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‘Donkey Princess’ Review: Locarno Film Festival

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When filmmakers predominantly known for animation make the leap to live-action features, you can never predict whose skill with wondrous image-making and imaginative storytelling will successfully translate to the different medium. It’s not even always a matter of the limitations of flesh-and-blood performers and physical locations hindering ambitious ideas that are easier to realize, with limited compromise, when you can control everything on paper, in a computer or with clay and puppetry. Even veterans given considerable resources and artistic freedom for a live-action feature may find their specific sensibilities are just better suited to animation.

For every high-quality live-action debut like “The Red Spectacles” (Mamoru Oshii), “Office Space” (Mike Judge) or “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” (Brad Bird), there’s an admirable but lacking big swing like “John Carter” (Andrew Stanton) or “Attila Marcel” (Sylvain Chomet) – or, heaven forbid, a disaster like “Jonah Hex” (Jimmy Hayward). What tends to work a little better on average is when the live-action film is produced as more of a hybrid with the techniques that made the director’s name. Henry Selick’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach,” for example, effectively ended up still being a glorified animated feature, with the live-action material reserved for lengthy bookends when the title character wasn’t hanging out on or inside that really big fruit.

Selick’s fellow peers in stop-motion animation, Chilean directors Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña, pulled off a similar feat with their first proper foray into live-action filmmaking. A few years after their horror-animation feature debut “The Wolf House” (2018) unsettled basically everyone who saw it (with some equally spooky shorts released before and after), the pair followed that up with “The Hyperboreans” in 2024: a blend of live-action with stop-motion animation and puppetry, where the production design surrounding the human performers very much still resembled something from their fully animated works. Exploring the historical legacy of Miguel Serrano, a Chilean writer known for his neo-Nazi beliefs, “The Hyperboreans” had a touch more specificity to its political themes than the more global crowd-pleasing aims of many of the live-action debuts cited above – although maybe “Jonah Hex” has some sharp observations about fascism, it’s been a while.

With their second live-action feature, the fantasy “Donkey Princess,” León and Cociña successfully use a (seemingly) much bigger budget and canvas for a continuation of that hybrid approach, though for a narrative that’s aiming for something a little more universal in its focus. Sorry to Selick, but a “Monkeybone”-style sophomore live-action misfire this most certainly is not. The Chilean duo’s latest only further establishes them as some of the most exciting makers of tangible, macabre visions on the world’s stage.

The more mainstream quality to the narrative of “Donkey Princess” is that it’s inspired by the famous French fairytale “Donkeyskin” (most notably adapted for the screen by Jacques Demy), though one certainly hopes people en masse are not resonating with the incestuous king character in that story. Offering a darker-hued, though no less visually stimulating flipside to Demy’s pastel-hued take (while also excising any musical element), the early goings of “Donkey Princess” – excluding an ominous opening bookend – sticks to some of the same beats of its loose source material: A princess (Diana, played by Antonia Giesen) becomes suffocated by her father’s (Francisco Melo) actions and obsessions in the long aftermath of grief following the death of her mother. Also, they have a prized donkey in their home. 

In the fairytale, the princess flees to another kingdom for a while to get away from the misery brought on by her father, finding work as a commoner to conceal her identity. In “Donkey Princess,” the departure to another kingdom at the end of the first act is instead a journey across time and space. And it won’t be the only one. But before all that, Diana meets an appealing suitor, Lalo (Andrew Bargsted), who seems to teleport into her birthday party. The problem for their blooming romance is that the king, his heart broken by his wife’s death from the plague, has outlawed the disease known as love anywhere in the land he rules: a fairytale reimagining of Chile, where the humans wander through sets that wouldn’t look out of place in a Laika production, small 2D-animated birds pepper the skies, and the occasional forest scene resembles the silhouette animation of Lotte Reiniger.

Before steps are taken to banish suitor Lalo from the kingdom, the young man gifts Diana with a reportedly magical bracelet he was given by a mysterious old woman in a desert; the same piece of jewellery apparently responsible for him appearing at Diana’s party out of thin air. “If you press this button,” Lalo was instructed by the old woman, “the bracelet will grant your wishes. They won’t come true in your kingdom, but in a distant kingdom and at another time. You will travel to that kingdom.”

When hope seems lost that she and Lalo will ever be together, Diana presses the button on the bracelet. Suddenly, her consciousness is transported to another version of herself. She’s in the same body, but her princess garments are now replaced with a winter coat and sweater, as she’s nearly hit by oncoming traffic. She’s in a world vaguely reminiscent of our present, with cars and apartment complexes, except the surrounding traffic as she finds her bearings is animation that moves like the background details of the “Spider-Verse” films. Here, she is the wife of Lalo, the couple working as pest control for a widespread infestation of bats, in a city where a health crisis sees a curfew imposed by the Chilean government. Her father is here, too, though he’s at least on seemingly more hospitable terms with Lalo than in the world where he wanted him dead – at least that’s the impression on the surface.

The surfaces continue to change as the button keeps on getting pushed, placing and recasting Diana, Lalo and The King in new contexts, each vaguely modelled on different film genres and with varying levels of playful artifice. In one “kingdom,” Diana is an actress wearing a donkey costume for a regular TV show gig; in another, she’s a woman on a beach married to another man, whose eye is unavoidably drawn to Lalo playing with his own partner and child.

There’s some fun to naming the direction the film takes as “Princess Diana Who Can Recall Her Past Lives,” though the recent movie that really springs to mind while watching “Donkey Princess” is “The Beast,” Bertrand Bonello’s time and consciousness-hopping adaptation of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle;” especially with how radically different each timeline in that sci-fi tale was.

“The Beast” notably builds to a memorably ‘feel bad’ ending that’s appropriately devastating and built up for maximum impact. If there is one nagging element to the otherwise impressive “Donkey Princess,” it’s that the more melancholic notes of its last stretch veer into wheel-spinning towards a telegraphed final resolution. That said, while the concluding section sags a bit, it does still contain one of the more viscerally upsetting examples of body-horror imagery – done with grisly practical effects and crunchy sound – of recent memory. If León and Cociña ever want to go full horror mode with another live-action effort, “Donkey Princess” hints that they’re more than capable of joining that genre’s royalty.

Grade: B

“Donkey Princess” premiered at the 2026 Locarno International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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The Simpsons Star Nancy Cartwright Predicts Show Will End Soon

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Nancy Cartwright, the voice actress behind Bart Simpson, isn’t convinced the show has many seasons left, predicting the sitcom will end its iconic run with Season 40.

Cartwright, who has been with the Fox animated sitcom since its debut in 1989, shared her opinion during a Tuesday appearance on Michael Rosenbaum’s “Inside of You” podcast.

“How long do you think ‘The Simpsons’ will go?” Rosenbaum asked Cartwright point-blank in the interview.

In response, Cartwright offered up a short “40 [seasons].”

When Rosenbaum pressed Cartwright if she really thought “The Simpsons” would end at Season 40, she doubled down, noting, “Yeah … It’s my opinion.”

A spokesperson for “The Simpsons” and studio 20th Television declined to comment.

However, Cartwright later clarified that she was happy to continue on with the show if it made it past that benchmark. Though, indicated that she was only interested if the whole cast was “still alive” to do it.

“Yeah, we’ll keep going then,” she said.

“Would you go as long as they wanted to keep going?” Rosenbaum further inquired. To which Cartwright responded: “Absolutely.”

Cartwright’s comments come a year after “The Simpsons” locked in a four-season renewal, confirming the show will continue on through Season 40.

Additionally, “The Simpsons” will premiere its second theatrical feature film, titled “The Simpsons Movie 2,” in September 2027. As for any potential ends for the show, showrunner Matt Selman told TheWrap in February that they plan to “never” have a series finale

“We did an episode about a year-and-a-half ago that was like a parody of the series finale. We jammed every possible series finale concept into one show, so that was sort of my way of saying we’re never going to do a series finale,” he said at the time. “We did a series finale in the middle of the show that made fun of all the ideas of wrapping everything up or ending.”

“The show isn’t supposed to change. The characters reset every week. It’s like Groundhog Day but they don’t know it — and they don’t die that much,” he added. “If the show ever did end, there’s no finale, it would just be a regular episode that has the family in it. Probably a little Easter egg here and there, but no ‘I’m going to miss this place.’”

You can watch Cartwright’s full interview in the video above.

Season 38 of “The Simpsons” premieres on Sept. 27 at 8 p.m. ET on FOX.

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‘Mortal Kombat II’s’ Simon McQuoid on Taking the Sequel Up a Notch

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There’s a sharable clip that Warner Bros. put out for “Mortal Kombat II,” which is now available on digital and a gorgeous 4K UHD disc, that shows some friends sitting down to watch the movie, a sequel to 2021’s “Mortal Kombat” and an adaptation of the beloved video game series. They have a giant bowl of popcorn and, just out of view, some spiky adult beverages (we’re assuming). “Recruit your champions, seize your snacks and get ready to kick it for a toasty movie night,” the text on the sharable reads.

It’s rare to see a piece of marketing so perfectly capture the ideal scenario for the movie, but this social sharable really does a remarkable job – “Mortal Kombat II,” a funnier, gorier expansion of the 2021 movie, with Karl Urban added to the mix as an egotistical American action star recruited to fight in a multidimensional brawl, is best enjoyed with some buddies at home. It’s a perfect “Friday night movie” – pure, did-you-see-that? fun.

And, again, we can’t recommend the 4K disc enough.

TheWrap spoke with director Simon McQuoid, who also helmed the 2021 version, about his intentions for the sequel, why studio notes aren’t always bad and what’s next for him (including whether or not it’s a third “Mortal Kombat” movie). Fatality!

Talk me through your experience on the first film, which was part of Project Popcorn (which saw every new Warner Bros. movie released in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously) and what your intention was for the sequel.

Well, during that time, I was told that it was going to be released on HBO Max at the same time it was going to be in the theaters, I was just grateful that it was being released in theaters. We’ve all wiped it from our memory but they were rough times and we were finishing mode of post right in the middle of it. There were lockdowns and I was just grateful that we were getting any theatrical at that point.

I was just like, people have way bigger problems than I do about, Oh, I don’t just want it in cinemas. That’s a business decision that they were making, and that’s for them to decide. But I was just like, If that’s my only problem right now, I’m good. Everything was an unknown then and there was a weirdness around everything. It was like, Okay, well, let’s see how this goes. I think we were really excited by the fact that a lot of people came out to see it at the cinema. Opening weekend was $24 million in the midst of the pandemic. It was one of the first films that came out. I was really proud of that. I was actually impressed with the fans more than anything. It was like, Good for those guys, they want to see this film in the best way they can. I was impressed and thankful. And then it just went through the roof on HBO Max and we were told that it’s been streamed more than anything else they had on the site.

Wow.

Yeah, that was wild. And I try not to sort of breathe my own vapor about anything. I’m always very cautious about, Okay, let’s be realistic here. I never try and ride the highs too high and the lows too low. I’m always just trying to stay fairly steady about everything. But it was nice. It was good that people were enjoying it. I describe it as there was a climate of confidence around the film that allowed us to swing hard in the second film, and I think that’s the spirit that is infused into the second film.

So you got the greenlight and then what were your priorities for the follow-up?

After the first one, I just sat down, and it was still COVID times and I just thought, Okay, I’m going to put a document together that says, here’s what we did well, here’s what I could have done better, and here’s what worked and didn’t work and here’s where we can go, where we should go. And one of the first things was up the female representation. There’s so many great female characters in “Mortal Kombat.” Let’s bring Kitana. Let’s bring Jade. That brings Shao Kahn in. That brings Kitana’s primal revenge story, which is a very primal human connection to the audience, so that was really important to me – that we had these kind of really clean, clear, understandable, real emotions at stake, and it brings a great bad guy into the story that was going to be a creative challenge. I loved that challenge.

And then it was, Wouldn’t it be nice to go to some different realms and feel the different flavors that “Mortal Kombat” is and allows that visual variety that that adds to this sort of whole maximalist thing?

What I was really trying to do was be respectful to the material and respectful to the fans, but then also just continue to up the cinematic scale of it. But really what I learned was let’s put the characters and their relationships as the most crucial component, and then every creative decision we took from that point was about informing and building those relationships and characters.

What were some things from the first movie that you thought you could improve on?

I realized what I didn’t do as well as I could, what I wanted to focus on, was I wanted higher highs and lower lows emotionally. I wanted the bad guy to get his comeuppance more. I wanted you to feel that when there’s a fatality attached to something, it’s because you want the bad guy to die because of what he’s done and his actions and who he is. Also you want our heroes to succeed more. You want to be rooting for them more and I think I got a little better at that.

Also how do we get a greater sense of visual variety, which was appropriate for “Mortal Kombat,” it was an important part of the games’ DNA. I think there was a bit of that in the first film but I knew where we could expand and how we could expand, just on a practical level. I wanted the movie wanted to feel bigger on an emotional level and also a purely visual, cinematic level. I really leaned into the Imax of it all and really loved working with those guys. The technology they have there and the way they go about it, they’re very led by what the best creative experience is going to be and what the best cinematic experience will be for the audience. It was great. There was stuff like that that I just felt like, Okay, we can push here and we can push there.

Everything is much clearer in this one, even having the scoreboard up in the sky is extremely helpful.

Honestly, that wasn’t in the first couple of drafts of this edit. It was actually one of the notes from the studio guys. Like, It would be good if we had a clear reminder of the tournament. They didn’t prescribe how that it should be, but they were like, It’d be good if we had, and I thought, Yeah, that’s a really good point. I initially was like, Oh, I don’t know about that, is it going to get in the way of that narrative? And then I was like, Yeah, actually, it’s a pretty good note. And then it was just, how do we do that in a way that feels like it’s part of the essence of the elder gods. It was like, How do we make sure the audience knows who’s winning?

Not all studio notes are bad.

No. It’s to make better things. You want to listen. You want to give it a try because more often than not, there’s a really legitimate and good, smart reason that comes up. Often they’ll say something and you’re like, Yeah, what a good point. I had never thought of that. You need fresh eyes all the time and through the entire creative process.

What’s the status of the third movie? You coming back?

I think it’s still going through its life cycle. So I don’t know yet. I’m not sure.

Is a third movie something you would like to do?

Well, I feel like there are other stories that I want to tell that aren’t necessarily in “Mortal Kombat” and I have multiple things in development, one of which we’re just casting now and that’s not “Mortal Kombat” at all, something that is in the real world and very much a deep dive into a singular character and character study. I’m excited about it. But I never want to close doors. I’m just always trying to open doors.

“Mortal Kombat II” is out on digital and Blu-ray and 4K UHD Blu-ray right now. Fight!

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Amanda Knox Responds To Petition Protesting Her Edinburgh Fringe Show

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Nearly 20 years after she was falsely accused of killing her roommate, Amanda Knox is still struggling to tell her own story.

The author and comedian, who was wrongfully convicted of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, has responded after a petition to cancel her Edinburgh Festival Fringe show Cartwheel surpassed 10,000 signatures.

“There is a petition to cancel my show at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Here is my statement,” she prefaced on Instagram. “Cartwheel is a show about motherhood, raising a daughter in a world that is unfair and dangerous for women, and what it costs to be the kind of mother who tells her the truth about that.

“Neither the author of this petition nor anyone who signed it has seen Cartwheel. The petition contains many false assumptions and completely mischaracterizes the show. Cartwheel honors Meredith Kercher’s memory and calls out the violence that was done to her and to me.”

Knox continued, “A petition to cancel a show no one has seen, on the grounds of false accusations intended to shame and vilify a wronged woman into silence, is not an argument against Cartwheel. It’s a fairly precise description of what Cartwheel is about and why it deserves to exist. And the Edinburgh Fringe is the perfect place for a show like this. 

“Many of the Fringe’s most celebrated comedy shows tackle difficult subjects including grief, trauma, mental health, addiction, illness, identity, and politics. Comics rarely treat these experiences lightly or make them the butt of the joke. Instead, they use comedy as a way to explore them, creating space for audiences to engage with complex ideas, connect through shared experience, and find moments of relief, perspective and hope in subjects that might otherwise feel overwhelming,” she wrote.

Started by Sally Alington, a former friend and co-worker of Kercher, the Change.org petition said the show “mocks the horrific events surrounding Meredith’s murder and aims to somehow turn this tragedy into entertainment,” calling for Fringe to “withdraw their support for this performance.”

Meanwhile, Fringe Society director Tony Lankester told BBC Radio Scotland the festival is “not afraid of controversy,” but the decision ultimately lies with the venue. A rep for the Gilded Balloon Teviot, which will host Cartwheel from Aug. 7-17, said they aim to “provide a platform for a wide range of voices, in line with the Fringe’s longstanding commitment to freedom of expression,” and will allow Knox’s show to continue as scheduled.

After Knox was convicted of Kercher’s murder in 2009 and sentenced to 26 years in prison, the conviction was overturned in 2011 and she was fully acquitted in 2015. The title of her Fringe show refers to claims she did cartwheels in the police station after being questioned over the killing.

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