1991 - Beauty and the Beast

Boy, when I started to write this one, I was in a pickle. I didn’t really have anything to say about Beauty and the Beast, because - well, I try not to overexaggerate things, but it’s perfect. Not flawless, mind, there’s still the occasional goofy bit of animation, and Belle can be a bit of a doormat, but what they made succeeds on every major level. The songs (Menken and Ashman again) are great, the voices (especially Paige O'Hara as Belle and Richard White as Gaston) are fantastic, the dialogue is tight and funny, the designs are imaginative, the romance is heartfelt… I didn’t want to write a review saying “This is great, this is great, this is great,” over and over. Especially since you’ve seen it! Yes, you, the person reading this, has seen this movie. Everyone has! How can I find a good way to approach telling everyone roar they already know? I mentioned this on Facebook, and my friends started chiming in with suggestions for topics. So here it is, the first-ever viewer mail edition of My Year With Walt Disney Animation Studios! Feeling participatory? So am I. So try the gray stuff, it’s delicious, and let’s talk about Beauty and the Beast.

I think you're not giving Gaston enough credit. While the basic idea is an obvious one, a beautiful man with an ugly heart to contrast the monster with hidden depths of goodness, they made the character more complex than they needed to. He's not at all intellectual, but he is quite intelligent and calculating. His single minded  determination to never be denied anything is backed up by actual nerve. People sometimes remember him as a coward because he begs Beast for his life before stabbing him in the back, but he was literally being dangled off a building like so much Prince Michael Jackson II. Prior to that, he was storming a magic castle and holding his own against a 7-12 foot tall monster. I think he could do all right for himself. Of course, in the Disney Villain Hunger Games, he'd still go out pretty early. All the hunting skills in the world can only take you so far when the competition is like 4/5 evil witches.

Speaking of. Well, as I mentioned, the very existence of Gaston kind of belies the claim that the movie is exclusively pro-physical beauty. But that is something the animators struggled with, when they realized that the reason they hated every "prince" design they came up with was because everyone had fallen in love with the Beast. This is not a new problem by any means. It is said that Marlene Dietrich herself, sitting next to Jean Cocteau at the first screening of his masterful 1946 adaptation, called out "But where is my beautiful Beast?" when the prince appeared. But in both Cocteau's and Disney's, Belle is hesitant. She doesn't trust the goofball in the ripped-up pants. She, like Dietrich, wants to know the whereabouts of her beautiful Beast.

As to the more direct question of the enchantress, if you wanted to teach a jerky guy not to judge by appearances, than being an ugly person while you curse him might send a mixed message. Probably better to go "Psyche! I'm hot! And a jerk! Enjoy your life as a buffalo gorilla!"

Nice job covering your hinder there, Friend Who Definitely Doesn't Work For the Disney Corporation. My insider source is right, Beast changes in size rather a lot. He normally seems to hover at eight feet or so, but seems able to grow about a yard when convenient. But he is animated by Glen Keane, who, as I have already mentioned, has a gift for animating gigantic characters, and part of that gift is knowing when to adjust the size a bit. If you're looking for it, you'll notice it - in the ballroom scene, for instance, Belle reaches his shoulder as they walk in to eat, his chin as they enter the dance floor, and his chest as they dance - but Keane works it so naturally it's hard to spot. Also, he switches between biped and quadruped a lot, which helps keep us confused.

  

I've heard a lot of people say this, but I don't buy it. For one thing, it's not in the source material. In the original story, the Beast is nothing but kind to her from the beginning, but she says she only loves him as a friend (it probably sounds better in French) until he gets incapacitated by heartbreak when she takes a long weekend, and she feels guilty and says she loves him after all. I could write an entire book on the unfortunate implications there, but Disney removed them by having the Beast act not as a creepy weirdo, but a roaring tyrant. 

And even in this movie, it's not as present as people seem to think. When he is cruel and demanding to her, she despises him, and flees the castle. She only comes back because he saves her life, and she feels obligated to return the favor, but even then she's not remotely happy with him. It's only after he starts feeling actual gratitude that they make a connection, maybe the first genuine one he's ever made. He stops the abuse first. Then the connection grows. It's made quite explicit in the movie that she doesn't think of him romantically at all until she sees him trying to feed the baby birds.

Standard fairy tale rules, man. Why did the whole kingdom have to go to sleep when Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger? Because the common people are just appendages of the royalty in these things. That's why I don't read much High Fantasy. Too much of what the rich people get up to, not enough of the average joes. Look at Game of Thrones. Two seasons in, and the most notable character that's not noble or working directly for one is Hot Pie. And we only get to see him because he hangs around Harry the Not-a-girl.

The writers of this film agree with you, though, and in the stage musical version, they are explicitly being punished for bringing up the prince to be such a privileged little turd. 

I'll be sure to keep an eye out for that. Ahem.

Read More

1992 - Aladdin

If The Little Mermaid started the new formula, and Beauty and the Beast codified it, Aladdin turned it into a full-blown juggernaut. Once again we have a well-known story, a misunderstood iconoclast for a main character, music by well-known Broadway types, and wacky sidekicks. Ohhhh, the wacky sidekicks. This is where they start getting really numerous. But we’ll get to that. For now, let’s see what happens when what was once bold and daring becomes the new standard and kick off the longest running “house style” this production company ever had. The production wasn’t easy, but they had unprecedented studio support, massive critical cred, and a dynamite creative team. Is there any point in a rhetorical question? No, you already know this was good. So get yourself some falafel, and let’s talk about Aladdin.

Dang, this one was good. Really well-made, well-cast, and there’s barely a single moment that feels dated. It doesn’t reach the heights of Beauty and the Beast, but that would basically be impossible, and the few minor issues I have aren’t anything approaching the buts of the Little Mermaid. And while there were no big technical leaps in the story (Well, one, but it didn’t catch on. We’ll get to that.), there was one major thematic leap: Princess Personality.

Jasmine is a criminally underrated princess. I can see a lot of the other princesses doing the “dress as a commoner to sneak out” thing. Heck, Cinderella did the reverse, and Aurora did it by accident, so they’ve come close. What I can’t see them doing is angrily insisting that they aren’t a prize to be won. I can’t see them angrily rebuffing the advances of a suitor and physically attacking him. When she finds out Aladdin was lying about being the guy she met in the marketplace, she gets PISSED and asks if he thought she was stupid. Finally, we get a totally confident and self-possessed princess who won’t put up with any patriarchal crap. Belle was close, but she was still, for instance, way nicer to Gaston than he deserved. When Gaston’s Middle-Eastern equivalent shows up to propose to Jasmine, she doesn’t make small talk with him, she throws a tiger at his pompous ass. And she’s clever, too, suing her wits to come out on top in every situation, just like Aladdin does. For once, the lead couple clicks right away and it makes sense on more than a physical level. Also of note - unless I missed something, this is the first time a Disney couple actually kiss each other before their big dramatic ending. We’re getting closer to real relationships every day, folks.

Boy meets girl, boy's giant blue friend helps him, the usual cliches.

The animation is really good. The design team was influenced by the work of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, whose swooping lines and curlicues evoked the feeling of Middle Eastern calligraphic art and architecture. The only exception was the villain Jafar, who was designed by Andreas Deja with a lot of long, straight, flowing lines that matched the others, but still set him apart from them. This is the first movie in a while to have a really impressive setting, too. The crowded city streets of Agrabah, the opulent Cave of Wonders, the insanely huge royal palace, all fantastic marvels of design. The layout supervisor, Rasoul Azadani, used his hometown of Ishfan as his primary influence, and the love he feels for it really comes through.

There’s two slips in the otherwise great animation, and that’s from the company’s premature decision to completely integrate CGI elements, inspired by the success of the ballroom in Beauty and the Beast. The results are… less than perfect. The flying carpet, with its complex pattern, is done with CGI and looks great, but it’s also just a rectangle. The other two major uses are not so great. The huge, talking, stone tiger that acts as entrance to the Cave of Wonders isn’t horrible, but does not fit in with its surroundings at all. Worse is Aladdin’s escape when said cave collapses, which is all CGI rendered and looks terrible. I remember being really impressed with it when I was 8, but it’s so flat and blocky and pixilated, I can’t imagine professional animators looking at it and saying, yes, that deserves to be in my movie.

"Can we make this quick? I have a ReBoot audition."

The character’s voices are also great, with one issue that will unfortunately stick around for a while. Minor teen heartthrob Scott Weinger plays Aladdin like he was born to it. He’s not a big star or a famous voice actor, he just hits the perfect voice for it. Which is good, because voicing Aladdin in spin-off media is like 95% of his career now. Linda Larkin as Princess Jasmine doesn‘t have that same spark. Her voice is Standard Princess, but rather lacks the extra je ne sais quoi Jodi Benson and Paige O’Hara had. She’s fine, though. Douglas Seale, who is a small guy with a twirly mustache and big white beard, plays the sultan unsurprisingly well, and Jim Cummings’ “mean voice” makes an obligatory appearance as the chief guard (and like, four people in the marketplace). Jonathan Freeman, ever sinister, rocks the house as Jafar, with condescension and loathing hanging on his every word. His cool menace is nicely contrasted by his parrot, Iago, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, which is not as bad as you might expect. Gottfried actually does a really good job, and while his character is a bit grating, it’s meant to be, and he actually kind of sounds like a parrot. I’m just not sure why Jafar would have a pet parrot in the first place, let alone a sarcastic comedy relief one. I’d love to know their backstory. There’s one really cute moment where they make a little “Eeeeeeeeeugh” noise together when they think their beheading may be imminent, Iago has a painting of the two of them in his cage; they‘re clearly good friends with a long history. Maybe Jafar used to be a circus hypnotist or something, and he met Iago there. Okay, that‘s my personal canon now.

Of course, no discussion of the cast would be complete without discussion of The Actor Who Played The Genie. The director really wanted The Actor Who Played The Genie to be in the movie, and when he was initially hesitant, they animated some of his standup act with the genie, and he signed on right away. Because Disney had produced some very successful live-action films of his, and because he loved the character and the production, and because he was rich enough where he could afford to do it, The Actor Who Played The Genie offered to work for Guild scale, the lowest they were legally allowed to pay him. This came out to about $75,000, which is a deranged amount of money for someone like me, but for an actor of The Actor Who Played The Genie’s status, it constitutes a huge pay cut.

In exchange for this boon to the budget, The Actor Who Played The Genie simply asked that his name not be used in advertising, and his character not be a sole focus of ads or merchandising. He had a live-action movie coming out a few months after, and didn’t want Aladdin’s advertising to oversaturate him. Honoring the memory of their dear founder, Disney agreed to his requests and then basically ignored them. This led to some pretty severe acrimony and lawsuits, the hiring of Homer Simpson for the sequel, and most importantly of all, publicity material that really awkwardly had to avoid mentioning The Actor Who Played The Genie by name.

But I'd know that Ethel Merman impression anywhere. Or it might be Paul Lynde. It's hard to tell.

There are two actors that I am less than enthusiastic about, and that’s Broadway types Lea Salonga and Brad Kane, who provide the singing voices for Jasmine and Aladdin. Starting now, and continuing for a long time, Disney gets into a bad habit of hiring actors who can’t sing for their musicals, and having separate singing voices who sound nothing like them. Kane in particular sounds like a goofball, but with Salonga, it’s hard to imagine why they didn’t just cast her as Jasmine. It’s not like Linda Larkin is a big name, and Lea Salonga’s a very good actress. It gets worse before it gets better, though. At least this is just for one song.

On a final, uncomfortable note, there is a little bit of that classic Disney racism in this. The film came under fire upon its release for its use of stereotypes, and I must say, the protestors had some point. While the leads look appreciably Semitic, they are also attractive and voiced by white, white actors. The minor characters, especially in the market, tend more to being ugly caricatures with thick accents that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jeff Dunham show. Fortunately, outside of the marketplace, the stereotyping tends to be of the bland, setting-based type. It may look a bit silly, 20 years on, and in 20 years more, it’ll probably look a bit like the crows from Dumbo, but like them, it should be easy enough to get past. Other than the guy who tries to cut off Jasmine’s hand as punishment for stealing, I don’t think anything hits Class 1 in this movie.

This was also the movie where they really started heaping on the reference jokes.

So yeah, what else is there to say? It’s a hell of a good movie, it holds up remarkably well, and I’d recommend it if it wasn’t for the fact that you’ve all already seen it. But hey, see it again.


ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* The reason they had to get influence from an American cartoonist whose work resembles Arabic writing and architecture rather than cutting out the middleman is that there isn’t any Arabian figure art to draw influence from. Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, forbids making drawings or sculptures of anything that exists in the real world, but unlike the other two, they’ve decided that that’s one of the rules they pay attention to. Creative Arabian types got around this by producing some of the most impressive buildings of their age, and some of the most impressive calligraphy ever. You ever see an Ottoman sultan’s signature? Redonkulous.

Seriously. This is how some Turkish nob actually signed his name.

* Speaking of history, the reason the villain is named Jafar is because of a historical vizier, Ja’far ibn Yahya, vizier to the caliph Harun al-Rashid. Ja’far was not remotely villainous, he was actually kind of awesome. He was a huge booster of science, bringing scientists from all over the world to Baghdad, and leading the movement to translate ancient Persian works into Arabic, and introducing paper to the caliphate. So awesome were he and his boss, that they were written into the Thousand and One Nights as characters, with Ja’far being a sort of detective, solving a murder mystery, and later appearing as an Indiana Jones type adventurer. So why is the villain named after him? Simple. Ja’far was so famous that his name became synonymous with ‘vizier’. If you needed a name for a vizier, Ja’far was the easy choice. It’s like naming a butler Jeeves. So the filmmakers probably just noticed the vast amounts of viziers named Ja’far (or Jafar or Giafar) and figured it was a good choice.

* Speaking of Jafar, his face and neck are different colors, and that has always bugged me.

Right? Tell me that's not weird.

* The Genie only has four fingers, to indicate that even in a cartoon world, he's a cartoon. Nice touch. He also loses his wrist cuffs and grows feet as soon as he is freed, but those get undone in the sequels, probably because he looks weird.

* As soon as Aladdin discovers the carpet is sentient, he starts referring to it as “he”. What if it’s a girl carpet, Aladdin?

* Friend Like Me was the first segment animated, and Aladdin is reeealy off-model in it, because his design hadn’t been finalized. But no one notices because the Genie is pulling all the focus.

* Why does The Cave Of Wonders contain all that fake treasure? I suppose it could be to test people, but when Jafar sent his goon in at the beginning, he didn’t get done in by his own greed, he got immediately eaten by a giant stone tiger head.

Read More

1990 - The Rescuers Down Under

“Hello? Yes, this is Bob Newhart. Do another voice for Disney? Sure, I’d… Not *another* voice? I don’t think I follow you. Well, what’s the name of the picture? The… what? The Rescuers? We already did that one, didn’t we? Oh. Ohhh. Oh, I see, after several abortive attempts to make a sequel to the Rescuers, you’re finally pulling it off? Did anyone like it the first time? Yeah, I guess it did okay. So which of the books will this one be based on? Oh, an original story. Australia? Yeah, I guess it is pretty popular right now. Say, don‘t these cartoon pictures take a long time to finish? What if everyone‘s over Australia by the time it comes out? Yeah, you‘re probably right. I… Mm? Am I what? Fair dinkum bonzer? Ah, well, yes, I suppose so. So I‘ll just go and get a vegemite and Foster‘s sandwich and talk about The Rescuers Down Under. Uh-huh. Okay. Bye now.”

Ah, boy. Yeah, like I mentioned a few times, there had been some random attempts to do a Rescuers sequel before, or at least bring back a character or two, and when they were in their fairly experimental Great Mouse Detective phase, they finally put one into development. After all, they must have theorized, people clearly love mice. Well, by the time The Little Mermaid taught them that no, people love singing magic princesses, this was already well into development, and on its way to being the Disney company’s number one footnote. I will say that they definitely put a lot of effort into it. This wasn’t a hacky sequel, nor did they rush anything when their new model became apparent, though I have to imagine they were champing at the bit to move on to Beauty and the Beast.

I also don’t think the Australian setting was an attempt to be trendy. Well, not just an attempt to be trendy. I have no doubt that the setting was largely in response to, as the Simpsons put it, America’s brief-lived fascination with Australian culture. For some reason, the Aussies and Disney thought this would be a permanent thing. But despite the setting’s likely genesis, they really made it work, and it makes sense as a choice - sort of. What does make sense is that there are unique landscapes, the wilderness of the outback, and Australia’s famously varied wildlife to participate in the story. What doesn’t… Well, we’ll get to that. More of the good first. Specifically as it relates to those landscapes.

Darling, ever since the animation upgrade, you've looked even more beautiful. You're so smooth, and your outline isn't lavender anymore...

Not unlike the first Rescuers introducing the advanced xerography, this one included a huge leap forward in animation technology, a program called the Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS. CAPS bypassed the copying and painting of xerography with directly scanning the drawings into a computer, where they could be digitally colored and sequenced. This also allowed even better integration of computer animated elements, which they certainly made use of. Again and again and again. There are so many dramatic POV flights through sweeping vistas that I was starting to get motion sickness. The first is the most famous sequence from the movie, a giant majestic eagle sweeping majestically through the majestic Australian wilderness with majesty. It’s a really great sequence, and joking aside, it is actually majestic as all get out.

Pictured: Majesty

The casting is also quite good. In addition to the returning Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor, we get a deliciously hammy George C. Scott as our villain, an animal-torturing poacher straight out of Captain Planet’s nightmares, and John Candy as Wilbur, their new albatross partner. Character designs are quite good, though they‘re mostly just generic funny animals.

I’m sure you all remember my huge sticking point with the first Rescuers film. The talking mice, their apparent openness in the world, and who can and can not understand their speech. There was also the minor issue of what exactly the Rescue Aid Society aims to accomplish. Well, you may be happy to know that in this one, it’s even worse.

The plot involves a young boy named Cody, who lives on a wildlife preserve in the Australian Outback, and suffers from Accent Abandonment Syndrome. One day while exploring, he meets an enormous eagle, Marahute, who he rides around on and bonds with. But a sinister poacher named MacLeach has killed Marahute’s mate and wants to go 2 for 2, so he kidnaps Cody to try to get him to reveal the location of her nest. Some local mice get wind of this and send word to the Rescue Aid Society for help, and Bernard and Bianca are assigned to the case.

Okay, is there really no more practical way to go about this? Let’s convert this into human terms. George C. Scott kidnaps a kid in Australia. The police are informed, and their first move is to fire off an e-mail to NYC asking for two people to come by and see what they can do about it? And yes, when I say the police are informed, that is equivalent. The RAS headquarters in New York is informed of this by their local agents in Australia, using telegraphs and such. They even sneak into a military installation to send a message by satellite, so they’re definitely field agents. And when B&B arrive, they’re guided by one such agent, who’s far more capable than they are. Why didn’t he just go after the kid? And how do the mice operate in such secrecy if they’re hacking military satellites? And the clothes! And signs! CLOTHES AND SIGNS!!?

Of course, the human authorities didn't bother listing a contact number, warnings, useful information, or a first name. So maybe they don't have much on the ball.

And as with the last one, the kid can talk to animals, except the villain’s sapient yet mute reptile henchpet (a goanna named Joanna, which is cute). And neither the kid nor the animals mention this as being the tiniest bit odd. I mean, I think they’ve established that human’s in general can’t understand them, but despite the more clear unusualness of it, no one notices it as odd. Not the kangaroo, not the koala, not the platypus. Did I mention this was Australian? Oh, and Marahute is also mute, for no reason.

But despite that aspect of it, despite the overuse of  the new animation, despite the villain putting the kid into a ludicrous James Bond deathtrap instead of just feeding him to a crocodile, I did like it. It’s not quite as good as the original, but it’s a worthy sequel. Certainly better than Crocodile Dundee 2. I’d say it’s a bit underrated, but that’s a bit unfair, because when it’s rated at all, people tend to praise it maybe a bit more than it deserves. But a bit of infrequent overrating is probably earned given how it gets lost in the shuffle. Definitely one worth seeking out.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* There’s a subplot about Jake, the Australian field agent, flirting with Miss Bianca, which shakes the confidence of Bernard, who is trying to pluck up the courage to propose to her. I was actually surprised at how well this was handled. Jake is never presented as a villain or a seducer, Bianca’s not presented as potentially unfaithful, it’s just a good, honest portrayal of adult romantic insecurity.

Lllllllladies. I mean Sshhhhhhhhielas.

* Jake was referred to in all the stuff I read as a kangaroo mouse, but those are only found in the US. I think they meant hopping mouse.

* More weirdness in the Rescue Aid Society’s methods: After a rough landing, Wilbur is left in the care of a RAS doctor, who attempts to perform unnecessary surgery on him, for… reasons? This is never addressed.

* Unless I missed something, this is the first Disney movie to feature a slapstick comedy bit involving an albatross wearing a bra.

* As a former employee of Outback Steakhouse, I am licensed to say this film is entirely and in all ways accurate.

Read More