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!

Of course, while I understand why a Rescuers sequel exists, I'm having a harder time understanding why THIS, specifically, is that sequel. Sure, Bernard and Bianca make their initial appearance early enough, complete with a sitcom-quality misunderstanding derailing Bernard's attempt at a marriage proposal, and there's a few scenes with Jack, or Jake, I can't even remember which, because he's probably the least important character to have ever been involved in an honest-to-goodness love triangle. They don't start having any connection whatsoever with the main plot involving Cody and McLeach and your friendly neighbourhood Giant Eagle, though, until there's only about a third of the film left. Couldn't Jakejack have saved the kid all by his lonesome, anyway, without having to enlist international help? Sure, he's only one rodent, but if a Bob Newhart mouse is capable of single-handedly pulling a drowning child back to the surface, I posit that ANYTHING is possible!

Also questionable is the Australian setting. And I don't mean to imply that there's anything awful about setting your movie in Australia or anything! I don't have a personal vendetta against Australia, I swear! It's just that it seems to be trying too hard - like Disney was having a late reaction to the popularity of Crocodile Dundee. "See? We can do that, too! Look, it's the Sydney Opera House, so you KNOW it's Australia!* And there's a koala, and a platypus, and accents, and it's all so very Australian so PLEASE LOVE US!" Which is my typically terrible way of saying that it feels like a setting that emerges not so much from the story itself, organically, but because it was simply the most (theoretically) profitable place they could think of to set an otherwise fairly threadbare story.

And yet, with both the Rescuers part AND the Australia part of this Rescuers-in-Australia film as questionable as they are, this still winds up being considerably more fun than the first film! You can partly just attribute it to the vastly superior animation, the first 100% digitally animated film in fact, with the CAPS system co-developed with Pixar. And it's just.....so, so pretty. Yeah, there's some part of me that feels a little guilty for saying that, since it's replacing the ol' human touch with cold, mechanical, computery exactness, but.....sweet Jesus, it's so fucking pretty! And then you have the voice direction, with is VASTLY improved from the original. Bob Newhart actually sounds like Bob Newhart! Eva Gabor actually sounds like (a rather old) Eva Gabor! John Candy clearly gets to have more fun as Wilbur than Jim Jordan ever got to have as Orville! (Though, Kevin already did a far better job than I could hope to do at explaining why all the stuff surrounding his spinal injury - the most fun and whimsical sort of injury, y'know - are maybe not entirely comfortable, which I concur with.) And then we have our villain, Percival C. McLeach, who would be a pretty typical and boring poacher were he played by just anybody - but he's NOT played by just anybody, he's played my George C. Fucking Scott, so he ends up being pretty interesting after all.

I have to wonder why Bernard and Bianca are suddenly supposed to be a couple that we're supposed to care about, though. Were there any romantic undertones to their relationship in The Rescuers? I don't believe so! And now, all of a sudden, Bernard's ready to get hitched and we're supposed to unquestioningly buy into the concept that They Should Totally Be Together, even though they had no romantic interest before? ("But Jesse", you say, "a lot can change in thirteen years!" You mean like....mice invariably dying of natural causes?) I'm supposed to just blindly trust that Bianca would honestly be better off with Bernard than the Australian chap, solely because Bob Newhart is more famous than Tristan Rogers? The first film got by just fine without a silly love triangle, so this hardly seems necessary! Just like....all the other things I mentioned that were unnecessary in this film. But it's still pretty fun, in spite of those things!

I suppose I don't have much of interest to say this week, and I'm sorry. There's not much insight that one can really make about The Rescuers Down Under, though! It's bright, it's colourful, it's....probably a touch too violent, and I feel genuinely sorry for Joanna the Goanna. That sad little wave goodbye as Percy goes careening over the waterfall? That's genuinely kinda sad, too! Now whose lunchbox will she pilfer from, I ask you? And, yes, okay, maybe it IS the second film in twice as many weeks to have a big action climax wherein the Big Bad and our male mouse protagonist go flying off a high ledge of some sort, into a huge cloud of mist, only for the hero to come flying out shortly thereafter, very much alive, on some sort of flying thing. I never claimed this was a creative movie in any way! It's definitely an inferior effort to the two films that surround it, that's for sure. But....I don't know what else to say other than "It's still pretty fun"! Because that's what it is. Pretty fun. Good fun, and nothing else, which is at least more than the original had to offer.

.....oh, but there's one more egregiously soul-destroying thing about this film that I wanted to mention!

TERRIBLY AWFULLY UNNECESSARILY UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-DVD-AND-BLU-RAY DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK: The Rescuers Down Under in Los Angeles sees Bernard (really old Bob Newhart), Jake (Tristan Rogers, who would probably kill for a direct-to-DVD role by now), and Bianca (um...Arianna Huffington?) whisked off to the beautiful city of Los Angeles, where Jake's folksy Outback ways cause them embarrassment time and time again, because he just doesn't understand how large American cities work, at all! Ha ha ha! This time, they're on the trail of an art-smuggling movie producer (Eugene Levy?) who has kidnapped a child (Skai Jackson) for....no discernible reason? It's just a plot device to get the Rescuers [Down Under] involved. Features a cameo by Mike Tyson as "Mike, the Mouse Meditating in the Park"!








*It's actually illegal to show the city of Sydney in a movie without showcasing the opera house. Don't believe me? THEN GO AHEAD AND FIND AN EXCEPTION.