tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46334802973528903142024-03-18T18:45:39.335-11:00KinemalogueGood taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than noneHunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.comBlogger1111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-12794562062253528612024-03-16T21:37:00.076-11:002024-03-18T09:46:37.515-11:00Walt Disney, part L: It's not my fault, if in God's plan, he made the Devil so much stronger than a man<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRcIP8mNSIKeS8YunM-WZbAhGlwhpptnNbOt8ymE7SW-a7rs01o9rn3QjkruYgXtnk5PBD5VQsEiKEaiRpeMletP3TRpYnJj3FKgR63rSaLpLF9JnY3Mly25wweHvD8ghP-fyxErqLKneNk-hA1nNFpUOAVlB8-Z1r3-LdRtDYfof0NcgqBlb7q7Sx1tsR/s600/Hunchback1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="400" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRcIP8mNSIKeS8YunM-WZbAhGlwhpptnNbOt8ymE7SW-a7rs01o9rn3QjkruYgXtnk5PBD5VQsEiKEaiRpeMletP3TRpYnJj3FKgR63rSaLpLF9JnY3Mly25wweHvD8ghP-fyxErqLKneNk-hA1nNFpUOAVlB8-Z1r3-LdRtDYfof0NcgqBlb7q7Sx1tsR/w266-h400/Hunchback1.png" width="266" /></a></div><br />THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1996</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Tab Murphy, Irene Mecchi, Bob Tzudiker, Noni White, and Jonathan Roberts (based on the novel </i>Notre-Dame de Paris<i> by Victor Hugo)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: high<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNkituhzSZVrtXrxVyFGWg6CjKqv7g7zmzq8eXJdBPL5cLWc20TECKU7z_xuWQSjXuaVnNv4eaTkRlLm8czBiX0THnRN-QKR4fOR6IYYhj_i-4qpczztNnb-w7CrmaMnjdoCr9NK1w5_8snCxma54uiEaMHqkiPE9SF4XSTGvpRsdNEvVeWgsqKUB_YzhT/s960/Hunchback2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNkituhzSZVrtXrxVyFGWg6CjKqv7g7zmzq8eXJdBPL5cLWc20TECKU7z_xuWQSjXuaVnNv4eaTkRlLm8czBiX0THnRN-QKR4fOR6IYYhj_i-4qpczztNnb-w7CrmaMnjdoCr9NK1w5_8snCxma54uiEaMHqkiPE9SF4XSTGvpRsdNEvVeWgsqKUB_YzhT/w400-h225/Hunchback2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />With <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>, the Walt Disney animated feature arrives upon a milestone: its first film where the comic relief has actually managed to substantially ruin it. The easiest thing here would be to say that with the advent of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">Aladdin</a></i>, and specifically Robin Williams's Genie, family animation had not been given merely the permission to pursue laughs regardless of the consequences, it'd been handed the outright obligation. Otherwise, the movie would be deemed "too serious," which is exactly what happened with <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/03/walt-disney-part-xlviii-at-minute-of-my.html">Pocahontas</a></i>. It's perhaps what happened here, as it wasn't very successful either (significantly higher-budgeted than <i>Pocahontas</i>, it was, in fact, almost not even profitable); but by God, they certainly gave it their best try, which is the same thing as saying their worst. I don't want to pretend that old-school Disney comedy wasn't frequently awful in its own right, but this would be the way going forward. And thus do we have <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>: a movie about infanticide, genocide, rape, torture, the misuse of state power, and Catholicism, that's funny.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Let's amend that right now: <i>supposed</i> to be funny. This is, and has always been, <i>Hunchback</i>'s infamy, namely being a very good movie that also has <i>those Goddamned gargoyles</i>, the consensus pick for the Disney comic relief that does the most damage to the movie they happen to be in, because of how much <i>Hunchback</i>'s comedy interferes with <i>Hunchback</i>'s everything else. However, let us correct both of the myths that attend the gargoyles here: the gargoyles are <i>not</i> funny, period, not solely because they trivialize a narrative tinged with historic horror; and it's not <i>just </i>the gargoyles, so saying "let's just mentally edit the gargoyles out" lets a ton of other misplaced comedy off the hook, such as the majority of everything to do with the heroine's sidekick goat, or those dumbfuck gags revolving around that horse's ass, or the interruption of the climactic battle, upon which turns rape, genocide, etc., with a "man falls in sewer" bit. I will admit only that "man falls in sewer," concluding a runner about an accident-prone old codger, <i>could've</i> been funny somewhere else.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi69ysRYd0VVc5I4PvViGM7z8PKWG2XzEnc-HDoM3RC_lVLu7oAmxur78vUCDTLdYdeFu7bmmrNMtrv0pb1AqKqYgDaKTEx4N5VpFuHTLVe_0djiEF4clh8hcUl0qQl-mYXE9crJuGKcckgLux6mez5FOtwELTp6nzSuB97_dkUvjSEZA1N6LZ2XAGzSQte/s960/Hunchback3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi69ysRYd0VVc5I4PvViGM7z8PKWG2XzEnc-HDoM3RC_lVLu7oAmxur78vUCDTLdYdeFu7bmmrNMtrv0pb1AqKqYgDaKTEx4N5VpFuHTLVe_0djiEF4clh8hcUl0qQl-mYXE9crJuGKcckgLux6mez5FOtwELTp6nzSuB97_dkUvjSEZA1N6LZ2XAGzSQte/w400-h225/Hunchback3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Now, I said the <i>easy</i> thing is to blame all this on <i>Aladdin</i>. That's the settled wisdom, and I mostly agree with it, though I have also sat through 91 minutes of hearing directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise and producer Don Hahn talk about <i>Hunchback</i>, and they sure don't <i>sound</i> like their hands were forced. After all, we can draw a line straight through 1992's <i>Aladdin</i> and back to 1991 and the directors' own <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i>, for <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> is prone to the exact same crap, only in more forgiving circumstances, because they'd established that film's villains as somewhat-comic figures themselves, and not<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>you know<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a seething mass of religious repression and racist hypocrisy. But <i>Aladdin</i> probably bears responsibility for the shocking strain of anachronism in <i>Hunchback</i>'s humor.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for the film around that, it at least touches greatness. It is, of course, based on the Victor Hugo novel <i>Notre-Dame de Paris</i>, with significant influence from previous film adaptations, particularly William Dieterle's 1939 version, though the most Hugo-indifferent changes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I don't even mean the gargoyles, which are, in fact, marginally text-based; rather, I mean the elevation of its English-language titular character to a true protagonist, and giving him his hearing back to simplify things<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>seem to be its own innovations. Even so, it's evidently not as far off as I'd assumed (which leads me to believe that the novel<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which I'll be shocked if I ever even try to read<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>probably uses a majority of its 940 pages for digressions about architecture). It is, needless to say, unfaithful in many of the ways you'd expect the Disney cartoon version to be: besides the establishment of something like a heroic center, its other hero (which is already another, enormous change) is way less of a womanizing shithead; France has a <i>king</i> in the book, not just a weird vacuum of power filled by a chief judge; the heroine is the broadly correct hue for a 15th century Roma with minimal European admixture, and the wrong hue for the revelations the novel gets up to, which is to say, those revelations are dropped, along with the most reprehensible behavior Hugo associates with Roma culture*; and the goth ending is changed to be mostly its opposite, for as Wise later noted, nobody ever wanted to make a movie that ended with everybody dead. But the <i>villain</i>... well, again, I've never read the book, but while they changed his occupation to avoid offending the whinier Catholics, the villain looks to be <i>substantially</i> the same.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid7UetD0WP88dYCdqQQ7Fg-4TvlPzcdjAX0zJOChxcesZfTwnIUA6WEyAMDqDk0VdEeyrbqAgdrgxTbs-W4bjxROPEDVszj21bq_iGRcRxNvbK7agJUf52UO8Fao-_YdD6uAMldfH86TKv3Ed1UpH4LpcmNS50saLVfLYYL46HHxzLZC1Wzj9jxFzdawuZ/s960/Hunchback6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid7UetD0WP88dYCdqQQ7Fg-4TvlPzcdjAX0zJOChxcesZfTwnIUA6WEyAMDqDk0VdEeyrbqAgdrgxTbs-W4bjxROPEDVszj21bq_iGRcRxNvbK7agJUf52UO8Fao-_YdD6uAMldfH86TKv3Ed1UpH4LpcmNS50saLVfLYYL46HHxzLZC1Wzj9jxFzdawuZ/w400-h225/Hunchback6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />This was the endpoint of Disney's development process, and to my understanding it had one of the easier times of it (perhaps even because of its fraughtness<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>perhaps that made it obvious what to change). First conceived by executive David Stainton in 1993, it was handed to Trousdale and Wise, who were sufficiently intrigued that they don't seem to have ever complained that they had to drop the project they'd been developing, a film about Orpheus (gosh, if you want to talk about fraught material), with <i>Hercules</i> soon preempting even the possibility of it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The story, then, as Disney would have it, wound up like this: in late 15th century Paris, we have the Roma street performer Clopin (Paul Kandel), who would like to tell us about the ringer of the bells at Notre-Dame, called Quasimodo (Tom Hulce), his name already suggesting something of his physical constitution, though to the extent this version of Quasimodo is afflicted with disability, it truly is only a social one; we'll discover soon that ringing bells all day will get you <i>fucking jacked</i>, capable of lifting dudes in armor off the ground with one hand and navigating the walls, roofs, and interiors of Notre Dame like a man with radioactive blood. But first, however, Clopin must hearken back to Quasimodo's sad origins, which Quasimodo did not then know himself: twenty years before our story begins in earnest, a Roma family, including Quasimodo's mother, attempted to enter Paris. They were accosted by Judge Claude Frollo (Tony Jay) and his men, and they fled, but in their flight Quasimodo's mother's brains were dashed upon the very steps of the cathedral her son would call home, leaving her infant child behind. Revolted by the child's deformations, Frollo's first impulse was to throw him down the nearest well, but the archdeacon (David Ogden Stiers) stopped him from completing this heinous crime, for the very sound reason that this is the well they all use. Also that infanticide is a sin. So, too, was murdering Quasimodo's mother, and thus was the orphan thrust into Frollo's care, as penance, to be kept at Notre Dame, but under the guardianship and tutelage of the judge who for that one moment knew moral horror, witnessing the Mother of God herself look down with contempt upon him, though his moment of clarity could only become dimmer and dimmer as it moved further into the past.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Two decades later, Quasimodo has grown, but remains forbidden to ever leave his quarters in the bell tower of the cathedral. He yearns to walk the streets of Paris, or to speak to anyone outside his incredibly constrained circle<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>beyond Frollo, that's only those gargoyles, whom he imagines speak back (Mary Wickes, Charles Kimbrough, and Jason Alexander). Yet on the day of the Festival of Fools, Quasimodo sees a chance to mix with the costumed crowds more unobtrusively than he might on an ordinary day. This goes altogether terribly: his unusual features earn him the crown of the King of Fools, and when they find out he's not wearing a mask, the mob does what a mob will do, mocking and tormenting him, their jeers halted only by the intercession of the Roma entertainer, Esmeralda (Demi Moore). Naturally enough, poor, naive Quasimodo cannot help but fall in love with the beautiful woman who showed him basic decency. But Frollo is also reluctantly present, and he'd recognized Quasimodo immediately; indeed, having welcomed the crowd's edifying punishment of his ward, he objects to Esmeralda's interference<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>he objects to Esmeralda in detail, not least because her dance has already aroused something slumbering in him<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but when Esmeralda further defies him, he sets his guards on her, and only through the sanctuary of the cathedral and the simultaneous romantic stirrings of Frollo's new captain, Phoebus (Kevin Kline), is she saved. Yet even this is temporary: Frollo is obsessed with her, and almost as obsessed with stamping out her race, and Quasimodo, Phoebus, and Esmeralda shall all dance for him in turn, as he uses them to lead him directly to the so-called "Court of Miracles," where the Roma population of Paris hides, and where they can, therefore, be eliminated in one fell swoop.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTXlpZcTVfxMxLDMiItMFIAPRWYMJNk5FvAjXfM5B-ANSDiF7AtN29sxyAu_W96kbrJ9WI0mQEYA2oiMnH75JA5mXkAieaq5nH5-uIllq3FkOR4fxE-VW5MaGGTsZdwMNB-NRYCLcuhboWEeHUVH9MlpgAQTbxLCPjaPtlFVKIQuKSAoiW3vuLnOiVE2n/s960/Hunchback4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTXlpZcTVfxMxLDMiItMFIAPRWYMJNk5FvAjXfM5B-ANSDiF7AtN29sxyAu_W96kbrJ9WI0mQEYA2oiMnH75JA5mXkAieaq5nH5-uIllq3FkOR4fxE-VW5MaGGTsZdwMNB-NRYCLcuhboWEeHUVH9MlpgAQTbxLCPjaPtlFVKIQuKSAoiW3vuLnOiVE2n/w400-h225/Hunchback4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I'm saying absolutely nothing new to remark that that is some <i>grim</i> material for a Disney cartoon, though I'm not even sure "subject matter" is the half of it. It's certainly not none of it, though; consider the centerpiece of this dramatic musical, Frollo's "Hellfire" (the second half of a diptych with "Heaven's Light," Quasimodo's nicer, sweeter first half of the song tending to be blotted out hard by the second, even if it shouldn't be), which earns its renown as the film's signature sequence for good reason. Here composer Alan Menken, lyricist Stephen Schwartz, and Frollo's supervising animator Kathy Zielinski capture, as explicitly as possible, and in what barely manages to remain "family animation" because of it, our unhappy judge's cancerous combination of slavering lust, perceived sin, racial animus, and weakness before God. If that's not enough for you, then you at least noticed it has a swear word in it. It's an even more surprising (and rather more serious) imposition of darkness than the sudden appearance of fascism back in "Be Prepared"; and I don't know if it's strange or not, and maybe you even disagree, but I think it is actually more surprising that there's a Disney cartoon from 1996 where its characters explicitly believe in God, and three of them even sing about it, than it is that there's a Disney cartoon that merely likens an evil lion to Nazis. (I mean, the characters in <i>Aladdin</i> are generically Muslim, and you can make assumptions about other Disney characters, but this film is unique in the Disney canon in actually engaging with <i>religion</i>; I think the only two Disney characters before <i>Hunchback</i> who were even explicitly Christian were <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/07/walt-disney-part-xiii-signed-sealed-and.html">Johnny Appleseed</a> and <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxvi-oh-hes-so.html">Friar Tuck</a><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>somehow <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/03/walt-disney-part-xxii-odds-and-ends-and.html"><i>King Arthur</i> wasn't</a>!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and even the former was ambiguously denominational, and was a recipient of direct divine revelation anyhow, while the latter simply had his denomination locked in by his job title. Even serious <i>Pocahontas</i> only barely manages to imply its white characters' Christianity, and never Anglicanism as such, and arguably doesn't get that far as regards its indigenous characters' particular spirituality.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it's not just swears and Catholicism: <i>Hunchback</i> is almost flabbergastingly <i>mature</i>, astonishingly willing to be emotionally austere and morally rigorous, maybe even moreso than if everybody had ended up dead, which would've at least provided catharsis by default. Disneyfication is present<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Quasimodo does not massacre his allies by accident, nor even his enemies; he does not perform frottage upon Esmeralda's corpse; Frollo perishes by an eye-rollingly convenient (though still pretty rad) Disney Death<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but there's still some moral gray here; the Roma have grown pretty fucking mean in their victimized insularity, for instance.** But, especially, there's the shift of Phoebus to co-heroic status amidst this story's "love" quadrangle, which does some weird things to it that actually seem to make it tougher, forcing Quasimodo to realize he's imagined a romantic relationship with Esmeralda even more surely than he's imagined his gargoyles doing sitcom banter from 1996. This isn't a quadrangle. It's not even a triangle. It really has very little to do with him, except that he is simply in a position to do, or not do, the right things; and the second half of the film finds Quasimodo's conscience dragging him, with much resentment, to the correct conclusions. He essentially gets nothing for this, only the basic human dignity that should've been his in the first place, while the smarmy blond gets everything; and Quasimodo's ordinary anger and depression about this situation is thrown into sharp relief by the spiraling, complex madness experienced by his father figure, who, if you pretend is still a Catholic priest (is it possible that, like the Duke of Richelieu, he could be both priest and secular official?), has put himself in a cage of permanent sexual frustration much akin to Quasimodo's, only he responds to the same stimulus horribly differently. (This is where "Judge Frollo" does pose some problems beyond the awkward logistics of trotting out to Notre Dame to see his ward once a week: the story as told somewhat requires someone who <i>can't</i> fuck, now suddenly realizing he needs to, and therefore foisting his years of self-denial upon his victim. My question is how this guy suddenly became a lecher at age 50. "<i>Judge</i> Frollo," after all, could take a wife, could even court Esmeralda, she'd need only be baptized, and, failing that, he has much discretionary income and lives in 15th century Paris. The silver lining is that Quasimodo should now at least have access to his city's recreational activities, with presumably much less self-flagellation about it.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPDD-cWR1FqX1YvW5Weo2VRbG_uJ1LVuOg9nsXNqWKEqKtLqQN96fuC-XXgNFiPgnnOOokOxlOJEQ7CKPMZJvWnw9ti4KCcRK1QqUfHZ53Aqddu9zUQGqi5WRQwaolp9LBzGWjLXsCz5dg4VXBaObN4kTKioIQ_8ZoVv43rQuFXSseDHEk66Bc8MFYWa1P/s960/Hunchback12.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPDD-cWR1FqX1YvW5Weo2VRbG_uJ1LVuOg9nsXNqWKEqKtLqQN96fuC-XXgNFiPgnnOOokOxlOJEQ7CKPMZJvWnw9ti4KCcRK1QqUfHZ53Aqddu9zUQGqi5WRQwaolp9LBzGWjLXsCz5dg4VXBaObN4kTKioIQ_8ZoVv43rQuFXSseDHEk66Bc8MFYWa1P/w400-h225/Hunchback12.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>But you can still see how this would suit the makers of <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, since that's what we have here, <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> for realistic and pragmatic grown-ups, shifted outside of wish-fulfilling fantasy and into a more cynical mode, with a Beast who was never a handsome prince, that role already being filled by another, and a Gaston who's pathetic; but, in fact, it's almost <b>distractingly</b> <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> again, if you realize, as I did with a bit of a shock, that it's <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> if you simply split the ravenous possessiveness of Gaston and the more appealing local hero qualities of Gaston into two separate characters, and then, likewise, split the Beast into two for balance. But the sort of unresolved emotions that <i>Hunchback</i> gets up to make it awfully distinctive anyway. Hypothetically, then, I like it <i>much</i> more than <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, a film I'm a bit of a heretic about.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So it's too bad that this revelation occurred to me during the climax, where the resemblance between the two is at its most disagreeably acute, thanks to both films finishing with the Beast figure getting the shit beat out of him by the rapey guy until the latter falls off the roof, interspersed with the asinine clowning of the former's impossible friends while we're meant to have our hearts in our throats wondering how it ends. <i>Yes</i>, it's the gargoyles again: there's stretches where you can accept that they are what Trousdale and Wise say they are, manifestations of Quasimodo's loneliness<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this doesn't explain their unfunny anachronism, or how the goat sees them<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and it's impossible to accept during the tonally-wrecked action finale, which otherwise does so much so well (Quasimodo snatching Esmeralda from the depredations of a demon, Quasimodo and Frollo battling on the literal spires of heaven over the literal pit of hell's fire that has been made of the square below***), but intercuts the good gnarliness with slapstick cartoon japery and zany sound effects, altogether even worse than the largely-Alexander-mediated obnoxiousness that at least previously had been <i>just</i> comic relief. (One of the few funny things they ever say is when Wickes's gargoyle turns around and belts Alexander with "No, you're the fat stupid one who can't keep his mouth shut," which is funny because she said what we were all thinking, and she sounds so sincerely contemptuous.) I even hate their designs: I think I'd have tolerated the gargoyles slightly more if they'd been the actual creatures their statues represent, instead of just stone blocks that bounce around stupidly on their truncated torsos. The idea was that, like Quasimodo, they are also "half-formed," sculptors' cast-offs; but you kind of have to be told that to get it. And, as it would lead to us pondering how they even manage to speak in the first place, it's perhaps uncharitable of me to question how a stone block ever manages an armpit fart; yet I question it all the same.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpQ4Kignnz0eVmFGAo9wn5C7HSxZIO7o4A7uRCn-rC3Rr5F-hkZ6DjC8YyyWrWax_iqXJ5wtKTOZbTzMJ8pWVDB3B2WmZ1-ZSDasp5xOXyvwKq3TaCkE0Chqrihb70-WimDK6BH0_KJdTKFSznitZxpPmGhyt5JPibWz2705SpDtcgNKZYigq0uLC5qzC/s960/Hunchback11.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfpQ4Kignnz0eVmFGAo9wn5C7HSxZIO7o4A7uRCn-rC3Rr5F-hkZ6DjC8YyyWrWax_iqXJ5wtKTOZbTzMJ8pWVDB3B2WmZ1-ZSDasp5xOXyvwKq3TaCkE0Chqrihb70-WimDK6BH0_KJdTKFSznitZxpPmGhyt5JPibWz2705SpDtcgNKZYigq0uLC5qzC/w400-h225/Hunchback11.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The climax is the most egregious misuse of these characters, but I'd respect anyone who claimed it wasn't even the worst, which may rightfully belong to their comic/"comic" musical number, "A Guy Like You," which purports to explain how Quasimodo gets it into his head that a romance with Esmeralda could be possible, and it isn't played <i>nearly</i> intelligently enough for the kind of tragic, psychological work it needs to do. Instead, it only jams up the film's momentum for upwards of three minutes (Frollo's been out burning Roma and Roma sympathizers in their homes; insert the film's single worst joke, it is in fact upon this subject), and it sits extremely incongruously amidst the rest of Menken and Schwartz's score and soundtrack. It's the lamest thing here animation-wise by an equal margin: just an excuse for bunch of backdrop and costume jokes, which almost uniformly suck<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the <i>solitary</i> exception is, aggravatingly, one of the movie's best single visual notions, in which the cathedral's statues of saints snap their fingers to the beat while still stiffly staring their baleful stares by way of a sort of Gilliamesque/Selickian pseudo-cut-out animation. It's the one single moment where the sense of half-mad delusion we should be getting for Quasimodo here manifests even slightly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Menken and Schwartz are solid otherwise, and the rest of <i>Hunchback</i>'s music is, indeed, some celebrated stuff, to the notable extent that it seems like most of their individual songs have their own Wikipedia pages. The majority of their music is very heavy and religious, loaded with Catholic liturgical cues and Latin chant, these elements finding their bravest expression in the invocation of the Confiteor in the aforementioned "Hellfire," though by no means is it their only expression. (The introductory "Bells of Notre Dame" is nearly <i>as</i> heavy and religious, thanks to them bells.) Though the most poppified thing here, I'm a fan of "God Help the Outcasts," for its prettiness as well as its spiritual earnestness; I like that the line "God help the outcasts, children of God" is so readily misheard as "God help the outcast children of God," which renders it something of a conundrum, one already proposed (probably on accident) by the lyrics' juxtaposition of the Parisiens' selfish prayers and Esmeralda's prayer for her people's survival, none of which, regardless of merit, God appears to be exactly <i>hurrying</i> to answer. And there is at least one actual fun showstopper, contra the gargoyles, in Clopin's Festival of Fools montage, "Topsy Turvy," which took years to animate because of the inordinate number of moving parts (it's not a huge song, but it may have more individual shots and individual hand-animated elements than any other four minutes in the film, and it was mainly the effort of one guy whose name I, sadly, forgot to write down).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgefMGEljJsLZa-Zdxwi1gqg3nxgH1J6CQnmVJiz86CA9bIOpniDcHzJLtUOV9BEYUz-9UHhW9apQXiwz0PNtg3wDs8Da_Xp8I8u1qkgwv4sjSH-whTFme9KL7zBoqQCkkMPgcWtUJyMRQEYJF6TdWcTerpjlDHRTksLYGZL3QtrodtuQlQfgImGLKAy-Zd/s960/Hunchback7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgefMGEljJsLZa-Zdxwi1gqg3nxgH1J6CQnmVJiz86CA9bIOpniDcHzJLtUOV9BEYUz-9UHhW9apQXiwz0PNtg3wDs8Da_Xp8I8u1qkgwv4sjSH-whTFme9KL7zBoqQCkkMPgcWtUJyMRQEYJF6TdWcTerpjlDHRTksLYGZL3QtrodtuQlQfgImGLKAy-Zd/w400-h225/Hunchback7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But the film's reputation rests more than anything else upon "Hellfire," and fair enough. It has the added benefit of such warped, frightening metaphors for carnality and shame<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Esmeralda, beheld as a beckoning creature of flames; Frollo, judged by a legion of amorphous, faceless crimson priests; and I personally love the subtlest effects animation of the sequence, setting a not-quite-realist baseline with the distorting haze of the fireplace from which Frollo's mind conjures these visions. Its biggest problem is that it's too <i>short</i>, and can't really elaborate past its initial batch of images. (It could be <i>more</i> Ken Russell.) Its biggest <i>success</i> lies in Jay, whose bass baritone crashes through this song with tortured feeling. But then, he's been delivering the film's best performance in all respects, not just as its best singer. (Though he <i>is</i> its best singer by far: Tom Hulce, offering a strong performance otherwise, is a bit rough on the musical front<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>charmingly so, maybe, though I daresay "Out There" isn't anyone's favorite "I want" number. For the record, Moore is perfectly okay<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, thankfully, she did not insist on providing her own singing voice, those duties falling to Heidi Mollenhauer<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Kline is doing what Phoebus calls for, though I suspect the majority of what I value about Kline's performance is how much it feels like a testbed for his next smug early-modern man of adventure in <i>The Road to El Dorado</i>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is, too, the matter of Menken being pretty sophisticated in weaving his melodies in and out of his score as character motifs, and I'm pleased to agree that <i>Hunchback</i> is one of the more lovingly-constructed musicals Disney ever managed, though it will never be a true favorite, as it lacks for the kind of freestanding banger that really ingratiates one to the Disney musical. Unless you hum "Hellfire" to yourself on no special occasion, which I doubt you do.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh89Q1JwKwH6rBarvIPMuC8jivm-2bg8cnqYdZ4ctaNiogS28-zQi2K6dzXnguDvxvQ6_3s-Av5CecJ0SPzyGoSzA7TeRQwqcQqfFIa1W9u6bkCgmi7ozxQAAPecgILP_QApiw6VbOIZR1A0e2igh45MPgrTu0Ax5rogNWkohpzJ7aLj3Ebxu_rhpWz3Uwa/s960/Hunchback8.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh89Q1JwKwH6rBarvIPMuC8jivm-2bg8cnqYdZ4ctaNiogS28-zQi2K6dzXnguDvxvQ6_3s-Av5CecJ0SPzyGoSzA7TeRQwqcQqfFIa1W9u6bkCgmi7ozxQAAPecgILP_QApiw6VbOIZR1A0e2igh45MPgrTu0Ax5rogNWkohpzJ7aLj3Ebxu_rhpWz3Uwa/w400-h225/Hunchback8.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Bound up in the music, as usual, is the animation, and I've covered most of the highlights without giving as much credit as I would usually like. I did name Zielinski, heretofore a specialist in titanic terror, but found here going about as far to other side of the villainous spectrum as possible, at least within the confines of a bombastic family cartoon made in a tradition that demands its villain be nakedly evil, wear black and purple clothing, and ride a night-ebon stallion. Frollo is theatrical and wonderful, but it's a remarkably <i>human</i> villain Zielinski made here anyway, middle-aged and odd-looking, like he sneered once many years ago and his face froze that way and it hurts to do anything else (though that face remains terrifically fluid in its limited repertoire of cruel expressions); his beady eyes are capable of enormities of fear, hate, ugly lust, and uglier self-revulsion. I enjoy the production anecdote that Zielinski frequently dressed in a cloak and silly hat to be her own life-reference, and while skinny like her creation, happily she's not as spindly and sickly frail as he is. (There seems some confusion who was the mastermind of "Hellfire," however, whether it be Zielinski or the Brizzi Brothers at Disney France, and it should be mentioned somewhere that this was Disney France's big moment, with significant stretches of animation for <i>Hunchback</i> completed, fittingly enough, in Paris. As for due credit for "Hellfire," the Brizzis apparently storyboarded it, but certainly the execution bears Zielinski's specific style<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the hefty, crisp figurework on the void-faced monks is her supervision, if not her personal work altogether; there's also the consistency of the acute angles and subtly-distorted "lensing" that attend Frollo throughout<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, in any event, Frollo bears her mark too, the crispest, heftiest creation in the film. He's just superb.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The other triumph here, if not at the same level, is James Baxter's supervision of Quasimodo, probably a tough nut to crack given both his asymmetries and surprising agility. He's extremely sympathetic by default (helped by the abstraction of Disney-style design, which would have a harder time making him <i>viscerally</i> repulsive, but you do get enough of a feel for his unpleasant aspect, before it normalizes, for it to never feel like a pure cheat); and Baxter is willing to use this sympathy to complicate him quite a bit, with dark, brooding, bitter moments even if these are not his "default." I'm also very impressed by Baxter's <i>King Kong</i>/Charles Laughton's stunt-double bit in the finale, and all the confidence of Quasimodo's brashly-superhuman athleticism that's led up to it. Tony Fucile's Esmeralda is quite good, too, as is Russ Edmond's Phoebus (Kline's dry sarcasm is perfectly translated into the latter); though between the two characters, if there's a standout moment for them, it belongs to below-the-marquee animator Anne Marie Bardwell, whom I understand is responsible for Esmeralda's dance. Bardwell was also a character designer, so my expectation is that she's the one who built Esmeralda's dance as a minor masterpiece of CAPS line and color, with her shimmering burgundy dress and the searing quality of the pink border surrounding it. (And it's maybe more gymnastic than <i>sexy</i>, but it's sexy enough, graded on a Disney scale.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it is CAPS, and the layout and design powers of Disney at the height of its Renaissance, where <i>Hunchback</i>'s reputation as a <i>great </i>work of animation really rests; and, sorry, past the character animation, I find it one of the least outstanding examples of its industrial method. By all means, this is a fine-looking film, but there's a <i>lot</i> of tech-demo, "just because we can" ethos in it, starting with the very opening shot that pretends that the 226 foot tall Notre Dame towers above <i>clouds</i> (though I do like this metaphorical touch), and then showily swoops down through Paris and about forty or fifty layers of paintings and animation. (And even then, winds up having to visibly halt, with a very clunky, very old-fashioned dissolve shot so that Disney's computers wouldn't crash. Though apparently they often did.) It's felt, too, in Disney's newly-developed software, Crowds, which did what it said, providing arbitrarily-large computer-generated crowds of six basic human types, who turn out to be pretty distracting in their uncanniness and compositing, which is why they're usually held well out of focus and behind hand-animated figures, who are also out of focus, though in the more angular shots that <i>Notre-Dame de Paris</i> demands, there's no concealing the visible seams between the artistry and the mechanization here. As for that focus<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is, CAPS' ability to replicate the weaknesses of live-action photography, which some of Disney's directors found very attractive for some heathen reason<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's never as tiresome as <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xlv-slimy-yet.html">The Lion King</a></i>'s fake rack focus, but there's one breathless moment that's worse than anything in it, when Frollo points menacingly towards the camera and his hand exits a "focal plane" that <i>doesn't fucking exist</i>, except as the boundary of a blur tool being applied to Zielinski's wonderful animation, whereupon I wanted to slap the mouse out of somebody's hand.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZp-opBN8qh-hqaJOUwe_s5luOMRiTeYSJzBXdoSyiZTG8Sf2La-F1LY7iLsf_JfFZQOkSwLRaWhO-gILRaDQUQVKv0cSC8EdcHangXLokXOvjjoYkhhaQfRFg5r9snB28r5LLe5FVMe2LaDsfIODTinaF-lRdZ6oOTdz6mBpngS1sgsV1iu84-17dT0g2/s960/Hunchback5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZp-opBN8qh-hqaJOUwe_s5luOMRiTeYSJzBXdoSyiZTG8Sf2La-F1LY7iLsf_JfFZQOkSwLRaWhO-gILRaDQUQVKv0cSC8EdcHangXLokXOvjjoYkhhaQfRFg5r9snB28r5LLe5FVMe2LaDsfIODTinaF-lRdZ6oOTdz6mBpngS1sgsV1iu84-17dT0g2/w400-h225/Hunchback5.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>And then there's badass shots like this, which positively revel in the absence of a camera; isn't that better?</i></div></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The possibilities Trousdale and Wise are exploiting here can be very action-oriented and exciting; they can also be janky and alienating and just plain <i>unready</i>, with the CGI elements winding up more jarring than they'd been in either <i>Pocahontas</i> or <i>The Lion King</i>, and maybe even <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>. What all this new technology only occasionally manages to do is make Paris feel big (in fact, the digital "crane shots" make it feel smaller, just a cathedral, a square, and some side streets<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>no bigger than Belle's podunk village, even, except there's an imposing church now), or the story feel more meaningfully epic. Oddly, it accomplishes these goals far more fully in the film's interior spaces, like the section of nave in front of Notre Dame's north rose window, or inside its bell tower.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I've got a lot more love for David Goetz's art direction and color style<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even then, there's something preemptively theme-parked about this early modern Paris that I don't adore<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but Goetz is doing some swell things with lightly expressionistic color (and Frollo's scenes' frequent leeching of color), as well as with the less hubristic things CAPS allowed, like taking a full scene through a beautiful orange-and-purple sunset into dusk. There's a splendid such scene, with Quasimodo and Esmeralda, that does more work on behalf of his hopes than fifty gargoyle songs could have achieved. But, of course, even one was too many<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>you might not remember this, but the beautiful, otherwise-dialogue-free denouement of Quasimodo's internal and external struggles is actually concluded with a gargoyle yelling at a pigeon. And so the last line of this serious film about, Jesus, <i>outcasts</i>, winds up being "don't you ever migrate?!" There's no telling how highly I would rate <i>The Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>, if instead of one gargoyle song, and three gargoyles, there were no gargoyle songs and no gargoyles. But it would be a quantifiable improvement.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim3EJpkcdPoU1PCV_SvOA7Jb3xPx4NKla99YHPJ-9iFhgZsK8p3WyNiRHn4jTJ0lh5rlaaw4gCOFQmOWwmpGWAVlXD4ngDU2zNlkMrcWovPnoWPtDoTCN3ZLpVIR4db7n9Zt1fUneIEiXqHf6n1AYjyHeVmuypuZgrCV_grV77v3KY7UCc09k-qoU4GjNn/s960/Hunchback10.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim3EJpkcdPoU1PCV_SvOA7Jb3xPx4NKla99YHPJ-9iFhgZsK8p3WyNiRHn4jTJ0lh5rlaaw4gCOFQmOWwmpGWAVlXD4ngDU2zNlkMrcWovPnoWPtDoTCN3ZLpVIR4db7n9Zt1fUneIEiXqHf6n1AYjyHeVmuypuZgrCV_grV77v3KY7UCc09k-qoU4GjNn/w400-h225/Hunchback10.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 7/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*I, of course, will use the polite and correct term "Roma" here; the movie inevitably uses "Gypsy" as it is a product of 1996 made in American English, which is, furthermore, dramatizing events in France in 1482. I doubt politeness would have been much on the early modern French mind, and we could safely assume that all our French-speaking principals would be using "Gitan," "Gitane," and "Gitans" (unrelated to the British slang term, "git," incidentally, though the mind-blower is that "Roma" is in no way related etymologically to "Romania"; it points to the Roma's origins, not in Egypt as "Gypsy" does, but northern India). In any case, I obviously look forward to the live-action remake that has the villain punctiliously refer to the people he wishes to variously kill or rape as "Roma" or "Romany."</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**<i>Pocahontas</i> does it: bad. <i>Hunchback of Notre Dame</i> does it: good? Oh, I see. It's a matter of how much you <i>like the movie</i>, as usual, got it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Of course, I would have liked it more if "Quasimodo's giant pot of molten lead" had been established in <i>this</i> movie, and not decades earlier, in the 1923 and 1939 movies from which it's been lifted.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-36873053567275397552024-03-11T18:54:00.043-11:002024-03-13T11:06:10.309-11:00Walt Disney, part XLIX: The pits<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUwhpV92m2b98w8PisgOx6z9Bfl5RgWcBOuFQXT0PXLopTbXD7k_iF2wfqNyIJ-NCPrvveKKswMnQ3v-nFItNsLLQgFpj6cYWXasJW2fjK6bAH31GmLg-yLYmRo5kiJAx_ry7lNL-Vx317Qc6EMog7qvClwhcJ2eCx0i3HJFtu4ct_3dEe1Bm0FfWGnMFm/s793/JamesGiantPeach1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="793" data-original-width="562" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUwhpV92m2b98w8PisgOx6z9Bfl5RgWcBOuFQXT0PXLopTbXD7k_iF2wfqNyIJ-NCPrvveKKswMnQ3v-nFItNsLLQgFpj6cYWXasJW2fjK6bAH31GmLg-yLYmRo5kiJAx_ry7lNL-Vx317Qc6EMog7qvClwhcJ2eCx0i3HJFtu4ct_3dEe1Bm0FfWGnMFm/w284-h400/JamesGiantPeach1.png" width="284" /></a></div><br />JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1996</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Henry Selick</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Karey Kirkpatrick, Jonathan Roberts, and Steve Bloom (based on the novel by Roald Dahl)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGncK_0oEIdjnvquROl3SbHnz66JMSB2E7k8AxJHqOFtC0hKSxo4kg8daSQJXQJUNAzeHvnwsxlm5oHF8Gvb8TF8LHTc9MEY9tGuj0_hKk2-5N4gOIY6rbuJy4iMtrKQ2SlByFHbJ68VLoVCoA9A7a7JfKAxSj5xjYwL_arkn6preTFVCmXXYIRWJ3RIZk/s740/JamesGiantPeach4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="496" data-original-width="740" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGncK_0oEIdjnvquROl3SbHnz66JMSB2E7k8AxJHqOFtC0hKSxo4kg8daSQJXQJUNAzeHvnwsxlm5oHF8Gvb8TF8LHTc9MEY9tGuj0_hKk2-5N4gOIY6rbuJy4iMtrKQ2SlByFHbJ68VLoVCoA9A7a7JfKAxSj5xjYwL_arkn6preTFVCmXXYIRWJ3RIZk/w400-h268/JamesGiantPeach4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I don't like <i>James and the Giant Peach</i>, which means it must've made some honest efforts to retake the ground it had already lost, since for a long time I sat there wondering exactly how much I was going to hate <i>James and the Giant Peach</i>, and, indeed, if I'd somehow made a mistake as to what <i>James and the Giant Peach</i> actually was. That time can be measured very precisely: it's the entire first act, which can itself be measured very precisely, at 19 minutes and 30 seconds, which is how long it is before this this stop-motion animated film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the second feature film from stop-motion animator, Henry Selick, following the qualified success of his first stop-motion animated feature film, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliv-and-my-feet-hurt.html">The Nightmare Before Christmas</a></i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>starts using stop-motion animation to tell its story. I also hate, a little, its finale, which sends us right back to the live-action we started out with, but it's only ten minutes, and I'd at least gotten a mild half-dose of whimsy by then, plus I knew it was going to be over soon, hence it doesn't reflect quite as poorly on the film as the decision to go on for literally more than the first quarter of its runtime<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>substantially more</i> than its first quarter, because when a movie clocks in at 79 minutes, we can reasonably begin accounting for the five or six minutes of closing credits<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>before giving us anything even resembling what we came to see, outside of a special effect here or there.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This was, as is extremely obvious, a compromise, though this is surprising in a couple of ways<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>firstly, that a movie that is, being charitable, two-thirds stop-motion animation still cost, at $38 million in 1996, $14 million more than the movie that was <i>all</i> stop-motion animation, and <i>groundbreaking</i> stop-motion animation, requiring the development of basically a whole stop-motion animation studio, that had been released only three years earlier. ($38 million places it in roughly the same budgetary category as <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xlv-slimy-yet.html">The Lion King</a></i>, and it did not, perhaps needless to say, vigintuple that budget. Hell, it didn't quite unituple its budget.) The Roald Dahl novel upon which the film is based had come to Selick's attention many years before, in the early 1980s when he was still at Disney, by way of Joe Ranft, who made repeated, unsuccessful efforts to pitch it as a possible feature, with most everyone else finding it narratively fuzzy and not really ideal for an animated adaptation in the Disney style<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so presumably even fuzzier than <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/08/walt-disney-part-xxxiii-i-presume-boy.html">The Black Cauldron</a></i>, and I daresay it might well be<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>plus it was Roald Dahl, so it has a bit of a nasty streak that they'd have to figure out what to do with, and why should they bother, just to get to a movie about a giant flying peach? Good question. Nevertheless, it stuck with Selick as his career brought him back to Disney, as well as to others who'd been exposed to it by Ranft, including, I assume, Tim Burton (a producer here but not, as on <i>Nightmare</i>, a co-creator). It's not entirely clear to me if Disney bought the rights to the novel from Dahl's daughter in 1992 at Selick's insistence, or if they offered it to him, without <i>Nightmare</i> even out yet, under the assumption that his sensibilities and prior interest made him right for the job; but in either case, he set to it once <i>Nightmare</i>'s production had concluded, <i>not</i>, in fact, planning to do it as a purely stop-animated film. What Selick originally wanted was a full-on live-action/stop-motion animation hybrid, more along the lines of a <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/walt-disney-part-xxxv-i-hope-youre.html">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a></i> or <i>Cool World</i>, and when this proved completely infeasible (though I understand he eventually managed such a thing, on <i>Monkeybone</i>), he said, "Fine, then, fuck it and fuck you. I'll just do this cartoon with a live-action prologue going on twenty minutes, and see how you like <i>that</i>."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0d5FErWdpASU_jdoEEa7coA_sc8gaLKaF8ajY3BySuDp0eoo-o1r0u3xBzZa7ZtGtnmEr3RzjS-FOFj1c5Y2uiKuDM_-iIA2t2g0kTQPZ0k0u8KvfRTFbrPT5-pY4HlcqLZxAOTO7UrB6JAxkob19kJkpQvvVDy2FPt7zjG1PVn8XX2KDXsp2qTLBAcOv/s1280/JamesGiantPeach3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0d5FErWdpASU_jdoEEa7coA_sc8gaLKaF8ajY3BySuDp0eoo-o1r0u3xBzZa7ZtGtnmEr3RzjS-FOFj1c5Y2uiKuDM_-iIA2t2g0kTQPZ0k0u8KvfRTFbrPT5-pY4HlcqLZxAOTO7UrB6JAxkob19kJkpQvvVDy2FPt7zjG1PVn8XX2KDXsp2qTLBAcOv/w400-h225/JamesGiantPeach3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The latter part of that production history is slightly speculative (Selick states he did so for budgetary reasons), but it feels like, as the kids say, an emotionally true production history. So: in 1948, James Henry Trotter (Paul Terry) is living an idyllic life with his mom and dad in England, but one day a rhinoceros comes and devours them<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so, we've arrived at that mean streak already, though it appears to make marginally more sense in the novel<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>rendering the lad an orphan, and sending him into the talons of his (I think maternal) aunts, Spiker (Joanna Lumley) and Sponge (Miriam Margoyles). They mistreat him, as is the prerogative of evil non-paternal relatives in children's fiction, but one day James is visited by a magical man (Pete Postlethwaite) who gives him a box of magical items, grossed up by Selick, or by one of his numerous writers<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Dahl is mean, but Selick is <i>icky</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>from Dahl's inocuous crystals to a bag of things they call boiled crocodile tongues, but which appear to be some manner of green-glowing pasta (so assuming they <i>were</i> supposed to be gross, they badly disappoint) that leap about if you don't keep a lid on them. Despite being warned to this effect, James accidently dumps the things out almost immediately, seemingly depriving him of the wish they could have granted, but there is some magic left, and the dead tree in his aunts' yard suddenly blossoms and fruits with a single peach, that gets bigger before their very eyes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We are still in live action and will continue to be so for several more minutes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the aunts turn it into a tacky tourist attraction, nominally because this happens in the novel, but I believe to pad out just a little more runtime using the source material that they're going to more-or-less abandon once we get to the actual plot<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and it is all incredibly brutal stuff. It practically hurts to watch, my first and I suppose definitive thought being "what if <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/10/gimme-some-sugar-baby.html">The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar</a></i> looked ghastly and awful?", with a purposeful children's stageplay aesthetic in the exterior sets (it has to be relaxed slightly in the interiors, which are just lightly expressionistic) that Selick has <i>no</i> idea what to do with except seemingly misframe everything in this film's unusual 1.66:1 aspect ratio while flogging the otherwise-talented Hiro Narita, a cinematographer unfortunately on the long downward slope from the top-of-the-B-list phase of his career, into some of the ugliest sludge imaginable, shot through a sock and unmotivatedly-lit with what's supposed to be gold sunlight or pale moonlight and all of it barely perceptible through a thick layer of grimy grain. It would likely be tedious in any treatment, just nearly twenty minutes of shrillly-stereotyped cruelty effected by Lumley and Margoyles, unimaginatively earning their paychecks mostly by virtue of suffering through being put into their hag makeup, whereas Terry, a fundamentally inadequate child actor even by the standards of the class, is basically just a wheezy little English boy voice, every last inflection and emotion of which you could undoubtedly do a solid impression of, even if you'd never seen this movie.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At last, however, James hears voices inside the giant peach one night, and investigating, becomes a stop-motion animated boy, which is bizarrely noted by James as a diegetic transformation, and this somehow makes it all worse, because he hasn't been <i>shrunk</i>, the bugs who are going to be his new friends have been, like the peach, <i>enlarged</i>, and it calls attention to the money-and-time-saving utter cheat of it, just making you mad at the movie all over again even once it's finally started. Those voices, anyway, belong to that collection of aforementioned invertebrates: the rough-and-tumble Centipede (Richard Dreyfuss), the fussy, pedantic Grasshopper (Simon Callow), the sweet, matronly Ladybug (Jane Leeves), the anxious Earthworm (David Thewliss), and the French Spider (Susan Sarandon), who is, in fairness, probably less an ethnic stereotype (no moreso, anyhow, than the rest are of various English types) than she is kind and motherly toward James, for he once saved her from the archnicidal terror of his aunts. (There is also a Glowworm (Margoyles again), though her contribution to the story is "being a lamp.") The aunts come to see what the commotion is, and the peach is detached from its tree, and it does not roll over them and kill them, per Dahl, but it does roll into the Atlantic Ocean; once James figures out how to use his new friends' skills to enslave a bunch of seagulls, it becomes airborne, and they have an adventure on the way to their shared destination, the place James's parents were going to take him before their misfortune with that rhinoceros, New York City.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqNgD9pL49nsFSdwRvlFYcR-EMV2n9kR3uMfBjoGqTaEZUIZnP9ZYtZHfqi2-j2FfX6tDYq7gXXNXPAYtM_wIq6NFE4kXOndA-862pRgPqwj8DhWHAAfQCGdNZ1RLF08ytix1uact8hHSr7Zafks8Sb3MNzEirz0IpCnE_U6tgxwu1B3rgBH8TRyvuW7o/s960/JamesGiantPeach5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjqNgD9pL49nsFSdwRvlFYcR-EMV2n9kR3uMfBjoGqTaEZUIZnP9ZYtZHfqi2-j2FfX6tDYq7gXXNXPAYtM_wIq6NFE4kXOndA-862pRgPqwj8DhWHAAfQCGdNZ1RLF08ytix1uact8hHSr7Zafks8Sb3MNzEirz0IpCnE_U6tgxwu1B3rgBH8TRyvuW7o/w400-h225/JamesGiantPeach5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />This part is <i>fine</i>, and though that's a lot of narrative and aesthetic sewage to wade through to only ever get to "fine," <i>James and the Giant Peach</i> immediately gets better once it's a stop-motion cartoon, and that stop-motion cartoon itself gets noticeably better as it goes along, too. There is probably a hard ceiling to how good it could get: it's a bunch of one-note characters pitched at somebody's idea of what children enjoy (and one of the things that makes me reconsider if I <i>hate</i> the film is the hubris of its more self-congratulatory gestures; its epilogue involves James telling his story to generations of children who adore it), and they're not usually funny or entertaining. The one designated the funni<i>est</i>, or at least you can tell everyone must've felt he should be even if they don't seem much more convinced than I was, Centipede, is mostly just annoying, Dreyfuss just doing this broad-as-a-barn, incredibly-unspecific shtick on behalf of an incompetent whiner who lies a lot. At best, he's something for the slightly-better-defined personalities to react to, and Callow's Grasshopper dutifully does so, getting a downright unfair fraction of the seven or eight lines in the movie that are actually funny, though these also become more frequent in the third quarter of the movie, where the vignettish adventure stuff and the dialogue gets better, particularly whenever Grasshopper finds himself correcting his fellows' doomsaying by noting some minor error they'd made, though always winding up agreeing with their initial conclusion that, yes, they definitely are all doomed. I will say, however, that it's deflating that <i>both</i> of Disney's animated films of the summer of 1996 have armpit fart jokes, even if this one's is, I guess, better. (Centipede has numerous armpits so at least there's some <i>novelty</i> here.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There are likewise some songs, courtesy Randy Newman (not exactly forced upon Selick, but not his first choice), which aren't abysmally bad (except for "My Name Is James" because Paul Terry was a worse singer than actor<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I get no joy from this, mind you), but you can see how you've never heard anybody humming one; the best is an ensemble number called "Family," in case the themes were too complex for you, but it's sweet enough. Newman's work on the score is a lot better, channeling some Horner and maybe a little Goldsmith here and there, and I think it's the single most successful thing in the movie, occasionally imparting a real sense of kid's adventure wonder to a film that otherwise, even at its best, feels like path-of-least-resistance kid's junk.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWlFa1pSaS_CAkTbARZ7rhyphenhyphenR2XyM3ov7_iMoY9t5JjKd08QSQPC3uxpulxCwEdvQbkpYIXXpwNYa1iJ1lbGg72PCJpK5pFhjj1DLoGiSbW_VDUxBRdw9cWaO9YdnfJbgLDMKRlOvUyXh6GyqT6H5bWraCm5Vvk2mCVS4OnjoZcZm3gUZGXNUwRyhqO-WhQ/s766/JamesGiantPeach2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="766" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWlFa1pSaS_CAkTbARZ7rhyphenhyphenR2XyM3ov7_iMoY9t5JjKd08QSQPC3uxpulxCwEdvQbkpYIXXpwNYa1iJ1lbGg72PCJpK5pFhjj1DLoGiSbW_VDUxBRdw9cWaO9YdnfJbgLDMKRlOvUyXh6GyqT6H5bWraCm5Vvk2mCVS4OnjoZcZm3gUZGXNUwRyhqO-WhQ/w400-h261/JamesGiantPeach2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Animation-wise, we're on firmer footing, at least. The flying giant peach<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a big orange globe pulled by seagulls, and afforded a spiral deck made out of the fenceposts it absorbed on its way to the sea<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is a singular image, if nothing else, and it allows Selick to play with yucky, probably rotting piles of fruit. The character design is fun, leaning into their types, though this does cut both ways, so they're always on the "cute" side of "cute-creepy," and mostly pretty arbitrary about the choices that went into them. On this latter count, Grasshopper wins again, with his thin, streamlined design suited to being the most elegant of the bugs; whereas Ladybug even actually "fits" her insect species in principle. Even so, Spider is pretty easily the best, the one that's most fun to watch gracefully move (and the one who most indicates the Burtonesque influence Selick had picked up on <i>Nightmare</i>), as well as the one who seems most indebted to anything about the period this film takes place in (the movie feels a whole lot more "30s" than "40s," and she bears the most Art Deco mentality, very much a vamp from a pre-Code movie poster); and while I have less than zero use for a spider wearing a Goddamn beret, I genuinely like the idea with her eyes, doubled inside each eyehole. If they'd remembered spiders usually still have eight eyes, and doubled the eyeholes accordingly, the movie might've even gotten up to "only a little bad." As for James himself, he's an unsympathetic little piece of protagonistic simplicity with a stupid-looking face and black doll's eyes, kind of a complete failure even with a pretty low bar.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Despite that, this part is harmless and fluffy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>sometimes literally, there's a really swell "sunset clouds" sequence that I assume, as <i>Nightmare</i> before it, uses cotton balls<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the adventure modules we get, though thanks to this movie taking an eternity to begin, we don't get very many (mainly just the one where they fight the corpses of underwater pirates to secure a compass, including a cameoing Jack Skellington as well as a cameoing dead Donald Duck), are enjoyable little exercises in the stop-motion art. But it's hard not to feel like it's wasting your time, and treading a lot of water. This is certainly true in "am I supposed to have <i>any</i> affective reaction to this" terms (the idea that you could play with, I think, is that this is <i>sort of</i> James's psychotic breakdown-induced fantasy where his only friends are the bugs he shares his attic room with). But it's also true when you think about it as a successor to <i>Nightmare Before Christmas</i>, and therefore a standard-bearer for feature stop-motion animation from the filmmaker who, in the 1990s, was one of its few if not its only serious practitioner. Perhaps there's stunning technical advances here only a real head would get<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I suppose I could work myself up to be impressed by the integration of the water into Selick's aesthetic, which I <i>think</i> is Sony Picture Imageworks' big contribution, and which has a nice tangible feel to it*<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but this sensation of watching nothing <i>special</i> is interrupted pretty rarely. And even then, it's mostly when you can feel Selick shaking off the Burtonisms of his previous film and hearkening back to his roots as an experimental animator, like during a splendidly-strange cut-out nightmare sequence that finds James as a caterpillar<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which is to say, a caterpillar cut-out with Terry's face on it (best part of his performance)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>chased by his evil aunts. There's also something about an earthworm wearing sunglasses that says "that's a Selick idea" to me.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Then it ends, necessarily returning to live-action, and the less said about this the better, probably<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>okay, I <i>do</i> like the implication that Striker and Sponge drove their wrecked car across the bottom of the Atlantic to chase their nephew and their giant peach, that's funny, and now that they're also wet the aunts really finally pop as disgusting grotesques<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but the movie would still prefer it take five times as long as it probably needs to, as it barely has enough ideas for this "climax" to even exist. As far as it fits into "Disney animation" history, it's like something they'd have made in the 60s or 70s, the most aimless era of the company. The film, uniquely enough in Selick's filmography (at least, whether or not I've complained that this kind of isn't one of them, amongst his "true" stop-motion features), found him working outside of any partnership with a strong visionary, and it thus prompts again the question that <i>Nightmare Before Christmas</i> raised, and which has dogged Selick throughout his career, of whether his personality as a filmmaker simply hasn't had that many chances to express itself, or whether he actually doesn't have a personality as a filmmaker <i>to</i> express, only a style and skillset that's served well as an executor for other artists. It's a movie that I'm sure you needn't look hard to find someone calling it charming, but even to the extent it ever is<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which isn't that much<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it feels like it amounts to less than even a meandering children's story should, on top of feeling a little like it's tricked you into watching it at all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 4/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*I'll sure be embarrassed if it's not CGI, anyway, but unlike <i>Nightmare</i>, there's just not a lot of available material about how this movie got made.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-66119713129316666242024-03-10T10:55:00.020-11:002024-03-15T19:43:25.551-11:00May thy knife chip and shatter<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHPx5n_wXDhh8k14MqzrNjbMh9xv5ygOtFsYo7MQ9vv1qjNS7jk2r4SjYVr4ihhMV27luwBhJrEkMPQ2Gad19pkFazYDHVQlfRbTeDZDP3tq6ghz7pDYCE-K3V0GY1cSZLJOs9S4XOHLVw1KjCMKtac12zQzLUFsNV2w40xRNY34eImc5uR9GtQ5lkOib/s960/Dune20.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="648" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHPx5n_wXDhh8k14MqzrNjbMh9xv5ygOtFsYo7MQ9vv1qjNS7jk2r4SjYVr4ihhMV27luwBhJrEkMPQ2Gad19pkFazYDHVQlfRbTeDZDP3tq6ghz7pDYCE-K3V0GY1cSZLJOs9S4XOHLVw1KjCMKtac12zQzLUFsNV2w40xRNY34eImc5uR9GtQ5lkOib/w270-h400/Dune20.png" width="270" /></a></div><br />DUNE: PART TWO</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2024</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Denis Villeneuve</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by John Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve (based on Dune by Frank Herbert)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: it's still just </i>Dune<i>, bros<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1XwUDcHTPPO2ybKFHq7-vzs7oP9-v5gPwS0jthneUHp5IKSkj-H0PmHEveqw3yxEKDaR9BBHcVQeMOkpqGm5mT72IMlndvRhiRxchz0XLEevPI6j0NQMunHgKpf0Tt9FbAHslN3HA6Oh67HrIFwr0I8htd5qxOIhB2XRXD5TrKm6_wQQfXYqF7lQ4exk/s780/Dune21.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="780" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjY1XwUDcHTPPO2ybKFHq7-vzs7oP9-v5gPwS0jthneUHp5IKSkj-H0PmHEveqw3yxEKDaR9BBHcVQeMOkpqGm5mT72IMlndvRhiRxchz0XLEevPI6j0NQMunHgKpf0Tt9FbAHslN3HA6Oh67HrIFwr0I8htd5qxOIhB2XRXD5TrKm6_wQQfXYqF7lQ4exk/w400-h225/Dune21.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So one thing that <i>Dune: Part Two</i> accomplishes, which might be the most important thing though I don't entirely mean this in a backhanded way, is that I probably like 2021's <i>Dune</i> (or <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/10/desert-planet.html">Dune Colon Part One</a></i>) better now for having seen its "sequel," in truth what feels more like one single (very) long film's completion of the task of adapting the classic Frank Herbert novel that I still haven't read. This is because, of course, that if I ever rewatch <i>Dune: Part One</i>, it will now come off much less as a story-free art installation on the subject of the planet Arrakis, interested principally in communicating how big and featurelessly imposing Patrice Vermette's production design (and, by extension, its sense of its universe's own history) is, and at least slightly more like the first not-quite-half of a story. I mean, sure, <i>Dune: </i><i>Part One</i> had a <i>plot</i>, it had fully two and a half hours of plot<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I hope you recall those two and a half hours well, because <i>Dune: Part Two</i> assumes you have them memorized<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>all of which was spent putting exiled space nobleman Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) into a position to be adopted into a Fremen band led by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), and at some unspecified point in the future, after a period of occultation and learning their ways, become their Mahdi. But it has, pretty objectively, been left up to <i>Dune: Part Two</i> to finally retroactively impose any <i>story</i> upon that set-up, involving Paul's reluctant bid for destiny, his mother Jessica's (Rebecca Ferguson's) active role in making that his only possible destiny, and the Fremen's cultural shift around the emergence of their messianic figure in the form of their former oppressor's scion, a seismic change tensely navigated by Paul's Fremen lover Chani (Zendaya) while they escalate their liberation war into a holy war against their resurgent, even worse Harkonnen oppressors.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Or maybe that <i>is</i> only more plot, but now it coheres into a plot that feels more satisfyingly akin to a narrative, rather than just some ideas for a narrative that, as far as they knew in 2021, may or may not have ever gotten finished. As you've probably gleaned from the way I've talked about it in the above paragraph, even if you didn't already know, I was not amongst those who hailed <i>Dune: Part One</i> (a corporate science fiction blockbuster based on well-known IP, but this one's different for some reason) as the savior of cinematic spectacle, if not cinema entire; and I still find it largely impossible to understand how a segment of <i>Dune: Part One</i>'s audience reached the conclusion that it was. (I guess it's a pretty large or at least influential segment, even so: <i>Part Two</i> doubled <i>Part One</i>'s opening weekend take, and whatever I may say, I don't begrudge what's shaping up to be a very notable business success.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Part Two</i>, in fact, <i>does</i> come close to making me feel how they must have felt back in 2021, not for all of its running time<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a truly prodigious 165 minutes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but there's a big stretch in the middle of those 165 minutes, where two very big, very great scenes nearly manage to adjoin (there's an interlude between, but it is, after all, a big movie with lots of scenes), and this stretch truly does live up to the <i>Dune</i>heads' promises about it embodying "The Movies" as some holy concept. Those scenes, though I bet you could guess which ones I mean, are, respectively, Paul's first ride on a sandworm and our trip to Giedi Prime to make the acquaintance of na-Baron Fayd-Rautha (Austin Butler), younger brother to the Harkonnens' failed governor of Arrakis, Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista), and hence the other nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), soon raised up to assume his elder brother's responsibilities.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAIVhW5Dqxb2vLV5VfoWXs_qzKKIFq7XMUdAChR2gre9wK_B8GELiG_bf2drQlIT3q9GkqTgGFnwO5aj9CWB_oSqH6Zq5rKBvrzlGHYtaQJfCCCh0zkCpKrsk-qmZZuf6H0R-UKk8OH6T7lOXkpecU0lExRspKwB7K_vMbV4l8NdMEbOe1rKsqspzT-Ue6/s512/Dune23.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="512" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAIVhW5Dqxb2vLV5VfoWXs_qzKKIFq7XMUdAChR2gre9wK_B8GELiG_bf2drQlIT3q9GkqTgGFnwO5aj9CWB_oSqH6Zq5rKBvrzlGHYtaQJfCCCh0zkCpKrsk-qmZZuf6H0R-UKk8OH6T7lOXkpecU0lExRspKwB7K_vMbV4l8NdMEbOe1rKsqspzT-Ue6/w400-h225/Dune23.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Conceived as rhyming setpieces in their way<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>both are about the rituals that climax the tutelage of young leaders in their respective societies<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they represent the most overpowering and appealing currents that director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve has brought to his pair of <i>Dune</i> adaptations, not just a feeling of incomprehensible scope in the visuals, though they have that, but a feeling of incomprehensible depth to the universe in which they take place in, a universe we've been abandoned in and are expected to make our own way through. This might be more impressive, in a way, for Paul's sandworm ride, which could have wound up being domesticated iconography thanks to sandworms being the single most famous thing about Herbert's <i>Dune</i>, whereas thanks to the challenges inherent to placing a tiny little CGI man on the back of something larger than a blue whale, who nonetheless then commands it, it could feel <i>entirely</i> phony. But Villeneuve pulls it off, simultaneously making it an almost-mystical experience before the majesty of a sandworm and a heroic accomplishment that only a Fedaykin could achieve, <i>and</i> the credible act of a human being, taught discrete steps that largely seem to make sense, except for the part where I'm unsure where the Fremen get the precision machinery to make their worm-summoners. (This is a problem for my literalist mind with basically all Fremen technology, down to the most seemingly-insignificant items, like their plastic tubes, their shoes, or their linens.) Well, it is a <i>masterclass</i> in shot scale, both in terms of editing and framing, alternating between a procedural approach to the individual desperate tasks that Paul must perform to ride his worm and the fullness of the spectacle, underlining that it is this legendary achievement that ingratiates him to the Fremen more than any other single act, which can only be even slightly understood from the distance of a mile. There is a particular moment, Paul sprinting atop a dune, pushing him up to the top of the frame, to catch the sandworm, as the sandworm itself indifferently smashes <i>through</i> the dune that looms up over us like a mountain, and collapses the very thing Paul's running on, that I expect will live in my mind as the singular image of the movies in 2024.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And then we arrive upon the Harkonnen homeworld, and it's almost a literal negative image of Paul's ritual, both story-wise <i>and</i> in visual construction, positing a downright impossible world that feels like a hallucination<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's not that <i>Dune: Part Two</i> is a colorful movie by any outside metric, but it somehow feels more colorful after we leave this planet where the <i>sunlight itself</i> is evil, such that it cannot refract in color and bleaches everything into an abrasive, innovative black-and-white, and necessitates, for the celebration we're attending upon Giedi Prime, fireworks that explode like black ink blots across a bone-white sky. (And if it's less perfectly-built than Paul's triumph, it's because the takes that Villeneuve's using to make it clear that it <i>is</i> because of the sunlight, and not just because we've arrived upon an unaccountable black-and-white sequence filmed with infrared-sensitive cameras to give it an even more alienating feel, aren't quite long enough, nor have enough of a transition zone, to burn this cognitively-assaultive and visually-uncomfortable concept into your soul.) Meanwhile, unlike the sacredness of Paul's test, the actual narrative content of Fayd's sequence is space operatic <i>camp</i> (albeit distinct from Lynch's camp in his go at <i>Dune</i>), a gladiatorial battle amidst some smoothed-out cod-Giger design that pits him against some of the less-important surviving Atreides retainers, and, along with some casual murders as pure aperitif, it efficiently but vividly establishes the villainous charisma we're dealing with. (It also, for the first time in this film franchise, gives Vladimir Harkonnen a touch of human personality instead of just blank, voidlike evil, in that his birthday gift to Fayd was to try to get his nephew killed, and Fayd, true to his archetype, is stoked.) This is delivered with disorientations beyond even the black-and-white or the purity of the malevolence, like the discomfiting forms of the ebon harlequins who manage the gladiatorial arena, or Fayd expressing his gratitude for his gift, in apparent conformity with his culture, by making out with his uncle. (Needed some tongue, though: give me <i>a-li-en</i>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fayd's big movie-within-the-movie is bookended with Bene Gesserit material that gets Lea Seydoux pregnant and that feel like a pointless over-texturization of the plot (maybe the point is <i>Dune Messiah</i>, I have no idea), and even then, it's the kind of dog's-ears you don't necessarily mind with such massive world-building; but if I've gone on so much about two sequences that occupy at most forty-five minutes, and those scenes are, I believe, in the first half of a 165-minute movie, is that... actually a good thing? It's not, probably, for the best, but a lot of it is just that I don't know what else to add to a discussion of <i>Dune: Part Two</i> that I didn't already say in my discussion of <i>Dune: Part One</i>, and in that first discussion I probably ran through all of the complimentary ways I had to a describe a magisterial, repetitive, beige movie, especially considering that this one is repeating its magisterial, repetitive, beige previous installment in most every way, <i>except</i> for the fact that it's gotten on with the plot.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3AuiHdOv0trflffg4hAYeLQb4GTr10X0qMGdmFsZaez0UG8F0JiGvY5856ChBWxGn_AQB45c0k_EgEsBJmhSp4aivHViaVsiqkMum_Habl_X1azF0RT79pzYGkgNen-ztQwtQhEG-zZHXVzHAK3b9Zj6T8kg_WGeT0IPYwoRSFLCHuD2TTO6AIaBsySyx/s860/Dune22.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="860" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3AuiHdOv0trflffg4hAYeLQb4GTr10X0qMGdmFsZaez0UG8F0JiGvY5856ChBWxGn_AQB45c0k_EgEsBJmhSp4aivHViaVsiqkMum_Habl_X1azF0RT79pzYGkgNen-ztQwtQhEG-zZHXVzHAK3b9Zj6T8kg_WGeT0IPYwoRSFLCHuD2TTO6AIaBsySyx/w400-h199/Dune22.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Re-reading that prior review, this goes down even to detailed criticisms, like how <i>Part Two</i> also starts running out of gas twenty minutes before it ends (which is a bigger problem here, because this has an actual climax, but at some point we have to start wondering if it keeps being <i>interesting</i>, on an action film level, for nearly every major dramatic turning point in this science fiction story to be effected by way of another fucking knife fight), or my general complaints about broader-scale warfare in Villeneuve's conception of <i>Dune</i>, which might not even be addressable complaints because they're the same as Herbert's conception of <i>Dune</i>, or Villeneuve's apparently ideological resistance to putting any psychedelia in a story that revolves around a substance that is, inter alia, a psychedelic drug. (Accordingly, Paul's clairvoyant visions are extremely brief and lacking in elaborate visuals when they're shown at all<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>he more often simply describes them in dialogue. The most psychedelic thing on offer here is Jessica's conversations with her unborn child, inasmuch as we get close-ups of the latter, in her gross embryonic state; I will concede this ain't nothing.) The strengths are much the same, too: besides those acknowledged, relating to scale and scope, it's Greg Fraser's photography (which is even better this time, with somewhat more chances for starkly-interesting lighting schemes in the interiors and hot orangey-reds in Arrakis's desert), and it's Hans Zimmer's score (which does its finest work, like every other department head contribution, on Giedi Prime, with the cod-Arabic strains of the score recast into something demoniac, like orientalist riffs performed with a door whose hinges haven't been oiled in a century), and it's the sound design that I reckon is like watching <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/what-disaster-earthquakes-bring-out.html">Earthquake</a></i> or <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/06/what-disaster-all-is-fair-on-fairground.html">Rollercoaster</a></i> in Sensurround. And while I would not call the movie boring, <i>I</i> could get boring talking about it, veering off into picking at the fundamental implausibilities of the world-building ("say, do you think the Fremen would be willing to trade spice harvesting concessions for... water?"). Ultimately, though, it's <i>almost</i> a problem that the <i>Dune</i>s can be almost as long as the <i>Star Wars</i> Trilogy (5 hours and 20 minutes vs. 6 hours and 17 minutes, anyway, so not that far off) and not feel like they've done or shown us as much as any single one of the <i>Star Wars</i> Trilogy's constituent entries.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Almost: that's the ethos of Villeneuve's <i>Dune</i>s and you do have to take it as you find it. But when that comes to story, that means it can feel inutterably distant, in bad ways as well as good. It's hard to even say what <i>Dune</i> is "about" from the films: it has themes, but so glancingly that you can wonder at how you can watch a movie with this much Islamic, specifically Arab influence and barely feel it has anything to do with anything, in <i>March 2024</i>. It kind of loses its actors: it's almost a factually true statement to say that Butler's is the only great performance, because it's the only one that can be, as Fayd is an attack from a different kind of movie that can support great performances; Ferguson manages a certain hold early on, but as much because I'm a pre-existing Ferguson superfan and because she was the best thing in <i>Dune: Part One</i>, but she's relegated to pretty much the single narrow groove of "Reverend Mother" for the latter two-thirds of this film; Chalamet is lifeless, as Chalamet almost always is and further hemmed-in by the stuffy dialogue (maybe it's just because he's already here as Chalamet's opposite number, but the movie continually makes you think about the alternate universe where <i>Butler</i> plays Paul, that actually manages the transition between diffidence and messianic charisma the role requires); Zendaya is giving the film's most <i>useful</i> performance, and I suppose for that reason its second-best.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is despite being handed an almost-unplayable character that is (I understand) the one figure most heavily-reimagined from the book, in that this Chani is openly contemptuous of the messianic portent attributed to Paul and terrified of the prospect that he will rise to leadership, which is a nice conflict for an actor to have, but presents an incredibly difficult psychological challenge for an actor playing the woman fucking the guy she also thinks might be a Space Hitler. Zendaya and Villeneuve do absolutely nothing <i>with</i> this psychology, to be clear, but it does vastly more work on the film's behalf than any of the other performances, more-or-less single-handedly giving <i>Dune: Part Two</i> any human dimension at all by steering its faceless implacability into a story of the man who surrendered the human part of himself to the tide of history. It's something that I <i>think</i> Zendaya has on her radar the entire time, but which Villeneuve leaves mostly to the blocking around Chani and Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh, doing noticeably decent work with her brittle dialogue, albeit <i>mostly</i> being just a fun object to hang Byzantine fetish costumes on), which winds up more interesting than the film's eighth or ninth knife fight, and a very well-chosen final shot.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What this amounts to otherwise is the curious and hard-to-describe sensation of a Bible film that's based on <i>Dune</i>, which is to say a legend told with utmost respect for its inherent value, and the expectation of it being received with the appropriate votive purpose by the faithful, as a pageantlike recreation of how, for instance, their messiah entered the Southern haven through a crowd of thousands of onlookers who did not yet believe, but nevertheless felt the awe of his presence, whereupon he announced the arrival of His kingdom. The distinction is that when we watch <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/09/g-d-week-truly-this-man-was-son-of-god.html">The Greatest Story Ever Told</a></i> or <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/04/g-d-week-life-for-life-eye-for-eye.html">The Ten Commandments</a></i>, their legends have the benefit of being "real," in the sense that the billions of people who have believed them to be real across millennia inevitably give their renditions of those legends undeniable emotional weight. They can be in some fashion "superficial" in their irreducibility, and are even supposed to be, but <i>Dune: Part Two</i> can possess <i>only</i> the superficialities of religious significance<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not by definition, perhaps, but in a treatment like this one, that absolutely and categorically rejects any obligation on its part to justify its significance to <i>you</i>. I think you can see how there's just something off about a blockbuster popcorn movie that's actually an art film, where the experiment it's conducting is so intellectual it barely manages to <i>feel</i> like it's anything at all. Yet it's absolutely fascinating, even so, this attempt at the pomp of a religious epic based not on religion but instead on a goofy science fiction book, which does, to its credit, achieve the sensation of an artifact from some alien culture where its significance <i>could</i> be assumed. So I still want to insist that this is a cool thing for a movie to do; that the <i>wrongness</i> of it is, indeed, what makes it different and interesting, even if by no means do I love it, nor, in its entirety, even like it as much it wants me to.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 7/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-20408194697377005472024-03-09T05:51:00.033-11:002024-03-16T23:02:08.927-11:00Walt Disney, part XLVIII: At the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_zSDzrogUUFutNxm7oeQdCnBtH-oC9BX_qRkRFcOSTxcM84p4XNXCLKyyhFa1N7XUqig6X8lZDti1GEvDi3ExRBlM_Zmu07zdhNaPtpMjdVCBN8BhIPgErcJcHXIHC8bwdEuEgq7uBbBzjD8T-lpUgZq-e3F2nXqmMjXJ6mREyIR2JEiOeQkCHUoWtCL/s750/Pocahontas1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="498" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1_zSDzrogUUFutNxm7oeQdCnBtH-oC9BX_qRkRFcOSTxcM84p4XNXCLKyyhFa1N7XUqig6X8lZDti1GEvDi3ExRBlM_Zmu07zdhNaPtpMjdVCBN8BhIPgErcJcHXIHC8bwdEuEgq7uBbBzjD8T-lpUgZq-e3F2nXqmMjXJ6mREyIR2JEiOeQkCHUoWtCL/w265-h400/Pocahontas1.png" width="265" /></a></div><br />POCAHONTAS</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1995</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Carl Binder, Sussanah Grant, Philip LaZebnik, et al</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: N/A<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz-LldzQQ1717xrvKJtbTuPOXTGdhR1saxfxPS_kGISJYzv_dYvPSzF7AQb4zOZg4xuR06m3DUr3WVpbUnbo_78UdnNhwglrgQnbqgkbXayGwvNVsdPmRkoJVlPY3Bl10cTotIqmsQpaLM2LIP5G7f6GPIfAs4cgR8meuZlfGCIP6Ot_XFICb5M8PzYTx/s960/Pocahontas10.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRz-LldzQQ1717xrvKJtbTuPOXTGdhR1saxfxPS_kGISJYzv_dYvPSzF7AQb4zOZg4xuR06m3DUr3WVpbUnbo_78UdnNhwglrgQnbqgkbXayGwvNVsdPmRkoJVlPY3Bl10cTotIqmsQpaLM2LIP5G7f6GPIfAs4cgR8meuZlfGCIP6Ot_XFICb5M8PzYTx/w400-h225/Pocahontas10.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />As it was the work of hundreds over the course of a score of years, there is obviously no exact day that the Disney Renaissance began to end. But I suppose if you had to pick one, March 28th, 1994, October 1st, 1994, or June 23rd, 1995 would be as good as any. The first is the day after Disney's president Frank Wells died in a helicopter accident, which is almost how long it took for Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Disney's film production, to be the last to be told about it, and where it finally dawned on him that his long-cherished, always-unrealistic dream—of being promoted to the presidency of a company where his boss, the board of directors, most of his fellow executives, and a number of his subordinates hated him—would never be granted to him by Disney's CEO, once Katzenberg's friend, Michael Eisner; the second date is the day that Katzenberg left Disney, taking his apparent ability to shepherd good cartoons with him. Walt Disney Feature Animation head Peter Schneider obviously deserves much credit, as well—and as for those aforementioned hundreds, the vast, vast majority of the it—but it says something that, given the enormous lead times in animation, the film oft-reckoned to close the Disney Renaissance, <i>Tarzan</i>, was also the last one Katzenberg had a hand in. There was vengeance in Katzenberg's heart now, and he'd get it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As that says, any fuller consideration of Katzenberg's achievements (and Katzenberg's follies) rightfully belongs more to the story of DreamWorks, not to the story of Disney. That brings us to that last date, then, in the summer of 1995, the day that <i>Pocahontas</i> was released. The film, in fact, did well, with a $346 million worldwide haul against a budget of $55 million, so by any metric "a success," and one that does not appear to have been expected to replicate the previous year's megahit, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xlv-slimy-yet.html">The Lion King</a></i>, the sheer scale of that film's impact having taken everyone by surprise anyway. That it performed substantially below <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">Aladdin</a> </i>(and barely above <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i>) must've undermined their confidence, though, even if Eisner put a happy (or disingenuous) face on things. What actually hurt, I think, is that for the first time in a while, it was a Disney cartoon that didn't do that well critically. And it <i>had</i> been expected to well critically; it might have existed <i>more</i> to do well critically than to make money. Though Eisner always had doubts, Katzenberg and most of WDFA's staff were convinced that <i>Pocahontas</i> had a chance to succeed where even the Best Picture-nominated <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> had failed, or at least equal its unprecedented accomplishment of confirming the art of animation as something to take seriously enough to think about giving top-category Oscars to. After all, what better way to do so, than with a socially-conscious stab at American mythology? This absolutely failed to materialize: <i>Pocahontas</i> received Academy attention only in the manner that had become conventional for a cartoon<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>nominations for Alan Menken's score and for Best Original Song, "Colors of the Wind," by Menken and his new lyricist Stephen Schwartz. (The consolation is that <i>Pocahontas</i> at least won both.) Strangely, a common refrain in its contemporary criticism was that<i> Pocahontas</i> wasn't bouncy and funny like <i>Aladdin </i>and <i>The Lion King</i>, which means that there was once a time when professional film critics actually demanded that Disney's non-human comic sidekicks talk, talk more, and get more screentime. This has had nothing but good outcomes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS8B6ZQybA-yfe2jbIeC0dCwvsPkJ12rTLuThi9f1yLbRyDcgqwu1HsnLqfuFA-2Ee48jSim5sJUD-zBMzFebTUgRPx7c3kIJX3KhCOwyvmLWEJWljHxuuMNbvrMxh8Z_w0g_PLONzOqXb4VBX3lJ5JaoILkELYIxTQzV-FJTQfUIg50cvvBPWz2pZ73AR/s960/Pocahontas5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS8B6ZQybA-yfe2jbIeC0dCwvsPkJ12rTLuThi9f1yLbRyDcgqwu1HsnLqfuFA-2Ee48jSim5sJUD-zBMzFebTUgRPx7c3kIJX3KhCOwyvmLWEJWljHxuuMNbvrMxh8Z_w0g_PLONzOqXb4VBX3lJ5JaoILkELYIxTQzV-FJTQfUIg50cvvBPWz2pZ73AR/w400-h225/Pocahontas5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But maybe this was as much a recognition of the fundamental tension within <i>Pocahontas</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a tension likewise perceived amongst its own makers, so that some of Eisner's last fights with Katzenberg were nominally about the latter ignoring the former's notes for more overt Disney-ness, though <i>everyone</i> appeared to have their own idea about the right balance to strike, so that you can't describe separate "factions." The tension, of course, arose from the inevitably awkward fit between the thorny history surrounding Matoaka/Pocahontas/Rebecca Rolfe and the requirements of a Disney film to still be a fantasy cartoon for children. So, for a seemingly innocuous example, guess how many of those names get used in <i>Pocahontas</i>'s swift 81 minutes. (It's "one," the nickname meaning "little brat.") Yet leaving aside its narrowness of scope, verging on erasure, it's a movie sourced as much from the no-fucks-given historical romances that sprang up centuries after Pocahontas's death than it is even Capt. John Smith's own hyperbolic, likely-fictitious account of their friendship. At least Smith, for all his own thorniness, never claimed to have had a romance with the twelve year old girl he knew. I rather doubt his correspondent, Queen Anne, would've thought it was cool if he had.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Disney's movie does posit such a relationship<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for it is a Disney princess film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though in case it needs to be spelled out, it ages her up, to seventeen or eighteen, and a case could be made for "thirty." The movie posits that relationship because it started as a pitch by co-director Mike Gabriel, and the easiest way to pitch "Pocahontas" was as Colonial American <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, which everyone involved probably already realized meant "Colonial American <i>West Side Story</i>." ("Then why not John Rolfe, the man she married on behalf of peace for her people?" Let us answer in three parts: Smith's account, properly reimagined, is inestimably more dramatic than "then Pocahontas got stared at by some white people and subsequently died"; as the preceding may have clarified, there's not as much possibility for Disney-style romance there; and despite its direct-to-video sequel actually continuing her story somewhat along the lines history set out, the makers of this particular <i>Pocahontas </i>strongly appear to have wanted her to never cross the Atlantic at all.) And this is well and good, for history ought not be the shackles of art.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiml_kRRnHeVp-EUBugWZGD6lLU-YHqJyNiFzMp3ry15-bAhLiulCuwhOnVPyl2fF4ahouFfkztSBeQ9wCQltou5HKrR6dnV5Y_mJJQe1I9vtB78RaEqzm_RTnsBPy2_vEhjv0jXga3_wNdRvwTX9pkrPsh7UUJJgiJL5hhPqSECY6O88RMkzX20reXIUct/s960/Pocahontas3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiml_kRRnHeVp-EUBugWZGD6lLU-YHqJyNiFzMp3ry15-bAhLiulCuwhOnVPyl2fF4ahouFfkztSBeQ9wCQltou5HKrR6dnV5Y_mJJQe1I9vtB78RaEqzm_RTnsBPy2_vEhjv0jXga3_wNdRvwTX9pkrPsh7UUJJgiJL5hhPqSECY6O88RMkzX20reXIUct/w400-h225/Pocahontas3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Yet by virtue of this legend's true basis, it was obliged to grapple with history nonetheless<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>culture, colonialism, genocide, and, most perilously of all, the discussions informing contemporary as well as future politics around those things<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>plus, occasionally, some measure of fidelity to the lives of the people it depicts, mostly to justify their characters' names, though there's a surprisingly and appealingly un-Disney melancholy maturity to the choices Pocahontas-the-movie-character is allowed to make, however counterfactual they are to Pocahontas-the-historical-person. And it had to do all of this, while still being a rousing, pleasing Disney princess musical with animal friends and magic, because that's what Disney knew how to make. It's aged like milk in the public mind ever since, and that renders it a fascinating object for historiographical study, too, since <i>Pocahontas</i> was built with the state-of-the-art in wokeness for 1995. More importantly, it means it's one of those stressful reviews I get to write every so often, where I continue prefacing until anyone hostile will have gotten bored and left, because, personally, I've always liked <i>Pocahontas</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>hell, we're going to find out I love <i>Pocahontas</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />So: in 1607, the British undertake to establish a colony in the tidewater region of the area of Tsenacommacah recently deemed "Virginia," under the governorship of John Ratcliffe (David Ogden Stiers, and while I won't do the thing where I point out every inaccuracy, if you'll allow me <i>one</i>, what we have here is more a composite of the worst traits of several other Jamestown leaders; the name was chosen, in High Disney fashion, because it <i>sounds</i> ugly, though even then, "De La Warr" sounds <i>hideous</i>, and I assume that wasn't chosen because it was simply too cartoonishly on-the-nose). Also along is John Smith (world-famous cross-cultural mediator, Mel Gibson), a tested adventurer, who expects to find little to wonder at in this particular "New World." But Smith is wrong, for it does impress him; meanwhile, his alienage, embodied in his handsome if unusual disposition, impresses Pocahontas (Irene Bedard), who spies him from afar, until allowing herself to be seen. As the child of Wahunsenecawh (Russell Means), the chief-of-chiefs of Tsenacommacah, Pocahontas has been informally betrothed to her father's leading warrior, the dour Kocoum (James Apaumut Fall), and, despite her free spirit, she probably would have obeyed her father's wishes. But now, here is John, eager (despite some missteps) to be taught the ways of this continent, and she would prefer him.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTIEFnG7iIhWYCyrU1fQfq6-23K77MSbH3QIU8z5rB8guI1bhD2FcvMgFxvmLXqm-bdASWMVbTG482-YjoZoxNQIzXXAw433AE8ApS0Z1O-qCKRR-Cx9AsMtSCX-ZGyLzooVtcNgIF9Ae6D2mRHCgAV4NOek5B-49oUR3o7rmqYMdgbk9AZyMch1-n3oDs/s960/Pocahontas13.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTIEFnG7iIhWYCyrU1fQfq6-23K77MSbH3QIU8z5rB8guI1bhD2FcvMgFxvmLXqm-bdASWMVbTG482-YjoZoxNQIzXXAw433AE8ApS0Z1O-qCKRR-Cx9AsMtSCX-ZGyLzooVtcNgIF9Ae6D2mRHCgAV4NOek5B-49oUR3o7rmqYMdgbk9AZyMch1-n3oDs/w400-h225/Pocahontas13.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Unfortunately, John's fellows are here for gold and conquest, and frequently discuss the prospect of killing Indians for fun, and the Powhatans' attempts to enforce their border policy lead quickly to conflict and casualties. Things get worse when Kocoum, for reasons apart from the defense of his people, gets himself killed in a precipitous attack on John, whereupon John is captured. His execution imminent, Pocahontas seeks counsel from her magic tree (Linda Hunt), realizing that she alone can snatch peace from the jaws of war. She does<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>iconically throwing herself between prostrate John and her father's killing blow<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and with this act of selfless love, she ensures the smooth integration of white settlers into sovereign indigenous territory such as marked our shared, largely-uneventful American history. With both sides persuaded to non-violent cooperation, Ratcliffe is sent back to London in chains by his own men. Sadly, John, thanks to a wound he sustained saving Wahunsenecawh in return, must also make the voyage back, requiring Pocahontas to make the painful decision to remain in her beloved homeland; as for Ratcliffe's fate, we can safely assume someone threw him overboard somewhere under the closing credits, since we're probably not meant to assume that John was hanged immediately after setting foot in Britain. Still a trade up from real life for Luckless Ratcliffe.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's difficult (and not very fun) to avoid being sarcastic when recapping <i>Pocahontas</i>, but this is <i>basically</i> alright. Let's do the Discourse: the thing about <i>Pocahontas</i>'s inspiration is that the Capulets and Montagues are both equally bad, and while this is, I'd aver, patently not something <i>Pocahontas</i> ever coherently argues, it gets close enough to raise some hackles, and for whatever reason<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they're foundationally important to generations of children, <i>or</i> they're big targets and you can garner attention by criticizing them<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Disney films can't just be films, they're Culture War battlegrounds. Much of that discourse around <i>Pocahontas</i> seems to be based, then, on the idea that it's intended as some heavily-revised victor's history meant to brainwash pioneer children, rather than a history-inflected fiction made for the perceived needs of the year in which it was actually released, 1995, with a moral message for the people of that era, and not "history," as such. (It's a moderate liberal message you can criticize on its own merits, but you should probably get the message right.) I hate to be this brusque about it, but the only possible moral of the events of 1607-1614 is that "giving any respite to starving immigrants might sound like a nice idea, but it isn't, they will only increase their numbers and bring ever more violence and disease." The moral of <i>1622</i>, meanwhile, is "don't stop any massacre halfway through." These are not, actually, good morals for 1995. And, ultimately, to consider <i>Pocahontas</i> as "history" is to adopt a concept of movie audiences as so contemptibly unsophisticated that you'd have to consider them, as the saying goes, barely even human; if you believe that folks truly do learn their history and morality from cartoons, then I don't know how you don't follow that line of thought to its logical conclusion, and start wondering if democracy was such a good idea.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKgIyxsYkArXV0jOMvijpZCsgH_7tDeZqWhCnZZjS6gLEybJAdcdm_xznSAXcir7ZJPvJrKo8LHXfj9oX18JTIRv0BzltAEhp4d2yvwpqKszoWe_hyphenhyphenNEseOx6Njx9ZQvkYoZifc-0MAoHh_YTCxdwNmM7AlZPPdUpVf5l7Q6nl3mtxMUDwxj8t19ONz1kO/s960/Pocahontas7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKgIyxsYkArXV0jOMvijpZCsgH_7tDeZqWhCnZZjS6gLEybJAdcdm_xznSAXcir7ZJPvJrKo8LHXfj9oX18JTIRv0BzltAEhp4d2yvwpqKszoWe_hyphenhyphenNEseOx6Njx9ZQvkYoZifc-0MAoHh_YTCxdwNmM7AlZPPdUpVf5l7Q6nl3mtxMUDwxj8t19ONz1kO/w400-h225/Pocahontas7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It is, however, absolutely imperfect, in blatantly insensitive ways, but ways that were, in 1995, presumably intended to be generous. In specific terms, I am thinking most of its eyebrow-raising 1990s insistence upon the Native American as a mystical figure, in many respects better than the white (so far as the liberal, ecologically-conscious white had decided, anyway), one indifferent to capital accumulation, in better touch with nature, and ready to be commodified for recycling ads. The connection to nature, anyway, is saliently demonstrated by Pocahontas and her... aforementioned magic tree. ("Grandmother Willow," that is, which is also the main point where <i>Pocahontas</i>'s overreach with computers becomes known, with a character who, in her horrifyingly hollow black eyes and uncanny drawn-over early CGI construction, isn't really quite fit to the purpose of being <i>just</i> a sassy, horny old lady who happens to be a tree, rather than something a little more eldritch and frightening.) There is, of course, also the matter of Pocahontas's animal sidekicks, Meeko the racoon (noises by John Kassir) and Flit the hummingbird (noises by Frank Welker)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>these sidekicks are at least not verbal<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which fits in readily with the long and august Disney princess tradition of magically communing with nature, and fits in problematically with the long, less-august Anglo-American tradition of Native exoticization, particularly when we recall that that first tradition had been laid by the wayside back in 1959 with <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/10/walt-disney-part-xx-all-that-beautiful.html">Sleeping Beauty</a></i>. (Ariel's sidekicks sort of count, sort of don't.) But then this forgets a resurrection of that tradition, through an unlikely male commoner, back in <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/04/walt-disney-xli-he-doesnt-even-know-how.html">The Rescuers Down Under</a></i>, a film likewise co-directed by, how about that, Mike Gabriel; on the other hand, Cody was supposed to be an Aborigine. But there we are: with Katzenberg's bloodless market-based decision to make Cody a white Australian, he inflicted upon <i>The Rescuers Down Under</i> the kind of invisible racism more poisonous than anything in <i>Pocahontas</i>. But, all that said, <i>Pocahontas</i>'s white writers probably could have tried harder to give the Powhatan priest (Gordon Tootoosis) something more properly rueful to say when he describes white people's "strange bodies that shine in the sun," which is some of the most flattering bigotry I've ever heard.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It others Native Americans considerably, without doubt. Of course, when it doesn't other Native Americans, but individuates them, or offers complexity to its depiction, that's apparently bad too: Kocoum's derailment of his chief's strategy on behalf of his perceived cuckoldry is more thematically ambitious than anything else in the movie; and, especially, there's "Savages," the two-part climactic musical number, which pits the Powhatans and British against one another as dueling choruses, describing each other as heathens and demons and, indeed, savages, with Menken and Schwartz clearly relishing the irony, while seeking to sensationally dramatize the manner in which dehumanization and violence go hand-in-hand, even when war be justified, as I can agree is the case for the Powhatan attacks in this film, as it was<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>with the necessary caveats<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in history. (For a recent parallel, of course it's not <i>good</i> when Ukrainians describe Russians as "orcs," even if it <i>is</i> good, in the context of their present war, when Ukrainian soldiers inflict casualties upon Russian ones.) This song draws <i>inordinate</i> heat; the phrase "false equivalence" comes up a lot, because an amazing number of people in our society can check the box "some college." But considering that the British are presented here, as everywhere else throughout the movie, as rapacious invaders, my personal theory is that it's disproportionately hurt <i>Pocahontas</i>'s reputation for "Savages" to be both its best song by far <i>and</i> its best sequence as a work of animation, thereby drawing so much attention itself.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZX2mt2rTiI5IvMLFlCRwEM7w0blDHaqJoSI0LJ1WyRwTugw4pNiEPqCeen2TXh22syJ163m74yCZYdw2dxKQDxgVdRL2eixxydPi7bs178Uq6OwwO5oIVnpPVNHyJbsijYswq6RZieoszemANiDBod1SHErsqL8xs4UekbUU9xoSYTM-znBDQ2sGCxDsu/s960/Pocahontas11.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZX2mt2rTiI5IvMLFlCRwEM7w0blDHaqJoSI0LJ1WyRwTugw4pNiEPqCeen2TXh22syJ163m74yCZYdw2dxKQDxgVdRL2eixxydPi7bs178Uq6OwwO5oIVnpPVNHyJbsijYswq6RZieoszemANiDBod1SHErsqL8xs4UekbUU9xoSYTM-znBDQ2sGCxDsu/w400-h225/Pocahontas11.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So <i>now</i> we can talk about this cartoon, though, even leaving aside "how racist is it, 90% or 100%?", which was only enjoyable to write when I got to meander off into talking about CGI, it has very clear weaknesses. I have implied it's good-not-great as a musical, and that's the case; it has one other banger-level song, "Colors of the Wind," which has the unenviable double-duty of establishing John and Pocahontas's romance as well as distilling the film's most presentist themes, so that John falls in love, effectively, with a lecture about environmental stewardship. It dovetails this better than that sounds, benefiting from Judy Kuhn's strong singing for Pocahontas (it also provides one cool couples activity, in American eagle falconry), and it has at least one dynamite, novel piece of only-in-CAPS animation, an over-too-soon gesture from Pocahontas's supervising animator, Glen Keane, that renders her in mystical, computer-recolored charcoals. (It certainly benefits from Gibson having no part in it, as we've already realized he's a lousy singer; it's something that would have been drilled into your brain through your ears if they'd kept "If I Never Knew You," a hypothetically-tearjerking number for mostly-Gibson intended for the night before John's scheduled execution; there <i>should</i> be something there, but what they had wasn't it and they knew it.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have shifted somewhat on "Steady As a Beating Drum," the Powhatans' song about squashes and other concerns, which attempts Native American percussive music and probably doesn't help <i>Pocahontas</i> feel like it's not exoticizing them, but has kind of earwormed for me regardless, possibly because it's still good and possibly because Menken uses it in his score fifty times. (Going by the other cut songs, Menken would've liked his <i>entire movie</i> to be set to it.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaJEX4i4L3z_8JmlQGJ9EAtuMRB4Zdd1MrmjepwsuIZZic4E9tiN7M2EL3qlluPrddjjz_mw3Vb4eGddnihKGW7iSJwoxQ82MnV3dZv0FTmJzcmmrw_jfREol6HaaADS4Xz0CX1wTeu83aMTrsAuuDKjdXfC1SVNX-aFqt2usv_YPrHA_PNRRTIe4aq9n6/s960/Pocahontas6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaJEX4i4L3z_8JmlQGJ9EAtuMRB4Zdd1MrmjepwsuIZZic4E9tiN7M2EL3qlluPrddjjz_mw3Vb4eGddnihKGW7iSJwoxQ82MnV3dZv0FTmJzcmmrw_jfREol6HaaADS4Xz0CX1wTeu83aMTrsAuuDKjdXfC1SVNX-aFqt2usv_YPrHA_PNRRTIe4aq9n6/w400-h225/Pocahontas6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Pocahontas herself gets her "I want" song, "Just Around the Riverbend," which flirts with being outright bad, more thanks to Schwartz's lyrics (a "too damn many of them" problem), though even Menken's music isn't doing much here; it survives anyway by recourse to some dramatic riverine staging, and some of the most beautiful water animation in a movie that I could be moved to claim boasts the most beautiful hand-drawn water animation in any Disney cartoon. (To the extent that the opening action scene, on the storm-tossed seas, could make you ask, "Do we even need the problematic tolerance parable when we've got danger on a tall ship?") I'm a small fan of "Mine, Mine, Mine," Ratcliffe's villain number, though only once it builds to its chorus-and-editing-driven crescendo; it's far enough from the best of its type that until I rewatched <i>Pocahontas</i>, a film I've seen five or six times, I'd forgotten it <i>had</i> a villain song. And there's the self-describing "Listen To Your Heart," sharing textures with "Drum," and it's fine though at this point it's well to frankly admit I forget that <i>Pocahontas</i> has so many songs in general, even right after I <i>just</i> watched it. I will attend to "Savages" below, but what it <i>should</i> draw heat for is the thudding didacticism of its study of dehumanization: "they're not like you and me!/which means they must be EE-vil!" is more akin to so-bad-it's-good; I'm not backing off my "best song" position, nor my evaluation of the sequence to which "Savages" belongs, but I've <i>never</i> not laughed out loud at that.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, you'll have noticed that studded throughout the above is a certain uniformity of praise for how <i>Pocahontas</i> looks. That doesn't obscure its weaknesses, but it does make them forgivable, even if I'm not done listing them: I think the very big one is that <i>Pocahontas</i>, like <i>The Lion King</i> before it, has retreated considerably from the complexity of characterization in <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i> or <i>Aladdin</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and since it's rare for anyone to describe <i>Aladdin</i>'s characterization as "complex," note that even Pocahontas's "inner" conflict is external. This isn't that big of a problem in itself<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>81 minute musical romances can do <i>just fine</i> with one-note elemental characterization, and it's no more profound a sin than <i>Sleeping Beauty</i>'s own fiat romance (even if her "I want [specifically, a man]" song does romance better)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but it's putting an enormous, dangerous amount of weight on basically just the fact that John can smile at this New World's majesty, whereas Kocoum smiles at nothing. Frankly, there's not enough Pocahontas-<i>and</i>-John here, no moment where she could become something more than an emblem of frontierland adventure for him; with the utmost charity, she's the lithe and agile counterpart he could never have found in Britain, but I know this mainly because of a deleted story reel that's told me so, via the oblique means of a funny bit where Pocahontas dresses in a mockery of London gentility at John's prompting<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"a funny bit between the two leads" even explains how it got cut, when the watchword for this relationship was "solemnity"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and so it's frustrating, because this not-even-a-minute-long, not-especially-taxing-to-animate scene would've paid off so handsomely. (Nothing here is helped by Gibson, I should say, who approaches "fine" in his speaking role, but there's the persistent sense that he is legitimately <i>baffled</i> by voice acting as a distinct craft; Bedard, thankfully, is better.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrtFuQuyaxiKHC-UZYAJoSLODklxOG7i2oqhRVmT-82PV1EhqGGuZGtXblIRVYZkIHio2yCOhyphenhyphenXxtz8XaRfdA5LQ1jS7xQodqztTyb_9KbQNgSRtrSI2hcdHitFCt70Tkx6tStiuUy7mS9Xo68In34J6qdKlTnHi8JJPUSQ048nTvmHcV3klZDW9JR0w7r/s960/Pocahontas8.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrtFuQuyaxiKHC-UZYAJoSLODklxOG7i2oqhRVmT-82PV1EhqGGuZGtXblIRVYZkIHio2yCOhyphenhyphenXxtz8XaRfdA5LQ1jS7xQodqztTyb_9KbQNgSRtrSI2hcdHitFCt70Tkx6tStiuUy7mS9Xo68In34J6qdKlTnHi8JJPUSQ048nTvmHcV3klZDW9JR0w7r/w400-h225/Pocahontas8.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />A smaller problem, too, is that Ratcliffe is B-tier. The genocidal colonialist is too much real evil to be "Disney villain" fun, and not all the efforts in that direction are successful, though he could've been worse, and almost was; originally conceived as a full-on revival of old-school Disney sloppy villainy, supervising animator Richard Hoppe splits the difference, and it's <i>reasonably</i> effective, with a giant, disorientingly top-heavy figure, fat and fey but powerful, whose incompetent flailing is comic, but dangerous, all of which I suppose fits a colonialist well. (It would probably be incorrect to credit Hoppe specifically for my favorite piece of animation on Ratcliffe, though, another CAPS-makes-everything-easier moment as his lily-white face so <i>imperceptibly</i> reddens in fury at John, until you suddenly notice he's become a blazing hot pink.) And, of course, the explicit point of the movie is to <i>avoid</i> an action climax.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Where <i>Pocahontas</i> makes up all this ground and more is<i> </i>craft. But it's a very distinct approach to the craft than you'd expect from any Disney Renaissance film: Ratcliffe's original sloppiness, and the sloppiness that remains, point us in the right direction; whereas my repeated references to <i>Sleepy Beauty</i> are not accidental. There is not a Disney film of the 90s<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>maybe ever, excluding <i>The Princess and the Frog</i>, in 2009, wherein they had the advantage of returning to a whole abandoned medium<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that more openly desires to be an aesthetic throwback, <i>Pocahontas</i>'s specific target being Disney's Silver Age in the 1950s. Gabriel's pitch used an image of Tiger Lily as a visual aid; the idea may have germinated fully during Gabriel and co-director Eric Goldberg's research into Disney's unproduced late 40s feature, <i>Hiawatha</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Whatever the case, there's much of the feel of a <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/07/walt-disney-part-xv-i-said-if.html">Cinderella</a></i> or <i>Sleeping Beauty</i> to this (and <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/09/walt-disney-part-xvii-boys-best-friend.html">Peter Pan</a></i>, though more its Hook than its Indians). It's wonderfully done and I respond to it easily, <i>Sleepy Beauty</i> being especially influential, thanks to its alignment with Gabriel's pre-existing interest in soaring epic landscapes, presently fulfilled to astounding effect by <i>Pocahontas</i>'s art director, Michael Giaimo. <i>Pocahontas</i>'s backdrops are an incredible thing to behold, getting across the natural majesty the whole film revolves around, and I only hold back from saying they're the loveliest of the whole Disney Renaissance because they're a little unvaried (the entire film takes place on basically one seemingly two-mile stretch of land, barely more sprawling than Friz Freleng's somewhat conceptually-similar "Bunker Hill Bunny"), and because <i>Aladdin</i> makes its own case, and <i>Tarzan</i> will soon kick our eyes' asses into the future. But there is a realist-downshifted Eyvind Earle here, with Giaimo's emphasis on the vertical lines of this primordial forest (which, because this is still a CAPS film made in 1995, frequently lends a hushed and holy subdued quality to the lighting), as well as all those geographically-spurious rock formations likelier to be found a good two hundred miles inland (though "primordial forest" might be as much of an invention, given the Powhatans' actual "connection to land" was to dominate it). I'll repeat an assertion I made ages ago: Disney was always good with <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/10/walt-disney-part-vi-because-we-never.html">North</a> <a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxxi-neither-one-of.html">American</a> forests, and <i>Pocahontas</i> upholds tradition.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaK_koZ-ICRYRwM_1RSa7VCp1-jc_T9QbUqZqHulhDVPCYn4qscaKdiNB44dJ0vkjicfrNAb3DV0faIRpxcA9ckxPo6MU1KWN5nCxkzKLIW3WYjgDuegFnh3DW4qoWB2D3UWCy8YnVFJT5LGnHtBUYCN9Ly5ee6yEQrMSuyr8lwFRu8qKiMwqyihGdGnxR/s960/Pocahontas4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaK_koZ-ICRYRwM_1RSa7VCp1-jc_T9QbUqZqHulhDVPCYn4qscaKdiNB44dJ0vkjicfrNAb3DV0faIRpxcA9ckxPo6MU1KWN5nCxkzKLIW3WYjgDuegFnh3DW4qoWB2D3UWCy8YnVFJT5LGnHtBUYCN9Ly5ee6yEQrMSuyr8lwFRu8qKiMwqyihGdGnxR/w400-h225/Pocahontas4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />We could just as easily, though, point to Meeko and Flit (plus Ratcliffe's pug, Percy, his effete woofs provided by Danny Mann), and the <i>most</i> racist thing in <i>Pocahontas</i> is the explicit parallelism of colonial violence and a cartoon racoon fighting a cartoon dog, so I suppose let's not dismiss that "false equivalence" thing completely out of hand. Now, I don't wish to discount Goldberg's contributions, but <i>Pocahontas</i> seems to be more Gabriel's movie (there's indication, though I can't confirm it, that Goldberg got so exhausted with the rock-and-a-hard-place production he surreptitiously took on jobs outside Disney to relax). Part of that is that it's so gosh-darned humorless, like a regular Kocoum. The animals address this somewhat, and given the frequency of reaction shots on the racoon that manage a resemblance to Genie's, I'm willing to say this is where Goldberg's energies found the most use. They're kind of shockingly effective, and in no other case do the strictures of being a prestige film benefit <i>Pocahontas</i> more than with Meeko, Flit, and Percy, all rendered pantomime figures, and even then, still channeled through comedy stylings that are so surprisingly <i>gentle</i>, practically missing the 50s altogether and finding their inspiration in the late 30s, where half the point was good-natured japery and the other half was prototyping realistic animal animation, though Meeko's surely no "prototype." Despite the Genie-like bits, there's almost no post-<i>Aladdin</i> anachronism<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so being self-serious really does have its upsides. It's present only in a few jokes with Ratcliffe's manservant Wiggins (also Stiers), which are at least so sourly ironic about colonialism as to be worthwhile.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Maybe most forcefully of all, we have the actual character animation, which is simultaneously like little Disney has ever done in its sharped-edged angularity, and still a cousin to the life-referenced animation of <i>Cinderella</i> and <i>Sleeping Beauty</i>, and Keane, John Pomeroy (supervising John, having escaped Don Bluth), and Michael Cedeno (supervising Kocoum) are insistent that you <i>notice</i> that life-reference in a way that is almost exclusively a feature of the Silver Age's two great successes and is completely apart from anything else at Disney in the 90s (or ever again)<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even though the muscular physicality of their characters isn't really like <i>Cinderella</i> or <i>Sleeping Beauty</i> either. This utterly unique quality attends all the characters, in fact (except Ratcliffe and Wiggins), but especially the ones belonging to those three animators. They wind up seeing the most action, and, accordingly, it's through them that we're invited to feel the weight and force of their bodies, individually as well as upon each other. The face of Keane's Pocahontas was built in ways I sort of don't agree with<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a Perfect Woman melange sourced from a dozen inspirations, a couple of whom were even Native American<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but I cannot fault the execution of these bodies or their movement. Even as the combination of realism and idealism in the designs imposes limits on the expressivity we expect from Disney animation, their curious mix of tangibility and towering inconicism is perfect for the goals of this film.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhu1Y1eF_k4LwN0dQIDAGo522jVJxPFrjO3yL4GPfF-tSW0jd6Jruf59YJIy0NTvNql5EDfblxKmTy4kpfZFc6L1WrBqfG1ALfPFEm3gUBg6aqdvKLGlNnpcjLMzNqAwZPp_GuxiqEI-WZ1g6f6J_FI0NiBivSXW5RjppdpmvbrMtJ7ezl3eBd4L-Q2rZ/s960/Pocahontas9.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKhu1Y1eF_k4LwN0dQIDAGo522jVJxPFrjO3yL4GPfF-tSW0jd6Jruf59YJIy0NTvNql5EDfblxKmTy4kpfZFc6L1WrBqfG1ALfPFEm3gUBg6aqdvKLGlNnpcjLMzNqAwZPp_GuxiqEI-WZ1g6f6J_FI0NiBivSXW5RjppdpmvbrMtJ7ezl3eBd4L-Q2rZ/w400-h225/Pocahontas9.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But at no point is it forgotten that this <i>is</i> a 1995 cartoon, with the technology of its age, and layout artist Rasoul Azadani (rapidly making himself plain as one of the unsung heroes of the Disney Renaissance) spans the divide between its classicist inspiration and modern construction, with CAPS "camera" movements that exploit that technology more fully than it ever had before<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>some awfully striking and narratively-useful swoops into the depths of the frame, just for starters<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>without betraying the stateliness that is <i>Pocahontas</i>'s principal operating mode. The effects animation follows suit, with a delightful mix of old and new: the opening ocean storm is a nice example, within three seconds of one another indulging in lighting effects through grates that would be all-but-impossible prior to CAPS yet rendering lightning flashes with a merely-easier-in-CAPS equivalent of an old-fashioned matte; and I've already mentioned the ravishing water animation. The "mists of history" that settle over half the film, meanwhile, and which are deployed to absolutely perfect effect in the tense initial confrontation between Pocahontas and John, are <i>all</i> modern<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but that scene is also a terrific example of Keane and Pomeroy's work together, the silent strategems of their characters made subtle and rewardingly ambiguous, and likewise feeling of another, more patient era.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But nowhere is the gulf bridged more intoxicatingly than in "Savages," which is somewhat just a special case of Giaimo's intermittently-expressionistic color style throughout. But <i>what</i> a special case: now he's blasting you with completely non-realist solid color<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>its only nod to realism is the colors that look like people get a differently-colored chiaroscuro outline, affording them some dimensionality, sometimes<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>thereby coding our two adversaries as forces in mutual annihilation, most eye-searingly in the somehow-correct deployment of foreground blues and background oranges for the Powhatans, not a combination often-observed for obvious reasons, but terribly memorable. This digital color and intentional flatness is a thing, completely, of 1995. Yet the more concretely symbolic gestures here could be straight out of something of <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/09/walt-disney-part-iii-serious-symphony.html">Fantasia</a></i>'s vintage: the most sublime belongs to Joe Grant<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>fittingly, since he helped kick off <i>Pocahontas</i> with Gabriel, but even more fittingly because Grant was one of the last links to Disney's Golden and Silver Ages still at WDFA<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Grant renders this struggle a cosmic one capable of conjuring red-and-blue storm clouds, and casting the shadows of war upon that newly-fearsome sky.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For all this, I think it's a shame that <i>Pocahontas</i> has basically been consigned to ignominy; it's clumsy, but not so outrageously bad, in the ways it's bad, that it cannot be enjoyed with the appropriate attitude ("this is some wacky white nonsense," if you must). Nor is it fairly dismissed in a world where you can readily find many insisting that, say, <i>Stagecoach</i> or <i>The Searchers</i> still need to be studied, or that <i>The New World</i> is great. (Though these things are true.) It's also kind of dizzying that this one, downright <i>engineered</i> to satisfy all stakeholders, wound up the <i>offensive</i> one, when Disney's other turn-of-the-millennium foray into indigene depiction, the "we're so completely indifferent to Quechua culture we named him 'Cuzco'" <i>Emperor's New Groove</i>, is not. In the narrow but notable ways it's <i>great</i>, anyway, it's a masterpiece. Of course, the atmosphere of disappointment around it also killed the Disney princess musical, ended Gabriel and Goldberg's feature directorial careers, and began the process of dismantling the Disney Renaissance; so it has those strikes against it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 9/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-49576167401202106562024-03-04T04:25:00.029-11:002024-03-14T21:40:51.796-11:00Walt Disney, part XLVII: Stand out till you notice me<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLWiYAMfE6hptke87QA8AJ28l6loc9spkA8D7kqFFq3JKIXIWawR4rv2-i18z_KsIIF6oBGL1FslXhr9Gokth-bjwGvYafw7ox_FDHgUgO4_KFiLg3CTIdlmNj8aYZeeis1LMTfg7zamvcwJ-F3bj-NsrwtmFUf9B2-vaZPwyJVIpMB_BOhV6zCyYKLi5g/s600/GoofyMovie1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="405" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLWiYAMfE6hptke87QA8AJ28l6loc9spkA8D7kqFFq3JKIXIWawR4rv2-i18z_KsIIF6oBGL1FslXhr9Gokth-bjwGvYafw7ox_FDHgUgO4_KFiLg3CTIdlmNj8aYZeeis1LMTfg7zamvcwJ-F3bj-NsrwtmFUf9B2-vaZPwyJVIpMB_BOhV6zCyYKLi5g/w270-h400/GoofyMovie1.png" width="270" /></a></div><br />A GOOFY MOVIE</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1995</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Kevin Lima</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Jymn Magon, Chris Matheson, and Brian Pimental</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdcKpMenzU5Msz0nnb1oSCxhErMrp2Yvie6hjuMmzqvY5brIb1osMFwl9u-xLbf5pkYjADHI1Y7Sdcw3LStqCdB14AXzT9dShdoJ7ayJ9gqGpEC6nS5G2FAEHRpj_DyNhxbcZroXrLtT7OAdvQEeDxrLC0H2smWBbn7RJdfHIQYxMSpC91MzQed3AtfWQl/s683/GoofyMovie3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="683" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdcKpMenzU5Msz0nnb1oSCxhErMrp2Yvie6hjuMmzqvY5brIb1osMFwl9u-xLbf5pkYjADHI1Y7Sdcw3LStqCdB14AXzT9dShdoJ7ayJ9gqGpEC6nS5G2FAEHRpj_DyNhxbcZroXrLtT7OAdvQEeDxrLC0H2smWBbn7RJdfHIQYxMSpC91MzQed3AtfWQl/w400-h214/GoofyMovie3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />We're at a funny place with <i>A Goofy Movie</i>. No longer is there any great urgency to reclaim it from the dismissive reception it got at the time of its 1995 theatrical release, for in the intervening twenty-nine years it's become one of Disney animation's small handful of true cult classic hits, lodged firmly in the hearts of people who were kids then and in their mid-30s today. And yet that's a self-terminating legacy: we're undoubtedly well past "peak" <i>Goofy Movie</i> in 2024, which means the film is now in danger of falling right back into obscurity, as one more example of perplexing Millennial shit. It's probably inevitable; it'll be a pity. But I believe I speak with immunity to any nostalgic pull: I never watched the show it's based on, and didn't watch the movie until much later in life, because by age thirteen, I thought I could tell the difference between a "real" Walt Disney Feature Animation movie and <i>A Goofy Movie</i>, and when I did finally see it, I assumed it would be embarrassing as well as terrible. To my delight, it was the opposite of <i>terrible</i>. It's <i>sort of</i> embarrassing, but partly just because a certain embarrassment is inherent to its genre (to the extent that I think we can't even leave "on purpose" off the table), and mostly because folks are always second-guessing themselves about their childhood faves. But it's not <i>my </i>childhood, so while I've often been more circumspect about it myself, screw it. Forget "cult," let's just call it the classic it is, one of the most unique ever released under Disney's banner.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For starters, it's the only theatrical feature actually <i>starring</i> one of their classic trinity of 20 and 30s characters, with not Mickey Mouse, nor Donald Duck, nor Goofy otherwise ever getting a whole one for themselves (the closest, which is still not that close, is Donald's package film, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/07/walt-disney-part-ix-i-mean-has-anyone.html">The Three Caballeros</a></i>). It's also a bona fide comedy; yet even amongst the four or five true Disney features where my first instinct would actually be to call them "comedies," not one of them is a comedy like <i>this</i>, situating that comedy in an entirely ordinary, even more-or-less <i>credible</i> contemporary environment, rather than, say, pre-Columbian Peru. Relatedly, but distinctly, its single most unusual move might be that this Disney comedy is actually about being, or about having, a teenager.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3u3EDlQA-OL9JcjRLxkyIXBX3YQgE7uRNhH_kWPYhCNfX1fMG3osX1lk6Ni8adYljdeDSnMDQySW73XK2m77c2y3ouw5RZrS3Z6zeJ7ApqdAdiuAlGFTyJRE6wRRDPXDaMBOLT0rfxFUlnNW7aicgAeP-HE3IKUPGIgRZ4zfAOzNEjTYOOXrLn7FMOjbe/s960/GoofyMovie6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3u3EDlQA-OL9JcjRLxkyIXBX3YQgE7uRNhH_kWPYhCNfX1fMG3osX1lk6Ni8adYljdeDSnMDQySW73XK2m77c2y3ouw5RZrS3Z6zeJ7ApqdAdiuAlGFTyJRE6wRRDPXDaMBOLT0rfxFUlnNW7aicgAeP-HE3IKUPGIgRZ4zfAOzNEjTYOOXrLn7FMOjbe/w400-h216/GoofyMovie6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I realize <i>that</i> doesn't sound unusual. But that's the thing: Disney does larger-than-life <i>ideas</i> of teenagers, existing mythlike in some Disneyfied milieu (and for the most part, they're teenagers of marriageable age, rather than barely post-pubescent). To be sure, they often embody their teenaged feelings with the kind of soul-blasting power that far exceeds anything <i>A Goofy Movie</i> would even want<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but, by the same token, not risking the kind of mundane relatability that comes with telling a story about one more suburban dork stuck with an unhip dad on a road trip. And what <i>that</i> means is that, in the absence of any high-concept to justify or obscure its slapstickier components, it's one of the few Disney theatrical features that openly gives you permission to call it "a cartoon" instead of something stuffier like "an animated film." This has an even more vital effect, of allowing its comedy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which, while mostly character-driven in some way or another, is still pitched in an unapologetically cartoony register<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to frequently serve as a metaphor and embellishment for all the realistic human emotions its story wants to get at (or realistic freakish bipedal dog-person emotions, which in this context are the same thing). And that's great, because in its center <i>A Goofy Movie</i> has a pair of the most intelligent emotional arcs to be found in Disney animation, bolstered by some of the most careful storytelling.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I'll make the case for all these extraordinary claims, but we should know what we're dealing with, an adaptation of the 1992-1993 television program <i>Goof Troop</i>, though right away my impulse is, "But not really, right?" The show looked to the material of Goofy's final, 1950s phase as a short film headliner, where he served as a parody of the suburban family man, and, accordingly, it took Goofy (Bill Farmer, whose tenure as the voice of Goofy has now outlasted even the character's originator, Pinto Colvig) much as it found him, but gave him a real-ish name ("G.G. 'Goofy' Goof") and transmogrified his son, "Junior," into an eleven year old 90s kid, Maximilian "Max" Goof, while excising the wife, making Goofy a single dad. <i>A Goofy Movie</i> is difficult to square with the show, however, shifting that premise around enough that it comes off like a soft retcon: for instance, I don't believe Goofy's neighbor, Pete (Jim Farmer), whom Goofy is too comically oblivious to recognize is his enemy, <i>is</i> Goofy's neighbor anymore, but he is Goofy's boss, at a different job in a department store; Pete keeps his son, P.J. (Rob Paulsen), but his wife has vanished; the Goofs used to have a cat. Smoothing things over somewhat, the movie takes place a good three (maybe four!) years after the show, long enough to need to recast Max (replacing Dana Hill, for obvious-enough hormone-related reasons, with Jason Marsden and the singing voice of Aaron Lohr). But what seems most important, in terms of its fidelity to a television show I've seen two episodes of, is how much those two episodes of <i>Goof Troop</i> feel like a poke in the eyes, especially after recently praising Walt Disney Television Animation for some well-above-average-looking TV cartoons. <i>A Goofy Movie</i> <b>couldn't</b> look like <i>Goof Troop</i> and expect to be taken even as seriously as it was: the character designs, some established in the 1930s, and the rest coming from a decidedly more modern, angular mentality (that still manages to mesh), obviously get a facelift; and the animation was always going to be sloppier on the TV cartoon; but the <i>backgrounds</i> of <i>Goof Troop</i> are such surrealistic scrawls that they're almost avant-garde. By this, I of course mean they're the most forceful of several things that make the show look wretchedly cheap.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidyuAfVSkV7LowKkbm6ADkjN6R6_-JcFo_mE-wPHrRrUfIkZmd85LDddFJdujQGAkwiZCIZFKQyStIazN__9j8pm08f7UAJNSwtMX_WkjwU99mF6JmnSy-ZOgsPmTyE15uZ6PVcldZQAd7MJFytSyPfjSuj0tY8iNeIeJVpyzosp0RNrzjFQ5kJ6vDzy7V/s960/GoofyMovie7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidyuAfVSkV7LowKkbm6ADkjN6R6_-JcFo_mE-wPHrRrUfIkZmd85LDddFJdujQGAkwiZCIZFKQyStIazN__9j8pm08f7UAJNSwtMX_WkjwU99mF6JmnSy-ZOgsPmTyE15uZ6PVcldZQAd7MJFytSyPfjSuj0tY8iNeIeJVpyzosp0RNrzjFQ5kJ6vDzy7V/w400-h216/GoofyMovie7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Not so for <i>A Goofy Movie</i>. For what it is, it looks tremendous. This <i>Goof Troop</i> movie's production largely mirrors its "Disney MovieToon" sibling (the only two ever so-branded), <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xlvi-bad-and-good-luck.html">DuckTales the Movie</a></i>: a special was contemplated, and then it got kicked up several notches. One interesting difference is that it somehow became Jeffrey Katzenberg's baby<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the whole "road trip" premise is attributed to him, founded upon a bonding experience he had with his own daughter<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and by the time it was released, Katzenberg was dead to Disney, which might explain the lack of marketing enthusiasm as well as yet another horrible Katzenfact that sounds made up, because nobody is that stupid or weird. The executive reputedly had Farmer, going on two weeks of recording, attempt the titular role without the character's customary voice, which Katzenberg allegedly deemed... goofy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I said thirteen year old me could tell the difference between a "real" Disney movie and this, but <i>A Goofy Movie</i> blurs that line, and its Katzenberg push put some real Disney institutional muscle into it. That's a marked departure from <i>The DuckTales Movie</i>, which existed mostly to see if Disney's international studios could make any movie. Principal animation was again handled in large part by Disney's outposts<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in France*, but this time with help from Australia (and from non-Disney studio Phoenix in Canada, as well as through an unknown-to-me, outsourced digital ink-and-paint firm, Pixibox, that used a software called Pegs)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but <i>pre</i>-production and the overall shape of the project, and afterwards a non-trivial amount of clean-up, inbetweening, and effects, were in fact handled at WDFA. Kevin Lima, a veteran animator and story artist who'd soon help oversee one extremely real Disney movie, assumed directorial duties; and from a story developed by Jymn Magon (previously a smuggler operating on the Outer Rim of the Galactic Empire, one presumes), a script was hammered out between its three screenwriters, Magon, Brian Pimental, and one Chris Matheson<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and it's feasible that some of the specialness of <i>A Goofy Movie</i> could be located in the legendary co-creator of <a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2015/12/be-excellent-to-each-other.html">Bill & Ted</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvk4irjjBTe6Loei5c_tOs58Bzhhr-jCLsMjrp-lG4djvVR7lwz3zRyRp7cFjXP-QwLgrb7JWZqJIYW2Wlb3T_nK80Pegve5R-JGR2sHTDa4IOKGnHMrxfQfJOhNNBOIG6D6kWD-iUgQPdceLCQAicVLpHMfp8T029uP3uoz4xLTP4qw3Gg1pr_G-CjVsh/s960/GoofyMovie2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvk4irjjBTe6Loei5c_tOs58Bzhhr-jCLsMjrp-lG4djvVR7lwz3zRyRp7cFjXP-QwLgrb7JWZqJIYW2Wlb3T_nK80Pegve5R-JGR2sHTDa4IOKGnHMrxfQfJOhNNBOIG6D6kWD-iUgQPdceLCQAicVLpHMfp8T029uP3uoz4xLTP4qw3Gg1pr_G-CjVsh/w400-h216/GoofyMovie2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />That story, then, is solid sitcommery, perhaps not quite recommending itself as "the movie" version of a show, given its vignettish structure, except for the sheer oomph put into it, and because it at least takes the characters out of their usual setting. So: as noted, it's a road trip, but a forcible one, instigated when Max, in the most wholesome example of acting out imaginable<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's a wonder how fully this feels like "a teen movie," burgeoning sexuality and all, despite being so G-rated<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>interrupts a year-ending school assembly with the help of P.J. and their co-conspirator Bobby (Pauly Shore, guys!**), whereupon Max puts on a lip-synced, cosplay performance of one of the big hits from his world's biggest pop superstar, Powerline (a rather smaller pop star in our world, a Princeling within this film's budget, Tevin Campbell). And I want to stop this already stop-and-start review to point out how quickly this announces itself as the damned smart and efficient piece of storytelling I previously called it. <i>A Goofy Movie</i> knows we don't know who the hell Powerline is; yet it knows it needs to tell us before it rests a crucial narrative pivot on it; <i>and</i> it knows this 78 minute movie needs that narrative pivot to happen immediately, and doesn't have time for any dedicated set-up. And so it gracefully turns this exposition into a tight <i>character beat</i> instead, having Max's famously clumsy father burst into his room to vacuum (at 7:30 a.m.!), and accidentally more-or-less destroy Max's beloved carboard standee of his favorite pop superstar. So <i>now</i> we know who Powerline is, and just as importantly we know that Goofy is a clueless, overbearing klutz, while Max accurately regards him as lame despite being pretty lame himself. (I'm <i>also</i> a fan of the erotic/horror opening dream sequence prologue, which accomplishes similar things.) Hell, the storytelling attending Goofy's over-the-phone discovery of Max's "delinquent" behavior is easily just as sophisticated, involving some striking axial jump cuts, like this was a <i>movie</i> or something, to fully get across Goofy's overreactive terror at Principal Mazur's (Wallace Shawn's) prophecies of Max's doom; it follows that up with some downright expressionistic lighting effects to reveal to Goofy the solution to the problem of his son, namely a fateful cross-country father-son fishing trip. And pretty much the whole movie is <i>like</i> this, not always so showily, but approaching perfect visually-supported narrative construction, even when, e.g., they get attacked by Bigfoot (Frank Welker).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That father-son fishing trip, however, is exceedingly bad news for Max. You see, Max's stunt has taken this zero and turned him into a high school hero (P.J. gets nothing; P.J.'s life is incredibly sad). Max perceives, in particular, that his stock has gone up in the eyes of his crush, Roxanne (Kellie Martin). (This is the point where you just have to accept that this story needs an inciting incident, even if I've always found it very sociologically dubious that "lip-sync cosplay" managed to turn a nerd popular<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>then again, TikTok<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though I also suppose the part where he drops the principal through a trap door would have some "cool rebel" appeal.) Anyway, Max has capitalized on his newfound popularity to secure a date with Roxanne, but now his father threatens to tear him away from her, and she isn't apt to wait for him (and let's file this under "minor flaws that are actually strengths," Roxanne only ever getting about twenty lines, and throughout all of them remaining <i>extremely</i> outwardly inconsistent about how she feels about Max, swinging between fully-reciprocal affection and borderline-hostile indifference, in a very petulant, teenaged way herself). In a quandary, Max can only go for absolute broke: he makes up an elaborate, insane lie about his dad<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>this</i> guy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>being Powerline's old bandmate, and how they're going to L.A. to make a walk-on appearance at the big Powerline show, so Roxanne should watch the pay-per-view special real close, because there he, Max, will be. But it's not exactly a lie if you pull it off, and in between the trials and tribulations of their odyssey, Max shall manipulate his dad into putting them into a position where he can at least try.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tIX3qMoorXptxOUYCeqt00EkuYzJTxIlm-fJysaC4Ru08E5EostH1PLtfvY5gYuBR8qvvIQhONT4y34VUUOhdBTypaCKYCBW-L4QQHIxxQImg3KEcskCLsykvBkwiZqVPckndsBFe-GRfaPhK9XZ5DrPGEpHFipyqtWZTglwOFRJaKhUdXJx7RXICRGe/s960/GoofyMovie4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tIX3qMoorXptxOUYCeqt00EkuYzJTxIlm-fJysaC4Ru08E5EostH1PLtfvY5gYuBR8qvvIQhONT4y34VUUOhdBTypaCKYCBW-L4QQHIxxQImg3KEcskCLsykvBkwiZqVPckndsBFe-GRfaPhK9XZ5DrPGEpHFipyqtWZTglwOFRJaKhUdXJx7RXICRGe/w400-h216/GoofyMovie4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Now that I type it out, it is legitimately hard to think of a protagonist in any teen movie, or any movie, including all cartoons, who's a dumber motherfucker than Maximilian Goof. But that's what's so great about <i>A Goofy Movie</i>, and it gets at what I said about how this avowed cartoon can capture the brain-addled febrility of teen alienation: a parent whose existence feels like a constant humiliation; a crush who feels like an inscrutable bitch; and a kid who's too stupid to explain himself to either one of them, and who, when confronted with the possibility of a hole, keeps digging. It's especially great at the dad stuff (even if it doesn't quite "speak to me" specifically, since my dad was cool), with a nicely-calibrated performance from Marsden that is, at turns, about as mean and dark as a film like this could get away with. It's perhaps not the single strongest plank of that performance, but I very much like Marsden's social horror and sullen fallout from the visit to one of Goofy's favorite roadside attractions, Lester's Possum Park<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which (again with the efficiency!) doubles as a nervy send-up of Disney's rodent-based parks, by asking what the difference is besides budget and placentalism. It's emblematic of the relationship here, where the son kind of honestly hates his dad, having practically forgotten why he ever loved him, because it's certainly not for anything he's done lately; the father, for his part, is at a loss to comprehend what's opened this gulf between them, even though it's the most obvious and natural thing in the world.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Which is how Goofy is such an ideal vehicle for an exploration of a parental-teenager divide tilted towards the teen's perspective: Goofy comprehends basically <i>nothing</i>, that's his whole deal, and you don't have to change anything to get him to serve as the most comically-blithe parody of fatherhood conceivable<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>fundamentally sweet and good, something we obviously recognize, and hence the dramatic tension, but still flailing and harmful, making it easier to side with Max's frustrations, even when Max is obviously <i>not</i> being sweet or good. Farmer's excellent at the hambone antics built into this (Farmer is, also, exceedingly funny, and this is an exceedingly funny movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>all that "efficiency" talk could make it seem like all it does is artfully deliver plot points, but "narrative efficiency" can be synonymous with "good comic timing," and <i>A Goofy Movie</i> is replete with well-timed gags and oddball moments that aren't quite "gags," but still make you smile, for instance, "Leaning Tower of Cheese-ah"). But I don't know, maybe the most interesting tiny thing in the whole entire film is the one part of Farmer's performance that's the least typical, during a remarkably satanic-feeling hot-tub conversation Goofy has with Pete.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuQmZBhEzyJg_4N1BEz8KFjHar4R9ewy1_SHCuvJpEYnc7ThXZeD_9Ik5Zy9vbdr3UAAW0_eSz8FSQI9UUL_8S5KZHoA_2gyk9SJ9JCROh83wMdfpUkPJD4R30wtv1S08HHW1NGHwjupilk8VSuqOYazMfhxaRUJfwIDus-ol3rbSba6jsAdzP49ibHPkC/s960/GoofyMovie5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuQmZBhEzyJg_4N1BEz8KFjHar4R9ewy1_SHCuvJpEYnc7ThXZeD_9Ik5Zy9vbdr3UAAW0_eSz8FSQI9UUL_8S5KZHoA_2gyk9SJ9JCROh83wMdfpUkPJD4R30wtv1S08HHW1NGHwjupilk8VSuqOYazMfhxaRUJfwIDus-ol3rbSba6jsAdzP49ibHPkC/w400-h216/GoofyMovie5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The latter holds forth on his parenting philosophy, and Goofy responds with an uncharacteristically-terse "yeah" that Farmer allows to punch nearly completely through Goofy's goofiness (almost-but-not-quite losing the "Goofy" accent!). It allows for the <i>deeply</i>-weird sensation of discovering a slapstick cartoon moron's genuine interiority, as he wrestles with how to be a father<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>indeed, judging his "friend" for representing such a monstrous alternative. And hence a character, altogether defined by his failure to understand anything, that understands this one thing implicitly, but the fact that Pete was also correct in his accusations gets us, soon enough, to a place where Goofy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>fucking Goofy</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>finds his breaking point, and gets <i>mad</i> like a real person. Pity that this fascinating little feature of Farmer's performance also gets the single worst, or at least most damaging, animation mistake, where somebody in Paris, Sydney, or somewhere appears to have to forgotten that key frames should have inbetweens, maybe <i>especially</i> when a character is walking slowly.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is perhaps not, then, a masterpiece of animation<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>there's a laughably bad cheat during a crowd scene, where the bird's eye camera hypothetically justifies extras "making a hole" by literally just disappearing between frames, and there's other small stuff you can readily catch<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but, for the most part, <i>A Goofy Movie</i>'s only sin is that it reins in the ambition that you associate with the Disney Renaissance, with noticeably less dynamic layouts, using shot scales and staging that, for better and worse, <i>are</i> more like "a movie or something" than a 90s cartoon. (The usual complaint here is that <i>A Goofy Movie</i>, often obliged to have heavily-populated backdrops because of its settings, can't really afford to animate its extras much, though I think between careful framing, strategic use of animator resources to give the illusion of background activity, and the ideal viewer's "who cares? they're extras in a cartoon" attitude, it gets the job done.) Even so, I would confidently put it in a contest with any other cartoon of the first half of the 1990s <i>besides</i> WDFA's<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it beats <i>the snot</i> out of <i>The DuckTales Movie</i>, just to start<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>especially on grounds of expressive character animation for Goofy, Max, Roxanne (who probably gets most of her character <i>from</i> her animation), and many others, where I think it <i>does</i> compete with WDFA. (Which you'd hope it ought, since the outposts would be doing chunks of WDFA cartoons soon enough.) To a degree the small-scaledness works on behalf of the story being told<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this is no grand fantasy, after all, and the background paintings are swell at doing "heightened version of quotidian Middle America"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and when it <i>does</i> get ambitious, it can have outsized impact, from something as wacky as the (often pretty damn great) squash-and-stretch approach it takes to vehicles for the sake of the film's physics-straining physical comedy, to something as dramatically crucial as the attention paid to light and shadow during the remarkably-intense river climax. (I'm not sure how much I adore how many different aesthetics get used for the effects animation <i>of</i> that river, by however many different studios worked on it, but it helps that they're all pretty excellent, particularly the pencil-like immediacy of the current during the perilous part right before the waterfall, which lands with surprisingly-high physical stakes for a movie that shouldn't be able to have <i>any</i> physical stakes by now.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcnm2GERQGYmwWrfteJkEiEmPsuglnjqLuRQLuW9aGma2rea8v03y2CC3rao4tpjpBPIJd6uNrF-c9kyI52tVtVOCWgVgHj8Lo-dkKI70YZScnUc-r8gnhUyiArgMcxQJWFrDRLSdhCu6aso9CBLnKcWyFKzTXEBjDHCuIJ8qnawDEhFW0sJYIbRrlQsi/s960/GoofyMovie8.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcnm2GERQGYmwWrfteJkEiEmPsuglnjqLuRQLuW9aGma2rea8v03y2CC3rao4tpjpBPIJd6uNrF-c9kyI52tVtVOCWgVgHj8Lo-dkKI70YZScnUc-r8gnhUyiArgMcxQJWFrDRLSdhCu6aso9CBLnKcWyFKzTXEBjDHCuIJ8qnawDEhFW0sJYIbRrlQsi/w400-h216/GoofyMovie8.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />There's also some ambition in the musical numbers, and I don't know why I wouldn't go ahead and assert that <i>A Goofy Movie</i> holds up to its corporate cousins on this count, too, even if it's a little bit apples and oranges. The three book numbers by Tom Snow and Jack Feldman are really good stuff, regardless: the scene-setting "After Today" montage does its job admirably, and performs the additional service of effectively giving Max an "I want" song; Max and Goofy's reconciliation duet "Nobody Else But You" is, rather than a ballad, a nicely-cozy, very-paternal song, gaining a lot from the meditative quality of all that water animation, plus some cute lyrics between the two; and, in the middle, "On the Open Road" is honestly extraordinary, a very fun song with some wonderful only-in-a-cartoon choreography (Damien Chazelle didn't even <i>try</i>, man) that takes advantage of moving cars and dozens of zany featured extras, putting it in the running for the stand-out work of animation here. There is also the matter of Tevin Campbell's songs; they might benefit unfairly from our ability to pretend that Prince doesn't exist in this universe at all, and the whole affair almost makes it feel like a period piece<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even from the standpoint of 1995<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a movie made by forty year olds for ten year olds, aiming to capture and assuage their fears of impending teenagedom, yet, charmingly enough, five years out of date already. Nevertheless, whatever: "Stand Out" and "I 2 I"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><span style="background-color: white;">heh</span><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>are <i>total bangers</i>, no notes. ("Stand Out's" reprise is likewise well-used for a cool <i>Ferris Bueller</i> riff.) And they also get some joyous and colorful, if somewhat more physically-bounded staging<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>on the other hand, they get some decent life-referenced, literal choreography<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I love how corny Goofy's triumphant contribution to that choreography is (and Powerline's "what the fuck <i>is</i> this?" initial expression is one of my favorite surprisingly-subtle pieces of character animation here). If you've bought into <i>A Goofy Movie</i> by now, and I suppose it's possible that you haven't, because you emerged from your father's head fully-grown like Athena, then it's kind of fantastic how redemptive that feels for this very goofy dad. It's not as good as Disney gets, but it's real close, and it was never <i>as</i> good at what it's doing here, anywhere else.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 10/10</b> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*Who had, in the interim, been responsible for 1994's direct-to-video <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">Aladdin</a></i> sequel, <i>The Return of Jafar</i>. I'm about two-thirds done with this Disney retrospective, but if I allowed myself to get sucked into <i>that</i> vortex, I wouldn't be halfway.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div>**And a major secondary character is also played by Jenna von Oy, aka Six. Very 90s.</div></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-1332731161070090052024-02-29T08:16:00.056-11:002024-03-02T17:16:28.745-11:00Walt Disney, part XLVI: Bad and good luck tales<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDrnWH9_FUGU74mMu6sGSK1KU4Bo8CmoRh2qNWk30sL66-353AKqNtYVKOyAjaLUuTkdL016GMQ3WnHSYwZy-q3SiO7h_Q_7OY4L4crlNO3lfn3zwDHBME2QvLPTpDjzlQiSFeE2w2v4pghbHfx5ZvcTkt1bYplUR7VOFlVwP5K1qW1q2Be_xyRhLOAHZT/s750/DuckTales1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="476" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDrnWH9_FUGU74mMu6sGSK1KU4Bo8CmoRh2qNWk30sL66-353AKqNtYVKOyAjaLUuTkdL016GMQ3WnHSYwZy-q3SiO7h_Q_7OY4L4crlNO3lfn3zwDHBME2QvLPTpDjzlQiSFeE2w2v4pghbHfx5ZvcTkt1bYplUR7VOFlVwP5K1qW1q2Be_xyRhLOAHZT/w254-h400/DuckTales1.jpg" width="254" /></a></div><br />DUCKTALES THE MOVIE: TREASURE OF THE LOST LAMP</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1990</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Bob Hathcock</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Alan Burnett</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhobHtQnkR8gKIB8h-U5Aa4YnhBbJ-Rb5x8ivgBF-hyHXRqxoUGOcJRUTwll9jgQQ1BhqQIwfTCTarm3vDxg4zocp_wJj0oOep2pg-JB4HVQw246meBvVDDMMbsRPy2OwLu29X9VPuTXbC33z6GaK4bt3lwW743j7yI-_eXuK_w5xWwfV6cdhqitONi4SyE/s901/DuckTales3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="901" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhobHtQnkR8gKIB8h-U5Aa4YnhBbJ-Rb5x8ivgBF-hyHXRqxoUGOcJRUTwll9jgQQ1BhqQIwfTCTarm3vDxg4zocp_wJj0oOep2pg-JB4HVQw246meBvVDDMMbsRPy2OwLu29X9VPuTXbC33z6GaK4bt3lwW743j7yI-_eXuK_w5xWwfV6cdhqitONi4SyE/w400-h239/DuckTales3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />So now, on this forty-sixth exploration of the history of Disney animation, we're obliged to go back in time a few years, and however it may appear, that's <i>certainly not</i> because I forgot a theatrically-released <i>DuckTales</i> movie existed in the first place, but then many months later realized that, to do what I wanted to do with Disney in 1995, my need to be complete and correct would compel me to look back at it whether I wanted to or not. That would be incredibly lame. No, I definitely want to write about it. I'd always planned to backtrack. I just didn't want to interrupt the story of the Disney Renaissance with an unprofitable curiosity produced by a completely different studio under the Disney banner, and on different continent altogether. Yeah, that's the ticket.*</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Yes, fine. I'm being overly contemptuous of a film that's almost okay. Rather more relevantly, though, it did in fact turn out to be an important part of Disney history. The awkwardly and inauspiciously titled <i>DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Christ, pick a lane, or at least add a second "the"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>arrived in theaters in 1990, coming between <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i>'s rejuvenation of Disney animation's fortunes the previous November and that subsequent November's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/04/walt-disney-xli-he-doesnt-even-know-how.html">The Rescuers Down Under</a></i>, which unfortunately rejuvenated nothing about Disney animation despite being one of Disney's masterpieces, though it did better than the <i>DuckTales</i> film, which didn't even gross its relatively slim, yet surprisingly high, $20 million budget back. This did not mean that this <i>DuckTales</i> film was not, in its way, a success<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but for that, we need to go back further.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Following the regime change at the Disney company in 1984, one of the initiatives Michael Eisner forwarded was Disney's entry into television animation. Now, Walt Disney himself had made some efforts in that direction; some of my favorite Disney animation of the 1950s was on television (namely, the Ward Kimball-led modernist limited animation on a trilogy of Space Race-related episodes of <i>Disneyland</i>, involving the added wooziness of a Nazi war criminal, Wernher von Braun, talking to American children about dumbshit moon base ideas he'd first forwarded to Adolf Hitler; that episode's not on Disney+, which annoys the historian in me, though at least "Man In Space" and "Mars and Beyond" are, being super-cool <i>and</i> Nazi-free). But Eisner's plan was more ambitious. In the 1970s and 1980s, television animation had brought the medium to perhaps its most abject status in history<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it wasn't without its nostalgic successes, of course, but when you go back, sometimes you can be floored at how bad it can be<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Disney sought to not only address this but <i>exploit</i> this, basically by meeting children somewhere in the middle, offering something less than Disney's theatrical animation but more than what was passing for animation from the other cartoon factories. Indeed, even if "Disney's theatrical animation" in this same period was itself a somewhat-fallen angel, this still meant some of the best-looking cartoons on TV.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFp5tc5wmpp86IRUodyTiVM7D2FNc3a1nkl4xq2LwkZqgBX7DjairfZMZaLM965cpNUEUHESp_6IXW63CUzIws4N_4SxTIL0lXUWB8vpdO0wrqM4ZGsYw3xD80565BCfZBq5Iwbl0GNd6f5UZcqFuEKHhJZ6JRbtlyN7t2hBIN5VYdHiHFWbfIumTyBCPV/s901/DuckTales5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="901" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFp5tc5wmpp86IRUodyTiVM7D2FNc3a1nkl4xq2LwkZqgBX7DjairfZMZaLM965cpNUEUHESp_6IXW63CUzIws4N_4SxTIL0lXUWB8vpdO0wrqM4ZGsYw3xD80565BCfZBq5Iwbl0GNd6f5UZcqFuEKHhJZ6JRbtlyN7t2hBIN5VYdHiHFWbfIumTyBCPV/w400-h239/DuckTales5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />After a few not-very-well-remembered ventures (<i>The Adventures of the Gummi Bears</i>, based on the candy Eisner's children enjoyed; <i>The Wuzzles</i>; something called <i>Fluppy Dogs</i>) Walt Disney Television Animation, led by Gary Krisel, produced a palpable hit. This was <i>DuckTales</i>, starring Carl Barks's beloved and influential 1947 creation, Scrooge McDuck, uncle to Disney animation mainstay Donald Duck, and great-uncle to Donald's shitty triplet nephews, Huey, Dewy, and Louie; the show would send the great-uncle and grand-nephews on many Indiana Jones-like treasure-hunting and grave-robbing adventures, and a brief refamiliarization with it has led to me to believe that it was, by-and-large, fine. Well, I'll certainly give it this: gauzily or not, I actually remember <i>DuckTales</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for where this fits into Disney's feature animation, following the show's success, director and producer Bob Hathcock wanted to do a more lushly-budgeted five-episode epic, and, ambitiously, pitched this as a big-screen adaptation. I don't know if he was surprised or not, but it got greenlit, and sent to France. And <i>that's</i> where this fits in: in 1989, Disney had purchased Brizzi Films, a French animation studio run by two brothers, best known for <i>Babar</i>-related material. It eventually took on the name Walt Disney Feature Animation France (even sprawling out into two physical studios, one in Paris and a satellite in Strasbourg), so you can see where this will go; it was a major plank in Disney's program to create a worldwide animation production network that could fuel what seemed like, at the time, WDFA's endless need for fast-yet-high-quality hand-drawn animation. Hence it kind of didn't matter whether <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i> made money, though that would've been a bonus. It was probably a calculated thing that none of these people (or at least, as I understand it, very few) had worked on the actual <i>DuckTales</i> show, because their goal was to get them to draw all sorts of shit that, by definition, they'd never worked on before. This experiment<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>under the horrible off-brand sounding name, "Disney MovieToons"<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>was undertaken to see if Disney could whip a bunch of European animators into shape to serve as an adjunct to WDFA (though Europe was by no means the only continent Disney had expanded into, nor would they be confined to just WDFA handmaidens). On that count, it worked.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3-r_BP5kXtTiUaIEmjbbUUG_oMSx8WMjba7PbFJpbCjJEA0rKrMae6VUwpZ8a7oQGWzT16Yncj9-FK0w62sDTmZyyAoKBAtMugrDeIUqr2fgAivVhK_i9Wf-VvLRILIzYgev6Dezb-QeQJtwTwmQuCWeOG5LY2Q_w0QIV_R7H1nU2NL0U0qVQAd7QEjpZ/s901/DuckTales4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="901" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3-r_BP5kXtTiUaIEmjbbUUG_oMSx8WMjba7PbFJpbCjJEA0rKrMae6VUwpZ8a7oQGWzT16Yncj9-FK0w62sDTmZyyAoKBAtMugrDeIUqr2fgAivVhK_i9Wf-VvLRILIzYgev6Dezb-QeQJtwTwmQuCWeOG5LY2Q_w0QIV_R7H1nU2NL0U0qVQAd7QEjpZ/w400-h239/DuckTales4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />As for the movie itself, though only a byproduct of an enormous, impersonal industrial process, it's still a fascinating artifact of the last days of the obsolescent technology that would be used to make it. But as I've been prefacing way too much for a slip of a TV cartoon adaptation, let's get to the actual story (which, for the record, was written by a <i>DuckTales</i> veteran, Alan Burnett). So: somewhere in probably-Egypt, our Scottish caricature of a late-middle-aged adventure hero, quazillionaire Scrooge McDuck (the indispensable Alan Young), has been funding, lo these many years, a search for the lost treasure of the legendary thief, Collie Baba. (I think that's funny, but it's unfortunate that the only funny or even marginally-thoughtful joke name in the whole film belongs to a figure who died a thousand years before it started.) Presently, Scrooge, his pilot Launchpad McQuack (Terrence McGovern), his nephews (all Russi Taylor, talking to herself), and well-treated servant-relative Webigail (still Russi Taylor) arrive to check out Scrooge's team's new find, and Launchpad lives down to his reputation by destroying a significant archaeological site during his awful landing, which, unaccountably, because this is a cartoon and it's just a joke about how at least it wasn't a <i>new </i>building, kind of bugs me the most out of anything in a movie that you have already guessed will veer from time to time into insensitivity.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So: Scrooge's Egyptian dogs (what? that's what they are**) haven't actually discovered all that much; but they <i>have</i> found a map. Thus Scrooge's quest across (and, ultimately, beneath) the desert begins, though what he doesn't know is that one of his hired Egyptians, Dijon (Richard Libertini), is really working for the immortal sorcerer Merlock (Christopher Lloyd); nor does Scrooge know that Collie Baba's treasure isn't <i>just </i>gold and jewels, but also a magic lamp and the Genie inside it (Rip Taylor). In a double-cross, Merlock and Dijon reveal their hand, but Webigail has already plucked the lamp out of the big pile of treasure, to add to her tea set, so the way it shakes out is that the kids have the lamp, and Merlock and Dijon must follow them back to Duckberg. Meanwhile, the kids discover <i>who's</i> in their lamp, and it turns out all the Genie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>nicknamed "Gene," as part of their subterfuge against their uncle<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>really wants is to just be a regular kid like them, though anything would be better than being a thrall to evil.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I think it would be possible to figure out, just from reading that, where this runs into its big structural problem: it's pretty much <i>exactly</i> the transition from Egypt to Duckberg. <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i> came during a fair run of embiggened TV animation properties<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a <a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/09/bah-weep-granah-weep-nini-bong.html"><i>Transformers</i> movie</a>, a <a href="https://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2018/05/once-man-i-was-onccce-man.html"><i>G.I. Joe</i> movie</a>, and it even shares a release year with a <i>Jetsons</i> movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and <i>DuckTales the Movie</i> might be the one that feels the absolute least like they had a story that was actually asking <i>for </i>a movie. What essentially occurs is that <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i> begins with about twenty minutes of barely-a-movie version of <i>DuckTales</i>, and ends with about fifteen minutes of an-actual-movie version of <i>DuckTales</i>, while in the <i>middle</i>, going on thirty-five minutes, it's <i>just</i> an episode of <i>DuckTales</i>, and I say <i>an</i> episode of <i>DuckTales</i>, a show with a standardized runtime of twenty-four minutes, deliberately. (Though even in the opening twenty minutes of <i>DuckTales, A Movie</i>, it finds the shamelessness to verbatim copy an action-scene quip from one of the episodes of <i>DuckTales</i> I watched to refamiliarize myself with the show, regarding a subterranean river's precipitously narrowing dimensions, and I didn't even watch very <i>many</i> episodes, so for all I know the entire damn screenplay here is a collage of dialogue sourced from the series.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So we <i>do</i> get some fairly-rich animated action-adventure to begin, starting with a terrific background painting that confuses the geology of the American Southwest with that of Egypt, but looks great and seems all serene and majestic, until the customary Launchpad-can't-fly gag sloppily splashes into it; and that leads to all sorts of fun stuff about buried pyramids and death traps and characters slipping down intersecting chutes (they <i>must</i> really love S1E4), not to mention some deadly giant scorpions (though I don't like the unfrightening, plush-like designs of said scorpions); it's even punctuated with some insensitive (but funny) Scrooge-the-peremptory-slavedriver jokes. But even on the kid's cartoon level I'm happy to meet it at, it's merely fine, and then it's cut short: either the budget or the inspiration vanishes, replaced with low-impact antics in McDuck Mansion amidst what I understand are the background paintings reused from the show. And sure, why not? But regardless of their provenance, the detail and general shit-giving goes <i>way</i> down. You can vaguely perceive that this is supposed to be the "heart" of <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i>, inasmuch as this is where our guest star gets his characterization, reveals his personality, and expresses his yearnings, but a lot of it is just grinding presentation-like exposition about the extremely idiosyncratic rules this genie obeys<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>three wishes per user, unless using Merlock's talisman, then you get endless wishes, but you can't wish for the talisman to be destroyed, et cetera ad infinitum<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the rest of it is unfunny nephew-and-Webby filler, and slightly-more-funny slapstick where Merlock attempts to infiltrate the mansion, in ways that unfortunately somewhat degrade him as a villain. I will admit to finding it impossible to even <i>pay attention </i>during this long downtime, and while I wasn't keeping count, I earnestly have no idea how these four kids burned through most of fully <i>twelve</i> wishes on, effectively, nothing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It probably doesn't help, either, that this middle stretch almost entirely fails to involve Scrooge, the protagonist and best character; as for Genie, Merlock, and Dijon, the new characters, I only have use for one of them, and not the one I'd have guessed from first principles. The former pair evince some semi-charming old-school celebrity voice casting: Lloyd is a pretty obvious choice here, and he's playing it on a pretty obvious level, but it's Merlock's astoundingly generic "sorcerer" design that makes him actually boring, despite our villain having access, as a shapeshifter, to all sorts of notionally-diverse evil animal forms; I <i>like</i> Rip Taylor (I might just like the idea of Rip Taylor), but he's surprisingly anonymous. (David Weimers, voice director on the film and creator and writer of 28 episodes of the show, has in later years revealed a tantalizing production anecdote: the guy he <i>wanted</i> to cast as his Genie was <i>Robin Williams</i>, and, given that level of celebrity, he naturally called upon Disney big wheel Jeffrey Katzenberg for help. Katzenberg said this sounded like a great idea, mysteriously stopped taking Weimers's calls, and, two years later, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">Aladdin</a></i> came out.) So that leaves Dijon, the most salient way in which this movie I said "veers into insensitivity" does so, and I kind of enjoyed him, not really because of even one thing Libertini is doing, which is just a broken "yes, effendi!" mock-Arabic accent, but because out of any of the new characters, and arguably any of the characters, period, he's the one who gets the best comedy cartoon design and animation, this craven coward with a very flat, narrow head that has a tendency to flatten further<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>virtually <i>melt into a puddle </i>resting on top of his spine<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>when Merlock is screeching at him. And this is, needless to say, most of their interactions together.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdScwlJ8JRGWS96xBOMXTc2szrhKPf22Xvx8TV6Dr3V0CdT9PleQCW8K1PUgOM3r0m-JZ9Hb3_S4OUtqsUJaXW1ADkyvEbcU_qN9cfrMooNyZPLlqYf1CFnhZpYdq3G291kMvzHGAl_L7t_k8puMAVHE0TTqm-AmJnoVkM9CEaGFs7ku2iYclNDww1zWx/s901/DuckTales2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="901" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPdScwlJ8JRGWS96xBOMXTc2szrhKPf22Xvx8TV6Dr3V0CdT9PleQCW8K1PUgOM3r0m-JZ9Hb3_S4OUtqsUJaXW1ADkyvEbcU_qN9cfrMooNyZPLlqYf1CFnhZpYdq3G291kMvzHGAl_L7t_k8puMAVHE0TTqm-AmJnoVkM9CEaGFs7ku2iYclNDww1zWx/w400-h239/DuckTales2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Dijon is all about really shaky <i>lines</i>, too, and so he benefits the most from what I called "fascinating" up top: it doesn't "count," but what we have is the very final Disney theatrically-released feature made before the switch to digital ink-and-paint with <i>The Rescuers Down Under</i>, and this doesn't even really do its aesthetic... "justice" is perhaps not the right word. It's not an <i>exciting</i> end-days-of-xerography cartoon, the way that a few non-Disney films of the early 1990s would prove, notably how Amblimation's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/disneys-challengers-part-ix-thriving.html">An American Tail: Fievel Goes West</a></i> exceeded what I would have considered the limits of xerography's possibilities, or how the Kroyers' <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/humans-will-always-lend-hand-with.html">FernGully</a></i> somehow came into existence looking like a Disney movie from an alternate reality where they made that instead of <i>The Black Cauldron</i>. But it is fascinating: <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i> can look like a Disney feature from the <i>1970s</i>, before they bit the bullet and buckled under to the reality that they had to hire more clean-up artists, and depending on the scene Scrooge and company are either remarkably tidy, or just the scratchiest creations in a Disney film since <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxvii-when-we-were_19.html">The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh</a></i>, complete with still-visible construction lines and the like. And yet it kind of doesn't look like <i>any</i> previous Disney feature, because the pre-established complexion of <i>DuckTales</i> means that instead of the subdued and moody color styling of actual Disney "famly animation" features in the 70s and 80s, it's poppy and flamboyant exactly like a children's TV show should be, with extraordinarily saturated colors designed to properly fry their little kiddie brains. (So while it's actually not too similar to <i>Aladdin</i> beyond their shared basic descriptions, in this respect it really does prefigure that extremely-colorful film, though it doesn't go for that film's aggressive background coloration.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As far as technique goes, meanwhile, Disney France is all over the place: the setpiece-laden beginning and end are generally more consistent, as you'd expect, since that's where all the energy went, and there are some real mistakes being made. For one, a noticeable amount of dialogue doesn't match the mouth flaps; but I'm especially negatively impressed by a long medium close-up of Scrooge where his pupils have contracted into pinpoints, clearly out of a sense of shock, but they forgot to do the beginning of this transformation, so it feels instead like the person drawing Scrooge was way off-model, and the person drawing Nephewey the Duck, whichever one it was, didn't have an opportunity to correct them. There's also some genuine weirdness, that I'm not sure can be ascribed to the animators<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for all I know, it's some mistake Disney+'s people made when getting an HD transfer onto the streaming service, since I feel like this would've been pounced on by the animation aficionados who've written about the film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but there are about half a dozen moments where it looks like <i>dissolves</i> are being used between key frames, like Huey, Dewey, and Louie have just been dosed with a fast-acting hallucinogen. Which I think would've made for a funnier movie, but whatever.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHMd5n6cJCIsLed6tpTnUarLB1Du_m934v_VkOk4nseogxRST4aWpwdoa94dtgGQN2A9HMEsoeFlIspwdQQoibEeFIdQnKc6luJ22pZxB7Cg8HShYqVlmXFuAZymVzoBySxRClt_IYLOLsZpiXnpz7goN7tfpfsw0acFLLPVF6PKWrgJD7yzqAVKRdMGT5/s901/DuckTales7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="901" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHMd5n6cJCIsLed6tpTnUarLB1Du_m934v_VkOk4nseogxRST4aWpwdoa94dtgGQN2A9HMEsoeFlIspwdQQoibEeFIdQnKc6luJ22pZxB7Cg8HShYqVlmXFuAZymVzoBySxRClt_IYLOLsZpiXnpz7goN7tfpfsw0acFLLPVF6PKWrgJD7yzqAVKRdMGT5/w400-h239/DuckTales7.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />But then there is the finale, and <i>Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i>'s finale has some strong cards left to play. Hell, even conceptually: it's a pity that the third act kick-off (semi-spoiler for the <i>DuckTales</i> movie, but greedy ol' Dijon gets <i>his</i> hands on the lamp, and wishes for Scrooge's fortune) isn't moved up to, like halfway through, and allowed to be way more of this story, since for the five minutes or so that Dijon is a going concern, we actually get a movie-sized, potentially-satisfying character-driven narrative about our upper-crust hero rendered homeless and destitute, with only his wits and experience to fall back on. It doesn't last, because we have a boring sorcerer to get back to, but this does allow for the coolest, showiest <i>spectacle</i> in the film, especially the transformation of Scrooge's money bin into an antediluvian magic floating fortress, including one strikingly tense, shockingly <i>beautiful</i> sequence on a collapsing flight of stairs with the nephews and Webby that uses alternating red and green, including on animated pieces of mobile "backdrop," to reach an almost full-on color-based abstraction (despite that piece of collapsing stairwell being very tangible). It is, without any exaggeration, one of the most thrilling 45 seconds of Disney animation of the decade. I'd say I'm surprised it's not talked about more; but it's a brief sequence in <i>DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp</i>, a film not even particularly beloved by <i>DuckTales</i>' own fans, for the sound reason it's just not very good and big chunks of it are, frankly, pretty dull.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 5/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*And if you're wondering when I started regretting numbering these Disney reviews, particularly using Roman numerals, it was "several years ago."</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Someone with more time and less personality than me should make a YouTube video about what the hell is going on with duck supremacy and general avian hierarchy in the universe of <i>DuckTales</i>. Oh, I'm kidding, I'm sure there are at least five already.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-46143358707293290302024-02-28T01:58:00.050-11:002024-03-06T09:05:44.877-11:00Walt Disney, part XLV: Slimy, yet satisfying<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht49a0Pf8aVf8UJdCFqiR2oVeKb_OvjTTX7LerNWolAlp-5D_3_AxTXqxxVI7d0TbGoYCp3gVpj0IkqUqRl1GC6qFm_F7S5n1BC4zwhE6n5X0MEBbU_9h7PXymnwWLwmqcrcJRS3LEsEzVZfh2Jztk3m9Mg7VtFvF2PsWP_zv6GhQAqslmMe3LUn9d4k9y/s800/LionKing1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="546" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEht49a0Pf8aVf8UJdCFqiR2oVeKb_OvjTTX7LerNWolAlp-5D_3_AxTXqxxVI7d0TbGoYCp3gVpj0IkqUqRl1GC6qFm_F7S5n1BC4zwhE6n5X0MEBbU_9h7PXymnwWLwmqcrcJRS3LEsEzVZfh2Jztk3m9Mg7VtFvF2PsWP_zv6GhQAqslmMe3LUn9d4k9y/w273-h400/LionKing1.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><br />THE LION KING</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1994</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by many</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: high<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje75fO844p6yyyJCFV7hRmADeXDUNWMUgv05nmAKhoCCizStHrHah4dBA3Shfv9epCcef_AEN6T_biHJih9uexef2GvDdu_h-gPAKSfgTT3wWGJ9iVRZAtFhcYMEjjZzGU84dlIysesWyZ4auN4rKgBJyGszQdTR36qf85CdzaOTqTb0_S0_NMJ3E4LBbY/s960/LionKing2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje75fO844p6yyyJCFV7hRmADeXDUNWMUgv05nmAKhoCCizStHrHah4dBA3Shfv9epCcef_AEN6T_biHJih9uexef2GvDdu_h-gPAKSfgTT3wWGJ9iVRZAtFhcYMEjjZzGU84dlIysesWyZ4auN4rKgBJyGszQdTR36qf85CdzaOTqTb0_S0_NMJ3E4LBbY/w400-h225/LionKing2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The Lion King</i> is, by any industrial metric, the landmark achievement of Walt Disney Feature Animation in the 1990s, which is as much to say one of the four or five landmark achievements of all Disney animation: to this day it still stands as the highest-grossing traditionally-animated film of all time<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>holding true even in constant dollars, leaving previous landmarks <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/08/walt-disney-part-i-disneys-folly.html">Snow White</a></i> and <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/07/walt-disney-part-xv-i-said-if.html">Cinderella</a></i> in the dust<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>whereas it's also the single highest-grossing film, period, of 1994. And there are, furthermore, its artistic successes to consider, though even in the short version, we have a more-or-less uniformly great soundtrack (it would place highly amongst the highest-grossing musicals of all time, as well), along with a stirring, epic story of generational vengeance; it is one of the masterpieces of digital ink-and-paint in animation, and I will declare it to be <i>the</i> masterpiece of animated feature color styling in the 90s. Moreover, even if we'd rather not acknowledge it, its 2019 all-CGI remake is the highest-grossing animated film of any kind. So you'd have to agree it resonated.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Famously, it did <i>not</i> resonate with the people who were actually making it, at least not at first, and this is indeed famous enough today that I'll dispense with any expression of surprise that the artists behind it could somehow have lacked faith in their own juggernaut. It is still awfully <i>curious</i>, though, so it helps if we can put ourselves in their shoes: on the one hand, you had a movie conceived on an airplane by three executives<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Peter Schneider<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which, thanks to its vague "Africa, lions" "concept," naturally went through several fundamental overhauls before animation began (at one point, for example, operating as a tale of lions at war with a tribe of baboons, a contest that doesn't seem grounded in even minimal ecological sense), which did not prevent innumerable, often-misery-inducing smaller changes <i>after</i> animation began, and all this on top of the fact that talking lions might not even be something you had an interest in; on the other hand, you had the other film in development at WDFA after <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i> had whetted an appetite for real <i>prestige</i>, <i>Pocahontas</i>, a historical romance of deep and serious intent that, everyone assumed, would prove itself Disney's signature film of the 1990s, and the talking lion movie less so. Things worked out quite differently, obviously, but at the time, <i>The Lion King</i>'s directors Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff had to scrounge around WDFA to get people to work on their film at all. You also had a story department and animators who remained unconvinced in the story they were telling, even once it came together, and I think you <i>can</i> see why, even if, to their credit as artists, they left essentially no trace evidence in the bombastic, enjoyable film they finally finished just a few scant weeks before it was in theaters.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLLZqiUz8wIHlg3ydIvbaCjcTSRPRsr9RyY0gpfFjNHl21GNq9g7o62jifV1roJoMKL4xLyygfLn4eZjZXYSMmxakyO0ITv5dPbWZeNlmDLRqX5WeXu5QGx6YTQ0lBx7NeMEAaDNWT5nHbj14o7opOqHkqie4pNLDPe9m8iZj0vtbzNJE4oU-HTwHeGaqv/s960/LionKing9.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLLZqiUz8wIHlg3ydIvbaCjcTSRPRsr9RyY0gpfFjNHl21GNq9g7o62jifV1roJoMKL4xLyygfLn4eZjZXYSMmxakyO0ITv5dPbWZeNlmDLRqX5WeXu5QGx6YTQ0lBx7NeMEAaDNWT5nHbj14o7opOqHkqie4pNLDPe9m8iZj0vtbzNJE4oU-HTwHeGaqv/w400-h225/LionKing9.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />That story, of course, can be boiled down to "what if <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/10/walt-disney-part-vi-because-we-never.html">Bambi</a></i> was <i>Hamlet</i>?", a formulation I don't love on either end. To get it out there, <i>The Lion King</i> is no <i>Bambi</i>, a film that could only have been made under the administration of a terrible businessman like Walt Disney (<i>Bambi</i>, for all its reputation, lost money in its day). There was a brief window, I don't know how long, where <i>The Lion King</i> was conceived similarly, as a film about "real" lions and, thus, about the majesty of nature, which <i>Bambi</i> had explored through a mostly-realist depiction of the life cycle of a deer rendered magical, not so much through a talking deer, but despite that<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>more by how elemental and profound his existence felt while you were watching him. It seems <i>Bambi</i> is always the starting place for ambitious cartoons about animals, but it never takes. And so on to lions fighting baboons, or whatever, and then on to the actual concept of <i>The Lion King</i>, which treats the idea of an animal monarchy so literally and so anthropomorphically (to the extent that we can identify that the <i>succession law</i> of these animals is, specifically, "agnatic primogeniture," and it's so central to their identity that <i>even the villain implicitly respects it</i>) that I wouldn't necessarily think to compare it to <i>Bambi</i>, unless forced; and I'm not even sure <i>The Lion King</i> could ever work quite the same way as <i>Bambi</i> anyway, considering the key difference between the films' respective protagonists<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is, lions:Bambi::Man:Bambi.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for <i>Hamlet</i>, that is likewise part of the production history, and the storypeople were indeed nudged into leaning into that, though what this actually means is only that William Shakespeare is the English language's paramount teller of stories of dynastic conflict, so any story with a monarch or even monarch-like figure who's being undermined, or killed, or flattered, or anything, is obviously comparable to <i>something</i> in the large and varied body of work which William Shakespeare produced regarding royalty. It doesn't even resemble <i>Hamlet</i> the most within that body of work, besides the fratricide (tell me how many <i>other</i> plot points resemble <i>Hamlet</i>, and no, the warthog and the meerkat are not meaningfully "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern"; hell, man, <i>Hamlet</i> doesn't even have agnatic primogeniture). It's at least as much like <i>Macbeth</i>; some say it's like the <i>Henry IV</i>s; I find it to be above all like <i>Richard III</i>, in that its villain is its most interesting, dynamic, and, arguably, likeable character. What it's <i>most</i> like*, of course, is <i>Star Wars</i>: a chosen one is cast out into the wilderness and has adventures alongside wacky sidekicks until he avenges the death of his father, James Earl Jones, while in the meantime he makes out with his sister. Which is pretty much the only way to understand where his love interest came from, anyway, in accordance with anything like real-world lion reproductive behavior; and while I suppose it's possible that she <i>could</i> be his cousin, since the actual plot of <i>The Lion King</i> is, in concrete terms, "a gay lion unaccountably vies for sole control over a pride of lionesses he clearly doesn't have sex with," probably not.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVAYvzKLqiYrXeAoa31NXZGPrzMYzkrNcdEgm_uy1E2ijcIZ4MpXWuImYXKYsJ_Bj41EyXWXRckquCxwKgvPNNPklC2TSc3ZIMNCy0om9d9x2_hWA1ym5n5034NQSsTv5zmPrz-EQXZHIQX71U2rMEwSJG1FajFnVNEfgjReBLR6gl_jhtZoEkbQOGi-TJ/s960/LionKing4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVAYvzKLqiYrXeAoa31NXZGPrzMYzkrNcdEgm_uy1E2ijcIZ4MpXWuImYXKYsJ_Bj41EyXWXRckquCxwKgvPNNPklC2TSc3ZIMNCy0om9d9x2_hWA1ym5n5034NQSsTv5zmPrz-EQXZHIQX71U2rMEwSJG1FajFnVNEfgjReBLR6gl_jhtZoEkbQOGi-TJ/w400-h225/LionKing4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This found Disney going for full-on Campbellian monomyth, then, almost for the first time<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and that the very first was the featureless void of <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/08/walt-disney-part-xxxiii-i-presume-boy.html">The Black Cauldron</a></i> might explain why so many people at Disney had doubts<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>while, beyond that, it represented a break from the successful formula they <i>had</i> established for their musical cartoons (this <i>Star Wars</i> would, also, be a musical), which were less about doing battle and more about escaping from some intolerable state of being, whether that was "<a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">being a fish</a>" or "being a literate French villager in a jerkwater town" or "<a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">being a 10th century Arabian loser</a>" (all of these stories ending with giant battles anyway, because movies simply work better with an action climax). The hero of <i>The Lion King</i> does not have a yearning, even if he has an "I want" song," he has only violent destiny. And it's something one can make too much of, so I will not, but you could essentialize this as a "masculine" storytelling mode, in opposition to the Disney Princess Musical's "feminine." The unfortunate fact is that the success of <i>The Lion King</i> on top of <i>Aladdin</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even though the latter <i>was</i> a glittering example of that "escape and transformation" mode of storytelling<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>taught the relevant decisionmakers the worst lessons. They didn't even recognize these as <i>modes</i>, just "boy shit" and "girl shit," and this wound up coming back to bite Disney in the not-even-that-long run.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, for our story, we must swoop down upon the African savannah, to witness the birth of the firstborn male heir to a pride of lions, Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the film concludes with a pleasing symmetry that replicates this opening because, whatever problems I have with this movie, it's artful <i>as fuck</i>. We follow the cub as his father Mufasa (Jones) lovingly teaches him the ways of lions and the world (and, for the record, we left "<i>Bambi</i>" territory before this, with the uncannily-human-like ritual undertaken by the savannah's symbol-manipulating, wisdom-dispensing, sometimes kung-fu-wielding primate shaman, Rafiki the baboon (Robert Guillaume)). What Mufasa does not know, however, is that the brother whom Mufasa has sort of let just hang around, the black-maned Scar (Jeremy Irons), resents his subordinate station. (And while I will henceforth attempt to abstain from literalistic bullshit, I will note that, all the traditional "God, Scar is so incredibly gay!" observations aside, this is one remarkably unreproductive lion pride, even when Mufasa's still around<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a dozen mates, <i>one</i> male child?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and frankly the siblings appear to share some serious fertility issues.) Well, Scar abhors Mufasa, more-or-less openly so, yet he suffers under the need to still offer the occasional token of his submission. And so he plots his brother's death<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and now Simba's as well, if Scar wishes to be king<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and to this end, Scar has made a treasonous secret alliance with the hyena pack his pride competes with for prey, notably Shenzi (Whoopi Goldberg), Banzai (Cheech Marin), and Ed (Jim Cummings).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_S1aC0pPCxZnYVJ9fr9T3HwBBVMhWQhoOR1Kt6UXxm9VCTG8KsmBgOj5KrKaibDDUgQ7ql6-GVEevoPk8BoGgtO1VxZhDA165AtUzzNtG3zn224KNF-kPaD1PuJ0nDepPW78Y9kX1P-PrPIDTWfj3ts4gBLNnyVfsL_K9JPNgTNIOm7ZRJgwyYmOR_Abf/s960/LionKing6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_S1aC0pPCxZnYVJ9fr9T3HwBBVMhWQhoOR1Kt6UXxm9VCTG8KsmBgOj5KrKaibDDUgQ7ql6-GVEevoPk8BoGgtO1VxZhDA165AtUzzNtG3zn224KNF-kPaD1PuJ0nDepPW78Y9kX1P-PrPIDTWfj3ts4gBLNnyVfsL_K9JPNgTNIOm7ZRJgwyYmOR_Abf/w400-h225/LionKing6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Scar finds his opportunity during a wildebeest stampede, and here Mufasa dies. Simba, still unaware of Scar's scheme and primed to believe that his father's death will be adjudged his fault, for he has been a most obnoxious and irresponsible princeling, flees into the wasteland. But Simba does not perish: he's rescued by Timon the meerkat (Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa the warthog (Ernie Sabella), raconteurs and voluntary insectivores, who, in recognition of the usefulness of having a lion in their debt, drag him back to the jungle that appears to exist alongside this desert, raising him to adulthood (Matthew Broderick) while teaching him the ways of their carefree lifestyle. And Simba is happy, but troubled by the past. He's confronted with it directly when his sister/lover Nala (Moira Kelly) finds him out here in the jungle<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not long after, he meets Rafiki, too<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and they charge him with his mission, to vanquish Scar and take his rightful place as king.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I've groused about it, but this has, basically, <i>perfect</i> bones. It becomes seriously troublesome in only two respects, and I'll lead with what, as a matter of temperament, bugs me more: the <i>joints</i> on these bones are misshapen and weird. I'm more accepting of the climactic clunk (which only flows from the fundamental narrative issue, anyway), whereupon Scar's perfidy is "revealed," but only with Simba's claws at his throat, so not exactly a situation where he'd provide a true confession; but then, I'm also not a lioness with a medieval mindset, either. However, even when I was <i>twelve</i> I was unconvinced by this story's principal pivot, built around the absolute narrative requirement that Simba blame himself for his father's death, which maybe wouldn't be so all-important if it weren't on these particular facts, or if it didn't define the emotional state of our protagonist the entire remaining forty-five minutes of movie. It sits very uneasily atop much diligent foreshadowing (Scar has already manipulated Simba into almost getting his father killed once already, after all; Simba even has a whole song about how he has no sense of responsibility), but <i>Goddamn it</i>, what happens <i>this</i> time is that trusted adult Scar explicitly instructs Simba to sit in one specific spot in a ravine, claiming to relay his <i>father's</i> instructions, and Simba dutifully obeys, whereupon a seemingly-unrelated crisis occurs. Even accepting that Simba is a child, it's difficult to see how "blame" needed to be apportioned at all. (I almost wonder if this was a late-in-the-game reconception: if Simba simply <i>knew</i> that Scar was evil now, and ran and never came back, he could indeed blame himself for being a <i>coward</i>, but I guess we can't have a movie about a confirmed coward any more than we can have one about a protagonist we actually do blame for his dad's demise.) They're trying to trick us into thinking Simba believes his pitiful roar caused the stampede, but this weak gesture doesn't take.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpSRSYJ1eSFGAL-0IiPcbIOqxhPi9zzPoCbjczztoQn5bmQaGf3mrGhwDHgFCTWv22LNcQ9hKe2_HxSExvoBPdxOpRcwQME2mXz3rGO1zL9tmFlfBlvtII5hIHVvcS_Lq_BThToVFUDQqC8c3AaELfloUmOmcB3_kaSDnPEiTiiiIKF-dqObcVysICqkh6/s960/LionKing8.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpSRSYJ1eSFGAL-0IiPcbIOqxhPi9zzPoCbjczztoQn5bmQaGf3mrGhwDHgFCTWv22LNcQ9hKe2_HxSExvoBPdxOpRcwQME2mXz3rGO1zL9tmFlfBlvtII5hIHVvcS_Lq_BThToVFUDQqC8c3AaELfloUmOmcB3_kaSDnPEiTiiiIKF-dqObcVysICqkh6/w400-h225/LionKing8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's <i>infuriatingly</i> sloppy work on the level of story (yet, almost confusingly, not ever on the level of story<i>telling</i>, the visuals letting us know, with flawless efficiency, exactly what Simba, Mufasa, and Scar know at any given moment throughout this hugely-complicated sequence<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and that's on top of its bravura spectacle <i>and</i> its considerable emotional impact<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though however much I'm moved, and I'm not <i>un</i>moved, by the perfect detail of Simba nestling himself against his father's cooling corpse, I greatly dislike the cloying liberty taken, of having a lion shed <i>tears</i>). But the insufficiency of the plotting just drives me nuts, far more than the merely-medium-sized problems of the film, like our pair of Simbas (not counting their two separate singing voices!), Thomas and Broderick, who are each suboptimal in their distinct ways. (Thomas is arguably just too good at being unbearably smug; Broderick is expectedly good at Simba's long stretch of diffidence, but just doesn't have the tools to fully persuade us that Simba is now a lion king, like his father before him. Maybe they should've just hired Mark Hamill.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I dislike it even more, in fact, than <i>The Lion King</i>'s irritating injections of kiddie and/or anachronistic humor. I have room in my heart for Timon and Pumbaa's goofery<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>up to and including the should-be-intolerable affront of their impromptu belting of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (hey, maybe they wrote it in this universe), or even Pumbaa's fart jokes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but the "sly" reference humor, and especially "they call me <i>Mister Pig</i>," and all of the action around <i>that</i>, can eat shit, especially coming <i>where</i> it does, in the midst of leonine gotterdammerung. The most aggravating of the comic relief characters, despite less screentime, is Zazu the hornbill (Rowan Atkinson), the pride's avian chief-of-staff; or he gets the worst single anachronism, anyway, a moment that could only exist in a post-<i>Aladdin</i> world. And so that film's negative influence can be felt immediately, in a stomach-churning reference to "It's a Small World" that is more-or-less expressly presented as <i>the</i> song from <i>the</i> fucking Disneyland ride, which<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>evidently<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Scar has <i>been on</i>. On the other hand, there are the hyenas, who are sort of bumbling, but manage to keep a nasty, still-threatening edge, and they're great.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I said two serious problems, and accepting that our tangent into <i>The Lion King</i>'s littler problems found nothing serious, that leaves only the one option, and I apologize in advance for doing it, but yes, I'm afraid it's that time where we discuss how <i>The Lion King</i> is possibly the most unintentionally fascist movie ever made. At least I think it's unintentional, although Allers or Minkoff do use the term "degenerated" in their commentary track, referring to the post-hyena pridelands. No, I'm quite sure it's unintentional; I'm also tremendously disinterested in talking about the poor pattern-recognition complaint, of how (two) people of (different) color were cast as hyenas, in a movie that has already made the deliberate move of casting Jones as the most noble, powerful figure around, and has the white guy, Cummings, play the most (well) degenerate of the hyenas, anyhow. (I also do not care that the British lion is a brunet.) And some of it is frankly more amusing than disquieting: the flop-sweat effortfulness of Mufasa's philosophy, about why it's actually righteous and necessary that the rulers of the pridelands eat their subjects, is grotesquely authoritarian if you forget that it exists, mainly, to justify predators as the protagonists of a family film to an audience of idiots who are themselves almost uniformly carnivorous, yet would likely experience genuine trauma if they had to confront that. (I'm also amused that a number of the lions' "subjects," notably elephants and giraffes, would be rather more the natural rulers here.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But there's so much that gets in by accident anyway, starting with the almost-nonexistent moral case the film makes for Mufasa's rule over Scar's<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it gets itself into trouble with the over-anthropomorphism here, in that it locates pure evil in the <i>peacemaker</i> of the two brothers, before just going ahead and positing <i>integration</i> as a sinister conspiracy hatched by a literal race traitor, which will also literally make the <i>rain stop falling</i>, because Mother Nature hates it so much<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though the thing that really gets me is that the one time we see how Mufasa treats his second-class subjects, it's in the way he uses his trusted advisor Zazu as pouncing practice for his shitheel cub. And I'd dismiss this if it were meaningfully "about" lions, but Scar is surrounded by a dozen lionesses who <i>could</i> have killed him themselves, at basically any point. (I mean, there is Scar's hyena army, and apparently only a kingly male lion can scare away the bad, dirty outsiders. In point of fact, they just kind of <i>wander</i> away, after foolishly turning against Scar, stupid <i>and</i> cowardly.) I think I will remain amused, however, that it even prefigures one of the more salient features of actual American neo-fascism, the fascists describing their opponents as fascists; I can remain amused because "Be Prepared" is still <i>awesome</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwdLCNCp4frza7KD9Jpo8TMJSV2ATrsgZ1cImMw-vOczM03tPTAaMezBem-GBc35yU7-Zr5RPxO0I9fjQI_Zk7jCldd4GS9rJtO7Mstdo5glKW4Ala6BafawpGSI9GnFmca1RfUFRfDCHsA_vFvX4u3SdYOsu1-K3yypKgKgPSGYvSmB8AX47V_3cGAmk9/s960/LionKing7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwdLCNCp4frza7KD9Jpo8TMJSV2ATrsgZ1cImMw-vOczM03tPTAaMezBem-GBc35yU7-Zr5RPxO0I9fjQI_Zk7jCldd4GS9rJtO7Mstdo5glKW4Ala6BafawpGSI9GnFmca1RfUFRfDCHsA_vFvX4u3SdYOsu1-K3yypKgKgPSGYvSmB8AX47V_3cGAmk9/w400-h225/LionKing7.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />And that's a lot, I realize, for a movie I'm still going to ascribe no small measure of awesomeness to. You have, of course, seen <i>The Lion King</i>, so you know it looks and sounds incredible. On every level of craft it sings, starting (fittingly enough) with its music, with a soundtrack courtesy Tim Rice and Elton John (after an invitation to ABBA fell through<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I am <i>curious</i> about that alternate timeline), and a score by Hans Zimmer that's one of his earliest great successes. The latter is easy to sneer at for its white guy Africana, though Zimmer's collaboration with South African composer Lebohang Marake and their incorporation of South African choral music into the score lends it a nice sense of, simultaneously, specific place and unspecific timelessness. (It is also integrated extremely well into the sincerest, most-soaring parts of the story; it's doing a tremendous amount of the emotional heavy lifting.) As for Rice and John, they kick things off with "The Circle of Life," a statement of purpose that, given I don't remember much of it besides its title, is even better as an excuse for a gobsmacking "cartoon as nature documentary" sequence, that utilizes CAPS for a shimmering world teeming with beautiful life. It also indicates <i>The Lion King</i>'s flexibility as a musical, in some respects a throwback, surprisingly willing to use non-diegetic songs coming from nowhere like a 70s or 80s cartoon<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the romantic interlude, "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," is even kind of <i>weird</i>, because <i>some</i> of it is non-diegetic, some of it isn't, and it's sung by at least four characters, sometimes in their heads, and that's when it's sung by the characters at all (<i>some</i> of it's Kristle Edwards on the soundtrack), while Timon and Pumbaa's homosocial grief is used as the song's comic framing device around the central romantic part. (All told, it's great: I enjoy its frolicky montage, and while <i>Aladdin</i>'s "A Whole New World" maintains its place with the most openly-sexual Disney lyrics, Simba and Nala's tussling may involve the most explicit "then they fucked" <i>editing</i>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, <i>The Lion King</i> maintains access to the innovations Howard Ashman and Alan Menken pioneered, and when it wishes, it's just as much an integrated musical, demonstrated soon enough by "I Just Can't Wait To Be King," at once the "Under the Sea" colorful showstopper and the "Part of Your World" character-defines-themselves number, with the small caveat that young Simba sucks. His song doesn't, and it's in the running for <i>The Lion King</i>'s best musical sequence, thanks to the extreme abstraction of the animation, a cartoon counter-attack upon the reverent realism of "Circle of Life," that takes an already very colorful movie up to eleven in its rendering of backdrops as basically just jagged blocks of color (so expressive that I would have happily allowed a full minute for its abstraction of "flowing water" into nothing besides a bunch of sharply-defined teal and yellow shapes), with animal chorines doing a Berkeley riff with wondrous implausibility.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuED-1xUMpsrOUqqaGpOewAIi_HSGX6akZZlmErPiqtT1rkgcUFqUGDRtm-HJuIc638hAN6RH-EM375brqLf9FsIdXo8JxX1KOpbHEEkL_cQeECmtWVAv7dgKm89730TlCIVYnVZmYeJHGxo7iREEKZpOHy2DzZfsJVCae0HWzTcSa2b1KAWbVncS4l8yY/s960/LionKing5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuED-1xUMpsrOUqqaGpOewAIi_HSGX6akZZlmErPiqtT1rkgcUFqUGDRtm-HJuIc638hAN6RH-EM375brqLf9FsIdXo8JxX1KOpbHEEkL_cQeECmtWVAv7dgKm89730TlCIVYnVZmYeJHGxo7iREEKZpOHy2DzZfsJVCae0HWzTcSa2b1KAWbVncS4l8yY/w400-h225/LionKing5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />There is also "Hakuna Matata," the joke song about Timon and Pumbaa's easygoing bad influence on the once-and-future king, and it functions well enough on this count, while also pulling the thankless plot duty of demonstrating that the lion cub grew to robust adulthood by eating several ten thousand insects every day (apparently), in a series of cool quick dissolves as they swagger across the world's longest fallen tree, that spans several geologically-distinct zones. (There's some great animal "butt" animation in their rhythmic sashaying during their "dance's" denouement, too, and there's a fun, real throwback, 30s and 40s "isn't animation magical and aren't you impressed by movement at all?" quality to that.) This was the big hit, I believe, at least for the under-twelve set; perhaps accidentally, since this second-most-fun song is also counter to all the values the movie holds dear about duty and responsibility.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Which is to say, I'm not sure how anyone could misidentify the <i>most</i> fun song, which <i>is</i>, after its fashion, all about "duty and responsibility." But as "Be Prepared" is bound up in so much of what else is going right here, we have to unravel that first, and the natural place to begin there is Scar, in a dead heat for Andreas Deja's masterpiece with Jafar, and I honestly don't know, I could go either way; if I choose Jafar, I'm sure it's only that I like the movie he's in more. Scar is tremendous; he is also beneficiary of the film's by-far-best vocal performance in Irons, who defined the parameters of Deja's supervision of the character as much as any Disney VA ever has (including Robin Williams), and if between the two we get the quintessential evil queer Disney villain, well, you're not wrong. But he's so <i>cool</i>, and that is<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for better or worse<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a huge part of that, the slinky, sultry, "sen<i>sat</i>ional" movement, counterpoised against his hostile, bored stillness, all leading up to the (very-Jafar-like, now that it occurs to me, though he's colder-blooded) explosion of mad ambition in "Be Prepared." There is a surfeit of amazing, well-observed quadrupedal character animation in <i>The Lion King</i>, in this regard as strong as anything since at least <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxxi-neither-one-of.html">Fox and the Hound</a></i> (and certainly richer)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I'm also very fond of Ruben Aquino's and Tony DeRosa's work on adult Simba and Nala, and of any time the lions <i>fight</i> like lions; and I'm more than fond of Alex Kuperschmidt and David Burgess's supervision of the angular, punkish hyenas, whose spiky, rather-more-animalistic antagonism even bolsters the beastliness of our more genteel main antagonist<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but by any metric Irons and Deja's Scar is <i>the</i> champion here, the one who just bleeds malign personality, and the one who best reconciles the tripartite tension between atavism, anthropomorphism, and mythopoeism that's always this movie's unresolved problem.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqjXYhAsPwPZrSiyTnQWOjjDXHjBcZyYShYY0PCUe3oa3v8RQidI0I9JS1F4I9fNKN53HZjaUsgGbGx29xaFyCUhj-qeuystu9WdNG7LgqleOVVdEZfkNOi30v9acF4nWL4DVy-rsExhWYqbCEXu3igLRzVg-81Vk7hLKbVbL_sZ960LSFvEe36ApK8sQ_/s960/LionKing11.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqjXYhAsPwPZrSiyTnQWOjjDXHjBcZyYShYY0PCUe3oa3v8RQidI0I9JS1F4I9fNKN53HZjaUsgGbGx29xaFyCUhj-qeuystu9WdNG7LgqleOVVdEZfkNOi30v9acF4nWL4DVy-rsExhWYqbCEXu3igLRzVg-81Vk7hLKbVbL_sZ960LSFvEe36ApK8sQ_/w400-h225/LionKing11.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />That's essential, but maybe not even <i>the</i> biggest deal about how "Be Prepared" represents all the currents of <i>The Lion King</i> coming together; if I had to choose, <i>that</i> would be the color design, which is properly credited to about a hundred people, but, more conveniently, production designer Chris Sanders (a name to remember, that one), art director Andy Gaskill, and artistic coordinator Randy Fullmer. In its most quotidian scene, <i>The Lion King</i> remains an eye-pleasing study in color, its characters each defined by very limited palettes, so that the whole world here is a creation of angle and shape, which in turn makes it, outside of <i>Aladdin</i>, maybe the <i>most</i> two-dimensional of Disney's last run of two-dimensional cartoons, and without even entirely meaning to be (the layout definitely would like you to think otherwise), with those shapes really given dimensionality solely by the liberal use of CAPS shadows. But a lot of <i>The Lion King</i> is <i>not</i> quotidian, and it uses color with a shocking amount of expressionism, downright <i>eager</i> to get to every heightened moment where it can throw hell-reds onto its slavering hyenas with the merest diegetic justification, or, to signal the encroaching peril of Scar's alliance, some supernaturally-tinged, completely-unmotivated green floodlights splashing across the rocks as his hyenas enter the pridelands with no big strong king to oppose them. (And there's how color style relates to adjoining scenes: the hard transition from "To Be King" to the chalky decay of the elephant graveyard is dizzying.) I could point to dozens of other things, but I won't, except to praise, no matter how dumb it is, the moribund hyena-ruled savannah, rendered in apocalyptic, ashen grays so powerful that the story must contort itself to accommodate it. And so <i>now</i> can we really appreciate "Be Prepared," the single least "quotidian" thing in the whole movie, and its own special triumph of color style, which does all of this while also offering the best song in the film as a piece of music<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>driving, soaring, <i>evil</i>. It does all this, <i>and</i> it pins it to one-to-one <i>Nazi imagery</i>, notably Albert Speer's Cathedral of Light, even deploying an unmotivated color scheme seen nowhere else in the film, with its sickly yellows; except it's also a Nazi rally held inside an <i>angry volcano</i>. This helps move it away from mere gauche grimness, and back to the matinee good time a movie like this still needs to be. The nerve it took to put this in a kid's movie (and it almost didn't happen!) is worth congratulating, and it all builds upon itself for a powerful, frightening, but still utterly joyous sequence, that holds up as one of the best in the Disney canon.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That isn't even what <i>The Lion King</i>'s makers are most proud of, and I can see their reasons; the centerpiece wildebeest stampede is, in a technological sense, one of the profoundest big deals in traditional animation history, only slightly short of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/04/walt-disney-xli-he-doesnt-even-know-how.html">The Rescuers Down Under</a></i>'s, well, everything, as Disney's first CAPS film. One will not-infrequently see the sentiment shared that <i>The Lion King</i> is the greatest exemplar of Disney's digital ink-and-paint era, and I can see the reasons for that, too. Besides the feast of color and line already described, it's another exercise in the ever-more-ambitious three-dimensional layouts CAPS made possible. But I'm of two minds about this: it also demonstrates the <i>bad</i> side of CAPS, more objectively bad in its marked tendency to use post-animation digital zooms just because that was a tool they now had available, so that in numerous shots we start with or end up with these chunky-ass outlines shoved into our faces. This, however, at least rests on some sort of articulable storytelling purpose. What doesn't is the coked-up party Allers and Minkoff are having with the focal plane, by which I mean "the focal plane," since if I wanted to see "cinematography," maybe I wouldn't be watching a 2-D cartoon. This is deeply intentional. They <i>wanted</i> it to look like a live-action movie, even citing nature documentaries that <i>don't</i> have a distinguishable focal plane (because they had to be shot with telephoto lenses) as an aesthetic to avoid; and it's grating, because the flatness with <i>pretend</i> three-dimensionality is one of my favorite things here. It's even salutary in small doses, of course (there's a nice shot right at the beginning, with ants and wildebeests widely separated by tangible-feeling space), but it can be distracting in its overuse. It reaches its nadir, I think, with a conversation between Simba and Nala in the foreground while Zazu glides overhead and the entire awkwardly-framed shot doesn't appear to have any reason for existing <i>besides</i> justifying a focus rack.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But these are somewhat minor, whinging complaints in the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme of which that wildebeest stampede is a major part: it was a sequence three years in the making, principally the work of story artist Thom Enriquez (whose entire job for over a year was <i>only</i> this) and CGI supervisor Scott Johnston, and as that implies it found Disney animation once again integrating CGI, only this time truly <i>well</i>. Obviously you couldn't hand-draw a thousand stampeding wildebeests<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>only with computers is that feasible<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though Disney's previous flirtations with CGI would not prepare you for how good it is. (Even its previous flirtation in this film: the CGI'd goosestepping hyenas are, in fact, <i>too </i>rigid, the one part of "Be Prepared" that isn't perfect.) Yet it's striking how they went straight from "not-very-good CGI environments" to "a credible stampede of CGI characters," and didn't stumble; however long it took to get it right, it was worth it, another more-or-less perfect sequence in a film that has quite a few, utilizing a brand-new technology that, nevertheless, feels ready in a way brand-new technologies usually don't in animation. (And for all this, I don't want to take away from the fiery finale, which is excellent in its own right, let down only by the tonal idiocy that Allers and Minkoff, who definitely aren't Clements and Musker, failed to resolve, and by the fact that Scar is <i>almost</i> the ideal villain, but unfortunately kind of gets thrown around by Simba, when he could have been a full physical equal.) <i>The Lion King</i> has its problems, and in some respects it's a movie I find a little difficult to like. But paradoxically, it's easy to love: if I compare its incredible strengths to its weaknesses, the strengths outweigh the latter, and it's not even close.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqIfNN8OJ4QR2KrC7m_C05uUwGcihJNuuuX2laFRegqL5ngjS4xUPIFvQsiSZl4bJEPq6S5iBlw4KhVUsMAsz_B5En79p7Dg3CTcmTdJSbYos6Jbo0aHxITgDCdD_Ql3OUIQzWjaRENnSQWSof4WIik-EU5p4XjMejc3axiH5pIV1z3DvZQW2U-v-JdMBV/s960/LionKing10.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqIfNN8OJ4QR2KrC7m_C05uUwGcihJNuuuX2laFRegqL5ngjS4xUPIFvQsiSZl4bJEPq6S5iBlw4KhVUsMAsz_B5En79p7Dg3CTcmTdJSbYos6Jbo0aHxITgDCdD_Ql3OUIQzWjaRENnSQWSof4WIik-EU5p4XjMejc3axiH5pIV1z3DvZQW2U-v-JdMBV/w400-h225/LionKing10.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Score: 9/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*As for the 60s anime, <i>Kimba the White Lion</i>, and the accusations of plagiarism that have followed <i>The Lion King</i> ever since its release, this is massively overlong already. "Simba" is just Swahili for "lion," though, and "Kimba" is just the copyrightable version of that.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-15968173544963073882024-02-25T01:46:00.042-11:002024-03-09T19:17:04.559-11:00Live girls are easy<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6P6VQHYF0FwlxhSk4DzrnZWGcUxL96RgrQpVtX9svbvAzi1Hv306cgxjv8XxNrZIdKQoWDR9GX3sCe3i8lFPFAfdjplhHgzJhj-CmBVNhn1XUV1Pj91v_vcfbrag7uSCSilntqdd50tESfzCakYmXPrLTGUaNAO_a1m00g56l6Dazo2syduUR9nlKfQOW/s356/LisaFrankenstein1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="237" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6P6VQHYF0FwlxhSk4DzrnZWGcUxL96RgrQpVtX9svbvAzi1Hv306cgxjv8XxNrZIdKQoWDR9GX3sCe3i8lFPFAfdjplhHgzJhj-CmBVNhn1XUV1Pj91v_vcfbrag7uSCSilntqdd50tESfzCakYmXPrLTGUaNAO_a1m00g56l6Dazo2syduUR9nlKfQOW/w266-h400/LisaFrankenstein1.png" width="266" /></a></div><br />LISA FRANKENSTEIN</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2024</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Zelda Williams</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Diablo Cody</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-3alZ3iVp2QRWL9YU_yiLTRC0iPFqrH3Rwv_zet5yX568aBPTc9iKHrwKQk9p7uKmuUDibi3e3nMV0D0k5iq9BCeD4mK0qMrVnJ76pTQQqRzcmdHD3MmXBr_rLWg0d7slSfQ4qSiojuOVD6NgjZBdzhhqnPXeogA7jSNhKROsuFMJPShZ8iAT6q2PvhHS/s474/LisaFrankenstein4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="256" data-original-width="474" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-3alZ3iVp2QRWL9YU_yiLTRC0iPFqrH3Rwv_zet5yX568aBPTc9iKHrwKQk9p7uKmuUDibi3e3nMV0D0k5iq9BCeD4mK0qMrVnJ76pTQQqRzcmdHD3MmXBr_rLWg0d7slSfQ4qSiojuOVD6NgjZBdzhhqnPXeogA7jSNhKROsuFMJPShZ8iAT6q2PvhHS/w400-h216/LisaFrankenstein4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />If I were going to choose what cinematic year I'd be doomed to repeat, it sure wouldn't be 2023. But here comes 2024 anyway, where the very first movie I watched in theaters<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in late February, even<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is once again a movie that happens to star Kathryn Newton and that I can't say I really outright dislike, but suffers under a thinly-conceived mess of a screenplay and some questionable direction that leaves the film operating well under its potential. The good news is that it is a much better Kathryn Newton performance, and a somewhat better movie, than <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/02/quantum-of-solace.html">Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania</a></i>. I almost said, "a more original movie," too, but I think we can agree that's only true in a legal, intellectual property sense. The more important part, anyway, is the bad news, and to deal with <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> is to deal with that dubious screenplay, courtesy of its outsizedly-famous screenwriter, Diablo Cody, which is dubious in ways that go well beyond the Codyisms you would not only expect but presumably desire if you willingly bought a ticket to a Diablo Cody movie. It is, then<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and fairly openly<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a companion to what is, in 2024, probably Cody's signature work, the now-fifteen-year-old <i>Jennifer's Body</i>, which was also a high school comedy thrust into a gnarly horror movie about coming back from the dead, specifically as a vampire in the earlier film, even if the word "vampire" was conspicuously never mentioned and its mythology tip-toed away from it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> is (perhaps needless to say) more explicit about its touchstone, and that brings us to the most perplexingly clumsy misstep of that screenplay immediately: this is not <i>Frankenstein</i>, nor is it even a subversion of <i>Frankenstein</i>, and <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> is therefore one really terrible name for the movie it actually is, setting up some very particular generic expectations that no one is even attempting to meet for almost half of its runtime (and not all that often thereafter), with a protagonist who is in no way, shape, or form a scientist, let alone a modern prometheus, or <i>even a graverobber</i>; and while she effects a resurrection, she does so, essentially, by means of wishing upon a star. It's not at all a good thing that <i>Jenny Dracula</i> would have been a far more reasonable title for <i>Jennifer's Body</i> than <i>Lisa Frakenstein</i> is for this; it's only too bad that <i>Lisa Scissorhands</i> would've made even less sense. Now, yes, the movie <i>is</i> set in 1989 (raising the curious expectation that, fifteen years from now, Cody will finally deliver a distaff mummy movie, set in 1969; I don't know about you, but I'll be there), and so of course I realize that the whole point of it is to make a cute little joke. But I don't think it's wise to try carry an <i>entire</i> first act on a fucking pun.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, that's kind of our plot already summarized, but we can be less opaque about it. In 1989 there is a semi-goth high school senior, Lisa Swallows (Newton)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"Swallows" is almost as annoying, because the title has already gone for it and you can't back out now<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>whose life has recently been upended by dual tragedy, first the murder of her mother by an axe murderer who almost killed her too (which feels, I'm afraid, like <i>way</i> too aggressive a backstory for it to matter so little); and second, and perhaps worse, by her father's (Joe Chrest's) recent remarriage to Janet (Carla Gugino), a narcissistic hyper-bitch late-80s stereotype, which has also required Lisa to move and switch schools. Lisa <i>sort of</i> gets along with her more popular stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano), though she perceives an unpleasant cajoling tone to most of her interactions with her, even when she is genuinely being nice. At a party she's been dragged along to, instead of flirting with her crush Michael (Henry Eikenberry) like she'd planned, she accidentally imbibes a drink spiked with some hallucinogenic agent, and suffering through the gross impertinence of another boy who'd offered her "assistance," wanders off into the woods, taking a shortcut she's long since known about through the Bachelor's Cemetary she's spent a lot of time hanging out in. We maybe know a little more than her thanks to an animated prologue that established the grave she stops at now as the final resting place of a musician who essentially died of heartbreak (though more proximately a lightning strike) about a century ago (this will soon be Cole Sprouse, credited as "the Creature," which we will see forthwith is exceedingly inaccurate). Having invested much romance in the dead artist, she wishes she could be with him instead.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3GTw1ecpiuqyBPnRH-Dfurq7OUfVOarbCGalszfOtIEoRV8zFKiH2IiDKp9vr68rFC_Vc7yzABX6z0kuHyNTqPwqRtG9u75Nk7i8Ykj9IPXsl73VypKwUsVYJAOi8fkVBNFe5G8dOi1HD_Mr2HmAbDikaoz0nj0AbYpvA4xJH3kjjPtNK1zqPia7gJgi5/s1359/LisaFrankenstein2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="695" data-original-width="1359" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3GTw1ecpiuqyBPnRH-Dfurq7OUfVOarbCGalszfOtIEoRV8zFKiH2IiDKp9vr68rFC_Vc7yzABX6z0kuHyNTqPwqRtG9u75Nk7i8Ykj9IPXsl73VypKwUsVYJAOi8fkVBNFe5G8dOi1HD_Mr2HmAbDikaoz0nj0AbYpvA4xJH3kjjPtNK1zqPia7gJgi5/w400-h205/LisaFrankenstein2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />What Lisa meant, she'll explain, is that she wished she were <i>dead</i>; but whatever power she invoked misunderstood, because it resurrects the musician with another bolt of lightning, and he comes lumbering to/through Lisa's door. Initially terrified but soon calmed by his pantomime pitifulness, Lisa realizes she has to keep her new revenant friend a secret, though this will become difficult once he starts killing people<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not entirely unjustifiably, but certainly inconveniently<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Lisa, about halfway through the movie, finally utilizes some measure of parodic mad science (a malfunctioning tanning bed) to start giving him zaps of life and integrate the new parts into his rotting body. He is, at the least, going to be a real distraction from her attempts at being cool at school and getting the boy of her dreams. But has the grave not already coughed one up for her?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I mean, yes, it has; it would only be a spoiler if, somehow, it <i>hadn't</i>, though after having pondered this screenplay for a few days, I can only assume that Cody did not do the obvious thing (<i>Frankenstein Created Man</i>, I suppose) in order to keep the underfed love triangle in the picture, insofar as the plot of <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i>, for a surprisingly long time, is her revenant serving as her mute wingman in her schemes to impress the vaguely-goth, vaguely-alternative Michael. (Eikenberry and his presentation here militate <i>incredibly</i> strongly against "uncool outsider," by the way, though I guess I am almost offering a spoiler on that count.) And this is mostly forgivable, ultimately, even if it takes an inordinate amount of suspension of disbelief far beyond a "high school girl builds her own boyfriend" lark; I mean, it feels outright <i>lazy</i> on top of being very aggravatingly un-Frankensteinian, especially when it does in fact veer back towards a joke Frankenstein conceit later, meaning that it had access to that mode all along but spent nearly half the movie on what amounts to a null concept. But at least once you're over the hump, it's <i>mostly</i> functional as a formulaic <i>Cyrano</i>-inflected zom-rom-com, albeit an especially shamblingly-structured one.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And as I've certainly given "mostly functional" movies higher marks than I'll wind up giving this one, none of that is the most serious defect here. (Though I think I'm being extremely well-behaved in not being a literalist shithead about any of this, like decomposition rates or the confrontational clarity with which some of the body parts Lisa uses to rebuild our "creature" are presented and how they would <i>obviously</i> not fit his frame; I will complain, only, that one of those missing body parts could have justified the slow-walk on the romance while still allowing a proper "Lisa Frankenstein" from the outset.) But, yes, it's possible that the <i>most</i> serious defect is that Lisa and her zombie require a screenplay dead-set on pushing them together in order to seem like their romance is written in the stars, and it takes a weird path to get there even then, finding an unusual medium between "the corpse in my closest who eventually gets his glow-up" and "I dug the perfect man out of the ground ready to go," by way of this particular "creature," a compulsory good listener who can also serve as an extra set of hands to hold a vibrator while Lisa, presumably, thinks about her living crush. This all gets us into an entire area of the difference between men's fantasies and women's fantasies that I'd just as soon avoid<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though "aren't sexy Frankenstein stories supposed to at least contemplate the objectification of a romantic partner?" is another good reason this isn't very Frankensteinian in mood<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so I'm just going to fall back on simply calling the romantic arc of it awkward again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCIPTHPpiUxQOadpZSwBl2rQT-3Tp91lYS00K89MkOTxwfurYAoIoS3CKWRhmfg3xnNqFFKn9mXTA_I4Usgl-RJuGon-hQNvDZmKBBjlp11xVccjkEuPN18eZIztzSPa20cAAxverlnDgzf9oQjuuocys8SylnQQvZpAOmSXBjxA2cs0JTVZSG8I-NMhk5/s1110/LisaFrankenstein3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="1110" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCIPTHPpiUxQOadpZSwBl2rQT-3Tp91lYS00K89MkOTxwfurYAoIoS3CKWRhmfg3xnNqFFKn9mXTA_I4Usgl-RJuGon-hQNvDZmKBBjlp11xVccjkEuPN18eZIztzSPa20cAAxverlnDgzf9oQjuuocys8SylnQQvZpAOmSXBjxA2cs0JTVZSG8I-NMhk5/w400-h200/LisaFrankenstein3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The defect, anyway, is that this screenplay is translated into actual action on the screen in a way I'm not even sure that screenplay fully intended, with first-time feature director Zelda Williams evidently taking as her starting point "this sure is like a Tim Burton movie" and running with that so far afield she accidentally wound up in "Wes Anderson movie but not as good," and as Cody writes <i>Kevin Smith movies</i> you can see how this could become a problem, with the vast majority of the performances channeled into stiff animatronic-like recitations of floridly-stylized Cody dialogue done in each character's single-note register. It's for this reason, along with the plot, that it feels like <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> doesn't even really have a supporting cast and that it's placing a downright unfair amount of the film's chances of success solely upon Newton and Sprouse (who essentially doesn't even speak, but by virtue of not having lines, only gurgles and reaction shots, is in fact arguably managing the best performance); more damagingly, it often prevents it from being anything like an <i>effective</i> comedy, with a swathe of material that might've been funny under a different treatment (for example, Karyn Kusama's, who understood "Diablo Cody writes Kevin Smith movies" and built <i>Jennifer's Body</i> accordingly) winding up laughless here, while the lines that do punch through and manage to be funny anyway, and they must be hilarious to do so, often don't get to build up to, or upon, anything else. (It's a little remarkable to find out who Williams's dad is<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is, the famously high-tempo Robin Williams<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>enough so that, while <i>making</i> a comedy and <i>doing</i> comedy are obviously very distinct skillsets, you could still be forgiven for wondering if this kind of icy, affectless, not-at-all-1980s-style un-comedy even comes naturally to her in the first place, or if she's forcing it.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Gugino suffers the most from it, in her wicked stepmother capacity, so austerely-defined in her astringent inhumanity that you can't even quite call her "cartoonish," and it's nothing short of painful to watch her (and that's a pity, because of the three people involved in this movie whose names I actually knew beforehand, Gugino was the biggest selling point). Soberano's stepsister is better in that her single register is simply less agonizing, though in some ways she gets the worst of it of anyone, with a character conceived to serve so many different inconsistent masters<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>simultaneously the wicked <i>Cinderella</i> stepsister who eats up all the validation at home, the Jennifer figure from <i>Jennifer's Body</i> at school, the airheaded Quinn Morgendorffer to Newton's dark pseudo-intellectual Daria, and, especially, a humanized subversion of each of these things in turn<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that she has to spend much of the movie backgrounded or else her contradictions would resolve too quickly for the movie to do what it wants to with her.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The bright spot, however, is that Newton is exempt from much of this (and there's probably some strategy here, to either place her as the center of a satire of<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the late 80s, I guess? topical<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or, more likely, to show that this is how <i>she</i> perceives and relates to other people; it's just not a very successful strategy), and she gets a lively, mean, vibrantly-nasty antihero to play. (Likewise, the film picks up a lot just once Gugino's enforced hyper-bitchery can no longer be a going concern.) And I realize I've been very down on a movie I don't really have profoundly negative feelings about, so it's worth turning around and admitting that <i>when</i> it's working, it <i>really, really</i> works, with most of its physical horror-comic setpieces managing to be either amusing or gross or both. (Though just one more negative, I'm afraid: this otherwise-provocative horror-<i>romance</i> is strikingly demure about both gore <i>and</i> sex. On the other hand, it's nicely icky: myriapods falling out of the "creature's" body onto Lisa during a romantic encounter is some enjoyably skin-crawling stuff; the running gag about his tears smelling like [insert colorfully-complex simile] is pretty great, too, albeit perilously close to a metaphor about masculine emotional vulnerability that otherwise got lost in the shuffle.) Anyhow, at its best, <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> can sing<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>not</i> literally, and nevertheless the best scene in the movie, buttoned by its absolute best line of High Cody dialogue, arrives with Newton singing an REO Speedwagon song like a person who has, fittingly enough, never sung a single song in her life. Accordingly, that dark, murderous romance works, too<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even in spite of itself<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Williams having good instincts for <i>some</i> things, like the lingering closeup on Sprouse in a (somewhat) more robust state of health, to underline how much of a still-slightly-corpsey, floppy-haired, sultry Byronic dreamboat he is. Or just the occasional full-on directorial flourish, that frankly I'd have loved to have seen more of, like the drug-addled one-take transition between the house party and the cemetery. (We at least get one more full-tilt indulgence later, in an homage to <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/11/bald-thing-i-think-i-love-you.html">Earth Girls Are Easy</a></i>'s own black-and-white dream, though a serious comparison to <i>Earth Girls Are Easy</i> is a thing this movie can afford even less than a comparison to <i>Edward Scissorhands</i>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And it gets to play out in a preposterously well-crafted idea of 1989, so that the truest stars of <i>Lisa Frankenstein</i> are all the below-the-marquee craftspeople who brought it into existence. This movie looks, at turns, just fabulous, thanks to DP Laura Huidobro, production designer Mark Worthington, art director Michelle C. Harmon, and set decorator Andew W. Bofinger, who honestly do make the exertion of listing out more of the art department than I usually would worthwhile in their creation of this eyeball-searingly pink-and-teal universe supplemented by heaps of sometimes-motivated and sometimes-entirely-unmotivated gaudy lighting, in a manner that is somehow not oppressively over-the-top despite it being, by any metric, so far over the top it's on the other side. (Meanwhile, not counting some harsh-looking daylight nature exteriors, it's a fairly strong replication of how those colors would've reproduced on late 80s filmstock, to boot, which is arguably even more important.) But they might not even be <i>the</i> chief craft contribution, as that might fall to Meaghan McLaughlin's costume design, which tells the story of Lisa Swallows better than anyone including the person she's dressing<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>eventually winding up turning her into a straight-up facsimile of Helena Bonham Carter<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and to the film's hairstylists, whose work is fun enough that I'm happy to credit both stylist Cammy Crochet and <i>key</i> stylist Natalia Shea Rose (not least because I don't know what the difference there is*), because this is to a shocking degree a movie <i>about</i> crimped hair. And I do not mean that in any kind of bad way, nor even as a backhanded compliment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 6/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*But I <i>do</i> know the difference between makeup and special effects makeup, so in that case I would single out the <i>regular </i>makeup artist, Bryan Waltzak.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-7150444297154389892024-02-22T01:33:00.055-11:002024-03-09T17:20:35.887-11:00Walt Disney, part XLIV: I'm bored from leering my horrible glances, and my feet hurt from dancing those skeleton dances<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMCapw2sgTKAuEXKvLo-bRz9V4SjkFCUz8IgRhClIkk4291D2g4_2uOgEN42VkMykuUxH1dZzHcYRaJNiaVj79sjV3mNdKw9g2n_7fSRnjPkbu_K4sO36O5TB3NW0ypCt1hDmrhUUsHLmBikghaVzDQsz1cTf5foI9om4ArGp3s7Gd5sZqw8U9BuzsyZy/s740/NightmareBefore1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="499" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMCapw2sgTKAuEXKvLo-bRz9V4SjkFCUz8IgRhClIkk4291D2g4_2uOgEN42VkMykuUxH1dZzHcYRaJNiaVj79sjV3mNdKw9g2n_7fSRnjPkbu_K4sO36O5TB3NW0ypCt1hDmrhUUsHLmBikghaVzDQsz1cTf5foI9om4ArGp3s7Gd5sZqw8U9BuzsyZy/w270-h400/NightmareBefore1.png" width="270" /></a></div><br />THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1993</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Henry Selick</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Caroline Thompson, Michael McDowell, and Danny Elfman (based on the poem by Tim Burton)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderately highish, I guess<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyUxSCjVsXFC_UCj2V5lZiY8uGNfaHCOLFg1-R8FqqU9_i2NW380nwcz9WuTCkCIeN9_8Uj0b5SqnVlSyY-_v4Ai30yDSsxJjD-Obz0qXzj6yU0a4lXs250zmjD3JRpmCYTreiDqERmD8cUQ8e6wdYioj8mgx6S1AGybqemsHeD4iqEx-EFaZoFPA4vrsa/s900/NightmareBefore6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="900" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyUxSCjVsXFC_UCj2V5lZiY8uGNfaHCOLFg1-R8FqqU9_i2NW380nwcz9WuTCkCIeN9_8Uj0b5SqnVlSyY-_v4Ai30yDSsxJjD-Obz0qXzj6yU0a4lXs250zmjD3JRpmCYTreiDqERmD8cUQ8e6wdYioj8mgx6S1AGybqemsHeD4iqEx-EFaZoFPA4vrsa/w400-h240/NightmareBefore6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />There is nothing I could say to take away from the reputation of the great mall goth masterpiece, <i>The Nightmare Before Christmas</i>, nor would I want to, for it has made many people happy over the years, in its heyday becoming no less than a foundational text for the kind of young adult who might or might not actually be <i>interesting</i>, but who would, at the least, be boring in such a way that they'd be a lot likelier to have a smoke I could bum. I myself have never had what you'd call a stable relationship to the film: I saw it in theaters and recall enjoying it very much, but over the intervening thirty years<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I've seen this movie at least six times in that period<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I have gone manically back and forth on it, either startled that I don't even like it, or surprised to once again think it's great. This does not bode well for any analysis of the film, I suppose, but something happened to clarify things: I in fact watched it twice for this review, and when I watched it that second time, it was with Tim Burton, Henry Selick, and Danny Elfman's commentary track, thereby reducing the story to only that which could be conveyed visually, while blotting out virtually every sound in the film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which is, incidentally, a musical<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>and I kind of liked it more that way</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Well, after that, there's probably no one left, but we have a procedure and procedure is important, so on to how this fits into a Disney animation retrospective. By now in the historiography of <i>Nightmare</i>, the tradition is to begin by correcting some imaginary reader who's still under the impression that it's "<i>Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas</i>," this being an impression you could reasonably get from the title that it's frequently been marketed under, in recognition of the fact that of its three principals Burton's was, even by 1993, by <i>far</i> the biggest brand name. But (as I'm sure you, a non-imaginary reader, already know), it was actually directed by promethean stop-motion animator Henry Selick, his first and career-defining feature film after a <i>really</i> long time on the more esoteric fringes of animation, whereas Burton was barely even a proper producer on it, extremely busy with <i>Batman Returns</i> and <i>Ed Wood</i>, and able to spend only a few days visiting Selick's studio in San Francisco during <i>Nightmare</i>'s entire production.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The idea that it's therefore really <i>Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas</i> has become common currency, so it's worth gently pushing back on that a little and finding some happier middle ground that acknowledges the authorship of both<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>because if pressed to choose <i>only</i> one, I <i>would</i> go with Burton, because even if he didn't make <i>Nightmare</i>, it came out of his head, and by turning it into a musical, he oriented the project towards something that belongs as much to Burton's trusty composer, Elfman, as to either Selick or himself. At the same time, Selick very much subordinated himself to "doing a Burton." Indeed, he did it so hard that "the Selickian" and "the Burtonesque" become difficult to disentangle afterwards, despite Selick's pre-<i>Nightmare </i>directorial work being some avant-garde shit that doesn't even quite share a vibe with Burton's stuff, though Selick's most recent effort as of 1993, the great (shall we say "nightmarish"?) 1991 short he did with MTV's backing, "Slow Bob In the Lower Dimensions," is, simultaneously, plainly the work of a talent that someone like Burton would want in his corner, as well as pretty solid evidence of how completely Selick's priorities as artist got submerged. I cannot speak to Selick's entire career to come, but it's noticeable that Selick's tendency throughout that career has been to carry forward the Burtonisms he picked up<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>as well as to keep getting himself into projects with overpowering partners and source material authors, starting with <i>Nightmare</i> and continuing with Neil Gaiman on <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2017/03/laika-week-part-i-cute-as-button.html">Coraline</a></i> and Jordan Peele on <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/11/re-animated.html">Wendell & Wild</a></i> (what I presume to be his best and worst movies, respectively). So it'll be interesting to see how that tendency functions with <i>James and the Giant Peach</i>, where at least Roald Dahl was dead.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirmZydaiasJ0na17s6EDkKRfpd3QgeH99Cu1QSOR3norRx6rUurCSW_WPQG-uARQcu6JEq0TdnrqAxSYccnblf3XTACax0YVBCoOkgpmSerOZ0Ey4q7hrYFK5whpEdvkJkt-Gu_K41SqZ-FlalbwPHdrnTRXWZTXgQkOpMAvmim-ZEDHGJxym_g0_llELQ/s450/NightmareBefore3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="450" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirmZydaiasJ0na17s6EDkKRfpd3QgeH99Cu1QSOR3norRx6rUurCSW_WPQG-uARQcu6JEq0TdnrqAxSYccnblf3XTACax0YVBCoOkgpmSerOZ0Ey4q7hrYFK5whpEdvkJkt-Gu_K41SqZ-FlalbwPHdrnTRXWZTXgQkOpMAvmim-ZEDHGJxym_g0_llELQ/w400-h240/NightmareBefore3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Anyway, it started with a poem<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a parody of "A Visit From St. Nicholas"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which Burton wrote in 1982 while he was working at Disney, where he'd first made Selick's acquaintance. The poem concerned a certain Jack Skellington, a skeleton in a scary tuxedo and the king of Halloween, who stole Christmas, though not in a Grinchlike fashion, but rather so Jack, bored of Halloween, could <i>be</i> Santa and usurp his place in the holiday cosmology. The first phase of Jack's plan comes off well enough (he has his hench-trick-or-treaters kidnap the jolly old elf), but Jack and his associates are so naturally and effortlessly malevolent that, instead of being toasted with milk and cookies, they only wind up ruining Christmas for the entire planet, by replacing the traditional holiday cheer with the monstrosities that they have, inevitably, confused with good presents for good boys and girls. Yet Jack learns his lesson and comes away satisfied with his adventure.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The idea had been rattling around Burton's brain since his childhood in Burbank, CA, where in the absence of the natural markers of what we normal people call "seasons," such as snow or temperature fluctuations, he became excessively attached to the artificial signifiers of the yearly cycle, particularly his favorite holiday, Halloween, and his second-favorite holiday (unless it's the reverse), Christmas. One year, he witnessed one of his lazy-ass neighbors (or perhaps just a psychotically-over-eager-for-Christmas neighbor, as he doesn't mention a specific date) directly replacing their Halloween decorations with Christmas ones, so that for a day they merged on a large enough scale to impress him. And thus Burton's poem's darkly zesty little subversion of the holiday, and when Burton showed it around, one of his few true-blue allies at Disney, sculptor Rick Heinrichs, helped him realize some of the likewise-darkly-zesty visuals he'd come up with, in the vain hope that Disney would produce it as a short or special. Unfortunately, after Burton and Heinrichs's 1982 stop-motion short, "Vincent"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>despite a widespread recognition of its excellence<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and especially after Burton's live-action 1984 short "Frankenweenie," it had become evident that Burton was not what was then considered Disney material.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw7r20Z3gTh9VEudjiot8n_2sFmSYMBY0E7HKEBX-9fsl8kJdQo3v9oERhhhuv-uJBSgeDoSckrrh4LZXalP1wUzp7bIJljj98NgHfDlSl7xjqKvAAK7FCYCNQeTtxpXKT9HGtavbP9-6enjZcFM9PKZoxUbSoKpREWwztbvarfauda5Sns8azYpG3qmhM/s450/NightmareBefore7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="450" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw7r20Z3gTh9VEudjiot8n_2sFmSYMBY0E7HKEBX-9fsl8kJdQo3v9oERhhhuv-uJBSgeDoSckrrh4LZXalP1wUzp7bIJljj98NgHfDlSl7xjqKvAAK7FCYCNQeTtxpXKT9HGtavbP9-6enjZcFM9PKZoxUbSoKpREWwztbvarfauda5Sns8azYpG3qmhM/w400-h240/NightmareBefore7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Don't cry for Burton, for obviously he landed on his feet (and "Burton and Disney at odds" is one Goddamned quaint notion today). By 1991 he could approach Disney from a position of strength and cultural cachet, whereas Disney itself was also different: Jeffrey Katzenberg (although direct authority over the project devolved to Mark Hoberman) welcomed Burton and his hand-picked director, Selick, I expect because if they were successful, they would help burnish Disney's reputation as the leader in animation in the 1990s (while if they were not, they could be easily disavowed). Burton's proposal didn't even require any of WDFA's resources, just money and distribution.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So did the studio synonymous with cel animation fund what would become probably the single most sophisticated work of stop-motion animation yet made, drawing upon the talent of the whole transatlantic body of stop-motion animators; and at once it represented something of a close of an era, as one of the last major stop-motion films to be made without significant CGI assistance (though even then I doubt <i>Nightmare</i> could have been made without the analogous advances in computerized camera control) as well as the beginning of a new one, one that redefined stop-motion away from the stereotype of rickety charm that it had picked up over the last several decades thanks to Rankin/Bass, especially the Rankin/Bass Christmas films. The dual association of the form with Christmas as well as with creature creation was surely one reason why Burton was, by 1991, set on stop-motion<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it was probably always his first choice, though he'd have taken anything in 1982. The other, though neither Burton nor Selick would be likely to say so because no artist wants to pigeonhole the medium they work in, is that stop-motion is just inherently spooky, regardless of subject. After all, even good stop-motion is jutterier and less smooth than merely-decent hand-drawn animation<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or later, fully-rendered CGI<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and even middling stop-motion, through the tangibility of the real objects to which it grants an illusion of movement, unavoidably conjures something that already feels supernatural, requiring very little extra push to get that up to feeling like horror.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikji7biSNSQb1kvTFRD5tTJ6LSt3fGaSnDX0zXLBt8Yjh7DMWcAfKjcekV-xdUXQlie_XEmOGRGKbII39ovwtSZi_6QrlLpnOWdTITvHn9OiCuFDtqsrSa2-DC8NhyphenhyphenuBjUJ8WHI6k78l-cb4hjHvgsAHE4QDppS-kxEUYpZ6b1ldhSKs9fT4s0G-Z4oIvu/s450/NightmareBefore4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="450" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikji7biSNSQb1kvTFRD5tTJ6LSt3fGaSnDX0zXLBt8Yjh7DMWcAfKjcekV-xdUXQlie_XEmOGRGKbII39ovwtSZi_6QrlLpnOWdTITvHn9OiCuFDtqsrSa2-DC8NhyphenhyphenuBjUJ8WHI6k78l-cb4hjHvgsAHE4QDppS-kxEUYpZ6b1ldhSKs9fT4s0G-Z4oIvu/w400-h240/NightmareBefore4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />"A darkly zesty subversion of the holiday," I called it before, but that also means that <i>Nightmare</i> was ever an idea in search of a story, and that's a problem which the transformation of Burton's poem into Elfman's musical helped camouflage, but which never got truly solved. Hypothetically, the movie had other writers besides Elfman; but those writers' chief goal was always just to beef this poem up to 75 minutes of screentime. The core remains almost untouched, then: we still have our Jack, "played" by an astoundingly superfluous Chris Sarandon on the rare occasion that Jack is not being portrayed by his singing voice, none other than Elfman himself. Jack goes through the poem's beats<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>he reveals to us his Halloween ennui, he wanders out into the woods beyond Halloweentown, he finds a door to Christmastown, and hatches his scheme to replace Santa<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though these beats are also stretched out, and become less impulsive on Jack's part, to the point that it becomes modestly confusing for us how exactly Christmas still manages to confuse him. But as far as this goes, <i>Nightmare</i> offers to Jack a strong arc that actually feels slightly distinctive from the poem, which was more about bringing Christmas spirit to Halloweentown; that theme that is dutifully preserved here, but it winds up being more pointedly about Jack coming to terms with his identity and function in this world, as the source of the pain and fear that makes any comfort and joy possible.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">With caveats, that's awesome. It's also not even close to the whole movie, and the rest is just a bunch of <i>stuff</i>, where <i>exceedingly little</i> of it is anywhere close to as good as Jack, nor as cleanly-conceived. So: there's Halloweentown's venal mayor (Glenn Shadix) with, get <i>this</i>, two faces (hur hur, good one, Gen Xer!) that whirl around his conical head, largely at random, since rarely do these two faces (one apple-cheeked and friendly, the other pallid and saw-toothed) demonstrate any difference in personality or even different emotional states. There's the irritatingly shallow and tacked-on romantic subplot involving Sally (Catherine O'Hara), about a sewn-together Frakensteinian doll (albeit stuffed with leaves instead of flesh), and she only intersects with the main plot because she's long-since loved Jack from afar, though in the absence of almost literally any interaction with Jack, I can't say why. <i>He</i> barely knows who she is, and he doesn't care that her creator keeps her enslaved (which is one of the surprisingly few ways Halloweentown feels "evil," so I guess I shouldn't complain). Her character's actual function in the story, however, is to be a frowny, moralizing scold about every last fun thing that Jack ever does, and so without even a reason for her to <i>respect</i> him, the obsession that persists in spite of this feels less romantic than like a pathetic starfucking crush. Whereas when it comes to the aforementioned uncleanliness of conception, Sally's a Frankensteinian bride who <i>also</i> has visions of the future, more-or-less openly because this is the only way to oil the plot wheels of her conflict with Jack, though I have some suspicion that the conflict itself exists primarily just to put her on a path to conjuring the fog necessary to set up an obligatory Rudolph gag.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip4WYu84MT-pxeWF6zaQrka4HBiQkptIJHiRL5cC2JJioJzysq2tYzomDLZ6qs7MtWA7g8lQT44fjIWYJQW7ARCKXalAKJLvx2VOURXg8j_i7wBgtmBxysRUdWA3TdcQ7TgNjjaeri9DoESMArfwvaq8rSka4Lti6bejWngIDv94Ak8AZz_hI3QepvJrhx/s450/NightmareBefore5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="270" data-original-width="450" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip4WYu84MT-pxeWF6zaQrka4HBiQkptIJHiRL5cC2JJioJzysq2tYzomDLZ6qs7MtWA7g8lQT44fjIWYJQW7ARCKXalAKJLvx2VOURXg8j_i7wBgtmBxysRUdWA3TdcQ7TgNjjaeri9DoESMArfwvaq8rSka4Lti6bejWngIDv94Ak8AZz_hI3QepvJrhx/w400-h240/NightmareBefore5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's a shame, because she's attached to the strongest of Halloweentown's concepts <i>besides</i> Jack, Dr. Finkelstein (William Hickey), the mad scientist who created Sally to serve as wife and/or servant, and who only exists in what amounts to a C-plot, or even a D-plot, but at least makes up for that by serving as a vehicle for a disproportionate number of the movie's neatest stray kid's horror notions. So not only is he responsible for everything that's ever interesting about Sally, though this is the case, but also his own cool, icky stuff, effected principally by the visual gags around the film's single most wonderfully Burtonesque conceit, a mad scientist with access to his own brain by way of his cranium's flippable lid, allowing a nice joke at the end that, amusingly in its undramatic shrug, effectively solves Sally's story without needing Sally's input. Oh, but <i>then</i> there's Oogie Boogie (Ken Page), the film's villain, in a film that already <i>has</i> one<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in case you didn't notice, <i>the villain is Jack</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>who's the single least-cleanly-conceived of the lot. His deal is that, in a manner that is never quite articulated, he's <i>too </i>evil for what is, basically, already hell. And whatever, films need action, so my actual complaint is that his deal, <i>conceptually</i>, is that he's a <i>sackcloth full of bugs</i> and somehow this was <i>wasn't enough</i>, so he's also, uh, a PSA about the dangers of, ahem, gambling and jazz. Presumably this is because once you start rolling down the path of being inspired by 20s, 30s, and 40s horror cartoons about sinners going to hell and the like, as this is, you pick up all kinds of ideas, whether they're germane or not.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So it's very messy, and none of that is even the problem. Because<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I know, I'm sorry<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the problem is the musical Elfman made. I love Oingo Boingo; I love Elfman's film scores; I kind of hate this, which is neither. It's a film with eleven songs in 75 minutes, occupying what I've seen described as "almost" half of those minutes, though thanks to Elfman's deliberate decision to embed them into speak-sung connective tissue to avoid the traditional musical trope of stopping the movie for the musical numbers, it feels like so much more. It's <i>too </i>much more. I fully realize that you can point to any number of musical features to contradict my impressions here, but, you know, fuck you, they all sound the same. "This Is Halloween," "Jack's Lament," and "What's This," the film's first three songs<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>regarding an introduction to Halloweentown, the revelation of Jack's boredom with Halloweentown, and his ecstasy over discovering Christmas, respectively<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>are practically all joined together and barely manage to convey different moods. Plus I <i>just don't like them</i>, nor most of their fellows: Elfman's music comes across more as a parody of showtunes than actual showtunes ("What's This" being an especially egregious offender), replete with Elfmanisms that aren't integrated very well and are never allowed to grimly soar; Elfman's lyrics, meanwhile, have the most desperate time managing enough throughput to relate what amounts to the entirety of the movie's plot, characters, and world-building, so meter is all over the damn place and there's the persistent suggestion that Elfman earnestly believes that a "slant rhyme" only means "two words that both possess vowels and consonants." Worst of all, maybe, while it's not a sung-through musical, it's close enough<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Elfman has called it a "three-penny opera"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and so it's as good (or, given the consensus on the film, as bad) an example as I could offer as to why I'm so hostile to the sung-through form. The exact thing Elfman wanted to prevent<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>characters breaking out into song to <i>emphasize</i> a new plot or emotional development<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is also the exact thing this story most urgently needs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And so there's only three songs that I think rise above the mire: "Oogie Boogie's Song" is at least distinctive (and benefits, downright unfairly, from the blacklight staging that briefly makes his den of iniquity the single most distinctive <i>set</i> in the film); "Sally's Song" manages an emotional hook even if I don't buy those emotions; and "Kidnap the Sandy Claws," sung by Jack's picked agents, is the only one that I think is <i>actually good</i>, probably because it doesn't actually have a plot function, existing solely to provide a joyful list of the horrible things the hench-kids are going to do to St. Nick when they get him. It's also one of the few spots in the movie that feels even slightly edgy (I mean, I've seen this movie many times, but I constantly misremember that someone accidentally <i>kills</i> Santa, because I want it to have more real nastiness); but, yeah, it's worth mentioning, somewhere, that despite <i>Nightmare</i> being released by Touchstone, because it was too dark and scary for "Disney" branding, this is sanded <i>way</i> down in comparison to Burton and Selick's earlier stuff, or even to things that <i>did</i> have Disney's name on them. At least I don't think it's all that contentious to claim that <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i> or <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/walt-disney-part-xliii-you-aint-never.html">Aladdin</a></i>, for instance, <i>are</i> more meaningfully "dark and scary."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />So now that I've pissed in your cereal and then knocked the bowl in your lap, you can see why I'd say that watching it without sound kind-of, sort-of improved it. It was always obvious enough, but now I really comprehend, with my heart, what still holds me fast to <i>Nightmare</i>, in spite of being a dipshit contrarian about it. Because fundamentally, it's <i>not</i> a story, nor a bunch of tedious Elfman songs that the professional singer isn't even singing all that well. It's a collection of visual ideas scraped out of the stripey, toothy, spindly imagination of a visual artist at the height of his powers, augmented by the ministrations of one of the greatest technical talents to ever work in his particular field, who had a macabre and morbid streak of his own.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD1-FCYqWAmLxb8X9_TOjxtJOLl5DtFraN0DTM45G_X8OnYhkrsNIEEiip_BDCvMO0kvMImCEXdvRgA4ta4mgSXrh0WFu6pU2yBBACKg1ixixqjr25W1uQkHPhi9T8W7h16-H-XB2c3xxVooPakid58dPH3eSgnkqxCzdldAx4S1W-OQtxgJdnoOzw6l1C/s500/NightmareBefore2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="500" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD1-FCYqWAmLxb8X9_TOjxtJOLl5DtFraN0DTM45G_X8OnYhkrsNIEEiip_BDCvMO0kvMImCEXdvRgA4ta4mgSXrh0WFu6pU2yBBACKg1ixixqjr25W1uQkHPhi9T8W7h16-H-XB2c3xxVooPakid58dPH3eSgnkqxCzdldAx4S1W-OQtxgJdnoOzw6l1C/w400-h240/NightmareBefore2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's a striking combo: everything is so goth and cool and gross<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I don't have much use for Sally-the-character, but Sally-the-thing-Tim-Burton-jerks-off-to, sure<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and basically <i>everything</i> is a winner in terms of its design and animation, all the way into the depths of its tertiary cast. The film starts off with a statement of purpose, a montage of these monsters, that demanded slithery, serpentine camera movements into and through the sets<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even underneath objects inside the sets<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and so sixty seconds in, <i>Nightmare</i> is already showing some of the most advanced stop-motion ever seen up until that point in time, punched up with some shockingly plausible effects animation (a fair amount of 2-D animation on ghosts and whatnot, and I'm not quite sure how they got "fire" to work the way it does) alongside just enough jank (everyone knows how they got the "water" to work because you can make out the fabric textures) to give it that desired stop-motion heebie-jeebie feel; and this innovation and sense of gusto never really stops. Oogie Boogie is <i>unnecessary</i>, but I don't think I would give up his nauseating finale for anything<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>hundreds of manhours for two wonderful seconds of shivers. And Jack is <i>amazing</i>, a 20s horror cartoon skeleton who practically shouldn't have been able to exist<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it was actually difficult to build an armature to Burton's delicate stick-figure specs<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>yet built with unheard-of possibilities for movement and expression, and designed in a way that he's always fun-scary, but a tiny bit legitimately-scary too, with my second-favorite small thing in the movie being any moment where Jack is fully lit, so that the reality of the black emptiness of his eye sockets really <i>hits</i> you. (Hence "amazing," but not <i>perfect</i>: my biggest complaint about the entire move, no matter what else I've said, might just be that Jack, the fleshless, eyeless skeleton, still <i>blinks</i>. It's not only that it's kind of stupid, though it assuredly is; it's that it makes him altogether too human, compromising the essential monstrousness that I like the most about him, and, frankly, making his emotions too easy.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I might not even call Jack the best part, when the design of the world<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or rather, the three worlds<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is this good: we spend most of our time in Halloweentown, so it is by necessity the best and most well-explored, swinging from a bleak, decay-filled autumnal netherworld in its daytime that, somehow, kind of feels spookier than its nights, which at least have that iconic supermoon that looks about to crash into the planet to give it glamor; the freakish angles and tentacle-like curves in the expressionist touches are all beautiful, and my <i>very</i> favorite small thing in the movie, that's present enough to be a big thing to me, is the textures of the landscape, raked in such a way that the entire world becomes a three-dimensional woodcut about unwholesome witchery in a book we oughtn't be reading. Hence Christmastown is a little weak and weenie-ish in comparison, with its Christmas colors and sparkling snow and tiny elves, but it's nicely juxtaposed while still having that "implausibly-budgeted kid's holiday special" feel the whole film does. The real world is "quotidian" but in ways that still have a Burton warp to it, right angles appearing in number for the first time, but with, for example, a marked tendency for the children to be ugly mutants; and all this is in service to some great gags about a jerk jerking up a bunch of innocent people's Christmases. So I would like to call <i>The Nightmare Before Christmas</i> a masterpiece like everybody else does: the artistry of its construction gets it closer than it maybe even deserves.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 7/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-47284994007714304072024-02-18T21:09:00.075-11:002024-03-08T11:58:37.033-11:00Walt Disney, part XLIII: You ain't never had a friend like me<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyErw1qdwnlmTMGwXdKMWGbJ0I5nxG48tg88LWK3w_D48lu87TTkGQqOw3IA4UiINx6jwZ2UXFDTobZGgEytvLeS0FlOi2pEqxCi5lDqZDHCT1lIlbUlrC6wDEMQvJDIEm7Sm3gVl3TIofGIr3k7p44jCeXXXjiqMs17opB5y4o-XSegGn7wFan213zHV1/s750/Aladdin1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="509" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyErw1qdwnlmTMGwXdKMWGbJ0I5nxG48tg88LWK3w_D48lu87TTkGQqOw3IA4UiINx6jwZ2UXFDTobZGgEytvLeS0FlOi2pEqxCi5lDqZDHCT1lIlbUlrC6wDEMQvJDIEm7Sm3gVl3TIofGIr3k7p44jCeXXXjiqMs17opB5y4o-XSegGn7wFan213zHV1/w271-h400/Aladdin1.png" width="271" /></a></div><br />ALADDIN</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1992</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Ron Clements, John Musker, and what appears to be the entire staff of Walt Disney Feature Animation</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAQC_2W8rGLfl1ULTiu8cWoJSoWZ2vcPEViEl5u2AERIUZ9HJHjGodCziceWW4ws8stXQEB8E0e6phXUj_DqLp4CfgcbluVj3adg8HpNA2SHPOjUnMwZMt9yn4d6upSVgPlg82nbSen4dOhkSVtcZUuOMmPVCcssSZ9FN83_TWax3i2FnFHFAclimsDp-/s896/Aladdin2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHAQC_2W8rGLfl1ULTiu8cWoJSoWZ2vcPEViEl5u2AERIUZ9HJHjGodCziceWW4ws8stXQEB8E0e6phXUj_DqLp4CfgcbluVj3adg8HpNA2SHPOjUnMwZMt9yn4d6upSVgPlg82nbSen4dOhkSVtcZUuOMmPVCcssSZ9FN83_TWax3i2FnFHFAclimsDp-/w400-h241/Aladdin2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Thirty-one years hence, in our contentified, anti-art media landscape, it's easy to forget that, once, executive meddling could be good. Such is the case with Disney's 31st "canonical" animated feature, <i>Aladdin</i>, which began as a treatment worked out by lyricist Howard Ashman and his songwriting partner Alan Menken following their contribution to 1989's <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i>. Disney's studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg responded initially by firmly steering them onto <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i> instead, unsure of the prospects of a <i>1001 Nights</i> riff almost fifty years after that particular cycle had been at its most popular back in the 1940s (and <i>Aladdin</i> eventually would take on numerous features of 1940's <i>Thief of Bagdad</i>, though the similarities can be overstated) With<i> Mermaid</i>, however, Ashman had<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>with no little tragic irony<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>already become what seemed like Disney's indispensable man, and, with Katzenberg now more eager to please, <i>Aladdin</i> began a slow-walk development. Linda Woolverton, whom some claim managed a functional screenplay for <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, was assigned to its story, with some concept art to be provided by Richard Vander Wende.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">You could frame what followed quite negatively: Katzenberg extracting from Ashman what he most needed, which was 1991's great animated musical hit, in full awareness that he could run the clock on Ashman's health and make the extreme course correction the lyricist's passion project required when he was no longer around to object. I'll say that I think this is basically what <i>happened</i>, but not, therefore, the correct framing; Katzenberg adored Ashman, after all. It may be as simple as nobody liking to tell a dying storyteller his last story sucked, especially when he was in no condition to do anything about it. Ashman passed in March 1991, with <i>Aladdin</i> confirmed for release eighteen months later, and Katzenberg now did something that would shock the team who had coalesced around it, notably Disney's other greatest talents, <i>Mermaid</i>'s directors, Ron Clements and John Musker, who despite working well with Ashman, had avoided <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> and had to be somewhat pressed into directing <i>Aladdin</i>. What these two had wanted to do instead was a personal project of their own, something about <i>Treasure Island</i> in space. Let us leave this perplexing story for another time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbFERYs4lnpV2ggU7zQ-DbDQKJ6dYLdCWR7A-fdAiLTnA-Xb-shTXIHQ-hy6nYJrn4S96pI75YvO1QzapWm4D9sOGWimLGHaxvJnVKdQGbp4_-Hf7wu29JywG0A1FyNfYtoFFDqe44RCMI5tReDClQ70vu0Uf4iKEl65SgIPu46o03EwiajU3qLZM0IOgn/s896/Aladdin5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbFERYs4lnpV2ggU7zQ-DbDQKJ6dYLdCWR7A-fdAiLTnA-Xb-shTXIHQ-hy6nYJrn4S96pI75YvO1QzapWm4D9sOGWimLGHaxvJnVKdQGbp4_-Hf7wu29JywG0A1FyNfYtoFFDqe44RCMI5tReDClQ70vu0Uf4iKEl65SgIPu46o03EwiajU3qLZM0IOgn/w400-h241/Aladdin5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />As far as <i>Aladdin</i> went, Katzenberg gave Clements and Musker the courtesy of viewing a story reel based on the work done so far, though given the fundamental nature of his objections he presumably already knew exactly what he was going to tell them: to start over from practically <i>scratch</i>; dispense with Ashman's vision; and figure out something else to do with the essential elements of the story Antoine Galland had laid out in his early 18th century adaptation of the "ancient" Arabic legend (that was, more likely, an original fairy tale by the late 17th century Syrian writer, Hanna Diyab*), namely the poor boy, the mighty djinn, the hot princess, and the antagonistic vizier; but, obviously, keep the cream of Ashman's finished songs.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Katzenberg was often wrong, but not this time, and he appears to have done nothing short of rescue <i>the</i> great Disney action-adventure romantic comedy from a story about a thirteen year old who loved his mommy. Of course, I'm biased about it: Ashman's could-have-been is not "my" <i>Aladdin</i>, the first movie I have an actual, concrete memory of seeing in a movie theater. So who knows how Ashman's <i>Aladdin</i> would've shaken out? But it's probably not too much to say that Katzenberg preserved the immaculate purity of Howard Ashman's short but potent legacy: four movies made before his death (don't forget <i>Little Shop of Horrors</i>), all of them truly beloved, rather than three and one awkward misfire. Clements and Musker are politic about it, but they have alluded to their own doubts. Certainly, this kind of interpretative history is always speculative, but as horrified as Clements and Musker had to have been to have their movie effectively back in development a year and a half before it would be in theaters, I have to wonder if they experienced some sense of exhilarated liberation about that as well.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMLMrlF5W11bJ8YjFa2-ufvboHt0MCvV7aWHCLwW2vZz57D13xTE7J61eMNsWel5819wdmfdwW7oyxPApHF6hF8opfcDeNSb-nL3G4UIN_5OyqsVXOcIjH6FqAsXXXCcS1SuQg7ccoApcIyOTDCazNWkrjjsL85nomCt_GXJph9qHkWsioVfa7HHZl8GXj/s896/Aladdin8.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMLMrlF5W11bJ8YjFa2-ufvboHt0MCvV7aWHCLwW2vZz57D13xTE7J61eMNsWel5819wdmfdwW7oyxPApHF6hF8opfcDeNSb-nL3G4UIN_5OyqsVXOcIjH6FqAsXXXCcS1SuQg7ccoApcIyOTDCazNWkrjjsL85nomCt_GXJph9qHkWsioVfa7HHZl8GXj/w400-h241/Aladdin8.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Because, however it happened, <i>Aladdin</i> is one the most liberated, exhilarating cartoons Disney ever made, and one of no less historical importance than either of its two recent predecessors, that rare transitional object that is strangely perfect in its combination of past and future. It absolutely remains an "Ashman," or rather an Ashman-Menken-Clements-Musker, a confirmation of their perfection of the Walt Disney Princess Musical formula<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the fantasy with the mythic heft of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/10/walt-disney-part-xx-all-that-beautiful.html">Sleeping Beauty</a></i> alloyed with the transformational yearning of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/07/walt-disney-part-xv-i-said-if.html">Cinderella</a></i>, now afforded the legitimate novelty of making its ash-faced girl a boy**, and cinching it tightly with the integrated musical discipline of a<i> Little Mermaid</i> or <i>Beauty and the Beast</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but it's simultaneously evidence of where Clements and Musker's own interests in broad comedy lay, as well as a prefiguration of where animation as a whole would head in the 21st century, a harbinger of a new era of big-ass celebrity voice casting promising snarky, ironic humor, so that there's basically a straight line between this and <i>Shrek</i> and eventually <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/01/the-super-mario-bros.html">The Super Mario Bros. Movie</a></i>. It is not good to blame <i>Aladdin</i> for this, because <i>Aladdin</i> does its pop culture references and its catastrophic fourth-wall breaking and its trivializing quips all so <i>elegantly</i>, interweaving almost all of it into the fabric of its concepts and story so that, even if I'd call it one of Disney's funniest films, it kind of doesn't even <i>feel</i> like "a comedy" foremost, though it's also distinct from so many other Disney films, where "comedy" is merely a box that needs to be checked. This is undoubtedly <i>why</i> it's able to be so thoroughgoingly funny, and that's kind of the Clements and Musker touch right there<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that unparalleled management of light and heavy tones<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though while there are two Clements and Musker films I think are even better movies, I could commit to calling <i>Aladdin</i> their single deftest, where their dramatic beats implausibly get to co-exist in harmony alongside their abrasively cartoonish comedy, where even the action-horror climax itself keeps cutting to jokes and somehow that's <i>correct</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But even top-of-their-craft directors can only do <i>so</i> much. The biggest reason this was possible is the other project-defining event of <i>Aladdin</i>'s pre-production: the casting of Robin Williams as the character who isn't exactly the lead, and might not have the most lines, but could definitely have the most <i>words</i> in his lines. (There is, as you know, very real Katzenbergian perfidy attached to Disney's epilogue with Williams; but that's well-trodden ground and there's no need to make this even longer.) It's not exactly Williams alone, of course, but Williams's presence began to snap <i>Aladdin</i> into place: every Ala ad-Din needs his djinn, after all, and Williams, by virtue of being Williams, inevitably established a <i>deeply</i> idiosyncratic djinn out of his motormouthed, improvisational, referential, and in-this-context-incredibly-anachronistic comedy style. Aided and abetted by Clements and Musker, he was then handed to former commercial animator Eric Goldberg, finally absorbed into WDFA after years of footsie, presently arriving with very clear designs on how to translate Williams's chaos into an entertaining, but credible, cosmic being.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2d4x4eNdoF0UdXCejZoFKaIShK4jf-aYluULozPfgPSRRTTjEEEXVHu1xEBX3txd_TF2M5Ynf6u4Ib-k4FbFtpa9_seYqhigKImxV-DmPpCCtX2GmnLv-KDq26IckmDy89jgRlkCz6_PgVXs38qYgKwWl25DqOIRPTuOp82gugcwUX1O-vUvrlIwEpv5R/s896/Aladdin12.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2d4x4eNdoF0UdXCejZoFKaIShK4jf-aYluULozPfgPSRRTTjEEEXVHu1xEBX3txd_TF2M5Ynf6u4Ib-k4FbFtpa9_seYqhigKImxV-DmPpCCtX2GmnLv-KDq26IckmDy89jgRlkCz6_PgVXs38qYgKwWl25DqOIRPTuOp82gugcwUX1O-vUvrlIwEpv5R/w400-h241/Aladdin12.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The result was (the usually articleless) <i>Genie</i>, one of the great cartoon creations, a constantly shifting frame-dominating field of baby blue color, defined by a simple, expressive collection of curves modeled upon the style of Goldberg's idol, illustrator Al Hirschfeld, a connection recognizable enough in Genie's "standard" form, such as he has one (essentially an enormous blue comma), and downright striking when he takes on his many non-standard forms, a manic flood of bizarre and out-of-category Williams impressions to fuel Goldberg's parade of Hirschfeldian caricatures. A lot of kids learned who Groucho Marx and Rodney Dangerfield were from <i>Aladdin</i>. Going into the future, at least as many will learn who Arsenio Hall was, so that what even felt maybe <i>too</i> current or pandering in 1992 feels delightful today<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>another pair of trunkless legs in the sand, sure, but why not?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, I hear you: given this is c. 10th century Araby, how is this... <i>good</i>? Well, this hyper-contemporary attitude is confined (not quite entirely, but with noticeable strictness for a cartoon comedy) to Genie <i>alone</i>, and the rest of the story practically has to make a conscious decision to <i>ignore</i> it, as if engaging with it would trigger Lovecraftian madness, which is exactly what makes the Genie's Williamsisms different from lazy meta-humor: more than even his power, this is what <i>persuades</i> us he's a cosmic being, not merely deathless but completely unbound by time, a creature older than mankind and easy to imagine hanging out and teaching Yiddish slang that wouldn't be invented for centuries to Solomon. It's also a fascinating treatment of a character defined by his imprisonment, affording Williams's goofballery a glimmer of real, don't-think-about-it-too-much psychological horror: "Robin Williams" is just what <i>happens</i> when you're omnipotent and omniscient and spend ten thousand years trapped in a lamp.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>With <i>that</i>, everything flowed<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and in a certain sense, I mean that literally, for <i>Aladdin</i>'s cast was redesigned to conform to Goldberg's creation, likewise smoothed into a series of (much more static) curved shapes, except for the villain, who maintains a certain detailed angularity within his curved silhouette; Aladdin himself was rebuilt completely, under dictates from Katzenberg, and appropriately aged up to match his (increasingly) hot princess. Story re-development, accomplished at a fever pitch, took about a week, lending credibility, I think, to the speculation that everyone always wanted to change Ashman's concept and so had ideas at the ready; outside screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio were brought in (<a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/09/the-night-breed.html">their prior experience</a> with an ad libbing supernatural comedian was probably helpful) to give it structure; and the non-trivial amount of animation that had been finished got sent back to clean-up. What survived was what had kept Clements and Musker anchored to <i>Aladdin</i> all along, Vander Wende's Persian miniature-inspired production design and Rasoul Azadani's deceptively-ambitious CAPS-powered layout, plus the color design they all had a hand in imposing upon the film. But, you know, 2000 words in means I really need to briefly summarize the story they finally told.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ9gtQSSd51VvPBgo7-RgWHgC6XHENopC30VpeLoNlUcR0Pva9QPTFab1FN8ywkMHzY5lEjpMsynodOXxO_8zFsGQShqG06OGMl7zhFBNMkc0gA0cEi4sl6Fv8y45_hiqYubt5kcYKJDUqFe91zuWieOla3B-XnSIAJ6WdOXh2-KZiFroR1tUaSaNXru7B/s896/Aladdin11.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ9gtQSSd51VvPBgo7-RgWHgC6XHENopC30VpeLoNlUcR0Pva9QPTFab1FN8ywkMHzY5lEjpMsynodOXxO_8zFsGQShqG06OGMl7zhFBNMkc0gA0cEi4sl6Fv8y45_hiqYubt5kcYKJDUqFe91zuWieOla3B-XnSIAJ6WdOXh2-KZiFroR1tUaSaNXru7B/w400-h241/Aladdin11.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Even in Ashman's treatment, the fairy tale had been removed from China, and so we begin in what I previously identified as 10th century "Araby"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the film is even less specific, offering us only the neverwhen of "Agrabah"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but it's not-infrequently suggested to be the 8th century Abbasid Caliphate, because that's the golden age of Baghdad and all. If you wanted to be a giant nerd about it, however, and I do<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even if obviously no one involved (probably including Azadani) cared beyond "post-Rashidun, pre-Ottoman, in an undifferentiated Iranopotamia"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>then the title of Agrabah's ruler, "sultan," marks it as <i>much</i> later, and Agrabah likelier to be a Turkic or Persian state than an Arab one. This is not important. We actually begin some undetermined point years, decades, or, perhaps, centuries after our story has already ended, initially eased into the tale by the first intimations of how Azadani is going to be using WDFA's still-new digital tools in his layouts, with rather magisterial but previously-impossible grandly-dynamic camera movements through deserts and even deep into a multiplaned Agrabah street (tellingly, Azadani remained Clements and Musker's layout guy for their entire career in 2-D animation); also easing us into the tale is the first of Ashman's three songs, "Arabian Nights," the one that people continue to manage to be offended by thanks to its outrageous insinuation that a medieval polity was "barbaric." And then <i>Aladdin</i> decides to <i>jolt</i> us into this story instead, courtesy a narrating merchant who's not only aware of us out in the audience, he's able to make physical contact with the <i>camera</i>. He sure seems to have access to a lot of contemporary references a medieval merchant probably shouldn't. He'd like to sell us something, but, failing that, he would still like to tell us a story about a lamp.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No <i>ordinary</i> lamp, but the magic lamp, coveted by the vizier, Jafar (Jonathan Freeman), who has discovered that to get it he needs a purehearted innocent<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a diamond in the rough, so to speak<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to retrieve it from within the mystical Cave of Wonders (a giant talking tiger's head that is also a cavern, one of the earliest fully-CGI <i>characters</i> in a movie, and probably the best-done for a while; voiced by Frank Welker). Jafar will find his catspaw in Aladdin (Scott Weinger, albeit sung by Brad Kane), though presently the authorities must not think this young man is so innocent, given that we meet the starving orphan-thief as he barely evades the Agrabah guards alongside his monkey companion Abu (Welker again). Aladdin wishes he could rise above his station; in the palace, the princess Jasmine (Linda Larkin and sung by Lea Salonga) is having the converse problem, her royal status compelling her sultanic father (Douglas Seale) to marry her off to a prince, and so she decides to run away, despite a cloistered upbringing that has rendered her pitifully ignorant of life outside the palace walls. This puts her on a collision course with Aladdin, he saves her, she impresses him, and naturally, he falls in love, and she probably falls in love with him, too<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but their romance is cut short when the guards drag him off to be "executed." Now caught in Jafar's ruse, Aladdin is led by the disguised vizier to the Cave of Wonders, whereupon Aladdin and Abu enter, acquire a sentient magic carpet, and get the lamp, but after a death-defying escape from the fickle, angry Cave, Jafar betrays them, too. Yet clever little monkey Abu managed to keep the lamp, and when Aladdin, faintly curious, gives it a rub, out comes our being with phenomenal cosmic powers, an itty-bitty living space, and only a vague awareness of what millennium he's in. Aladdin is entitled to three wishes (which is not an innovation of this film, but placing bounds on the djinn is the most <i>obligatory</i> change; and the efficiently-exposited rules that constrain Genie are <i>all</i> most dramatically useful). Well, Aladdin's first wish is to put himself into a position where wooing Jasmine is possible<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>he wishes to be a prince. He <i>very</i> promptly fucks this up, until Jafar has the lamp again, and darkness enshrouds the land.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So here's my biggest problem with Aladdin: it is desperately unclear what "wishing to be a prince" <i>means</i>, and much of the film's inner conflict arises from Aladdin wishing (that is, wanting) to come clean with Jasmine without feeling he's able to, and, to praise it for its narrative arc, this is remarkably strong "Disney princess" characterization, if you accept that Aladdin fills that role; frankly Aladdin is a real <i>shit</i>, afforded a secondary conflict about what to do about Genie's freedom that he keeps putting off. (Meanwhile, Aladdin and Jasmine's inability not to talk past one another<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or lie about their identity to one another!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>despite their mutual magnetism, taken together with their great stupidly-smart/smartly-stupid dichotomy, gives their romance what feels like substance, even though in objective terms they've not had even one full non-lie conversation before the movie's already over.) But, I was complaining: what did Genie <i>do</i> to grant Aladdin's complicated wish? (Also, it's very cute and amusing, but I'm mildly distressed by how <i>forcibly</i> Abu gets transformed into that elephant.) My question is, where is this sultan's son's sultanate? Because in practice, Genie makes him "a prince" by giving him a makeover and a sparkling white new outfit, just in case those <i>Cinderella</i> comparisons might've remained too abstract. At the end of the movie, they act like he's not a prince. Jafar never <i>un</i>wished him to be a prince; he used sorcery to change his shirt. I also feel "I have a djinn" would impress a chick way more than "I am a prince." My only other real problem barely is: it's that Jafar, played by a Broadway musical veteran, somehow doesn't get a proper villain musical number. (All attempts were terrible, including Ashman's, and eventually Clements and Musker just dumped it.) Even this seemingly serious oversight is mitigated by Jafar's great late-game reappropriation of Aladdin's big princin' song, "Prince Ali," recast with palpably vicious sarcasm and cackling lunatic happiness.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz2Vl4cprCLHHrxQpPxH1LFHbjz_gXuZtnoPeZvO5Lib03hjb-FCaMQ81FOBEl9E31i2McJRfV4sMMHW3PwihrG-Z1VLuIqQy1HA3CTfy9yd_W-BF0YP2DMe3wcluUw-FukruVd-i-f_JaLWxVx3Jjqth4AGTPpO5HzkgZjt0JldxCpoPc4HXMPOoAf7CX/s896/Aladdin7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz2Vl4cprCLHHrxQpPxH1LFHbjz_gXuZtnoPeZvO5Lib03hjb-FCaMQ81FOBEl9E31i2McJRfV4sMMHW3PwihrG-Z1VLuIqQy1HA3CTfy9yd_W-BF0YP2DMe3wcluUw-FukruVd-i-f_JaLWxVx3Jjqth4AGTPpO5HzkgZjt0JldxCpoPc4HXMPOoAf7CX/w400-h241/Aladdin7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So like with<i> Mermaid</i>, barely any problems at all, and that brings us to those songs, about which I <i>really</i> have no serious complaints. This is in spite of the necessity of replacing Ashman with Tim Rice (Menken remained and, as with <i>Mermaid</i>, he also did the score); hell, depending on my mood, I would actually name one of Rice's contributions as my favorite. This isn't Aladdin's introductory number, "One Jump," though I like it even so; it's studded with a few unhammered nails in its lyrical choices ("one jump ahead of the hitman/one hit ahead of the flock," are you?), but the words bleed harmlessly into a fugue, and "gotta steal to eat/gotta eat to live/otherwise we'd get along" is approaching Ashmanesque cleverness. It's bouncy and winning stuff, supplemented by a thrilling chase through a series of <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2015/10/buckle-that-swash-part-iv-rarest.html">Thief of Bagdad</a></i>-style (1924 this time) visual jokes, allowing the sequence to double as an introduction to Agrabah, too, very Ashman in that respect, specifically "Belle" in its intention (likewise its construction, with various tertiary cast praising and execrating Aladdin in turn). Plus Kane is good at singing in an impression of Weinger, at least in this number and its brief, slowed-down, "I want" reprise a few moments later, in which we learn that for all his bravado, this semi-homeless teenager yearns for more. But there are Ashman's two contributions past "Arabian Nights," and these are <i>terrific</i>, each given to Genie, both in the tradition of "Under the Sea" and "Be Our Guest" (and both being far less aggravating to get stuck in your head than "Be Our Guest"). That means that Ashman's posthumous Disney musical nonetheless managed a <i>double</i>-dose of his trademarked high-energy, animator-punishing choreographic fun-blasters.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The first comes after a surprisingly long first act (I don't think it's troublesome, but does last 37 minutes out of this 90 minute film), showcasing those phenomenal cosmic powers for the first time, in "Friend Like Me"; even leaving aside the considerable merits of the song, it was still the loosest, wildest, most <i>cartoonish</i> sequence in a Disney narrative feature since the 40s, the fullest display of Goldberg's ideas for a Genie unconstrained by so much as Disney realism, full of gags that indeed feel like 40s animation at its most madcap, bolstered by the modernism of its bold, digitally-painted colors; my favorite <i>individual</i> bit is, I think, the crazily-unstressed way that Genie emerges from his own mouth, his tongue serving the function of stairs. Ashman's final contribution, "Prince Ali," is even better, arguably kind of redundant with "Friend Like Me," if we're talking pure functionality, though it does serve as a foundation for the insufferable phoniness that "Ali Ababwa" is going to be demonstrating for the next few reels as he apparently forgets the one single thing he actually knows about Jasmine's personality, and begins misjudging her character in increasingly idiotic ways. It's another opportunity for even more <i>stuff</i>, though, firstly Ashman's inventive rhyme and meter, but also some only-in-CAPS legions of Genie-conjured servants, copy-and-pasted without the perils of too many celluloid layers to worry about. It winds up with the best combination of staging and song here, the latter's martial qualities continually escalating while the former becomes something like a joyous invasion, explicitly so when Elephant Abu beats down the palace doors over Jafar's objections. For his part, Williams is weirdly great in these songs, with a fascinatingly offbeat singing voice, nasal and prone to well-chosen strategic voice cracks, perfect for the sense of overblown hype that drives them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rDfRuCYgVTnRLsavovX9TTlipDaylCBMrNzkcLZDOHE1giR_FCBkzxhjonYGNz3TMyiA4uHNrva878D8_EEHY7Iy4L0nlxNVJ-gJ-FZKow3y01TfaT5IQVBLYMiUIIF0GdsMvYYrdLD_70m-bkckxvKSBj6o2UMLDmeMUFotFKKpybPJOC053dxnXa-B/s896/Aladdin10.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-rDfRuCYgVTnRLsavovX9TTlipDaylCBMrNzkcLZDOHE1giR_FCBkzxhjonYGNz3TMyiA4uHNrva878D8_EEHY7Iy4L0nlxNVJ-gJ-FZKow3y01TfaT5IQVBLYMiUIIF0GdsMvYYrdLD_70m-bkckxvKSBj6o2UMLDmeMUFotFKKpybPJOC053dxnXa-B/w400-h241/Aladdin10.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So, depending, "Prince Ali" <i>could</i> be my favorite; but I'm a gooey romantic and usually this is Rice's "A Whole New World," the film's love ballad and, it occurs to me, one of the not-as-many-as-you'd-think romantic duets in Disney animation, so therefore the best. (The song's one small issue, besides the not-very-10th-century-Araby lyric "every moment red-letter," is that Kane opens up full-blast in a way that is <i>somewhat</i> noticeably not "Aladdin" singing. Salonga, however, is a strikingly good singing double for Larkin, or at least the self-serious put-on of Larkin's Jasmine.) It's just so damned swoony, kicked off with the excellent black humor of Aladdin's fake lovelorn "suicide" off the balcony, and effected by a travelogue (that, famously, appears to travel through time as well as at an unrealistically high Mach number) through some gorgeous flight animation, pulling at every emotion a "magic carpet ride" should do. I really adore the way their voices dovetail, and I am never, ever not startled by how this <i>must</i> have the most openly sexual lyrics ever put in a Disney song, which means it's still allusive, but with the dizzying sensation of the film getting away with one pretty horny love ballad that, even so, still fundamentally engages with Jasmine's caged bird of a character. I certainly don't know why anyone ever needed that urban legend about subliminal sexual messages in <i>Aladdin</i>, when we <i>already</i> had "I can open your eyes, take you wonder by wonder" followed immediately with "over sideways and under," out in the open and more-or-less explicitly declaring Aladdin's preferred protocol for sexual positions.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Or I may like it the best because it's bookended by the most sublime character beats and character animation in the movie, and there remains <i>that</i>, how <i>Aladdin</i> looks and moves. The film is altogether irrepressibly beautiful in its intelligent and focused way; it's deliberately simplified, partly because of its abbreviated production, but also because that's what Clements and Musker wanted out of it, an elemental and direct form of storytelling dependent as much on color and shape and personality-defining gestures (and, notably, even <i>editing</i>) as dialogue. (Though I think the script and the VAs are all terrific, Larkin especially. I realize I've skipped Gilbert Gottfried's Iago, Jafar's parrot familiar; Gottfried makes a nice evil counterweight to Williams. Even the "intelligent animal" conceit that could potentially break the reality<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Abu only speaks Welkerese, which doesn't count<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>finds a comfortable place in the suggestion that he's an ifrit bound to Jafar, or something else otherwise not-quite-mundane. They have perhaps the best villain/henchman interplay in the whole Disney canon; uniquely, they appear to kind of actually <i>like</i> one another.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In any case, there's the blunt color coding of characters and scenes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>blue is <i>good</i>, red and black are (are you ready for this) <i>evil</i>, yellow is just the world as it stands; you could add "white is frivolous dipshittery," since that defines the Sultan and "Ali Ababwa"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but it can become slightly complex in its interplay, and I'm terribly fond of, for instance, a clash of aqua-blue and hell-reds in the climax that foreshadows by seconds Jasmine's last gambit. But even when this isn't being slavishly followed, the aesthetic of just these giant <i>blocks</i> of saturated color allowed to dominate whole shots, and whole scenes, provides the film a downright abstract quality at times, which doesn't mean it doesn't have some rich, detailed backdrops, but at vital moments, it permits Clements and Musker to declutter their frame of every possible distraction. My favorite image in the movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>there's many to pick from<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>might just be the very spare image of "Whole New World's" conclusion, utilizing the three dimensions of flight to effect highly-flattened, high-impact visual shorthand, with only the precious few elements that are required: Aladdin, Jasmine, Carpet, the balcony jutting out into space, and a sprawling field of stars that you may realize only now are getting a crucial goosing of effects "twinkling."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDSYjcg3Sx-ii66S1pojXBKUNIuEOOFC8grVgLw09pamf3IeqOhyphenhyphenrH3RE_1FJBPaTFVqe1rFDRKowwZY4faRF9p4FCDJ4O1lHakHSkkFwWDPYhBgzoKiTWgh4CKL0KlONOjg3Bor_KD-1d7VtBiBE0uqbsgv1Grs5Eq66XJcx5sUlfItqf0EB2S-HZJx4n/s896/Aladdin9.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDSYjcg3Sx-ii66S1pojXBKUNIuEOOFC8grVgLw09pamf3IeqOhyphenhyphenrH3RE_1FJBPaTFVqe1rFDRKowwZY4faRF9p4FCDJ4O1lHakHSkkFwWDPYhBgzoKiTWgh4CKL0KlONOjg3Bor_KD-1d7VtBiBE0uqbsgv1Grs5Eq66XJcx5sUlfItqf0EB2S-HZJx4n/w400-h241/Aladdin9.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Or consider this.</i></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizbJ-Kh5BdDHryb9uXAZqlv8wcodacPUozLikiVIOodJWQBfE7wdrtGrmucPumKAKbZmUWKOzP1aHVURwqm5qKKN7kZkmGEcT47T0uQ2nzdUKD0BvjjBGa01tuMSF29ZLKFWtJmIGg_fdgb0bj1TSiA0d5xtNe6Gb5vU3w7yvPMe5KJzpnwOHNDUlXQhNg/s896/Aladdin3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizbJ-Kh5BdDHryb9uXAZqlv8wcodacPUozLikiVIOodJWQBfE7wdrtGrmucPumKAKbZmUWKOzP1aHVURwqm5qKKN7kZkmGEcT47T0uQ2nzdUKD0BvjjBGa01tuMSF29ZLKFWtJmIGg_fdgb0bj1TSiA0d5xtNe6Gb5vU3w7yvPMe5KJzpnwOHNDUlXQhNg/w400-h241/Aladdin3.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Or this.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWsEen8yLyHDOwCa5zSOB7A7UYDeEsVpEtMBo2ylZSdjdh2s2Ctin0s_2jVZZpLwqRhbckLVgG-UXiPAdC8vF5JXeFs0-UXGxrTkEv5jA6WgiKlsPQW6sJsdUSZtnceI5bsYvHfD-ug1baofSTvXvJP3sga5BsZYrYUOy1G32AS9maSYfYqMonwuOV0Px/s896/Aladdin14.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBWsEen8yLyHDOwCa5zSOB7A7UYDeEsVpEtMBo2ylZSdjdh2s2Ctin0s_2jVZZpLwqRhbckLVgG-UXiPAdC8vF5JXeFs0-UXGxrTkEv5jA6WgiKlsPQW6sJsdUSZtnceI5bsYvHfD-ug1baofSTvXvJP3sga5BsZYrYUOy1G32AS9maSYfYqMonwuOV0Px/w400-h241/Aladdin14.png" width="400" /></a></div>And <b>man</b>, this movie does "colossal scale" well.</i></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That's the big picture, though it wouldn't matter much without the confluence of WDFA's all-star Renaissance animation team; it was the last time the big guns worked together. (And how they did is a wonder in itself: WDFA had completed its split between its California and Florida facilities, the latter at Disney World's MGM Studios park, which, unless I really misunderstand it, involved tourists gawking at you while you tried to draw shit. It sounds fucking intolerable; now add "coordinating an animated feature over fax machines.") Well, Glen Keane led on Aladdin, broadening his repertoire again after Ariel, and Aladdin's <i>swell</i>, Keane ensuring that his brashness is consistently haunted by the specter of self-doubt; Jafar is Andreas Deja's masterwork if <i>The Lion King</i>'s Scar is not, and I might give it to Jafar, the ornate silhouette of this light-consuming villain offset, just enough, with rich sardonic humor (I love how openly insincere he is), while the vindictiveness that's never been comfortably contained by his semi-coolness explodes in the climax into some tremendous megalomaniacal frenzy. (Deja does not deserve all the credit, however: Kathy Zielinski, herself a villain specialist, and having conjured a supernatural monster for <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/humans-will-always-lend-hand-with.html">FernGully</a></i>, rejoined WDFA to provide the <i>oh</i>-so-Clements-and-Musker giant-sized climax, with Jafar's horrifying snake form; she also did Jafar's disguise as a grotesque, spidery old man, and I <i>think</i> both the "dark" Genie and Jafar's own final fate.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLWjIf2hwTb3cmS3OFpEyI2YbiTaFhQWJ4qHkdzNFDKlthgabKkVKXxqLpDRB71uOXt82p4iAf7etccTYX9cqXyi74eBJ7DXHhxQDR7wmruXyklCT24EGEDm5a-sAEyLJrLwZp15sB7uzBoR66EuHnizCC9ukb1-ELZMhI-uMTZqnCGE-ZiZVU6dvlVWq/s896/Aladdin13.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="896" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjLWjIf2hwTb3cmS3OFpEyI2YbiTaFhQWJ4qHkdzNFDKlthgabKkVKXxqLpDRB71uOXt82p4iAf7etccTYX9cqXyi74eBJ7DXHhxQDR7wmruXyklCT24EGEDm5a-sAEyLJrLwZp15sB7uzBoR66EuHnizCC9ukb1-ELZMhI-uMTZqnCGE-ZiZVU6dvlVWq/w400-h241/Aladdin13.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But besides Goldberg, who's practically operating in a whole different branch of the art here, <i>Aladdin</i>'s champion is undoubtedly Mark Henn, lead on Jasmine, supplementing Larkin's already strong performance for a character that is astoundingly active despite her "prince" function in a Disney Princess Musical largely sidelining her; Henn (whom I am now prepared to apologize to for questioning his contributions to Ariel, or else he learned much from his joint supervision of her with Keane and the too-many-hands debacle of supervising Belle) puts so much <i>mentation</i> into her, constantly observing and thinking. There's the splashy things you probably even remember: the cocked-eyebrow curiosity of "How are you doing that?" upon witnessing Aladdin appear to levitate, or the sharp suspicion of "What?" when he repeats words from their previous meeting, but there's a hundred subtle things, like pinching her lips at some dumbassed lie "Ali" is telling her, and in every case Henn works the orientalized "Arab babe" design to render her probably the most visually distinctive Disney Princess, and certainly its most visually distinctive Prince Charming.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And I will spare a small word for Randy Cartwright, who animated a carpet. (He relates being tapped for the assignment: "What's its personality?"/"It's like a rectangle." Inspiring words from Clements and/or Musker there!) Well, Carpet's great, in a Disney cartoon that accomplishes the unequalled feat of having <i>every</i> comic relief character be great, but it might be the most forceful example of that thesis I kind of laid out ages ago, regarding how <i>Aladdin</i> looks backwards and forwards at the same time: of everything in <i>Aladdin</i>, that rectangle is the most Disneyesque, in the very classic sense, a pantomime nothing of a concept blessed with the illusion of life anyway at 12-to-24 drawings per second, performing the single most "Walt Disney would have <i>creamed</i> over this" gesture of all the animation here in its "I'm the champeen!" clasping of its tassle "hands"; yet Carpet is also the first significant character in Disney history to be absolutely dependent on computer VFX, because all Cartwright drew was that rectangle, its Persian pattern being of course the result of covering it with a computer-manipulated skin. (The overall best VFX in the film, then, as the overreach of the escape through the naked CGI backdrops of the cave is the one place where <i>Aladdin</i> feels irretrievably <i>lost</i> between its eras.) And so this combination is another reason to love Carpet, the same way I love the way that Goldberg's design priors enforced thin-and-thick lines on the clean-up animators to the point they might as well have been <i>inking</i>, while the film around it could only be a creature of CAPS, or the way that I love Williams pointing in the direction of a dystopian celebrity-drenched future while the essence of Ashman, Menken, Clements, and Musker's purification of the Disney "genre" folds perfectly around his disorienting presence. Those men had already made one of the best and one of the most important animated films of all time with <i>The Little Mermaid</i>; with <i>Aladdin</i>, they turned right around and did it again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 10/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*Something one of Ashman's lyrics acknowledges whether he meant it to or not: "Scheherazade has her thousand tales" would be kind of <i>weird</i> if we were actually inside one of them, wouldn't it?</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Though mistaking "princess, who can be a boy" for "just boys generally" would go on to have very deleterious effects on WDFA's future, of course.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-60426962959876965852024-02-15T01:16:00.067-11:002024-03-01T09:31:02.951-11:00Disney's Challengers, part XI: Après moi, le déluge<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_zvc89wYpW9kzKNv_kb5s0YC-5jf4F8zpGUoqtO43TIM2WfYC5YPRSr9T8veftbmm5a6qlcAGom2z98JC6wbWVEzn9p0Zilkj0LbgZ4zxngw342xEjIz4DnrzC_V1fsxhr2BXU-NOsJfs0QCmyUYzuhV5nzJmQq70tU0Tjue0H1XictSx8rCCAv8a1-dU/s944/Rock-a-doodle1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="944" data-original-width="635" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_zvc89wYpW9kzKNv_kb5s0YC-5jf4F8zpGUoqtO43TIM2WfYC5YPRSr9T8veftbmm5a6qlcAGom2z98JC6wbWVEzn9p0Zilkj0LbgZ4zxngw342xEjIz4DnrzC_V1fsxhr2BXU-NOsJfs0QCmyUYzuhV5nzJmQq70tU0Tjue0H1XictSx8rCCAv8a1-dU/w269-h400/Rock-a-doodle1.jpg" width="269" /></a></div><br />ROCK-A-DOODLE</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1992</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Don Bluth</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by David N. Weiss and numerous others (based on the play </i>Chantecler<i> by Edmond Rostand)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYoBOC3tgxUm29bFAMQ2UanvF-elEePcosWMFxAzC-Uk1aTD50q2VFPz93caYnDPN6QESVsY7RX23kc4CTlCC5-bDma9YTwPpBowEE_qB9nma1d40vGCetsTLagog633AXq5nT32182wMHsquHikoUCvNP9oitR2nbe67beVJzyL_TZS1Jd4VVr5dNJsl1/s474/Rock-a-doodle2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="355" data-original-width="474" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYoBOC3tgxUm29bFAMQ2UanvF-elEePcosWMFxAzC-Uk1aTD50q2VFPz93caYnDPN6QESVsY7RX23kc4CTlCC5-bDma9YTwPpBowEE_qB9nma1d40vGCetsTLagog633AXq5nT32182wMHsquHikoUCvNP9oitR2nbe67beVJzyL_TZS1Jd4VVr5dNJsl1/s320/Rock-a-doodle2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />There must've been something about the concept of Chanticleer, I know not what, but presumably just the fact it involves talking animals, that rooted itself in the hearts of a minority of 20th century animators. From the 1930s until 1992, somebody<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not that many somebodies, but somebody<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>was constantly thinking about a singing rooster, and for much of that time somebody was pitching that idea to Walt Disney. Marc Davis and Ken Anderson were major proponents of the medieval French fable, "How Reynard Captured Chanticleer the Rooster" (spoiler: he did not successfully capture Chanticleer the Rooster), as a subject amenable to the Disney treatment. Disney never agreed, but something akin to Chanticleer found his way into 1973's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxvi-oh-hes-so.html">Robin Hood</a></i>, in the form of the rooster minstrel and all-round-best-part-of-that-movie, Alan-a-dale; and, considering that they were working on the tales of Reynard the Fox, it's likewise fairly obvious, even beyond the stereotypical attributes, how that movie wound up with its vulpine Robin Hood.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's therefore likely that <i>Robin Hood</i> is where Don Bluth picked up his own highly-mutated strain of Chanticleer fever, which gestated throughout the production of <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/disneys-challengers-part-v-courageous.html">The Secret of NIMH</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vi-and-streets.html">An American Tail</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vii-your.html">The Land Before Time</a></i>, and <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/disneys-challengers-part-viii-dog-damn.html">All Dogs Go To Heaven</a>, </i>until, at long last, it resolved itself in 1992, but only by way of what amounts to a <i>completely different</i> iteration of Chanticleer, this being not the hero of the medieval folk tale, but Edmond Rostand's reimagination of that archetype for his 1910 talking animal play, <i>Chantecler</i>, which was greatly disliked in its time and has only been somewhat rehabilitated since (it's quite possible that it would not have even been staged, nor its memory persist until the present day, except that Rostand died writing it and he was already famous for other, more beloved works). Well, at least I can say with certainty why Rostand's <i>Chantecler</i> is the way it is: it's a Romanticist message play aimed squarely at a materialist and rapidly secularizing society, written in defense of the necessity of irrational idealism for a contented life. By contrast, I'm not sure it's even possible to know why <i>Rock-a-doodle</i>, Don Bluth's animated rock-and-roll adaptation of <i>Chantecler</i>, is the way <i>it</i> is, though I suppose that even if nothing about it is ideal, it is at least extremely irrational. That's a judgment that's hard to avoid with <i>Rock-a-doodle</i>: it's a movie that makes <i>All Dogs Go To Heaven</i> look like a completely coherent narrative, and while I wouldn't absolutely need to mean that with malice, as a Bluth film, its flirtations with something like outright surrealism are somehow boring. I don't even understand <i>how</i> it manages to be boring, and once we get through the plot, perhaps you will also wonder how it doesn't at least manage to be fervidly bad.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So then: the innovation of Bluth and his story team was to start Rostand's four-act play in Act IV, as well as to resituate it in a 1960s-inflected neverwhen, therefore recasting Rostand's hero in the form of the 60s' pop cultural figure who had made himself as important to our world as Chantecler (or "Chanticleer," as here) was to his Basque Country farm, namely Elvis Presley. Just like Presley<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this was a real problem in the 60s<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the sun doesn't even rise without Chanticleer (Glen Campbell) there to greet it with his song. Or at least that's what Chanticleer thinks, and what everybody on the farm thinks, but of course this is not so, and when a rival rooster engages Chanticleer in a pre-dawn battle, he is kept from his sacred task long enough to realize that the sun <i>will</i> rise without him, whereupon the jeers of the barnyard animals send him off into exile. In an extremely unclear gesture (and we'll see how ever being "unclear" can be sort of laughlessly funny in this context, regardless of how weird and random the film becomes), the animation appears to show the sun sinking back down below the hillside, saddened that its friend Chanticleer will no longer sing for it, or something. And then, in Chanticleer's absence, the rains begin, and they do not stop, threatening the farm with destruction. This is all according to the master plan of the evil one, the Grand Duke of Owls (Christopher Plummer):</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOdS3cH5CpJtw_vorGYxRMZ-lYMBnToLwj6IMSr-5KmCX9XDIZtBtK2cCgbVv8JUHxZ7KQadt-pZL1ilVZIm7IqJ533R9G3rpPBTIv__r3YbuUEOpiscoKB9QuqpASeWJFdRfl-q6p5St84TOD5mdZUmB5lP07K8zdbplLIzPLyv9bzNBK8-WY14uOAC6/s583/Rock-a-doodle4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="328" data-original-width="583" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBOdS3cH5CpJtw_vorGYxRMZ-lYMBnToLwj6IMSr-5KmCX9XDIZtBtK2cCgbVv8JUHxZ7KQadt-pZL1ilVZIm7IqJ533R9G3rpPBTIv__r3YbuUEOpiscoKB9QuqpASeWJFdRfl-q6p5St84TOD5mdZUmB5lP07K8zdbplLIzPLyv9bzNBK8-WY14uOAC6/w400-h225/Rock-a-doodle4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />I'm sorry, <i>wrong file</i>:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhekRtrbw_6cKqAFi2jJOIPVqJGkDL43NlLRCsKkWA1QyWtxkOiEf3eB3ZpJP5N8Rb4pDQs0H0gUsNQEmWtH8sRjrYEMM-xqQU0lDiO5_JFVR8MrJLQ2NstpcM2j6d5jcBMXZyIoVRBz6M04tQ60bDOT9l-Kk55DJhaIfyUumUFRJ9unTSpnMyF4o9PtX4/s474/Rock-a-doodle5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="309" data-original-width="474" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhekRtrbw_6cKqAFi2jJOIPVqJGkDL43NlLRCsKkWA1QyWtxkOiEf3eB3ZpJP5N8Rb4pDQs0H0gUsNQEmWtH8sRjrYEMM-xqQU0lDiO5_JFVR8MrJLQ2NstpcM2j6d5jcBMXZyIoVRBz6M04tQ60bDOT9l-Kk55DJhaIfyUumUFRJ9unTSpnMyF4o9PtX4/s320/Rock-a-doodle5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The Grand Duke has plotted to eliminate Chanticleer, for owls love the darkness and the rain, and while I am fairly certain the latter part of this factoid is not true, this is no matter, because our story is presently interrupted to reveal it is, in fact, <i>just</i> a story being told. So here we get wrenched into the live-action framing narrative of <i>Rock-a-doodle</i>, where young Edmond (a lispy wee lad named Toby Scott Ganger<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but now we know how this middle American kid got named "Edmond") is being soothed into sleep by his mother (Kathryn Holcomb). Outside, a massive storm rages, threatening the existence of their farm as well as Edmond's family's lives. Edmond has no interest in sleep, for he'd prefer to be a big boy and help, but he's about five, so of course his offers of assistance are refused; nevertheless, inspired by his mother's reading from his storybook, he cries out for Chanticleer to return and save them all. But now, in a <i>Wizard of Oz</i> kind of deal, the avatar of the storm smashes through Edmond's bedroom wall, and face to face with the Grand Duke, Edmond is magically transformed into a kitten<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the better for the great owl to consume his flesh and bones and/or the easier for Sullivan Bluth to integrate him into their cartoon<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and his farm becomes, through some mysticism, Chanticleer's farm, animation included. (The transformation of the bedroom from live-action photography into a cartoon is probably the coolest effect in the whole movie, and it's not even as good as the similar transformation of Fievel's pulp-inspired fantasies to his "real" world in <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/disneys-challengers-part-ix-thriving.html">An American Tail: Fievel Goes West</a></i>, sufficiently low on the list of cool things the Bluthless <i>American Tail</i> sequel did that I neglected to explicitly point it out in a 3000 word review of a 75 minute film.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, we're back to the story in progress: the Grand Duke is distracted by the narrator of Edmond's story-within-the-story (and, evidently, our story-<i>outside</i>-the-story, but let's discuss that later), Patou the hound dog (Phil Harris, both the actor and the design potentially a nod to this film's origins in <i>Robin Hood</i>). Edmond completes the Grand Duke's temporary banishment with a flashlight, which operates upon the owl as if he's been hit by a train. The crisis persists, however, in that the farm is in danger of being washed away, and so, after some introductions, the feline Edmond and his new allies<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Patou along with Peepers the mouse (Sandy Duncan) and Snipes the magpie (Eddie Deezen, whose entire career really does appear to be "obnoxious-as-fuck twerp")<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>head off to find Chanticleer, who has in fact decamped to The City to become an enormous rock-and-roll superstar overseen by his sinister manager Pinky the fox (Sorrell Brooke), minion of the Grand Duke who will soon see fit to further ensnare his rock idol client with the honey of Goldie the sexy pheasant (Ellen Greene). But Edmond and friends need to pierce Chanticleer's isolating bubble of fame if they ever want to see a sunny day again.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Okay, that's an awful, awful lot, and while it all feels like a collection of pretty empty ideas in the telling (it takes a long time for a <i>summary</i>, but is virtually presented as a summary already in the film), there are a whole bunch of concepts this movie is trying to fit into its 74 minutes. There are at least the four really big ones: the Rostand notion of the continuing vitality of myth is <i>kind of</i> still here, albeit reduced to the level of kid's movie boilerplate about self-esteem; a parody of fame and a satire of the popular music industry, deploying the signifiers of the story of Elvis Presley as sourced from a fairly wide swathe of his career; the <i>Wizard of Oz</i> (though my initial thought was "<i>Invaders From Mars</i>") thing that actually turns it into something more like a very shitty, very literal version of <i>The Neverending Story</i> that only manages to track with the little kid's character arc in scenes that were clearly afterthoughts; and, while it might not quite rise to the level of "a concept," this movie's primary operating mode is <i>just</i> the most cookie-cutter funny talking animal cartoon, wherein a hypothetically-amusing set of character traits are thrown into a loosely-drawn slapstick comedy version of a modern world. (For instance, the climax requires a mouse to fly a helicopter, and Duncan's excited panic over this development probably entails the film's single best line read.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Some of these things<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I think "rooster Elvis and pheasant Priscilla? Anne-Margaret?" had potential<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>could have been their own movie. <i>None</i> of these things work together here, and they don't work in and of themselves. It occurs to me I've actually undercounted, there's a fifth concept, "fantasy epic, somehow," and while the Grand Duke is a figure in Rostand's play, he is <i>not</i> a sorcerer who lives in Sauron's tower, but, by golly, that's what Bluth decided he'd be here. Accordingly, my other candidate for "coolest thing in the movie" is just the perspective-boosted background painting the camera pans over that depicts the owl's 200 foot tall pipe organ, which is at least a very neat piece of kid's horror design in a movie that feels like the only way to even begin to tie this crap together would be "horror." It doesn't get there, at all, and the Grand Duke is a truly pitiful villain, repeatedly vanquished by flashlights and prone to singing snippets of the film's worst musical numbers, all of them sort of like limericks with barely any musical component and Plummer certainly isn't helping. (None of its musical numbers, including its showtuned rockabilly numbers, rise above "barely fine," but these are terrible.) But all this is ultimately probably less important than his design<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the Grand Duke of Owls barely resembles "an owl" in the first place (more like a chubby bear in a cape), and his design conveys "evil" less than it does "parody of evil." Look, he looks like Grandpa Munster. His villainy is principally effected by his little nephew, Hunch (Charles Nelson Reilly), a comedy owl whose shtick is to shout semi-non sequiturs (nouns that end with the suffix "-ation," e.g., "aggravation"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>a human person believed this was funny</i>) and evidently intended to ensure that Deezen would somehow not be voicing the most annoying character. He's sometimes supplemented by a gang of anonymous palette-swapped larger owl henchmen who provide further evidence after <i>All Dogs</i> that Bluth's color style was going south fast, and they're all very disappointing, though the Grand Duke is extremely so from an animator who once brought us that absolute <i>demon</i> of an owl back in <i>The Secret of NIMH</i>, who dripped with antique malevolence and magic, even though he <i>wasn't</i> actually evil.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I would prefer not even getting into all the littler "what the fuck?" insanities<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I will only point out, because it's a medium-sized insanity, that the Grand Duke has some kind of "magic breath," so it looks like he's barfing backlit Lucky Charms upon the child and others<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but of course it's all very hard to take seriously even on the extremely heightened level of "a kid's nightmare." The big insanity, that really bothers me a lot, is the total unwillingness to confirm either the physical or metaphysical nature of "the sun," or to conform to any nature it's already established. The film makes its first misstep in its very first frames<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I don't mean the backlit pink logo on a green galactic fog, but you wouldn't be wrong to think so<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>with a shot of a sunrise from <i>space</i>. This exists to set up a slightly impressive<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so probably the film's <i>most</i> impressive<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>animation sequence, that takes us from "space" to "Chanticleer's bouncing uvula" in a "single" move that uses quick dissolves but, also, what looks like fully-drawn landscape animation, so kudos there. But this Flat Earth fairy tale about the Goddamn sun refusing to rise is harder to swallow than it should be, when the first image of the film is the sun in space having a full-blown, over-enthusiastically effects-animated Carrington event as it comes up over our big round globe. (Maybe things are just pre-Copernican.) That's all trivial, but that sun still remains a distraction: we have the sun not coming up several miles <i>from</i> the City, without that affecting the day-night cycle <i>of</i> the City, and I realize the film is actually telling us that Chanticleer keeps rainclouds from <i>hiding</i> the sun, but that only feels exactly like what it is, a stupid kludge of a solution to the problem of two major scenes that need to geographically trace a path from the City to the farm (and a whole movie that needs the City to go indifferently about its business, yet I'll forward that having the jaded, modernist city folk ignore the arrival of permanent night would further <i>several</i> of the movie's concepts better, including the Grand Duke as a true spirit of darkness rather than "I dunno, magic owl"). How stupid is that kludge? Well, let me ask you this: DO YOU THINK IT NEVER RAINS ON A FUCKING FARM?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I'm honestly surprised that I can get this exercised writing about it: it's as if actually thinking about <i>Rock-a-doodle</i> will frustrate you, but in the midst of watching it, it's very ordinary and sedate. That's not, at all, because it follows some inexpressible emotional logic. I mean, Jesus, it's a movie that can't figure out how to dovetail "basically Satan" and "the music industry" into a cohesive worldview, which is kind of the gimme here (cf. <i>The Phantom of the Paradise</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or, though it's much later, just freaking <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/07/hunk-of-burning-love.html">Elvis</a></i>). The Grand Duke and Pinky are probably kept carefully separate for a reason; they feel like they've come from completely separate movies.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-SIiZBSMZq9trqqLEak2-beVbLM86FKOrPp5eVo0jqrmt-wyUR3Y3w7I2X0-vGrwewuuYE3xIEvWgg0nYfsy3rS2Z8BUf4Hjys6SNVBYKFawrIFfK1bS8tQHEkC09vGLgWgqS4SI1upWW1Uo6zsNaXdX0zXuC93m34PaFH6bzhLhItbE0oRea9SOClMQA/s474/Rock-a-doodle3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="255" data-original-width="474" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-SIiZBSMZq9trqqLEak2-beVbLM86FKOrPp5eVo0jqrmt-wyUR3Y3w7I2X0-vGrwewuuYE3xIEvWgg0nYfsy3rS2Z8BUf4Hjys6SNVBYKFawrIFfK1bS8tQHEkC09vGLgWgqS4SI1upWW1Uo6zsNaXdX0zXuC93m34PaFH6bzhLhItbE0oRea9SOClMQA/w400-h215/Rock-a-doodle3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It should all feel absolutely bananas in its craziness, but it never does, because it's not crazy, it's just <i>sloppy</i>, a kid's movie desperately lashed together at what feels like (and somewhat was) the last minute by Sullivan Bluth, despite the project being in development for almost a decade, and the story plays out pretty much exactly as you'd expect a careless kid's cartoon about a sad rooster rock star would, with various goofy subterfuges undertaken by our sub-<i>U.S. Acres</i> heroes met with over-the-top nonsense countermeasures by our villains. Take Goldie, as previously noted a "sexy pheasant," which is to say a bird built like an Egyptian deity and drawn with tits and ass filling out a chorus girl costume (pretty much the same design mentality as gigachad Chanticleer, except you're perhaps less apt to notice it with him, and I suppose I'll commit to the two being the best designs in this lot, with the mild caveat that the "30s showgirl" thing, stressed further by Greene's performance, and "60s rocker" don't<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>like so many things here!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>actually jibe). But she doesn't feel dangerous in any way: she <i>should</i> be abhorrent, but she's just <i>there</i>, serving basically no function whatsoever now, except to appease the legion of eight year olds who would have left unsatisfied if their favorite character from an old French play didn't make it into their cartoon. Even describing this as "functional" kid's cartoon storytelling would be going too far, however; the film was renovated right before release to address its distributor Goldcrest's (justified) worries it made no sense, by way of Patou providing reams and fucking reams of narration<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Harris's voice is constantly weaving in and out, overexplaining things we've seen and describing scenes that aren't actually here<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the ultimate effect is that it comes off like the film is cheating, and also making itself worse, by further domesticating what ought to feel nuts, by interrupting whatever choppy flow it's established, and sometimes by just weirdly spoiling shit outright, like mentioning that Goldie is actually good in her introduction.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That leaves it as a work of animation, and while I've mentioned some good things<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I'll even mention one more, I like the exaggerated construction of the pink Cadillac<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this is at best only mediocre in form, often dragged down to "just plain ugly" by the generally poor and underdetailed design, plus that utter shitshow of a story. The average of it feels like barely a rung over TV animation, and it achieves that mainly by not having blatant mistakes like missing parts of characters' bodies or anything. (There's some discussion of how it was animated in full-frame and matted for theatrical release, and I assume this doesn't help<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I watched it in widescreen<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but I'm frankly not interested enough to try to compare the two.) In any event, theatrical audiences rejected it, even without the complicating factor of a Disney release on the same weekend (and so Bluth, or Goldcrest, had learned something from their mistakes; though it still wound up releasing just a week before <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/humans-will-always-lend-hand-with.html">FernGully</a></i>). It found second life, however, on VHS tapes purchased by undiscerning parents for children they did not love, so while between this and <i>All Dogs Go To Heaven</i> enormous damage had been done, at least Sullivan Bluth wasn't out of the game yet. I will charitably assume that even if it's quite a while before his brief comeback, this will at least remain Don Bluth's <i>lowest</i> point, because it is, anyway, hard to imagine how he <i>could</i> get worse.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 1/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-39775605808339678322024-02-13T22:50:00.043-11:002024-03-01T09:30:49.846-11:00Disney's Challengers, part X: A thriving animation studio, somewhere in the world<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdiiR4BexAmRTNO0kkNNZSXRJfRAQWDvm7KT3YBNdRjRzej4mg7HoDUstSd7msxKbuHT7XWoAYzJZbTzoQuPLMYqfN0gy0wrjTro08zb5oHJQtJ0JF0YHrgC31yeQXRyUX0WztpgE7RKjzUnw0cBrdBE1wj37yHZUoRiGuRRQ-NOY0FfhGH9p-L5ovM0Vx/s1500/FievelGoesWest1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1012" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdiiR4BexAmRTNO0kkNNZSXRJfRAQWDvm7KT3YBNdRjRzej4mg7HoDUstSd7msxKbuHT7XWoAYzJZbTzoQuPLMYqfN0gy0wrjTro08zb5oHJQtJ0JF0YHrgC31yeQXRyUX0WztpgE7RKjzUnw0cBrdBE1wj37yHZUoRiGuRRQ-NOY0FfhGH9p-L5ovM0Vx/w270-h400/FievelGoesWest1.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><br />AN AMERICAN TAIL: FIEVEL GOES WEST</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1991</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Simon Wells and Phil Nibbelink</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by David Kirchner, Charles Swenson, and Flint Dille</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisjI6XUOExVVkdQnV_86awSKAitZFMMZuSvjUbqJ3erigqz8L6_-ScigVrXzMmNzH-g7sN_UyozJedFyVRoFNKL7HUkUAAJhAnyJgZI1-spi0Vhr-Lw0X4ifVdFREXc07rjD7WvsQnb67BqEpkFDbUOMR5aFp05vjlW1D-RlpARiK2xeM9DJxGKZwsAnXL/s1066/FievelGoesWest2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1066" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisjI6XUOExVVkdQnV_86awSKAitZFMMZuSvjUbqJ3erigqz8L6_-ScigVrXzMmNzH-g7sN_UyozJedFyVRoFNKL7HUkUAAJhAnyJgZI1-spi0Vhr-Lw0X4ifVdFREXc07rjD7WvsQnb67BqEpkFDbUOMR5aFp05vjlW1D-RlpARiK2xeM9DJxGKZwsAnXL/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Now, I've sometimes called Steven Spielberg a demigod, but in the mid-1980s he must have actually believed it; presently at a crossroads, and deciding which path his career would take, he apparently decided to take all of them. It's a testament to his once-in-a-century talent that he pulled it off as well as he did: the same guy who did <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/steven-spielberg-part-xx-okay-some.html">Jurassic Park</a></i> did <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/steven-spielberg-part-xxi-i-could-have.html">Schindler's List</a></i>, and the same guy as that somehow got it into his head that he could be the next Walt Disney. Surveying the scene in the mid-80s, you can see why <i>somebody</i> might think they could; Disney itself wasn't doing so hot, and Don Bluth had determined no later than 1979 that if there were going to be any new Walt Disney, then it was going to be him. Naturally enough, then, Spielberg had brought Bluth into his orbit at Amblin, and with the former arranging the financing<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and choosing the projects<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they'd made two hit cartoons together, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vi-and-streets.html">An American Tail</a></i> in 1986 and <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vii-your.html">The Land Before Time</a></i> in 1988. As his behavior at Disney had always suggested, however, Bluth was not temperamentally suited to subordination, and so Bluth made his break. Unfortunately, <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/disneys-challengers-part-viii-dog-damn.html">as we outlined not so long ago</a>, <i>without</i> Spielberg's financial and industrial assistance<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>indeed, perhaps without all the artistic impositions that Bluth had chafed at<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Sullivan Bluth Studios instantly spiraled off into oblivion, continuing to send signals back to our planet, but ones that only got fainter and fainter till one day they finally stopped.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for Spielberg, it didn't slow him down at all: on yet another side of his multi-faceted career, namely the business end of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/walt-disney-part-xxxv-i-hope-youre.html">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a></i>, made in alliance with Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg, he'd had the opportunity to become acquainted with the actual animation studio that produced that film, Richard Williams's outfit in London. Immediately, Spielberg brought a number of Williams's more talented animators into his fold; he cast his net even wider than that, drawing from the animation talent of all Europe. And so, alongside his trusted Amblin partners Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg built his <i>own</i> animation studio in England<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Bluth in Ireland be damned. Spielberg called it Amblimation (I can never quite figure out if I actually like that name), and for his new animation studio's mascot, he chose the hero of Bluth's most successful film, Fievel Mousekewitz. I don't think this was meant to insult Bluth<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Fievel was already named after Spielberg's granddad; more than that, Fievel was going to be the star of Amblimation's first movie, the <i>American Tail</i> sequel that Spielberg wanted to do and which Bluth was so adamant that he wouldn't do that he ended a career-making business relationship over it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but, when you're starting up a major animation studio and you make your company's mascot a <i>mouse</i>, you probably intend to step on <i>somebody's</i> toes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK6FTEcMiFqS9pE8WWLJZ62q1m627r8S_389WxLp2-iwedzeILUWx47gLtH9lumJBPfnDB-J0KGH-fR0alCLYQP9_CLHGjVx8dSHUDwuA_pQIpt3qXUtO_YQQ89NzuqL8KCK1LL_fmY5f_sn1KHoVylUMIH_pZkgUqKS_5IxBehfeI26D7ednz8tq_P8h8/s640/FievelGoesWest5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK6FTEcMiFqS9pE8WWLJZ62q1m627r8S_389WxLp2-iwedzeILUWx47gLtH9lumJBPfnDB-J0KGH-fR0alCLYQP9_CLHGjVx8dSHUDwuA_pQIpt3qXUtO_YQQ89NzuqL8KCK1LL_fmY5f_sn1KHoVylUMIH_pZkgUqKS_5IxBehfeI26D7ednz8tq_P8h8/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Here's the thing about Spielberg and Disney, though: even if he himself was not a great animator, Walt Disney built his animation studio atop decades of toil in the animation industry; Spielberg essentially just <i>bought</i> one, and was not in a position where he could give it his utmost attention anyway. Spielberg, if not exactly erratic, had a hard time being present, and he could be found doing remarkably stupid things with his studio, like communicating his desires so belatedly that finished animation had to be cut and redone, or hiring prestigious live-action screenwriters to adapt <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/02/your-scientists-were-so-preoccupied.html">dopey picture books about dinosaurs</a>, with contracts that said their screenplays had to be adhered to word-for-word. Amblimation itself seems to have lacked much corporate structure<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I'm not sure it ever had a layer of hierarchy between Spielberg and its staff that you'd describe as "management" (there's Kate Mallory, but she was basically an HR officer; compare WDFA, which technically wasn't even directly managed by Katzenberg)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, accordingly, that function was taken instead by two "veterans" from Williams's crew, 32 year old Phil Nibbelink and 28 year old Simon Wells. (I am obliged to note here that the latter is, indeed, the great-grandson of seminal science-fiction writer Herbert George; as for his parents, actual scientists, they had seriously disapproved of Simon's career, so it had to have been most gratifying, at first, for the young man to be able to throw his success back in their faces. For Nibbelink's part, he was an American ex-Disney animator who'd put himself in what must've seemed like the right place at the right time by falling in love with a Briton and remaining in London after <i>Roger Rabbit</i>.) In some combination or another, the pair would wind up directing all of Amblimation's movies, even if, by their own admission, they didn't really understand "story" until the last one.*</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Maybe none of these institutional weaknesses would have mattered too much but for <a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">Disney's amazing resurgence in 1989</a> and going forward, both thanks to, and despite, the leadership of that same Katzenberg<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and while Katzenberg will be a figure of enormous future importance to the story of Amblimation, as yet it's only as a rival. And so, however it happened, across three expensive attempts between 1991 and 1995, Amblimation never managed to make a single film that turned a profit, starting with <i>An American Tail: Fievel Goes West</i>. It did the best of them, no thanks to Spielberg, or its distributor, Universal. With a strategy pulled straight from the Don Bluth Megalomaniacal Idiot Playbook (which, after all, Spielberg and Universal had helped author in the first place), on November 22nd, 1991, <i>Fievel Goes West</i> was released directly into the maw of <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i>. It's surreal to read trade paper quotes from the pre-release wind-up where Universal executives and Katzenberg<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the latter with apparent sincerity<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>express their blithe expectations that both films would do well. It's almost like they hadn't witnessed what had <i>just</i> happened to <i>All Dogs Go To Heaven</i>. I guess you can't fault their faith in the power of animation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr0S6Pc-TMZ3_lFPxE9mdUfUpsnUnlCD3p82-J41CnQQblj_nD-xYB3o8cZ49kHQCc_2YrNY2q06U4fjvx8I3_hKACTO0jUn4WwhFp530daa0uOaDpgdWgzUT-VJLoM7uNyTRjdDxXxU_rzUYX0n-wgE-KARg61918fdRVPRobPRnniVog-fR0bWj_1-Bc/s640/FievelGoesWest4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr0S6Pc-TMZ3_lFPxE9mdUfUpsnUnlCD3p82-J41CnQQblj_nD-xYB3o8cZ49kHQCc_2YrNY2q06U4fjvx8I3_hKACTO0jUn4WwhFp530daa0uOaDpgdWgzUT-VJLoM7uNyTRjdDxXxU_rzUYX0n-wgE-KARg61918fdRVPRobPRnniVog-fR0bWj_1-Bc/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But if part of Amblimation's problem was brash and inexperienced leadership, that's part of where Amblimation's unsung triumph lies as well; it can't be denied that Spielberg had faith in the power of <i>animators</i>, and you can perceive across the whole length and breadth of <i>Fievel Goes West</i>'s 75 minutes Spielberg's cheerful speakerphone exhortations to his employees, "oh, you can <i>too</i> do that," Wells and Nibbelink agreeing with their boss through anxious laughter but still pulling it together anyway. It's the pity of progress, I suppose, but having come out in 1991, <i>Fievel Goes West</i> can be unfairly overlooked, for it arrives at pretty much the exact moment of the industrial transition to digital ink-and-paint systems such as Disney had fielded twice already, <i>Fievel Goes West</i> finding itself on the "wrong" side of animation history. Hence all of the incredibly difficult things Spielberg asked his animators to do with their last-generation technology, and which they made such heroic exertions to accomplish, would shortly become<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>had, in fact, <i>already become</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>if not <i>easy</i>, then not quite so impossible and miraculous. Results do still matter more; I'm not going to say, "<i>Fievel Goes West</i> looks better than <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>." (Though I'm neither going to say, outright, that it <i>doesn't</i>.) And the results of <i>Fievel Go West</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in its lighting effects, its dynamic staging, all these live-action filmmaking techniques, often specifically Spielbergian live-action filmmaking techniques that Spielberg refused to understand weren't being replicated in animation because it was fucking ridiculous to try<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>would still be impressive, no matter what technology went into it. Being "impossible" and "miraculous" on <i>top</i> of that can be, if one prefers, a serious enhancing factor.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for the story, it's basically just <i>An American Tail</i> told at a moving point in reference to wherever the analogous part of <i>An American Tail</i> was, always remaining about three thousand miles west of where the plot had gotten in the previous movie. That's somewhat unfair, because there's still a massive difference in valence between the two films; it's the difference between how the first film shoved David Kirschner's story about genocide and migration through the filter of Bluth's apparent indifference to it, and how <i>Fievel Goes West</i> screenwriter Flint Dille simply applied his experience on Spielberg's kid's television cartoons to the plot beats of that story, more-or-less making a long episode of <i>Tiny Toon Adventures</i> out of it instead.**</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In specifics then, what happens is that, despite the victories achieved previously, the Mousekewitzes are still just scraping by in a New York City that remains swarming with sadistic cats, and so after a particularly vicious attack<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>much like the one that began <i>An American Tail</i>!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they are primed to hear a huckster's message that, out West, there's a paradise waiting for them, just like they previously thought in <i>An American Tail</i>, except in this paradise cats and mice work together; Fievel (Phillip Glasser), already a fan of Wild West stories in general and famed canine lawman Wylie Burp (James Stewart) in particular, is stoked at the prospect. Unfortunately, this is a scam, run by one Cat R. Waul (John Cleese; his name is fortunately rarely spoken), who intends to trick the west-bound mice into building their own mousetrap so as to save him and his conspirators (which notably includes a tarantula) the trouble of actually having to catch them; you could perhaps liken him to the cat who pretended to be a rodent politician in <i>An American Tail</i>. Of course, without even considering Waul's particular genocidal endgame, once the mice arrive in the West, it turns out the West actually sucks, this being not at all unlike how New York turned out to actually suck in <i>An American Tail</i>. On the way to the West, however, Fievel discovers Waul's plan, and Fievel is dispensed with by being thrown off the train, separating him from his family and leaving him somewhere in the middle of the great American desert... hey, <i>kind of like</i> how he went overboard into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in <i>An American Tail</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhofDr9A7N6E4LRmO8j2o7qFoGw0ItZlCu6gIJpM-HIRkreqQTyYnkeInRzcMgg-lWNF58cn0s0fblSj4MosXHVypqWzT7YEXCpKqilGOPJHS85iWvxOQCrrGweMBAhTtrDwbco7mrAaClMmwCG_veeFZPvVus1ZarX0XP9PsGLRT_9yHkqU8pL5mb3RDNz/s640/FievelGoesWest7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhofDr9A7N6E4LRmO8j2o7qFoGw0ItZlCu6gIJpM-HIRkreqQTyYnkeInRzcMgg-lWNF58cn0s0fblSj4MosXHVypqWzT7YEXCpKqilGOPJHS85iWvxOQCrrGweMBAhTtrDwbco7mrAaClMmwCG_veeFZPvVus1ZarX0XP9PsGLRT_9yHkqU8pL5mb3RDNz/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The manner in which Fievel's feline friend, Tiger (Dom DeLuise), re-enters the action by following the train is possibly the first plot element that <i>is</i> meaningfully different from <i>An American Tail</i>; he winds up in a cartoon short from the 1940s (not in a good way, though at least it has some cool silhouette animation) about being worshipped as a god by "Mousehicans." But Fievel eventually finds Tiger, and Fievel enlists the help of his idol, Wylie, who is a lot older and weaker than Fievel had thought, and they all team up to fight the evil cats. Also, Fievel's older sister Tanya (Cathy Cavadini) wants to be a singer. She's discovered by Waul, in a subplot that serves, not especially well, solely to permit a boisterous tavern musical number, insofar as the several minutes detailing Waul's uncharacteristic obsession with the mouse's beautiful voice figure into absolutely no other part of the story.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But then, this is not an especially <i>good</i> story, even above and beyond its startling plot redundancies with <i>An American Tail</i>. Hell, I'm willing to agree it's a barely-functional story, with at least one awful, intolerable character filling out a very key role. DeLuise's often-tiresome comic patter is the offender here, and he's just foregrounded <i>so much</i>, which means we get to really think about what a piece of shit character <i>design</i> Tiger has always been, this giant ginger cat in an <i>ill-fitting</i> <i>purple fucking T-shirt</i>, some decades before T-shirts were even being worn by people; and once the final act arrives, and Tiger also begins to have plot function alongside Fievel and Wylie, he degrades them both. The latter instructs him on how to "be a dog" and use that to frighten cats, in one of the more asinine training montages of the late 20th century; this continues into a deeply "off" action climax, where everyone involved in this film's direction proved themselves entirely unable to solve the problem they'd created for themselves, of making a sincerely dramatic ending to an action Western without any access whatsoever to consequential violence. (They use slingshots instead of guns, which is self-evidently lame enough that I hate that it kind of makes sense. You see, Waul <i>does</i> use a gun. This has not been so much as briefly set up, and it feels completely dizzying in its strangeness, but the important thing is that of course they don't have guns; dogs and cats don't make guns, and this one gun, made for humans, is more than half the feline's size. The real lede I've buried is that <i>Fievel Goes West</i> has at this point spent much of its runtime being resolutely contemptuous about <i>scale</i>: the cats seem <i>way</i> too big, and more-or-less the very instant the mice arrive West the film almost totally ceases to pretend that humans still exist in this world anymore, or even ever existed in order to build it. Humans return only if the movie needs them for the occasional<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, for the aforementioned reasons, jarring<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>joke.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is also the deeper matter of how <i>Fievel Goes West</i> jettisons the historical richness of its predecessor, which I know sours some folks on the film, and I can't really argue with that, except to say that I think <i>An American Tail</i> is so thoughtlessly-trivializing in its approach to its fundamentally-grim subject matter that <i>Fievel Goes West</i> does better just by at least trivializing its subject matter deliberately. It actively rejects the <i>need</i> to care about whether its historical allegory is ever on-point, and even when it is, it feels more like it's simply taking joy in doing snide satire rather than fulfilling its contractual obligation to celebrate immigrants; and hence how its entire story can be dedicated to mocking westward-bound settlers as truly <i>pathetic</i> rubes in ways <i>An American Tail</i> wouldn't have dared, despite using the exact same plot elements its predecessor did. My single favorite gag in the movie is <i>astonishingly</i> sharp and nasty: involving this film's analogue to the "No Cats In America" musical number, "Way Out West," and visualizing the mouse community's collective fantasy of their civilizing mission, in a series of lightning-quick dissolves we find an increasingly-horrified, undoubtedly metaphorical bear. We watch as he is imprisoned by the metropolis emerging out of the soil around him, the unmistakable implication being that the bear will soon be dead. (I suppose sometimes it's the joke, sometimes it's the way it's told.) So it winds up having <i>some</i> substance, after all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb660yOQeijrOi42xW-KRJiVixHueKtFWjALD_c-tBYnOoKcrHmkcOBK3zLxMYYr5ylGAhSdxIkhczUrLzrY9_TF4ABCMFPwuWWhuR0Pj4J1zN9hTWQtAQR3Eseu6ZLjGnkWpkT7wpMGpjUVIFdrvwPdX6givGyCcsHc6mwrU5cKSKumULWGGMpU_fOz6V/s640/FievelGoesWest3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb660yOQeijrOi42xW-KRJiVixHueKtFWjALD_c-tBYnOoKcrHmkcOBK3zLxMYYr5ylGAhSdxIkhczUrLzrY9_TF4ABCMFPwuWWhuR0Pj4J1zN9hTWQtAQR3Eseu6ZLjGnkWpkT7wpMGpjUVIFdrvwPdX6givGyCcsHc6mwrU5cKSKumULWGGMpU_fOz6V/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />But it's <i>mostly</i> just an excuse for cartoon anarchism and broadside parody, to the point that even some of Tiger's scenes deploy enough escalating violent slapstick that I reluctantly began to laugh at them; one of the film's very first moves, which suggests what kind of movie this sequel will be, is to insult the audiences who had found <i>An American Tail</i> moving, by having humans start throwing rotten vegetables at Tanya when she starts in on an abortive performance of the prior film's signature song, "Somewhere Out There." It's maybe tougher to recalibrate than it ought to be, then, but it <i>is</i> funny enough to get away with it, at least up until the finale, which just can't support that unseriousness of tone. Until such time, Wylie's a reliable source of humor, albeit underutilized (and with a "old man called back to adventure" arc that is rushed so hard it occurs within a single two minute scene), and of course we can spot a cartoon underutilizing Stewart in what turned out to be the final months of his life; he does manage to be a pretty enjoyable presence, to the extent he can be present, and he earns some laughs on the basis of his still-extant Stewartness, notably with a complicated, goofy wall of dialogue composed entirely of canine puns. Cleese's evil feline villain is better still. And even Glasser's Fievel is less hatefully obnoxious than he was before, partly because of far less aggressive character animation, partly because of backing off on the lisp, and probably partly because he has what feels like half as much dialogue this time. But however it happened, this is one reason I'm glad Bluth didn't direct this, because his instincts tended to lead him towards nauseating and self-defeating "cuteness," and these guys barely seem to <i>like</i> Fievel, leaving him to die in the desert and all. (Second best joke: when Fievel passes Tiger in the same desert, each dying of thirst, and both of them having been set up to believe the other is only a mirage. It's such a good, classic-feeling cartoon gag I wonder if I just don't recall what it's stealing it from.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And here's where we get back to the real deal: that's <i>all</i> secondary to what actually recommends <i>Fievel Goes West</i>, not as a good <i>American Tail</i> sequel, or even a cartoon comedy, but just <i>as a cartoon</i>. This cartoon is a little awe-inspiring, especially considering Amblimation's technological levels; devoid of Disney's tools, Amblimation's talent almost matched Disney's capacity for spectacle anyway. I'm not even sure how they actually did some of these Spielbergian shafts of light, except through a lot of sweat, which is, to be fair, obviously the way that the backgrounds got filled with so many inordinately-large crowds of hand-animated characters. But it goes beyond just "a lot of work." This movie sometimes looks like it shouldn't quite be able to exist before digital ink-and-paint at all; certainly not without innovation. From the swirling 360 degree shot of Fievel's Western fantasy that kicks off the movie to the many generous invitations it offers us to explore its "sets" (frequently in three dimensions, even sometimes, if not as often as you'd want, from actual mouse scale), it seems like it'd be hard to point to a <i>standout</i> example of Spielberg's ambitions on his animators' behalf. But there are at least two outright amazing setpieces that really make you sit up and notice, both, I believe, the joint work of painter Harald Kraut and camera supervisor Robert Crawford, who figured out how to translate Spielberg's demands that a flabbergastingly-long sewer-rafting sequence, and a later scene where Fievel gets "rescued" from an evil-looking scorpion through the tender mercies of a hungry hawk, both be effected in very long "takes."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfl061DTUKs3zE_QfZNr0vzFf8rQHJVYABAOHMBRQl_9znED0sUyxLxlPdnIywgUpVePAvyIUVuAOhGnWdEKkMmuBCchRPGIeCC6tbv-6rBeUVdDbt5-64Jq_OTF-EFCxf0NtgYw676ZPmr7jMCzYjZKs8WXF0WC9dqznxiQfrdG_eF4cifHhoqi7C2Vg7/s640/FievelGoesWest6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="640" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfl061DTUKs3zE_QfZNr0vzFf8rQHJVYABAOHMBRQl_9znED0sUyxLxlPdnIywgUpVePAvyIUVuAOhGnWdEKkMmuBCchRPGIeCC6tbv-6rBeUVdDbt5-64Jq_OTF-EFCxf0NtgYw676ZPmr7jMCzYjZKs8WXF0WC9dqznxiQfrdG_eF4cifHhoqi7C2Vg7/w400-h225/FievelGoesWest6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's kind of primitive, yes, which only indicates how much finessed technique it took to get there: for this and other reasons, Crawford had to build Ambilation a multiplane camera from scratch, while Kraut figured out how to make long background paintings and hide edits to provide the action continuous flow. It's more apparent in the half-mile vertical lift with the hawk, where the wing flaps perform the necessary task of concealing jumps to new backdrops; the seams are <i>just</i> visible enough for you to appreciate the wondrous handicraft. As for the sewer rafting, it involves water animation every bit as accomplished as Bluth managed in <i>An American Tail</i>; the effects animation overall is great. The character animation is an outright improvement<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>no longer are characters spasming around the way Bluth, in his idiosyncrasy, preferred<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I'm very fond of the wire-puppet mouse that Waul uses to swindle the crowds, whom we are allowed to intuit something deeply wrong about from its movement, even before the character detailing reveals its artificiality. From time to time (mostly with Tanya), there'll even be a grace note that actually <i>does</i> go to character, as if this were a real story, which I find charming even if it never quite serves any function. It's only a pity that the ugliest damn shot of the movie is the very last, which finds Amblimation experimenting with a CGI landscape for no good reason.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So I kind of love <i>Fievel Goes West</i>, even if its weaknesses are pretty serious. (And I didn't even mention Tiger's big-titted cat girlfriend<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Jesus fucking Christ, guys.) But they are at least different weaknesses than its predecessor had; and, for my part, they're <i>mostly</i> weaknesses I like better. Whatever else, it was a hell of an opening salvo from Amblimation<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>whether enough people heard it or not.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 7/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*If you're wondering where I'm getting this from, it's from the horses' mouths, or, more precisely, a magnificent coup of a podcast, The Look Back Machine's "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn8CzRXrkt4">The Oral History of Amblimation</a>," which offers a collection of interviews with Nibbelink, Wells, and other key Amblimation figures about their experience with the studio. They pull Spielberg in, too, via that "thriving animation studio" comment<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which is <i>incredibly</i> bitchy toward Disney, don't you think?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which he must've made on TV sometime, but unfortunately I cannot find its source.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Dille isn't a credited writer on a single episode, but apparently did <i>some</i> kind of development work for the show.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-29547521532273556222024-02-12T23:44:00.055-11:002024-02-24T04:10:01.654-11:00Reviews from gulag: The red [door/car/nosed reindeer]<div style="text-align: justify;">As we continue our clean-up of 2023 with a series of reviews for movies that may or may not have deserved their own entries, we arrive upon <i><b>Insidious: The Red Door</b></i>, annoyingly both the fourth and the second sequel to James Wan's 2011 horror superhit, <i>Insidious</i>, picking up the Lambert Saga ten years after Wan finished it in <i>Insidious: Chapter 2</i> for no obvious reason besides giving perennial supporting-actor champion Patrick Wilson his first crack at directing; <i><b>Ferrari</b></i>, Michael Mann's biopic of Enzo Ferrari that, hypothetically, appeals to Mann's historic strengths as a filmmaker or should at least offer some good racing scenes; and <i><b>Silent Night</b></i>, John Woo's pun-titled, Christmas-themed experimental action film. As the title up top indicates, there is indeed something meaningfully red in all three of these movies, but the <i>actual</i> secret theme of these graybles is that they all involve a director I respect a great deal, even if it's for reasons besides directing, nevertheless proving a disappointment.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmd3AHc24qP7Z2SzucKpkgRr9Jtfrxz1c6HB5qPMJoKsRgV1VVgWCSvi_2smNXqFx_VfLnwVO4W53KJIVD80h5O1ocHTHNjL8nXhuOqv5Xn_nUrmAUD6J6asGVHMg7qzTtlRqVZbVJG1YxarXXLSfKMi_mpbiImL1yciQOvcmu9Nv-C4X1E78uS-cSw5Uk/s356/InsidiousRedDoor1.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmd3AHc24qP7Z2SzucKpkgRr9Jtfrxz1c6HB5qPMJoKsRgV1VVgWCSvi_2smNXqFx_VfLnwVO4W53KJIVD80h5O1ocHTHNjL8nXhuOqv5Xn_nUrmAUD6J6asGVHMg7qzTtlRqVZbVJG1YxarXXLSfKMi_mpbiImL1yciQOvcmu9Nv-C4X1E78uS-cSw5Uk/s320/InsidiousRedDoor1.png" width="213" /></a></div>INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I've suggested in the past that the <i>Insidious</i> franchise, prior to <i>Insidious: The Red Door</i>, is not good, and, having recently reacquainted myself with them (or become acquainted with some of them in the first place), I'm happy to recant that, albeit with faint praise; it's a horror franchise with the agreeable distinction of improving steadily throughout all of its first three entries, going from a low 7/10 for the first <i>Insidious</i> all the way to a <i>medium-high</i> 7/10 for 2015's <i>Insidious: Chapter 3</i>. This was unlikely to continue apace and it did stumble, rather hard, with its fourth entry, 2018's <i>Insidious: The Last Key</i>, which at least had a few strong novelties to offset the feeling that the franchise had clearly exhausted most of its best moves already. (The first three all had the benefit of being directed by one or the other of its creators, James Wan or Leigh Whannell, which makes more of a difference than you might be ready to guess, given how formulaic the scares and stories are. Meanwhile, <i>The Last Key</i> was at least written by Whannell, which didn't save it, but it felt of a piece with its three predecessors.) Other than <i>The Last Key</i> not being good, however, the worst thing about those first four films is that <i>Chapter 3</i> took the unusual step of being a prequel focused upon Lin Shaye's paranormal investigator and spirit medium, Elise Rainier. Obviously, insofar as Elise was almost objectively the single best element of the franchise, its focus on her was not the <i>bad</i> part; that's the "prequel" part, where Whannell blinked and took his franchise back in time to give Elise a new story, despite having already ended <i>Chapter 2</i> with an inordinately strong sequel hook, for while that film concluded the "central" story of the Lambert family on a satisfying and happy note, it also promised Further adventures (ha, ha) with Elise and her sidekicks, irrespective of the fact that Elise had been dead for an entire movie by this point. I mean, it's a franchise entirely about ghosts and the metaphysical dark mirror of the real world where ghosts hang out after they die; this was not some insuperable challenge. The worst thing about the worst thing, meanwhile, is simply that, flying in the face of all logic, Whannell's prequel was <i>still named</i> "chapter 3." This had to be awfully irritating when development began on <i>Insidious: The Red Door</i>, which finally does offer a chronologically-third <i>Insidious</i> movie, as well as another (and presumably the final) chapter in the story of Josh Lambert (Patrick Wilson) and Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins), father and son astral projectors whose unique talents had tended to get them into trouble.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span><a name='more'></a></span>Unfortunately<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>frustratingly</i>, considering that Lin Shaye puts in a cameo, and probably could've been convinced to fully reprise her role in a franchise that had become hers absolutely by the beginning of the third film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this can't-call-it-<i>Chapter 3</i> has essentially not a damn thing to do with Elise's ghost, and everything to do with making the Lamberts the heroes of a story that, arguably, was <i>never</i> about them. And yet I don't think that, by some necessary law of universe, this <i>needed</i> to be unfortunate, though one of those first two <i>Insidious</i>es' weaknesses is that the Lamberts are the most boring fucking family to ever manage to have two good haunted house movies built around them. I'm honestly not really sure why this would be the franchise Patrick Wilson wanted to learn how to be a film director on. (The assumption would be that <i>The Conjuring</i>verse, where he <i>is</i> interesting, was simply too financially important to Warner Bros. to let him fool around with it, whereas the <i>Insidious</i>es were basically just sitting there.) In any case, the Lambert problem got solved in <i>Insidious: Chapter 2</i> mostly by virtue of having Wilson spend almost literally the entire film playing an entirely different character (an evil ghost) possessing Josh's body; and I suppose you could argue that this actually offered an opportunity to Wilson, along with Whannell (allegedy helping write this story, but say what you will about Whannell, he's a pillar of 21st century horror cinema, and I don't think he wrote much here) and Scott Teems (who co-wrote the story, and wrote the script, and has to date indicated no similarly pillar-like attributes), who would not need to be held back from fashioning a new, interesting "Josh."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">They get about as far as "in the aftermath of <i>Insidious: Chapter 2</i>, Josh has become inordinately distant from his family, to the point of no longer truly being part of the lives of his three children, principally Dalton's, but presumably also those of Dalton's two younger siblings who were basically just set decoration in earlier <i>Insidious</i>es and somehow still remain so here." (While it's jumping ahead, the two times that Foster Lambert (Andrew Astor) does pop up to have a brief, caustic phone conversation with his older brother, I wished like hell his character were a lead instead<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>supplementing the other leads, sure, but, ideally, just outright replacing one or any of them.) Anyway, Josh is almost out of the picture, having sometime in the past ten years been divorced by Renai (Rose Byne, who's clearly doing Wilson a favor by being here at all<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the very first shot involves a showy loop-de-loop camera move at a funeral that holds on the casket, briefly, before revealing the faces of the mourners; I strongly assumed the casket was Renai's and I'm not entirely sure this wouldn't have been a better idea). Josh's mom's just died; Dalton's on his way to college for art; prodded by Renai, Josh at least manages to drive his son to school, where they fail to get along whatsoever, and then the movie basically just splits into two separate halves entirely.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This kind of happens in two ways: on one level, there's the Josh plot, where he seeks medical advice for the fog he's been living in for the last decade, and there's the Dalton plot, which involves Dalton thrust into friendship with Chris Winslow (Sinclair Daniel) when they accidentally assign <i>her</i> (liability issues ahoy!) to be his dorm roommate; on another level, there's the horror movie that's obliged to occur from time to time, involving the breakdown of the post-hypnotic suggestion that cut Josh and Dalton off from their clairvoyant powers at the end of <i>Insidious: Chapter 2</i>, which in turn has re-invited all the ghosts and demons back, but there's <i>also</i> the story of a reconnection between an emotionally-unavailable father and his son, overcoming their mutual traumas together, while the latter takes his first steps into adulthood.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And, like, not even a <i>little</i> bit of this works, together or separately, outside of maybe a dollop of horror here or there, where Wilson demonstrates basically one trick that isn't purely an amateur cover band recreation of Wan/Whannell jump scares, wherein ghosts spend a lot of time popping into and out of existence in the negative space of shallow focus 'Scope-ratio shots, spooking us out while we wait for the scary to happen. It's an <i>okay</i> trick. (Actually, there's one other thing that "works," where some show-offy, junkily-cute throwback-to-the-00s editing and sound design gets used in a scene where Josh dives into some microfilm, which I would smile benevolently upon if the movie hadn't lost me many minutes earlier, or if it made any sense that he'd be allowed into some basement archive to look up private medical records.) Wilson, the actor, is fine and professional (and frankly leaning too readily upon his established skillset) on behalf of the kind of borderline non-entity that he has often played, though usually with a better script that realized the Wilson character <i>was</i> a non-entity, and did something with that. Josh is arguably <i>more of</i> a non-entity now than he was the first time, thanks to his brain cloud. As a director, his approach is more blandly-functional than I think you could readily imagine. A flailingly <i>incompetent</i> director might've made a better movie, and it's very plausible that he'd have gotten something more out of his collaborators. Wilson's inexperience shows only in the <i>really important</i> things, after all: he evidently had not the first idea how to communicate with cinematographer Autumn Eakin, who is doing a downright miserable job at making an <i>Insidious</i> movie, and I would openly question if she'd seen one; the overriding problem is that she's not creating <i>nearly</i> a strong enough distinction between the actual world and the realm of the Further thanks to, with almost no exaggeration, <i>every single scene</i> at college being barely-lit by string lights and dim-ass desk lamps, which is a profound misunderstanding of how this franchise works its atmosphere, though there's likewise the specific problem of the lighting <i>in</i> the Further, which for the first time is trying to use the full spectrum of light rather than distinctions between aquamarine and teal, rendering the signature imagery of the series into hatefully boring scenes of Wilson holding a white lantern up to his pink fucking face. There is not one thing here that argues Wilson is passionate for a franchise he helped start; the only thing here that suggests he has a personality at all is an end-credits theme song, "Stay" by Ghost, upon which our director offers a vocal track, and at least indicates something about his taste in music. (For the record, I do like the song.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">He's not that good at presenting story beats; I was actively confused at least once by how outrageously bad his memory is supposed to have gotten. (Josh starts out "disaffected" and somewhere in the middle this morphs into something bordering on "dementia"; Dalton is... mostly fine?) But he is ultimately hamstrung by that screenplay, which, for starters, feels like it was written by someone who literally never left his dorm room in college, so instead of life at college in 202X, he's basing it on movies about college, old movies about college, and possibly old movies he had described to him secondhand on Twitter, rather than movies he actually watched. I would not go so far as to say he never met another <i>human</i>, though with Chris, it wouldn't astonish me; and through Daniels's inhumanly-chipper, purely-instrumental performance, the irresistible force of this screenplay's dull annoyance meets the immoveable object of Ty Simpkins's sullen inertness, which is more along the lines of "reluctantly allowing himself to be photographed" than "any recognizable kind of acting." Yet it's hard to say that either role offers any greater possibilities than the sleepy ruts that Wilson allows them to wallow in; the structural problem is glaringly obvious<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's a movie about a father reconnecting with his son where they share, I think without hyperbole, three scenes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and while I don't like just rewriting movies from scratch, it's hard not to do so in real time, wondering aloud, for instance, whether Dalton needs to be moved out to college at all for this story, let alone does that story benefit from it. Though I think what <i>bugs</i> me here is that they've rejiggered this franchise to be <i>about trauma</i>, something that informed <i>Chapter 3</i> and was mishandled in <i>The Last Key</i>, but neither in this oh-so-2020s vein; it has taken the ending of <i>Chapter 2</i> and reimagined it as some kind of toxic family milestone, and it cheats to get there, because I've watched <i>Chapter 2</i> recently and even as an eight year old child, Dalton already understood the franchise mythology that turned his dad bad. It doesn't even fit this story on a concrete, literal level, then; worse than that, somehow the triumph of the Lamberts destroyed their lives. It did so on behalf of this movie, that trades in a fun time<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to some degree, even the mechanical pleasures of jump scares!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for something that its makers are embarrassingly desperate for you to take seriously. They "elevated" this horror and all they have to show for it is phony crap.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 3/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidXDZzNiLDFQ7RCGzX0bmE2-pSYHTrBDv_7GsdtJw-FD1oq09Ra_sslMgjv6g2WxXTD8MlhX5bBk6BbrJiTOZuwXpqnvLc05AHr4Uf5bbaIo5co8_Y2lFSDp_-imrPdtAynUQv-5nRyV5Nn16TpX_nw6MIvR2_ZtE4tuNkFHE_05X7bGsDvpPUqbwpqZPX/s480/Ferrari1.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidXDZzNiLDFQ7RCGzX0bmE2-pSYHTrBDv_7GsdtJw-FD1oq09Ra_sslMgjv6g2WxXTD8MlhX5bBk6BbrJiTOZuwXpqnvLc05AHr4Uf5bbaIo5co8_Y2lFSDp_-imrPdtAynUQv-5nRyV5Nn16TpX_nw6MIvR2_ZtE4tuNkFHE_05X7bGsDvpPUqbwpqZPX/s320/Ferrari1.png" width="216" /></a></div>FERRARI</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div>First off, it sucks fucking eggs that Ferrari and Maserati both use essentially<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>if not <i>exactly</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the same red, so "good racing scenes" are practically obviated from the get-go (though they're still okay, just harder to follow than you'd prefer). The nicer part is that, inasmuch as it's the story of husband and wife Italians at odds over their famous name starring Adam Driver, it's at least better at being <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/12/the-father-son-and-house-of-gucci.html">House of Gucci</a></i> than <i>House of Gucci</i> was, with significantly more justification to tell its story and with far less abomination in its dialect work. Though I will repeat, every time it's relevant, that we used to be able to make Anglophone movies set in foreign countries <i>without</i> dialect work, which very rarely does anything but distract the performers and the audience. I don't know when the change came but it has been a bane, a <i>bane</i>, on cinema ever since.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, it's an okay story, and well-acted enough through the dialect work, with the obvious MVP here being Penelope Cruz as Enzo's wife, Laura, transfigured long before we ever meet her (she opens the movie attempting to kill Enzo one morning with a gun) as a spirit of alternately hot-and-cold vengeance, thanks to Enzo having spent much of their marriage cheating on her, though she is not, to begin with, aware of the entire secret family Enzo has begun with his mistress (Shailene Woodley). On Cruz's behalf, I'm going to make a wild claim, based on nothing, because I obviously can't really tell a Castilian accent from Italian<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>nor Castilian from Andalusian, as the case may be<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but I don't believe she's <i>doing</i> dialect work, and maybe that's why she's the MVP (more realistically, even if it doesn't have anything to do with my pet peeves, it's just that she's been favored with the most interesting sit-and-emote silent shots of the film). Anyway, however it happened, she gets the most out of her part; Driver, nonetheless, is pretty good at being seen through the cracks of his stoic Enzo. There are some Ferrari drivers, too, who do not really matter nor have what you'd really call "characters," though they are available to do the climactic race, whereupon my question, "why is this movie rated R? it could not have been the buttocks in that chaste sex scene, could it?", got a somewhat better answer.</div><div><br /></div><div>As for how that story is told... this is a Michael Mann movie, I guess, in that it's about a dude whose identity is bound up in his competence in his profession, etc., but if it's not the most <i>biographical picture</i> thing he's ever done (though I've never seen <i>Ali</i>), it might well be the most biographical picture of 2023, and about as biographical picture as it gets with the thankful exception of its narrative being focused on a thin slice of Enzo Ferrari's life rather than the whole, 70-ish year blob. There's some bits and pieces (the cross-cutting and sound design around how these characters watch an opera, for instance) that indicate some imagination about how to dramatize this part of Enzo's life, but not really anything I found special. The treatment of auto racing is okay, but it really only feels like there's a vision animating it during the brief part that's at night, when the headlights become the kind of abstracted visual Mann sometimes gets up to. It is, therefore, arguably adequate at its genre. (Maybe I'll watch <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2015/09/frankenheimer-pops-clutch-and-tells.html">Grand Prix</a></i> again, because man, what a good movie about racing, and Ferraris, <i>that</i> was.) <i>Ferrari</i> ends, and more like halts, with what I think was supposed to be a note of "ambiguity" about a matter that can be resolved through Wikipedia, but it doesn't do anything dramatically useful, particularly when this movie's been pretty hidebound otherwise.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is also <i>conspicuously</i> badly shot, and not like <i>Blackhat</i> was (sometimes) conspicuously badly shot, as an experiment in how digital cameras work. This is badly shot merely in the most aggravatingly basic 2023 manner. Mann and DP Erik Messerschmidt are just doing some awful, awful things together in more-or-less every single conversation scene, between the former's blocking of his actors in an attempt to stage-in-depth and the latter's insistence on an extremely shallow depth of field that obliges him to rack focus with the most feverish yanking, resembling a guy whose girlfriend is starting to completely lose her patience. (There is a shot where Driver and Woodley are sitting side by side in a 90 degree medium shot, wherein Messerschmidt <i>still</i> somehow needs to rack focus.) Well, this approach works out pretty well on the rare occasion it works out, but it has a hit rate of <i>maybe</i> 5% in the conversational interiors, more-or-less solely when Mann's doing some pseudo-70s thing with Driver's face (or the back of Driver's head) shoved fully into the camera and dominating about a third of the 'Scope frame, which at least gets across an idea beyond "so Character X is talking now." I also have grave concerns about the color grading (most of this is also Basic 2023 bad<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though it's at least never underlit!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but there's a major argument between Enzo and Laura where Driver appears to be on his way to becoming the non-corporeal energy being from <i>Altered States</i>). Anyway, it sometimes but not usually obscures how conspicuously badly <i>edited</i> it is, with just dozens of shots that clearly don't end when they "should," notably a push-in on Enzo's bastard boy eavesdropping, that cuts about 30% into the camera movement and still about a dozen feet away from him; this isn't even all, there's a 30 degree rule violation during a well-delivered speech about cars and masculinity that's genuinely painful. It's Mann, so all of this can be defended on some "presumably on purpose" level<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"is Enzo not self-absorbed? shallow focus! oh shit, how could I have known that <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/08/doctor-manhattan.html">Oppenheimer</a></i> would do this <i>well</i>?"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but whatever, this is a very conventional biopic where the distinguishing factor is that it's been rendered consistently annoying in its manufacture.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Score: 5/10</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIhwsVku6ElWzGXKoxbh-9i_NoxAFbE2AH88FpJIWXZjyMF_MfRofb70geAFWZsMiix255Belvnttt3pR0O8-yjoE_SVq0A8QmYU01eyBrqSwH7v47AdaBkk1vfz84bfbfDpkB-jlAlFFniGtnvkMZboijE0fPJU0LefvEIF2RIaZ-kwzxc7KJiYEp_dkC/s378/SilentNight1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="378" data-original-width="255" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIhwsVku6ElWzGXKoxbh-9i_NoxAFbE2AH88FpJIWXZjyMF_MfRofb70geAFWZsMiix255Belvnttt3pR0O8-yjoE_SVq0A8QmYU01eyBrqSwH7v47AdaBkk1vfz84bfbfDpkB-jlAlFFniGtnvkMZboijE0fPJU0LefvEIF2RIaZ-kwzxc7KJiYEp_dkC/s320/SilentNight1.jpg" width="216" /></a></div>SILENT NIGHT</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>Let's give John Woo's return to American filmmaking this much credit: it is genuinely effective at being an old-school reactionary action-thriller, which I mean at least as much as an objective genre categorization as a value judgment, and it gets there in no small part by way of its formal conceit, which tells the story of how Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnamon) and his kid were gunned down in a drive-by shooting on one Christmas in Texas, and only he lived but with his vocal folds permanently destroyed<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>aha<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>thereby rendering the proceedings into a silent film. Or, more accurately, a synch-score film with no dialogue, which is <i>kind</i> of the same thing as "being a silent film"; I don't think it's literally the only human sounds with an onscreen source, but at least 98% of is purely grunts and shouts attending Brian's death-wishing next-Christmas vendetta against the cartel that murdered his son. The absence of dialogue gives it a certain something extra: it helps the surprisingly-emotional first act, devoted to Brian's physical recovery, his psychological fracturing, and the emotional dissolution of his relationship with his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno); at the same time, it posits an elemental, apocalyptic world that looks a lot like ours, but feels nastier, quite literally more <i>brutish</i>. So we can give it this, too: of the innumerable film titles that reposition the Yuletide phrase "silent night" for irony, this is probably the one that best earns it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet it arguably already starts running dry on actual novelty, or even just any personality beyond that conceit, by the time it's out of its prologue, and it probably does suck in some nebulous way that the first scene, which throws us in medias res into Brian's attempt to run down his son's killer (Harold Torres, practically rendered a movie monster beneath face tattoos) in a blood-splattered Rudolph-themed ugly Christmas sweater, is also this film's best scene. It's often a perfectly sound action movie thereafter, but at a certain point<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to its credit this point is pretty deep into its third act, but it hits like a ton of bricks when it comes, and I think it can be pinned down with some exactness to a pretty bog-standard ascend-the-stairs sequence<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the answer to its experimental question, "can the world's most basic action movie be made without dialogue?", goes from "yes" to "yes, <i>obviously</i>," in a way that begins to make you wonder, even while the movie's still playing, if the question was all that smart or interesting in the first place. There are some gestures towards Woo's traditional aesthetic concerns, but this is blunter than his typical style, and not altogether in a good way; not to sound like a nerd, but it lacks the fantasy and poetry you've come to expect, and kind of just replaces those with middling <i>John Wick</i>. The vestigial existence of the detective-turned-ally (Scott Mescudi), meanwhile, appears to be prompted <i>purely</i> on the basis that John Woo movies are supposed to have masculine dyads, and it is awful damn pointless. By some margin, it's the best of the bunch we're reviewing today, but a damned far cry from <i>The Killer</i> or <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/when-day-comes-that-we-have-to-go-to.html">Broken Arrow</a></i>. And that's before I get mean and say, "probably not as good as <i>Windtalkers</i> or <i>Paycheck</i>."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Score: 6/10</b></div></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-17517251625204048062024-02-11T00:00:00.038-11:002024-02-13T08:35:03.286-11:00The annihilator<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSYLo25VIXcJB1wN1fyUFNMi_0v3NXymWfHxAwnXnrsMeFjokv0cRq2amT7dBuL07b02nTTHAoDZcPC0IRptDmecHlWmY4sN7foHqjViaZUCTGkM-3KrQrkCsKYX_zyoB_0wssujMaOhzLBWRE0ZqlnlAzIaZ9mANi77EvwRgDJdr-JJ7EK5a022cZCk26/s356/Marvels1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="237" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSYLo25VIXcJB1wN1fyUFNMi_0v3NXymWfHxAwnXnrsMeFjokv0cRq2amT7dBuL07b02nTTHAoDZcPC0IRptDmecHlWmY4sN7foHqjViaZUCTGkM-3KrQrkCsKYX_zyoB_0wssujMaOhzLBWRE0ZqlnlAzIaZ9mANi77EvwRgDJdr-JJ7EK5a022cZCk26/w266-h400/Marvels1.png" width="266" /></a></div><br />THE MARVELS</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Nia DaCosta</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik, and Nia DaCosta</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLg0h9BWe5pbCuG1A-B1ypr5VcwaqklhgVPwrG1Fwh2ye7alrUTnXggb2mIniavuY_x-NZpYZWXTwCO27jNy0ELa43yHzcn1DOHWNjRL2iMBrvlm25rv_qeoTBLTOO0gmh8FZMES0xhUytM0Ph5TAv7m7Yz31LRm_0QvsFpWaCKxgH2pN3Ru0My6XjPHU-/s1470/Marvels2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="698" data-original-width="1470" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLg0h9BWe5pbCuG1A-B1ypr5VcwaqklhgVPwrG1Fwh2ye7alrUTnXggb2mIniavuY_x-NZpYZWXTwCO27jNy0ELa43yHzcn1DOHWNjRL2iMBrvlm25rv_qeoTBLTOO0gmh8FZMES0xhUytM0Ph5TAv7m7Yz31LRm_0QvsFpWaCKxgH2pN3Ru0My6XjPHU-/w400-h190/Marvels2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It probably goes without saying that the world was too hard on <i>The Marvels</i>, though be aware that this is only the same thing as saying that it deserved any better than it got when the movie is placed alongside the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise that, until 2023, had managed to tread water with an aggressive absence of anything good for so long that you can almost forgive Kevin Feige for coming to believe that being good had stopped mattering. What <i>The Marvels</i> got in terms of its objective reception, anyway, was the lowest box office in the MCU's history*, or at least the worst since really early days<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but let's look and make sure, and holy moly, it really <i>did</i> do worse than <i>The Incredible Hulk</i>, not even adjusting for inflation, and the fact that the phrase <i>not adjusting for inflation</i> might be genuinely meaningful hammers it home just how damned long this thing has lasted, though of course <i>The Marvels</i> (and the majority of its genre-mates from 2023) have called its future into serious question.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Still, I'm not referring to the indifference to the film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that turns out to have been more-or-less correct. Instead, I mean the white-hot anger about it, much of it driven by people who have made it central to their identity to hate superhero films (which is obviously exactly as cool as, e.g., being good at sports or kissing, indeed, it's the <i>very opposite</i> of being a nerd); a non-trivial minority of it is, as usual, driven by YouTube Nazi "film critics"/grievance panderers. There was a time when the average American male would watch <i>The Marvels</i>, smile from time to time because Brie Larson's Captain Marvel costume makes her ass looks terrific, and subsequently forget the movie within a week. Today, that same man will have convinced himself that a movie with a female lead, let alone <i>three female leads</i>, foretells the end of civilization. That is to say, we used to have a real country. (Yet by pretty much the same token, <i>The Marvels</i> made barely one third what <i>Captain Marvel</i> did, which is nuts until you realize that its more-than-a-billion dollar gross was less a sign of a great movie, or even audiences actively committed to big-ticket movies by women, and more that a whole lot of people believed they'd discharged their obligations towards "activism" five years ago, and are now resentful of the notion they might have to do it again, let alone twice in six months. So there's my <i>Barbie 2</i> prediction for you.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Myself, I can work up enough residual affection to be melancholy about <i>The Marvels</i>, because if you just described to me what was in it in terms of its action scenes, character dynamics, space operatic settings, and so forth, I'd have assumed I'd have loved it. But just about every one of those elements that's been thrown into it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>everything about which I'd have said "sounds cool"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>feels like it's been cooked up in the weakest possible formulation that still more-or-less satisfies the promises that have been made. The better news is that it gets through it in just 105 minutes, which for an MCU movie makes it practically a B-picture, even if nobody told Disney's accountants, because these 105 minutes still racked up $200 million in production costs, so that every one of these minutes (and remember about seven of them are a credits crawl) has cost a little more $2 million, <i>apiece</i>, even the ones with the purposefully-bad (I assume) rubber Skrull masks.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In any case, what we have is, as always, beholden to what came before, not just in <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/03/strong-female-character.html">Captain Marvel</a></i> but numerous other things, principally the awful TV shows <i>WandaVision</i> and <i>Ms. Marvel</i>, from which it derives its broader cast of "Marvels" (it apparently derives nothing from the TV show <i>Secret Invasion</i>, which I can only say I heard was awful, though I really could not give less of a rat's ass about it or how it contradicts this). Paramount amongst those "Marvels," then, is Carol Danvers (Larson), Captain Marvel, whom we last saw on the big screen <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/05/avengers-forever.html">helping defeat Thanos in a pretty plug-n-play, tertiary role</a>, and so, if it's possible, we should cast our minds back to her 2019 movie, where this human woman accidentally granted godlike powers by an alien Kree star drive shook off the brainwashing the Kree had then subjected her to, and became that race's mortal enemy. We also have Carol's "niece," Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), aged to adulthood in the interim, now an associate of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) at the spacefaring super-governmental agency S.W.O.R.D.; she has acquired energy powers (including the ability to throw energy bolts and make herself intangible, but also "the ability to see the electromagnetic spectrum," and so do you and I, presumably, but they mean "all of it," so it obviously could've been worded better). And finally there's teenaged Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who got powers in some way I don't quite recall, though it has something to do with her grandma's bangle; she calls herself "Ms. Marvel" because even before getting her ability to make solid constructs out of light, she was already a weird, sometimes-funny parasocial freak fangirl who wanted to fuck, in an unspoken PG-13 way, Carol Danvers. I say this because if she <i>doesn't</i> want to fuck her, it's much, much lamer.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxv7ZqPUAS5x1VsrfGWrR2G3iJ3g1chp8c_zWzktf3Dfb9_ha_m_qBm6GVWsQe20XcpaZuxN9vBBwki9bIykgIoNUYWF7Kx6PS6BkX5umg4UcahhuU27l0YNRscIvynXTETll7LKiXsGxH9yd-qfeaCaF-LNLI_evY3Rm_sMVcZr1C3yuGuCNAhaRUJcdc/s750/Marvels3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="750" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxv7ZqPUAS5x1VsrfGWrR2G3iJ3g1chp8c_zWzktf3Dfb9_ha_m_qBm6GVWsQe20XcpaZuxN9vBBwki9bIykgIoNUYWF7Kx6PS6BkX5umg4UcahhuU27l0YNRscIvynXTETll7LKiXsGxH9yd-qfeaCaF-LNLI_evY3Rm_sMVcZr1C3yuGuCNAhaRUJcdc/w400-h183/Marvels3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Something's about to happen to entangle their quanta, however, and so, as teased in the final shot of the <i>Ms. Marvel</i> show, they all begin to swap places with one another's location in spacetime, in the most inconvenient and amusing ways. This would be bad for our heroes, but it's worse still, because Carol has made some nasty enemies in the years since she flew off into space, above all the new Supremor of the Kree Empire, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who's just uncovered the other "bangle" that pairs with Kamala's, knowing that it is in fact a mighty quantum band. She wants the other one and she wants to revitalize her empire, but, more than anything, she really wants to kill Captain Marvel.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In short, what that amounts to is a little trifle of a superheroic planetary romance devoted to questing across a series of cosmic locations that are hopefully interesting, offering up concepts that are hopefully weird, all of it tied together by a plot that boils down to a likeably-simple three-part ecological heist undertaken by its villain to steal the air, water, and stellar plasma from other inhabited solar systems so her ruined planet can survive. This part's neat; it's less poetic and possibly more unintentional about the more specific homage James Wan made in his DCEU finale, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2024/01/aquaman-and-lost-kingdom-2023-directed.html">Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom</a></i>, but I kind of love that the MCU's own Last Film of the Superhero Age of Cinema brings us back to that legendarily-cliched "holes in the sky" imagery, such as superhero films finally abandoned several years ago because annoyed audiences kept calling the cliche out, only now the holes in the sky have the virtue of being motivated by a genuinely fun-stupid idea.** I mean, damn, if it's good enough for <i>Spaceballs</i>... (And so, in the spirit of fun, I shall cheerfully abstain from complaining that, in space, water is literally commoner than dirt, and stellar plasma <i>infinitely </i>so. She wants to destroy the Earth's sun for personal reasons anyway.) I am aware that Dar-Benn is considered one of the MCU's worst villains, a sentiment with which I strenuously disagree; it takes barely <i>anything</i> to get to mid-tier MCU villainy, and Ashton (also clearly benefiting from having the second-least fucked-with-in-post performance, after Jackson) is charting a reasonably well-defined character that, within the constraints of "shrieking matinee maniac" (which she's also pulling off well), is easily discernable as the kind of villain who's a hero from her own point-of-view.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxSIdmhecYlzMDiKYYUIdlLvTZN9rirEdrnVXJ1ua_aen_uKP-nr_v9ZvmB5AAZwdCvzbJaK82xaZ6DGMUMJJHPBjAw7rECr36wRcx2hQB4BuRAhqaOh1trgxswGfuWJ3w4GhcSfrm_ltr_8873kYvUo_fvb-JI3mYiUdu_begwWIIOGO1wG5apsVtCVDm/s700/Marvels4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="700" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxSIdmhecYlzMDiKYYUIdlLvTZN9rirEdrnVXJ1ua_aen_uKP-nr_v9ZvmB5AAZwdCvzbJaK82xaZ6DGMUMJJHPBjAw7rECr36wRcx2hQB4BuRAhqaOh1trgxswGfuWJ3w4GhcSfrm_ltr_8873kYvUo_fvb-JI3mYiUdu_begwWIIOGO1wG5apsVtCVDm/w400-h200/Marvels4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Likewise, I understand there are numerous accusations that this plot is incoherent, and while it reads as pretty straightforward to me (beyond a few baffling details, anyhow), I <i>did</i> see its lead-in Disney+ series, and hence I did already know where this crap came from. The thing is, those shows <i>suck</i>, and I'm unshakable in my belief that you could not be better off if you'd seen them, too. In Kamala's case, you get what's necessary for her pretty much just from the cutely-stylized "animated fanart" exposition sequence that the first act set-up drops on us, one of only two really major things, not counting Kamala herself, that it's importing from the preexisting continuity of <i>Ms Marvel</i>. (The other is just her family<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a collection of flat, semi-irritating, semi-funny hyphenate-American stereotypes<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I'd daresay they're self-explanatory enough, so long as you have a working knowledge of where humans come from.) As for Monica, the less said about her origin in <i>WandaVision</i> the better, and accordingly <i>The Marvels</i>' screenplay in fact says too much, given that if the original six hour television program wasn't able to justify her shoehorned-in origin story, then the phrase, uttered twice in this film, "walked through a witch hex," sure as <i>fuck</i> isn't. But all told, it's quite possible to pretend<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>if you pretend real hard!<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that you're watching a superhero movie in a shared universe with other superhero media, where people with superpowers will probably be fairly common.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the other hand, we have Carol Danvers, and while her story is not <i>incoherent</i>, either, there's still something maddeningly <i>ineffective</i> about the way this film appears to be under the impression that it's actually <i>Captain Marvel 3</i> rather than <i>Captain Marvel 2</i>, which is pretty much where it places itself with its primary lead: in between <i>Captain Marvel</i> and now, Carol has been busy. Completing her vengeance in the self-serving language of liberation, she took her fight to the Kree homeworld, Hala, murdered the tyrant-god computer that had overseen every aspect of ther lives, the Supreme Intelligence, and then left behind a few billion Kree to make do, which, unsurprisingly, they didn't. So, you know, that's basically a <i>whole movie</i>, conjured up in the notional space between one movie that came out in 2019 and this movie that I watched in 2024, and maybe that was doable, except that this obligatory very-first-scene backstory is not laid out till the freaking forty-five minute mark. In the meantime, it feels, troublingly, like the movie is operating under the assumption that this will be a twist that should reorient the relationships between our characters, as well as between the audience and our central hero. In the actual movie that exists, it doesn't reorient <i>shit</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it has been exposited obliquely a half-dozen times already (calling somebody "The Annihilator" gets the point across quickly); but even simply moving it up against Ms. Marvel's embarrassingly gushing praise for her idol would at least have given it the bite of ironic juxtaposition. And that's a <i>drag</i>, because it has done something quite good here by finally giving Carol a character with more dimensions than merely "chafing under patriarchy." It's even done this with some elegance, considering that this tragic mistake arose out of the two traits we already knew the former USAF pilot had, namely her insistence on being a blunt object whose first recourse has typically been to thoughtlessly break shit and, whenever she created a reliance in anyone, abandon them. I suspect that at some point this had a political allegory embedded into it, rather than the extant film's political allegory-shaped hole; I'm entirely convinced that at some point this paralleled her relationship with Monica (which is otherwise the most boring part here, and probably still would be regardless of configuration, because Monica is surely old enough to understand that her mom's friend became a space god); but I'm pretty sure that the crestfallen, heartbroken reaction shot from Vellani upon learning Carol's dark secret, that's still in the finished movie, at one point led to something <i>much</i> meatier. In the movie as it stands, Kamala shrugs it off with bemused indifference. For my part, I'm bemused as to how blowing up a <i>computer</i> put the Kree's <i>sun</i> out.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This tells us what we already knew about the movie, though, that it was smashed to pieces with rewrites, recuts, and reshoots without its director even being present (that 105 minute runtime is probably the result of this brutality), though it's remarkable that this pile of mush visibly retains its original dramatic spine, even when that spine isn't attached to much of anything anymore. That leaves us with the fun planet-hopping adventure; and it is, in fact, fun. I will, unfortunately, have to continue bitching, because it's so resolutely the <i>least</i> fun version of itself it could be while still being fun. Yet there is at least the one, I think, rather fine exception, the plot-establishing quantum teleportation sequence, which is where our heroes' problem is at its least-controlled and involves the showiest editing around a fundamentally editing-driven mechanic. I've seen very mean things said about it, but I thought it was cute and put together with a unique energy that sells it, and it winds up with some of the best acting from our leads on the simple basis of the comically-dumbfounded expressions they're wearing as they attempt to do battle with evil Kree henchmen but continually find themselves shuffled around whenever they use their powers. Why, I'm not even going to complain about how what constitutes "usage of powers" becomes almost completely lost to more convenient action staging thereafter; we do have a movie to make here, so relax. (But would I prefer it if the mechanic were more important? Well, yes, I would. Is there an "all is lost, unless..." beat in the action climax where it <i>obviously</i> would've been incredibly useful? Well, <i>yes</i>, there is. Is there another one in the heroic denouement that would have been kind of emotional, and, God help my fanboy bullshit, helped set up future MCU movies better? Yes.***)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But that's kind of where <i>The Marvels</i> needs to be met at, with an acceptance that whatever delightful idea it's currently playing with, it will be suboptimal at it: this is massively the case with the film's one truly unforgivable sin, committed when we arrive upon a planet where they communicate solely through Musical Theatre, which would be just wonderful if it committed to that bit longer than "momentarily," or if anyone involved realized there's more to a musical number in a movie than autotune, vaguely-choregraphed walking in a group, and the words [musical number] written in a screenplay. I even like how they exit this, with a legitimately funny joke, but it would be more impressive if they weren't so <i>terrified</i> of their own movie's possibilities that they needed to exit it immediately. This is pretty much the compressed version of a criticism that applies to the whole movie, though: it's so timid about every single idea it forwards, from Carol the Neocon, to how her failure would impact a girl who previously had possessed absolute faith in her, to how, even leaving aside the more dramatic aspects of this three-hander dynamic, this girl is creepy and strange yet Carol (and Larson) are not allowed to find her annoying or off-putting for more than a few shots at the beginning<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to do so would be to diminish Ms. Marvel's brand (or call into question "fandom" as a concept), just as dwelling on Carol's mistake would do to her; it's all so slimily corporate in its absence of friction<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so it can't even be half as funny as it could be. The movie can't contemplate any character conflict beyond Monica's pre-approved abandonment issues and, again, using the switching mechanic for the heroic denouement would at least have given Monica the <i>semblance</i> of a character arc.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So at what point do I say nice things about it? It is, for all that, a smooth ride: it's never less than pleasant; for a Marvel movie the action is good, and presented with the clarity of posed action figures (in a good way this time); it's colorful, and while at times it's chintzy, it's chintzy like a <i>Star Trek</i> episode; it does <i>possess</i> ingenuity, even if it feels like it's been forbidden to express it; and I haven't mentioned Jackson much, but <i>The Marvels</i> is the closest the movies have ever gotten to doing right by Nick Fury, not the Ultimate Nick Fury whose comic book "casting" as Sam Jackson became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the regular old Marvel Universe Nick Fury<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>all but the cigar-chomping<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in Jackson's regular-joe-in-a-world-of-sci-fi-nonsense amused contempt, and his general benign over-this-shit gruffness. Additionally, I suppose I must prefer Disney executives artificially deadening a film's emotions to James Gunn puking them directly into my mouth like a mama bird, because I liked this better than <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/05/everything-ive-ever-cared-for-or.html">Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3</a></i>, though the forty-five minute difference in runtime and absence of completely-braindead needle-drops undoubtedly contribute to that. Even through the murk of a movie that got remade in the middle of making it the first time, it's Larson's most humane performance out of her three goes at the role; Vellani is adorably hyper-committed, even in the teeth of a character who should be obnoxious. It's one more okay Marvel movie; but I'll admit I came close to talking myself into disliking it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 6/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*Full-on "enormous bomb" territory; I fully realize I didn't help, but ironically, or not, or whatever, it was my girlfriend's fault.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**A callback to <i>Iron Man</i>'s post-credits scene, involving <span style="background-color: #444444;">the Young Avengers</span>, much less so. I categorically do not care.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">***I hate the mid-credits scene very much, but, I mean, if you've gotta do <span style="background-color: #444444;">Rogue</span> <i>somehow</i>.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-48937214002676509962024-02-06T05:07:00.049-11:002024-02-09T23:01:44.098-11:00Disney's Challengers, part VIII: Dog damn<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4-0J-_sb4nyvN2I-Dukp0HtZO0wLUntcfkObD5bnDMjp4dObZ2fZJYidubE-758sGyFEHRKhQTBwNxSAvoYlvRDOmrmG9fBCSJLK_oFDiXIhHaoy8Q6bEoWTR-jlDUlBjMJJho4Wyodpi1bY8YKzMc77r82j0poitZchOvAs-imhhKrSJ1nISUDUYrS5X/s1547/AllDogsGoToHeaven1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1547" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4-0J-_sb4nyvN2I-Dukp0HtZO0wLUntcfkObD5bnDMjp4dObZ2fZJYidubE-758sGyFEHRKhQTBwNxSAvoYlvRDOmrmG9fBCSJLK_oFDiXIhHaoy8Q6bEoWTR-jlDUlBjMJJho4Wyodpi1bY8YKzMc77r82j0poitZchOvAs-imhhKrSJ1nISUDUYrS5X/w259-h400/AllDogsGoToHeaven1.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><br />ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1989</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Don Bluth (co-directed by Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by David N. Weiss and zillion other people</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwCcBCWHG9tiH0GX3Bn1Wquf5Sd2t20Vq9RvTLQRjIjVvYeP23QCKl4ku5HywubGioVse2xO93NSXDa9nqw5pkT-3FPo4ndC85WS2-SYinUp1YqQ5gW6k4bmmgEsUpDxqAiaKmG9DJpJNIEsHXGOVTV2hpjQeSk3iLqbn44rvkH0N1YYH6FOGWNKJh-guz/s1280/AllDogsGoToHeaven6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="694" data-original-width="1280" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwCcBCWHG9tiH0GX3Bn1Wquf5Sd2t20Vq9RvTLQRjIjVvYeP23QCKl4ku5HywubGioVse2xO93NSXDa9nqw5pkT-3FPo4ndC85WS2-SYinUp1YqQ5gW6k4bmmgEsUpDxqAiaKmG9DJpJNIEsHXGOVTV2hpjQeSk3iLqbn44rvkH0N1YYH6FOGWNKJh-guz/w400-h217/AllDogsGoToHeaven6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />I don't know, though I'm going to guess, why Don Bluth thought it was a good idea to spend the major half of his independent career on frontal attacks against his former employers at Disney by almost invariably opening his animated movies directly against theirs and often enough on the very same weekend; by 1989, he'd done so twice already, and while <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/walt-disney-part-xxxii-greetings.html">TRON</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/disneys-challengers-part-v-courageous.html">The Secret of NIMH</a></i> in 1982 was possibly an actual accident (whereas <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/08/walt-disney-part-xxxiv-supreme-ruler-of.html">The Great Mouse Detective</a></i> and <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vi-and-streets.html">An American Tail</a></i> in 1986 overlapped only in subject matter, not release window), in 1988 we have <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/walt-disney-part-xxxvi-beginnings-are.html">Oliver & Company</a></i> and <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vii-your.html">The Land Before Time</a></i>, confirming that <i>somebody</i> must have deliberately been playing chicken. It takes two to tango, so you could just as easily lay the blame with Disney<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>after all, Bluth would presumably have had less control over his release dates (he didn't even always have the same distributor) than Disney/Buena Vista would have had with theirs. But it's fun to think that, because he hated them, he didn't merely want to succeed, he wanted his enemy to fail, and this obsession brought about the destruction of all he held dear. However it came to be, that's what happened, and on November 17th, 1989, the two rivals would clash for the last time as anything like equals, when Bluth released <i>All Dogs Go To Heaven</i>, confident that Disney was going to release one more piece of disposable junk like they'd been doing, not without any interruptions, but nonetheless with regularity, for the past thirty years. This was the studio whose last movie was <i>Oliver & Company</i>, after all. But the movie Disney fielded on that fateful day was <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i>, and it almost single-handedly birthed an entirely new era in American animation, though Bluth probably already ought to have been cautioned by the incredible success of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/walt-disney-part-xxxv-i-hope-youre.html">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</a></i> the year before. Sullivan Bluth Studios or a successor would still carry on, releasing four more animated features; Bluth would go on to direct seven more in total. But after 1989<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>after <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, after the Disney Renaissance<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the entire remainder of Bluth's career is, in a sense, epilogue. Only the jewel of <i>Anastasia</i> would go on to do anything to burnish his legacy; and it's reductive to describe it thus and I love the movie, but <i>Anastasia</i> is basically <i>The Little </i><i>Mermaid</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">On the other hand, Bluth came to the fight with this, and even if he <i>did</i> think he was competing with <i>Oliver & Company</i>, <i>Oliver & Company</i> still wins. The striking similarities between the two projects make it incredibly easy to compare them, precisely like-to-like<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and isn't it weird that within a period of just 365 days the American animation industry somehow produced two whole feature cartoons that can be filed under the hyperspecific genre classification, "canine gangster musical adoption melodrama"?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, in that comparison, <i>Oliver & Company</i>, despite being bad, is better on almost any given metric: animation, design, songs, even plot somehow, though <i>maybe</i> not on "story," when all things are considered. (<i>All Dogs</i> can really only claim better human animation and, specifically, better "sad moppet girl" animation, with any unambiguous superiority<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>as far as human and sad moppet girl design go, it is <i>really</i> unambiguous<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I would personally give <i>All Dogs</i> "better effects animation," for if there's one thing that you could have the utmost faith in from Bluth in the 80s, it was effects animation, but even then the integration of CGI into <i>Oliver & Company</i> is perhaps more interesting.) There has been a long and largely successful effort from the VHS generation to rescue this initially-maligned film's reputation, and while I agree, in a vacuum, that maybe contemporary critics (and contemporary theatrical audiences) were being unfair in their readiness to deny it so much as a right to exist, just because <i>The Little Mermaid</i> existed too, this isn't a vacuum. I just watched the damn thing, and I just don't <i>get</i> it, outside of the custom of the animation aficionado to pay obeisance to Bluth for challenging the big, bad entertainment company with his own small, bad entertainment company. (Sullivan Bluth's working conditions got, let's say, <i>suboptimal</i>, though admittedly there was hardly any way around it.) No, I don't get it at all: there is very little about the film that's appealing, not all that much that makes sense, and not much of its nonsense is presented in an enjoyable way, even on a "crazy kid's cartoon" level; and while it <i>is</i>, undeniably, a crazy kid's cartoon, it's kind of boring about <i>that</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCMKqzx35T6gc2ZP3ppTFWCA6GZpLBwrjLk4kbJPD_tc_RjhlwqP9tpF6clX-27tPGMCuL45UqlU3Txsd0ccKy85vF20GHree4Szau3kjvuJCfGk7XRG6l3Gh4hWzxLvo0Jwcy8ZG3Oqg-zAxSfSUVb5J-SvEcL3MAf_4OvAHTUKnL4jxQmdeXmPDKyhn/s500/AllDogsGoToHeaven5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="281" data-original-width="500" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCMKqzx35T6gc2ZP3ppTFWCA6GZpLBwrjLk4kbJPD_tc_RjhlwqP9tpF6clX-27tPGMCuL45UqlU3Txsd0ccKy85vF20GHree4Szau3kjvuJCfGk7XRG6l3Gh4hWzxLvo0Jwcy8ZG3Oqg-zAxSfSUVb5J-SvEcL3MAf_4OvAHTUKnL4jxQmdeXmPDKyhn/w400-h225/AllDogsGoToHeaven5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />What it does have is a concept, embodied in its excellent title, and that concept is good and clever<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's a hook in a way the original concept, "canine private detective solves a crime of some sort," dreamed up around the time <i>NIMH</i> was being made, is completely inert<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I did say, back on <i>Oliver & Company</i>, that maybe that movie about a canine crime ring wouldn't have been so objectionably stupid if it had built out a canine criminal underworld better-capable of supporting that idea. <i>All Dogs</i> doesn't entirely make me eat my words, for at least you can, for a little bit, kind of buy into its premise. So: in New Orleans in 1939, Charlie, a German shepherd (Burt Reynolds), has been sent to "death row"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is, the dog pound<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>framed for a crime he didn't commit, and while I feel this is <i>already</i> prompting importune questions such as "so was it a jury of humans or of other dogs who 'convicted' him for this 'crime'?", that's me being no fun, and we don't have time to think about it too much anyway, because we begin right in the midst of his breakout with help from his friend Itchy, a daschund (Dom DeLuise). Upon his escape, Charlie naturally enough seeks out his old business partner, Carface, a bulldog (Vic Tayback), at the casino Charlie helped build, unaware that Carface is the one who put him away with, I don't know, fabricated evidence and suborned witnesses, whatever, let's just get through it, and Carface really wants to keep Charlie out of the picture. To this end, and exploiting poor Charlie's trust, he sends him to heaven by way of a speeding car and the Gulf of Mexico.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Unfortunately for Carface, while Charlie duly arrives in heaven, he doesn't <i>stay</i> there; he's determined to get his revenge, and he doesn't even wait long enough to process the warning that while all dogs go to heaven, if he leaves, he can't ever come back. The good news is that Charlie now has the advantage over Carface<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the bulldog, after all, believes Charlie's dead<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and he cajoles Itchy into an infiltration of Carface's casino, to investigate something Itchy overheard there, about the "monster" Carface keeps locked away. This is no ordinary monster, though<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>why it's no monster at all, but a little orphan girl, Anne-Marie (the tragically short-lived Judith Barsi, in her final role before her murder). Anne-Marie does have a gift, however<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>she can talk to animals, dogs, yes, but also rats, horses, anything that can be used for racing (in this world dogs can talk, but usually only to other dogs), which has made her the lynchpin of Carface's gambling operation. Charlie sees the value, and kidnaps/"rescues" her, promising to get her new parents in exchange for her help at the races, likening their scheme to that of Robin Hood (the semi-legendary figure, not <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxvi-oh-hes-so.html">the better talking animal cartoon that Bluth worked on</a>), and all of this, of course, is bullshit. But Charlie is living on borrowed time, and so far all he's done is ensured the misery of an innocent little girl, and that wherever he goes next, it's definitely not going to be heaven.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-rupTiI0vYQUBEKN0I4vsgFdZr0J5oVuiM9ztMuGonwi9dp9ltMPa026xGfMD9nOGBqxX8_Sii25hq3fn69Usqr2cedrZEdTD46iziSj7QC6kLMYj2osRIBmIFE1cKEiD76m7AOzMhDI-UjrEpgG99yg0bgmQ3N3V1Lc3SZ1OsoQmWgnSq2cl8JjKFXq/s625/AllDogsGoToHeaven3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="625" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-rupTiI0vYQUBEKN0I4vsgFdZr0J5oVuiM9ztMuGonwi9dp9ltMPa026xGfMD9nOGBqxX8_Sii25hq3fn69Usqr2cedrZEdTD46iziSj7QC6kLMYj2osRIBmIFE1cKEiD76m7AOzMhDI-UjrEpgG99yg0bgmQ3N3V1Lc3SZ1OsoQmWgnSq2cl8JjKFXq/w400-h215/AllDogsGoToHeaven3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So far, so okay, I guess, though I think it's far more noticeable than Bluth and this film's extraordinarily large group of storypeople must have perceived it to be that Charlie forgets that what he crawled out of his watery grave for was to get <i>revenge</i>, not to make a bunch of money (nor to have his heart grow three sizes over the course of 84 minutes), and that the best revenge is not just "living well" when you openly advertise your reemergence to the crime boss who already murdered you once and will undoubtedly attempt to do so again, which Carface inevitably does. This really goes to the foundational problem with <i>All Dogs Go to Heaven</i>, that it's almost completely unfocused as a narrative<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's one reason those 84 minutes feel like almost two hours<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and in lieu of focus, things just sort of <i>happen</i>, sometimes things that somewhat track with the story, and sometimes things that spring out of absolutely nowhere, such as the infamous deployment of "Flash Gordon ray guns" by Carface's canine gang (this was at least a dumbassed censorship issue), or what that ray gun chase scene sets up, the even-more-infamous dive into a subterranean pit where Charlie and Anne-Marie confront the proverbial big-lipped alligator (Ken Page) and his army of "tribal" sewer rats. The latter ties in <i>very loosely</i> to the setting, if you even remember this is New Orleans, or 1939, or that in the 1980s you could still be obliquely racist, though you might not; this is more-or-less the first time that the film has actually insisted on New Orleans in any specific way, and that's if you can call "vodoun stereotype alligator?" particularly "insistent." Then the alligator launches into a parody of an Esther Williams routine from at least five years after 1939 (and more like thirteen)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I suppose somebody could try to (poorly) argue it's in reference to 1933's "By a Waterfall" from <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/busby-berkeley-talking-pictures-its.html">Footlight Parade</a></i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but, in either case, I fucking hate it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There's some energy in this sequence, at least, and I can concede that there's something idiosyncratic to <i>All Dogs</i>' 30sness (and, as noted, its 40sness), in that Bluth has, for whatever reasons that made sense in his brain, smashed together all the things I assume he must have liked<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>30s gangster pictures, 30s orphan films (I think so anyway, I've not seen many Shirley Temples, but I assume there's some resonance there), 40s celestial bureaucracy pictures, talking dog cartoons of several eras (though the 50s are presumably Bluth's touchstone given it produced the form's <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/10/walt-disney-part-xix-dog-days-are-over.html">definitive example</a>), and, finally (but maybe not exhaustively), in this one scene with an alligator, an "undifferentiated tropics" South Seas adventure with <i>King Kong </i>overtones. (Yet somehow not musicals, besides aquamusicals, from <i>any</i> of those decades: <i>All Dogs</i> is, obviously, "a musical." That's an objective fact, since characters, mainly Charlie, do break out into song. But with all the love in the world to Burt Reynolds, whose performance is reasonably fine and Reynoldsy, he transforms it into something I would like to describe as an <i>anti-musical</i>, a place where songs go to die, and they do not die <i>quickly</i>. In case you were wondering why the alligator spares Charlie's life, it's because when Charlie howls, he discovers Charlie's <i>beautiful voice</i>, which in its own right feels like a horrible anti-<i>joke</i>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxeVeU3oBC3Y6oqtt9OyAa8-6OMRjKJHKiJVVflY09IsNIkwnnMxAuiGy2tOAQdrKnBvU3nidQLzCBxvNMYht3afoJnX-SQ0U7m4MJLK15SwKkcuG-Pi5IXJ2fyW-O4sxxTGYWkOZKkaEHuJM4d_eNUPFTGO-lAekhvqLKplZhck6_x92Flj3cm9pPIxxo/s720/AllDogsGoToHeaven2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="392" data-original-width="720" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxeVeU3oBC3Y6oqtt9OyAa8-6OMRjKJHKiJVVflY09IsNIkwnnMxAuiGy2tOAQdrKnBvU3nidQLzCBxvNMYht3afoJnX-SQ0U7m4MJLK15SwKkcuG-Pi5IXJ2fyW-O4sxxTGYWkOZKkaEHuJM4d_eNUPFTGO-lAekhvqLKplZhck6_x92Flj3cm9pPIxxo/w400-h217/AllDogsGoToHeaven2.png" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Somehow it's never a reference to </i>Gator<i>. (At least they did one earlier.)</i></div><br />I cannot say what this pile-up of genres really amounts to, though, except a mess, and the vast majority of it is just the 30s gangster movie anyway, and a deeply unengaging version of that, just a long-feeling series of fixed animal races that start to shake the already-wobbling world-building once you realize that, in this universe, the animals appear to <i>already</i> be fixing their own races for their own purposes. (This is pretty explicit with the horses, who do further damage to the story logic, because at least one of them can very clearly already understand "dog.") It's some kind of indictment of <i>All Dogs</i> that the single best scene in the movie (at least that isn't in a metaphysical realm) is when it pretty much entirely gives up, and just becomes a corny, dopey, for-once-kind-of-funny gag cartoon for three minutes, concerning a girl and two dogs in a coat attempting to place a bet.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The metaphysical parts do work out better. Not uniformly: Reynolds sings a paint-peelingly awful duet with the whippet angel in heaven (Melba Moore), "Let Me Be Surprised," regarding the potential aridity of existence in paradise, which barely fits in with why he wants to leave paradise, so even <i>before</i> Charlie's returned to seek his vengeance, he's already losing track of it. But they are, nonetheless, the recipients of the strongest design and conceptual elements here, as well as the most committed effects animation<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the clocks, representing the boundedness of canine lives, and particularly the river of clocks flowing over a cloud in heaven, are really cool<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the vision of <i>hell</i> that seizes Charlie in a nightmare is <i>great</i>, a realm of lava and monsters and a demonic Charon so scary they cut finished animation, lest they give children nightmares. (Which it still did!) And the climax in a sinking ship is fairly good, too, demanding some more hellish fire effects along with strong water animation.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiblWxYYJSOw8PSqFtKkVNZBk8N8tA-fumkcVnwMkst1BzsqcecZiOrTpJlCrkARnKqGKA6Z391lK9WscrzKqBoycE6NSKHfBLNBwlzJGv-fiWYGkUYYBJ_qOMPW-tED5EXOOatbAwc0smaG2eh-xvoJ05x7_42zw8pipDtP1YcUxDn5I6t_yFtDRnv4hBt/s1136/AllDogsGoToHeaven4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="618" data-original-width="1136" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiblWxYYJSOw8PSqFtKkVNZBk8N8tA-fumkcVnwMkst1BzsqcecZiOrTpJlCrkARnKqGKA6Z391lK9WscrzKqBoycE6NSKHfBLNBwlzJGv-fiWYGkUYYBJ_qOMPW-tED5EXOOatbAwc0smaG2eh-xvoJ05x7_42zw8pipDtP1YcUxDn5I6t_yFtDRnv4hBt/w400-h217/AllDogsGoToHeaven4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />But this is just not a lot of the movie. Most of it is just aimless 30s gangster movie <i>stuff</i>, aggravatingly so when the cherubic Anne-Marie is slotted into the corrupted ingenue role, even animated with new (and unnatural) facial expressions to this end, without any ability, obviously, to actually <i>do</i> that; her entirely-static function winds up instead to deliver annoying moralistic nagging intercut with a bunch of cloying emotional manipulation, purely as a locus for audience sads, without any character to actually attach those sads to. For those who love this movie, a common refrain is that it finds its way to sentiment through darker channels than Disney fare, and I don't know what they're talking about. Nothing is truly dark in this movie besides, sometimes, the color palette; it charts something that superficially looks like a challenging course with Charlie-the-asshole, or Itchy-the-even-bigger-asshole, but the ending is always foreordained; the one and only time I thought it got at anything legitimately and meaningfully mature is in the <i>other</i> best not-in-heaven-or-hell scene, where Charlie and Anne-Marie hole up with the collie, Flo (Loni Anderson), who is strongly implied to be a canine prostitute, and amongst whose extremely large number of puppies is strongly implied to be one or more of Charlie's offspring, and in these implications, there is, at last, some actual subtlety and grown-up texture that is present in no other relationship in the film.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For all that, Anne-Marie is still probably the <i>best</i> character here, because she is at least sympathetic and cute and well-animated and well-designed (there's a lot of Snow White in an 80s Bluth style to Anne-Marie). Charlie, meanwhile, is downright awful as a visual<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>frankly, he looks more like a giant rat, and I hate looking at him, which is a problem because he's in virtually every scene<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Itchy is worse, wearing <i>clothes</i> (some but not all of the dogs wear clothes), notably a kewl backwards baseball cap. He's given immensely irritating voice by DeLuise, who recorded alongside his pal Reynolds so that the two could improvise a bunch of conversations that never seem to end, and while these two being tedious together won't shock anyone who's ever seen <i>Smokey and the Bandit II</i>, it's still a drag. There is also how Bluth has decided to approach "dogs" and a "secret dog society to the side of humanity," which I found extremely distracting<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>you could ask "why is <i>NIMH </i>(or whatever) good, then?", and I would simply point to scale: a miniature society works when it's actually <i>miniature</i>, and invisible, but dogs are huge. Likewise, there's this sour spot that the film finds with their anthropomorphism, this uncanny position between <i>Lady and the Tramp</i>/<i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/10/walt-disney-part-xxi-fur-is-dead.html">101 Dalmatians</a></i> doggy naturalism and dogs with overt primate features that, furthermore, will visibly transform, frequently within the same shot, depending on the needs of any given activity. <i>The Land Before Time</i>'s focus on quadrupeds tamped down a lot of Bluth's worst habits about fidgety secondary movement; this protean quality brings it back more than you'd like.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So it's not just the worst of Bluth's first four features, but the worst-looking. That doesn't mean it looks outright bad, because Bluth had set a pretty high baseline, but <i>All Dogs</i> doesn't quite hit the bar. A lot of it is thanks to the character issues I've already discussed (it is certainly not limited to the <i>characters</i> I discussed: ugly character design is <i>everywhere</i>, and, astonishingly, the alligator isn't even the creature here with the <i>most</i> grotesque lip design). But Bluth and Larry Leker's production design <i>can</i> be bad, not as routinely as the characters, and there's an "everything is always a giant trash pile" aesthetic that it can capture quite well, but there are some baffling color design decisions, with a tendency toward vomiting multiple hues all over the backdrops that sometimes even erupts into the animated elements. (This really hurts that scene at Flo's: her puppies look like fucking Carebears.) And while one of the Bluth hallmarks I generally like is his early films' unique photographic haze, in this one it goes overboard, to the point it feels like even the camera department didn't quite know what they were doing; it's uncommon for an animated film to have a shot actually, unintentionally <i>out-of-focus</i>, but <i>All Dogs</i> has one. I recall that I liked <i>All Dogs Go To Heaven</i> when I was a kid, so at least nostalgia should be working for it, but it's not. It takes a lot<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>usually more than it should!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to <i>make</i> me not like something I already liked as a kid, but this one manages it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 2/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-3963813871889478442024-02-04T10:43:00.061-11:002024-03-05T07:47:43.439-11:00Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPO0CKonx4SHv3tCZF-1q5dnIu2NjH_ntW2uyvYPw8FNXZ75GN7ZaIg4jHy7jQuyl17mz1PNwgJ6JOGKx3kNNNN0Hj5howfOyQvNPsO-VeERKBYeciirjamM5NHkWkrVLjY8MqaK2RvNwnV4eefS0_TmTAcMWcDF_9G3RC1vw-yiIIkKASJxJCTZoMFDFU/s750/WereBack7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="500" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPO0CKonx4SHv3tCZF-1q5dnIu2NjH_ntW2uyvYPw8FNXZ75GN7ZaIg4jHy7jQuyl17mz1PNwgJ6JOGKx3kNNNN0Hj5howfOyQvNPsO-VeERKBYeciirjamM5NHkWkrVLjY8MqaK2RvNwnV4eefS0_TmTAcMWcDF_9G3RC1vw-yiIIkKASJxJCTZoMFDFU/w266-h400/WereBack7.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><br />WE'RE BACK! A DINOSAUR'S STORY</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1993</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Phil Nibbelink, Ralph Zondag, Dick Zondag, and Simon Wells</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by John Patrick Shanley, Flint Dille, and Sherri Stoner (based on the picture book by Hudson Talbott)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXAoFYJqfDLuvQBW2QB1AcDt-towq1e-IH5tECD89gAQpbL0vOaRnQ_yOPelvGys3bk41B8RmspIu_2QC0ctw3DC59BC6p_GyXhJebDAkleQwufvjqD4N_O6HPpXGld8QHpTPIh-URQ9fKo05pCEYA4naZbsuvU4zsGJ6xVm_HwLBXL3GBmi_gyDZWsxA/s735/WereBack1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="386" data-original-width="735" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGXAoFYJqfDLuvQBW2QB1AcDt-towq1e-IH5tECD89gAQpbL0vOaRnQ_yOPelvGys3bk41B8RmspIu_2QC0ctw3DC59BC6p_GyXhJebDAkleQwufvjqD4N_O6HPpXGld8QHpTPIh-URQ9fKo05pCEYA4naZbsuvU4zsGJ6xVm_HwLBXL3GBmi_gyDZWsxA/w400-h210/WereBack1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />If you have never seen <i>We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story</i>, as I had not before I screened it yesterday, it can still sort of feel like you have. I'm not even going to check to see if one of the mid-aughts nostalgia critics<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>probably the actual Nostalgia Critic<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>reviewed this all those years ago, because I'm sure I don't need to. It is like the platonic ideal of a movie made for that kind of performer, where you can literally just describe what happens in its plot while shrieking and gesticulating and showing clips, perhaps occasionally putting on some comedic hats between cuts, and you have nonetheless committed a legitimate act of film criticism. As a story, it <i>is</i> just one insane thing after another, told in the most insane manner I think you could choose, never insane in ways that bolster the insanity of anything else, and almost always insane-<i>bad</i>, except for the one single time where it's insane-good, right at the end, because being insane-bad all the way through would be, by this point, exactly what you'd be expecting it to do, and <i>any</i> kind of narrative cohesion is this film's antichrist. Anyway, while I was watching it, it could seem like I was remembering certain things; when I saw it happen, I'm almost certain that I did have a previous actual memory of knowing about the villain's insane-good ending, which I believe is kind of famous even if nothing else about the movie is. So I must've been exposed to it <i>somehow</i>, even if this did nothing whatsoever to domesticate it for me.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it's also a film of historical significance: <i>We're Back! </i>was the very first animated feature, not made at Walt Disney, to be produced entirely in a digital ink-and-paint system. This turns out to be one of the most perversely insane-bad things about it, and we'll come back to it, but this movie looks <i>horrible</i>, almost impossibly horrible for a $20 million cartoon in 1993, and in no small part because of its technological basis<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's <i>early</i> days here, and has ever since remained one of the worst examples of how digital ink-and-paint could be misused.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It <i>is</i> hard to blame anyone for overlooking even the literal images flashing in front of their eyes, though, when the nonsense narrative is this belligerent. Part of the problem, of course, is what this film is: an adaptation of Hudson Talbott's 1987 children's picture book about dinosaurs, itself a follow-up to a joke calendar about dinosaurs, and I wouldn't be surprised if the joke calendar had roughly equivalent story content. I would not even like to call Talbott's book "good" or "bad": there's so little <i>to</i> its 40 pages that I'm not sure it's capable of being judged, except if I'd purchased it I would've felt ripped off. There's a cute dolled-up <i>Far Side</i>dness to Talbott's painted art, at least, and while it's effective at making dopey dinosaurs (the cartoon resembles it very little), it's still pretty unspecial; there's <i>very</i> little else, at most just a faint sense of irony that can make you chuckle. Somehow it attracted the interest of numerous parties, including Ron Clements and John Musker, who sadly just had to go make <i>Aladdin</i> instead.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLSL3hyphenhyphent2VW2Bs_BS_fKh8zwl7qR-18dvs6T9JLIKbwwhdIOiR5zC3sEDZYCc5AolsyLSGpg_htiCSMayVKC4d4YEBeSqzhRJnBGCNHYZBNCJzlzCZTImjEt7jyUqz-6P5i1yTy9T96bcKowqDKfxK7C72YNZxVFrqBkOctJmeroKsUEYyumMB4_99iAuM/s1280/WereBack2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLSL3hyphenhyphent2VW2Bs_BS_fKh8zwl7qR-18dvs6T9JLIKbwwhdIOiR5zC3sEDZYCc5AolsyLSGpg_htiCSMayVKC4d4YEBeSqzhRJnBGCNHYZBNCJzlzCZTImjEt7jyUqz-6P5i1yTy9T96bcKowqDKfxK7C72YNZxVFrqBkOctJmeroKsUEYyumMB4_99iAuM/w400-h225/WereBack2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />All of the narrative concepts of Talbott's book wind up in the movie, though if this were it, we'd have a seven minute movie, so when Universal purchased the rights for no less a personage than Steven Spielberg (whose six year old son had fallen in love with it), obviously liberties were going to be taken. Here its troubles began, so that I'm reasonably sure it's the single worst thing with Spielberg's name on it to be made in the 20th century. (And I've seen <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/02/steven-spielberg-part-ii-you-know-some.html">Something Evil</a></i>.) It's a coincidence that it was finally released the same year as <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/steven-spielberg-part-xx-okay-some.html">Jurassic Park</a></i> and marketed as a more truly-small-child-friendly alternative, but of course Spielberg's interest in dinos was preexisting, attested to by 1988's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/disneys-challengers-part-vii-your.html">The Land Before Time</a></i>, the film that led to his acrimonious split with Don Bluth, so by the time we get to <i>We're Back!</i>, it was under the auspices of Spielberg's own animation house, Amblimation, as its second feature. After five years of production, however, it had cycled through at least three screenwriters<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>including Flint Dille and Sherri Stoner, though only John Patrick Shanley is credited<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which doesn't sound nearly as bad as cycling through four directors, starting with Simon Wells and Phil Nibbelink, who were kicked over to another Amblimation film (a never-made adaptation of <i>Cats</i>) in favor of brothers Ralph and Dick Zondag, until such time as Nibbelink was put back in charge, with Wells pitching in where needed. (In these latter days Wells seems mystified and embarrassed that his directorial credit is still on the film, which is the only correct reaction to have.) Whether or not the Zondags were out of their depth and had only been good at selling their dino-enthusiasm to Spielberg<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they'd both been animators on <i>The Land Before Time</i>, while after jumping ship to Disney, Ralph wound up co-directing (can you guess?) <i>Dinosaur</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it <i>really</i> comes down to Shanley, to whom Spielberg had made the, honestly, <i>extremely</i> stupid error of providing a contractual assurance that not one word of his screenplay could be changed without his permission. And as that screenplay is an utter clusterfuck of ideas poorly-presented, that's what we got.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So we start with a gambit that I'll concede does its job of being "intriguing." On a golf course lives a young bird who's having a hard time of it with his siblings, in such a way that 71 minutes later, the script will insist it's "paid off" on this, in terms of how the movie's story has enlightened this bird about the importance of family, even though I don't see how it's addressed his specific situation; I mention it only because I suspect this small, rankling problem will have been completely overshadowed by the time it becomes relevant. Anyway, who shows up but a most-unusual golfer, Rex (John Goodman)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a tyrannosaurus rex<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>attired in the incongruous costume of a man of his sport, but, upon encountering this wee baby bird, Rex is moved to explain how he got here.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Around 250 million years ago, judging by the inaccurate representation of Pangaea with a detached Antarctica (it's obviously the end-Cretaceous, but also who cares), Rex was a regular old stupid theropod, concerned only with eating other stupid animals, until the day that a spaceship from the future comes and Captain Neweyes (Walter Kronkite, why not) and his alien sidekick Vorb (Jay Leno, likewise) feed him a bunch of drugs. Now appropriately medicated, Rex achieves sapience, and is invited into their collection of uplifted dinos<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Woog the triceratops (Rene La Vant), Elsa the pterodactyl (Felicity Kendal), and Dweeb the parasaurolophus (Charles Fleischer, and good luck saying <i>that</i>, children, because I can't; he was originally an apatosaur and my guess is they couldn't figure out how to incorporate an apatosaur's horizontality into the layout). Wikipedia claims they have personalities<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that Rex is kind, Woog gluttonous, Dweeb half-witted<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but they're <i>all</i> kind, and gluttonous, and effectively half-witted, so that means that the only dinosaur who even partway differentiates herself is Elsa, whose personality is that she's slutty (principally toward Rex), which will be the default state of this film's female characters, and as much as it's already bothering me that the pterosaur wants to screw the theropod, this isn't the most worrisome expression of this impulse. Well, with his dinos aboard, the captain spins up his psychic wish radio, and they listen to the wishes of a bunch of alarmingly ethnically-stereotyped children from "the middle future," i.e. 1993, and he notes how many of these geeks want to see dinosaurs, explaining that he gave his new pals intelligence so that they could choose whether they wanted to grant their wish. Rex and company affably agree, so Neweyes sends them to our world, parachuting them into the mouth of the Hudson River where they fail to make their rendezvous with the Natural History Museum's Dr. Bleeb (Julia Child, and again, <i>why not</i>). Instead, they drop right into the lap of one Louie (Joey Shea), an oceangoing Huckleberry Finn who is sailing his raft to New York to join the circus, but who most of all needs a friend.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sWy5Piau6OUJk7u_XEkWhZJJ5OoN6STtwqE8baq2dg9X7BoTTF7-mXkeUBkUquOwz3uPIy1eVihKx50LlZwVqTz5oIiIh8ryuLN9GhDbxIKHBq2gXE11pQJRWbj0DCiT6ZfrAocAw0GjRr5dDjMDEzQM1JRZdfunfZFRYPYwflMUPH2ZJpUrX3gS_Zfd/s474/WereBack3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2sWy5Piau6OUJk7u_XEkWhZJJ5OoN6STtwqE8baq2dg9X7BoTTF7-mXkeUBkUquOwz3uPIy1eVihKx50LlZwVqTz5oIiIh8ryuLN9GhDbxIKHBq2gXE11pQJRWbj0DCiT6ZfrAocAw0GjRr5dDjMDEzQM1JRZdfunfZFRYPYwflMUPH2ZJpUrX3gS_Zfd/w400-h225/WereBack3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This is <i>only</i> the first fifteen minutes, and it's already awe-inspiring in its overcomplicated, the-dinosaurs-aren't-the-only-ones-on-unprescribed-medication-here "YES AND" storytelling, and what I have not so far mentioned is that while essentially every single idea here is some variety of bad, the accumulation of them at such a high tempo is <i>intoxicating</i>, the kind of thing that makes you feel alive. It's not so much "so-bad-it's-good," but always so vividly bad it's impossible to get bored with it. But it doesn't feel pleasant, even so, and the flashback framing is probably part of that, when it confronts us directly with the desired endpoint<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"an intelligent dinosaur, in 1993, makes friends with a small child"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and accordingly lets us feel the logical-illogic of every single clumsy step taken to get there.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At this point, the screenplay has translated nearly every last one of Talbott's concepts (albeit devoid of so much as a vestige of his dry humor, which made Talbott sad, and it makes me sad too, given the mind-melting mania needs to be cut with something). The kid is already original, and so is the villain, Professor <i>Screw</i>eyes (Kenneth Mars), brother to Captain Neweyes and a fellow time traveler, but evil, and not merely marked <i>as</i> evil by his disfigurement, but explicitly driven <i>to</i> evil because of the loss of his eye<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>just the one eye!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>so, leaving any other concerns aside, we have a federation of planets in the far-flung future that can travel through time and give dinosaurs human intelligence, but neither fix an eye nor have a society where a modest lack of depth perception won't drive you to commit acts of temporal crime. I mean, fuck it, it doesn't matter: on behalf of the villainy for this science fiction film, Screweyes is <i>basically just Satan</i>, somewhat managing to still somewhat fit in as long as he's just running a circus in 1993 and showing off his <i>fear</i> radio for the giggles. But then he finally just whips out the magic glowing floating slavery contract from <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i>, with the added nastiness of requiring signatures in blood, just <i>drops</i> of blood, that transmute mystically into the signatories' names. Which would be cool if this were a movie about a supernaturally evil circus, as would be the denouement to his antagonism (in the very end, <span style="background-color: #444444;">he refuses his brother's offer of forgiveness, but admits in soliloquy that while he drew his power from fear he's the most fearful of all, whereupon a murder of crows surrounds him and devours him, tastefully enough for a G-rating, and horrifically enough because the only thing left is his metal screw eye</span>; you would also be wrong to expect that <i>any</i> of this has been "set up" except in the most oblique and confusing way about four minutes before it happens). But this is not a movie where a supernaturally evil circus comfortably exists.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHIJVxndgPXIsLW4_SModoYRBnse6_R5HpV2YNN4_9b-s5WeuDzfCvRQ33J3xygMvk3gxQIOfTzMi4lZTmqU92MGvrO1dvG1mhz209kLb3oDJ9dUCQIg9oh5oi6RWDFWSPTEs5LiZZ_AiYPrqHL6gZygwxn8CpeimeLVLrC1jZI0yz4fxkU-7DRLUUCs7U/s992/WereBack6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="992" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHIJVxndgPXIsLW4_SModoYRBnse6_R5HpV2YNN4_9b-s5WeuDzfCvRQ33J3xygMvk3gxQIOfTzMi4lZTmqU92MGvrO1dvG1mhz209kLb3oDJ9dUCQIg9oh5oi6RWDFWSPTEs5LiZZ_AiYPrqHL6gZygwxn8CpeimeLVLrC1jZI0yz4fxkU-7DRLUUCs7U/w400-h210/WereBack6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Insane insane insane, and completing our cast is Cecilia Nuthatch (Yeardley Smith), a girl Louie's age who hates her yuppie parents, and whom Louie encounters after being flown pterosaur-back around New York, and if you'll remember what I said about the film's female characters, Cecilia represents the inordinately discomfiting spectacle of Lisa Simpson being aggressively horny at Louie, astonishingly so for a prepubescent child, for much of the remaining forty-five minutes of the movie and in ways that, between Smith's suggestive performance and the animators' bedroom eyes on this ten year old, made my skin crawl entirely off my body. (The nadir is probably when the tyrannosaur makes a "ch-ch" aside to Louie to coax him into talking to her.) It also made me ponder whether Smith, presently the world's single most famous 59 year old prepubescent girl, ever had trouble dating, but no matter. Cecilia's ultimate function is to save the day and, uh, tie things up neatly<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>this is being extraordinarily generous<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>by uttering the desperate cry, "Let no bad happen!", a sentence that automatically destroys any drama that has been accidentally accrued, that obeys no rules of English fluency or how a distressed child would express disfluency, and that no human being has ever said, would ever say, or will ever say again except in mocking this movie. This is the most forceful expression of the Spielbergian emotional manipulation running through this story<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>does Louie, a resentful runaway, find a replacement for his father and mother in an impossible friend? oh, he does? wow<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though I have never seen it at a more subterranean level. Rather than Spielberg's own sharper instincts actively guiding it, it feels like Shanley, or somebody, merely <i>pandering</i> to him by pretending to be him, and somehow it escaped his notice that it is the most insipid version conceivable of Spielbergian sentiment, Louie alternating between grating obnoxiousness and grating mewling, Cecilia alternating between squirmily seducing Louie and even-more-grating mewling, while the dinosaurs serve in loco parentis with emotions that exist solely because they have to, and because the movie tells you they are so. And contra the sci-fi/fantasy concepts, this <i>isn't</i> vividly bad, just lousy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So to add to what I said up top, not only <i>can</i> you just recite this story in fine detail as a review, you can't help yourself. I'd go so far as to say only one scene in the film is even functional, a stretch of about six minutes where New Yorkers mistake the dinosaurs for robots, and it works not despite but <i>because</i> of Wells directing it as a "reshoot" after test audiences noted how ghastly the movie was; remarkably, it appears that it's a punch-up of a vignette in the book that's its sole flirtation with "having any plot at all," and the way it's described by Wells, Nibbelink, and Talbott, it's implied the Zondags, or Shanley, or Spielberg had somehow neglected to include what amounts to the source material's only actual scene. In Wells's hands, anyway, it became a musical number, featuring the film's theme song by Thomas Dolby and James Horner, "Roll Back the Rock (To the Dawn of Time)," and I'm not apt to call it "actually good," but it's one of the harrowingly infrequent times in this kid's cartoon where it's doing a diligent, competent job of what a kid's cartoon is supposed to do. It probably has the most impressive animation in the film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in that the links between characters, backgrounds, and effects animation are all tangible and appropriate, which is also harrowingly infrequent. But its musical staging is fine, and there's some coolness to the numerous moving parts of a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (they're eagerly playing with the new digital prospects for transparency with all those parade balloons) held in a setting that actually manages to be "cartoon New York."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDarELs_bAdyvU36I7Hzg-c3fdmX4gNAmSrJppb-sb_uAUko6GnZOrZoHqewj7Jd_Rbl0FJCogcejjQag3wmwHu4FiAUhfHUJ1po0Lx6tIaXZ-GRdJV0q5eIU4HIg1Vlec7RqSS_yPLAgAP7-YBXD0ukDZ1EZRyz5lm-23vkMdGSJHHKzJlB8uuCQOJ13y/s992/WereBack5.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="521" data-original-width="992" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDarELs_bAdyvU36I7Hzg-c3fdmX4gNAmSrJppb-sb_uAUko6GnZOrZoHqewj7Jd_Rbl0FJCogcejjQag3wmwHu4FiAUhfHUJ1po0Lx6tIaXZ-GRdJV0q5eIU4HIg1Vlec7RqSS_yPLAgAP7-YBXD0ukDZ1EZRyz5lm-23vkMdGSJHHKzJlB8uuCQOJ13y/w400-h210/WereBack5.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Which brings us to what I would usually find most interesting about a bad cartoon, how it's a bad <i>cartoon</i>, and <i>We're Back!</i> is a <i>wretched</i> cartoon, in no small part because the possibilities opened up by Sidley Wright and Associates' (somehow not a law firm) digital ink-and-paint system are being so violently exploited by inexperienced artists who clearly must have thought they were bringing good into the world. The goal, apparently, was to use the powers of digital paint to bring a vastly fuller dimensionality to the characters, and much like the introduction to this story is disorienting and stupid, so is our introduction to this animation, with the system's capabilities inflicted upon those birds with a complete absence of taste that results in the most uncanny alienage of their for-some-reason-constantly-backlit-and-toplit figures against the backdrops. Then there's the dinosaurs, who are slathered with "airbrushed" blobs of shadow pretty much constantly, sometimes in ways that work with more dramatic lighting conditions, but usually in complete disregard of "light" as a thing that defines shade at all, so they remain these mottled blobs that would probably look decent in stills, in another location, but look distractingly uncanny in motion, and often grotesque. (There is also the matter of their design, which distinguishes so much between their "Brain Grain" versions and their "natural" states that the "funny" parts where they transmogrify between them are stomach-churning body horror; but the abiding problem is that, modally, they look dumb and wimpy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>those <i>nostrils</i> on Rex<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to the extent that I doubt any kid would be excited to see these "real dinosaurs." In fact, they weren't: the movie bombed.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is also a great deal of enthusiasm in the ways they're allowed to integrate CGI and easy multiplane, notably during Louie and Elsa's flight, one beat of which is cool (they fly through an office building, which is likely the part least indebted to the new digital tools), though it's undermined by being surrounded by scenes where multiplaned CGI buildings loom up apocalyptically, like a premonition of <i>Inception</i>. But the thing that makes this movie really horrendous to behold isn't entirely a creature of its digital ink-and-paint, though it permits some of its worst sins in this category (and it often has some pretty unattractive line quality despite being digitally-inked, like there wasn't enough clean-up or the scanning process itself added an unlikeable chunkiness to them); but the worst is the <i>backgrounds</i>, which are inexpressibly ugly, especially for the first twenty minutes, slamming us from the Cretaceous Period's hellscape orange to a purple-pink Manhattan shoreline that would be more at home in a <i>Blood Music</i> adaptation. Many backdrops here are hazy mush, and have a monstrous tendency toward exactly-wrong single colors, but it's never worse than in this sickly evocation of "dawn," that even draws a little extra poison from the digital tools by way of the flawless reflection of this all-flaws vision of New York in the water below. I don't know if there was ever a potential version of this film where the style might have let you enjoy the madcap chaos of the narrative, but who knows, the wacky, tacky, over-ambitious constant movement of the layout is probably half the reason for this film's undeniable verve. So in the end the only saving grace is that it is such a unique and concentrated experience that it's hard to feel like it's truly wasted your time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 2/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-27618116942458309272024-02-03T01:21:00.058-11:002024-03-01T09:31:15.133-11:00Disney's Challengers, Part XII: Humans will always lend a hand with the destruction of this worthless jungle land<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz0RqKmEgXTlDJQHlXt3rVl3tC6kBAdSlcP_0lwX7aVmjQFrZ7Am947nbu6lJw62y2wLWfb4-lCYKdTDa4_6M2fyX0MWIv7cVJoLrL26RpB54DE6C0Bq9u7oKNd94dDgtq3uxhHxo3Pwvwh0zS4XyxCQz-h1eGitN_LNHknwya15yBw_mTRrvoI6olj2CH/s1426/Ferngully1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1426" data-original-width="950" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz0RqKmEgXTlDJQHlXt3rVl3tC6kBAdSlcP_0lwX7aVmjQFrZ7Am947nbu6lJw62y2wLWfb4-lCYKdTDa4_6M2fyX0MWIv7cVJoLrL26RpB54DE6C0Bq9u7oKNd94dDgtq3uxhHxo3Pwvwh0zS4XyxCQz-h1eGitN_LNHknwya15yBw_mTRrvoI6olj2CH/w266-h400/Ferngully1.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><br />FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1992</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Bill Kroyer</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Jim Cox (based on the novella by Diana Young)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSqysTiR4LEx7yRyZxUGPxd0R8Dtxjc9ouq9nqwRyh4oP3zMEujRQstCfsAqOpXKLOM2_5k9W9IGO8mBHgGaB3y7D-mRlDgPcHWIxJRXg4N90V7ZIn-EXkUDiWueIcaP1EIiEa9cghyQtXHsaEtmIutcm1W6ZITYKBlxsznL6BsDB3JoNfZbG1vmKaCz4c/s682/Ferngully6.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="682" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSqysTiR4LEx7yRyZxUGPxd0R8Dtxjc9ouq9nqwRyh4oP3zMEujRQstCfsAqOpXKLOM2_5k9W9IGO8mBHgGaB3y7D-mRlDgPcHWIxJRXg4N90V7ZIn-EXkUDiWueIcaP1EIiEa9cghyQtXHsaEtmIutcm1W6ZITYKBlxsznL6BsDB3JoNfZbG1vmKaCz4c/w400-h217/Ferngully6.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I promise I have more interesting things to say about <i>FernGully: The Last Rainforest</i>, but what we'll start with is, at least, more interesting than my first impulse, which was to bitch about its title's typography: it is, presumably, the best film ever made as a present from a film producer to his wife by an Australian insurance company. The movie producer in question was Wayne Young, and his wife was<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or is, as I've had some trouble running down their biographical data<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Diana Young. By 1990, Diana had created a little paracosmos called <i>FernGully</i>, wherein fairies used magic to maintain and defend their rain forest habitat and taught at least one human the value of the environment. Or I assume she'd gotten that far: I call it a "paracosmos" not to infantalize her but because, as near as I can tell, Diana hadn't actually written <i>FernGully</i> yet. The book seems to be based on the movie as much as the other way around, complete with an acknowledgment of gratitude to the movie's screenwriter, Jim Cox, so that the situation takes on the strange complexion of a man going halfway across the world to get his wife a children's book deal and possibly even to incentivize her to finish it. Nevertheless, she seems like a very earnest woman, and her husband a very earnest man; Youngheart, the production company they formed for <i>FernGully</i>, has a LinkedIn from not that many years ago, still propounding the ethos of the film they instigated, still bearing its coda, "for our children and our children's children."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have no idea how Wayne managed it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>his only prior producer credit is <i>Crocodile Dundee</i>, and maybe he had Australiana fad money to throw around, though I half-wonder if he was pretending to more clout than he had<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but somehow he convinced Australia's Fire and All Risks Insurance to start FAI Films, <i>solely</i> to make a cartoon about saving the planet. Then Wayne went to Los Angeles and, armed with a list of recent Oscar animated short film nominees, he came to the door of Bill and Susan Kroyer, who in 1990 maintained a small animation firm that I only can't call "literally mom-and-pop" because I'm not sure if the Kroyers had kids. The Kroyers' stock-in-trade was actually CGI: Bill had cut his teeth on <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/walt-disney-part-xxxii-greetings.html">TRON</a></i> with Steven Lisberger, and acquired that Oscar nomination for 1988's "Technological Threat" (Susan also worked on it), this being an amusingly-hypocritical gag short revolving around the formal conceit of early<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>very</i> early<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>CGI character animation at odds with traditional character animation, in a story about systematically murdering CGI robots lest they take your job. In the meantime, the couple had managed contract work, sometimes CGI (1990's <i>Jetsons: The Movie</i>), sometimes not (the UPA-ish animated opening to 1989's <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxvii-it-could-be.html">Honey, I Shrunk the Kids</a></i>). The supposition would be that Australia had <i>nobody</i>, or else Young always planned on playing up his Canadian girlfriend of an American animation studio to his backers, but whatever the case, he asked the Kroyers if they could make a theatrical feature film to compete with Walt Disney with a final budget of $24 million. It is bad-ass as hell that they said "yes," but it's badder-ass still that they <i>did</i> it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVJnwcKpoZzxbR77M177-XKaxkIX4WcJXBDdM39jRvCEJUjzp4JXuqlIwJMFONifBaXcvn4qdNbWtAQ6U1ViU9FBZnwoIsPsYw6A6yDsEKRUj-4hiGMhdPrYr2whScCv2ES1boo-cwGHVKdROHz4MwTejXH9Bx6FuHGivQIjsSBENejq-6xWDjT-3DJ1O3/s960/Ferngully4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVJnwcKpoZzxbR77M177-XKaxkIX4WcJXBDdM39jRvCEJUjzp4JXuqlIwJMFONifBaXcvn4qdNbWtAQ6U1ViU9FBZnwoIsPsYw6A6yDsEKRUj-4hiGMhdPrYr2whScCv2ES1boo-cwGHVKdROHz4MwTejXH9Bx6FuHGivQIjsSBENejq-6xWDjT-3DJ1O3/w400-h216/Ferngully4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />I love that this is how <i>FernGully</i> came to be, which is why I've gone overboard on its history. Like 90s environmentalism, it's not a story with the happiest ending<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the Kroyers did not become important fixtures in the industry, and for Bill, who took the directorial credit (though I don't think it's too much to say that Susan, who took numerous credits, was effectively a co-director), it would turn out to be his last feature directorial turn (he's still a working animator... on the new DNEG <i>Garfield</i> movie)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but at least the story has a happy middle. <i>That</i> part of the story is "hardscrabble underdogs made a movie that's never been forgotten": the Kroyers had to build a whole organization out of the losers and cast-offs and malcontents of the animation game in the 1980s, and despite the inevitable ephemerality of the association, their team came out of it with enough mutual affection to show up to <i>FernGully</i> reunions years down the line.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I promised an <i>interesting</i> part, and I almost glossed over it: Bill Kroyer was himself one of those losers and cast-offs and malcontents from the animation game in the 1980s, one of the innumerable Disney veterans<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though "veteran" might be pushing it, since not counting <i>TRON</i> (which you shouldn't) he worked on only one Disney cartoon, <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/05/walt-disney-part-xxxi-neither-one-of.html">The Fox and the Hound</a></i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>who flipped the Mouse the bird and walked away, because fuck <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/08/walt-disney-part-xxxiii-i-presume-boy.html">The Black Cauldron</a></i>. And Goddamn, that <b>is</b> <i>FernGully</i>: a movie that looks and feels exactly, <i>thrillingly</i> like a Disney movie made ten years earlier, or, better yet, still eleven years after <i>The Fox and the Hound</i>, but now in some crazy alternate universe where Disney got its shit together in an entirely different way than it actually did<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>by all means, in a less complete and less revolutionary way, but that's what <i>makes</i> it so interesting. Disney, under new management, was presently taking a quantum leap into tomorrow; the Kroyers were stuck with ten years of iterative improvements to the clunky technology of the 1980s to make their own independent Disney-style movie, so that when their movie came out in 1992, it <i>wasn't</i> all that close to "the Disney style" anymore, not after <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/04/walt-disney-xli-he-doesnt-even-know-how.html">The Rescuers Down Under</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/02/walt-disney-part-xlii-come-into-light.html">Beauty and the Beast</a></i> and the advent of CAPS, the medium-redefining digital ink-and-paint-system developed by Pixar (founded by another <i>Black Cauldron</i> refugee). (And that's one of the other things about <i>FernGully</i>: where do you think the painters on <i>FernGully </i>came <i>from</i>? The Kroyers are not crystal clear about it, but it's also obvious that then-independent 20th Century Fox's lawyers forbade them from saying so much as the word "Disney" in relation to <i>FernGully</i>, or even mentioning any Disney film, so their commentary track somehow omits acknowledging <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/09/walt-disney-part-iii-serious-symphony.html">Fantasia</a></i>'s "Nutcracker Suite," despite the approximately five hundred homages to it. Well, the bulk of the job was done in Korea, though a significant chunk of primary work was accomplished in-house.) I've tried to be as diligent as possible, and I think I'm right to say so: this is the very last traditionally-animated American feature film that, as that "tradition" was understood in 1992, had real pop cultural impact.*</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4SpkUSV-BhTcMHQXM9WGdMmEfUyU9KO0PrB0G4LJwce7W70iPRzJShRnYdhA43zpvbYsNUHYnqQE1Xr-8W15-EVHyljftb0VeRiMMayPllzAVErjAqhkW9LWaqqUVa3qfMHR0-_Uh-6VeKlu3yQdAKzosGOx6GxszImP3zzBDhH6QpARrvGutGsX86_du/s956/Ferngully3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="517" data-original-width="956" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4SpkUSV-BhTcMHQXM9WGdMmEfUyU9KO0PrB0G4LJwce7W70iPRzJShRnYdhA43zpvbYsNUHYnqQE1Xr-8W15-EVHyljftb0VeRiMMayPllzAVErjAqhkW9LWaqqUVa3qfMHR0-_Uh-6VeKlu3yQdAKzosGOx6GxszImP3zzBDhH6QpARrvGutGsX86_du/w400-h216/Ferngully3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />"But the films of the Disney Renaissance are traditionally-animated," someone might say, and someone would be sort-of right and sort-of wrong; I hold, only slightly facetiously, that "traditional" animation has barely existed for sixty-five years. The critical event here is 1961's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2019/10/walt-disney-part-xxi-fur-is-dead.html">101 Dalmatians</a></i>, marking the introduction of xerography, with which Walt and Roy Disney, giddy in their greed, fired their "useless" inking staff. (Whose function was essentially replaced, eventually, with more clean-up animators.) I am, of course, on record as saying xerography sucks, with a limited aesthetic applicability despite it being the default aesthetic for all American animation for three decades; but it <i>also</i> improved greatly over time, culminating in the Animation Photo Transfer process at Disney, which afforded the one masterpiece of xerography in feature films, <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/01/walt-disney-part-xxxviii-whats-fire-and.html">The Little Mermaid</a></i>, right before getting thrown into history's dustbin. (To be clear, <i>of course</i> I am not saying that <i>FernGully</i> looks, or is, as good as <i>The Little Mermaid</i>. But the quality of <i>FernGully</i>'s line resembles Disney's APT<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>mostly the more advanced stage of APT represented by <i>The Little Mermaid</i>, and sometimes, unfortunately, the unimpressive experimental phase represented by <i>The Black Cauldron</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>more than any true old-school xerography.) In any event, while <i>The Rescuers Down Under</i> and digital painting didn't occasion a purge like <i>101 Dalmatians</i> did, the Kroyers are <i>pretty</i> clear that <i>FernGully</i> benefited from the redundancies at <i>some</i> not-explicitly-identified company (on top of outright talent poaching, which occasioned a small feud with Jeffrey Katzenberg that's likely the reason the Kroyers were advised against mentioning "Disney" on a Fox home video commentary).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have, regrettably, pushed back discussing the movie itself<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but you've probably seen <i>FernGully</i>. The story, as you know, is just a knock-off of <i>Avatar</i> with a more mature, less wish-fulfilling ending (I may have my dates mixed up here). So: in a corner of Australia there is the fairy, Crysta (Samantha Mathis), student to the shaman Magi Lune (Grace Zabriskie), the latter introducing us to their world during its striking opening sequence inspired by Aboriginal art (which somewhat implies humans evolved in Australia, but whatever). She tells us of the long-ago time before the coming of the spirit of extinction, Hexxus (Tim Curry), who killed all the humans, and almost killed the fairies, too, before the fairies' magic put a stop to him. Crysta is skeptical that <i>all</i> the humans could have died, and maintains a curiosity in general about the vast world beyond FernGully, so that despite frolics with her fairy pal Pip (Christian Slater) and other denizens of the forest, she's driven to investigate a pillar of smoke she spies on the horizon. Inevitably, these are Crysta's precious humans<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>we know they're loggers sent to cut down this forest, though Crysta can't understand that yet. Their number includes Zak (Jonathan Ward), whom she saves from a tree felled by the forest-eating "monster" (Zak's friends' admittedly-terrifying logging machine), but only by accidentally shrinking him with fairy magic. Thus reduced in size and power, and also immediately smitten with the scantily-clad bug-woman, Zak finds it expedient to pretend he was trying to protect the trees with magic sigils rather than marking them for timber. This goes well enough until his colleagues destroy one very special tree, the even-more-evil-looking-than-usual boab that has, these eons, been Hexxus's prison. Hexxus bends the loggers to his will, and his will has but one object: the destruction of first the fairies who trapped him, then all life on Earth.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4UM_Dfs8rVM1DQqq5jsU-Rr-tnn5C4GevsY6oqfdovbptt3xzJxvbFqERA_xB6PYKJ2OQc6f44afcN9JAM3joYOi9SljW5rF3waYTsbN3kvkpMAo2glEaMyTCaYO7HmbyUTIgt6Pi5HhjlOXu6RHhIrweKM1Lwc7uUz_PyA5o9Ab6SYfszGGAYKGpI5rv/s1200/Ferngully5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4UM_Dfs8rVM1DQqq5jsU-Rr-tnn5C4GevsY6oqfdovbptt3xzJxvbFqERA_xB6PYKJ2OQc6f44afcN9JAM3joYOi9SljW5rF3waYTsbN3kvkpMAo2glEaMyTCaYO7HmbyUTIgt6Pi5HhjlOXu6RHhIrweKM1Lwc7uUz_PyA5o9Ab6SYfszGGAYKGpI5rv/w400-h210/Ferngully5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Also, somewhere between this and that, a rapping cyborg bat flies screaming out of the clear blue sky, his time as an experimental test subject having primed him to serve as comic relief (this would be Robin Williams, and while <i>FernGully</i> has a remarkably stacked cast for an indie film already, obviously this was the <i>get</i>). Well, <i>Avatar</i> certainly doesn't have a rapping bat. <i>FernGully</i> has a rapping bat <i>and</i> a rapping varanid lizard (Tone Loc with lyrics from Jimmy Buffet, in case this wasn't too strange and 90s enough for you already).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So <i>FernGully</i>'s a musical too, a "make it <i>exactly</i> like Disney" imposition upon the Kroyers and Cox, but one they accepted readily enough, and principal songwriter Thomas Dolby ensured it would be a pretty dang decent integrated musical. It might beat anything Disney had made prior to <i>The Little Mermaid</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which wouldn't be a fair comparison<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>at least as far as the density of its songs (those raps are practically right on top of one another) and their usefulness go. And it's still not <i>trying</i> to be <i>The Little Mermaid</i>: for a lot of it, it's still "being an animated musical" in ways that Disney in the 70s and 80s did animated musicals, to the extent that the big love ballad, "A Dream Worth Keeping," is a non-diegetic pop song montage. (I would also point to Alan Silvestri's score, which isn't even doing <i>Disney</i>-in-the-80s, but something more like Don Bluth's movies, with a lot of excellent, mystic filigree, notably synthesizers that sound like otherworldly choral voices.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2GKLror-lWXEiJzE4L5o7JKusOeBUat53bS6-hDozBLzeCx63B7q-Vpfo0JKBddBG2UcGq0qqwBuO6KNiZG8lr5-m5WnZvZXZSDmUtUA3uOlpWuo1c1AuTcmoacDu4aQMpPkJY3o_2s9wLRug35rvfHo0QDC9ZsCESF8TF4Hc7tIlFDUlwR29STAeRuw/s960/Ferngully2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="960" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2GKLror-lWXEiJzE4L5o7JKusOeBUat53bS6-hDozBLzeCx63B7q-Vpfo0JKBddBG2UcGq0qqwBuO6KNiZG8lr5-m5WnZvZXZSDmUtUA3uOlpWuo1c1AuTcmoacDu4aQMpPkJY3o_2s9wLRug35rvfHo0QDC9ZsCESF8TF4Hc7tIlFDUlwR29STAeRuw/w400-h216/Ferngully2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />The raps are, somehow, almost the most integrated songs in the film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>frankly, I like them, though I'm not sure how much "time capsule" irony is going into me liking them<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and they both serve wholesome narrative functions: the self-describing "Batty Rap," besides introducing the character and being (some value of) funny, prefigures the conflict between nature and human rapine, posing a warning to Crysta to not trust humans, even if she's foreordained to ignore it**; the lizard rap, "If I'm Gonna Eat Somebody (It Might As Well Be You)," re-introduces us to nature from Zak's perspective, as a terrified, weenie human reduced to a potential meal for a goanna***, plus Tone Loc is always an enjoyable vocal presence in small doses. (As for Williams and Batty, let's take a moment to recognize that he makes for good Disney-style Sidekick Comic Relief, which is of course not going to startle anybody on this side of 1992, but outside of how arbitrarily his character is inflicted upon the narrative<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which I can't get mad at, for it's a 76 minute film, and that obliges it to take numerous shortcuts, of which this is only the brusquest<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>he's suprisingly <i>unobtrusive</i>, and even useful <i>thematically</i>, standing somewhere between us and the film to comment upon human perfidy. This makes him a more palatable joke engine than a goofy, inept clown of a bat should be, particularly one with a built-in mechanic for manic Williamsisms, in the form of the radio device horrifically stuffed inside his brain by human science. Now, it's never as <i>good</i> as the outside-time-and-space mechanic of Genie, and it doesn't ever lead to as good results, but it's all reasonably cute, and more-or-less justifies the rapid-fire impressions we were going to get one way or another.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Still, neither rap is <i>the</i> song from <i>FernGully</i>, that title correctly belonging to the weird, loungey "Toxic Love," a shockingly fully-formed Disney-style villain number given the absence of virtually any precursors<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>really just "Poor Unfortunate Souls"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>sung by Curry on behalf of Hexxus and powered by the unmistakable suggestion that pollution turns him on, sexually. It's a terrific piece of villain song staging, too<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the musical numbers all use animation to bolster them, and vice versa<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and while we should circle back to Hexxus's animation, that animation, the almost-abstract staging, and Curry's commitment all combine to distract from some inordinately clumsy lyrics, probably most blatantly just the refrain "you're going to love my toxic love," which at least sounds better in the song, but above all the world-class terrible couplet, made worse by being put in the mouth (or mouthlike organ) of a deathless spirit of environmental degradation: "filthy brown acid rain/pouring down like egg chow mein." But it's not easy to forget Curry's rendition of that first part, "FIL-thy BROWN... ASS-id rain."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Sparing a word for our leads, then, they're fine; as a Mathis fan, it's difficult to comprehend how they could put her and Slater in a movie together and <i>not</i> give Slater the male romantic lead role, other than if it's because their post-<i>Pump Up the Volume</i> relationship had already wound down (which shouldn't have mattered anyhow, since we find them in 1996's <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/when-day-comes-that-we-have-to-go-to.html">Broken Arrow</a></i> picking up exactly where they'd left off). Ward is serviceable as a dumb blond California-coded bro, and Mathis is a bit better than that as a guileless naif; on the animation front, things get flipped, Zak being the better-animated of the pair, courtesy lead Chrsystal Klabunde (I'm fond of a stressed reaction shot during their "Dreams" frolic montage that's the movie's funniest joke), while Crysta, split between several animators but mostly Doug Frankel, is recipient of a design from S. Kroyer that maybe goes too far in caricaturing Mathis as a dumb innocent (to the extent I wasn't sure she was a caricature of Mathis, until I saw a picture of Zabriskie, whose Magi Lune is <i>100%</i> a caricature of her), with a tendency (for good and ill) to be drawn with lust in her animators' hearts, as well as a tendency (always for ill) to save time by not always drawing her face moving if she's not speaking, or remembering that hair is subject to gravity and wind, particularly while flying. And we will get to her <i>flight animation</i>. But it all works as the boy-meets-magical-girl sketch it needs us to meet it at; the "Dreams" montage is, even with its weaknesses, lovely, and ends on a classy, subtle, but amusing gag that can be interpreted as anything on the romantic comedy spectrum from "walking on air" to "metaphor for an accidental but welcome erection."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The show here, for character animation, is Hexxus (arguably <i>all</i> the rest of the "top ten animated characters from <i>FernGully</i>" slots are taken by animals, including some appearing only in single shots, though I kind of even mean this as a compliment). Well, despite not having that much screentime, Hexxus was complicated enough to require the devoted attentions of two leads, Kathy Zielinski and John Allan Armstrong, who may not have had all the same ideas about him<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>mostly in a productive way that keeps him mercurial and gross and capable of being frightening in forms as diverse as a sickeningly-wonderfully-animated blob, an oil stain of a ghost, and a rotoscoped ebon skeleton with a heart made out of backlit fire (plus the weird choice from Zielinski to give him a floating, detached skull, which B. Kroyer asserts was an assistant's mistake, but as a design feature consistent across an entire sequence it was almost certainly deliberate, whether we disagree with it or not). Hexxus is basically all<i> effects animation</i>, and some really amazing and expressive and distinctive effects animation (there's all sorts of great beats, though I think my favorite is during "Toxic Love" where he first appears as a poisonous cloud, splitting into four or five different faces all singing with their own Curry voice, which immediately eat each other; the grace note at the end where he closes the funnel cap to get intimate with the logging machine's exhaust is also fantastic).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But at this point, if we're talking about effects animation, we're talking the texture of the film generally, and my thesis is that <i>FernGully</i> looks great, but with huge caveats. It is, I would aver, something close to a masterpiece of background design and color styling: in the latter capacity, art director Ralph Eggleston came up with a simple but profoundly effective color theme that tells the story as well as the actual story does, about an hour of lusciously verdant greens giving way to dead browns and then infernal reds as things turn against our heroes (there's a great cut with a dozen frames of poppy birds-of-paradise immediately replaced with a bleak hellscape), and alongside fellow art director Victoria Jenson, although it's possible this was just a matter of production reality, the backdrops that essay this color theme, which have always wanted you to notice the handicraft of their gouache construction, start getting much more impressionstic and abstract as things get scarier and more dominated by a giant oily smoke monster riding a logging tank. There is likewise the impressive kineticism with the way these backdrops get used<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>befitting a film with a lot of flight, it's extremely dynamic and three-dimensional in its staging, despite the necessity of cumbersomely old-fashioned multiplane, and there is an immersive sense of the scale of FernGully as seen from fairy point-of-view; the effects animation keeps up, with the one very salient exception, but this includes some outstanding water animation and, recalling that the Kroyers were CGI-peddlers, some even more outstanding machine-traced/hand-painted CGI so that we can, for instance, swiftly race down a mighty Amazon of a jungle stream, beneath a canopy of river plants. (The logging tank is also CGI.) It's also worth noting, considering how often traditional animation would fuck this up, how good <i>FernGully</i> is at integrating animated background elements with its background paintings.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_lu2r1imYFp3DmtqL104MV8P2h5YM0apFy8JsrTOnWMjlc4-J43SpGS0fDSJ2nPJSd8NUaY_96HxE33vd1tp4tR0rptJTxmA1dB6loP5aFe-OUOeLNlReIcPBz1njawMXaO28HZjrSJ0NKIKepEMN5pfzkT6bK5ryzJkU9W-cTs_OPoV9W0f8Pahd6Q49/s682/Ferngully7.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="682" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_lu2r1imYFp3DmtqL104MV8P2h5YM0apFy8JsrTOnWMjlc4-J43SpGS0fDSJ2nPJSd8NUaY_96HxE33vd1tp4tR0rptJTxmA1dB6loP5aFe-OUOeLNlReIcPBz1njawMXaO28HZjrSJ0NKIKepEMN5pfzkT6bK5ryzJkU9W-cTs_OPoV9W0f8Pahd6Q49/w400-h219/Ferngully7.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />And then there's the unavoidable fact that, for all its constrained but real technical splendor, it's still cheaper than it needs to be, and that cheapness screams like a baby in the night: it has some terrific lighting effects and an agreeably nostalgic reliance upon 80s backlighting for its frequent glowy magic stuff, yet, as the Kroyers will happily acknowledge, they simultaneously couldn't afford more than about a dozen <i>drop shadows</i> for the entire film; and I've been arguing with myself for hours whether to take a full point off for how utterly distracting every last shot of fairies in flight is, and as this is nearly every shot of the fairies, it's also most shots in the movie. In the making-of featurette, there's a stray observation that the designers were debating whether the fairies should have wings<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>yeah, really!<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but the movie that got made demonstrates how that question even came up: they could not afford to credibly <i>move</i> those wings. Even cheating like mad with obscuring, backlit "magic," which the Kroyers will pretend has a story logic rationale (it doesn't), it's not nearly enough to hide that there is only the occasional, physics-optional flutter of these wings as their owners move or float through the air. I understand it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the translucency made it a multiple-pass problem, and it probably would've added millions of dollars to the budget to get it "right"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but it is <i>enervating</i>. (And the most dubious part of the movie's secondary cast, the Beetle Boys (wow, Cheech and Chong?)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>tiny people who ride beetles and, confusingly, aren't fairies<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>are even worse: those beetles they <i>fly</i> don't even have <i>their</i> wings exposed.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This one part of the movie hurts it enormously in my eyes, because most everything else about it I adore: I'm a sucker for ecofables, rushed elemental romances, <i>and</i> backlighting effects supporting mystical mumbo-jumbo, so that even the most abtruse part of the film's story (its Obi-Wan gesture, which feels like it's missing crucial exposition) doesn't bother me in the slightest. But then I think on it, and in a way it's only a special case of how <i>FernGully</i> was manufactured, on paper and on plastic, and in camera, in a way that made it almost the last of its kind by the time it was released into the world. Not quite paradoxically, having so much of it made mechanically, rather than digitally, affords it a tremendously organic feel<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>you can so clearly perceive the hands that operated those machines, sometimes very literally when you have outright shit like a misregistration of animation frames under the camera. It's dirty, it's messy, the xerography is an embarrassment whenever they quixotically attempt to outline Crysta's black hair against a dark background. But it feels tangible and alive, as a story like this should, and for all that digital ink-and-paint rightfully was the future, the sterility it could sometimes occasion is never even a possibility here.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 8/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*1993's <i>Batman: Mask of the Phantasm</i> is an argument, though it has the problems of <i>Batman: Mask of the Phantasm</i> being neither a hit nor, in a completely robust sense of the term, American.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**It's also the one full sequence where the Kroyers experiment with digital ink-and-paint, albeit a system clearly more primitive than CAPS.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">***Oh my God, <i>Rescuers Down Under?</i> "Joanna"? That movie absolutely just keeps on giving.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-55544248772831754022024-01-30T21:58:00.051-11:002024-02-07T00:50:31.860-11:00Reviews from gulag: Vampires suck<div style="text-align: justify;">It's that time again, when we face the necessity of getting fast and somewhat dirty as we dispose of the detritus of the previous year. For our first batch of titles, we have a convenient theme in 2023's major vampire films: <i><b>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</b></i>, which is the Dracula-on-a-boat adventure it says it is, adapting Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker's novel; <i><b>El Conde</b></i>, the new Pablo Larraín film, of all things, which deploys the curious conceit of wondering what it would be like if Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had actually been a vampire who never died; and <i><b>Renfield</b></i>, which, like <i>Demeter</i>, looks to the beginning of things with Stoker for its inspiration, and wonders what it would be like if Dracula and Renfield survived long enough for Renfield to read self-help books and decide to rebel against his toxic boss, while also giving Universal Pictures an opportunity to do something/anything with its <i>Dracula</i> IP, still good for a few more years. You would never, <i>ever</i> guess which one of these is not a piece of shit.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Note:</b> I will be <b>spoiling</b> <i>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</i>, a little. I guess I kind of spoil <i>El Conde</i>, but only if you're unrealistically ignorant of late 20th century history.<span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA4W5-HCuFnX4VAWAD-YgaV9fybEUU9qUwidd2nG3nzbY_8yeBHo6vE1y6AXCm077lR-hVsPNOelpiiavP8v784XlPvq0QKD_hlpccsrNCQglzM8Ew5PHbkYf0riQtcFdkk97jehKqFjHqc-kVRt4tDvvpB7OE-GeZM6Fn7AdBKy3vk7v2RANOXjDnzeB2/s375/LastVoyageoftheDemeter1.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA4W5-HCuFnX4VAWAD-YgaV9fybEUU9qUwidd2nG3nzbY_8yeBHo6vE1y6AXCm077lR-hVsPNOelpiiavP8v784XlPvq0QKD_hlpccsrNCQglzM8Ew5PHbkYf0riQtcFdkk97jehKqFjHqc-kVRt4tDvvpB7OE-GeZM6Fn7AdBKy3vk7v2RANOXjDnzeB2/s320/LastVoyageoftheDemeter1.png" width="213" /></a></div>THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div><br /></div><div>Of course, if I warn you that I'm spoiling <i>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</i>, have I not already spoiled <i>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</i>? But then, if it's even meaningful to <i>ask</i> "guess who survives the Demeter?", the project has already failed in the first place. Look, <i>The Last Voyage of the Demeter</i> ends not with extinction, but a fucking sequel hook. This insane unwillingness to fully embrace the fatalistic nihilism that ought to be burned right into this weird sidequel's bones was <i>always</i> going to be its biggest problem; yet, with this treatment, I'm not entirely sure that if it had done so it still could have managed to have clawed its way up to an adequate movie<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I just wouldn't have totally despised it. I felt a deep sense of pessimism about its chances sweep over me within the first seconds, which outline the basic scenario in its introductory text<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the <i>Demeter</i> wrecked on the English coast (this is, uh, not the most faithful adaptation in any respect), the captain's (Liam Cunningham's) log found<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and then wrench you right out of the story it's telling, by announcing right in the midst of its text narration that it's "based on the novel <i>Dracula</i>," which is almost correct, in that <i>Dracula</i> offers itself as a curated archive of documents that are real in its universe, but are only <i>a novel</i> in ours. A few seconds after that, it shows us exactly what it just told us, I suppose so you'd know that superfluousness was going to be a major element of this movie. I don't think anything in the movie ever gets wonkier than this first minute, at least, but the screenplay does frequently flirt with similar malapropism, notably when a character asks if everyone has been "struck dumb," meaning "stupid," even though "dumb" has never meant "stupid" when you put "struck" in front of it (and it would be exceedingly hip and with-it for this Russian to use "dumb" for "stupid" in his mostly-fluent British English in 1897 anyway, so it's not "character embroidery"). There's also a line where a Romanian claims that Dracula's <i>castle</i> is older than any of them, which, from context, is supposed to be impressive for some reason.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div><span></span>I do realize that this is trivial dialogue stuff, but it's symptomatic of a deeply terrible screenplay with much worse problems. It's a story that somehow must have actively resisted being told; though I earnestly think there was some potential in the creative lack of creativity of making a movie out of Chapter 7 (<i>part</i> of Chapter 7) of Bram Stoker's <i>Dracula</i>, this potential was not ever going to be tapped by using it as a template you only half-filled in. Yet somehow director Andre Ovredal decided that he'd been handed a "literary adaptation" (of a bad book <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/08/and-yet-unless-my-senses-deceive-me-old.html">that was wonderfully adapted in toto</a>, years ago, <i>with a runtime barely surpassing this one's</i>), rather than just a gimmicked slasher movie nobody even tried as hard on as the writers of a <i>Friday the 13th</i> film, and he got too big for his britches; this is where we get to the real shit, and it shocks the conscience that someone was allowed to make the adaptation of half of a chapter of a novel into a 119 minute movie, let alone one where this little happens, and there is basically not a single character with more than a single personality trait. This may even overcount the personality traits of the medical doctor protagonist, mind you, for despite his best efforts (and, honestly, reasonably strong ones, the observant wiriness of his performance is one of the few things here I could be moved to call "good"), it's not fair to ask Corey Hawkins to reconcile the vague sketches of a character that's sort of sciencey, sort of philosophizey, and sort of angsty, but not ever really any specific flavor of those things.</div><div><br /></div><div>Somehow, despite all this time available, it also feels like it doesn't ratchet correctly: the monster manifests full-blown almost immediately, dispelling all mystery and any psychological angle upon the horror; yet everyone is still brutally slow on the uptake; in a "stowaway" (Aisling Franciosi) that Hawkins somehow immediately knows to offer blood transfusions (what disease does he <i>think</i> she has?), they have an exposition machine that they never really take advantage of, even once the few people still alive have agreed that the thing sucking the blood out of everything is probably supernatural; and even without her input, several solutions or mitigations for their vampire problem appear to present themselves. And though I make no pretense to being an expert on the age of sail, I'm also very unclear how a ship in the Bay of Biscay and English Channel en route to London hasn't passed forty, fifty different ports. But this last is nitpicking (it's a nitpick <i>Bram Stoker</i> predicted, insofar as Dracula mostly killed secretly, and his last victims were set upon by an impenetrable fog he conjured); and nitpicking would be ignoring larger issues of pace and structure, such as "so what the hell did you even do the last fourteen hours of this summer day?" Dracula himself can look cool, as a Nosferatu-esque figure, but the way he's edited into the movie usually isn't very cool. And despite dialogue to the contrary, there's no real malign intelligence here, let alone anything more elaborate and interesting (and he's not even meaningfully a shapeshifter, for while it's hazy, I think they actually are trying to do "materialist vampires," with <i>fucking Dracula</i>); the flying bits notwithstanding, a Goddamn bear could've gotten loose on the boat and you'd have the same movie. Likely a better, more disciplined movie. And I repeat that it's so annoying how quickly the demon gives its game away, probably just to obviate the need for these people to write anything more difficult than, "and then Dracula kills this guy, or vampirizes him instead, which will save us <i>even more</i> time writing anything," which it does over and over. It's a boring, boring movie; even its gutsiest move<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it kills the kid<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is squandered by dragging this out across, like, thirty full minutes, so that you're immediately soured on how it chickened out and let the little bastard survive, even if the movie does, <i>eventually</i>, permit him die.</div><div><br /></div><div>The physical production is nicely robust, at least, and Tom Stern and/or Roman Osin's cinematography is surely diligent, even if I don't know if I'm inclined to say it's good (it's inevitably a very samey "yellows, blues, darkness, sometimes shafts of light during the day-set scenes" across these two hours, and there's a rather LED quality to all the lamplight, though I do appreciate how the frequent bolts of lightning actually hurt your eyes a bit in a darkened room). Ovredal, for a horror filmmaker, has no idea whatsoever how to make any of this scary, or even suspenseful.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Score: 3/10</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbO1QvyJ2Gw9tR5R0N0SN1BXPZ2OavzHj5Rr4j9OejoR7HjoJkuQ7QZaPuIPHfBGhocoYZnPLguLGvJ8gOQzuyQ6TBbL95imCzuswZ-rAjqGODJZy3ZQ-p1ATQjioQsCoXMGJnuYvgQrQ4Eahg8amqpz9Yh4y44dQ99dybwlIe4_Lyb4_htH5H6Kn7V7Th/s391/ElConde1.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbO1QvyJ2Gw9tR5R0N0SN1BXPZ2OavzHj5Rr4j9OejoR7HjoJkuQ7QZaPuIPHfBGhocoYZnPLguLGvJ8gOQzuyQ6TBbL95imCzuswZ-rAjqGODJZy3ZQ-p1ATQjioQsCoXMGJnuYvgQrQ4Eahg8amqpz9Yh4y44dQ99dybwlIe4_Lyb4_htH5H6Kn7V7Th/s320/ElConde1.png" width="205" /></a></div>EL CONDE</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>I'll say this much for <i>El Conde</i>: it has genuine "going-for-it" energy, and I think it might be entirely possible for someone else to have gotten on this film's wacky, wacky wavelength and simply enjoyed the ride. For me, however, I found it pretty awful and often tedious, and even with all the charity that I hope I could give a foreign film bearing allegorical portent about history I don't know much about, it still feels a lot more like a bad indie comic from 2005 than a satire, usually more concerned with being cool/weird, and frankly I'm not at all convinced the allegory, or the satire, or whatever, ever does go much deeper than the very basic idea, "the fascist Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) was metaphorically a vampire, so what if he were literally a vampire, still haunting the world?" Everything beyond that<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>his immortally-depressed deathwish, his squabbles with his wife and children, the enlistment of a nun/evil accountant (Paula Luchsinger) to exorcize/kill him<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>seems like full-on stream of consciousness, and a third act revelation <i>really </i>screws with any sense that there's something more here, and I'm just not "getting it." Incidentally, I don't know how you would fail to get ahead of this "revelation," except it's so unsupportably dumb<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>whatever appearance of "allegory" or "metaphor" the movie had previously, at this point it's getting real close to just being a piece of Anne Rice Immortal World fanfic that has had "Pinochet" and "______" find-and-replaced into it<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but if I did call it a "revelation," this would suggest you wouldn't figure out the identity of "The British Woman" narrator, speaking in English, within half an hour, tops. You <i>will</i> figure it out, partly because, Jesus, how many major British woman conservatives in the tier of Pinochet, a national leader, are there? Two? But really just one? It's not Mary Poppins! (Even if there's some resembalance.) However, you will also figure it out because Pablo Larraín (writing as well as directing) sure never gives you the chance to <i>forget</i> she's telling this story.</div><div><br /></div><div>And for all the many, many things I don't really like about El Conde, that's the most terribly damaging part: it is structured like an audiobook, and it is twenty minutes into this (apparently) Wes Anderson movie about fascist vampires before Larraín permits her to finally shut the fuck up, at least for a bit, with that narration. Yet she is never far from imposing herself on the story again; somehow this makes that story more incoherent, and it also allows Larraín to take the path of absolute least resistance as far as his actual story<i>telling</i> goes. Which is something like the ethos of his whole film; I think the overarching plot kind-of-sort-of "makes sense," but it's hard to tell, and while I wouldn't necessarily need it to, it's also not the kind of art film (I don't believe I would call it an "art film" at all without its political content) that ever properly disengages from conventional storytelling modes. So it's really just addled and lazy and larded up with irritating narration instead, with an idea of satire that feels extremely unfocused in any respect beyond Larraín's insistence that the dead dictator of Chile flying around in full military regalia, by way of deliberately unpersuasive VFX, is funny. And in fairness it is funny, that first time. A model scene that reflects the problems here finds Luchsinger's not-very-secret vampire hunter (I presume her resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar is a happy coincidence) interviewing Pinochet's kids over the course of a montage, and here the film does threaten to be a little bit incisive, as she cheerfully over-validates all their self-serving bullshit; yet this gets ribboned with the much, much blunter comedy of simply insulting them straight to their faces without them noticing, which isn't particularly incisive (or particularly funny), plus this scene, as many others, invests heavily in a bunch of just-plain-weird semi-surrealist sexual "jokes" that are purely try-hard, and which tend to remove even the caricatured humanity from the situation. And this is still arguably the dialogue-driven scene in the movie that works the best.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's just such a mess. The best scene in the <i>movie</i>, whatsoever, is just straight-up the scene from Jeannot Szwarc's <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/super-week-addendum-leave-this-place.html">Supergirl</a></i> where Kara Zor-El learns to fly; and, like that scene, it comes out of a different, better, and entirely more poetic motion picture. But good grief, Jeannot Szwarc only made a bad, dumb superhero movie that happened to have the one good scene; Jeannot Szwarc wasn't trying to grapple with the immortal poison of fascism, and, accordingly, he didn't subsequently get so carried away with his scene's cinematic prettiness that <i>he accidentally said fascism is beautiful</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>This movie has received a Best Cinematography nomination either because, in these decadent days, simply "lookin' fine" gets you a default Best Cinematography nomination, or because it's in black-and-white. I thought it would at least look more striking than it does. Also, the opening credits, over a montage of images of tokens of Pinochet's past, is edited really annoyingly, every single shot in that montage ending about three seconds before it should, presumably to intentionally enervate you (and it's really lousy at "giving credit to the cast and crew"). So, yeah, you figured it out: the one that isn't a piece of shit is <i>Renfield</i>? How the hell is <i>that</i> possible?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Score: 4/10</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu60jV5CPXqDkBGb8sk9_CkJTNUfZdQKDDbLhq67s2qQQZHqL6_11MlUQW-b4jWqJTWMAXgrT5T977isFCCCftJ4AHP2qSeDluyH9QmS_MDLMAOIoV4s7CQ3vFcpRjWVUYXxg0JkT7yNHKbEw19eBN9tHa_xPo6oW2JHAjIVscVrJSwHZS6KTZu1a8zp4m/s825/Renfield1.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="550" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhu60jV5CPXqDkBGb8sk9_CkJTNUfZdQKDDbLhq67s2qQQZHqL6_11MlUQW-b4jWqJTWMAXgrT5T977isFCCCftJ4AHP2qSeDluyH9QmS_MDLMAOIoV4s7CQ3vFcpRjWVUYXxg0JkT7yNHKbEw19eBN9tHa_xPo6oW2JHAjIVscVrJSwHZS6KTZu1a8zp4m/s320/Renfield1.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>RENFIELD</b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>But somehow it <i>is possible</i>: I believe <i>Renfield</i> must be this (past) year's single biggest surprise for me, in that I don't think there's been a bigger gap between how I thought I'd respond to a movie and how I actually did. Most everything about it seemed primed to be tremendously awful: the "movie monster side character goes to group" conceit that looked for all the world to be a middling <i>SNL</i> sketch distended into a 90 minute feature film; the high likelihood that its Dracula, Nicolas Cage, would not be in it much; the even higher likelihood that Nora Lum, playing the last good cop in the city Dracula has relocated to, would spend all her time Doin' An Awkafina; the full-tilt superheroization of horror that the trailer so eagerly promised; and while I would not usually describe cinematography so bluntly as to call it "stupid," the trailer sure did make it look like this had some very stupid cinematography.</div><div><br /></div><div>Several of my fears turned out to be entirely real<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>most saliently, "Mitchell Amundsen's cinematography when Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) goes to group is indeed quite stupid, why would they have spooky green Halloween Express lights in what is supposed to be the proverbial safe space?" (the sheets-of-color nonsense sometimes works okay elsewhere, but pretty much solely when the eldritch horror of Dracula is onscreen to motivate it)<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but most of my fears were muted in the watching, and sometimes even things I thought would be bad turned out to be, if not great, then fine, and handily outweighed by the good. I would have expected this movie to be borderline unwatchable and, mea culpa, it's by-and-large actually quite funny. Even an unanticipated percentage of the "therapy-speak" jokes are funny, and, better yet, when the jokes here are not funny, they aren't forced to drag on, which is what I was really afraid of. (Okay, there is one runner, about ska music, that the movie clearly thinks is funnier than it is.) However, there's also a joke about vampire lore here<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>involving the rules about when one can enter your home<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that I pray is original to this film, because it's brilliant, spectacularly clever <i>in addition to</i> being fall-off-the-couch funny. But for the last bit of the denouement, which does something I didn't need it to do and unfortunately represents the movie kicking off the very last vestiges of "proper horror" that had accidentally gotten stuck to its heels<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>alongside my belated realization that I had basically just watched a Dracula-skinned, lamer version of <i>Braindead</i>, which clarified somewhat why it can still feel "off"<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I might have gone even higher on the score than I am.</div><div><br /></div><div>It does feel off, sometimes. There's a slight unsteadiness to what precise register of comedy it's taking, and while I appreciate a movie that feels free to experiment with its tone, the way it glues "idiotic hyperviolent slapstick" to "ZAZ cartoon sometimes" to "actual character-driven story" is by "making a Marvel movie out of it," and there are numerous points where having characters say nothing would have somehow felt less comedically lazy than having them actually speak aloud the crappy, trivializing lines that they do. (On the plus side, <i>Renfield</i> understands how to make an MCU-style superhero movie out of Universal Horror characters a whole lot better than 2015's <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2014/10/now-this-is-bat-country.html">Dracula Untold</a></i> or 2017's <i><a href="https://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2017/06/tom-mummy-slayer.html">The Mummy</a></i> did, and, further, it corrects their categorical weakness of being PG-13 four-quadrant wuss horror. Now, it does this mainly by being a Matthew Vaughn action movie, and there is probably not a single shot that went by where director Chris McKay <i>failed</i> to ask himself "WWMVD?") The bug-eating-for-superpowers (Renfield absorbs "the life force" and briefly gains superpowers when he eats bugs) is where it gets conceptually hugely disagreeable<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>damn near going from "superhero riff" to "joke video game mechanic"<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I dislike it even though it actually <i>is</i>, kind of, from the book. (The movie never answers the question, "How powerful would he be if he ate, say, a sparrow?") Though never fear: this movie <i>aggressively</i> wants you to know that its canon is <i>Dracula</i> '31 rather than the book<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it would pretty much have to be, given what a useless diversion Renfield is in the book<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but then, the formal recreation of the early sound flick with Cage and Hoult is one of the movie's finest gags. It's the best thing it's got going for a goodly while, during the belabored, over-narrated, so-I-am-going-to-hate-this, aren't-I? set-up phase. Anyway, the bug-eating is a bad mechanic, but only right up until it's an outstanding visual joke.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other off thing is that you do clearly perceive the narrative guardrails here, principally in the form of Lum's policewoman, whom we are required to spend a lot of unproductive time alongside as she establishes and re-restablishes this movie's uninteresting organized crime plot, which becomes increasingly transparently an excuse for deserving Bad Guys to be funneled into grand guignol action sequences. I mean, obviously it is, but it's actually why I hate the last sixty seconds of this movie so much, because that's when it hit me how cowardly it's been, and perhaps had to be, with its serial killing slave, whose crimes, even his <i>mistakes</i>, are in the end banished into the off-screen void. And one's suspicion is that this is a much better movie if the ingredients of vampire, servant, and cop were mixed together more naturally, rather than the latter two serving as Haggar and Cody in <i>Final Fight</i>. Maybe it couldn't be as much a comedy, though, and that would be a shame. In any case, good for Lum<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>she's giving the third-best performance in a movie with three characters (potentially the fourth-best, as Shohreh Aghdashloo doesn't have "a character" but is doing pretty solid "Pantsuit Mob Boss"), but even if her performance is 90% the same scowl, it <i>is</i> a performance, and I'm happy to welcome Lum back to Actually Acting. For the record, Hoult is doing decent work doing <a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2015/05/war-and-traffic-accidents.html">much the same thing that brought him to the world's attention</a>, being the sympathetic/pathetic henchman of pure evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>As for <i>pure evil</i>, there's Cage, and there is <i>more</i> Cage here than I expected, and <i>better</i> Cage than I would have dreamed. Beneficiary of some wonderful makeup (the Oscars really bite, man), but not defined by it, it's a genuinely outstanding performance, immensely funny in its Cagey manner<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>some truly alien line reads here<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>yet almost completely impervious to the instability of tone that McKay is cooking with everywhere else. Cage is serious about his Dracula being evil<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>self-amused evil, that certainly <i>can</i> also be amusing to us, but not usually "a joke" as such<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, more impressively, he's very specific about his Dracula being a creature lost in time, thanks to having so thoroughly relied upon Renfield for a century. (Cage is, weirdly, <i>far</i> more noticeably emotionally connected to Hoult than Hoult is to him.) It's a performance that still has its crowd-pleasing frivolities, but even most of these are well-judged (his final line is <i>probably</i> misjudged, but at least it's a gas); in earnestness, it's one of the best supporting performances of 2023. And I'm not even a Cage Boy, I only occasionally watch his movies. But it's occurred to me that this might have been a terrible oversight on my part.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is, as I thought, too much of a reliance on therapy-speak in this movie (particularly once it goes from "it's a joke" to "it is the only way in which we will describe Renfield's arc"), but Renfield's <Cage>studio apartment</Cage> full of inspirational posters is, still, pretty funny.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Score: 7/10</b></div></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-85127765163562368722024-01-28T08:56:00.048-11:002024-02-26T00:03:24.649-11:00Hall of egress<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4t32o_4hZtQ5W45Hq_Yi7T6KFds4jp2BQXVtaNxurvmTKSK4O-TrdmtO-H4k3OoSDyilPk_p_Iu73upx0w0atRBLkf7HK012GzwSlIMbFZPnAkvejxDpQ0-zWn8gG_CC-fx8UEeVp9S-reHDFQzKmM8XL7KaRh5hhsgnwaMw-nvBFiYOdFqffueaGjNon/s1414/TunneltoSummer1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1414" data-original-width="1000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4t32o_4hZtQ5W45Hq_Yi7T6KFds4jp2BQXVtaNxurvmTKSK4O-TrdmtO-H4k3OoSDyilPk_p_Iu73upx0w0atRBLkf7HK012GzwSlIMbFZPnAkvejxDpQ0-zWn8gG_CC-fx8UEeVp9S-reHDFQzKmM8XL7KaRh5hhsgnwaMw-nvBFiYOdFqffueaGjNon/w283-h400/TunneltoSummer1.jpg" width="283" /></a></div><br />THE TUNNEL TO SUMMER, THE EXIT OF GOODBYES</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>aka <i>Natsu e no Tonneru, Sayonara no Deguchi</i></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2022 Japan/2023 USA</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written and directed by Tomohisa Taguchi (based on the novella and comic books by Mei Hachimoku, Kukka, and Koudon)</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiida1iFeDoQUXBQfY_mZhQVlWp2sy5GiJvh4YgXdkyg0GYhrAS80gn29hTH_ub2x_1phDaArRybXBXEJfXwapqZz1jSGiFDT1jtd13Zhi4V9DlM5MJe4LW2YigDVoqeGP2khIPf3my8y5u_0vmfL5jyRMEm3MzX41y50dO9IZ6YNHSzUZFfdBoIC0xNF__/s1333/TunneltoSummer4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="1333" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiida1iFeDoQUXBQfY_mZhQVlWp2sy5GiJvh4YgXdkyg0GYhrAS80gn29hTH_ub2x_1phDaArRybXBXEJfXwapqZz1jSGiFDT1jtd13Zhi4V9DlM5MJe4LW2YigDVoqeGP2khIPf3my8y5u_0vmfL5jyRMEm3MzX41y50dO9IZ6YNHSzUZFfdBoIC0xNF__/w400-h166/TunneltoSummer4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />This is potentially speaking from a place of ignorance about Japanese pop culture, with just enough knowledge to be a danger to myself; and, as genre is genre, some similarity between works is no sin; but <i>man</i>, it is <i>very</i> hard to watch <i>The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes</i> and not have the one very obvious thought about it. Before you've watched it, of course, that thought would probably be that anime needs better translations for its titles, because <i>The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes</i> is one of the wonkiest-sounding titles I've ever heard in English. The fact is, however, that this appears to be 100% what the author of the light novel and comic book, Mei Hachimoku, meant to call it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I recognize the gairaigo, "tonneru," but <i>that's</i> the almost-functional half of this title<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I probably simply need to accept that Japanese is an extremely different language that will naturally have different idioms and aesthetic priorties. Nevertheless, it <i>sounds</i> like an intentional parody of the English translation of a Japanese film's name.*</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, that's trivial. Meanwhile, once you <i>have</i> watched <i>The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or while you're in the middle of watching it, or, quite possibly, especially if you know its basic plot outline going in, while you're watching its very first scene, even the first-batch-of-shots first <i>part</i> of its first scene<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>your thought will be, "Man, Makoto Shinkai has <i>truly made it</i>." It is, to belabor it, not <i>actually</i> a Makoto Shinkai film; that's something that will be very apparent, also, from the first-batch-of-shots first part of the first scene, for while they feature both rain and ennui in a very Shinkai-like manner, you would presumably notice the lack of characteristic juice from Shinkai's CoMix Wave team (<i>Tunnel of Summer</i> was produced by Studio CLAP), and there's been no point in these last fifteen-or-so years where Shinkai would have signed off on the rain animation in any part of this film.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it <i>is</i> a Makoto Shinkai rip-off, something I would have been cautious about claiming<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>hypothetically, it's simply another animated sci-fantasy teen romance, which just sometimes happens to feature rain, and while Shinkai perfected those things, he did not actually <i>invent</i> them (though sometimes I'm not sure about rain)<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>except it kind of openly <i>wants</i> you to notice that it's stealing. Which I suppose I can respect, since it's stealing from the best, though it is so extraordinarily out-in-the-open, from the more generic elements of an animated sci-fantasy teen romance, to things that surely resemble <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2017/05/pleasemake-me-handsome-tokyo-boy-in-my.html">Your Name</a></i> but aren't exactly <i>Your Name</i> (time travel, a reliance upon Japanese folkore, a rural setting, a festival that puts the female lead in a yukata at roughly the same point in their stories, a divorcé single dad, a girl more interesting than the boy), to things that are <i>very specifically</i> lifted from <i>Your Name</i> and, because until now Shinkai has done a champion job of cornering the Shinkai knock-off market all by himself, also his subsequent project <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/01/some-day-real-rain-will-come.html">Weathering With You</a></i> (notably the third-act desperate run into infinity that involves the protagonists forgetting how to not trip over their own feet, or how to break their falls with something other than their faces, for added physical melodrama), and, for a bit of variety (<span style="background-color: #444444;">and in a turn that indicates that the Japanese are unfamiliar with this thing you call "discourse"</span>), a little <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2017/05/all-that-heaven-allows-may-in-fact-vary.html">Garden of Words</a></i> flavor sprinkled in, somehow. I would swear in open court that during that run into infinity, composer Harumi Fuuki is quoting the RADWIMPS score from the same spot in the narrative from <i>Weathering With You</i>. (And to dispense with the historical question you might have regarding <i>Tunnel to Summer</i>, even the original light novel significantly post-dates <i>Your Name</i>; the anime wouldn't have even started production till after <i>Weathering With You</i>.) And so you see what I mean: Shinkai <i>has</i> made it, and, despite having very little in common with the previous century's great man of Japanese animation besides "they both make cartoons," he has now become what he has been often hailed as over the past decade, "the next Miyazaki"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is to say, a source of direct inspiration to everyone else in his medium. And I think that's swell.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I wish they would be equally inspired by his meticulous aesthetic, but we can tackle that later. As for being a knock-off, well, I like "genre" as a rule, and I'm not sure Hachimoku or the feature adaptation's writer and director, Tomohisa Taguchi, could have found any quicker way to my heart than confirming "Shinkai movie" as a genre unto itself. So: in an unspecified area of rural Japan (they may mention Kyushu) lives an unhappily-teenaged boy named Kaoru (Ouji Suzuka), whom we will learn over the first third of the film is dealing, not very successfully, with the triple tragedies of his life, a sister who died young, a mother who abandoned him and his father in the aftermath, and a father (Rikiya Koyama) whose grieving has curdled completely into alcoholism and bouts of abuse. (Whether it's because the plot moves more frictionlessly without it, or because this omission was genuinely intended to reveal their characters, Kaoru has one of the worst dads you'll ever see, given that his son disappears without a word for seven full days at one point and, while he's happy when he comes back, he didn't notify any authorities, and was annoyed he even had to talk to Kaoru's school.) When we meet Kaoru, however, it's in tandem with his first encounter with a new girl in town, Anzu (Marie Iitoyo), with whom he has an awkward conversation at a bus stop that goes mildly unsatisfactorily, but he does, chivalrously, manage to get her to take his umbrella to shield the package she keeps protectively clutching to her chest so it won't get rained on. Unwilling to be in his debt, she insists they exchange numbers on their primitive flip phones so she can return this unsubtle token, but even though it turns out they're going to the same school, she never quite manages to give it back.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In the meantime, Kaoru accidentally falls off a railroad embankment and into the woods, where he discovers something amazing, something he would probably have kept to himself if he could've<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the Urashima Tunnel of urban legend ("Urashima" being a fairy tale reference, mind you, rather than anything like a geographical descriptor). Entering the tunnel, this is when Kaoru loses those aforementioned seven days, though for him it's been only minutes. In return, he acquires some impossible things, like a parakeet who ought to be dead and his late sister's shoe, which makes him eager to go back into the tunnel to see what else could be returned to him. However, when he does, it turns out that Anzu has been stalking him, or something, and now she knows about the tunnel too (it's the moment where this film's incredibly tight 84 minute runtime is most keenly felt in a negative way, insofar as since the story needs Anzu to be here at this time, Kaoru doesn't even bother asking her why she would be). The good news, though, is that she's <i>exactly</i> as eager to plunge into this mystic hole that the stories say can grant your dearest wish, even if it's at the cost of being thrown who-knows-how-far in time; but she does steer Kaoru toward testing the tunnel's properties, so they might know how high the price they'll be paying is. That price, they determine, will be years, maybe even centuries. But they decide to follow through<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>even if maybe they don't truly understand what they're dealing with at all.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The single biggest differentiating factor between this and a Shinkai movie, then, which I think is relatively clear from that summary, is that this is <i>very</i> clean and straightforward, in ways that even Shinkai's latest and most logical teen sci-fantasy romance, <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/04/always-be-closing.html">Suzume</a></i>, only approaches. This is a double-edged sword: it's "better," in that despite its magic concept's apparent obscurity (we thankfully never get a lore dump about the Urashima Tunnel), that concept <i>is</i> so logical in its underpinnings, so that I'd almost tell you it falls closer to the "soft sci-fi" side of the "sci-fantasy" basket (even the folkoric reference is metaphorical), and it gives the movie a nice (and distinctive!) "weird fiction" vibe that <i>Your Name</i> didn't have. Likewise, at no point since watching it have I had to grapple with my conflicting impulses to go with its flow and nitpick it till it horribly died, like the <i>months</i> I spent before I finally surrendered to <i>Your Name</i>'s irrational majesty; but the downside is that it's not going to be as baroque as <i>Your Name</i>, <i>Weathering With You</i>, or <i>Suzume</i>. This tidiness comes in with that 84 minute runtime, too: it's simultaneously very pleasant to sit down with a modern movie this <i>utterly</i> direct, but it's also pretty ruthless about itself, virtually devoid of any secondary cast, with maybe three non-protagonists who get names (and possibly not a dozen lines apiece), though the girl-bully that Anzu sucker-punches is at least memorable for getting her nose broken. It barely has space for its leads, though: Anzu, as mentioned, is much more interesting than Kaoru, not entirely by default<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though she could be, because he's hitting bare minimum Male Anime Lead levels of individuality<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but her secret wish is a whole lot more idiosyncratic and textured than his (it's more complicated than this, but she basically wishes <span style="background-color: #444444;">to be a great manga artist</span>), and if it threatens to be a little inside-basbeball and self-reflexive, it's obviously coming from a sincere place. But it's probably a bigger problem than I'm acknowledging that they are both rather humorless brooders<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's the kind of romance where the female lead explicitly notes that her could-be never laughs, but <i>she's</i> not what you'd call hilarious, either<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the scene-setting first act can start spinning wheels even at only, like, sixteen or seventeen minutes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXge73vkzTijHcrMw6Mw1AhEfN3yXQQPSKuV51Og7jARGyV6vSTPuAWPXwPTQZ0dojYK-v6uZNq6EEsF7XUz1Z_p6MCAeBHeIJT7tryseL8mayX4rFhFIB5T9wqqk2beAo2u30VMfrLIdAG-1z6g7W72j-teP-zNyJbY_o8lkUiLHd1AqkUOdLxeoNsBS/s1200/TunneltoSummer2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="739" data-original-width="1200" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXge73vkzTijHcrMw6Mw1AhEfN3yXQQPSKuV51Og7jARGyV6vSTPuAWPXwPTQZ0dojYK-v6uZNq6EEsF7XUz1Z_p6MCAeBHeIJT7tryseL8mayX4rFhFIB5T9wqqk2beAo2u30VMfrLIdAG-1z6g7W72j-teP-zNyJbY_o8lkUiLHd1AqkUOdLxeoNsBS/s320/TunneltoSummer2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Hey, check out this promotional image that pretends this movie has more than 1.5 characters!</i></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It <i>does</i> have the space, however, to be very cool about the magic in its center, in ways that kind of top Shinkai in treating the conceit as a problem to be worked. It's where that tightly-logical construction starts to shine as a point of recommendation in its own right, doing duty well beyond its plot function by delineating a personality for Anzu (as much as any of her expressed traits and backstory do) as she approaches the existence of a time-distorting wishing-cave with the most wonderful arch-rationalism, dragging flat ol' Kaoru behind her. Thus a lot of the second act is montages of empirical measurement doubling as barely-encrypted dates, which gives way to what are easily-recognizable as actual dates, though since they're Japanese cartoon characters, they cannot confirm an attraction to one another without apocalypse or death prodding them into it. The most Shinkai thing here, needless to say, is the insistence that going inside girls is better than going inside magic caves (it is, let's say, a noticeably yonic cave mouth), alongside the assumption that it takes the power of the supernatural to put two young people alone together long enough for them to figure this out. But I can appreciate that Hachimoku and Taguchi have shaved off the Tohoku-derived world-ending stakes from their exercise in the Shinkai workbook. This one has no stakes larger than the fate of two kids, and that gives it a somewhat different valence, with the tunnel representing something close to a barely-metaphorical suicide pact, on top of a metaphor for the perils of nostalgia and grief (and somehow also a metaphor for the distractions of modernity from the small-c conservative ethos the story bends towards, though in a way that it productively busts up in its denouement, for it's a movie that's really astonishingly good at having its cake and eating it too, simultaneously arguing that you must move on <i>and</i> that you must not, depending on what would be most emotionally effective in the moment, and these moments are somehow placed <i>side-by-side</i>; and whatever, it <i>works</i>).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is somewhat consistently let-down by a production that is... fine, and in some respects visibly cheap. (I'm not familiar with relative newcomer CLAP, but their rough peer would be, I think, Studio Colorido.) There is a certain underdetailed slackness to its depictions of the spaces its characters occupy; this is unfairer than any comparison to Shinkai in its story, because Shinkai is the best in the world at what I'm describing, but if you're gonna <i>do</i> it, you're gonna be judged on it, and this is a bunch of digitally-painted photographs and/or CGI with cartoon characters composited into them, that didn't have anybody involved who saw these digitally-painted photographs and/or CGI as ends in their own right. Makoto Shinkai <i>loves</i> his settings, and that feeling is palpable; <i>Tunnel to Summer</i> does not. Lighting and effects animation come off largely similarly; it also has a problem with playing around too much with "shallow focus," in this object made of layers of drawings, though arguably this is as much my problem as the film's; but while I mentioned rain animation that Shinkai wouldn't sign off on, there's some computer-assisted multiplane that I'm not sure Walt Disney would've signed off on, in 1933, when he barely knew what multiplane was yet. (ETA 2/1/2024: okay, the latter was always hyperbole, but even if the former wasn't when I wrote it, I will admit that Shinkai would sign off on <i>some</i> of the rain animation in the movie, at least two of the sixty or seventy "rain animation" shots are lovely.) It gives it an unfortunate quality of hollow pastiche sometimes, probably most saliently when they use just straight-up filmed footage to do "fireworks" and make the further unforced error of compositing Anzu and Kaoru into a wide establishing shot <i>with</i> these photographed fireworks. That this is still one of the best scenes in the movie does, however, indicate how little that that "hollow pastiche" sensation matters, if the story's there and if the animation can satisfy the core mission well enough.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcyFOYg06b3wUOVehcglPouxcFmw6lIHxoL37CoCf_H3NxY1s1Nl3OIOgRMEriUiCpTUqiLbZGjyTnh9mSv2Pczrcc1M7cF73OVo8ePUF9-HsvFrVDN4004uc55UPfSy-kT4p-gJMVMnwjJXftZJkTOr4AE_I6Elf3kDeVd4k7ecgrG_gh4fExCsqSEBcP/s1920/TunneltoSummer3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1920" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcyFOYg06b3wUOVehcglPouxcFmw6lIHxoL37CoCf_H3NxY1s1Nl3OIOgRMEriUiCpTUqiLbZGjyTnh9mSv2Pczrcc1M7cF73OVo8ePUF9-HsvFrVDN4004uc55UPfSy-kT4p-gJMVMnwjJXftZJkTOr4AE_I6Elf3kDeVd4k7ecgrG_gh4fExCsqSEBcP/w400-h166/TunneltoSummer3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />And it does: the central imagery of the endless hall of glowing magic maple trees in the flooded, otherwise-pitch-black void of the tunnel is simple but very effective in its weirdness and its counter-intuitively technological, "why <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/walt-disney-part-xxxii-greetings.html">TRON</a></i>?" feel; and, for the record, there's some downright <i>gorgeous</i> animation of shed maple leaves in the stagnant water, that demonstrates that Taguchi was discerning enough to direct his limited resources to the most crucial places. (And on rare, happy occasions, when it isn't so crucial to the emotional impact of a scene: there's a reflection on a turned-off TV screen in a room barely lit by exterior gray skies that, perhaps unaccountably, did impress me. Or maybe it was more "crucial" than it seemed.) The <i>character</i> animation is pretty good, though obviously I'm mainly talking about Anzu, who could be the more interesting lead on the basis of her design alone; Kaoru is at his most indifferently standard in <i>his</i> construction, but just as a baseline, they give Anzu very sharp eyes, and a sort of borderline-sinister quality, that comes out with a certain self-gratification in her anger<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>she's stereotypical but not the "right" stereotype, and even then there's some real specificities, like the way her hair is animated a little more stringily than you'd expect, suggesting with a little intimation of turn-of-the-century J-horror that this depressed girl doesn't wash it as much as she maybe ought. She has so much larger an emotional repertoire (and, hell, costume repertoire) over the course of the movie it was probably inevitable that she'd be the standout piece of animation here. (The indeterminancy of our couple's eye colors, on the other hand, is low-key fucking <i>aggravating</i>. I don't think this is useful. I'm not sure purple eyes are ever useful.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But it's strong on animation and design when it really counts, and it counts the most in its "okay, you are <i>transparently</i> thieving" climax, and I don't know what to tell you except to say Taguchi handles it altogether correctly, with blunt but well-deployed symbolism (this movie uses cellphones <i>terrifically</i>), and even exploiting the "logic" thing for emotive power, letting you get ahead of his movie at precisely the right time to know what's coming, which makes it hit harder (I'm not sure when exactly it becomes explicitly clear <span style="background-color: #444444;">it's 2005</span>, so alternatively I'm stupid not to have noticed it until very late, because that <i>so</i> gives the game away). The movie's weaknesses are clear enough<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's such a streamlined version of its influence that the streamlining is a problem<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but damn it if it doesn't satisfy its formula, even to the extent that I might hesitantly forward that, in a year that had a real Shinkai movie and saw him maybe fiddling too much with that formula, it could be the more successful exercise in it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 9/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*Yet there is another project worked on by this film's female lead VA whose name caught my eye, and I submit to you <i>Zyuden Sentai Kyoruger vs. Go-Busters: The Great Dinosaur Battle! Farewell, Our Eternal Friends</i>, which I recommend we humble ourselves before, while contemplating how perfect it is in every way.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-3405697365956575782024-01-21T19:50:00.052-11:002024-03-09T18:04:14.960-11:00When the oceans drank Atlantis<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98r8QtMRmL0DJGF0oSOroZtTKcRrIBe92MuLgqb98SjNv_DcbaaFKVHYr5X_aKIVXDbaGelMiVchXQD49eoX0oBDhIMErEKzlCCcO5ZTnnYCjPGYasLkm9mjDn6TBvRxnp6ATwVPtOYAxoRqCxfLfjuFETzB3TB4av6-iWl7PPUaoMB5PvtA4liRrA6Np/s702/AquamanLostKingdom1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="474" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98r8QtMRmL0DJGF0oSOroZtTKcRrIBe92MuLgqb98SjNv_DcbaaFKVHYr5X_aKIVXDbaGelMiVchXQD49eoX0oBDhIMErEKzlCCcO5ZTnnYCjPGYasLkm9mjDn6TBvRxnp6ATwVPtOYAxoRqCxfLfjuFETzB3TB4av6-iWl7PPUaoMB5PvtA4liRrA6Np/w270-h400/AquamanLostKingdom1.jpg" width="270" /></a></div><br />AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by James Wan</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, Thomas Pa'a Sibbett, Jason Momoa, and James Wan</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid7awUGA4mR1gzDaIzV-nUJZGmoAZfQUrb8wth7zHxdZF03R3Brz2tKwCIUvnHBYb2Mfu-KHJcpGEFZbrG8trSsy8BhPveZjMbm-vhmSTAMBFSzoPbEIq2fv6JkLp34fh4WK2krCUgq6_r2SCxAW94d_TCWXuL32I4srju32gxEg9DHueLzYzifUy-13CD/s960/AquamanLostKingdom2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid7awUGA4mR1gzDaIzV-nUJZGmoAZfQUrb8wth7zHxdZF03R3Brz2tKwCIUvnHBYb2Mfu-KHJcpGEFZbrG8trSsy8BhPveZjMbm-vhmSTAMBFSzoPbEIq2fv6JkLp34fh4WK2krCUgq6_r2SCxAW94d_TCWXuL32I4srju32gxEg9DHueLzYzifUy-13CD/w400-h225/AquamanLostKingdom2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Frankly, I think it says something about how much curdled resentment there is out there that the usual response is actually gleeful triumphalism; but, speaking only for myself, I think it's kind of sad when a cinematic movement that's been the most popular thing for many years<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in this case a decade and a half, which is an accomplishment<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>finally exceeds its audience's appetite, and the trend dissipates so much faster than the industrial assembly line can regear for whatever comes next, so there's still movie after movie (after movie) coming out, each one looking a little more pitiful till finally the trickle stops. This is probably not an entirely accurate summation of superhero cinema in 2024: unlike previous movements, as far as <i>this</i> genre fad is concerned, our major media corporations are in so deep and have so few other options available that, to all appearances, they actually are going to die trying to get their superhero audiences back. But when it comes to what we once called "the DC Extended Universe," that is truly over, <i>Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom</i> representing the 15th and final installment in that continuity, and that this could be The End for this "story" is, I suppose, really just the final expression of the nobody-has-any-idea-what-the-fuck-they're-doing charm that, to me, has always been the DCEU's best quality. To its own credit, however, <i>The Lost Kingdom</i> is content to be the first and last sequel to 2018's <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2018/12/hearts-in-atlantis.html">Aquaman</a></i>, which I don't necessarily want to commit, hard, to calling my favorite superhero film of all time, though I'm not shy about letting you think it could be.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The sad part isn't just that it's over, or even that audiences got bored; that <i>is</i> sad, kind of, but all things run their course. The part that's <i>interestingly</i> sad is watching the fickleness of opinion, and how disappointingly lacking in integrity people are when it comes to jumping on, and moreso when it comes to jumping off, bandwagons, and the general inability to treat individual works as individual works rather than opportunities to pontificate and prognosticate. Which I realize I am also doing, and have always done. We can leave aside the many people who just didn't go see the movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>hey, it's a free country, and maybe it's not so surprising that a mass audience that's been trained to only care about movies that "matter" failed to show up for a movie that its maker has explicitly told them doesn't matter anymore. (I'm going to paraphrase something here that critic Tim Brayton recently said, because it's too perfect not to: we used to have a <i>lot</i> of movies where it didn't "matter" what happened after they were over, and <i>we called these movies "movies</i>.") But there is simply no way that a whole lot of the people who <i>did</i> go see it would have had half the mean things to say about it if the exact same motion picture came out even three years ago. And that's the sad part, the stragglers punished for the sins of their predecessors. I've seen it happen to other trends, and of course superheroes weren't going to be different. (Which reminds me that I need to mention, one last time, that this is Disney's fault, for despite all the ways in which the DCEU has indeed managed to suck, it has not sucked for even one-tenth of the number of <i>hours</i> that the MCU has sucked.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So, <i>Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom</i>? It's <i>pretty damn good</i>, and it at least saves the DCEU from halting on the inexplicably low note of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/12/he-was-like-superman-for-metropolis-or.html">Blue Beetle</a></i>, or even on <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/07/for-want-of-can.html">The Flash</a></i>, which I personally quite liked, though I suppose I can reluctantly comprehend how it's more objectively unlikeable than this well-built and extremely-straightforward superhero film. It gives the DCEU a chance to end doing what it's done best, which is sincere stories about larger-than-life figures<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>godlike, if you prefer<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>feeling enormous, godlike feelings, and offering hope and inspiration, which even at the DCEU's grimmest and most Snyderesque was the commonest denominator between the manifold styles and tones the franchise took on, except that James Wan's <i>Aquaman</i> turned out to be the best at it. My understanding is that Wan, returning for this second go-'round, could not have known that it <i>would</i> be an ending till very late in the game. (It would, however, explain why there is not one single reference to the wider DCEU in this whole movie. It's very streamlined<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>maybe too streamlined in some respects, but we'll circle back.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Still: unless it really was pure fate, I think he managed to do at least one thing here that attempts<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I think with outright world-class generosity<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to bring this long chapter of film history to a close. I don't think I'm spoiling the movie to say, in vague terms, that its post-climactic denouement involves a big speech. It's a speech delivered by Wan's star, Jason Momoa, which, purely on its own terms, offers a very fitting ending for the character of Arthur Curry<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Aquaman<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>as well as to his mysterious, underwater corner of the DCEU. It's very heartfelt, it's about peace and ecological stewardship, it's corny, and it's great. At the last moment, though<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Momoa's very last seconds onscreen as this character<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it shifts to something equally sincere, but a little more x-treme and a little more in-your-face, and while it is, naturally, delivered in the bro-surfer idiom that Momoa has made such a vital part of this character in the movies, it's hard not to think that Wan's not giving his bro-surfer the opportunity to eulogize not merely the DCEU, but the whole genre, in full awareness of its impending death. Accordingly does Aquaman end his era with an homage to its beginning, which started not with a DC, but with a Marvel, all the way back in 2008. It was called <i>Iron Man</i>, and it ended with a defiant declaration of identity and Tony Stark dropping a mic on a startled world who cried out for more and more, and who got it, till they glutted themselves sick on it. <i>The Lost Kindgom</i> ends on basically the exact same scene, but of course it's not hello this time, it's goodbye.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That's the last part of the <i>integral</i> narrative of this motion picture. But after all, superhero movies really pioneered narratives that had no integrity, principally through all the dozens of the mid-credits and post-credits sequences that have been so annoying to those of us with small bladders for lo these fifteen years. I'm earnestly disappointed that <i>The Lost Kingdom</i> doesn't <i>have</i> any post-credits sequence, advertising a movie that won't ever exist; I think that would have been an utterly delightful little spike of sourness to a movie that's otherwise been so sweet and good-natured about its ignominious place in history. But it does have a mid-credits sequence! I wouldn't say it's meaningless<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it pays off terrifically on this oft-comedic film's best joke (the <span style="background-color: #444444;">shrimp of the land</span> gag) whilst sending another major character off in a nice, off-kilter way<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but I love that it <i>doesn't</i> appear to know that this is the end. Even though I'm surprised it wasn't straight-up spoiled for me because, to a certain mind, it has got to be just beyond perfect that the very final image of The Superhero Age of Cinema is, well, <i>that</i>.*</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, there is an actual movie to deal with here and not just elegies for the superman and final scenes to grub meaning out of. So: in case we've forgotten, our hero will cheerfully narrate for us where he ended up at the end of <i>Aquaman</i> five years ago (though I don't believe that many years have passed in continuity), thankfully getting the single worst thing in the movie out of the way first. The first <i>Aquaman</i> managed to go two and a half hours without regurgitating certain people's hurt feelings that "Aquaman swims and talks to fish" was (at some point, in, like, the 1980s) a joke with currency in real-world comic book fan circles; this screenplay references that joke right upfront. It's only briefly worrisome, thank God: the movie leaps in quality the instant this lame meta-crap is dispensed with, and half-human, half-Atlantean Arthur reminds us that, some amount of time ago, he deposed his evil brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) from the throne of Atlantis, took his birthright as Atlantis's king, rescued his mom Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) from exile, and, in the space between movies, knocked up his Atlantean hydromancer girlfriend Mera (Amber Heard), who gave birth to their child and has consented, I guess, to raise Arthur Jr. on land with the help of Arthur's dad Thomas (Temuera Morrison), while they commute to their jobs in the ocean. Atlantean politics are hard and boring and polarized<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the isolationist/eliminationist impulses towards the surface world were not dispelled with Orm<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and Arthur questions if it's even worth being their king.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">More critically, however, a catastrophe looms on the horizon, for Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the demi-villain of <i>Aquaman</i> who swore eternal revenge on Arthur for leaving his pirate father to die, has pursued his obsession with gusto, roping in dopey, naive scientist Dr. Shin (Randall Park) in his quest to accumulate enough Atlantean technology to kill Atlantis's king. On one of these expeditions Manta gets more than he asked for<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>access to the so-called "Lost Kingdom," its very name stricken from the Atlantean chronicles. From its ruins he acquires a weapon of great power and antiquity, the Black Trident, as well as a very insistent voice in his head, belonging to the ghost of a long-dead and utterly-malign king. In consultation with this sinister force, and to free it from the Antarctic ice in which it has been imprisoned, he takes it upon himself to accelerate the greenhouse destruction of Earth's whole climate. When Aquaman intervenes, Manta draws blood, and Arthur is left with only one option: the one Atlantean who knows Black Manta, and so might know how to track him down, his own fascist brother, Orm, the once<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and future?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Ocean Master.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So that is some <i>dorky</i> shit, and it's pretty fantastic, like <i>Aquaman</i> before it drawing on numerous influences to be its own silly-wonderful thing, in this case leaning even more than "it's about Atlantis" already requires upon early 20th century fantasy in its supposition of grand superhuman kingdoms lost to abysses of time, with the caveat being that that which is not dead <i>can</i> eternal lie, while mashing that into aquatic superheroics and mid-century sci-fi and a current of pop 90s eco-messaging that's salient throughout<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the villain is doing climate change for "a reason," and it <i>feels</i> like it's practically for the lulz, <i>principally</i> just to piss off Aquaman, who understandably does not like climate change<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>eventually culminating in the single most splendid <i>Captain Planet</i> image that I expect has ever graced a feature film, let alone any episode of <i>Captain Planet</i>, of a giant volcano belching out towering plumes of "greenhouse" gas that is, literally, <i>Nickolodeon slime green</i>. So a colorful good time at the movies, to say the least.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjilX7DaoITDFTIYMu89hnM0KlVMiidBB8cX-Nm9QhuMwIrzVs5TkIEo3HlRkUv6pHOQ1j_r5o-DJkDNlWItiAIpQpSUudICis69S3nNZQdLZuvZszcIdTowGZbxP7Rd0hr1T6BWuV4suF7ZhUZwvz-z6-giXR8EH1sTstN06sIEZaZGcMqLRjPpqq0o0QP/s960/AquamanLostKingdom3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjilX7DaoITDFTIYMu89hnM0KlVMiidBB8cX-Nm9QhuMwIrzVs5TkIEo3HlRkUv6pHOQ1j_r5o-DJkDNlWItiAIpQpSUudICis69S3nNZQdLZuvZszcIdTowGZbxP7Rd0hr1T6BWuV4suF7ZhUZwvz-z6-giXR8EH1sTstN06sIEZaZGcMqLRjPpqq0o0QP/w400-h225/AquamanLostKingdom3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />It certainly <i>has</i> more: the careers of James Wan and Patrick Wilson have been intertwined for a very long time now, and it was for this as much as anything, I'd imagine, that recommended Wilson for the big bad part in <i>Aquaman</i>, and, speaking as a giant Patrick Wilson fan**, he was excellent there with a whole lot less to do than he has here in a movie that, once it really kicks off in its second act with Arthur's secret-mission rescue of Orm from a prison designed to permanently dehydrate him, has been structured pretty much exclusively as a mismatched-pair buddy comedy. This is just purely-pleasurable, old-fashioned action-adventure movie-making, and it works exceedingly well, Momoa and Wilson demonstrating stronger chemistry than I'd have guessed even from <i>Aquaman</i>, where their mutual enmity was still founded on a pretty strong foundation of good scene-partner chemistry. Wilson in particular rides a rewarding line here of arch, peremptory villainy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>of the kind that you'd expect from a guy who demanded you "call [him] 'OCEAN MASTER'"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that continually wobbles against Momoa's sloppy, whatever-dude charms, and while Orm's worldview is destined to crumble before his good-hearted half-brother's own philosophy, Wilson charts this crumbling expertly and with solid straight-man humor. Meanwhile, there are moments that Wan doesn't stress, but Wilson does (and with Kidman particularly), that anchor this in a legitimate emotional reality for our poor misguided Sea Nazi.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The big downside is obvious, and distressing depending on your partisanship, and I was very suspicious of <i>The Lost Kingdom</i> and Warners as regards their intentions with Amber Heard. (It played a minor part in how late I saw it, but I eventually realized it couldn't possibly help Heard <i>not</i> to see the movie she's in.) Long story very short, she has virtually nothing to do in this, but it's in a way that I don't know how she <i>could</i> have<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>Mera has a couple of splashy heroic moments (and one wild swing of a comedic moment early on, combining hydromancy and urine for a joke that, I'll give it this, I've never seen before), which all at least strongly indicate Wan and Momoa didn't purposefully ditch her<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and it's so entirely built-from-first-principles to be Arthur and Orm's movie that the first <i>Aquaman</i>'s entire damned secondary cast has gotten themselves demoted to featured extras here. And, you know, I'll take it: it amounts to one shockingly focused superhero movie, and if the genre had gotten more <i>Lost Kingdom</i>s over the last few years, maybe it wouldn't be in the place it's in today. Other than a third act complication that, if we stare a hole into it, is almost certainly cheating with its whole "we said he was doing it this one way, but he could have just done it this other way, which is the way he's doing it now" villain plotting, it's maybe the most mechanically-sound superhero flick screenplay in a decade.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The smaller downside is that whatever might've been interesting about Abdul-Mateen's villainy, one-dimensional but maybe compelling, is harder to appreciate through the green fog of ancient mind control; this is such a small downside that I almost regret bringing it up, because Black Manta is a villain best-enjoyed on the level of pure imagery anyway<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>ridiculous bug-eyes the color of rubies sitting atop an ebon humanoid form that melds into the murk and shadows, notably when Wan reminds you he's a horror director foremost, in a scene in a darkened house that's all the more effective <i>because</i> you know what's coming.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And while the script is, I'll concede with slight reluctance, principally "for" the combative relationship between Arthur and Orm, it's only the <i>slightest</i> <i>bit less</i> "for" giving Wan and returning production designer Bill Brzeski one more opportunity to take us on another tour of their wacky sci-fantasy imaginations, with the same <i>Aquaman</i> ethos<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>nothing can be <i>too</i> ridiculous<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>very obviously driving that effort. Thus another ocean-full of wonders, from Martin Short as a slimy Jabba-fish amidst the accumulated shipwrecks of a millennium, to glowing seahorses that (well, I laughed) make land-horse <i>sounds</i>, to an octopus sidekick whose intelligence Orm openly disrespects. And the ocean isn't even the half of it: Arthur and Orm's prison break from a magical desert kingdom run by withered skeletal monsters and burrowing worm-horses, for instance, or the arrival upon Manta's monster island, which I guess shows that Wan can pretend to feel embarrassment, because he cites as his inspiration Ray Harryhausen, but he's <i>fucking lying</i>, <a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/07/cardboard-science-then-out-of-smoke.html">he <i>means</i> Bert I. Gordon</a>, and Wan is a treasure. His action staging is crisp and clear and cool, and while this movie is very obviously mostly big wads of CGI, Wan maintains the DCEU tradition of using CGI well and in service of real, gratifying spectacle; and there's a special commendation here for how <i>incredibly</i> legible the undersea action is, despite every single thing about it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the distortion, the sheets of bubbles, the scope of the battles, the three-dimensionality of the environments, the overwhelming threat of submarine darkness<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>posing a mortal challenge to keeping it readable and exciting. Now, it's not devoid of some semi-serious flaws: the final battle does start to get a little stale by the time it ends (even when it finds a rather better dramatic toehold than "Manta <i>really hates the shit </i>out of Aquaman, and the green man makes him hate him even more"), whereas the climactic glowing emerald ghouls are, unfortunately, the least-interesting creatures we get to see in the whole movie. This is a very mild bummer in the context of a sequel to <i>Aquaman</i>, which escalated absolutely perfectly straight through. But there's a moment when Aquaman calls upon an army of whales as his only hope against one of Manta's several ultimate weapons, and they confront the villain's submarine, which is also shaped like the villain's head, and if I'm being honest with you, I don't think I've been more <i>delighted</i> by a scene in a movie this whole past year. In the midst of cartoonish Silver Age nonsense, it finds wonderment and soul. Superheroes are dead, but even if this movie knows it, it never gives the game away.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 9/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*And that I appear to have predicted it in my <i>Flash</i> review, by way of a metaphor I was only trying to be vividly gross with, is, I hope you'll allow me, something of a modest mindfuck.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**So giant I haven't seen <i>Insidious: The Red Door </i>yet, but while a Wilson fan I may be, it's not fair that he'd ask me to play catch-up with a horror franchise that even at its best was only good. But I'm gonna do it anyway.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-47420334070053330822024-01-18T14:42:00.045-11:002024-02-04T23:01:43.217-11:00Another castle<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeuR-sgK34tsHcYG7ArCoXlsCrMa0qqeex34cKxMUEooTH4kn_MKfdJkqWtMAM-rN19Zawa6d2JkAMMGL0ouK3kb0avAtYooJFtdr_T-e-7GRQoHUEc85IIiGPdyD18JHSihFsd1Auco1BN-vlsH98jrrx5vHXQAFdnDweFyhj5fjp1gHU_Z7RhuGtJ9yx/s828/SuperMario1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="588" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeuR-sgK34tsHcYG7ArCoXlsCrMa0qqeex34cKxMUEooTH4kn_MKfdJkqWtMAM-rN19Zawa6d2JkAMMGL0ouK3kb0avAtYooJFtdr_T-e-7GRQoHUEc85IIiGPdyD18JHSihFsd1Auco1BN-vlsH98jrrx5vHXQAFdnDweFyhj5fjp1gHU_Z7RhuGtJ9yx/w284-h400/SuperMario1.jpg" width="284" /></a></div><br />THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Matthew Fogel</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsZVmEG8M0fPv_KSvky_9R0JeQZaE8hFiHgcMedjG_S2uicVfMu0l7U-jeEPxEfbcqMXerwr5Rc-R9-tq0XnypZJDd2fQo9gzWu5UYPEvgfT6WkS5BybI4fbJiHmuxRa_B7R5WlMMlNgn-6_yD6OPXtctRr_H50KICI5bn1nB5Beak47U9n1PLnj4guz5A/s958/SuperMario2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="403" data-original-width="958" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsZVmEG8M0fPv_KSvky_9R0JeQZaE8hFiHgcMedjG_S2uicVfMu0l7U-jeEPxEfbcqMXerwr5Rc-R9-tq0XnypZJDd2fQo9gzWu5UYPEvgfT6WkS5BybI4fbJiHmuxRa_B7R5WlMMlNgn-6_yD6OPXtctRr_H50KICI5bn1nB5Beak47U9n1PLnj4guz5A/w400-h169/SuperMario2.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />For all its brightly-lit, candy-colored splendor, <i>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</i> cowers in darkness, trapped in the shadow of a thirty year old failure. It makes not one single decision of its own, except in reference to 1993's <i>Super Mario Bros.</i>, the first serious effort by American film studios to adapt a video game, and while by no means the last until now, I suppose it's fair to say it at least set the tone for that "genre" for the next decade or two. The infamy of its predecessor<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>born from the contemptuous and fascinatingly self-destructive unfaithfulness of that film, though I am content, for the time being, to agree that 1993's <i>Super Mario Bros.</i> is "bad"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>put Nintendo off of film adaptations of its properties for more than a quarter of a century, and I expect things like <i>Street Fighter</i> didn't do anything to convince them that the simple storytelling of 80s and 90s video games could be adapted into the more robustly narrative form of a theatrical feature film. Then the 2010s and 2020s happened, and I suppose they realized that neither robustness nor narrative was necessary or desired, only recognizable IP. And the result was <i>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</i>, a film scared of its own audience, and above all terrified of being likened to its predecessor on any level, made <i>at</i> Illumination, in a way that I don't entirely feel it'd be correct to say it was made <i>by</i> Illumination, even once we adjust for the comparatively modest ambitions of what is probably the least interesting of all the major American animation houses. But in any case, it was <i>clearly</i> made under the microscopic scrutiny of immensely conservative rightsholders, who made it very clear that this project was not to set one foot outside of what everyone knows about Mario, and that the one and only purpose of this<i> Super Mario Bros. Movie</i> was to trigger fun memories of playing Nintendo games and, better yet, make you want to buy one on your way home.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Curiously, and I suppose quite strategically and deliberately, what this approach ended up with was a narrative that arguably doesn't quite reach a "kid's movie" level of complexity<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>because it arguably doesn't quite reach all the Super Mario Bros. games' level of complexity<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and, nevertheless, pretty much the entire appeal of the movie, along with most of the plot, is a lumped-together mush of visual and verbal references that only middle-aged adults could possibly get. (And even then, the <i>leaf</i> doesn't give you the Tanooki suit, what the hell?) But it <i>is</i> 2023, or it was, and that's all it takes; the movie made well over a billion dollars and was received by its constituency as the way to do a video game adaptation "right." Which I guess actually <i>means</i> "not adapting it at <i>all</i>," as it's more akin to watching a video game get played for 92 minutes with the bare minimum effort put in to make it "a story." Even the thing that's slightly more than the bare minimum<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>addressing the Jesus-they're-barely-fictional-characters-in-the-first-place sexism of the "Mario saves the Princess" trope, by ceding Peach's hostage function to Mario's brother, Luigi<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>turns out to have been the bare minimum after all, because certainly you couldn't expect Luigi to be able to <i>teach</i> Mario how to play the video game he's found himself in, whereas Peach can, and accordingly does. This constitutes most of the second act of this movie, to the extent, anyway, that it has acts.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKFgRk4F0ErHZmsncN5RSV3y7TAEVySSsxh8yyVb3UvZGVfqAMnthR5igxiPbjEPixn8zVyJWuecvYhr27u3g-0sof7inzHoIYg0SZqsHt1SpY67XdZiVSe6zuWIreV2O4qX_feuTzYRWFo455uMOpxMPcyhIl2KHGEOVFC-fI2FjVXH3bQ_BGUcrH-Q2o/s776/SuperMario4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="776" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKFgRk4F0ErHZmsncN5RSV3y7TAEVySSsxh8yyVb3UvZGVfqAMnthR5igxiPbjEPixn8zVyJWuecvYhr27u3g-0sof7inzHoIYg0SZqsHt1SpY67XdZiVSe6zuWIreV2O4qX_feuTzYRWFo455uMOpxMPcyhIl2KHGEOVFC-fI2FjVXH3bQ_BGUcrH-Q2o/w400-h171/SuperMario4.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />As for the first act, which is where the film pretends the hardest (still not terribly hard) to have a story, let's meet Mario Mario (I assume; Chris Pratt) and Luigi Mario (Charlie Day), Brooklynites who have, to the chagrin of their family and amusement of their peers, recently quit their jobs on a wrecking crew (I get it, I guess) to devote themselves full-time to their true passion, plumbing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And we're going to stop right here, because I feel that it's important to mention this right now. <i>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</i> is, notionally, a comedy<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it is by <i>pedigree</i> a comedy, to start with being directed by the creators of <i>Teen Titans Go!</i>, Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (the director and writer respectively of the movie of <i>Teen Titans Go!</i>, the very funny <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2023/07/smells-like-teen-spirit.html">Teen Titans Go! To Movies</a></i>, so that Horvath and Jelenic's entire theatrical feature career bears the unpromising stamp of movies with the word "movie" in their title), whereas just the cast members I've already listed strongly imply the intention to be a funny movie. And, already, it's just not <i>working</i> its comic situations: "you want to be a <i>plumber</i>, one of the most reliably remunerative professions in America? you're lucky I don't disown you!" is just <i>confusing</i>, not comic (like, maybe if they'd been Wall Street traders or NYU professors?), and while "bad plumbers" is potentially comic, the Mario Bros. are confusingly bad at being plumbers. And this will continue throughout a film that isn't really able to do "jokes" (a <i>shocking</i> turn from guys who made <i>Teen Titans Go! To the Movies</i>) but also isn't competently "serious," either.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, by way of some confusingly bad plumbing<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>at least I think that's what happened<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the Marios threaten to sink Brooklyn, and in their attempt to fix it and be heroes to their borough, wander into a thankfully-unexplained secret section of the sewers, where Luigi gets lost in a magic warp pipe and Mario strumbles in soon thereafter. Following a sequence that is, frankly, overvisualized with its Jupiter-and-beyond-the-infinite glowy stuff, rather than hard cuts and sound effects, this spits them out into different parts of the Mushroom Kingdom, ruled by the human Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is excited to meet a fellow H. sapiens for about three seconds before she loses interest in that, and whom Mario takes a full 24 hours to ask how she ended up here, because we have <i>video game mechanics</i> to describe. Luigi, you see, has wound up in occupied territory, the hellscape controlled by the demonic King of the Koopas, Bowser (Jack Black), who has seized an invincibility star and taken Luigi as one of his many prisoners; obviously, Mario needs to rescue him, but he needs, first, to power up. Well, after we spend several hours watching Mario play Super Mario poorly and slowly get better at it, he convinces Peach to allow him to accompany her on her diplomatic mission to secure an alliance with the king of the Donkey Kong franchise (Fred Armisen) and his son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen). Donkey Kong takes a dislike to Mario immediately, but this is nothing compared to the white-hot hatred Mario stokes in Bowser's heart, for Bowser's ultimate goal is not the conquest of an empire, but of the princess he's so long loved, and the existence of a male of her species in her company is an intolerable affront.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqe8DSWwXbttCPV9fnGQ3fKUGgWzzbFcaSUsCRgImEsK0vfFw1-mvNVQogaECZxvqMmpYNo1oDhHQgIOOsX8SzOJUUIis6PQZYeZ16gebUKvrL_NrxMRBhYU2qA3CaAbYSOeKKdB03iskXJuC-YCFtYeqF5uSSqkZRl2qIO6M9UCeMwEFDghtkdjWLQY4l/s1000/SuperMario3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqe8DSWwXbttCPV9fnGQ3fKUGgWzzbFcaSUsCRgImEsK0vfFw1-mvNVQogaECZxvqMmpYNo1oDhHQgIOOsX8SzOJUUIis6PQZYeZ16gebUKvrL_NrxMRBhYU2qA3CaAbYSOeKKdB03iskXJuC-YCFtYeqF5uSSqkZRl2qIO6M9UCeMwEFDghtkdjWLQY4l/w400-h200/SuperMario3.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />So, points, I guess, for "the plot of this kid's movie is that the turtle monster pretty much explicitly wants to rape the hot chick?", which is at least <i>unexpected</i> in a 2023 blockbuster cartoon, though if my vague awareness of post-<i>Super Mario World</i> games doesn't fail me, it's merely adapting the forcible-marriage premise (and the iconography) of one of them. I think you'd have to be very charitable to perceive it as <i>doing</i> anything with this premise, however. Even when it sort of, kind of tries<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>notably in a showy centerpiece revolving around a piano ballad Black sings to the absent object of Bowser's affection<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's very noncommittal. Black sings this song twice; I couldn't tell you if it's good or funny because it's not even in the movie for sixty aggregate seconds, because Bowser is interrupted <i>both times</i>. And I don't know what to do with a movie that has a musical number it evidently despises so much that it stops it <i>twice</i>. But then, even above and beyond "it's like a video game," <i>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</i> is repetitive: if it finds an idea it thinks is cute, it will shove it down your throat a second time in its bid to hit 92 minutes without actually having any particular story content, memorably so with its pair of slow-motion "mamma mias" from Pratt's Mario.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And might as well dig into that: this is like the platonic ideal of mindless celebrity casting. Black is at least doing a bit (he plays Bowser as so consummately malevolent that it wouldn't occur to him to distinguish between "good" and "evil"), and for that is the best in the cast by default, though his "joke" parts, regarding Bowser's nervousness about meeting Peach, just flop around; Day's Luigi gets runner-up here, simply by virtue of being the only participant who feels like anyone even thought about who'd be <i>good</i> at this neurotic rendition of the character, rather than throwing a dart at a board of Hollywood actors. As for our hero, Pratt is at least doing (barely) "a voice," and it's a reasonably noble effort on behalf of a figure who, to my recollection, has historically been a collection of Eye-talian catchphrases, and still is, though Pratt has the thankless task of continuing to read dialogue between those catchphrases. Taylor-Joy lives completely down to her non-character; meanwhile, you could convince me Rogen didn't know he was playing Donkey Kong, or even what movie he was in (for all the flak Pratt caught, Rogen was the one that struck <i>me</i> as "film-wreckingly miscast," but such is <i>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</i> that it can't really <i>be</i> wrecked by something as insignificant as the performance of a major character in it); and Keegan-Michael Key plays Toad, who's so important I didn't mention him, and he's loudly convivial, which is sort of like being funny, I guess. On the margins, there's some slight effort, though the film's breakout character, a Luma (Juliet Jelenic) in the same World 8 prison as Luigi, who's gone cheerfully mad with despair, feels like such a desperately forced "laugh at our provocation" gesture that I couldn't even enjoy it despite it being more-or-less on my wavelength of humor. Mario's biggest joke, anyway, is a runner about how he doesn't like mushrooms, and it's <i>pitiful</i>. There are a couple of sequences done up like side-scrollers that are mildly amusing even if they are, and feel, a little obligatory.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Theoretically, though, the principal driver of this cartoon is adventure. It's basically <i>The Last Starfighter</i> with about the same lack of awareness that watching someone else play a videogame fucking sucks*, but I have never been of the opinion that making an adventure movie out of Super Mario material is <i>impossible</i>. I don't really think it should be that hard, even, given the enormous, borderline-surrealist imagination that's gone into the video game franchise over the past forty or so years. On this front, Illumination has even almost succeeded by virtue of pure brute, eye-zapping force: this movie looks <i>great</i>, probably the best thing that studio has ever delivered on a technical level, between the intoxicating colorfulness of the design, lighting effects used to create a world humming with poppy energy, and hi-fi renditions of the Mario characters that despite slavish faithfulness at least feel like the expensive, American CGI-animated movie versions of those characters. (And I'm pretty sure somebody here, not just Bowser, wants to fuck Princess Peach. This isn't a criticism, as it also means Peach probably has the most expressive character animation, even if neither she nor Taylor-Joy have much to express.) It is occasionally even able to snatch bits and pieces of genuine filmmaking out of video game references, such as the sound decision to make its go-kart chase into <i>Mad Max: Rainbow Road</i>, which it prosecutes with some complicated staging and terrifically dynamic layout.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I'm not even entirely sure why or how Rainbow Road happened, and what might have been its coolest moment, the reveal that the featured henchman chasing them was always a Koopa <i>Para</i>troopa, must be punctuated by him exclaiming "BLUUUE SHELLLL!" to, I reckon, the audience, because while this is a movie that, yes, leaves a lot of its easter eggs to be found by those with an interest in collecting them, because there are so many that it would otherwise be a constant screech, it is still a movie where half the screenplay is spent shouting "THIS IS A REFERENCE, DO YOU GET THE REFERENCE?" at you. The other half is just labeled [music montage], and this is an embarrassing nadir of lazy pop music needle-drops, most being ungodly literal in their relationship to the action, e.g., "Holding Out For a Hero" as Peach patiently holds out for Mario to become a hero, and then going into full-tilt "random noise" territory with "Take On Me" in the nonsensical <i>Diddy Kong Racing </i>module, which I find especially vexing because from the point of view of 2023, "Africa" is, like, basically sitting right there on the shelf next to it, though I suppose I concede that it's too meditative a song to go along with a dumbass video game reference and complete non-adaptation of Kong Island as any kind of actual place.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's annoying, because this is a movie that had 99% of its work done for it already<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>most of it is <i>just</i> the application of CGI-animated feature film technology to a video game series that figured out how to translate its iconic character and world designs into CGI animation many, many years ago<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to the extent that when they <i>didn't</i> have templates, like for Mario and Luigi's fellow Brooklynites, they feel "off," like they're not from the same design mentality. (And not to spoil too much, but <i>returning</i> to Brooklyn just feels like a complete error; it places me in the awkward position of having to declare that the worst thing that the movie ever does<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>in its weak, even kind-of-bullying attempt to tie off a character arc for Mario that hasn't even existed for the last hour<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is also the one thing it ever does that so much as <i>threatens</i> to step outside of its "watching a Mario game" box. But oh well. Somehow, I feel something like the same way about Brian Tyler's score, which I respect more than anything else in the movie: it's quite good at rearranging various Mario themes, but Tyler was apparently the sole person involved who didn't want to use the games as a crutch... even though he might as well have.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I said there's no reason Super Mario <i>couldn't</i> be a fine adventure movie about a plumber and a princess on an odyssey through design elements established long ago by people an ocean away. All they had to do was put <i>life</i> in them<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>purpose, personality, identity, spirit, whatever you want to call it. The closest it gets is what I'm confident calling the film's best scene by some margin, where Luigi is confronted, and is suitably terrified, by the horror of deathless Dry Boneses rising from a mass grave. Otherwise, it's when we learn that, in the Mushroom Kingdom, they use pipes for transportation. But, man, I already knew that. Will we <i>do</i> anything with these pipes? Will they be a fun, action-adventure mechanic? These are rhetorical questions. Everything here takes the path of absolute least resistance; it's just "remember this?" four hundred times in a row, and only on the rare occasion, for instance a field of fire flowers, a world or a story that wants you to care about it on its own merits. It's at least focused enough in its IP-sploitation that I can reluctantly comprehend why it managed to make so many people happy. It's finessed enough that I wouldn't describe it as a pop-culture-is-dead emergency on the level of a <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/12/spins-multiverse-any-size-doesnt-matter.html">Spider-Man: No Way Home</a></i> or a <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2021/07/ready-player-none.html">Space Jam: A New Legacy</a></i>. But I'm not saying it's not on that spectrum.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 5/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*Obviously literally hundreds of millions of people disagree with this proposition. But while even I myself will sometimes watch <i>Super Smash Bros. Ultimate</i> tournament play<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to learn from masters and get better at <i>Super Smash Bros. Ultimate</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that doesn't mean, by any estimation, that I am apt to find <i>animators</i> flogging characters through a video game "fun."</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-19984314755064626212024-01-13T23:56:00.077-11:002024-03-14T20:34:10.038-11:00The ecstasy of gold<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KnTwJ3henMnVEVQqVSrj79QxbtJKJ7xYMn1_p4JdhOV4L4xNznMjzYphu36pVXp_tZr-EvluvATqi6PVckRhckmdtv_vQCpJ0GxrOjLS0pV4i1VvW5zvCmLyU8KGyk9zcAjUvclAOfEWeQDiQL7Fd9I0XAdr9hsmtuGOuuTe9-jURQEpm5jMGa1AEypz/s880/KellysHeroes1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="880" data-original-width="571" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_KnTwJ3henMnVEVQqVSrj79QxbtJKJ7xYMn1_p4JdhOV4L4xNznMjzYphu36pVXp_tZr-EvluvATqi6PVckRhckmdtv_vQCpJ0GxrOjLS0pV4i1VvW5zvCmLyU8KGyk9zcAjUvclAOfEWeQDiQL7Fd9I0XAdr9hsmtuGOuuTe9-jURQEpm5jMGa1AEypz/w260-h400/KellysHeroes1.jpg" width="260" /></a></div><br />KELLY'S HEROES</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>1970</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Brian G. Hutton</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Troy Kennedy Martin</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRqOJaVgCfhFoKr57mGR_nmz4o_61OoVPSh7ata3jT0wQc2sV_t_cA9xzCBDiYJu8q_RqqL02w6eJGW7gHRzTkYhJC7c-hEdIfDeCAiOMd-NmRFBS_CAL3gYMMZ965vZh9FvshAdzzM0aHegq4JlfiwMr4QSaVQytx7tUONpQ-qfTCgbFro8jWxWUnWRt7/s1017/KellysHeroes4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="1017" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRqOJaVgCfhFoKr57mGR_nmz4o_61OoVPSh7ata3jT0wQc2sV_t_cA9xzCBDiYJu8q_RqqL02w6eJGW7gHRzTkYhJC7c-hEdIfDeCAiOMd-NmRFBS_CAL3gYMMZ965vZh9FvshAdzzM0aHegq4JlfiwMr4QSaVQytx7tUONpQ-qfTCgbFro8jWxWUnWRt7/w400-h173/KellysHeroes4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Kelly's Heroes</i> is maybe the perfect 1970 movie, in specific ways involving its story and attitude, and which we'll get to shortly, and in ways more general, regarding its industrial manufacture and function in the cinematic marketplace of its day, which we'll get to right now. But I do mean the perfect <i>1970</i> movie, not 1970<u>s</u> movie, a movie balanced delicately upon the edge between the decade that was and the decade to come. It honors what came before, for the 1960s had been the golden age of the war film, particularly the World War II film, and the genre had benefited greatly from so many unique aspects of both that particular conflict and the environment of mid-century optimism in which its stories were being retold that I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that this golden age could never be repeated. Still, the most important material factor here is probably just that functional World War II gear was new enough to still exist in quantity but old enough for nobody to care too much about a bunch of civilians dicking around with it. (Sociologically, you <i>could</i> say much the same thing about the history: new enough to still be the events that defined the world but old enough for people not to be precious about it. And even all these years later, though our approach to war cinema has had to change, World War II itself has never quite lost its luster as the good war America won, nor our adversaries lost their odium.) But the 1960s were many things: they were the golden age of the heist film, too, <i>and</i> they were the golden age of the long-ass megaproduction comedy. And so I can't imagine a more perfect film to close the 60s out than <i>Kelly's Heroes</i>, the World War II heist film megaproduction comedy with the 146 minute runtime, even if calling it a "megaproduction" isn't accurate, except in the experiential sense that, well, just <i>look</i> at the Goddamn thing, and be in complete awe of how far $4 million could go in Yugoslavia in 1970. And maybe that's an element of "being the perfect 1970 movie" itself, as the 1960s had seen savvy international film production come into its own.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This would only make it the perfect 60s movie, of course, yet <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> feels like the precise point that American war movies stopped being about World War II or anything else and could henceforward be only about Vietnam, a claim that is complicated solely by the fact that <i>M*A*S*H</i> came out several months before it, sharing a top-line co-star and something like the same fundamental idea, "this movie about a historical conflict is actually about the current conflict, which it shall obliquely mock by way of the most belligerently contemporary cynicism you've ever seen," only it's expressed here in ways as different as you can get within the apparently very accommodating boundaries of cartoonish, larky comedies about war. The salient difference is that <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> is pretty much a joyous bloodbath, which is the big way it <i>is</i> still "about World War II"; it's "about Vietnam," meanwhile, in that it can't detect a <i>purpose</i> to fighting World War II, which would be sort of horrendous if I thought it was about World War II, and in a sense this makes it even bolder than <i>M*A*S*H</i>, which had used Korea, and taken advantage of Korea's subordinate mythological status, for its stand-in. But using World War II gives <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> a truly delirious energy, a worldview held suspended in superposition for almost the whole duration of the film, a wonderful hypocrisy that it exploits with utter ruthlessness.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoDxF84Nq1ljABK03XadAdpiqn7UW1DVrvBWXPdnU70JB9gkv3J2i5ns6dvLphD-wkQL04vxpskAA1Bn1e8CLF4JcLmi-Rl2lFc0a7b30AwpWrmVKR1TqrrLtMdyPeEyGF3SZWNGzVmKiODlkw_Z_UvlulpFmz0OoCXIowneUHb1O0nQ28cqWgXWwv6xu3/s474/KellysHeroes5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="197" data-original-width="474" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoDxF84Nq1ljABK03XadAdpiqn7UW1DVrvBWXPdnU70JB9gkv3J2i5ns6dvLphD-wkQL04vxpskAA1Bn1e8CLF4JcLmi-Rl2lFc0a7b30AwpWrmVKR1TqrrLtMdyPeEyGF3SZWNGzVmKiODlkw_Z_UvlulpFmz0OoCXIowneUHb1O0nQ28cqWgXWwv6xu3/w400-h166/KellysHeroes5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It's always a good thing when a movie understands that first scenes are important, and this extremely-1970 World War II movie announces its intentions as soon as it starts. We begin on a stormy night in the late summer of 1944, and Pvt. Kelly (Clint Eastwood) is behind enemy lines in France, having seized a high-value German prisoner, Abwehr colonel Dankhopf (David Hurst). Disaster almost strikes, but as Kelly peels out with his captive through a gauntlet of explosions, what lunges out of the soundtrack is the not-even-remotely-of-1944 sonic textures of the film's theme song, "Burning Bridges," written by composer Lalo Schifrin and performed by the gee-can-you-tell-they're-not-from-the-1940s Mike Curb Congregation. It's such a <i>ballsy</i> opening gesture, and asks you to grapple with not only some serious anachronism, but the woozy aesthetic juxtaposition of flower-child light rock flowing across some kind of dimensional rift into the more concrete reality of fleeing Nazis who are trying to kill you. (It also asks you to recognize that Quentin Tarantino didn't invent this shit, if, obviously, that wasn't its intention.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Once Kelly gets back to his platoon, what it wants you to do is place a different valence than you might have otherwise on all the World War II movie cliches it's going to be getting up to with Kelly's unit, despite these cliches being about as old as World War II movies made during World War II, comprising all the standard boilerplate bellyaching about boring homosocial misery and serving under moron officers, risking life and limb for some nebulous cause, all of which it identifies as one of those old "war never changes" things. Troy Kennedy Martin's screenplay is, inevitably, a <i>little</i> bit more prone to swearing than a World War II movie made in World War II would've been, but not even as much as he could have gotten away with, and this is certainly not a movie with "realistic" dialogue in any sense of that term, as we'll soon see; this is maybe also a good place to note what's "missing" from <i>Kelly's Heroes</i>, for despite the modal complaint of its G.I.'s being "but <i>what</i> about the <i>broads</i>?", so that the plurality of the non-plot dialogue involves pondering where French prostitutes can be obtained, the movie has literally not one female speaking part, and virtually no female faces whatsoever. That works well on its behalf; for one thing just keeping it from getting sleazy, ever the danger in 70s war films, while also cutting productively against that whole "perfect 1970 film" thing, arriving at the close of the swinging, sexy 1960s, where an absence of women, even in a war movie, somehow feels "off." (Not that it's surprising from the writer of <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/07/hang-on-minute-ladsive-got-great-idea.html">The Italian Job</a></i>, who barely had any idea what to do with women when he did have them.) But above all it channels that explicit horniness into the all-purpose sense of yearning for more that will ultimately drive Kelly's heroes on their quest.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGM1SGLReWkto3c7Eq5359SpFuJrdZuGqk8kB9d0yWem3A1mvgk-twhX5apXnH3dshzVayDRe2SSmSa3BJfB0T7VyK_l2BzulLMJPLUNSbJr16hba4sf9wQAIM_DUUPm-7pwHZEnP3jo04_c_3vqFIz1x2KniGvTZP6_mJSl6E4wZA2PDuplgj1cGcoS-d/s718/KellysHeroes2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="311" data-original-width="718" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGM1SGLReWkto3c7Eq5359SpFuJrdZuGqk8kB9d0yWem3A1mvgk-twhX5apXnH3dshzVayDRe2SSmSa3BJfB0T7VyK_l2BzulLMJPLUNSbJr16hba4sf9wQAIM_DUUPm-7pwHZEnP3jo04_c_3vqFIz1x2KniGvTZP6_mJSl6E4wZA2PDuplgj1cGcoS-d/w400-h174/KellysHeroes2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />That quest is laid out for Kelly when he discovers Dankhopf's secret: thirty miles behind German lines there sits, in a bank, 14,000 bars of gold, guarded by a small but heavily-armed detachment of SS Panzers<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>notably three Tiger I tanks. During a German counterattack, the colonel is accidentally killed, so now his secret belongs only to Kelly and the web of co-conspirators he enlists to take the gold: "Crapgame" (Don Rickles), the crooked logistics specialist with his hand in every pie; the dozen-or-so men of Kelly's platoon, and, with heaving reluctance and only after being hectored into it, Kelly's platoon's chief NCO, "Big" Joe (Telly Savalas); and, most importantly of all, because I don't know what Kelly thought he'd do without him, the tank savant known as "Oddball" (Donald Sutherland), who, in a stroke of fortune, has three Shermans and no commanding officer. And Oddball and Sutherland's performance thereof is essentially <i>the </i>key structural component of this entire movie, but as far as Kelly's own commanding officer Capt. Maitland (Hal Buckley) goes, he's managed to get his troops some boring backcountry R&R, in the meantime heading to HQ to show his uncle, Gen. Colt (Carroll O'Connor), the yacht he found in a river. As U.S. Army resources that could undoubtedly be put to be better use elsewhere are deployed to haul his new boat back to the rear, the captain reminds his men that looting is punishable by death. This doesn't seem to register, and that night Kelly's conspirators execute their plan to smash through the German lines and get that gold.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That's the heist movie <i>and</i> the war movie, and if the sine qua non of the heist movie is the pleasure it finds in the irresponsibility of its heroes while balancing that pleasure against the need to not make them sociopaths, <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> changes the rules, tantamount to playing a whole new game: I am confident that there is not another heist movie in the history of cinema<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not even the meanest, cruelest bank robber film uninterested in pleasure and scarcely deserving of the title "heist film" in the first place<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that has a body count <i>half</i> that of <i>Kelly's Heroes</i>. You would have to parse this movie frame-by-frame to even estimate the number of Nazis it kills en route to that gold. And yeah, <i>kill</i> those Nazis, but that's that wonderful hypocrisy: it is so <i>unbelievably violent</i> in service to an utterly venal cause, and yet all their victims, in a sense, deserve it. More to the point, their job here in Europe <i>was already to kill them</i>, just for much loftier, and for Kelly's heroes, rather harder-to-define reasons. The movie did, originally, have more character drama, cut for time (it still has a brief exchange led by Crapgame that's essentially a dry parody of the WWII movie enlisted man backstory template, having Rickles roll his eyes at how boring it is); and if I do have one negative thing to say about the movie, it's that it clunks slightly as war drama, in that it has the exact wrong amount of characters die in it<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>zero</i> would keep it a purely anarchic goof, while four or five would slam home the slimy pragmatism in its heart. Instead, <span style="background-color: #444444;">we get three, all at once, all highly-tertiary characters, in a "war is also sad" module that does <i>work</i>, but feels a little alien to the rest of it</span>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwncNORMxe94iiC6AjwiIDDYHMxffeOEwWpgF_z3WQfPt9g8l6l1tg6HykSXnbEumv01Tm9FhTLv6782unGLZQdVXWeN-JeoU7E3Xt87eNa8BAyF5UkiYNzDdBBo0QI0GK7aiAiyZda3pxHpkggUFjP92VoKSQh7siktDEKiXX6dCyUaCIr35rakr8ONYL/s1000/KellysHeroes6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="1000" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwncNORMxe94iiC6AjwiIDDYHMxffeOEwWpgF_z3WQfPt9g8l6l1tg6HykSXnbEumv01Tm9FhTLv6782unGLZQdVXWeN-JeoU7E3Xt87eNa8BAyF5UkiYNzDdBBo0QI0GK7aiAiyZda3pxHpkggUFjP92VoKSQh7siktDEKiXX6dCyUaCIr35rakr8ONYL/w400-h166/KellysHeroes6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The comedy part of it is all over, however<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the premise is already comic (though it turns out it's almost a true story, and I wouldn't call the true story "funny"), and, depending on the scene, the whoop-and-holler Nazi slaughter is comedy, though it sticks to absurdism and never overplays it into sadism. A nice baseline is set by Rickles's New Yawk huckster and Savalas's charismatic long-suffering sergeant, and it finds rich veins of black comedy as it heads into its conclusion. (Having seen it twice in two days<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I really like this movie, has that come across?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I noticed the second time, distracted on the first by the delightfully showy non-continuity editing of the film's excellent denouement, what this editing is actually <i>depicting</i>, <span style="background-color: #444444;">namely a town full of French people obliviously celebrating their liberation while their "heroes" steal a fortune that <i>belongs to them</i>, payment for services rendered</span>.) The nastiest, most disorienting joke of the movie is its very climax, which suddenly asks if violence <i>is</i> necessary, and it finds one surprising answer to that question, as the film lurches into the weirdest possible mood that mixes genuine humanism and full-tilt nihilism into one big "fuck you" slurry. (But even here details are important: it drags it the one vital step back <span style="background-color: #444444;">when Kelly's new Nazi accomplice (Karl Otto Albery) is compelled to reconsider how useful his Nazism will be going forward when he's just committed treason for cash</span>). There is also a strain of zany satire, effected principally by O'Connor's maniacal, Pattonesque general, who discovers Kelly's plot but misidentifies it as warrior patriotism, for by this point the film has taken on a quiet surrealism thanks to Kelly's plan snowballing into what I assume would have to be the most successful platoon-level action in history, since by the evidence of <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> if they'd kept going, by the end of the week they'd have killed Hitler.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is all intellectual stuff, dependent on thinking about a loud, goofy war movie more than it probably even wants you to. Heck, as "a joke," O'Connor is slightly obnoxious. (The outhouse joke is also, I think, misplaced.) So when it comes to <i>funny</i> comedy, the parts you laugh at so hard you chuck up a lung, you have Oddball. And when I say "you" I mean "me," and if Oddball does not make you laugh, then I believe you might have a very hard time with <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> no matter how much you like WWII tanks. Except I don't laugh so much <i>at</i> Oddball, either, though I do love<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>whatever reservations I had were obliterated by this second viewing<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>what a wild <i>concept</i> he is, explicitly a hippie from 1970 who has traveled through time to lead a tank unit against Germany on an amoral mission for gold. Instead, what I laugh at so hard it hurts is Eastwood's straight man reaction to Sutherland pretending to be high-off-his-ass and constantly worrying about the effect of "negative waves." Eastwood<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>well, I <i>suppose</i> I mean Kelly<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span><i>just hates this man so fucking much</i>, and God has never crafted a face more perfectly-built than Eastwood's to express, without saying a word, how incredibly much a person <i>can</i> hate a hippie. Nonetheless, the cleanest, maybe the only, "character arc" in the movie belongs to the mutation of Kelly's relationship to Oddball into a still-deeply-irritated respect. Well, whatever the case, the <i>movie</i> loves Oddball, and despite almost dying of meningitis in a Southeastern European backwater during the shoot, I would assume that Sutherland <i>must've</i> loved his movie back, giving it 110% in return, with flourishes as small as his bizarre eye movements, or as big as the way he swings on his Sherman's gun.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAKBXP7xU2qh6bn3_F9X27V0xGoa1A8cbb0DmWVKbNA1o62BWbEM8xDfR_4sisqUlFKbh1Hzamz11buQ7uZ2nfrYqvJjJXnmLWdbFWiUk0YWnmWSeQxRkHD2KqKpYDp9gih4J9R2ro5CvqLed9oqiE3BGcAzP3Tz5uWEA7P6vcloQj4XxJTneFXFF38NMH/s1275/KellysHeroes3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="529" data-original-width="1275" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAKBXP7xU2qh6bn3_F9X27V0xGoa1A8cbb0DmWVKbNA1o62BWbEM8xDfR_4sisqUlFKbh1Hzamz11buQ7uZ2nfrYqvJjJXnmLWdbFWiUk0YWnmWSeQxRkHD2KqKpYDp9gih4J9R2ro5CvqLed9oqiE3BGcAzP3Tz5uWEA7P6vcloQj4XxJTneFXFF38NMH/w400-h166/KellysHeroes3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />That brings us to the <i>megaproduction</i> part, and I'm sorry, I just can't think of <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> any other way, despite knowing that it wasn't unusually expensive by 1970 standards. It cost less than <i>one-sixth</i> of what <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2022/09/sleeping-yes-but-only-rather-ordinary.html">Tora! Tora! Tora!</a></i> cost; and since such profligacy isn't the best comparison, let's say it <i>barely</i> cost any more than <i>M*A*S*H</i>. For whatever it's worth, it cost less than half of <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/10/what-disaster-sudden-decompression-at.html">Airport</a></i>, which at no point required a tank to crash through the airport. Tanks crash through several buildings in <i>Kelly's Heroes</i>, and blow up many, many more. This is, remember, a comedy, but in any given frame it sure resembles a bloated war epic. There's a shot involving hundreds of extras trudging down a road, that exists <i>solely</i> to impress upon you the monumental scale of World War II; they blow up a railyard; they blow up two towns, towns that I assume must be sets because they blow them up, but the last one sure <i>looks</i> like they just blew up an actual Yugoslavian-standing-in-for-French town. During the opening the special effects team dutifully stages artillery strikes a good <i>half-mile</i> away from the camera.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is, of course, just the matter-of-fact existence of those Shermans and Tigers (actually T-34s with <i>extremely</i> good dressing*), which they weren't allowed to completely wreck, but were allowed to partially set aflame so you never really question it. <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> manages three crucial things that probably aren't unique individually, but as far as its peer war movies go, might well be unique in their combination: first, it actually managed to get its hands on not merely real but pretty-close-to-accurate weaponry, actual tanks that are of the era the movie claims them to be (cf. <i>Battle of the Bulge</i>, which has more tanks, but all manufactured after WWII), allowing the sight of a Tiger I throwing a tantrum to land with complete verisimilitude; second, and even more importantly, it managed to get its actors to actually <i>take part</i> in the scenes where their characters <i>do things</i>, for instance standing on top of a tank, which is rarer than you'd think given that the hallmark of this golden age of war movies is its tactility (cf. Richard Burton living inside a pocket universe of process shots in <i>Where Eagles Dare</i>, or Robert Shaw floating clairvoyantly across panzers in <i>Bulge</i>), and this gives the movie an unheard-of flexibility and dynamism in its choice of shot scales and angles; third, it shoots night <i>for night</i>. Gabriel Figueroa's photography is tremendous throughout (when Oddball suggests we appreciate the beauty of summertime France/Yugoslavia, it's awfully hard to disagree), but there are some real standout pieces of lighting design in the night sequences, especially that hell-lit thunder run with red and orange splashing off our heroes' faces as they smash through a German-held town.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Director Brian G. Hutton is taking the utmost advantage of these resources to make the best war-heist-comedy he can, veering hard from his previous movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the aforementioned <i>Where Eagles Dare</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>which is itself a very worthy war thriller, but exactly what I mean when I say <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> is transitional, Hutton's and his editor John Jympson's efforts on their first WWII film together resulting in a stone-facedly "serious" silly movie whose chiefest goal is to bring to mechanical fruition the possibilities of blowing up things on a mountain and clawing at people on an alpine tram with an ice axe. (Hutton was not a prolific filmmaker, but he was at least damned good at getting what he needed out of his second unit; his reputation rests so entirely on these two great WWII movies you might not have even heard of any of his others.) In any case, though <i>Kelly's Heroes</i> is infinitely more personable, the mechanics remain resolutely in command of their machine, above all in the finale that consumes the whole last forty minutes of the film, which Hutton and Jympson at first build slowly, with meticulous thriller instincts, as Kelly's band infiltrates the town, before allowing it to explode into an orgy of violence, which then shifts into <i>the</i> great screen tank battle, complicated by the challenges of close-in urban fighting that give Oddball's single remaining Sherman the barest chance of victory. And then it ends on a <i>total joke</i> (a <i>reference joke</i>, even, to Eastwood's Westerns), buoyed by the strangest strains of Schifrin's score. But it's a <i>bad-ass</i> joke, and that's <i>Kelly's Heroes</i>, one of the baddest-ass jokes ever told.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 10/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*To the point this humble dumbass was fooled; corrected 2/7/2024.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-82600735246064129042024-01-12T08:18:00.035-11:002024-03-09T18:33:24.348-11:00Discontinuation War<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbFdzC-ybUqaLLUKJKZFlZJ6nCB4C8Eat5siTCzIGVtsKJ5JEtIZi_dW_608H3U32ctcCw2P5gEUNYTGN6NQkBlEehfLe_9sqsFTU8c9Uvjs81cKIsQmYY-FGujToLgVU9NPOL-eC_rYlxmnBAnqkp-QMjqWg62_iZQrJVm30s2zDXrI94mYjDC7CRQBmy/s800/Sisu1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbFdzC-ybUqaLLUKJKZFlZJ6nCB4C8Eat5siTCzIGVtsKJ5JEtIZi_dW_608H3U32ctcCw2P5gEUNYTGN6NQkBlEehfLe_9sqsFTU8c9Uvjs81cKIsQmYY-FGujToLgVU9NPOL-eC_rYlxmnBAnqkp-QMjqWg62_iZQrJVm30s2zDXrI94mYjDC7CRQBmy/w266-h400/Sisu1.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><br />SISU</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written and directed by Jalmari Helander</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJeMWivMhGF9u63qVWa4_OAi7FrGq44SYU5RXL6ijpQ2tvrTVbvnTD8DUZkMvDprcnx4JV7PSK6LGMOe1VFtd2bYoO8EchSdQU_aP0gJKTMBnBtmTX5L-mP3a4TmSODRjRvREdlOUyCqyzHMPfhraHMOzHNucvMr8OiiawwYFALGuy9vMtHjOBOmTJXE0V/s627/Sisu2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="627" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJeMWivMhGF9u63qVWa4_OAi7FrGq44SYU5RXL6ijpQ2tvrTVbvnTD8DUZkMvDprcnx4JV7PSK6LGMOe1VFtd2bYoO8EchSdQU_aP0gJKTMBnBtmTX5L-mP3a4TmSODRjRvREdlOUyCqyzHMPfhraHMOzHNucvMr8OiiawwYFALGuy9vMtHjOBOmTJXE0V/w400-h240/Sisu2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />The war guilt of the Axis powers (a formally inaccurate, but useful name) has been, over the decades, processed by each co-belligerent in their own popular culture in their own ways: German movies about the war, to the extent they're even allowed, are all about misery and shame, reflecting the remorseful acceptance of Germany's status as the unique villain of history; Italian movies would for many years rail against the legacy of fascism, never actually expurgated from their society; and Japanese movies like to put forth the thesis that the central tragedy of their part of the war was the conventional and atomic bombing campaign that led to the collapse of the Japanese Empire, which might have been involved in some unpleasantness elsewhere, though most Japanese movies aren't very sure. That exhausts the list of Axis powers that the average person can name, though my expectation is that the general attitude in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria is that they were to some degree or another coerced into the war and its associated horrors by big bully Germany, and to some degree or another, that's probably true. And then there's Finland.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">How Finland processes its war guilt, I can't say, though I think one would be forgiven if one were unable to perceive that they <i>have</i> war guilt. On the contrary, they appear to have war <i>pride</i>, particularly as regards the most famous phase of their participation in the patchwork of conflicts called "World War II," the 1939-1940 Winter War with the Soviet Union, which Finland lost, but gloriously. The Finns' subsequent alignment with Germany wasn't made, of course, in contemplation of how it might tarnish their heroic reputation eighty years down the line, and so when Germany invaded the Finns' adversary in 1941, Finland did so too. They lost again, not so gloriously this time, with this "Continuation War" being less defined by the Winter War's badass ski troops and invisible snipers than by Finland's role in the starvation of Leningrad, which I've learned some Finns would prefer you didn't mention. If the one Finnish-American I've ever known is typical, anyway, discussions of the Continuation War<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>hey, he brought it up<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>get really defensive, really quickly, in ways that in retrospect suggest that <i>something</i> must've been eating the guy.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Now Jalmari Helander arrives with a whole new approach, which is to just pretend that Finland was a Nazi-occupied country. I regret the preceding historical infodump, but Helander's movie, <i>Sisu</i>, is only by the narrowest margin less brazen than the <i>marketing</i> for his movie in its exploitation of your presumed ignorance of the 20th century, so obfuscatory that for half the trailer, I was trying to figure out what part of the Soviet Union or Poland it was set in. The film itself, at least, opens with a very brief narration explaining that the Moscow Armistice has obliged Finland "to disarm the Nazis in Lapland," which is correct though its words are carefully chosen to <i>not</i> explain, to the ordinary dumbfuck layperson, that until yesterday the Nazis in Lapland were Finland's welcome guests. (Okay, technically, the film <i>opens</i> with the word "sisu," declaring it to be an untranslatable concept before immediately translating it; it means "determination," "stubbornness," etc., and I'd love for you to tell me how "implacability" is not an <i>exact</i> translation.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus does <i>Sisu</i> provide a new Finnish myth for the Lapland War, to supersede that of the Winter War, about how an individualistic heroic Finn achieved about 3% of the Lapland War's KIAs all by himself and routed his country's Nazi invaders, who had sexually enslaved Finland's women, had strung up the corpses of Finland's legendary, world-renowned anti-Nazi resistance fighters along the roadside, and had also committed some other war crimes that are significantly less lurid but, to their credit, not <i>fictional</i>, nor as copy-and-pasted from what Nazis did to countries that weren't their friends and partners in genocide.* Now, I'm rolling here, but I'm still assuming more "good faith"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>or maybe let's call it "artistic integrity"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>than I think is actually the case for <i>Sisu</i>. That would assume Helander made his movie <i>on behalf of Finland</i>. If that were the case, however, I suspect this Finnish movie wouldn't have every one of its Finnish actors communicating in English-standing-in-for-apparently-German (there's eventually about eight or nine lines of Finnish at the end). I'll cut it some slack on that<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>small country, world language<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but if it were for Finland, it probably wouldn't be quite so keen to put the Continuation War in a box and chuck it into the deep blue sea. It would probably also not be such a <i>shameless</i> hybrid of Tarantino knock-off and <i>John Wick</i> bandwagoner (down to its hero's folkloric-sounding Russian-language epithet, Koshchei, standing at most only ten feet away from "Baba Yaga"), which is how you know it was gunning specifically for an American audience, in the hopes that the resurgence of fascism in America entailed a resurgence in interest in movies about laying waste to cartoon Nazis, which turned out to be justified enough for <i>Sisu</i> to be a memetic success, so that I spent an unproductive hour on Letterboxd this summer looking to see if even one of you dolts knew which side Finland was on. And that is probably the underlying aggravation I have about <i>Sisu</i>: in a world where the most de minimis infraction can occasion a disproportionate wokescold response, somehow a movie about revising history to pretend a country that fought alongside Nazi Germany was one of its victims flies completely under the radar; in other words, Helander thinks we're idiots, and it always hurts worse when an insult is accurate.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But here's the thing: this has been nothing but me indulging in being pedantic and tedious. I think it's important to discuss who uses history and why, but what truly sticks in my <i>craw</i> is this: Helander told you he was makin' a movie about killin' Natzis, he delivered the absolute bare minimum version of Natzi-killin', and because politics, that you don't even understand, are <i>it</i> for you, this was found to not be merely satisfactory as action cinema, but praiseworthy. And that would be difficult to abide even if his movie's absolute bare minimum version of Natzi-killin' wasn't in service to mythologizing the absolute bare minimum version of Natzi-killin' undertaken by the Finns in real life basically only because the Soviets made them.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Well</i>, then: in late 1944, in the wilderness of Lapland, exists a man, whom we will learn, much later, is named Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila). He was once the terror of the Northwestern and possibly the Karelian Fronts of the Red Army, though they're pretty unclear on whether he fought in the Continuation War, and perhaps he did not, for he was always a rogue agent, operating entirely outside of the control of the Finnish Army, driven half to vengeful madness by the loss of his family to the Russians (presumably by air attack, as otherwise I don't really see how). Yet in the years since he's retired to Lapland in solitude<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>accompanied by a cute dog, which the marketing actually spelled out won't die, because this isn't like <i>John Wick</i>, where would you get that idea?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and he has dedicated himself to small-scale mineral prospecting. On this day, he finds a rich vein of gold, and, rather than covering it right back up and waiting the days or possibly weeks it'll take for the remnants of the Germans' 20th Mountain Army to exit the area, because this would wreck the contrivances it takes to put Korpi on his anti-Nazi warpath, he determines to get that gold back to Rovaniemi right now. Accordingly, he runs smack into German stragglers. The first group is a small column of Waffen-SS troops slinking out of Lapland under the command of Lt. Bruno Helldorf, trafficking a half-dozen female sex captives (principally Mimosa Willamo) and centered around what we're invited to suppose must be one of the last working panzers in Finland (a T-54, which I found incredibly distracting, but I still appreciate the use of a practical tank**). Helldorf's band initially ignores Korpi, but the Finn runs into a German roadblock barely a mile hence, and they hassle him. This is a mistake, since he kills them all, but Helldorf hears the commotion and turns his column around, and when he discovers that Korpi is carrying satchelfulls of gold, he seizes upon the idea of taking it for himself. But Korpi is no ordinary opponent, and even when the Nazis kill Korpi, Korpi, as was prophesied, refuses to die.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In substance, this isn't even a WWII movie, it's an action-oriented Western dressed in WWII costumes and powered by Finnish nationalism, and a movie like this is only going to be as good as the two or three things you need an action Western to do well by: its landscapes; its characters; and, as implied, its action. <i>Sisu</i> gets halfway there, which doesn't seem very mathematically clean, but I think I'll stick by it. What it has in spades, for I can in fact say nice things about this movie, is landscapes; it was filmed, naturally enough, in Lapland, principally in the countrysides of Utsjoki and Inari, and at the "correct" time of year to represent the Lapland War (fall) though you could make a powerful argument that accuracy would not have been worthwhile if the Lapland War had taken place in spring instead, for this is absolutely beautiful in its untamed Arctic bleakness, lichenous greens and rocky grays splotched with autumnal golds (and as the film goes on we reach "wintry" as well). Whatever other grudges I have against the picture, they do not include Helander and cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos's treatment <i>of</i> this landscape, or of their establishing shots generally, which manage some lovely and diligent photography that uses the sun and the skies and the gently rolling plains and the trees and the dust kicked up by a T-54 or the smoke belched out by a landmine explosion in some pretty creative and aesthetically-pleasing ways, frequently with a low-lying camera intended to make its figures tower up bigger-than-life, and within a digital treatment that imposes a moody, doomy haze on this imagery that is probably the one thing (outside of the costume design, anyway) that most brings <i>Sisu</i> in line with the notion that this <i>is</i> a movie is about the apocalyptic end of World War II in Europe. I will, however, bitch loudly about the ugly post-production slow motion that Helander often inflicts upon the accomplishments of Lagerroos's photography, constituting a pretty major fraction of this 91 minute movie's runtime.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This represents us running out of particularly nice things to say, though I suppose I'll note the gloopiness of some of the bodily destruction can be well-rendered, albeit mostly in isolation<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>there are a couple of Nazis run over by their own tank that are disgustingly splendid pieces of work, and a self-surgery scene that's also quite nice. But "overdoing slow motion" somewhat pins down what we're dealing with, which is try-hard and striving and not indicative of any innate talent at staging action-based thrills, and also something very comfortable aping other filmmakers who do have that talent. It's not the worst thing about the movie, but what might be the most just-plain-irritating is the announcement of onscreen "chapters" in what's a practically real-time story that takes place largely on a single stretch of rural Finland, and involves a screenplay that may have had more "chapters" than pages. It even goes for Tarantino in the design of its text, with backlit fuzziness that says, "I have seen Quentin Tarantino's evocation of war movies, though I've obviously never actually seen so much as <i>Where Eagles Dare</i> for myself, because then I'd have realized I wasn't even exploiting the violent possibilities of a pickaxe to their greatest effect."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That gets us right to "action," and while "characters" are where <i>Sisu</i> gets a half point instead of nothing, "characters" and "action" are so inseparable in their failures here that it's probably just best to treat them together. Of course, it isn't any kind of sin for an action movie's action and characterization to be nearly coterminous, so <i>Sisu</i> isn't doing anything too wrong on that count, and I would go so far as to say that the hardbitten performances of its two leads, Tommilla and Henie, are some of the best assets Helander had at his disposal, between the two of them almost dragging this nonsense into a tale of survival, greed, and fundamental amorality that would've fit the spaghetti Western war movie Helander wants it to look like. (The terseness is probably the biggest way it legitimately resembles the <i>Wick</i> films.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The movie Helander <i>made</i>, though, is basically a series of responses to the prompt "so what stupid-as-fuck thing that we won't bother trying to massage into any kind of intellectual or even emotional plausibility should we do next?" There's been violence beforehand, but the first major sequence that pits Korpi against Helldorf really sums up what the movie will be like going forward: it starts out well enough, with the tactical complication of a minefield between Korpi and the Nazis (why, even bringing into play something bad the Germans actually did to Finland, their mines managing to occasionally kill unlucky Laplanders well into the next decade); and long story short, it climaxes with Korpi having somehow figured out how to <i>throw</i> one of these landmines at a Nazi pursuer. Now, it's not completely opaque: he dug it out of the ground with his mining pan. I will leave aside that I cannot for a second believe this is how landmines work, and I've certainly never seen another movie hero attempt digging a landmine up in four inches of earth with a plate and throwing it away. Counterfactuality is not the core issue, really; it's that the shot-to-shot action storytelling does not even give me a chance to believe it, to identify with Korpi's resourcefulness, or to get us to a place where this was now, simultaneously, the surprising <i>and</i> inevitable outcome of the scene. Maybe more than anything else I've mentioned, <i>Sisu</i> owes its biggest debt to Spielberg's masterpieces of cartoon Nazi-killing, <i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i> and <i>Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I desperately wish its debt were even bigger.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The best work it ever manages is openly ripping off the chase from <i>Raiders</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>should I be clearer, and say "the second time it rips off the chase from <i>Raiders</i>?"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>featuring a bit of tank action from <i>Last Crusade</i>, except it's completely B-movie in ability to render spectacle, and even more disappointingly it feels so <i>utterly</i> linear, both in terms of its physical geography (it is on a road, though that didn't stop Spielberg), and narrative complexity. That's ultimately what makes <i>Sisu</i> pointless beyond a gore shock here, or a neat idea about a tank gun barrel poking into the women's truck there<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>once you crack its "what would be stupid and break any sense of immersion" story engine, it doesn't have that many surprises anymore, and the ones it does have are bad (once it arrives at the "plane" part of its <i>Raiders</i> template, it truly does feel like the mission was "make it completely moronic, then also have a climactic fistfight that's been edited to be as slow and tiresome as possible, then have something happen that's so moronic that you can't believe it, like you literally can't believe that Helander thinks his movie would be cooler if his hero didn't even bother trying to level out the plane"). It gets where it needs to go by virtue of having some extraordinarily bad villainy, in the sense of its villains being very bad <i>at</i> it; its hyper-cruel Germans more-or-less deliberately fail to kill Korpi a few times to keep the movie from ending prematurely (it even has access to a semi-credible reason for them to take Korpi alive<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"he knows where the gold <i>is</i>"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that it never actually seems aware it could have used), and of course they are all expert marksmen when they sociopathically gun down their own, while remaining steadfastly unable to shoot in Korpi's general direction when they fire at him. And Korpi is too <i>good</i> at it, just this entirely frictionless object that no stakes can ever attach to, for whom, even if Helander could've afforded more extras, the whole damn 6. SS-Gebirgs-Division could not have posed a greater threat. Which is like if you had an Indiana Jones movie described to you secondhand by someone who did not understand Indiana Jones movies.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I mean, he often gets "hurt," in some notional way. He gets wounded. He even gets captured. I said, in the plot summary, he gets killed, and I wasn't<i> joking</i>. He gets <i>killed</i>. He gets killed <i>three times</i>. Helander has placed at the core of his movie a guy for whom getting shot or stabbed can't actually matter, because he could lose all his blood, and <i>that</i> wouldn't matter<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for he has clearly established that his hero does not even need to breathe in the first place. And it's boring. This movie about Nazis getting blown up is <i>fucking boring</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 5/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*One thing the movie gets right is the Germans' scorched earth tactics on their withdrawal. Look up "German war crimes Lapland War" and you can find out how many houses they tore down, and that this could possibly be the <i>emphasis</i> kind of tells you what you need to know about the Lapland War and its context within World War II.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Cf. the DC-3 we get later on, which is then mostly or entirely CGI anyway. The hell? Did they not have an off-the-shelf Ju 52 model at the VFX store or what?</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-80585548405552390452024-01-09T09:16:00.041-11:002024-02-09T23:10:23.106-11:00Yeah? Well, I'm gonna go make my own Blade Runner, with blackjack, and hookers<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsK4wwgb6WPXSrKtxk8Z56ruFMMEqSwF7igsEmEJS3uMia64RIAsXyDVcRwb4SU7SJ2Q9JvhddDz8fNHy3OgCb50rDIsWgfhQGgqLPmxp1YXLyaQfR_kjlWsLxURUNBhuL0_kIOEBt_rv4-rfT5gqOyBiz5UikgTnvIoj0bm4qMOykzkm2yY2w1rHoSi-p/s682/TheCreator1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="682" data-original-width="474" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsK4wwgb6WPXSrKtxk8Z56ruFMMEqSwF7igsEmEJS3uMia64RIAsXyDVcRwb4SU7SJ2Q9JvhddDz8fNHy3OgCb50rDIsWgfhQGgqLPmxp1YXLyaQfR_kjlWsLxURUNBhuL0_kIOEBt_rv4-rfT5gqOyBiz5UikgTnvIoj0bm4qMOykzkm2yY2w1rHoSi-p/w278-h400/TheCreator1.jpg" width="278" /></a></div><br />THE CREATOR</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Directed by Gareth Edwards</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written by Chris Weitz and Gareth Edwards</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkJtXLFf81I7Fe5HHfmU0p_ZK3qLFTy7SPQe0QTBWHL6WOrU3VhvScCUK7r3a-maicwBGX7Bol2j6dxGAA2bUzysaaOTdhyyqLO3dIkvS-gn3TU1nnsdF_n3Obsi2DjCnGrzgc0SaF-D3S-oizi8Qo6LzzraSLE_FuIXSDu-YFf08-vff1KLfQ4fA90aKz/s2160/TheCreator2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="2160" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkJtXLFf81I7Fe5HHfmU0p_ZK3qLFTy7SPQe0QTBWHL6WOrU3VhvScCUK7r3a-maicwBGX7Bol2j6dxGAA2bUzysaaOTdhyyqLO3dIkvS-gn3TU1nnsdF_n3Obsi2DjCnGrzgc0SaF-D3S-oizi8Qo6LzzraSLE_FuIXSDu-YFf08-vff1KLfQ4fA90aKz/w400-h144/TheCreator2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />We can be too ready to extend sympathy to the hardscrabble underdog, and I at least wish people could fake it better. Case in point, <i>The Creator</i>, which has earned Gareth Edwards a heap of praise that's backhanded as all hell, expressing satisfaction that, seven years after he quietly exited <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-presence-ive-not-felt-since.html">Rogue One</a></i> during its post-production, he could come to some kind of rapprochement with Disney by way of 20th Century Studios to make a new movie that managed to approach tentpole levels of special effects on a budget of only $80 million. Certainly, this much praise is due: Edwards ran a tight ship, marshaling location shooting and practical sets, and, as for this director's particular calling card, the CGI, <i>The Creator</i> was obviously made with the discipline you'd expect from a guy who once did a whole movie's VFX on his personal laptop, sticking to the storyboards of the shots and the pre-visualization of the VFX rather than sending the VFX companies a stack of uncontracted-for surprises to "fix" (plus, so I've heard, there are actually fewer VFX shots than it feels like while you're watching it). All of this stands in repudiation of the modern ethos of remaking movies three or four times while in the middle of shooting them, which is maybe the single biggest reason that so many Disney and Warners special effects tentpoles wind up looking like trash, being dumb as fuck, and feeling like the same old shit you've seen before, despite costing $200 million apiece. So Edwards does deserve some backhanded congratulations for boldly proving the proposition that, in 2023, you actually could still make a special effects tentpole that's dumb as fuck and feels like the same old shit<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and even looks okay!<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>for <i>way</i> less than $200 million.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">To be clear: I don't despise <i>The Creator</i> for being same-old. "So <i>this</i> is 'original'?" is not the sarcastic question I'm going to build an argument around, nor am I going to make strained puns about whether <i>The Creator</i> is all that creative. (I'm not even going to ponder whether its standard approach to its standard subject<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>how readily humans can fall short of humanity when they're threatened, in this case by the machines we've made in our image<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>might've been ill-timed, arriving in the same year that "actual" AI, that is, programs capable of slopping words and pictures together just like a real boy, began to manifest a legitimate threat to human livelihoods. I'll only spare a moment to remark how utterly stuck in a future past this makes <i>The Creator</i> feel.) "Unoriginality" simply can't be the priority here, though, even if that complaint is damn near objectively valid, so that the film's single most interesting visuals are just inversions of one of James Cameron's more horrifying images, asking "what if the giant genocide tanks were the humans rather than Skynet, and, also, if the US Army switched its font to Helvetica?" Heady stuff, but no: it's not that I've seen so many versions of this before. It's not even that I've seen <i>better</i> versions. It's that this version <i>sucks so much</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb4sIacG2Ro_6zydDT8FuXVogtez3EHko0Oanuk_8GGP-sf2-sZmh_P2nXu7IQnOESYpZTDSYmNWzGc9cothfXWhZ7F8_YLNfOBmrSLsr0tp2zU4zuLsKf01TjQPOJuSc-ufmLW5DaR_TMM-gOda2nOIjo51e7tb3CUn4SA796aSvZjH-k98nTKUsQ3TBJ/s960/TheCreator3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="346" data-original-width="960" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb4sIacG2Ro_6zydDT8FuXVogtez3EHko0Oanuk_8GGP-sf2-sZmh_P2nXu7IQnOESYpZTDSYmNWzGc9cothfXWhZ7F8_YLNfOBmrSLsr0tp2zU4zuLsKf01TjQPOJuSc-ufmLW5DaR_TMM-gOda2nOIjo51e7tb3CUn4SA796aSvZjH-k98nTKUsQ3TBJ/w400-h144/TheCreator3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />So: in some near-future year, humanoid robots are more-or-less perfected, and they begin to take their place in society. Some time passes during Edwards's introduction to his world, a montage that's probably my favorite thing in his movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I'm not sure it actually helps settle you <i>into</i> it, because if anything it's disorienting, pitched as retro-futurist kitsch within the formal signifiers of mid-20th century industrial propaganda<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but the frictions between robots and humans increase, until the robots drop a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles. Well, take <i>that</i>, Adam Conover.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">America (referred to as "the West," but they mean "America") declares AI illegal. But it's already proliferated, and while <i>The Creator</i> is distractingly, deafeningly silent on how the rest of the world responds in its bid to keep its story as featurelessly smooth as the surface of a windless pond, the recently-confederated states of "New Asia" instead embrace AI, leading to an American... invasion? Let's get back to it. Whatever it is, America sends Sgt. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) on a deep undercover mission to get close to "Nirmata"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>"the Creator"<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>a pro-AI terrorist scientist. Thus does he seduce Nirmata's daughter Maya (Gemma Chan), even wedding her and impregnating her. The other shoe drops: in an operation gone wrong, Joshua loses his wife and his unborn child to his own side, and subsequently spends a further set of years stewing in grief and resentment until he is again asked by his country (mainly Allison Janney) to take another crack. The deal is sweetened by the revelation that Maya didn't die. And so Joshua accompanies the mission to a secret New Asian science base, but he finds neither Nirmata nor Maya there; what he discovers instead is the creature he'll dub "Alfie" (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), bearing the seemingly-innocuous form of a human child yet possessed of great power<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the robots' ultimate weapon. Joshua only cares about Maya, so he takes the "child" for himself to get to her. But, along the way, is it possible that Joshua will find his humanity in this machine?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgffJdBvBjZNkEj1aV7mNNzkHz4WAS9rYbiAdlf8YdoljyhZEREJJI1t3G3qV9jgnRu_awVYF5A7pz43FilYBuLsFl3DaRRtxyyk2ckDlDlNslz6hxUrlXh7bJbqmS8bntxVv8AEq0FQRyL51EdFGhRrKzOtdsd_vbMdn-hruSGjXr_M7ZvqYSaTTik_Hi/s992/TheCreator4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="992" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgffJdBvBjZNkEj1aV7mNNzkHz4WAS9rYbiAdlf8YdoljyhZEREJJI1t3G3qV9jgnRu_awVYF5A7pz43FilYBuLsFl3DaRRtxyyk2ckDlDlNslz6hxUrlXh7bJbqmS8bntxVv8AEq0FQRyL51EdFGhRrKzOtdsd_vbMdn-hruSGjXr_M7ZvqYSaTTik_Hi/w400-h146/TheCreator4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Yes, it's possible, though until the last four sentences, I was dealing with the first five minutes, which wins <i>The Creator</i> points for efficiency, at the cost of being slightly confusing, which isn't that a big deal, and of suggesting a <i>much</i> more interesting movie that's ended before this one properly begins, which is. The "confusing" part isn't just how it's told, however, but <i>what's</i> being told, and it kicks off pretty much as soon as backstory starts being laid out, beginning with the absolute refusal by Edwards and co-writer Chris Weitz to contemplate any of the various questions that are already popping into your head ("send someone who speaks a local language or would at least be willing to learn one? that's just what they'd be expecting us to do!"), and even the huge question, "what draws Maya and Joshua together?" is answered with a film-encompassing null response. This isn't the sensation you want from your transportive science fiction film<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that the movie is built completely out of questions that never occurred to its screenwriters<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and it only accelerates. You could shout yourself <i>sick</i> declaring your Butlerian jihad on <i>The Creator</i>: this isn't, as is often the case in sci-fi, simply the one big stupid thing that you need to get past to enjoy it. I don't know if it'd be enjoyable in any case. But the stupid things just never <i>stop</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don't like to use superlatives, but it's awfully hard to think of a more sputteringly-incomprehensible work of sci-fi world-building, certainly not one that simultaneously wants you to notice its world-building above all else, but also seems so amazingly disinterested in its substance. It's capable solely of <i>evoking</i>, and the emptiness beneath those evocations is palpable. Edwards, for instance, is thunderingly proud of his big-ass symbol for American imperialism, the USS <i>ACRONYM</i> (or <i>NOMAD</i>, and I hate it, especially when "USS <i>Shangri-La</i>" is sitting there collecting dust). It's an orbital missile platform, calculated to trigger visual associations with a B-2 (or Super Star Destroyer), except thousands of times larger (than the B-2, that is), so large that despite being all the way out in space it looms in the sky like a floating mountain. And, like, I'm not even going to mention that this is a ridiculously silly idea, because I will accept that it looks cool. But I am going to be bored if looking cool in the same way, over and over, is <i>it</i>, and that "looking cool" represents the very maximum extent (not, for that matter, even the usual extent!) of Edwards's imagination regarding the shape of future geopolitics, despite his movie being 131 minutes of future geopolitics. 131 minutes, and yet I do not know what this "war" <i>is</i>, or even if it's "a war." New Asia doesn't <i>treat</i> it like a war. When the Americans land in the environs of Alfie's base<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>boasting an absence of support that already makes it feel decidedly low-intensity<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>they're met by the <i>police</i>. At no point does New Asia appear to even have a military. At <i>numerous</i> points, I asked my screen what was happening, sometimes more forcefully than others, like when Edwards left it up to some geographically-whimsical VFX artist to define the borders of New Asia, terminating, curiously, halfway through Uttar Pradesh. There's a part where a random motorist gives this obvious American soldier a lift to town in his family van. "What does <i>this guy</i> think the political situation is?" I wondered, and I suppose I will continue wondering, insofar as the connective tissue that should bridge this scene to the next is replaced by editing so clumsy that I earnestly thought the Hulu presentation had accidentally skipped a scene.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's so unbearably muddled, and that muddling attaches to every second we spend in this so-called "New Asia," this phony-ass political entity that is never resolved into a peer adversary like China, or a client state like the Republic of Vietnam, or a resentful quasi-ally like Pakistan, or even just a plain-and-simple fucking <i>place</i>, rather than just this sterilized mush of Vietnam War movie images that, sometimes, have robots in them. My kneejerk response to that is "wow, these sure are some up-to-the-minute references," though one's annoyance with it runs deeper.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBcJ95t-KPTBSfgNkNvuq9ZWltqyI54wR8N3op_8CLrXBBvUN0ioKJJmsC631itfulsQH9VWgtMC5PHWwPZ5x5LJvNV8tLiluispgm_1NAxZm7MdG3O_Y0XQnNpHoPzp8foJNrhgooXTLU2Q_v2Atd00Wl0wmgrTT3-fNScH1Qu-oTMu8VraRK8vBIEXWa/s820/TheCreator5.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="820" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBcJ95t-KPTBSfgNkNvuq9ZWltqyI54wR8N3op_8CLrXBBvUN0ioKJJmsC631itfulsQH9VWgtMC5PHWwPZ5x5LJvNV8tLiluispgm_1NAxZm7MdG3O_Y0XQnNpHoPzp8foJNrhgooXTLU2Q_v2Atd00Wl0wmgrTT3-fNScH1Qu-oTMu8VraRK8vBIEXWa/w400-h144/TheCreator5.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />This is before we get into the appropriateness of this allegory: AI and automation are, after all, actual things that have their own real-world consequences; and I could go on for a little while about how bizarre it is that Edwards fixed on Vietnam instead of, oh golly, I don't know, Japan, a county that has offered up a whole array of sci-fi templates we could use regarding how their culture relates to technology (whereas it also offers up this movie its most important Robo Cong fighter, in the form of a potentially never-more-ineffective Ken Watanabe), and it does all this without ever once seeming <i>interested</i> in its setting beyond postcard images. And that's one of the shittiest moves <i>The Creator</i> makes: it does not, in fact, have a vision for "New Asia," nor a vision for how or why these cultures, or even a made-up movie culture, have managed to forge an alliance with AI, or what "an alliance with AI" <i>means</i>, so indifferent to exploring this that you could just as easily assume the New Asians were terrorized into compliance by AI, or just managed to keep them enslaved, or opted for a "well, the scorpion probably won't sting <i>my </i>back" betrayal of humankind. (It's eventually revealed that the L.A. nuke <span style="background-color: #444444;">was a human coding error</span>, whatever <i>that</i> means, and while the person who reveals this would not seem to have any way of knowing this, and would be biased enough to spin a conspiracy theory, what no one contradicting him means is that we can't even have <i>that </i>much complexity.) I'm pretty sure, anyway, that <i>human</i> Asians in this movie have a quarter as many lines as robots pretending to be Asians, and that's not necessarily bad, but it underscores how <i>The Creator</i> exists solely for the superficialities of robots dressed in human faces, human clothes, human cultural signifiers, and human religions. "Robots are Buddhists." That's an<i> </i>idea! You now have as complete an understanding of what that idea entails as if you'd watched this whole movie.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, <i>The Creator</i>'s robots can be just folks quite readily, because it never actually treats them as anything <i>else</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>airgapped bipedal criers who eat ice cream, <i>so just fucking people</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and so we might have the single least imaginative movie about robots ever made. I don't know why we built these robots, because they're as useless as human beings. There's a part where another American soldier wrestles a robot, mano a mano, and the soldier wins. The most "robotic" thing about the supposedly respected cyber-citizens of New Asia is that they're built with off-buttons.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And all that, that's top-level, <i>conceptual</i> stuff, not even getting into form or action movie bona fides, let alone story; but that's the exhaustingly shallow experience <i>The Creator </i>is, its own Cinema Sins video. So, form: there's <i>sort-of</i> a bright spot here, in Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer's cinematography, caveated by Edwards's arbitrary decision to shoot his film in the unusual 2.76:1 Ultra Panavision ratio, and the results are not <i><a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/02/i-tell-you-theyre-drunk-with-religion.html">Ben-Hur</a></i> or <i><a href="http://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/09/g-d-week-truly-this-man-was-son-of-god.html">The Greatest Story Ever Told</a></i>, with Edwards rarely modifying any of his 2023-standard blocking and shot scales to compose for an old-fashioned aspect ratio. Its squashed thinness winds up an active detriment, given the preponderance of basic, not-especially-well-framed close-ups and shot/reverse-shot conversations; I watched it on a television, but it's detrimental in ways that go beyond the hyper-letterboxing, considering how <i>much</i> I noticed it. Edwards's reason was likely <i>NOMAD</i>, its wide, thin menace going well with that wide, thin slice of screen; but it doesn't work on behalf of much else. (Edwards's historical talent for iconic imagery is really not much on display here.) The cinematography itself, however, <i>is</i> neat, a digital job that wants to evoke shot-on-film 70s and 80s movies about Vietnam, without pretending like <i>it's</i> been shot-on-film, so that the whole thing has this hot, metallic cast, a fine trick for a movie about future robots.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That's it for serious compliments about this movie, I'm afraid. As for the remainder of "form," we have the rest of the movie's design, and I feel that human-cyborg relations might be improved a skosh if the "simulants" just put full fucking skins on their heads, rather than walking around with big holes in their skulls in service to Edwards's try-hard uncanniness. Those vaunted visual effects are good, at least<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>we've got some solid-feeling robots here<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though I might be more impressed than anything by the way thunderclouds in the digital skies interact with the photography. As for "action filmmaking" and "story," though, they're heavily intertwined, and in baleful combat with each other, particularly in the way that Edwards's lazy construction of his story almost invariably makes his action-thrills worse (I already mentioned the robots having off-switches, but not that one of these robots is switched off while he's <i>sleeping</i>). Anyway, the average action scene will include at least one part where you yell "just shoot him already," and I believe I counted just the one action beat that felt inspired. It involves none of our principals, but a macaque. And it's filmed like a joke, in a movie that can't do jokes, or accommodate anything but the most po-faced tones, though, bless it, it sometimes tries.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">A lot of that action revolves around Alfie's powers<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>she's been given dominion over machines, and if you asked "oh, like she can hack the mainframes?", you're overthinking it, this sci-fi robot has magic, which she activates by making a "prayer" gesture that Edwards is fixated on and gets tedious by the second time he's shown it. The obligation to make a rollicking actioner out of this notionally-cerebral sci-fi meditation, however, means the story, or "story," has to be shoved into the smallest possible compartments. Take the thematic centerpiece of the film, showcased in the advertising, about heaven, good people, non-people: it comes out of precisely nowhere, and is exactly as long as it already was in the trailer. It's a special case of what's happening throughout, this "grand emotional journey" shoved brutishly through every one of its foreordained waystations exactly in the order and ways you expect. Clearly, there are an endless number of sentences I could write about this movie that begin, "I don't know," but the worst is "I don't know why he cares."</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I've never been in the anti-Washington camp (I liked him enough in <i><a href="https://www.kinemalogue.net/2020/12/its-expression-of-faith-in-mechanics-of.html">Tenet</a></i>, where he arguably has even less to do), but I'm wobbling. I don't even know what "good" would look like here, with the instrumentality that is Joshua; there are moments of levity, that don't really feel like they belong in this movie, but they're the moments where Washington's performance at least feels like it belongs in <i>a</i> movie. So Washington isn't selling me on caring, but neither is poor Voyles, who's modestly awful: she's so <i>cute</i>, and that in and of itself feels like Edwards giving up immediately on anything but the laziest version of this. "Don't you <i>empathize</i> with this thing that has the semblance of a child?" Exactly: this character and Voyles's performance of that character feels like a fucking <i>put-on</i>, the exact kind of thing an AI would do when it has an understanding of human stimulus response and no understanding of our bottomless capacity for paranoia and resentment. This is no Haley Joel Osment, who knew <a href="http://kinemalogue.blogspot.com/2016/04/steven-spielberg-part-xxv-i-am-i-was.html">how to be <i>a robot</i></a>, and I suspect Voyles would be cloying even if she were playing a girl. Even in the one real "acting" beat she ever gets, in the very final shot of the film, you can clearly perceive Edwards on the other side of the camera giving her prompts while she mirrors the showy, complex facial expressions he wants her to make. I don't want to rewrite this bad movie (I truly do not), but just making the weapon a duplicate of Maya might have at least begun to solve both the problem of the movie ignoring its own world-building and the problem of Joshua's absent personality. And while you might well say, "you want it to be about a robot duplicate of his dead wife? what a ridiculous cliche," <i>don't get ahead of yourself</i>. It's miraculous how continuously this movie's stupidity can escalate.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What this leaves is me wondering what this movie even does for 131 minutes. The insult that comes to mind, as boring and mechanical as the movie I just watched, is to ask if Gareth Edwards <i>really</i> put his money where his mouth is, and had an AI write his AI propaganda. And yeah, that joke's lousy. But, honestly, I'd respect his movie more if it were true.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 2/10</b></div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4633480297352890314.post-49924837157616628052024-01-01T03:47:00.035-11:002024-01-14T03:53:10.391-11:00The aristocrats!<div style="text-align: justify;"><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihwVfeiS9JUePb-3uv7FmqbidGpM101gl5c7p_Dds-Xq3cCd420T9eH_BQOGuu8kbq63NqJi-DxkmguiQaRm3uNSBUsQ8jQZXTKneO_3jzjcUi26VHW0P4Gw348suu4qYJOTUdY7C1W-iLE6sS3ue_GD0xBhg7M7e4JC3C4MEvRG2p3rGh6S4RyAVksi0V/s720/Saltburn1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="486" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihwVfeiS9JUePb-3uv7FmqbidGpM101gl5c7p_Dds-Xq3cCd420T9eH_BQOGuu8kbq63NqJi-DxkmguiQaRm3uNSBUsQ8jQZXTKneO_3jzjcUi26VHW0P4Gw348suu4qYJOTUdY7C1W-iLE6sS3ue_GD0xBhg7M7e4JC3C4MEvRG2p3rGh6S4RyAVksi0V/w270-h400/Saltburn1.png" width="270" /></a></div><br />SALTBURN</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>2023</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Written and directed by Emerald Fennell</i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>Spoilers: moderate<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdYXa2R3Heeq5rMTAp37cIWAwJDXvJUhBC69xlLxwKH8YEarzxm32NnL8gBuWl8eBj7smA6j7PKoK0ZgBTcpYl-uqGKbvSGZt4ZOLr3p9mooT0rlmnOoWYYBoU356YuqniK4UelBgBhC8IQAv3qzst7XOBMTELDiyASrQdPE2Lz6sv9L3UgCBc1TimE6Kr/s792/Saltburn4.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="528" data-original-width="792" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdYXa2R3Heeq5rMTAp37cIWAwJDXvJUhBC69xlLxwKH8YEarzxm32NnL8gBuWl8eBj7smA6j7PKoK0ZgBTcpYl-uqGKbvSGZt4ZOLr3p9mooT0rlmnOoWYYBoU356YuqniK4UelBgBhC8IQAv3qzst7XOBMTELDiyASrQdPE2Lz6sv9L3UgCBc1TimE6Kr/s320/Saltburn4.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />By the time I've gotten around to it, <i>Saltburn</i> has already proven itself<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and I expect I'll wonder forever and ever how <i>this</i> could have happened to <i>this</i> movie<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>to be one of the more divisive efforts of the awards seasons of 2023, with two camps forming on the film, split between proponents, who don't always make the best case for it on account of often being teenagers, as normal as you find these days, who enjoyed the grandly superficial sordidness of its young adult melodramatics, and say things like "hell yeah I'd drink the cum out of his bathwater," and detractors, who latch onto complaints that I think they've largely invented, or at least exist mostly to the side of the movie itself.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Those complaints will vary in their priority by the person making them, though people who <b>hate</b> <i>Saltburn</i> will usually get to every last one of them if you have the patience to wait<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>it's not about <i>class</i> right; it's not <i>gay</i> right; it's <i>just</i> a movie version of a [reference to Internet phenomena such as "Instagram mood boards" that I neither understand nor care to, except to perceive it's plainly gender-coded]; its maker comes from <i>a privileged background</i>, unlike most Hollywood filmmakers, who, as we all know, are otherwise all hardscrabble refugees from the global south; worse than that, it not merely fails to be mind-blowingly original, it's <i>directly comparable to several other movies made in the past hundred years</i><span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but what is absolutely clear from all this is that I did myself and, it seems, <i>Saltburn</i>'s writer-director Emerald Fennell a real favor here, by never bothering to watch her Oscar-nominated debut feature, 2021's <i>Promising Young Woman</i>, because I thought it sounded obnoxious. Yet because everyone, to this day, has been incredibly cavalier about spoiling <i>everything</i> that happens in that movie (they're incredibly cavalier about this one, too, not even treating it like a movie you might see, and again, I really, really, really wonder why), I acquired what I thought was a pretty good sense of how the rape-revengey <i>Promising Young Woman</i> "subverted" its genre mostly how a smart-alec kid might do while idly pitching joke ideas to their stoned friends, along the lines of, "lol, what if, instead of super-powers, Spider-Man got cancer?" Didn't sound interesting to me at the time and, frankly, it still doesn't.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The stumbling block that Fennell seems to have chucked into her own path<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>besides deciding in her mother's ampulla to have a vagina, in case I've been too subtle about that<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>is that she built a reputation on being the writer-director who makes Oscar-grasping social statements, and while I don't think <i>Saltburn</i> is devoid of such things, it seems a lot more like a sophomore filmmaker who'd kickstarted a career by telling you to eat your vegetables and do your homework (and, presumably, not rape people), but now, having acquired notoriety the 2020s way, she wanted to do something actually fun, under the impression that this would be allowed. Well, let's take it as we find it: the goal here, I think, was to pitch some red meat to an audience raised on teen soaps and slash fiction<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>now <i>I'm</i> gender-coding it, but I'm not using it as a cudgel, am I?<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the college-aged erotic thriller thing she made is not, it's true, any profound statement on society, though I strongly suspect it has some autobiographical resonance with Oxford-educated Fennell herself, in ways prone to be misinterpreted. I'm open to correction here if I don't understand the English class system that well myself, but it seems like there's a serious tendency (born out of the usual "not liking a movie means the movie is <i>counter-revolutionary</i>" logic we all love to see) to switch around whom Fennell, the daughter of a successful artisan and entrepreneur*, would "be" in her story, if it is indeed "about" her in any way, on account of many Americans refusing to understand class except in simplified, American terms.**</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFIZVg_1UZbYbP4yyFQKW6G4SeYsKMtXNTv6I-GHRUogmln1gYjfADm0PLHGKvYOSp9bGu07liiJGrmR0Pkp5i7cxpKTuQERMKw8bI1OKvKY0RbUmqAg020_1gBmv6pBG9lFh7sqydVGIzijnmTjkvuJC3tXBgiptBeq8waQ-NFcwL_p-RUUIvS73x9Eet/s600/Saltburn3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFIZVg_1UZbYbP4yyFQKW6G4SeYsKMtXNTv6I-GHRUogmln1gYjfADm0PLHGKvYOSp9bGu07liiJGrmR0Pkp5i7cxpKTuQERMKw8bI1OKvKY0RbUmqAg020_1gBmv6pBG9lFh7sqydVGIzijnmTjkvuJC3tXBgiptBeq8waQ-NFcwL_p-RUUIvS73x9Eet/s320/Saltburn3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Now, yes, it does have its real problems. But for now, let's meet Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a young man graduating from Oxford in 2006 (and we'll get the not-really-a-big-problem out the way, namely that, at any closer than fifty paces, Keoghan is very visibly not 22). Both ill-schooled in the ways of the upper crust and kind of a dweeb on his merits, he's failed pretty comprehensively at fitting in with his new milieu, until by an act of, let's say, kindness, he ingratiates himself to Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the Ferris Bueller of Oxford, Oliver's crush and so much more than that word "crush" could imply. He attaches himself to Felix with as much lamprey strength as he possesses, despite Felix already beginning to tire of the obligation he represents, and despite the unconcealed disdain and bigotry of all of Felix's established friends, including both of Felix's girlfriends and his half-American cousin, Farleigh (Archie Medekwe). It's only through pure pity, engendered by the death of Oliver's father, that Oliver manages to secure an invitation to summer at Felix's aristocratic abode, the titular Saltburn, a vast estate out in the country somewhere (presumably played by one of those museum houses where the British state keeps its more decadent aristocrats like a declining species in a nature preserve). There Oliver makes the acquaintance of Felix's mother Elsmuth (Rosamund Pike) and father Sir James (Richard E. Grant) and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), and renews the enmity of Farleigh, and appears to only not elicit cartoonishly large eyerolls from the butler Duncan (Paul Rhys) because Duncan is too professional to do so to Oliver's face. But he does manage to make himself <i>just</i> likeable enough to the family to, ultimately, do some real damage.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So this is likely to remind you of a number of things, but that's alright, that's what "genre" means. Where <i>Saltburn</i> does bog down, a little, is that it is<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>rather deliberately<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>reluctant to choose what genre it actually is, or at least it's reluctant to devote itself to it. It was never going to be a surprise where this ends up, and, in fairness, that's never what Fennell is attempting to do anyway<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>the movie has a (sparingly-used) framing device, wherein Keoghan almost mockingly tells us we <i>shouldn't</i> be surprised<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>but Fennell has, nevertheless, elected to structure her movie around the idea that, theoretically, you <i>could</i> be surprised. And you know what? In a vacuum, I'll happily spot her this. After all, one of the least likeable things genre can do is not actually bother pretending you've haven't seen it all before, and Fennell makes some <i>herculean</i> efforts to pretend, withholding enormous amounts of information on behalf of several twists in service to one big twist, some of which are genuine surprises on their own, but the overall shape of which isn't even really close.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's disagreeably artificial in its manufacture as a result, and this isn't nothing, though maybe the bigger issue is that a long stretch of the movie is spent sort of just... meandering through its characters and setting and not-quite-a-plot-yet, attempting to maneuver between fully three different modes<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>college sex comedy, sour class satire, and gonzo psychological thriller<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>while looking and feeling pretty much exclusively like the latter two, and mostly just the thriller even then (and if that implies <i>Saltburn</i> isn't funny, by all means it <i>can</i> be funny, but probably less so than I think it wants to be, and much more smirkingly than uproariously when it is). Still, some of this is even a good thing, as Fennell wants to capture a miserable college experience giving way to a languid, horny summer in an evil castle, and this is a vibe she and her photographer, Linus Sandgren, successfully seize upon. And <i>Saltburn</i> looks positively terrific: presented in a curious 1.33:1 ratio that has its strengths<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>emphasizing faces, and emphasizing even more the headspace often found above those faces, with empty stretches of frame that are not to all tastes, but I think do get across a nice, hanging sense of doom<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>and the real star is Sandgren's lighting, which ranges from cozily tasteful to phantasmogorically lurid over the course of the film, and at every turn manifesting as luxury porn that's hollow and spiritually ugly but still sells the obsessive desire to have it. (I wish Fennell and Sandgren were less afraid of deep focus two-shots, but it's 2023 and we don't get to have those so much anymore.) Editor Victoria Boydell, for her part, is remarkably good at keeping this snappy even when the screenplay is not being snappy, and flagging in the middle stretch.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhahXlTJclydkmjGQ4YUDwNoowvzNE88Yk979lXa-nwRqqNb66DzDWgAKSB-s76uvWHC62b6HDWLabTaYAnxGiN6w8v1v1Hshdg-fonhJ0ZWG_55xqevL1FRP-tkqU0R7nUlqNED4DIzzU4v7nNwrRIcIUXs9bvjbpfGxpgFijrkt7OzjQ8TWrl9TmdADY/s1068/Saltburn2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="801" data-original-width="1068" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhahXlTJclydkmjGQ4YUDwNoowvzNE88Yk979lXa-nwRqqNb66DzDWgAKSB-s76uvWHC62b6HDWLabTaYAnxGiN6w8v1v1Hshdg-fonhJ0ZWG_55xqevL1FRP-tkqU0R7nUlqNED4DIzzU4v7nNwrRIcIUXs9bvjbpfGxpgFijrkt7OzjQ8TWrl9TmdADY/s320/Saltburn2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Which is as much to say, <i>Saltburn</i> demonstrably doesn't need <i>all</i> of that screenplay to get to where Fennell wants it to go, and some of it is outright begging to be cut, though I suppose that even two people who both liked the movie might well fail to agree on precisely what. (For example, <i>I</i> would not dream of cutting one of the more textured moments, found in a montage, wherein Oliver, despite being by any metric a more diligent student, is completely ignored, in favor of Farleigh's more sparkling personality and more noble heritage, by their <i>literature tutor</i>; whereas you might dispute my own preference to cast into nameless oblivion every last trace of Oliver's twerpish "real" friend at Oxford (Ewan Mitchell), whom we are invited to understand on some intellectual level has been "betrayed" when Oliver joins up with the Plastics, but is such an atrocious little pill of a person that I can't imagine anyone watching this actually countenancing the possibility of hanging out with him themselves, or not rooting for Oliver to escape him.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Fennell has sensed that this absence of shape has given her a movie a shambling quality that, let's be real here, could even get boring, given the intentional emptiness of these characters. She has a plan for this contingency: during the middle hour of this 131 minute movie that undoubtedly didn't need to be more than 110, about every fifteen of them she inflicts something <i>weird</i> and <i>provocative</i> onto the film, at something like a right angle to it. And, in the absence of a tighter structure, they do feel a bit like weird provocation for its own sake<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>that is, goosing you into continuing to pay attention and remembering the "cool" parts after the movie's over<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>though I generally like these gestures because I do, in fact, like to remember cool parts. Given that the other mode of criticism this movie has garnered can be boiled down to "a bunch of virgins on the Internet sneering about how this movie didn't <i>shock</i> them," I'm willing to appreciate that "secretly watching your crush masturbate into his bathwater and slurping the drain after he's left" is, indeed, both weird <i>and</i> provocative, though I admit I had expected this scene to be cummier. (Then again, a similar, less-talked-about scene for our evil bisexual<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>not that "bisexual" is the proper framing, almost to the point of it being disingenuous<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>involves so much blood the question becomes "<span style="background-color: #444444;">wait, are you on your period or are you having a miscarriage</span>?") I don't adore, however, how much this can feel like this has been imposed upon the proceedings: there can be some massive lurches between the film's two distinct energy levels, "slightly heightened" and "fully abnormal," and while it finally arrives upon "fully abnormal" all the time, this is possibly not until the very last shot (but it's a tremendously <i>long</i> last shot, that earns every second of it). At last, <i>Saltburn</i> feels absolutely in tune with its purpose, and this is in part because <i>Saltburn</i> has by this point spent the previous twenty minutes barfing up its non-secrets. Maybe it's the only way it could've had the giddy impact it does, I don't know; but a <i>whole</i> movie that had the same loopiness that Fennell hits us with for her "<i>Risky Business</i> ain't got nothing on me" finale would have been a movie I'd be bouncing off the walls to tell you about, rather than just something I'm warmly disposed to.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So that's the effect that this somewhat cumbersome narrative gambit has, but the intent (again, largely theoretically) is to keep you from fixating on the streak of nastiness that Oliver has that's at least every bit as wide as his aristocratic targets. The idea that this was hidden became deeply notional (and I would have to assume Fennell was completely aware of this) the instant Barry Keoghan showed up on screen, which is partly why I'm of two minds about it: I respect the strategy, but I don't know if it was ever necessary. Keoghan always remains, despite his Keoghan-y unctuousness, exactly sympathetic enough to keep him an ideal vehicle for irresponsible, antisocial fantasy and for the relatability of inwardly wishing all sorts of unspeakable horrors upon people for purely social slights<span face="Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 13px;">—</span>I think Keoghan is positively great here, for the record, perhaps fittingly the only member of the cast whose performance fully extends beyond a stereotyped sketch, even if fundamentally Oliver shouldn't be able to do that (arguably Elordi does, too, but only in that his dream bro is so gauzy in Oliver's view that he can't quite be called "a sketch of an aristocratic asshole barely even trying to conceal that any politeness to Oliver isn't self-regarding noblesse oblige," and so can therefore manage the occasional human semblance). Keoghan, anyway, is game enough to make something very natural to his character out of even the most insectoid paces that Fennell puts him through in pursuit of all those "be weird, provoke somebody!" flourishes that keep the audience's blood up during the slow patches.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">And so that's <i>my</i> biggest complaint: that Fennell should have trusted in Keoghan and in Oliver's freakish appeal, since that's so clearly where her instincts lay, anyhow. (I've had an argument about this, but up until a certain point, the bad things he does are still painfully understandable and human. And I think I can make a cogent argument that shoving the more minor transgressions into a <i>Usual Suspects</i> explainer module at the end indicates a certain calculation, basically an escape hatch for Fennell to take so she could hide in "ah, you thought he was the hero? no, it's <i>all</i> satire.") Anyway, this is especially true given that, unless I miss my mark very badly, these are funhouse mirror reflections of her own resentments and insecurities as a perfectly well-off kid who found herself surrounded by literal lords in her own youth, these resentments and insecurities now offered in a gender-swapped package for the extra fun of playing around with a masculinized version of a typically feminine dynamic, all channeled through a scenario that at least makes a case for the immensity of Oliver's vengefulness against people who have never seen him as human, so at some point he's made the decision to stop being one. I wish the movie <i>were</i> as ruthless as Oliver, but I like what we got.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Score: 7/10</b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">*A designer of fancy spoons, apparently. Um, whatever. I really have no idea how rich her family is, but there's a strain of hostility that treats Fennell as some unholy combo of Tori Spelling and Elon Musk, and I'm very sure that's not fair. Meanwhile, and I don't want to make this a text version of a grueling YouTube video essay, but if one accepts that women have a harder time of it in the industry, then one would expect (though I don't even know if this is statistically true) the ones who make it would come from comparatively privileged backgrounds. So, like, just fucking chill out.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">**Which means they oversimplify American class too, but that's way beyond our ambit here.</div>Hunter Allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10925220178171355473noreply@blogger.com0