Disney's Challengers: Put it in a flower pot and you'll see what you shall see

THUMBELINA

1994

Written and directed by Don Bluth (based on the story "Tommelise" by Hans Christian Andersen)

Spoilers: moderate

The mission that Don Bluth perceived that he'd been given, when he departed Disney in dissatisfaction in 1979, was to restore to the medium of animation the power and grandeur that he remembered from his youth, and while what Bluth considered to be powerful and grand in animation is rather idiosyncratic, for Bluth it was clearly located in a primordial past, when Walt Disney himself was still alive, still passionate about cartoons, and his missteps had not yet laid his studio low.  I'm not sure how conscious of it Bluth was himself, but the way that drive manifested across his first five films, it doesn't even seem quite limited to a quest to revive only Disney's "Golden Age" (though of course Disney's Golden Age looms unmistakably over all of Bluth's early films), but to go back even further, to recapture the creative ferment of the mid-1930s that brought about that Golden Age, and recreate, from first principles, a whole new idea of American feature animation, so while we can return to this idea a little later, I think it's suggestive that Bluth's first film of 1994—Thumbelina—kicks off with what I have to interpret as a gesture not towards Snow White, but to the even earlier "The Old Mill," probably the most powerful and grand of Disney's Silly Symphonies, and then spends like twenty minutes resembling the only animated feature film of the 1940s that Disney didn't make, Fleischer Studios' Mr. Bug Goes To Town.

There were a few big problems with this approach, and one of the biggest, by 1994 (for indeed it had happened some years earlier), was that what had by now been rechristened Walt Disney Feature Animation was itself doing something along (philosophically) similar lines, and, with The Little Mermaid going forward, Disney had been infinitely more successful at reconceiving American feature animation in a new old fashioned way for the 1980s and 1990s than Bluth and his compatriots ever were.  This meant, amongst other things, that Bluth and financier Morris Sullivan's animation studio, which wasn't even Bluth's first studio, had been pushed into bankruptcy in 1992, with Sullivan retiring and the company renamed, simply, "Don Bluth Entertainment" (I can't tell you what Gary Goldman or John Pomeroy thought about any of these names) even as it tottered on the edge of oblivion.  The Los Angeles branch of Bluth's operation effectively closed down; its Dublin branch clung to existence by virtue, or whatever, of its employees remaining technically on-staff but not getting paid.  Rescue arrived in the form of two firms, Merlin Films, John Boorman's outfit, alongside the rather less artistic-sounding Media Assets, but neither turned out to all be anything but concerned with the bottom line when it came to funding Bluth, for as they surveyed the three projects Bluth then had at various stages of development, their judgment was that even though it wasn't the one closest to completion, Bluth's next film was going to be Thumbelina whether he liked it or not, because they'd identified it as the most marketable—and, by 1992, "the most marketable, in the face of Disney," was essentially synonymous with "the one easiest to trick audiences into thinking it was Disney," though for the most part audiences weren't fooled.

Now, it'd be even more straightforward if Thumbelina had been outright forced upon Bluth, but because it was already far along in development, it's at least hard not to believe that Disney's nemesis was already making something like the same commercial calculations, even if he's never admitted it.  Bluth's autobiography not only doesn't really capture the genesis of Thumbelina—nor even anything as minimal as fixing the production history it does contain to any specific years—but in the way Bluth relates disconnected vignettes related to its production, you could get legitimately suspicious that he misremembered that Thumbelina actually was prioritized and released six months earlier than the film that entered production before it, A Troll In Central Park.*  The most I think we know about the early days of Thumbelina is that Bluth had contracted Carol Lynn Pearson, a fellow Mormon but also best-known even then as an advocate for queer acceptance in the LDS church (for, inter alia, the church had saddled her with the avoidable grief of a gay husband who died of AIDS), which I mention mostly because of how it may reframe some background assumptions one may or may not have about Bluth (along similar lines, he was also a relatively early proponent of women in animation and his studio reflected this at least somewhat), but not because it's terribly enlightening to the subject at hand; Pearson's screenplay for Thumbelina was ultimately rejected (it is unclear whether "mostly" or "entirely"), particularly because Bluth felt that Pearson's rendition of the heroine was too weak—yeah, let's table that for now!—and her plotting insufficiently action-oriented.

The unanswered question that I find the most urgent, anyway, concerns when exactly Thumbelina was conceived as a project for Bluth Entertainment: when All Dogs Go To Heaven had threatened the continued existence of Bluth's studio, which is to say, the year The Little Mermaid came out, or when Rock-a-Doodle virtually ensured the extinction of Bluth's studio, that is, three years after The Little Mermaid came out?  Either way, any question about the origins of Thumbelina that does not include the words "The Little Mermaid" couldn't possibly be very close to getting to the heart of the matter.  The thing would speak substantially for itself even if all it were doing was being a musical version of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, which it certainly isn't, since besides the numerous littler knock-off touches it's attempting that are generically "cartoon" or even generically "movie" enough that we might let them slide otherwise (an aggressively-accented comedy sidekick, a sufficiently greater emphasis on the male romantic lead of Andersen's story we can halfway-reasonably call him "a male romantic lead"), it's a musical version of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale starring Jodi Benson in the title role.  And good grief, Bluth's story is that it was inspired by seeing the 1952 Danny Kaye musical about Andersen, but if that's your casting, then I don't know what it could avail you not to admit you're doing it on purpose, I just want to know if you did it on your own initiative or if your financiers made you.  (Now, another question does come to mind, only slightly less pertinent, which involves the words, or word, "FernGully," the film that kicked Rock-a-Doodle's ass in 1992, despite not being made by Disney, but by Bill Kroyer and his wife Sue, the former having previously been a representative of the third, loosely-associated faction that existed back at Disney in the late 70s, who were just as disgusted with Disney's fade into self-sabotaging irrelevance as Bluth was, but disdained Bluth's nostalgic yearning for Walt's Disney at least as much.)

Where this gets interesting, or something like that, is that regardless of which way Bluth was "doing it on purpose," he very patently didn't want to, or at least didn't know how to, actually make a counterfeit Disney Renaissance film, and so if it's the latter we do at least have Thumbelina to thank for being the instructive Goofus to Anastasia's exemplary Gallant.  But that's three years hence, and this is now, and now sucks, in great part because of this reluctance or inability.  Nonetheless, as long as you weren't too aware of the film's reputation, I think you could maintain some real optimism about Bluth in Disney Renaissance mode for a couple dozen minutes out of its total of 86, though its very first couple of minutes might make that difficult, right out of the gate attacking us with a certain Jacquimo (Gino Conforti), a swallow and our narrator and also a character within the narrative, albeit in a greatly expanded and rather reconceived role than what Andersen gave his Thumbelina's avian rescuer, as he's now unaccountably French (Andersen's bird migrated to southern Europe; Bluth's Thumbelina takes place in—northern—France), and also dressed as a clashily-colored commedia dell'arte clown with even less, which is to say, I believe literally no, justification for it (and while not the last character to be dressed so, by no means is it a "theme" or "motif" either, just weird chaos, and Bluth's autobiography, with a subtlety present nowhere else in that book and thus indicating he probably really didn't mean it this way, throws character designer Rowland Wilson completely under the bus for this and for all the many other terrible character designs here).

We meet Jacquimo on the wing as he flies through a stunningly not-ready-for-primetime CGI multiplane tableau of Paris, roughly equivalent to Aladdin's Cave of Wonders sequence but right off the bat and paired with Bluth's customary doomy color palette even though that's not appropriate yet, and Jacquimo is singing this musical's first song—all its songs' words by Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman, with their music, for some reason, by Barry Manilow—called "Follow Your Heart," which would slide off the brain a little easier if Jacquimo, having completed about one verse of this song, didn't insist on his song's quality in dialogue, then purport to make an exegesis of its lyrics in dialogue ("you can do impossible things/if you follow your heart" means that "if you follow your heart, nothing is impossible," savvy?) as if they represented poetry of the most oblique sort, not soundtrack-filler already written for the comprehension of four year-olds.  (Intermixed with this is other direct address with ill-advised word choice if our narrator is going to keep identifying himself as a "swallow," though I concede that being discomfited by "I am a passionate swallow" is arguably my problem.)  As for impossible things, Jacquimo would like to tell us a story about impossible love, and gesturing towards a few classics of that usually-tragic genre, settles on another text instead (cutely tiny, repulsively pink-bound), namely Thumbelina, a story about a woman who is incredibly small, around an inch and a half in stature, but of course still desires romantic love, which would pose a pretty overwhelming dramatic impossibility if, as soon as her yearning was established, she weren't immediately courted by an incredibly small, around an inch and a half in stature, magical man.

Well, that's getting ahead of ourselves, and once Bluth's overcooked version of a Disney storybook opening has given way to the actual narrative, it's not nearly so wretched: a spinster farmer (Barbara Cook) has acquired from a good witch a flower which, upon its bloom, births a tiny child, or rather a physical and cognitive late adolescent more-or-less already looking to establish her own household, so it's a little confusing, though in fairness it's probably the most accurate interpretation of the absence of childrearing in Andersen's tale, even if I can't really see the point of the miracle.  The girl is named Thumbelina (Benson), and there's some reasonably genial cartooning here with this miniature person's doomed attempts to provide labor to her mother's farm; and Thumbelina's first act offers plenty of pleasure for anyone who enjoys this kind of play with scale, including the film's single best image, of Thumbelina standing atop an open collection of fairy tales where the illustration of a handsome fairy prince is approximately her size, which has the extra fortune of coinciding with the best strains of Benson's performance, especially in a question to her mother, regarding love, (I may be slightly paraphrasing) "doesn't it work better if they're about the same size?", where you come real damn close to perceiving a freestanding reason to hire the actor who portrayed Disney's greatest and most human princess in the way Benson asks that question, making it very clear she is thinking in terms of emotional dynamics but also sexual mechanics, without pushing that anywhere beyond a matter-of-fact request for confirmation of what she already knows.  (Unfortunately, subsequent shots of the book, placed upright, give us a better look at a different illustration of the fairy prince, and his unpleasantly-sarcastic smirk, which I guess is production designer Rowland Wilson's fault.)

Thumbelina is about to get a more-or-less conclusive resolution for her problem, anyway, with the arrival of the real fairy prince Cornelius (Gary Imhof) (Cornelius?), presently wandering off from his fairy parents (Kenneth Mars—Don Bluth will have you know he never even saw The Little Mermaid—and the august June Foray) on their autumnal parade, so if The Land Before Time was Bluth's riff on Fantasia's "Rite of Spring", Thumbelina has got "The Nutcracker Suite" covered, with its mystical imagery of a year's seasonal cycle structuring a movie that we will politely refrain from pointing out doesn't feel like it takes place over longer than 72 hours.  Whatever else goes wrong with Thumbelina, it will retain the Bluth outfit's customarily outstanding effects animation, and while the loving care put into it punches through even harder from time to time (I'm incredibly impressed by "snow" that we'll later see falling through the light from a window, that someone put in the obsessive effort to recolor reflected gold, and I mean holy moly), I don't think Thumbelina ever gets as purely-pretty as this again: Cornelius takes Thumbelina on a magical flight, promising love in what we'll retroactively recognize as probably the movie's best song** (and now we have an amped up revision of Bluth's 90 seconds or so of animation for Xanadu), and they're practically informally engaged by the end of it because it was so wondrous and backlit.  (The wing animation on the fairies and Cornelius in particular almost infuriates me, given that "doing effects animation contract work for the Kroyers on FernGully" would have been a better use of Bluth's time and resources than Thumbelina, and it's just not fair that the far superior early-90s non-Disney animated film couldn't do full justice to fairies in flight, the thing that one's actually about.  Now, it is apples and oranges, slightly: FernGully has to do it much more, which in a roundabout way will wind up being one of the strikes against Thumbelina).

So no particularly salient problems, albeit maybe some incipient ones, like more-or-less solving the (Little Mermaidesque!) dramatic arc of the movie in the first twenty-ish minutes by virtue of a love story that you could charitably call "elemental" and uncharitably call "featureless and insipid," or a male hero with an unacceptable haircut, or what amounts to the first substantial character animation of humans (or more-or-less humans) in a Bluth film, with fewer weaknesses specific to that than you'd probably think there would be, though Bluthian animation principles remain in full effect, which means that this movie's director was asking every animator every day why for every last second of footage they haven't delivered twelve individual drawings of their characters moving whether it's useful for those characters or not, spinning in a circle if need be.  (Sometimes, possibly, twenty-four drawings for every second: some of the movie's most pointless stimming has a kind of "on-ones" complexion that's weirdly fluid, with the character moving seamlessly but almost like they're in slow motion.)  But there is, so far, very little that is aggravatingly bad, and a fair amount that shows real potential for loveliness and maybe even a reasonable facsimile of a story, enough that no matter what happens, we can already safely declare it better than Rock-a-Doodle (and, not to spoil anything, but I personally like it better than All Dogs).  Take all of the foregoing together, you can even sort of look at it like Bluth's own Snow White, an analogy that makes more chronological sense with The Secret of NIMH, of course, but there's not actually a Bluth film more constitutionally similar to Snow White than Thumbelina—goodness, Snow White solves its heroine's romantic yearnings even earlier than this movie does, and I think it would require a Bluthlike reverence for the Source of All Cel Animated Feature Cartoons to argue Snow White is better-drafted or more interesting to look at than Thumbelina—and Snow White worked out pretty well.  All it needed to do now was find a new dramatic conflict, which in these circumstances pretty much means "a villain."

The movie does, and in doing so, destroys itself.  Maybe "Thumbelina" is just bad—I think the Andersen story is awfully sleepy, and in Bluth's resistance to figuring out how his erstwhile colleagues and present adversaries at Disney were making successful adaptations of fairy tales, it's instead as structurally-faithful an adaptation of one as I imagine the 1990s ever produced at this level of technical accomplishment, with the creaky and arguably-never-good bones of Andersen's scenario, which at least was kind of about something (the constrained possibilities of marriage), getting fleshed out with "novelty," in a manner that doesn't change their essence, though the "novelty" feels like what somebody at Fleischers or even, like, Harman & Ising would've done with "Thumbelina" in a short film released circa 1936.  I mean that in a derogatory way, though it also does it with modern technology, and the brutally clear demarcation between the fine and miserable parts of Thumbelina is another one of those out-of-date "experiments" with CGI regarding a 3-D marsh and a computer-assisted "crane" shot during the first five seconds of which Thumbelina, certainly for the only time in this Bluth film, is represented by a blatantly obvious held frame, and the held frame isn't even her sleeping, it's her regaining consciousness and stretching.  It is humiliating that this could've shown up in a finished animated film intended to compete directly with Disney.

So, you see, during Thumbelina and Cornelius's airborne romantic idyll, Thumbelina caught the attention of a toad, Grundel (Joe Lynch), who determines that he shall have the beautiful diminutive creature, and his mother contrives to steal Thumbelina and deliver her to her son as his wife, and that's essentially just the Andersen, except the mother is the entertainer and celebrity, Charo, and I cannot imagine why this must be, except to offer its connection to Bluth's final film at Disney, the one he walked off of, The Fox and the Hound, whose director Wolfgang Reitherman was forced off that picture.  One of the reasons why, I've heard, is that he had wanted Charo for that movie, to play a fox hamming it up with her shrill presence in what was a melancholy and quiet fable about a friendship pulled apart by the unfairness of social roles, so I guess we can just speculate that Bluth was fulfilling the last wish of his old friend's career regardless of or else insensate to just how fucking stupid and arbitrary that wish was.  Neither Mrs. Toad nor her offspring actually manage to ascend to "this film's principal antagonist," which is almost a secondary concern anyhow, because Charo means they're Spanish, and the only way you could defend it as anything besides flabbergastingly racist is because these racist toads are, on the purest technicality, supposed to be European.  Well, in turn, Grundel is succeeded by Berkeley Beetle (Gilbert Gottfreid, preceding his vastly less-irritating voice performance in Aladdin, but also only on pure technicality), and by Mr. Mole (John Hurt) and his subservient neighbor, Ms. Fieldmouse (Carol Channing).  The male contingent of the rest of that dramatis personae has basically the same idea as the toad—one has to expend a fair amount of goodwill, incidentally, just to meet this adaptation where it lives in respect to all these vermin getting hot for the human broad—each attempting to coerce her into marriage by means more or less foul; meanwhile, our hero Cornelius is pointlessly meandering about all creation, presumably because the Andersenian text doesn't permit him to do anything yet, which means the difference is split on the damsel-rescuing duties with Jacquimo, though Bluth seems to have overlooked that if the bird can just carry Thumbelina later, which he does (because he did in the Andersen), he could have solved her entire crisis on their much-earlier first encounter, here.

It's all grindingly vignettish going forward, and always bad, with the most you can say being that it finds different modes of bad: the overtly 1930s (or 1940s) part, the one that exists to homage Mr. Bug Goes To Town, at least rises to the level of invigoratingly bad, with Berkeley Beetle masquerading his captive woman as a female beetle and enforcing her participation in a concert for the other beetles, gussied up in a complex "beetle" costume that's bizarrely Deco and tremendously well-animated, and accompanied by a song that is at least the other best song in the movie, not really "like" Taco's 1982 cover of "Puttin' On the Ritz," because that's a genuinely good song, but you will understand what I mean when I say they share a spirit of modernizing something that is obviously anchored in the early 20th century.  The sequence is unfortunately shabbily-told in its narrative dimensions—it'll turn on Berkeley quailing before the judgment of his arthropod peers who think his human slave is ugly, which isn't set up, and in any event starts slapping you in the face with the incongruity of why the toads and the moles want to fuck her—and it's of course front-to-back Gottfried ad-libbing sexually aggressive dialogue, of which I'm sure I don't need to elaborate why that's just inherently detrimental to how much you'll enjoy either the movie, or the remainder of your life on earth after you hear it.  The mole stuff is still worse because it's just plum dull, this satire of a money-marriage, exposited by arguably the movie's worst song courtesy Channing, with the mole shown to have a Scrooge McDuck repository of actual money, like coins, like he buys things at the store, which even Andersen didn't suppose.  The one neat thing, an intrusion of Bluthy darkness in the form of a chamber of pinned dead insects, feels less neat than it should, because despite insects being people here and despite the prospect being raised in dialogue, it doesn't go anywhere, even visually, so it's only "concerning" rather than "nightmarish."

There was ever much prospect of a good movie once Bluth put his Disneyesque musical fantasy adventure romance onto its Andersenian rails (the prospect of a good movie that did something with its most fascinating notions, which are to the side of Andersen and all revolve around the fairies as harbingers of the seasons, bound by cosmic rules regardless of their personal wishes, and siting its conflict somewhere in the middle of that, does get occasionally suggested, but it's obviously too little and too late).  But the nigh-on unwatchability of this Thumbelina might just be down to Thumbelina herself.  So remember when I said Bluth's problem with Pearson's script (and, going by the credits, which he rewrote all by himself) was that her Thumbelina was too weak?  It boggles the mind to wonder what she must've been like then, because Snow fucking White would've called Bluth's Thumbelina a moron, and Aurora would've called her a pussy, and Ariel would, in her newfound disgust with humanity, have retired to a life of idle partying under the sea.  I remarked that Benson is at least good for the first act; she is swallowed alive by the non-character—the anti-character—that Thumbelina becomes once the nonsensically psuedo-faithful phase of the film opens up, having to react to such things as the Charo Toad attempting to inveigle her with musical stardom, so she'll remain and allow her son to fertilize her eggs (gosh, talk about your mechanical difficulties), with tantalization, because that's what the musical sequence requires now, and which shall be partly represented by the unnervingly long time Thumbelina spends, probably looking "at" the Charo Toad's dance move, but drawn in such a way to suggest she's caressing the freakish, spherically-titted amphibian's whole body with her eyes.  We can chalk that up to heightened "musical" reality, if you want (she seems to experience similar joy when the insect puts her in his all-beetle revue), so we will consider instead Thumbelina abandoned on a lilypad that's pulled direct from the fairy tale, and is staged such that your lasting impression of the character is that she doesn't even bother trying, just whining, until someone saves her, even though there's no obvious reason within that staging that she would not succeed in saving herself with trivial ease.  Later, after her stint in Beetletown goes bad due to beetle racism, she will weep, having been successfully convinced she's ugly, and yes, it's Andersen again, but unless we're as stupid as Thumbelina, in the movie, the prince of Goddamn fairies (amongst others!) has just pledged his eternal love to her.

There's at least some very late-coming attempts towards making Thumbelina active in the climax with her mole suitor, though it's pretty addled and comes with the new problem that, despite not one but two other heroic characters who are almost protagonists, they pretty much don't accomplish shit in this movie either.  And given that this musical is committed to a fault to expending what little narrative energy it has on Thumbelina's bland ball of inertia and inconsistency, you might think, "at least it has Benson, so it will not sound bad, like Rock-a-Doodle, or ungodly horrible, like All Dogs Go To Heaven."  This much is, to be fair, true.  Yet it will surprise you, and perhaps gall you, to learn that its "get" of a female lead feels like she might literally not sing as much as she did back in her mermaid movie, where the whole plot was she lost her voice not even halfway through it.  It is, anyway, certainly galling to think of Bluth's continued quixotic quest, and the way he had put together a truly talented group of artists (which could, within his limitations, include himself), apparently without considering over the course of two back-to-back flops that maybe his way was wrong.  Everything I've been told about Bluth's next efforts don't suggest that he learned that lesson here, either.

Score: 3/0

*I'm even slightly convinced he did.  The section on Troll concludes, "The next movie, I kept telling myself, the next movie will change everything," and the next section is devoted to Thumbelina.  In fairness, as he notes, he is 99 days older than Snow White.

**As for these lyrics, he promises he'll show her a whole new world.  However, that world is specifically "Saturn."  They're pretty much all this clunky.