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haven-of-dusk · 2 months

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It's in the AM now, so it's time for me to pull out the basically fanfiction plot I thought up way back when Descendants: Rise of Red was announced and present it as though anyone cares. Need to put this weird early morning energy somewhere.

Principal Cast: Returning: Mal, Evie, Ben, Uma, Lonnie, Red (sort of, I wrote this before I knew anything about her personality since I came up with it back when all that was known was the title of the movie. New Principal Characters: Kivuli - Scar's child (can be either gender) that even Scar didn't know about. Has since grown up with the Hyenas (who have reformed significantly, though are still treated harshly by the lions) Taa - Simba's youngest, formed a close friendship with Kivuli despite their family history and the gap of years between them. Krys - Elsa's son of an unknown source. Was raised entirely by Anna and Kristoff as Elsa vanished into the Enchanted Forest a long time ago before Krys was born and Krys' exact origin is unknown (and also thus Elsa could still totally be queer and Disney wouldn't have to show it). Inherited a literally watered down version of his mother's powers (hydrokinesis) that gets stronger and more like his mother as the film continues. Coronus - Son of Hercules and Megara, formed a very close bond with Krys that blossoms into romance. Also the brawn to Krys' brain. Jack - Son of the Queen of Hearts. Has lost his sanity after being imprisoned in Wonderland with his mother. For Auradon it was 25 years. For him, who knows... Evan - The elder son of the Evil Queen, was imprisoned underneath Auradon's castle for attempting to kidnap infant Ben alongside Jack. The prison's magic makes it feel for him as though 500 years have passed despite the short time it has actually been. A powerful sorcerer in his own right. Hans II/Flint - Prince Hans' only son. Was exiled and imprisoned in the Frozen North for the supposed assassination of his grandfather using his gift for fire magic (that he learned from spellbooks, not from bloodline). Cast of his father's name once he realized his father set up false evidence to let Flint take the fall and allow Hans freedom from the Isle of the Lost (for "good behavior") Beiye Yu (I really hope I didn't butcher the spelling or coming up with that name, someone please correct me if I did) - Shan Yu's daughter, leading a reassembled fighting force for revenge on Fa Mulan and Auradon in general for siding with Mulan.

Plot:

Prologue: 25 Years Ago/Act I: Auradon 'At Peace' A brief chase sequence showing the forces of Auradon capturing Jack and Evan and imprisoning them, emphasizing their terror. Match cut from infant Ben to present day Ben, celebrating his anniversary with Mal and generally enjoying the fact that Auradon is thriving. This is also where we get the introduction to our hero kids. Cutting over to the Pride Lands, we see Kivuli playing with hyena cubs (including playing dead to let them win, this'll come back later), followed by a discussion of their general lack of food (Pride Land segments can be animated, but the characters take on human-esque forms in Auradon). He meets with Taa and asks for his help, though Taa says their resources are limited as well. Not long after Kivuli stumbles upon the gateway to Auradon, which the Pride Lands have had the whole time, and realizes what Taa and the other lions have been hiding from them, infuriating him. His friends and 'family' have been starving, and he witnesses Auradon living in excess. Over the opening credits, Beiye and her forces are traveling in a blizzard, when they come across an isolated manse, housing one occupant with his feet constantly bound together, Flint. Kivuli sneaks under Auradon and finds the containment vessel for Evan, freeing him. They decide to work together to force Auradon to recognize its history of cruelty and hypocrisy, and they set off to free Jack as well.

Ben and the hero boys are going off on a camping trip, planning to stop near Hans' estate, but they find it in chaos, with the charred remains of Hans' body having been found in his office. Realizing what this means, Ben prepares to lead them back to Auradon. Meanwhile, Evan shattering the seal on Wonderland's gate has allowed Jack back into the 'real world' and drawn Mal and the rest of the protagonists to the Isle, where the trio trick them and trap them inside a newly formed barrier. Taa arrives, having followed Kivuli, but is also trapped on the Isle as Kivuli shatters the bridge. While most of the group tries to find a way off the Isle, Red and Evie go to Wonderland for a little side quest.

Act II: Auradon Falls The five antagonists come across each other and forge an even larger alliance, marching into Auradon. Recall the music video for Ways to be Wicked with the Apples that unleashed dark urges? Evan actually casts that spell on the many children in Auradon, turning them wild and against their parents, causing riots and rampant destruction. During this rampage the quintet take the castle with ease, destroy the sculpture garden (and the gardens in general), wreak havoc, ad then parade the captured kings and queens through the streets, all while their own children jeer, mock, and harass them. Kivuli also retrieves Ben's crown from the throne room and snaps it in half, declaring the Kingdom of Auradon a broken promise and a worthless lie. Ben, Krys, and Coronus witness this from outside the city, and Ben sends the other two to retrieve the rest of Auradon's remaining military from the Northlands (they were intended to prevent incursions like Beiye's, but Beiye's forces slipped through thanks to help from Flint in evading Auradon's defenses), while he surrenders himself to the quintet to buy everyone else time. Mal and co. find a route off the Isle, and Red and Evie return just in time with the item they were looking for: the Vorpal Sword, aka the only weapon capable of destroying Wonderland beings when they are outside of Wonderland (Jack is also capable of summoning and manipulating card soldiers, should've mentioned that sooner). While captured, Ben realizes the depths of what Auradon has allowed and in a fury, literalizing their title for him of "a blind king leading a blind people," Flint burns out Ben's eyes. The battle converges on Auradon.

Act III: Absolution Kivuli guards Ben on the castle's central tower, Evan is below the castle, preparing a larger scale version of the curse to unleash the dark side of all of Auradon, Beiye and Jack prepare to lead their forces on the front lines, and Flint returns to Anna, who he stored in another tower of the castle, furious with her for forgiving his father. A chaotic battle ensues. Coronus and Lonnie working together are able to subdue Beiye, and Lonnie reveals to her the truth of who her father was, causing Beiye to surrender. Evan similarly is coerced into standing down by Evie (and Uma fighting him magically). Jack fights Red and Mal for a time, until Red manages to grievously wound him (but not kill him yet) with the Vorpal Blade, and Mal continues upward. Krys overpowers Flint and rescues Anna. Taa frees Ben from his restraints, and though blind, Ben is able to access some small fraction of the Beast's power, and use those enhanced senses to help fight Kivuli. They are still losing though, and Ben takes a deadly blow in Taa's place, until Mal arrives in dragon form and turns the tide. Unfortunately, she was too late, and though she's able to hold his hand and sing to him in his final moments, Ben dies of his injuries. Kivuli and Taa's tussling sends Kivuli over the edge of the balcony, in a dark mirror of their father and grandfather, but Kivuli refuses to take Taa's hand and plummets to his death. Similarly, Jack, refusing to be reimprisoned in the madness of Wonderland, fatally stabs himself with the Vorpal Blade, dying with a smile on his face. Flint too, chooses to set himself ablaze along with the tower rather than return to his imprisonment. As the hyena cubs (more of the Pride Lands arrived as reinforcements for Auradon) try in vain to wake up Kivuli's motionless body, Evan mourns, even as Mal and Taa descend with Ben's body. He lectures them on the twisted system they still haven't stopped perpetuating, and most of all their cruel justice that means its recipients would rather die than be imprisoned.

Evan is placed under house arrest/Evie's care, a small monument to Ben is erected, the innocent and/or abused children of the villains are finally brought to Auradon proper en masse, and though the losses were great, Auradon may finally find the dawn it thought it had perpetuated for so long. Is it way too dark for Disney Channel? Almost definitely. Would they ever go for it what with the queerness, heavier themes, pointing out how royally f**ked the morals of Auradon are, the violence, etc? Doubtful. But my brain wanted to do something interesting with the franchise since I assumed (and seemingly assumed correctly) that Rise of Red would just be another sanitized, by the book, nothing product.

I also didn't mention it, but this would still be a musical. A dark musical for sure, but those exist obviously.

#descendants #my weird writing #is any of this good or logical? I honestly don't know anymore

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beastars-takes · 4 years

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Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better

The Shock Collar Draft

So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:

I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.

And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.

Let’s talk about why!

Part 1: “Because Disney”

Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.

That’s not how it works.

I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.

There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.

That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.

The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.

Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.

But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?

Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good

I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.

I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.

But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?

Oh, yeah.

So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.

“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”

Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.

Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)

This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.

And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.

To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:

Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.

That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.

Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?

Ah fuck.

Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.

Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:

Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?

People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.

This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!

Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.

(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)

So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.

Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.

Wow, this place is a paradise!

Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?

Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad

So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.

It also teaches us nothing.

If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?

The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.

If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.

And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.

The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.

Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad

So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?

Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.

The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.

The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.

Fuck you, Judy!

But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.

There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.

Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.

But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.

See you next time!

#zootopia #zootropolis #zoomania #zootopia takes #judy hopps #nick wilde #disney #chief bogo #byron howard

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liskantope · 4 years

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Some brief (and sometimes not-so-brief) reactions to major Disney films 1937-1967

Around a month ago I made a temporary switch from Netflix to Disney+ with the goal of watching all major Disney movies in order, roughly paced so that one year of Disney film-making equals one day of real life. I should clarify here that by “major Disney movies” I mean mostly just all the animated ones plus a few hybrid live-action/animated ones, and a few of the most popular live-action ones (at least the ones I remember having a song considered good enough to feature on one of the Disney Sing-Along videos, a staple of my video-watching as a kid growing up in the 90′s). I would have been interested to see Song of the South, which I’ve never seen in its entirety, but it’s not included on Disney+ for fairly obvious reasons. As I get further into modern Disney, I’ll probably skip over most of the sequels and other features I strongly expect not to like (with the exception of Belle’s Magical World, which is said to be so legendarily bad that I just have to see what the fuss is about).

This time range of three decades happens to include more or less exactly those Disney productions that Walt Disney himself took a major role in (he died shortly before the final version of Jungle Book was finished). I’d like to do this again in another month, when I will have gotten up through the late 90′s, but honestly this post wound up way longer than I was imagining and took several more hours than I expected (or could really afford), so I’m not promising myself or anyone else that.

Looking at Wikipedia’s list of Disney productions, I’m a little taken aback at what a low percentage of these are animated features, which to me form the backbone of that company’s legacy; visually scanning the list makes the line of animated films look shorter than I had always imagined, but really what this is showing is that Disney produced far more live-action movies than I ever knew about, including (and perhaps especially!) in its early days. Right now I’m continuing on through the 70′s films, but this set of mini-reviews represents the first month of watching and three decades of Disney magic.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937

This is the full-length feature that began them all and which had the burden of defying contemporary skepticism that a full-length animated feature could be taken seriously at all. We are already far beyond the earliest days of animation and have progressed lightyears beyond the quality of “Steamboat Willie”; throughout the film I marveled at the sophistication of the animation with a newfound appreciation of how groundbreaking a lot of the sequences must have been.

I know I watched this at least a couple of times in childhood and I think once when I was a bit older, but even that was long ago.

Snow White is based on one of the simpler classic fairy tales, and the writers had to come up with ways to flesh out this very short story enough to occupy well over an hour. This was done not by exploring the character of Snow White or the Queen or even filling in extra plot details (the fate of the hunter is never addressed) but by spending a lot of time on the dwarfs. The detail spent on individuating them took a lot of work from the animators, but I think their efforts paid off. I can’t say the same about the attention paid to Snow White or the Queen (pretty much the only remaining characters). Snow White has an almost entirely flat personality, with no sense of curiosity or concern whatsoever about the Queen’s designs to have her killed, just having literally only one goal in mind: to marry this Prince who she’d only seen for about two minutes and run away from out of shyness. (This is of course a trend we’ll see with Disney princesses for a long time.) The Queen similarly only has the goal of being “the fairest in the land”. Something about the particular harshness of her voice strikes me as The Quintessential 1930′s Female Villain Voice (“I’ll crush their bones!”), whatever that means -- maybe I got my idea of what this should be from the movie Snow White in the first place.

I still think “Heigh Ho” (which I’ve known well since early childhood) is an excellent song in its utter simplicity, especially when complimented with the “Dig Dig Dig” song (which I did not remember at all until a few years ago when a Tumblr mutual posted the excerpt containing it!). I’m not enormously fond of “One Day My Prince Will Come”, although I did enjoy playing it on the violin at a couple of gigs with one of my musician friends back during grad school -- I was convinced then, and up until watching Snow White just now, that it belonged to Cinderella.

Pinocchio, 1940

This was a favorite movie of mine in earlier childhood; we owned the VHS and I watched it a lot. As a child, I had no sense of one Disney movie coming from a much earlier time than another one; it was only much more recently in life that I understood that Pinocchio really comes from all the way back eight decades ago. Pinocchio taught me the meaning of “conscience” (both in the dictionary sense and in a deeper sense), and it shaped my notion of what fairies may look like -- for instance, my mental picture of the Tooth Fairy, back when I believed in her, was inspired by the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio.

It’s amazing just how much the quality of Disney animated features improved from the first one to this one, the second. It helps that both the story and the characters are far more complex than those of Snow White. The plot from the original book (which I’ve read in Italian and English) was more complex still, of course. There is one gaping hole where it’s never explained how Gepetto somehow found himself in the belly of a whale (I don’t remember whether or how this is explained in the book), but I’ll forgive that.

It’s interesting to see the 1940′s caricature of “bad (early teenage?) boy” shown in the animation and voice of Lampwick. Phantom Strider talks about the turning-into-donkeys scene as a notoriously dark scene for adults who didn’t find it as terrifying when they were children -- count me in as one of those adults! It’s especially terrifying to see the whole mass of boys-turned-donkeys being treated as slaves in the hellhole known as Pleasure Island and realizing that this is never going to be resolved in the movie -- it’s rather unusual in Disney stories for some great evil to be left unresolved with no recompense even for the chief villain. In fact, Pinocchio is pretty much the only Disney story I can think of where the worst villain doesn’t meet some kind of dire fate. Really, the range of Pinocchio’s view is much narrower: it’s just the coming-of-age story of one puppet in his quest for Real Boyhood. (And yes, I still giggle at how intricutely Jordan Peterson analyzes particular scenes from the movie to support his beliefs about neo-Marxism or whatever.)

Disney+ heads many of the descriptions of the older movies with “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” I’m a little surprised they don’t do this with Pinocchio, given what appears to me a rather derogatory depiction of Gypsies.

“When You Wish Upon a Star” has become a timeless hit, for good reason. And I still find “Hi Diddle Dee Dee” extremely catchy.

Fantasia, 1940

I saw this one multiple times growing up (for earlier viewings, I was not allowed to see the final number “Night on Bald Mountain”). My mom, for her part, saw this in theaters at the age of around 4 (even though it originally came out long before she was born) and thought for years afterwards that there was no such film in real life and her memory of seeing it had been just a pleasant dream.

I have nothing much more to say about this one except that, representing a very different approach from most animated films, Disney or otherwise, 1940′s or otherwise, it succeeded exquisitely. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” number was particularly perfection; it was as though the composer originally had every motion of the story in mind when writing the music. At the same time, having the main character appear in the form of Mickey Mouse in some way seems to cheapen the effect.

The Reluctant Dragon, 1941

I watched this for the first time, not having known it existed. There isn’t really much to say. All that stuck in my mind was one of the shorts, “Baby Weem” (amusing in a disturbing way), and the longer segment which gives the movie its title (also amusing, in a different kind of disturbing way). It was especially interesting to see a 1940′s cartoon portrayal of a very effeminate man, or should I say, male dragon.

Dumbo, 1941

I saw this maybe two or three times growing up, and not in very early childhood. It was never one of my favorites. Later on, I learned that it was done very low-budget to make up for major financial losses in the Disney franchise. This definitely shows in the animation. However, if there’s one thing I can say in praise of Dumbo, it’s that it’s incredibly daring in its simplicity, not only to have such elegantly simple animation but in having a mute title character (instead the main “talker” in the film is the title character’s best friend, who had much more of a New York accent than I’d remembered).

In some ways I find this film incredibly cold and dark by Disney standards, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, and I remember feeling this way even on earlier watchings when I was much younger. The stark cruelty of the humans running the circus, as well as the elephants other than Dumbo and his mother, just really gets to me. (I vividly mis-remembered one of the lines I found most memorable in childhood as “From now on, Dumbo is no longer one of us.” The actual line is, “From now on, [Dumbo] is no longer an elephant”, which in a way, is even more chilling.) In this regard, there was no need to make a modern, woker remake of Dumbo containing an explicit anti-animal-exploitation message -- the 1941 version conveys this message loud and clear. Now that I’m writing this, I suppose it could be argued that this is another instance of what I described under “Pinocchio” of leaving a major evil unresolved in a Disney film. And apart from that, while the ending for Dumbo is meant to be a very happy one, as an adult I find it incredibly naive: Dumbo is now super internationally famous for his extraordinary gift and is entering the life of a child celebrity, and it’s just going to be smooth sailing from now on? I hate to say it, Dumbo, but your troubles are only just beginning. (I was glad to see Dumbo reunited with his mother in the last scene, however, which I hadn’t remembered happening at all.)

“Look Out For Mr. Stork” is a skillfully-written song I’d completely forgotten about for two decades or so but remember knowing well when I was young. I still think “When I See an Elephant Fly” is a fantastic song, especially with all its reprises at the end -- I’d had some bits of it confused in my memory but had kept the main chorus with me over all the years. Now it’s widely decried as racist, or at least the characters who sing it are decried as racist caricatures. For whatever my opinion is worth, I’m inclined to disagree with this, in particular on the grounds that the crows seem to be the most intelligent, witty, and self-possessed characters in the movie. I’m also pretty sure I heard critical things about it over the years which are false. For one thing, not all of the crows are played by white actors -- only the lead crow is, while the rest of the voices are members of a black musical group called the Hall Johnson Choir. Also, I’m not clear that the lead crow was actually named Jim Crow by the time the movie came out (no name is given in the movie itself). Now an earlier, much more forgettable song featuring black men singing about how they like to work all day and they throw their pay away... yeah that seems awfully racist.

Bambi, 1942

I have surprisingly little to say about this one -- it’s just very distinct from other Disney films of the time, in its story’s lack of magical elements, its characters all being animals and animated in to realistically model animals’ movements, its lack of musical numbers, and its plot reaching the same level of simplicity as that of Snow White. Not to mention actually having a benevolent character die, which I don’t think had been done up to that point. I remember watching this a couple of times as a kid; I was never terribly eager to watch it again and I feel the same way now, despite having majestic beauty that I can really appreciate.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949

This is the first of Disney’s animated features that I never had seen before. What a strange movie, or should I say, two smaller, unrelated movies rolled into one. I liked Mr. Toad’s half better than Ichabod’s half, or at least I found it more entertaining. I was brought up with the book The Wind in the Willows and recall seeing a non-Disney animated rendition of it (which was better and somewhat more thorough than this half-movie-length rendition). I was kind of excited when the “The Merrily Song” started because it unlocked a song from my early-childhood memory that I’d forgotten about for more than twenty years but knew from one of the Disney Sing-Along videos. I still think it’s a not half bad song, especially with the harmony.

The Ichabod story was not at all what I expected, not being familiar with the original book version (I had always assumed that Ichabod must be the name of a villain). I found it completely boring until the final horror sequence. As a child I would have found the courtship part even more boring (at least now I can muse on how man-woman courtship dynamics were shown in the late 40′s), and I would have found the horror part at the end very scary (in fact, maybe this is the reason my parents never showed the movie to me). It is a little shocking in being the only Disney story I’ve seen so far with a decidedly unhappy ending.

Cinderella, 1950

This one I only ever saw once or twice as a child. This is not counting a very vivid memory I have from around age 6 or 7 when I was watching a part of it over at another family’s house and their child, who was almost my age and nonverbal autistic, rewound and repeated the same 2-minute sequence involving the mice for probably about an hour (I was impressed because I at the time didn’t know how to work the controls of a video player).

I suppose this could be considered the second in the main trifecta of the most conservative fairy tale princess stories that Disney did in the earlier part of its history. I think one can argue that Cinderella has the strongest and most fleshed-out character out of those three princesses. I like the spirited internal strength she reveals in her very first scene. That said, like the other earlier princesses, she seems to have one singular goal in life, and that is to find her true love, not, say, to escape her abusive stepmother and stepsisters.

My reaction to this movie is overall positive. The mice were fun (I also like how their voices seemed a lot more like how mice “should” talk than in most other Disney cartoons); the dynamic between Cinderella and her evil relatives, and the dynamic between the stepmother and stepsisters themselves, was shown in a rounded way; and the fairy godmother is a great character despite having only one scene. The character of the king is pretty odd (very selfish yet his main dream is of getting to play with his future grandchildren) while not especially memorable or well fleshed out. There are certainly some great classic songs in this one -- not the most stellar that Disney has ever produced, but solid.

Alice in Wonderland, 1951

I was curious about what I would think of this one, since we owned the video of this at my home growing up and I watched it many times during childhood but as I got older I fell in love with the original Lewis Carroll books which, together, I often consider my favorite work of written fiction ever. I had not seen the Disney film Alice in Wonderland for around two decades, although I made the mistake of catching parts of more modern, live-action adaptations of the story more recently. I wondered what I would make of the old animated Disney adaptation after getting to know the books so well.

There is simply no way that any movie can recreate the true flavor of the books, but Disney’s Alice in Wonderland does a fine job of creating the general nonsensical, sometimes bewildering dream atmosphere, and, perhaps more importantly, capturing the essence of Alice’s personality. I give a lot of credit to Katherine Beaumont for this -- she has the major girl’s role in the next movie on this list as well, but she especially shines as Alice. Two other very distinctive voices, Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter and Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, also add a lot to the cast of characters.

While mixing around some of the scenes of the original book Alice in Wonderland, with some scenes of Alice Through the Looking Glass inserted, the progression of the plot is a long, dreamlike sequence of strange situations with only a few common threads, true to the original first book (Looking Glass had a little, but only a little, more structure). In the movie, everything breaks down at the end with many of the previous scenes and characters swirling together and Alice frantically trying to wake herself up. One could object that this is not how the dream ends in the book Alice in Wonderland, but there is a similar sort of breakdown at the end of the dream in Looking Glass and it feels very real somehow, as in my experience this is sometimes how vivid dreams disintegrate.

Oh, and did you know that Alice in Wonderland has a greater number of songs in it than any other Disney film? There are nearly 25 that made it into the film, even if lasting just for seconds, with a around 10 more written for the film that didn’t make it.

So, does the Disney film do a good job of conveying one of my favorite books of all time, within the confines of being a children’s animated film? I would say yes. For reasons I described above, and from the fact that it manages to avoid working in a moral lesson for Alice, or depicting Alice as a young adult, or manufacturing an affair between Alice and the Hatter (ugh), like some film adaptations, I would say that this classic Disney version is the best Alice in Wonderland adaptation that I know of.

Peter Pan, 1953

Although I never knew this one super well, this movie has a special place in my heart from the way the flying sequence enchanted me in early childhood. I have to differ with the YouTuber Phantom Strider when he dismisses the 40′s/50′s-style song “You Can Fly” as just not doing it for him, because that song along with the animation of the characters’ journey to Neverland had a major hand in shaping my early-childhood sense of magic and wonder and yearning. I distinctly remembering a time, around age 6, when I just didn’t see much point in watching other Disney movies, or movies at all, which didn’t have flying in them, because what could possibly top the sheer joy and freedom of feeling able to swim through the air? I’ve had hardly any exposure to Superman, and so the kind of bodily flight I imagined in fantasy or performed in dreams was almost entirely shaped by Peter Pan. (At the same time, the crocodile in Peter Pan influenced my nightmares at the same age.)

I only ever saw this one a few times, but I distinctly remember the most recent of them being when I was a teenager, perhaps even an older teenager, and I remember thinking at the time that it was a pretty darn solid Disney movie. I still think the same now, while granting that some aspects of the movie seem a little antiquated and certain sequences with the Native Americans are quite cringe-worthy from the point of view of modern sensibilities. Only a couple years ago, when visiting my parents’ house, I finally took down the book Peter Pan from the shelf and decided to give it a read and found it a beautiful although slightly strange and offbeat story. In particular, I was shocked at how nasty and vengeful Tinker Bell was (particularly in trying to get Wendy killed), when I had remembered her as sweet and naive in the movie. It turns out I was wrong about the movie -- Tinker Bell tries to get Wendy killed there also! -- but somehow the tone is moderated well enough that in this version I never really feel horrified at her behavior, nor do I feel disturbed at the situation of the Lost Boys in the way the book made me view them. The song of the lone pirate who sings about how a pirate’s life is short, right before Captain Hook fires his gun and we hear a dropping sound followed by a splash, is one of the more masterful executions of dark humor that I’ve seen in Disney animation for children.

While most of the songs in Peter Pan, considered as songs on their own, are pretty good, I think the best one is the one whose lyrics didn’t make it into the film: “Never Smile at a Crocodile”.

Lady and the Tramp, 1955

Despite being more obscure than most of the old Disney animated classics, I used to know this one quite well since we had it in our home. I’ve always considered The Great Mouse Detective as the most underrated Disney film of all time, but I think it has serious competition here. Lady and the Tramp is an absolute gem. While not quite as Disney-fantasy-ish with its lack of magic and other fairy tale elements, in my opinion Lady and the Tramp is, in most ways, superior to everything else on this list save Mary Poppins. Beautiful animation which shows Lady and most of the other animals moving realistically in a way we haven’t seen since Bambi*. Everything visually and conceptually framed from the dogs’ points of view. Great voice acting. Consistently solid dialog without a single line too much or missing. A story evoking the dynamic between humans and pets, class inequality, and deep questions about the place of each of us in society and choices between a stable existence among loved ones and striking out to seize life by the horns. Our first female lead who stands on her own two four feet and whose sole goal isn’t to get kissed by her true love (one could argue that Alice was the earlier exception, but she is a little girl whereas Lady is actually a romantic female lead). When Lady is approached by her two best (male) friends in a very awkward (perhaps especially from a modern sensibility) but sweet scene where they offer to be her partner, Lady makes it clear that she doesn’t want or need a husband just for the sake of having a husband to make babies with -- her standing up for her own wants in this way doesn’t in the least turn into a Moral Stand that dominates the movie. Excellent music all the way through.

Oh, and this movie was my very first introduction, in early childhood, to the Italian language (”Bella Notte”), which some 25 years later sort became my second language of sorts.

Criticisms? Well, the baby was animated rather stiffly and unnaturally, but that was like half a minute of the movie at most. And there’s the whole segment with the Siamese cats, which produced a great song purely music-wise (fun fact: Peggy Lee provided the voices of the cats) but nowadays comes across as rather racist. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I will say that I’m sure in the minds of the creators this was no different than having animals of all other nationalities (Scottish, Russian, Mexican) appearing in the film with voices reflecting the respective accents.

*There may be a few exceptions, like Peggy, who seems to be modeled after the musician Peggy Lee and moves like a sexy human woman. The way that human sex appeal is conveyed through the animals’ movements in this movie is quite impressive: my mom confesses to having somewhat of a crush on Tramp growing up and not quite understanding how that could be possible when, well, he’s a dog.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1954, and Old Yeller, 1957

I don’t want to say about these movies, as they don’t really fall under the category of animated classics. I just want to say that, while I saw each of them once growing up, on seeing them again I recognize each as a great movie in its own adult point of view way that is not necessarily very Disney-ish.

Sleeping Beauty, 1959

I think this was the movie I was watching at the time I decided it would be fun to write a bunch of mini-reviews for Tumblr, as my reactions were changing a lot as I was watching. I went into the movie very curious, because while I only remembered enough of the fairy tale story to know that it was another of the very simple ones, and I remembered the one song as a waltz by Tchaikovsky, and I knew I had seen the movie once (and probably only once) as a kid, I couldn’t remember anywhere near enough to possibly fill a full movie time. What was actually going to happen in this hour-and-a-quarter long film?

I wasn’t watching long before I came up with the description “spectacularly forgettable”, in part to justify why I’d managed to forget practically all of my one previous viewing. The story doesn’t have much substance and feels sillier than even the other fairy tale Disney plots, like even minor twinges of critical thought, even granting the magical rules of the universe, are liable to make the plot topple. There is some filler to flesh out the movie, but (unlike with Snow White’s dwarfs) none of it is as amusing as the creators seemed to think it was. The only characters with actual personality are rather boring -- the capers between the members of royalty and the jester are a bit on the annoying side in my opinion. Maleficent seems to have no motive whatsoever. She actually calls herself something like “the mistress of evil” later in the movie. This is pretty black-and-white even by Disney standards, where the bad guys usually at least want to think that they’re on the right side of things or justified in their aggressive behavior. Aurora (the title character) has the least personality of all the Disney princesses. Literally all I can say to describe her is that she has the Disney Princess Trifecta of characteristics: she has a good singing voice; she is friends with all the “nice” animals; and her only goal in life is to be reunited with her True Love who she met once for all of a few minutes. The reason why I couldn’t remember any songs other than the Tchaikovsky one is that there aren’t any.

The one thing I consciously really enjoyed while watching was the fact that the score throughout was Tchaikovsky; the idea of having one work of classical music as the entire score seems like a bold one for a Disney film. As I was digesting the movie afterwards (and watching the short documentaries supplied on Disney+ helped here!), I came to realize that this classical music backdrop was complimented in quite an interesting way by a fairly unique animation style. I had been disappointed by the animation early in my watching, disliking how a lot of the figures in the beginning castle scene (for instance, various people’s faces), looked very “flat” somehow. But I’ve come to see this as part of a style where everything looks almost like a series of cut-outs superimposed on each other, to incredibly beautiful effect in a lot of the outdoor scenes.

My conclusion? If you watch this the same way you watch most Disney animated movies -- focusing on plot, characterization, action, and meaning of the main story -- it will just be kind of forgettable at best. But if you watch it as more of a purely visual and musical piece of art without trying to make much “sense” out of it (so, more like I would watch a ballet), you may find it uniquely beautiful among Disney classics.

One Hundred and One Dalmations, 1961

Whew -- what a complete and utter contrast from its predecessor! I can hardly imagine a film that’s still distinctively Disney while being more different from Sleeping Beauty in every aspect.

I remember seeing One Hundred and One Dalmatians a handful of times in childhood (when I was around 5 and it had just come out on home video, my mom almost bought it for me but decided to go with Beauty and the Beast instead explaining that it had better music -- I grew up knowing the preview for Dalmatians that showed at the beginning of our Beauty and the Beast VHS than the dalmatians film itself). I remembered a number of scenes very distinctly, including a lot of the Horace and Jasper bickering and Cruella smashing one of their bottles of beer into the fire and knew Lucky’s line after getting stuck behind in the snow almost word for word, while I had entirely forgotten all of the country/farm characters and entire sequences involving them. I had forgotten, but soon remembered, the television scenes including the Kanine Krunchies jingle. (Some years later, I think as an older teenager, I read the original book with some interest.)

Although I wasn’t around in 1961, everything about this movie’s style strikes me as very contemporary -- the animation in particular seems like the current style for 60′s cartoons. Something about the dialog and humor feels that way as well, as though it closely represents a sort of 60′s young-people-in-London culture that I’ve never seen myself (I was struck for instance by Cruella being asked how she’s doing and cheerfully answering, “Miserable dahling as usual, perfectly wretched!”). It was a little strange and offputting to see television so prominently featured in Disney animation from so long ago, and to see such a decrepit bachelor pad (with the accompanying lifestyle and attitudes) as Horace and Jasper’s in a children’s movie. The crazy driving in snow at the end startled my adult sensibilities (as I now have some memorable experiences driving in snow) in a way that didn’t affect me as a child -- scenes like that just didn’t feel like Disney after having just watched all the previous films. All in all, these novel features made the whole movie a wild ride.

I’m bemused by the fact that, despite taking place in London (which I hadn’t remembered -- I thought it took place in America), the only accents which are fully British are those of the villains Cruella de Vil, Horace, and Jasper.

Main criticisms: I found all the stuff with Rolly being characterized by his body shape and only ever thinking about food to be in poor taste (although not surprising for the times). And while “Cruella de Vil” is a great jazz number, the movie has no other music to speak of -- my mom was quite right to choose Beauty and the Beast over it.

(I realized when finishing this review that this is the only one of all the movies in the list that I’d actually enjoy seeing again sometime soon. Not sure what to make of that. Something about it is more interesting than most of the others? Especially the human-centric parts?)

The Sword in the Stone, 1963

I never saw this movie until later childhood or maybe even early teenagerhood, when I quite liked it. On watching it again, I was overall pretty disappointed. This movie has some decent songs and some fun aspects to the story, but a lot of it is kind of weak and forgettable and it’s all just sloppily done.

The story has a clear moral message which is generally pro-education and about reaching one’s full potential, but in my eyes it comes out kind of muddled because the story shows Wart ending up as a legendary king only out of the arbitrary happenstance that that happens to be his divine destiny. Merlin’s motives seem kind of inconsistent as well, with him sometimes seeming to support Wart in his desire to become a squire, then flying off in a rage when Wart chooses squirehood over fulfilling a “greater” destiny, then joyfully returning after Wart pulls the sword from the stone and is now set on the fixed path to being king, even though this involved exactly zero change of attitude on Wart’s part. The message that actually comes across looks more like, “We have to just follow whatever fate has in store for us” than “We must strive to be the best we can be”. And, it arguably even comes across as subtly disrespectful to more mundane lifestyles and career paths.

The animation is not great by the high standard of full-length Disney features (I noted how I especially disliked how tears were shown). Wart’s voice seems to change a lot, sometimes broken and sometimes not yet broken. I found out after watching that this is because the character was played by three different actors, sometimes with more than one of those actors in the same scene! This was purportedly because the voice of the first actor cast for the role started to change, but then why does Wart sometimes sound like his voice has already changed anyway? Sloppiness all around.

Still, some parts of The Sword in the Stone are fun even if none of it is stellar, and it entertained me more when I was younger, so worth watching once, especially if you’re a kid, I guess?

Mary Poppins, 1964

I came into this one far more familiar with it than with most of the other Disney movies, including the ones I watched many times when I was young, so it feels a little strange to try to summarize a similar-length review of it. Mary Poppins is in my book without a doubt one of the top three Disney movies of all time, in some respects the very best, and certainly the masterpiece of Walt Disney himself, the culmination of literally decades of determination on his part to turn Pamela Travers’ children’s works into a movie. (I would feel sorrier for Travers about how strongly Disney twisted her arm to turn her books into a movie whose style was entirely antithetical to hers, if it weren’t for the fact that the Disney version of the story is just way better than her rather weak set of stories. I give Travers ample credit for having created an amazing character in the person of Mary Poppins, but for coming up with good stories, not so much.)

I didn’t see the full movie Mary Poppins until later childhood (although I knew many of the songs) and it quickly became a favorite of mine. I went a gap of a number of years without seeing it before I copied the soundtrack from someone when I was in college, which spurred me to go out and rent it (back when Blockbuster was a thing) and so I managed to reconnect with it at the age of 20. More recently I’ve become somewhat of a Mary Poppins enthusiast -- feeling pretty alone among my generation in this regard, with the possible exception of the theater subculture -- having seen probably most or all of the documentaries there are on its production and learned a ridiculous amount of trivia about it, not to mention knowing the whole soundtrack pretty much in my head.

Mary Poppins seems to be Disney’s longest children’s classic, at 2 hours and 19 minutes. All it lacks, really, is an animal-themed or classic fairy tale atmosphere and a proper villain. But what can you get out this movie? Stellar child acting (especially for that period) and excellent performances all around, apart from some awkward but endearing aspects of Dick Van Dyke’s acting (while his singing and physicality is superb). A complex and multi-layered story combining magic, comedy and a little tragedy, appreciable in equal measure from a child’s level and from an adult’s level. Revolutionary special effects which include the first extended hybrid live-action and animation sequence. Timeless words and phrases which have permanently entered the lexicon. One of my favorite extended musical sequence of all time in any movie (”Step In Time” takes up 8 minutes and change, and I’m glad they didn’t go with the “common sense” measure of cutting this “unnecessarily long” number). The Sherman brothers at their very best, in a musical soundtrack that easily scores in my top two out of all Disney movies (the other one being The Lion King). A beautiful message (among several big messages) about the little things being important (or at least, that’s a very crude summary), exquisitely encapsulated in the most beautiful song of the movie, “Feed the Birds” (this apparently became Walt Disney’s favorite song ever, and I’m pretty close to feeling the same way -- I’m determined that one day when I finally have a piano I’m going to learn to sing it along with the piano). I could go on and on here.

If I try really hard I can come up with the sole nitpick of feeling that maybe the parrot head on the umbrella’s handle shouldn’t only reveal itself as a talking parrot head in only one scene right at the very end -- this should have been shown at least once earlier. Even granting that, this film is still practically perfect in every way.

The Jungle Book, 1967

(Let’s get the Colonel Hath in the room out of the way first: “The Jungle Book” is a terrible title for a movie. You know, when you base a movie on a book you don’t have to give it the same title as the book...)

I saw The Jungle Book several times as a kid and, despite not considering it nearly as good as Mary Poppins, similarly reconnected with it in adulthood (particularly the soundtrack). Only several years ago I found myself thinking of getting hold of a double album of classic Disney songs that I thought I’d heard about but couldn’t seem to find online. It soon occurred to me that mostly what I really wanted was some of the songs of The Jungle Book, so I got that movie’s soundtrack instead. I soon learned for the first time that The Jungle Book’s songs were written by the Sherman Brothers*, precipitating an “Ah, that explains why I remember them as so good!” moment. (“I Wanna Be Like You” seems like the clear winner among the songs.) Of course hearing the soundtrack made me curious about the movie, which I did eventually get hold of several years ago; thus I had seen this film exactly once already since childhood.

It says a lot about the music and the overall technique behind this film that I still look back on it as one of the great classics, considering how weak the story is. In particular, I consider a story arc to be pretty flawed when characters that seem significant and/or memorable come in without really living up to their expected big role: the wolves who raised Mowgli play a crucial role in the beginning before more or less disappearing (and it doesn’t entirely make sense to me why Bagheera, rather than they, is guiding him to the man village), and King Louie (who is a well-formed character that I particularly enjoy watching) really ought to come back into the story later somehow (an alternate, and much more complex, ending had him make a reappearance). The villain Shere Khan is not especially well developed in terms of his character and motives, but I do enjoy his menacingly bass voice. Still, the voice acting, the action, the animation, and the overall setting are all very solid here.

I’ll end with some random observations about the song “That’s What Friends Are For”. I think the likeness of the vultures to the Beatles was mostly lost on me as a kid (along with the recognition that this movie came out in the Beatles’ heyday). More interestingly, even when I was old enough to understand how vultures eat, the fact that every single line of the song is a clever macabre double-entendre went completely over my head. I do think it was a very obvious mistake, by the Obvious Standards of Cinematography, to give Shere Khan the last line of the song and begin that line with the “camera” on him, rather than have his voice come in “off-camera” and Mowgli and the vultures looking thunderstruck before panning to him, but maybe I shouldn’t be pushing for overdone techniques here.

* An exception is “Bare Necessities”, which was written by Terry Gilkyson, the original songwriter Disney received submissions from, who wrote two hauntingly beautiful other numbers which were deemed not Disney-ish enough to be put in the film.

Some general stray observations:

These older Disney films love gags involving alcoholism and drunkenness, a bit of a questionable emphasis given that the audience is children. This trend continues into the 80′s at least, but I don’t think one sees it much in modern Disney movies.

Watching these animated films I often find myself flinching as characters’ heads smash into things or gigantic objects smash over their heads, feeling almost surprised when they come out of it pretty much fine. I guess this a staple element of cartoon action throughout the decades, but I can’t recall a more recent Disney animated film where we see this (guess I’ll soon find out!)

There is a certain style of vocal music, with unified rhythm and lyrics but complex harmony and a capella, which seems to have been immensely popular in the 40′s and 50′s and distinctively appears in practically every single one of the 40′s and 50′s films above (“You Can Fly” is a typical example). I recognize it also from some non-Disney-related old records my parents have that were passed down to them. I’m curious about whether this style has a name.

For years I thought the Sherman Brothers did only the soundtrack for Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, only discovering they did The Jungle Book songs rather recently as I explained above. It turns out they were involved in most of the major Disney films around that period, including The Sword in the Stone and The Aristocats (although not its best-known number “Everybody Wants to Be a Cat”).

There is a particularly sad instrumental passage, played by the string section starting with a minor-key violin melody going downward and joined by lower string instruments, which I knew well from my Jungle Book soundtrack (partway through “Poor Bear”) but was surprised to hear in desperately sad moments of several of the other movies around that time (including One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Robin Hood, or at least a close variant of this passage with slightly different endings). I have no idea who wrote this or how it came to be reused so many times.

I knew the name Bruce Reitherman as the voice of Mowgli in The Jungle Book, but in watching all of these other features back to back I’ve noticed that there are some other Reithermans in the front credits of quite a few of them.

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howdoyousayghibli · 4 years

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Miyazaki Finally Gives Up the Pretense, Makes Film About Man Who Draws Planes for a Living

“Spoiler culture” gets a lot of hate these days, and I get it. There’s a fine line between “how hard is it to not talk about the plot of a movie you just saw on social media” and “how hard is it to stay off social media for a little bit until you’ve seen the movie.”

I get the annoyance with spoiler culture, but I also remember the circumstances that led to our current situation. I remember the mid-2000s, when trailers had half the movie in them — and if that wasn’t enough, the movie’s official website usually went the rest of the way. I remember poring over detailed rosters of every character set to appear in an upcoming X-Men movie. Even Pixar fell into the over-sharing trap — The Incredibles villain Syndrome, who doesn’t appear until a good chunk of the movie has passed, had a bio on the official website with his “powers” and evil plan right there for 12-year-old Chase to read all about.

This led to teenage Chase making a conscious decision to not seek out information about movies that he already wanted to see, a policy I still roughly adhere to today. My greatest success was with Ant-Man, which I managed to see in theaters without having seen a single trailer. Usually, though, it means I just stick to teaser trailers.

This go-in-blind mentality is never easier than when writing these reviews, since there’s not exactly a marketing blitz, past or current, for Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. So far, I think my policy of avoiding both trailers and reviews of these movies has served me well, helping me to form my own thoughts without being biased one way or another. Unfortunately, this policy may have done more bad than good with this particular movie.

The Wind Rises was released in 2013, and is (for now) the last film directed by Miyazaki. It’s a dramatized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, designer of Japan’s infamous “Zero” fighter planes — but you wouldn’t guess that from the movie itself. Not knowing anything of the film going in, I assumed I was watching a historical drama, like From Up on Poppy Hill or Grave of the Fireflies. As such, I was confused at the pace of the movie, which skips freely through large portions of Horikoshi’s life. The rapid and largely unannounced jumps in time and the lack of chyrons made it difficult for me to get a handle on the time period — although I’ll admit it probably wouldn’t be nearly so difficult for someone native to Japan, who could likely guess closely enough from the clothes, architecture, and other context clues.

Beyond being confused about the setting, though, my lack of foreknowledge of The Wind Rises left me confused about the story the movie was telling. When you know a story is based on true events, it changes how you experience it. Studio Ghibli already departs from traditional Western ideas of storytelling and structure, and when you throw real-world subject matter into the mix, it goes further afield still.

This is all to say: I think I would’ve enjoyed The Wind Rises more if I’d understood what it was beforehand. It’s a bit like how I kept waiting for the magic to show up in Whisper of the Heart, only it was a bigger, structural issue — something just felt off, until I pulled up the movie’s Wikipedia page after it ended and suddenly things clicked into place.

Is the movie at fault for not spelling out its premise? Even the trailer doesn’t mention that it’s based on a real person. More than ever, I think that cultural differences may play a role here. I get the feeling that Jiro Horikoshi is relatively well-known in Japan; it would make all the difference watching this movie if you were vaguely aware of Horikoshi’s name and achievements.

As for the movie itself: it’s breathtakingly beautiful. The animation is almost insultingly lavish, like the third dining room on an episode of Cribs. Horikoshi’s glasses distort your view of his face, just like in real life. There’s a close-up involving a moving slide rule that made me gasp with its detail. The Wind Rises portrays Horikoshi as a dreamer, and his dreams constantly leak into the world around him, to wondrous effect.

The audio work is similarly audacious. Horikoshi’s (and Miyazaki’s) infatuation with flying machines breathes life into them, reflected not only in the lively way they’re animated, but also in the choice to use human vocals for the sound effects. The planes literally hum, roar, and gasp — never quite approaching cartoonish personification, but instead letting us see them through the engineer’s eyes.

Other aspects of The Wind Rises aren’t quite as thrilling. I think there’s something very worthwhile in the film’s message on trying to make something beautiful in a world bent on cruelty, but it’s a bit muddied by a strange insistence that creative people have only 10 years to produce their life’s work. It’s an oddly specific limit, made even odder by Miyazaki’s own prolific career — at the time of this film’s release, his directing career alone stretched over 34 years. This may sound like nitpicking, but the 10 years number basically bookends the film, so I feel justified in calling shenanigans.

Equally odd is the film’s love story. While beautiful and charming at times, it ends on an strange and unsatisfying note that makes me question the purpose of including it at all; did they simply feel that they couldn’t make a whole movie only about designing planes? If so, they could’ve done more to integrate the two stories, especially since this plot line was already entirely fabricated.

To end on a positive note: the voice cast for this film is impossibly stacked. You’ve got Horikoshi voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, his work buddy voiced by John Krasinski, his boss voiced by Martin Short, Emily Blunt as his love interest, Mae Whitman as his little sister, Werner Herzog as his random German friend, Stanley Tucci as his Italian dream-friend, Zach Callison as young Horikoshi, and Elijah Wood in a role so small I literally can’t figure out what it was. It should be difficult to pick a favorite among such a lineup — and they all do great work here — but the runaway winner is, of course, Werner Herzog. The raspy voice and dry humor he brings to the sympathetic Castorp are a highlight of an already beautiful movie.

I fully expect that, when I read other reviews of The Wind Rises, they will have only the highest praise for it. I can see where they’re coming from; this is a movie with breathtaking visuals, an innovative soundscape, a moving message, and talented cast. For me, however, those individual elements aren’t brought together in the service of a compelling story.

Up Next: The Tale of Princess Kaguya! It’s the last film directed by the late Isao Takahata and I’m ready to be emotionally destroyed. It’s also the second-to-last Ghibli movie (as of 2019), which is wild! Will I finish these reviews before the year ends?? The suspense is killing me!

Alternate Titles: The Wind Rises: Because No One Wanted to Put Poppy Hill on Their Best-of-the-Decade Lists

#studio ghibli #ghibli #the wind rises #hayao miyazaki

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raeynbowboi · 5 years

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Top 10 Disney Villains

10. King Candy Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Although he’s newer to the villain roster, King Candy was a well-written villain who served as a perfect blend of humorous and genuinely threatening. He also tied very nicely into the themes of the film, which makes him stand out in my memory as a good villain, because I take more than just personality and actions into account when judging characters, but also role in the narrative, and how they support the themes and ideas of the story. King Candy is the perfect villain for a story like this, which is why I consider him good enough to be on this list, even if as a villain himself, he might not be the most memorable among the Disney canon.

9. Gaston Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Perhaps the Disney villain we’re most likely to meet in real life, Gaston is the perfect example of toxic masculinity on full display. He’s a great anthithesis to the Beast, though I never saw him all that handsome, which sort of detracts just a little bit from the story. But in a story about how looks don’t matter, but actions do, he’s a great foil to the love interest. He’s a selfish hateful man who is handed everything he wants, and when he doesn’t get his way, he strongarms people until they meet his demands. Yet, despite his personality, he retains a legion of followers who are more-so admirers than actual friends. He never once considers anyone to be his equal or of sufficient worth unless it was helpful in his own endeavors. And anyone who has ever had a friend who basically used them and then ditched them at the soonest convenience can probably recognize that kind of so-called “friend” in Gaston. He’s a great villain to dissect as an analysis of our current culture, but I don’t want to write a five page essay on Gaston for a top 10 list.

8. Yzma Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

Inarguably Disney’s best comedic villain (not counting her henchman Kronk), Yzma is a brilliantly funny character whose exaggurated appearance and over-the-top personality blend well with the fast-paced slapstick comedy that fills the movie. Yet, despite being a funny villainess, she avoids a major pitfall of many comedic villains by also being legitimately threatening and dangerous to our heroes. That, combined with the excellent writing in the movie makes Yzma so memorable and likable.

7. Mother Gothel Tangled (2010)

Although her actual villainous actions in the movie are surprsingly few and far between, I genuinely love Mother Gothel as a villainess. Her motivations are well-established, and she’s the sole reason the story has any plot at all. Comparisons have been made to the living conditions of both Quasimodo and Rapunzel, and I would genuinely agree that Mother Gothel is akin to a diet version of Frollo without all the genocide and religious superiority. She has to be more discreet and pretend to be kind in order to keep her little flower content to remain obedient locked away from the outside world. It makes total sense the way she treats Rapunzel, and her entire character, personality, and role all fit together to enhance the narrative of the story.

6. Long John Silver Treasure Planet (2002)

Arguably one of the most human villains from Disney, Silver is a beautiful complexity as he juggles the duality of being a father-figure to the impressionable young Jim, while also betraying Jim’s trust. Since Jim’s father left when he was a child, Jim closes himself off from people and seems adrift in the world. Silver, who has no need to trick the boy for his mutiny to succeed, still takes the time to take Jim under his wing, nurture the boy’s abilities, and form a bond. Heck, with how relatively apathetic Jim was, he could have manipulated Jim into hating being on the ship, and thus have him be happy when the mutiny sets him free. But instead, he chose to teach the boy and boost his confidence. In the end, Silver is a compelling Anti-Villain where it’s hard to really define him as a good or wicked person. That is honestly more interesting than just being a straight deceitful villain.

5. Bill Sykes Oliver & Company (1988)

Perhaps the most surprising choice on my list, Sykes was a villain from Oliver & Company, a retelling of Oliver Twist with stray dogs and a kitten. However, despite Disney’s family friendly brand, Sykes is a surprisingly menacing character. A loan shark and a cut-throat business man, he spends most of the movie threatening to kill Fagin which is far darker than Disney tends to get. While many Disney villains want to kill people, those desires were driven by personal grievances with that person or people. With Sykes, it’s cold, ruthless business. He doesn’t care about Fagin’s life. All he cares about is getting his money, and Fagin’s life just happens to be the collateral. It’s the purest form of cold-blooded murder, and that’s not a common thing among Disney villains.

4. Ursula The Little Mermaid (1989)

There’s a good reason Ursula is one of the flagship villains of this franchise. She has a strong personality, is a great antagonist, and directly plays off the protagonist’s weaknesses to win. Second only to Scar, and possibly Jafar, Ursula is the classic hand-drawn animated Disney villain to get closest to winning. The fact that she’s based on a drag queen is kind of perfect, since the fairytale was written by Hans Christian Andersen to express his love for Edvard Collin discreetly. He intended to give it to Edvard as a wedding gift, but Edvard and his wife purposefully “forgot” to tell him when the wedding was out of fear that he’d make a scene or announce his love for Edvard in front of everyone. Thus, the mermaid’s taboo love of someone she shouldn’t who comes from an entirely different way of living is a direct parallel to Hans’ feelings for the young Gentleman, and the mermaid being unable to speak and suffering greatly to be near her love is a clear metaphor for Hans’ own feelings of torture. So the inclusion of a drag queen in a movie adaptation of a covert metaphorical gay romantic tragedy is just deliciously fitting.

3. The Horned King The Black Cauldron (1984)

Sykes got a place on this list for being genuinely intimidating, but this villain is living nightmare fuel. One of the best things a genuinely threatening villain can do is successfully scare you, and this villain scared the living daylights out of me as a child. In fact, he was the only Disney villain to truly and completely scare me as a child. The rest of the villains were pretty much just bad characters, but the Horned King was far more terrifying than anything else I’d seen as a kid. Though his movie bombed and the story itself was a bit lacking, the Horned King was a genuinely horrifying presence, and to this day, I can’t think Disney Villains without this guy clawing his way into my mind. Maybe as a villain himself, he’s a bit flat, but he’s a horrific undead murderous monster trying to snuff out all life. He doesn’t need to be that complex for what he is, and that works with the type of villain that he was created to be.

2. Claude Frollo The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1996)

If Sykes made it to number 5 for the cold-blooded attempt at murder on one person, Frollo strolls into 2nd place for his cold-blooded successful mass racial/ethnic genocide of multiple people over a long reign of tyranny. Although we don’t see his treats on-screen, he very verbally implies that he has been executing people one by one for at least twenty years as he crushes ants. We even see him barricade a family with children inside of their house and then proceed to burn it down. This man is not messing around, and I love it. When it coems to dark, twisted, and messed up villains, Frollo takes the cake. He is hands down one of the greatest and most horrible villains out there. And the fact that he does this all in the name of God is a hauntingly dark reminder of the true cruelty of the medieval Christian church. Frollo was written in the original book to be a deliberate critique of the Catholic church, and I for one am grateful that Disney decided to be faithful to Frollo’s horrible nature when adapting to film.

1. Maleficent Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Finally, we reach the leader of the Disney Villains. How could I not put her at the top of this list? She literally fights with all the powers of Hell. But what I like most about her is what you can piece together from the narrative. Out of all the fairies, only Fauna thinks that Maleficent could be reasoned with, and she feels sad at the idea that Maleficent may not even grasp the concept of happiness, or what it feels like to be loved. This opens Maleficent up to being a product of abuse, abandonment, and bitterness. Her hatred for the world and her actions of spite and envy come into a new light with the idea that it’s kindled from neglect and exclusion from others. It offers the question of what would happen if someone did try to just talk to her, and offers a possibly sympathetic reading of her character. But, the true crux of what Maleficent stands for is that she’s evil, and she takes great pleasure in her evil ways. She cursed a baby because she wasn’t invited to a party. When it comes to pure, unfiltered evil, Maleficent has that in spades. So, Maleficent is a perfect character no matter which type you prefer as a villain: the tormented outcast lashing out, or the heartless monster lighting the world on fire for fun. No matter what kind of villain you prefer, there’s a way of reading her narrative to satisfy you.

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alyssnah · 5 years

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cats.

Finally, the much anticipated Cats post.

On Monday, the 29th of July, I was afforded the opportunity to witness a showing of Cats 2019 at my local theatre. After receiving several responses to my initial Instagram post, I was informed that trailers for the animated movie were shown during other screenings at the theatre. It had also slipped my mind during the initial post that the live-action movie release of the musical Cats was scheduled to release in December 2019. Thus, I was aware that I would be seeing the animated feature upon my arrival.

Regrettably, I do inform you that I arrived somewhat late. As such, I missed a short portion of the movie. However, I was able to quickly catch on to the events occurring.

Immediately, I noted that the voice acting was rather bizarre in more than one way. Firstly, it was jarringly overacted in a way akin to that of a straight to DVD knockoff-- that it was. Secondly, as the film was originally released in Chinese, the dubbing was VERY off sync. Often times, the characters' mouths would either be moving with no words being said or be closed while dialogue could be heard. On the topic of the movie being initially released in China, all the text shown was in Chinese and almost all of the human characters appeared to be Chinese as well.

In contrast to sound, I'd say the animation was actually rather pleasant. Nothing special, but nothing terrible. As much as I think Illumination is a shitty animation studio, considering this was somewhat of a knockoff of their movie The Secret Life of Pets, the animation in Cats was very close to the quality of the material I am almost certain it is piggybacking off of.

Now, for the big boi: the plot.

The plot of Cats 2019 (animated, not musical) revolves around a young cat named Cate (had to Google all the names, I forgot them) who wants to see the world. At the point which I arrived, Cate was attempting to escape the apartment which he lived in to go to a place called "Peachtopia" (NB: The alternate title for this movie is "Cats and Peachtopia"). It is stated that his father, Blanket, has told Cate that his mother is in Peachtopia which is somewhere off in the mountains in the distance. As I arrived late into the movie, I was unsure if they had revealed at this point if it was a euphemism for the death of his mother but whether or not the audience knows this does not change that Cate does not. Cate escapes the apartment using a firework/rocket contraption that shoots him across a river from what I assume to be one island of Hong Kong to another. The contraption is rather elaborate involving not only the rocket but a paraglider which he uses to make his descent. The movie mostly focuses on Cate's adventures and his father and a macaw (which also lived in the apartment) chasing after him.

Let me note that the IMDB plot nor anything previously stated can express to you the complexities of this story. This is where we deep dive. Proceed with caution or turn back now.

When Cate lands from his paraglider, he ends up in a strange garden full of glass animals-- an art exhibition of sorts. This garden contains an assortment of live animals as well-- raccoons, dogs, monkeys, etc. The garden is also filled to the brim with animal traps: nets, cages, and the sorts. Cate almost gets caught but a monkey helps him escape. Soon after, raccoons start chasing after him. Raccoons also aid in some sort of security by helping the garden staff to capture animals that wander in? Very strange. When Cate is almost cornered, a black cat comes to his rescue and leads him away. IMBD does not have the name of this black cat nor the name of the majority of the cast so I will call him John. John owns a bar. Yes, a bar. There's this strange scene in which John and the raccoons pour shots and have some sort of game involving mixing up the glasses? Keeping in mind that this is a children's movie, I think now would be a good time to introduce that movie censorship laws are a lot more lax in Asia and, as such, this movie can get away with a LOT more than its American counterpart.

Anyways, the entire movie is alarmingly convoluted. John was an old friend to Cate's dad-- Blanket. Blanket had given a glass necklace to Cate which was created by the same artist who owned the garden. This necklace is the reason for the huge chase behind Cate for the majority of the movie; times are getting hard for the artist and he would like to reclaim one of his earliest works because his newer pieces are no longer selling. I swear I can't go into every single detail of this movie without taking a minimum of 5 pages to get into it but the necklace was given to Blanket by John and John was previously the pet of the glass artist. However, once the artist became cruel and cynical, John left to start his bar. Also, on Blanket's journey, he meets a ton of hippie yoga animals think Zootopia spa scene but Asian.

The most jarring thing about this movie is that it does NOT shy away from animal cruelty. Once Cate is captured and revealed to not have the necklace, he is thrown into a pound-like area with many other animals. It is explained to him that the glass artist manages to create such realistic pieces by choosing an animal from the bunch every month or so to turn into a live mould. At one point, the animals try to escape and accidentally knock down a feeding stick. A staff member remarks that they are playing with the feeding stick and, thus, must be hungry promptly before throwing a handful of plastic bags into the cages. Even on Blanket's adventure for his son, while roaming the streets, they see raw meat being chopped-- blood and all. The dialogue is also rather adult. Those evil raccoon characters often spew mountains of philosophical dialogue in their exchanges with the main cast.

This is already too long but let me get to the climax and conclusion of the movie. They escape the glass artist man in a glass submarine which he has made. They propel it forward using an oxygen tank and head towards Peachtopia, which is only accessible via travelling under a lake. At this point, John has already revealed to Blanket that his mother is dead and prior to that we get a detailed flashback showcasing the event. Cate's mother (honestly, a very thicc cat) was standing on the windowsill when a thunderstorm began. Thunder shook the window, causing the glass to slam down and push her off the ledge off the very high apartment window. There's a very dramatic fall scene in the rain. The owner goes down and comes back up, crying. Blanket turns to happy, smiling and youthful Cate. Also, before getting to the glass submarine. The artist decides that he is upset and that ALL the animals should be moulded alive. Cate is chosen as the first and you see him standing on a conveyor belt. The movie then cuts in a way that makes me think they just didn't bother to include 20 minutes and Cate is now in a plastic bag in a pile of garbage going to an incinerator. Blanket and the macaw arrive just in time to see him but not early enough to save him. Cate appears to die. Blanket and the macaw cry. A few too many moments later, we see Cate was caught on the edge and barely manages to escape. Then, we get to the oxygen propelled lake submarine.

While trying to escape, the glass man spills an entire pot of lava and we almost see many characters die. However, the only one who does die is the glass artist man who is STRAIGHT UP KILLED. They push him off into the water and he DROWNS. The movie immediately moves on. They travel. They all collectively pass out and wake up in Peachtopia which leads me to think it's a metaphor but I just think the movie didn't know how to transition. Anyways, the movie ends with Blanket, John and Cate reunited before immediately deciding Peachtopia fucking sucks. Blanket and macaw go back to their apartment. Cate, despite being like literally five years old or something, decides he wants to travel the world. John decides to join the raccoons and start a new bar. They all part to their new lives as a default Windows background fills the shot.

And that's Cats 2019.

#cats 2019 #cats #cats movie #definitely not the one youre looking for #its a chinese movie #i had a breakdown writing this post

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britesparc · 5 years

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Weekend Top Ten #388

Top Ten Things Tim Burton’s Batman Films Did Right

Thirty years ago, give or take, the first Tim Burton Batman movie was released in cinemas (according to Google, its UK release date was 11th August 1989). Everyone knows the story; it was a phenomenon, a marketing juggernaut, a hit probably beyond what anyone was reasonably expecting. I was too young to understand or appreciate what was going on, but for twenty years or more the image of Batman in the public consciousness was intertwined with Adam West and pop-art frivolity. Suddenly superheroes were “dark” and “grown-up”; suddenly we had multi-million-dollar-grossing properties, franchises, and studios rummaging through their back catalogues of acquired IPs to land the next four-quadrant hit. Throughout the rest of the nineties we got a slew of pulp comic adaptations – The Spirit, The Phantom, Dick Tracy – before the tangled web of Marvel licenses became slightly easier to unpick, and we segued into the millennium on the backs of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Flash-forward to a super-successful Batman reboot, then we hit the MCU with Iron Man, and we all know where that goes. And it all began with Batman!

Except, of course, that’s not quite the whole story. Studios were trying to adapt superheroes and comic books for a number of years, not least because Richard Donner’s Superman had been such a huge hit a decade before Batman. And the Batman films themselves began to deteriorate in quality pretty rapidly. Plus, when viewed from the distance of a couple of decades or more, the supposed dark, gritty, adult storytelling in Burton’s films quickly evaporates. They’re just as camp, silly, and nonsensical as the 1960s show, they’re just visually darker and with more dry ice. Characters strut around in PVC bodysuits; the plots make little to no sense; characterisation is secondary to archetype; and Batman himself is quite divorced from his comic incarnation, killing enemies often capriciously and being much less of a martial artist or detective than he appeared on the page (in fact, Adam West’s Batman does a lot more old-school deducing than any of the cinematic Batmen).

I think a lot of people of my generation, who grew up with Adam West, went through a period of disowning the series because it was light, bright, campy and, essentially, for children; then we grow up and appreciate it all the more for being those things, and also for being a pure and delightful distillation of one aspect of the comics (seriously, there’s nothing in the series that’s not plausibly from a 1950s Batman comic). And I think the same is true of Burton’s films. for all their importance in terms of “legitimising” superhero movies, they have come in for a lot of legitimate criticism, and in the aftermath of Christopher Nolan’s superlative trilogy they began to look very old-fashioned and a much poorer representation of the character. But then, again, we all grow up a little bit and can look back on them as a version of Batman that’s just as valid; they don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be definitive, but we can enjoy them for what they are: macabre delights, camp gothic comedies, delightfully stylised adventure stories. They might lack the visual pizazz of a Nolan fight scene or, well, anything in any MCU movie, but they’re very much of a type, even if that type was aped, imitated, and parodied for a full decade following Batman’s release. There’s much to love about Burton’s two bites of the Bat-cherry, and here – at last – I will list my ten favourite aspects of the films (that’s both films, Batman and Batman Returns).

Tim Burton’s Batman isn’t quite my Batman (but, for the record, neither is Christopher Nolan’s), but whatever other criticisms I may have of the films, here are ten things that Burton and his collaborators got absolutely right.

Great Design: seriously, from an aesthetic point of view, they’re gorgeous. The beautiful Anton Furst Gotham, all gothic towers and industrial pipework, is a thing of beauty, and in terms of live-action the design of all of Batman’s vehicles and gadgets has never been bettered. It gives Batman, and his world, a gorgeously distinctive style all its own.

Wonderful Toys: it’s not just the design of the Batmobile and Batwing that impresses (big, bulbous round bits, sweeping curves, spiky wings); its how they’re used. Burton really revels in the gadgets, making Batman a serious tech-head with all manner of grappling hooks, hidden bombs, and secret doo-dahs to give him an upper hand in a fight. It makes up for the wooden combat (a ninja Michael Keaton is not), suggesting this Batman is a smarter fighter than a physical one. Plus all those gadgets could get turned into literal wonderful toys. Ker-ching.

He is the Night: Adam West’s Batman ran around during the day, in light grey spandex with a bright blue cape. Michael Keaton’s Batman only ever came out at night, dressed entirely in thick black body armour, and usually managed to be enveloped in smoke. From his first appearance, beating up two muggers on a Gotham rooftop, he is a threatening, scary, sinister presence. It totally sold the idea of Batman as part-urban legend, part-monster. Burton is fascinated with freaks, and in making his Batman freaky, he made him iconic.

You Wanna Get Nuts?: added to this was Michael Keaton’s performance as Bruce Wayne. Controversial casting due to his comedy background and, frankly, lack of an intimidating physique, he nevertheless utterly convinced. Grimly robotic as Batman, he presented a charming but secretive Bruce Wayne, one who was kind and heartfelt in private, but also serious, determined, and very, very smart. But he also excellently portrayed a dark anger beneath the surface, a mania that Bruce clearly had under control, but which he used to fuel his campaign, and which he allowed out in the divisive but (in my opinion) utterly brilliant “Let’s get nuts!” scene. To this date, the definitive screen Bruce Wayne.

Dance with the Devil: The counterpoint to this was Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Cashing a phenomenal cheque for his troubles, he nevertheless delivered; his Joker is wild, over-the-top, cartoonish but also terrifying. In my late teens I was turned off by the performance, feeling it a pantomime and not reflective of the quiet menace and casual cruelty of, say, Mark Hamill’s Joker; but now I see the majesty of it. You need someone this big to be a believable threat to Batman. No wonder that, with Joker dead, they essentially had to have three villains to replace him in the sequel.

Family: Bruce’s relationship with Alfred is one of the cornerstones of the comic, but really only existed in that capacity since the mid-80s and Year One (which established Alfred as having raised Bruce following his parents’ deaths). So in many ways the very close familial relationship in Batman is a watershed, and certainly the first time many people would have seen that depicted. Michael Gough’s Alfred is benign, charming, very witty, and utterly capable as a co-conspirator. One of the few people to stick around through the Schumacher years, he maintained stability even when everything else was going (rubber) tits up.

Meow: I’ve mostly focussed on Batman here, but by jeebies Batman Returns has a lot going for it too. Max Shreck, the Penguin, “mistletoe is deadly if you eat it”… but pride of place goes to Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. An utterly bonkers origin but a perfectly pitched character, she was a credible threat, a believable love interest, and an anti-hero worth rooting for, in a tour-de-force performance. Also came along at just the right time for me to experience puberty. If you’re interested. Plus – and this can’t be overstated – she put a live bird into her mouth. For real. I mean, Christ.

Believably Unreal: I used to criticise Batman for being unrealistic, just as campy in its own way as the ‘60s show. But that’s missing the point. It’s a stylised world, clearly not our own thanks to the Furst-stylings. And Burton uses that to his advantage. The gothic stylings help sell the idea of a retro-futuristic rocket-car barrelling through city streets; the mishmash of 80s technology and 40s aesthetics gives us carte blanche for a zoot-suited Joker and his tracksuited henchmen to tear up a museum to a Prince soundtrack. It’s a world where Max Shreck, looking like Christopher Walken was electrocuted in a flour factory, can believably run a campaign to get Penguin elected mayor, even after he nearly bites someone’s nose off. It’s crazy but it works.

Believably Corrupt: despite the craziness and unreality, the first Batman at least does have a strong dose of realism running through it. The gangsters may be straight out of the 40s but they’ve adopted the gritty grimness of the intervening decades, with slobby cop Eckhart representing corrupt law enforcement. Basically, despite the surrealism on display, the sense of Gotham as a criminal cesspool is very well realised, and extends to such a high level that the only realistic way to combat any of it is for a sad rich man to dress up as Dracula and drive a rocket-car at a clown.

The Score: I’ve saved this for last because, despite everything, Danny Elfman’s Batman theme is clearly the greatest and strongest legacy of the Burton era. Don’t come at me with your “dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-Batman” nonsense. Elfman’s Batman score is sublime. Like John Williams’ Superman theme, it’s iconic, it’s distinctive, and as far as I’m concerned it’s what the character should sound like. I have absolutely no time for directors who think you should ever make a Batman film with different music. It’s as intrinsically linked with the character as the Star Wars theme is with, well, Star Wars. It’s perfect and beautiful and the love-love-love the fact that they stuck it in the Animated Series too.

Whelp, there we are. The ten best things about Burton’s two Batman movies. I barely spoke about the subsequent films because, well, they’re both crap. No, seriously, they’re bad films. Even Batman Forever. Don’t start.

#top ten #batman #1989 #tim burton #Michael Keaton #batman returns #comics #movies

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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The Corpse Grinders

This movie was directed by Ted V. Mikels, who did the same job on Girl in Gold Boots, and was written by Arch Hall Sr., who did the same job on Eegah!. Those were two of the sleazier and more misogynistic entries in Moon 13’s big ol’ vault of Kingachrome vials, so let’s prepare ourselves. Another warning sign is how the title card is literally cut out and glued on the film there. This isn’t just gonna be slimy, it’s gonna be cheap.

I’m not sure I can write a normal plot summary of this movie because that would make it sound far too straightforward. As with The Astro-Zombies, we seem to have several beginnings, all of them for unrelated movies. First we’ve got a couple who are suddenly attacked by their cat. Then we’ve got a gravedigger grumbling that a guy named Landau owes him money. Then we’re at the Lotus Cat Food company, where Landau is complaining that he needs more product. Then we’re at a hospital, where a doctor named Howard and a nurse named Angie are also getting attacked by a cat.

Even when I write it out like that, you can kind of see where this is going – the cat food company is buying bodies from the gravedigger, and as a result the cats are developing a taste for human flesh and attacking their owners. In the movie itself, however, it’s still less clear than that, because all these scenes focus on things that are beside that point. The scene with the gravedigger is more about his fractured relationship with his wife, who is mentally ill and obsessed with her doll, than about what he’s up to. The scene at Lotus is a showcase of the disabled weirdos Landau employs. The bit at the hospital is about Howard’s drinking and his affair with Angie.

Anyway, yeah, Landau and his pal Maltby load the corpses into their rape van and probably molest them before feeding them into a ridiculous contraption that somewhat resembles an old, rusty version of the Teletubbies’ tubby custard machine. When the local graveyard runs dry, Landau starts killing his employees and random homeless people. Howard and Angie investigate. There’s a detective with a mustache hanging around watching things and he looks so much like Howard that I was forty minutes into the movie before I was sure they were two different people.

Like the other Ted V. Mikels movies I’ve seen, this one is dark and out of focus and never makes a whole lot of sense. The actors are bad, weird editing choices are made, and only one of the cast – Sanford Mitchell as Landau – looks like he’s having any fun. The camera focuses on women dressing, undressing, and lounging around in their underwear, rather on things that might develop the plot. The nearest thing to a special effect is a shot of Howard pulling chicken gizzards out of what may be an actual taxidermied cat. There’s only one mildly amusing joke in the entire movie, which is the ad on the wall of Landau’s office: Lotus Cat Food, for cats who like people! Pity you can barely read it.

The levels on which the whole thing is ridiculous are many and varied. Landau thinks he’s gonna get rich selling cat food? The cheapest way to get meat for it is to buy human corpses? A taste of the result makes eight-pound cats attack hundred and fifty pound humans? The stuff I feed my cat claims to be mostly turkey and giblets but I’m quite sure if she ever saw a real turkey she’d go right up the nearest tree and howl until I got her down. Why hunt your own food when you can pester the humans until we give you some? Isn’t that the whole reason evolution gave us thumbs – so we could open cans of cat food?

The Corpse Grinders isn’t even really sure what’s supposed to be its major source of fear. Is it the cats turning on their owners? If so, it’s pretty poorly presented, because we don’t get to see the bond between human and animal before we get the attacks. Is it the fact that they’re digging up corpses? If that’s so, we really needed to see people reacting to the raiding of the graveyard and not knowing what’s become of their loved ones’ remains. Is it how Landau regards human beings as so disposable? The movie should have spent less time making fun of the ill and disabled, then. Is it Landau’s crony feeling up the bodies? This only happens once. Is it the reminder that we are, in the end, made of meat? This has been used to horrifying effect in many films, but it just never works here. The Corpse Grinders throws a number of ostensibly awful things at us, but never has the focus required to make us feel any real disgust or horror.

All we’re left with, then, is a really bad movie made by people who obviously hate cats. In several scenes a cat is supposed to be attacking somebody, but it’s clear that what’s actually going on is the ‘victim’ holding the cat against him- or herself while it struggles to get away. The only cat attack scene that doesn’t involve obvious cruelty is the one where the cats move in to eat Landau’s body at the end – this seems to have been accomplished by putting cat treats or catnip on the actor’s chest. I really hope the taxidermy cat in the autopsy scene was one they found at a garage sale or something, rather than being killed and preserved for the movie.

Not only does the movie mistreat its actual cats, the script insults them, too. At several points we’re told that so-and-so adored her cat (it’s always a woman) only for the ungrateful beast to turn on her. That does mean there’s a little bit of food for thought in this movie, because you quickly realize it had to be about cats. You couldn’t make this movie about dogs, because people and dogs have a totally different relationship.

There’s a bit where Howard reads from a book that even domestic cats are ‘half-savage’ and that we don’t own them, they own us. Anybody who actually has a cat, including myself, would agree with this – a dog is a pet, while a cat is a room-mate. If all the humans magically vanished, dogs seem like they would probably wither away and die while cats would get along just fine. Like most things we all kind of know without remembering where we learned them, this isn’t actually true in the real world: both dogs and cats can survive in the wild much better than we’d expect, but both prefer to seek out human help if they can find it. But we do not trust cats, and that’s what this movie plays on. We would have a hard time believing our dogs would suddenly turn on us, but our cats? They do it all the time, as soon as they’re tired of having their tummies rubbed.

The other reason this movie has to be about cats is because dogs would be expensive. Dogs can be pretty big and could easily hurt somebody, so a movie in which dogs turn on their masters would require trained animals, their handlers, and a ton of insurance. Cats are small enough that if you’re an asshole you can hold them down or throw them around. I guess you could use only small dogs, but it might be hard to take the movie seriously when somebody’s getting their toes viciously gnawed off by a miniature schnauzer.

The Corpse Grinders is also about how we treat the dead, the homeless, and the disabled – three categories of humans that society would rather push under the rug and forget about. It’s not the first to explore the intersection of these categories, either. In a sense, this is a Burke and Hare movie. If you haven’t heard of Burke and Hare, they were a couple of landlords in early 19th century Ediburgh who made some money by selling the corpses of their dead tenants to the university medical school to dissect. Eventually it occurred to them that they didn’t need to wait for their victims to die on their own. They’ve been the subject of several movies, themselves, ranging from outright horror to dark comedy, and The Corpse Grinders follows the same basic premise. When you’re already selling the dead, it’s a small step to the almost dead, and from there to the merely unwanted.

Almost all of Landau’s victims fall into this category. There’s his disabled employees, who work for him because ‘nobody else will hire them’. There’s the homeless drunks. There’s the gravedigger and his wife, an isolated and ill couple who don’t appear to have any friends. He knows to pick victims like these because his first victim, the cat food company’s financial backer, was missed, and it’s still causing him trouble after all this time. People like one-legged Tessie, or the gravedigger’s wife, have no support system. The fact that nobody even notices they’re gone ought to be just as horrifying as their fate.

Not that this is actual social commentary on the movie’s part. I don’t think even the stuff about cat-human relationships was intended to make us think. The film-makers just don’t like cats. Even when it shows us Landau’s victims, its logic is the same as his: nobody wants these people, nobody will care if they’re gone. The setup in which we meet people like Willie, Tessie, and the Gravedigger’s wife is mostly to show us why nobody wants them, rather than trying to make their deaths into tragedies. Mikels and Hall Sr. don’t seem to like people any better than they like cats.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go hug my cat and tell her she’s a pretty girl. She’ll try to eat me, but it’s just her way of telling me she loves me too.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the corpse grinders #tw: rape #70s

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animebw · 6 years

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Binge-Watching: Akame ga Kill, Episodes 1-3

And so we begin! In which I extol the benefits of intentional edginess, Tatsumi confuses me as a character, and Akane is already fantastic.

Oh, You Know

Akame ga Kill was a name I had seen bandied around a lot in the anime circles I frequent, despite not knowing much about the show itself. And it always seemed to crop up when discussing a very particular kind of show: the edgefest. Elfen Lied, King’s Game, Evil or Live, those were just a few of the names that were thrown around in close relation to this one. All shows infamous for their juvenile stabs at maturity, mistaking blood and nudity and torture porn for actual depth and meaning. So there was a not insubstantial part of me that was going into Akame ga Kill under the impression that I was in for a similarly stupid experience. And three episodes in, I don’t think I was wrong about that assumption. What I wasn’t expecting, though, is that much like the Venom movie, it feels like a good chunk of the people making it were actually in on the joke themselves. Make no mistake, Akame ga Kill is dumb, dumb, dumb and doofy in its pretensions toward darkness, but it feels like that’s entirely the point. And while it’s still uncertain what side of the tightrope it’s going to fall off in the end, the result as of now is still nothing less than fascinating.

Much like the aforementioned Venom movie, what makes me think that Akame ga Kill is attempting to take the piss out of its own pretensions is just how wonky and wibbly the tone is. We establish this corrupt fantasy kingdom full of lowlives and evil politicians, while the team of colorful assassins Night Raid are the good guys doing dirty deeds for the sake of an insurrection movement, and our protagonist Tatsumi is a naive newcomer dragged into this dangerous world by circumstance and forced to adapt to a darker morality than he’s comfortable with. As a plot structure, this seems like an obvious set-up for a conventionally dark story, perhaps in the realm of Psycho-Pass’s descent into man’s cruelty to man. But in execution, the mission statement seems to have been not to weave a complex web of misery and pain, but to push every bit of its darkness past the point of absurdity so it wraps right back around to being funny. I mean, in the middle of the big dark reveal at the end of the first episode, that the seemingly cute and innocent girl actually dragged Tatsumi’s friends into her prison and killed them for sport, she suddenly breaks into this ludicrous rant about how they deserved to die because of awful and poor and gross and filthy and not-elite they were and god, that one girl’s hair was just so disgusting, any self-respecting woman should keep good care of her hair! And it’s accompanied by a sketchy, stupidly expressive impact panel the likes of which Kill la Kill would often pull out to emphasize the climaxes of its over-the-top action scenes. It’s such a jarring departure that I literally burst out laughing on the spot. There is no way that wasn’t intended to be played for comedy; it’s just too obviously stupid to be taken as anything else.

And that one moment becomes the first marker of how fast and loose this show plays with its own tone. One moment we’re in the middle of a brutal fight scene with sickly red blood going everywhere and horrible atrocities committed on screen, and the next moment we’re back to the wacky camaraderie between the assassins and jiggly tits. There’s a very intentional effort on display to undercut every moment of darkness it hints at by either segwaying into comedy too quickly to let it land, or just letting the darkness get so overblown that it becomes funny in its own right. I mean,Tatsumi literally senses the incoming assassin death squad by saying”I sense malice!” with a straight face, and the evil corrupt minister with bug eyes and a mile-wide shit eating grin who implicitly rapes and tortures women is literally named “Minister Honest”. They had to know what they were doing here. There is no way this show was intended to be taken seriously; we’re meant to laugh at its childishly overblown blood spurts and high-school level philosophizing. And I am certainly laughing so far; something about this level of self-aware charm really works. I have no idea if Akame ga Kill will be able to keep this up over its remaining 21 episodes. But for now, its got a confident enough grasp on its own stupidity that I’m willing to see where it wants to take me.

Hanging By a Thread

And that’s good, because even if I appreciate the overarching intent to make a purposefully overblown edgelord romp, there’s still a lot I can criticize about how it all comes together under that intention. For one thing, there are a handful of major logical flaws that stand out, signs that the thought going into the actual plot isn’t as strong as the thought going into the subversive atmosphere. I don’t believe for a second that Tatsumi would be able to hold his own against Akame when they first meet, given she’s gunning to kill him with the same overwhelming skill that just cut three highly trained guards down like it was nothing. Not to mention at the end of episode 3, where the Iron Fist bad guy could leap through a hail of bullets like it was nothing but then couldn’t shake off one scrawny kid holding him in place. The fights have all been pretty low stakes thus far, but I imagine Akame ga Kill will want to start ramping up at some point, and these few shoddy moments don’t bode well for its future.

I could also do without all the dumb, shitty fanservice. Yes, I’ve complained about this stuff time and time again while writing for this blog, and I’ll complain about it as many times in the future as I need to, because I don’t see any value in it. We’re basically introduced to Leone tits first with one of the dumbest, laziest ogling shots I can recall, just shoving her tits in our face without the slightest bit of consent from my end. Akane’s already stripped down to her underwear for our viewing “pleasure”, and we just couldn’t escape without Tatsumi walking in on one of the girls changing, the laziest and more overplayed trope in the book (”What’s up? Are we having a festival?” I wish, Leone). The fact of the matter is, this kind of cheap pandering only serves to make all these characters less interesting, reducing them from people we can care about to slabs of meat on a platter. Intentionally stupid or not, there are ways to revel in your own dumbness without letting it overtake and consume you.

Tatsumi the Contradiction

Perhaps the most concerning of all my, well, concerns thus far, though, is how the character of Tatsumi is being handled. In short, it feels like the show wants him to be two people at once depending on which of its clashing tones it wants to be at any given moment and can’t figure out how to make them feel like the same person. He’s established in the first episode as painfully naive, full of himself and dreaming of visions of glory but robbed and played for a fool the instant he gets into town. And his realization of the horrors the Imperial Capital is perpetuating, followed by his first enraged shedding of blood, is treated like his first step down the path of the assassin that he’ll follow from now on. But from then on, it also feels like the show wants him to already be a badass edgelord stone-cold killer; he takes down a demonic captain of the guard without breaking either a sweat or his emotionless visage. The two halves feel like different people, and the result is a really confusing characterization of somebody who is at once observing the darkness of his comrades from a horrified distance and already knee-deep in that same darkness itself. If Akame ga Kill wants to solidify its foundation moving forward, the first thing it needs to do is figure out who this Tatsumi kid is supposed to be.

If Looks Could Kill

Thankfully, while we’re waiting to see if this show can pull itself together moving forward, it’s still got plenty to enjoy in the meantime. Another helpful aspect of the seesawing tone is that it can breeze through plot points fairly briskly and efficiently, having Tatsumi's inevitable decision to join Night Raid come pretty early without it feeling out of place (Or having Mine say “let me explain my backstory to you” literally a second after Tatsumi wonders about her past. Holy shit, that had me cackling.). And it allows the characters themselves to come to the forefront fairly quickly, showing off their eclectic personalities and designs to get us accustomed to the large central cast. I greatly enjoy how Bulat is essentially a mashup of countless shonen references (seriously, he looks exactly like Knuckle from Hunter x Hunter and his armor is a literal Stand power, how can you not love that?), and Sheele’s strong resemblance to Sachan from Gintama has me chuckling already.

But it’s definitely Akame herself who’s the real standout of the cast thus far. She feels like a more expressive take on the classic deadpan kuudere archetype, capable of communicating effectively but choosing to view her surroundings from an ironic distance. She feels in control of herself in a way that this archetype usually doesn’t, and it allows her the freedom to have some truly expressive moment of memetic comedy, slipping in underplayed jabs and quips at every opportunity with hilarious dead fish eyes of judgement. I can just picture as a guest on an episode of MST3K lobbing deadpan cherry bombs at awful monster costumes. Also, she is literally me when it comes to cooking: I will never stop taste-testing the food either. Bottom line, she doesn’t give a single fuck, and it’s awesome. I look forward to watching her whip Tatsumi into shape far into the future.

Odds and Ends

-Oh yeah, this OP is aaaaaall the edge. Love it.

-*skeptical* asdkjasdkl that was such a Kazuma face

-”That was so encouraging I’ve got tears in my eyes.” See? This show doesn’t not know what it’s doing.

-”Why did bro pop into my head?!” This just in, Tatsumi is canon disaster bi.

-”I’m not sure what that entails, but okay!” askdhaskajsd you absolute dork

-”I can’t believe you’re sacrificing yourself!” That one moment gave me such major Bisky vibes it’s not even funny. Mine, you little shit.

-Okay but why does this guy look like All Might mixed with Cthulu

And with that, we’re on our way. This is going to be one hell of an interesting ride, huh? Well, see you next time!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #akame ga kill #esdeath #akame

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dweemeister · 6 years

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Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

The Walt Disney Company is on a financial rampage. Its pending acquisition of 20th Century Fox will be just the latest of a long line of safe purchases by its chairman and CEO Bob Iger – perhaps the first step in erasing the glorious history of a rival, formative major Hollywood studio. In the midst of rapid change in how television and cinema is consumed and distributed, the Walt Disney Animation Studios remains the spiritual home of the corporate behemoth that has been banking hard on monetizing nostalgia to decrease its risks. Apart from (recent) Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel, and whatever else Disney has acquired, the Walt Disney Animation Studios can be proud of its history of artistic innovation and narrative timelessness. So it is dispiriting that Rich Moore and Phil Johnston’s Ralph Breaks the Internet will be the first of two of the Animation Studios’ sequels over the next two years (the other is 2019′s Frozen 2 – good riddance to John Lasseter). This sequel to Wreck-It Ralph (2012; which I enjoyed) drowns in its thematic incoherence about the Internet, muddles a well-intentioned center about the nature of friendship, and overdoses of my least favorite things about recent Disney movies – making hollow metatextual jokes about the Disney Company and previous Disney movies; the latter reveals a modern-day Disney ashamed of its past in all the wrong places.

For all that and more, Ralph Breaks the Internet – which, again, I enjoyed while watching it in a theater – is the worst Disney movie for at least a decade. It goes beyond Big Hero 6′s (2014) bombastic Marvel-sized corporatism and Zootopia’s (2016) ultra-contemporary character behavior. As a professed Disney fan cut by a different cloth, the passes that recent canonical Disney movies have received from other, noticeably hesitant-to-criticize fan-reviewers (apologies for all those hyphens) reveal a brand loyalty that yours truly does not possess. Animation history cannot be written without mentioning the works of Walt Disney Animation Studios. And thus they must be held to highest standards.

The film begins six years after the original, with Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) the best of friends at Litwak’s Family Fun Center and Arcade. Vanellope is tiring of her game, Sugar Rush, and a contrived moment which will make you question whether the arcade characters have free will and which results in the destruction of the game’s steering wheel controller sees Sugar Rush being unplugged – leaving its characters homeless (if this makes no sense to you, you probably did not see the first movie). Soon after, Mr. Litwak has plugged in a new Wi-Fi router, connecting the arcade to the Internet. Ralph and Vanellope decide to travel to the Internet and purchase a replacement wheel as soon as they can. They head to eBay, and in their enthusiasm, overbid for the wheel. As a result, they must raise $27,001 – which looks like a decent final score in a game of Jeopardy! – as they navigate pop-up advertisers, the dark web, a Disney fansite that needs more Eeyore and Grumpy, a YouTube knockoff led by an algorithm named Yesss (Taraji P. Henson; no the character is not named “Yasss”), and a Grand Theft Auto-like online game called Slaughter Race.

In Slaughter Race, in conversation with charismatic racer Shank (Gal Gadot), Vanellope finds what she believes to be her virtual calling. Ralph, who has been monetizing videos on that YouTube knockoff by making an absolute fool of himself, overhears his best and only friend thinking about leaving Sugar Rush. He is despondent, and willing to do too much to keep Vanellope in Sugar Rush. All this inspires plotline (Vanellope, who is essentially a child, wants to live in what probably is an M-rated game? Do these concerns make me a game-phobic adult?) and universe logic questions that are too numerous to bring up in this review. For that alone, Phil Johnston (Zootopia) and Pamela Ribon’s (2016′s Moana, 2017′s Smurfs: The Lost Village) screenplay can be described, charitably, as calamitous.

Take a deep breath; that synopsis was a lot, I know. Now, do you like Fortnite references? What about Internet memes that allow this reviewer to approximate when this screenplay was finished within a three- to six-month window? Do you care for lazy product placement for Twitter, Google, YouTube, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Instagram, Snapchat, and especially ©Disney and its ever-growing list of intellectual properties? If you said yes to each of these questions, then Ralph Breaks the Internet is probably going to be your favorite film in the Disney animated canon.

I am just grateful the film did not find the space for 4chan or InfoWars.

In a year where all these corporations and some of their most prolific, famous users have been under much-delayed scrutiny for their ethical misbehavior, Ralph Breaks the Internet seems to want to say something, at times, about their worst aspects. The comments section in the YouTube knockoff that Ralph attempts to monetize videos with has a comments section room, teeming with negativity and cruelty. Because this is a Disney film, you have to imagine casual racism and sexism must be buried in there, but Ralph – whose self-worth has become defined by his friendship with Vanellope – shrugs off his momentary disillusionment with how some on the Internet think of his videos. Most everyone who has engaged in social media and has received nasty comments from anonymous or known users online never pick themselves up that quickly. The film looks like it wants to make a statement here – whether subtle or as obvious as a clothed person at a nudist colony. But the plot must progress to the next frantic sequence or extremely contemporary joke that will date badly in a years’ time let alone fifty years’ time, as Ralph’s Power of Friendship with Vanellope is so unbreakable that the film cannot take a few minutes for the audience to reflect on why people (perhaps themselves) act like this online. Mind you, this paragraph is only on social media negativity, in the light of revelations that video-sharing site algorithms reward the vapid and the controversial.

Johnston and Ribon deserve credit for the film’s crux, however: that friendship, any worthwhile relationship of any kind, is not what a person provides you, but what you can do to foster that person’s growth into the best individual they can be. Ralph, understandably, given how ostracized he was for decades among those at Litwak’s Arcade, is terrified of losing his best friend. But that is no excuse for keeping a friend away from what they want most, especially if what they want the most will take them elsewhere – best intentions be damned because best intentions do not always yield behavior that is healing. Unfortunately, the film’s message contradicts those from Wreck-it Ralph if only because of the inconsistent universe rules established in the first installment. Vanellope’s final decision seems not to consider how much she is valued from the place where she has come from (Ralph has more to learn, yes, but so does Vanellope, and her bit of introspection is exclusively understanding what she, and she alone, wants). Ralph’s flaws are also portrayed far too literally – no spoilers here, but the animation in this over-literalization of Ralph’s clinginess is outstanding – and manifests itself in a fatiguing action/chase/rescue setpiece. And to further bury this integral part of Ralph Breaks the Internet, there is barely a reprieve – once Ralph and Vanellope have departed Litwak’s arcade for the Internet – from a comedic scene where Ralph suffers as a result.

Some of the film’s funniest, but simultaneously disheartening, sequences occur when Vanellope finds herself at the Disney fansite – a detour that the overstuffed screenplay does not need. The most discussed moment is when she meets the Disney Princesses (all voiced by their original voice actor if that voice actor is still alive – with the exception of Mary Costa for Aurora), from Snow White to Cinderella to Belle (1991′s Beauty and the Beast) to Moana. Yes, this is a light-hearted aside from the main plot. But what is bothersome is that every joke in these few minutes are based on online-generated criticisms or perceptions on each of the characters. To dig the hole deeper, the film appears to insist that these versions of the Disney Princesses are the actual Disney Princesses. Snow White is useless and has that high-pitched voice. Aurora (1959′s Sleeping Beauty) is a tad drowsy. Don’t get me started on Merida (2012’s Brave). The Walt Disney Studios that has operated after Walt’s death – aside from nephew Roy E. Disney’s tenure through the 1990s – bears little to no resemblance to Walt’s artistic vision. Likewise, the depictions in Ralph Breaks the Internet are not reflections of what made each of those princesses’ appeal to audiences worldwide – aesthetically (many of the features of the pre-2000s princesses have been poorly rendered) or characteristically.

Before getting to the point, though, I will note that “A Place Called Slaughter Race” – with music by Alan Menken (numerous Disney Renaissance films; if you do not know Menken’s name, you should) and lyrics by Phil Johnston and Tom MacDougall – is delightful, and elicited the most laughs out of me during the entire film. Anyways, back to the Disney Princess scene.

That scene, in addition to the interminable parade of live-action Disney remakes of their animated classics, is part of a worrying trend for the studio’s 2010s movies. In films like Tangled (2010), Frozen (2013), Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, this film, and probably the foreseeable future given the history of the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ chief creative officer Jennifer Lee, Disney’s animated films cannot stop making self-referential jokes about Disney tropes and previous Disney movies. The live-action remakes and the animated films are both responding to contemporary criticisms of Disney classics (foxes aren’t always devious creatures, Zootopia trumpets deafeningly; if you wear a dress and have an animal sidekick, you are a princess, says Maui from Moana; etc.). For Ralph Breaks the Internet, the central criticism of these Disney princess movies is that none of these princesses – especially the earlier ones – were feminist “enough”. I acknowledge (and almost entirely agree) the points from anyone who says that some of the older Disney princess movies have serious problems in how they portray gender stereotypes. But Ralph Breaks the Internet is judging the princesses on a standard that has not withstood the unforgiving passage of time, unwittingly close to saying it is not worth anyone’s time to see Snow White. Intersectional feminism, from my understanding among its many facets (full disclosure: I’m a dude), seeks to understand the environment in which a work of art was produced. It critiques that art for the gendered inequalities within, but reserves praise for those works in what good they did for depictions of women in their time.

Ralph Breaks the Internet represents a concerning turn in the artistic direction of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Its impulses to become a studio of the likes of Illumination (of Despicable Me fame) are rooted in the early 2000s, when Disney’s then-Chairman/CEO Michael Eisner proceeded to destroy the hand-drawn animation department after the box office failure of Treasure Planet (2002) and the success of Shrek (2001) – I am not saying that a hand-drawn animated movie is necessarily better than a CGI movie, but have you noticed how poorly the referential, cynical humor in Shrek has dated? That transformation, noting the résumés of the people in charge at the key positions at Disney, is nearing completion. Will Disney’s past be prologue? This axiom proved itself true once before, but the appetite nor the groundwork seems to be apparent for a second sampling.

If nothing more, Ralph Breaks the Internet is the sort of movie I – if I was a parent or a babysitter – would put on the television (or tablet or phone... there are many reasons why you should never watch movies on a tablet or a phone if you cannot help it, but that rant is for another setting) to distract children with. The film is almost devoid of thoughtful discourse about how the Internet has changed human behavior for better and worse, preferring to occupy too steadfastly what is now, leaving others to write the future.

My rating: 5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

#Ralph Breaks the Internet #Rich Moore #Phil Johnston #Disney #Pamela Ribon #John C. Reilly #Sarah Silverman #Gal Gadot #Taraji P. Henson #Alan Menken #My Movie Odyssey

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