Cats Don't Dance (Turner Feature Animation/Warner Bros., 1997)

The year were aught-ninety-seven. A 13-year-old Brian Lynch was perusing the VHS selection at the Arnold Schwartz Memorial Library. Since he was to be watching this movie with his younger brother and sister, he was in the kids section. “No matter,” said he, “For, after all, I still like cartoons. Why, 16 years from now, I’ll probably be writing a blog about them, whatever one of those is. What‘s this? ‘Cats Don‘t Dance‘? I‘ve never heard of such a thing. It‘s about a cat who wants to be a dancer? How foolish! How silly! Clearly this is an inferior animated product, designed only for the easily amused. I‘ll get the Little Nemo movie instead, there‘s a good life choice.” And time and again he went to that library, rolled his eyes at “Cats Don’t Dance”, and moved on, getting classic films like “The Saint”, “Phantoms”, and “Nothing But Trouble”. But that child is older now. He drives a car, and teaches at the school where he once was a student. He has traveled, sailed the ocean, and seen not one, not two, but six X-Men movies, three of which were pretty good. He has kissed girls, and done other things with them as well. He has finally gotten around to reading the one Wizard of Oz book the library didn’t have. And he has, at the age of 29, finally seen one of the finest animated films of all time.

SINGING!

DANCING!

A MOVIE THAT NEVER STOOD A CHANCE AT MAKING A PROFIT!

IT’S CATS DON’T DANCE!

I’m not kidding about that. I’ve been aware of Cats Don’t Dance for its entire existence, and I never even gave it a moment’s thought. It looked to me like one of those straight-to-video bashed out quickies, a video babysitter. I mean, a cat that wants to be a dancer? That sounds like a parody of a children’s book you’d see on a sitcom.

"Here is the elephant; he's happy with his balloon. Oh no! It's gone! Where is it? It's not behind the rhino!"

So imagine my surprise when I found out that this movie is actually kind of amazing. I initially started watching it about 20 minutes before I was going to go to bed one night, figuring I’d watch the first few scenes and see the rest the next day. I was so captivated by the opening, I wound up watching the entire thing.

One of the first things I was impressed by was the voice acting. I had known Scott Bakula was the lead, and while he’s a winning enough actor, I wasn’t expecting much out of him in terms of a voice performance. But good gravy, he nailed it. In retrospect that shouldn’t have surprised me. While his “tall, somewhat goofy Midwesterner” appearance keeps him playing fairly bland roles in live action, Quantum Leap was always finding excuses for him to sing and dance and otherwise show off. His love interest is voiced by Jasmine Guy, who does well, with Natalie Cole doing the singing. Cole is close enough to Guy to avoid my usual annoyance with singing voices. Plus, come on, it’s Natalie Cole. What are you going to do, tell her not to sing in your movie? The villain, played by a pair of unknown child actors, also has a singing voice and a speaking voice, but it’s seamless, both of them are phenomenally good, and with child actors you have to make more allowances for this sort of thing. The supporting cast, though, is where the actors get really impressive. The cat’s fellow struggling animal actors include Hal Holbrook (goat), Betty Lou Gerson (fish), Don Knotts (turtle), John Rhys-Davies (elephant), and Kathy Najimy (hippo), and the humans who run the show include George Kennedy, Rene Auberjonois, and Frank Welker.

How is he gripping the sign?

The plot actually is “a cat wants to be a dancer”, so my judgmental younger self was right about that. But it’s a plot that’s developed wonderfully. It’s set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, the summer of 1939, to be precise. Danny, a starry-eyed young cat from Kokomo comes to California with a goofy hat and a pocket full of dreams. When he arrives, though, he learns that there are plenty of eager animal actors, but the humans that run the studios never give them a chance to star. The best bet for an animal performer is Mammoth Pictures, who frequently use animal extras for the films of their child star, Darla Dimple. Danny thinks he can impress Darla and the director with a bit of showboating, but Darla turns out to be a psychotic tyrant who rules the studio with an iron fist, and when Danny’s showboating ruins a take on her latest movie, she vows to destroy his career, and those of all his animal friends.

So the plot is solid. It’s also formulaic and clichéd, but that’s not always a bad thing, when it’s done well, and this is done amazingly well. Because in addition to being a solid story, it’s also really funny. The director, Mark Dindal, is primarily a special effects guy, but he’s got a killer sense of timing as a result of that, and the film is full of perfectly executed wordplay and physical gags. Dindal also directed The Emperor’s New Groove, and this film contains much of the wild abandon that one showed, and the magnificent use of cartoon physics. He also directed… Chicken Little? That can’t be right. Okay, moving on.

Chicken... Little...

Apart from the comedy being on point, the animation itself is really beautiful. Turner and Warner poured a lot of money into this, and it shows. The characters are smooth, slick, and expressive, and the dancing is extremely well done. It was partially choreographed by Gene Kelly (his final film, in fact) and this ties it to the actual days of classic dance movies. Filtered through the talented animators, the moves of Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Fred Astaire, and their contemporaries look marvelous. These dancers always looked like they could defy the laws of physics, and now they actually can.

The songs that accompany those dances… Well, they’re mostly quite good, and a few are fantastic. Some of them are just a little generic, if still enjoyable. It’s Randy Newman at his most medium. Of course, inserting generic songs into a movie is a hallmark of Golden Age Hollywood, so it’s allowable as a reference. And the ones that do stand out are phenomenal. “Little Boat on the Sea“, Darla Dimple‘s song for her terrible Noah‘s Ark movie, has some wickedly funny lyrics, and Danny‘s arrival song, cleverly titled “Danny‘s Arrival Song“, is thoroughly catchy. The hands down champion, though, is “Big and Loud”, Darla’s villain song, which begins as false encouraging advice to Danny, and turns to shrieking megalomania as soon as he leaves. There are also several music-only numbers which Newman really lets himself get creative on, and those are always enjoyable.

Okay, here’s the thing: This movie bombed HARD. With a budget of about 38 million, it earned about 4 million at the box office. Part of the reason for that is the merge of Turner and Warner Bros. This was originally developed at Warner a modern-set live-action and animation hybrid starring Michael Jackson and the Looney Tunes, until they farmed the idea out to Turner and made their own “Iconic Michael J./Looney Tunes” movie. Once it landed at Turner, it was midway through production when Warner bought them out and a rotating series of executives tried to put their stamp on it, including one that attempted to tell Dindal to take the half-finished movie and make it about 1950s rock and roll. Dindal, correctly assuming that these execs would be reassigned, alternately talked them down and ignored them. But by the time the movie was finished, it was dumped into theaters with one poster, one trailer, no TV spots, 2 kids’ books, and a line of kids’ meal toys… at Subway.

Subway! Who gets a kids' meal at Subway!? It's the promo toy version of a landfill!

But I have to say, it doesn’t seem like the film was particularly a victim of mismanagement, it just got lost in the studio shuffle. So while it stings that it made only a third of what “Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie” made (opened on the same day), at least I can be happy with the movie I got. Speaking of the studio shuffle, it turns out my research was a little off, and this was the only Turner/Warner co-production, so we’ll be moving from this straight into the solo films of Don Bluth. FINALLY.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Mammoth Pictures is pretty obviously a parody of 1930s Hollywood’s biggest man on campus, MGM studios, only with an elephant instead of a lion. The best part is MGM’s pretentious Latin logo, “Ars gratia aris” (Art for art’s sake), becomes “Optimum est maximum” (Bigger is better). I appreciate a film that tailors jokes for people who speak limited Latin and know film history. Why didn’t this make any money again?

Those that worked on the film were given sweet jackets...

And thoroughly sarcastic T-shirts.

* Speaking of references that are totally accessible to the film’s target audience, the greatest character in the film is Darla’s butler, Max, a clear reference to Erich von Stroheim’s character in Sunset Boulevard. Like that film’s Max, he is intimidating, creepy, and psychotically devoted to his boss. Unlike that film’s Max, he is a fifteen foot tall Frankenstein-looking monster. He’s also a real achievement in animation and comic timing, only moving whatever body parts are required for a task, up to the point of speaking by sliding his lips from side to side. And he’s voiced by Mark Dindal, on what was supposed to be a scratch track for the animators until they ran short on time and money and decided to keep it.

* And speaking of Sunset Boulevard, I’d like to break my loose “no cussin’” guideline to relate my favorite Classic Hollywood story. You always hear about these classic stars and directors and the witty one-liners they came up with on the spot, and this bit of wordplay is my favorite. After the premiere of Sunset Boulevard, studio titan Louis Mayer (the second M in MGM) was so offended by its portrayal of the movie business that he viciously berated director Billy Wilder outside the theater afterwards for betraying the industry that made him. Wilder, a known master of the clever insult, quickly assessed how much effort he thought Mayer was worth, walked up to him, and said, “I directed this picture; why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

"Get hot, Mr. Wilder."

* While Max keeps every body part isolated for maximum comic effect, the rest of the film does not agree, featuring an incredible amount of background business and character tics. Darla in particular is just a big pile of quirks and mannerisms which are always hilarious and not infrequently kind of terrifying.

* Lauren Faust’s first job as an animator was on this movie! She’s awesome!

A '90s animated movie that actually puts its actors in the opening credits? CRAZY!

* Okay, I did have one problem, but it was less with the movie than with the film industry in general. It has been said that the experiences of the animals reflects the experience of black actors in Hollywood at the time this movie was set, which is largely true, which is kind of annoying. I mean, how many movies have we seen where Fantasy Group X is supposed to stand in for Marginalized Group Y, and yet we don’t see any examples of Marginalized Group Y on the screen, thus keeping them marginalized. “Oh, the aliens in this movie are supposed to stand in for Native Americans! Let’s make sure we don’t hire any Native actors.” Or “The mutants in this movie represent gays. But all of the characters are straight. And most of them are white guys. And when we set a movie in the civil rights era, the only minority mutants were killed or turned evil by the halfway point. We‘re not very good at this?”

* That, however, is a problem with society and the entertainment industry at large, and doesn’t really diminish the enjoyment of the movie until it’s done and you think about it and get a little annoyed. Here, read this article about representation in media. It‘s good for you.

Speaking of bad treatment of black actors in 1930s Hollywood, references to this movie kept popping up. Probably not a coincidence.

* As a result of my confusion as to the nature of the relationship between Turner and Warner, I‘ll be moving my review of “The Pagemaster” to a later point on the schedule than originally intended. Also, I’ll be adding the Tom and Jerry movie, because apparently I’m a masochist.

* Speaking of Gene Kelly, Danny stole his job, as the end credits show some posters for the movies the animal actors made after hitting it big, and Danny was in Singin' in the Rain. Interestingly, the poster parodies are played completely straight, with the pictures just being completely accurate copies of classic movie posters with the film's characters put in place of the actors. I actually really liked this, as it showed an affection for the classic films, which included not only '40s and '50s movies, but went into the '70s, '80s, and '90s, without falling into the "Here's something popular right now!" trap. Except The Mask, I guess. And Twister. But still, that Grumpy Old Men poster makes it all worthwhile. Anyway, here's a link to a gallery of most of them.

Ha!

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Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (Warner Bros, 1993)

For the next few weeks, we’re going to be shuffling around the calendar to take a look at Warner’s feature film output prior to the creation of their own studio. While they’d had some success distributing the work of independent studios - and we’ll be looking at those in a bit - their in-studio films had largely been just compilations of old Looney Tunes, with maybe 10 minutes of linking animation as far as new material. The movie we’re looking at today was the first feature-length animated movie made entirely by Warner Bros, but it wasn’t intended to be. See, shortly after the release of the terrible yet successful movie Batman Returns, TV cartoon creators Paul Dini and Bruce Timm were tasked with making a new Batman cartoon for TV. The result, “Batman: the Animated Series”, was massively successful with children and adults, fans and critics, and spawned the DC Animated Universe, which lasted for 15 years across 8 TV series, 4 films, and numerous shorts. Urged by the show’s early success, Warner quickly commissioned a direct-to-video movie, but the executives were so excited by what they saw in early development that they decided on giving it a full theatrical release - and then increasing the budget and expectations while not giving the creators any more time, resulting in a grueling eight-month production schedule and a small release with no promotion. Oops.


FISTICUFFS!

DETECTIVE STYLES!

OLD TIMEY CARS AND GUNS FOR NO REASON OTHER THAN THAT THEY LOOK COOL!

IT’S BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM!

First off, I’m issuing a rare spoiler warning here. Even though this movie is 20 years old, and that generally falls well past the spoiler statute of limitations, it’s a noir mystery with plenty of good twists, and I always feel that a mystery is deserving of more spoiler consideration than most stuff.

Welcome back. Let’s talk about superhero origin movies. Do we really need them? Is there a person on earth who doesn’t know the origin of Superman? Hell, Grant Morrison was able to tell it in just nine words, and you could probably do the same with Batman. Spider-Man’s probably the only other hero where the general public is that familiar with it, but for a lot of heroes, you just don’t need to spend time on it. And yet they just keep on making them. And the most annoying part is that they tend to be very good. Batman’s an interesting case, as his “origin” takes only a few seconds in a dark alley, and the stories built around that moment give it a lot of variety.

"Would you find me more terrifying with bat ears? Be honest, now."

See, with those others, there’s a structure. Superman’s parents raise him right, he feels a bit out of place with his powers, so he creates a superhero identity to allow him to embrace all sides of himself, and to protect the adopted planet he loves while still remaining true to himself as Clark Kent. Spider-Man’s a bullied geek who gets overly cocky when given super-powers in an accident, and that cockiness and lack of care kills the person he loves most, causing him to never lose sight of the Great Responsibility that comes with his Great Power. Their personalities are similarly well-established. Superman is a friendly Midwesterner, always seeking out the good in the world. In both his normal life and his superhero life, he protects and seeks justice for people who can’t defend themselves. Spider-Man is extremely intelligent and has a rapid sense of humor, he talks and jokes constantly, especially when fighting, in order to distract his enemies from their attacks and himself from his fear.

Batman, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a personality. He’s usually angry, he’s cold, driven, and analytical. He doesn’t have a job, he has only a few close friends. His public persona as Bruce Wayne is a bit of a put-on, but doesn’t have any steady traits, either. So when an origin movie is made, it’s interesting to see what kind of story they build the origin on, and how they present the Bruce Wayne persona. Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman” showcased Batman’s introduction to Gotham, as an urban legend terrorizing the crime world, and portrayed Wayne as a flighty, kind of creepy weirdo. In 2005, “Batman Begins” focused the story on his training and the development of his crime fighting style, and portrayed Bruce as a flightly, disinterested socialite. 2011’s “Year One”, based on the comic that largely inspired Begins, focused entirely on his development of Batman as a persona and decision to target the Falcone crime family, with the Bruce persona as easygoing and friendly, but something of a recluse and a drunk.

I'm not crying... It's just been raining... on my face.

Mask of the Phantasm, as you’ve no doubt guessed from my writing so far, is an origin movie. But it takes an approach that I’ve never seen in any Batman-related media before. It focuses on Bruce Wayne. The approach taken to Wayne in The Animated Series has always been my favorite, which is that as intense and driven and angry as Batman is, in his life as Bruce Wayne, he tries to be the son his parents would have wanted to have. He’s pleasant and generous, he’s reasonably social, he takes a fairly active role in running the company. This has always been the most satisfying version of Bruce for me because while the playboy versions are great for removing suspicion, I prefer the idea that Batman would want his civilian identity to be as good for Gotham as possible. And yeah, it’s still an act. He plays it a little more well-meaning than intelligent, and kind of goofy, and when no one’s looking, he drops it right away.

But what if it wasn’t an act? What if the Bruce he secretly wished he could be was brought to the surface and came into conflict with his drive to avenge his parents? That’s the conflict at the center of Mask of the Phantasm, making it the only Batman movie I’ve ever seen where Bruce is fully as important as Batman. The film deals with Bruce’s return to Gotham after training abroad, as he sets in motion his vigilante plans. But a wrench is thrown into the works when he meets a woman named Andrea Beaumont at the cemetery. With Andrea, he finds love, acceptance, the promise of a real life. He is deeply conflicted and undergoes great distress over his newfound urge to settle down with Andrea. Bolstered in no small part by his disastrous attempts to enact vigilante justice wearing a ski mask and leather jacket, he decides to try to build a new life with Andrea at his side. But she rejects him and, along with her father, leaves town, and the pain of this pushes Bruce down forever, leading him to become Batman.

Admittedly, this is not the most practical of weapons.

Several years later, Andrea’s back in town, and while this doesn’t for a second make Batman think of quitting, it does give him flashbacks to a time when that was a real possibility. But he’s got bigger problems, because there’s also a new vigilante in town. He’s called the Phantasm, he’s got a suit that lets him mimic a ghost, and he’s out to murder the enforcers of the Valestra crime family. Worst of all, he wears a shaggy black cape and skulks around in shadows, so people assume Batman’s the one taking the mobsters out. When law-and-order city councilman (and Bruce’s former romantic rival) Arthur Reeves starts an anti-Batman task force, things get real. Investigating the Phantasm’s murders, Batman discovers financial links - serious ones - between Valestra and Andrea’s father. Mr. Beaumont was in deep, and the reason he and his daughter flew the coop was to avoid them. With this new knowledge, Batman starts to believe Mr. Beaumont is the Phantasm. Plus, they’re both voiced by Stacy Keach. But Reeves reveals that in exchange for campaign donations, he gave up the Beaumonts‘ location, and Valestra had the man killed. Speaking of which, Valestra’s getting extremely nervous as the Phantasm hacks his way through the caporegimes, and turns to the only person he can think of for help. The psychotic former employee who pulled the trigger on Carl Beaumont. But he’s gone through some changes since then…

Hello, dum-dums!

Yes, they just couldn’t resist adding the Joker into the mix, and can you blame them? When you make your big-budget Batman movie, you’re going to want the Joker in there. The film’s vision of the Joker is very much in line with Tim Burton’s. Before he became the Joker, he was already mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and now even the other mobsters are afraid of him. Unlike Burton’s though, he’s removed himself from the mob hierarchy and now lives on his own in an abandoned World’s Fair expo, in the decrepit “house of the future”. It’s a great twist on the Joker’s old carnival hideouts, and even allows for a monorail fight, which I’ve always thought movies should have more of.

I admit I was a bit leery, knowing that the Joker was in the movie. I feared it would be one of those cases where the villain they set up for the movie is sidelined by a more popular villain that gets shoehorned into the story. Think Venom in Spider-Man 3 or Lex Luthor and Brainiac being the ones behind Cadmus, or Ultron in… well everything he’s ever been in. But they really do a good job justifying his presence and making it work. A mere Batman vs. Phantasm match would have made for a good movie, but throwing the Joker in adds an extra element of chaos that keeps both vigilantes off balance. Particularly in that the Joker is the only one who knows who the Phantasm is the entire time, because he killed her dad.

That’s right, the Phantasm is none other than Andrea Beaumont, who has gone a little bit bonkers after her dad was killed, and devoted her life to training, wearing a scary costume, and taking down criminals -HEY, WAIT A MINUTE. The movie hits the emotional point really well, and “Oh hey, you’re just like me, only way worse” would have been an easy point to mess up. But the movie seems to take the view that even considering all the murder, the Phantasm isn’t really all that more messed up than Batman. Before her secret, sorcret identity is revealed, he accuses her of stonewalling him on orders from her father, and she points out that the only one of them that’s controlled by their parents is him. Alfred also gets some scenes where he expresses serious concern for Bruce’s sanity, including a wonderful scene where he drops his butlery façade and recoils in terror upon seeing Batman for the first time. In the end, though, Andrea’s murderous vengeance takes her too far, and she follows the Joker to their apparent death by explosives. It seems that in this film, Batman’s unwillingness to kill saves his own life, too.

"Just... Just give me a second, I'm trying to work out how you're standing."

The voice work is amazing. Andrea Romano is one of the finest voice directors in history, and though all her work for Warner Bros, has cast and directed her performers BRILLIANTLY. Kevin Conroy as Batman is probably the greatest success of her career. He’s scary and intimidating without succumbing to the Christian Bale Monster Voice, but his Batman is still distinct from his Bruce. It’s not for nothing that he’s considered by nearly all to be the greatest Batman of all time. Mark Hamill’s Joker is equally, if not even more iconic. With clear influence from Cesar Romero, Hamill creates a layered performance of wildly varying laughs and energy levels, which has not been matched yet. While I’d give Conroy the narrow win for pure quality of performance, there have been other Batman voices that have succeeded on their own merits. No subsequent Joker, though, has ever even come close to Hamill. Joining them from the TV series are Efrem Zimbalist, Bob Hastings, and Robert Costanzo as Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Bullock respectively, all of whom do admirably, and get some good character work. And though the prequel nature of the movie means the Joker hasn’t yet met Harley Quinn, Arleen Sorkin still gets a cameo as a woman flirting with Bruce at a party.

As for the new voices, they are also excellent. Dana Delany plays Andrea, which at the time was something of a surprise celebrity voice. Delany took so well to voice acting, though, that Andrea Romano called her again a year later to play Lois Lane on Superman. Her performance was excellent, though as a DCAU fan, I kept expecting her to call Bruce “Smallville”. Valestra was played by mob movie legend Abe Vigoda, and the Phantasm’s first victim, Chuckie Sol, was character actor and Joe Dante mainstay Dick Miller. Stacy Keach, as mentioned above, was both Carl Beaumont and the Phantasm, the latter being revealed to be a voice modulator in Andrea’s mask. As Beaumont, he gets to play friendly and scared, which he doesn’t often get to do in live action, due to his terrifying face. As the Phantasm, he’s nice and creepy, and his voice gets a little bit of an electronic deepening tweak that doesn’t make it too obvious that it’s the same guy.

The animation… Okay, if there’s one problem in the movie, it’s the animation, and I don’t remotely blame the animators for that. The style and character design is excellent. Far from Anton Furst’s creeptacular Gotham in the contemporary Tim Burton films, Timm’s Gotham is all Art Deco skycrapers, 1940s-styled cars, and red skies at any time of day. It’s intimidating, and it looks great. The character animation, though, can get really shaky. With the limited production time and the fact that they had to largely work in their TV style, there can be some real clunky movement and awkward faces. It’s rarely an issue, though, and the action scenes - particularly Batman’s close call with the police -look good. I’d also like to call out the score, which I don’t often do here. Pioneering composer Shirley Walker, who also did the music for the TV series, really ran with her increased budget and created a truly epic, and well-paced score. Her Batman theme, modified from Danny Elfman’s movie theme - Walker collaborated with Elfman on the Flash TV series, and conducted for him on several films - is particularly stirring.

All the latest technology here, folks.

I can’t recommend this movie enough. One of my favorite things I’ve read about it  is that Siskel and Ebert didn’t review it when it first came out. They had assumed it was a compilation of scenes from the TV show like the old Looney Tunes movies, and since the distribution was so bad, they didn’t bother seeing it. A few years later, they both gave it a shot on the recommendation of other critics, and devoted an entire segment of their show to apologizing for their failure to review it later. Ebert in particular praised it for having a better story than any of the live action films. So when a movie can get two film critics,  one of whom was famously lukewarm on superheroes, to devote a segment of their TV show to apologizing for selling it short two years prior, that’s a movie with something truly special.

Siskel and Ebert’s experience was not unique. This movie flopped pretty hard, despite a surprising lack of family fare in winter 1993. On a budget of a mere 6 million dollars, it only made about 5.5 in theaters. (By comparison, the previous year’s Aladdin had 28 million in budget, and earned 500.)  But the positive critical response and creative success led Warner to decide it was high time to start making their own films. But before they got around to Quest for Camelot, they decided to pair with a studio that already had two flops, and throw a ludicrous pile of money at them to make another miserable failure. Jesus, when am I going to get to write about a successful movie that isn’t fricking Space Jam?

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* That nine word Superman origin I alluded to went as follows: “Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple. Superman.” That’s all he had to say, and then he could get on with the damn story.

"NOW, FEEL THE SLICE OF MY... WAIT, IT'S ON MY OTHER HAND, ISN'T IT? I CAN'T FREAKING SEE THROUGH THIS THING."

* Re: “Batman has only a few close friends.“ Comics-wise, Batman’s only consistent “inside” friends, that is to say, close friends that know his identity, are Alfred and Superman, and that’s really it. Maybe Wonder Woman. To a certain extent, Oracle and the various Robins and Batgirls, but they’re more co-workers, as are the rest of the Justice League. Bruce Wayne’s only friend is Lucius Fox, and Batman’s only “outside” friend is Commissioner Gordon. Harvey Dent was an interesting case, as he was friends with Bruce and Batman separately.

* Non-sequel superhero movies that weren’t an origin story: The Incredible Hulk, Dredd, Punisher: War Zone… That’s honestly all I can think of right now. Besides, two of them are continuity reboots of characters with recent origin movies, and Dredd is technically about a police officer, not a superhero. And even that was an origin of sorts for Judge Anderson.

Just think. If that bat hadn't flown in, he'd have gone out in this mess.

* As far as thoughts actually about the movie, minor mob guy Buzz Bronski has an almost identical character design to Rupert Thorne, the major recurring mob villain on the series. And every time I watch the movie, I think, “Oh, it’s Thorne.” It never is.

* The Joker’s writing is really on point. “Oh, Sal, why so formal? Mi casa nostra es su casa nostra.” He’s not an easy character to write well, but Paul Dini does it better than most. Frankly, the only people who should be allowed to write Joker stories are Dini and Grant Morrison. Though I’d settle for a lifetime Joker-ban on Kevin Smith and Brian Azzarello.

Oh, yes, Azzarello, have the Joker rape someone. That's how we'll all know you're writing a grown-ups book. It's very impressive. You didn't at all just take a leftover 100 Bullets script and scribble in different character names.

* One minor quibble: The Phantasm has super-strength, speed, and agility, is bulletproof, and is able to teleport. How? It’s never explained. Her appearance is always accompanied by a heavy layer of smoke/fog, so it’s easy to surmise that has something to do with it, but still, you know, one line about her robbing a science lab or something would be nice.

* The opening credits are a slow tour through the film’s wonderful Art Deco-style Gotham City, in early 90s CGI that actually looks really gorgeous.

* Siskel’s review of Batman Forever contains the great line “I liked it while I was watching it and as soon as it was over, it didn't mean anything to me and as the days have gone on it's meant even less.” I’ve felt that emotion a lot over the course of these cartoon reviews.

"Is this forwards or backwards? Atmosphere be damned, I'm not getting dressed in the dark anymore."

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Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Warner Bros. 2003)

With the smashing success of Space Jam, it’s kind of surprising that after it left theaters, Warner returned to not doing much of anything with the characters. There was the occasional straight to video short, or a terrible video game, and of course, the constant advertising, but a Space Jam sequel proved either beyond the company’s reach or beyond their ambition. I’m sure to this day there are “Space Jam 2” treatments rattling around Warners’ development hell division, probably about Lebron James at this point. But it wasn’t until 2003, 7 years after Space Jam, that the Tunes finally got another shot at the big screen. And this time, rather than a director cloaked in mystery, the film was in the hands of cult film mastermind Joe Dante. Would lightning strike twice? Or would this movie, unlike Space Jam, actually be preferable to being hit by lightning?

THRILLS!

LAFFS!

A COMEDY LEGEND DEEPLY DISAPPOINTING ME!
s
NO, NOT BILL MURRAY THIS TIME!

IT’S LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION!

Let’s talk about Joe Dante for a bit. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that of any live-action film director out there, he has the most Looney Tunes-like sensibility. This is often blatant, as in Gremlins, Gremlins II, Small Soldiers, and “It’s a Good Life” from the Twilight Zone movie. But it even seeps into his other work, as seen the anarchic mania of The ‘Burbs, the subverted nostalgia of Matinee, and even The Howling, which was a straight horror film, but still packed with inside jokes and references. When he was announced as the director of the new Looney Tunes movie, I was extremely excited. I literally can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have at the helm.

But there’s a flip side to that, too. Dante is not a director who plays nice with the studios. He tends to go over budget and over time due to his devotion to the craft, he always sides with writers and actors over executives, and his love of references and homages can result in free advertising - or worse, expensive licensing - for other studios. Like Terry Gilliam, he’s a director whose work has been very well-received, but who still has to struggle to get his dream projects funded. There’s a reason the majority of his work over the past 15 years has been TV episodes and anthologies.

But the trouble is, a Looney Tunes movie is obviously going to be micromanaged to infinity by the suits, as we saw with Space Jam. This led to the fear that Dante would be hamstrung by studio demands and not be able to really make the movie he wanted. And I regret to say that’s more or less the case. There are flashes of the usual Dante magic, and those were always the best parts of the movie. To wit:

Classic visual puns!

* Cameo appearances by Dick Miller and Robert Picardo. Miller has been in every one of Dante’s movies, and Picardo has been in all but two. Seeing them there reminded me of who was running this show.

* The reference jokes were really on point. An early scene features Shaggy and Scooby Doo at lunch with Matthew Lillard, complaining about how he portrayed Shaggy in the movie. A scene set at Area 52 (Area 51? That’s just a paranoid fantasy.) features appearances by the Metaluna Mutant, Ro-Man, Robby the Robot, a pair of Daleks, and, of course, Marvin the Martian.

* There was a lot of sniping at executives, in the film, particularly with a pair of characters called the Warner Brothers, a pair of childlike imbeciles who ran the company, and Kate, the executive who was put in charge of the Looney Tunes despite having no sense of humor or knowledge of the characters, because she could successfully monetize them. Huh. No wonder the studio hated him.

The best and worst anti-executive humor in the movie comes at the hands of the movie’s villains, the ACME corporation. Their boardroom is filled with a long line of Vice Presidents with ridiculous titles, including the VP in Charge of Bad Ideas, VP in Charge of  Being Unfairly Promoted, VP in Charge of Stating the Obvious, and (a cameo by Ron Perlman, yay!) VP in Charge of Never Learning. The worst… Ah, we’ll get to that. First, the plot, such as it is.

Look out, Brendan! That giant Timothy Dalton is about to shoot you!

 Like Space Jam, the film co-stars a popular human person alongside the Looney Tunes. Unlike Space Jam, the film is smart enough to put the Looney Tunes front and center, so it’s all good. The human of this film is Brendan Fraser, playing Warner Bros. security guard DJ Drake. Drake wants to be a stuntman, but his career has been sidelined after Brendan Fraser put the rumor out that he doesn’t use a stuntman, causing Drake’s work in the Mummy films to go unnoticed. Yeah, it’s a little weird. There is also Jenna Elfman as the aforementioned executive Kate, who fires Daffy Duck for being difficult to work with, then desperately tries to get him back, as Bugs refuses to work until she does. Drake and Duck (oh, I get it) eventually join with Kate and Bugs in attempting to rescue Drake’s father, an international superstar spy (played by Timothy Dalton) from the evil ACME corporation, and it’s chairman. (Steve Martin)

In order to explain how these plots come together would take far more time and effort than they’re worth, and I’m pretty sure the movie agrees with me on that point. Like I said last time, in a Looney Tunes endeavor, the plot can be thin as anything so long as the gags land. It’s an excuse plot. Spy stuff sends them to [Location], where [Looney Tunes villain] tries to prevent them from finding [Clue to next Location]. Repeat. The villain/location match-ups sometimes make sense (the Coyote in the American desert, Marvin the Martian at Area 51), sometimes are a bit of a stretch (Yosemite Sam in Vegas, the Tasmanian Devil in the jungle), and sometimes are just plain inexplicable (Elmer Fudd at the Louvre, Beaky Buzzard at the Eiffel Tower).

It’s heartening to see the Looney Tunes villains treated like actual villains, rather than, you know, basketball teammates. And it’s good to see lesser-remembered villains like the aforementioned Beaky Buzzard, Nasty Canasta, and Crusher. And the pseudo-villainous characters like Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester also make appearances suitable to their personalities. Sadly, the absolute worst part of the movie is the main villain, the Chairman of ACME, played by Steve Martin.

STOP IT.

Oh my crap, it is impossible to describe just how awful this performance is. They took one of the finest, most Looney Tunes-ish comedians in the world, and then they give him this awful wig, and short pants, and he has NO funny lines, and his only joke is that things don’t work when he tries to use them, and I HATE IT. When Bill Murray shows up and phones it in, I can roll my eyes and say “Eh, whatever, he picked up a paycheck.” But Martin is giving 100% energy to this absolute turd of a character. I don’t know how Martin or Dante or even the studio hacks could have thought this was funny. It’s not remotely.

There are other big problems, too. The ending sequence, despite the inclusion of Duck Dodgers, is overlong and tedious, and a lot of the bits spread through the rest of the movie are unfunny and unneeded. The human cast is, apart from Martin, good enough. Bill Goldberg does his job well as a silent henchmen, Joan Cusack is charming, if trying a bit too hard, as the Q-esque head of Area 52, and Heather Locklear plays a Vegas lounge singer, and is very… Heather Locklear. Oh my, yes she is. As for our leads, Fraser is his usual likeable self, and Elfman is funny enough in her scenes with the Tunes, but together, they have all the chemistry of a bag of wet newspapers.

Oh my, yes she is.

The animation cast, unsurprisingly, fares better. There’s only two voice holdovers from Space Jam; Bob Bergen as Porky Pig, who doesn’t do much, and Billy West as Elmer Fudd. West was replaced as Bugs by Joe Alaskey, who also plays Daffy, Sylvester, and a few others. He’s a phenomenal Bugs, and while his Daffy’s not as acerbic as Dee Baker’s, it’s fun to have them played by the same guy, in classic Looney Tunes style. And since the daffy side of Daffy is emphasized in this movie, a less abrasive voice was called for. Warner animation utility man Jeff Bennett plays Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam to perfection.

The animation was directed by another Disney favorite of mine, Eric Goldberg, who not only made the movie look ten times better than Space Jam, but also expertly voiced Marvin the Martian, Speedy Gonzalez, and Tweety. This is not the most surprising voice casting in the movie, though, as the end credits revealed to me that the Tasmanian Devil was actually voiced by Brendan Fraser, who did such a good job, I never would have guessed it wasn’t one of their regulars.

So yeah, it’s not a very good movie. But you know, it’s the kind of not very good movie where you wind up spending most of your blog entry talking about all the things you liked in it. So even if you don’t have a blog, go ahead and give it a shot. The individual bits are more enjoyable than not, the actors - except Steve Martin - are decent, and it’s a good-enough looking movie.

All right, you slop artist.

So that’s it for Warner Brothers Feature Animation. In our next entry, we’ll move once again back in time, to take a look at the flop that first got Warner interested in producing their own animated fare.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* Another way Dante is like Terry Gilliam is that they keep being offered big budget tentpoles and then losing them. The greatest superhero movie never made is Dante’s 1987 film “Batman”, starring Alec Baldwin as Batman and Tim Curry as the Joker. Oh, it would have been so good.

* Other ACME Vice Presidents include the VP in Charge of Climbing to the Top, the VP in Charge of Rhetorical Questions, the VP in Charge of Child Labor, and the VP in Charge of  Nitpicking.

"Doc, I don't think a remake of Fatal Attraction is right up my alley."

* This was the last movie with music composes by Jerry Goldsmith, a legend at genre-film scoring who died just prior to completing the score. The soundtrack is typically excellent for him.

* After one really tedious bit with the Chairman, which included a shoehorned Michael Jordan cameo, he triumphantly states “Who’s laughing now!? Apparently no one.” True words, man. True words.

Well. That's meta.

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