Walt Disney, part LXII: Out in the land where the weak are target practice

HOME ON THE RANGE

2004

Directed by Will Finn and John Sanford

Written by Michael LaBash, Sam Levine, Mark Kennedy, Robert Lence, Will Finn, and John Sanford

Spoilers: moderate

Of the seven films that Walt Disney Feature Animation produced between the end of their Renaissance (typically pegged to 1999's Tarzan) and the arrival of their first fully-rendered computer-animated film (Chicken Little in 2005), the only one that hit at the time was Lilo & Stitch, and the only other one that has been fully redeemed after-the-fact is The Emperor's New Groove, which, whatever the appellation is worth, I personally prefer to attach to the Renaissance's hot streak anyway.  (Partly, that's because I actually like Fantasia 2000; partly, it's because I don't consider Dinosaur to have broken WDFA's streak, because I don't consider Dinosaur to have been a WDFA film.)  But this post-Renaissance epilogue, 2000-2004—despite being defined by tumult within the wider Disney corporation, the pronounced decline of WDFA's financial fortunes, and the twilight of traditional feature animation—has turned out to be rather more of a mixed bag than I had remembered it to be; meanwhile, even the very biggest losers of the period have their latterday fans.  Now, I continue to refuse to accept that Atlantis: The Lost Empire ever became genuinely popular; but you would have to be willfully blind to not trip over one of the army of online champions that Treasure Planet has recruited over the years, a number that, however reluctantly, I suppose includes myself.  And I'm aware that some people even enjoy Brother Bear.

But then there's the one that gets almost completely forgotten, as if the memory of it has been actively avoided; forget championing it, you'd have to go out of your way to find somebody mentioning it.  (DisneyWar—published in 2005!—doesn't mention it.)  When it is recalled, it's usually because someone's obliged themselves to, for completeness's sake—for instance, in a Disney animation retrospective.  That film is 2004's Home On the Range, and its unheralded position in Disney animation history, despite its seemingly ultimate position in Disney animation's chronology, makes a certain degree of sense: it was a serious commercial failure, grossing $143 million on a $110 million budget; yet this mismatch between its box office gross and its budget still wasn't enough to overshadow Treasure Planet, and by the time it had come out, Disney had already declared feature cartoons made with traditional animation to be dead anyway.  Thus you can't even say it contributed directly to the dissolution of its own art form, like the rest of the post-Renaissance had, so you can't even properly resent it.  Nevertheless, it was the final work of the Disney animation studio to be made in formal, industrial, and cultural continuity with Snow White, and while (obviously) WDFA survived this period—it wouldn't even be the last 2-D cartoon they eventually made—there is, even so, a certain emotional truth to the idea that On the Range was "the last Disney cartoon."  But when we contemplate this last Disney cartoon, we don't even get to contemplate a film attempting to sum up all of Disney's aesthetic and narrative priorities of the preceding fifteen (or sixty-seven) years—no Princess Musical to beat all Princess Musicals is this.  Instead, the last Disney cartoon is a deeply frivolous comedy about talking cows in the Old West.  Its best scene is a musical number built around yodeling.  It's obviously not fair, because of how long animated features take to produce (this one even took longer than usual), but it helps us fully understand why nobody cares much about Home On the Range: it's almost offensively oblivious to its own place in history.  If Disney animation couldn't take its own demise seriously, why should we?

There are, however, other ways to look at it; we'll get to it, but you could frame On the Range instead as a bold defiance, rather than as some diffident mouth fart, WDFA continuing its late Renaissance trend of thrashing against the ossification of its style and committing to crazy formal experimentation right up until the end.  I think an argument could be made that it is the single most experimental (or at least unique) of Disney's traditionally-animated features, after its Golden Age, at least that received any "canonical" placement.*  I don't know if that argument holds all the water it could, when On the Range comes only four years after New Groove, which is obviously the Disney cartoon with which it shares the most in common—rather strangely, really, considering New Groove was itself such a financial disappointment.  But they went ahead and made another one (even if it diverges quite a bit), and I expect this was the result of having such similar production histories, both films starting out as somewhat more serious projects, then floundering so hard the only thing that could be done with them was to turn them into joke-stacked comedies very specifically inspired by Warner Bros. short cartoons from the 1950s.  (There are other differences, but I'd say the two most obvious ones are that On the Range more-or-less remains "a musical," and that On the Range is more than bare-minimally concerned with whether its story has an emotional throughline, whereas, when discussing New Groove, I described that film as not caring whether you gave a shit, and I do think On the Range cares at least a smidgen.)

In any case, as New Groove had before it, On the Range began as something else; in fact, it went through two distinct stages of "something else," and both its concepts (New Groove was at least always "the movie about the werellama," even when it was Kingdom of the Sun) weren't even that close to each other.  It began all the way back in 1996, as a light kid's horror film (a horror musical comedy, I would assume, though I don't know for sure) set in the Old West and revolving around the depredations of a ghostly cattle rustler.  Since that couldn't possibly make much sense, I should clarify: this cattle rustler's modus operandi was to stampede herds of cattle off of cliffs to add their spirits to his own great herd in the sky, and, as this is indeed quite metal, I can see why the concept's originator, Pocahontas's co-director Mike Gabriel, thought it was cool.  (The ghost's henchmen were named "the Willies," which somehow persisted right through everything and into the finished film, albeit with a different justification.)  Gabriel, joined by his production designer from Pocahontas, Mike Giamo, developed a story about the rustler being tracked down to his ghost town by one of those heroic callow male youths such as were the rage at WDFA in the late 90s, but that story never quite clicked, and the first and most significant reorientation of the project occurred when they got rid of the human protagonist in favor of a bull, whereupon the film acquired the name Sweating Bullets.

Thomas Schumacher, probably immediately after feeling the consequences for allowing New Groove to become a grand debacle, decided to be more proactive with Gabriel and Giamo's film, and my understanding is he basically fired them.  (Honestly, while Sweating Bullets, in its intermediate form, doesn't sound very enticing, I'll always be curious about how it might've shaken out in its original form, given that Gabriel, who also co-directed The Rescuers Down Under, is secretly one of my favorite Disney Renaissance creators.)  Still, in an effort to salvage the concept art (this is called "the sunk costs fallacy"), Schumacher brought in Will Finn and John Sanford.  Each making their directorial debut, Finn had by some margin the most experience (he'd started his career as an animator with Don Bluth's renegades in 1979, and after spending a decade at Disney, he'd most recently been working at DreamWorks); Sanford, for his part, had been a storyman on a few Renaissance films.  I don't know, that still doesn't sound like that much on-point experience between the two, but every director has a first film, and it's mainly a pity Finn and Sanford had to start here, at the end of all things.  Though their association with WDFA's decline wasn't as fatal to their careers as some other directors, I don't think you can say it was a boon: Sanford has made the more robust showing since, directing TV stuff for DWA; Finn got to direct one more movie, but sadly it was Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, a CGI cartoon that eradicated the upstart studio that made it, and pretty much Finn himself in the bargain.

Well, with Finn and Sanford and a whole bunch of other storypeople, they finally hammered something out, seizing upon an unfinished idea from Gabriel and Giamo's tenure on the project and applying a Pied Piperish cast to the project's one constant, the evil cattle rustler.  They also took that talking bull and replaced him with three talking heifers.  But things really came together once they cast Roseanne Barr as the lead cow.

So then: we begin with Maggie, that cow, the sole remaining head of cattle of the hundreds once belonging to Dixon Ranch, otherwise swept off in a moment by the mysterious rustler, with an even more mysterious secret command over cattle that we only see a glimpse of as yet, Alameda Slim (Randy Quaid).  With the ranch wiped out, Maggie's old owner can't keep her anymore; the basics of Maggie's circumstances are related by way of Barr's voiceover narration as she makes the journey to what will be her new home, and in keeping with the comparisons to New Groove I've been making, On the Range likewise makes sure that one of its earliest jokes (its very first joke is a goofy Alan Menken and Glenn Slater song about the brutality of the Old West) is also its most daring, not necessarily setting a baseline but setting a tone by way of the surprise it entails.  There it was Kuzco having his guards throw an old man out a window to his presumptive death for literally almost nothing; here it's Maggie, in the most Roseannesque gesture the heifer gets up to in a role that is 90% just "Roseanne Barr" already, correctly supposing that her udders have been center-framed in the shot, and confidently informing us that they are, indeed, real.  This is possibly even less "the way comedy works" in On the Range than Kuzco murdering people was the way it worked in New Groove, but it's a bit of a shock to the system like that, and does indicate the flip and modern attitude, even if it's the dirtiest joke by some margin, and it's also one of only a few really glaringly anachronistic jokes in the movie, though I actually just noticed that it was because I was more focused on the dual funny notions of 1)the dissonance of treating udders as boobs and 2)a Disney protagonist being aware of her own mammary glands in the first place.  I do, for the record, think that these things are pretty funny, though the other "most glaringly anachronistic" joke in the film—a miserable Goddamn reference to the California Milk Processing Board's "Got Milk?" ad campaign of the late 90s—has aged like... well, anyway, that joke, if you weren't informed otherwise, you'd think was a mad dictate from Michael Eisner or something that they forgot to delete once Eisner was gone, considering that it comes as late in the movie as it possibly could and is shoehorned into a scene where it has nothing to do with anything.  But getting it in was, unfortunately, Finn and Sanford's own preoccupation.

Anyway, Maggie is now commended to the care of kindly old Pearl Gesner (Carole Cook) on her little dairy farm, rightly dubbed by its mistress "Patch of Heaven."  (Oh, and it's not something you will at all benefit from realizing, but I will point it out: the plot of the movie, inter alia, involves saving 5,000 head of cattle from Slim, so as far as the vast, vast majority of the cows in this movie are concerned, all our bovine heroines will ever achieve is that instead of them being sold to black market meat distributors to be killed en masse and butchered illegally, they will be returned to their owners, to be killed en masse and butchered according to the law.  Nor will it help you to remember that a cow must be impregnated prior to producing milk, the logistics of how this is to be accomplished being ignored by this film, unless you count a couple of comic sex pest bulls they eventually run across, that are hypothetically a riff on some comedic duo I've never heard of, but whom I enjoyed on the basis that Mark Walton's voice performance for both of them makes them sound like twinned parodies of Bing Crosby as a pair of leering creeps.  So forget 50s Warner Bros. cartoons, now it's a throwback to early 40s Warner Bros. cartoons, where fully half of their content comprised bitter, jealous parodies of sex king Bing Crosby—it's enough to wish the second bull were a parody of Frank Sinatra, which comprised the other half of Warners' 40s animation content.)

I have been sidetracked: Pearl makes the acquaintance of Heaven's talking animal menagerie, particularly its pair of existing cows, Mrs. Calloway (Judi Dench), the prim and peremptory one, and Grace (Jennifer Tilly), the distracted and dreamy one with hippie inflections (essentially a "Phoebe Buffay," though eventually given leave to be a mild subversion of her moron sub-archetype such as I tolerated rather better, before it was nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services).  Unfortunately, Patch of Heaven is nearly as broke as the Dixon Ranch, and not much longer for the world, unless someone can come up with the $750 Pearl needs to stave off foreclosure.  Maggie concocts an intermediate plan that really only matters insofar as it sends her, Calloway, and Grace to town, where they come up with their real plan, which is to capture Alameda Slim themselves—his bounty, conveniently, is precisely $750—which will net Maggie a measure of revenge as well as solving the problem at hand.  At least if they can accomplish it: besides the blunt fact of being cows in a man's world, which is (often quite amusingly) only a minor problem, they have competition in the form of Buck (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a horse likewise determined to catch Slim himself, thereby proving that he's a proper Western hero and impressing his idolized rider, the grim Eastwoodesque bounty hunter Rico (Charles Denning), whom he still worships despite being abandoned by Rico almost immediately, due to overcompensations on Buck's part that read to the human as skittishness.  Meanwhile, there's still Slim and the Willie brothers (a trio of cognitively-impaired clones all voiced by Sam J. Levine), and Slim proves his power when it is revealed exactly how he rustles all that cattle: he yodels, and when he yodels, cows are so taken with his hypnotic ululations that they snap into a dissociated fugue state and follow him wherever he wants to go.  And as the ladies aiming to take him down are, themselves, cows, this will prove to be an obstacle.

Given my frequent digressions, it's slightly amazing that two things are simultaneously true here: the basic concept of "three cows fight a supernatural yodeler to earn bounty money" is in perpetual danger of flying completely apart; and it's held together, nonetheless, by a surprisingly rock-solid plot, despite the difficulties that plot faces as a result of that concept, and the effect is some pretty delightfully-disciplined loopiness.  You can map that plot very readily and logically, anyway, and even though I'm pretty certain that the premise is at least half the reason people don't know what to do with the movie, and find it a little embarrassing—I have been guilty of this—it's a remarkably skillful piece of storytelling and strategic editing, making the elisions it needs to make, without calling attention to how elliptical it's actually getting, which forms a subtle but pervasive part of its cartoon charm.  Maybe things really started coming together, then, once they realized they could make the cows' tails prehensile, regardless of whether that's stupid; the plot's conveyer belt of events is likewise lubricated by the advent of a weird half-mad jackrabbit, Lucky Jack (Charles Haid), whom they give opposable thumbs, regardless of whether this is stupid.  (It's startling how not totally distracting this all is.)  It's all pretty contrived, but so breezily efficient it doesn't feel that way, and this efficiency doubles as a gratifying respect for its audience, with information only repeated if repeating it would be a funny callback.  Sometimes information is not conveyed directly at all: Grace's plot-essential tone deafness is communicated by Tilly pretending (?) to be the world's worst singer, and the movie assumes you'll "get" that this is her secret weapon later, when Grace alone seems perplexed by everyone else's description of Slim's beautiful, mind-altering yodels as "singing."

All that plot is not entirely a framework for gags: it's also a framework for composer Menken to stride back into Disney and have a ball with a new genre—country—usually but not always as non-diegetic numbers, sung by an unusual array of pop talent, altogether in a bit of a "70s Disney" throwback sort of way, while also writing a score replete with TV and movie Western interpolations.  (Or at least I'm pretty sure I heard "Rollin'" a couple of times in here.)  It's also got a surprisingly good emotional dynamic, our central trio somehow feeling perfectly-cast and perfectly-balanced between one another—ever wanted to see a buddy comedy with Roseanne Barr, Judi Dench, and Jennifer Tilly?  what do you mean the question has never occurred to you?—and it's both plausible and pleasant to witness the blatant temperamental clash between Barr and Dench play itself out, some of that work undertaken by Menken, Slater, and Bonnie Raitt by way of an "okay, let's feel some feelings for a bit" ballad.  Of course, to the extent anyone has a "favorite" cow from On the Range, it would presumably be Grace, thanks to Tilly's mediating likeability and the fact that she's noticeably the best-animated, with Mark Henn applying his "thoughtful women" skillset to this cow and offering the theoretically-dumbest member of our cast what is, by some margin, the most clearly-expressed interior life.  So it's actually quite fun to go on a trip with the three and see how they become friends while having comic adventures.

It is, even so, and to its credit as a comedy, mostly a framework for gags.  It covers pretty much the whole field of comedy, though it's probably not as funny as New Groove: Patrick Warburton offers a cameo as a feckless horse, but there is no effortlessly-hilarious equivalent to Warburton's Kronk; and, speaking more taxonomically, maybe it's also because it doesn't do Tex Avery-style overt reality-breaking to speak of (there is no complete equivalent to Kronk's "by all accounts, it doesn't make sense" bafflement with his own film**).  I might even aver that as wacky as it is, the comedy is principally dialogue-driven, rather than physical, though that isn't necessarily less funny.  (Sometimes it is, and sometimes it's worse however it's pursued: Gooding's Buck is sort of annoying-on-purpose, and the anachronistic kung fu routines he daydreams about just leave me cold***; on the other hand, he has one of the best "cartoon jokes" in the movie when he super-speeds around to leave a landscape of confusing tracks to stymie his bovine rivals; but they also forced Gooding at gunpoint to do "got milk?"; on the other other hand, supervising animator Michael Surrey is using Buck for the film's most successful "Warner Bros." animation, the horse being the one that most benefits from Chuck Jones-style snaps, holds, and minisculely-overwrought twitch cycles inside those otherwise-held frames.)

But it's mostly very funny, even if it took me more watches to fully warm up to it than is ideal for any comedy; and there are some great gags that make you forgive the weaker material (the cut-backs to Patch of Heaven's barnyard comic ensemble are, perhaps, not wholly worthwhile).  There are great gags, anyway, ranging from as simple as a reversal of the roles of a rooster and a chick, to as gentle as two chicks hiding in the same hatched eggshell (now we're throwing back to Disney in the 30s), to the oddly-piercing and even sorta-edgy, like the cheerful indifference that peg-legged Jack evinces towards his own backstory, involving the harvesting of his "lucky" rabbit's foot.  But I'm especially thinking of a joke revolving around a Chinese immigrant in this Old West, happily confused about getting "free cows! what a country!", that I'm not even sure is meant to be as razor-sharp as it is, though it's my second-favorite joke in the movie.  My first-favorite joke, however, is just all its currents (character-based buffoonery, cartoonish relaxed reality, and abiding goofiness) coming together: Slim, who has surreptitiously bought up all of these properties that he's distressed, only comes to target Patch of Heaven belatedly, because one of his henchman has sat in the exact same spot in the exact same position in his map room for years, and his obscuring cartoon head is the exact same shape as Patch of Heaven's plat.  (So this one, I guess, is definitely in the telling.)

But if there's an enormous reason to love On the Range, and there is, it's above all how it looks and moves: after three films running that were something of a return to form for WDFA—Treasure Planet in particular, its deployment of CGI aside, desperately wanted to return to Disney's early 90s aesthetic priorities—On the Range does the exact opposite, and, gratifyingly, Finn and Sanford don't let Atlantis be the culmination of the process kicked off by Eric Goldberg in Aladdin and begun in earnest with Hercules in WDFA's late 90s turn towards a more angular, graphic mentality.  Basically, if there was a style at WDFA in the late 90s, struggling to break free of, I suppose, specifically Glen Keane's melodramatic-realist and emotionally-delicate draftsmanship, then On the Range is that style's triumph.  (I have mentioned that On the Range isn't really built to acknowledge what amounts to the end of all WDFA styles, but one way it does represent a swan song for the studio is the way that as many hands as possible seem to have pitched in, including talents as high-flying as Andreas Deja taking subordinate jobs beneath their stature, as well as other talents, including Keane, working without credit entirely; even Chris Buck, who'd already moved into direction on Tarzan, supervises Maggie.  I'd say it's almost a surprise Goldberg wasn't one of these talents, considering how up his alley On the Range would've been, but he was busy directing actual Looney Tunes for Joe Dante in Back In Action.)

Now, I've said "Warner Bros." several times and I'm going to hold to that, but it's dedicated to a hybridzation of a couple of very specific slices of Warners animation—most particularly Jones in the mid-50s, under the influence of United Productions of America animation, and Friz Freleng in the early-early 50s, if for some reason he did Coyote and Road Runner cartoons instead of Jones.  The former is probably the most predominant aspect of the aesthetic: for a Disney film, this is some astoundingly flat and stylized animation, married to some astoundingly flat and stylized backgrounds.  I really do love these character designs, and this is presumably peak "animated cow," if, anyway, I had any mental leaderboards for such a category: essentially, they're these sort of filigreed rhombuses, and my favorite detail is the way their front sides join in a curlicue point like an elf's shoe, forming curved, blade-like sternums.  I'm also fond of Dale Baer's Slim, whom I would guess started out as an answer to the question, "what if Yosemite Sam were freaking huge."  And the way these flat characters, the cows especially, interact with the characteristic richness of Disney layout is very cool, with a few obliquely-angled shots of the cows that come perilously close to acknowledging they are creatures of pure two-dimensionality.

The backdrops are even better, so that the film's champion craftsperson seems to be its background supervisor Cristy Maltese (I get the impression she worked the longest on it of anyone, too), inasmuch as she oversaw a just-about-flawless set of gorgeous, jewel-toned backgrounds of jaggedly-presented colors that are nearly as abstract, geometric, and totalizingly-fanciful as Sleeping Beauty's (or, alternatively, like somebody gave Maurice Noble and Philip DeGuard millions of dollars and a giant team to do a Road Runner), that are still (mostly) able to interface with the Disney expectation of an expensive and robust production incorporating digital tools and realist or at least quasi-realist effects animation.  The "mostly" is doing some serious work there: there are employments of Deep Canvas in this film, in particular some "crane shots," that are simply evil.  But "mostly" does mean "almost all of the time": there's a flash flood that's a great join of seemingly-incompatible arts, effected by means of some very-abstracted-by-Disney-standards (but still very well-done) water animation.  A lot of times, even the Deep Canvas (or at least the CAPS-mediated multiplane) works shockingly well: when it wants to, On the Range can feel like a miraculous pop-up book, with these defiantly-flat backdrops laying on top of one another in what is only a charming simulacrum of the "depth" those tools usually want to impose; likewise, the big comic chase climax involving minecarts in an abandoned mine uses depth tools in conjunction with a quick-enough cutting scheme that the uncanniness doesn't have time to curdle into anything disagreeable.  And, given that one of my hugest bugbears about CAPS layouts—it was one of my primary bitching-points about The Lion King—is how many of Disney's directors and layout supervisors would pretend that their movies employed "cameras" with "lenses" that have "focal planes," it pleases me inordinately that, to the best of my recollection, On the Range virtually never bothers with that pretense.

It's just such a swell and unusual looking cartoon (not what you'd want if it were The Little Mermaid, of course, or even if it were actually Sleeping Beauty, but for its purposes it's incredibly lovely), and I haven't even covered the best part of it, attaching to Alameda Slim, namely the yodeling number.  I'm not sure what influence I could attribute this to, except the very obvious touchstone of Dumbo's "Pink Elephants On Parade," only not quite as horror-inflected, albeit only because very few things are.  It's visually aggressive as all get-out, even so (to the point that it's one of those times that the "photosensitivity warning" should be taken seriously), starting off with what is, even considered on its own, a surprisingly delightful musical production number, the first in a Disney cartoon since all the way back in 1998's Mulan, sung by Quaid (with crucial support by stunt yodelers Randy Erwin and Cary Christiansen, who do, in fact, yodel most prettily).  It becomes something very unexpected, a sort of meditation on the possibilities of Disney's digital "traditional" animation tools, if that's not being too snooty about it, Slim dancing and yodeling amidst a whole panoply of CGI-conjured cows taking on Berkeleyesque geometric arrangements, sometimes in a black void, sometimes spiraling through backgrounds and in violation of any known physics, each of them blinking across a whole spectrum of abrasively-bright neon colors in some sort of alien rhythm, in that it seems such a rhythm is being cultivated, but that it's "wrong."  It's freakish-looking, and even the unearthly digital smoothness is good for it; my biggest complaint about it is that it's not twice as long.

It is likewise, perhaps, fair to wish the movie did something this awesome more than just once, but it is, anyway, only a special, impossible-to-ignore case of what it's doing all the time, whether it intended to or not.  I really do, after all, understand why Home On the Range flopped, and why it isn't accorded any legacy; it's a dumb and silly movie that avows its own inessentiality (Jesus, that poster tagline), and has absolutely no business being the final chapter of seven decades of tradition.  Yet maybe it earns its right to be, anyway: Disney animation, as a form, was often the pursuit of fussed-over realism, an illusion of life, and is three-dimensional CGI not that pursuit taken to its utmost?  Perhaps it's therefore even more fitting that one of the last feature-length works of American "traditional" animation devoted itself instead to what only traditional animation could do, and just made a beautiful little cartoon.

Score: 8/10

*Hence leaving out Victory Through Air Power, though I think we'd also have to leave out Dinosaur, which, whatever else, truly is fuckin' weird as shit to look at.  I would also necessarily mean "to date": Chicken Little, let alone Tangled, are obviously the more "radical experiments," at least within the ambit of Disney animation.

**Though "is this the end of Rico?" does get us, like, 70% of the way there.

***I'm also befuddled by the brief aspect ratio change to 'Scope in this daydream (which also suggests they'd never actually seen a spaghetti Western) and how that change worked theatrically; I assume it didn't letterbox itself inside the 1.85:1 frame in theaters like it does on a TV.  I will also use this aside to also mention that the post-reversal finale to the action climax, which is a little disappointing in its "let's get this wrapped up" feeling already, also requires a kung fu move of Grace, and I do not enjoy that at all.