Dan Fogelman

Part "Truman Show", part "Homeward Bound", and with just a soupçon of "Taken", this Disney film is rightly credited as the precursor to the Disney Revival (much like "Great Mouse Detective" was for the Disney Renaissance). It's charming, cosy and fun. My main complaints on it are all just that it's very good at everything, but great at very little. It's got pathos, but doesn't pack quite the emotion required to be truly memorable, and while funny, it's not sufficiently so to be a great comedy, either. A huge accomplishment breaking out of the slump of the half-decade of production that preceded it (Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Dinosaur, The Wild and Meet the Robinsons, all ranging from very forgettable to outright bad), it might not go into the history books as one of the big Disney accomplishments, but it certainly paved the way for other films which did.… (mere)

An utter delight. Sure, the first few episodes are a bit on the weak side whenever someone isn't singing (and the song which thinks random words in yiddish = comedy still makes me wince), but once the ball gets rolling, this is a non-stop ride of joy and fun. The music is catchy as all get-out, the lyrics hilarious, and by the end of the first season, the characters are wonderfully entertaining in their own right, even between the songs. And the second season (whose mere existence might be the greatest miracle in all of TV history) is somehow even better. All this, and to boot the ever-brilliant Timothy Omundson puts in the performance of a lifetime as the villain/frenemy/sidekick/best bud/comic relief/spoiled child/unlikely hero/evil king you never knew you needed to see, but by Jove do you ever.… (mere)

An utter delight. Sure, the first few episodes are a bit on the weak side whenever someone isn't singing (and the episode which thinks random words in yiddish = comedy still makes me wince), but once the ball gets rolling, this is a non-stop ride of joy and fun. The music is catchy as all get-out, the lyrics hilarious, and by the end of the first season, the characters are wonderfully entertaining in their own right, even between the songs. And the second season (whose mere existence might be the greatest miracle in all of TV history) is somehow even better. All this, and to boot the ever-brilliant Timothy Omundson puts in the performance of a lifetime as the villain/frenemy/sidekick/best bud/comic relief/spoiled child/unlikely hero/evil king you never knew you needed to see but by Jove do you ever.… (mere)