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?