So here's the last feature-length Don Bluth movie ever released (in some markets [I have been informed that others got it before "Titan A.E."] and last feature to date; let's be optimistic here). Let's pause for a minute or two and let that sink in.
Depressed? Yeah, so am I. It's hard to imagine a quieter whimper to go out on. But that's not the only reason why "Bartok" is a very strange animal.
Records disagree as to whether it's the last feature Don Bluth ever made. It certainly is the last most of us ever heard of him. Whenever it was made, Fox shoved it onto DVD after "Titan" imploded at the box office. (Currently, it can only be found as a special feature on the two-disk edition of "Anastasia", a fact I learned just in time by chance.) You might not be a Don Bluth fan, but you do have to agree that it is very sad to see someone like him go out like a fart in the wind.
This is supposedly a sequel to "Anastasia". As such, it barely qualifies. The only things connecting this film and it's predecessor are one character and the country it is set in.
And that leads to the sauropod in the room I mentioned a long while back: All those gorram sequels. It must suck in ways none of us can imagine to make all these beloved movies and then not be able to say what the studios who own the rights to said movies can and cannot do with them. And so we live in a world where there are, at last count, fourteen "Land Before Time" movies. (For the record, there are about ten "Halloween" movies. I mention them because that is possibly the only other movie whose reputation has been so badly ruined by it's own not-original-director-involving sequels. It took years for the original "Halloween" to be appreciated.)
So this is why "Bartok" is one of the strangest movies I've watched during this project: Of all the Bluth-derived sequels, this is the ONE movie sequel he directed.
"Better" is a subjective word. I can't rightly say if this is indeed "better" than any of the sequels Bluth was not involved with. But I can pretty much guarantee that if it isn't better, it is at least *stranger* than any other sequel to a Don Bluth film.
It feels more like one of the Dark Age Disney movies than any Don Bluth film. There were a lot of scenes and characters that gave me bad "Sword in the Stone" flashbacks. There were other scenes that felt like something out of "Dragon's Lair: Time Warp". In all, the whole movie is very confusing and, at times, damn creepy in a way that's hard to explain (ie, the big, perverted-looking dragon who shows up at the end.)
First, Nerd Joy from the closing credits. These all prompted me to shout, "YES! I EFFING KNEW IT!!!"
So, hypothetically, a movie involving Joss Whedon, Ben Edlund, Wayne Barlowe, the Blue Sky crew, and Don Bluth should make me go
And "Titan" was perfectly okay, and even great at times. But there's something off about it and I can't really say what it is.
2000 was a weird year if you were a science fiction fan. "Titan A.E." could not have been released to theaters at a worse time. Let's just say that people were... a *little* disillusioned with big damn galaxy-spanning space operas with gorgeous CGI and crazy alien designs after a certain hotly anticipated movie came out the summer before. "Titan" ultimately flopped and is, to date, Don Bluth's last theatrical film.
And that's very sad, because one of the awesome things about this film, upon rewatch, is the fact that you get to see what Bluth could do with a big sandbox of state-of-the-art animation and a hefty budget. The movie is one of the best-looking sci-fi films of the past decade. Look at the gorgeous and tense chase through the ice rings.
There are also some wonderful little subversive moments with a distinctly Whedonesque feel to them (the cook character who looks like he's going to stick around as a JarJar-esque annoyance -- then gets blasted to smithereens, that wonderful "An intelligent guard?!" scene.) There are times when the movie feels like a test run for ideas that Joss would eventually get to play with further in "Firefly". And there are a few really neat characters. In the commentary, Bluth wishes that Gune could have had his own movie and I, too, almost wish that this had been his story. He's a great, whimsical, and very Bluthy little character with a very funny anxious John Leguizamo voice. He gives the movie some much-needed levity.
And I think that might be what strikes me as off about "Titan": get rid of Gune and there is almost no humor in the movie. Bluth's movies have always been a little dark, certainly more so than Disney's, but it's always undercut with something funny or sweet. This is a movie that starts off with the end of the world (which is very dark even by Bluth standards) and never lightens up after that. Bluth appears to have been unfettered for the most part, so where is his trademark weirdness? (Well, OK, there is some weirdness. But it's the kind of weirdness that was clearly the executives' fault, and we'll get to it at the end.)
Also, before I started this project, I used to think that music wasn't as big a deal to Don Bluth films as they were to Disney films. But let's try an experiment here: Hum the score from "N.I.M.H." Now sing something from "American Tail". Now hum the opening credits music from "Land Before Time". Sing something from "All Dogs", "Rock-A-Doodle" (I can and I didn't even rewatch it!), "Thumbelina", "Penguin", "Troll", "Anastasia". OK.
Now name a song from "Titan A.E." Yeah. What we get is a weird mix of modern (for 2000) hard rock with bludgeon-obvious lyrics. So in other words, you get those aforementioned amazing animated sequences set to the lilting tunes of... Lit. (Next challenge: remind me what Lit's one popular single was.)
Basically, what we're left with here is a movie that has an amazing combination of CGI and hand-rendered animation -- that also casts Janeane Garofolo as a Knees Akimbo kangaroo/velociraptor weapons expert. In the previous sentence, the executive-mandated weirdness is in italics.
So that brings us to the end of Don Bluth month... or does it?
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Art of the Day?
Man, how can I tease the painting any further? I won't. Have these instead:
And the awesome news is that World's Beyond, the first Comicbook Artists Guild prose anthology, has had it's first print run recently. In other words, I have another piece of art published! Yay yay yay!!!
I don't know if this link will work for anyone not a CAG member but it's worth a shot. I'll have a more elaborate post about this in a week or two; I want to show the work in progress if I can find the pictures I took. :)
I didn't want to say anything about this until it was confirmed, but the animation world has just suffered a tragic loss. Satoshi Kon passed away yesterday after suffering a long battle with cancer. There is an excellent tribute here and a fine review of "Millennium Actress" (which has shot to the top of my Netflix queue without hesitation as I haven't seen it yet) at the Onion AV Club, part of it's way-too-brief New Cult Canon animation month.
It's very sad when you are just starting to appreciate an artist, whether they be a director, a musician, or what have you, only to realize that there's going to be nothing more to come from them. "Tokyo Godfathers" was great fun and "Paprika" reminded me why I fell in love with animation in the first place. So raise a pint to Kon and rent "Godfathers" on my recommendation. Honestly, if you don't enjoy even one minute of that film, I owe you a beer.
As I said before, fans of Don Bluth who were captivated, as children, by "The Secret of N.I.M.H." and "The Land Before Time" were on their knees by 1997, hoping our hero would come through with the kind of movie we knew, deep down, that he was capable of. And then we saw the trailers for "Anastasia". After trolls and penguins and Thumbelina, maybe -just maybe- this would be Don Bluth's big comeback. The world at large would finally appreciate him.
It was a comeback, however mild, but it's hard to imagine it coming at a better/worse time.
Let me explain by taking a minute and setting the stage. In the wake of "The Lion King", every big Hollywood studio wanted their own animation department, whether they'd had one in the past or not. Which means that this was a damn fun time period to be a fan of hand-drawn animation. Some well-loved cult favorite features come from this time, and while they are all of varying quality, all of them appeared to have taken their influence more from Don Bluth than from Disney: "Ferngully", "Pagemaster", "Once Upon a Forest", "Little Nemo", and of course the beloved "Iron Giant". The Dreamworks animation studio came barreling out of the gate with "The Prince of Egypt" -- they had the guy who MADE "The Lion King" on their side so they should have been unstoppable! ("Prince" and the other all-but-forgotten hand-drawn and "tradigital" [ugh] Dreamworks films are certainly worth a re-watch. Turns out there are only *five* of them, so t'is a story for another day.)
Meanwhile, a little studio in Emeryville, California was quietly working on some movies of their own that would, unwittingly, and for better or for worse, change the playing field forever.
So in other words, the market for animated films was actually overcrowded. Into this environment, around the same time I just entered college, entered "Anastasia". And I have to say I liked the movie when I first saw it but didn't think that much of it. It was okay; certainly a damn site better than "Hercules" or (shudder) "Space Jam".
Thing is, had I known at the time that this was going to be the third-to-last Don Bluth feature film for more than a decade... I probably would have treated it differently.
Upon rewatch, and with all this in mind, "Anastasia" is a strange ride. It's as if Fox asked Bluth to make them a movie that would directly compete with Disney and that was also, by the way, an adaptation of the previous film and play "Anastasia". Aside from these prerequisites, he could go to town.
And so now we have a movie that tells the fictionalized story of the lost princess Anastasia with big bombastic Broadway (read: Disney)-style musical numbers, cute little animals, Meg Ryan, and a happy ending that rides off giving double swear-fingers to your high school history teacher. And that also suggests to it's young primary demographic that the Russian Revolution happened because everyone just suddenly dropped everything and started attacking the Romanov family. Because some glowy green demons told them to. Because said shiny demons were sent by Rasputin. Who was apparently an evil Satan-worshiping zombie wizard thing. Because why the hell not? Screw you, historical accuracy and sane storytelling decisions, I do what I want! I'm Don Bluth b**ch!!!
(Something tells me Don Bluth and Quentin Tarantino would get along very nicely. Anyway...)
In print, this all looks ridiculous. It's that good old Bluthy weirdness applied to actual historical persons. And if you let that kind of thing bother you, this movie's going to be hard going. No offense to any and all actual people involved in these incidents in real life, I'm just here for the pretty animation.
And dear sweet lord, it is gorgeous. So this is what Bluth can do when handed a big, big budget. It's absolutely fantastic. The DVD I got was in anamorphic widescreen and so, so pretty.
But aside from the pretty visuals, there's not much that stays with me. The songs are pretty good, and the best ones are hideous earworms as usual. The songs suffer, however, from the annoying and distracting post-"Lion King" trend of "oh let's hire a name-voice for the speaking part and let the professional voice actor do the songs. Nobody will be able to tell!" Well, you really can tell. Additionally, the story is a little bland with no real good character or action moments and a whole lot of weird references to "Titanic" and, err, "Speed". This is also the first film where Don Bluth uses extensive CGI sequences and - yikes. WTF giant stone Pegasus?
But overall, "Anastasia" is pretty good and worth a rewatch. We'll see if the same can be said for Don Bluth's very last theatrical feature to date.
I dreaded this film. I knew I was eventually going to have to get to it, and I anticipated it like an appointment to get a cavity filled. I remembered seeing the trailer for this thing years ago and... let's just say it didn't inspire confidence. "The Pebble and the Penguin" was irredeemable, so how could this possibly be any good?
Well...
It's not amazing. Some would even say it's not very good at all. But, in my mind, at least it's better than both "Penguin" and "Thumbelina". I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn't awesome, but it was better than I feared it would be.
Chief among the reasons is that the good old Bluthy crazy-ass moon logic is back in full swing. On that note (let's just get this out of the way) I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed the movie twice as much if I had watched it under... certain circumstances. (The plot involves a Fairy creature and his magical plants hanging out in a city park. Don't blame me!)
The animation crew is back from the half-assedness of "Penguin" and the old lush Don Bluth style is back in full force. This is, by far, the best kid's film about two annoying children flying around in a dream boat with a gardening troll I will ever see.
All I can really say is this: If I had any sculpting skill, I'd kinda want to make a little fiberglass Stanley for my garden. D'awww.
Now, don't get me wrong. If I hadn't seen such a bad movie immediately before this, I very likely wouldn't have liked "Troll" as much. Main reason for this being that I am not a four-year-old. Don Bluth fans who were old enough to remember the promise of "N.I.M.H." were on their knees at this point. Would our devotion ever be justified? Would we ever see a good movie out of the Bluth studio ever again?
So this is it. Out of all the movies Don Bluth ever made, this is the one he disowned. He is not listed as a director. The film was originally credited to Alan Smithy, the name directors used (before Joe Esterhaus ruined the fun for everyone with his awful "An Alan Smithy Film") when their own film is so terrible that they are too embarrassed to put their own name on it. If I'm lucky, this will have been the nadir of this here Don Bluth Month project. I really hope it is.
Because good God, this movie is terrible. I could see why Bluth turned away from it almost immediately: there are times when the animation is just downright sh**ty. I know bad animation bothers Don Bluth more than story problems, because even something like "Rock-A-Doodle" has excellent effects and character animation.
In "Penguin" the animation, particularly of the characters, is either inconsistent or downright ugly. Oftentimes, it's both. Seems they farmed the animation duties off to some other, cheaper studio. The characters freely change size and perspective while standing still. They shimmer in and out of existence. They even occasionally appear as immobile still frames that may "twitch" once and again; the effect is less like the kind of fluid, lifelike animation Bluth was trying to keep alive and more like something mind-scarring from a Japanese horror film.
There is even a scene, late in the film, where they forget to draw a major characters head. 'Nuff said.
Add to this the fact that the penguin character designs are downright ghastly. Why do they all have such prominent teeth? Why is Marina given a pair of human-like hips way the hell up near where her wishbone should be? It's "Happy Feet" all over again, with all the creepy almost-anthropomorphic penguins running about. Why the hell is it so easy to mess up the cuteness of a penguin?!
And the story is... man, you know what, f*** it! I don't even remember it!
That says a lot. As I mentioned before, story problems do not appear to bother Don Bluth too much. I might have hated "All Dogs Go To Heaven", but at least it's memorable because it has some insane fever-dream logic at work (the scene where the infamous King Gator suddenly reappears as a singing big gay unstoppable force of nature for example). It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least it is fun to make fun of, and to wonder what kind of deranged mind came up with it.
"Penguin" is just irredeemably boring and tedious, with ugly, unlikeable characters, a story that goes nowhere, and songs that feel like an obligation in the fact that they just keep showing up and stalling the plot. There's one in particular that almost made me want to gouge my ears out with a skewer, in which Hubie and Rocko sing about how friendship is nice or something. It goes on forever. In the duration, we learn that the two characters are exactly like what we thought they were before (though we do learn that Hubie is more annoying than we thought we did, so yay for whatever character development we can get). Also, during the song they advance a physical distance of about twenty feet on their adventure from New Zealand to Antarctica.
I guess the more important question is this: how in the hell do you go from "The Secret of N.I.M.H." to this?!?
Up next, "A Troll in Central Park". Please, please at least let the animation be better in this one?
I hate cliched movie lines as much as the next person (and the next person is Brian DePalma), but say hello to my lil' friend:
Mr. Blueberry Martini here is going to help me get through this thing called "Thumbelina".
Have you ever seen that one episode of "Star Trek" where Worf has to do the Klingon version of running the gauntlet? Every few steps, there are two other Klingons on either side of him, and they just wail on him with staffs or jab him with tasers or do other unpleasant things to him. The dialogue in the scene goes a little like this:
I bring this up because I see a lot of Klingons bearing pointy weapons coming up in the ol' Netflix queue.
I'll be the first to point out that, yes, I didn't get to (read: have to) watch "Rock-A-Doodle" and, in fact, that might help me survive this intact. But even so, this project has very suddenly stopped being fun and started being an endurance test. My prize at the end: bragging rights. Wee.
So, "Thumbelina".
(Long, long, awkward pause...)
Now, to be fair, I am not a five-year-old girl. But I just watched this movie about a half-hour ago and I remember almost nothing. *Almost* nothing. I almost can't even comment on it, but I'll try.
I remember that the songs were horrible and were all written by Barry Manilow (who I keep confusing with Neil Diamond, hence me singing "Sweet Caroline" along with half the musical numbers). In particular, there's a song you will get to hear over and over about how nothing is impossible if you follow your heart, and it's sung by an aggressively annoying swallow. (He doesn't do anything more helpful than fly around and tell Thumbelina to, if you will, never say never. God help us all if he ever meets the pigeon from "An American Tail".) I remember there were three irritating cutesy-poo little bug characters that look like they walked out of a completely different feature altogether, and I kept forgetting that they were in the movie. Then again, the writers tended to forget about them too, since they really only have two scenes. I remember Gilbert Gottfried. Boy do I wish I could forget that part. And -oh good- I remember a few things I can discuss at some length.
First, the Toads. I... wow. So, like, nobody during the production of this movie (and animated films take a very long time to make) took a look at the Toads and thought, "gee guys, these characters, with their pencil mustaches, giant boobs, and heavy accents, might not be okay"? Mind you, this movie was released in 1994, not 1934, so they can't use the trusty "it was just a product of it's time" excuse.
Second thing: Thumbelina is, like, the worst character. There are times when this movie looks like the Barbie princess movie cash-in of itself and Thumbie here is the main reason. She has got no personality at all; none. Her character arc is basically: "I am sad that I'm tiny. I am happy that I met the Fairy prince. I am sad again because the creepy toad and mole want to marry me and the Gilbert Gottfried beetle was mean to me. Now I am happy again because I married my hottie prince." My favorite scenes with Thumbelina are the ones where she's still dancing and smiling *after* each of the musical numbers are over. It's like she doesn't even know what she's doing.
Third and most important:I had a running checklist in my head of every scene that appeared to be lifted whole-cloth from Disney. They're pretty unsubtle about it too. Obviously you've got Jody Benson as Thumbelina and, God bless her, she gives it her all and sings her heart out on those "Sweet Caroline" clones. The story itself is based on a Hans Christian Anderson story -- same author as "The Little Mermaid". There's a big movie musical style song and dance number a la "Beauty and the Beast". In case that isn't enough, the opening is set in Paris for... some reason. There are some Fairies-changing-the-seasons animation that look identical to the similar scenes in "Fantasia". Kinda sad that they look the same, with 54 years worth of technological achievements between them.
This is the worst-looking Don Bluth movie so far. It barely even looks like any of the other Don Bluth movies. The only truly Bluthy highlight is a blink-and-you-miss-it scene with a fox. Everything looks so cheap and half-assed. I don't know what the story behind this movie is, but it almost looks like they just wanted to get it overwith.
Meanwhile, Disney released a little movie over that same summer with talking animals singing Elton John songs. "The Lion King" would go on to be the most popular animated film to date of all time. Ouch.
This is about where, as a kid, I stopped seriously paying attention to what Don Bluth was up to. Next up, a movie I've never seen before: "The Pebble and the Penguin". I am just giddy with excitement here, dear readers.
You know how I said, in the last post, that "I am looking at my Netflix queue, and things go straight downhill from here"? Yeah. Make that a 90 degree angle on a runaway train down a triple-black diamond.
Oh, "All Dogs Go To Heaven". The movie that assaulted my childhood. Most people my age have the "Star Wars" prequels or "Transformers 2" "Michael Bay Learns to Add and Subtract"*. I have "All Dogs Go To Heaven".
It is a hard thing for a kid to learn that their favorite director can do wrong, but something died inside me when I saw this movie. How in the world do you follow "The Land Before Time" with this? But before I go ahead and tear into how bad this movie is for all the conventional reasons (gaping plot holes, boring songs, ect.), let's talk about the psychology of a child at the time this movie was released.
There is something crucial missing from 80's nostalgia. You kids probably feel the same way about the 1980s as I did about the 1960s: a big, nonstop party to which I wasn't able to attend due to inconveniently not being born yet. Back then, 60's nostalgia meant tie-dye and the Beatles and hippies and Woodstock (possibly the ultimate retro "You shoulda been there" moment). There was, tellingly, no mention of racial tension, political unrest, or the Vietnam War and it's aftermath.
So with that in mind, here's my question about 80's nostalgia: Where's the death?
Listen, next time you're rocking out to "1999", pay attention to those lyrics. When Prince warns that "we could all die any day", he ain't kidding. That was the zeitgeist of the time. It was the peak of the Cold War and the bombs could drop at any minute. Just a few decades ago, there was a serious possibility that all life on Earth would be wiped out because two countries had different economic systems.
I was about six or seven when I realized all this was happening.
On top of this was an unspoken but collective agreement that something was going to happen in 1999, which wasn't too far away. Maybe this was a prediction from Nostradamus, maybe some other Middle Age prophet guy, but the world would be very different once the Millennium approached. Human nature being what it is, it was unanimously assumed that "different" meant "bad", and so the prediction was tangled up in nuclear paranoia. The point is, us 80's kids were thoroughly convinced that some way or other, we'd never live to see adulthood, an undercurrent of unshakable despair that still runs deep in our hearts today.**
Into this environment came a strange and seriously creepy trend in the motion picture world: Dramatic, non-horror (not intentionally anyways) movies where the action doesn't start until after the main character dies -almost always in a presumably horrible offscreen car accident- and returns as a supernatural something-or-other. "Ghost" is the best known of these and may have even started the trend. There are the utterly traumatic "Ghost Dad" and "Fluke" and "Jack Frost". There's "Casper", who, for his feature film debut, was given a sad backstory that explicitly reveals that he would more accurately and horrifyingly be called Caspar the Friendly Dead Child. Robin Williams has *TWO* such movies under his belt (and this is only if I am forgetting one): the thematically related and utterly mind-scarring "Jack" (Robin is a sweet child-man a la "Benjamin Button" who is doomed to die before he gets to college), and "What Dreams May Come" which may be the prettiest movie to ever have the potential to do you some serious psychological damage as a young person, ups the ante by killing off ALL of the major characters during the course of it's running time, and includes the classic line, "That's the last time I ever saw my family when we were all alive." Mind you, this big long list is off the top of my head, and ignores the wide world of End of the World/Rapture-themed entertainment(?) and direct-to-video/TV films.
And then, of course, there's "All Dogs Go To Heaven", which is a tender tale about a dog who dies twice and which operates in a universe where your afterlife options are a boring cotton candy cloud Heaven or an aggressively interesting Wayne D. Barlowe fever dream Hell.
"All Dogs Go To Heaven" was yet another symptom of the creepy death fixation running through Hollywood and the world at large at the time, and I hope you enjoyed those last few paragraphs because that is the only interesting commentary I can give this movie. I might have mentioned earlier that "All Dogs Go To Heaven" is... not good. Let me make something clear before I rip into this movie: even though it is terrible, the character and effects animation is superb. Once again, you'll see Bluth and his team at the top of their game in this movie. That's what's going to help me survive some of the upcoming movies. As bad as they get, they'll still *look* good.
Man, if only that terrific animation was in the service of a better... well, I was going to say "story", but really, "everything else."
We'll start with something that always drove me up the wall as a kid. The plot centers around this little girl who can "talk to animals". Apparently, inter-species communication is impossible in the world of "All Dogs Go To Heaven". Except when it isn't. And among other things, this raging plot hole makes the infamous You Know What even more worthy of a "what the f*** just happened?" (Speaking of King Gator, there are some character designs in this movie that are just eye-searingly ugly.)
It's easy to sum up everything wrong with this movie by fast-forwarding to around the 45 minute mark. In quick succession, you get a God-awful song about sharing that has ruined stronger people than I (ye Gods, can you see why "The Little Mermaid" killed this at the box office?), a sad song that is essentially "Somewhere Out There" with the numbers filed off, and a truly horrifying nightmare sequence. This film doesn't know what the hell it wants to be and suffers dearly. But not as much as I did while watching it.
Next up, "Thumbelina". Yaaaayyy...
* - It will never stop being funny. NEVER. If you don't understand, and you're like me and you haven't seen "Revenge of the Fallen" because you've heard how bad it is and you don't want to give Michael Bay any of your money, read the second to last Q/A in this. Of course, maybe it's enough to say that this is the same Michael Bay who thinks sunset can happen all around the world at the *same time*, so... ** Only Mayans and archaeologists are sicker of hearing about 2012 than I am, but I have the deepest sympathy for little kids growing up and hearing about it. And of course I'll be the first to say that the Cold War was gorram cake and ice cream compared to today's kids' post-9/11 world.
First off, this one's going to be a little picture heavy. And you may want to read this old post before we begin, as many of it's points still stand.
Also, just because this showed up again:
I had to see what it was all about. Clicking that link leads to a short film that shows kids how to use a DVD remote and eventually ends with this image:
Yeah...
In the last post I mentioned two important things that I didn't have the space to expand on: That "The Land Before Time" was the first movie I ever became a hopeless fangirl for and that it was The Movie That Changed My Life.
Completely Sealed Young Trishie's Fate, more like it. "The Land Before Time" is the one movie, more than any other, that made me want to be an animator. Seriously. Once I saw this, there was no other imaginable career path. I remember reading some little blurb about the Sullivan/Bluth studio as a little kid and making my one and only ever Life's Plan to get over there and work for them when I grew up. There's a small, but very (VERY) vocal part of me that still wants to work there.
(And Trish lets out the deepest, most heart-rending sigh you could ever imagine...)
Now that that serious bummer is out of the way (for YOU; I have to live with it) let me share some of the evidence and memories of my fandom. Gotta start out with another serious bummer: Try to imagine what all the cool kids in my middle school were writing about when they did their inevitable "My Favorite Movie" essays. Now imagine how much fun it was to run to the defense of some seventy-minute long dinosaur cartoon. Yeah.
I'll start with these weird wall decorations that I chanced to find ages and ages ago in a long-extinct hardware store. For some reason bare walls were abhorrent to the mind of an 80's kid, and these oversize stickers were there to please. Sadly, they did not come off in one piece. Sorry for the blurryness in some of these.
I saved Petrie for last because of a weird little phenomenon I've noticed over the years: no two tie-in products agree what color scheme he is. (I suggest you take my word for it instead of doing a Google Image search. "Petrie" turns up some weird sh*t.) Officially, he's the cruddy orange that seemed to be the default colors for Pterosaurs in the 80's, but in the above wall art and the Pizza Hut party supplies and the hand puppets below, he's practically a Sparkledactyl.
So about those damn hand puppets:
I have yet to meet a person of around my age who never owned one of these little monstrosities. Apparently, they were only a buck at the time so who could resist?
There was a glaring omission from the "Land Before Time" DVD I watched last night and it ain't the missing footage (well, OK, that too). Comment below if you have this stupid commercial well drilled into the tooth of your memory:
I don't recall ever having a Pizza Hut birthday party during this time period, but boy did we go there a lot. Our local Pizza Hut hung stuffed animals of the main cast from the ceiling and each time we ate there, I seethed with envy.
You see, those toys were J.C. Penny exclusives and there wasn’t a J.C. Penny store for miles. Whose genius marketing idea was that? I think there was a coloring contest where Pizza Hut would award one of the stuffed toys as a prize. I very definitely remember getting a picture of Littlefoot to color in. Littlefoot, just to remind you, is brown. The picture came with a sealed packet of crayons: red, yellow, blue, and green.
Chain restaurants hate children and want them to be properly disillusioned by the age of ten.
Anyway, if I couldn’t have the stuffed animals, the puppets were a... decent... substitute. (Decent as in off-model, awkwardly designed, and failing utterly at fitting on a human hand.) Honestly, give-away toys are like a giant conspiracy against you when you are about nine or ten and want a complete set. (See also all the trauma caused by McDonalds’ Happy Meals.) But as you can see, eventually I got my complete set. Sharptooth and everyone. Yard sales are awesome. Turns out these aren't so hard to find on eBay and neither are the 1988 "Land Before Time" plushes. (Said plushes really aren't that great looking and not really worth it IMO.)
Funny coda: I passed by a stuffed animal Littlefoot in Ocean State Job Lot a while ago, and the irony of blithely ignoring something I would have given my eyeteeth for as a little kid did not escape me.
I guess what I really really longed for was more "Land Before Time". As I said, the film is really short. I would have to wait years and years for my foolish little ten-year-old wish to be fulfilled in pretty much the worst way imaginable (sorry to address the sauropod in the room like that). Ah, but there was something to sate us dinosaur animation geeks (at least until "Jurassic Park" but we had no idea back then.) And I kind of want to slap my younger self for being so desperate for animated dinosaurs that she'd voluntarily watch this thing right here:
This little slice of shameless cash-grabbing is "Dink the Little Dinosaur". And I call it shameless because even as a kid, I knew this was a blatant rip off the popularity of "Land Before Time". They're not even subtle about it, really. It's kind of hilarious/sad that the basic plots were almost recycled by the "Land Before Time" series.
The DVD, whatever edition Netflix sent me, wasn't as terrible as I feared. The print looks pretty clean. As usual, there are no decent special features for older fans, though this one did silence all my years of fan speculation:
Here's the crazy thing: all of the text in the special features is read out loud for you. I can't tell you how annoying that is.
I wish Universal knew that there was an audience out there for a good anniversary edition of "Land Before Time" and, while we're dreaming, "An American Tail" made with Don Bluth's input. Give us a letterboxed format and a cleaned-up soundtrack. Give us some kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hell, really throw us a bone and let us know what the missing "Land Before Time" footage was all about!
This last thing is a bit of a point of contention for me. First off, I remember having two little paperback books that contained scenes that aren't in the final cut of the movie. One of them is a scene that enforces the "species-ism is bad" theme when the gang meets two different genre of hadrosaur who refuse to share the food and water they're hording with each-other; in a surprising moment of character development, it is Cera who tells them off. The other is far, far more interesting: it shows Littlefoot arriving at the Great Valley by himself, then backtracking to rescue his friends. It's clear where these scenes were rearranged in the final cut. Secondly, in the old Memory Lane message boards (it's very meta, the fact that they could be featured in a modern-day equivalent of Memory Lane), there was a poster who claimed to have a copy of the original storyboards and promised to send us scans of the missing scenes. I am still very bitter that this never happened.
I guess it's clear by now that where most kids in my peer group had "The Little Mermaid", I had "The Land Before Time". I'm sorry if this nostalgia binge was too much for some readers, but this movie means a lot to me.
Also, I might as well write two long posts on "The Land Before Time", because I'm looking at my Netflix queue, and it's pretty much straight downhill from here.
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"Art of the Day"! Here are some pop culture dinosaurs. Click for big:
First, hilarity from Netflix (I regret not sharing more of these. Sometimes I wonder just what movie they watched):
This is going to be another hard movie to write about. You see, while "The Secret of N.I.M.H." is my favorite movie of all time, "The Land Before Time" is no less than The Movie That Changed My Life. It's going to be hard to talk about it subjectively, as it was my favorite childhood movie. I may even have to have this stretch over two posts. I have a LOT to say about "LBT".
Here we have Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg re-teaming after "An American Tail". This time, they brought a third friend along. And I am just going to direct you to Jollyjack's lovely one-panel comic over at DeviantArt, which needs no further comment really.
There is a minimum of "Lucasness" in this film, fortunately. Though watching it again for the first time in ages, there's one thing that strikes me about "The Land Before Time" and it strikes me hard: It's *SHORT*. I mean, it's really short. It's barely an hour long and feels like it's over before you know it. This ends up working to the movie's advantage: there's simply no room to f*** anything up.
OK, seriously. The short, short running time of "The Land Before Time" means that the movie is tight as hell. There's not a moment wasted: everything goes towards character development or moving the plot forward, all set to what is arguably James Horner's very best movie score (this might even be my absolute favorite movie score of all time; too bad the prices on Amazon make me cry). And if that sounds like a dull experience, you'd be wrong. Because this movie has Don Bluth and his animators at the top of their game.
"The Land Before Time" is seventy minutes of nonstop amazing hand-drawn, hand-painted analog animation. This is still one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen and it includes some of the most astonishing sequences of character and effects animation I've had the pleasure of watching to this day. I don't know if there's an actual record for this, but I think it's fair to say that this little film, pound for pound, has more hand-rendered special effects animation than any other. (I remember the wonderful Bob Thomas book, Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast, in which one of the special effects animators bragged that "Beauty and the Beast" had "everything but volcanoes". Hey, guess what "Land Before Time" has? And there is a distinct lack of CAPs technology in their end credits. [Then again, "Beauty and the Beast" has a character who is a constantly moving and changing light source, so if you ignore the computer animation issue, the films are pretty even.])
And I'm just going to go ahead and say it: this is the very best fully animated film about dinosaurs. The production team went all out and made the most accurate dinosaur movie for it's time (EDIT: heavy emphasis on the "for it's time" part). And yes, I know how weird that sounds twenty-odd years later, but you have to remember that it was 1988, complete remains of some of the species depicted hadn't been discovered yet. Even so, about the only characters who really look bad are the hadrosaurs, the tyrannosaurs, and the... I wonder if that's meant to be an Oviraptor during the "even hatching was dangerous" scene? (It actually might be, as the only skull known at the time was crushed, so it was assumed they looked either a little less weird or a lot more conventional and ornithomimis-y.)
That's why this movie caused a sensation in my little ten-year-old universe. We were finally going to get to see a whole movie with dinosaurs in action. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal in today's post-"Walking With Dinosaurs" world, but you kids have to understand that back then, animated dinosaurs usually meant "Flintstones" reruns. And the only other high-profile dinosaur movie from the 1980's was... yeah...
So this was the first-ever movie I became a total fangirl for. But we'll hold off on that story for the next post, which will include a lot of potentially embarrassing pictures...
But first, hilarity from the Universal DVD. Indeed, dear reader. How do we find things? (I didn't play the game; sometimes it's more fun to wonder.)
These next few films are going to be hard to talk about without bringing in my childhood memories. It should be noted at this point that there was such a crazy and wide variety of hand-drawn animation coming from various studios by the early '80s, that I never ever developed the "All animated films are Disney films" delusion. Even so, by 1986 I was not yet aware that each movie was made by a specific studio and directed by a specific person. So it never occurred to me, sitting in the theater, that this weird movie about immigrant mice was by the same person who made that awesome movie about the big glowy-eyed owl and the wizard rat guy.
And "An American Tail" was and is, upon re-watching, weird as hell. Even weirder than the previous Don Bluth productions. As a child I didn't even really like it that much, though I could see that the character animation and the score was much better than what you'd see in, like, "The Care Bears Movie". But even though it was really pretty, "Tail" always struck me as kind of awkward in ways I couldn't explain.
Part of this might be indirectly Steven Spielberg's fault. "An American Tail" (which was basically his idea for an animated film) exists somewhere in between "E.T." and "Hook". I have already mentioned this elsewhere, but I was never really a big fan of "E.T." I don't think my sister liked it much either -- but our mom loved it and it's still one of her favorite movies. Now I understand why: Adults watch "E.T." and see a cute story about a kid who gets help from some other kids in reuniting with his family. Children, on the other hand, get hours in the dark (since even short movies seem really long when you are a child, thanks to your messed-up perception of time) staring at something with a direct mainline to all of their worst and most deeply instinctive and primal anxieties. Being a kid lost in the supermarket is one thing -- try being a peaceful hippie-alien stranded on another planet overrun with violent primates. It goes without saying that "Tail" runs on these same "lost little kid" themes. On top of that, the sequence of events in the film almost look as though there was a contest to see how many traumatic things poor little Feivel could be made to suffer through!
And yet, that's not what bothered me the most when I watched this movie as an eight-year-old. Now, you have to remember that when you are a child, nothing makes sense. This is simply because everything is new to you, and you have the whole of accumulated human knowledge to catch up on. Fun times. You don't understand half of the jokes in "Looney Tunes", commercials are likely to scare you out of your mind because you have no way of knowing that giant fruit doesn't regularly fall from the ceiling, and you don't understand that there were things that happened before you were born called "history". Eventually, a lot of it makes sense as you grow up and learn more, but there are scenes in "An American Tail" that actually bothered me because the movie never explained them further. Why the heck did they change Tanya's name to Tilly? Why was that guy selling the Brooklyn Bridge for pocket change? Why won't Annoying McStereotype (and that brings up another issue I could get into that bothered me when I watched it after I'd grown up a bit) help Feivel just because his family aren't registered to vote? What does that have to do with anything?
If nothing else, this movie proves that there's a fine line between understated and confusing. I don't even know if I'd show this movie to my hypothetical children. Can you imagine the conversation?
Baby Trish*: "But mommy, why are they singing that there are no cats in America? Of course there are cats in America! Why don't the mice know that?" Trish: "Well, see, honey, this is a mousey version of a misconception commonly held by the real immigrants of the time. Like when your great-great-grandparents came over from Europe, they thought America was a magical land where everything was made out of gold and there was no hunger or homelessness and everyone was happy and they'd never again face the problems they struggled with at home. Unfortunately, they came here and had to deal with a whole new set of problems, including the prejudice of the people who were already here. So in effect, there damn well were 'cats' in America. OK, sweetie?"
(There is a long and awkward pause.) Baby Trish: "I just wanted a movie about a lost mouse."
I have to agree with Roger Ebert's opinion of the movie from way back when. However, I'd add that "An American Tail" is all the beautiful bleakness of "Pinocchio" without any of it's humor. (Face it, if it weren't for Jiminy Cricket, "Pinocchio" would have been the bleakest Disney movie ever made.) And all this makes the following fact especially puzzling: For a long, long time, this was the highest grossing animated film ever made.
Lord knows why. Maybe it was Feivel himself? He could sing anything in that plaintive little mouse voice of his. Or maybe James Horner has a gift for bringing people in with an Oscar-baiting end-credits song? (That said, "Somewhere Out There" is one of the best examples of it's kind, and I highly doubt that anyone who wasn't going to see "Titanic" or "Avatar" anyway was swayed by their respective Oscar-Bait Songs.) All of the songs, incidentally, are the most aggressive of earworms. I'll never get these damn songs out of my head! Never!
Henri: "Ah, ah, ah! Never say never! (singing) Never say never, whatever you do! Never say never agai-AAAAAWK!!!"
(Sounds of Trish, who, mind you, is a big-hearted bird lover, strangling the pigeon.)
So, no, "American Tail" doesn't hold up too well. Next, we'll see how strong my Nostalgia Filter is with "The Land Before Time". * - Because some My Little Pony collector has to do it. Be assured that I won't, IRL, though as far as geek baby names go, this is pretty tame.
There was a time when video game graphics were usually just colorful little blocky things. But the thing was, YOU -and notice the emphasis on YOU- COULD MOVE THEM! You modern-day kids don't even know a world without video games, so you have no idea what a huge deal this was. Trust me, seeing something on a screen that YOU were controlling, changing the course of animated action just by pressing a button, that in itself was absolutely mind-blowing. No longer were we passive observers -- we were like gods.
Now I was too young to understand the full implications of the video game revolution until much later, when the neighbor kids got an NES. So I do not know, firsthand, what kind of impact "Dragon's Lair" had on the arcade world. From what I've heard since, however, it must have completely altered the landscape.
Except, weirdly, it doesn't look like it did. "Dragon's Lair", "Space Ace", and "Dragon's Lair: Time Warp" were the first-ever CD-ROM games and the first games to use full-motion video (some would argue that they remain the only good FMV games). According to the supplemental materials on their DVDs, they took a great deal of time to produce and utilized technology that was brand new, expensive, and difficult to keep working correctly. The games were popular, but since their production and upkeep were so expensive, they never really started a trend. FMV games and CD-ROM games tried for a comeback in the 1990's, but the technology (mostly the video quality and load speed) just wasn't quite there yet.
So here we have the Don Bluth / Rick Dyer games on DVD, where the gameplay moves almost unreasonably fast. Thankfully, each game has a "watch" option, a blessing for those of us who like it better when we have a minute or two to think. And this is appropriate, because really, every game is more like an interactive movie. And I don't know about you, but I have a feeling Rick Dyer said to Don Bluth, "Eh, just do whatever you want to."
The result, in each game, is about twenty minutes of unrestrained and distinctively Don Bluth-y weirdness. Bluthiness, if you will. "Space Ace" is the kind of movie (if you take these as short animated films) where the hero meets a giant evil version of himself. Then the giant evil version of the hero starts blasting himself with a laser until he's just a giant laughing head rolling around. Huh. Didn't see that coming.
There's rivers of gooey slime, overflowing tubs of bubbly lava, and giant rocks that immediately crumble under the hero's feet. And everything is trying to eat the hero. Everything. It's especially obvious in "Time Warp". Really, only Maurice Sendak seems to have as much of a creepy obsession with being devoured by something toothy and unpleasant.
But with all this said, the games are still fun as hell to watch. Bluth's attitude was, and still is, very like Pixar's, as I explained a few weeks ago. Animation is an art, and it should be done with love and care or not at all. Even the weirdest moments in these games are amazing to watch. That gives me hope for the rest of this project.
Next, we'll see how strong the nostalgia filter is with "An American Tail" and, on Monday, "The Land Before Time".
"My child, we can no longer live as rats. We know too much." --Nicodemus
Oh, God, I don't know where to start.
This is the first movie I really remember ever seeing. Now, I must have seen movies and other things before this one, but this is the first movie I really remember. As with the aforementioned "The Brave Little Toaster", I could tell this one was different right from the start. There was a darkness, poignancy, and overall a maturity I wasn't used to, and where some kids would have been frightened, I was fascinated. "The Secret of N.I.M.H." was the first movie that didn't insult my intelligence. This made me happy. I was, perhaps, five.
And at 32, I'm very happy to say that the film is still wonderful. Now, this was the first time I watched my copy of the 2-disc Family Fun 25th Anniversary Edition (I know, I know), so I've only seen the movie on the grimy pan-and-scan VHS. What I want you to do is run out and grab a copy of this DVD immediately (this goes double if you're a parent with a weird, proto-geek kid). It looks absolutely terrific. Do what I did and watch it on the biggest screen you have ready access to.
Watching "The Secret of N.I.M.H." in this cleaned-up widescreen print felt like watching it for the first time. A few things that struck me on this viewing:
* - Everything about this movie is superb, but the sequence with the Great Owl. Holy s**t. (Yes, I actually did say that out loud. Me = total dweeb.) This scene is Bluth's Crowning Moment of Awesome right here. The animation, the composition, the music, the visual effects, even the sound design -- I don't know what they could have been using for the sound of the Owl walking, but you feel like those talons could tear you to pieces!
* - And this is key to the next thing I noticed: this movie never lets you forget that the heroine is a mouse. Inches high, very low on the food chain, running on fear. Notice how the only thing keeping Brisby on-task is her determination to save her family. She's brave, but it's bravery born out of necessity.
* - The quote at the top of the page. I loved it since I found "N.I.M.H." again in high school, but I just noticed that it informs the entire movie. It's at once funny and sad and scary and poignant. And it is not a line of dialogue you're going to hear in "Cats and Dogs 2".
* - I can only really compare "The Secret of N.I.M.H." to a PIXAR movie (not even other Don Bluth movies). The way it's clearly a labor of love. They way the pathos is undercut with humor. The gorgeous character animation. The epic score. "N.I.M.H."'s closest relative might be "WALL-E" or "Finding Nemo".
Announcement: Ebay auctions are back after a summer hiatus. I'm already selling some of the old books and things from the Basement Cleanout. Have a look!
