In a battle of the sequels, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" retained its superhero grip at the weekend box office, finishing No. 1 and beating the animated "Rio 2" by a slim margin.
For pure stupidity, it's hard to beat ABC's animated concoction called "Turbo Teen". I hope I have this straight: It's about a teen-age boy who finds himself able, when he perspires enough, to sprout wheels through his hands and feet and turn into a high-performance, turbocharged red sedan.
Disney's musical fairy tale adaptation Frozen won the Golden Globe for best animated film, beating The Croods and Despicable Me 2. The Globes are run by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and voted on by barely 80 journalists – in contrast to the Oscars, chosen by 6,000 members of the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Then he pulled up a video of the musician Peter Gabriel singing a scat beat alongside a half-dozen animated figures who, one by one, joined him in precise concert.
"The Conjuring" also beat out "Turbo," the $135-million 135-million 3-D 3-Deanimateda garden snail.
And we won't note that, despite the headlines to the contrary, "Finding Dory" did not actually beat the record for biggest animated opening of all time.
After only one week at the top, "The Spy Who Shagged Me" was knocked off its perch by "Tarzan," Disney's latest animated feature, which beat its chest to great reviews and swung into 3,005 theaters over the weekend to collect an estimated $34.1 million.
The most complex performance was a version of "The Lamp Is Low," whose tune is borrowed from Ravel, which she prefaced with a fragment of John Coltrane's "Naima" and animated with a springy beat.
"Trolls" also yielded a Netflix animated series, "Trolls: The Beat Goes On!", and the characters will be featured in a sequel, "Trolls World Tour," due in theaters in spring 2020.
