2003 - Brother Bear

A ‘dude flick’, for lack of a better term, can be a very difficult thing to make. I say for lack of a better term because for some weird reason, there’s not a name for the male equivalent of a ‘chick flick’. You know the type I mean, even if we don't have a word for it. A movie specifically designed to play on the emotions of its male audience. There’s a handful of good examples I can throw out. Field of Dreams is the archetype, but there’s also Big Fish, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, Dead Poet’s Society, the Shawshank Redemption… They’re less common than their female equivalent, probably due to the strong patriarchal culture deeming emotions “unmanly”, but those that come around and make an impact tend to be very good, as the list there should indicate. Why am I leading with this? I don’t know. Maybe being philosophical is a way to avoid thinking about THIS TERRIBLE GODDAMN MOVIE. GRRRRARGH? So am I. So forage for berries and snap up a salmon in your jaws, and let’s talk about Brother Bear.

My opening paragraph there wasn’t a complete non-sequitur. This is pretty transparently meant to be a movie for guys. Brothers, to be precise. And since Treasure Planet dealt with father figures and male bonding so well, I was fairly optimistic. And for the first 20 minutes, it is good. Very good, as a matter of fact. It deals with Kenai, the youngest of three brothers, receiving his spirit totem, a bear that represents love. The interplay between him and his brothers Sitka and Denahi is natural and heartwarming, and you can see the culture and the history they share. Sitka has become a man, Denahi is on his way, and Kenai is just starting his journey. But when Kenai runs afoul of a bear, Sitka gives his own life to protect his brothers, and Kenai starts on a dark path. Against Denahi’s advice, he goes after the bear in revenge and kills it. In retribution, the spirits change him into a bear. And the movie turns to GARBAGE.

There is a good movie that follows, they just chose not to make it. The basic plot is fine. Kenai tries to find his way to a place where he can meet the spirits and get changed back, guided by a hyperactive cub who got separated from his mother. Congratulations, by the way, you just figured out the shocking twist. Yes, the cub belonged to the bear Kenai killed, and along the journey, they go through all the usual buddy-movie bonding stuff until Kenai sees him as a new brother, tearfully confesses his actions, and chooses to stay a bear to be where he is needed. To add drama, they are being stalked the whole time by a grief-stricken Denahi, who has mistaken Kenai for the bear that “killed” his brothers.

Of course, in the end, everything's back to... normal? 

When I write it down like that, it doesn’t seem that bad. So what went wrong? Ohhhh, so much. Let’s start with the visuals. In the beginning, the color palate is very muted and realistic. When Kenai gets beared, the color palate gets more cartoony and colorful, and the animals get more anthropomorphized. This regrettably undercuts a lot of the drama, and they don‘t invest any time in the sort of sweeping vistas that were once so common to this company, which is a huge waste of the gorgeous Canadian setting. Though apparently in theaters, they shifted the aspect ratio into crazy widescreen when he changed, so maybe the scenery looks better that way? I don’t know, that wasn’t featured on my DVD version.

The pacing of the whole thing is bad, too. The movie perks up any time Denahi almost catches them, or when they flash back to the initial bear attack from the mother’s perspective, but for the most part, it slows down and flattens out as soon as the change happens. A lot of the blame for this goes to a pair of comic relief moose, who - Never mind, we’ll get to them. But the larger part of it is on the script, which can’t lay out its scenes properly, and covers the whole thing with hacky, overwrought dialogue.

The music is another point taken away, which is a real shame, because it’s Phil Collins again, trying to do what he did with Tarzan. But lightning isn’t striking twice here. The songs are forgettable at best, and some of them are reeeeeal stinkers. And only about half of them are sung by Collins, which means you lose the through line of one voice that made it work in Tarzan, but at the moments when it is Collins, it just seems derivative and distracting. Also he rhymes “festival” with “best of all”, which makes me want to choke him. The worst moment, though, has to be when Kenai confesses that he killed Koda’s mother, and just as he begins, his voice fades down and Collins takes over with the worst song in the movie. It’s like on Downton Abbey, where they tend to cut away and skip very interesting conversations because Julian Fellowes doesn’t like writing confrontation, I guess. Only instead of cutting away to Thomas scheming or Molesley failing, we have to watch the conversation happen while Phil Collins sings a lousy song at us.

Guess which of these is the exact face I was making.

The casting is… Not terrible. Mostly. To my annoyance, no actual Inuit or other Native American actors were used (Well, one narrator guy at the beginning). While I’ve maintained this isn’t necessary, it has been nice and added an air of authenticity to the films that is missing in this one. The actors are fine though. Joaquin Phoenix is Kenai, and since this is before he went bonkers, he does well. Jason Raize, the original Simba from the Broadway version of The Lion King, is Denahi, and he does very well. Sitka is D.B. Sweeney again, but little is asked of him, so he’s not a disappointment. Not-awful child actor Jeremy Suarez is Koda, and reliable actors like Michael Clarke Duncan, Greg Proops, and Estelle Harris turn up for small parts as some other bears. Then there’s the moose…

Okay, here’s the thing about the moose. They’re the McKenzie brothers. Yeah, from SCTV and the movie “Strange Brew”. And that’s not some dig at Canadians, either. They are voiced by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, same voices, same style of humor, same patterns of speech, same everything. And I like the McKenzie brothers, I really do. But it doesn’t work. They are used way too much, they never have any effect on the plot, and their bits can get intensely awkward. I will admit they got a laugh out of me when they announced their intention to go eat some barley and amber wheat over malted hops. Even being in a G-rated Disney flick can’t stop the McKenzies from their beer.

Remarkably, the culture was handled very well. It helps that it takes place 10,000 or so years ago and the tribe isn’t tied to any concrete historical figures, so they get a lot of leeway in their portrayal of the Natives. The magic aspect was less offensive than it was in Pocahontas, as it was portrayed as a fundamental part of nature, rather than Magical Native Americans casting spells. So that’s all passable. But then, it’s only really present in the good opening scenes. There’s also only one woman in the entire movie. She’s the shaman of the tribe, and throws out some exposition occasionally, but that’s about it. I mean, I get that the movie’s about brothers, but come on. Even in the animal world, there’s just two female bears, and they get one or two lines each. And I guess Koda’s mom, but she’s a cypher.

Sadly, Mountain Dew would not be invented for another ten thousand years.

This is a really short review, but I don’t want to put any more thought into this movie. It was just one long missed opportunity, a chance for a good movie tossed away by a nervous film company. It did fine financially, but domestic sales were sluggish, and critics were lukewarm. The writing was on the wall, and next week’s entry would seal the 2D deal. At least temporarily.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Kenai’s totem animal is the Bear of Love, and Sitka’s is the Eagle of Leadership. Denahi’s is the something of Wisdom, but they never tell us what. So I’ma go with Triforce.

* While I’m in no mood to watch this movie again right now, I might take another whack at it someday, since the DVD has commentary by the moose, improvised by Thomas and Moranis. I can see that working better than they did in the movie.

Are... are they watching the movie they're in?

* While there’s only one named woman in the movie, there is one female character I find very compelling. In the very beginning, during a tribal ritual, a girl breaks free of her mother’s arms and runs into the circle of men, briefly attempting to join their ceremonial dance. I like to imagine she’s going to grow up to challenge gender roles. Because I can imagine whatever I want. It’s got to be better than the actual sequel.

* The opening is animated by an elderly Denahi, who says it took place “Long ago, when the great mammoths still roamed our lands.” I’m pretty sure that was for our benefit, because to us that’s ancient, but to the kids he was speaking with, it would be like 40 years ago. Man, those mammoths must have gone extinct quick.

* There is one good comedy bit of a goat arguing with his own echo. I laughed. Thought I’d mention it.

* There’s a bald eagle in this movie, and rather than screeching majestically like they do in most movies, it makes an accurate sound, which is rather like a seagull, a fact that is hilariously disappointing to many Americans.

Awfully considerate of the ancestors to put their handprints way up there so you wouldn't have to stretch or anything.

Read More

2002 - Treasure Planet

One thing I notice about Disney in the modern age as opposed to the classic Disney is that they’re a lot more willing to take risks and move in an unexpected direction, even if that direction hasn‘t been working for them. As I’ve mentioned before, I think a lot of that is due to the fact that while the production time on the films has gotten a bit smaller, the development time has remained the same or gotten longer, and several movies overlap in production now. In the old days, I’m pretty certain the relative failure of Atlantis would have nipped this one in the bud. It’s another big action movie with a unique visual hook and a subverted seafaring theme. But hey, they went for it and here we are. Got scurvy? Me too, ye lubber. So get some plurps or woozlewozzle or whatever stupid alien food they made up for this, and let’s talk about Treasure Planet.

So as the title seems to imply, this is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island. That wasn’t necessarily a given; after all, The Emperor’s New Groove had nothing to do with the Emperor’s New Clothes. So they could have been justified in taking nothing but the basic idea of pirates and treasure and pinching the title for their space adventure. But they really go the whole shebang. Well, a lot of the shebang. While the plot is largely the same -

WE INTERRUPT THIS REVIEW FOR A LAST MINUTE EDIT: I realized as I made ready to post this that I was presuming the reader knew the basic plot of Treasure Island, and I really shouldn’t, because not everyone has read the same books as me. So, short version: Jim Hawkins lives with his mom, who runs an inn. One of their tenants, an old sailor, dies of a stroke and leaves Jim a treasure map. A local wealthy moron pays for a voyage to find said treasure. Since he knows squat about boats, he lets a local tavern keeper hire most of the crew and serve as cook, with young Jim as his cabin boy. This man, “Long” John Silver, turns out to be one of the pirates who put the treasure there in the first place, and the rest of the crew are his old buddies. They mutiny, and it’s a race to the treasure with much shooting and sneaking about and jolly good adventure. Okay, on with the review:

While the plot is largely the same, there is, as you might expect, a lot changed. So much in fact, that I think I have to do one of my “let’s get the changes out of the way” lists.

Point 1: This is objectively the coolest flag ever.

*The dour taskmaster Captain Smollett is now the sharp, lithe, Captain Amelia, a catlike alien. Still a total badass. Not sure why they had to change her name, though.

* Mr. Arrow is now a polished, stern authoritarian, whereas in the book he was a drunken, angry slob who fell off the boat and drowned after the pirates got him hammered.

* Friend of the family Dr. Livesey and expedition financier Squire Trelawney have been combined into the nebbish dog person Dr. Doppler.

* Jim’s father is not dead, but has in fact left the family, causing Jim to become Jim Hawkins, Troubled Youth, as opposed to the bland upstanding lad he was in the book.

* WHERE THE HELL IS BLIND PEW?!

* Billy Bones dies as soon as he sets foot in the inn, instead of lingering for several months and a couple of strokes.

* John Silver is still missing a leg, and now an arm, an ear, and an eye to boot. But he’s got cybernetic replacements, so it’s hard to argue that he’s much worse off than he was in the book.

* Mr. Hands has been renamed “Scrope” for some insane reason. And there’s still a pirate named Hands. He just doesn’t do anything.

And that’s really it, apart from some minor things. And unlike The Jungle Book, where the changes didn’t make the story better or worse; or Pocahontas, where they were an affront to history; or Hunchback, where they simplified and occasionally hurt the story; here, the changes make the story much stronger. Jim is so much more interesting as a troubled teenager, and it makes his bonding with Silver (and Doppler) so much more meaningful. Combining the Doctor and the Squire is fantastic for plot economy, as they were sort of mutually useless before. Making the captain a bit more of an adventurer-type works for the story as well, and passing on his more serious qualities to Arrow gives the pirates a much clearer motivation to kill him. As for Silver…

"Arr, it's a pirate's life, Jimbo. Freedom, adventure, and all the striped pants ye could want."

Movies of Treasure Island - of which I’ve seen at least six - tend to have a bit of trouble with one aspect of Silver. In the book, he’s quite the anti-villain, and becomes a mentor/father figure to Jim. This makes for great drama, but the balance is tough. Lean on it too hard and you make him a hero. Go too easy on it, and you lost the most interesting part of his character. Make him too friendly, and you lose the authority figure aspect. Too stern, and he loses the inherent friendliness that lets him connect on that personal level.

Thankfully, Silver is done marvelously. South African character actor Brian Murray brings a tremendous deal of warmth and charm to the cyborg, and Glen Keane animates him as only he can, an enormous, hulking brute who nonetheless possesses a graceful air. I didn’t notice how smoothly the character moved until a point in the movie when his mechanical leg gets disabled. He extends his artificial arm long enough to touch the ground and uses it as a crutch, stumping along like the Silver of the book. His fondness for Jim grows organically, and never seems artificial or forced, and you can really feel his conflict when he has to either kill Jim or lose the map. His cybernetic parts also provide clear looks at two of the movie’s unique visual aspects.

First of all, it’s a sci-fi future that looks like people have been living in it. This is tricky, as the default is to make everything shiny and new in the future. This isn’t bad (see the 2009 Star Trek, for instance), but when done really well (see Alien, for instance), creating a scummy, lived-in future can make a huge difference in how the audience buys into the world of the film. Silver’s prosthetics work well, but are bulky and fairly artless (in-universe. Film-wise, they look great). His arm is held on by a bulky shoulder harness we never properly see, and he has several cables plugging directly into his skull. The final effect is undeniably futuristic, but also reassuringly grounded. You can also see in his robot bit’s the skillful use of CGI elements for technology, which is seamlessly integrated with the traditional animation that makes up his body. This extends to everything. The ship is all CGI, the planet is painted backgrounds. It’s a neat way of blending the old with the new. Speaking of which, the third and most prominent visual aspect…

"Someone call Fantasia 2000, we found their gimmick."

The film is not merely set in the future. It’s set in a future that’s explicitly and clearly based on the 1740s setting of the original book. The clothing is 18th century-based, ships have sails that collect solar energy, and laser guns have little flintlock shaped energy cells. This has divided critics pretty sharply, with some thinking it doesn’t make any sense. Why would the future wind up looking so much like the past? Well, these people are WRONG.

Remember the scene in To Sir With Love when Sydney Poitier takes the kids to the museum and shows them the historical antecedents to their own fashion and hair? It’s like that. Why can’t the future wind up looking like the past? Heck, they’re not even on Earth, maybe Montressor didn’t look like this at all during their equivalent of the 1700s. And most importantly, it just plain looks cool. There’s something about the pirate aesthetic with laser guns and such that really works. And while it’s amped up considerably, it’s not new to this. Where do you think Lando Calrissian’s cape came from?

WE INTERRUPT THIS REVIEW FOR ANOTHER EDIT: I realize now that I am presuming a lot of familiarity with the 1967 film To Sir With Love, starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu. In this film, Sidney Poitier finds a burning tampon and calls a bunch of girls sluts. And probably some other stuff happens. Lando Calrissian is not in it. Sadly.

This is also another one with a GREAT voice cast. Joseph Gordon Levitt played Jim, right at the beginning of his transition from child actor to adult actor. David Hyde Pierce is Dr. Doppler, and does his usual consummate job. Captain Amelia is Emma Thompson, who seems like a really delightful person in all ways, and voice acting turns out to be no exception. Mr. Arrow is Roscoe Lee Browne, whose name you may not know, but has a voice that I would unhesitatingly rank alongside Christopher Lee and James Earl Jones. Martin Short… was really good in some other stuff?

That's what this movie needed. Jar Jar Binks.

Yeah, I’m praising this movie pretty fulsomely, but I will freely admit, it’s not all peaches and gravy. There is a LOT of reliance on terrible jokes, which are frequently plopped down in relatively serious moments. And I mean it, these jokes are bad in their own right. There’s an alien that communicates by farting. Yyyyeah. The only character that gets away with it is Dr. Doppler, because Pierce can heal a lot of bad writing with good delivery. There’s a few small plot holes, some flubbed moments, and the movie’s version of Ben Gunn is B.E.N., a screaming comedy relief robot voiced by Martin Short. Not to mention Jim's hair, which is... well, just look at the pictures. But while it’s far from perfect, it’s not bad by any measure.

Sadly, it BOMBED. And that’s not in the “Oh, it only made 250 million at the box office” way that Disney’s been defining bombs lately. This was the first Disney film since The Black Cauldron to not even make its budget back. Why on earth is that? There are a lot of reasons. For example, timing. The market was pretty full when this came out, Harry Potter 2 was taking the family audiences, and James Bond 22 had opened the week before, taking the action audiences. There’s also the marketing, which Disney directed heavily toward young children despite the material being more suited for older kids and teens. Whatever the reasons, Disney blamed the failure on what else but the animation. After seeing the response to their next two films, they decided that it their bad receipts were because people wanted computer animation and only computer animation, and shut down the 2D animation studios. Of course, it somehow escaped their notice that the movies Pixar was putting out had really good plot and character elements, whereas the movies that followed Treasure Planet… You’ll just have to wait and see. Hey, next they’re doing Native Americans again. That always goes well.

See, this is the kind of crap jokes I'm talking about. 

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:

* The ship is the RLS Legacy. RLS =  Robert Louis Stevenson. Clever enough to mention, I figured.

* Okay, I can’t lie about To Sir With Love, it’s really really good and you should all see it, you just really have to remember it was made in 1967, and while it was remarkably progressive for the time, a lot of it hasn’t aged that well.

* Due to the nature of the story, Jim’s mom gets the short end of the characterization stick, but what she has is strong, and its clearly demonstrated she‘s the source of a lot of his good qualities. Her being voiced by Laurie Metcalf helps a lot, because she’s really good at playing moms in animated movies that don’t get to do much else.

* In addition to a crutch, Silver’s prosthetic holds a sword, a gun, several knives, a rotary saw, a vegetable peeler, a whisk, a flamethrower, smaller hands for precision work, and some sort of dedicated shrimp peeler. He must have visited the same doctor as Inspector Gadget.

And... Captain Hook?

* Dr. Doppler and Captain Amelia get together at the end. It’s one of those “They fight but then turn out to be attracted to each other deals”, which is a bit of a cliché, and their bonding is after she is injured and he cared for her, which is a bit of a sexist cliché. I can overlook that last one, though as she’s an action hero and he’s a doctor, so it comes naturally for once. Also, he gets emotional and she remains stoic, which is a decent enough subversion. We see their babies at the end, which are three girls that look like her and one boy that looks like him. This is the same thing that happened in Lady and the Tramp, but at least they were the same species. I guess these guys are, too? And their species just has fairly extreme sexual dimorphism?

* There’s a wacky animal sidekick in this movie, a floating pink blob called Morph. Morph can change shape, and uses that talent to cause wacky trouble for the characters. You’d think that would annoy me, but like Djali, he’s actually from the book. He’s the sci-fi equivalent of Silver’s parrot, Captain Flint, who would cause wacky trouble for people by mimicking them.

* Not featured from the book, as I mentioned before, is Blind Pew, the messenger who first delivers Silver's death threat to Billy Bones. I feel like something really cool could have been done with him, alien-wise, but I understand the drive to get the plot moving. This story's always had somewhat off pacing at the beginning.

* Jim’s middle name is Pleiades. What?

* Two things I meant to mention about Lilo and Stitch that I forgot. First, that Lilo was animated by Andreas Deja, who remains awesome. Second, David is the first guy in a Disney movie who seems to actually like his romantic interest as a person, have an existing history with her, and respect her feelings toward him. That’s pretty big, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention it. Dude doesn’t swoop in and save her at the end, he helps her get a job interview. Class.

Read More

2002 - Lilo & Stitch

It’s a time of risks for Disney, and the risks were not always paying off. While they hadn’t had any legit flops, every new idea they tried was falling short of their expectations. With that frame of mind, CEO Michael Eisner thought back another time they’d had a couple of underperforming artistic movies, namely Pinocchio and Fantasia. The response then, if you recall, was to make a cheap crowd-pleaser, Dumbo. So the budget of their next film was reduced by 40 million, and production was started on an odd little idea by storyboard artist Chris Sanders, who was named director. Sanders had developed the stories and visuals of Mulan, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast, so he had a pedigree, but this was his first directing effort. And far from the ancient times and fairy tales he had worked with before, this was a modern-day comedy about aliens. In addition to directing, he also did the storyboards, screenplay, character design, and the voice of Stitch, making this more of an auteur effort than usual for the company, another risk. Would the payoff be greater than other recent efforts? Would Sanders become a company hero, or would his directing debut be a dismal disaster? Allow me to add suspense by pointing out that this was the last film Sanders ever worked on for Disney. Suspensed? So am I. So get some poi and a plate lunch, and let’s talk about Lilo & Stitch.

Okay, I need to dispel the suspense first before I can say what I want to lead with: Sanders was indeed fired from his next directorial position at Disney, a movie called American Dog. He left the company and was hired in the development department of Dreamworks, where he remains to this day. So if Disney didn’t like what he was doing there, what does that say about this movie?

I’m going to be very clear. At the end of this endeavor, I will be making a top 10 list. Since the movies are all good in different ways, I’ll just be doing them in chronological order, rather than ranking them. After all, they all work in different ways, how can I compare them? But I know this: If I were to be ranking them, Lilo & Stitch would be number one. No contest.

When I write these reviews, I tend to focus on five things. Story and Script, Animation, Characters, Acting, and Music. And, I suppose, Additional Thoughts, which if we were to quantify it, we can say it’s a measure of how the movie held my interest. This movie hits all of those elements perfectly. Let’s start with the story.

Market research.

The plot revolves around two individuals Lilo Pelekai and Experiment 626. We open in space where a mad scientist, Jumba Jookiba, is on trial for illegal genetic engineering. His creation is 626, a living weapon. Jumba is found guilty and 626 is to be destroyed, but it escapes and makes a hyperspace jump that lands it on Earth, Hawai’i to be precise. Meanwhile, we meet Lilo, a troubled child who’s having difficulty adjusting to life in the care of her sister Nani after the death of their parents. After a particularly disastrous visit from the social worker Cobra Bubbles, (“Bubbles? That’s an unusu-” “I know.”) Nani decides to get Lilo a dog, hoping that caring for it will steady her sister emotionally. 626, who has found himself in the shelter where they go to adopt their pet, arranges his alien body into something resembling a blue koala and a Chihuahua and gets himself adopted by Lilo, rationalizing that she can be an effective human shield against any aliens who pursue him. Seeing herself in Stitch’s behavior, Lilo attempts to teach him to be a good person, as Nani tries to get a stable job so she can retain custody of Lilo.

What makes the story work so well is that is does not try to soften its blows in the plot or characters. Nani and Lilo’s situation is not ideal. It may not even be any good. Nani is overworked, overstressed, and unprepared to care for a child. She clearly loves Lilo, but may not be the best caretaker. This makes Bubbles not just some menacing authority figure with a weird name, but someone that you can honestly and sincerely believe wants the best for Lilo, even if that means making the hard choices. And when Stitch comes into their lives, he’s not just a ‘troublemaker’ or ‘prankster’, he’s genuinely destructive. This movie is set in a world where actions have consequences.

OW, MY FEELINGS.

Lilo actually seems like a child, as well. These movies give us a lot of poorly-written kids, and that is not happening here. As a teacher, I’ve worked with kids like Lilo. She’s not a bad kid, but her emotional situation has left her with almost no impulse control. At one point, she starts punching and biting a classmate who called her weird, and when her teacher stops her, she immediately pulls her hands behind her back and starts apologizing. And she means it, she just had no ability to stop herself. In the moment that precedes this, she’s passionately explaining how she needs to give a peanut butter sandwich to a fish every Tuesday. When she says it’s because the fish controls the weather, the adults in the room all get very odd expressions, and it‘s only later that you learn Lilo‘s parents died in a thunderstorm. It‘s a fantastic role that lets itself go very over the top while still being totally grounded.

Stitch is also very well-written. His destructive programming is designed to attack cities and large population centers, and his only weakness is that he’s completely non-buoyant, so he can’t swim. So when he winds up on an island with no big cities, he’s at a loss. Even his creator doesn’t know what his programming will do when faced with this situation. So after attempts at destruction and violence are met with reprimand and a spray from a squirt bottle, he doesn’t know what to do. He wants to act well, but doesn’t know how. When Lilo shows him a book of The Ugly Duckling, he knows that he has to find a family. And when he finally defends himself to the aliens by walking to Lilo and Nani and saying (his first full sentences in English), “This is my family. I found it all on my own. It’s little and broken. But still good. Yeah. Still good.”… I cry. I cried like a baby watching this on an airplane, and I even teared up just now typing it.

Also, comedy!

Wow, I just spent three paragraphs talking about how emotionally real this movie gets, and I think I might be giving you the wrong impression about it. It’s incredibly funny. Lilo’s matter-of-fact delivery of her occasionally bizarre lines is great, and while Stitch is destructive, it’s in the finest tradition of a Looney Tune. The aliens who are on earth to hunt him down, his mad creator Dr. Jumba and the nebbish exozoologist Pleakley are also hilarious. In another very Warner-esque touch, they go undercover as a tourist and his wife, and despite Pleakley having one huge eye and tentacles, the wig seems to cover any questions anyone has about them. There’s also David, a good natured dork with a thing for Nani, and Gantu, a 20-foot brute who is sent to get Stitch when Jumba and Pleakley fail. Both of them manage to be very likeable and funny while still advancing the drama of the Earth and space plots, respectively.

The acting is again excellent. Disney keeps up its laudable trend of ethnically appropriate actors with Hawai’i natives Tia Carerre and Jason Scott Lee as Nani and David, both of whom do a great job, and helped the writers put in a lot of local slang and other regional terms. Chris Sanders plays Stitch, because he has to do everything. We get another fine performance from David Ogden Stiers as Jumba, and Kids in the Hall vet Kevin McDonald as Pleakley. But the standout is young Daviegh Chase as Lilo. Chase is an astonishingly talented young actress - you may know her as Samara from The Ring or as Samantha Darko from Donnie Darko - who just finished up a long and very good run on Big Love, and hopefully she makes it through that weird child actor intermediary period. With luck, she comes out of it as more of a Ryan Gosling than an Ashley Olsen. In terms of fame and longevity, not what parts she plays.

The music deserves a mention, as well. The film is not a musical, though there are two original pieces of Hawai’ian music on the soundtrack. The bulk of the music, however, is Elvis songs. Lilo is a huge Elvis fan, and uses his movies and music to try and teach Stitch, thus leading to much Elvis on the soundtrack. I largely approve of this, as I’m a big Elvis fan. I mean, who isn’t? My favorite Elvis song, Burning Love, is played over the ending montage, and it’s such a great montage, I don’t even mind that they used a cover version by Wynonna.

"And an Elvis song covered by Wynonna is an ABOMINATION!"

Animation is also great. Sanders has a very distinctive visual style, and it works wonderfully here. Human faces are fun and expressive, and best of all, they look like real people. Nani has thick legs and a waist that kind of looks like it belongs on a human. Lilo and the other kids are chubby, because that‘s what kids look like. The aliens have a great variation. A lot of them are based on designs he did when hired to create the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, and he responded by drawing any kind of insane monster he could think of. (They wound up using none of them)  There’s also a few based on Winnie-the-Pooh characters, which is fun. The backgrounds, for the first time since Dumbo, are done in watercolors, which really brings out the tropical feel.

So yeah, I can’t recommend this enough. The comedy, the cleverness, the animation, the feminism, the surprising verisimilitude,  the treating Hawai’i as an actual place instead of just somewhere white people go on vacation, everything about it is great. This is one of the best movies Disney has ever produced, and it is my personal favorite. If you haven’t seen it, see it now. If you have, see it again.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Yes, I spell Hawai’i with an apostrophe. It’s how the Hawai’ians spell it. I’m not going to negate that because of some lazy white mapmakers.

* Well, technically, I spell it with an ‘okina. Interestingly enough, there is more debate on the spelling of Hawai’ian, with some choosing to go with Hawaiian even if their preferred spelling of the state is Hawai’i.

* If you're wondering about the poster, the original marketing campaign for this movie consisted of famous scenes from the Disney Renaissance ruined by Stitch. Like dropping the chandelier on Belle and the Beast as they dance. They're very funny, and you can see them here.

* There’s a great running gag about Pleakley’s fondness for mosquitoes, which he has classified as critically endangered. It starts as just a simple gimmick to explain why the aliens don’t all-out attack the Earth, but they keep using it for little jokes, and there’s a great payoff.

I also tear up at this part, but it's only because I'm SO HAPPY.

* There were a number of deleted scenes that drove in the emotional damage issue even more, and I really wish they were kept in. One was for Lilo, where a passing tourist yells at her for directions from his car, asking her if she speaks English. Shortly thereafter, Lilo goes to the beach and pretends the tsunami sirens are going off, effectively ruining the tourists‘ days. Disney claims it got the cut because it was too soon after 9/11 for a disaster warning joke, but I can’t help but think it was a little to scathing toward tourist culture for the company that profits so much from it. Lilo’s resentment of tourists is still in the film, via a weird running gag where she likes to take photos of obese, sunburned people.

* Another deleted scene focused on Stitch, wherein he accidentally kills Pudge, the weather fish. This caused him to learn about mortality and the consequences of his actions. Cut for being too heavy, even for a relatively heavy film.

* The last major deleted scene was DEFINITELY altered for 9/11-related purposes, as it involved Stitch chasing a spaceship by hijacking a 747 and flying it through Honolulu. The animation was heavily altered so Stitch could take a spacecraft and fly it through the O’ahu mountains instead. This is better, anyway, as it kept the action local.

* My autocorrect changes exozoologist to erotologist. What do they think I’m writing here? It also automatically capitalizes Hawai’i as Hawai’I and then tells me I’m spelling it wrong until I fix what it changed on me. That seems way passive aggressive.

Read More

2001 - Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Before I write these I put together a loose outline of what the final product is going to be. Just a little note reminding me of what I want to put in each paragraph. The note I have for this intro is “The CGI Menace”, and that’s a pretty accurate assessment of what Disney was feeling at the time. When Dinosaur came out, the audience’s hunger for computer animation was just starting to grow, and they hadn‘t had much to choose from. By the time Atlantis came out, four more computer animated films had debuted, three of which were successful, and two of which were good. While the development on this film started long before those movies came out, Disney were smart enough to smell the change on the wind. To that end, they decided it was time for them to change with the times. And they knew what America wanted to see: A dramatic sci-fi adventure set in 1914 and inspired by Japanese animation and American independent comics. Were they correct? Was America ready for - You know what? I’ll just tell you. No, they were wrong, people didn’t want to see it, it didn’t flop yet was not a big hit, and it’s largely forgotten today by the company and the public.

However, like The Black Cauldron, Disney’s attempt here at a darker palate and more dramatic tone has led this to be a bit of a cult classic. However 2, the phrase “like The Black Cauldron” is not one that inspires confidence for a lot of reasons. However 3, the company is in a much better place artistically now than they were back then, so it might not be that bad. How ever are you feeling? I’m sure I feel the same. So eat some chuck wagon slop and let’s talk about Atlantis.

This movie had one great advantage for me going into it, and that’s the designer that came up with most of the movie’s visual aesthetic, Mike Mignola. Mignola is an independent comics artist best known as the creator, author, and primary artist of Hellboy. I have no idea how he came to work for Disney, but I’m glad he did, because the movie looks fantastic. Mignola’s got a very distinctive visual style, and lost civilizations and ancient monsters are a specialty. While it’s not a flawless transition - his fondness for bulky sleeves and his square, blocky hands make for some awkward moments of animation - it does give the movie a unique look that works wonderfully. I don’t think I’ve seen this strong and cohesive a design aesthetic since Aladdin. The biggest problem comes when the animators were clearly going away from Mignola’s designs. The character of Moliere, in particular, is pretty blatantly Disney-designed, and he never quite fits with the look of the other characters.

And those characters are EXCELLENT. A voyage to Atlantis clearly requires a submarine, and a submarine requires a crew. The writers smartly decided to take a page out of Star Trek (or, more to the point, SeaQuest DSV) and work out what jobs they needed, fill those jobs with a diverse group, develop a clear personality for each character, and give everyone a moment in the spotlight. Some of them are familiar Star Trek archetypes, like the Medical Officer or Chief Engineer, and some specific to the job, like the Geologist or Demolitions Officer. And they all feel like real, developed people. Dr. Sweet is half black, half Native American, grew up on a reservation, and served in the army. Audrey is the Hispanic 16-year-old daughter of their previous engineer who trained under her father. Vinny the explosives guy is Italian, and comes from a family of florists. None of this is plot-relevant, but it makes the characters seem far more real, and it lets the movie take a breather in between the action scenes by developing them. Also, time spent on character development is time not spent on plot, and… Well, we’ll come to that.

Look at all that production design! No, really, look at it, we can't have you paying attention to the plot.

The actors, to my everlasting relief, are FANTASTIC. This is a loooooong way from Dinosaur. Whether it’s voice actors like Cree Summer and Corey Burton, character actors like Don Novello and Jim Varney, or primarily live actors like James Garner and Michael J. Fox, everyone presents a voice that is full of personality and perfectly suited to their character. Fox in particular, as the mission’s linguist and our lead character, does a marvelous job. This was his first role after his Parkinson’s Disease forced his retirement from TV, and he throws his all into it. The animators clearly took a lot of influence from his mannerisms in the development of the character, so the fusion of actor and animation is as good as it’s ever been.

Actually, that happens a lot in this. Don Novello does his typical stream-of-conscious rambling as Vinny the demolitions guy, and the animation puts in just the right blend of stone-faced deadpan and accents of emotion. Novello actually recorded his part by reading the lines as written and then free-associating alternate takes. The filmmakers actually wound up using not a single line as scripted, landing him in the Robin Williams/James Woods camp. Phil Morris as the doctor also provided a challenge to the animators by talking as fast as he possibly could in his introductory scene. And if you’ve seen him on Seinfeld as Jackie Chiles (the only black person in New York, as far as I can tell), you know how fast that is. The actors inform the characters as well as the other way around. Man, I hated Dinosaur.

As long as I’m throwing out propers to the actors and avoiding the part I have to talk about next, some more standouts: Leonard Nimoy as the blind Atlantean king brings his legendary gravelly gravitas. Cree Summer, best known at the time as Elmyra from Tiny Toons, plays Princess Kida as stone cold badass. And particular credit to Jim Varney as the expedition’s cook. Not because of his great comic relief performance, I knew that would be good. But because he took the role knowing full well his lung cancer would kill him before the he’d have a chance to see any of it. Oh, also John Mahoney is in it. He's always good.

 

Okay, Mignola, we get it, you like old-timey photos of people standing in groups.

Okay, I’ve avoided the subject for long enough. The animation was great. The characters were great. The actors were fantastic. So what was the problem? Well, the plot that all those great aspects were plopped into is TERRIBLE. Well, not the plot really. The plot is fine. When an old explorer discovers a possible map to Atlantis, his insanely wealthy friend agrees to finance an expedition. The explorer dies before they’re ready to leave, so they hire his beloved grandson Milo, a translator of dead languages, to help them decipher the map. When they reach Atlantis, they discover a living, but stagnant situation. When it turns out the captain was planning all along on exploiting Atlantis for his material gain and doesn’t care that he’s going to have to kill the Atlanteans to do it, the more moral members of his crew rebel. Led now by Milo, who has fallen in love with the Atlantean culture, they save the civilization. Writing it down like that, it’s not a bad plot at all. But it is put together so ineptly. And both of the major conflicts are founded on  gaping plot holes.

First and foremost is the fact that the distrust the King has for the explorers, which is bound up in their cultural stagnation. This is represented by the fact Atlanteans don’t know how to read their own language or operate their machinery, which causes Milo to be an invaluable resource who helps them rediscover their cultural identity. The writers were inspired by the Egyptians encountered by Napoleonic forces in the 1800s. They were surrounded by remnants of a great civilization, but didn’t know what they were or what they meant. Problem is, in Atlantis, thanks to a magic McGuffin, these people have been around for 2,000 YEARS. They are the same civilization that sank in the first place. Did they just forget how to read? I hate the movie thing where a white guy shows the minorities that he’s better at their culture than they are (Avatar, Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, etc) but their attempt to avoid this trope just reinforced it and made the natives look like damn idiots.

The second conflict, after Milo teaches everyone how to ride a fishbike, is the revelation that Captain Roark was planning on pinching the legendary Atlantean power source, selling it to the highest bidder, and splitting the profits among his team. When he finds out that the Atlanteans are alive, which he had NO WAY OF KNOWING, he takes it anyway, condemning them to die in the process. Oh, and by the way, these movies are getting recent enough where I’m starting to feel a little bad about spoilers, but when the guy turns up with an army of sinister gas mask stormtroopers, I feel his turn to badness is being telegraphed maybe just a little. So forgive me for giving stuff away, but trust me, plot is not among the reasons to see this movie.

"Oh, good, my shipment of expendable faceless henchmen arrived in time for the plot contrivance."

And they’re not the only things he turned up with for insane reasons. For his mission to an underwater cave, he for some reason brought fighter planes and a hot air balloon. Is there any reason for those other than to give his mooks something to fly around and blow up on in the final battle? And not only that, but his plan makes no sense. Why did he think that leading the expedition to discover the lost continent of Atlantis WOULDN’T make him rich already? And when he finds out they’re still alive, why does he still take the power source, even though it turns out to be an actual living person? And if he DIDN’T know they were alive, WHY DID HE BRING AN ARMY?

And why did his team only have a change of heart when it was too late to do anything about it? Not when he announced his genocidal intentions, not when he beat up and murdered an old man, but when he was sitting in a truck, ready to leave? If this was his plan all along, did Milo’s grandfather know about it? He was an original member of the team, and they were all in on it. Where the hell does Atlantis get sunlight from? Why do Roark’s minions never remove their gas masks? Well, I know that one, it’s to dehumanize them, because a LOT of them die. But still.

And the movie’s a mess on top of it. The scenes don’t hang together at all, and the dialogue tends to be horrible. The best actors in the world can’t save a script this bad. It was clearly a case where their ideas outstripped their ability to pull them off. Yet despite all that, I am giving it a recommendation. It’s not the best, it’s very far from the best, but there are enough moments when the quality concept shines through that you can still enjoy yourself watching it, and most of the plot problems are the sort that don’t start bothering you until after it’s over. So give it a look. You probably won’t be sorry.

My biggest complaint is the unconscionable lack of Aquaman. Why, it's OUTRAGEOUS.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* David Ogden Stiers has a brief role early on. He may be edging out Jim Cummings in number of appearances.

* At one point, Milo exclaims that Roark might sell the power source to the Kaiser. This is the only time that the film’s 1914 setting becomes relevant.

* At the very beginning, Milo reveals that one of the runes in a Viking description of Atlantis’ location was mistranslated, and after changing one of the letters, COAST OF IRELAND becomes COAST OF ICELAND. This is stupid for so many reasons.

* Kida is the only Disney Princess to officially become a Disney Queen. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t get any merchandise.

"One side, Milo! I'll make short work of that robot lobster!"

* An early scene is set at the mansion of eccentric retired explorer Preston Whitmore. He has a fish tank full of coelacanths, which were thought to be millions of years extinct at the time, which indicates that he was a damn good explorer, and ties in thematically nicely. I do think, however, that it seems like a lot of effort to go to for something that will only be noticed by nerds like me that watch movies and go “Ooh! Coelacanths!”

Look, I don't care, I'm just going to keep posting Aquaman pictures.

* The film was a modest hit, but came out the same year as Shrek and Monsters Inc., avatars of The CGI Menace, and they wiped the floor with it. Disney did have one far more profitable 2D animated movie that year, namely “Recess: School’s Out”, which I really like. It was made by Disney’s B-list studio, Movietoons. The upshot is that Atlantis cost 100 million, looked great, and made 150 million. Recess cost 10 million, looked lousy, and made 44 million. So, you know, percentages.

"What manner of devilry is this?! We're not a bunch of tattooed illiterates! DAMN YOU, DISNEY!"

Read More

2000 - Dinosaur

As I mentioned in the review of The Emperor’s New Groove, this movie actually came out earlier that same year, an unusual movie for Disney. What I didn’t go into detail about was the difference in how the two were sold. (Note to people who are reading these in film order: Sorry about that) The Emperor’s New Groove was released in December, prime real estate, but with relatively little publicity for a Disney movie. Dinosaur was released in May, also a great time, but with a HUGE marketing push. This movie was everywhere. It was heralded as an amazing, world-changing movie, technically groundbreaking, emotionally epic, a film that would live through the ages! And it worked! This movie made hundreds of millions and was the number 5 movie of the entire year, while Groove had the worst box office for a Disney film since The Black Cauldron. But when I discuss my blog with people, Groove is remembered with near-univeral fondness, and Dinosaur is… Well, it’s not remembered. This film has made almost no cultural impact, contrary to the expectations of it, and it’s excellent box office showing. So why hasn’t this lasted in the memory the way its contemporaries have? Was it as good as Disney thought, or was it all hype? Why do we describe someone as having a meteoric rise when meteors are known for falling? Feeling the burden of undue anticipation? So am I. So steal some eggs from an unprotected nest, and let’s talk about Dinosaur.

The first thing I’d like to address is the animation, a major selling point of the movie. At the time this came out, computer animation was still very much the new hotness. Moreover, the Disney animators made a commitment to realism in the portrayals of the various dinosaurs. Sure, they let themselves cheat a little, and sure, some of the dinosaurs have been rendered inaccurate by new research, e.g. the Velociraptors didn’t have feathers, but it still works. The other big selling point was the backgrounds, which rather than being posed on a computer, were filmed on location. This works really well - for about seven minutes.

That wasn’t an arbitrary number. The first seven minutes or so of this movie are fantastic. It consists of a montage of an egg being carried all over the place by other dinosaurs, pterosaurs, rivers, etc. And it’s beautiful. The sight of the Pteranodon flying through a gorge, or a mass of herbivores grazing (even though at the time the film was made, grass as we know it wasn’t thought to have evolved until after dinosaurs, but whatever), or a pair of Oviraptors running through a forest, it looks wonderful. It really feels like you’re looking into a prehistoric world, and the live backgrounds look great with the animated characters. Then the egg is found… by lemurs.

"Are you aware of the title of this film?"

Yes, the Disney folks thought we needed mammals to relate to, because after all, it’s not like dinosaurs were ever popular with kids before, right? So yeah, lemurs. Modern ones, too, but I’ll overlook that, because at least they aren’t chimps or something. Anyway, the egg hatches, and the result is an Iguanadon, which the lemurs decide to raise. Somehow, the 16-inch arboreal primates successfully raise a 20-foot-long ground-dwelling reptile, and live in peace with him on their little island, until a meteor storm forces them to flee. The meteor storm brings two more problems. One, the animation doesn’t work in it. The CGI and live elements start clashing like crazy. More importantly, after the meteorites have pounded the earth, the lush, beautiful backgrounds go away, and are replaced with boring brown rocks all over the place. And in order to escape from the desolation, they wind up joining a herd of various dinosaurs being lead by a jerkhole of an Iguanodon who says he can lead them all to the Great Valley. I mean the Nesting Grounds. Sorry. Don’t know where that came from.

Of course, I only know what it’s called because they all talk. I can’t tell you how fast this movie lost its goodwill when the talking started. That great opening sequence was also speechless. The dinosaurs communicated in hoots and clicks and roars and I was fine with it. I understood it. And I remember when I was a kid, there was no indication that they talked in the trailers or anything. If I hadn’t seen a cast list when I was doing my preliminary research, I would have been really taken aback. And oh, what a cast list.

I go on about the voices a lot as I review these, and that’s because voice acting is an art separate from live acting. And this movie demonstrates that very well, featuring flat, lifeless performances from actors who I know are at least decent, like Joan Plowright, Hayden Pannetiere, and Juliana Margulies, or even very good, like Alfre Woodard and Ossie Davis. Our lead, Aladar, is played by D.B. Sweeney, who I swear is the result of some sort of scientific experiment to create the blandest, most forgettable actor in history. At the time he recoded this, given the production time, I guess he’d just done Fire in the Sky? Or Spawn? Maybe they thought he’d be a star by now. Because I can’t imagine anyone listened to his voice and went “Yeah, that’s acceptable”. The only actors who really bring something are Della Reese as an aging Styracosaurus and Samuel E. Wright as Kron, the brutish lead Iguanadon. Wright is actually fantastic, and since the only thing I know him for is playing Sebastian in The Little Mermaid, I’d never have recognized him.

"Wait! Take me with you! I don't want to be in this!" 

In addition to being the best actor, he’s also the only interesting character. The plot is dull and derivative, owing more than a tiny bit to The Land Before Time. Kron is a welcome source of legitimate conflict. He’s motivated entirely be the survival of his adopted herd, and he’s willing to embrace the notion that their survival might mean some of the old or slow ones die. At one point, the herd is being tracked by a pair of Carnotaurs and Aladar tries to convince them to help the slower ones survive, and without preamble or warning, Kron throws him to the ground and says “If you interfere again, I will kill you.” There’s no veiled threat, no metaphor. It’s a directness you don’t expect to see in a Disney film.

Sadly, the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that one moment of brutal honesty. For the most part, it’s an endless sea of clichéd moments and hacky lines. Including my new least favorite cliché, the Arbitrarily Silent Animal, which I first really noticed in Tarzan. Again, the carnivores are completely speechless, only growling and roaring despite clearly being as intelligent as the herbivores. And it’s really too bad. They are carnivores after all, they need meat to survive. It would be interesting to see their morality in this context as thinking, speaking characters. But alas. There’s also an Ankylosaurus that acts like a dog, which is more than a little weird. Is he just mentally challenged or something?

"Where's my feathers, Disney!"

So we’ve established why no one remembers this - because it’s completely unmemorable. It received middling reviews as well, so why was it such a big hit? Well computer animation it was still a novelty at the time. There had only been computer animated movies at this point in time; two were about toys and two were about ants. A large-scale movie, with a big ensemble cast of living (well, formerly living) animals was something new, and the hype was considerable. It put butts in seats, but it didn’t put the movie in their brains. The Emperor’s New Groove might not have busted any blocks at the theaters, but it’s the one people remember and the one they want to see again. Next, Disney will try to make a dramatic sci-fi epic based on the work of an independent comic artist, a fake exo-linguist, and Napoleonic-era French interpretations of Egypt. Who wants to take bets on how that goes?

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* For evidence that D.B. Sweeney is the most generic white guy ever, here’s a depressing story: Apparently, Terry in the comic book Spawn looks a lot like Eriq LaSalle. But some studio executives decided the movie had too many black people in it and told the director to make Terry white. So with a casting goal of “white guy to balance the cast out”, they landed on D.B. Sweeney.

* He also hasn’t gotten any better as a voice actor. I mean, how the hell did they land on him for the adult version of Aang in Avatar? Hella disappointing. I know they have Phil LaMarr’s number, they could have got him. I would say Daniel Dae Kim, but he was already on that season.

* No, the entire additional thoughts section isn‘t going to be about how much I hate D.B. Sweeney.

"I'm making this same dumb face in so many pictures! I look like a bunch of other actors glued together!"

* One nice thing I can say is that Iguanodon was a good choice for the lead, paleontologically speaking. Medium sized, capable of bipedal or quadrupedal motion, prehensile digits, easy face to anthropomorphise, and extremely common and widespread.

* When Iguanodons were first discovered, their thumb spikes were mistaken for horns and placed on the nose. Oddly enough, the two villainous Iguanodons in the film have nose horns. It’s not terribly accurate, but it helps differentiate all the beige lumpy guys, so I’ll just count it as a history reference and accept it.

* The competition probably also had something to do with the box office. Dinosaur was up against Road Trip and a Woody Allen movie that I know I've seen, but somehow don't remember Hugh Grant being in. Groove was up against What Women Want and Dude, Where's My Car. Which might not sound like a big deal, but that's back when kids wanted to see movies starring Mel Gibson and Ashton Kutcher.

* Okay, I'm just kidding, it's actual competition was partly from Disney itself. 102 Dalmatians came out the week before, and hogged a big chunk of the family film market, and two weeks after the terrible Jim Carrey/Ron Howard version of The Grinch, which rather depressingly was the number one movie of the year.

* I bet the D.B. stands for Dumb Boring.

Read More

2000 - The Emperor's New Groove

2000 - Kingdom in the Sun

Well, with a few different and experimental works under their belt, the studio decided to get back to animated epic fairy tales with this one, Kingdom in the Sun. Using a story inspired by The Prince and the Pauper, this was the simple and classic story of a spoiled prince who meets a peasant who looks just like him and switches places with him. And then an evil witch turns him into a llama so he can’t reclaim his throne, and plots to kill the peasant so she can take over the kingdom and use its magic to block out the sun which she blames for her aging. And the llama escapes and joins forces with a beautiful peasant woman who falls in love with him as she helps him get back into the castle. And Sting was doing the songs. Feeling complex? So am I. So get yourself some guinea pig and quinoa and let’s talk about Kingdom in the Sun.

They canceled it. Yeah, after a big chunk of it was already finished, they realized it was a convoluted and bloated mess, so they yanked it, massively retooled it, and turned it into a wacky slapstick comedy. Did it work? Were they able to pull gold from this mess, or did they just get a smaller, cheaper mess? Needing a change? So am I. So rework that guinea pig into some sort of party dip, and let’s talk about The Emperor’s New Groove.

All right, let’s get to the big question first: Yes, it’s good. It’s actually excellent. One might be worried that this would turn into a too-many-cooks situation, that it would bear the telltale marks of executive meddling, that it would feel like a quickie rushed out so all the development money wasn’t wasted. No in all cases. It does, however, have a very different feel than any other Disney movie to date. The jokes come fast and furious, and anachronisms abound. But rather than being a random distraction, or the province of one magic character, they’re part of the structure of the entire world, so they don’t bother me at all. It’s a lot like Hercules in that regard, in that they’ve created a world that works for a blatantly humorous story, so the characters can work in the way a wacky comedy requires without seeming inconsistent.

What’s really impressive, though, is that the movie still trusts itself with serious moments. Unlike Hunchback, which was constantly undercutting its own drama with those damn gargoyles, or Hercules, which placed such a divide between the comedy and drama that it could come off as bipolar, this movie lets drama happen. There’s several quiet moments between our main peasant character and his wife, or moments where the friendship between the prince - well, now an emperor - and him is allowed to grow naturally. And, yes, the peasant is now married.

To a LLAMA.

In the reworked story, there is no prince-and-pauper switch and no beautiful peasant love interest. The former witch, Yzma, now a mad scientist, turns emperor Kuzco into a llama by accident. She intended to kill him, but her idiot manservant Kronk accidentally slipped essence of llama into his drink rather than the poison. The poison for Kuzco. The poison intended specially to kill Kuzco. Kuzco’s poison. That poison. (Trust me, that was very funny if you’ve seen the movie.) After Kronk takes the llama out of the city, he winds up on the farm of Pacha, a peasant whose home he is planning on destroying to build a summer palace. Pacha agrees to guide the llama-emperor through the jungle to his palace in hopes that the spoiled jerk will have a change of heart. So it’s a buddy comedy now, and a very well-made one at that. Kuzco’s change of heart, though inevitable, is hard-won and seems genuine.

It’s a real sign of the strength of the reworked script that the characters are so well realized. There’s no inconsistency in anyone, and there’s real growth and development throughout. Kronk is particularly good, as a henchman who’s not particularly evil, just reeeeeeally dumb. It’s blatantly stated that he was hired for his looks, and that Yzma gets a new muscle boy every few years. He’s considerate and caring, and speaks fluent squirrel, albeit with a heavy human accent. Yzma is good, too, though she tries to usurp the emperor’s throne, it’s hardly her main motivation.

WHY HAVE I NOT BEEN USING GIFS THIS ENTIRE TIME.

The voices are of the usual high quality we’ve come to expect. David Spade plays Kuzco, and it turns out the magic formula for making me like David Spade is to stop me from looking at him. The whiny man-child character that’s been growing more and more impractical and irritating as the actor ages really does fit him like a glove. John Goodman plays Pacha with all the warmth, passion, and bullheadedness he’s known for. Eartha Kitt is Yzma, and with her rasping voice and excellent comedic timing she totally earns my forgiveness for foisting “Santa Baby” on the world. As for Kronk, he’s a tall, handsome, well-built moron. How could he be anyone other than Patrick Warburton? Wendie Malick, John Fiedler, and Tom Jones turn in good supporting performances. And that’s pretty much it. The movie goes almost entirely on the four main characters.

This is going to be a short review because what works, which is almost everything, works in a very simple manner, and what doesn’t isn’t even worth mentioning. There’s a couple of bits that go on a hair too long, and the lower budget resulted in the occasional wonky background, but those things are basically irrelevant. The movie works because of its gags, and they are legion, they are hilarious, and they are delivered by very talented actors. This movie is fantastic, it’s hilarious, and if you haven’t seen it, you should. I don’t know what Kingdom in the Sun (or Kingdom of the Sun, as many sources put it) would have been like. Honestly, probably pretty lousy. There’s a lot of junk around the corner, and without this inspired fit of lunacy, that crap might have come sooner. Stay tuned for Dinosaur! Yeah! Remember that movie?

Yeah, next few weeks are going to be fun.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Speaking of Dinosaur, that technically came out a few months before this, and was way more expensive AND way more successful. But I haven’t watched it yet. And I like this movie. So I’m doing 2000 out of order.

* There's a documentary called The Sweatbox about the making of this movie. Sting's wife, a documentarian, was granted permission to do a making-of feature on Kingdom in the/of the Sun, but instead of the fun "Here's  how a cartoon gets made" movie the Disney suits expected, the production process dictated its transformation into a "Here's how the executives overproduce and ruin movies" movie. Apparently it's very good, but Disney owns it, and for obvious reasons, aren't letting anyone see it.

* I do find myself wondering if my opinion would change if I were to see The Sweatbox. Probably not, because this movie is still funny. I had to delete most of the original Additional Thoughts section because I realized it was basically just a list of gags I liked. And half of those were just Kronk quotes.

* If you regret the loss of the Prince and the Pauper subplot, Disney did make one of those, a short released with The Rescuers Down Under. I haven’t seen it, but it’s got Mickey in it, so it’s probably lousy. Instead, try the movie Dave, or Garfield 2 if you’re a masochist.

* The German title of this seems to be “The Emperor is a Llama.” I love that.

* Yes, Incans actually ate guinea pigs. Deal with it.

And they drank foamy pink stuff.

Read More