2008 - Bolt

When we join our heroes, the acquisition of Pixar is complete, their creative types are now running the show, and Meet the Robinsons has done the very epitome of bland reviews and unremarkable business. The critical response was about the same as mine - a resounding “Meh. It was mostly fine,” and the audiences said about the same. So with John Lasseter in his new role as CCO, it had already been announced that the company was going to be returning to its roots with a big ol’ traditionally animated princess musical extravaganza. The all-CGI experiment had failed. Of course, they also had this one pretty far into production. It already had a troubled history, and was completed in a rush and dumped down with relatively little fanfare, with the company already making ready for the return of the fairy-tale juggernaut. Did the unappreciated project have any merit? Or was this no more than the third child of a bad idea? Well, get yourself another reheated joke about dog food, and let’s talk about Bolt.

First of all, that troubled history. This movie began its life as American Dog, a movie about a neurotic TV actor dog who gets lost in the desert and has to find his way back to civilization with the help of a one-eyed cat and a giant radioactive rabbit. As with most heavily altered or abandoned Disney films, information is sketchy, and relies on a lot of guesswork. What is known is that it was to be written and directed by Lilo and Stitch’s Chris Sanders, so I’m inclined to assume the best. But when he proved resistant to the suits’ “helpful suggestions”, he was fired from the film, and subsequently left Disney for a position at Dreamworks’ story department. He was replaced by Chris Williams, a story artist who had worked on Mulan and The Emperor’s New Groove, who now had 18 months to finish the film, as opposed to the typical 4 years.

I knew about this little backstory going in, and I wasn‘t expecting much of a payoff. To my surprise, they kind of nailed it. Of all the movies from the CGI period, this is the one I knew the least about and it stands head and shoulders as the best. They clearly learned from previous mistakes. In Chicken Little, they tried to be Dreamworks, and in Meet the Robinsons, they tried to be Disney. Here, they stopped trying so hard and just let themselves be Disney.

With a touch of Pixar. But in a good way. 

The story is wonderful. It starts off with an extended scene from the TV series “Bolt”, establishing the world the dog Bolt believes he is a part of. At the end, we learn that the whole thing was an elaborate setup, and Bolt is returned to his trailer. But this is no mere Toy Story thing, where Buzz Lightyear denies his obvious reality as a toy. Bolt’s show was explicitly set up by its director to appear real to him, with the intent of truly capturing canine emotion and loyalty on film. Does it make a lot of sense? No. Was it even possible to film the opening chase scene on a single soundstage? No. Is it likely or feasible that they could pull off every shot perfectly on the first take? Definitely not. But it’s largely irrelevant. The director’s basically making a dog version of the Truman Show, and he’s portrayed as an insane visionary perfectionist, constantly over budget, so I‘m willing to forgive a lot.

Speaking of Toy Story, that’s a comparison I’ve heard a lot in relation to this movie, and in that it’s about an individual thinking they’re a superhero and then having a rude awakening, they’re right. But they handle it very differently here. Bolt never has one moment of realization brought on by an outside force, but gradually comes to realize and accept that what Mittens the cat has been yelling at him is true. It gives the whole thing a nice edge of maturity for the character in that he’s not shocked out of it by being given an obvious sign. And it makes a great running gag, as the world does give him several obvious signs that he misses.

Literally several obvious signs.

The other characters are similarly well drawn. Mittens is a stray cat, declawed and then abandoned by her owners, leaving her deeply distrustful of humans. Rhino is a hamster and TV addict who joins the two on their journey. He is also unaware that Bolt isn’t a real superdog, which makes a good balance as one attacks Bolt’s delusions while the other feeds them. Bolt’s owner, Penny, is a bit of a dull character, and her mom is less than that, but they move the plot along well enough. The standouts in the human world are the aforementioned director, the ratings-hungry network exec, and especially Penny‘s desperately schmoozing agent, whose tendency to come up with bizarre stories and justifications for everything he does are among the film‘s best gags.

Casting is good, but not great. I don’t know, maybe I’m just used to excellent and it’s making it hard for me to take acceptable. John Travolta is Bolt, and he’s got a nice blend of maturity and naiveté that works well, even if it’s pretty bland. Miley Cyrus is his owner/costar Penny, and does fine as well, though again, kind of dull and generic. Fortunately, the supporting cast steps it up. One of the animators plays Rhino, and really sells the fan boy aspect. I‘ve learned that I generally like when the production staff takes parts in these movies. James Lipton is the director, which I like. He’s more than just a disturbingly earnest talk show host, he‘s a pretty good actor as well. Greg Germann plays Penny’s agent, and while he somewhat apes James Woods’ speech patterns, he doesn’t try to copy his voice, so it’s all good. Malcolm McDowell is delightful in his few brief appearances as Dr. Calico, the villain of the show, and Diedrich Bader plays his pet cat. The cat, who knows he’s an actor, likes to mess with Bolt by going to his trailer and making evil pronouncements, so it’s great that they cast Bader, who’s known for playing easygoing normal guys and evil geniuses, so he plays the switch very well. And Mittens is Susie Essman, which means that in voice as well as appearance and personality, she’s pretty much a ripoff of Rita from Animaniacs.

The Goodfeathers also feature. (Not a joke. Warner probably could have sued.)

As far as the animation is concerned, it’s taken a HUGE step up. Now, I’m going to backtrack a little here, because I’ve been disappointed with how hard it’s been to explain the terrible animation of the last two movies, and I think I’ve got it. Here’s a thing - frankly, Toy Story doesn’t look that great by modern standards. It doesn’t. The faces are overly stiff, the backgrounds are limited, surfaces are flat, and the humans just look terrible. But it’s similar to Snow White, and not just because it was the first major animated film of its kind. Snow White is full of bad rotoscoping, weird pans, shaky character animation and all that, but just like in Toy Story, the animation serves a good, solid story, and there’s a palpable sense of giving their all, and of working with their limitations. The reason Snow White has so many dwarves and animals and women in giant capes is because they knew they knew humans would look weird. The plasticky animation in Toy Story doesn’t matter, because they anticipated that, and created a cast made almost entirely of actual plastic.

So it’s a problem when the animation in Chicken Little and Meet The Robinsons didn’t look much better than Toy Story. They didn’t look bad in the understandable, appealing, innovative way Snow White did, they looked bad in the cut corners, lazy animators, using technology as an excuse for making a sup-par product way of The Aristocats. There’s no reason for a movie that came out a decade after the form was created to look like nothing’s changed.

Bolt has no such issues. While the story was pure Disney, the animation was clearly achieved by looking at the work done by their competitors at Dreamworks and their partners at Pixar, and studying how to do CGI right. The weird designs and layouts that came from trying to do 2D stuff in a 3D environment are finally gone. Characters are proportional to each other, the backgrounds are gorgeous and detailed, and full use is made of the depth and scope of the settings, particularly in the action scenes. But the film is not without its own unique look, with soft focus backgrounds and a particular lighting style apparently based on Edward Hopper paintings. Gotta say, though, eyes and mouths still look a little weird.

And I'm pretty sure this was comically outdated, even in 2008.

Conclusion: See this movie! I’m late enough in the game where I can comfortably say it’s not going to wind up in my top 10, but it would have stood a real chance if I was watching them in random order or something. That was something I considered early on, before I determined that going chronologically would be better, as I could track the company’s artistic development. But if Bolt had come in early, it would have hung around in my favorites for a while. Like a good movie that comes out in February and spends a few months in the top ten grossing movies of the year, but everyone knows it doesn’t stand a chance at staying there once the summer season starts. That was a weird metaphor and went nowhere. Whatever. The next batch are way better.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Okay, I just randomized my list, and Bolt would have been the thirteenth movie I watched had I done that. On the other hand, the Randomizer gave me Chicken Little first, then Peter Pan and Dumbo. Yikes. I might not have made it.

* I must say, after the opening, I kind of want to see a whole movie of Bolt the show. It was kind of awesome. I mean, who doesn’t like seeing a dog jump through a helicopter’s blades? (Wait- how did the director rig that one up? No, I said I wouldn‘t think about it.)

And it's not as if a tech-savvy girl named Penny and her intelligent dog isn't a tested premise.

* Failing that, I wish I’d gotten to see the actor who plays Dr. Calico out of character. That would have been a fun bit.

* More on Chris Sanders: He was hired by Dreamworks to try and fix up a lousy script called Crood Awakening, intended to be a co-production with Aardman Animation. In short order, he wound up writing and directing the excellent How to Train Your Dragon. When the Crood Awakening rights reverted to Dreamworks, it was retitled The Croods and given to Sanders to direct. Apparently it’s pretty okay?

* The agent’s best moment, when attempting to convince Penny to accept a fake Bolt: “When I was a little boy, I wanted a bicycle. But my parents got me a baseball glove instead. So you know what I did? I pretended that baseball glove was a bicycle. And I rode it to school every day. True story.”

* Penny was originally to be voiced by an unknown child actor, who still has a brief role as a younger Penny. the kid had only had a few small film roles and a job on the then-current Winnie-the-Pooh series, so she was replaced with Miley Cyrus, whose name could be thrown all over the posters. That kid is doing just fine for herself, though, so it’s all good.

* Speaking of that, Cyrus played an exploited child actor. And Travolta played a big-name star who was brainwashed into believing in a redonkulous sci-fi scenario. I wonder if they noticed.

But that's when I watch Community!

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2007 - Meet The Robinsons

After the modest success and critical massacre of Chicken Little, Disney was probably a bit on edge. I imagine they were looking to pursue a new audience and refresh the old one. I guess… you know what? I’m going to be doing a lot of imagining here, because there’s not much in the way of information on this film’s production, because no one gives a crap about it. Oh, that was mean. Actually, the reason I can’t find much is because while it was in production, Disney bought Pixar for a kazillion dollars, and promptly installed their CCO, John Lasseter, as head of the animation department. Lasseter, upon seeing a preview screening of this film, told them that they needed to make serious changes. In the end, about 60% of the movie was scrapped. And if Kingdom in the Sun has taught us anything, it’s that Disney really likes covering it up when they have to totally revamp a movie late in the game. Anyway, no sense in dwelling on the past. Keep moving forward. So eat your food in pill form, and let’s talk about Meet the Robinsons.

Meet the Robinsons is loosely based on a children’s book by William Joyce called “A Day With Wilbur Robinson”. And by ‘loosely’, I mean “A kid goes to see a weird family named Robinson.” The kids from the book have the same names and haircuts in the movie, as well. And the similarities end there. It’s about a brilliant orphan named Lewis, who invents a machine to recall lost memories in an attempt to find his mother. At the science fair where he’s set to unveil it, two unusual things happen. An ambulatory bowler hat sabotages his machine, and he meets a boy named Wilbur Robinson who is insistent that he finish his project and continue his scientific work. It is eventually revealed that Wilbur is from the future and has followed another time traveler, known only as “Bowler Hat Guy” back in order to stop him from sabotaging Lewis‘s science career. Lewis and Wilbur return to the future, and things kind of go off the rails.

The next long bit of the movie involves Lewis meeting Wilbur’s family in the future. The future, we learn, is a whimsical, if somewhat impractical place. People travel around in floating bubbles, Wilbur’s mom trains singing frogs, he’s got a robot butler, and his uncle is unhappily married to a puppet on his hand. That last bit is somewhat troubling, as this comes off as less a wacky quirk, and more a straight-up mental illness. Like if instead of a dummy mob boss, Arnold Wesker walked around with Loretta Lockhorn on his hand. And neither of them seem happy about it. As for the rest of the family, there’s a pretty significant problem. I have no idea who’s related to whom. The familial relationships are maybe mentioned once, and then basically forgotten about. There’s a human cannonball, a woman obsessed with trains, a pizza delivery superhero, a mad artist, and two people who live outside in potted plants. None of whom seem emotionally stable. Even Wilbur is cagey and paranoid, even if he doesn’t have a wacky gimmick.

This was my face for the whole movie.

This is a problem that comes up a lot. The future they live in is insane, dangerous, and occasionally terrifying, and it’s all due to the inventions of Wilbur’s father, the mysterious Cornelius Robinson, who turns out at the very end of the film to be a future version of Lewis, after an adoption and a name change. I’ve been feeling a bit guilty lately about the casual attitude toward spoilers on this blog. Sure, it was all fine when reviewing 60-year-old movies, or stuff everyone’s seen, or terrible stuff, but we’re within a decade of the present now, and this movie’s marginally worth seeing, so trust me when I say this is not a spoiler, though the movie would think it is.

See, the movie contains a number of what it would have us think of as surprise twists. But they reeeeeeally aren’t. The reveal of Lewis as Wilbur’s father is the most obvious one, but there’s other stuff, and I managed to spot every one of them. I listed them as I figured them out, and my sister, a tremendous Meet the Robinsons fan, confirmed it every time, usually by scowling at me. The Bowler Hat Guy’s motivations was the only twist I had to take a guess at, but it wasn’t a huge leap. I can easily imagine the twists would be less obvious to a child, but they still work to the detriment of the movie. Lewis’s future wife Frannie shows up at the beginning in the present, but the film has to really awkwardly fuss around  to try and let it be our last surprise that the brainy black-haired frog trainer of the present is the same as the one of the future. Which I can’t imagine was a surprise to anyone, no matter how young or stupid.

It sets up a weird predestination paradox thing, too. Does Lewis pursue Frannie because he likes her, or because he knows he’s going to eventually marry her? Or is it some combination of the two, where he likes her because he knows she’s going to grow up totally hot with the voice of Nicole Sullivan? Will he still invent Doris the Bowler Hat, knowing that it may one day escape and take advantage of a demented hobo? If so, it won’t be the former Bowler Hat Guy, because Lewis has already altered the timeline by preventing the event that put Bowler Hat Guy on the path to pathetic obsession, rendering him a happy and well-adjusted child. So if there’s no Bowler Hat Guy, no one steals the time machine and Wilbur doesn’t come back to fix things, which mean’s Lewis’s life… Goes on exactly as it otherwise would. Wait, that actually works. Well, except for him having knowledge of future events. Man, if they gave him some sci-fi amnesia, this would be one of the only sci-fi movie without plot holes I’ve ever seen.

Pictured, left to right: Fats, Corky Withers, Buildinghat, Conan O'Bnoxious, Adam West, Wall-E Extra,  Bulletman, Audrey from Atlantis Cosplay, Secretly The Lady From the Beginning, Doc Brown,  Plant Guy 1, Jonathan Lipnicki's Understudy, Wilbur's Mom Has Got It Goin' On, Cool Kid, Other Plant Guy, and Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With.

There are plot holes, though, but to honest, not many. The ending seals most of them up, and the plot isn’t particularly solid to start with, so who cares? The plot’s just there to string together the wacky future gags. The gags vary wildly in quality, but there’s not much that’s Chicken Little bad. The Bowler Hat Guy is usually quite funny in how terrible he is at being a villain. The wackiness of the family is usually dull and sometimes deeply concerning, but has a few good jokes in it. I spoke last time about the different types of bad movie, and how Chicken Little was mostly boring with occasional moments of artistically offensive. This is still mostly boring, but the moments that aren’t are usually pretty funny, or at least semi-enjoyably perplexing.

Casting is mostly okay. In addition to the aforementioned Nicole Sullivan, there’s plenty of solid voice actors around. Laurie Metcalf plays a hyperactive scientist, allowing her to break out of her usual generic mom roles. Adam West plays the pizza superhero - Frannie’s brother? Maybe a cousin? They have similar hair. - and shows why he gets to keep doing voice over roles for superheroes. It’s not just a reference joke - he’s REALLY good at it. Wilbur is voiced by someone who sounds so much like prolific teenage voice actor Eric Von Detten that I was legitimately surprised when it turned out not to be. Most of the Robinsons are played by two or three pretty okay actors who I didn’t recognize, which usually means moonlighting animators. Bowler Hat Guy, interestingly enough, is voiced by the director, Steve Anderson. He does a fine job, with the unfortunate happenstance that he sounds a lot like Will Forte, who would have been waaaaay better. So I just keep being reminded of who I’m not seeing.

This was my sister's face for the whole movie. Like I said, she's a fan.

The animation is pretty bad, too. Thankfully, they didn’t go all Chicken Little this time, and actually remembered they were making a CGI movie. There’s a cohesive design concept, the lines are all nice and smooth, and they make good use of the 3D environment. But still, the quality of the animation is about up to par with what Pixar was doing ten years prior. Faces are stiff and plasticky, hair is animated as solid chunks, and textures seem flat and static. It’s rarely horrible, but they could have and should have done so much better.

Still, it’s well worth a look if you feel like it. It’s got a charm to it, and the 50s-future design is quite nice. And who knows, maybe you’ll take to it like my sister did, and consider it an epic work of art on par with The Seventh Seal in its deep explorations of the concepts of life and fate.

This is funny. If you speak Swedish.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* In a futile attempt to get the audience to know who everyone is, there’s a scene where Lewis gives a rundown of the entire family to Wilbur. This contains two very funny bits, one where Wilbur admits nobody knows who the people in the plants are related to. In the other, Lewis asks what Cornelius looks like, and Wilbur tells him he looks like Tom Selleck, after which point Cornelius is represented in Lewis’s mind by a completely realistic painting of Tom Selleck. When we finally meet Cornelius, guess who provides the voice? According to the director, the wrote the joke first, and liked it so much it gave them the idea for the casting gag. In international versions, Selleck’s painting was replaced with a photo of whatever celebrity cameo they had playing Cornelius.

* By the way, the reason his name is Cornelius instead of Lewis is because when he’s adopted, his new parents change his name. I’m not sure that’s psychologically sound for a 12-year-old.

* Speaking of not psychologically sound, I’m not kidding when I say some of the Robinsons are clearly mentally damaged and seem to be miserable with their lives. One of them (an uncle?) is massively overweight and completely sedentary, never leaving his chair, which is usually parked in front of the TV. He’s completely non-verbal, and when a piece of toast lands on his plate at dinner, he starts crying in terror. None of this is funny. I want to call him a psychiatrist.

* Lewis/Cornelius managed to create a Jetsons-level future in what, 30 years? At the most? That’s pretty impressive, if somewhat unlikely.

* Wilbur is careful not to let anyone see Lewis’s hair, lest they recognize the distinctive style. For a brief moment, I thought the color was the problem, and that blondes had been bred out of existence in the future. That seemed kind of dark.

Could always be worse, I guess.

* Much is made of Cornelius’s motto, “Keep moving forward”. It’s not terrible, and it’s nice that the family is shown to celebrate failure as well as success, because failure is what motivates progress. But at the end, they put on the screen a lengthy quote from Walt Disney that contains the phrase ‘keep moving forward’, then fade out the rest of the words, leaving only those three. It’s a nice moment, but a bit contrived to make it seem like “Keep Moving Forward” was an official catchphrase of Walt. It’s better than a usual out of context quote, because at least they show us the context before removing it.

* I kind of wish they had one with absolutely irrelevant context, though. Like “Hey Roy! Help me move this couch into the break room! No, just push! Stop - No, don’t shuffle it around, just keep moving forward!”

* Or “I’m not going to keep this VCR. I’m moving to Anaheim next week, and I don’t see the need to hold onto it, since the fast forward button sticks.”

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2005 - Chicken Little

The year: 2005. The place: I don’t know, probably Anaheim or somewhere. The Walt Disney company had closed the book on traditional animation, declaring computer animation to be the way of the future. That’s what people want, they said, and we shall give it to them. Negotiations with Pixar were hinging on this movie. If it was a hit, Disney could say “We don’t need you, Pixar, be off with you.” If it failed, Pixar could say “You guys suck at this, now give us some more money.” In the end, the film was a modest success. Better than Disney had been doing, but worse than Pixar had. Of course, Disney didn’t have to share the money, so they made more of a profit… In the end, Disney kept making their own CGI films, but bought Pixar outright so they could continue to get a cut of their profit, and Pixar was happy to, because they could stay fully funded and by left alone artistically.

Hm. Artistically, artistically… Oh yes! I almost forgot! I was so distracted by the financial dealings that were this movie’s entire reason for being that I neglected to bring up that this is ONE OF THE WORST DAMN MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE! It’s incompetent garbage! The animation is so inept and ugly it makes Home on the Range look like Tarzan! The actors are so ill-suited and ill-directed it makes Dinosaur look like Lilo and Stitch! The plot and story are so badly thought out and executed it makes the Aristocats look like Beauty and th - Wait, let’s not go nuts. But it makes it look at least like Oliver and Company or something. Something pretty okay? Anyway, this movie was horrible. I’m annoyed and so are you, so fry up an omelette and let’s yell at Chicken Little.

Look, gentle readers. To define bad movies is as difficult as to define good ones. Some bad movies I genuinely like. These usually have something going for them, like the giddy all-out delights of “Batman and Robin” and “Street Fighter”, the uncompromising earnestness “From Justin to Kelly”, or the sheer perplexingness of “A Talking Cat?!” and “Creating Rem Lezar”. But there’s a dark side, too. Movies that are so inept, so nasty, so cruel to the performers that watching them is legitimately unpleasant. “Heartbeeps”, for instance, or “Slapstick of Another Kind”. These movies aren’t necessarily any fun to watch, though there is a horrible fascination with the emotion - the anger they produce. There are also movies that are just plain boring. Where nothing much happens, and what does happen is tedious and annoying, rather than horrible. Lots of kids’ movies in this category, “Marmaduke”, “Garfield”, etc. Lots of rom-coms and action movies.

Chicken Little wavers between the two worse categories. It’s immensely boring, for the most part. The plot is extremely thin. For those of you who don’t know the fable of Chicken Little (or Henny Penny, or Chicken Licken, as it is sometimes known), it is about a chicken who has an acorn fall on her head, leading her to assume the sky is falling, because she is a damn idiot. She causes a brief panic among other birds (Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, Turkey Lurkey. It’s that kind of story.), until they are invited into the home of Foxy Loxy (of course), who eats them.

There’s not a lot to go on there, and not much room to expand. It’s rather like the Three Little Pigs in that the story is so methodical and formula-driven that there’s no room - no reason, in fact - to expand.  And like The Three Little Pigs, Disney had already adapted this as a short, in 1943. The running time was a shade over 8 minutes, and that’s even with the added element that Foxy Loxy was willingly manipulating the crowd with tips her got from reading Mein Kampf. Yeah, it’s one of those. So in order to stretch it out to 80 minutes, they had to pad. And boy did they pad.

Why am I not watching this?

The worst offender is a loooooong stretch where Chicken Little (now a male -see Additional Thoughts) joins the baseball team. His father, you see, has been weird with him ever since the Sky Is Falling incident, and C.L. feels bad for embarrassing him. So he joins the school baseball team, and after being hopeless all season, manages to score the Winning Run at the Big Game. His dad is proud of him! Hooray! But that night, the sky falls on him again! And his dad doesn’t believe him again! And the town hates him again! And the entire baseball segment was completely irrelevant to the plot, but that’s fine because no one ever mentions it again! I’ve been reading a lot of Roger Ebert reviews lately, for obvious and regrettable reasons, and he said of this movie that if your film isn’t about baseball or aliens and you feel the need to spend so much time on baseball and aliens, it probably means your plot isn’t very good. Oh yeah, aliens.

See, unlike in the old story, it wasn’t an acorn that fell on Chicken Little, it was a camouflage panel from the underside of a spaceship that just happened to look like the sky at the time. The aliens are just there to get acorns themselves, not for anything sinister, but when one of their children wanders off, they assume it was kidnapped, and launch a full-scale invasion to get it back. This invasion includes vaporizing much of the film’s supporting cast, and while they’re eventually revealed to be fine - the weapons were just teleport guns that moved them inside the ships - it’s still a bit weird that an exceptionally fluffy movie would seem to start killing people ¾ of the way through.

Isn't this like a person having a rug shaped like a fetus?

Which would be more a problem if I cared about the characters. Which I might do if they were characters. But they’re not. They’re just character traits. Chicken Little is insecure and nervous. Ugly Duckling is a girl and thinks people should talk. Fish Out Of Water is a vehicle for annoying sight gags. Worst of Chicken Little’s friends is Runt Of The Litter, who is a pig, and is fat. That’s the joke. Ha ha! He’s fat! Ha ha! He fell down! He weighs a lot! It’s FUNNY, ISN’T IT? Ugh. Once we’re out of Chicken Little’s immediate circle of friends, we get into the stupid rhyming names, your Doggy Woggy, your Morcubine Porcupine. The only one who gets a personality is Foxy Loxy, and it just pisses me off.

See, Foxy Loxy has been switched to a female fox, and is in the position of class bully. But unlike most female bullies, she’s not given a “mean girls” type personality, but rather that of the typical jerky jock. She’s still a dreadfully written character, but at least she’s somewhat subverting expectations. But at the end, after the aliens return her, her brain has been scrambled, and she’s now super girly. The aliens offer to put her right, but Runt Of The Litter says she’s better like this, and kisses her, and everyone’s fine with it? Because you know what’s just GREAT? BRAINWASHING WOMEN TO CONFORM TO GENDER ROLES. Arrrrrrrgh.

There were more than a few points in this movie where I had to pause it just to give my frustration time to dissolve. At one point, I realized I had been screaming “NO NO NO” at my computer, and I don’t remember starting. But to be honest, it doesn’t often reach the depths of the truly loathsome movie. Mostly it’s content to stay in the ‘boring’ category, with the truly horrible elements showing up as little isolated moments. And that is the absolute worst kind of bad movie. To be sitting around bored and then suddenly rushed to pissed off is a jarring and unpleasant thing.

Man, never put a good movie in the middle of your bad movie. It just makes the audience sad.

This is most easily seen in the soundtrack, which wants to be Shrek. Remember how at the beginning of Shrek, they show Shrek taking a shower and getting ready for his day while “All Star” by Smash Mouth plays on the soundtrack? And because the movie was made by competent people, you don’t really notice that the music and lyrics of the song don’t really apply to what’s happening in the movie at all? Well, the songs in Chicken Little are about as appropriately chosen, but far more ineptly inserted. The worst offender is the use of the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”. Not only is its inclusion completely gratuitous, but it was, by that point, ten years old. Too new to be  ‘classic’, but too old for the target audience to register it as even the lazy, “Hey, they are saying a thing I know about” joke. There are plenty of those as well. At one point Chicken Little says “Oh, snap.” That’s the entire gag. He says that. One time. But it’s better than having someone say “You will survive” at a random time so the soundtrack can play “I Will Survive”. Which is a thing that happens.

I was at least holding out hope for the actors, as Disney has - apart from the notable misstep of Dinosaur - been doing quite well on that front lately. They managed to extra disappoint me yet again, though. While Dinosaur cast terrible and boring voice actors, this movie casts very talented voice actors in completely inappropriate roles. Chicken Little’s dad, for instance (Whose name is Buck Cluck, which I guess means CL’s actual last name is Cluck? Whatever.) is played by Garry Mashall, who is quite an accomplished character actor and takes to animation well, but sounds like a 70 year old Jewish TV producer from New York. Which he is, so that’s fine, but casting him as a hapless suburban dad and former high school sports star just doesn’t work. Likewise Joan Cusack doesn’t sound like a child, duck or otherwise. And while Zach Braff is good, he needs a certain kind of direction to hit his strong points, and he’s not getting it here. And whose idea was it to have him sing “We Are The Champions” a capella? No. Just… no.

YES.

The biggest crime of the casting is the wasted actors. Amy Sedaris is Foxy Loxy, and has pretty much nothing to do. Steve Zahn, who makes a great awkward dad, is Runt of the Little, where all he has to do is scream, whimper, and mutter Bee Gees songs to himself. Patrick Stewart, of all people, is their teacher, whose only function is to read the various animals names off a list. Admittedly, he nails it, because he’s Patrick Stewart and of course he does. Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, and Patrick Warburton play the aliens in the last scene and again, do the best they can with bad material. Probably the biggest waste was Wallace Shawn as the principal, who has only two lines, both of which are exposition. And they don’t even design a character for him, they just use a recolored version of the generic crowd-filler dog, shot once in silhouette and once from behind.

Oh yeah, the animation. It’s terrible. Home on the range may have been ugly, but at least it had a cohesive design concept. Any named character in this looks like they’re from a completely different movie, and the background people all look like free samples that came with the animation program. They had an idea to use 2D animation techniques like squash and stretch in the 3D style, and developed a lot of new techniques to that effect. But the stuff that works in 2D doesn’t always work in 3D, and the movie winds up looking cheap and weird. The backgrounds in the town are all uneven and weird, and the design of the alien ship is generic and doesn’t make any sense with the aliens’ anatomy.

So yeah. This was, as I said, a modest success, but it was also the worst-reviewed Disney movie ever, a record it still holds. It’s not as completely abandoned by the company as, say, The Black Cauldron, though. Chicken Little still makes the occasional appearance in the theme parks, and was in a couple of Kingdom Hearts games. But all in all, they seem as happy as I am to forget this. They did stick with their computer animation phase, though. Let’s see if they improve at all. There is literally nowhere to go but up.

The kids these days, they have the phones.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Chicken Little was originally a female chicken, as in the story, to be voiced by Holly Hunter. She had apparently recorded all her lines when word came down from the studio to make the chicken a boy. I was initially annoyed by this, until I read that the reason was because panicking and overreacting are seen (by idiots) as negative female attributes and they wanted to avoid stereotyping. Since the story couldn’t exist without those attributes, they regendered the chicken.

*Of course, I’ve also read that Michael Eisner wanted a boy character so it wouldn’t be a “girl movie”. But I’m choosing to go with the more positive story for my personal reality canon.

Of course, they could have just split the difference.

* For a while, a lot of people thought “All Star” was written specifically for Shrek, or at least closely associated the song with the movie. It was not. It was written for a movie, though, namely the mostly forgotten comedy Mystery Men, which involved D-list superheroes who have to step up their game in a world that screws with them at every turn. Now doesn’t that make more thematic sense for that song than “A cartoon ogre brushing his teeth”? It’s that kind of soundtrack appropriateness that this film is sorely missing.

* In the finale, the night sky is revealed to be the camouflaged undersides of an entire fleet of alien ships. When they separate and descend on the town, the sky above them is revealed to be broad daylight. Did no one in the town look at their clock?

* It’s mentioned a few times that the piece of sky that hit Chicken Little was shaped like a stop sign. It was shaped like a hexagon. Come on people, you’re not even trying!

* Credit where it is due: Here’s the parts I liked.
** As mentioned, Patrick Stewart calling roll. The man knows how to land a line, and hearing him say “Morkubine Porkupine” was quite funny.
** Don Knotts is mayor Turkey Lurkey, and he's the only character where they seem to have put effort into the design, writing, and voice. He doesn't get to do much, but it's generally a brief highlight in the scene.
** Some of the gags relating to the various animals were good, like a bird repeatedly walking into a window, or a bull who owns a china shop. But there were WAY more that were terrible, so yeah.
** There’s a scene where Buck apologizes for making Chicken Little feel that he had to earn his love. “Earning the parent’s love” is such a common theme in movies that it was nice to hear it shut down, even if the line was sort of randomly crammed in.
** There’s a running gag where Chicken Little attempts to deflect suspicion by taking a long pause and saying “Who we talking about?” Braff sells the line very well. Here’s a video, which is also useful because you can see a hint of how bad the rest of the movie is.
** There’s an announcer voiced by Harry Shearer, who at one point says “Everyone! Hold your horses! Horses! Hold your friends!” That’s pretty funny, I guess.

What the hell is even happening in this movie.

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2004 - Home on the Range

Urgh. URGH. I have not finished watching this movie yet. In fact, I started, and at a certain point I said “Geez, this is terrible. Well, I must be about half an hour in. I can take a break now.”

11 minutes.

I had only been watching for 11 minutes and I could swear I’d gone north of 30. This movie is ugly, badly written, annoying, clichéd, and any other bad thing I can feel like saying about a movie. The fact that even as many as 55% of critics gave it a passing grade is baffling to me. This plunges to depths that can only be described as Aristocatic. Do I have to? Is anyone even going to read this? Despairing? So am I. So grill up an entire cow because they DESERVE IT, and let’s talk about Home On The Range.

Okay, here’s where we’re at so far. After a rather catchy song that I shortly noticed had absolutely terrible lyrics is sung over some tedious slapstick, we meet our protagonist, a cow named Roseanne. Well, she has another name, but she’s Roseanne. Roseanne Barr isn’t a terrible actor, but she’s really known only for her standup, her sitcom, and a handful of other roles where she’s basically been playing herself, and with a voice that distinctive, I can’t really buy her as anything else. The rancher that owned her has gone bust after a notorious rustler stole his entire herd in one night, and now he’s selling her off to a small farm and moving to California.

At the farm are two other cows, Jennifer Tilly and Judi Dench. Who also have very distinctive voices, but are talented and varied enough actors that I can accept them in a wider variety of roles. But I’m still not learning their names. They’re worried because their kindly owner is about to lose the farm (of course), and flat out refuses to sell any of her apparently awesome animals. So Roseanne, being a former show cow with a lot of apparently amazing skills, is sure she can win them the money. I say apparently awesome skills, because Judi Dench is a COW that can put on a HAT, and how are you going to beat that? Anyway, a few tasteless jokes about whether her udders are real, and we’re all caught up. Okay, I’m going back in. See you in another 11 minutes.

***

"We are travesties of design."

Okay, so the cows are off to the county fair to earn some money for the farm. How are they planning on entering themselves in the show with no human? NO TIME! We also meet Buck, the Sheriff’s horse, who idolizes a bounty hunter named Rico. Rico takes Buck to go hunt down the rustler that ruined Roseanne’s farm, and wouldn’t you know it, the reward is the exact amount they need to save the farm. So they hitch themselves to a chuck wagon and go off to join a cattle drive, which seems a sure target for rustlers.

NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Hi, it's me, Brian, editing this for publication. If you're wondering, Roseanne's show-cow talents never wind up coming in handy, and that entire plot thread has been dropped. This movie just screams "we never bothered making all our drafts match up." BACK TO THE PRESENT

We’re still largely in exposition country at this point, so there’s not much going on. At one point, they pass Maggie’s old farm, now being auctioned off by the bank, and we see a few flashback shots of the rustler, Alameda Slim. He’s a big fella with a big red mustache and a little red beard. The farm is being sold to a big fella with a big red mustache and a little red beard. I reeeeeeally hope they aren’t expecting to surprise me with the revelation that they’re the same person. Because a rustler driving farms out of business, then buying up the land at auction under another name is not a horrible idea for a movie. Expecting me to believe they’re different people because they have different hats on is.

Okay, I’m going under. See you in another 11.

***

Ain't no party like a Donner Party.

Two elements I’ve noticed about the movie that I’d like to mention: First, they can’t decide on how animal-like they want to portray the animals. They try to keep their movements realistic, except at random points they’ll have a horse on its hind legs, or a cow with a prehensile tail. It’s like on My Little Pony, where they make a real effort to keep the pony movement within the realms of their bodies, but sometimes they’ll pick up a bowl or something with their hoof because it’s more convenient. Except this is a 100 million dollar movie, not a Flash-animated TV show. And they’re farm animals, not intelligent beings in a fully equestrian society. So no excuse.

The other is that with the cows being a stern authority figure, a brassy former beauty queen, and a dippy new-age type, Disney has basically created the Witches of Lancre in cow form. This is making me like them a bit more, because I’m sure as hell never getting a Wyrd Sisters movie. Anyway, on to the 11 minutes.

I’m actually feeling rather charitable at the moment, as I just came off a rather excellent moment. We finally meet Alameda Slim properly, and he’s delightful. It turns out the technique that allows him to rustle so effectively is his ability to yodel in a hypnotic fashion, causing cows to fall into a trance and go wherever he leads them. He’s voiced by Randy Quaid, who is a damn fine actor, despite also being a giant bag of crazy, and he apparently does all of his own yodeling, which is not easy.

There’s one odd thing in his song, which involves his three sidekicks making fun of his weight, in the form of three references to his having a big butt. Except he doesn’t, because the character is animated with these tiny little Yosemite Sam legs, which makes a total disconnect between the song and the animation. I can get past it, though. The jokes aren’t mean-spirited, and the character is actually well-designed and well-animated. He rides a buffalo, too, which is a neat visual and possibly the only animal that looks good in this style.

I freely don’t expect it to last, as they finished with a joke about how Jennifer Tilly-Cow is immune to the yodel because she can’t sing. Which is admittedly more of a payoff than I expected to what appeared to be a mere “Jennifer Tilly has a squeaky voice” joke.

Okay, back I go.

***

The farm is shaped like a henchman's head. These are the jokes, folks.

It’s been difficult to put into words just how bad this movie is. Merely describing what happens doesn’t make it clear how ineptly it’s made. The animation is garish and frequently ugly, and barely a single joke is landing. There’s a gag where Slim puts on his disguise he uses to buy farms, and his henchmen don’t recognize him any more. There’s no joke that follows, that’s the entirety of the joke. And the way they carry it out, and the way they exposit their sinister plan, makes it seem like this is the first time they’ve ever met. It’s like the gag in Austin Powers where Michael York is constantly telling people things they already know (“ The year is 1967, and you're talking on a picture phone.”), but without the joke. Just an inept handling of a conversation they should have had months ago.

Anyway, Steve Buscemi shows up as the black market cattle buyer and does his best with awful lines, and Patrick Warburton is just wasted as Rico’s new horse, who Buck scares off. And I just realized Buck is Cuba Gooding Jr, who was right at the height of his apparently trying to prove that winning an Oscar doesn’t have to stop you from having a horrible career.

After a joke about Buck being the stallion of the Cim-Moron, which I think is the most direct jab at another company I’ve seen in a Disney movie ever, the girls have capture Slim with the help of a peg-legged rabbit (he’s unlucky, har har). All right, I’m going back under.

***

Yeah, he looks like he sounds like Steve Buscemi.

So Rico is working for Slim, in a twist that I might have actually been surprised by, had the film invested even a little bit of time in developing his character. Things look bad for the girls, then they look good. Steve Buscemi reminds me of Lucky from Ichabod and Mr Toad. Moving on.

***

And the girls save the farm with some tedious and artless slapstick. That’s it. I’m done. This was a painfully bad movie and while the acting was good, as usual, and there was the odd chuckle in the script, the final product is a tedious and annoying collection of barely even trying. Just prior to its release, Disney announced that they were shuttering the 2-D animation studios and moving into computer animation exclusively. Part of me is inclined to think they tanked this on purpose just to give them the excuse to do so. Or maybe the filmmakers saw the writing on the wall and just stopped caring. Regardless, it was a rotten time, and it’s not going to improve by much.

THAT'S what would improve this movie! DRUGS! No, wait, that would run the risk of entering a horrible world of Home on the Range hallucination from which there is no waking. Never mind.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* No. I didn’t even want to think of it the first time.

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