As stated during Random 90's Animation Month, there were a significant number of unusual and interesting animated films from the 1990's that were not yet available through Netflix during the actual movie marathon. Whenever they do become available, either through Netflix itself or other means, I'll be reviewing them as they pop up. "Balto" was just recently on Comcast OnDemand (managed to catch it on the night they took it off, as it happens), and so here's our first such review.
It took me a couple of nights to fully digest "Balto". There are a lot of things to like in it, and it is easily the best of the three theatrical Amblimation films. But there are also a lot of things that keep me from loving it.
I don't remember being particularly enthralled with "Balto" as a kid. Revisiting the film as an adult, I think I understand why, and this probably helps explain why you don't see much nostalgia for "Balto" and also why the film wasn't terribly popular in it's initial release:
"Balto" is essentially like many other animated features where cute animal characters do cute, fun animal character things and their leader saves the day just through bravery and by being himself. Except this time, all those cute animals are doing their cute animal thing against the backdrop of little children in agonizing, excruciating pain dying horribly as a Diphtheria epidemic rips right through their little village.
As you might imagine, the juxtaposition of cute animals and little kids dying horribly makes this film pretty rough going for it's intended young audience. Hell, before the climax of "Balto", we get to see a madcap (and very "Les Poissons"-ish) scene where the goofy goose character gets chased around a butcher shop and a scene where one of the dogs happens upon the village carpenter, who had previously gifted a little girl with a handmade sled of her very own, building a set of small coffins. Look, you know I'll stand by dark animated films. But -and I will admit it is hard to quantify exactly why- somehow it feels like a bit much when you're presenting a very real threat that is slowly killing a little human kid just like you...
The reality subtext, which is hard to ignore when you watch the film as an adult, doesn't help things. You see, "Balto" here is in the same somewhat unenviable boat as the better-known "Pocahontas" and "Anastasia". It is an animated feature film that is somewhat... kind of... a little bit... if you squint and tilt your head sideways... not really... inspired by an actual true historical event. (Long, long pause.) Well, a couple of the characters in the movie have the same names as the people involved in that actual thing that really happened, so there. At any rate, it's hard to watch "Balto" without wondering how many of those adorable little sick kids survived in reality.
But let's try (real hard) to ignore all that for now. How's the movie itself? Well, as I said, it is very definitely the best theatrical Amblimation film. It is also the least interesting Amblimation film to discuss, given how "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" and "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" were so fascinatingly bad. "Balto" is merely inept, since the things it gets wrong aren't all that unusual.
You've got bored-sounding, miscast live-action actors working against professional voice actors. You've got some surprisingly sloppy, almost unprofessional animation. Indeed, the film looks like it might have been rushed to finish. You've got some very generic looking character designs right next to very stylized characters who appear to be from a different movie entirely. In particular, while I love the design and animation of the two otherwise irritating bears animated by Nicolas Marlet, they really look like they wandered in from an alternate universe. The music isn't very interesting, the pacing is a little strange (the film is overall fast-paced, but the second half feels very rushed), and I don't even know what the filmmakers thought the live-action bookends were contributing to the experience. They just make the opening and closing of the movie feel like a bad Christmas special.
"Balto" wound up being the last theatrical feature released by Amblimation. Steven Spielberg essentially abandoned the studio to focus on the then-forming Dreamworks S.K.G. studio, and it looks as though many of the people who worked on "Balto" followed him there. Meanwhile, as Universal animation was want to do at the time, the film was followed by a mercifully brief series of increasingly strange sequels.
For more in this series, click this link or the "Random 90's Animation Month" tag below.
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Sketch of the Day
It's my 500'th post! Have some colorful dinosaurs!
Note: I had to watch and review this film way out of order. I was already three movies ahead of it when it finally arrived. Because of course the one DVD I was least looking forward to watching in this marathon had to take the longest time to get to me.
Also, there will be swearing in this one too. Lots and lots of swearing. And nerd rage, but if you are familiar with this movie, you probably already guessed that.
Your Too Long, Didn't Read review: "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" could be much more accurately retitled, "Things That Make Me Drink: The Movie!" Here goes.
The marketing for "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" (henceforth "WBADS") was kind of fascinating. Indeed, I remember it vividly from my early teens after all, it being not only fascinating but downright insulting. Picture this: It's the autumn of 1993. "Jurassic Park" has just thoroughly blown the minds of every dinosaur loving youngster to tiny pieces. Everyone is happy with the film and...
Actually, no. Some people are not happy with the film. Some people are very angry with the film, and no, I do not mean Michael Crichton fans who were mad with all the changes to the story.
I'm talking about everyone's favorite, concerned parents. Yes, there were people who brought their very young children to "Jurassic Park" and were very upset when the whole thing wasn't dinosaurs playing nice with little children.
Now, there are probably a few of you lovely readers out there who are in their early teens and familiar with the Jurassic Park franchise. And you are wondering how in the hell anyone could get that idea. For the benefit of those readers, let me remind you of the other big popular dinosaur-involving franchise from the early '90's. People old enough to have lived through this, brace yourselves:
Yes, there were presumably sensible adults who took their children to "Jurassic Park" expecting something more like "Barney and Friends". Let that sink in.
This probably explains why Amblimaton chose to clarify things and advertise "We're Back!" with the tagline, "Steven Spielberg Presents A Dinosaur Movie for the Whole Family!" Although, now that I have finally seen the beast that is "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" in it's entirety, I declare that it is not appropriate for anyone.
Let me tell you how I felt about "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story". Stand back, kids, and wear your protective eyewear, cause I'm 'bout to unpack my adjectives. We'll start with "terrible" first, then "condescending", "ugly", "annoying", "discordant", "offensive", "Trollicious", "Nightmare Fuel-errific", and finally "really, really bad and dumb". Furthermore, it's really really bad and dumb in ways I hadn't even anticipated. Because you would have no reason whatsoever to expect a big-budget mainstream theatrical animated feature to do things that are as horrible and stupid as the things we see in this movie. I suppose the only reason I survived "WBADS" in one piece is because I had just recently watched all those DTV Disney sequels as well as "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" and "Cool World"; I was already hardened against incredibly sh**ty animated films.
"WBADS" is another bad movie that has a bare-bones DVD release, but needs a more informative one packed with commentaries and special features just so that the creators of the film can explain to us viewers, in so many words, what the f***?!? The film is very, very, very, very, very loosely based upon a well-liked Hudson Talbot children's book of the same title with the simple plot of Mesozoic dinosaurs given the ability to speak and brought to modern-day New York City to live in the Museum of Natural History and bring joy to the all the children of the world. The picture book is cute, charming, very funny, and basically everything it's film adaptation is not. Talbot later wrote a sequel where the dinosaurs are brought to Hollywood to make a movie of their story and... well, more than a few readers have read the main character Rex's frustration as the author's own.
Anyway, something had to be done to pad out the story so that it could be long enough to qualify as a feature. (As an aside, there are two nice things I can say about "WBADS", and the first one is that it is mercifully short and moves very fast. So you are more annoyed than aggravated during the process of watching the damned thing. The aggravation comes when you stop and think about the movie later, but we'll get to that.) Showing the same kind of delicate wisdom displayed by the studio when handling the works of Dr. Seuss, Universal chose to make the story feature-length with highly annoying things on the one hand and utterly bizarre things on the other.
On the highly annoying side, we've got a couple of "cute" "funny" sidekick characters voiced by Jay Leno(???) and Martin Short who are supposed to be helpful to the protagonists but who come across as JarJar-esque nuisances instead. We get a pair of kid characters who end up involved in the dinosaurs' adventure and contribute absolutely nothing to the proceedings aside from suddenly acting creepily like adults for a supposed "romantic" subplot, participating in a "save the day through the Power of Love" scene that the Care Bears would stare incredulously at, and being yet another example of the cowardly assumption that children will not sit still through a movie that hasn't got any characters "just like them" to relate to. (Though these kids do suffer the most trauma of any characters in the story, so that's fun in a "this is the exact opposite reaction the audience is supposed to have" way.) And we have the prologue and epilogue where Rex is telling the entire sequence of events to a baby bird because...? The last thing plays out a little like this:
By the way, according to this movie, kids threatening to run away and join the circus is still a thing kids do in 1993. It's a little thing, but I'm pointing it out because no single element of "WBADS" better sums up it's downright surreal disconnect from reality and sheer WTF-ery.
As for the bizarre things, we have the Brothers Professor (Something)Eyes. Kindly Professor NewEyes is a time traveler who invented a machine that allows him to read people's minds and see their greatest and most intimate wishes (because there's nothing sketchy at all about that). He brings them their hearts' desires. And so he's going to take dinosaurs from the Mesozoic Era, make them cute and cuddly, and bring them to New York City in 1993 to, um, make everyone happy. (Just so you know, in case it isn't clear by now, cute goofy-ass dinosaurs do not make me happy. They make me very upset, in fact.) At no time during this process, does NewEyes inform Rex and company why he needed to go all the way back to the Mesozoic to get nonavian dinosaurs for 1993 New York. Think about it. Ouch.
Now if you are at all paying attention, you will notice how deeply f***ed-up NewEyes and his "plan" is here. Imagine you're sitting around eating lunch and suddenly a time machine appears and this strange-looking creature from the far future captures you. He then feeds you a substance that transforms you, physically and psychologically, into the future's idea of what humans were like. And I say "were", because now he's going to transport you and three other randomly chosen and similarly transformed single specimens of Cenozoic animals millions of years into the future and long past your species' extinctions. Which, incidentally, he doesn't tell you about aside from the mysterious statement, "There are a lot of children from my time that miss you!" For the rest of your life you will be living in a museum, pretending to be a statue except for the brief moments where you are either fed hot dogs or must entertain the children of the future. Wow.
Even so, NewEyes is a sweetheart compared to his brother Professor ScrewEyes. He's our villain for this evening and I'm honestly a little ambivalent about him. He shows up at around the half-hour mark. If you are an adult who has been bored, irritated, and even a little offended by the events so far of "WBADS", he's here to wake you the f**k up.
If you are a child, he's going to provide you with some pure unfiltered nightmare fuel. ScrewEyes and his evil circus arrive right the f**k out of nowhere in what had thus far been a goofy colorful series of hijinks, so his scenes are still genuinely scary and upsetting even though it is pretty obvious that they were edited to hell and back to keep this, you know, "A Dinosaur Movie For the Whole Family". Yeah, keep that tagline in mind while ScrewEyes does his thing.
Incidentally, if you do enjoy weird circuses and horror shows and such, and if you have tattoos and crazy hair and clothes, then according to this movie you are a sad, strange person and you should feel bad, you weirdo freak. God damn this damn movie. It has a little something to p**s off everyone I know!
So let you dear Auntie Tricia tell you the most important reason why this movie made me drink (aside from everything I have mentioned so far): Before NewEyes can bring the dinosaurs to modern NYC, he uses a cereal he invented known as Brain Grain to turn them into what struck me as a bunch of characters who were kicked off the set of "Barney and Friends" for insulting the three-year-old audience's intelligence too much. So help me, Rex looks like Barney himself in everything but color scheme. We are informed that this cereal has made them "smart", and in an offhand line of dialogue, NewEyes notes that Brain Grain has essentially caused world peace in his home time. Living things that eat it will no longer harm each-other. Man, there are some f**ked-up implications there. One is left to wonder if every animal in NewEyes' time has likewise been transformed into a cockamamie depowered cuddly plush toy...
On the other hand, ScrewEyes has invented a Brain Drain pill. We're told it's just an antidote to Brain Grain, but we are specifically not told it turns you into a vicious evil monstrous version of yourself as a side-effect. (There is that scene where the children are forced to take the pills and it transforms them into honestly refreshingly cute -and more importantly quiet- chimpanzees for about a minute and a half, so I don't even know. But again, there are some pretty weird and uncomfortable implications there.) So when Rex and friends take the pills, the glowy-eyed, giant-fanged, screaming, roaring, slavering monsters they become are... Well, those are apparently supposed to be "real" dinosaurs. I wish I was kidding. This is meant to show us what our nonhuman protagonists were like before they got high on Brain Grain. Yup, even the hadrosaur is bloodthirsty. I... I need a beer.
This, ultimately, is why I hate this movie with the white-hot passion of a thousand stars. If you are a dinosaur in the world of this movie, you must either be a vicious primeval murderbeast or a giant toy that's safe to leave the kiddies with. The only thing you can't be is a normal animal. Really, the most haunting thing about "We're Back" is that it reminds us all of how people who do not understand dinosaurs think of dinosaurs! You can only be either Barney or a monster, and it'd be absurd to imagine you as just another animal.
That is, unless you are an extant avian. Believe it or not, and here comes the second of the two good things I have to say about "WBAD", the movie has this weird bird motif going on. It's set during Thanksgiving, one of the human characters is named Nuthatch, you've got the bookends with the annoying little baby bird, the villain gets his comeuppance at the claws of a Parliament of crows (I will consider those corvids the real heroes of the picture), and we even get a very brief impression of a little nonavian dinosaur with feathers on it's head (and only there, but it's the early 90's and that's the most you could hope for back then). It all makes me wonder if somebody working on this terrible piece of s**t knew...
(As it happens, the night I watched "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story", the local water birds were crying and screaming and singing dirges in the dark. While I was writing this review, all the little songbirds in my backyard were likewise acting very strange. I am not entirely convinced that this was a coincidence.)
I haven't said much about the actual animation, have I? This is the second feature-length effort from Amblimation, and I'd like to be able to say they've improved since "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" but "WBAD" manages to look worse. (It certainly does not help that they made "A Wish For Wings That Work" in the interim, since the animation in that Christmas special is quite excellent.) A lot of this has to do with the character designs, which range from uncreative to eye-explodingly bad (holy s**t, the Parasaurolophus...) I could swear the little girl character was drawn a completely different age in every shot. Overall, the animation is just sloppy and weirdly "off". It's good the movie is so short, because after a while the weird sloppy animation actually started to hurt my eyes.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's enough words about "We're Back!" Next up, a movie where a human transforms into a big, scary, flying dinosaur and, for some improbable reason, she is terribly upset about it.
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Art of the Day!
Man, dinosaurs just can't catch a break in animated films, can they?
Today we begin what I shall be referring to in full as the Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon. I needed to watch some good -or at least decent- animation after My Summer of Sequels, so I filled my Netflix queue with all the 90's animation I can find. It seems as though shortly after the Bronze Age of Disney animation got into full swing, every studio suddenly wanted their own animated features to release, and the situation got even crazier when "The Lion King" owned the box office like no other animated feature before it.
The films I'll be reviewing will be kind of, duh, random. And yes, we will creep into the early 2000's for a couple of them. But they are all interesting and strange in some way or other and worth revisiting and discussing... I hope... Sadly, a number of intriguing films were not available through Netflix, but then again, I am a little pressed for time (I am doing this for-fun project concurrently with -and I might as well spill the beans- a sudden influx of commissions I need to finish). Finally, before you cry, "But what about 'Ferngully'/'Pagemaster'/etc.?!?", try searching Nessie's.
It looks like we're getting the most tedious and aggravating films out of the way quickly. (You may notice a lack of "Space Jam" in the above list. This is due to the fact that I have nerd-raged enough about it as both a Looney Tunes fan and basketball enthusiast in the past. And, more importantly, I can already tell without even having seen it that "We're Back" will provide me with more than enough nerd rage-worthiness for one movie marathon.) On that note, with our first film, I will be washing off the stink of all those terrible ill-conceived shameless cash-grabs of sequels with... a terrible ill-conceived shameless cash-grab of a sequel! It's "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West". Oh joy.
For those of you who were mad at me for not doing any Don Bluth sequels during My Summer of Sequels, (a) chill the eff out, I said I was only doing Disney sequels right from the beginning; (b) I really hope you're happy now, since this is the only one I'll be even acknowledging. Now, to be fair, it was not surprising that Universal's newly-formed Amblimation unit would wish to make a sequel to "An American Tail" for it's very first foray into animated features. After all, it was up until a certain point the highest-grossing animated film of all time. What is surprising is everything else about "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West", starting with the fact that it's title is so inane, I just have to refer to it in full through the whole review.
A bit of poking around the Internet reveals that there are a surprising number of otherwise reasonable adults who have nostalgia for "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West", and there are a few who even prefer it over the original "An American Tail". These people are objectively wrong and they should feel bad. (I strongly suggest you watch it again as an adult before you argue with me here.) As I said during Don Bluth Month, I was never a big fan of "An American Tail", but I have since grown to appreciate it's darkness and it's willingness to stick with that weird, dark tone and frankly strange overall premise. And of course it also has that lovely James Horner music and gorgeous Don Bluth character and effects animation.
"An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" has got none of this. Well, that's not entirely accurate. James Horner is still around to contribute his themes from the first movie and to resurrect a song deleted from the first film. Speaking of the songs, all you really need to know about "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" is that yes, we do get to hear a character sing "Somewhere Out There" again.
And the song is quickly interrupted by people jeering and complaining and throwing fruit until the character gives up singing it. This is immediately followed by Poppa making a long and astonishing speech that completely undermines the whole conceit of the original film. And this happens:
After seeing this gag, I started to imagine that everything happening in the film had to be the result of Fievel innocently stumbling onto a cache of the 19'th Century equivalent of powerful hallucinogenics. Oh, and as for the hopeful-signature song from this film, the aforementioned "new" song, it... well, it deserves better than the slightly creeptastic scene it's sung in here.
Don Bluth (I could only imagine him drinking heavily during the entirety of "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West") and Steven Spielberg parted ways some time after "The Land Before Time". So Bluth is not at all involved in this film. And although he was supposedly the head of Amblimation, Spielberg apparently was only involved to personally direct James Stewart. (Oh yeah, Jimmy Stewart's very last IMDB film credit ever = "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West". God's honest truth. *Sigh...*) I say this because the thing that struck me about "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" is that what you see onscreen constantly throughout the film are all the very worst impulses of the people behind the original "An American Tail". Not only that, but it's louder, sillier, and throws the characters in a new situation that does not really suit them at all ("Fievel in Space" would have only been a little more ridiculous, given that this is already a movie where a character living in 1890's New York City idolizes Western icons that weren't popular on the east coast until well into the 1920's).
"An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" also feels an awful lot like a television cartoon. It has a TV series plot and TV series pacing; hell, it's only about 75 minutes long but you feel every second of it. "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" in fact was followed by a Saturday morning series that, from the looks of it, is now largely forgotten and perhaps deservedly so.
One thing I'm not entirely sure I've gotten across effectively is just how deeply bizarre "An American Tail 2: Fievel Goes West" is, especially as a sequel, but really just as a thing that exists and that was released on -again, honest truth- the very same weekend as "Beauty and the Beast". There's a spider character who *pukes* webs at people. There's a highly uncomfortable scene where Tiger the cat is worshiped as a god by old-timey "Injun" stereotype desert critters. There's another highly uncomfortable scene where the lead antagonist is squished against the gigantic breasts of a woman who constantly screeches "Oh, pussy! My PUSSY!!!" This last gag was apparently so funny and edgy and mature to the filmmakers that they had to repeat it near the end.
Like I said, the whole thing has to have been a hallucination. Along with the aforementioned terrible Saturday morning series, Universal also produced two direct-to-video sequels long after the fact which both sport headache-inducing subtitles and a total disregard for the fact that these characters were ever out West at all, so my theory is as good as confirmed as far as I care.
Next up, another early 90's film that is weird as f***, but for very different reasons.
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Sketch of the Day!
Apropos of nothing, here are some live studies of a female Mallard.
