1989 - The Little Mermaid

Oh my, we are flying high now, aren’t we? While the not-inconsiderable success of the past two films provided Disney with reason enough to keep the theatrical animation division open, it was the massive success of a movie called Who Framed Roger Rabbit that caused them to be willing to spend gobs of money on it. A co-production with Warner Brothers, produced by Don Bluth’s producer, a wily young kid called Spielberg, requiring epic amounts of rights and royalties, hiring the finest screenwriters to extract a sensical plot out of the source novel... Expensive stuff. But they reaped the rewards and were now prepared to engage in the finest of all Disney Animation’s fine traditions, spending huge piles of money fulfilling one of Walt’s dreams. Jeffrey Katzenberg warned them that a “girls’ movie” wouldn’t do as well as their previous “boys’ movie”, but the animation crew was confident and sunk every cent of their hard-won budget into this film. Would Katzenberg’s predictions - Tell you what, I think we’ve established that JKatz was kind of an idiot back then, so are you guys okay if we skip the rhetorical questions this time? So am I. So fry up les poissons and let’s talk about The Little Mermaid.

I want to make one thing clear here, because I’m going to be complaining a lot. I do like this movie. It’s very well made, it’s deservedly a classic. In fact, it was the first movie since the inception of home video to get its first home release under the “Disney Classics” banner. And it’s earned it. I love it, it’s great, I am not disparaging it.

But…

Well, that’s it, isn’t it? In my head, there’s a lot of but in this movie. Of all the things I can think of to say about it, there’s a little voice of doubt in my head tempering it. I don’t deny that it’s important in Disney history, nor that it’s very good, but it’s a bit… Overrated isn’t the right word, I guess. But The Great Mouse Detective brought back quality, Oliver and Company brought back the music, The Little Mermaid brought back… Well, massive success. And better music. And princesses.

There's also a lot of butt in this movie.

Take the music for example. If there’s one thing everyone knows about this movie it’s that it has great songs, right? Hell yes, it’s by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, the creators of “Little Shop of Horrors”, and they made some classics. “Kiss the Girl”, “Under the Sea”, “Part of Your World”, and of course that great villain song, “Poor Unfortunate Souls”. There’s also a fun, if unnecessary song called “Les Poissons”, sung by the castle chef. BUT: their two stabs at introductory songs, “Fathoms Below” and “Daughters of Triton” are forgettable, the score is lackluster, and the integration of song and story is not always that good. And the good song that won the Best Song Oscar was the worst of the four. “Under the Sea” is fun, but it’s sort of stuck in awkwardly much later in the movie than it should have come, and the others are way better.

But still, mostly good there. How about the actors? They’ve been on a good kick there. Well, there’s certainly some standouts. Samuel Wright as Sebastian, the unaccountably Carribean crab, is really good, and sings the two award-nominated songs. Pat Carroll is deliciously evil as the villainous Ursula, and Rene Auberjonois is fantastic as always as the deranged chef. BUT: Everyone else is kinda generic. In the case of Ariel, played by stage actress Jodi Benson, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, because I think she only comes off as generic because her voice became the model for “cartoon princess” after this, and she really is quite good. But her dad and love interest are the most generic choices possible. King Triton is Ken Mars, who has pretty much two voices, the psychotic German, which is great, and the stern yet loving dad, which is bland. Guess which one he used here.

No, not that one.

Prince Eric is Christopher Barnes, who is so generic he sounds like the 1990s cartoon Spider-Man. In fact, he was, but I didn’t know that, because it’s impossible to listen to his voice and remember where you recognize it from because you DON’T, because it is BORING. Flounder is a generic teenager, Grimsby’s a generic butler, the maid is Edie McClurg, and you know what you’re getting with her. And the voices of Flotsam and Jetsam, Ursula’s servants, just confused me. They’re played by a woman, they speak in clearly female voices, but Ursula refers to them as “Boys” whenever she talks to them. It’s just weird.

Okay, so what about the story? Well, I’ll say this, it’s certainly nice and tight. There’s hardly any filler, and the story flows so smoothly I was amazed that it’s actually a bit on the longish side for these, at 83 minutes. And the basic beats of the story all hit, and I had a very enjoyable time while watching it. I also loved that for the first time, we see an actual relationship building. I mean, it’s only three days, but you remember how pleased I was in Sleeping Beauty when they had so much as a single conversation before falling in Twoo Wuv. And it’s also great that Eric initially has this fairy tale idea of romance and is hurt when he thinks Ariel isn’t the woman he met on the beach, and then actually grows to have feelings for her on her own merits. BUT: Pretty much as soon as it ended, I was struck with a load of problems I hadn’t noticed while it was on, which I shall now detail in my beloved bulleted list format.

I checked to see if Joss Whedon or Quentin Tarantino were in middle school when this came out. It would have explained so much.

* Ariel is willing to trade her voice for compatible organs with a man she’s never really met. Then her dad gives his freedom and his powers for her, then her boyfriend saves him, then she gets what she wanted. She has no arc, no growth as a character. I’m not too bothered about this one, because she should have been allowed to follow her dreams in the first place - or should she?

* The reason Ariel’s father is so opposed to her joining the human world is because they routinely haul fish out of the ocean and eat them, apparently unaware that all fish are sentient. (Except maybe the shark, but that’s another problem.) And when we get out of the water, it seems that the entire economy of Eric’s little seaside principality is based on their fishing industry, and the castle’s kitchen is basically a fish torture chamber. This is never addressed.

* I say principality rather than kingdom, because unlike Phillip and Charming, Prince Eric seems to have no father. Nor does he seem to do any governing, for that matter. And he just walks around downtown with no guards like he’s Christian X or something.

* Or maybe it is a kingdom, but he doesn’t get to be king until he puts a proper shirt on.

* A couple of years ago, I had a fairly severe laryngitis that left me mostly mute for about a week. It took all of six seconds to work out a simple charade for “I’m usually able to talk, but I can’t now. Sorry.” A little effort, Ariel, and we can clear this whole thing up before the halfway point.

* And I was willing to forgive her for not just writing it down, on the assumption that Merfolk have a different language, or are illiterate, what with writing being impractical underwater. But then my friend reminded me that she SIGNS HER OWN NAME to Ursula’s contract.

* What was Ursula’s evil plan, anyway? Screw with Triton’s daughter, get him to sign his life away to save her, steal his magic hat (?), grow gigantic, and… Then what?

* They have a boat just for weddings?

* The Wikipedia article for this movie contains the phrase “Closeup of the alleged penis”, and that’s all we’ll say on that matter, I should think.

* Two entries for the “I forget what the note I made while watching means” category: The first is “Black”. Possibilities: Ursula’s disguised hair color? Something in the animation? A reminder to download Michael Ian Black’s new book?

* Second: “Hellboy”. No idea.

* The opening scene contains among its “additional voices” none other than Mark Hamill and Tim Curry, unrecognizably playing random sailors. Awesome.

I'm not crying, I just have something caught in my FEELINGS.

Wait, that plot problems bulleted list seems to have accidentally segued into the usual “Additional Thoughts” section. Oh well, I’ve said what I need to. Look, this is a very good movie. It just has all these little bits that cause me to see it with a bit of trepidation. It’s a great movie on its own, but all the elements they need are not quite there yet. Anyway, I’m sure their next film will get it. It’s another big musical based on a classic fairy tale, right? Wait, what?

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1988 - Oliver and Company

After the success of The Great Mouse Detective, the animation team was flying high. They’d made their mark, secured their jobs, and had a bunch of fun new toys to play with. And in the finest Disney tradition, they decided to go crazy for their next one. In some ways this was a return to form. This was their first full musical in a while, and it used non-anthropomorphic animals, a la Lady and the Tramp, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and The A********s. But it also took risks, with a completely modern setting, a WAY more intense bad guy than they’d previously used, an extreme twist on a well-known story, and a use of popular singers not seen since the Jungle Book. So did it work, or was it also a return to the fine Disney tradition of disappointing follow ups? Did the technology hold up, or bog the film down? Wheeeeeeeere is Love? Beats me, kid. So get some chicken wings, because that’s what I was eating when I watched this and I’m tired of making pet food jokes, and let’s talk about Oliver and Company.

The first thing I want to address is the modern setting, because that has a MAJOR effect on the tone of the film. This is only the fourth movie they’ve done with a modern setting, and the first that really goes for it. Dumbo was set in the timeless world of the circus, and One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Rescuers spent the majority of their films in rural locations. This movie, however, is set in New York City, and it really goes at it full-blast. The wire-frame technique from the last film’s Big Ben (containing clock) finale is used throughout here to create the vast city streets and legendary New York traffic, and it looks fantastic. The big and boxy cars of the mid-80s are perfectly suited to the necessarily blocky frames, and there’s an extremely citylike feeling of depth and scale.

It was exactly the right choice to make, because this is, in case you weren’t aware, based on a Charles Dickens novel, Oliver Twist. Dickens’s depictions of London are justifiably legendary, and the loving attention they lavish on NYC in this is the perfect connection to that. In case you were wondering how Oliver Twist becomes a pet-based Disney flick: In the original, Oliver is a homeless orphan who befriends a street urchin named Dodger. He is then taken in by Fagin, a sleazy jerk who takes care of a small army of children in exchange for them stealing for him. But he’s in deep debt to one of his former pupils, the vicious Bill Sikes. Oliver is taken in by a wealthy old man and comes to love his new home, but after being “rescued” by Dodger, Fagin attempts to ransom him, which gets violent and dangerous when Sikes gets involved.

The Disney version is exactly the same.

Plus or minus a few humans.

Oh, sure, Oliver’s a kitten, Dodger’s a stray mutt, Fagin’s gang are dogs, and he’s adopted by a cute little girl instead of an old widower, but still, they translated the beats of the story impressively. The only major change is that Fagin is kind of a nice and sweet guy who uses the dogs less for stealing and more for garbage picking, begging, and unsuccessful short cons; and Sikes is not his former student, but a vicious loan shark. Which makes sense, because if Sikes learned from Fagin, he’d be a dog. I suppose it also would have been nice for Dodger to be a puppy rather than an adult dog, to really make him a peer of Oliver like in the book, but the character is quite well-realized and well-acted, so we’ll let that go.

The look of the film is extremely 80s, but I don’t mean that in a critical way, nor to say that it’s super-exaggerated like Breakin’ or something. The animators very clearly studied the fashions and styles of the 80s, the layout and design of the streets and buildings, the patterns of city movement. I can’t tell you how perfectly they get the feel of the city, starting right from the opening montage, narrated musically by Huey Lewis, the first of the 80s superstars that populate this film.

Or PUP-ulate! HA!

The main draw is Billy Joel, who plays Dodger. He proves a very capable voice actor, turning up his Noo Yawk mannerisms to eleven. His musical number is the best one in the movie. You’re thinking about it right now. It’s the only part of the movie you remember. Ruth Pointer is another of Fagin’s gang, and sings a song so generic that I forgot about it while I was still watching it. I just started humming Billy Joel’s song. Bette Midler plays a snobbish show poodle owned by Oliver’s adopted family. I have no strong opinions about Bette Midler as a singer, but I’ve always rather liked her as a person. She seems sort of pleasant and goofy. She delivers her dialogue excellently, though her song reminds me mostly of a moment in The Drowsy Chaperone where the narrator informs us that the actress playing the Chaperone insisted on having “A Rousing Anthem” in everything she did, no matter how inappropriate to the situation it is.

The other cast members are all quality. Future teen heartthrob Joey Lawrence as Oliver, Dom deLuise as Fagin, Cheech Marin and Roscoe Lee Brown as a Chihuahua and Bulldog in his gang. Taurean Blacque gives real menace to Sike’s vicious Doberman, and Rober Loggia absolutely nails every second of it Sikes himself. And I meant what I said earlier, he’s probably the best villain we’ve seen so far. Oh, sure, your evil queens and flashy witches make the big splash, but this guy’s such a real kind of evil, you feel it. Oh, how you feel it. He’s animated by Keane, and just like with Ratigan, the main theme of the performance is the interplay of thuggish brutality and self-conscious sophistication, only this time, the brutal part is MUCH closer to the surface. And after seeing magic spinning wheels and Dalmatian coats, some simple extortion, kidnapping, and dog fighting seems all the scarier. Also: his death scene will not be topped until maybe Tarzan. See, after Sikes kidnaps Oliver’s owner to get a ransom from her rich parents, the dogs and Fagin go to rescue her. Sikes gives chase, winds up driving down the railroad tracks, and… Ah, just see for yourself.

And his Dobermans get electrocuted. It's pretty dark at the end.

The animation is also solid. Apart from the excellent use of the computer wire-frame technique I already mentioned, they’ve obviously gotten comfortable with the ATP technique and thin outlines are back. The character designs are really strong, too. Everyone’s personality comes across really strongly just by looking at them, and the even more overtly stylized humans look fantastic.

In design, not attractiveness.

So considering that I’ve had only good things to say about this movie, it may be surprising to hear that it wasn’t among my favorites. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked it, and there’s nothing that it really does wrong. But it doesn’t really hang together that well. It’s very disjointed. A lot of that is a holdover from the Dickens. Dickens wrote for serial publication in magazines, so naturally, a lot of his work is quite episodic. I won’t criticize them like I did with the Black Cauldron, because more than just an old-fashioned story, this is an essential part of the structure, but it still makes for a bit of an unsatisfying story. Likewise, the actual dialogue is rather dull. Not bad or anything, just kind of… there. I certainly enjoyed myself, and I definitely recommend it, but in the end, it’s a technically awesome movie with brilliant moments that just doesn’t have the spark to make it a real classic. We’ll save that for next week.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* A lot of people in the opening scenes, which take place mainly at the animals’ level, are wearing spats. Were there a lot of spats around in the 80s? Or did they just figure that if they were drawing a lot of feet, they had to do something to make them interesting?

From the pitch session: "Come on, Katzenberg! This thing merchandises itself!"

* While there’s a few cameos in this film from former Disney dogs, like Pongo and Jock, far more surprising is the brief appearance of Scooby-Doo. Nice one, animators.

* While most of the dogs’ barking is done by sound effects, Georgette’s is just Bette Midler yelling “Bark bark!” I have no problem with this, though, because it’s funny.

* Jenny’s “school bus” is just a wireframe for a pickup truck with a covered bed and a “school bus” sign on top. Seriously.

* This is what, the third British Bulldog we’ve had? Okay, I guess the one in One Hundred and One Dalmatians didn’t count, they were all British.

This was actually less racist than it could have been. Or maybe I just still have low standards from the '50s.

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1986 - The Great Mouse Detective

The Great Mouse Detective

Well, the Black Cauldron flopped to a rather legendary degree, and the studio was in trouble. There were huge waves or layoffs and encouraged retirements, they were taken out of their historic offices and moved down the highway to a nondescript gray building, and they were told that they’d better churn out something cheap and profitable fast, or it would be CURTAINS FOR THEM! Nyah-hah-hah!!

(Artist's rendering.)

Fortunately, the new wave of animators, now unencumbered by the older guys, had a plan. Take the best storytelling techniques of the old days, the best filmmaking techniques of the modern age, and the new styles of animation that could cut corners and save money while still looking good. Unfortunately, time and money were working against them, and the company‘s reinvigorated focus on live-action films and distributing work through their various other studios meant they would not hesitate to cut the animation department loose if they continued on their spiral. Would they be able to pull it off? What innovative techniques would they use to get their project finished? Could they get away with having beer and strippers? In the movie, I mean, not in the office. Except maybe for research? Excited about the beer and strippers? So am I. So get yourself some beer and strippers and let’s talk about The Great Mouse Detective.

On the surface, there’s a lot going on there that’s similar to The Rescuers. A time of major creative shifts, a fairly obscure British book about mice that solve crimes, inexplicable clothes-wearing - the two seem quite similar. But there are differences. The mice in this one aren’t half-dressed, they’re all the ways dressed, with little pants and ascots and waistcoats and what have you. Also, instead of their homes and possessions being made of human things, they’re all fully built to mouse scale. This full commitment to the scenario means I’ve got less problems with it. Sure, they still have signs and businesses, but it’s a lot easier to have the intellectual disconnect between the human world and the mouse world.

It certainly helps that the story is really solid. It’s a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, which is something that generally works well. It’s a kid’s cartoon, so it trades on a lot of Holmes stereotypes, and the mystery is not exactly intricate, but it’s more than good enough, and they did manage to throw in some references to the classic stories. Dawson served in the same Afghanistan regiment as Watson, for instance. Though I must admit, the fact that the mice are apparently fighting international wars did crack through my suspension of disbelief. Basil is played in the manic Robert Downey, Jr. style, as opposed to the more languid Jeremy Brett style or the intense Benedict Cumberbatch style. This was clearly the right choice for a cartoon, and his introduction, where he bursts in wearing an outlandish disguise and starts firing his gun into the sofa for reasons we are never made aware of, is fantastic.

SCIENCE, that's why.

Supporting characters are also very well-realized. The villainous henchman, Fidget, is a bat with a crippled wing and a peg leg, and I can’t imagine that was easy to animate. He kidnaps a toymaker named Flaversham, which is a delightful name for a cartoon mouse. He’s voiced by Alan Young, doing his typical Scottish accent, and that’s never a bad thing. Flaversham’s daughter, Olivia, is a rather typical moppet, but her pwecious accent and tam o’shanter won me over. The greatest of them all, though, is our villain, Professor Ratigan.

Ratigan is an enormous (well, comparatively) sewer rat who hides a constantly stewing homicidal rage under a veneer of taste and class. The scenes in which he freaks out and straight up murders some of his henchmen are just magnificent, as is his eventual breakdown. His animation is phenomenal, and works absolutely perfectly with the voice, that of Vincent Freaking Price. Price never hit it as big as he could have, due to his association with B-grade horror, but he really is a phenomenal actor, and this role lets him really work his range. He’s so good that the movie isn’t a musical EXCEPT FOR HIM.

And he really knows how to berate a henchman.

To be precise, there are three songs in the film. One, “Let Me Be Good To You”, is sung by the aforementioned stripper in a seedy bar Basil and Dawson are infiltrating. It’s kind of out of nowhere, and has no real plot relevance, except to distract the heroes, but since they only needed to be distracted for half a second, I’m pretty sure this was just the filmmakers having fun. Nonetheless, it is digetic music, which is film music that exists in story, as opposed to background. We see the piano player, we know the audience is watching a singer. Not so with “The World’s Greatest Criminal Mind”, the only straight-up musical number in the entire film. It shows up pretty early on, when Ratigan’s employees are so moved by his evil they sing along with him about how evil he is. Then he feeds one of them to a cat, and they complete the song with rather frenzied and panicked expressions, which is very darkly funny. Also they‘re all drunk.

This is not some joke I keep making. She starts wearing more clothes than she ends with. I have no clue how they got away with this.

The last song, Goodbye So Soon, is my favorite in the movie. Ratigan has created a death trap built of every way he’s ever wanted to kill Basil. Basil and Dawson are tied to a mousetrap, which will set off a pistol, which will trigger a crossbow, which will release an anvil, and then a preset camera will snap a photo of the whole thing. Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to be there, he sets the mousetrap to be activated via a rope pulled by a phonograph arm. And for the occasion, he records a special song about how time is fleeting and how bittersweet it is to say goodbye. It’s hilariously upbeat and swinging, and provides the perfect background noise for Basil’s despair at his imminent death.

This movie is also where character animators really start to shine, becoming truly distinctive. Ratigan was, I believe, animated by Disney legend Glen Keane, who would go on to animate a similar battle of savagery and civilization in The Beast, so it’s great to see him applying the same to a villainous persona. I had thought he was done by Andreas Deja, but he was still fairly new, and doing the comparatively minor character of Queen Mousetoria. You’ll see these two names pop up a lot from now on, since I was a huge fan of theirs as a kid, because I was a nerd.

Reference joke!

Okay, so speaking of the animation, I need to address how they saved all that money I mentioned, and whether or not it looks any good. First of all, it looks great. I’m not sure to what extent the APT process was used, but the characters all have highly simplified designs with large blocks of color and noticeably thick outlines, which surely must have helped. They also used computer animation for the first time ever, to GREAT effect. The finale takes place in Big Ben, and the various gears were built as 3-D wireframe models, which were then printed, xerographed, and painted. The result is a huge sweeping chase that looks nothing short of amazing, and took a fraction of the time and money it would take to do it by hand.

And it worked! For the first time in a LONG time, Disney was a hit with audiences and critics, Roger Ebert giving it a particularly notable endorsement. Disney was back on top, and if you guys remember back to the heyday, you know what that means! Something highly innovative but not altogether great is coming up next!

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* The score was by Henry Mancini, who provided the perfect mix of adventuring and cartoony whimsy. But then, he did the Pink Panther theme, too, so he knows what’s up.

* After Basil escapes the aforementioned deathtrap, he grabs Dawson and Olivia just so they can smile for Ratigan’s camera. Because what’s the point of living if you can’t gloat?

"Dawson, I believe this shop is engaged in false advertising."

* People say “You don’t understand,” a lot in this movie. Not making a point, but it happens often enough to be weird.

* The Animators wanted to call the movie “Basil of Baker Street”, but the execs insisted on the title we got. Basil’s animator sent a memo around suggesting they retitle some of their other movies, like “Seven Little Men Help a Girl”, “The Lady With the See-Through Shoes”, and "Puppies Taken Away".

* Big Ben is actually the name of the bell, not the clock. But this isn’t Hunchback, so we don’t need to get too precise.

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1985 - The Black Cauldron

While I’ve mentioned a few movies that I was particularly looking forward to this or that film, this one is the clear winner. It’s a fascinating and important film for a variety of reasons. It was their first PG rated film, an attempt at a serious, dramatic animation for grown-ups. It was their first film to be completely non-musical, with nary so much as a background song and with a score by Elmer Bernstein, who was quite the new hotness at the time. It was critically despised but has built up a loyal cult following, and it was such a colossal failure that it almost resulted in shutting down the entire animation department. (Again.) So would its ambition and scope be its triumph or downfall? Would I find myself on the side of the masses or the cult? Is there a worse possible protagonist than this one? No. Feeling adventurous? So am I. So boil up a haggis, and let’s talk about The Black Cauldron.

Oh, I do believe I may have tipped my hand with that last rhetorical there, mayn’t I? First, the background. This was, as I said, intended to be a serious, mature, and dark movie to capture the adult audience. Everyone was on board with that, the old and new animators alike, but the animosity between the two groups had basically gotten to the point where they weren’t even speaking to each other. The lead animators of the old crew had more or less all gone by now, but their assistants were still clinging on, resentful of the new crew of hotshot CalArts graduates. This resulted in a movie that was wildly inconsistent in tone and quality, and I have no idea who to blame. Things were not helped by a third production team: The executives. While back in the Walt days, they largely let the animators get on with things, the 80s were the corporate age, and there were some very powerful people fighting over this film, including studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and company CEO Michael Eisner. Upon seeing the final edit of the movie, Katzenberg suddenly decided it was too dark and unilaterally locked himself in the editing room to hack it to pieces. Eisner stopped him, but agreed to push back the film's release by six months for retooling. About 15 minutes were cut with nothing to replace them. I’m not going to be so naïve as to blame that for all the movie’s failings, but it couldn’t have helped.

Who gave this jerkhole a sword?

And what are the failings? Let’s start with the characters. Our “hero”, Taran, is an apprentice pig-keeper responsible for the stewardship of Henwin (my research material insists it’s Hen-Wen, but they are all clearly saying Henwin), a pig who can foretell the future. Taran is a whiny, petulant ego-case who insists that he is to be a great knight someday, and while he is off daydreaming about how great he is, Henwin is captured by the forces of our antagonist, the Horned King. You may expect Taran to grow and mature over the course of his adventure, becoming the hero he always was inside. You can just carry on expecting. As for the villain, I don’t need to describe him, because he’s just what you get when you pop Skeletor, Mumm-Ra the Everliving, Megatron, Cobra Commander, and Gargamel into a blender and hit frappe.

(And Sheriff Terrorbull. And one of the Misfits. And the Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak.)

He’s got the de rigeur hunchbacked lackey that he strangles for every minor failure, of course. And Taran’s got three idiots of his own. There’s Princess Eilonwy, who occasionally gets a spot of press for being one of two Disney Princesses not to be featured in official Disney Princess material. I’d assumed that was because the film was a flop (The other unlucky princess is from Atlantis, after all,), but I think it’s more that she’s a shallow, annoying character who never really provides any evidence that she is a princess. There’s also Flooder, whose name is spelled in some silly Welsh way, but we all know how I feel about that. He’s a bard, who is also a coward and constantly endangering them with his bumbling ways. A string on his harp breaks every time he lies, which I kept expecting to be a plot point, but wasn’t. There’s also our comic relief characters, Gurgi, a sort of Ewok thing that is also cowardly and talks like he’s auditioning to be Donald Duck, and Doli, a cranky old fairy who bypasses “80s Saturday Morning Cartoon” and goes straight for “80s Breakfast Cereal Mascot” in his characterization.

The plot… Well, I don’t know what to make of it, really. It’s based on two books by Lloyd Alexander, and as I understand it, they are quite good, and the characters aren’t nearly as annoying. But the plot seems to be largely the same, i.e. clichéd out the pigsty. But he was writing in the mid-1960s, when this stuff wasn’t as clichéd as it is now, so I can probably go easy on him. I think I can blame the Disney folks, though. When a Lord of the Rings movie finally came along after years of development, they changed things to make it work better with modern storytelling techniques, and it improved the story. Increased roles for Arwen and Eowyn, introduction of real conflict between Frodo and Sam, a more varied personality for Faramir, the moment of realization for Treebeard… I could go on, but the fact is, these were changes that were necessary to make the story work for a movie. Disney made changes to the story of The Black Cauldron, but rather than improve it for the medium of film, it’s just to make it less from a rather typical high fantasy book into a rather typical 1980s action cartoon. I might as well be watching G.I. Joe

The music would be better, too.

The animation gets a cut here, despite the use of another technical advancement, the APT process. This is another form of xerography that can copy blocks of color in addition to lines. Unfortunately, that leads to random shifts in color tone, and characters that don‘t appear to match their backgrounds at all. There’s no weight, no gravity, no lighting, and Fudd flags abound more than ever before. Characters often develop a sketchy white outline around their proper outline, and there’s occasional random use of photo backgrounds that don’t fit at all. I’m not going to lay all the blame on the method, because they use the same method in their next three movies, and they look fantastic. I just think that the background fighting and budget cuts took their toll on what we can see.

By this time, Don Bluth had left Disney, fed up with the company, and formed his own independent studio, making the classic film “The Secret of NIMH”, which captured the respect of critics with its mature and rather scary style. In a lot of ways, this seems like a response to that, but despite the work of Tim Burton and others, it just can’t measure up. There’s a pretty severe learning curve coming up, and the new guys are going to really take charge, in a pretty intense way.

Taran: Gurgi, you're alive!     Brian: FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU...

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Because haggis is generally agreed to be disgusting, but some people really like it.

* There are three witches in this movie, but rather than the traditional Maiden, Mother, and Crone, they seem to have gone with Crone, Mother-in-law, and Overweight Harlot. There’s a lot of “humor” with O.H. smooshing Flooder into her breasts. HA HA! She’s fat but has the audacity to be sexual. That’s… inherently funny? I guess?

* I couldn’t remember while writing the last bit what plot-relevance the witches had. Then I remembered they gave The Black Cauldron to the heroes, which should have been easy to recall. I think this movie broke my brain.

* The Black Cauldron is the plot MacGuffin, by the way. It's a powerful weapon that the heroes must destroy, lest the enemy use it. Not that that sounds familiar or anything.

* Oh, and when they defeat the villain, his tower collapses. Which is weird, because it's not even really his. He's just squatting.

* And all it does is reanimate the dead, who are really slow and shambling and rickety.

"I expected my unstoppable army to have more..." "Muscles, my lord?" "Muscles, tendons, whatever." "Oh, like you can talk."

* There’s more special effects animation in this one than we’ve seen in a while, and it’s not all terrible. So that’s something.

* Disney acknowledges this movie in their theme parks less than any other, including the infamous Song of the South. The only standing reference to it was a restaurant called “Gurgi’s Munchies and Crunchies” that was removed in 2002.

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