2013 - Frozen Mini-review

After a hiatus due to working retail at Christmas, I have returned. Before we move on with volume 2, I have a Christmas gi - er, a Childermas gift for you all. I will occasionally be putting in off-schedule mini-reviews of tangentially related films, stuff I see that I think is interesting, or - as in this case - new Disney movies. Frozen, the 53rd film in the Disney canon, came out late last month, and will probably be kicking around in theaters for a while yet, so I figured I’d give you a quick set of my thoughts on it, in my usual categories.

PLOT - The film is allegedly based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”. I say allegedly because The Snow Queen is about a peasant rescuing her brother from an evil, supernatural queen of ice and hatred, and Frozen is about a princess whose sister has magical ice powers and runs away after being crowned queen, so she has to go find her with the help of a hunky ice salesman.  Also, The Snow Queen in the book has a mirror that reveals the worst of everyone who looks into it, and when it shatters, shards of it land in the brother’s eyes, forcing him to only see the worst aspects of everyone he meets. In the movie, she has a Wacky Snowman Friend.

While I would have loved to see a movie closer to the book, or at least as close as The Little Mermaid, an Andersen adaptation which changed quite a lot, but at least kept vaguely the same shape as the story, this was still good. The relationship between the sisters was well-realized, and there was a neat subversion of the old Disney “love at first sight” bit, and we all know how much I love that. Part of the story didn’t work for me, but I don’t want to spoil, so I’ll just say the thing that was the thing probably should have been another thing than the thing it turned out to be, which was a bit too simple. Also the trolls were kind of lame.

ACTING AND CHARACTERS - The main royal types were played by Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel, who both did predictably excellent jobs. Bell acted much as she did in Reefer Madness, selling the Disney brand of pseudo-oblivious optimism sincerely, rather than parodically, as she did in that movie. Menzel excellently communicated the fear and confidence of her character, and the conflict between the two. She doesn’t sound even close to 18, though. I have no idea how old she is, but I assume everyone from the original cast of Rent is 50 or so. And based on how craggy Anthony Rapp looked on Psych last week, I may be right.

Put that in your theme park, Disney.

Lots of Broadway people and character actors in the rest of the cast, always a good thing. Wacky Snowman Friend is played by Josh Gad, who I guess is doing all the stuff Dan Fogler doesn’t do any more now that he’s big enough to be on Hannibal. He does a good job, though, and puts a lot of charm into a character that would otherwise have annoyed me. The male leads are kind of bland, but they, too, are carried by the actors, Jonathan Groff and Santino Fontana. (Fontana, incidentally, is the non-mustached guy in the greatest online video ever. There are five parts. Watch all of them.) Ciarán Hinds is the king of the trolls, and does predictably well as the leader of a gang of shaggy mountain hoboes. Alan Tudyk, as in Wreck-it Ralph, plays a sinister nobleman while using an unrecognizable voice. The character is underused, but that relates to the thing I mentioned before about the thing, so I won’t go into it any more.

ANIMATION - The one area that gets almost unreserved praise from me. I say almost because the main character designs are kind of uninspired. I mean, they’re attractive enough, band appealing enough, but everyone looks like a first draft. And Anna looks pretty much exactly like Rapunzel. The supporting characters, though, look great, and more importantly, so does the setting. When the Snow Queen accepts her powers and starts instinctively using them, she creates a huge ice palace from nothing in a really spectacular scene, and the rest of the movie is all snow and ice and giant snow golems and races across frozen oceans. It’s really spectacular.

I mean, really.

MUSIC - Again, not so good as the sum of its parts. I was excited to see Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez in the opening credits after their work on Winnie-the-Pooh. And yes, the songs are quite good, generally. The opening number is good setting-establishy stuff; the second song “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman”, is a fun and quite touching song developing the growing distance between the sisters; and the big breakout number, “Let it Go”, may well unseat “Defying Gravity” as Idina Menzel’s signature.

There are a few others that I recall as working well, and a few that I recall existing, though I can’t recall a single other thing about them. The trouble the soundtrack runs into is a complete disconnect with the tones and styles of the various songs. Unlike Hercules, where there was a defining style throughout the movie, or The Princess and the Frog, where there was a theme of deep South style, these songs don’t really sound like they belong to the same movie. And as a friend on Facebook pointed out, it’s a bit odd to cast a Broadway/Glee star like Jonathan Groff and then only give him one little 50-second song.

And he stands about while other people are singing. So that's something?

CONCLUSION - Go see it. Despite the fact that it doesn’t hang together very well, it’s still quite an enjoyable time, and I can easily see how the pieces might arrange themselves together a bit better if placed on someone else’s mental shelf. So give it a shot. I may not be rewatching it any time soon, but I did enjoy myself.

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Space Jam (Warner Bros., 1996)

I’d like to take a moment now to step back in time. While Warner had distributed and even produced several feature animated films before starting their own studio - and we’ll be covering a number of those later - this is the film that really convinced them to go ahead with Warner Bros. Feature Animation, so I‘m giving it honorary inclusion. Like how everyone counts Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing as a Vertigo book even though it predates the imprint. (That’s a reference people get, right?) With that in mind, I’d like to take a look at this one, before I go ahead with the review of WBFA’s final film, which is directly related to it.

As for this one, its genesis is pretty easy to explain. Warner Bros’ most famous characters by a looooong shot are the classic Looney Tunes gang, but by the mid-90s, they weren’t up to much but Saturday morning reruns and the occasional advertisement. One such ad campaign was a set of Nike ads featuring Bugs Bunny and basketball legend Michael Jordan playing some one-on-one. The ads proved so popular that Warner decided to adapt them for a full-length Looney Tunes/Michael Jordan basketball epic. Armed with the forces of brand synergy and the ubiquitous 90s slang term “jam”, they went to work.

ATHLETICISM!

COMMERCIALISM!

CONSUMERISM!

CAPITALISM!

NIKE!

IS IT IN YOU?

I’M LOVING IT!

BUY OUR PRODUCT!

BECAUSE OF SPACE JAM!

I guess I shouldn’t knock crass commercialism, since this movie made buckets of money for its producers. But “producers” is very key there, because it sure is a movie that was produced, and not, you know, written or directed. Almost literally. It was nominally directed by well-regarded commercial and music video director Joe Pytka, but it’s kind of an open secret that most of the actual directing work was done by producer Ivan Reitman. Still, I’d rather assume this was done by an advertising guy in over his head than the guy who made Ghostbusters. As for the writing, the screenplay is credited to a team of writers, most of whom have done some decent stuff. But the film is still a disjointed mess that seems to be constantly forgetting that it’s meant to be a Looney Tunes movie with basketball, not a basketball movie with Looney Tunes.

And a basketball movie it is. In fact, we’re nearly 15 minutes into the film before the Looney Tunes put in their first appearance. What are we spending our time with? NBA legend Michael Jordan, who discusses his childhood dream of becoming a baseball player in an inspirational scene with his dad set to an R. Kelly song, this being made at a time when R. Kelly was just an annoyingly ubiquitous R&B crooner, before he became a famous pervert and then a hilarious lunatic. The film then whisks us away to 1993, where we see Jordan’s retirement from the NBA to start a new career as a mediocre baseball player. The murder of his father, which killed his love of basketball and left him wanting to try a baseball career, is not mentioned, obviously. I can’t blame them for leaving it out, but it really does make it look like a stupid and random decision, which is soon to become a hallmark of this movie.

I hope you like that expression, because it's the only one Jordan's got.

Then there’s some stuff about his disappointing baseball game (he wasn’t great, but the film rather oddly depicts him as worse than he was in real life), and his wacky dog, and his new personal assistant, who is played by Wayne Knight trying way too hard. Though as one of only two actual actors in the film’s live-action cast, it’s nice to see him trying at all. The other, you see, is Bill Murray, playing himself as “guy who’s in the movie because he’s friends with Ivan Reitman”. Not kidding, they actually make that joke. That probably went over a few heads.

Anyway, after an interminable amount of Michael Jordan playing baseball and golf, we finally see some animated characters. Specifically a Danny DeVito-voiced, Danny DeVito-shaped monster called Swackhammer, whose name is not spoken until the last few minutes of the movie, and his tiny assistants, who don‘t get names at all. Swackhammer runs “Moron Mountain“, a space amusement park that is failing badly. Why is this? Is it because the design aesthetic is terrible, ugly, and blatantly evil? Is it because the rides are either lethal or boring? No. Is it because it’s called Moron Mountain? No, it’s because they haven’t enslaved the Looney Tunes characters to perform standup comedy or something. Let’s fix that.

MOVE, JACKASS. I WANT TO WATCH LOONEY TUNES.

But after tantalizing us with some Looney Tunes clips played on some TVs in the background, it’s back to Michael Jordan family drama, more baseball stuff, and after an intolerable amount of that, it’s FINALLY time for the freaking characters we came here to see. Swackhammer’s little assistants show up to forcibly recruit the Tunes to Moron Mountain, and in some truly stupid scenes, decide that if the Looney Tunes beat them at basketball, they won’t kidnap them. Oh, look, a plot has finally presented itself.

In order to gain an advantage over the Looney Tunes, the little guys travel to Earth (oh yeah, the Tunes live in another dimension or something. It’s not very clear,) in order to steal basketball talent from NBA players, thus setting up cameos by Muggsy Bogues, Charles Barkley, Shawn Bradley, Patrick Ewing, and Larry Johnson, who show up in recurring cutaways for the rest of the film showing them undergoing various physical and psychological tests in order to determine why they are suddenly incompetent at basketball. These gags are the funniest part of the movie, which is why I bring them up here, despite them having nothing to do with the plot.

"I don't know why we're here either."

Actually, I‘ve already spent far more space on plot than I normally do, and I‘m not sure why. Probably because this isn‘t the kind of bad movie that‘s fun to discuss. It’s basically artistically bankrupt. The plot is, as you can tell, complete nonsense. It’s only there to set up the basketball game which was the movie’s entire reason for being. And really, that’s the rest of the plot. Armed with the talent of some of the greatest basketball players ever (and Shawn Bradley. ZING.) the little guys turn into giant basketball players and, now dubbed “The Monstars”, trounce the Tunes in an exhibition game. So the Tunes kidnap Michael Jordan to be coach and captain for their team, the “Tune Squad”. There are many wacky gags. The Tune Squad wins. Michael returns to Earth in a spaceship and scores the winning home run, then goes back to basketball, his love for it having been rekindled by the Looney Tunes. Just like in real life.

The writing is really bad. I mean, let’s be honest, in a Looney Tunes movie, the plot can more or less be total garbage if the gags are funny. But like I said, this isn’t a Looney Tunes movie, it’s a Michael Jordan movie. And all the stuff about Jordan is dead air. We don’t care about it, and despite the best efforts of Wayne Knight, it’s not funny. They could have improved the movie immensely, and saved themselves a good 20 minutes if they had just started with Swackhammer on Moron Mountain, gave two minutes of exposition before his henchmen go after the Looney Tunes, and then have the Tunes bring Jordan into it. You know how much setup Jordan needs? NONE. He is, to quote the Broadway musical The Full Monty, “MICHAEL FRICKIN’ JORDAN”. We all know who he is. The advertisements that inspired this movie relied on the audience knowing exactly who he was as soon as we saw him.

But even if they had opened up with the Tunes, there’s a larger problem at play, and that’s that said Tunes are written terribly. Sure, going into the classic films, most of them are jerks. Bugs, Daffy, the Road Runner, etc, all made us laugh by being jerky to Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, the Coyote, etc, who were all bigger jerks. But there’s a pleasant, winking sort of subversive anarchy to their jerkiness in the classic cartoons that is lost here. A major part of that involves their opening scenes, when the Tunes heap abuse on the tiny, non-threatening aliens. The aliens pose no threat to them, even with their ray guns, and the Tunes mock them and injure them. The key to the Looney Tunes’ classic jerkiness is the power balance between the protagonists and antagonists. The antagonist should always be more powerful. A hunter, a gangster, a predator, and yes, an alien invader - but Marvin had powerful super-weapons and an army of Instant Martians, as well as a powerful brain. These little ones are small, weak, and stupid. The only equivalent in existing Looney Tunes antagonists is Henery Hawk, and even he managed to present a credible threat once in a while. This sets up a common theme of the movie. The Looney Tunes don’t seem looney, they seem like mean, petty, spiteful bullies. And I haven’t even mentioned Lola.

Yes, you aren't the worst original characters in the movie, ya jerks.

I have no problem with adding characters to the Warner Bros. roster. I certainly have no problem with adding female characters, as there is an insane lack of them in the Looney Tunes universe. (Granny is the only major recurring one, with Witch Hazel, Melissa Duck, and Petunia Pig infrequently recurring.) But Lola is terrible. What are her personality traits? She’s sexy. And good at basketball. And that’s it. She's there for Bugs to chase after. Her plot function is one based purely on sexism. Is it any wonder that she’s the only player who never gets an amusing cartoon injury? In fact, the moment that she decides she likes Bugs after all is when he saves her from getting clobbered by a Monstar. “Oh, the big strong man, saved me, I guess I love him after all.” That’s not a good female character, that’s a fakeout. And what good is a Looney Tune that can’t get clobbered? For a better description of why I hate her as a character, read this Tumblr post, which is both eloquent and concise, and I cannot improve on it. (It also mentions a later incarnation of the character which is good. More on that in "Additional Thoughts".)

The acting is mostly fine. Jordan isn’t an actor by a long stretch, but he is naturally charismatic, and his flat delivery sometimes lands a joke. He’s like a toddler acting on a sitcom, where you’re mostly just happy they remembered the whole line, and there’s something charming about their bad acting. I’m talking to you, Lilly from Modern Family. The Tunes, most of whom were originally voiced by the late Mel Blanc, are played by a variety of talented voice actors. Unlike Disney, Warner doesn’t have ‘official’ replacement voices who take over full-time, but casts on a movie-by-movie basis. Billy West isn’t my favorite Bugs, but he does all right, and his Elmer is fantastic. Dee Bradley Baker is one of the best Daffy guys they have, and also does a fine Tazmanian Devil, though not as good as Jim Cummings. The harsher voices of Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, and Sylvester are all excellently done by Bill Farmer (who, incidentally, is the official Goofy for Disney). Bob Bergen handles Porky, Tweety, and a number of minor characters. Granny and Witch Hazel are voiced by June Foray, the only original Looney Tunes actor in the film. (The only one still alive, in fact.) Maurice LaMarche plays Pepe Le Pew, and makes the most of his few lines. And Lola is Kath Soucie, who I’ve always found pretty generic, which just adds to the problem.

I think this makes him taller than the actual Danny DeVito.

There are two final things I’ll say about this: I loved it when I was a kid, and it made boatloads of money for Warner Bros. So it certainly succeeded on those levels. Even to this day, I’ve gotten more bewildered, shocked, angry reactions for saying I don’t like Space Jam than for any other critical viewpoint I hold. And I’m a noted fan of From Justin to Kelly, for cripes’ sake. (I don’t think it’s any good, mind. I’m just a fan of it.) People really love Space Jam, and I can’t get into it. A Looney Tunes movie where the Looney Tunes don’t show up for 15 minutes, play second fiddle to a non-actor, and have a terrible, somewhat offensive new character added. F minus. But it made heaping pots of money, and they did make a pseudo-sequel eventually, and that’s what we’ll look at next time.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Lola was eventually brought back in the excellent TV series “The Looney Tunes Show”, and, as the Tumblr post indicated, she finally fits. Many fans of Space Jam derided her character on the new show, as her personality was now flighty, indecisive, airheaded, and romantically obsessed with Bugs, but these people are wrong. For one thing, she actually HAS a personality. And while it’s true that she’s not the finest feminist role model, I’d say that a flaky character with a real personality and agency is better than a plot device character with no personality. They’ve also given her a friend and co-worker, Tina, so now she doesn’t have the burden of being the only female character in the entire group, and she’s played by Kristen Wiig, who ad-libs much of her dialogue, which means - and this is the most important bit of all - SHE’S ACTUALLY FUNNY. And she’s no longer above the abuses and injuries that Looney Tunes are prone to. She finally belongs!

Here she is having more facial expressions in three seconds than she had during the entirety of Space Jam.

* If you doubt my assertion that Lola was added purely for sex appeal, I invite you to - with no children around - browse the Lola Bunny tag on Tumblr. If a post is about her in her Space Jam form, it will usually be sex-based. If it’s in her Looney Tunes Show form, it will usually be comedy-based. Case rested.

* Also, the name "Lola", which has so many sexual connotations that it's mentioned in the second paragraph of the name's Wikipedia article.

* And yes, it’s Tunes, not Toons. That’s just one of the many reasons I don’t like Tiny Toons.

* The animation, incidentally, was fine. Maybe a little heavy on the light and shadows to make the Tunes look more 3-dimensional. Bruce Smith was the animation director, and you all know I like him. Actually, he worked on Roger Rabbit, too.

* Boy, I’d thought I’d seen Bill Murray phoning it in before, but this is impressive.

"Try? No, I don't think I'll be doing that. I have a quixotic quest for an Oscar to embark on. Now where's my terrible FDR makeup?"

* That said, when he turns up on the court and Swackhammer yells “I didn’t know Dan Aykroyd was in this picture!” it gave me my biggest laugh of the movie, so I guess that’s okay.

* They throw the word “slaves“ around pretty casually in this movie. It‘s hard to find the humor in Bugs Bunny loudly shouting “Dey‘re gonna make us SLAVES, doc!” It gets even worse when we briefly get a glimpse of Jordan chained up and forced to work at the amusement park. So all you future writers, take note. Maybe avoid comedy plots involving slavery?

* The referee for the big game is Marvin the Martian, which is a gag I quite like, as he is the only possible impartial judge in a match between Looney Tunes and aliens, being both himself. And his status as a villain explains why he won’t call any personal fouls. Either that or he trained under the Globetrotters.

* While “I Believe I Can Fly” and Seal’s cover of “Fly Like an Eagle” were the breakout hits on the soundtrack, there was one legitimately awesome song that has been criminally overlooked, and that’s “Hit ‘Em High”, a theme for the Monstars that only plays in the background of one scene. Since the Monstars stole the talent of basketball’s best players, this song is performed by five of the best rappers ever, namely Coolio, Busta Rhymes, Method Man, LL Cool J, and B-Real.

"You promise this movie will make me enough to pay off my massive gambling debts?"

* I was planning on recalling the (and Shawn Bradley) joke from before and making fun of one of the rappers, but really those are all solid choices. If I was to mock one of them, it would probably be Method Man, because he was in a movie about haunted weed, B-Real because he’s the least famous (on his own, that is; he’s the main guy from Cypress Hill), or LL Cool J because he’s pretty goofy.

* By the time this movie was released, Barkley, Johnson, and Bradley were all playing on different teams than they were when it was filmed leaving their uniforms as accidental advertisements for their former teams. Though I suppose it‘s accurate to the film‘s timeline, being an accurate story of Michael Jordan‘s retirement.

* One of the Monstars is voiced by character actor Dorian Harewood, who is notable for turning up in all sorts of weird places, and also for me thinking he’s classy British actor David Harewood every time I see his name in animation credits.

* I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the 1996 Space Jam website is still operational, and it is pretty glorious. Here’s the link.

* And here’s a Lola clip from The Looney Tunes show, giving us all hope for the future.

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Osmosis Jones (Warner Bros., 2001)

So after one bad movie that did poorly, and one great movie that also did poorly, you’d think Warner Bros. might look at their recent decisions and spot some patterns. See, the film that was made with little involvement from the executives was critically successful and hailed by many as brilliant. The film that they poured the marketing into, though, did better financially, despite being the worse movie. Clearly, the key to getting a good movie would be to stay very hands-off and trust the creative team, and market the hell out of it. So they did the exact opposite. Perhaps they thought that since their instincts had been 100% wrong so far, they should forego the obvious decision and instead do the bad idea, and micromanage a movie into mediocrity and then not tell anyone they made it? Solid choices, folks.

ADVENTURE!

SUSPENSE!

BIOLOGY!

IT’S OSMOSIS JONES!

Osmosis Jones is not one movie, and that’s the main problem. It’s two main movies, with a lot of random threads of other ones glommed onto it. The best part of it, and what it was sold as, is a stylish parody of buddy cop movies. Just like a typical cop movie, the streetwise cop born and raised in the mean streets of the city is paired with a no-nonsense, by-the-book transfer. They conflict at first, there’s some major setbacks, they get in trouble with the authorities, and in the end, their complementary styles work out, and they take down the big underworld boss.

The major change in this case is that the city is a guy called Frank, the city cop is a white blood cell, the transfer is a cold pill, and the underworld boss is a viral infection. The obstructive mayor is a brain cell, the shady informant is a former flu shot, the hero’s love interest is a hormone, the scummy criminal hangouts are foot fungus and zits, etcetera. This is, for the most part, quite well done. There’s loads of ridiculous puns about the body parts, and ridiculous puns are my favorite. And the action is solid, as the virus appearing as a mild cold before striking at the nervous system is relayed into a plot where the new criminal in town takes over the small-time rackets first before moving to the big game.

Also, Pikachu is in one scene. Look, right there on the left. I didn't edit this.

The voice casting is very good, too, with Chris Rock as the blood cell Jones and David Hyde Pierce as the cold pill Drixenol, or “Drix” with Laurence Fishburne as Thrax, aka “The Red Death,” a virus threatening Frank’s life. Fishburne played a lot of interesting psychopathic thugs throughout the 90s, and if you only know him as Modern Laurence Fishburne, who mostly plays tough yet reasonable authority figures who yell at white people until they do their jobs better, you might not even recognize him. Rock and Pierce, on the other hand, have unmistakable voices, but Rock takes to voice work very well, and Pierce, of course, is one of the greatest voice actors out there. It‘s fun to hear them both in action hero roles, which their scrawny frames keep them from in live action films. William Shatner gives a good, if somewhat bland performance as the self-involved mayor, as does Brandy Norwood as his assistant, Leah. Leah is also Jones’ love interest, and while she’s a generically underwritten female character, I do like that they wrote the two of them as having an already existing flirty and somewhat adversarial relationship, since it made the fairly perfunctory romance subplot feel like it had some depth.

The animation is fine, too. It’s not up to Iron Giant levels, but it’s still good work. The organic curves and shapes of the City of Frank look suitably biological, and the elastic nature of the cellular characters allows for some fun stretching gags. Drix is cel-shaded computer animation, used again to great effect to highlight his artificial nature. The viruses are done with a different style of movement and design from the cells, and the design of Thrax in particular is very nice, as is the effects animation in the various big set pieces (allergy attack, vomit, zit popping).

"Hi, I'm terrifying. Basically, I'm just a villain from a whole nother movie."

So yeah, all in all, a really solid animated movie. Not always the most cohesive or mature, but with enough high spirits and fun to gloss over any flaws and leave me, the viewer, happy. But like I said, it’s not just one movie. It’s two. And the other one is a damn mess. Because they didn’t think the clever and creative cartoon would work for the masses. So they decided it needed more gross-out toilet humor, delivered via live-action scenes showing Frank, the body that Jones was a part of. And to direct their gross-out humor, they turned to the masters, Peter and Bobby Farrelly.

Now, you have to understand, at this point, the Farrellys were not the godawful sinkhole of creativity and taste they would eventually (like, in a year or so) become. When they were hired for this, they had directed only three movies. The reasonably clever and funny Dumb and Dumber, the pretty okay Kingpin, and the actually very good There’s Something About Mary. So the notion that they would bring a little crude spark to this movie was not entirely without merit.

The problem is, their lowbrow poops and farts style is so at odds with the winking and witty tone of the animated stuff, the two movies don’t mesh at all. And while it might be fine to cut to a live-action gag every once in a while, and some of them are admittedly funny - Frank gets sick initially after eating a hard-boiled egg that was dropped on the ground and then almost eaten by a chimpanzee - they attempt to give the live action segments their own dramatic stakes by having Frank’s young daughter concerned for his health following the recent death of her mother due to an unhealthy lifestyle. I cannot understate how little I care about this, or about the girl's camping trip she wants to take. And when they're not being overreachingly earnest, the live segments have this really small, mean, depressing feel to them. Compounding the weirdness, the script seems to think that Frank and his daughter are fat, but she’s played by a tiny wisp of a thing, and he’s played by…

To be fair, this is before he got all Oscar-hungry.

Oh, Bill, how could you? I don’t think it’s overstepping it at all to say that Bill Murray is one of the most gifted comedic actors in America, but he does not need to be doing this. There’s something kind of depressing about seeing him doing this material, when you know he didn’t need the money. Because we all know that when Bill Murray is really capable of phoning it in, and for the most part, that’s what he does here. The gags might land better if he was invested, but it’s obvious he couldn’t care less. While watching it, I started thinking of other actors that could play the part better, and Chris Elliot came to mind. He usually looks pretty scummy and unhealthy, he’s able to work well with bad material, he knows the directors already, and he’s not famous enough to turn down parts. This line of thought became even more annoying when I got a few scenes further in and it turns out he’s playing Frank’s brother.

So yeah, wasted talent, cheap, poorly-done sentimentality, and an intense feeling of mood whiplash due to the complete tonal disconnect with the animated portions. But despite the live-action error, I still recommend this movie. The live action stuff does drag down the overall rating, but the animated portions are still really well made and entertaining. It may not be a very good movie, but it’s got enough going on to say it’s worth the hour and change it takes to watch.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

HA!

* At one point, a character in one of the live segments says “hypotenuse” when they mean “hypothesis”, and I can’t tell if it was supposed to be a joke, and that makes me SO ANGRY.

* At one point, Jones calls Leah “Brandy”, and… That’s it. Is that just because she’s played by Brandy? Or is there a joke I’m missing there? Because if the whole gag is “Character uses an actor’s name instead of the other character’s”, that might be the worst joke I’ve ever heard.

* “There’s been a Jones on the force ever since my ancestors came over on the umbilical cord.”

* Among the film’s Wikipedia categories: “Fictional microorganisms”.

"Kidney Rock". Okay, that's funny enough to justify the shoehorned cameo.

* Following this, the Farrelly brothers made Shallow Hal, Fever Pitch, a remake of The Heartbreak Kid for some reason... Basically nothing but hot garbage. And that Three Stooges movie which was pretty okay.

* If you’d like to learn more about artistic brothers named Peter and Bobby, please observe this vastly more creative and talented set. They're twins, which makes them objectively better, they have funnier voices, and while they haven't made a Three Stooges movie, I have seen them set fire to an old lady's rug while trying to wash a cat.

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The Iron Giant (Warner Bros. 1999)

The Iron Giant (Warner Bros., 1999)

In 1968, Ted Hughes wrote a short, somewhat hippieish novel called The Iron Man.

In 1986, Pete Townshend used it as the basis for a Tommy-style song cycle/rock opera/concept album.

In 1993, Warner bought the rights to this song cycle and started developing it as a movie.

In 1996, skilled animator and former Simpsons director Brad Bird was hired to direct the film.

In 1998, Quest for Camelot made no money.

Those five events are what led to what I feel comfortable calling, without hyperbole, the greatest animated film of all time.

COMEDY!

DRAMA!

YES IT ACTUALLY LIVES UP TO THAT HYPE!

IT’S THE IRON GIANT!

The Iron Man is a very odd book. I read it all in one sitting during a study hall period when I was in tenth grade. I don’t recall if I had seen the movie at that point. It had only come out some months previous, and I know I didn’t catch it in theaters. But whether I had or hadn’t, my reaction would have been the same: pleasant bafflement. While the writing is very good (Hughes was a poet laureate of England), the story is a bit all over the place. It concerns the sudden appearance of an enormous, metal-eating robot who drives a town into fear. A young boy named Hogarth helps them catch the robot, and when it escapes, leads it to a scrap yard where it can eat all it likes, eventually befriending the robot. That’s all fine. Things get a little weird when the Earth is terrorized by a Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon (that’s not me being snarky, it’s what it’s called in the book) who demands tribute in exchange for not destroying Australia. The Iron Man saves the earth by challenging the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon to a heat-withstanding contest where it will lie on burning petrol while the SBAD lies on the sun, and they‘ll see who breaks first. Wait, it‘s not done. When the SBAD is finished, it has become tiny and no longer scary. It reveals that its job is to sing cosmic harmony and create peace through the galaxy, but the sounds of war on Earth corrupted it. Now that it has been humbled by the Iron Man, it remembers its past, and  sings a peace song that makes humanity realize that they are all family, and they end all war forever.

It’s no surprise that this story of a misunderstood and damaged outcast, the fear and prejudice of a panicked populace, and a lasting peace through music would draw the attention of Pete Townshend, guitar player for The Who and driving creative force behind Tommy, which dealt with similar themes. His album “The Iron Man: The Musical” was a hit, and like Tommy before it, led to stage productions and film adaptations. The film, set to the song “A Friend Is A Friend”, focuses on Hogarth and the Iron Man’s growing friendship, which is the far more adaptable part of the story, and the part that Brad Bird chose to focus on.

I don’t know much about the early development of the movie before Bird was hired, but it did begin as a straight adaptation of Townshend’s album, and Townshend, as well as Des McAnuff, co-writer of the Tommy stage musical, retains a producer credit in the final product. I presume, since his songs were originally to be used, that the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon was included in early drafts. But Bird had a different directorial vision. He saw the strongest part of the movie as the friendship between Hogarth and the robot - who had been renamed the Iron Giant for obvious reasons - and the fearful reactions of the townsfolk. So now, Hogarth keeps the giant’s identity a secret, rather than the whole town finding out at once. In order to get the most benefit from the town’s paranoia, the movie was set in the 1950s, with a thick helping of nuclear panic informing the storyline. The cast was expanded, as well, with roles for Hogarth’s single mother Annie; Dean, the beatnik owner of the scrap yard who helps Hogarth hide the Giant; and Kent Mansley, an intimidating CIA agent who is convinced the Giant is a Soviet weapon, and moves into Hogarth‘s house as a lodger when he starts to suspect the boy. With this new plot and cast in place, Bird set about developing the story. Just as they were entering production, the best possible thing happened. Quest for Camelot tanked.

Suddenly Warner wasn’t so hot on animation anymore. The budget for The Iron Giant was trimmed, and production time cut dramatically short. Bird and his staff suddenly had to rush it out as quickly as possible. And - this is the good part - the executives basically started ignoring them. Bird now had free reign to make the movie as he wanted, free from studio interference. And what an amazing movie it is.

I can’t even imagine what this movie would have been if Warner Bros. cared about it at all. We saw the dirty hands of executive meddling all over Quest for Camelot, and it ruined any slim possibility of that being a good story. The Iron Giant has no funny sidekicks. The music is all orchestral soundtrack and digetic ‘50s pop. There are no jokes that rely on anachronistic references or situations. The ending is heartbreaking, and resolutions are not easily won. And Mansley is frankly terrifying. He gradually steps up his intensity throughout the movie until he’s literally threatening Hogarth in his own house while Annie unsuspectingly works the night shift. I can’t imagine a character like Mansley in a lot of kids’ movies. They keep a bit of a comical edge on him, including some deftly handled toilet humor, but that only highlights his menace when it’s brought out, rather than neutering it.

But fear isn’t the only emotional beat this movie hits hard. The friendship between Hogarth and the Giant is heartbreakingly honest and real. It’s structured very much like ET, probably intentionally. The kid makes friends with the alien despite his initial fear, and at first it’s all fun and games. He shares his comic books, teaches him about earth, rides his giant friend around, stuff like that. But just like ET, the government gets involved, and Hogarth has to do a lot of growing up very quickly. Of course, ET’s problem was that he was too fragile for Earth’s environment. The Giant has rather the opposite problem.

The movie is beautiful. All hand-drawn animation except for the Giant, who is a gorgeously rendered cel-shaded wireframe. This highlights his alien and artificial nature and it really looks fantastic. The character designs are also very strong. Bird has a real gift for faces, and even the most minor background people are brimming with personality. The animation is really strong on action, too especially the dramatic ending sequences and the introduction to the Giant as he runs afoul of a power station.

Speaking of personality, the voices are also phenomenal. I was somewhat worried about Jennifer Aniston, who plays Hogarth’s mother. She was the only real “celebrity” voice in the movie, and at this point in her career, didn’t really have that much of substance. But she really sold her lines and rose to the occasion. I guess Harry Connick Jr. would be considered a celebrity voice, too, but do people really know what he sounds like when he’s not singing? Anyway, he did a fine job as Dean the beatnik. The remainder of the cast is filled out just the way I like it, with excellent character actors, including Christopher MacDonald as Mansley, John Mahoney as the general who leads the hunt for the Giant, Cloris Leachman as Hogarth’s teacher, and James Gammon and M. Emmett Walsh as actors who show up in like everything.

But yet again, the standouts are Hogarth and the Giant. Hogarth was played by child actor Eli Marienthal, best known as Robin in a variety of DCAU productions. He does an amazing job, given that he has to carry pretty much all of the emotional weight of the movie. His performance is one of fantastic energy, variety, and nuance, and he was rewarded with an Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in a Feature. It’s not every 12-year-old who can say they beat out Ralph Feinnes and Suzanne Pleshette for the same award in the same year. Fore the voice of The Giant, the producers originally intended to cast Peter Cullen, the voice of Optimus Prime, but he was unavailable in the small window of time they had, so they started looking at other gravelly-voiced types, finally deciding on an unknown with the appropriate name of Vin Diesel. Diesel is a gifted actor, and paces his few lines with the perfect amount of gravitas and innocence. So it is with the best line of the movie that I leave you. Get ready to cry.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* I rarely mention the Annie Awards on this blog, because I don’t really care about them, but for what it’s worth, Daviegh Chase also won for Lilo and Stitch, and it was well-deserved. Brad Bird would go on to win the acting award himself, for his performance as costume designer Edna Mode in The Incredibles.

* For what it's worth, even though it had 20 million slashed from its budget, the movie was still left with 10 million more in its budget than Quest for Camelot had. But that's still only about a third of the budget of Disney's movie that year, which was Tarzan.

* There is no evidence of the tiny budget, though. To me, this means Brad Bird should direct every movie. He should definitely direct the next Star Trek movie, now that he's in with JJ Abrams.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS CONTAINING SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING, SO IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT, DO THAT NOW. SERIOUSLY. IT’S NOT THAT HARD TO FIND.

* Brad Bird’s original ending had the Giant remain destroyed and the USA and USSR at war. His co-writer wisely talked him down, pointing out that if you kill ET, you have to bring him back.

* I’m sure glad the Giant didn’t see Man of Steel, because if he had, rather than nobly sacrificing himself, he would have blown up Mansley with his eyeball lasers. “SUPERMAN.” VOOMP. SSSSSSSS.

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Quest for Camelot (Warner Bros. 1998)

When putting together the list for this volume of the blog, I pretty quickly decided that I would arrange it by film studio, rather than chronologically. And which studio to start with was a no-brainer. Warner Bros. and Disney were rivals going back to the short subject days when Warner’s Merrie Melodies  and Looney Tunes began wiping the floor with Disney’s Silly Symphonies (I’m sensing a naming theme). As Fleischer Studios passed into memory, Warner became Disney’s most heated rivals in the cartoon short game. But feature animation was pursued by Warner more cautiously, until the early 1980s, when they started to distribute animated films produced by other studios, and met with modest success. After the smashing victory of The Lion King, Warner kicked up their distribution game into high gear, and started preparing their own animated films. The first of these was Space Jam, a live-action/animation mix that we’ll get into later, but by 1998, they were ready for the first fully animated prong in the Warner Bros. Feature Animation attack.

ACTION!

ADVENTURE!

A GUY WHOSE FACE IS SOMEHOW OFF-MODEL IN EVERY SHOT!

IT’S QUEST FOR CAMELOT!

Who wrote your tagline, Leo Tolstoy?

This is a bad movie. In fact, while I was watching it, I thought it was worse than any of the Disney movies, and while I can see now that was an overreaction, it’s still very very very not good. Let’s start with the most obvious problem, the inconsistent tone. The movie was based on the horribly-titles novel “The King’s Damosel”, which was apparently a fairly serious and sober work of Arthurian legend. I keep reading that the movie was originally intended to be a serious and dramatic movie originally, but I’m not sure they were ever going for much by way of adaptation, as you can see from this list of similarities between the movie and the book:

1 - There is a blind guy in them.

With a goofy-ass face.

That’s pretty much it. The book began with an adaptation of the legend of Lynette and Lyonesse, then continued with Lynette taking a job as a messenger for King Arthur after she is abandoned by her husband. The movie is about a girl named Kayley who wants to be a knight, and has to find Excalibur and return it to Camelot before the evil ex-knight Ruber can invade. Which means it’s not even a quest for Camelot, it’s a quest for Excalibur. Though I suppose it’s “for Camelot” in that it’s on Camelot’s behalf. “Quest undertaken as a representative of Camelot”.

Anyway, changes to the story aside, the intent was still to make a somewhat serious movie, and the plot, while aggressively formulaic, is not bad for that. But somewhere along the line, the studio got cold feet and decided that for the first plank in their assault on Disney, it was best to try to rip them off as much as possible. So the decision was made to “Disney-fy” it, via the following methods:

1 - Make it a musical.
2 - Wacky sidekicks.

GO TO HELL.

Number one is particularly annoying, since as far as I can tell, the film was already cast when that decision was made. The singing voices bear no resemblance to the speaking voices to an extent beyond anything I’ve ever heard. Have you ever listened to Celine Dion and thought “I bet that’s what Jane Seymour would sound like when she sings”? Or perhaps you have heard a Journey song on the radio and mistaken Steve Perry for Pierce Brosnan? Of course not, because you are not an insane person. The same cannot be said for the person who cast the singing voices in this movie. Worse than that is that they clearly also had the movie scripted when they added the songs in, because for the most part, they stick out like poorly-composed sore thumbs. Dion’s dreamy, slow, and dramatic “The Prayer” (which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar) is used to underscore a dramatic and action-packed escape scene which doesn’t fit it at all. The dragons sing a wacky, anachronism-filled introductory number, a standard trope of post-Aladdin animated films, but the humor doesn’t match anything else in the movie, the random ‘dream sequence’ style comes out of nowhere, and the song is clearly meant to set up their characters… but they’ve already had a very lengthy scene and proper introductions. It’s useless, it gives us nothing, it was clearly just crammed into wherever they found a lull in the script.

And that gives me the perfect segue into the movie’s second failing, the wacky sidekick characters, of which the dragons, Devon and Cornwall, are the worst offenders. While they never warp reality or demonstrate magical abilities after their song is over, they do keep making anachronistic jokes that don’t work at all in the context of the film, and aren’t funny anyway. At least it’s a relief from the warmed-over Odd Couple comedy that they rely on for the rest of the movie. They’re conjoined, you see, and one of them - I have no idea which is Devon and which is Cornwall - loves fancy things like theater, and the other one likes… Well, it’s very vaguely defined. Fancy Dragon likes culture, and Other Dragon doesn’t, but he also doesn’t have any well-defined interests of his own. When they sing about what they’d do if they were separated, Other Dragon just sings about how happy he’d be to not be attached to Fancy Dragon. He does express attraction to human women at several points. Is the joke that he’s a straight guy attached to a gay guy? Wasn’t that a Farrelly brothers movie?  (Wait for it.) They are played by Eric Idle and Don Rickles, and you get no points for guessing which is which. Idle is a MUCH better singer than Rickles, which really hurts their duet.

Oh yeah, great idea, put a reference to a good movie in the middle of your bad movie. 

The other comic relief characters fare similarly. Ruber’s pet griffin is serious, sinister, and silent in the fight scenes, but in between makes snaky comments in the voice of Bronson Pinchot. Ruber’s henchmen have all been magically merged with their weapons to make a badass cyborg army, which is almost a cool idea, except that he tested it by merging a chicken and a hatchet, resulting in the whimsical underling Bladebeak, voiced by Jaleel White. I have no idea how merging a chicken and a hatchet results in an intelligent creature who can speak English. Actually, it seems to make the rest of his men stupider. And prevents them from dropping their weapons if need be, which leads to some serious issues later. I’m pretty sure it was a terrible plan all around. Ruber himself is somewhat comedic, but in an interesting “crazy villain” way. He’s really violent and unhinged, he punches a dragon to death at one point, and is voiced in a series of strange lurching screams by Gary Oldman. I feel like if the exact same character was in a better movie, I’d really like him. At least Oldman does his own singing. Well, I say “singing”.

Actually, the one thing I can say for this movie without reservation is that - singing voices aside - the casting is very good. The charming, sarcastic hero is Cary Elwes, Pierce Brosnan is a suitably dignified King Arthur, White and Pinchot use creative and funny voices that don’t just copy their famous goofy sitcom accents, Idle and Rickles are consummate pros as ever. The only disappointments in the cast are Kayley, played by an actress I don’t recognize and am too lazy to look up, who plays the role very bland and flat, and John Gielgud as Merlin. Not that Gielgud’s a bad actor, obviously, but he’s got like two lines. I probably wouldn’t have remembered Merlin was even in this movie if I hadn’t noticed that they wasted maybe the greatest actor ever. That helps it stick in the memory.

Speaking of the greatest actors ever, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Gary Oldman.

The animation is… Well, it’s underwhelming, but I’m just now coming off 50+ Disney movies, so maybe my standards are a bit too high? This obviously wasn’t Warner’s first foray into animation, nor even the first feature film they produced on their own, but it was the first they put a lot of effort into, the former one being based on a television show and animated by the same folks that did the show, and for considerably less money. This was big-budget feature animation with all-new character designs, and I’ll forgive a lot of the technical screw-ups for that reason, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’m being too generous. There is one CGI troll in the movie that is just gob-smackingly awful. Poorly integrated mid-90s CGI is going to be a trend this year, just so you know.

I can’t be as kind to the designs. Garret, the blind forest person, is particularly bad to me, since every time I paused the movie to make a note or get a snack or beat my head against the wall in frustration, it would pause on his face, and it always looked horribly goofy, but in a different way every time. Most of the human characters looked too stiff and sort of washed out, and the creature characters looked rickety and awkward. Ruber gets both ends of that, as well as raising the question of why Arthur decided the gray-skinned, eight-foot, jagged-nailed monster psychopath would fit in well at the Round Table.

"Did anyone check this guy's references?"

This was a pretty dire first effort for a studio with such a history. While there was clearly talent involved in the making of it, the plot was nonsense, the script was lousy, the animation was shoddy, the songs were dreadful, and the entire movie was just plain unpleasant to watch. I’ll admit, there was the occasional joke that made me laugh, but they were few and far between, and there were far more that made me… Not just not laugh, but whatever the opposite of laugh it. Hgual, I suppose. While I was watching it, I was sure it was the worst movie I’d ever seen for this blog. It’s not, but when that’s the main instinct it evokes, that’s not a good thing.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* In the climax of the movie, Ruber uses his potion to merge himself with Excalibur. I was interested to see what sort of magic sword-monster he turned into, but it turns out it’s just Ruber with a sword for a hand.

* Kayley eventually defeats him by tricking him into stabbing the famous “In The” Stone with Excalibur, which for some reason kills Ruber and separates the sword from him, then sends a wave of healing energy out that separates the weapons from his soldiers without destroying them, and heals some strategically dramatic wounds on good guy characters. What’s really weird is that the healing wave also separates Devon and Cornwall, despite the fact that they were born conjoined, but doesn’t heal Garret’s eyes, despite him not being born blind. I’m glad they avoided the nasty implications that arise whenever a disabled character is magically healed, but it causes something that already makes no sense to make even less sense.

* Oh! And Devon and Cornwall embrace each other while the healing wave is still going out, thereby rejoining their bodies! Maybe it’s not healing magic, just some loose plot threads.

"Hey, how many rocks in Stonehenge?" "I don't know. Just draw one of the things, the audience'll get it."

* Much of the movie takes place in the Forbidden Forest (no, not that one), where all the grass and trees and stuff are apparently alive. No one ever mentions this and it never becomes relevant. I guess the background animators were just bored.

* I am somewhat heartened to learn that WB lost quite a bit of money on this, due in part to releasing it in the middle of a crowded summer, surrounded by Deep Impact the week before, The Horse Whisperer (which, incidentally, features the actress who played Kayley) the same week, and the massively hyped Godzilla the week after. While none of those movies (well, maybe Godzilla) were in direct competition, the advertising for all three was intense, and Q4C got lost in the shuffle.

* Seriously, Godzilla was INCREDIBLY hyped. I don’t recall when I’ve ever seen a movie so aggressively advertised, except maybe The Phantom Menace. And it worked, because that’s the movie that got 14-year-old Brian’s allowance added to it‘s receipts. Sure wasn‘t Quest for Camelot. Or the Horse Whisperer, for that matter, though I did see that on VHS a year or so later and quite enjoyed it.

Seriously, these things were everywhere.

* There was a good side to Quest for Camelot’s failure, apart from artistic justice, and we’ll see that next week.

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Announcing Volume 2!!

Throughout the (ahem) year of Disney, I noticed an trend of people recalling the nostalgic Disney films from their childhood - A lot of them weren’t by Disney. They were by Don Bluth, by Warner Bros., by some independent company, etc, but people remembered them in the broad mental category of “Disney Movies”. And that does make a bit of sense. While there were various studios supplying our childhood animated classics, the name-recognition of Disney does rather have a way of taking over the memory. TV Tropes even has an article about it, because of course it does.

At first, I didn’t take much notice of this, but after a while, it did get me thinking about all the studios that have tried to take on Disney over the years. Often at times when the company was putting on a weak showing, other companies have pushed out slates of animated movies to grab that market share for themselves, and that’s what we’ll be looking at this year.

We’ll begin with the various attempts by Disney’s old rivals in the animated shorts department, Warner Bros., first with their late-90s feature animation division, then their earlier partnership with Ted Turner. We’ll then look at the complete works of former Disney animator Don Bluth’s independent studio, which includes our only direct-to-video piece. Then a few more Warner-distributed things, before moving to Steven Spielberg’s brief foray into the game with the horribly-named “Amblimation”. We’ll look next at the early 2D work of Spielberg’s far more successful company Dreamworks, then jet back to the 1970s, where Golan and Golobus, who despite their names are somehow not supervillains, loaded their legendary egos into Cannon Movie Tales, the first-ever blatant attack on Disney’s market. After a brief miscellaneous round, we’ll look at the feature films of TV cartoon moguls Hanna-Barbera and holiday special specialists Rankin/Bass.

The end of the volume will take us back to Disney, looking first at their live-action/animation mixes, and then at some animated films they paid for, but didn’t themselves produce.

I’m not guaranteeing reviews for all of these. Some of them, specifically the mid-70s stuff, I’m not even sure have been released on DVD. But this is the current plan, with a few bonus films thrown in along the way.

EXCITEMENT!

MERRIMENT!

WILD VARIATIONS IN QUALITY!

IT’S MY YEAR WITHOUT WALT DISNEY ANIMATION STUDIOS!

(current planned list of films under the jump)



WARNER BROS FEATURE ANIMATION

Quest for Camelot
The Iron Giant
Space Jam
Osmosis Jones
Looney Tunes Back in Action
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

TURNER FEATURE ANIMATION

Cats Don't Dance
The Pagemaster

THE FILMS OF DON BLUTH

The Secret of NIMH
An American Tail
The Land Before Time
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Rock-a-Doodle
Thumbelina
A Troll in Central Park
The Pebble and the Penguin
Anastasia
Bartok the Magnificent
Titan AE

BONUS ROUND - MORE WARNER-DISTRIBUTED FEATURES

Gay Purr-ee
Animalympics
The Nutcracker Prince
Rover Dangerfield

AMBLIMATION

An American Tail 2
We're Back!
Balto

DREAMWORKS

The Road to El Dorado
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron
The Prince of Egypt
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

CANNON MOVIE TALES

The Emperor's New Clothes
Rumpelstiltskin
Hansel and Gretel
Puss in Boots
Red Riding Hood

BONUS ROUND - JUST SOME STUFF I FEEL LIKE REVIEWING

Ferngully
The Swan Princess
All Dogs Go To Heaven 2
The Brave Little Toaster

HANNA BARBERA

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear
The Man Called Flintstone
Charlotte's Web
C.H.O.M.P.S.
Heidi's Song
Go Bots: Battle of the Rock Lords
Jetsons: The Movie
Once Upon a Forest

RANKIN/BASS

Willy McBean and his Magic Machine
The Daydreamer
The Wacky World of Mother Goose
Mad Monster Party
Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July
The Hobbit
Return of the King
The Last Unicorn
The Flight of Dragons
The Wind in the Willows
The King and I

DISNEY LIVE-ACTION/ANIMATION HYBRIDS

The Reluctant Dragon
Song of the South
So Dear to My Heart
Mary Poppins
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Pete's Dragon
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Enchanted

DISNEY-FINANCED ANIMATED FILMS

The Nightmare Before Christmas
James and the Giant Peach
Frankenweenie
Mars Needs Moms
A Christmas Carol

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Q&A: The Final Disney Wrap-Up

An interesting question with an interesting answer. While the Disney canon has a few flops, this is a company that, for their animated films at least, considers “only tripled its budget” to be a flop. There have been a few that didn’t make their money back, but only one really joins the pantheon of legendary money losers, and that’s Treasure Planet, which lost the studio about 80 million dollars. That doesn’t compare to their biggest live-action flops, like John Carter, which banked on a charmless lead and source material no one’s heard of, and The Lone Ranger, which banked on racism and source material no one cares about. Both of these films lost over 100 million, with estimates for Lone Ranger as high as 120 million (though it’ll be hard to say for sure until its out of theaters a bit longer).

The interesting bit is that Disney is also responsible for the biggest flop of all time, and it’s an animated movie. Just not one of their canon. Through ImageMovers Digital, a partner company, Disney produced a film called Mars Needs Moms to the tune of 150 million dollars. Not only was the film a pile of junk, the advertising budget was comparatively tiny. Which is too bad, because if they had spent a lot trying to sell it, it may have actually had losses larger than its budget. As it is, it made 40 million in theaters, leading to a net loss of 130 million. Mars Needs Moms is currently slated as the final film of Volume 2. I’m looking forward to it.

I was surprised as I went through the list just how malleable a concept “feels like Disney” turned out to be. The… emotional beat of the company, for lack of a better term, permeated nearly everything they did. There were points where it was weaker - the compilation films, the Rescuers/Fox and the Hound/Black Cauldron period - but even so, in those groupings, the films still feel like each other, and that gives them a stronger connection to the Disney canon as a whole. So I’d have to give this one to a movie that not only has a different feel to it, but also stands on its own as a bit of an odd duck, and that’s Wreck-It Ralph. I mentioned in the review how it felt more like Pixar than Disney, and that’s all true. And since it’s surrounded by traditional princess musicals and a Winnie-the-Pooh flick, it stands out all the more. So while it’s still very good, that’s the one that feels the least like Disney. Though I have my suspicions Big Hero 6 may be dethroning it.

I don’t know, Walt’s head? I have a soft spot for the hysterical religious right panics of my childhood, of course, like Aladdin telling teenagers to take off their clothes, or the priest’s knee-boner in The Little Mermaid. I like the really inexplicable ones, like that no one is allowed to be declared dead at a Disney park, or that Walt’s will states that the first man to become pregnant will be given the entire company. But most of all, I like the true ones. Like the photo of the topless woman in The Rescuers, or that the documentary filmmakers herded lemmings off a cliff when nature failed to conform to their script. But of these turns-out-to-be-true legends, my all-time favorite is that Harlan Ellison was hired as a staff writer for Disney in the mid-60s, and was fired on his first day after Roy O. Disney heard him joking in the cafeteria that the company should make a porn.

Not really. Disney was actually kind of good about that stuff. You know, given the times and all. They certainly weren’t free of stereotypes, as we’ve seen on this very blog. But I’ve never seen the kind of virulent, sincere, hateful racism from them that I’ve seen in the 1940s cartoons of Warner Bros., MGM, Leon Schlessinger, Famous Studios, etcetera. Most of the things you see linked online as “banned Disney cartoon” are more like “Disney cartoon they don’t show much because it’s about tin rationing or some stupid thing like that.” The only thing I’ve seen of theirs that really matches the racism of their contemporaries is Sunflower from Fantasia, and they’ve cut her out of there. There’s also the cartoon illustrated above, “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” which… Ah, it’s on YouTube.

Incidentally, Warner has released a DVD of their wartime cartoons, with a contextual introduction from Whoopi Goldberg, and following the success of that, is planning on releasing a DVD of their “Censored 11” and other old offensive cartoons. Frankly, they shouldn’t, because they’re reeeeeeally racist, and frankly kind of terrible. I sought out “Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs” after seeing animation historians refer to it as a masterpiece and one of the greatest cartoons ever made, and Bob Clampett’s magnum opus and stuff like that. It’s not. Even if you are super good at compartmentalizing racim, it’s just an unfunny collection of tired, simple gags with overly frantic animation. AND A LOT OF RACISM. I have no idea what the historians are thinking. I guess they’re just overcorrecting, and trying to be edgy?

The cause of the schism is easy to see when you look at what Disney was making in the late 70s. Basically garbage. Disney was full of stifling older animators, a labyrinthine bureaucracy, and an uninspired creative team. So he left, taking John Pomeroy and more importantly Gary Goldman with him, as well as a short film they‘d made, which they shopped around to get funding. Sullivan Bluth Studios produced eight films, but declining quality and sales led the studio to close, and Bluth and Goldman accepted an offer to start Fox Animation Studios, which produced Bluth’s final two movies. Much more information will be available in Volume 2 of the blog, wherein I shall discuss the entire output of Sullivan Bluth and Fox Animation.

Incidentally, the Disney film that is generally agreed to have been the final straw for Bluth is Pete’s Dragon, which I will also be covering here.

Well, in the Lucasfilm deal, they got not only Star Wars, but also Indiana Jones and a number of small franchises/titles, like Grim Fandango, Willow, Monkey Island… Um… Radioland Murders… That movie about Preston Tucker that nobody saw. There’s also Marvel, of course, and the Muppets, their two big acquisitions. They’ve bought Pixar outright, so all the Disney/Pixar characters are just plain Disney characters now. They acquired a terribly run yet fairly creative comic company, CrossGen, and are trying to think of something to do with those characters (the correct answer, as far as I'm concerned, is keep making Ruse and Abadazad, and dump the rest in a landfill). They own ABC, of course, so I assume they got some licenses with that. I know they bought distribution rights to a bunch of their old rivals in the shorts business, but I’m not sure what exactly. Actually, it’s hard to research this right now, since trying to research properties acquired by Disney just brings up pages on pages of articles on the Lucas deal.

1 - No, he had planned to have his brain put into the robot body of Michael Eisner, but Dwight Frye dropped it on the ground and they had to use an evil, business-savvy potato who was really awkward at hosting TV specials.

2 - Honestly, I just remember them because of a TV ad for the 1994 VHS release of Snow White, wherein they showed a number of people being challenged to remember the dwarfs’ names. The “man on the street” nature of the ad was belied by the fact that everyone said them in the same order. Whoops. Anyway, that ad was on TV constantly, so that’s how I remember them, and if I were stopped on the street by a commercial-maker, I would say them in the same order. Self-fulfilling advertisement.

3 - The best name.

What gives you the right to cast aspersions on anyone’s scheduling - Oh, you produce, not one or two, but three high-quality podcasts on a regular basis? One of which has had an official panel at the Emerald City Comic Con? And that same podcast is one on which I am a frequent guest, and on which I will be appearing on next Monday, November 11th?

Thanks for your question, Aal! Happy birthday!

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