issue with more fundamental artistic tools like colour and sound, is that it is less obvious how to work it into the language of film. People are still finding ways to make use of it, but to do so they need to be experimental and try things out to see if they get the desired response from an audience. However, at the moment 3D is only really being used in big budget blockbusters and animated family films, which studios rely on for the majority of their profits. They won't want a director to experiment on something that they are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into in case it doesn't work and that money is thrown down the drain. 

In order to get experimental with 3D then, it needs to be used in the lower budget films. This doesn't happen at the moment as the technology is so expensive - again, studios won't want to spend loads of money on a 3D camera for a film that they don't expect many people to see. Fortunately as the technology is developed, the more basic 3D cameras will become cheaper and more accessible to smaller studios, so we should start to see more interesting use of the medium. If an idea is tried and it works, it can then be picked up by the bigger films and will end up written into the artistic language of cinema. 

The developing technology will also help overcome the more fundamental problems audiences have with 3D films at the moment. The biggest one is the higher price, which is predominantly down to the cost of the screens and projectors required to screen 3D in cinemas. As such screens and projectors become more commonplace, the need for the higher ticket price should diminish, which should at least stabilise the price and may even cause it to go down a bit, even if 2D always remains cheaper. People also don't like the glasses, which are necessarily dark and so diminish the colour spectrum available, as well as being awkward if you already wear glasses. The technology already exists to show 3D without the need for glasses - for example in the Nintendo 3DS - so the next logical step is for this to be expanded and utilised in cinemas. Some people find themselves getting headaches from 3D, but this can be reduced by the higher frame rate that was explored in the first Hobbit film, and again may be helped if the glasses become obsolete. 

Another argument that I have heard against 3D is that the focus of the lens is often honed in on the one thing the filmmakers want you to look at, with the background being too fuzzy to make anything else out. This prevents people from admiring the work that goes into the set design and so on. For example in the image below from Clash of the Titans, Ralph Fiennes' Hades is in good focus but the decoration of the room he's in is clearly intricate but hard to make out in any detail. 

I think this is more of an artistic issue than a technological issue - the focus of a lens is used in 2D films to create depth of field anyway, and has been for a long time. It is not necessary to create modern 3D, which relies instead on the relationship between what one eye sees and what the other eye sees, the same way as our eyes and brain create perspective in real life. I would guess that the shallow focus is so often used in modern 3D to emphasise and exaggerate the depth, rather than an attempt to create it. Many 3D films (infamously including Clash of the Titans) are made using normal 2D cameras and then converted into 3D digitally afterwards, which has great benefits for the studios as it's a lot cheaper and they still get the higher box office returns, but it's a lot less effective artistically and looks worse to an audience. Shallow focus hides the inferior 3D and makes it easier for the people working on the post-conversion to tell what the finished product will need to look like. Again, as the technology becomes better and cheaper, the need to use post-conversion should ease up, and hopefully the shallow focus will be a lot less ubiquitous. 

So in short, 3D has a huge amount of potential, but in order to reach it the technology required to create and screen it needs to be better, cheaper and more accessible. The only way that will happen is if people are working on developing that technology, which will only happen if they get paid to do so, which will only happen for as long as the studios that pay them continue to believe that it is a worthy investment. That in turn relies on audiences paying to see 3D films. The more people dismiss it as a gimmick and not worth the extra money, the more it will be used as a gimmick to create films that aren't worth the extra money. So don't give up on it just yet! 

Minor spoiler alert - I'm going to try and write this without any major spoilers for the new film, but I will assume that you've seen the first, so if you haven't seen the original film, or want to avoid learning anything about the new one, you might want to steer clear until you've caught up. Seriously though, watch both of them. You'll be glad you did :)

The first How To Train Your Dragon movie came out of nowhere to become one of my favourite films. I remember seeing it in the cinema around the same time as Avatar and, much as I loved Avatar too, I enjoyed Dragon so much more. Everything about it was perfect - the animation is beautiful, the music is stunning, the characters are likeable and funny without ever being irritating, and the humour is understated but ever present. It also has Toothless the dragon, simply one of the greatest creations ever put on film. Empire magazine summed him up perfectly in their review of the sequel, saying that the dragons combine the best qualities of every pet you've ever had - the playfulness of a kitten, the enthusiasm and loyalty of a dog and the beauty of a parrot. It also wasn't afraid to show the consequences of violence, with Hiccup losing a leg at the end to emphasise his connection with the similarly disabled Toothless. 

The sequel takes everything that made the first film great and expands it. The world, the music, the dragons, and the characters are all bigger and even more exciting than in the original. The choice to age the characters was a stroke of brilliance - not only are the younger cast, who were teenagers in the original, now visibly more adult 20-somethings (but still completely recognisable, to the point where you almost forget what they looked like before), but older characters like Stoick and Gobber look a little more weathered and grizzled. 

The quality of the animation has grown up too - it is still clearly a cartoon, but every little element of detail is immaculate, from the tiny tufts of facial hair on Hiccup's face to the texture of the clouds that they fly through. It's well worth paying extra to see it in Imax to take in all the detail. Stick around at the end of the film to see some of the concept art behind the credits and marvel at the beauty of the landscapes they have created. 

Even more impressive than the quality of the details though is the way the Dreamworks animators have really mastered showing emotion in their characters. It's realistically subtle, often using small gestures instead of grand ones. It makes it so much easier to sympathise with them - there are moments that feel less like watching a movie and more like watching people you know feeling joy or tragedy. There are some truly sad parts that had my 3D glasses getting a bit soggy, but also beautifully happy moments too. At one point, a couple of characters sing and dance to a romantic song which was written for the film by Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, whose lilting celtic, storytelling style fits beautifully into the tone of the film. 

The rest of the music, composed by the brilliant John Powell, is just as good as the first film's Oscar nominated score, equal parts exciting and emotional. I bought the soundtrack as soon as I came out of the cinema, and could happily lie in bed with my eyes closed and the music on loud just letting it sweep over me. It is truly absorbing, and every bit as evocative as the visuals of the film - you can listen to it and feel like you're in a battle or soaring over the ocean. Like the first film, Jonsi from Sigur Ros has contributed a track, this time called Where No One Goes, which is a pounding, uplifting number that borrows themes from the original soundtrack. 

The first How To Train Your Dragon didn't really have a villain - the giant dragon was more a force of nature that had to be overcome than a character in its own right - but the sequel has a cracking one in the form of Drago Bludvist, a warlord with an army of dragons at his command. He is physically and idealistically the antithesis of Hiccup, wanting to eradicate dragons from the world by enslaving enough of them to destroy the rest. Where Hiccup uses gentle persuasion to train his dragons, Drago dominates them completely, literally crushing them under his boot or threatening them with a wave of his spear and an animalistic bellow (Djimon Hounsou manages to make one of the genuinely angriest noises I've ever heard). 

The other new characters are equally well cast. Cate Blanchett manages to convey the range of emotion required for Valka beautifully, as well as giving a great Scottish accent. She actually sounds when we first meet her like I'd imagine someone who hasn't spoken to anyone in 20 years would sound - slightly unsure of her own voice and hesitant to use words when she can say the same thing with a gesture. Kit Harrington's Eret (Son of Eret) has a bit of a London accent that sounds slightly out-of-place in a film where everyone else sounds Scottish or American, not helped by the fact that Harrington has a Northern accent normally and sounds slightly too much like someone trying to do a comedy London accent. However, it kind of works for his character, who is essentially there for an amusing sub-plot involving Ruffnut and doesn't need to carry too much emotional weight. 

I absolutely cannot recommend this film enough. The Dragon films are the only non-Pixar CGI films that stand up alongside Pixar's finest, and this is one of those rare films where the sequel stands up to the original (Dreamworks have been getting good at sequels recently - see also Kung Fu Panda 2). The first one lost out at the Oscars in the two categories where it was nominated, criminally losing the soundtrack award to the Social Network and, more forgivably, being unlucky enough to be released in the same year as Toy Story 3, which took best animated film. I have no doubt that the sequel will score both nominations again and should at the very least win best animation at the next awards. The director Dean Deblois agreed to make a second film on the condition that it was part of a trilogy, and I cannot wait to see how they close the series...

Spoiler alert: This blog will talk about the magnificent ending of the Lego Movie. If you haven't seen it, you may not want to read this yet - but I definitely recommend watching it, and then please do come back here!

It would have been very easy to make the Lego Movie a funny but generic kids' film that happened to feature characters made of lego. Instead, they have made a brilliant film that celebrates all the things that make lego such a popular and addictive toy. 

The beauty of lego is in its potential for imagination and creativity, and that is what the film is really about. The villain, Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell), has taken over the world and brainwashed people into constantly following the instructions, building lego buildings and vehicles exactly as they were intended and reporting any deviation to the authorities. His big, evil plan is to cover everything in superglue, fixing it in a perfect, unchangeable state exactly the way he wants it. The heroes fighting him are the Master Builders - classic characters who can still use their imagination to rearrange the blocks and rebuild the world in a more interesting and creative way. 

There is some great fun in the choice of the characters used as Master Builders, who all have their own running jokes. Many of these are based on their characters outside of the lego universe, such as Green Lantern constantly trying to be Superman's best friend, or Gandalf and Dumbledore getting confused with one another. There is even a brief Star Wars cameo, with the original C3P0 and Lando Calrissian lending their voices. 

The best jokes though are the ones where the personalities of people playing with lego are transposed onto the characters. For example, in one scene where a group of characters are trying to build a submarine, each is doing their own bit in their own style. Batman yells out "If anyone finds any black pieces, I need them - I only work in black, or sometimes very, very dark grey." I can definitely remember playing with lego with other people in my childhood and someone would call a monopoly on pieces of a particular type because they wanted to work to a particular theme. Similarly, the character Benny, AKA Nineteen Eighty-Something Space Guy, has a constant desperation to build a spaceship - lego always had a great range of pieces that would work for a spaceship and allowed for a great deal of creativity, so there was always someone who wanted to build a spaceship irrespective of what else was being made. They may be life or death situations, but the Master Builders play with lego in exactly the same way we would. There is even a scene where the main character Emmett can't find an axle piece to repair a wheel so sticks it on his head. 

Lord Business represents a different kind of lego fan, as is made clear by the fantastic ending of the film. Emmett falls into a mysterious vortex and lands in the real world, where he is unable to move or change his facial expression. He sees the lego world for what it actually is - a huge display piece owned by the lego deity 'The Man Upstairs', who turns out to be Will Ferrell, represented by Lord Business in the lego world. He has built it to look at, but not to play with. The events of the film have been the actions of his son, who has given in to temptation and come down to play with the set properly, defying his father with creativity just as the Master Builders he plays with defy Lord Business. The final battle starts to go in the boy's favour, as fire engines and cranes are rebuilt into war machines and fight back against Lord Business's army of robots, but when the Man Upstairs gets involved they are destroyed or turned back into their designated form. 

In order to triumph over evil, the boy/Emmett has to talk to his father/ Lord Business and persuade him that by deviating from the instructions, they can make creations of far more beauty and imagination than those originally designed. In the lego world, Lord Business is persuaded by the argument that his experience at following the instructions and orchestrating the construction of whole worlds makes him potentially one of the greatest Master Builders of all time. The Man Upstairs softens when he realises that his son has made him the villain of his playtime, and sees in a new light what he has been able to make. The cap is put back on the superglue and the two are able to play together in the way you are meant to play with lego. 

The movie is very self-knowing and shows a perfect understanding of its source material. It makes you want to dig out your old lego sets and see what you can do with them. It also ends with a beautifully judged duplo cameo that had me in absolute stitches, and may be setting the scene for the sequel, which is already being planned. Basically, the theme song sums the film up quite nicely (and I couldn't not mention it given the title of this blog) - Everything is Awesome.

So the Oscars are on tonight - last year I stayed up and watched them, but I rather regretted that decision when I had to drag myself out of bed the following morning, so I might just read about it afterwards this time! 

Even so, it's always a great ceremony recognising what's been great about the last year of cinema, which ties in rather nicely with the subject of this site. So, without further ado, here are my thoughts and predictions on who will be taking little golden men home with them tonight...

NB, I've put a star next to the nominated films I actually managed to see...

Best Picture
Nominees:
*American Hustle
*Captain Phillips
*Dallas Buyers Club
*Gravity
Her
*Nebraska
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
*The Wolf of Wall Street

Prediction: Gravity
There are a lot of great films in this category this year, several of which tick the usual Academy boxes of true story, overcoming diversity, etc. The other nominees were brilliant too, but this year has been all about Gravity. 12 Years a Slave seems to be a popular choice as well, but from what I've heard it's a bit brutal, which tends to put Academy voters off. Similarly, Wolf of Wall Street, whilst being an incredibly entertaining film, is not the most PC in its subject matter. Philomena, Her and Nebraska are possibly a bit too indie to take the biggest prize, and although the others all stand a good chance too, I think Gravity is the film that everyone has been talking about this year. It's a bit like Argo last year - there is so much positive buzz coming off the back of this film it'll be hard for them to justify not giving it the award.

Actor in a leading role
Nominees:
*Christian Bale, American Hustle
*Bruce Dern, Nebraska
*Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
*Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Prediction: Chiwetel Ejiofor
This is a really tough one as McConaughey and DiCaprio were both completely mesmerising as men whose world's were falling apart one way or another. Either of them could win this and I would not be surprised, and it is about time DiCaprio got one for something! I loved Bruce Dern in Nebraska as well - he was incredibly subtle and likeable and completely realistic - but his story isn't quite as compelling as the others on this list and I think that will be enough to count against him. Bale was great as ever but his character was so unlikeable I'd be surprised if he gets the votes. I haven't seen 12 Years a Slave so I can't really comment on how good Ejiofor's performance was, but everything I've read about it seems to suggest he's a bit of a shoo-in. Out of the ones I saw I would probably give it to McConaughey, but I think it's going to be Ejiofor.

Actress in a leading role
Nominees: 
*Amy Adams, American Hustle
*Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
*Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Judi Dench, Philomena
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County

Prediction: Cate Blanchett
I love Amy Adams and she was very captivating in American Hustle, Sandra Bullock did a magnificent job of holding everything together in Gravity, and Dench and Streep deserve any awards they get, but this should definitely go to Cate Blanchett. Her mental breakdown in Blue Jasmine was a stunning performance, which was all at once brutal, funny and sympathetic in equal measure. I would be quite surprised if she doesn't win it. 

Actor in a supporting role
Nominees:
*Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
*Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave
*Jonah Hill, Wolf of Wall Street
*Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

Prediction: Jared Leto
I really, really hope Leto wins this one - his performance as a transvestite drug addict was stunning, and completely unrecognisable from anything else I've seen him in. Abdi was brilliant as well - anyone who can stand up that well next to Tom Hanks in his first ever film role thoroughly deserves an award, and he got the Bafta for it which is usually a good indication of Oscar success, but I do think it will go to Leto.

Actress in a supporting role
Nominees: 
*Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
*Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
*June Squibb, Nebraska

Prediction: June Squibb
I'm a little bit in love with June Squibb after seeing Nebraska. In a more realistic sense, I'm far more in love with Jennifer Lawrence, and I think she has a very good chance - her performance was very emotional and carefully measured and the Academy seem to like her a lot - but I really hope Squibb steals it. She was incredible as a wife who seems horrible at first glance but little by little her affection starts to show through the cracks. I have a feeling this will actually go to Nyong'O, but I can't quite call it so I'm saying Squibb :)

Animated feature film
Nominees:
The Croods
*Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
*Frozen
The Wind Rises

Prediction: Frozen
It would be hard not to give this to Frozen after its phenomenal success over the last few months. Despicable Me 2 was fantastic, and had me laughing so hard in the cinema that my 3D glasses steamed up, and The Wind Rises looked beautiful - it wouldn't surprise me at all if they give the Oscar to Hiyao Miyazaki's last ever film - but it has to be Frozen. I would have liked to have seen Monsters University on the nomination list as well, though...

Best cinematography
Nominees:
The Grandmaster
*Gravity
*Inside Llewyn Davis
*Nebraska
Prisoners

Prediction: Gravity
The first, I think, 15 minutes of Gravity was done in one long tracking shot, with the Earth in the background at sunrise. It was a stunning feat of camerawork and lighting, and will almost certainly win Gravity this award even notwithstanding the rest of the film. I loved Llewyn Davis and Nebraska and they were both beautifully shot, but for sheer technical achievement they can't not give this to Gravity.

Best costume design
Nominees:
*American Hustle
The Grandmaster
*The Great Gatsby
The Invisible Woman
12 Years a Slave

Prediction: American Hustle
Quite a tough one to call, this. I do think Hustle deserves it though - its glamorous outfits alone were enough to establish the time and place the film was set in, as well as making the people wearing them look stunning or ridiculous as required. Gatsby had some fantastic costumes as well, and I haven't seen the others but I'd imagine they all have a good chance. I will say Hustle though, even if it's only as a consolation prize for not getting the hair and makeup nomination...

Best Director
*David O'Russell, American Hustle
*Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
*Alexander Payne, Nebraska
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
*Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

Prediction: Alfonso Cuaron
Gravity was unlike any other film that's been made, and Cuaron was the man who pulled it all together. The techniques and rigs used to create the effects of working in zero gravity would have put a lot of pressure on the cast and crew, and the fact that Cuaron was able to see that they worked through that and still make the best movie of the year thoroughly earns him this award. Much as I hate to deny it to Scorsese, and much as I loved Nebraska, I can't see them giving it to anyone else.

Documentaries, foreign language film and shorts
I'm skipping these ones, as the only one of the nominations I've seen in any of the categories was Get a Horse, the animated short that played at the start of Frozen. It was vaguely amusing but not nearly as good as past winners such as last year's beautiful Paperman, so if the other entries are any good I'd be very surprised if it wins. I can't really comment beyond that though!

Film editing
Nominees:
*American Hustle
*Captain Phillips
*Dallas Buyers Club
*Gravity
12 Years a Slave

Prediction: Gravity
My predictions may be getting a bit predictable here, but again it's hard to see this going anywhere else. Gravity was tense and suspenseful but also introspective and personal, and the editing was a big part of that. I'd quite like to see it go to Captain Phillips (for pretty much the same reason), but it's gonna go to Gravity. 

Makeup and hairstyling
Nominees: 
*Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger

Prediction: Dallas Buyers Club
The Lone Ranger looked like it had some cracking hair and makeup, most of which was arranged in some artful way on the head of Johnny Depp, but it's probably a little too off the wall for the Academy. Especially, that is, compared to the far more subtle and realistic but no less challenging work that went into Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto's characters in Dallas Buyers Club. Bad Grandpa had some impressive prosthetics but was basically a scaled-up version of the surprising a celebrity bit of Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway - not the sort of high brow stuff the Academy tends to go for!

Music (original score)
Nominees:
*The Book Thief
*Gravity
Her
Philomena
Saving Mr Banks

Prediction: The Book Thief
I can only really judge this out of the two that I've seen, although Her was directed by Spike Jonze who does tend to have a good ear for a soundtrack. Gravity had very good, tense music from what I remember, and as I type I have a vague memory of really liking the music that played in the last scene, so (forgive the stream of consciousness!) I wouldn't be too upset if it took this one too. However, I saw the Book Thief just the other night and the music was lovely - it was composed by John Williams, the God of Soundtracks, and I would very much like him to get all the awards we can give him.

Music (original song)
Nominees:
*Happy, Despicable Me 2
*Let It Go, Frozen
The Moon Song, Her
Ordinary Love, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Prediction: Let It Go
It's a cracking song, and one that works really well in the context of the movie. Plus it's written and sung by people with a strong Broadway pedigree, which will appeal to a lot of the Academy voters many of whom will have a similar pedigree themselves. If it had been one of the songs the minions sing at the end of Despicable Me 2 I would have been more inclined to consider that one too, but as it's just Pharrell I'm sticking with Frozen. That man's had a successful enough year already...

Best Production Design
Nominees:
*American Hustle
*Gravity
*The Great Gatsby
Her
12 Years a Slave

Prediction: The Great Gatsby
The sets in Gatsby's mansion were just stunning. There was so much going on in the party scenes that you didn't know where to look - the extravagance of the detail was so ridiculously frenzied that it would take repeat viewings just to take it all in, all of which fitted perfectly with the themes and plots of the film itself. American Hustle has some fantastic set design too, and Gravity is awesome in everything, but I think Gatsby should win it just for sheer opulence.

Sound Editing
Nominees: 
All is Lost
*Captain Phillips
*Gravity
*The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Lone Survivor

Prediction: Gravity
In space, no-one can hear you scream, so working out what noises to use to convey incredible and horrendous destruction without any atmosphere to carry the sound must have been a tough job. I would love to see the Hobbit get it, just for Smaug's awesome booming drawl, but I don't think it will. 

Sound Mixing
Nominees: 
*Captain Phillips
*Gravity
*The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
*Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor

Prediction: Inside Llewyn Davis
Let's be honest, it'll probably be Gravity again, but I would love to see Inside Llewyn Davis get this one. The music in that film worked brilliantly in with the rest of the sound, and it all came together really nicely. I struggle to tell the difference between the two sound categories a bit, but I liked the way Inside Llewyn Davis sounded.

Best Visual Effects
Nominees:
*Gravity
*The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
*Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
*Star Trek Into Darkness

Prediction: Gravity
This category tends to be the only one where the big, fun blockbusters are able to get any nominations, so has the potential for something a little bit different, but that's not going to happen, because Gravity. Which is a shame, because Smaug is probably the best movie dragon of all time, and an absolute masterpiece of computer generated character creation, and Iron Man and Star Trek both had some stunning action sequences. However, there is no way Gravity is not going to win this one - even if the Academy unanimously decided they hated it and didn't give it any other award, they would have to grudgingly admit that the work that went into creating the effects in this film, both practical like the huge rigs used to simulate zero gravity, and computer generated like the gorgeous expanse of Earth stretching away in the background, means it has to take this award.

Writing (adapted screenplay)
Nominees: 
Before Midnight
*Captain Phillips
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
*The Wolf of Wall Street

Prediction: 12 Years a Slave
Much as I would love to see Captain Phillips win this one, 12 Years a Slave will probably take it if only as a consolation prize when best film goes to Gravity. Plus that sort of subject matter must have been incredibly difficult to adapt into the visual medium without compromising on the uglier scenes. It's possible that Wolf of Wall Street could jump in and steal it, but I think it will be 12 Years a Slave.

Writing (original screenplay)
Nominees:
*American Hustle
*Blue Jasmine
*Dallas Buyers Club
Her 
*Nebraska

Prediction: Blue Jasmine
I actually think this is one of the hardest ones to predict - all of these films are incredibly well-written, and thoroughly deserve the award, but I'm going with Blue Jasmine because the writing was, alongside Cate Blanchett's performance, one of the main reasons why the film was so successful. Its exploration into and portrayal of Blanchett's character's fragile mindset is realistic and believable, and flips between humorous and dark just enough to prevent either side becoming overwhelmed. Again, I would really like it if Nebraska took this one, and Dallas and Hustle both thoroughly deserve it too, but I think Blue Jasmine is the more likely bet.

So that's all of them! Basically, Gravity will probably do rather well. I'm looking forward to seeing if I got any of them right tonight. Or, more likely, tomorrow morning...

Quick disclaimer - this blog assumes that the reader has seen the three Toy Story films. If you haven't, why on Earth not?! Watch them before reading, or even if you don't end up reading this blog, watch them anyway...

One of my earliest film-related memories is from way back when I was 5 or 6 years old and my Dad first got the internet at home. He'd recently moved his office from a building in the city centre to the back of our house, and one day invited me to come through to his computer and have a look at a video he'd just found online. I watched as a three-dimensional animated cowboy doll turned to a depressed looking spaceman. He asked the spaceman to give him a hand, and in response was thrown the toy's detached arm. 'Boys are Back in Town' by Thin Lizzy played as the film's logo appeared. It may not sound like much now, but I was completely blown away.

I remember feeling at the end like I had just seen something incredibly exciting - this was probably the first time I had seen a video online, one of the first times I'd seen a trailer for an unreleased film, and the first time I'd seen fully CGI animation - all things that are completely taken for granted now, but at the time I believed I was privileged to have seen history in the making. Even though I now know that the same trailer must have been seen by thousands of people back then, it still feels like a significant moment in cinematic history, as it marked the birth of a style of animation that is now the industry standard, as well as the first feature length release from a studio that has become the undisputed leader in that field. Toy Story broke this new ground, Toy Story 2 became one of the few sequels to actually surpass the original, and Toy Story 3 is, in my opinion, one of the greatest animated films of all time. 

The concept of the trilogy - what do toys get up to when you're not watching them? - is an incredible idea. Like many of Pixar's films, it's simple but original, and allows for a wealth of colourful characters that operate within the parameters of their own world. It also allows the audience to recognise and identify with the characters very quickly - everyone who had a cowboy toy, or a spaceman or dinosaur when they were younger could instantly feel like it was their own toys they were watching; old friends they've known and loved all their life. The actual personalities of the characters are very relatable too. Every member of the central cast has been written as a real, well rounded, almost human person, and the plots revolve around the adult experiences that their lives are throwing at them. 

The first film is about learning to adjust to new situations. Woody is the respected leader of a group of well-loved toys, who occupies a special place in the heart of their owner Andy. The plot of the film kicks off when he is kicked out of both of those positions by a newer, more impressive toy. Buzz's arrogance and delusion of being an actual spaceman aggravate him even further. Although Woody's actions are initially motivated by jealousy and selfishness, we can still sympathise with him as he struggles to stop his world crumbling down. Over the course of the film he learns that the world is far bigger than Andy's room, and that there are other people in it with far bigger problems than his own. 

Buzz's character arc is effectively the reverse of Woody's. When he first arrives in Andy's room, he is an intergalactic hero, on a life-threatening mission to keep the galaxy safe. He firmly believes that he occupies a vital role in the world, and that any admiration and praise he receives stems from that importance. His discovery that he is in fact a child's plaything leads him to realise that the universe he occupies is far, far smaller, and his role within it is laughably insignificant. 

The interaction of the two characters allows each of them to put their issues in perspective. Woody teaches Buzz that he is still an important part of one boy's life, and that with the love and imagination of a child that being a toy gives him access to, he will still be the great hero that he always thought he was. At the same time, Woody comes to the realisation that his role in life is to make sure Andy is always happy, even if that means letting other toys take centre stage. Both characters essentially find that although they have completely changed each others' perspective of the world, their role within it is still the same it's always been. 

The second and third films continue with the adult stories transposed onto children's toys, showing a mid-life crisis and retirement, respectively. The themes remain equally grown up, with the toys facing fears of abandonment, becoming obsolete, their glory years being behind them and their freedom being denied to them.

As I said in my Frozen blog, the best comedies offset the laughs against some moments of sadness to put the lighter moments in perspective, and the Toy Story films, especially 2 & 3, have some incredibly beautiful examples. Jessie's song When She Loved Me in TS2 is one of the most soulful, wistful, melancholy tunes you'll ever find in a kids' film, in which the cowgirl tells the story of her owner growing out of her. The song is set to a sepia-toned series of flashback images that start out mirroring Woody's life with Andy at the start of the first film, before slowly transitioning into his worst fears realised. It's such an emotionally charged moment that it allows the audience to believe that this would make Woody genuinely consider leaving Andy after so long.

The third film has two moments that had me crying under my 3D glasses when I first saw it, both of which work purely because I, like so many of the rest of the audience, grew up with the first two films and feel like I know the characters as closely as I do my oldest friends. The first is the moment in the Hellish furnace of the incinerator at the dump when the toys see that there is no way they can survive their predicament and, wordlessly and with perfectly judged/animated emotion playing across their faces, accept their fate. They stop struggling and hold hands to reassure each other, and like our heroes the audience can only look on in horror as they are dragged into the inferno. It's an incredibly powerful moment, which rivals any other film I can think of, animated or otherwise, in terms of the impact it had and continues to have on me. Yet it didn't hit me anywhere near as hard as what happens 10 minutes or so later...

Fortunately, of course, the toys survive, thanks to a nice little tribute to one of the best jokes in the first film. They make it back to Andy's house before he heads off to college, only to suggest to him through a hastily scribbled post-it note that he passes them on to Bonnie. As he hands each toy over, he tells her about the games he used to play with them and the personalities he gave them, validating the efforts they had all gone to over the last three films to stay with him for the sake of the love they feared was disappearing. Thanks to the fantastic set-up in the first film, each introduction feels like we are saying bye to old friends for the last time. The toys' efforts are finally rewarded with the one thing they'd wanted since the start of film 3: a final moment of playtime with their owner like they used to enjoy. The fact that they are in their static toy mode throughout this scene, rather than the animated characters we've been watching the rest of the time, makes it feel like a dream sequence - the Toy Story equivalent of their lives flashing before their eyes. It's a beautiful scene and the perfect ending to the series, which made me feel guilty about the way my own childhood toys are stored away under my bed at home.

Obviously it's not all sad - the films are gloriously funny, with jokes that will amuse small children ("I'm Sheriff Woody! Howdy howdy howdy") and adults ("Nice ascot..."). Many of the jokes are built around the toys themselves, like Mr Potato Head's desperation for a Mrs Potato Head in the first film, or Ken in TS3 getting teased for being a glorified Barbie doll accessory.

The casting in all 3 films is perfect too. Tom Hanks is brilliant in everything, but is particularly well suited to Woody, giving him an instantly likeable warmth that makes him sound like both a natural leader and a normal, down-to-earth friend. Tim Allen gives Buzz just the right amount of self-assured cockiness and confidence to make us understand why he winds Woody up so badly to begin with, but without making us dislike him ourselves. Joan Cusack handles Jessie's passionate outbursts and introspective low moments (and that song!) with just the right amount of energy and beauty. Even the various supporting cast members all manage to craft memorable characters with actually very few lines each, all things considered - Slinky for example, voiced by the late Jim Varney in the first two films and then replaced by Blake Clark in the third, barely says anything, yet is many people's favourite character and we feel like we know him almost as well as we do Woody or Buzz.

I also really love the music in the Toy Story films, which is famously written and composed by Randy Newman. You've Got a Friend in Me is the obvious classic, full of charm and warmth and optimism. I can't hear it without being transported back to the sofa of the house I grew up in, sat between my Mum and Dad and without a care in the world. It's such an iconic song in the first film that it's covered in each of the successors, first crooned by Michael Buble in TS2 and then brilliantly reimagined in Spanish by the Gypsy Kings in TS3 (Hay Un Amigo En Mi, Para el Buzz Espanol), each one closing its respective film to end it on a high note. The other two songs in the first film - Strange Things and I Will Go Sailing No More - are fantastic too. I thoroughly recommend downloading Strange Things especially, as it has a lovely bit of backing singing that you can't really appreciate in the film. All three songs are used to illustrate a character's thoughts and feelings at that time in the film, which is quite an effective device.

Pixar is unarguably one of the best film studios out there, consistently delivering incredible films that each become instant classics, and Toy Story is the film that enabled it to do that. It proved to the world, and to the people in charge of Disney's bank accounts, that feature length movies could be animated completely in CGI, and that by taking the time to ensure that a good story and characters take priority over that CGI, such films can become phenomenally successful. As such, it has rightly become iconic in the world of film, and continues to be one of Pixar's favourite franchises - despite saying goodbye in Toy Story 3, the characters are popping up in various wonderful short films such as last year's Toy Story of Terror. As long as they can continue to make children (and inner children) happy, Pixar will never quite be able to put the toys back in their toybox. They are far too awesome.

Spoiler warning - there will be some spoilers in here, so read at your own risk if you've not seen the film yet...

Frozen is the latest Disney film, (loosely) based on Hans Christian Anderson's the Snow Queen, about two princesses, Elsa and Anna. Elsa has the power to create snow and ice, but when she inadvertently throws the kingdom of Arendelle into a permanent winter and flees to the mountains, Anna has to journey out to find her and bring her home. It took me a while to get round to seeing this, as Christmas meant I was pretty busy when it first came out. Apparently the same thing happened to everyone else too - Frozen actually had the 3rd most successful 5th box-office weekend of all time. That may sound like a tenuous achievement, but what it means is that only Titanic and Avatar have ever done better, which is incredibly impressive and testament to how awesome this film really is. 

I was completely into it from the beginning. Traditionally, the first song in Disney movies is used to establish the tone and world of the film (for example Circle of Life in Lion King and Arabian Nights in Aladdin), and this has a brilliant one. Choral chanting gives way to a steady rhythm as ice cutters saw and hammer through a frozen lake, singing a quickly building shanty about the powerful nature of ice, featuring such evocative lyrics as "Cut through the heart, cold and clear/ Strike for love and strike for fear/ There's beauty and there's danger here/ Split the ice apart - beware the frozen heart," which sets up the tone perfectly. Winter isn't all about ice crystals, snowmen and sledding - it's also a treacherous world of piercing cold and sinister, frosty darkness. The contrast of ice as something beautiful to be admired and something deadly to be feared is one of the film's strongest themes, and we are often reminded that Elsa's power could develop either way. The fact that she was originally going to be the villain of the movie shows how tied in her character is with that dichotomy. 

The first clue to that connection comes quickly after Frozen Heart, when we see Elsa accidentally fire her magic at Anna's face as they play in the snow she created. The King and Queen take her to a community of trolls (refreshingly portrayed as the mystical creatures of Scandinavian folklore rather than the big dumb brutes of films like Lord of the Rings and Troll Hunter), who are able to save her by removing all memory of Elsa's power. However, the trolls predict that one day Elsa will be feared for her abilities and the family resolve to keep her locked away from everyone, including Anna, for Elsa's own protection. At this point the film's emotional heft starts to come into play, as a confused and frustrated Anna sings the incredibly sweet song Do You Want To Build A Snowman? to try and persuade her sister to come out and play like they used to. 

Unlike other Disney fairytales like the Little Mermaid and Tangled where the isolation of the princess is imposed by concerned or antagonistic parental figures, in this film Elsa shuts herself away, choosing not to leave her room even for her own parents' funeral. The King and Queen's death is shown in the middle of the song, in a stunning shot where the ship they are on is slowly and silently swallowed by the sea in the distance during a storm. Many Disney heroes and heroines are orphans and we often see their parents' death, but it is usually heroic and/or given the attention such tragedy deserves, like with Bambi's mum or Mufasa. Somehow the anonymity of this death makes it all the more upsetting, reflecting the distance Elsa is putting between herself and the people that matter to her the most, and the final verse of Anna's song is beautifully judged to take full advantage of that poignancy. 

So far I've probably made the film sound incredibly depressing, but that's not the case at all. The best comedy features a little bit of tragedy, and one of the reasons this film is so awesome is how effectively they manage to pull at the heartstrings at the key moments, even making some small kids start crying in the cinema when I saw it. Between the tragic start and the child-upsetting bit at the end, the rest of the film is incredibly funny. Most of the comedy comes from Olaf the animated snowman, whose song about how much he would love to experience Summer for the first time is absolutely genius ("Winter's a good time to stay in and cuddle/ But put me in Summer and I'll be a... happy snowman!"), but there are plenty of other sources. My personal favourite is the Wandering Oaken's Trading Post and Sauna scene, which is only a short section of the movie but features a fantastically likeable and entertaining shopkeeper. If ever a minor side character deserved a spin-off, it would be Wandering Oaken. The trolls are very entertaining as well, with a great song trying to set Anna up with her mountain guide Kristoff by listing the reasons why he's 'a bit of a fixer-upper' (including 'his thing with the reindeer that's a little outside of nature's laws...'). 

The main songs in the film are the bigger set pieces, such as For the First Time in Forever and the particularly powerful Let It Go, which I predict will have a very good shot at the best song Oscar (it's already had a Golden Globe nomination). All the music in the film has a much more Broadway feel to it than other Disney fare, which is largely down to the songs being written by (the appropriately named) Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Tony winning songwriter Robert Lopez, who wrote the music for Avenue Q and the Book of Mormon. Let It Go is belted out magnificently by Idina Menzel, who voices Elsa and also has a theatrical background and a Tony under her belt for her performance in Wicked. The impressive vocals lend themselves perfectly to the dramatic mountain landscapes in the background of a stunning sequence where Elsa finds herself free to explore the limits of her powers.


The visuals in this sequence make it one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen in an animated film. Elsa waves her hand and stamps her feet, and builds an incredible ice castle, where the floors and pillars branch out like snowflakes crystallising and chandeliers form on the ceiling like icicles. It's a celebration of creativity and a dazzling display of what animators are capable of - you get the impression that they took the same opportunity Elsa did to let their imagination loose. The rest of the film is just as beautiful. The textures of the ice and snow are immaculately realised, and the blizzard raised in the finale feels like it stretches off for eternity, with stranded ships looming out of the gloom. Even things that are taken for granted in animation nowadays, like skin tones, are perfect - the characters look cold throughout without resorting to blue tones, chattering teeth, etc. 


The most awesome thing about this film though, representing a landmark step in Disney's catalogue and one that I hope we see more of in future movies, is its treatment of the two heroines. At the start of the film Anna looks like she is in danger of becoming another identikit Disney princess, singing about her dreams of falling in love before deciding to marry a handsome prince just one short musical number after meeting him for the first time. She then gets mocked for this decision for the entire film, by her sister and Kristoff especially, and by the end is very much aware of how ridiculous an idea this was. Compared with the romantic plots of the older classics like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, where the princesses seem to have been waiting their entire lives to fall instantly in love with the first random stranger in a crown who comes their way, this is groundbreaking material. Both sisters have well-rounded and thought out personalities - one extroverted, one introverted - and their interaction is a completely believable and realistic relationship between two sisters. They are each independent and neither fully understands the needs and emotions that motivate the other, but they are still the most important people in each others' lives. Their relationship, not that of any romantic entanglement, is what drives the plot and carries the emotion of the entire film, and as they are the first Disney princesses to have ever done that, that is pretty awesome.