Walt Disney, part LXIV: At least I saw the wild before it disappeared

THE WILD

2006

Directed by Steve "Spaz" Williams

Written by Mark Gibson, Philip Halprin, Ed Decter, and John J. Strauss

Spoilers: moderate

The Wild presents itself as an awkward loose thread in Disney animation history: it was not made by Walt Disney Feature Animation, nor by any Disney unit at all; it is included in Disney's animated "canon," but only in Europe, where circa 2010 it was wedged into the 46th spot instead of the similarly-awkward Dinosaur, domestically numbered 39th, so that they could call Tangled the 50th; as justification, it was substantially funded by Disney, and distributed by Disney (and it apparently did better in the United Kingdom than anywhere else it was released, which is not to say it did especially well in the United Kingdom), and Disney's Kevin Lima executive produced it; and nevertheless, upon its release in April 2006, Disney was reasonably content to let it die, though, in fairness, it wasn't showing particularly strong signs of life.

Some of what The Wild is and how it came to be can be explained, but by no means all, and I've found the matter of its background to be quite obscure.  On the most basic level, what we have with The Wild is the sole feature-length cartoon to be made by Canadian VFX studio C.O.R.E. (which I don't believe stands for anything, so it's simply irksome), founded twelve years earlier by a consortium that included, curiously enough, William Shatner.  It did relatively bustling business for a decade and a half as a contractor on live-action productions (they also did TV animation), with a competency evidently ranging from 1994's Johnny Mnemonic to 2008's Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and while it was mostly shifting macroeconomic conditions that led to the studio shuttering in 2010, it is unlikely that The Wild helped.  It had transpired that in or around 2004, Disney pumped C.O.R.E. full of cash on behalf of The Wild, with the proximate goal of hiring enough people to make a movie, but with the evident long-term goal of reorienting the VFX firm towards becoming a full-fledged animation company, specifically a fully-rendered CGI animation company, specifically a CGI animation company like Pixar was a CGI animation company, and this not-coincidentally came about at roughly the time that the relationship between Disney and Pixar was at its lowest ebb and the latter was considering ditching the former.  The former, meanwhile, was already in the process of abandoning traditional animation, rebuilding their own wholly-owned studio, WDFA, to function as yet another CGI cartoon factory; but there seems to have been some belief that with WDFA as-yet untested, and with Pixar seeming to be on the verge of going its own way, a back-up would be nice.  Then Disney bought Pixar, and after that, it became entirely unclear what further purpose their relationship with C.O.R.E. served.

As for The Wild, it was already done, so they released it and all.  But here's where I don't even feel that comfortable speculating what happened with it, without disclosing that what I have read is only rumormongering made without citation.  It seems like it could be true: essentially that The Wild did indeed originate at Disney as a project for their other short-lived CGI cartoon factory, The Secret Lab, as a follow-up to The Secret Lab's sole feature film, Dinosaur; and that these origins therefore went back to the 20th century, with the idea consigned to mothballs for a few years but, nevertheless, with some basic development work complete before it was transferred to C.O.R.E.  The reason this is tantalizing is that one of the reasons The Wild did so poorly at the box office and one of the reasons The Wild received so much critical scorn—to get it out there, one of the reasons, for The Wild is also pretty bad, which could also be a reason—is that it was beaten to the punch by nearly a year (and in fact it seems the film was delayed by several months on account of this) by DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar, and this is germane because The Wild and Magascar are basically the same movie, to the extent that while both films frequently use the phrase "the wild" to mean the wilderness/jungle, on the order of a dozen times apiece, I think Madagscar actually uses it slightly more.  The very obvious supposition is that DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg set out to wreak vengeance once again upon his previous employer by undercutting them with a similar film his animation studio released first—making this a hat trick after the diptychs of Antz/A Bug's Life and The Road To El Dorado/The Emperor's New Groove*—and the older The Wild was, as a concept, the likelier it is that Katzenberg would've heard about it, and the likelier it would've been that he'd have committed DWA to the quest, since the balance of Katzenberg's vendetta was against, specifically, his ex-friend Michael Eisner, who left Disney in early 2004.

And holy moly, are they ever similar: Antz and A Bug's Life are similar in the sense that feature-length family cartoons about ants are likely to follow fairly inevitable patterns about messaging individualism, and they're pretty distinctive, while El Dorado and New Groove don't even actually share the same continent and have completely different stories; but Madgascar and The Wild?  They are, each of them, about a lion who lives at a zoo—a zoo in New York City!—who likes the zoo, and does not want to leave the zoo, but in order to rescue someone he cares about, he and a close band of multi-species friends depart the zoo and head out onto the streets—of New York!—and, as a result of their misadventure, they wind up in Africa, where they have no idea what they're doing and do not really belong.  Except now it's West Africa.  I mean, such a premise ("zoo animal escapes") is also likely to follow fairly inevitable patterns, even if how you end it comes down to temperament because either way you get an unobjectionable moral ("change is good" versus "there's no place like home"); but God, it seems downright actionable.  Well, whatever else, the outcome for Disney and C.O.R.E. was being excoriated by the majority of critics for ripping off Madagascar so brazenly, even though I have my doubts that they did (they were also excoriated for ripping off Pixar's 2003 film, Finding Nemo, which maybe they did, although it just shares a basic structure, not even a specific character dynamic, and it's incredibly too far to call a movie a "Finding Nemo rip off" because it has a father and a son in it), while a courageous few, perhaps more reasonably but with no hard evidence besides DWA tradition and the res ipsa loquitur of the movies they'd seen, accused Madagascar of ripping off The Wild.  I cannot resolve this mystery, if a mystery it be at all, and it doesn't really seem like enough people have ever cared enough to have resolved it for us.

I'll say this flatly: The Wild is better than Madagascar.  Admittedly, that is an enormously low bar, because I think Madagascar is awful, so that leaves a great deal of room for The Wild to not be good; but doing a nearly side-by-side comparison, as I have done, I'd think it difficult not to conclude that The Wild is at least putting vastly more energy into its business of being an obnoxious children's comedy, and, speaking more personally now, I think it also looks bad in a softer and more forgivable way.  That's not immediately apparent, for The Wild begins with a fairly belligerent gesture.  The beginning of the beginning—that is, the very first frames—constitute a parodic take on the Walt Disney castle logo, not so dissimilarly to Chicken Little, except Chicken Little was instantly parsable as a goof on Disney storybook openings generally, and this only makes sense as an incredibly opaque parody of The Lion King if you remember that the first shot of that film (notwithstanding the logo) was the sun rising, and as a narrator—our hero, Samson, a lion (Kiefer Sutherland)—keeps having to restart his tale, the "sun" keeps having to restart its arc over the Disney castle, expressing cartoonish frustration.  Which is odd since I generally perceive the glowing dot to be Tinkerbell.  Anyway, when Samson finds a story that pleases his young son (Greg Cipes), we are launched into some very aggressive stylization, regarding Samson's lone pursuit of a herd of grotesquely souped-up wildebeests across a notional, graphic-feeling, and occasionally almost two-dimensional landscape, and this tells us where we are in the history of early CGI with The Wild: it's bizarrely ambitious, and is writing checks its ass can't cash.  It works remarkably well with the wildebeests, who have been rendered "badly" in such a way that they look like moving background paintings, and it lends them a heaviness that's good for the danger they present; then Samson, heretofore a dynamic silhouette, bounds fully-lit into the scene and he's a plastic toy, rendered just-plain-badly in such a way that the best thing to say about it is that it resets your baseline, and makes the furred photorealism of the rest look better than maybe it should.

Samson, we find, is a lion at "the New York Zoo" (by which they mean the one in Central Park, not any of the outer boroughs, but not the one in Madagascar, and while neither one looks entirely like a plausible collection of spaces constituting "a zoo," The Wild's zoo at least looks much more like a zoo than Madagascar's incomprehensible series of waist-high fences looks like a zoo).  Samson's a popular fellow with the guests—he has been given the marketing sobriquet, "the Wild"—as well as with the other inhabitants of the zoo, particularly Benny, a loudmouthed squirrel (and I suppose not technically "a zoo animal"; Jim Belushi), Bridget, a sarcastic giraffe (Janeane Garofalo), Nigel, a clumsy koala (Suzy Izzard then d/b/a Eddie), and Larry, a deeply stupid anaconda (Richard Kind).  Unfortunately, Samson is having trouble with his cub, Ryan—I don't know which aside to lead with, "and where's his mom? where the narratively-superfluous parent always goes in family cartoons" or "wait, Ryan?"—who, and I quote, is "eleven, but he's still roaring at a nine year-old level," which should give you an idea of this film's relationship with ecological reality.  Ryan is basically having a very difficult time living in the shadow of his famous father, and he sulks, and acts out; for instance, in a prank gone wrong he ruins his dad's friends' big after-hours curling match with the penguins out on the ice rink, which I hope gives you an idea of the film's relationship with any facet of reality.  (This might be the film's funniest joke anyway, because it's an unstressed parody of The Lion King, where Samson upbraids his kid for causing "a stampede," in the zoo, that could have threatened their extremely domesticated way of life.  Perhaps as many as half the scenes here wind up resting on some measure or another of "unstressed parody of The Lion King," which I wouldn't say is easy to miss, but it does get frequently blotted out by the violently stressed nature of literally all of its other jokes.)

Well, Ryan is suitably ashamed, and winds up stowing away in one of the big green containers that get sent back to Africa for more animals, and by the time he's realized this is a terrible idea, he's on his way to the port.  To save him, Samson and company break out into Manhattan, have some scrapes with street animals that begin to suggest that, for all of Samson's braggadocious tales of prowess, maybe his history with "the wild" is less extensive than he's publicized, and finally the situation demands that they commandeer a tugboat to chase the container ship Ryan's on all the way across the Atlantic.  At their destination, they find the exigence for the voyage—a giant volcano is about to wipe out a large stretch of African biome, and the zoo is rescuing as many animals as possible—but they don't all find Ryan before a tribe of very strange and advanced wildebeests led by Kazar (this would be C.O.R.E. co-founder Shatner) finds them, and Kazar has been given a holy mission from God to uplift his people by the only way that makes sense in their milieu—these wildebeests are on the cusp of becoming carnivores, and all they need to complete their mystic transformation is to eat a couple of lions, cooked to perfection atop a thermal vent in their volcano lair because, like I said, half this movie is Lion King parody.

I am streamlining much more than you could imagine, but I hope that summary gets across one thing: The Wild gets motherfucking nuts.  (If you're not convinced, then Kazar is also his tribe's choreographer, and is constantly berating his lieutenant, Blag (Patrick Warburton), for screwing up the steps; the pity is that you can absolutely tell that C.O.R.E. bit off more than they could chew regarding the computer-melting full-length dance number this pretty much explicitly promises, and you can also tell exactly where they cut their effort short after a few disorienting cartoon gags, including a wildebeest's head protruding upside-down from the top of the frame.)  I don't know if this means "The Wild becomes a good funny animal cartoon," since I'm pretty sure it still doesn't, but it does become a more memorable one than I think anybody would have to initially peg it as.

Until this point, which arrives about 50 minutes into an 82 minute picture, it's more "normal" insofar as any early 21st century children's animated comedy ought to be normalized, though I did mention earlier that it struck me as unusually energetic about being an early 21st century children's animated comedy.  And to be clear: most of this is bad.  But in comparison to Madagascar, which is bad because when its jokes fall flat, it's because they're unfunny and nobody is bothering to pretend otherwise, The Wild is aggressively pushing its bad jokes into a place of anti-funniness, which I sort of prefer.  There's the very expected stuff: I would not hazard a firm guess as to the number of scatological jokes in this movie, for it is likely over two dozen, including jokes about things being stuck up there, though the one I believe I shall remember forever is the addling concept of Samson busting in on a hyrax (Colin Cunningham) taking a shit in a broken bamboo stump—this is quite explicit—that has the profound misjudgment to elaborate upon the joke by having the hyrax sarcastically look down into his "toilet" to look for the lost lion cub Samson is seeking, foisting his rear end up in the air so that we get a good sense of how this animal that was just taking a shit has no anus, but a simple gastrovascular cavity, so he should be defecating from his mouth, like a jellyfish or brittle star.  This is simply gross, of course, though the hyrax is also the venue for some genuinely inappropriate humor, regarding what rapidly resolves itself into some sort of vore kink, regarding his excitement over being potentially consumed by Samson, which is probably the keenest of the uncomfortable sex jokes in this cartoon, though the film is swamped with them thanks to a story-long pestering courtship between Benny and Bridget, which is to say, the squirrel and the giraffe.  At the risk of spoiling things, it's requited with a kiss.

Again, I don't know if this is even "funny" let alone "good," but it's at least compellingly wrong, which is a distinct but related quality I don't mind seeing, and by-and-large everyone is committing to their weird and misshapen characters—Belushi and Shatner are, I think, having a genuinely good time throwing themselves into the what-the-fuckness of their characters, and the principals enjoy a roundedness to their personalities thanks to their celebrity performers that (not to keep comparing this to Madagascar) is pretty different from Madagascar's lazy celebrity performances and reliance on kid's komedy stereotypes as a counterbalance to that laziness.  (Izzard is the only one that I think isn't trying hard, possibly because the material provided makes the koala's dialogue the most annoying out of the whole cast; but then, the plot function of the koala sure is something.)  Now, look: I have to give the movie credit for never losing sight of what it's principally "about," a father coming clean with the son he's accidentally made feel worthless, and reconnecting with him over the course of an adventure.  If it's not, by dint of how it's been made mostly as a collection of, alternately, annoyingly juvenile and concerningly boundary-pushing jokes, all that effective at telling an emotional story, then it's still trying, and there are glimmers of success, particularly with the "reveal" that's not much of a reveal to us, but is specific enough in its details to make itself worth saving till the third act.  And even with its maintenance of that focus, there's something fascinatingly broken about The Wild.  The film was directed by Steve "Spaz" Williams, a VFX artist formerly of Industrial Light & Magic and not previously any kind of director, and I don't know if that inexperience had any hand in it, but it really does feel like The Wild up and gets bored with itself a little over halfway through, and I can understand why it might—for instance, it trots out some of the most miserably earnest pop song montages I've ever seen in its attempt to convey Ryan's melancholy, and I don't think it's having any fun with its emotional story until its plot has been allowed to rattle apart with whatever zany or even eyebrow-raising idea the scenarists (or whoever!) felt like putting into the movie.  Williams's signal success here, to the extent it is a success, is flogging those ideas at us fast, so that I don't think a viewer could remain bored with The Wild.  (Which is certainly not the case with Madagascar, which I honestly had trouble finishing.)  It starts feeling desperate, but only in a really negative way right at the close, when we get that face-searingly obligatory dance party ending.

Maybe I would go so far as call it "alright" if it looked better (probably not, because a lot of the comedy here is very terrible, and if I haven't dwelled on the really bad stuff, it's that it's terrible in merely ordinary ways—just for one example, then, take the two Brooklynite crocodiles they meet in the sewer, who do dialect/New York geography "jokes" for what feels like a month).  Still, it looks about as good as I think you could possibly expect it to, given its origins and its vintage.  It certainly takes getting used to: there is an uncanniness to the photorealistic textures of a high mid-budget CGI film from 2006 that never totally goes away, but it mostly gets fur right, and the mixture of "realistic" animal movement and cartoonish anthropomorphism is surprisingly graceful.  As far as the expressivity of the figures goes, there's a grotesqueness to the technological level it's operating at that I think it's actively courting, so I can't necessarily complain about it (and it looks most grotesque in stills, rather than in motion); Madagascar helps, which attempted an angular stylization and failed so hard at it that ordinarily-ugly early photorealism was somehow soothing to me.  So if I'm really let down, it's just in how many blatant shortcuts it's taking.  Most thoroughgoingly, there's the cheating it's doing with spaces that ought to be filled with humans, but are as still as a tomb; though most prominently, it's in the last half of the last act, when they've decided to randomly reorient the movie's plot again (by way of what I'm afraid I must describe as "secret agent chameleons"), but in a way that I would've enjoyed, as a matter of theory, both narratively and visually; only they obviously didn't have the ability to do the visual justice, but unlike the dance number that mostly got left on the storyboards, they couldn't really juke their way out of its depiction.

I'm probably being overindulgent to a movie that practically tells you it doesn't respect its own existence, but there is a boldness this occasions—the alternative, I've seen with my own eyes, is flatlining completely into children's entertainment mush.  I don't think I like it, but I don't believe I could find it in my heart to hate it the way I'm supposed to.

Score: 5/10

*And some would add Flushed Away/Ratatouille and Shark Tale/Finding Nemo, but these are less convincing for various reasons.