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.