With a deflated global economy forcing people everywhere to pinch pennies, the mood seems right for the return of the cheapest of the cheap, Ebenezer Scrooge, in Disney's big-budget holiday extravaganza, “A Christmas Carol.”

There's a whole lotta whiz-bang in “Astro Boy,” a slick CGI interpretation of the 1950s manga classic, but even Astro's shiny red rocket boots can't lift this conventional superhero story into orbit.

As success follows success for animation powerhouse Pixar, the pressure to maintain the streak must be phenomenal. Will the next film be the one that stumbles, the one that breaks stride?

I like Scrat. You like Scrat. We all, apparently, like Scrat. But no one, I suspect, likes the saber-toothed cartoon squirrel – who, along with his beloved, ever-out-of-reach acorn, made only brief appearances in both of the first two "Ice Age" films – enough to want to watch a whole movie about him.

The super-duper 3-D big-screen Imaxed-out extravaganza that is "Monsters vs. Aliens" has bells and whistles, whiz and bang, sound and fury. It even has Reese Witherspoon.

"Waltz With Bashir" is one of Israel's first animated features, and it's going to be a hard act to follow. Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen.

All told, "Madagascar," and its sequel, "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," took 400 people 8 1/2 years to make. But back to back, the two movies wouldn't even take three hours to watch.

Revered Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki has no intention of swapping his pencil for computer graphics and will keep hand-drawing his films for as long as he can, he said during the last Venice film festival.

Animated features intended for families come in two varieties: films with personality and a genuine sense of humor, and films in which characters stand around cracking jokes like they were doing stand-up.

French-made, computer-animated film "Dragon Hunters" follows the adventures of two hunters-for-hire, Lian-Chu and Gwizdo, and their trusty friend Hector, on their quest for fame and fortune in a world that has turned into a series of freestanding islands of varying sizes and shapes.