And suddenly, it is Autumn! So far the weather has been pretty mild and sunny, good for reading and ill-conceived still life setups. And musing about things that have recently caused major rifts in the areas of the Internet where I frolic. We'll start with something I am disappointed in (and lots of people appear to be largely in agreement with me) and go on to something I am unabashedly optimistic about (and lots of people appear to be largely in disagreement with me).
You know, it seems like only yesterday it was the day after the Superbowl and I was picking apart the trailer for "Terra Nova". In that post, I had a list of things I hoped the producers wouldn't do. Unsurprisingly, they didn't listen to me, but I was alarmed to see that most of those things were right there in the pilot. In hindsight, I wish I had added to my "don't do this" list things like, "no annoying children please", "no annoying teenagers either", and "seriously, guys, don't just be '"Lost" Meets "Avatar" - But They're in the Cretaceous!'"
Too Long; Didn't Read Version: "Terra Nova", I am Disappoint.
Extended Dance Remix: Let's begin in the Uncreative Sh**ty Future that the first ten minutes or so of the show take place in. It is basically the same old post-apocalyptic (post-"Blade Runner", more honestly) land of smog and traffic and overcrowded cities and fascist police and black clothing and in light of everything else absurdly easy to break rules and blah whatever. Since we leave the Uncreative Sh**ty Future and go to Terra Nova pretty quickly, I'm not even sure why it's even part of the plot, except that it supplies the Main Family with Angst. God, this series has Angst. So much Angst. Angst everywhere. Most of it comes from the kids and we'll get to them in a bit. By the way, way to talk loudly about your secret plans on the way to Terra Nova, Annoying Older Brother.
So through a series of events that is too stupid to recount here, the Main Family goes through the Totally Not a Stargate to Terra Nova (the place). This is where we must talk about how the hell time/dimension-travel even works in "Terra Nova" (the series). Through exposition that is way too easy to miss, we learn that this giant rift I guess formed out of nowhere and that things sent through the rift never came back. They assumed this rift must lead to another dimension (another easily missed bit that really only exists so time paradoxes aren't an issue even though it brings up a ton of other problems) because the signals from the objects were never received by the scientists who APPARENTLY HAVE A RADIO THAT CAN COMMUNICATE WITH THE DISTANT PAST HOLY SH*T! If you hope to have this magic radio explained, you will be disappointed. They also don't explain how anyone learned how, if the rift takes you to a different time and dimension on a trip that there is no returning to the future from, the rift led to a place that is even habitable for humans instead of, like, the bottom of the sea or inside a volcano or on a planet with a toxic atmosphere or no atmosphere at all or, hell, in the middle of nowhere in outer space. I'd go on and on and on about all this but I am starting to feel myself getting a nosebleed.
So Main Family go through the rift and immediately start Angsting at each other, like you naturally do when you are a human who is suddenly in the Cretaceous Period holy sh*t! And you have just escaped the horrible post-apocalyptic future. And you are experiencing the sun and the moon and clouds and stars and clean water and clean air and edible plants and trees and ferns and flowers and nonhuman animals other than cockroaches and Cher for the very first time ever. This freakin' series, my God.
Annoying Older Brother is mad because his father was in prison for two years, and now he's mad because his father is no longer in prison, and now he's mad because his girlfriend is back (?) in the Sh**ty Future, and now he's mad because there's nothing to eat but Duran Duran Fruit, and now he's mad because his iPhone doesn't work, and holy sh*t shut the hell up already Older Brother! By the way, raise your hand if you would rather see a series focusing on the first scientists to explore and build Terra Nova instead of focusing on this Boring TGIF Sitcom Family.
And then there is the youngest daughter. Sweet Raptor Jesus. Finally we Jurassic Park readers have our book-accurate Lex. I am so Goddamn happy about this you guys, you don't even understand.
So... we learn that there is a group of Other people who went through the rift and live in an Other part of the forest and want to do things in the Cretaceous Other than what Colonel Quaritch wants to do. They've adapted to the weird new world long ago and are in on the local Ontological Mystery (tm) involving mystery numbers. So, yeah, the show basically does look a whole awful lot like '"Lost" Meets "Avatar" - But They're in the Cretaceous!'"
Which brings us, finally, to the dinosaurs. Oh man. We got our first look at a motion-capture dinosaur and it looks bad. Like more herky-jerky in it's movements than something Ray Harryhausen would have animated. That bad. We also get our first look at one of Brannon Braga's invented dinosaur species and...
Goddammitsomuch, Braga.
It might actually be easier to post this, so here is your Art of the Day:
(Edit: Thanks for noticing this one, guys! [And see Albertonychus' comments below as well.] Can you tell at what moment I was done with this series?)
"But Trish, it's just a TV show! Plus something about how it isn't really the Cetaceous Period and how it's more about the human characters! You should, to borrow a phrase, really just relax!"
You know, I want to. I wish I could. But the sad, sad truth is that more people are going to watch Braga's bulletproof gorilla suit Oviraptor-things tear up tanks with their tail-blades and assume that what they're seeing is the Bakker's-honest truth than will ever pick up a book. Or visit a museum. Or listen to teachers and scientists.
Listen, there are still folks out there who have no idea Dilophosaurus didn't have a ridiculous frill-thing. To the point where you will see such things on cheap knock-off toys. And to the point where a sign in a zoo I once visited - and dear reader you cannot imagine how much I want to be making this up - assured everyone that it's actual alive Frilled Dragons do not spit poison. So when your much-hyped fictional species looks like a not-sarcastic version of Matt's Prehistoric TV Reconstruction Kitteh, that makes me very, very sad. People, dinosaurs were perfectly normal animals just like you and me, not something that looks more at home in a D&D Monstrous Manual. (And anyway, as has been established, the human characters suck.)
Man, to think a few weeks ago we were all complaining about a dinosaur documentary!
Ah well, speaking of things the Internet likes to complain about, how about the "Avatar"-based section of Disney's Animal Kingdom that was announced a little while ago? Here are my thoughts, which are edited from things I posted over at DisBoards' thread on the subject. (I do not recommend reading the whole thing, which is damn near fifty pages of mostly "Wah! This isn't what I would have done with this intellectual property I didn't happen to create or own the rights to! I know better than the people in charge of my favorite things!" Unless you have a very strong drink handy.)
Here we have Walt Disney World teaming up with James Cameron. Cameron is a filmmaker who is a notorious taskmaster who goes on many an ego trip -- but who ALSO goes big, shoots for the moon, wants to blow the audience's mind, wants to show people things they've never seen before, has created some of the best-selling films of all time with some of the most passionate fans you will ever meet, and who, above all, basically invents technology along the way just to get a movie made.
Hmm... just like Walt Disney did.
So I have no problem whatsoever with a Disney/Cameron Marvel Teamup.
Now as far as the film "Avatar". Very few people were enamored of the story, even the hardcore fans. Why did people keep coming back to the theater? Why were an alarming number of ordinary folks crying at night, wishing they could turn into Navi and live on Pandora? (To which I say, my God, pull yourself together and book an ecotour of Costa Rica. Earth is pretty too. And real.) I'll tell you why:
World. Building.
Pandora was built in excruciating detail from the ground up. Some of the most creative minds were put in charge of every detail. I was sold on the movie once I heard Wayne D. Barlowe and Neville Page were involved. (As you may have guessed, I am a creature design nutcase.) So this is indeed a world as detailed as, say, Hogwarts. (I'll give you Star Wars, since we're dealing with several planet's worth of Barlowe and Terryl Witlatch critters rather than one planet we haven't even seen the aquatic fauna of -- yet.)
So there are a lot of interesting opportunities to be had here. One possibility I like (aside from the fairly obvious "Trudy Lives!" flight simulator, "Soarin' on a Turok", and "Neytiri and her Forest Friends") is an exhibit of the real organisms who inspired the fictional creatures: Lemurs, Ocelots, Tube Worms, Birds of Paradise, Lanternfish, Butterfly Lizards, Tree Ferns, Raffelasia, Flower Hat Jellyfish, and a whole slew of plants and animals who are strange, awesome, and need more love.
I've got the same attitude I already had with the Fantasyland expansion: I'm trusting Disney can pull it off and am ready to enjoy something new. Because in the end, we are getting a new themed land out of this. You HAVE to agree that's worth getting excited over.
That said, here's an interesting thing to ponder that I didn't even think of until the folks over at another message board brought it up: If we're going to get a park-within-a-park based on a fictional planet populated with strange creatures and a fully realized ecosystem, why Pandora and not Barsoom? I mean really, Disney. You're usually so good at shameless synergy.
Next Week - So many trip reports!
What? You expected an immediate "Terra Nova" reaction? Well, sorry; there's something much, much more important on our plate right now.
I mentioned this game in the comments for the precursor of the wonderful wonderful Cinnamon BUNZUH! blog/project. I have no idea what the story is behind the game, where it fits in book continuity (not at all; check out Lion!Rachel), or why I happen to own a copy of it. All I know is that in the middle of the four-day power outage we suffered after Hurricane Irene, I was bored enough to play it, as I promised I would.
Here, then, is (I'm sure) the Internet's first and only attempt at a playthrough of the "Animorphs" Game Boy Color game. Yes, Game Boy Color. I'll be playing it on my trusty Game Boy Advance. I should warn you that I haven't the slightest clue how those neat, clear screenshots of GBA screens in handheld game-based Let's Plays are done.
So here's the first thing you see when you pop your game in. Note the barely-visible "continue" option. I will spare you, but I got to see it an awful lot.
This is as good as the graphics get in this game. If I had perused my very brief childhood fixation with needlepoint, I'd cross-stitch this and applique it to a pillow. (Nice hair, Marco.)
And heck yes, I am ready to become an Animorph! Man, it has been a while since we had a game where your player character was an animal-based shapeshifter, hasn't it? Will this be as complicated and kind of mind-blowing as "Evo: Search for Eden"?
No. No it will not.
The small blob in the upper-left is a mouse. The giant green towel is a "Note from Dad" telling us that animals have been acting strange lately. The blue thing is Ax and the bird is... well, more on him in a second.
That little yellow blob-thing is our player-character. We start the game as Cassie, and here is, all things considered, the weirdest observation I have about "Animorphs: the GBC Game": Name another game where your player character is a black woman. (The fact that the only other one I can think of is half of that crazy "Matrix" tie-in thing means that something is dreadfully wrong.)
Tobias J. Emohawk will be our Navi ("Hey, listen!!!") equivalent for this evening, flying and bossing us around. Having Cassie make him repeat what he says here ("Talk to everybody! Even though we are the only resistance against a secret invasion!") leads to this amusing screenshot:
I have a new Crack Pairing.
Although, come to mention it, my real Crack Pairing is Cassie/Ax... Oh, hey, an Original Song (hey, the last video game had a song, this one must have one too.)
CASSIE: "Four! Eyes! Hypnotizing!
Could you be our savior? Could you be a Centaur?
Your! Powers! Are tantalizing!
I don't understand them, but I wanna have them!
Share! Them! A-with me!
Cause I want to transform! Don't want to be the norm!
A! Cquire! DNA!
I don't get how that works.
"You're from a war out in space
with hideous brain-worms!
But since you're at my place
wanna make love with someone who shares the same fa-ace?
(Chorus)
"TOUCH! ME!
ACQUIRE ME!
Visitor from the 'bove!
Let's redefine 'self-love!'
TRANS! FORM! INTO ME!
Let's destroy some barriers! Fly like Northern Harriers!
"You're an ALIEN!
You're so outa sight!
I'm an Animorph!
You're an Andalite!"
AX: "Got me horny like a Hork Bajar!
they go run around the trees eatin' BAH-A-A-ARK!
Got a tail blade could kill a T. rex!
Folks are like, 'yeah, that what she said.'
Shapeshfting squick is good, clean fun!
Tell me what's next? CINNAMON BUN!
They call me a Centaur
four-legged, horny, tough!
Maybe it's cause your boy
Axie's in-to weird stuff!"
(Chorus ad nauseum to end.)
Making sweet, boundary-defying love to Ax nets us our first password, and one of the game's stranger mechanics:
The game has no Save option. At all. None. Instead, whenever a major plot point happens (or not), it spits out a password for you to input after hitting the "Continue" option. Too damn bad if you don't understand what's going on here or forget to write the thing down.
I may have mentioned that I am an obsessive-compulsive Save-er.
So, about the mouse I mentioned earlier. Let's go near it and see what happens.
We are suddenly in an epic struggle between girl and mouse! Yes, here we have the game's strangest mechanic: to Acquire the form of an animal, we need to fight it while in the form of another animal.
Our first Morph, or "Starter" if you will, is a redonkulously overpowered dog.
Let's see what attacks we have:
You wonder why dogs are so popular, given all they do is kick things and scream all the damn time.
Anyway, kicking the crap out of the mouse allows us to transform into it. Just like it works in the books.
So we now have Mouse and Dog at our disposal. We can have six forms at a time, including our human form. Each form, in turn, has it's own health bar. Also, each animal has four -and only four- special moves.
This is the single most original game ever created for a Nintendo handheld system ever ever!
(Not even halfway through the review and I really hope everyone has their Sarcasm-detector on by now. Otherwise, I am in for some interesting comments.)
Let's head outside and see if we can't save more animals by beating them up and stealing all their DNA!
Ah, nature. Hey, is that indistinct blob in the upper-left a goat? I like charging into things; that could be useful! Let's see what moves it has...
Later on, although I did not get screenshots, we will learn that elephants can punch. I don't even want to know with what.
A word about the moves in this game. Some of them are evasion moves and some of them are attacks. You will not know which is which until you use them and they actually hit. That's the other thing: accuracy in this game is for sh*t. There's also no consistency with regards to which attacks (or creatures!) are more powerful than others, but we'll get to that soon enough.
Tobias tells us to get over to the pet store:
Here we get the useful Chimpanzee (with a tail?) form...
Oh wow. This game...
Aw, come on fishies! I just want your DNA!
The pet store also nets us the useful Generic Snake (Swim/Burrow/Climb/Venom yeah) form, which we'll use to sneak into the Zoo and...
Oh God dammit.
Even though the books went on to be more nuanced about them, here the Hork-Bajir are Goddamn Spiders. Any one of your attacks merely chips pixels off their health bar (except when and if it randomly doesn't), while they merrily stomp each of your forms without a care.
By the way, every time one of your animal forms loses all of it's hit points, you lose that form for good unless you can fight the animal and Acquire it again. Lose all of your forms and you lose the game, so you're essentially playing a forced Nuzlocke Run. With an impossibly wonky attack system and enemies who are ridiculously overpowered, right from the very beginning.
Thanks largely to the Hork-Bajir, we get to see this screen a lot:
We will skip over the part where I forgot to write down the last password (FUUUUUU-) and proceed directly to the Zoo/Gardens.
Tobias neglects to tell us exactly what we're up to here, but it could only involve acquiring as many species as possible, right?
Gettin' Cassie's trademark Wolf first. I will use Wolf to nab what is surely the best form early on in the game:
So majestic!
Now, unfortunately, walking within fifty feet of an animal starts a battle with it, even if you've already fought it. Wikkid, wikkid fun when you just barely survived the last fight. Also, it results in things like this happening:
There's lions in the zoo too! Now that's going to kick some ass. Surely, if I attempt to fight him, he won't kill each of my powerful pain-in-the-ass-to-acquire forms in a row while they make not a dent, leaving me with only my least-powerful form to fight with, which he will them smash easily, right?
This f***ing game.
("Continue", password, re-get every animal, see that a bat is available -a flying form!- attempt to acquire and...)
This. F***ing. GAME!
Yeah, I have no idea where to go. I leave the Gardens and wander around for a bit -- as Wolf!Cassie!
This mountain has a glitch that gets me stuck and unable to move.
Working my way free, I head upwards to... a plot point, surely! The Sharing is the creepy Yeerk brain-slug cult thing where visitors are merely instructed to walk around without a helmet. Maybe I'm supposed to enter this building and...
No.
Yeah, uh, I'm going to quit here. Because there's probably three more levels of this B.S. and I'm done. Just one last thing before I go...
Batmanning like a pro! Until I get stuck beside this bush. *sigh*
...
...
...
Oh, what the hell.
So... the last two and a half week's worth of posts were, for the most part, written well in advance, if it isn't obvious. And I missed "Reign of the Dinosaur Revolution". This is all due to In Real Life drama.
Now as you may have noticed, I hate sharing personal stuff online. So I hope "family from Florida came to visit for a week and a half" and "every day was an Adventure largely centered around consuming as much lobster as possible" and "a pipe leading to the downstairs toilet decided to troll us all" is enough for everyone.
So instead of a review of "Dinosaur Revolution" (which won't be happening for a while as I may wait for the DVD because Lull Destruction in nature shows makes me cry), or one of the seemingly twenty trip reports I would like to write (and aside from the plumbing problems, we did indeed have a great time), I have for you Links of Interest!
* - Hey look, another person watching every Disney film there is! The Disney Film Project is both a blog and a podcast, which makes things a little bit different, and it doesn't look like Ryan is doing the films in any particular order. However, and this is the kicker, he's reviewing shorts (giving me a terrific nostalgia trip over favorite shorts I couldn't remember the titles of) and everything from "Song of the South" and "Make Mine Music!" to, er, "Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure" and "The Country Bears". Godspeed and good luck!
* - On another note, how about a blog dedicated to obscure prehistoric animals written by a seven-year-old kid? Next time you feel disillusioned with the youth of today, head on over to Life Before the Dinosaurs and breathe a little easier.
* - If you haven't been reading the Dinosaurs Reanimated Production Blog, you should start. Simple as that.
* - September is apparently Velociraptor Awareness Month. How is it possible that I was previously unaware of this?
* - Archosaur-themed wines? Well, yes. There are quite a few, technically speaking. That said, I need Apatosaurus Chardonnay in my wine label collection yesterday.
* - ColourLovers did a fantastic infographic on the use of color in comics.
* - Speaking of classic superheroes, check out this super-adorable "Up"/"Rocketeer" fan-film.
* - Junk Food Dinner dug up a trio of bizarre children's films for their 75'th episode and also, perhaps more importantly, brought my attention to the website "All Clues, No Solutions". Going over their catalog, it has occurred to me that my alter-ego has been on a very long hiatus hasn't she?
* - Meanwhile Oh Noa reviews the stupidest Halloween costumes currently available. Now I don't have to. (There is no universe in which that Sexy Big Bird costume is okay.)
* - The often hilarious, and oddly named, pop culture blog Wolf Gnards (as with Topless Robot, I promise it isn't what it sounds like) applied a little basic genetics to inexplicably popular sitcoms of the past and the results... my God, I will never see a "Full House" rerun in the same light.
* - Speaking of phrases that name-check God (even though we weren't): There have been a lot of interesting reactions to DC's giant reboot... thing. However, this one might be the weirdest.
* - Speaking of "Full House" (which we were), this is amazing. I want to be able to play this.
* - The Urban Pantheist had a fantastic post about the endangered species issue.
* - You have probably already heard of these shoes. And to them I say, big deal! They don't even really lace themselves and you are just stuck with a pair of really ugly (this coming from a not-a-shoe-person person) shoes. Where is my f***ing Hoverboard?!?
* - As I mentioned a few weeks ago, there doesn't seem to be much happening at Walt Disney World for the parks' 40'th Anniversary. This might be changing early next month. (Wanna bet the "special surprise" is a preview of the Fantasyland expansion? Ffft, yeah right.)
* - Speaking of WDW, OMGWTFLOL!!! (Just trust me when I say that there is a small crater where DisBoards once stood...)
* - Speaking of Disney, obviously a lot of ink and blood has been spilled over the most recent "Star Wars" revisions, but the revisions to Disney films often don't raise a peep. Some thoughts about this here.
* - And on the subject of revised Disney films, remember "The Sweatbox"? The documentary about the implosion of "Kingdom of the Sun" and last-minute bashing together of "The Emperor's New Groove"? Well a tiny little bit of it has been posted on YouTube, so go watch it while you can.
* - And the Audubon Society's blog shared these gorgeous photographs of feathers in amber.
Lots of Art Evolved-keteers getting shout-outs recently, which is awesome! They include:
* - Dave and Niroot's dinosaur fights from "Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs" being featured on io9.
* - A link to and discussion of a rather old "When Pigs Fly Returns" story on Science... Sort Of.
* - And speaking of "Science... Sort Of", hey look who's featured in their a-hundreth episode! Thanks guys, you rule!
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Art of the Day!
Hey, I finished the turtle painting!
It's a little different from when I started; I didn't like how the greenish-black turtles were fading into the greenish background. Now they're yellowish-puce.
Note: click all Flickr-hosted illustrations for the big/legible versions.
A few years ago, the Disney fandom was blown away by some really strange concept art that appeared online with very little explanation and looked like this. Some people freaked. Some people loved it.
And a very small, very specific portion of the fandom, myself included, completely lost their sh*t especially after more plot details surfaced. The game, which we now knew to be titled "Epic Mickey", involved Mickey Mouse being trapped in a weird, twisted version of Disneyland populated entirely with forgotten and lost Disney characters.
(Well, not in this sense, but that would have been amazing.)
Furthermore, Mickey would take on different characteristics depending on how the player approached different parts of the game. And Mickey would be able to manipulate the very game environment with pencils, erasers, ink, paint, thinner, brushes and so on. Hate dealing with enemies? Erase them! Or melt the floor out from under them! Or paint a big box around them, trapping them!
Now, as the game made it's way to the market, some... compromises were made. The game's overseer, Warren Spector, later explained that he learned where Disney draws the line by initially going way the heck over it. Focus groups (if we could ever point the finger at any one entity, then focus groups are essentially the one reason why we can't have nice things) were not one bit happy with the weirder initial aspects of the game, leading to whole swathes of ideas being scrapped.
So "Epic Mickey" in it's current form is... not what I was initially led to expect. Now, it is a pretty good game, but there were times when it almost stopped being fun and became more of a chore. You know what, let's start the review proper with all the things I disliked in "Epic Mickey". First off, this (go here for big):
Let me level with you. I am terrible, terrible I tell you, at both targeting and platforming in video games. "Epic Mickey" has quite a few enemies that require rather accurate aiming to dispatch; the fact that the Wiimote isn't always intuitive doesn't help here. And there is a lot of jumping from platform to platform over roaming monsters, bottomless pits, and rivers of what is essentially The Dip in all but name. And so help me, if the title of this post didn't alert you, there are so many levels where the floor is Dip as far as the eye can see.
So many...
So Goddamn many...
And I wouldn't even complain about this much -- if it weren't for the real Big Bad in the game...
(Thun-dun dun-dun thun-dun dun-dun, thun-dun dun-dun thun-dun dun-dun)
MICKEY: "There's paint thinner / all over the floor.
Rea-CHIN into the distance / to the other shore.
Tiny platforms for me to jump across.
I CA-nnot see them though / I'm at a total loss.
One slip in / and I will meet my end.
Too BAD the camera is, like, just nobody's friend.
There's paint thinner / all over the floor.
Rea-CHIN into the distance / to the other shore.
"This crazy camera I can't see 'round the bend!
Just one missed jump 'round here an' I will meet my end!
This Goddamn camera it makes me motion sick!
Whoever programmed it is just a total --"
CHORUS: "Mickey's gone 'round the bend!
Will the madness ever end?
It only takes a little slip
to go rollin' in the Dip!
"Mickey is gettin' sick!
The camera is such a dick!
It's like a bad acid trip!
Rollin' in the Dip!"
MICKEY: "There's a gear puzzle that I must resolve. (Wo-O-oah!)
Must thin them crystal clear so they do not revolve. (WO-o-ah!)
Turn my body / into paint black and white
If I screw up / and don't solve this puzzle right.
I will slowly / dissolve in that goo.
Killin' me horribly just like that Squeaky Shoe."
(Repeat CHORUS and ad lib to end.)
Honest and no kidding, whoever programmed the virtual camera in this game needs to just sit in the corner and think about what they have done.
If the camera in "Kingdom Hearts" was annoying at times, here it almost feels like the camera is actively working against you. It changes angles randomly as you're making a string of difficult jumps (ie, Mickey had to move forward a second ago, suddenly he has to move to the right). It gets right in Mickey's face during battles with roaming monsters (good God, the confrontation with the giant blobby brute in the castle's tapestry room!) And while you do have some minimal control over it, that ability craps out at the most inopportune times (usually when you are anywhere near anything that can be affected by Mickey's paintbrush). The camera is the real villain of "Epic Mickey". Try to argue it.
And as far as the Gear Puzzles... They kind of reminded me of the three elemental monkeys in "Pokemon: Black and White". Whoever came up with the idea must have REALLY loved it, so they just keep showing up everywhere and getting in the way. Only difference is the monkeys were pushovers and the gears ended up killing my Mickey over and over.
It's worth noting that I am an obsessive-compulsive Save-er.
Normal Person: "Neat, I beat the lead boss! Save!"
Me: "I just read a new line of dialogue from that NPC - SAVE!!!"
"Epic Mickey" has a rather infamous "autosave" option. As in, you cannot control where the game saves and there's a very real chance that the only time the game does save isn't until after you've beaten a level. The idea was to force the player into not backtracking once she had crossed some turning point or other. The reality is oh, so much fun... (I'm just glad I finished this game prior to Season Premier, er, season so the TV wasn't compromised by not-videogame-understanding-people.)
So with all that said, there is an awful lot to love in "Epic Mickey". Let's go on to the good.
The paintbrush gimmick is clever as hell and results in some genuinely cool moments. There's something inherently satisfying about filling the local Goomba equivalent's maw with paint, converting him to Team Mickey, and watching him run off to headbutt his former fellows while you go do something that's actually important. I love how the rescued Gremlins often help you in return during difficult boss fights. And speaking of the Gremlins, I love, love, love how "Epic Mickey" showcases characters Disney barely acknowledges.
(OK, not all of them, but still.)
Honestly, since I am a total geek for Weird Disney Things and I own a Wii, it sometimes felt like the game was made just for me. There are tons of obscure Disney references packed in every level (many are listed here) and each new level is preceded by a mini-level based directly on a classic cartoon and not necessarily one most people would be able to name off the top of their head. People, there is a mini-level based on "Plutopia" for goodness sake!
And as with the original "Kingdom Hearts", the story of the game is downright heartfelt and moving. I hope that ultimately this prompts many, many unexpected "starring roles" for Mickey and friends outside of the game world.
Plus there's something deeply cathartic about a game that lets you trash the dolls from "It's A Small World" for prizes.
OK, let's just get it right on the table right away: Yes, "Song of the South" is a racially problematic film. And there are a few scenes that are downright weird and uncomfortable.
Having finally watched the film, it is absolutely understandable why Disney doesn't quite know what to do with it. Disney's usual method of dealing with the inconvenient spiky bits in the cotton candy of their films is to cut them right out. Unfortunately, there's no way to cut out the controversial portions in "Song" without altering the film beyond comprehension. And so, "Song of the South" was put on "permanent retirement" after it's anniversary re-release in 1986.
"Song of the South" quickly became the forbidden fruit of animation fans. I'd never ever get a chance to watch it, so I ran on what little information I could get out of animation history books. And nearly all of the books agreed on one thing: The animated portions of the film are fabulous, and probably the best animation to come out of the studio's features around World War Two. But the live-action portions are so inexcusably racist, they will melt your face off.
Well, what the history books don't tell you about those same live-action portions is this: Aside from being racially problematic*, they are also really boring. Really and truly and astonishingly boring.
The only bright spot in the live-action segments is the character of Uncle Remus himself. Warm and grandfatherly, his relationship with the unforgivably annoying child characters is very believable and sweet. The film picks up once he enters the story, and he leads us into the film's big "Holy Sh*t" Moment, about fifteen minutes in.
For this is where the animation begins, and it does so in a moment of... I can honestly and non-sarcastically call it Disney Magic. There are three animated stories in all, each with a signature song that I was surprised to already know all the words to. Disney may have Vaulted "Song of the South" for good, but they have lost no love for the songs nor the animated characters. (This is as good a time as any to admit Splash Mountain may be among my favorite rides if I have to choose.)
The animation is lively and gorgeous, and what's especially interesting about the animation is the fact that it doesn't really feel like anything else Disney was doing at the time. The humor and characterization both have much more in common with what you'd see in contemporary Looney Tunes, and there are scenes in the film that are directly referenced in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Speaking of, the moments when live-action and animated characters interact are still something truly special to see. Indeed, the only bad thing I can say about the animation here is that there is far, far too little of it.
The animated sequences are the reason why one should go through all the trouble of finding a way to watch "Song of the South". The cultural kerfuffle over the film has, sadly, overshadowed it for... well, turns out during my research that this film has been causing controversy practically since the day it was conceived. The thing is, Disney's self-censorship of the film has just exacerbated it beyond reason. I am in agreement with the Antagony and Ecstasy blog that if Disney quietly put "Song of the South" out on a limited edition Blue-Ray tomorrow, honestly most of the people buying it would be doing so just to see what the whole hubbub is all about. Until that day comes, you will, sadly, have to find the film through unconventional means. And I shouldn't encourage this kind of thing, but what choice has Disney left us with?
Well in any case, it's far more important to note now that I have caught up on every big-deal classic Disney film that contains animation! It's been a hell of a journey, and one that I recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest in animation.
That said, I'm not stopping until Disney does. Bring on "Winnie the Pooh" and "Wreck-It Ralph" and "King of the Elves" (maybe?) and "The Snow Queen"! For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.
* - "But Trish, since I don't want to go through the trouble of finding a copy of the movie, just how racially problematic *are* the live-action portions of 'Song of the South'?"
Well first off, thanks for asking a person who has actually sat down and watched "Song of the South" rather than, as I suspect, one of the many, many people who refuse to experience controversial media yet form an opinion about them anyway. But the best way to find out how offensive "Song of the South" is to *you* (and notice the emphasis on *you*, because I simply have no way of knowing what would offend *you* as different people are sensitive to entirely different things), if you're really curious, is to just watch the darn thing yourself.
Listen, essays have been written on this subject. Long ones. By people far, faaar more qualified to talk about this kind of controversial and highly emotional issue. So I don't know what I could add to the argument, but I feel I should add something. But I highly suspect I wouldn't feel compelled to elaborate on any of this if Disney hadn't self-censored the film.
And this is because honestly, the awkward ethnic identity politics here are about as offensive as other films and animation and media from the time period. As I said, I didn't find "Song of the South" as face-meltingly racist as I found it just really, really weird and uncomfortable. What do I mean by that? Well, remember, the less you resembled what Walt Disney would consider "normal", the more problematic your onscreen depiction would be. Which means that anything uncomfortable in "Song of the South" is in good company with other (suspiciously not censored) Disney films. What's up, Peter Pan. How's Princess Tiger Lily? More to the point, how's her entire tribe?
The most obviously offensive aspect of "Song of the South" is the very, very bizarre "American Adventure"-ish Disney spin and big giant smiley face it puts on one of the most horrible chapters in United States history... maybe. The movie doesn't state openly whether it takes place before, during, or after the Civil War and that's what most of the awkward scenes orbit around.
Okay, details. So in "Song of the South" there's a rich old white woman who lives in a mansion that just happens to be right near a field where poor black people cheerily whistle their way to work and are generally depicted (much like other non-WASPs in Disney's movies) as weird/scary/fascinating alien Others. The word "slave" is never spoken out loud ever, and indeed the film takes the longest possible route out of it's way to avoid any racially charged language at all. Annoying Little Boy's best friend is a black kid, and the film interestingly does not approach this friendship as unusual at all. But then you notice that said best friend is conspicuously absent during the big (and ultimately kinda pointless) birthday party scene without explanation. The only truly mean human characters are a pair of unspeakably cruel poor white boys (though that's pretty loaded in its own way come to mention it). Uncle Remus lives in his own little shack and it is shown late in the film that he can pack up and leave whenever he likes. Annoying Little Boy's mother doesn't want her son playing with Uncle Remus, and in one of the more awkward scenes, Uncle Remus does not act more assertive when confronted by her. This is all because she is really really prejudiced against... storytellers. Yup.
As it happens, the film is so obtuse and reliant on outmoded ethnic stereotypes from several generations back, I found myself saying "OMG, this is so racist!" much much less often than I was saying, "uhhh?" or "wait, what?" But if I am to be truly honest, I found the racial politics in a slightly more recent film more troubling. And there wasn't anything in "Song of the South" that was so openly racist that it melted my face off the way an obscure number in this stone-cold Christmas classic did. And "Song of the South" didn't p*ss me off nearly as much as "Gone With the Wind" did, so there's that.
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Sketch of the Day!
Such controversy! Such drama! Let's wash it all away with in-progress turtles!
It's early in the summer of 1903 in the picturesque little town of Fulton County, located somewhere in the mythical turn-of-the-last-century midwest that Walt Disney so loved. And here begins the tale of what is perhaps his most forgotten film with animation in it: "So Dear to My Heart".
The film is as obscure as Disney films get. It's tucked away among the Anthology Features (obscure in their own right) like an afterthought. The very few scenes of animation within the film are at least as interesting as anything in "Melody Time" or "Make Mine Music", and include some fine moments indeed.
It's too bad the film surrounding those approximately fifteen minutes of full animation is such a slog.
OK, kiddies, gather 'round. As I said before, it's 1903 and we're somewhere in the mythical candy-colored midwest that very likely existed nowhere else but in the fertile mind of Walt Disney. As legend has it, Disney grew up on a farm where... hell with it. Suspiciously, no two accounts agree on what Disney's childhood was like. But we do know that in any case, whether it was rosy and happy or horrifically traumatic, he had a lifelong affinity for farms and for the Good Old Days.
Oh, the Good Old Days! When little boys lived with their fire-and-brimstone-and-horrible-guilt-and-blatant-contradiction preachin' grannies and did all the chores that didn't involve sewing or knitting or weaving or cooking or beating rugs with those rug-beating things. When uncle Burl Ives would come over with his guitar and his folky songs and little cousin Tildy, who has been a mite bit grumpy lately since her application to the Lollipop Guild was rejected cause her little squeakie voice wasn't *quite* grating enough. Where you could raise yourself a baby lamb to win the Special Prize at the county fair, even though that lamb is... well, you know... black! Where boys could tromp through the deep woods where the owl blinks and the werewolf howls and the Skunk Ape screams, and look for bee trees, whereupon they could raid the beehive without incident and bring a fortune in honey into town. Where the highlight of a little boy's day was puttin' pretty pictures in his scrapbook, and hallucinating while reading it. And where the highlight of a little girl's day was pouting and whining and runnin' home cryin' to her daddy.
Aw, gee wizz! You all don't know how nice we had it back in the Good Old Days! You kids these days and yer card games and yer face books and yer motor cars and yer rap music and yer public schools and yer piercings and yer electricity and yer animal rights and yer child labor laws and yer civil rights and yer women's lib...
As you may have guessed, I have a healthy level of cynicism about nostalgia for the Good Old Days.
But all criticism aside, the animation is very pretty, and it has some truly beautiful moments. The idea is that Jeremiah (the little boy) is collecting pictures in a scrapbook and he imagines them coming to life. The animated characters interact with the scrapbook elements in really inventive ways. At the same time, all the animation is at the service of musical numbers with inspiring messages for the young audience, and these songs are very, very boring when they aren't downright head-scratching. There's a reason why you don't hear these ditties much anymore. (My gosh, "Stick-to-itivity"...)
So overall, "So Dear To My Heart" is pretty dull and unintentionally very, very weird. It's SO aggressively a product of it's time that children will likely either be bored silly or find the movie as utterly baffling as a student film. It's ultimately of interest only to the hardcore Disney animation completest.
For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.
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Sketch of the Day!
As I stated a while back, Disney has a long history of making-of documentaries that, while informative and often fascinating, also tend to be a bit sugarcoated. It turns out that history runs back at least as far as what could be called Disney's first-ever making-of feature, and it is one of the very strangest Disney Animated Canon films of all.
When I was a little kid, I thought that "The Reluctant Dragon" was merely a rather lavish short based on a cute Kenneth Grahame short story that would air among other compiled theatrical cartoons on the Disney Channel. I had no idea at the time that it was part of a feature until I chanced to catch that feature once on the Disney Channel. (Yes, there was a time when TDC showed classic cartoons and weird and obscure old Disney stuff from their vaults. And they also showed things like "The Harlem Globetrotters Visit Gilligan's Island". Let's not let the Nostalgia Filter get too rosy). My recent viewing of the film for this review was only the second time I have ever seen it, and it sure is a thing.
What kind of thing is "The Reluctant Dragon"? Well, it is a film that purported to show it's 1941 audience how Walt Disney made cartoons in his shiny new Burbank studio. The one with the Mickey Ave. and Dopey Drive signpost (which according to some Disney historians, was made purposefully for the film just to make the studio look more whimsical and never came down). According to "Dragon", the Disney studio is about two parts Venture Industries, two parts Emerald City, two parts Zevo Toys, and four parts Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory (especially in that genuinely lovely paint lab scene). And while it is very hard to find information about the film, this much is almost assuredly true: the happy happy 1941 Disney studio depicted in "The Reluctant Dragon" was utter horsesh*t.
You see, almost everyone onscreen is an actor. Aside from the impossible-to-imitate Clarence "Duckie" Nash and Florence Gill, there is but one moment where actual Disney legends from the time are onscreen, and their presence is all but unheralded (that's Ward Kimball, Norm Ferguson, and Fred Moore in the "How to Ride a Horse" segment). There is, naturally, an awkward realty subtext here: "The Reluctant Dragon" was released during an extremely vicious studio strike. For those in the know, it's a little hard not to notice the tension in the scenes involving actual Disney artists, particularly the one incredibly brief scene towards the end where Walt Disney himself appears (in, appropriately enough, the legendary Sweatbox).
But never mind the lie that is this making-of "documentary" (and indeed, if you do not understand how animation works, this film won't exactly help, as all the various steps are parsed out to us in random order [soundtrack, then photography, then ink and paint, then character design, then storyboard... yeah.]) What treasures does this lost little lamb of a film hold for us Disney animation geeks?
Well, I was very wrong when I said back during the original Disney Animated Canon project that there was nothing interesting here aside from the off-screen drama. You get quick (or surprisingly long) glimpses at early versions of characters who would star in "Bambi", "Dumbo", "Lady and the Tramp", "Peter Pan", and others. You get a brief but interesting look at how the famous Multiplane Camera works (although exactly *what* we're looking at isn't explained if you don't already know), and you get the sense that Disney was basically the absurdly ambitious James Cameron of his day. You see what could only be described as the world's first animatic during the "Baby Weems" sequence (which also may have introduced the very concept of storyboards to Hollywood at large, as theorized in this Antagony and Ecstasy review.) And you get the rather sweet "Reluctant Dragon" short itself, along with a less-heralded but very cute Goofy short.
Oh, and you also get a thankfully very few but still rather alarming instances of casual sexism, racism, and arguable homophobia (oh wow, the Reluctant Dragon himself). Which sadly brings into focus the fact that the less you resembled what Walt Disney would consider "normal", the more... problematic your onscreen depiction would be. We... might have to get into this in a bit more detail in an upcoming review.
All in all, "The Reluctant Dragon" is a fascinating little anomaly hidden among the other, more loved Disney films. Definitely something worth digging up if you can find it. Join me next week, when I will tackle the most controversial Disney animated feature film of all, as well as the... probably least controversial one (but not necessarily in that order).
For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.
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Sketch of the Day!
So here's our first loose end from the Disney Animated Canon, just recently available on Netflix. Actually, I'll consider it a good thing that I had to skip this one during the time I was originally watching/reviewing the Canon all those years ago, since "James and the Giant Peach" is a very interesting, all but forgotten film that deserves a bit of elbow room, rather than a quick paragraph-long review. The same could be said of the other three films I'll be reviewing over the next two weeks.
Some years ago, there was considerable debate as to which animated features made by Walt Disney Pictures should be considered "true" Disney films and which ones shouldn't. This was largely spurred by the glut of direct-to-video/DVD Disney sequels, as seen here, but the question is one that seems to have haunted Disney as long as I can remember. There is an Official Official List of films in the Disney Animated Canon, and even so, part of me wonders how much was added and subtracted just so Disney could say they've hit fifty films in all just last winter.
You see, back when I was a kid, if a Disney film contained animation, it was considered an "Animated Disney Animated Classic Animated Entertainment Event What is Animated." Simple enough. So clearly "Fantasia" and "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" were part of what would in the future be called the Canon, but so were things like "Victory Through Air Power" and "Song of the South" and even "TRON" (speaking of, here are more thoughts on this issue). If you were a movie and you gave Disney a reason to brag about it's animation legacy, you were in, which made a lot of sense back when Disney was hurting for things to brag about with regards to animated films. (To get a sense of what Disney was like in the late 70's through the mid 80's, picture a peacock who is desperately trying to replace his shiny display feathers, even as they are moulting.) As you can see here, when you count every notable Disney feature-length film with animation in it as part of the Canon, we left #50 in the dust years ago (then again, given the movie that gets to be number fifty by my reckoning is the much-derided "Dinosaur"...)
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" in particular has always had a strange and uncomfortable position within the Disney Animated Canon and, indeed, within Disney films period. When the film was initially released, Disney had little idea what to do with it, how to advertise it, and, most importantly (and tellingly) how to make it into a toy or a theme park ride or a Happy Burger King Kid's Club Meal. It took years and years for Disney to figure out how to appease fans of "Nightmare", and while one could argue that they are going way too far in the opposite direction, it's nice to see them doing anything at all with it. By far, the greatest bone thrown to "Nightmare Before Christmas" and it's fans is the appearance of Jack Skellington and company in "Kingdom Hearts" back before that series went off the rails in a way that is, come to mention it, truly impressive. For this reason, I'd have felt remiss if I hadn't included it in the Canon.
And if "Nightmare" counts then, by God! so does it's immediate successor. Which brings us, finally to today's entry in my journey through the Disney animated films I'd missed out on earlier for various reasons and just recently procured copies of (and never you mind how, though mad props to those of you who have supported this project). Ah, "James and the Giant Peach", what a wonderful little oddball in the history of animated films you are. It is very sad to reflect that, while Disney has taken so very long to acknowledge "Nightmare Before Christmas", "James" might as well be completely invisible.
Henry Selick, the director of both "Nightmare" and "James", and also of "Coraline" and the impressively bizarre "Monkeybone", is, God bless him and his beautifully crazy mind, the kind of director who makes whatever Bizzaries and Fantasies he would like to watch and screw you all if you don't like it. Which is why his adaptation of a Roald Dahl storybook lies among the best Dahl-inspired films. And this is because Roald Dahl, may he and his beautifully crazy mind rest in peace, always struck me as the kind of children's book author who wrote what he wanted and never mind if there are any concerned parents who don't like it. (Maurice Sendak is a close soul-brother.) To that end, his characters tend to face the most unthinkable trauma before some kind of magical thing or other whisks them away to their Happily Ever After. And I do mean "unthinkable". Very early on in "James and the Giant Peach", we are told by the sweetly grandfatherly voice of Pete Postlethwaite (and how I miss him!) how our young hero watched on helplessly as his kindly mother and father were eaten by an angry rhinoceros.
Methinks if almost any other children's book author at all had written something like that, it would warrant a passionate 😱
In a Roald Dahl book, getting maimed by an utterly random animal is Monday. Hanging with large invertebrates (here designed by the wonderful Lane Smith) is Tuesday.
The action inside and around the titular giant peach is why we're here and Selick's work in "James" is astonishing and wonderful. All the creatures have great physicality and marvelous little character moments. The same astounding attention to detail present in "Nightmare Before Christmas" is here too. The live-action bookends are a touch awkward... but I *did* just watch "Rock-A-Doodle", so I'm willing to let them slide.
So here we have a lost little gem that, I think, deserves a lot more attention. Next up, speaking of lost movies, we dig a little deeper into the Disney vault. For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.
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Sketch of the Day!
A new month dawns and as it does, a loose end rears it's ugly head.
With any luck, I will have resolved several loose ends in September. To wit, "Rock-A-Doodle". It is now available via Netflix instant, where it was not available through Netflix at all during Don Bluth Month last year. My hideous dark twisted sense of completion and the private little hell that is my obsessive-compulsive disorder both demanded that I watch it and give a full review. I hope they are happy.
Where to start with "Rock-A-Doodle"? I don't know, but I feel that it's definitely worth noting that the story upon which the film is (very, very, very loosely) based had a long, very strange trip to the screen. Jim Hill tells the tale in excruciating detail here. It isn't hard to imagine Don Bluth hearing about the rejected project while working on "Robin Hood" and getting it hopelessly stuck in his head.
I should also note that personally, I was pretty messed up by the film. See, this is back when "The Land Before Time" was still my favorite movie and "All Dogs Go To Heaven" stung badly. The "All Dogs" video included a preview for a singularly strange looking upcoming animated film with a bunch of animals on an adventure down a river (promising) and a rooster Elvis impersonator (what?) I was hoping for a movie that would be on the level of Bluth's earlier films. Maybe -just maybe- we'd get something as good as "The Secret of N.I.M.H." Instead, we got "Rock-A-Doodle".
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, here's the plot of "Rock-A-Doodle". I don't do plot summaries often but it's worth recounting the plot as it is probably the one thing critics of the film agree is the film's greatest problem. We start in space, where a bored-sounding Phil Harris (Baloo the Bear in "The Jungle Book", shameless Baloo clones in two subsequent Disney films) informs us that there is a singing rooster whose crowing raises the sun. Which would be an easier concept to take if we hadn't started in space. Anyway Chanticleer the rooster, king of the barnyard, is disgraced when the sun raises without his singing, and he runs away to The City to seek his fortune with folks who appreciate his golden syrinx (or whatever roosters crow with). This, naturally, causes the rains to come and flood the farm. Never you mind how the crops survive if Chanticleer banishes the rain with his singing, but a pretty straightforward animated folky tale so far, no?
"Rock-A-Doodle" takes precisely five minutes to run completely off the rails. That's when we suddenly shift to a live-action family struggling through a hurricane on their own farm.* The story of Chanticleer we just heard was actually a story read to the little boy of the family, because kids just love the Canterbury Tales. The child is played by the same kid who voiced the titular character of what was arguably the single most uncomfortable "Ren and Stimpy" episode ever. At least, I would have assumed the kid was being read a story if the narrator wasn't still hanging around and acting as if the tale of Chanticleer AND the story of the live-action family were both the God's honest truth. After some business that's way too pointlessly convoluted to get into here, the film switches back to animation, Chanticleer's friends set out to find him and bring him back to the farm and save the day, and we're introduced to the villain of the piece (I'll get to him later).
This transition back to animation is all prompted by the live-action kid transforming into an animated kitten. You can basically ignore all of this because it has no bearing whatsoever on the plot. None. I'm not kidding; everything introduced in the live-action sequence, including the very presence of humans in the world of this movie, is brought up in the very beginning and ending of the main story and in a few lines that appear to have been edited in during post-production and that is literally it. The whole rest of the movie completely ignores it.
So why even bother with the live-action sequences? It would appear as though either Don Bluth or his supervisors wanted to cash in on the popularity of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Which seems like an absurd excuse, given that the few scenes that combine mediums aren't even as good as those in Walt Disney's old "Alice" shorts. Mind you, the source I found this out was TV Tropes, but it and other trivia out there about "Rock-A-Doodle" is believable in terms of animation behind-the-scenes stuff. They're unbelievable enough to be true.
So... Chanticleer's friends go to the city and take way, way too long to realize Chanticleer is now the biggest rock star in the country. Come to think of it, every action that should move the story along takes way, way, WAY longer than it reasonably should. They try to bring him back to the farm, but the rooster is distracted by... Goldie.
Goldie is another element of the film worth her own paragraph. Okay. She is a Golden Pheasant, apparently, and female even though there is not the vaguest attempt to make her resemble a female pheasant. What the character designer DID take pains to make her look like is a female human. I have often said that certain tetrapods just can't be made into appealing anthropomorphic animal-people. Goldie demonstrates this fact beautifully nightmare fuel-illy. The result of mixing poultry and beautiful girl results in what can comfortably be described as A Thing That Should Not Be.
According to TV Tropes, Goldie was meant to be as sexy as Jessica Rabbit. Yeah.
The script has a cavalcade of other brain farts. For an example, there's a scene where our heroes are banned from Chanticleer's concerts by the rooster's boss. Said boss may or may not be under the employ of the main villain depending on what particular scene in the movie we're talking about, but never mind that now. See, specifically, there is a sign at the concert hall barring "Cats, Dogs, Mice, and Birds". Yeah. The heroes disguise themselves as penguins to get in, but it turns out that everyone at the concert -not just the heroes- must disguise themselves as penguins. Because... ??? (It seems unnecessarily pedantic at this point to note the searing logical flaw in having avian performers and patrons in penguin costumes at a concert that bans birds. Ye Gods, this movie.)
The songs, aside from maybe the opening number, are annoying and the animation is frequently terrible. Things to note in a film that arrived in theaters in-between "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King". Actually, this is one of the few cases where Bluth and company farmed some of the animation out to make the release date deadline, and a lot of the same problems seen in "The Pebble and the Penguin" can be spotted here too. Characters "shimmer" and shift around in the picture plane, and they casually change size and perspective while standing still. (I have heard, since doing Don Bluth Month last year, that certain of his films were released out of production order, which may help explain why "Rock-A-Doodle" showcases the worst elements of both "All Dogs" and "Penguin".)
With all of this in mind, all of it, watching "Rock-A-Doodle" for the first time in all these years was... not as painful an experience as I anticipated.
I think I know why. Most Don Bluth fans haven't sat down and watched "The Pebble and the Penguin", and that one movie puts everything else in perspective.
Also, as it happened, I experienced a bunch of weird things during the day before I watched this movie in the evening. It was back when I was still entertaining my little cousin. We went to the Wildlife Park and encountered two field trip groups, with all the attendant chaos that implies. I got into what can only be described as a "Who's On First" routine with a person who saw my Sketchbook. We tie-dyed, which turned out to be way more involved than I remembered. We found parasite-infested caterpillars in the veggie garden. We watched a Barbie direct-to-video movie and...
You know what? It's Tangent Time. That last thing might have made the biggest difference. You want to appreciate a lesser movie from a quality animation studio, you go watch one of the "Barbie" movies. Because once you have seen "Barbie and the Secret of the Fairy of the Princess of the Pegasus of the Planet of the Apes", any subsequent animated feature you see -and I mean any one- is going to look like Disney's "Pinocchio" in comparison. (Also, you cannot imagine how much more you will appreciate what they do with Barbie and Ken in "Toy Story 3".) It's not just that it's as bad as you'd imagine it would be from the title. It's actually worse. In the parlance of a recent Temple of the Seven Golden Camels post, it's "all frosting, no cake." And that frosting is the gross cream cheese kind. It's absurdly cheap, the animation is downright crappy, the visuals are unimaginative, and the whole thing shows open contempt for it's young audience. I mean it. We're talking about a film made in 2011 where a character bends over backwards in slow motion to dodge some sh*t, just like in that awesome twelve-year-old sci-fi kung-fu movie that THE TARGET AUDIENCE IS TOO YOUNG TO WATCH OR HAVE EVEN HEARD OF WTF MATTEL?!?** Also, the term "Bling" is used unironically. And fashion designers are Fairies. Yup.
Auntie Tricia got to watch "Barbie and the Gooey Kablooey" with six-year-old cousin twice.
Auntie Tricia would have watched "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Fraggle Rock" or "Dinosaur Train" or -honestly- "Rock-A-Doodle"*** with adorable six-year-old cousin instead, but adorable six-year-old cousin refused to watch anything besides "Barbie and the Who Gives a Crap". Callback to a few weeks ago: Adorablausting.
So with all of this in mind, I found myself even enjoying the sheer open madness of "Rock-A-Doodle". There is some evidence in the film to suggest that events in it are, after all, supposed to be a fever dream that the kid is having and it (unintentionally) fits that tone perfectly.
So, about that villain. He's the Grand Duke and he is voiced by Christopher Plummer. It seems that Plummer doesn't get a lot of truly hammy bad guy roles, so he has way, way too much fun with the Duke, chewing up whatever scenery he is in. "Rock-A-Doodle" is, sadly, very definitely made for children (though lord knows what they'd get out of it), so the Grand Duke isn't allowed to do anything truly evil or even interesting (aside from the deleted scene above and the bit where he turns the kid into a kitten -- and remember the movie barely acknowledges that). But he is used frequently as an outlet for the few flashes of trademark Bluthy weirdness. This may be due to his being the last vestige of a proposed film called "Satyrday", one of Bluth's most deeply fascinating lost projects.
Honestly, the only real sadness I experienced while watching "Rock-A-Doodle" is the fact that there are no more Don Bluth features to be seen (though I remain optimistic that we haven't heard the last from him). It's a real bummer to end on such a weak note, and it was hard to watch portions of "Rock-A-Doodle" and wonder what happened to the Don Bluth who gave the world "The Secret of N.I.M.H.". Ah well, more loose ends await.
* - Ah, how timely! See, I'm posting this the day after we *just* got our electricity and phone/internet/cable back after Hurricane Irene came and kicked our asses a little harder than we though she would. And left us without power for three and a half days. Fun times.
** - Yeah, I know "Animaniacs" had an episode that was a direct parody of "Apocalypse Now". That's totally different. Because it just is, shut up.
*** - Don't worry, this wouldn't have been her first Bluth. We watched "Banjo the Woodpile Cat" together. D'awww...
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(Pre-Hurricane) Garden Update!
I am going to go ahead and declare this garden to be a successful experiment.
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Sketch of the Day!
I don't even know...
