2010 - Tangled

At the end of the Princess and the Frog review, I mentioned that the underperformance of that film had led to an unusual change in this one, but the more I think about it, it was really just the most visible aspect of a major tonal shift in the marketing. See, the big and clear thing was that the movie was originally called “Rapunzel”, but after the sarcastic quotes failure sarcastic quotes of The Princess and the Frog, they changed the name to Tangled, and gave the male character far more prominence in the advertising. On the one hand, I can see that this is as much his story as it is hers, but still, can you imagine a studio changing the title and marketing of their big release to de-emphasize a male character? Yeah, didn’t think so. They also shifted Glen Keane from director back down to character animator, and with that, changed the design of the movie from his planned and innovative approach to more typical CGI. In addition, the entire tone of the advertising switched to being very action-oriented and Dreamworks-ish, with the posters even featuring the smug, much-maligned “Dreamworks face”. So was this a case of Disney following the lead of the once-surprise dark hose studio? Or did they have a secret plan up their sleeve? Splitting at the ends? So am I. So legally obtain some apples, and let’s talk about Tangled.

Before we begin, I do need to address the Dreamworks question, which has been in the back of my mind for a while. Dreamworks Animation came onto the scene in 1998, and for the most part, engaged in the usual Disney ripoff stuff that studios had been making for years in futile attempts to compete with Disney. There was a bit of a rush of them at the time, with Warner Bros, Fox, and other studios trying to leap on the limping gazelle that was Disney at the time. Dreamworks’ early efforts ranged from excellent (The Prince of Egypt) to pretty good (The Road to El Dorado) to dire (Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas). But in 2001, they made a little movie called Shrek.

Shrek was a very good movie, and more to the point, it was a smashing success. In its irreverent, sarcastic attitude, Dreamworks had finally found its brand. While Fox and WB’s feature animation studios floundered, Dreamworks found itself racing to the top on a chariot built of smirks and reference jokes. But what they were making was basically garbage. Shark Tale, Over The Hedge, Flushed Away, Bee Movie - This stuff is Meet the Robinsons bad at best, and often approached or reached Chicken Little levels of horribleness. But they were making massive amounts of money. All of them. Even Bee Movie. And that’s a movie where Jerry Seinfeld plays a bee named Barry B. Benson, who’s upset that Ray Liotta is stealing his honey.

That is not some sort of joke I told, that's an actual thing that happened.

This, along with their already discussed Pixar envy, was among the contributors to the fear that led Disney to go all-CGI for a time. And in the mid-late 2000s, something changed: Dreamworks got good. No longer coasting on the snarky Shrek style, they were making real high-quality work. Kung-Fu Panda, How To Train Your Dragon, Monsters vs. Aliens, this was really good stuff. And as Dreamworks became an artistic competitor to Disney as well as a financial one, we get a Disney movie with a trailer of nothing but slapstick, a cynical title, and ohhhhh, the smirks on the poster. I was sure this was just Disney responding to the Dreamworks threat.

Well, to my surprise, this is not that kind of movie. In fact, I’d say this is an even better return to form for the company that The Princess and the Frog was. While TPATF modernized  the story and played with the themes and structure of it, Tangled is just a straight-up traditional fairy tale. There’s some annoying stuff that comes with that  - predictable story structure, all-white cast, elevated relevance of royalty - but the story is so well-done, it doesn’t really matter.

Rapunzel is one of those thinly-plotted fairy tales that requires a lot of work to stretch to feature length, but the Disney machine has gotten so good at plot generation that I barely even notice any more. The days of relentless padding like we saw in Cinderella are long behind us. The agent of plot expansion in this film is one Flynn Rider, a dashing thief who agrees to be Rapunzel’s guide through the world outside her tower. Since he’s not a prince, he doesn’t climb her hair, and his total in-tower time is maybe a couple of hours (most of which he spends unconscious), that means pretty much the entire original plot of Rapunzel has been jettisoned in favor of an out-of-tower adventure.

Though not one as good as this would have been.

Really, I mean it. I didn’t realize until I was writing this, but they really dumped the whole plot. In the original Grimm story, a poor forester is caught stealing rapunzel from a witch’s garden, and agrees to give up his firstborn daughter to her. The witch keeps the girl in a tower, accessed by means of climbing her long hair. She is eventually discovered by a prince, who falls in love with her and gets her pregnant, causing the witch to find out about them. The witch cuts off the girl’s hair and casts her into the wilderness, then blinds the prince and casts him out as well. At least nine months later, as a convenient biological reminder lets us know, they find each other, and her tears regrow his eyes, why the hell not.

Literally all they took from that is “tower” and “hair”. Mother Gothel is not a witch, Rapunzel’s parents are a king and queen, she is kidnapped as opposed to traded for a plant, her hair is magic and has healing properties, Flynn is not a prince, no one gets blinded, and there is no pre-marital hanky-panky. Most of all, Grimm’s Rapunzel was… Well, she was kind of dumb, and had no real desire to leave the tower until a man turned up. Disney’s Rapunzel is a rapacious reader, and has longed all her life to leave the tower.

And Rapunzel’s drive to get out of the tower is what really makes this work. While Flynn is the one who facilitates the expanded story, Rapunzel is the one who starts it, and this prevents it from being the male-centered story the title change made me wary of. The danger comes to both of them equally, from Rapunzel’s jailer/”mother” pursuing Rapunzel to get her back in the tower, the city guards pursuing Flynn for stealing Rapunzel’s crown from its place of honor in the palace, and Flynn’s former partners the Stabbington Brothers chasing Flynn for selling them out and escaping. Not until the very end of the movie do Flynn and Rapunzel learn of her true parentage, and their romantic relationship grows smoothly and naturally throughout the movie. Rather than one gooey scene between the two of them where Twoo Wuv instantly blossoms, we see a gradual progression and growing respect and admiration between “crazy girl in a tower” and “con artist boy with warrants”.

Admittedly, she doesn't impress early on.

Rapunzel and Flynn are very good characters. Rapunzel is inquisitive and adventurous in a way we’ve never seen in a Disney heroine. Belle can talk about books all she wants, but Rapunzel spends nearly every second out of the tower, learning and experiencing new things. Even when she’s stuck up there, she spends all her time studying and practicing various skills. Flynn’s entire persona was born of a feeling of inferiority from childhood, which is a great reversal of the typical confident male hero. This is carried over into a scene where a gang of thugs at a bar musically express their less-than-manly interests and hobbies. While it is somewhat annoying that there are only two female characters in the movie, I appreciated the rejection of societal norms and gender roles that were casually tossed in. It’s far from perfect on that front, but there’s something nice about a burly thug depicted as loving to bake cupcakes.

Acting is great, though after the grand slam of The Princess and the Frog, it was going to be hard to live up. And sure enough, none of the actors reach the amazing success of that movie’s cast, but they all do an excellent job. Mandy Moore plays Rapunzel, and is naturally adorable and a talented singer. Flynn is played by Zachary Levi, who brings a lot of his Charles Carmichael charm to the role, and also gives a surprisingly credible musical performance. Maybe he can sit in on Jeffster’s new album. Ron Perlman voices the Stabbington brothers -  well, voices one and grunts the other - and is perfect because of course he is, he’s Ron Perlman. Various supporting thugs and guards are played by character actors M.C. Gainey, Brad Garrett, and Jeffrey Tambor. But as is so often the case, the MVP goes to the villain. Broadway star Donna Murphy, best known to the general public as Dr. Octopus’s wife, strikes a great balance between her fake loving disposition and her true, ruthless nature. She knows just the right moments to drop a touch of menace into a sweet moment or a moment of pathos into a threat. Since her character’s biggest trait is her emotional abuse of Rapunzel, this is a necessary gift, and Murphy rocks it.  This trait is most visible in her villain song, “Mother Knows Best”, where she frames her blatant fearmongering and disrespect of Rapunzel as a mother’s love, complete with a darker reprise later.

The music in general is very good, though again, not Princess and the Frog good. Alan Menken is back, with Glenn Slater, a frequent partner of his, on lyrics. He’s good, but he’s no David Zippel, much less a Howard Ashman. Actually, my favorite musical piece in the film is lyricless, a number called “Kingdom Dance”, which accompanies Rapunzel and Flynn’s whirlwind tour through the city. It’s appropriately Ren-fair old-timey, but with wonderful folk-rock touches that make it fit the rest of the score. The song sung by Tambor and Garrett as the sensitive cutthroats is also a heck of a lot of fun. The only misstep is the stupid award-bait love song. I haven’t liked one of those since “Beauty and the Beast”.

Yeah, but don't worry about the freaking bookseller that has to clean that up. Jerks.

I referenced older films and films by other studios a lot in this, and that’s really the way I can’t help but look at it. I guess that’s the side effect of being the next-to-last movie I’m looking at here. This was Disney’s 50th animated movie, and the second of two attempts to recapture what they had done before. And I think I can say that though the Princess and the Frog was the superior movie, Tangled did “classic Disney” better, and was handsomely rewarded with the biggest box office receipts Disney had seen in a long, long time. This made what happened next… Just plain inexplicable. We’ve got one left folks, and it’s a good one.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* I barely mentioned the animation, which is quite good. It’s just good in a way that’s not too interesting to talk about. When Keane was signed on to direct, he wanted to develop a new form of CG animation inspired in part by paint-on-glass animation, that would give it the organic feel of traditional animation. In the end, they basically went the standard route. It looks good, though, and you can still feel the guiding hand of Keane and the other traditional animators. It basically looks like Beauty and the Beast with the scope of Bolt.

* Particularly good bits include a scene with tens of thousands of floating lanterns,  a scene with a bursting dam, and anything involving Rapunzel’s epic hair.

Epic glowing hair, no less.

* One result of the many, many, MANY changes to the classic fairy tale is that Rapunzel’s name no longer has any sort of explanation, and is now just a really weird name.

* You know, I suppose her parents named her something different before she was kidnapped? Huh. That’ll take some getting used to. I mean, they made a whole holiday in her honor, the kingdom probably knows her as, I don’t know, Princess Jessica or something.

* In early development, Rapunzel and Flynn were set to be played by Kristen Chenoweth and Dan Fogler. While they are fine performers, I hope the characters were extremely different then, because they would have been horrible for this script.

* It occurs to me that of all the fictional kingdoms I’ve seen in all of these fairy tale movies, this is the first one that has a flag.

* On the topic of the Dreamworks-ification of the advertising, the trailer actually contains several slapstick comedy scenes that aren’t in the final movie. This is not so much misleading as outright lying.

This is my favorite episode of Chuck ever.

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2009 - The Princess and the Frog

All right, Disney is back! Princesses! 2D animation! Musical numbers! It’s all just like it used to be! Aren’t you excited? OF COURSE YOU ARE! THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT!!!!

That was my impersonation of the marketing for this movie. So the movie kind of set itself up to be a disappointment for a lot of people. I remember when it came out, the prevailing opinion was “Well, it’s good. But it’s not Beauty and the Beast”. Nor should it have been. Really, there was no reason to expect it to. Part of the reason Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and the Lion King and the films surrounding them were so good was that they were a surprise. They weren’t an attempt to revive an older era, and to the minor extent they were trying to bring back the ‘50s, the audiences and critics that went to the theaters for those weren’t the same ones going to the theaters 40 years later. But this was not only a very direct “Hey, remember the 90s” move, but only 20 years at the most and a VASTLY increased home media presence made the Disney Renaissance far more recent to 2000s kids than the Restoration was to 1990s kids. So not being able to reach those impossibly lofty goals was not a surprise. But now that it’s a few years down the line, how does the film look? Free from the burden of hype, does it look better? Or without the magic of anticipation, does it falter and fade even more noticeably? So stir up a pot of gumbo, and let’s talk about The Princess and the Frog.

As befits a film with such high expectations, the production was fraught with executive input, market research, and focus groups. As a result, the movie comes across as very structured, very studio-driven and executive-driven. Disney wanted a return to fairy tales, they wanted a new princess for their merchandising bonanza, they wanted her to be African-American to appeal the brand to a wider market, and they wanted it set in New Orleans so they could promote it in that section of Disneyland, New Orleans Square being the only place in the park without a princess at the time.

But working with set goals in mind doesn’t necessarily have to have bad ends and in this, case, it didn’t. I’ll be honest, though, not great ends, either. The movie holds together very well, and it’s really well-made, but the plot is kind of thin. A slacker prince, cut off by his parents, tries to marry a wealthy American girl, and is turned into a frog by local magician/con artist Dr. Facilier, the Shadow Man. When attempting to kiss a princess to turn back, he mistakenly kisses a waitress, and turns her into a frog. Wacky hijinks ensue, magical technicalities are exploited, and Twoo Wuv saves the day in the end. It’s pretty basic stuff, and it’s easy to see the twists coming, but the story is really just a vehicle for the animation, songs, jokes, and acting. It’s rather reminiscent of Aladdin that way (The films share a directing team).  So while there’s no denying a sort of veneer of artificiality on the whole thing, it can largely be overlooked because of the quality of the result.

Newsies 2: The Newsening

Okay, the good stuff: Let’s start with the music. The music and lyrics were both by Randy Newman, who I generally like, but don’t love. But Newman lived in New Orleans as a child, and really nailed it with this, pulling influences from Cajun music, Dixieland jazz, and zydeco to make the best all-around soundtrack I’ve heard from Disney in a long time. The Academy Award-nominated “Almost There” is a particular standout. After years of “I’m wishing for the one I love to find me,” and “A dream is a wish your heart makes,” and “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere,” we finally get a princess who is actually doing something. “I know exactly where I’m going, getting closer and closer every day.” The opening number is performed by New Orleans legend Dr. John, and the rest of the songs are performed by the actual actors, with not one singing double in the cast.

And those actors are phenomenal. The casting directors forewent the ’grab the big stars’ impulse that takes over animated films these days, and went with a Rennaisance-style mix of Broadway talent and quality character actors. Tony Award winner and From Justin To Kelly supporting player Anika Noni Rose plays Tiana, the waitress/princess-to-be of the title, and does a fantastic job. Brazilian actor Bruno Campos plays Prince Naveen with a frankly ridiculous amount of charm. Apparently the final casting was done by polling the ladies of Disney and asking which actor had the sexiest voice. He doesn’t have the sexiest voice in the entire movie, though, as the villain his played by voice acting master Keith David, who oozes with confidence, suaveness, and a general sinister ooze.

Supporting cast is great. Tiana’s marriage-crazed friend Lottie is played with unchained enthusiasm by Jen Cody, who is balances out nicely by her Big Daddy, played by John Goodman. Big Daddy, as the nickname implies, is a booming, loving collection of Southern Gentleman stereotypes straight out of Tennessee Williams, and Goodman owns the part. Oprah Winfrey plays Tiana’s mother, reminding us all that she’s a really good actress as well as a media titan. Over on the magical side of things, we’ve got my two favorite performances in the movie. Michael-Leon Wooley, who I saw on Broadway as the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, plays Louis, a friendly, if somewhat neurotic, alligator who dreams of playing trumpet in the great jazz clubs. As the Audrey II, Wooley was tasked with creating a voice monstrous enough to be scary, but charming enough that people would go along with its intentions. In this film, he twists those same two traits to make a voice undeniably friendly and loving, but with an undeniable “I am a gigantic alligator” boom to it. There’s also phenomenal work from perennial bit player Jim Cummings as Ray the firefly, his biggest role in a Disney movie since Aladdin. Ray is a Cajun, a difficult accent to pull off, but Cummings lived in New Orleans as a riverboat deckhand and Mardi Gras float builder, and it’s no surprise that a voice pro like him picked up the Yat perfectly. The part was apparently largely improvisational, with Cummings supplying the accurate New Orleans slang to the laid-back and helpful bug. Shout out also to Jennifer Lewis as the boisterous voodoo queen Mama Odie, about whom more will be said later.

"This is working out so much better for me than when I gave a ride to that scorpion."

Two performances that didn’t do much for me conveniently are for the two characters that didn’t do much for me. First is Terrence Howard’s brief appearance as Tiana’s dad, which seemed really phoned in and underwritten. He dies before the story proper gets started (a photo of him in a WWI uniform and a Distinguished Service Cross on Tiana’s nightstand is all the explanation we get), and I can’t help but think it would have worked better if he was totally unseen, or just left to silent flashbacks. The other is Peter Bartlett, the poor man’s Timothy Spall, as Naveen’s put-upon manservant Lawrence, who is magically disguised by the Shadow Man after Naveen is befrogged. Lawrence is a weird part that suffers from really bad plot-induced inconsistency. When needed, he’s servile or he’s rebellious; he’s conniving or he’s stupid; he’s gleefully going along with the evil plan or having to be bullied into it; he’s a smooth and slick liar or he’s a nervous, stammering wreck. He strikes me as less of a character and more of some lazy plot glue holding the show together. He’s played as a “sissy villain” type, the biggest I’ve seen since Prince John, but I imagine that was to make the fact that he was seducing Lottie under falce pretenses as un-rapey as possible, so it’s coming from a positive place, I guess.

I'm just saying, the vision of his dream future involves fabulous purple tights, sniffing flowers with his pinky out, and the prince bending over.

Lawrence is also animated inconsistently with the rest of the cast, which is annoying. While the human characters are generally kept to realistic proportions, Lawrence is a tiny, fat, cartoon ball of a man, and he doesn’t fit into the world of the other characters. Dr. Facilier and Big Daddy are also leaning toward the cartoony end of the spectrum, but in a way that compliments the style. Facilier’s independent, intelligent shadow makes for a really nice bit of animation. For the first time, the animation was done entirely on computers, with Toon Boom Animation software taking over from the now venerable CAPS system. It’s still traditional animation, not CGI, it’s just all done on Wacom tablets now instead of being done on paper, and scanned in, and it looks wonderful. Really beautiful stuff.

Before I wrap up, I‘d like to discuss the role of Voodoo in the movie. Warning: It’s about to get anthropological up in here. First of all, I’d like to state that there’s a difference between Voodoo, Vodou, and Vodun. Many well-meaning people use one of the latter terms when referring to Voodoo, but they’re often wrong. Vodun is a widely practiced polytheistic and animistic religion along the West African coast. Many slaves came from that area, and in Haiti, the new religion of Vodou was formed, a highly syncretic variation of Vodun that takes elements from other slave religions, most notably Yoruba and Taino beliefs, and Catholicism. Vodou is widely misunderstood, and has been stereotyped by Hollywood into a crazy, evil religion of zombies and voodoo dolls, the end result of a campaign of marginalization by colonists who were afraid of the possibility Vodou had to rally the common people. There is, however, a third form, Louisiana Voodoo. Voodoo is an even more syncretic adaptation of Vodou, with stronger elements of Catholicism, and a healthy influence from Hoodoo, or conjure, an African-American system of folk magic, which itself adds Native American practices, European spiritualism, and Freemasonry to the list of influences.

"Look, I just think it's a little insensitive-" "Shhhh." "I mean, you're dressed like an actual religious figure-" "SHHHHH!"

I bring all this up because this movie got a lot of flak for having a Voodoo practitioner as its villain, and I think a lot of that flak -  not all of it - was unwarranted. While there are plenty of films that do use Voodoo or Vodou as the scary “other”, like Live and Let Die or The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Princess and the Frog goes out of its way to showcase greater accuracy, especially as it relates to Louisiana Voodoo. The white-clad Voodoo queen Mama Odie is shown as a completely benevolent figure, and the sinister Facilier explicitly mentions Hoodoo and “things I ain’t even tried” as sources of his magical power. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t go as far as I would like in not doing the “’ethnic’ religion = magic” trope, but it’s a damn sight better than Pocahontas with that, and since invocation and conjuration is such a major part of Voodoo, it works reasonably well. The animators also went out of their way to avoid any visuals that would associate with any specific rituals, and Mama Odie is a ‘good guy‘ Voodo queen dressed in the traditional white. Dr. F makes a Voodoo doll at one point, which was a focus of a lot of the complaints, but Louisiana Voodoo does make dolls, and Hoodoo uses them for curses (this element being taken from European witchcraft superstitions, namely “poppets”.) On the other hand, Hoodoo is mentioned only once, whereas Voodoo is discussed constantly, and Facilier dresses at one point as Baron Samedi, an actual Voodoo god, which are symptomatic of the typical Hollywood Voodoo problem. Actually, though, Samedi is a god of death, resurrection, and magic, and also kind of a crazy party animal, so he'd probably get a kick out of it.

So, short version: The history of Voodoo is incredibly complex and intertwined with itself, and while The Princess and the Frog isn’t perfect, it’s better than most attempts to use it in film, and a sight more accurate than people realize.

So that’s The Princess and the Frog. It’s quite good, and the casting, animation, and music are the best they’ve been in at least a decade. But when it comes down to it, story is what makes a film work, and this story is just meh. Suitable, but the most interesting thing I can say about it is a lengthy digression into one of my own interests. It’s a good movie, but not the return to classics that the company and the fans were hoping for. It was, financially speaking, what I have started to call a Disney Disappointment. As TV Tropes puts it, it was only a massive success, but they wanted an overwhelming success. It was, however, beat at the box office by Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, and only the fifth highest-grossing animated movie of the year, and that has to hurt. Oddly enough, part of the blame was given to the word “princess” being in the title, and an odd shift was made to their next movie… But we’ll get to that.

This scene was so funny already, I don't have a caption that can do it justice. 

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* I just LOVE that the moral of the story is the wishing on a star is basically useless. Take that, Jiminy Cricket.

* Naveen is probably the best catch of any Disney prince. The filmmakers took great care to show that although he was something of a slacker, he had a lot going on. He’s musically talented,  creative, speaks at least three languages, is immediately friendly to everyone he meets regardless of race or class, and once he commits to Tiana, is more than willing to forget about his fortune hunting and work hard to make their lives work.

* Speaking of Tiana’s hard work, there’s definitely some good-looking food in this one, and after watching it, I started putting Tabasco on everything. I do not regret this.

* According to a newspaper at the beginning, the movie takes place on a Friday/Saturday in June, which is weird, given that the Mardis Gras setting is so important, and that would be a Tuesday in March.  Considering that we wouldn’t even notice if the paper had no date on it, it seems odd that they put that in.

* Mama Odie has no teeth and no eyes, and at one point, a jar full of teeth and eyes is seen in her cabin. That’s pretty weird.

* Naveen’s dad’s got a pretty sweet mustache. I think all cartoon dads should have mustaches. All fictional dads, in fact. Imagine how much better the epilogue of Harry Potter would have been if Harry, Ron, and Draco all had big Magnum dad-staches.

I was going to put a picture of Naveen's dad here, but I  found this while looking for one, and I couldn't let it go.

* Favorite animators check-in: Mama Odie was animated by Andreas Deja, and Louis by Eric Goldberg, who got an Annie award for his work. Facilier was animated by Bruce W. Smith, who shows a strong influence from Deja’s excellent villain work of the ‘90s, as well as his own independent work as the creator of Nickelodeon’s ‘The Proud Family’. Smith has done a lot of work for a lot of different studios, and we’ll be seeing him a few times in Volume 2 of this blog.

* Louis intimidates people by roaring at a few points, leading me to wonder if alligators do, in fact, roar at all. After some research, it appears they are known to bellow, but only when mating. Puts a rather different spin on the scenes where he roars and everyone runs.

* During the song “Almost There”, the animation does a sudden shift into a simplified style patterned after the advertising of the Jazz Age, and it looks phenomenal. They’ve done this sort of thing, occasionally before, most notably in the beginning of Mulan’s “A Girl Worth Fighting For”, but it’s never worked this well.

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It's coming, it's coming.

Oh, who asked you?

Quick note to followers and folks who just find this blog via the Googly: I started a very time-intensive two month job shortly after the last review was posted, and have had little time for else. But it's about to wrap up, and the final three reviews, end-of-project best/worst lists, and start of volume 2 are all coming very soon!

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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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