VULTURE: 19 Animated Films and Shows We Can’t Wait to See This Fall
August 25, 2023
Some bittersweet themes — retirement, aging, and endings generally — run through several of the upcoming animated film and TV releases of the fall, a time when nature slows down, the air chills, and we find excuses to break out our cozy sweaters. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the new animation isn’t stuffed with life or liveliness. The next few months will deliver a buoyant new Disney film, a fresh Dan Harmon series, and a return to the shadowy vampire-hunting action of Castlevania. At the same time, they’ll give us Hayao Miyazaki’s farewell to feature filmmaking with The Boy and the Heron, the final bow of Disenchantment, and the end of an era with the conclusion of Attack on Titan (for real this time). Before the holidays hit, we’ll even hear Gilbert Gottfried voicing an animated character again. Here’s to autumn: It’ll be gone before we know it.
The Inventor (In theaters, September 15)
Stop-motion had a massive 2022 — the year of Pinocchio, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, and Wendell & Wild — and it will return in the winter with a long-awaited Chicken Run sequel. But this fall, The Inventor carries the form’s indelibly tactile baton with a movie about one of the western world’s most consequential Renaissance men: Leonardo da Vinci. Directed by Jim Capobianco, one of the writers of Ratatouille, and starring Stephen Fry, the film looks a lot like the Animagic stop-motion technique used in the Rankin-Bass holiday specials of decades past but more polished. It pairs this form with yellowed traditional 2-D sequences evoking da Vinci’s drawings. Mixing the styles feels like the right way to tell a story about this artist and inventor’s relentless experimentation.
