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.

Tales from the Dork Age - Thoughts on "Dream On, Silly Dreamer"

It is weird as hell that "Dream On, Silly Dreamer" (available through the official website or for around two dollars on iTunes) is more accessible than "The Sweatbox" since it is, by a country mile, the more damning Disney animation documentary.

This is the tale of the events leading up to what could be called The Day The Magic Died. March 25, 2002, that awful day when over a thousand Disney animation artists were fired. This led to the shutdown of the auxiliary animation studios, and to the very darkest period in Disney animation history.

In "Dream On", this story is told through the words of those then-freshly fired animators.

As you might imagine, this film will probably make you very depressed.

However, it's fascinating to hear the story of the rise and fall of Disney animation during this time period from the artists who lived to tell about it. We don't see much in terms of animation art, and the archival footage is essentially the same as in "Waking Sleeping Beauty" (and presented in a grainy, blurry state at that), but the stories the animators tell are enthralling and heartbreaking. If you were disappointed that we do not hear much from Andreas Deja in "The Sweatbox", I can assure you he has a lot to say here.

We learn that one of my longtime suspicions is indeed true: the astonishing success of "The Lion King" spoiled the hell out of everyone involved in Disney animation. In that moment, the business side of Disney animation took over the art side, executives became ravenously greedy, and everyone contracted a fatal case of Small Name, Big Ego. From then on, the reputation of Disney films began to suffer, as the Disney name was suddenly associated with Lucas-level marketing orgies (does anyone want a Quasimodo stuffed doll?), an emphasis on spectacle over story and character, and -worst of all- a seemingly endless stream of cheap direct-to-video sequels. The film gives us a better name for the Dork Age: the Greed Age.

Ultimately, the executives start to assume that there is no future for hand-drawn animation because of the higher box office numbers achieved by PIXAR films. While this joke made more sense in the age of "Chicken Little" and "Dinosaur", I still secretly want the executives who came to this conclusion to write a five-page essay entitled "Why PIXAR's Scripts Don't Suck".

The film has a sobering take-away message: Animation is not easy. Animation is really freakin' hard. Indeed, being an artist is a hell of a career choice because half the time people think what you do is some kind of magic trick or special effect and the other half people wonder why you don't have a real job. Furthermore, it's physically and emotionally draining. The good old "actor with a pencil" metaphor is brought out again but no actor has ever been asked to work for twelve hours straight staying in character the entire time and exercising only one set of easily-fatigued muscles.

The film ends on a colossal downer, with the interviewees facing an uncertain future and Disney's reputation squarely in the crapper. Oddly, the official companion website has no updates on any of the artists interviewed, so their fate largely remains a mystery. Overall, the film is a fascinating look into a very strange period of animation history.

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In happier animation news. Hey, does anyone remember that weird "Guardians of Childhood" thing William Joyce and Guillermo Del Toro and Leonardo DiCaprio of all three people were working on together that involved a whole bunch of childhood folklore characters saving the world or something equally ridiculous?

Yeah. Well, the trailer's out and it turns out that the crazy-sounding project looks, and I apologize in advance for this mom, f***ing AMAZING:



I believe I will now trust these guys with anything. My God, the hummingbird-like fairies! The Ghibli tributes conjured by the Sandman! TATTOOED BADASS SIBERIAN SANTA CLAUS!!!


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Sketch of the Day! I have drawn for you less popular folklore characters!

In Which, By Some Miracle, Trish Watches "The Sweatbox"

It was a huge weekend for animation news, wasn't it? Glen Keane, one of my biggest influences, resigned after 37 years(!?!) at Disney. The initial episodes of "The Legend of Korra" (the sequel series to the outstanding "Avatar: The Last Airbender") were temporarily released a little early.

And, what else what else? It was kinda important... Oh yeah! "The Sweatbox" appeared online for a while.

Ah, "The Sweatbox", the legendary documentary made by Trudie Styler that chronicles the very very strange evolution of "The Emperor's New Groove". I'd heard about it, I'd read about it, and I was pretty sure I'd never get to see it. I think the film was screened in two, if even that, film festivals years ago and hasn't resurfaced in any meaningful way since, most likely because Disney owns the rights to the documentary and the executives did not enjoy the way they were portrayed in it.

Well it appears as though by some completely random chance, an early cut of "The Sweatbox" surfaced in various places online. I learned about this while reading an animation thread on a certain website last Thursday. "Screw you, original afternoon plans," I said and dropped everything to watch the workprint immediately.

I was actually afraid that it would be taken down as I was watching, so I didn't want to risk waiting. It has since been deleted from YouTube, but the Internet never forgets and there's a very slight chance that it's still available somewhere out there. It was well worth a look just to satisfy my curiosity about the thing.



Now a very, very small portion of the film was posted over the summer and is still available (see above). It actually gives you an excellent idea of the documentary as a whole. First of all, it's not at all the muckraking clusterf*** I was led to expect after all these years. As a matter of fact, it's actually very sympathetic towards the film crew. If there was more aggressive dissent between the film crew and the executives, it's not onscreen. Heck, the executives don't even come across as that bad; they really only just admit that the original version of the film isn't working. There's not a lot of screaming and swearing, but there's a lot of shrugging and statements of "Oh well, them's the breaks."

The story is, naturally, mostly told from Sting's point of view and therefore covers how he and the other musicians and composers had to radically alter the film's music as it went under several dramatic tonal changes. I hate to say it, but this part of the story was by far the least interesting. We do get to see a lot of the animation art from "Kingdom of the Sun," the movie that mutated into "Emperor." This includes the brilliant Yzma villain song posted above and an animatic for another completely deleted song. Mostly there's storyboards, animatics, story sequences that were completely cut, and early character designs. These last two things are especially fascinating, and I really wish that much more time was spent on them.

We learn that Pacha was originally a completely different character, much younger and voiced by Owen Wilson. He would have been involved in a sort of "Prince and the Pauper" subplot, switching places with the transformed Emperor... Manco (stop laughing, Japan). There was a very very strange little character essentially in Kronk's role; a talking Olmec statue who sang a song about why humans can't be more like rocks. Yeah. And there was a princess character(?!?) who falls for Pacha(!?!?!) and sings the aforementioned deleted love song with him(?!?!?!?) while he is taking the Emperor's place.

Now it turns out that the tone of "Kingdom" wasn't as dreadfully serious as I'd been led to believe. It looks like the film had two very different supervisors, one of whom wanted a serious big damn epic, and the other wanted more humor. Eventually the humorous director got to take over the project entirely, and we got "The Emperor's New Groove". Sting was called -while on tour, which was just a little bit problematic for him- to write new songs for the new version of the film and from what "The Sweatbox" shows us, these are essentially the ones we hear in the final film. Yes, including "My Funny Friend and Me", which I always assumed was a holdover from "Kingdom of the Sun" and seems to come from yet another completely different film entirely. The sadder story is that of Andreas Deja, who is interviewed twice (*sigh*, only twice): once as he is working on the earlier version of Yzma and again after he's essentially dropped from the project.

Hanging over the documentary is, of course, the fact that "Emperor's New Groove" actually did eventually get made and released (with a lot of the discarded songs on the soundtrack yet), and is, especially given it's strange history, really good. So while "The Sweatbox" isn't like the "Lost in LaMancha" of animation, it's an entertaining look behind the scenes of an animated film, which is a rare treat indeed. I still wish Disney would let it be officially released so that more fans could finally satisfy their curiosity about it.

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Sketch of the Day!

Some of these character designs might have been for the project I had to put on hold when I heard I could finally watch "The Sweatbox":

Let's Watch "The Illusion of Life" and listen to the Animation Podcast!

During extremely busy times when I fear I have no time to write this blog it always makes me happy to stumble upon something that is well worth talking about and bringing to everyone's attention.

I'm sure we're all familiar with Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's seminal doorstopper on the art and history of Walt Disney studios, The Illusion of Life. What's not so well known is the 1981 television special of the same title. YouTube user YensidTun has kindly uploaded the whole special, and you can watch it as a playlist through this link. (Embedding disabled, but you'll want to watch this fullscreen anyway.)

Originally aired as part of "Walt Disney Presents", the special is hosted by Hayley Mills who was apparently originally meant to voice Princess Eilonwy (the premise of the special is that she is revisiting the Disney studio for the first time in years to see how the animation process has changed.) Yes, this is 1981 and "The Black Cauldron" is just getting started. There's no indication of the spectacular debacle the film's development would become, and make sure you keep an eye out in the very end of the show for some concept art that was entirely new to me (oh my God, Lyon could have been in the movie?! [Cries at What Could Have Been.])

With this in mind, "The Illusion of Life" makes a fantastic companion piece to a wonderful podcast that I just discovered and is sadly long dead but well worth listening to: the Animation Podcast. I'm not going to go too crazy here; just listen to the first three episodes (an interview with Andreas Deja). I guarantee you will be hooked.

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Sketch of the Day!

"You'd be surprised there's so much to be done..." - Thoughts on "Winnie the Pooh" (2011)

Movie # 64: "Winnie the Pooh" (2011)

"Winnie the Pooh" is adorable and sweet and, miraculously, completely and utterly unironic, unsarcastic, and unhip (ie, it's not the bad sort of hip; more on this in a bit). It features terrific character animation by such Disney legends as Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, and Mark Henn and some cute songs by Zooey Deschanel and -heh- one of the songwriting minds behind "Avenue Q" and "The Book of Mormon". The animation is digital (using the ToonBoom software) but beautifully simulates the look of the beloved "Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" from back in the late 70's and the use of straight-up CGI is kept to the very barest minimum.

And "Winnie the Pooh" is also very definitely for young children (and their attendant adults of course). And it is short. Really, REALLY short. Like, barely qualifying as a theatrical-length film short. Like, were it not for the prologue and opening credits, it'd just make it to one hour short. That short.

Now, as we have seen, short animated films are not a bad thing, especially because they tend to be tight as heck and leave little room to screw things up. So every minute in "Winnie the Pooh" is dedicated to fun character moments and furthering the refreshingly basic plot (Pooh is hungry, he and the gang get caught up in searching for Eeyore's tail, a note left by Christopher Robin gets misinterpreted and this sparks another adventure, etc.)

And I probably don't even have to explain why an animated film for children that does not include any instances whatsoever of gross-out humor, sexual innuendos, cute animals singing catchy songs with horribly inappropriate lyrics, cute animals begging to eat at Chain Restaurant You Must Beg Your Parents To Take You To After The Movie, coprophagy, or Happy Madison alumnae is a freaking Godsend. (Side Note: You used to not have to worry about these things so much but we live in strange times.)

If there is anything negative I have to say about "Winnie the Pooh" it is that it is not *quite* as good as "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh". (In particular, the Backson song ain't got nothin' on the Hephalumps and Woozles number.) It more closely recalls a particularly lavish episode of the Saturday morning cartoon. It is however much closer to the original Disney Pooh shorts and anthology film, and the way the characters get to play with the text again is wonderful.

There is also a fantastic gag involving Owl, Piglet, and a pit trap that is way too fun to spoil here and appears as though it was written just for kids who think the way I did at that age (and still do, of course).

For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.

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Picture of the Day!

I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween. In lieu of a drawing, I bring you this lovely autumn market scene:

Thoughts on "Waking Sleeping Beauty"

Disney has produced many behind-the-scenes documentaries before. They are often very informative, but fluffy pieces packed with smiling talking heads and footage of animators happily working and maybe a segment showing early concept art or rough animation or something. Granted, I am not saying they are bad; they are often fascinating. "The Making of 'Beauty and the Beast'", which ran on the Disney Channel years and years ago, is fairly typical:

When I watched such specials as a child, I thought it must be great fun to work at Disney. Animators like Glen Keane and Andreas Deja were the stars of the movie just as much as -if not more so than- Robbie Benson and Page O'Hara. Plus, they had a studio right in Disney World! How awesome would it be to make Disney animated features right in Disney World? Well. If you grew up with the Bronze Age of the Disney Animated Canon and want to know what happened *behind* behind the scenes, you owe it to yourself to watch "Waking Sleeping Beauty". The best way to learn what was really happening at Disney Feature Animation during the Bronze Age is straight from the mouths of the animators who worked there. Produced by Don Hahn, "Waking" is a fascinating and incredibly poignant look at the ten years between 1984, when the animation studio was just about to go belly-up, and 1994, right before the record-setting release of "The Lion King". I'm stating the time-span this movie covers right away to forewarn you: This movie is amazing and you should watch it, but overall it feels like the prologue to a much longer and equally incredible story. "Waking" ends before Michael Eisner left (or, depending on who you believe, was kicked out), before Jeffrey Katzenberg kissed off for DreamWorks, and before the full impact of Frank Wells' tragic death became really clear. Walt's poor nephew Roy E. Disney must have felt that he was left alone to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic before John Lasseter pulled Disney animation out of it's long, long Dork Age. Part of me really, REALLY wants to hear that story (really, just what thought-process leads to something like "Home on the Range" or "Chicken Little" or all those dang-blasted DTV sequels?) I suppose I can wait. Remember how I said that it is a genuine miracle that "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" even exists, and an even greater miracle that everyone working on that movie, which had so many things that could go wrong, just knocked it out of the park? Turns out that's pretty much the case with each and every Bronze Age Disney Animated Canon movie. "Part of Your World" was nearly cut from "The Little Mermaid" (as an aside, one of the most moving scenes in the DVD special features is archival footage of Jodi Benson and Howard Ashman singing the song together -- and then she nails it in the first recording). Both "Beauty and the Beast" and "Aladdin" had to be scrapped and rebooted entirely because they had such awful pacing problems in their first iterations. And the film -way too briefly- covers one of my favorite ever surprising pieces of Disney trivia: After "Beauty and the Beast" won the Golden Globe for Best Musical/Comedy Film, and received a surprise nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the highest-ups at Disney demanded more serious Oscar-baiting films. Thereafter, "Pocahontas" became the movie *everyone* wanted to work on -- but they let the other animation team finish their silly little movie about animals singing Elton John songs. Which went on to be the highest-grossing animated Disney film of all time. One of the coolest things about "Waking Sleeping Beauty" is the format. It's not people sitting down and giving interviews; though we do get lots and lots of narration from all the animators. Instead, we see all the archival footage like home movies and photographs and caricatures and other fun stuff we've never had a chance to see before because Disney squirreled it away in the Vault. This alone is worth watching the movie for, though it's odd to recall that Warner Bros. has been making animation documentaries like this for years and years. The aforementioned special features on the DVD are also fascinating (I was especially geeking out over the uncut Studio Tour home movies), and add a great deal more to the story. Now, how likely is it we'll ever see "The Sweatbox"? ---- Festive Thing of the Day! Speaking of Disney, it doesn't really feel like winter until I see Donald and the three nephews' impossibly awesome snow forts. ---- Sketch of the Day! It's hard out here for an artist.