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...
-----
(Pre-Hurricane) Garden Update!
I am going to go ahead and declare this garden to be a successful experiment.
I have to say, watching "Banjo the Woodpile Cat" after having watched each and every Don Bluth film in order (hit the "Don Bluth Month" tab below if you missed that series) is quite the experience. Originally conceived as a feature film, and later as a Christmas Special, "Banjo" is an approximately twenty minute long short animated film made by the independent Don Bluth studio in it's larval stage. Many of the animators still worked at Disney while making "Banjo" on the side. And -according to animation mythology and, if true, then it gives this cute little special a punk rock touch- "Banjo" was produced entirely in a garage.
As for the film itself, "Banjo" is sweet and cute and charming. It's also interesting to see all the similarities it has with later, better-known Bluth productions. We've got a cute little character who is separated from his family, gets into adventures in a big city, and makes some new friends who help him find his way home -- just like in "An American Tail". The overall look of the film, however, is more similar to "All Dogs Go To Heaven". The characters sometimes look very odd, and there is a similar montage of characters getting into mischief in the city. The film is also visually consistent with the Disney films Bluth and company had worked on.
Overall, "Banjo" is a fun little short with terrific animation and a simple, sweet story.
----
Happy Holidays to everyone! I will likely start posting again the second week in January (I may be going on an adventure for New Year's). Have a great Solstice Holiday of Choice and a very happy New Year!
First off, I found this on Best Week Ever, and they could only describe it as "A Kazaam wish come true!"
I will also share with you the traditional Christmas music of my people.
And finally, Comics Alliance has an annotated preview of the comic "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" in it's entirety. It is much, much better than it sounds.
----
Art of the Day!
Here's a Christmas commission I had recently. I was simply told, "Make us an album cover with cats on it". This is what they got. Fortunately, they got it right away and loved it. (Plus you can't have enough Christmas Cats.)
Now the story of a animator who worked for Disney and went out to found his own studio, which had a series of hits in the 80's, and several flops in the 90's. And the fan who decided to watch each of his directorial credits in chronological order over the course of a month. It's Don Bluth Month.
A quick, easy-to-link-to list of every post from Don Bluth Month, for those who would like to read them in order (which you should, as they wouldn't make sense otherwise.) In August of 2010, I watched every readily available Don Bluth film in chronological order and shared my thoughts.
It sucks beyond all manner of sucking that Don Bluth Month had to end on such a low note, because this overview began on such an emotional high. When you go back and watch Bluth's early films, they are absolutely beautiful. Hell, I even appreciate the animation [if not the story content] of "All Dogs Go to Heaven" now. When you watch "Anastasia" or "Titan A.E.", they have moments of absolute beauty as well. So that brings us to the unspoken, awkward question that I'm sure is on the mind of a lot of Don Bluth fans including myself:
What happened?
What went wrong in-between "The Land Before Time" and "Thumbelina"? (The answer is probably "Rock-A-Doodle", but I have a hard time picking on a film I didn't get to watch. Yes, "GET to"; at least it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting than "The Pebble and the Penguin".) How could the man who so hated "baby talk" and sh**ty animation possibly go on to make "The Pebble and the Penguin"? How could a person sound so excited in the commentary track about the new technology he got to play with in "Titan A.E." go on to make... *nothing*? How does the director who made the movies that shaped the childhood of every person around my age, even more so than Disney, seemingly vanish without a trace? Where the hell is he know that we need him?
We do. We need Don Bluth to come back, and we need more people to pick up his "animation is an art form and should be treated as such" mantle. Because right now, the world of animated films is a grim place indeed. My heart goes heavy when I wonder if there's even a place for a hand-drawn, totally analogue animated feature film in today's "Eh, let's make another 3D live-action/CGI movie based on a beloved -or not- vintage cartoon" environment.
(Addressing another sauropod in the room: Yes, I know the next Toon to get this treatment will be Bugs Bunny. And as a fan of classic Looney Tunes, after years and years of things like "Space Jam" and "Loonatics" and other monstrosities of that ilk, I'm just too exhausted to muster as much outrage as I should about this. I can only heave a sigh that sounds suspiciously like this: "Goddammitsomuchwarnerbrothers...")
I don't want this to end on a total bummer. So I should note that "Bartok the Magnificent" isn't the last we ever saw of Don Bluth, thankfully. He has a very nice website, and he has made several books and CDs about art and animation principles. And there is this little oddity called "The Gift of the Hoopoe", which was apparently directed by Don Bluth. Sadly, there is hardly any information outside of IMDB and those storyboards about this short film.
I also need to finally share what I was working on during the month:
----
Painting of the Month! Click for huge:
It's called "There Had Never Been Such a Herd Before". It is my humble tribute to "The Land Before Time" and my entry in Art Evolved's "Pop Culture" gallery. I figure that when I ever feel the need to do fanart, I better go big.
So here's the last feature-length Don Bluth movie ever released (in some markets [I have been informed that others got it before "Titan A.E."] and last feature to date; let's be optimistic here). Let's pause for a minute or two and let that sink in.
Depressed? Yeah, so am I. It's hard to imagine a quieter whimper to go out on. But that's not the only reason why "Bartok" is a very strange animal.
Records disagree as to whether it's the last feature Don Bluth ever made. It certainly is the last most of us ever heard of him. Whenever it was made, Fox shoved it onto DVD after "Titan" imploded at the box office. (Currently, it can only be found as a special feature on the two-disk edition of "Anastasia", a fact I learned just in time by chance.) You might not be a Don Bluth fan, but you do have to agree that it is very sad to see someone like him go out like a fart in the wind.
This is supposedly a sequel to "Anastasia". As such, it barely qualifies. The only things connecting this film and it's predecessor are one character and the country it is set in.
And that leads to the sauropod in the room I mentioned a long while back: All those gorram sequels. It must suck in ways none of us can imagine to make all these beloved movies and then not be able to say what the studios who own the rights to said movies can and cannot do with them. And so we live in a world where there are, at last count, fourteen "Land Before Time" movies. (For the record, there are about ten "Halloween" movies. I mention them because that is possibly the only other movie whose reputation has been so badly ruined by it's own not-original-director-involving sequels. It took years for the original "Halloween" to be appreciated.)
So this is why "Bartok" is one of the strangest movies I've watched during this project: Of all the Bluth-derived sequels, this is the ONE movie sequel he directed.
"Better" is a subjective word. I can't rightly say if this is indeed "better" than any of the sequels Bluth was not involved with. But I can pretty much guarantee that if it isn't better, it is at least *stranger* than any other sequel to a Don Bluth film.
It feels more like one of the Dark Age Disney movies than any Don Bluth film. There were a lot of scenes and characters that gave me bad "Sword in the Stone" flashbacks. There were other scenes that felt like something out of "Dragon's Lair: Time Warp". In all, the whole movie is very confusing and, at times, damn creepy in a way that's hard to explain (ie, the big, perverted-looking dragon who shows up at the end.)
First, Nerd Joy from the closing credits. These all prompted me to shout, "YES! I EFFING KNEW IT!!!"
So, hypothetically, a movie involving Joss Whedon, Ben Edlund, Wayne Barlowe, the Blue Sky crew, and Don Bluth should make me go
And "Titan" was perfectly okay, and even great at times. But there's something off about it and I can't really say what it is.
2000 was a weird year if you were a science fiction fan. "Titan A.E." could not have been released to theaters at a worse time. Let's just say that people were... a *little* disillusioned with big damn galaxy-spanning space operas with gorgeous CGI and crazy alien designs after a certain hotly anticipated movie came out the summer before. "Titan" ultimately flopped and is, to date, Don Bluth's last theatrical film.
And that's very sad, because one of the awesome things about this film, upon rewatch, is the fact that you get to see what Bluth could do with a big sandbox of state-of-the-art animation and a hefty budget. The movie is one of the best-looking sci-fi films of the past decade. Look at the gorgeous and tense chase through the ice rings.
There are also some wonderful little subversive moments with a distinctly Whedonesque feel to them (the cook character who looks like he's going to stick around as a JarJar-esque annoyance -- then gets blasted to smithereens, that wonderful "An intelligent guard?!" scene.) There are times when the movie feels like a test run for ideas that Joss would eventually get to play with further in "Firefly". And there are a few really neat characters. In the commentary, Bluth wishes that Gune could have had his own movie and I, too, almost wish that this had been his story. He's a great, whimsical, and very Bluthy little character with a very funny anxious John Leguizamo voice. He gives the movie some much-needed levity.
And I think that might be what strikes me as off about "Titan": get rid of Gune and there is almost no humor in the movie. Bluth's movies have always been a little dark, certainly more so than Disney's, but it's always undercut with something funny or sweet. This is a movie that starts off with the end of the world (which is very dark even by Bluth standards) and never lightens up after that. Bluth appears to have been unfettered for the most part, so where is his trademark weirdness? (Well, OK, there is some weirdness. But it's the kind of weirdness that was clearly the executives' fault, and we'll get to it at the end.)
Also, before I started this project, I used to think that music wasn't as big a deal to Don Bluth films as they were to Disney films. But let's try an experiment here: Hum the score from "N.I.M.H." Now sing something from "American Tail". Now hum the opening credits music from "Land Before Time". Sing something from "All Dogs", "Rock-A-Doodle" (I can and I didn't even rewatch it!), "Thumbelina", "Penguin", "Troll", "Anastasia". OK.
Now name a song from "Titan A.E." Yeah. What we get is a weird mix of modern (for 2000) hard rock with bludgeon-obvious lyrics. So in other words, you get those aforementioned amazing animated sequences set to the lilting tunes of... Lit. (Next challenge: remind me what Lit's one popular single was.)
Basically, what we're left with here is a movie that has an amazing combination of CGI and hand-rendered animation -- that also casts Janeane Garofolo as a Knees Akimbo kangaroo/velociraptor weapons expert. In the previous sentence, the executive-mandated weirdness is in italics.
So that brings us to the end of Don Bluth month... or does it?
----
Art of the Day?
Man, how can I tease the painting any further? I won't. Have these instead:
As I said before, fans of Don Bluth who were captivated, as children, by "The Secret of N.I.M.H." and "The Land Before Time" were on their knees by 1997, hoping our hero would come through with the kind of movie we knew, deep down, that he was capable of. And then we saw the trailers for "Anastasia". After trolls and penguins and Thumbelina, maybe -just maybe- this would be Don Bluth's big comeback. The world at large would finally appreciate him.
It was a comeback, however mild, but it's hard to imagine it coming at a better/worse time.
Let me explain by taking a minute and setting the stage. In the wake of "The Lion King", every big Hollywood studio wanted their own animation department, whether they'd had one in the past or not. Which means that this was a damn fun time period to be a fan of hand-drawn animation. Some well-loved cult favorite features come from this time, and while they are all of varying quality, all of them appeared to have taken their influence more from Don Bluth than from Disney: "Ferngully", "Pagemaster", "Once Upon a Forest", "Little Nemo", and of course the beloved "Iron Giant". The Dreamworks animation studio came barreling out of the gate with "The Prince of Egypt" -- they had the guy who MADE "The Lion King" on their side so they should have been unstoppable! ("Prince" and the other all-but-forgotten hand-drawn and "tradigital" [ugh] Dreamworks films are certainly worth a re-watch. Turns out there are only *five* of them, so t'is a story for another day.)
Meanwhile, a little studio in Emeryville, California was quietly working on some movies of their own that would, unwittingly, and for better or for worse, change the playing field forever.
So in other words, the market for animated films was actually overcrowded. Into this environment, around the same time I just entered college, entered "Anastasia". And I have to say I liked the movie when I first saw it but didn't think that much of it. It was okay; certainly a damn site better than "Hercules" or (shudder) "Space Jam".
Thing is, had I known at the time that this was going to be the third-to-last Don Bluth feature film for more than a decade... I probably would have treated it differently.
Upon rewatch, and with all this in mind, "Anastasia" is a strange ride. It's as if Fox asked Bluth to make them a movie that would directly compete with Disney and that was also, by the way, an adaptation of the previous film and play "Anastasia". Aside from these prerequisites, he could go to town.
And so now we have a movie that tells the fictionalized story of the lost princess Anastasia with big bombastic Broadway (read: Disney)-style musical numbers, cute little animals, Meg Ryan, and a happy ending that rides off giving double swear-fingers to your high school history teacher. And that also suggests to it's young primary demographic that the Russian Revolution happened because everyone just suddenly dropped everything and started attacking the Romanov family. Because some glowy green demons told them to. Because said shiny demons were sent by Rasputin. Who was apparently an evil Satan-worshiping zombie wizard thing. Because why the hell not? Screw you, historical accuracy and sane storytelling decisions, I do what I want! I'm Don Bluth b**ch!!!
(Something tells me Don Bluth and Quentin Tarantino would get along very nicely. Anyway...)
In print, this all looks ridiculous. It's that good old Bluthy weirdness applied to actual historical persons. And if you let that kind of thing bother you, this movie's going to be hard going. No offense to any and all actual people involved in these incidents in real life, I'm just here for the pretty animation.
And dear sweet lord, it is gorgeous. So this is what Bluth can do when handed a big, big budget. It's absolutely fantastic. The DVD I got was in anamorphic widescreen and so, so pretty.
But aside from the pretty visuals, there's not much that stays with me. The songs are pretty good, and the best ones are hideous earworms as usual. The songs suffer, however, from the annoying and distracting post-"Lion King" trend of "oh let's hire a name-voice for the speaking part and let the professional voice actor do the songs. Nobody will be able to tell!" Well, you really can tell. Additionally, the story is a little bland with no real good character or action moments and a whole lot of weird references to "Titanic" and, err, "Speed". This is also the first film where Don Bluth uses extensive CGI sequences and - yikes. WTF giant stone Pegasus?
But overall, "Anastasia" is pretty good and worth a rewatch. We'll see if the same can be said for Don Bluth's very last theatrical feature to date.
I dreaded this film. I knew I was eventually going to have to get to it, and I anticipated it like an appointment to get a cavity filled. I remembered seeing the trailer for this thing years ago and... let's just say it didn't inspire confidence. "The Pebble and the Penguin" was irredeemable, so how could this possibly be any good?
Well...
It's not amazing. Some would even say it's not very good at all. But, in my mind, at least it's better than both "Penguin" and "Thumbelina". I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn't awesome, but it was better than I feared it would be.
Chief among the reasons is that the good old Bluthy crazy-ass moon logic is back in full swing. On that note (let's just get this out of the way) I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed the movie twice as much if I had watched it under... certain circumstances. (The plot involves a Fairy creature and his magical plants hanging out in a city park. Don't blame me!)
The animation crew is back from the half-assedness of "Penguin" and the old lush Don Bluth style is back in full force. This is, by far, the best kid's film about two annoying children flying around in a dream boat with a gardening troll I will ever see.
All I can really say is this: If I had any sculpting skill, I'd kinda want to make a little fiberglass Stanley for my garden. D'awww.
Now, don't get me wrong. If I hadn't seen such a bad movie immediately before this, I very likely wouldn't have liked "Troll" as much. Main reason for this being that I am not a four-year-old. Don Bluth fans who were old enough to remember the promise of "N.I.M.H." were on their knees at this point. Would our devotion ever be justified? Would we ever see a good movie out of the Bluth studio ever again?
So this is it. Out of all the movies Don Bluth ever made, this is the one he disowned. He is not listed as a director. The film was originally credited to Alan Smithy, the name directors used (before Joe Esterhaus ruined the fun for everyone with his awful "An Alan Smithy Film") when their own film is so terrible that they are too embarrassed to put their own name on it. If I'm lucky, this will have been the nadir of this here Don Bluth Month project. I really hope it is.
Because good God, this movie is terrible. I could see why Bluth turned away from it almost immediately: there are times when the animation is just downright sh**ty. I know bad animation bothers Don Bluth more than story problems, because even something like "Rock-A-Doodle" has excellent effects and character animation.
In "Penguin" the animation, particularly of the characters, is either inconsistent or downright ugly. Oftentimes, it's both. Seems they farmed the animation duties off to some other, cheaper studio. The characters freely change size and perspective while standing still. They shimmer in and out of existence. They even occasionally appear as immobile still frames that may "twitch" once and again; the effect is less like the kind of fluid, lifelike animation Bluth was trying to keep alive and more like something mind-scarring from a Japanese horror film.
There is even a scene, late in the film, where they forget to draw a major characters head. 'Nuff said.
Add to this the fact that the penguin character designs are downright ghastly. Why do they all have such prominent teeth? Why is Marina given a pair of human-like hips way the hell up near where her wishbone should be? It's "Happy Feet" all over again, with all the creepy almost-anthropomorphic penguins running about. Why the hell is it so easy to mess up the cuteness of a penguin?!
And the story is... man, you know what, f*** it! I don't even remember it!
That says a lot. As I mentioned before, story problems do not appear to bother Don Bluth too much. I might have hated "All Dogs Go To Heaven", but at least it's memorable because it has some insane fever-dream logic at work (the scene where the infamous King Gator suddenly reappears as a singing big gay unstoppable force of nature for example). It's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least it is fun to make fun of, and to wonder what kind of deranged mind came up with it.
"Penguin" is just irredeemably boring and tedious, with ugly, unlikeable characters, a story that goes nowhere, and songs that feel like an obligation in the fact that they just keep showing up and stalling the plot. There's one in particular that almost made me want to gouge my ears out with a skewer, in which Hubie and Rocko sing about how friendship is nice or something. It goes on forever. In the duration, we learn that the two characters are exactly like what we thought they were before (though we do learn that Hubie is more annoying than we thought we did, so yay for whatever character development we can get). Also, during the song they advance a physical distance of about twenty feet on their adventure from New Zealand to Antarctica.
I guess the more important question is this: how in the hell do you go from "The Secret of N.I.M.H." to this?!?
Up next, "A Troll in Central Park". Please, please at least let the animation be better in this one?
I hate cliched movie lines as much as the next person (and the next person is Brian DePalma), but say hello to my lil' friend:
Mr. Blueberry Martini here is going to help me get through this thing called "Thumbelina".
Have you ever seen that one episode of "Star Trek" where Worf has to do the Klingon version of running the gauntlet? Every few steps, there are two other Klingons on either side of him, and they just wail on him with staffs or jab him with tasers or do other unpleasant things to him. The dialogue in the scene goes a little like this:
I bring this up because I see a lot of Klingons bearing pointy weapons coming up in the ol' Netflix queue.
I'll be the first to point out that, yes, I didn't get to (read: have to) watch "Rock-A-Doodle" and, in fact, that might help me survive this intact. But even so, this project has very suddenly stopped being fun and started being an endurance test. My prize at the end: bragging rights. Wee.
So, "Thumbelina".
(Long, long, awkward pause...)
Now, to be fair, I am not a five-year-old girl. But I just watched this movie about a half-hour ago and I remember almost nothing. *Almost* nothing. I almost can't even comment on it, but I'll try.
I remember that the songs were horrible and were all written by Barry Manilow (who I keep confusing with Neil Diamond, hence me singing "Sweet Caroline" along with half the musical numbers). In particular, there's a song you will get to hear over and over about how nothing is impossible if you follow your heart, and it's sung by an aggressively annoying swallow. (He doesn't do anything more helpful than fly around and tell Thumbelina to, if you will, never say never. God help us all if he ever meets the pigeon from "An American Tail".) I remember there were three irritating cutesy-poo little bug characters that look like they walked out of a completely different feature altogether, and I kept forgetting that they were in the movie. Then again, the writers tended to forget about them too, since they really only have two scenes. I remember Gilbert Gottfried. Boy do I wish I could forget that part. And -oh good- I remember a few things I can discuss at some length.
First, the Toads. I... wow. So, like, nobody during the production of this movie (and animated films take a very long time to make) took a look at the Toads and thought, "gee guys, these characters, with their pencil mustaches, giant boobs, and heavy accents, might not be okay"? Mind you, this movie was released in 1994, not 1934, so they can't use the trusty "it was just a product of it's time" excuse.
Second thing: Thumbelina is, like, the worst character. There are times when this movie looks like the Barbie princess movie cash-in of itself and Thumbie here is the main reason. She has got no personality at all; none. Her character arc is basically: "I am sad that I'm tiny. I am happy that I met the Fairy prince. I am sad again because the creepy toad and mole want to marry me and the Gilbert Gottfried beetle was mean to me. Now I am happy again because I married my hottie prince." My favorite scenes with Thumbelina are the ones where she's still dancing and smiling *after* each of the musical numbers are over. It's like she doesn't even know what she's doing.
Third and most important:I had a running checklist in my head of every scene that appeared to be lifted whole-cloth from Disney. They're pretty unsubtle about it too. Obviously you've got Jody Benson as Thumbelina and, God bless her, she gives it her all and sings her heart out on those "Sweet Caroline" clones. The story itself is based on a Hans Christian Anderson story -- same author as "The Little Mermaid". There's a big movie musical style song and dance number a la "Beauty and the Beast". In case that isn't enough, the opening is set in Paris for... some reason. There are some Fairies-changing-the-seasons animation that look identical to the similar scenes in "Fantasia". Kinda sad that they look the same, with 54 years worth of technological achievements between them.
This is the worst-looking Don Bluth movie so far. It barely even looks like any of the other Don Bluth movies. The only truly Bluthy highlight is a blink-and-you-miss-it scene with a fox. Everything looks so cheap and half-assed. I don't know what the story behind this movie is, but it almost looks like they just wanted to get it overwith.
Meanwhile, Disney released a little movie over that same summer with talking animals singing Elton John songs. "The Lion King" would go on to be the most popular animated film to date of all time. Ouch.
This is about where, as a kid, I stopped seriously paying attention to what Don Bluth was up to. Next up, a movie I've never seen before: "The Pebble and the Penguin". I am just giddy with excitement here, dear readers.
You know how I said, in the last post, that "I am looking at my Netflix queue, and things go straight downhill from here"? Yeah. Make that a 90 degree angle on a runaway train down a triple-black diamond.
Oh, "All Dogs Go To Heaven". The movie that assaulted my childhood. Most people my age have the "Star Wars" prequels or "Transformers 2" "Michael Bay Learns to Add and Subtract"*. I have "All Dogs Go To Heaven".
It is a hard thing for a kid to learn that their favorite director can do wrong, but something died inside me when I saw this movie. How in the world do you follow "The Land Before Time" with this? But before I go ahead and tear into how bad this movie is for all the conventional reasons (gaping plot holes, boring songs, ect.), let's talk about the psychology of a child at the time this movie was released.
There is something crucial missing from 80's nostalgia. You kids probably feel the same way about the 1980s as I did about the 1960s: a big, nonstop party to which I wasn't able to attend due to inconveniently not being born yet. Back then, 60's nostalgia meant tie-dye and the Beatles and hippies and Woodstock (possibly the ultimate retro "You shoulda been there" moment). There was, tellingly, no mention of racial tension, political unrest, or the Vietnam War and it's aftermath.
So with that in mind, here's my question about 80's nostalgia: Where's the death?
Listen, next time you're rocking out to "1999", pay attention to those lyrics. When Prince warns that "we could all die any day", he ain't kidding. That was the zeitgeist of the time. It was the peak of the Cold War and the bombs could drop at any minute. Just a few decades ago, there was a serious possibility that all life on Earth would be wiped out because two countries had different economic systems.
I was about six or seven when I realized all this was happening.
On top of this was an unspoken but collective agreement that something was going to happen in 1999, which wasn't too far away. Maybe this was a prediction from Nostradamus, maybe some other Middle Age prophet guy, but the world would be very different once the Millennium approached. Human nature being what it is, it was unanimously assumed that "different" meant "bad", and so the prediction was tangled up in nuclear paranoia. The point is, us 80's kids were thoroughly convinced that some way or other, we'd never live to see adulthood, an undercurrent of unshakable despair that still runs deep in our hearts today.**
Into this environment came a strange and seriously creepy trend in the motion picture world: Dramatic, non-horror (not intentionally anyways) movies where the action doesn't start until after the main character dies -almost always in a presumably horrible offscreen car accident- and returns as a supernatural something-or-other. "Ghost" is the best known of these and may have even started the trend. There are the utterly traumatic "Ghost Dad" and "Fluke" and "Jack Frost". There's "Casper", who, for his feature film debut, was given a sad backstory that explicitly reveals that he would more accurately and horrifyingly be called Caspar the Friendly Dead Child. Robin Williams has *TWO* such movies under his belt (and this is only if I am forgetting one): the thematically related and utterly mind-scarring "Jack" (Robin is a sweet child-man a la "Benjamin Button" who is doomed to die before he gets to college), and "What Dreams May Come" which may be the prettiest movie to ever have the potential to do you some serious psychological damage as a young person, ups the ante by killing off ALL of the major characters during the course of it's running time, and includes the classic line, "That's the last time I ever saw my family when we were all alive." Mind you, this big long list is off the top of my head, and ignores the wide world of End of the World/Rapture-themed entertainment(?) and direct-to-video/TV films.
And then, of course, there's "All Dogs Go To Heaven", which is a tender tale about a dog who dies twice and which operates in a universe where your afterlife options are a boring cotton candy cloud Heaven or an aggressively interesting Wayne D. Barlowe fever dream Hell.
"All Dogs Go To Heaven" was yet another symptom of the creepy death fixation running through Hollywood and the world at large at the time, and I hope you enjoyed those last few paragraphs because that is the only interesting commentary I can give this movie. I might have mentioned earlier that "All Dogs Go To Heaven" is... not good. Let me make something clear before I rip into this movie: even though it is terrible, the character and effects animation is superb. Once again, you'll see Bluth and his team at the top of their game in this movie. That's what's going to help me survive some of the upcoming movies. As bad as they get, they'll still *look* good.
Man, if only that terrific animation was in the service of a better... well, I was going to say "story", but really, "everything else."
We'll start with something that always drove me up the wall as a kid. The plot centers around this little girl who can "talk to animals". Apparently, inter-species communication is impossible in the world of "All Dogs Go To Heaven". Except when it isn't. And among other things, this raging plot hole makes the infamous You Know What even more worthy of a "what the f*** just happened?" (Speaking of King Gator, there are some character designs in this movie that are just eye-searingly ugly.)
It's easy to sum up everything wrong with this movie by fast-forwarding to around the 45 minute mark. In quick succession, you get a God-awful song about sharing that has ruined stronger people than I (ye Gods, can you see why "The Little Mermaid" killed this at the box office?), a sad song that is essentially "Somewhere Out There" with the numbers filed off, and a truly horrifying nightmare sequence. This film doesn't know what the hell it wants to be and suffers dearly. But not as much as I did while watching it.
Next up, "Thumbelina". Yaaaayyy...
* - It will never stop being funny. NEVER. If you don't understand, and you're like me and you haven't seen "Revenge of the Fallen" because you've heard how bad it is and you don't want to give Michael Bay any of your money, read the second to last Q/A in this. Of course, maybe it's enough to say that this is the same Michael Bay who thinks sunset can happen all around the world at the *same time*, so... ** Only Mayans and archaeologists are sicker of hearing about 2012 than I am, but I have the deepest sympathy for little kids growing up and hearing about it. And of course I'll be the first to say that the Cold War was gorram cake and ice cream compared to today's kids' post-9/11 world.
First off, this one's going to be a little picture heavy. And you may want to read this old post before we begin, as many of it's points still stand.
Also, just because this showed up again:
I had to see what it was all about. Clicking that link leads to a short film that shows kids how to use a DVD remote and eventually ends with this image:
Yeah...
In the last post I mentioned two important things that I didn't have the space to expand on: That "The Land Before Time" was the first movie I ever became a hopeless fangirl for and that it was The Movie That Changed My Life.
Completely Sealed Young Trishie's Fate, more like it. "The Land Before Time" is the one movie, more than any other, that made me want to be an animator. Seriously. Once I saw this, there was no other imaginable career path. I remember reading some little blurb about the Sullivan/Bluth studio as a little kid and making my one and only ever Life's Plan to get over there and work for them when I grew up. There's a small, but very (VERY) vocal part of me that still wants to work there.
(And Trish lets out the deepest, most heart-rending sigh you could ever imagine...)
Now that that serious bummer is out of the way (for YOU; I have to live with it) let me share some of the evidence and memories of my fandom. Gotta start out with another serious bummer: Try to imagine what all the cool kids in my middle school were writing about when they did their inevitable "My Favorite Movie" essays. Now imagine how much fun it was to run to the defense of some seventy-minute long dinosaur cartoon. Yeah.
I'll start with these weird wall decorations that I chanced to find ages and ages ago in a long-extinct hardware store. For some reason bare walls were abhorrent to the mind of an 80's kid, and these oversize stickers were there to please. Sadly, they did not come off in one piece. Sorry for the blurryness in some of these.
I saved Petrie for last because of a weird little phenomenon I've noticed over the years: no two tie-in products agree what color scheme he is. (I suggest you take my word for it instead of doing a Google Image search. "Petrie" turns up some weird sh*t.) Officially, he's the cruddy orange that seemed to be the default colors for Pterosaurs in the 80's, but in the above wall art and the Pizza Hut party supplies and the hand puppets below, he's practically a Sparkledactyl.
So about those damn hand puppets:
I have yet to meet a person of around my age who never owned one of these little monstrosities. Apparently, they were only a buck at the time so who could resist?
There was a glaring omission from the "Land Before Time" DVD I watched last night and it ain't the missing footage (well, OK, that too). Comment below if you have this stupid commercial well drilled into the tooth of your memory:
I don't recall ever having a Pizza Hut birthday party during this time period, but boy did we go there a lot. Our local Pizza Hut hung stuffed animals of the main cast from the ceiling and each time we ate there, I seethed with envy.
You see, those toys were J.C. Penny exclusives and there wasn’t a J.C. Penny store for miles. Whose genius marketing idea was that? I think there was a coloring contest where Pizza Hut would award one of the stuffed toys as a prize. I very definitely remember getting a picture of Littlefoot to color in. Littlefoot, just to remind you, is brown. The picture came with a sealed packet of crayons: red, yellow, blue, and green.
Chain restaurants hate children and want them to be properly disillusioned by the age of ten.
Anyway, if I couldn’t have the stuffed animals, the puppets were a... decent... substitute. (Decent as in off-model, awkwardly designed, and failing utterly at fitting on a human hand.) Honestly, give-away toys are like a giant conspiracy against you when you are about nine or ten and want a complete set. (See also all the trauma caused by McDonalds’ Happy Meals.) But as you can see, eventually I got my complete set. Sharptooth and everyone. Yard sales are awesome. Turns out these aren't so hard to find on eBay and neither are the 1988 "Land Before Time" plushes. (Said plushes really aren't that great looking and not really worth it IMO.)
Funny coda: I passed by a stuffed animal Littlefoot in Ocean State Job Lot a while ago, and the irony of blithely ignoring something I would have given my eyeteeth for as a little kid did not escape me.
I guess what I really really longed for was more "Land Before Time". As I said, the film is really short. I would have to wait years and years for my foolish little ten-year-old wish to be fulfilled in pretty much the worst way imaginable (sorry to address the sauropod in the room like that). Ah, but there was something to sate us dinosaur animation geeks (at least until "Jurassic Park" but we had no idea back then.) And I kind of want to slap my younger self for being so desperate for animated dinosaurs that she'd voluntarily watch this thing right here:
This little slice of shameless cash-grabbing is "Dink the Little Dinosaur". And I call it shameless because even as a kid, I knew this was a blatant rip off the popularity of "Land Before Time". They're not even subtle about it, really. It's kind of hilarious/sad that the basic plots were almost recycled by the "Land Before Time" series.
The DVD, whatever edition Netflix sent me, wasn't as terrible as I feared. The print looks pretty clean. As usual, there are no decent special features for older fans, though this one did silence all my years of fan speculation:
Here's the crazy thing: all of the text in the special features is read out loud for you. I can't tell you how annoying that is.
I wish Universal knew that there was an audience out there for a good anniversary edition of "Land Before Time" and, while we're dreaming, "An American Tail" made with Don Bluth's input. Give us a letterboxed format and a cleaned-up soundtrack. Give us some kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hell, really throw us a bone and let us know what the missing "Land Before Time" footage was all about!
This last thing is a bit of a point of contention for me. First off, I remember having two little paperback books that contained scenes that aren't in the final cut of the movie. One of them is a scene that enforces the "species-ism is bad" theme when the gang meets two different genre of hadrosaur who refuse to share the food and water they're hording with each-other; in a surprising moment of character development, it is Cera who tells them off. The other is far, far more interesting: it shows Littlefoot arriving at the Great Valley by himself, then backtracking to rescue his friends. It's clear where these scenes were rearranged in the final cut. Secondly, in the old Memory Lane message boards (it's very meta, the fact that they could be featured in a modern-day equivalent of Memory Lane), there was a poster who claimed to have a copy of the original storyboards and promised to send us scans of the missing scenes. I am still very bitter that this never happened.
I guess it's clear by now that where most kids in my peer group had "The Little Mermaid", I had "The Land Before Time". I'm sorry if this nostalgia binge was too much for some readers, but this movie means a lot to me.
Also, I might as well write two long posts on "The Land Before Time", because I'm looking at my Netflix queue, and it's pretty much straight downhill from here.
----
"Art of the Day"! Here are some pop culture dinosaurs. Click for big:
First, hilarity from Netflix (I regret not sharing more of these. Sometimes I wonder just what movie they watched):
This is going to be another hard movie to write about. You see, while "The Secret of N.I.M.H." is my favorite movie of all time, "The Land Before Time" is no less than The Movie That Changed My Life. It's going to be hard to talk about it subjectively, as it was my favorite childhood movie. I may even have to have this stretch over two posts. I have a LOT to say about "LBT".
Here we have Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg re-teaming after "An American Tail". This time, they brought a third friend along. And I am just going to direct you to Jollyjack's lovely one-panel comic over at DeviantArt, which needs no further comment really.
There is a minimum of "Lucasness" in this film, fortunately. Though watching it again for the first time in ages, there's one thing that strikes me about "The Land Before Time" and it strikes me hard: It's *SHORT*. I mean, it's really short. It's barely an hour long and feels like it's over before you know it. This ends up working to the movie's advantage: there's simply no room to f*** anything up.
OK, seriously. The short, short running time of "The Land Before Time" means that the movie is tight as hell. There's not a moment wasted: everything goes towards character development or moving the plot forward, all set to what is arguably James Horner's very best movie score (this might even be my absolute favorite movie score of all time; too bad the prices on Amazon make me cry). And if that sounds like a dull experience, you'd be wrong. Because this movie has Don Bluth and his animators at the top of their game.
"The Land Before Time" is seventy minutes of nonstop amazing hand-drawn, hand-painted analog animation. This is still one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen and it includes some of the most astonishing sequences of character and effects animation I've had the pleasure of watching to this day. I don't know if there's an actual record for this, but I think it's fair to say that this little film, pound for pound, has more hand-rendered special effects animation than any other. (I remember the wonderful Bob Thomas book, Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast, in which one of the special effects animators bragged that "Beauty and the Beast" had "everything but volcanoes". Hey, guess what "Land Before Time" has? And there is a distinct lack of CAPs technology in their end credits. [Then again, "Beauty and the Beast" has a character who is a constantly moving and changing light source, so if you ignore the computer animation issue, the films are pretty even.])
And I'm just going to go ahead and say it: this is the very best fully animated film about dinosaurs. The production team went all out and made the most accurate dinosaur movie for it's time (EDIT: heavy emphasis on the "for it's time" part). And yes, I know how weird that sounds twenty-odd years later, but you have to remember that it was 1988, complete remains of some of the species depicted hadn't been discovered yet. Even so, about the only characters who really look bad are the hadrosaurs, the tyrannosaurs, and the... I wonder if that's meant to be an Oviraptor during the "even hatching was dangerous" scene? (It actually might be, as the only skull known at the time was crushed, so it was assumed they looked either a little less weird or a lot more conventional and ornithomimis-y.)
That's why this movie caused a sensation in my little ten-year-old universe. We were finally going to get to see a whole movie with dinosaurs in action. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal in today's post-"Walking With Dinosaurs" world, but you kids have to understand that back then, animated dinosaurs usually meant "Flintstones" reruns. And the only other high-profile dinosaur movie from the 1980's was... yeah...
So this was the first-ever movie I became a total fangirl for. But we'll hold off on that story for the next post, which will include a lot of potentially embarrassing pictures...
