In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
Fifty films in, it is a bit of surprise that Disney had not already co-opted the Brothers Grimm tale of Rapunzel for their abundant animated arsenal. One would expect the Grimm reserves, as well as those of Hans Christian Andersen, to be pilfered completely by now. What, pray tell, will the studio do when these sources of inspiration are all dried up? Certainly, this is a crisis for another day. 2010's Tangled opens with some glib narration by dashing rogue and flashy scoundrel Flynn Rider, who tells the tale of how a centuries-old woman stole the only child of benevolent royalty to harness the girl's magical hair, which has the power to restore youth and heal all wounds. The smarminess of Flynn at the outset is a little off-putting as he plays the cad and cracks wise underneath a calculated "smolder". Luckily, his cockiness doesn't reach the levels of sleaze emanated from say, Kuzco, in The Emperor's New Groove, and it soon falls by the wayside as he falls for Rapunzel and her long locks. He meets her after stealing the crown from the castle and falling upon her tower while looking for a place to hide.
The beautiful Rapunzel is fairly well-adjusted considering she has been locked inside a single room for all eighteen years of her life by an evil, manipulative woman who claims to be her mother and swears that the imprisonment is strictly for Rapunzel's safety. Sure, Rapunzel's best friend is a chameleon with whom she confides and consults at every opportunity, and she is paranoid, scared and woefully timid. Not to mention her hermit-like hairstyle, grown out to a full seventy feet and the surest sign that she has never seen another human being, let alone studied any sort of fashion. But other than all of that, Rapunzel is a sweet, smart, artistically gifted child who daydreams of innocuous pleasures like touching grass and watching a light show.
The film has a tendency to rely on slapstick humor a bit too much, particularly at the outset, where we watch as Rapunzel hits the gate-crashing Flynn over the head with a frying pan several times, repeatedly knocking him unconscious. This is followed by a sustained sequence of her attempting to hoist his limp body into a closet, which leads to more pratfalls and faceplants. It is a minor quibble and mostly tolerable, especially considering how the filmmakers could have easily resorted to the lower forms of humor practiced by their contemporaries, namely being manic, grotesque, or referential.
The animation throughout Tangled is opulent and breathtaking. The design of Rapunzel's tower is inspired, nestled in an idyllic valley and imbued with a gorgeous pastel palette. The logistics of working with Rapunzel's voluminous tresses is handled with complete aplomb. Her hair is a character unto itself in the film. Meanwhile, the action set pieces are all excellently choreographed, aided by some very deft camera work. A series of well conceived tracking and crane shots add a sense of awe to a handful of epic escapes. The one design choice that does not work however, is the decision to give the female characters, Rapunzel in particular, grossly oversized eyes. At times she looks like a Bratz doll and the mammoth pupils frequently distract, particularly in scenes of emotional turmoil as she wells up and can't help but look like some sort of bug-eyed alien. The animators took the tendency to play cute and crossed a threshold that nullified their desired achievement. Let us hope the pendulum swings backwards in future films.
The one department that deserves to be singled out above all for their expert contributions to the film is the lighting crew. The film credits eight people as lighting supervisors and it is apparent from the finished product how essential those people and their staff were. It is hard to overstate just how stunning the various lighting effects in the film are. From early scenes set in Rapunzel's tower where a golden shaft of light peaks through a skylight or open window, and on to a later scene of dire peril wherein Rapunzel and Flynn are fated to drown until Rapunzel uses her magical hair to light a path through the clouded water. The highlight of the picture, and the scene where the lighting depatment truly earns their paychecks, is a pivotal sequence wherein Rapunzel finally gets to watch as the kingdom releases thousands of floating lanterns into the sky in honor of their missing princess. The scene recalls the majesty of both the "Kiss the Girl" sequence in The Little Mermaid as well as the beautiful firefly-lighted bayou in The Princess and the Frog, while managing to top them both. It is a stunning section that alone cements the film's worth.
The score by Alan Menken is his most theatrical in two decades. Besides an opening number written in a more contemporary style, replete with strident acoustic guitar, presumably tailored to star Mandy Moore's abilities, the remainder of the songs would not be out of place in the inevitable Broadway adaptation. These tunes, with decent lyrics by Glenn Slater, offer up golden opportunities for some great staging. The villainously vampy "Mother Knows Best" is sung in the darkened tower with just candlelight illuminating the scene. It is a creepy and fittingly claustrophobic moment. Later at the wonderfully named tavern, The Snuggly Duckling, Rapunzel meets a rogue's gallery of thugs and lowlifes who reveal their softer side in a rousing, rollicking number called "I've Got a Dream". These scenes are reminscent of some of Menken's best work in Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
Tangled opens with a special version of the Walt Disney Animated Feature logo, with Mickey Mouse whistling "Steamboat Bill" from inside a zero commemorating the fiftieth production released by the studio. In many ways, Tangled is the right film to receive this designation. Being a princess story, it calls back all the way to the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, while being a contemporary update that shows how far the studio and society has gone since then. The star of this princess story--created by ones and zeroes instead of ink and paint, but just as delicately and lovingly crafted--breaks out of her repressive prison and learns to assert herself in a great, big, wonderful world. Tangled may not be remembered seventy years hence as a magnificent achievement but it is a gorgeous, entertaining picture with the DNA of Disney's best coursing through its frames.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
The Princess and the Frog is a film with a clear purpose. It is a picture obsessed with recapturing some of the hallmark elements of a classic Disney feature. It is the first film since Mulan's release a decade prior that focused on anything resembling a princess. In the interim the studio released a full dozen features, many of which were designed to cater to the tastes associated traditionally with boys. These films featured time travel, hidden cities, flying saucers, and many other science-fiction elements, not to mention a tendency to rely on crude humor and failed attempts at being hip and edgy. The Princess and the Frog would be an antidtote to all of that, as well as the first hand-drawn animated feature since John Lasseter reopened the traditional wing that had been dormant since Home on the Range.
The film is a very loose adaptation of the traditional fairy tale about a prince who is magically turned into a frog and can only be restored to his human form by kissing a princess. The movie actually opens with a character reciting the original story to two young children, one of whom is Tiana, a headstrong black girl who cringes at the thought of wooing an amphibian. This disgust serves as a means of narrative shorthand, showcasing that the film will deviate severely from the source material. Later on when Tiana, who is now a young woman working as a waitress is forced to kiss a frog, the effect works backwards, turning her too into a mucous-secreting creature with a penchant for flies.
Much fanfare was made about the fact that The Princess and the Frog would feature Disney's first black princess. This is a shame for a few reasons. The first is that it turns the character of Tiana into more of a novelty. The truly proud moment will come when Disney releases a film with its second or third black princess because by that point a character's race will not be a news story. An auxiliary problem associated with this focus on race is that the character spends two-thirds of the movie as a green frog. If they wanted to superficially highlight a character's skin tone then they should not have done it with a character who is physically altered for a significant portion of the movie. The last problem with promoting Tiana's ethnicity is that it detracts from the far more important advancement in princess characterization, namely the protagonist's strong, hard-working ethos. She is motivated more by her desire to open her own business than by landing a man or becoming rich. Princesses from the past decade such as Pocahontas and Mulan started the trend but Tiana feels like the first fully formed embodiment of a self-sufficient woman. At one point she turns the entire trademark of the company on its head when she says, "you can't just wish on a star and expect things to come true."
The film is set in New Orleans during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The choice of location was no doubt made by the renewed interest in the area following the tragic devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. It is also a stroke of genius as the city and its surrounding environs provide an artistic godsend to the animators who have created some of the most beautiful backgrounds ever to grace a Disney picture. The Latin Quarter shines with wrought iron railings and the bayou glistens with moonlight on a murky river. The true beauty of traditional animation and its sumptuous color palette is on full display throughout the feature. Oftentimes one wishes to pause the film just to savor an establishing shot for a moment or two longer.
The animators fill the New Orleans backdrop with lovely little touches, including a couple of noted references to Disneyland, whose own New Orleans Square was an inspirational forefather to the idealized version of the city shown on screen. A riverboat lazing through the bayou recalls the theme park's famed Mark Twain sailing across the Rivers of America. The best and most subtle reference to the park comes at the end of the picture when Louis the alligator is onstage at Tiana's new restaurant playing trumpet in a ensemble called the Firefly Five Plus Lou, a sweet nod to the dixieland group composed of famed Disney animators in the 1950s called The Firehouse Five Plus Two, who would often perform concerts at Disneyland, going so far as to release a live album recorded at the park.
Save the brief appearance of the great John Goodman as a rich and generous man, father to Tiana's childhood friend Charlotte, the film is blissfully free of recognizable celebrity voices. Oprah Winfrey and Terrence Howard make appearances as well but their roles are more seamlessly integrated into the story and are never used to highlight the personality behind them. The work by the central voice cast is uniformly great. Anika Noni Rose gives Tiana a strong yet warm inflection, with a nice singing voice to boot. Bruno Campos provides just the right amount of silly swagger to the fun-loving, hubristic playboy Prince Naveen to keep him interesting and tolerable. The two comedic sidekicks, the trumpeting alligator Louis and firefly Raymond, voiced by Michael-Leon Wooley and Jim Cummings respectively, are a garrulous pair who never resort to loudmouth antics or petty wisecracks to charm.
The most distinguishable element that elevates The Princess and the Frog from the decade's worth of films that preceded it, is the presence of a good, old fashioned villain. The voodoo-practicing shadowman, Dr. Facilier is a spooky harbinger of evil, with a legion of creepy, crawly shadow minions who stalk the landscape hunting down the escaped Naveen. He is easily the most memorable Disney villian since Judge Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Dr. Facilier gets one of the greatest scenes in the film when he delivers his version of Ursula the sea witch's "Poor Unfortunate Souls", a neon-colored dance of the macabre set to the tune "Friends on the Other Side". Tribal masks come to life in hall of smoke and mirrors.
The film is chock full of musical moments, more so than any film since the heyday of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. At a number of points the film goes only two or three minutes between song-and-dance routines. For the most part they are well-integrated and give the animators ample opportunity to work in a series of stylized and more abstract styles, including a great art deco reverie as Tiana tells her mother of her ambitious restaurant plans. The filmmakers wisely chose composer Randy Newman to write the soundtrack, no doubt with some nudging by executive-producer John Lasseter. Newman does not contribute a single song as memorable as his now-standard "You've Got a Friend in Me" from the Toy Story pictures, but he is well versed in the style and sounds emanating from New Orleans. His best numbers in the film are the ones that dive the deepest into a particular genre, particularly his jazz and zydeco tunes.
The Princess and the Frog is a fantastic film and a great modern continuation of the classic Disney formula. The film is possessed with gorgeous design, memorable characters, toe-tapping songs, larger-than-life villainy, and a moment of surprising emotional poignancy. It is a film that does not try and compete with the Shreks and Ice Ages churned out by its competitors. It knows what its creators excel at and provides a wonderful canvas for the filmmakers to showcase their abilities. The Princess and the Frog reminds viewers what a Disney film is capable of.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
Like Meet the Robinsons before it, Disney's 2008 release Bolt is a by-product of the regime change at the studio. The initial inklings of the film were devised and shepherded by Lilo & Stitch creator Chris Sanders under the working title American Dog. However, Pixar chief John Lasseter, who had been installed as the new head of feature animation, did not like the direction Sanders' work was going and had him replaced, scrapping much of the completed work on the film. The germ of the idea remained the same throughout the process but the final product feels more sleek than Sanders' initial treatment. The film that became Bolt tells the story of a famed television dog who becomes stranded and must find his way back home, all the while believing that he is still on television. Gone are the offbeat elements included by Sanders like a one-eyed cat and radioactive rabbits, as well as the more idiosyncratic animation style, pieces of which can still be found floating around online.
Compared to its two predecessors, Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, Bolt is a vast improvement in most every respect. First and foremost, the computer-generated animation is a major step forward. This is evident in two different ways in the first two scenes. The film opens with an idyllic prologue showing the young girl Penny picking a puppy out of a litter at an animal shelter. The scene is quiet, with soft golden lighting and some wonderful set design. The texture on the linoleum floor and the tangible presence of a window with reflections and beams of light streaming through it look more fully realized than anything from the last couple of pictures, both of which ascribed the clean, plastic sheen common to CGI to nearly every conceivable surface, be it wood or metal, man-made material or organic.
The scene following this muted meeting of canine and companion showcases the truly great action work of the animators. After a title card announces the passage of five years, we are thrust abruptly into a segment of the dynamic television show Bolt as if it were truly happening. Penny's father has been kidnapped and she and the dog must race to save him, thwarting helmeted henchmen armed with electric claws and ticking timebombs every step of the way. The sequence is the best action scene of any animated feature this side of Pixar's The Incredibles. It is a bravura achievement that marries evermore hysterical climaxes with fluid editing and a clear sense of space. Now, if the events that transpire in this snippet of the television occurred weekly, Bolt would be the most expensive show in the history of the medium. Helicopters explode, trucks are flipped on their sides, and sonic booms tear across the desert destroying everything in their path.
The story of how Bolt finds himself alone in the world for the first time, away from the lights and make-up of Hollywood, and how he comes to terms with his ordinariness, is told in a crisp style that flows much more effortlessly than many of its cartoon contemporaries. There are some nice little touches along the way, as we see Bolt learning how to become a regular dog, begging for scraps and enjoying the simple comforts of wind on his face. His journey back home is punctuated with some more clever action pieces that subvert and contort the tropes seen in the bombastic Hollywood opening. Midway through the film, an escape from an animal shelter also ends with a gigantic fireball but is is achieved by all-together different means than the shameless blockbuster production in the beginning.
Accompanying Bolt on his cross-country journey are two animal sidekicks, a skeptical, street-smart alley cat named Mittens and a hamster with a severe case of television addiction named Rhino. Mittens is voiced by the comedienne Susie Essman as a bit of a PG-rated version of her character Susie on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mittens is easily the best character in the film and Essman lends some surprisingly serious emotional weight to the film's most satisfying backstory. It is unfortunate that she and the audience are saddled with Rhino, who cancels out most of Mittens' excellence by being the most annoying character in the entire feature. The character is a brash fanboy who fawns over Bolt and uses the word "awesome" in nearly every sentence. Rhino spends the whole movie so amped up that there is no room in his character for nuance or reflection. It is interesting to note that while the movie hinges on Bolt being reunited with Penny, and Mittens is emotionally scarred from being left behind by her "people" to fend for herself, Rhino has no compunction when he decides to abandon his owner to set off of a two thousand-mile journey that ends with him becoming adopted by Penny. One pictures the poor old woman who lost her hamster crying at night to herself in the trailer park.
The other peripheral characters are tedious as well, with Penny's stereotypically sleazy Hollywood agent vying for vexatious supremacy with a legion of localized pigeons who adopt the most obvious, exaggerated mannerisms of their chosen town, be it New York, Los Angeles, or the South. The sunbaked birds native to Southern California try to pitch Bolt their "original" idea for the show (aliens--which may be a sly commentary on the preponderence of science-fiction elements creeping into so many Disney features over the last decade) and at one point yell the choice phrase "holler back" in their most stoned drawl. These contemporary sign posts littered throughout the script cheapen the story and resign the production to an unfortunate time capsule.
Curiously enough, Bolt contains more product placement than any Disney film since Oliver & Company, coincidentally the studio's last animated film to star a dog. The previous film shilled for Ryder trucks among other things, but the company appears to have switched allegiances to U-Haul sometime in the ensuing decades. Also, a less-than-flattering sign of the then-still-fresh Disney/Pixar merger can be seen in the film's use of the Apple logo on all computer products. Steve Jobs negotiated his upstart company a multi-billion dollar payday and as a bonus got to plaster the logo of his day job anywhere he damn well pleased.
For all of its growing pains and corporate compromises, Bolt is an entertaining film with its fair share of likable qualities. The often stellar animation and solid story are positive signs for a wayward company trying to find its footing in a new cinematic landscape. The film successfully works a clever conceit around a decently devised emotional core. Like a dog, the film can be amusing and comforting, but loud and obnoxious as well. One can bemoan the lost opportunity and missing charm of a personal, left-field production but sometimes what one needs is simple reassurance. Bolt provides the sort of enjoyments one may look for when seeking out a Disney picture. The film is bereft of surprises but it is a decent, reliable companion.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
Between the release of Chicken Little and 2007's Meet the Robinsons, there was a massive overhaul in the upper ranks of Walt Disney Studios. CEO Michael Eisner was ousted and replaced by Bob Iger. Iger immediately set about trying to steer the company back on track in terms of quality family entertainment, a demographic in which Disney was always the undisputed powerhouse. However, in the previous decade, upstarts like DreamWorks and Pixar were frequently outperforming the feature work of the company. Iger decided one of the biggest means of keeping pace with the competition involved simply absorbing it and so in 2006, Walt Disney Studios purchased Pixar Animation for $7.4 billion. In so doing, Iger installed the Emeryville company's head John Lasseter, director of Toy Story and A Bug's Life, as the head of Disney Feature Animation.
Meet the Robinsons became a product of this transitional time and it is apparent in every single frame. The film was partially reworked with Lasseter's involvement and one can see his fingerprints in the film's early going, where we meet orphaned Lewis, a pie-in-the-sky science geek who is constantly dreaming up inventions in his shared room at the orphanage. The film tries valiantly at the outset to build an emotional connection with the audience, showing this boy's longing to find his unknown mother. One can almost see the Lasseter production notes floating by as Lewis sits on the roof, notching another mark in his wooden crate that tallies his failed adoption interviews. The heartstrings are tuned and ready to be plucked.
After a particularly destructive meeting wherein Lewis demonstrates his peanut butter-and-jelly gun to his prospective peanut-allergic parents, he settles on the idea of creating a device that digs into one's brain and uncovers long lost memories, namely the face of his mother, whom he only saw once as an infant when she dropped him off at the orphanage's door. He tinkers away and builds a prototype of the contraption which he plans to unveil at the school science fair. However, a mysterious new boy warns Lewis of a treacherous man in a bowler hat who will try to sabotage the project. Indeed the man succeeds in ruining the science fair and steals the device for his own personal gain. Lewis soon learns that both strangers are from the future. The child, Wilbur Robinson, takes a skeptical Lewis forward in time to prove it. There Lewis meets Wilbur's wacky family and a thunderingly obvious reveal about their relation to the orphan boy lurks around every corner. Meanwhile the behatted villain manages to ruin the future with his chicanery and it is up to Lewis to set things right. Along the way, he learns his worth and finds a surrogate family.
The character design in the film is resoundingly generic, although it is a significant step up from the atrociousness of Chicken Little. Many characters even resemble specific creations from children's entertainment of the past. The character of Wilbur looks like a cross between Japan's Astro Boy and Eddie Munster. Meanwhile the bowler hat guy recalls Dudley Do-Right's nemesis Snidely Whiplash and the tormentor of the Baudelaire orphans, Count Olaf. The animated depiction of the future metropolis is sufficiently sleek and shiny (set to a really great choral pop tune by composer Danny Elfman), while the alternate-timelined dystopia, full of bowler shaped factories and lifeless zombies, is expertly, horrifically conceived.
By far, the film's worst element is its approach to comedy which is broad and brackish. The filmmakers equate humor with manic energy and they subsequently turn everything up to eleven. The extended Robinson clan, which includes a robot and twins who live in planter boxes, are all completely, irrevocably bonkers. They are quirky to a fault and the middle portion of the film is exhaustingly spent in their crazed company. The goofiness is simply a series of unexpected events designed to substitute for actual jokes. This is best exemplified during a chase scene that involves an octopus being shot out of a cannon at a rampaging dinosaur. You know, just because. In fact, at one point Lewis, who has been disguised in a Carmen Miranda-type fruit hat, comments on yet another daft event by saying, "that was unexpected." Even the characters are non-plussed by the comedic efforts of the filmmakers.
There are two refrains repeated throughout Meet the Robinsons that seem to sum up the picture quite succinctly. The first is uttered by a series of animals mind-controlled by the villain, "I'm not sure how well this plan was thought through." This phrase rings in a viewers head after each increasingly wacky non-sequitur or abrupt tonal shift. The second phrase is Keep Moving Forward, which is the story's message, and could serve as a proxy rallying cry for the picture's production. If that previous joke or plot thread didn't work out, ignore it, something else will come along to distract the audience. In the movie, the slogan is hammered home so many times that the filmmakers even end up making fun of it in a bombastic fireworks-laden show-stopping production number. This sloganeering saturation does nothing more than dilute a truly important life lesson. This is a shame because the movie ends with a lovely quote which reveals the motto originated with Walt Disney himself:
"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
Unfortunately, Meet the Robinsons does none of the maverick things a visionary of Walt Disney's caliber would strive for. The film assimilates its 3-D effects as nothing more than the gimmick it most always is. It throws gags at the screen with no rhyme, reason or wit. And the personalities onscreen are braying, brackish buffoons, shouting and jostling one another for a modicum of screentime. The film, like its protagonist, shows the glimmers of promise but fails many times before it achieves any sort of success.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
Chicken Little begins with indecisive narration trying to find the best way to introduce the story of a child who raised a panic by declaring that the sky was falling. Unlike Woody Allen's iconic introduction to Manhattan which uses a similar conceit to transcendent effect, Chicken Little just wants to show us how hip and cool it is in comparison to your classic Disney features. In succession, star Zach Braff briefly entertains before throwing out the ideas of starting with "once upon a time", the epic savanna hymn of The Lion King, and the fabled storybook opening familiar from Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Then, instead of finding the perfect artistic solution to his creative conundrum, he basically just gives up and lets the movie play out.
This opening sequence is a perfect synthesis of the problems running rampant throughout Chicken Little. The film wants to avoid any attempts at looking staid or conventional but instead of actually attempting anything new, it just throws crap at the screen, hoping to distract us from its lack of ideas. For example, after Chicken Little is shamed by the town's people for his hysteria, a cottage industry grows up, making a quick buck retelling the tale of the crazy chicken in audiobooks and an advertised forthcoming movie. Chicken Little's father, a widower who was a local athlete and the popular inverse of his awkward child, comments on the ridiculousness of turning the paper-thin story into a feature-length film. Of course, this is intended as a winking nod to the audience, who have themselves purchased a ticket to said story, but it also feels like an omission of guilt. The filmmakers are working with the most innocuous germ of an idea. At one point, Chicken's friend Abby consoles him about the feature film, suggesting that if he's lucky it will just go straight to video.
Padding the film out are a nauseous mix of terrible thematic tunes by the likes of Barenaked Ladies and Five for Fighting, and every obvious, lazy pop song a children's film could hope for. Besides the requisite C + C Music Factory command for everyone to dance now, we get a Spice Girls karaoke party and an alien invasion cued to R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It". Worst of all, Chicken's portly, priggish, Porky Piggish friend Runt has a nasty habit of calming himself in times of trouble by singing empowering seventies anthems like "Stayin' Alive", "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and "I Will Survive". At times the film feels like a veiled infomercial for a Time/Life boxed set containing all of the AM hits you know and loathe.
Meanwhile, the hucksters in the Yucks Department must have misunderstood their bureau's stated aim. For instead of trying to make us laugh, they choose most consistently to simply gross us out. As the rotund Runt bounces down a hill, he is accompanied by an orchestra's worth of belches, of every octave and timbre one could ever hope for. Later, we get the great privilege of listening in as Abby and Runt think up every conceivable synonym for "urine" their poetic minds can dream up. It is an outright travesty that this film was not even nominated for Best Original Screenplay. The best material the screenwriters can come up with is having a P.E. coach separate a dodgeball game into the popular and unpopular kids.
Yes, the music is horrible, the story threadbare, and the dialogue insulting, but these elements pale in contemptible comparison to the abysmal, appalling animation. Animation, the vanguard of the Disney legacy, an elegant, evocative medium of ink and paint and ones and zeroes, responsible for such masterful moments as Bambi ice skating and Figaro the cat swinging from an open window, is put to use in Chicken Little to create the largest rogues' gallery of ill-shapen, unpleasant looking creations the eye has ever seen. It is a testament to the film's drunken drive for disfigurement that the character of Abby, a buck-toothed version of the fabled Ugly Duckling, does not stand out from the crowd. She looks quite normal next to this community of monstrosities.
The film follows Chicken's path as he tries to redeem himself in the eyes of the town and more importantly, his father. When far-flung aliens arrive he finds his opportunity. In trying to return a three-eyed alien child--that in keeping with the film's dedication to the uninspired, looks like a rough-draft rejected from Pixar's Monsters, Inc.--to its mechanized, rampaging parents, Chicken proves his mettle. The apocalyptic alien attack brings father and son together as Chicken Little becomes a resourceful, fearless hero. The town forgives Chicken and surprise, a dance number ensues.
Chicken Little concludes with the town gathered at the cinema to watch Hollywood's adaptation of the preceding events. The film within the film is an overblown action extravaganza with a tall, muscular Chicken Little and a sexy Abby. The joke is that Hollywood will always mess up the heart of a story by throwing in explosive bells and titillating whistles. But it seems as though the filmmakers do not realize that they are guilty of the exact same shenanigans. Instead of focusing on the emotional story of a father accepting his awkward son, they decided to populate their film with the laziest pop culture references and overplayed pop hits of the 1970s. Chicken Little is just as generic as the films it winkingly nods at. It is a complete and utter failure of a picture, an eighty-minute audio/visual babysitter that condescends to even its most juvenile demographics. This piece of animated pablum serves no artistic purpose. It is a big, bold bruise on the Disney canon. Now would be a good time to panic.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
Home on the Range may be the most curious production ever released by Walt Disney Feature Animation. The perplexities are myriad but they truly boil down to two niggling inquiries: how and why was this film made? It is easy to see how the high concepts of films like Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire secured their respective productions the coveted greenlight, but how were the studio brass of the early 2000s adequately convinced of the box office prospects of a musical Western starring a cow voiced by Roseanne Barr? The final film is an anachronistic jumble of down-home, simple pleasures and brash, in-your-face hijinks. It is decidedly the product of a studio that had, for all intents and purposes, lost its way. Admittedly, this confusion occasionally resulted in some great left-field work, notably Lilo & Stitch, but that charming film was easily the diamond in the rough.
The screenplay to Home on the Range unfolds like it was hastily scribbled out over the weekend. It is as if the filmmakers came up with a title and then wrote down the first ideas that popped into their heads, never bothering to refine or question their work. The film stars three cows, voiced by Judi Dench, Jennifer Tilly, and the aforementioned Roseanne. One of the cows is a stuck-up society woman, another a beatific airhead, and the last a brash, loudmouth. Try and guess who is who. The cows are faced with eviction from their peaceful little farm by a villainous cattle thief whose reward bounty happens to be the exact price needed to save their property. The cows decide to track the thief down themselves and they set off across the vast, unknown prairie. The script contains two modes of humor, the first being the inappropriate release of bodily functions, with Roseanne's heifer Maggie starting up an impromptu belching contest with three little piggies. She also works blue, telling some ogling farm animals that her mammoth udders are in fact, real. The second brand of humor is the dreaded pun, with the characters checking off every lazy bon mot that could be haphazardly stretched to the farm setting. These include such choice turns of phrase as, "phony express", "wake up and smell the alfalfa", and "what does she specialize in, sour cream?" the latter referring to Dame Judi Dench's haughty behavior.
To its credit, Home on the Range does possess a handful of positive attributes. First and foremost is the animation style, which is chock full of exaggerated line work, very different than any design usually associated with Disney. The style also feels like a throwback, looking more like it was made for a fast-and-loose short from the forties or fifties, not the sleek designs of the new millennium. The character designs never reach the level of the truly iconic, like the inspired design of say, Cruella de Vil, but they are often quite fun to look at. The best might be the weasly Wesley, who is drawn like a diminutive hybrid of Gomez Addams and the character's voice actor, Steve Buscemi.
There a quite a few bits of eye-popping animation interspersed throughout the film as well, including a brief transition from a flat frame to the widescreen format, a juxtaposition that works a hundred times better than the same effect when it appeared in the previous Brother Bear. Here it is kinetically added to an action-packed daydream created by the energetic sheriff's horse, Buck, who envisions himself singlehandedly fighting off a posse of bandits. Later, the filmmakers pull off a thrilling action climax that combines some truly energizing point-of-view shots on a roller coaster mine train ride and a sparkling, high-powered explosion courtesy of some brake sparks and a whole lot of TNT.
Despite the animation's strengths, the best work in the film is reserved for the paint department, who frequently find the brightest, boldest colors to populate the prairie, with pink sunsets and blue-capped rock formations. Their tour-de-force however is saved for a vibrant, psychedlic musical number, reminiscent once again of the unparalleled "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence in Dumbo. In the film's strangest plot point, it turns out that the cattle thief, Alameda Slim, manages to nab all of his bovine by hypnotzing them with his yodeling prowess. This leads to a herd of neon-colored cows marching through a swirling void of nothingness and into Slim's clutches.
The soundtrack is the best to come from either Disney or Alan Menken in a good long while. Working with the cowboy setting, Menken churns out a batch of Western songs, the best being the title track, which plays twice in the feature and is reminscent of the popular balladeers, The Sons of the Pioneers, who along with their lead singer, Roy Rogers, appeared way back in 1948's Melody Time. Home on the Range's tunes are sung by a cavalcade of capable contemporary country crooners, including k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, and Tim McGraw. Even the ballad this time around, "Will the Sun Ever Shine Again" passes by with a modicum of decency. Of course, the plot mechanics unspooling underneath the song's melodies are the most bland, forced attempts at sentimentality one could muster, which completely undermines the attempted effect.
Home on the Range was a failure in every sense of the word. It was a modest film burdened with much too large a budget, one it could never hope to recoup from ticket sales. In fact, the film made less than half of its production cost back in American cinemas. Pixar Animation Studios' release from the same year, Brad Bird's The Incredibles, made fifty percent more than Home on the Range's entire box office haul in its opening weekend alone. Disney announced before the film's release that Home on the Range would be the last traditional, hand-drawn animated feature the studio would produce. Henceforth, the company would focus on computer-generated cartoons exclusively, as if the outdatedness of Home on the Range was the fault of its look. Happily, there was a regime change brewing at the studio and before the end of the following year the people responsible for turning their back on the work that was the studio's foundation would be gone. That would not stop the march of progress or save the company from making inferior products, but it was a vote of confidence for an artform that still had a lot of life to give. If only they would give it a chance.
In 2012, this intrepid reporter plans to watch, in chronological order, all of Walt Disney Studios' 52 theatrically-released animated features, one per week.
After three features with decidedly futuristic sci-fi tones, Disney chose to return to a more traditional narrative with Brother Bear, focussing on the bonds of family in an idealized natural setting. It would also give them the opportunity to incorporate talking animals, something we have not seen since the petulant Kuzco unwittingly turned into a llama three years prior in The Emperor's New Groove. In fact, the basic plot elements of Brother Bear are almost identical to that previous feature, although the tone is decidedly less snarky and more majestic.
Brother Bear takes place in the upper reaches of North America shortly after the Ice Age. The film begins with the story of three Inuit brothers; the wise elder Sitka, the teasing middle child Denahi, and the immature slacker Kenai. It is the day of Kenai's ceremonial graduation to manhood and he is tasked with securing some celebratory salmon high in a tree so that bears cannot get to it. He does a slapdash job and following the ceremony, the family discovers the fish are gone. Attempting to make right, Kenai tracks the thieving bear as his brothers follow but he and Denahi become endangered on a glacier and Sitka gallantly sacrifices himself to save them. Kenai blames the bear for Sitka's death and against Denahi's objections, vows vengeance. Atop the tribe's mystical mountain, Kenai does manage to kill the bear, but the spirit of Sitka intervenes and turns his brother into a grizzly to teach him a lesson in humility and responsibility.
The film makes a number of odd visual choices. The strangest being the decision to change the film's aspect ratio after Kenai transforms from a human to a bear. The first third of the picture is framed in a squarish 1.66:1, before switching to a widescreen scope frame of 2.35:1 for the last hour. The color palette of the film also changes from a more washed out grey look in the prologue to a vibrant, popping colorful world when seen from the bear's perspective. This changing of format has been done before in a number of pictures, most effectively in the great science-fiction homage Galaxy Quest, but its use in Brother Bear is not handled particularly well. For one, the change does not occur instantly with Kenai's transformation, it happens the next morning when he awakens. The screen cuts to black and then suddenly everything is widescreen but there is no dramatic orienting shot of say, a mountain vista, just a point-of-view shot of a bear looking up at some leaves. If one wasn't paying close attention, this fluorish could be rather easily missed.
Some more subtle, but better integrated, visual tricks are interspersed throughout the film. During the tribe's funeral for Sitka, the screen freezes and blacks out with evocative mystical imagery. Also early on in the picture we do get a grand shot of the forest scenery and the animators include a lens flare as if their handpainted sun was affecting the camera's perception. This is an anachronistic--but unconsciously effective--means of establishing the grandeur of the surroundings, and is a testament to how cinematic shorthand has permeated our understanding of the world. Two movies made after Brother Bear, the digital science fiction wonders WALL*E and Star Trek, do similar flaring techniques.
As Kenai comes to terms with his newfound fur and claws, his brother Denahi is tracking him because he mistakenly believes Kenai is the bear that killed both of his brothers. Kenai meanwhile befriends an energetic little cub named Koda and the two head off in search of the salmon stream, which conveniently rests adjacent to the mountain where Kenai can change back into a man. Along their journey, the duo meet all manner of wild creatures including mammoths, goats, and the film's best supporting characters, a pair of moose named Rutt and Tuke, voiced by Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis as an overt homage to their immortal creations, the brothers Bob and Doug Mackenzie of Strange Brew fame. The two have a fantastic interplay between each other, honed from years of collaboration, and even though they're straightjacked by the family friendly film, they do manage one gloriously subtle nudge to their characters' origins by looking for, "a pile of delicious barley and amberweed on a cool bed of malted hops, eh." The film would be Moranis's last theatrical role before his retirement.
Tarzan songwriter and famed casual dresser Phil Collins returns to the composer's chair for Brother Bear. His presence is much more predominant here, with a series of overblown ballads that the filmmakers use for narrative shorthand in nearly a half dozen montages throughout the film. Even during the picture's most supposedly emotional moment, when Kenai informs Koda that his mother is dead, the soundtrack is highjacked by Collins's belting and we are only allowed to hear snippets of the two bears' dialogue. To its ultimate disservice, histrionics substitute for emotion time and again in Brother Bear.
However, this "story of a boy who became a man by becoming a bear" ends with a tenderly composed reunion of both families. While the beats that got us there were well worn and wholly unsurprising, there is still a satisfying emotional closure by the climactic homecoming. Kenai embracing his Inuit brothers while Koda reaches out for the spectral presence of his dead mother does a much better job of illustrating the circle of life than another bombastic song. There is little to distinguish Brother Bear's narrative from any number of stories before it (as well as a few that came after, including Pixar's recent Brave) but like the traditions passed down through the Inuit tribes, there can be comfort in that familiar journey.
