From the ugly design to the lacklustre script, this is one parents might want to skip this half-term holiday

In 1912 in Germany, antisemitic writer Waldemar Bonsels published The Adventures of Maya the Bee, which later became a 1970s anime series in Japan called Maya the Honey Bee, and was later dubbed into English a couple of times, including for kids TV channel Nickelodeon in the 1990s and a bunch of films between 2014 and 2021. Still with us? Recurring characters from the show include Arnie and Barney, a pair of dimwit ants, and now, at long last, they have their own spin-off movie.

The film opens very much in media res, with a young female bee flying through outer space clutching a small pig and droplet of water the size of her head. She’s being pursued aggressively by a handful of wasp-type creatures and a narrator solemnly intones: “Sometimes the most unlikely heroes … become legends.” The bee then stops next to a couple of red ants and asks what they’re doing. They are the narrators, they explain, but this his is all soon revealed as fantasy – the pair of ants are telling a story to a larger platoon of ants. Some exposition follows about the ants’ mission: to find fresh water.

Maka Gogaladze’s debut feature looks at generational differences in the context of Georgia’s education system and emphasis on collectivism

The scars imprinted on impressionable young minds can never fully fade away. Aiming her lens at a rocky beach thrashed by crashing waves, Maka Gogaladze opens her intimate film with a painful anecdote from her adolescent years. Through on-screen texts against a stormy sky, the Georgian film-maker recalls the time she dumped all of her poems into the garbage. The impulsive decision was a gesture of rebellion against her domineering mother; Gogaladze had wanted her to feel guilty.

This debut feature would appear, at first glance, to be another act of revolt. Putting her mother in front of the camera, Gogaladze asks probing, at times blunt, questions about the strict education thrust on her in childhood. Together, they talk about piano lessons that ended in tears, and tough academic exams that continued to haunt the director well into her adulthood. Their contrasting personalities are fascinatingly revealed across these conversations in all their tension, yet these sequences also represent a moving effort to reach across generational differences.

A scrappy girl discovers her tribe – which includes a vegan vampire – at a school for top scarers in this entertaining pre-teen animation

In films, twins are usually written as either identical personalities or complete and total opposites, and it’s the latter dynamic that’s at work in this pre-teen animation. One twin is a popular straight-A student heavily invested in fitting in and doing well at ballet, while her sister Mia is a chaotic kook. They both live in Primrose, an appropriately named community that apparently used to be infested with monsters, but can now claim to be proudly monster-free for the last 500 years. The twins’ parents are supportive of their golden child and try their best to understand Mia too, but it is easier for them to praise the kid bringing home the perfect behaviour reports than the one exasperating her teachers with her determination to discover monsters, by hook or by crook.

Scrappy Mia is, naturally, the protagonist of this film, and it’s not too long before she finds herself accidentally enrolled in Rotwood Academy, a school for monsters who would be shocked to discover a human in their midst; from their point of view, humans are brutal, cold-blooded creatures, best avoided, who prefer – ugh! – cupcakes to grave-worms. Mia quickly buddies up with some misfits including a vegan vampire, and the stage is thus set for some Addams Family Lite hijinks, with culture clash comedy highlighting the difference between monster norms and human ways providing much of the humour.

The makers of Coraline return with their distinctive animation style in a magical tale of a secret world of strange beasts, talking animals and evil governesses

Here is an engaging family movie from the Portland-based Laika studio that created Coraline. It is a fantasy adventure in Laika’s distinctively crafted stop-motion animation, written by Chris Butler from the bestseller of the same title by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy, the latter being a band member of The Decemberists, one of whose tour posters we duly glimpse in this film. The director is Laika’s lead animator Travis Knight. It’s a forthright, exuberant, good-natured and old-fashioned children’s tale which CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien might have recognised, a story about the mysterious glory of going on a quest and the terrible fear and wish-fulfilment euphoria of being called upon to confront secret forces that the grownups know nothing about.

The setting is modern-day Portland, Oregon, a groovy city whose hipster-ish stores (there’s a coffee shop actually called Dripster) and Woke 1.0 signage are affectionately mocked. But most of all, the film is aware of a huge forest park next to the city, a place here mythologised as the impassable wilderness or “wildwood” where strange creatures, fairytale nobility and wisecracking talking animals reputedly dwell, of which the city-dwelling humans are entirely ignorant. Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a 12-year-old girl whose parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are a couple of amiable hippies who believe in natural forces and benign magic. They have another child, Prue’s baby brother Mac, who Prue has to look after one day, pushing him in his stroller around the city and having to endure a certain classmate of hers tagging along. This is nerdy Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) who has a crush on her.

Sam Rockwell voices the gumshoe who becomes embroiled with Scarlett Johansson’s femme fatale in this big-hearted and beautifully designed fantasy spectacular

Brad Bird, the Spielberg of animation, applies his masterly authorial touch to a terrific family film that retrieves the genre from the doldrums of dull, AI-formulaic stories and visuals. This animation is smart, witty, humane: a fantasy spectacular with old-fashioned entertainment values and some amazing cityscape design showcasing a beguiling and sweet romance.

The setting is a city of marvels in a world to come, a retro-futurist urban landscape with hints of Metropolis and Blade Runner; there are plenty of regulation moving walkways, flying cars and eerie hologram billboards, yes, but a light touch to put the fun back into what could be just cliche. Here is where an old-school noir thriller is to take place with tough private detectives and bad guys wielding state-of-the-art laser-particle firearms (this explains the title, though I’d hoped that it might also include some reference to 1980s Republican politics). There are careworn cops, cynical club owners and alluring shady ladies with touches of Lana Turner and Veronica Lake. The airborne automobiles also have the bulbous lines of a previous century, and the TV monitors show black-and-white images; plasma flatscreens have evidently been disinvented.

I don’t flip a table every time this happens – but I actually do mind when it’s the default decision with no discussion

Being a lesbian in a heretofore heteronormative society means having to go along with lots of things that don’t make sense to your beautiful lesbian brain. One such thing for me is the ongoing expectation that women who marry men should change their surname to their husband’s.

Last week my tolerance was tested again when it was revealed that after a decade of marriage, Margot Robbie has changed her surname to that of her husband, Tom Ackerley.

There’s trouble afoot when Shaun’s pumpkin-supersizing serum ends up in a balding farmer’s hair growth bottle in this third cinematic adventure

Summer is over and Halloween is on the way … not for a fair bit, of course, but if all the UK’s Halloween merch and continuing pop culture content is up to the standard of this film, then no one is going to be complaining. This is the third in Aardman’s thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written Shaun the Sheep stop-motion franchise of what are effectively silent movies, with a few intelligible words. It is the story of gutsy and heroic sheep involved in amazing adventures in the sleepy village of Mossy Bottom, starring characters who first appeared in the Wallace and Gromit short film A Close Shave.

This one is another excellent family film, crammed as ever with top visual gags, great throwaway references and, of course, a homemade Heath Robinson contraption, so often to be found in Aardman films. We get nods to The Archers, The Wombles and The Simpsons; there’s a wacky chase worthy of What’s Up, Doc?; a homage to the notorious waxing scene from Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin; and even what appears to be a brief visual walk-on for George Bernard Shaw as Bigfoot. As ever with Shaun the Sheep and Aardman Animations generally, the standard of writing is extremely high and the script here, from Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, sparkles with good-natured fun. One high-street hairdressing salon in the wool-producing district where it’s set is called Barber Black Sheep – and if no real-life shop has stolen this joke yet, they ought to.

‘I’d just made two films in America. Shooting on a Lancashire farm was very different. There was mud everywhere – and we’d be eating dripping, jam butties and fried eggs in buns’

Whistle Down the Wind was originally a novel written by my mother, Mary Hayley Bell, about three children living on a farm in Sussex. The children – loosely based on my sister Juliet, my brother Jonathan and myself – discover a man in their barn. Thinking he’s Jesus, they decide to hide him and protect him from the adults because they don’t want the same thing to happen to him as before.

Following in the footsteps of Michael and Janet Jackson, and Kylie and Dannii Minogue, the Hobert siblings have simultaneously struck pop gold – with no rivalry

The history of rival sibling pop solo acts is a limited but potent one. Most famous, of course, are Michael and Janet Jackson. Kylie and Dannii Minogue, Billie Eilish and Finneas, Beyoncé and Solange, Natasha and Daniel Bedingfield, Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry, Jessica and Ashlee Simpson, and Brandy and Ray J all share the intimate and rare understanding of what it was like to share Lego sets and chart space.

That strange dynamic recently gained a new pairing. The US artists Audrey Hobert, 27, and her younger brother, who performs as Malcolm Todd, 22, have both scored global hits synonymous with the sound of summer 2026.

This new adaptation of Michael Ende’s 1973 novel contains some neat parables for our digitally nihilistic age, but even a mystical tortoise can’t save it it from monotony

Momo – the 1973 fantasy novel by German author Michael Ende, who also wrote The Neverending Story – has been adapted in live and animated forms before, in 1986 and 2001. This latest version, too, is ostensibly a live-action film – but it’s been made with so many visual effects it might as well have been a cartoon. Still, the residual human element represented by the cast feels necessary, given the story is about the dangers of letting capitalism suck away our ability to enjoy the moment.

Over the years, readers have posited all kinds of metaphorical interpretations of the plot, which involves a world where grey beings arrive and con everyone into literally “banking” their time, so as to have it all to themselves. Only the urchin Momo, here played by teen actor Alexa Goodall (whose gorgeous supernova of ginger curls is practically another character in the film), can save the world.

Stranded on an island full of prehistoric animals, the Paw Patrol squad get stuck in in a remarkably charmless animation

The Paw Patrol pups – that’s Chase, Marshall, Skye, Rocky, Rubble and Zuma – are engaged in a rescue mission as this latest film instalment of the puppy rescue team series opens. A family on a yacht are in danger of being burned alive, and the plucky dogs are all that stands between them and a crispy fried demise. Unfortunately, it’s a little difficult to root for this family, the annoying teenaged son in particular, who is either an influencer or wannabe influencer. Obviously nobody deserves to die on the basis of their being an influencer, but building a rescue sequence around one feels a bit like if Jurassic Park were about trying to save dino-embryo-thief Dennis Nedry, instead of having him meet his demise at the hands and claws and teeth of a dilophosaurus with impeccable comic timing.

Speaking of Jurassic Park, that’s more or less where the plucky pups end up after the yacht rescue: a storm blows them off course to a mysterious island that boasts a T rex and other assorted prehistoric beasties. None of what transpires as a result is particularly entertaining, and we can only urge families to vote with their wallets and hand over their hard-earned to higher quality children’s entertainment.

As AI slop takes over our screens, what better antidote for enquiring minds than a magical film? We ask directors, producers and critics to pick one must-see movie for each year from infancy to early adulthood

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Screentime has a bad rep these days: it’s allegedly at the root of everything from the collapse of media literacy to the rise of the far right. For parents, and indeed anyone who cares about the future of the planet, the relationship children have to their screens is a particular hot potato.

‘It’s good to be back,’ says the actor in a new trailer for the forthcoming Ebenezer. Has everyone forgotten about the ghosts of his past?

It is fair to say that, professionally speaking, Johnny Depp has had a quiet few years. Since he and Amber Heard sued each other amid a whirlwind of genuinely ugly accusations in 2019, and went to trial in 2022, Depp has struggled to reclaim his position in Hollywood.

His 2020 film Minimata made less than a million dollars at the box office. Jeanne du Barry fared better in 2023, although its Cannes premiere was marked by feminist demonstrations and an open letter signed by 100 members of the French film industry, furious that the festival appeared to be offering alleged abusers institutional protection. Aside from that, he voiced a Puffin called Johnny Puff in a cartoon series called Puffins, and that’s about it.

A half-chicken half-hare, a skunk and a tortoise go in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog in this wholesome animation with a surprisingly complex plot

Although this animated feature doesn’t have a title as utterly awesome as its predecessor, Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness, it’s still a perfectly adequate 90-ish minutes of creamy pastel-coloured picaresque entertainment. It feels like it’s skewed in the direction of younger viewers given the simple character designs, general wholesomeness and easy-on-the-jokes tone, but the plot is surprisingly complicated. The lead character is named Chickenhare because of course he is half-chicken half-hare, although in practice he looks more like a hare than a chicken other than a tuft of feathers on the crown of his head. He is best friends with a skunk named Meg, equipped with the awesome power of stink and who is very butch-coded with her waistcoat, faux-hawk and tomboy characteristics; there is also a tortoise named Abe, who as you might imagine is less keen on running about than the other two.

After a pleasingly kinetic introductory action sequence that feels very Indiana Jones-inspired, during which the treasure-hunting trio run into a svelte but scratchy cat called Crolloq, an old school friend (girlfriend?) of Meg’s. Angry at Meg for assorted reasons, she leaves the other three in a pit but they eventually escape with the golden spork they were seeking all along, a doodah that proves useful later. One thing leads to another, like they do, and they end up on a new adventure in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog with a backwards facing face who can turn back time. A new character accompanies them on the way: Gina, Chickenhare’s long-lost half-sister who is, wait for it, a harechicken – more aviform than mammalian.

From global loanwords and garbled Italian, the slang of the children of millennials doesn’t just share elements with Minionese – it may have absorbed it

I was four years old when Despicable Me was released in cinemas and the banana-coloured, overall-clad Minions took the world by storm. By the time I was seven, my siblings and I were using The Official Minion Manual to teach ourselves Minionese.

Minionese is, of course, the made-up language spoken by Kevin, Stuart, Bob and company, which consists of a combination of melodic gibberish and variations on genuine vocabulary from a diverse array of world languages. When the Minions shout “kanpai” (“cheers” in Japanese) or “para tú!” (a variation on the Spanish “para ti”), it might remind you of how gen Alpha slang, which primarily consists of nonsensical words such as “cap” and “mogging”, also draws on world languages. Consider the Bulgarian scat origins of “skibidi”, for example.

A sinister new tablet threatens the honest-to-goodness toys’ existence, but Buzz, Woody and Jessie’s big tech moral battle feels compromised

The fifth episode of the Toy Story franchise is as slick and smooth as you like, as glitchless as Toy Story 6 or Toy Story 7 might be … or will be. As a piece of family-entertainment content it has the unblemished sheen of a brand new smartphone. But at heart, it has gone dead. For all the intensive, high-energy creative work that has clearly gone into this film’s every frame, the jeopardy, the novelty, the ideas and the passion are lacking; the crucial Toy Story theme of mortality feels underpowered, and the film even calamitously loses its nerve with its own big idea – those squeamish about spoilers had better look away now – the sinister way addictive tech devices are undermining the imaginative play that kids once had with honest-to-goodness toys.

Here a creepy tablet device called Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) enters the children’s world, but ultimately proves to be capable of sentimental self-sacrificial heroism when it comes to their mental health. Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from TS3, had the courage of his evil convictions.

‘The studio wanted me to wear less. They wanted to see my muscles. But we were shooting outdoors in winter – and I had to put Vaseline on to keep my body heat in’

Cannon Films had the rights to Masters of the Universe and thought: “Let’s get this new guy. He’s blond, has good pecs … He can wield the sword.” I was convinced to do it but only very reluctantly – I didn’t want to play a toy. There was lots of excitement but also lots of worry. I’d been Soviet bad guy Ivan Drago in Rocky IV and now I was going to be this American hero. I was nervous and afraid people weren’t going to like it.

I Knew It, I Knew You is written with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff and marks a return to Swift’s country roots

After days of speculation online, Taylor Swift has announced the release of a new original song for Toy Story 5.

Titled I Knew It, I Knew You, the single will be released on 5 June, with CD singles available for preorder on Swift’s website. Three variants will be available, each containing different versions of the song: a piano version, an acoustic version and the original.

Cat and mouse are transported to a quasi-medieval China in this luridly bright animation that has none of the inventiveness of the Hanna-Barbera originals

This expensively rendered, eye-searingly bright animated feature from China rests on a truly weird premise. Tom and Jerry, the cartoon foes of yore, are chasing each other around a museum in present-day New York City when they are supernaturally transported, thanks to a magic compass doodah, to a quasi-medieval China where humans mix freely with gods and cryptozoological animals including phoenixes, gargoyles and talking rats. Which, admittedly, isn’t a massive conceptual leap from Tom and Jerry’s usual imaginary world, where a cat and a mouse can be endlessly regenerated after being flattened, sliced, diced or blown up according to comedy needs. Nevertheless, there’s some serious cognitive dissonance going on here; this is a mix-and-match mashup of mythologies that fans of the original T&J shorts, written and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in the 1940s and 50s, may find disturbing. Welcome to the future, where IP can be infinitely remixed provided you have enough lawyers or material whose copyright has expired.

So Tom and Jerry fall out of the sky in this brave new world, and the local residents of Golden City assume at first they must be gods, and Tom at least isn’t in any rush to disabuse them of this notion. Partly it’s because his newfound fame has helped catch the attention of Jade (voiced in the English dub by Janice Kawaye), a white-furred, blue-eyed opera cat in a red cheongsam dress. For some reason, Jade can both sing and talk, while Tom is mute in the traditional manner – apart from the tiny devil and angel that appear on his shoulders occasionally, just to add a little Judeo-Christian iconography to the mix. Otherwise, the vast amount of talking is done by two opposed characters, the Phoenix Master (Matthew Yang King), a supernatural humanoid trickster who’s been looking for the compass thingy for 300 years, and his arch-enemy Mega-Rat (AJ Beckles), an embittered creature who attempts to trick fellow rodent Jerry into joining forces with him. There are a bunch of other wisecracking, often bickering, pastel-coloured creatures but they’re eminently forgettable unless you are the sort of person who collects plastic figurines from McDonald’s Happy Meals.

Tim Allen, Joan Cusack and Greta Lee join Hanks to answer your enquiries about the forthcoming animation and its previous instalments

Is there a more eagerly anticipated movie this year than Toy Story 5? For many people (with and without children), you can keep your Odysseys and Minotaurs and Place in Hells, because the return of Woody, Buzz and friends is what cinema is really all about. The series so far has made $3.3bn, and last year’s teaser trailer had 142m views in 24 hours – of which only 140m were my son pressing refresh.

The new film, which is released worldwide on 19 June, sees Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack) leading the gang in eight-year-old Bonnie’s room, with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) her second-in-command, after the departure of Woody (Tom Hanks) at the end of Toy Story 4 to help abandoned toys find their owners.