Friday, April 9, 2021

Walt Disney, XLI: ...He doesn't even know how to fold a map


THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER

1990
Directed by Hendel Butoy and Michael Gabriel
Written by Jim Cox, Karey Kirkpatrick, Byron Simpson, and Joe Ranft

Spoiler alert: high


Once upon a time, Disney didn't do sequels.  It seems hard to believe that now.  Hell, it would've seemed hard to believe that ten years ago, after a decade plus of pimping God alone knows how many direct-to-video B-picture cash-in sequels, ranging from the crass to the understandable to the economically and artistically inexplicable, from your Bambi IIs to your Returns of Jafar all the way down to your Kronk's New Grooves.  And yet it's true: Disney, a machine made for making money and (increasingly, it seems) controlling the artistic expression of an entire civilization with an iron fist and a lazy bone, did not sequelize even one of their animated films until the year 1990, when they followed up their studio-reviving, pseudo-throwback, coming-of-age musical masterpiece The Little Mermaid with an action-adventure cartoon with no songs and no existential yearning and definitely no princesses, that deigned instead to continue the adventures of Bianca and Bernard the mice, the protagonists of 1977's The Rescuers, a movie I doubt anyone outside of Disney had thought twice about in thirteen years.

It was kind of an accident (nobody told Disney they were about to undergo a Renaissance, and therefore had a formula they needed to follow), and it did not go well.  The Rescuers Down Under underperformed so hard its first weekend, partly thanks to being pitted against the box-office juggernaut of Home Alone, that Jeffrey Katzenberg literally abandoned it, pulling all promotion in a last-ditch effort to save a few million pennies after already spending a few ten million dollars, not to mention roughly half a decade of the studio's time.  (Frankly, I even somewhat respect the unsentimental ruthlessness.)  And so by the time the decade of successes it ushered in was done, and all the totals were tallied, Down Under was marked as the least successful film of the Disney Renaissance by a terrible margin, and, caught between Mermaid and the block-busting, Oscar-grasping Beauty and the Beast, it was swept aside even more quickly than that.  Branded a misstep by Disney, and treated as a footnote by everybody else, even that was mostly by historians of animation technology who weren't necessarily interested in the film itself.

And this is fucking bullshit.

On the plus side, it's plausible that Down Under's commercial failure and critical—I think I'll go with "misapprehension," because it's produced criticism that I can't even come close to understanding the point of—is what put Disney off theatrical sequels for so long.  It's a streak that only ended with Ralph Breaks the Internet, and obviously one wishes it hadn't.  (As it was more in keeping with Walt's original intention of a rotating animation anthology showcase, I'm not one to count Fantasia 2000 as "a sequel," nor, for other reasons, 2011's Winnie the Pooh or 1945's Three Caballeros.  However, I'm not against adding them to Disney's Sequel List on principle—as long as you also add them to the much shorter Good Sequel List.  That also leaves out the theatrical-but-not-canonical Return to Neverland, but who gives a crap?  I'm making a rhetorical point here!)  Anyway, this does not speak to this film.

So: The Rescuers Down Under is—I am comfortable saying even without having seen so much as a bare majority of the things, for it is known they are mostly bad—the best Disney sequel.  Yes, that's sort of a default position, especially since the vast majority of the "Disney sequels" weren't produced by WDFA/WDAS.  Still, I'd be comfortable saying it anyway, because Down Under may be literally the best sequel—that is, the best sequel to anything—at least in the sense that I can't actually name any other sequel that improves so completely on its original.  Meanwhile, it is historically important from a technological standpoint: as the first full feature made in Disney and Pixar's game-changing scan-and-paint Computer Animated Production System after a single shot in Mermaid (and also the first fully digital film, period), it was arguably the single biggest leap forward in animation technology since the 1920s.  And that certainly doesn't hurt it, either, because few technologies have arrived so fully-formed.

Does this cool shot make use of CAPS in a way only CAPS could be used?  Yes.  It's not all about showing off, but...

The minds behind the film clearly knew what they had, and Down Under opens with one of the most confident fuck-you gestures you'll ever see in a cartoon (if not as mechanically complex as its antecedents in the Disney line, the ambitious multiplane shots of the Golden Age): it's a dolly shot that begins in the grass amidst a bunch of chirping bugs right before blasting off at somewhere close to the speed of sound across a field of flowers and towards the house belonging to the kid-in-need-of-rescue-this-time-around, showing off some of what CAPS could already do extremely well, which is integrate layers of background into seamless, easy, cheap multiplane, as well as what it could already do extremely well, but was limited by the other tools on hand, which is integrate layers of CGI into "traditionally-animated" artwork, previously only seen (for example, in The Great Mouse Detective) by way of laborious hand-tracing.

The result is a gobsmacking opening move, boosted further by the first grand moments of Bruce Boughton's thunderously adventuresome score (which includes less Australiana than you'd think, though it is gratifyingly present in small doses), and it sets the tone for a hell of a good-looking movie, that typically uses CG elements even better than the (admittedly easy-to-notice) repeated patterns of flowers we're sweeping past, and it only occasionally uses CGI less well than that, depending on whether they bothered painting over it or not (notably in the New York-to-Australia bits that use naked CGI for the New York and Sydney skylines and streets, though even this is a massive step up from, e.g., The Rescuers, which, in its analogous scene, used an ugly, sloppy background painting of a street full of cars that we get to stare at for what seems like full minutes while they adamantly refuse to move—so much the nadir of Disney animation and the studio's willingness/ability to make even the slightest effort during their Dark Age that I tend to repress the awful memory of it).  And those skylines are still better-accomplished than the four-years-later Cave of Wonders escape in Aladdin.


But the composition of CGI isn't even the best thing CAPS allowed.  That's the newfound ability to control and manipulate color, both in the scanned penciled lines and in the digital "paint," which meant figures were no longer bound by default to black lines, and lighting effects were easier and blending gradients were possible without painstaking handicraft; this is probably most easily seen on Bianca's mouse makeup (which sounds stupid, but it looks amazing).

There could be no more striking a contrast between two animated films, or at least two Disney films, than the Xerography Era Rescuers and its CAPS Era sequel, and Down Under has more in common aesthetically with Disney movies then thirty years old than its series progenitor.  Of course, it has even more in common with every Disney movie to come afterward.

My biggest complaint about the whole affair is that they apparently decided that Bianca doesn't have whiskers now, because she's... a girl mouse, I suppose?

I'm not saying it's better than The Little Mermaid (so much the greatest triumph of the Xerography Era that you forget how it was made), or that it even looks better, but it certainly demonstrates more toys for its animators to play with.

The Rescuers Down Under also has a story.  No, really.  It begins as we find our kid, Cody (Adam Ryen), on an aimless hike through an unrealistically ecologically and geologically diverse vision of the Australian Outback, accompanied by an unrealistically biologically diverse pack of animal friends with whom he happily converses.  (So Down Under's doing two things right off that are interesting: first, it corrects The Rescuers' disagreeable decision to forget to mention that, in this universe, children can talk to animals, before almost half the movie's elapsed; second, I think it's the only time in the Disney canon that a boy is presented with a menagerie of fawning fauna, in the Snow White/Cinderella/Aurora vein, and that's very nice.  Less nice is that Cody was also, for much of the film's development, an Australian indigene until he was changed, because Katzenberg was all too happy to unblinkingly pander to the presumed racist preferences of his audience.)


Cody, apprised of a crisis only opposable thumbs and tool-use can solve, braves a tall ridge, atop of which he finds the colossal golden eagle Marahute caught in a trap.  He sets about freeing her, and, in the eagle's fear and fury, is knocked off the cliff, hurtling downward for a nauseous moment before the eagle overtakes his descent and catches him, and it's worth stopping again to praise one of the single most wonderful things in any Disney movie, ever, as Marahute takes Cody on a ride that exists to explain the bond Cody feels for the animal, but even more obviously exists to be a tear-sheddingly gorgeous redefinition of the term "flight" that takes us across the background artists' stunning, multifaceted landscapes of Australia.

Supervised and animated by Glen Keane (albeit drawn, in her exhausting feathered detail, by dozens), Marahute represents the greatest success of the greatest modern Disney animator's main skillset: though most famous for co-supervising Ariel, and thereby helping establish the basic template of Disney protagonists even into the modern, full-CG era, Keane first achieved prominence for his great beasts, starting with The Fox and the Hound's bear.  Marahute, in a way, represents the best of both Keane's worlds: imposing, superhuman power now matched with otherworldly grace and beauty.  Not for nothing is Marahute, uniquely amongst the animals here, animated with significant if selective realism (she even has veiny nictitating eyelids), and, almost uniquely, not given a human voice (and though she had a voice actor, I think it is a compliment to Frank Welker that I thought for years that she was performed by recorded eagle sounds).  It sets her decisively apart, turning her subtly into something like a god, which makes Cody's flight all the more transcendent, the villainy that revolves around her all the more heinous, and the rescuers' quest, in its way, holy.

With its all-CAPS opening statement and that transportive prologue, Down Under has set itself up as a full-on masterpiece already, and that status is the movie's to lose; remarkably, it doesn't, and even if it never quite hits those heights again, there is an awful lot of good stuff left.  So Cody, upon his return to Earth, is gifted with a feather, and Cody promptly gets himself caught in a poacher's trap on his way home, whereupon this feather catches the eye of a one McLeach (George C. Scott), the nastiest and almost certainly the best-equipped hunter in all the Outback, as well as his pet carnivorous dinosaur Joanna (supposedly an iguana, but Jesus).  McLeach, obsessed with finding the golden eagle, imprisons Cody and demands to know where Marahute is; Cody doesn't break, yet, but things are starting to look grim for the boy and eagle alike.  That's where our heroes get into the picture, as the underground network of mice that forms the Rescue Aid Society gets the word to New York in a radio montage that is another pretty-damn-high point for Down Under.  We check in again with the RAS, finding it to be more in accord with human geopolitical boundaries this time around...

And possibly too in accord with what Disney animators thought of human phenotypical differences.  But an Aboriginal kid?  Impossible!

...and once again Bianca and Bernard (still Eva Gabor and Bob Newhart) are tapped for a dangerous mission to save a child.  By way of albatross (previously Orville, now Wilbur (John Candy), and that's cute), as well as, in a nod to how dumb it would be for an albatross to try crossing the Pacific, a transcoceanic jet, they arrive in Australia; and, with the help of Jake the kangaroo rat (Tristan Rogers), they set off to find Cody and rescue him.  It has been pointed out that kangaroo rats, despite the name, are not native to Australia, but then again, neither are the colonialist adventurers Jake's modeled after, so it works better than they could have possibly intended.  (Incidentally, one of Down Under's clearest connections to the original is in its seizing upon a transitory trend: just like The Rescuers made a lot of hay out of 70s hicksploitation, Down Under urgently desires to capitalize on the fad of Ozploitation that ran throughout the 80s and had, by the time it was released, had all but completely died.  Nevertheless, it remains a monumental capstone to Hollywood's most meridional moment.)

It makes some sense that it was The Rescuers that got the sequel nod; with its globetrotting and story-of-the-week structure, there is no other film in the Disney canon that more plainly makes itself available to episodic storytelling.  Indeed, it almost did become a TV show—it could've exploited every trend several years too late!—and this only failed to happen because Disney pursued a feature instead.  Thus did chipmunk Indiana Jones and chipmunk Magnum P.I. get their show with Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, showcasing its distinct but equally-influential vision of Mouse Sexiness in the form of Gadget Hackwrench.

And that's why Millennials are all messed up.

But since I raised the issue, one of the most refreshing and lovely things about Down Under is that it is, also, a romantic comedy, and in all the annals of Disney, it's possibly the one single time they've ever managed a mature take on any relationship—Mermaid arguably having a pretty mature allegorical take on sex, but not on relationships—so while it's probably too much to suspect that Down Under takes place literally thirteen years after The Rescuers, insofar as Bianca and Bernard are still alive, it's clearly been a good, healthy while, and so it's the only Disney feature that depicts anything even remotely similar to normal coupling in the 20th or 21st centuries.  Threaded elegantly through the film is a whole subplot about Bernard's humorously failed attempts to propose to Bianca after a long and eventful courtship, interrupted (from Bernard's perspective) by the humorously aggressive posturing of the Australian man's mouse and sex fiend, Jake, and all leavened with Bianca's obvious-to-everybody-but-Bernard complete disinterest in Jake's flirtations as anything but a way to 1)make use of his skills and 2)(and even more importantly) tease her partner of many, many years.


If one wanted to be complimentary about it, and I do, it's like a Lubitsch film with cartoon mice.  If one wanted to be insulting, it's sitcommy.  But sitcommy can still be really good, and Newhart and Gabor were certainly no strangers to such things.  They make the romantic farce absolutely sing here, with Newhart's jealous neuroticism honed to such a razor point that he makes it extremely clear, in this Disney movie, that Bernard's a bundle of sexual insecurities and convinced he's dating above his station, while Gabor is nothing but delightful in her polite, polished, winking sluttiness, leading to a situation where Bernard is pushed to go above and beyond to save the kid, but where he pretty plainly won the lady ages ago and is just too dumb to know it.

On more-or-less the same note, Down Under has some of the most effective comic relief, generally, in any Disney film, to the point it almost-but-not-quite represents a tonal problem, though much, much less so than usual; and I personally wouldn't trade Candy, the "epidermal tissue disruptor," and the most Looney Tunes-esque antics ever seen in a Disney feature until The Emperor's New Groove for a more merely-coherent cartoon.  Nor would I trade Joanna.  Also "voiced" by Welker, she's the mirror image of Marahute: too subhumanly stupid to talk, in the same way the eagle is too divine, but still possessed of some great interactions with McLeach in which she makes her funny animal cunning known.


Which brings us to the best Disney villain nobody talks about.  McLeach doesn't reach the very top ranks of the Ursulas and Jafars, but he's doing something very different anyway, being a cartoonish expression of a very prosaic evil (his clearest precursors are Bambi's unseen hunter and Fox and the Hound's redneck furtrapper) and he beats Cruella de Vil/Madame Medusa with the butt of a rifle.

Played by an expertly-cast and scenery-devouring Scott as so-dumb-he's-dangerous and yet with a fair amount of animal cunning himself (McLeach's ultimate gambit to get Cody to reveal Marahute's aerie is actually really smart)—and designed and drawn with aggressively sharp and pointy edges and a potbellied, triangular shape that nevertheless always feels threatening rather than slack—McLeach is scary in a way few Disney villains are, because you could find him in real life.  And so you feel it when he explains that he plans to get away with it because kids get eaten by crocodiles all the time.  Oddly—like, dumbfoundingly—many folks have walked away from Down Under thinking the nastiness represented by McLeach is a weakness of the film, rather than an enormous strength.  I take the opposite view, and also find myself very amused that McLeach never knows he's being foiled by secret agent mice.  Plus, Down Under features a "Disney death" where a protagonist actively helps the villain fall to their demise, and who wouldn't dig that?

Can you believe this guy isn't secure in his masculinity?

So let's throw in, too, the spectacular, mythic Australian backgrounds that feel even more spectacular and mythic when seen from a mouse-eye view, plus a lot of well-paced, well-choregraphed animated action and suspense—I haven't even mentioned Cody's attempted jailbreak with the help of McLeach's tragicomic animal captives.  The film only falls down the once, in a weird scene that takes good advantage of mouse scale to help our heroes survive the treads of McLeach's halftrack, but with a curious inability to represent movement that undermines its conceptual coolness.  That's a minor complaint, of course, and taken altogether with what is otherwise great, groundbreaking animation, some excellent adult relationship comedy, and a uniquely strong villain, what we've got is the Renaissance's unsung (ha ha!) masterpiece, and, seriously, one of the most incomprehensibly ignored films that Disney ever made.

Score:  10/10

7 comments:

  1. Can't wait for you to review 2011's Winnie the Pooh. I almost prefer it to The Adventures of Tintin as a cartoon about alcoholism, since The Adventures of Tintin now looks to me like a (superior) prequel to Ready Player One. As for ignorance, I consider it bliss that we'll never get a live-action Rescuers cash-in.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I almost want to see a misbegotten live-action Rescuers. Can they digitally resurrect voices yet? (Ok, Newhart's still alive, but he's 91. Incidentally, I did not know till just now that Gabor was either 69 or 70 when she did this movie!)

      I feel like I must've forgotten something important about Pooh 2011... anyway, I remember enjoying it a lot.

      Delete
  2. I'd be interested in reading the post mortem from Disney's marketing department that I'm sure someone had to write concerning this movie's box office failure, because I can tell you just going off memory this release had a weird, major branding issue: namely, it never registered to me at the time (and for YEARS afterward) that it was a Disney movie.

    This despite already knowing The Rescuers was Disney; I never gave it much thought, but I suppose I figured maybe it was based on some source material that another studio went and got the rights to and was trying to cash in on the Disney connection. Factor in the long gap between this film and its predecessor as well as the fact that Disney never did sequels before - also, the movie in general somehow reminded young me of An American Tail so I guess I associated it with the "faux Disney" flicks of the era.

    Even after finally getting its studio parentage straight, I've always assumed it was some kind of side project like DuckTales or A Goofy Movie, and am only JUST NOW realizing The Rescuers Down Under was a full-on entry in the Disney canon. And it just goes to show the power of branding because now I'm so much more keen on going back and checking this out than I ever was (I always did think it looked pretty spiffy). Go figure!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't know how they thought they were going to market this--it's got a weird high concept that doesn't even feel like a "talking animal cartoon" and, as you say, makes it feel like it could be anybody as easily as Disney (though there weren't so many "anybodies" in 1990); beyond that, how do you market a sequel to The Rescuers in 1990? to the thirty year olds who probably don't even remember The Rescuers? And I don't disagree, while it is probably just its box office and historical ignominy doing it, it does somewhat require "animation historian" levels of care for digital inking and painting systems to punch through the "is this even real Disney?" vibe it gives off.

      On the other hand, to my mind, A Goofy Movie is one of the highlights of the Disney Renaissance without even being WDFA/WDAS proper. So it's not in bad company.

      Delete
  3. In that vein, DuckTales The Movie was my shit!

    What's sad about Rescuers Down Under is that I recall thinking the movie looked GREAT, I was truly impressed with the art and animation. But I was a busy kid between Ninja Turtles and Home Alone and Super Mario Bros. 3, and it wasn't like this was, you know, a *real* Disney movie or anything. No offense to Fern Gully The Last Rainforest and all them, but a kid only had so much allowance and I had to save it for the top-tier authentic stuff.

    Come to think of it, I think a big part of it was the fact the ads didn't play up the sequel angle, and I already knew sequels were all about THE WHOLE GANG'S BACK PART 2: THE RETURN (this spirit was always so infectious I used get excited for sequels to movies I never even saw). So it came off less like an official Disney "The Rescuers 2" and more like a random movie that happens to star The Rescuers (in fact I might've took as it the Australian version of The Rescuers or something). What might've seemed like a shrewd move to the studio turned out to backfire in my case.

    Also, The Little Mermaid was VERY clearly positioned as "The Revival of the Old Disney Classics" and despite literally being a revival of a (relatively) old Disney classic I never got the sense The Rescuers Down Under was meant as a followup to *The Little Mermaid* at all, certainly not the way Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King et al. would. It felt conspicuously stand-alone.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alright I'm looking at the trailer for Aladdin and it literally starts with clips from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. "Rescuers Down Under, what's that? You must be thinking of Feivel Goes West or something."

      Moving on to the trailer for Rescuers Down Under itself, I'm seeing it came attached with an original Mickey Mouse short! I'm imagining Jeffrey Katzenberg reading my posts and pulling his hair out going, "Not Disney? What more does it fucking take?!"

      (Actually, I remember this! The Prince and the Pauper. Somehow I never connected it with Rescuers Down Under, I think the Disney channel used to show it by itself).

      Delete
    2. I've actually been trying to think if I saw Rescuers Down Under in theaters, and realized while I definitely saw movies prior to this, and have been told about some of them (apparently I got my dad to take me to Transformers at age 4), the earliest *actual* memory I have of being in a movie theater is seeing Aladdin for the second time (even though I don't have an actual memory of the first) in a second run theater. I also feel like I would have some memory of Prince and the Pauper if I saw Rescuers Down Under theatrically, even if there were no specifics attached to the experience.

      The point is, re-release Rescuers Down Under.

      Delete