BEST DISNEY SONGS! Wrap-up part one

Over the past 20 months, I’ve seen a lot of movies, and heard a lot of music in those movies, so to start off these supplemental posts, it seems only fitting to honor that music. So here’s the first of my seven top 13 lists, celebrating my favorite Disney songs. The next two lists will cover the worst songs, and then a special one for the top 13 villain songs, because let’s be honest, the villains always get the best songs, and it wouldn’t be fair to put them on this list. Why top 13? Because narrowing it down to 10 was too hard and 13 is ¼ of 52. But before we look at the top quartile, a word on my process.

Miss me?

The first thing I did was look through every Disney movie soundtrack on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything, and writing down every song that I thought might qualify for the list. I wasn’t very discriminating this time around, just pretty much every song that I particularly liked. This left me with about 80 songs. Then, to maintain fairness, I narrowed it down to one song per movie. This was much more difficult, and based on the quality of the music and lyrics, the song’s catchiness and enjoyableness, and the function of the song to the movie’s plot or tone. Then, using the same criteria, I whittled the list down further until I had my top 13. Random trivia: Three movies, The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast, and Winnie-the-Pooh, had their entire soundtracks nominated, but none of them got on the Best Songs List proper. Funny, that.

Anyway, without further ado, here it is, the top 13 Disney songs! Click the titles for a link to a YouTube video!

Little Wooden-Head

Music by Leigh Harline, Lyrics by Ned Washington

Performed by Christian Rub as Gepetto

Little Wooden-Head go play your part

Bring a little joy to every heart

Little do you know and yet it’s true

That I’m mighty proud of you

This one, while very short (the snippet I posted there includes over half of the lyrics), represents something major for Disney. Snow White had a few good tunes, but it was all very presentational, very “HERE IS A SONG NOW OKAY”. But Pinocchio opened up with this utterly charming number that set the tone of the story, established the character of Gepetto, and gave us some funny visuals to boot. (Okay, technically Pinocchio opened with “When You Wish Upon a Star”, but I hate that freaking song.)

We’re Three Caballeros

Music by Manuel Esperon, Lyrics by Ray Gilbert

Performed by Clarence Nash, Jose Oliveira, and Joaquin Garay as Donald, Jose, and Panchito

We sing and we samba!

We shout “Ay Caramba!”

What means “Ay Caramba?”

Oh yes - I don’t know.

I can’t get this song out of my head. Seriously, even after more than a year since I’ve seen the movie, I find myself humming it constantly. I’m not surprised the movie was so successful in its goal of enhancing public opinion of the US in Latin America, as the title song is just about what good friends America, Mexico, and Brazil are. Also, contains the phrase “Three happy chappies, with snappy serapes”.

The Work Song

Music and Lyrics by Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman

Performed by Jimmy MacDonald, Helen Siebert, and June Sullivan as the Mice. Probably some other people, too. They weren’t great at crediting actors back then. Maybe June Foray?

She go around in circles

‘Til she very very dizzy

Still they holler “Keep a-busy, Cinderelly!”

This song is composed of two segments, the first involves the mice singing a song about how poorly Cinderella is treated, and the second is a reprise of Cinderella’s odious song “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” that is a billion times better than the original, partially because of the mice’s squeaky voices, but mostly for reasons I’ll get into on the Worst Song list.

Bella Notte

Music and Lyrics by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke

Performed by George Givot as Tony

Oh THIIIIIIIIIIS is the NIIIIIIIIIGHT

It’s a BYOOOOOOTIFUL NIIIIIIIIIGHT

And we CALLLLLL it BELLLLLLLLLA NOTTEEEEE

This song is representative of a kind of song that was quite common in Disney’s heyday, where the first verse is sung by a character, and then an unseen chorus takes over, often just repeating the initial verse.  “Once Upon a Dream” from Sleeping Beauty is the ur-example, and it was used most recently with “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” I have to say, I normally hate these, as the chorus parts are irksome and unneeded. And while that’s still true here, I just love those two goofy Italian stereotypes that get us started. They’re so into it! So dang catchy! And at least you get a little Thurl Ravenscroft in the studio chorus.

I Wanna Be Like You

Music and Lyrics by the Sherman Brothers

Performed by Louis Prima as King Louie with Phil Harris as Baloo

[intense scatting]

As I mentioned in the review, the Jungle Book was the first Disney to fully come together as a musical, with songs, plot, and character fully meshing with one another to create a fully-formed experience. While the soundtrack has a lot of strong contenders, and “The Bare Necessities” allllllmost made it, this one’s got Phil Harris and Louis Prima scatting at each other. And you can’t beat that.

Why Should I Worry?

Written by Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight

Performed by Billy Joel as Dodger

The rhythm of the city

Once you get it down

You can own this town

You can wear the crown!

First of all, “Charlie Midnight”? How awesome is that? Second of all, this song, as performed by the always likeable William Joel, is unquestionably the highlight of this movie. If I were awarding these movies stars, this song would be a half star on its own. It’s fun, it’s catchy, and it’s so Noo Yawk in da ‘80s it hurts. And that’s why I love it, even if it does contain the word “bebopulation”.

Kiss The Girl

Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by Howard Ashman

Performed by Samuel Wright as Sebastian

Sha la la la la la

My oh my

Look like the boy too shy

Ain’t gonna kiss the girl

Sha la la la la la

Ain’t it sad?

Ain’t it a shame? Too bad

He gonna miss the girl.

It’s no secret that The Little Mermaid is the movie where the Disney Musical really coalesced, and this song’s smooth blend of romance, comedy, and energy make it the standout among standouts, clicking with the story in a way the love songs usually don’t.

Friend Like Me

Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by Howard Ashman

Performed by Robin Williams as The Genie

Yes sir, we pride ourselves on service

You’re the boss, the king, the shah!

Say what you wish

It’s yours, true dish

How ‘bout a little more baklava?

While I may have joked about Robin Williams and Disney’s legal conflict in the Aladdin article, Williams really was perfect for this role. He clicked perfectly into a role that almost any other actor would have made obscenely irritating (consider that a plug for my upcoming Quest for Camelot review), and this song couples his performance with Ashman’s finest lyrics for a top-notch musical number.

The Bells of Notre Dame

Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by Steven Schwartz

Performed by Paul Kandel as Clopin, with David Ogden Stiers and Tony Jay as The Archbishop and Frollo

From the big bells as loud as the thunder

To the little bells soft as a psalm

And some say the soul of

The city’s the toll of

The bells of Notre Dame

Songs that move the plot along don’t always get a lot of love on ‘best song’ lists, because the plot mechanics, dialogue breaks, and occasionally awkward shifts can make for rough listening on the ol’ soundtrack album. For that reason, I had “Topsy Turvy” in this spot for some time. But the excellent lyrics, powerful music, and looming presence over the rest of the movie won this song its spot. The cathedral is as important as any character, and this song keeps it in our mind, even with rushed exposition and overuse of Jim Cummings.

Zero to Hero

Music by Alan Menken, Lyrics by David Zippel

Performed by LaChanze, Lilias White, Roz Ryan, Cheryl Freeman, and Vanéese Y. Thomas as the Muses

From appearance fees and royalties

Our Herc had cash to burn

Now nouveau-riche and famous

He could tell you what’s a Grecian earn

Speaking of songs moving the plot along, there is an easier way for them to do that - MONTAGE! And boy, if there was ever a movie made for montages, this is it. And this one, accompanying Herc’s rise to glory. And not only does a montage allow the rapid movement of plot, it also allows the densest possible concentration of sight gags, puns, and clever rhymes, with some of the best animation Disney's ever done. So it’s a win-win. Win. 

I’ll Make a Man Out of You

Music by Matthew Wilder, Lyrics by David Zippel

Performed by Donny Osmond as Li Shang

LET’S get down to BUIS-NESS

To de-FEAT

The HUNS

HUH!

I’m willing to make the statement that this is the most popular song in any Disney film, because about 80% of the time when I mention Mulan to someone, they start singing this right away. And well they should. This is possibly the greatest training montage song of all time, and Donny Osmond is a surprisingly capable vocal double for BD Wong.

Strangers Like Me

Music, Lyrics, and Performance by Phil Collins

I can see there's so much to learn

It's all so close and yet so far

I see myself as people see me

I just know there's something bigger out there

I loved the unique conceit of the Tarzan soundtrack, with one guy not only writing all the music, but performing it as well. This song, performed in the authorial voice of Tarzan as he starts learning about all the human world can offer him, is a real delight. It captures the wonder and excitement of gaining knowledge and the vine-swinging scene with him and Jane is very sweet.

I’ve Got a Dream

Music by Who Else But Alan Menken, Lyrics by Glenn Slater

Performed by Brad Garrett, Jeffrey Tambor, Zachary Levi, and Mandy Moore as Hood-handed Thug, Ugly Thug, Flynn Rider, and Rapunzel.

I've got scars and lumps and bruises

Plus something here that oozes

And let's not even mention my complexion

But despite my extra toes

And my goiter, and my nose

I really want to make a love connection

While “These tough fellows are secretly creative and sensitive” is a fairly obvious place to go, this song gets that plot point out with such boisterous good fun that it seems new and fresh. The performances are full of character, and very well-sung, considering that with the exception of Moore, you wouldn’t peg any of these folks for a singer. Most of all, with all the dreams these Disney characters have, it's nice to hear some that are clearly laid out.

BONUS

The Backson Song

Music and Lyrics by Robert Lopez and Kristin Anderson-Lopez

Performed by Craig Ferguson as Owl, with Tom Kenny, Jim Cummings, Travis Oates, Kristin Anderson-Lopez, Bud Luckey, and Wyatt Hall as Rabbit, Pooh and Tigger, Piglet, Kanga, Eeyore, and Roo.

They made me catch the cold I caught.

They made me lose my train of thought

They swipe your stripes

They clog your pipes

They dig up your garden

They don’t beg your pardon

I wasn’t sure whether to put this as a villain song or a regular song, since the villain they’re singing about exists only in their imaginations, so here it is as a special Judge’s Award. Whatever. I'm allowed. The rhymes are clever, the actors are PERFECT, and the unique animation style is just plain delightful.

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2011 - Winnie-the-Pooh

For the final entry in the Walt Disney Animation Studios chapter in this blog, we turn to Winnie-the-Pooh. Wait, Brian, you are surely saying, didn’t you already do Winnie-the-Pooh? And, you go on to state, it couldn’t have come out recently, because surely I’d remember it. Yes, you brazenly conclude, you have clearly lost your marbles, and forgotten what movie you are doing.

First of all, shut up, jerk. I don’t know why I imagined you to be so mean. Possibly because I had to engage in some activity to purge my mind of negativity and anger, because this beautiful, wonderful movie will not allow it to exist. Yes, there is a second Winnie-the-Pooh movie, and it did come out in 2011. Why don’t you remember it? Well, for some reason, Disney did everything in their power to sabotage it. They released it in the UK four months before the US, and dumped it stateside with pretty much no advertising in the middle of the summer, rather than the cozy late-fall/early-winter release a movie like this needed. It was, in fact, released the SAME FREAKING DAY as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2, and just a week before Captain America. It was released to near-universal critical acclaim, but got lost in a sea of blockbusters and made a pathetic 3 million dollars over budget. Which is a real stone cold shame, because I’m about to make a bold statement after 52 movies: This is my favorite one. Feeling the towering expectations? So am I. So choose your favorite food from the last 51 reviews, and let’s talk about Winnie-the-Pooh.

I can’t even tell you how much I love this movie. From the writing to the animation to the voices to the music, every single thing in this film hits exactly right. I have watched this movie more times this year than any other. Any time I finished a disappointing film, Winnie-the-Pooh was my palate cleanser. Part of this is due to its length - coming in just shy of an hour, it beats out Dumbo as the shortest movie in the canon. And even that’s not a problem, as the movie doesn’t feel short. It’s exactly the length it needs to be. It’s a very dialogue-heavy movie, which I have to imagine contributes to that. There’s barely a moment where either the characters or the narrator aren’t speaking, which gives the movie a wonderfully full feeling. It’s as densely-written as an episode of Gilmore Girls. And the moments when they do use quiet work all the better because of this. The writing is all very sharp, and nearly every joke lands. In fact, in lieu of my usual jokes, the photo captions here are just going to be movie quotes. And it is such a quotable movie. Look at this exchange, when everyone but Piglet is stuck in a pit: 

Rabbit: Tie the bits of rope together, Piglet! Can you tie a knot?
Piglet: I cannot.
Rabbit: Ah, so you CAN knot.
Piglet: No. I cannot knot.
Rabbit: Not knot?
Pooh: Who's there?
Rabbit: Pooh!
Pooh: Pooh who?
Rabbit: No! Pooh... eh... Piglet, you'll need more than two knots.
Piglet: Not possible.
Owl: Ah, so it IS possible to knot those pieces.
Piglet: Not these pieces!
Pooh: Yes. Knot those pieces!
Piglet: Why not?
Eeyore: 'Cause it's all for naught.

"You can't possibly think that's long enough to get us out of here!" "Well, Owl read it to me once, and it was the longest thing I've ever heard."

That’s funny stuff, and sold perfectly by the actors. Obviously, Disney had been making Winnie-the-Pooh material for years in the time between the former movie and this one, including several TV series, and I was surprised initially to learn that they had largely recast the characters. I can’t argue the results, though. Jim Cummings was one of the two actors kept from the TV material, and he plays Pooh and Tigger better than he ever has before. I sometimes joke about how easy to pick out his voice is in these movies, but the guy knows the difference between bit parts and fast TV work and two lead roles in a movie, and he BRINGS IT. His Pooh is a bit more easygoing and less thoughtful than Holloway’s, and his Tigger’s more of a scrapper than Winchell’s, but there’s nothing wrong with a character growing alongside the actor. The other returning cast member is Travis Oates as Piglet, who was hired to play the part after the fairly recent death of John Fiedler. He’s got a somewhat more youthful voice, but that’s only to be expected, and works very well with Cummings.

Of the new voices, there’s three that could be considered “celebrities”. Well, one by general standards and two by my personal standards. The big star is Craig Ferguson as Owl. Ferguson plays up Owl’s scatterbrained nature, and runs a good deal more manic than Hal Smith did, which fits the rapid pace of the movie. Rabbit is played by voice acting superstar Tom Kenny, with the tones of a younger, more intellectual Ice King. Junius Matthews, you’ll recall, was one of the parts of the older film that didn’t really work for me, and Kenny is fantastic as always. Musician and voice actor Bud Luckey plays Eeyore, which is just too perfect. For those who can’t place the name, Luckey’s come to Disney through his many roles for Pixar, including Chuckles the Clown in Toy Story 3, which I know you’ve all seen. See? He’s PERFECT. Kanga, always a rather thankless part, is voiced by the film’s lyricist Kristin Anderson-Lopez, and she does a fine job. The child actors for Christopher Robin and Roo are also very good, and hey, C.R. finally has a British accent! And speaking of British accents, the narration duties are taken over this time by John Cleese. I don’t need to tell you what a great job he does, because he’s John freaking Cleese.

"Is there honey in this paragraph?" "Sorry, Pooh, I don't think so." "Then I don't find it very useful."

There is one other voice, which surprised me, and that’s Zooey Deschanel, who provides all the vocals for the interstitial music. I was initially expecting a modern version of the old Disney chorus, but having Deschanel provide the voice worked perfectly. Just as the running theme of Phil Collins’ voice gave a great spirit to Tarzan, so does Deschanel’s folksy singsong perfectly create the mood for this movie. The songs themselves, by Avenue Q co-creator Robert Lopez and his aforementioned wife, are uniformly excellent, blending old-school Sherman Bros. style with modern sensibilities.

The animation is also great. Due to Disney’s recent decision to focus on CG animation for the time being, this is the last we’ll see of Toon Boom for a while, and it does well. Obviously, in a movie like this, the focus is on the characters, and many of my favorite character animators got a chance to shine. Eric Goldberg lent his skill to Rabbit, a smaller and more restricted character for him than usual, but one he did excellently. Bruce Smith continued being an overachiever by animating Kanga, Roo, and Piglet. And Andreas Deja lent the fluidity of motion the so characterized his  classic villains to the more boisterous movement of Tigger, making him the MVA once again. Deja also did a sketchy sort of shading on Tigger’s stripes, which called to mind the character’s origins in the xerography age. A lot of the animators tried to emulate the “shaggy edges” of xerography at certain points, but with the slick and smooth Toon Boom animation, it just doesn’t work as well, and thankfully, they don’t try too much.

"It's a good thing I noticed it. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen it."

What a wonderful final movie to end our “year” with. And what a ridiculous shame it made such lousy money. Sure, it’s a small, character-driven comedy and not a big actiony blockbuster, so I wouldn’t expect it to break any records, but it’s Winnie-the-Pooh. The brand recognition on that name alone should have been enough to push it above 100 million with just the merest whiff of competent marketing. Instead, it made a feeble 33 million. Yeah, this movie had a 30 million dollar budget. That is tiny for any film, and if this had been a hit, we might have seen more small, affordable, and really good 2D animated features from the studio in the future. But it looks like big, action-packed CGI is the trend of the studio, and while Wreck-it Ralph was certainly enjoyable, it did leave me a bit leery of the next few years. Frozen looks like a mess at the moment, and Big Hero Six is such an easy property to mess up. And I’ll certainly come back to review those when the time comes. For now, though, the review portion of Volume 1 of the blog is over.

We’ve still got a little more of My “Year” With Walt Disney Animation Studios to go, though. The next couple of weeks will bring some supplementary entries handing out some awards to the top songs, villain songs (which has to be its own category, because come on,), and the best movies, as well as de-wards (or whatever) to the worst songs and worst movies. I will also be presenting a list of the hottest gentlemen of Disney, based off popular vote, and the hottest ladies, based off my own personal opinions. Then it’s on to Volume 2, which I have titled: “My Probably More Than A Year Without Walt Disney Animation Studios“. It’s gonna be good.

"All right, Pooh. I guess you've thought this through." "Indeed I have."

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

* As previously, we get a live-action opening in Christopher Robin’s room, which looks a lot more lived in now. The set decorators deserve a special Oscar for perfectly showing the room of a boy with a wide range of interests and a bubbling creativity. Over the end credits, we see still shots of the movie scenes as Christopher Robin was imagining them, enacted by the stuffed animals with makeshift props.

* There is one more voice in the movie I didn’t mention, and that’s national treasure Huell Howser in a post-credits scene I don’t want to ruin. Just definitely stay to the end, and don’t read the cast list when it pops up, or it’ll spoil it.

* Not that you really need prompting to stay through the end credits. Even after the live-action stills are done, the credit scroll is filled with all sorts of funny little animated vignettes involving the characters.

"The Backson is horrible! Ferocious! And worst of all - terribly busy!"

*  In addition to being an excuse to get the plot started, Eeyore’s tail forms a great running gag, as it is replaced with an unraveling scarf, a spring (for Tigger training), the Pooh-coo clock, an umbrella, and an anchor.

* It is also replaced at one point by a balloon, which the other chiropractors consistently refer to as if it were alive.

* Okay, my computer barely autocorrects anything, but somehow I seem to have put a typo in “characters” that resulted in “chiropractors”. But you know what? Since they’re fixing Eeyore’s tail, I’ll leave it in. It fits.

"Found an anchor over there / Now it's on my derriere. / Not that anyone would care."

* One of the musical numbers is animated in a different style, a trick I always like. In this case, it’s chalk drawings as done by Owl on the small blackboard serving as Eeyore’s tail at the time.

* The gag of characters interacting with the text on the page is done even more this time around, and I love it.

"Everything is honey / There's a honey Pooh / he's just made of homey, so I guess I'll eat him, too."

"Isn't this super-duper fun, two Tiggers here together? / I used to be the only one, but two is twice as better!"

"As Pooh watched the honey honey away, his honey honey honey honey..."

"So Piglet dug and dug and dug. And Pooh supervised."

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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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