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.)
Thus ends Don Bluth Month.
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Art of the Day?
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There was a time when video game graphics were usually just colorful little blocky things. But the thing was, YOU -and notice the emphasis on YOU- COULD MOVE THEM! You modern-day kids don't even know a world without video games, so you have no idea what a huge deal this was. Trust me, seeing something on a screen that YOU were controlling, changing the course of animated action just by pressing a button, that in itself was absolutely mind-blowing. No longer were we passive observers -- we were like gods.
Now I was too young to understand the full implications of the video game revolution until much later, when the neighbor kids got an NES. So I do not know, firsthand, what kind of impact "Dragon's Lair" had on the arcade world. From what I've heard since, however, it must have completely altered the landscape.
Except, weirdly, it doesn't look like it did. "Dragon's Lair", "Space Ace", and "Dragon's Lair: Time Warp" were the first-ever CD-ROM games and the first games to use full-motion video (some would argue that they remain the only good FMV games). According to the supplemental materials on their DVDs, they took a great deal of time to produce and utilized technology that was brand new, expensive, and difficult to keep working correctly. The games were popular, but since their production and upkeep were so expensive, they never really started a trend. FMV games and CD-ROM games tried for a comeback in the 1990's, but the technology (mostly the video quality and load speed) just wasn't quite there yet.
So here we have the Don Bluth / Rick Dyer games on DVD, where the gameplay moves almost unreasonably fast. Thankfully, each game has a "watch" option, a blessing for those of us who like it better when we have a minute or two to think. And this is appropriate, because really, every game is more like an interactive movie. And I don't know about you, but I have a feeling Rick Dyer said to Don Bluth, "Eh, just do whatever you want to."
The result, in each game, is about twenty minutes of unrestrained and distinctively Don Bluth-y weirdness. Bluthiness, if you will. "Space Ace" is the kind of movie (if you take these as short animated films) where the hero meets a giant evil version of himself. Then the giant evil version of the hero starts blasting himself with a laser until he's just a giant laughing head rolling around. Huh. Didn't see that coming.
There's rivers of gooey slime, overflowing tubs of bubbly lava, and giant rocks that immediately crumble under the hero's feet. And everything is trying to eat the hero. Everything. It's especially obvious in "Time Warp". Really, only Maurice Sendak seems to have as much of a creepy obsession with being devoured by something toothy and unpleasant.
But with all this said, the games are still fun as hell to watch. Bluth's attitude was, and still is, very like Pixar's, as I explained a few weeks ago. Animation is an art, and it should be done with love and care or not at all. Even the weirdest moments in these games are amazing to watch. That gives me hope for the rest of this project.
Next, we'll see how strong the nostalgia filter is with "An American Tail" and, on Monday, "The Land Before Time".
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Watercolor of the week!
Here's a rainy view of Long Lake:
