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.

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.

D52 Week 17: 101 Dalmatians!

Well, it's that time again. Disney started digging itself yet another grave with yet another overgrown commercial disaster - in this case, Sleeping Beauty - and so, amid talks of closing down the animation studio once and for all, a decidedly low-budget film is thrown together, the company's future essentially riding on its detail-lacking shoulders. It's really quite amazing just how often the studio was close to collapsing during those first few decades! (Of course, by the 1960s, I'm sure they could've gotten by for awhile just producing live-action That Darn Cats and Westward Ho, the Wagonses....not forever, but for awhile.) 101 Dalmatians came about due to circumstances similar to the ones that caused Dumbo, so it's kind of impressive to see how much more comfortable this film is in its inexpensive skin than its predecessor. Its cheapness, in a way, is an art style! But it makes grand gestures beyond that, too, drawing a clear stylistic line in the sand between 1950s Disney, with its obsession with trying to be 1930s Disney still, and 1960s Disney, which was more willing to try different things, because everyone was starting to get high at that point in time anyway.