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.