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.)

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!

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...

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.

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?

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!