My Summer of Sequels: "Brother Bear 2" (2006)

In case it isn't self-evident by now, My Summer of Sequels was a bad idea.  And it is making me feel bad.  About the only thing that's saving me at this point is that all of these sequels are really short; they've topped out at about an hour and twenty minutes, so I've been going through them pretty quickly.  Or maybe it's more correct to say they've been going through me.

By far the most interesting thing about "Brother Bear 2" is the fact that it even exists.  I happen to like "Brother Bear" a lot, and I will happily defend it.  It is, after all, one of the last significant gasps of beautiful hand-drawn animation in a major Disney Animated Canon feature after all.  But I do not recall the film being all that popular outside of a small cult audience.  So we are obviously at the point where Disney was just about ready to make sequels to anything.

We join Kenai -here voiced by a profoundly unenthusiastic Patrick "McJustHappenedToBeOnTheLotThatDay" Dempsy- living the ultimate Otherkin dream, and loving life with his adopted brother Koda and the other bears.  What possible conflict could there be here?  Well, turns out back when Kenai was a human, the spirits essentially betrothed him to a girl.  If she marries anyone else, the spirits will be offended and destroy everything.  They need to travel together and take a thing up to a place at a time and do stuff with it to break the bond and chill the spirits out.

This... is actually kind of interesting.  But here's the thing.  In the universe of "Brother Bear", the spirits that run the universe are absolutely demonstrably real and they go around changing things into other things and causing people to be destined to be together forever.  So how come this issue hasn't ever come up before?  Surely this isn't the first time one of a pair of people destined to be together has been transformed has it?  You would think this wouldn't even be much of a shocker anymore.

Not surprisingly, the writers do not do anything interesting at all with this kind-of-interesting premise.  The journey is extremely predictable and I could easily see the major story beats coming, though they go for the less-terrible solution to the problem in the end, so there's that.  Eh, at least Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis are back as Tuke and Rutt and since they are enthusiastic it's fun to have more of them.  The terrific music from the original film is not back, and in it's place is...

Yeah, let's talk about the songs in these sequels I've seen.  Because as mentioned before they tend not to be very good, almost as if they're only there in the movie as an obligation.  They all feel a little samey and remarkably mediocre, like what you'd here on the local radio station with "Mix" somewhere in it's name in the post-Hootie and the Blowfish era.  Bland, twangy Adult Alternative that is mostly by singers I did not recognize, and sometimes by singers I was surprised to hear in this context as they can do much more interesting things.  It's the latter case here, where Melissa Ethridge gamely sings an opening song with lyrics that feel like a grab-bag of themes from the original film's songs.

So, there's "Brother Bear 2" for you.  Next we'll tackle one of the strangest sequels of all.

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Sketch of the Day!

Oh... bear...?



Incidentally, I have been sharing older art here for... reasons.  Good reasons, I assure you.  I will elaborate when the time is right.

My Summer of Sequels: "Bambi 2" (2006)

We're in the home stretch now.  After this, there are only three movies left.

And if anything, "Bambi 2" reminded me that the smartest thing I did before launching My Summer of Sequels was to prune a few titles off the queue and only concentrate on the Disney DTV sequels that are supposedly not so terrible.  (Though it turns out that they are, in fact, pretty terrible anyway.)  The DVD for "Bambi 2" includes trailers for *both* "Beauty and the Beast" sequels (along with another DTV sequel I've already forgotten about), and given the eye-bleeding animation and "yeah, f**k this" voice acting, I saved myself a lot of misery.

Honestly, the special features included in the "Bambi 2" DVD are more interesting than the movie itself.  Out of curiosity, I checked something called "Disney Sketch Book" and was flabbergasted to see that it was a very brief interview with Andreas Deja.  Yes, Andreas "If animators are actors with pencils, he is the Robert DeNiro of Disney" Deja is interviewed in a special feature on the "Bambi 2" DVD.  (It is a feature that is clearly for young children, and he briefly talks about the importance of drawing all the time if you want to be a good artist.)  It's... jarring.  Apparently, Deja was brought into DisneyToon studios to give the animators there a crash course in animal anatomy.  As a result, the character animation in "Bambi 2" is pretty lush compared to that of most other sequels I've seen. So it has that going for it; which is nice.

So.  "Bambi 2".  It's the Disney sequel that was rather remarkably in hindsight predicted by this (slightly NSFW) memorable "Saturday Night Live" animated short from 2001.  And that short is especially impressive for it correctly predicts two significant things about "Bambi 2".

First, "Bambi 2" isn't really a sequel at all.  It has the dubious honor of being the Disney DTV sequel that introduced the terms "interquel" and "midquel" into the world; sequels that take place during the original movie.  Now to be fair, this concept is not new to Disney DTV sequels.  "The Lion King 1.5" takes place during the original story.  So do the aforementioned "Beauty and the Beast" sequels.  But somehow setting the sequel to "Bambi" during the original story is especially irritating and almost insulting.

Maybe it's because there was a good 64 years in-between "Bambi" and it's midquel and it's hard to think of what deep unanswered questions people may have had about the events of the film in all those decades.  Maybe it's because there's a sequel to the original printed-page Felix Stalton Bambi, Bambi's Children, so there's the question of why, if they felt the need to do a "Bambi" sequel, they didn't just make an adaptation of that.  And maybe especially, it's because as with the "Beauty and the Beast" midquels, it's crystal clear how shameless these DTV sequels are.  The most obvious reason why they are set during the original story is so that they can show major characters in their much more marketable forms (the servants as Enchanted Objects, Bambi as a cute little fawn, etc.)

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, the SNL short predicted when "Bambi 2" would take place during the original story: right after That One Scene.  You know, That One Scene that comes up anytime you try to talk about "Bambi" as arguably the most significant and game-changing early Walt Disney animated feature with adults who, it quickly turns out, have not watched it in a while.  Specifically, they have most likely not watched it since the one time they saw the film in childhood, when their well-meaning parents shut the tape off after That One Scene.  (Major tangent from the child psychology minor: Although your deep-seated instinct tells you to take your child away from whatever is making them cry, and although I will be the first to admit that the situation would be very different in a crowded theater, surely the best way to deal with a sad/scary moment upsetting your child in a work of fiction is to have your child stop experiencing that work of fiction right there, during the sad/scary moment, making that moment the last thing they'll ever remember from it and not getting to see the subsequent resolution and happy ending.  Yes I have thought about this a lot.  Yes it really bothers me.)

Anyway, "Bambi 2" begins immediately after, as so wonderfully cynically worded in "Friends", "The guy stopped drawing the deer".  And it's only discernible reason to exist is, I guess, to show us that Bambi was not immediately abandoned by his father after they both walk away in the snow.  As far as the other deep unanswered questions addressed by "Bambi 2", we learn that somehow wild forest animals are aware of Groundhog Day (just... what?), that the California Quail are still hanging out in the implicitly Maine woods (an admittedly nice continuity nod), and that Bambi and Faline met Ronno the rival stag as a fawn, which actually makes their encounter as adults in "Bambi" more awkward.

Now if I had it in me, I'd talk a little about how the characters in "Bambi 2" are suddenly very like their rough equivalents in the original "The Land Before Time" (which is funny as "LBT" was dismissed in many negative reviews as "a prehistoric 'Bambi'") to the point of paraphrasing or even directly quoting them.  Speaking of, if I had it in me I'd talk about how the original "Bambi" famously had less than 1,000 words of dialogue in it's entirety while the characters in the midquel never shut up ever.  And oh, if I had it in me, I wish I could get into the long long and fascinating discussion of how, given that there are sixty four years of animation history and technological advancements between them, it's not even fair to compare the animation in "Bambi 2" to that in it's predecessor, where everything was done by hand by a team of people who did not have the luxury of sixty-four years of animation history and technological advancements behind them, and were basically flying by the seats of their pants.

I... don't have it in me.  To busy bracing myself for the next sequel.

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Sketch of the Day!

Oh, deer.

My Summer Of Sequels: "The Lion King 1.5" (2004)

Having got this far into My Summer of Sequels, I almost feel like "The Lion King One-and-a-Half" (henceforth, "TLK 1.5") was made by prescient people as a breather episode for any poor souls who decided, out of morbid curiosity, to watch a bunch of Disney DTV sequels in a row.

The idea is simple: tell the story of "The Lion King" from Timon and Pumba's point of view.  (If the original "Lion King" is Hamlet but with a happier ending, and "The Lion King 2" is, based off my vague childhood memories, Romeo and Juliet but with a happier ending, this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead but actually funny.)  It helps the proceedings a great deal that Timon and Pumbaa are among the best Disney sidekick characters.  And indeed, it helps that Meerkats are one of the world's most loveable... Charismatic Normal-Size-Fauna, I guess?

Look, I'm not going to get too serious with this one.  The whole premise of "TLK 1.5" is that the very idea of Disney DTV sequels is really, really silly.  Silly and strange and kind of sad.  And, above all, worth mocking to hell and back.  The characters themselves make fun of the concept at every opportunity.  I hate having to invoke the loathed "This is the X for people who hate X" phrase, but this is indeed the Disney DTV sequel for people who hate Disney DTV sequels.  It is the first one I can recommend without feeling awful afterwards.

It helps that the original voices are back for the most part, the animation is quite good, and that the "new" songs... aren't.  They're either variants of the songs from the original or remixes of songs written for the original that they could not use for some reason or other.  It really helps that those Hans Zimmer themes still get me every time.  Though ultimately, "TLK 1.5" made me suck it up and buy The Lion King" on Blu-Ray...

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Sketch of the Day!

Older Study of Random Hoofed Mammals!

My Summer Of Sequels: "The Jungle Book 2" (2003)

Okay it's time for some audience participation.  Think back to Disney's "The Jungle Book" for a minute.  What do you remember?  You probably remember a few specific sequences, maybe a line of dialogue or the terrific character animation.  But most likely, the first thing you remember is the music.  In particular, you remember "The Bear Necessities", a song that is sung no less than three times in the duration of "The Jungle Book 2".

Yeah, let the record show that this is the first time I started genuinely questioning why I am making myself watch all these Disney sequels.  "Jungle Book 2", another DTV sequel that got a theatrical release for reasons that are unclear aside from the obvious and extremely cynical ones, seems to be nothing more than an excuse to put new animation and voice acting to "The Bear Necessities".  A few other songs from the original movie end up in here too, and honestly it might have even be easier just to post a link to what Roger Ebert had to say about the film (which, like so many of Ebert's reviews of terrible and ill-conceived children's films, is magical) and this picture in lieu of a review:



Here's the plot.  Mowgli is a human and thus belongs in the human village where he will get a job and work all day.  But his best friends are all wild animals and he longs for the freedom and excitement of jungle life.  This is complicated by the fact that the vicious tiger Shere Kahn would very much like to eviscerate the boy.

If you are at all paying attention, you may notice that, uh, this is THE EXACT SAME PLOT AS THE ORIGINAL FILM.

Which, granted, is not unusual in sequels.  Usually the mark of a bad sequel is that instead of giving us anything interesting at all, like continuation of the story or further character development or world-building, it instead just gives us more of everything people liked in the first movie.  However, repeating the plot is especially stupid here because (finale spoilers for an almost ten-year-old Disney sequel), as the characters eventually figure out, the jungle is right outside the village.  Baloo essentially lives in Mowgli's backyard, and they can visit each-other whenever.

So does "Jungle Book 2" bring anything new at all to the table?  Well, the new voice actors are perfectly fine.  The animation is the best in all the sequels I've watched so far.  This is the second sequel in a row where a character from the first film whom many consider to be an offensive stereotype simply does not appear onscreen - but is acknowledged somehow anyway, which actually makes things more awkward. There are some impressively mediocre new songs.

Oh, and "The Jungle Book 2" includes my winner for the hotly contested title of Worst Disney Sidekick and quite possibly the Worst Character Ever:



This is Ranjon.  He is the reason why "Jungle Book 2" is so tedious, and why I started calling this whole project into question.  His personality is exactly like that of the youngest and most badly-behaved member of the Big Box Store Wacky Family of the Day I always seem to run into over and over while shopping and eventually end up stuck in line behind for what feels like forever.  The biggest problem with this picture of Ranjon is that it is silent.  When casting voice actors, Disney decided to cast the most ear-splitting little kid voice they could find.  This makes him the first Disney character since the lemurs in "Dinosaur" and the Goddamn Martin Short robot in "Treasure Planet" that I wanted to flat-out cold murder.  But, you see, those characters are not annoying hyperactive children with voices that sound like a hot spike being driven into you ear.  Therefore, little Ron Jon Surf Shop here is the Worst Disney Sidekick.

The sequels I will be watching next week are (for Disney DTV sequels) well-liked.  Let's hope so; I could use a breather.  Until then, I recommend this episode of the very nice "Rotoscopers" podcast, in which a letter from a listener and the release of "Madagascar 3" prompt the gang to discuss animated sequels.

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Sketch of the Day!

Older HMNH fish study.

My Summer of Sequels - "Return to Neverland" (2002)

"Return to Neverland" got a theatrical release in America in February of 2002.  The opening sequence quickly drops us smack into the London Blitz.  Our young heroine, Jane, is constantly aware that her country has been plunged into a violent war, her city is under attack, and her family is in constant danger as death is suddenly a moment-to-moment possibility.

Once again, it probably looks like I am making this plot point up, but I promise you I am not.  It was probably unintentional, given the length of time given in making an animated film even one as half-assed as this, but intentional or not, we have here a post-9/11 Disney movie.

And it is a God-damned direct-to-video "Peter Pan" sequel that was clearly put into theaters at the last minute as a shameless cash grab.

I'll admit the setup, the very idea of setting a sequel to "Peter Pan" in the middle of World War Two (by the way, hell of a context for kids to learn about these events for the first time) is fascinating, and it might have actually worked out had they spent more effort on it.  Unfortunately, as I mentioned, this film is half-assed.  Every single thing about it is half-assed.  The animation is far worse in quality than "Pooh's Grand Adventure" (for the record, the two films were done in different Disney studios.  Moment of silence for the international branches of Disney Animation.)  The songs are terrible and feel even more like an obligation.  And there is some use of fully-rendered computer animation that... Conspicuous CGI doesn't even cover it.

And then, there's the main conflict of the movie.  It's not the fact that Captain Hook is back and has traveled to our world to kidnap a descendent of one of the characters in the original story and now Peter has to save them and blah.  (There's a lot of originality in these "Peter Pan" sequels isn't there?)  Nope, it's a conflict that's alarmingly common in children's fiction and that drives me up the God damned wall.

In this film there are two opponents: faith and skepticism.  Jane, who -just as a reminder- is living during a time period when her home was likely to be bombed into oblivion at any second, is skeptical and realistic about her situation.  And according to arguable insane troll logic of this film, if you are a person who is skeptical and realistic about anything, you are ALSO a person who believes in nothing.  So Jane doesn't believe in Peter Pan or magic or wonder or childhood whimsy or fun or getting any sort of enjoyment out of life.  But her mother and little brother Believe!  Oh, wouldn't it be better for Jane if she just Believed!  If she could stop worrying so much about her family dying horribly at any moment and live in a wonderful world of make-believe and denial and... yeah, if you can't tell by now, this whole subplot is f***ing ridiculous.  It's handled as badly and clumsy as that one episode of "Friendship is Magic" that p**sed everyone off and that I am probably going to quickly and strongly regret ever bringing up.  It's that ridiculous.

As an aside, it should be noted that at least neither "Return to Neverland" nor "Feeling Pinkie Keen" handle this theme in a way that is as nauseatingly bad, deeply insulting, and even downright dangerously as "Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue" does.  I'm not covering the Tinkerbell movies here, even though up until the third one they were much better than I expected.  But in case you are blissfully unaware, in "Great Fairy Rescue", the hero is a little girl who believes in Fairies (who are absolutely real in the world of the film) and her main antagonist is her own father, who is -pause for drama- a skeptical biologist.  You cannot imagine how much I would love to be making all of this up.  Like all the mean old adults in this movie, he's under the assumption that that Fairies aren't real, so he flat-out tells his daughter to stop "studying" the Fairies and even throws her Sketchbook away when he sees that she's filled it with Fairies.  Because if there is anything scientists are known for, it's that they will completely discourage their own children from using their imagination or engaging in creative play of any kind because scientists themselves suffer from a complete and utter lack of imagination.  And as we all know, all scientists operate under the assumption that they already know everything there is to know about the world and that there is absolutely nothing new at all to learn anywhere ever.  That's totally how science works.  And when confronted with firsthand evidence or one living specimen of a creature that for centuries was assumed to be extinct or mythical, they will treat it as cruelly as humanly possible.  Lastly, in this day and age, we very very definitely need a movie for very young girls where science is bad and wrong.  Yeah, f*** you very much, writers of "Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue." 

I should also note that I have a lot of problems with the opposite version of this "skepticism is bad and so you should believe in everything" theme, as it so often and easily warps into "using your imagination is bad and so you should be uncreative and boring".

There's also a weird spit motif going on in "Return to Neverland", but that's neither here nor there.  The -sigh- Indian Camp makes an appearance in this film, but it is unpopulated, which is actually more uncomfortable than not addressing it at all.  And after a while, since they are onscreen more prominently here, the slow realization that the Lost Boys are essentially running around in fursuits gets... awkward.

But not as awkward as this thing that shows up in the end credits, which is as good a note to end on as any:



I'm sure they're so happy to have inspired this.

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Sketch of the Day:

Random older dog sketches.

My Summer of Sequels - "Pooh's Grand Adventure" (1997)

And so we launch into My Summer of Sequels and my gosh I hope I do not end up regretting this.  But, man, if today's movie sets the tone for the project than this is going to be a very long ride. 

A bit of background before we begin.  Disney started making direct-to-video (henceforth DTV) sequels to it's beloved animated films in 1994 with "The Return of Jafar".  Now something that may surprise people today is that most fans actually did not have much of a problem with this first sequel, as it was essentially setup for the well-liked "Aladdin" animated series.  "Return of Jafar" was soon followed by "Aladdin and the King of Thieves", which many still consider to be the best DTV Disney sequel of them all.  (Sadly, neither of these films are readily available through Netflix.)

"Pooh's Grand Adventure" was the third-ever Disney DTV sequel, and still few people had a problem with it (in principle, but we will get to that when we get to that).  It was "Beauty and the Beast: the Enchanted Christmas" that started to sour everyone on the concept.  At the time, many people considered "Beauty and the Beast" to be the overall finest animated feature Disney had ever created, and to make an obvious cash-grab Christmas movie that takes place *during* the original, happily retconning a great deal of it to hell and back, cheapened both the film and, in many ways, the very Disney name itself.  (I will not be covering "BATBEC" as that's not something I want to suffer through again.)

And then "Cinderella 2" came along in 2002 and Disney fans were basically done with DTV sequels for good.

This brings us back to the lecture at hand: "Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin".  I think fewer people had a problem with this movie for many of the same reasons last year's "Winnie the Pooh" had a disappointing box office: over the years, Disney has done a spectacular job of Pooh oversaturation.  For as long as the character Winnie the Pooh has been around, Disney has been producing animation, toys, books, and whatever for well over HALF that time.  And so this particular DTV sequel felt, at the time, less like a cheapening of the character and everything we love about him, and more like another drop in the bucket.

That said, "Pooh's Grand Adventure" might just be the most deeply upsetting and inappropriate thing Disney has ever done with Winnie the Pooh and the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood since "Too Smart For Strangers".  (By an astoundingly wide margin, to be sure, but still.)

"Grand Adventure" isn't entirely sure whether it wishes to be a direct sequel to "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" or a finale of sorts to "The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh".  It's much much closer in tone and overall look to the Saturday morning series, "New Adventures", which had its share of surprisingly dark episodes.  Those dark episodes were pretty short, though, while "Grand Adventure" is so very long.  Yeah, the running time is listed at only an hour and a few minutes, but the pace is excruciatingly slow.  The bewildering songs that seem to be included only as an obligation rather then to keep the plot going do not help.

The plot seems like a test run for last year's "Winnie the Pooh" theatrical film (Pooh et al misinterpret a note left by Christopher Robin and set out to find him) and, oddly, "Toy Story 3".  Like "TS3", you've got a gang of toys struggling to reunite with their master in a story with sometimes surprising darkness and depth.  The thing is, the "Toy Story" series is generally pitched towards older kids, and it earned that darker deeper tone over the course of three feature-length films.  Winnie the Pooh is, when all is said and done, a character created for very young children.  The tone is kept exceedingly light and "safe"; cheerful songs assure us if the characters appear to be in danger and any monsters are exaggerated and silly.  (Case in point: the DVD of "Pooh's Grand Adventure" contains the short "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" among the extras and... man, that's not even fair!)

By contrast, "Grand Adventure" takes the perils and sadness of its story very seriously, and it is damned jarring.  (Take a drink whenever the particularly discordant term "Skullosaurus" is uttered.  Just, what?)   These are all going to sound like I am making them up, but I promise you I am not.  Before the gang finally meets up with Christopher Robin again...

* Piglet is carried high into the sky by cute little butterflies and nearly falls to his doom.

* Tigger is trapped on a flimsy bridge and the whole gang falls down an impossibly deep chasm trying to rescue him.

* Pooh wanders off alone in the middle of the night and sings a song about how lost he is without Christopher Robin and it's utterly heartbreaking.

* Everyone gets lost in a huge perilous cave and they each suffer their own tedious ordeals before finally running into each other again.

* During that time, Pooh is trapped in a very small room all alone for what feels like forever(!) and is damn near ready to spend the rest of his life stuck down there(!?) with only the memory of Christopher Robin to keep him company(!?!)

* And this happens:



Gaze upon it in despair.

Take as long as you like because it's really everything you need to know about this movie.  Just, the longer you stare at it, the more it'll start freaking you out.

During an overlong and utterly mystifying sequence that is far stranger than I could possibly describe, Pooh stays... like that... for what feels like several minutes.

At least it was long enough for me to realize that somebody had to storyboard this sequence and that some poor animators had to draw him like that for a while because at no moment did anyone point out, in so many words, WTF.

Might as well mention (I want to wrap this up because my gosh, these are an awful lot of words about a direct-to-video Winnie the Pooh movie) that the DVD format does not do this film any favors and I figure the same will be true for most of the upcoming DTV sequels as well.  The animation mistakes are far more obvious now, and there are some moments that are downright sloppy; jumpy foreground shrubs and whatnot.  Given that the next sequel coming up had to satisfy a theatrical audience, one can only hope it'll at least look better.

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Sketch of the Day!

Thinking of Pooh inevitably makes me think of college, since my dorm basically adopted him as our spirit guide power animal. Here's an old sketch of campus:

A Salute to All Nations, but Mostly Links of Interest!

* - Well, first of all, Sciurumimus Sciurumimus Sciurumimus!!!

* - Witmer Lab made the Ghetie's Atlas of Avian Anatomy available as a big, giant PDF file!

* - Speaking of avian anatomy, I am suddenly in the market for a fairly expensive book.

* - Passport to Dreams wrote a very detailed history of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", its influence on Italian horror (!!!), and in particular the strange case of "Snow White's Scary Adventures".

* - Long-Forgotten also wrote about "Snow White's Scary Adventures" and its possible influences on the Haunted Mansion.

* - And while we are on the subject of "Snow White's Scary Adventures", here is a story that is at once deeply strange, utterly fascinating, and a genuine crowning moment of heartwarming.

* - If you need a drink after all those rides, Party Through the Parks recently redesigned sections of their website.

* - I recently discovered Tom Ruegger's blog "Cartooniacs".  Here, he shares the story of a not-too-well-thought-out promotion for "Animaniacs".

* - Tetrapod Zoology has just written a very long article on our old friend David Peters.

* - And speaking of TetZoo, after reading this, you will never think of "Turtle Power" the same way again...

* - Deep Sea News explains how the Cretaceous coastline impacts modern-day politics.

* - Muddy Colors shared some advice on creating a portfolio.

* - You can now watch every single episode of "Reading Rainbow" on YouTube.

* - Time for some weirdness.  This unsettling-in-a-way-that's-hard-to-put-into-words song poses a philosophical question that has never occurred to me.

* - Here's a fantastically animated short that shows how an oddly-named Pokemon move actually works (NSFW language).

* - io9 shared a list of genre films to watch out for in the coming years (including several animated films I had forgotten to list last weeks.)

* - And finally, here is a fine gallery of summery art!

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Sketch of the Day!

Here's an older study of a young Bald Eagle: