Muppet Haunted Mansion

 This halloween special was filmed over 17 days... and it shows. It's not terrible overall as it is aimed clearly at children and keeps it simple. It lacks the jokes only adult fans would get and seems rushed and watered down. It's basically Gonzo and King Prawn going through the first part of the Haunted Mansion ride at the Disney parks, integrating muppets with the ride's well-known set pieces. 

I did like the last 2 muppet movies, so I'm not a muppet purist but I hope this is not the future of the franchise. 

Encanto (2021) directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, co-directed by Charise Castro Smith

 

Encanto is the lightest film about transgenerational trauma you might ever see. It manages to be fun, musical (thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda) and still gets a pretty deep message across about how terrible events in the past can still affect the present, even effect those who were not alive at the time of the event. 

As expected from any Disney film recently, the animation is flawless, the skin tones and the colour palette is really complex and beautiful. They have a way of making the most complicated animated scenes look effortless and every frame brings you deeper into the film's world of magical realism. 

All the members of a family have been granted magical gifts after being chased from their homeland a generation or two ago but these powers seems to be fading. One family member, Mirabel, was not granted magic powers and it comes down to her to find out why things are changing and discover how to fix them. I won't spoil it, but the lives of her siblings are not was magical as one would be led to believe. 

I like how the time and place of the film is never defined and even the traumatic event is very broadly defined so it could be anywhere anytime. Well, anytime after photography was invented as they use a camera in the movie a couple times. 

A well done, well acted. and well sung film with a deeper side if you care to look into it. 

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

500 years after all the dragons have been turned to stone by the evil Drunns who were in in turn banished by the a crystal welded bu the last of the dragons, humanity has turned against themselves and separated into tribes. One of the leaders wants to unite all 5 tribes but he is betrayed and the Drunns come back when the crystal is shattered and dived amounts the rides. The Drunns over the following years turn most of the population into stone but the daughter of the would be unifying leader goes on a quest to find the last dragon, bring the crystal pieces together and save their world. 

While not a life changing event, this is a pretty fun, beautifully animated and hits many of the right notes. there are cute animal sidekicks and other typical Disney tropes but if you are looking for something light you can do a lot worse than seeing this. The voice of the dragon was the only thing that didn't work for me and the modern day references and speaking styles were sort of out of place but there was some nice action that kept me from leaving the story being told. 

Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941) directed by Dave Fleisher

 

Fleisher Studios was Walt Disney's biggest competition at the start of the early cartoon era. In the end, the two became friends but they were fierce rivals for years. In may ways, the Fleishers out Disney'd Disney with animation and new techniques. The had parallax shots and filmed cels over 3D models to get depth into the cartoons. They invented Popeye and Betty Boop and were in many ways a more adult focused company. 

While many people remember Gulliver's' Travels as their full length feature animation, they did do another... Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Animation-wise its a tour deforce of smoothly moving characters and wonderful background pantings. It's close to 2 hours long... and eternity for even live action films of the time. 

The story is of a grasshopper returning to his little home (bug) town which has been under siege by the humans who walk through it destroying everything and setting things on fire with their cigarettes and cigars. There is a complicated plot involving the grasshopper's girl friend being pursued by the local rich bug who lives on higher and more secure ground. In the end, none of them is safe as the lot they are on is about to be used for a skyscraper. The grasshopper eventually leads the town, after lots of pitfalls and misunderstandings, to a new garden on the top floor of the building where they can be in harmony with the human couple who live there. 

In most ways the film is delightful... despite the racism that is sort of inevitable in a film, particularly animated ones, of this period. It's not close to worst ever seen, but it till does make one's teeth grind when you see it. Visually beautiful with endearing characters, I would say it's a bit too long and complicated, The Fleishers were ahead of Disney in many ways but story was a weak point and while never dull, it could move along a lot faster. 

(Also called Hoppity goes to Town)

Soul (2020) directed by Peter Docter

Pixar is in top form with this film. Yes the animation is fantastic as it is with all Pixar films but I honestly barely noticed it as the story and characters rightfully took all my attention from start to finish. 

A musician (Joe) dies unexpectedly by falling into a manhole on the day of his big break to join a legendary jazz artist in her band and dies. That is the start of the story. On his way to the great beyond, he refuses to go there and leaps into space only to find himself in a place where souls are before they are born. He is mistaken for someone else and is charged with helping a reticent (to say the least) pre-born to find its purpose so it can go to earth. Joe uses them to sneak back to earth but he ends up n a cat while the other (22) ends up in his body. The film then turns to them trying to get Joe to his gig on time and back to his his own body. 

One thing I loved about this film was the design of the characters. There is often a tendency to try for "realism" in modern animations and this goes the opposite direction and avoid all the uncanny valley pitfalls and distraction "realism" can burden an animated film with.  Some compare this to another Pixar film "Inside Out" but it's truly it's own thing and a very mature project with problems dealt with a way anyone can understand. 

I don't think it's my favourite movie even in Pixar's history but I really appreciated the risks it took by making something so thought provoking and adult in nature. I really does not seem to be aimed at kids at all, in very good way. The end is open to interpretation, we are not sure what direction Joe is heading and that makes the film point... it's not what he ends up doing, it's how he ends up doing it and why. 

Pinocchio (1940) Walt Disney Productions

After the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Walt Disney went to the Carlo Collodi story The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881-1882). The film strays, like most films do, form the source material in many ways (the blue fairy for example plays a much more central role in the story) but the basics are still there. A lonely woodcarver, Geppetto carves a puppet out of a talking piece of wood and the puppet then spends the rest of the story trying to become a « real boy »  after learning this is possible through the intervention of the blue fairy and with the help of a friendly cricket. In Collodi’s version, Pinocchio kills the cricket almost immediately. This does not happen, of course in the Disney version and the puppet has a series of adventures that lead him back to his father and the realization of his dream to become human. 

This is one of, if not the most satisfying of all of Disney’s films. Made for about 2.3 million it has made about 84 million at the box office total but was a flop at the start pulling in less than ½ of it’s budget on first release. By 1994 the film was added to the National Film Registry in the USA and Time magazine has put it in the best 25 films of all time. 

The script moves from one adventure to the next with great skill and the animation is rightly considered some of the best ever done. The songs and background designs are top notch. Many breakthroughs in animations were brought about by this film. Disney had 3D models of the characters and set pieces made so the animators could have realistic perspectives to work from, early forms of rotoscoping and integration of stop motion were used to add realism. The opening shot where Jimmy Cricket jumps down the street to Geppetto’s shop window with everything moving in parallax is truly amazing. There is a story that having spent so much time getting this scene right, Disney was very disappointed it did not get the notice it deserved and was upset when a boat shot in Peter Pan,done with the simplest of techniques, got an ovation, prompting him to swear to never do anything as complicated as Pinocchio’s opening shot again. 

The movie pushed special effects animation past it’s limit. The fairy dust and especially the water effects are so impressive that I would take them over 3D simulations any day. The backgrounds are beyond amazing. I saw a few at an exhibition and they were not only just beautiful paintings but the ability to draw them in ways the camera could pan across them and give the impression of turning a corner or zooming in... all through use of perspective tricks on one canvas was mind boggling. 

Obviously it is on my top list of films ever made, I never get tired of seeing it and get choked up every time I see Pinocchio face down in the water after saving his father from Monstro the evil whale. I can’t explain why, but that simple shot is always a shock to me. The entire film is memorable from start to finish. 

In the last few years, Disney Studios has been making noises about a live action film, as it has done with and plans to do with many of it’s other animated classics. Please… don’t. Re-release the original in theatres instead and let new generations experience how magical it is. 

Moana (2016) directed by Ron Clements and John Musker

I, for one, like Disney films, and Pixar films and many other animated films coming out from various studios these days. Even the ones with more limited budgets have access to fantastic tools and talent to make beautifully done animation.  Where some of them get less points is for the storylines and the types of stories (which can be very receptive).

While Moana doesn't exactly throw away the mold Disney has made over the years, it's a great film and recently with films like Zootopia, the Good Dinosaur etc, Disney has shown it's still more than capable a telling a good solid original story with great characters within that framework.

The music works, it's funny, visually stunning and tells a compelling story. The directors also worked on The Princess and the Frog, Disney's last non 3D generated film and that was one of my favourites in their entire history. Moana's tale is based on real Polynesian mythologies and the mystery of why they stopped being a sea-faring culture 3000 years ago and then resumed - again mysteriously - 1000 years later.

The only thing I could critique against this film is mind boggling minor. I personally thought the "ocean" character was little lame. It looked too much like a tongue and I thought needed some additional  anthropomorphizing to work better. I NEVER thought I would be saying that about a Disney film!

The Good Dinosaur

Pixar Studios (2015) 93 minutes

This is bound to become a forgotten film in Pixar’s history but not for lack of trying or because it’s a bad film. It is actually quite good. A decent, well told story and characters with the studio's typically great animation. It shines most brightly in is backgrounds and environments - they are beyond stunning. In fact it’s very easy to confuse them for real world locations and think the animated characters, which are very cartoon-y, were just composted into them.

The basic story is one of a fearful, maladroit dinosaur child gets separated from his family farm (in this universe, the asteroid that knocked out many of the dinosaurs misses and they go on for millions of more years, eventually sharing the earth with early man) and has to make his way back through a series of adventures with a human child. Of course a parent dies, this is a Disney produced animation afterall. The man-cub is all but a puppy dog in intelligence and behaviour and fun to watch. The cartoon style of the creatures might be a little jarring fro some against the photo-real environments but I found it charming. It reminded me of the super simple people in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty against that films very detailed background paintings. I wish they spent more time with the stegosaurus than the tyrannosaurus castle ranchers but that is a minor quibble.

Why will this film be forgotten? For one it didn’t make much money in release and came out the same year as their blockbuster Inside/Out . It didn’t get much promotion or fanfare and while its settings were amazing, the rest of the movie, though entertaining didn’t catch on with the public even though critical response was very good overall. I personally liked this more than Inside/Out but since I actually work doing animation, I think my reaction was probably a little different than the 5-10 year olds the film aimed at.

Jim Crows or Jive Turkeys?

Cher said recently that when she saw the film DUMBO (1941) as a kid - and saw those singing birds, she thought to herself "I can do that" - and set her course for show biz.

The crow leader is named Jim Crow.




Jim Crow: [singing] I seen a peanut stand /And heard a rubber band /I've seen a needle that winked its eye / But I been done seen about everything / When I see an elephant fly.



Despite their jazzy pimptastic personalities and jive-talking - the crows are heroic in the film.

One blogger writes: Come on, blackbirds acting in a manner stereotypically assigned to African-Americans isn't that offensive. At least they didn't just get some white guy to do his best "black voice." Oh, really? They did?

Yes - caucasian Cliff Edwards (best known as the voice of Jiminy Cricket) voiced "Jim Crow".

Still nowhere as bad as Sunflower the pickaninny centaur in Fantasia (1940) who was edited out of the film by 1969.



Sunflower is a big Whoopsie Daisy! element- or should I say "Whoopsie Disney!"

Disney Strikes Again

Is it just me? I mean, come on. Bad choice of words. This giant billboard is all over LA.

Gimme The Mermaid

Pantheon's post about The Little Mermaid reminded me of a weird video I saw a couple of years ago that featured Ariel. It was rumored that the video was made by a Disney animator on the sly which made it seem so very subversive. Turns out the rumor was true and here's the story according to the info on YouTube (You can find anything on YouTube. Love the YouTube.):

This piece was commissioned by the experimental sound collage group Negativland for the video compilation, "Our Favorite Things," soon to be released. The track had been cut by Negativland several years before, an audio document of their problems with copyright/trademark issues concerning their "U2" album. Many years and a painful settlement later, they had successfully transformed their experience into even more art, and a little activism besides. This little piece, made on Disney equipment after hours when no one was looking, remains quite popular. San Francisco experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin has been kind enough to include it in "culture jamming" programs he has organized throughout the US and Europe. Several times has it been used in conferences and on panels about copyright for the legal profession. And it's fun, to boot. The statute of limitations has apparently run out on this piece, and it is now considered perfectly legal. What a relief!

Dirrrty Disney

The Little Mermaid (1989) was the film that brought Disney animation out of their Fox & the Hound toilet and into a 20-year reign as hitmakers of animated musical films with accompanying soundtracks of top 40 hits and Broadway shows. Speaking of cartoon tunes, doesn't Ashman-Menken's "Somewhere That's Green" (From their Little Shop of Horrors) sound alot like their later Mermaid's "Part of Your World?"

Oh well, it's all about 'Somewhere Over The Green Rainbow World' for those gays, I suppose.

People also made a fuss when the posters and home video design showed a phallic spire rising from the sea floor. The artist swears it was not intentional. Ofcourse when mags started talking about the cock in the shot - a concerned parent did a double take and complained - so the art work was later altered.

read the snopes details here

A couple years later, Disney's Aladdin would revise their original theatrical lyric about barbaric Baghdad as a place "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face" to "Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense" on the later film/CD releases.

But back to the Little Spermaid (as I would have likely called it back then - if I was playing my time killer game of making up porn titles of current films while waiting in line at the cinema) -- why didn't they change the questionable lyric (for concerned parents with no life, ofcourse) in the film's song UNDER THE SEA?

I am referring to the saucy "Darling it's better down where it's wetter."
I mean Reeeeeeallly. Who are we kidding?
I guess sick minds think alike -- I found this on-line.