Akira has to be one of those ground breaking movies that even after all these years since it first came out still has the power to excite and delight the watcher.

Discovering Akira

I first saw Akira many years ago in the cinema, with subtitles and with its original Japanese soundtrack, for me it was a pivotal moment in my movie going experience.

Not only was it an animated movie, but it was one with an adult rating, which intrigued me and I wasn’t disappointed with it at all. Those days of “cartoons” were going to be left behind as I had discovered the world of “Manga“.
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The critical tide has finally turned against Pixar: Cars 2 is doing fine at the box office, but almost the entire world of film journalism is telling you that you’d be crazy to watch it. So is this it, the moment in which one of cinema’s most consistently celebrated and successful studios starts a spiralling descent into the catacombs of history?

It seems unlikely, but you can’t help but feel that some are really hoping that it is.

Pixar are a studio with an astonishing track record. Every single one of their eleven films to date features in the list of the ‘top fifty highest grossing animated films of all time’. Since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to annex animation into its own category, the only real way to be in with a chance of winning has been release your film in a year without a Pixar film (resulting in well deserved wins for Spirited Away and Curse of the Warerabbit). Only two Pixar films have ever failed to win the prize – Monster’s Inc and Cars – and the Dreamworks films that beat them (Shrek and Happy Feet) faced allegations of bought votes.

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Image via Wikipedia

As the latest round of Simpsons guest stars are wheeled out, it’s easy to dismiss the whole thing as a lot of old barrel scraping. But guest stars make the Simpsons, and have done since its inception. It’s just that in recent years, the show’s pandering to current trends and faces that become instantly obscure is far more pronounced. The old cliché is that you haven’t really made it until you’ve been featured on the Simpsons, but the tendency for the later seasons to bundle actors in under their real names is frankly indulgent (and indicative of the blight on professional voice acting that Hollywood stars have been since Aladdin). Katy Perry, Halle Berry, Russel Brand, Daniel Radcliffe?

The Simpsons entered the Guinness Book of Records with 337 Guest Stars nearly six years (and seasons) ago. There are now 740 Credited appearances of guest stars, though this figure (unlike the record breaking figure above) includes the multiple appearances of actors like Albert Brooks, Kelsey Grammer, Phil Hartman and Joe Mantegna (you know, talented people who play characters other than themselves). This is quite an achievement when you consider that for at least the first four seasons, a number of A-listers were appearing under pseudonyms, apparently embarrassed about appearing on an animated show. Nowadays, we get to be embarrassed about A-listers in our animated shows. How times change.

Anyway, without further ado the best and the worst in Simpsons guest stars

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This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Moviestorm. All opinions are 100% mine.

Now that’s one heck of a prize a $2,000 iMac, so what do you have to do to get your hands on this tasty morsel, well this is a competition from Moviestorm for those budding film makers out there to make a kids movie, get it on TV, win an amazing $2k iMac.

So I expect you are wondering what Moviestorm is, well it’s a virtual home movie studio that offers you everything to make your own animated move, now how cool is that

The software is great value and unlike other animation tools, you don’t have to pay lots of money to buy it. Instead, it’s subscription-based, and costs just $8/month – that’s $0.25/day!

If you aren’t too sure about then you can try the software out by checking it out for free on windows and Mac. There are also a stack of content packs, so you can make all sorts of movies: horror, cop shows, romance, music videos, sci-fi etc. The skies the limit, so you can just let your imagination go wild, you never know you could be the next big star in the animation world..

There is also something called “content rental”,  the unique content rental system works like real-world movie-making. Your subscription can be used to rent content packs by the day or by the month, so you only pay for what you actually use, and you don’t have a big up-front cost for expansion packs, which can save you a bit of cash at the end of the day.

Moviestorm does seem to be very easy to use and has a good collection of video tutorials to help up and coming animators with their new masterpiece.

So if you think you are up to the Moviestorm Challenge and you would like the chance to get your animation on tv and getting your hands on a iMac worth $2,000 then what are you waiting for stop by and check it out…