"environmental"

2008 · Andrew Stanton · 98 min · Animation / Sci-Fi

WALL-E is one of Pixar's finest achievements, a film that communicates more through beeps and gestures than most movies manage with pages of dialogue. Its first act is a near-perfect piece of visual storytelling, and the love story at its center is among the most emotionally affecting romances in animation. The spaceship sequences don't quite match the brilliance of those early Earth scenes, and a few elements land with less nuance than the rest. But the highs here are so high that the dips barely register in the final accounting. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and almost two decades later, nothing in animation has told a better love story with fewer words.

1997 · Hayao Miyazaki · 133 min · Fantasy

Princess Mononoke is Miyazaki at his most ambitious and his most furious. It's a sprawling, violent, morally complex fantasy that refuses to simplify anything, and it's better for it. The pacing asks for patience, and the lack of neat resolution will frustrate viewers who want clear answers. Those who meet the film on its own terms will find one of the most rewarding animated films ever made, a story that trusts its audience enough to leave them with questions instead of lessons.

2023 · 1-4 Players · ~60-120 min · Cooperative

Daybreak is Matt Leacock's climate crisis cooperative game, and it succeeds by making the fight against global warming feel like a solvable puzzle rather than an inevitable doom. Players represent world powers deploying policies to reduce emissions and build resilience, and the engine-building creates a satisfying arc from crisis to cautious hope. The theme is handled with educational nuance rather than preachy simplification, and the cooperative tension rivals Pandemic at its best. Some players find the theme too heavy for entertainment, and the complexity ramp in the first game can be steep.