D52 Week 52 (FROM THE NEAR FUTURE): Wreck-It Ralph!

(WARNING: Spoilers for a newish film you very much may not have seen ahead!)

I'm not actively participating in this anymore, y'know, but I figure, if I just happen to watch one of the remaining movies, I might as well still say something, right? It's always nice to still have the option of subjecting others to my opinions.

As a writer (in theory) myself, I'm all too aware that virtually any story that anyone anywhere could think of has, with almost 100% certainty, already been told countless times in the past. Because, well, humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. It's kind of our thing. Other animals got all sorts of practical, yet fascinating and awesome, physical abilities; humans, instead, got the ability to make shit up, and against all reason, we've done pretty well for ourselves with that. Anyway, objectively speaking, nothing is original, ever. And yet, things still feel original to us. Why is that, when they clearly aren't? It's a simple question of conviction. Do the people behind a story honestly believe in it, or are they simply running down a checklist, making sure it has all the essential components that make it recognizable as a story? Despite the frequently gorgeous animation, the often catchy songs, and their admirably patriotic support of the all-American "non-A-listers whose voices you might nonetheless hopefully recognize" industry, the Disney Renaissance all too often felt like the latter, as I've liked pointing out a lot. And then DreamWorks achieved box office prowess, and Disney shifted to marking off essential film components on a wackier checklist for much of the 2000s. By comparison, Wreck-It Ralph feels like a revelation. It's got just as many storytelling cliches as the far less impressive Disney films that came before it, but it engages them with a renewed sense of self-confidence. They're not just half-heartedly checking them off; they're all here for a reason, and that alone makes this probably the best thing Disney has done in at least a decade and a half.

(Perhaps it helps that video games themselves are positively overflowing with obvious cliches. One could argue, then, that if anything they enhance the atmosphere here.)

Nothing Exciting Ever Happens.

Hi, blog! I'm sorry I've been neglectfully neglecting you. That's just awful of me, and I'm sorry. How can I ever make it up to you?

You can't. I'm really, really pissed off and I'm never, ever gonna forgive you. I think we should see other blogpeople.

I....I know, I was being selfish, but this isn't me, honest! I can do better, really I can! P-please....just give me one more chance....

*sigh* Okay, fine. Go ahead.

...what? Really? I just.....I didn't expect you to give in so easily.

Yeah, well, I don't have much self-esteem.

Cool. Okay, where to start?

D52 Week 40: The Emperor's New Groove!

There's no shortage of divisive films in the Disney canon - at least three of which involve offensive Asian stereotype cats - but The Emperor's New Groove has to be the most curiously divisive. It divides the realm of People Who Watch Disney Films into two categories, with almost stunningly clean-cut precision. Those who watch Disney films because they're just general animation fans tend to like it, because it's something different; but those who watch Disney films out of the belief that they're inherently superior to other animated films tend to look down on it, because it's SILLY, like something produced by one of those OTHER studios, harrumph. Granted, yes, this is a very silly movie, and even in its most theoretically tense moments, it chooses instead to lovingly embrace Teh Wacky. But still, people. Go harrumph yourselves.

Where does Jesse fall? Well, frankly, I'm in the former category. I've never thought there was anything admirably consistent about Disney, quality-wise - aside from the Pixar films they merely distribute, at least. Sometimes, their in-house productions are good. Sometimes they're not. Oftentimes they're forgettable. They're consistent where it gets tiresome to be consistent, like using the same fucking story in roughly 80% of their movies; and they're inconsistent everywhere else. What makes Disney so special? Damned if I know! I'm certainly not a big enough fan to enjoy watching a different Disney film EVERY SINGLE WEEK. (I'm certainly also not a big enough fan to think it's an even remotely romantic idea to spend a honeymoon at a Disney-themed amusement park. You're welcome, Tails.)

Indeed, when I expressed my interest in the D52 thingamajig, I thought it would mostly be a recurring sort of discussion topic at most, until it unwittingly morphed into THIS, which is not a consistently consistent source of fun. Anyway, at least I was less frustrated with this particular week. Because, you see, I fall into the former category.

D52 Week 39: Dinosaur!

Congratulations are in order for Gurgi and, um....other, even less memorable characters. The Black Cauldron is no longer my least-favourite D52 film!

We have a most puzzling paradox, really: Dinosaur would've been considerably less boring had it, well, allowed itself to be "boring"! It's absolutely absurd that they went through all the trouble of making these realistic, detailed dinosaur models, then completely ruining that by giving them goofy cartoon voices - to the degree that Della Reese's voice is goofy, anyhow. Um. Well, it's goofy relative to the visuals, anyway. If Della Reese really was a dinosaur, nobody would take her seriously, and Touched by an Anchisaurus would've been cancelled after just one season, instead of *consults Wikipedia* holy shit Touched by an Angel was on the air as recently as 2003? I like the stories about angels, unicorns, and elves, now I like those stories as much as anybody else, but....seriously, that's kind of sad, isn't it? When you consider all the amazing series out there whose lives were cut tragically short because networks don't get those young people and their internets, and then TOUCHED BY A FUCKING ANGEL gets NINE SEASONS??? Screw you, CBS, and your freakishly old audience!

Consisting of dinosaurs, you could say.


Which brings me back to the movie I'm ostensibly supposed to be writing about. *takes a deep breath*

D52 Week 38: Fantasia 2000!

Hard to believe it's only been eight months since I took a look at the original Fantasia (my first full-fledged D52 review, from an apparently happier time in my life!), and yet, here we are. Fastest fifty-nine years EVER! Of course, it wasn't the first time a sequel had been proposed: in the 80's, your friend and mine Wolfgang Reitherman proposed something called Musicana, "an ambitious concept mixing jazz, classical music, myths, modern art and more, following the old Fantasia format". And then this was ditched, because Recyclerman was physically unable to do anything potentially interesting by that point in that career. Why, the mere THOUGHT of doing that eventually killed him, so it was shelved. But then, in 1990, Roy Disney entered the fray, feeling the need to prove that he is every bit as much a Disney as his Uncle Waltie; and so, following in his footsteps, he produced a Fantasia film that ended up heralding the end of a period of critical acclaim and commercial successes for the studio. Just as Fantasia begets Dumbo and Melody Time, Fantasia 2000 begets Treasure Planet and Home on the Range. Thanks a lot, dudes.

Still, that shouldn't affect one's opinion on the quality of the Fantasiae themselves. After all, we should be fair, and impartial, right? So, come join me in being an impartial fairy, as I take a segment-by-segment look through Disney's first package-style film in quite some time! (It's easier to not be dreading a package film when I know that it won't be succeeded by, like, six more.)

D52 Week 37: Tarzan!

And thus, the period somewhat arbitrarily known as the Disney Renaissance comes to an end, forever. With this most momentous of occasions, one very important question comes to mind: What is it about nature-based settings that predominately feature animal characters that brought out this weird urge in Disney to hire famous pop singer-songwriters, to contribute awkward quasi-ethnic songs? There's something very 1990s about slow pop ballads set to tribal chanting and percussion, isn't there?

Yes, Tarzan is, in many ways, a good note for this era to go out on. It's really pretty! There are some genuinely interesting characters! The action scenes are nicely done! The biggest problem with the film can be summed up quite simply: Phil Collins. The again, the biggest problem with most things Phil Collins is involved with can be summed up in the same way. A Disney film doesn't have to be a musical to succeed, but if it's going to lean heavily on its soundtrack - and they often do - then those songs should be, y'know, organic and entertaining at best, unobtrusive at worst. Phil Collins manages none of these things. (Of the many petty things Trey Parker and Matt Stone have pettily been pissed off about over the years, losing to Phil Collins might be one of the most reasonably petty of them all.)

D52 Week 36: Mulan!

Y'know, the Disney Renaissance experience seems to be really hampered when you watch all of these movies back-to-back (as are a lot of cumulative Disney experiences, apparently). How wonderful it must've been to be moviegoers in the 90s - I wasn't allowed to see movies at that time, period, so I wasn't one - and have a new gorgeously drawn Disney film almost every year! Why, that's almost just long enough to forget enough about the previous one to feel like the new one's, well, new! Whereas, when you watch them all back-to-back, it's a little wearying. That barely concealed sadistic side of us all seizes on the repetition to come gradually more to the forefront, practically begging to see even ONE movie that doesn't end in unearned happy lovey-dovey romancings. For all the intriguing new directions they go in on a visual level, and all the surprisingly well-cast characters that pop up, it still always seems to boil down to the same rusty old story mechanisms, creaking away, until the end of time itself. Is this literally the only type of plot they could dream up at this time? Seriously, dudes??

And so, we come to Mulan, a film where our heroine mentions on precisely one occasion that she thinks her commander is hot, and he can't bring himself to murder her for being a woman. Clearly, They Should Totally Be Together, forever!!! ♥

D52 Week 35: Hercules!

I can't help but wonder if I would've enjoyed this movie more had I not been overexposed to James Woods' episodes of Family Guy while living in one of the few states even worse than Montana!

After the grimness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I suppose it's only logical to have some palette-cleansing silliness. (And when you think of silly stories, the first thing that comes to mind is Greek mythology, right???) As such, like Aladdin a few years back, we get an ostensibly serious figure who ends up being voiced by a Particularly Unlikely Celebrity whose fast-talking mannerisms surely take forever for whichever fool(s) ended up being responsible for animating them. Of course, regardless of how James Woodsed out I might be for one lifetime, Robin Williams as the Genie makes his Hades seem reigned-in and relatively tame by comparison, in that he actually has, y'know, an actual concrete characterization and stuff. (Not that I'm implying that Ed Sullivan impressions don't count as characterization in and of themselves, but-- oh, actually, I TOTALLY AM.) And, yeah, again, there's kind of a romance somewhere in there, with a lady who's forced to get close to the Big Bad against her will - which is also more tolerable than some of the previous examples of this. Despite trying a couple of interesting things, Hercules is pretty much one of the more formulaic entries from the Renaissance era, but at least it's formulaic in a competent way, I guess!

D52 Week 34: The Hunchback of Notre Dame!

As a general rule, with the past Disney films we've covered, when someone boasts of how a particular movie is "unusually dark", what they secretly mean is that it's forgettable at best, horrible at worst, with no real personality. "Sleeping Beauty is unusually dark compared to other Disney films of its era!" Yeah, because everyone's drawn somewhat more angularly? Because our villainess has a less vivid skin tone than even some albinos, which is used in place of giving her an actual personality? Big deal! "The Black Cauldron is one of Disney's darkest films, period!" Well, OF COURSE it is. Having to put up with Gurgi would give ANYONE dark thoughts.

Darkness hasn't served Disney well in the past, is my point. But, somehow, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is different, not to mention even darker than either of those two films, because it's taking on real-world issues! Social injustice! Religious intolerance! Strumpetism! The idea that someone with a name like Frollo can be anything other than wacky! The really surprising thing is that it's actually willing to analyze these rather serious issues that it drags into the fray, and the result is one of Disney's most surprisingly thoughtful films, and probably the most underrated part of the Renaissance.

...though, somehow it's appropriate that people lock this film away in the belltower of their minds instead of trying to appreciate it at all.

D52 Week 33: Pocahontas!

Well, you have to give Pocahontas credit for one thing, at least. It's a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans than Peter Pan!

But, yes. Everyone knows that Pocahontas is a film with an incredibly naïve worldview, a film with the audacity to pretend that everything's gonna be alright between European settlers and Native Americans from now on, and - furthermore - a film that abandons pretty much every genuinely interesting thing that actually happened in its subjects' lives for the sake of retelling The Fox and the Hound, as a romance, with human people. (I suppose there's also a healthy splash of far-less-magical-and-interesting The Little Mermaid in here, too.) But let's give them the benefit of the doubt, okay? Don't the majority of biopics oversimplify their subjects' lives and throw out the most uniquely interesting bits in favour of telling a more comfortably familiar story? That's just what they do, because, in all fairness, it's quite difficult to compress most interesting lives into less than two hours. Surely we can just put aside the pseudo-historicality of it and just enjoy it as a sweet and romantic romance, right??

Well, no. No matter what, Mel Gibson is always Mel Gibson. Even Disney Mel Gibson!

D52 Week 32: The Lion King!

The Lion King is, by a significant margin, the most successful of Disney's Renaissance era films, which is honestly kind of surprising, because it's also probably the strangest. The Little Mermaid? Not particularly weirder than the original tale, though certainly less depressing! Beauty and the Beast? They actually came up with reasonable reasons to have household objects sing songs and, furthermore, to make people drink fluid poured forth from Angela Lansbury's nose! Aladdin? Who cares if Aladdin is arbitrarily Arabian instead of Chinese, because you're not expected to pay attention to anyone who isn't Robin Williams anyhow! But The Lion King is pretty inexplicable, when you get down to it. It's kinda sorta Disney's adaptation of Hamlet, except with animals. And not anthropomorphic animals living in an otherwise human-style society, like Robin Hood, even! They're normal animals, living normal animal lives, and they even eat each other like normal animals, except they talk and worship certain lions as kings-slash-demigods. The worst side-effect of realistic animals is that, of course, our main character's Disney love interest is, at best, a cousin of some sort; at worst, his half-sister. Because, y'know....it's a fun film for the entire family! *wink wink*

And which popular pop artist's music is the obvious choice to accompany this backdrop of murder and political feline turmoil and incest? Why, do you even have to ask? Elton John, of course!

Jesse's Summer of Improvised Vegetable Shakes: Carrot!

Okay, so I've finally got around to this one. I absolutely adore carrots in liquid form, perhaps to a strange degree! You don't even KNOW how excitable I get when I come across a fruit juice blend that happens to prominently feature carrot as well. Of course, they're not always easy to find, so I've gotten in the habit of keeping pure carrot juice on hand, to enhance any other kind of juice I might end up drinking. Not only is it tasty, but it delusionally allows me to believe that the sugary beverage I'm drinking is somehow healthy for me! It's a win-win!

When the time came to try shake-ifying carrots, I thought back to some rather tasty honey-glazed carrots I made a few years back. First, I lightly steamed my lucky chosen carrot, and chopped it up, and threw it in the blender, along with a squirt or two of honey, for sweetness. Rounding out the shake package, of course, was some whole milk, and a splashlet of vanilla - because I just like vanilla, okay?

The verdict? Perry the Platypus is hilarious.

(And I liked the shake, because I like carrots, but in all honesty, I think sweet potatoes possibly lend themselves better to shakes than carrots - but maybe I'd just need to try a more concrete recipe. Anyone?)

D52 Week 31: Aladdin!

No offense intended to you, Mr. Robin Williams, but did you SERIOUSLY think Disney wasn't gonna spill the beans about your Geniein'?

I don't mean to imply that Disney is inherently untrustworthy like that, though....yes, they definitely are, actually. Mostly, though, what I'm saying is that the dude was, y'know, THE STAR OF THE ENTIRE FREAKING MOVIE. Sure, it's named Aladdin, after its main character, but he's certainly not charismatic enough to really be the star, exactly. (He's voiced by Scott Weinger, who is cosmically not allowed to be the star of anything, after all!) There's a romance of some sort going on here, and some power plays - both political and magickal - by none-too-subtly-darker-skinned-than-everyone-else villains, and best of all a MONKEY, but Disney isn't fooling anyone. This film exists so that people can listen to Robin Williams improv without actually having to look at Robin Williams himself. If only they'd do that to him now, in the present day, after he's decided to abandon all pretence of being anything but a hairy, disgusting gorilla...

Jesse's Theory of Better Emotional Understanding, via Not Trying To Understand Emotions At All, Really

"I know what it's like to have anxiety and depression. I feel anxious and depressed sometimes, too!"

There's something distinctly obnoxious about having mood disorders that also fall into the realm of words that everyone uses to describe themselves whenever anything mildly unpleasant happens to them. They're always so pleased with themselves, because they can actually understand what someone less fortunate is going through, which is a noble and wonderful thing for them to do, they think. As well-meaning as they may be, of course, they're wrong. Feeling a little bit down once and awhile isn't the same thing has having a clinical depression, which makes you feel really, REALLY down, more often than not! Feelingly mildly anxious when doing something that's generally regarded as being stressful isn't the same thing has having Social Anxiety Disorder, which entails heart-pounding terror when doing things as simple as checking the mail!

You can blame it all you want on simple, harmless ignorance, but making such rash assumptions about things that can actually make people so very miserable is anything but harmless, I'd think...

D52 Week 30: Beauty and the Beast!

Do you ever feel pressured to like a movie, just because someone terribly important to you already absolutely adores it? If you're one of the rare people who happens to know my beloved Taylor but somehow isn't already aware, Beauty and the Beast is pretty much her favourite Disney film, ever. (To be fair, though, I'm assuming she HASN'T seen Home on the Range yet.) And, well, yes, of course I've already seen it, but I was only in elementary school at the time. (Or grade school, or primary school, or whatever you prefer.) So, it's not like I remembered it vividly or anything. I found myself actually worrying about it a little bit! "Oh god, what if I end up not liking this? Will she disown me? Will I not get any tonight?" There's a lot of pressure when it comes to having to form an honest opinion about something someone close to you holds so near and dear to their hearts. So, you can imagine my relief when, yes, Beauty and the Beast actually was genuinely good! Relative to the previous Renaissance fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, it's definitely a lot more focused, with a less head-scratching story, and a sense of emotion that its predecessor couldn't be bothered to muster.

Which is to say, yes, I did get some after all.

Jesse's Summer of Improvised Vegetable Shakes: Sweet Potato!

So, um, yeah. Sometimes I agree to weird stuff, and then make it even weirder by deciding to make it an official thing! Vegetable shakes? Sure, why not, let me arbitrarily make this a thing.

I'd originally intended to start off with a carrot milkshake - that's the idea from which my summer experiment emerged - but it seems like SOMEONE in this house is dead set on stealing my carrots, every single time I buy them, as soon as possible. So let's settle for something that probably makes more sense as a milkshake in the first place. Something SWEET. Sweet potatoes!

D52 Week 29: The Rescuers Down Under!

It's easy for someone in this day and age to look back and say, "Why, golly gee willikers, everybody! Disney was on such a hot streak by this point, why would they even bother making a sequel to such a minor film as The Rescuers?" As though The Little Mermaid instantaneously gave the company the right to immediately return to full-blown arrogant cockiness. But, how was Disney supposed to know, really? Proportionately, Mermaid wasn't a much larger box-office smash than The Fox and the Hound, which also had a relatively big budget. And what happened when Disney took THAT film's success to mean they could have some degree of confidence in themselves? The Black Cauldron happened, that's what! By this point, Disney had been financially bipolar for SO LONG.....how was Jeffrey Katzenberg supposed to NOT grow more paranoid with each and every box office success? Minor though it may be, The Rescuers WAS a success, and through Katzie's haze of paranoia, a safe sequel to a relatively recent success probably seemed like, well....the safest possible way they could proceed. Of course, NOW we know that it..............wasn't. Insert your favourite cliché pertaining to hindsight here!

D52 Week 28: The Little Mermaid!

Here's something I was discussing with my tasty li'l cupcake, Taylor, while we were watching this, that I feel would be worth recycling here, for her to re-read, and also, the one or two other people who might pay attention to this blog. (And the poor souls who stumble upon my blog while hoping to find actual, substantive information on "Bongo", which nobody remembers, at all.) Romance, as a "genre", seems to be subjected to even more scrutiny than just about anything else, and that's because, well....it's one of the most subjective things in fiction, isn't it? You can judge a mystery by how well the logic ties together, for instance, and even something as objectively subjective as comedy CAN kind of be measured. (PROTIP: Chickens are always amusing.) But romance....EVERYBODY has a different view of what romance is, and so, in my mind, setting out to write a romance is a really risky thing!

For instance, some people see a sense of noble sadness in unrequited love, whereas others think it's just creepy. (When it happens in real life, who feels what way about it tends to depend very much on who's, um, giving, and who's receiving.) And some people feel brightness and happiness and general optimism when they hear tales of "love at first sight", whereas others will say, hey, c'mon, dudes, that's just silly and impractical. And then there are the idiots who think falling in love with one person means abandoning everyone else of importance in one's life, which is...well, I'd like to think that's more objectively stupid, but maybe it's not? Actually, for proof of how much people's taste in romance differs in weird ways, look no further than Twilight. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FIND THAT ROMANTIC. And there are apparently weirdos out there who find The Little Mermaid romantic, too, though I am, shall we say............not one of them.

D52 Week 27: Oliver & Company!

Did you know? The Disney Renaissance is just around the corner! Next week, it officially kicks off with The Little Mermaid, and....well, okay, I have a confession to make, I've never actually seen it in its entirety, I don't think. I've heard the songs, and I remember the silly male anatomy-related controversies, but for one reason or another, I've never actually watched the movie itself. So, for now, I'll unquestioningly agree with what the animation scholars tell me. It must be good, right? I mean, the main character is a redhead, and they're some of my favourite people, sexually.

But first, Disney needed a kick in their pants to recommit to the movie musical format. And so, here, we have a smaller-scale effort in the musical department. Oliver & Company deserves credit for being, in a way, what ultimately served to point Disney towards one of their longest winning streaks in years. What else does it deserve credit for? Ummmmm......well, Young Joey Lawrence probably appreciated the work to bridge the gap between Gimme a Break and Blossom, maybe?

D52: The Halfway Point Roundup Thingamajig!

Oh, hey, look at the time. Apparently we're already halfway through this silly little project! Twenty-six down, twenty-six to go. (Weird to think that nearly half of Disney's films were released just in the last two decades, isn't it?) What have I taken away from this so far? Well, um......pioneering as they might've been, there's no denying that Disney's early stuff is HIGHLY uneven. I can't think of a single film so far that I liked 100%, with no major caveats. When Disney himself was in charge, a recurring hang-up I had was the general lack of emotion characters tended to display, especially females in abusive situations. And then Wolfgang Reitherman came along, and gave everything visual character, but also made for stories that were, undeniably, pretty shallow. And then.....well, let's just say that it's clear that they didn't know where to go from there.

But now the Disney Renaissance is around the corner, and that'll be an entirely different story! And hopefully a better one. But, before we march forward into a fairly thick gauntlet of princesses, allow me to take a look back and share a few things I liked, and a few others I didn't, in the best format of all: ARBITRARY LISTIES.

D52 Week 26: The Great Mouse Detective!

It's a bit strange, when you think about it, that Sherlock Holmes first popped up one-and-a-quarter centuries ago, and is being borrowed so heavily from even to this day. Earlier this millennium, the formerly number one rated drama on television, House, was a fairly blatant ripoff homage to Holmes, at least conceptually, and actually was pretty much only amusing when Hugh Laurie got to pull the old Holmesian deduction routine. Even more recently, Hollywood-type people have decided to stop beating around the bush and just revive Holmes wholesale, with those insane big-budget films directed by Guy Ritchie, and the supposedly quite good (and presumably less insane) BBC series, and the upcoming CBS series which sounds like basically the same thing as the BBC series, but boring, and with an audience in their eighties, because it's CBS. So, yeah. The Sherlock Holmes stories still have legs.

That still doesn't mean it's not a strange concept to adapt the Holmes universe with mice that aren't Holmes and Watson, but happen to live in the same flat as they do, and have many of the same character quirks, so they might as well be. I can get behind the idea that Basil thinks Sherlock is totally rad and wants to emulate him, even though the movie downplays this to a confusing degree. But, really, what are the odds that this Holmes-adulating mouse would just happen, conveniently, to meet another mouse, that is exactly like Watson in every way, even down to his participation in the Second Anglo-Afghan War? For that matter, why were mice participating in that war at all? It's a really bizarre concept for one book, let alone several as well as a major motion picture. It's nuts! But let's not hold that against it, okay?

Squaring the Cylinder, or All's Wellbutrin That Ends Wellbutrin!

Hi. Sometimes I still have weird thoughts that aren't related to Disney films! Tonight's one of those nights where I'm having trouble sleeping, because anti-depressants have a way of simultaneously making me drowsy and giving me insomnia. (They also have a way of making me more depressed, always, no matter what it is. Truly, anti-depressants are the masters of confusing contradictions!) I'm hoping that having to endure my own ramblings on will finally be the thing that renders me unconscious for the night.

So, let's say that, hypothetically, you were an employee of some sort of government agency, of the sort that has to drug test a bunch of people. Let's look past the idea that you've somehow stumbled into a job where you have the misfortune of having to process copious amounts of urine, which sounds like a pretty horrific nightmare to me, as it would be to anyone, really, who isn't gross and icky and awful. (Hello, unspecified former roomie!)

Your hypothetical job is a very delicate one, of course. There's so many ways that things could go horribly awry. We've all heard about that silly myth about how indulging in a tasty poppy seed muffin can mark you as a reprehensible heroin addict and, oh wait, it's totally not a myth at all! And then, of course, there's the issue of pills.

D52 Week 25: The Black Cauldron!

In 1959, Disney released their noble experiment, Sleeping Beauty, their first film produced using the Technirama process, allowing for a wider picture and more detailed art, especially the backgrounds, which artist Eyvind Earle poured a theretofore unprecedented amount of time into, to get them juuuuuust right. The film was also an exercise in crafting a darker, more realistic narrative than was standard for the studio at the time. (It immediately followed a particularly fluffy movie about doggies in lurve, after all.) And Sleeping Beauty was such a smashing critical and commercial success that, twenty-six years later, they decided to recreate that magic with The Black Cauldron, another unusually dark Disney fantasy filmed in glorious Technirama!

By which I mean, nobody really liked Sleeping Beauty, and it lost Disney a lot of money, so I don't know why the fuck they thought it would go any better this time. Actually, it managed to go even worse. Idiots.

D52 Week 24: The Fox and the Hound!

I know, I know. I'm running really far behind on these. I have my excuses, of course - the people who matter know, and the people who don't matter don't know. But, for now, I'm gonna pretend that my slowness in getting this up is just my homage to the laid back country bumpkin ways of the characters in The Fox and the Hound. Yeah, that's the ticket. And, I suppose I have to make a confession right out of the gate. As someone who lives in rural America, I kind of hate rural America. (There's a LOT of Amos Slades living 'round these parts.) I'm probably predisposed to dislike this, in the same way that I was predisposed to dislike Pixar's Cars. But, y'know, we'll see. It's interesting to note that Walt Disney really didn't set many of his features in rural settings, though. Even the ones that DID feature, like, barns and shit only included them as an obstacle for characters based in more urban settings, e.g. 101 Dalmatians. So, for as traditional and old-fashioned and horribly dated as it might seem, this really IS still a studio with an identity crisis trying new stuff and seeing what sticks.

D52 Week 23: The Rescuers!

Wow. It's already the last week of this project that I can whine about Wolfgang Reitherman? Though I've enjoyed the "sketchy" animation over the last decade and a half, it's been obvious that I've been increasingly unimpressed with his habit of recycling, over and over and over again. (Perhaps calling it "recycling" is, itself, giving this practice too much credit. I love recycling! But this....this is just lazy.) But, then I realise that I can't really whine about him all that much this week either! With a couple other directors also, um, directing, and a bunch of new animators stepping up, there's a distinctly different feel from any other Disney film, not only during Wolfgang's wolfreign, but up to this point in general. You'd think that change would be a good thing by this point, but The Rescuers would be their last reasonably successful film for, like, twelve years. I guess they could only keep cannibalizing their past efforts to maintain the post-Waltie goodwill for so long. Now, the studio has to try, and fail, on their own merits, which is probably not the best thing in the world for them. Why, it would take some sort of miraculous renaissance, of some sort, to save them from themselves!

D52 Week 22: The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh!

Does it count as an embarrassing confession to say that I really, really loved Winnie the Pooh when I was a rather small child? I never got to watch The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh as a whole, but I did own the three shorts individually on VHS. I was also quite fond of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, the series, and while I figure it probably wouldn't hold up terribly well today, I assume it would hold up better than, say, something like The Book of Pooh, or that one where they killed off Christopher Robin so they could replace him with a little girl. I'm not fully sure WHY I liked Pooh so much, because it's actually really hard to put early childhood tastes into words, but I figure it's just because, at one point, when I was young, I just had a particularly gentle sense of humour, something which probably isn't as true now. So, I really didn't know what to expect when I revisited these three shorts so many years later! And the end result was a surprisingly pleasant one. The TV serieseses that followed were very much for small, small children, but in these original shorts, there was something more than that - a feeling that the Hundred-Acre Wood was a place, even a society, as opposed to just a series of forest-like backdrops for semi-educational quasi-hijinx. (Confession: I have not, at this time, seen the 2011 film, so I don't know if this bitchiness applies to it yet or not.)

D52 Week 21: Robin Hood!

Part of me has to wonder if I would've enjoyed Robin Hood more if I hadn't first watched it now, in the continuing presence of the Tea Party movement. No matter how much of a twat Prince John was, no matter how totally justified everyone in the story was in their stances on the issue, there's still a bit of reflexive eye-rollingness now every time I hear one of these characters complaining about being overtaxed by our strawman villains. Such is how history works, I suppose, as the reasoned objections of long ago become sullied by contemporary pettiness, time and time again, worn down by the Satire Treadmill. (The pre-eminent target of the Satire Treadmill these days, of course, is Hitler, who went from being one of history's greatest monsters, to being a comical and/or provocative reference point to compare every mildly annoying politician anywhere to.) But it's not the film's fault that I'm watching it in a year where the subject matter is just a little wearying, is it? Of course it isn't. I won't have to look too far to find legitimate flaws, though.

D52 Week 20: The Aristocats!

Well, hopefully without being too terribly morbid, I think I have to at least acknowledge the elephant in the room here. With Walt Disney having nobly donated his body to science - the science of putting things in fancy freezers - we come to the first film made without his guiding hand. And, yes, I've done a fair amount of complaining about his simplistic artistic choices throughout this project thus far, probably more than people were willing to tolerate, honestly. Even still, I want to be absolutely sure to give credit where credit is due and acknowledge what a truly stabilizing force the man was. As conceptually strange as some of the things we've seen have been, would you say that any of it felt somehow un-Disney? You really couldn't say that, no matter how much it was clear that the studio was having yet another identity crisis at any point. (Well, okay, I guess the package films.) But now....now we're approaching a point where you very much could say that. Without such a unifying force pulling the strings anymore, of course things would start changing and of course visible uncertainty would start setting in. It was inevitable! Sometimes the new directions would work. Sometimes they wouldn't. Two months of confusion separate us from the relative stability of the Disney Renaissance, starting with The Aristocats.

D52 Week 19: The Jungle Book!

Something this project has made me actually stop and consider, for the first time, is just how utterly random Disney's taste in books to adapt really is! Yes, of course the fairy tale adaptations make sense. But then you wonder, for instance, why one would choose to adapt something like The Hundred and One Dalmatians instead of, say, all sorts of infinitely more notable novels. Or why you'd try to make a movie out of Dumbo, a Roll-a-Book with only a couple lines of text. Looking to the future, you have to wonder why Disney looked to the picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson for the big screen, when that would entail creating, like, 95% of the story from scratch. And here, this week, we have the oddity of a film based on a book that was so very committed to just being a book that it went as far as to have the word "book" RIGHT IN ITS NAME.

D52 Week 18: The Sword in the Stone!

Following the Sleeping Beauty Incident of '59, Disney's animation division wasn't doing so very well. And though Walt could never bring himself to close it outright, for sentimental reasons, it's clear that this was a point where live-action endeavours were what really kept the company alive. It's probably safe to say that one of the most fondly remembered of those films was 1965's Mary Poppins. (One will find that Mary is far bitchier than they might remember; don't worry, however, Dick Van Dyke's British accent is exactly as spotty as you remember.) It's a delightful little tale, even though it's not so much a proper narrative so much as it's a series of small, unconnected adventures with scenes of the kids' dreadfully-boring-but-gradually-improving home lives stuck between them. It's a movie that everybody remembers. Of course, it's not part of this project, so I can't really talk about it.

But, as it turns out, you can say many of the same things about The Sword in the Stone, which nobody really ever seems to remember, sadly.

D52 Week 17: 101 Dalmatians!

Well, it's that time again. Disney started digging itself yet another grave with yet another overgrown commercial disaster - in this case, Sleeping Beauty - and so, amid talks of closing down the animation studio once and for all, a decidedly low-budget film is thrown together, the company's future essentially riding on its detail-lacking shoulders. It's really quite amazing just how often the studio was close to collapsing during those first few decades! (Of course, by the 1960s, I'm sure they could've gotten by for awhile just producing live-action That Darn Cats and Westward Ho, the Wagonses....not forever, but for awhile.) 101 Dalmatians came about due to circumstances similar to the ones that caused Dumbo, so it's kind of impressive to see how much more comfortable this film is in its inexpensive skin than its predecessor. Its cheapness, in a way, is an art style! But it makes grand gestures beyond that, too, drawing a clear stylistic line in the sand between 1950s Disney, with its obsession with trying to be 1930s Disney still, and 1960s Disney, which was more willing to try different things, because everyone was starting to get high at that point in time anyway.

D52 Week 16: Sleeping Beauty!

Yes, in its later years, Disney would produce some thoroughly charming animated fairy tales that are hard not to love unless you're a soulless husk of a human being. And yet, these earliest attempts at princessy romance for movie theaters present the same sort of conundrum that watching, say, the first series of the British Whose Line does - I like what came of this later on, but seriously, how did anyone give it the chance to get to that point when it started out SO BAD? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella each had the excuse of their respective places in history as an excuse for just being mediocre; coming directly in the middle of a string of successful full-length features, Sleeping Beauty has no such excuse to save it. This one will have to stand on its own merits. And, um, seeing as how its merits are pretty much "like Snow White, but less whimsical", that.............might be a problem.

D52 Week 15: Lady and the Tramp!

Did you know that this could've very well been Disney's first full-length feature not based on a pre-existing work? A film called Lady was first pitched to Walt Disney in 1937, based on the gentle misadventures of studio story guy Joe Grant's Cocker Spaniel of the same name, but Disney ended up cutting off the project after preliminary storyboarding, because he thought it was dull, because of course something like that would be kind of dull. And then Disney read a short story in Cosmopolitan - yeah, apparently he read Cosmo, though to be fair that was before it was essentially softcore porn for the laaaadies - called "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog", and bought the rights to it, just so he could add a Happy Dan-esque character to Lady. And thus, the "and the Tramp" was born! It's a weird combination of things that both sound simply dreadful, and yet somehow the film itself is Disney's most consistently solid film since....well, probably since before the war. (Incidentally, the actual first Disney full-length feature not based on a pre-existing work was also pet-based: The Aristocats, unless I'm mistaken.)

D52 Week 14: Peter Pan!

I don't know what it is about Peter Pan, but both Sexy Girlfriend-Type Person and I have been having a devil of a dickens of a time thinking of things to say about it! It's another one of those 1950s Disney films that isn't really overwhelmingly good or overwhelmingly bad, it's serviceable and it's just kind of.....there, existing to be re-released every decade or so, then quickly forgotten again. It's another one of those films that Walt Disney had wanted to make earlier in his career, but then it got pushed back, first by script changes, then by Hitler, finally emerging as a warmed-over chimaera of dozens of different possible adaptations of the story. At this point in time, the man was so obsessed with preventing his female characters from doing anything that might "cross the line", which of course was a problem when a lot of the films from this period have female main characters!

D52 Week 13: Alice in Wonderland!

Apparently, Walt Disney was just crazy about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. His first significant success as a film producer came with the short "Alice Comedies", before even Mickey Mouse and his more interesting friends. He very well could've even based his very first feature-length film on the stories, if not for the fact that Paramount released a live-action adaptation in 1933, which flopped, horribly. So, he revived the idea in the mid-1940s, featuring live-action Ginger Rogers interacting with cartoon characters, because the Alice stories are nothing if not the The Three Caballeros of Lewis Carroll's bibliography; after seeing this storyboarded out, though, Disney rejected the proposal upon realising that the Alice stories were, um, nothing, I guess. It took until 1951 to realise what he had finally deemed to be an acceptable adaptation! And I sure bet that was worth the wait, right??

D52 Week 12: Cinderella!

(Yes, this is rather late, but I kinda sorta have a reason?)

Can you imagine being a fan of theatrical animation in the 1940s? Not only was there all that non-animated war nonsense going on, but also, you had to go EIGHT WHOLE YEARS without a proper Disney animated feature to enjoy! And this was waaaaaay before you could just buy the old ones and re-watch them endlessly on some sort of home media format, too! Perhaps that's why Cinderella is remembered so very fondly, despite being middling as Disney's features go. (At least it's not a collection of shorts about international avians or something again!) Perhaps that's also why it so shamelessly attempts to emulate Disney's biggest (and almost only) financially successful animated feature up to that point, Snow White and the Seven Drawves.

D52 Week 11: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

At last, we reach the final film of the wretched 1940s! Nothing from the package film era is inherently awful on its own. Underwhelming, but not terrible. But when they're the only Disney thing you watch for a month and a half, it really does become a bit like torture, doesn't it? As the dessert bar at Disney's metaphorical package film buffet, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad concludes our extended gorgefest with something that would've actually been pretty good on its own, but now that we're stuffed, it's not so appetising, because we're not Ichabod Cranes that can just eat and eat indefinitely, defying the laws of physics in the process. If we eat any more, we might vomit all over the place! And that would be quite the buzzkill, now wouldn't it?

D52 Week 10: Melody Time!

Imagine you're some sort of child in the late 90s. Your mother would like to do something nice for you, and so she decides to buy you a Disney movie, in the popular Video Home System media format of the day. So many wonderful choices, both classic and recent! Now imagine that your mom's really weird and has ended up giving you Melody Time instead. You've just been imagining something not-as-bleak-as-usual from my childhood! And I imagine you'd be just as disappointed as I was. This just really is not a movie for young children anytime in the last couple decades. The Andrews Sisters! The Sons of the Pioneers! Horticulture! This did not interest me! I haven't dragged out that old VHS tape in over a decade because, um, it just didn't sound like fun. But was there any chance that I might enjoy it more now, ostensibly being an adult and with a bit more of a historical perspective of the 1940s in Disney history?

Well, no. Not at all, obviously. But perhaps it could at least follow through with one of the concepts laid out during its titular song?

Mel-oh-dee Tiiiiime! It's time for sweet romance...

I'm going to hold you to that. I'd better be up to my ears in sweet romance with every single short or you're gonna get a knuckle sandwich, everyone involved with this film.

D52 Week 9: Fun and Fancy Free!

Just imagine being part of Walt Disney's film animation division in 1941! Everyone was riding high on the successes of two films and the failure of two others, and it seemed like the sky was the limit! Why, there you had a studio that could continue expanding indefinitely, starting countless new projects before even finishing the previous one, forever and ever, right?

Well, everyone who thought that was kind of a moron. Hitler happened and then the 1940s became the package film decade. Unlike Make Mine Music, with its mostly new (but low-budget, of course) shorts and general making mine music, Fun and Fancy Free was an attempt to blatantly burn off a couple half-completed feature film projects from before the war. The name, of course, comes from the fact that, well, they couldn't be bothered to find any sort of thematic link between the two segments. I've already got one - the climbing of plants is fairly important to both. Walt Disney's Plantastic Adventures?

D52 Week 8: Make Mine Music!

Oh, look, it's another musical package film! Huzzah?

It's odd to ponder the differences in circumstances between Fantasia and Make Mine Music. After all, both are essentially an attempt to say "Hey, isn't music neat?" via the medium of animation. Yet, whereas Fantasia was a misguided and overblown high-budget labour of love from a thriving animation tycoon, Make Mine Music is very much the opposite: a desperately (relatively) low-budget salvaging of leftover story ideas by a studio just scraping to get by. Fantasia was a collection of short films by well thought out design; Make Mine Music is a collection of short films because anything longer was literally infeasible. In the end, neither was a success when released, of course. While Fantasia ended up becoming a beloved classic over time, Make Mine Music is one of the least remembered films in Disney's entire animated features canon. Now, don't get me wrong, Fantasia is, by far, the superior film; but its weird little cousin who doesn't leave its own house very often actually has a little goodness to offer, too, buried beneath all the forgettableness of course.

D52 Week 7: The Three Caballeros!

It's really hard for me to talk about The Three Caballeros without repeating what I said about Saludos Amigos last week. Several weeks down the line, I just might find myself struggling to remember which bits were in which film. (The fact that package films are rarely able to find their own voice in the first place certainly doesn't help matters!) The 1940s for Disney were definitely more interesting behind-the-scenes than on the big screen, being turned into a propaganda machine, followed by a string of odd compilations cobbled together in a desperate attempt to gradually become profitable again. A film about that period in Disney history could be easily more interesting than the films from that period in Disney history.

D52 Week 6: Saludos Amigos!

It's always kind of a miserable experience to wade through WWII-era entertainment, which is usually maybe not so very good, to say the least. Of course, I realise that there were more pressing issues at the time than the arts, many of those issues involving Fox News alumnus Adolf Hitler (who is so loathed that Firefox's spellchecker refuses to even acknowledge his given name). In Disney's case, this caused a shaky financial situation that lead to them only being able to produce "package films" consisting of several shorts strung together, which - unlike the beautifully crafted shorts comprising the not-at-all cheap Fantasia - were (relatively) simply animated and not terribly distinguishable from Disney's theatrical shorts. Yes, Disney's theatrical shorts weren't bad-looking or anything, but they're a far cry from the visual craftsmanship of Disney's features, and that's especially disappointing coming off the sheer gorgeousness of Bambi. Did I mention that Saludos Amigos is only 42 minutes long? Yeah, everything about this particular "feature" sounds like a very underwhelming experience. But, the original theatrical poster promises that this was Walt Disney's "gayest musical Technicolor feature". So...here's hoping for some hardcore twink action?

Adapting Evanovich: Even Morons Deserve a Little Better Sometimes

I swear, there's nothing I hate more than being able to talk about this like some sort of knowledgeable expert or something! You see, last week, mom dragged me with her to see something she's been anticipating for years now: the film adaptation of Janet Evanovich's best-selling novel, One for the Money, her immortal tale of awful lady stereotypes poised as some sort of bold feminism. (Can you believe it? This chick knows nothing beyond the world of lingerie, and yet she's trying to be a bounty hunter to make ends meet, like a man! Isn't that adorable-slash-empowering???) Of course, my first exposure to Evanovich's oeuvre came back in August, where I quickly surmised that Janet Evanovich and/or her sweatshop team of ghostwriters are no-talent hacks and you really should not read the things that they do, ever. Yet, it wasn't that difficult to convince me to go. For one thing, movie theatres are the only place around here where you can get one of the most fuckably awesome sodas ever: Mr. Pibb. And also, the film sounded like a bloody trainwreck waiting to happen and, honestly, aren't trainwrecks fun to watch, too?

D52 Week 5: Bambi!

Most Montanans are heartless monsters who like murdering things with guns. That's a fact. Hunting's really big here. There's something about wide open spaces filled with adorable animals that seems to make people want to shoot all of them, repeatedly. I can't say I'm sure why. During my public schooling days, I knew a kid who actually rooted for The Man. When Bambi's mom got shot, he cheered! "I wanna shoot Bambi", he declared proudly! (Last I checked, that kid grew up into a meth addict - something else wide open spaces seem to make people do.) It always seemed unsettling to me that anyone in existence could react to that infamous scene - a scene whose inherent childhood trauma value was regarded as significant enough for the film to land on Time's "Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time" list, of all places - not with shock or even indifference, but with sadistic glee. When I went to rewatch it for this little project, I hadn't even seen Bambi in over a decade. I'd forgotten just about every detail of the storyline, but that scene I could still remember in vivid detail. Was that because the rest of the movie was genuinely uninteresting? Or was it just that nothing, no matter how good, could possibly be as memorable in the shadow of one of the most childhood-traumalicious of Disney's many childhood traumas?

D52 Week 4: Dumbo!

Last week, we covered Disney's first real financial failure; this week, I get to take a look at the outcome. After neither Pinocchio or Fantasia were an immediate success (thanks a lot, Hitler), Dumbo was thrown together as a quick way to recoup some of those losses. Not only is it really short (64 minutes, which is still slightly longer than 2011's Winnie the Pooh, I think), but the animation is noticeably a lot simpler than the lavish detail and, sometimes, outright beauty of the previous three Disney films. Given that, at times, the only thing those films had going for them was gorgeous visual craftsmanship, this might not bode well for Dumbo, which shows a similar disinterest in any sort of significant plotting. To compensate for this lack of visual endowment, though, Disney has clearly opted to stuff the metaphorical trousers of this film with the metaphorical sock of increased gag output. Did it work? Well, most critics seem to regard Dumbo as a charmingly crafted little movie in its own right, so...maybe?

D52 Week 3: Fantasia!

A Word From The Future: If you're reading through this blog in chronological order (and if you are, congratulations for being one of a very elite group of people, "elite" in this case meaning "small and insignificant" - and don't know what this is all about, let my acquaintances Kevin and Amanda, explain the what and the why and perhaps some other W word you're seeking. Basically, for each week of 2012, we watch one of Disney's 52 canonical theatrically released animated features, and post our thoughts. For the first two weeks, I just limited my thoughts to comments on their blog posts, which were so long and unwieldy that everyone involved thought I should just do it on my own. Those two movies will probably receive retroactive "official" write-ups, eventually, before the year is through - but, for now, here's the first piece I wrote for the project. (Oh, and also, my super-cool girlfriend also takes part in this. Give her a read too.)

Here I am, only three weeks into this silly thing, and already I've reached a film that I haven't seen before. It's hardly surprising, of course. Children rarely go out of their way to listen to classical music, and I suppose I was no exception. But, with age comes a more open mind, and perhaps it's for the best that I waited to experience Fantasia until I was ready for it (i.e. not a terrible child). Seeing the high esteem in which this odd highbrow experiment seems to be held, I found myself wondering whether this could truly hold up, or if it would just end up being a glorified Melody Time. (The question of whether or not my memories of Melody Time as being sort of terrible are still accurate will have to wait several weeks.)

Okay, maybe THIS will be the year where everything bets betterish!

A Word From The Future: I'll surely recap my New Years Resolution progress at some point later in the year, but......Jesus, if only I had known...

As always, the start of a new year means that people everywhere make promises to themselves, usually involving weight loss, that they probably have no real intention of actually keeping, to be perfectly honest. It's almost as grand a tradition as making films about how not believing in fictional characters is just plain wrong around Christmas, or having the President pardon a turkey that has been wrongly convicted of the heinous crime of being a turkey around Thanksgiving!