I have had an inordinate fondness for "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" ever since I found it by chance back in college. Granted, the story is kind of dumb and predictable, the songs aren't that great, and while none of the characters are particularly interesting, Nemo himself is essentially a non-entity. But the visuals kept me coming back. Seriously, look at this:
I was a little familiar with the works of Windsor McCay since obviously he gets a mention in every history of animation book (his "Little Nemo" was essentially a lavishly illustrated story released chapter-by-chapter as a feature in the Sunday newspaper comics and in his spare time he recruited the characters from the strip so he could invent the animated film as we know it) and my school's library had a decent book collection of the strips. Scenes like the above blew me away with how vividly they recreated McCay's insanely detailed style and "whatever, this is a kid's dream" attitude. And so, for years, I assumed that this was a tribute to McCay made by a random animation studio that was quietly released in the early 90's to stunning indifference, and that I had the good luck to discover like a lost treasure hiding in the Children and Family aisle of the local Blockbuster.
Boy, did I ever not know the half of it.
The unassuming "Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland" has one of the most truly astonishing histories of any feature film, animated or otherwise. Here's a brief list of people who were involved at one time or other during the at least ten years this film was in production: Ray Bradbury, John Canemaker, the Sherman brothers, Ken Anderson, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Jean Giraud - better known as Moebius, and Brian Froud. The contributions of the latter two are most obvious (although I couldn't help but notice this time out that King Morpheus shares Ollie Johnston's great affection for trains). The overall look of Slumberland as we fly over it is very reminiscent of Moebius' art, and at one point our main characters are joined by a crowd of extremely Froud-ian amorphous goblins who appear to have walked right off the set of "Labyrinth", and who contribute very little to the story - but I don't care because whoever animated their various transformations was going for broke. (Meanwhile, note how Nemo is Bland Anime Boy Protagonist Model 3.)
Oh, and Hiyao Miyazaki and fellow Ghiblian Isao Takahata were involved very early on. Aside from an overall Ghibli-pretty look to the final film, their influence isn't really felt and allegedly they hated every minute of the production they were there for. It turns out that part of the reason "Nemo" was in production for ten years is because there were two production companies working on this film, one in Japan and one in America. The animation was primarily done by TMS in Japan, and the end result is therefore essentially an Anime that is occasionally -and very conspicuously- interrupted by things that studios think people want out of a western animated feature (loads of songs, written by the Shermans on one of their off days so they're still hideous earworms, and note Nemo's highly marketable pet squirrel in the above screenshot.) The production was so troubled that the film was finished in the late 80's (the closest thing I could find to an official release date was, in fact, 1989...ish), but wasn't released in America until well after it's own video game adaptation. This has had the odd effect of many fans of "Little Nemo: Dream Master" (known as "Doki Doki Panic" in Japan*) having no idea that the game is more directly based on a movie than the Windsor McCay comic.
With all this in mind, I am sad to report that the DVD version of "Nemo" has, like, nothing for special features (reportedly the BluRay fixes this a little). However, the film itself is very different from the version I watched years and years ago. It turns out that the original American distribution company cut many scenes out of their release of the film, reportedly to secure a G-rating. These are all reinstated in the DVD version. In hindsight the only edit from the American theatrical/VHS version that even kind of makes sense is the shuffling of the opening credits to the back-end of the movie. None of the reinstated scenes are scary (if they do frighten your child, then depending on how old they are, you may have to let your child get out more) or offensive (the film does a very good job of avoiding the... "it was a different time"-y elements of the comic that you may have noticed/winced at in the original McCay animated short). I'd suppose that they were cut for time, but most of the cuts are only seconds long, and some of the longer scenes (and by "longer", I mean they average a minute or so) actually help certain parts of the movie make a little more sense. One of the very weirdest cuts is a seconds-long scene where Nemo rides an elevator that is controlled by a "Spirited Away"-looking caterpillar thing, which finally explains Tress MacNeille's mysterious "Elevator Creature" credit in the edited version's cast list.
All in all, "Nemo" is a strange being indeed, but I highly recommend it and not just for Ghibli completists. For more in this series, click this link or the "Random 90's Animation Month" tag below.
* - I'm joking! The real original title is the even sillier "Pajama Hero Nemo".
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Sketch of the Day! I'd like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season free from creepy surveillance elves.
Recently, I subjected myself to watched three animated feature films that don't *quite* deserve full reviews on their own, since their quality ranges from "the memory of this movie evaporated from my brain-parts an hour after I watched it" to "this is pure hate on film". Let's get right into it with...
The Never-Really-Accurately-Named Random 90's Animation Month: "Happily Ever After" (1990)
Say what you will about notoriously execrable animation studio Filmation, but I have to admire the ginormous solid brass balls they must have had when they made unauthorized sequels to Disney's "Pinocchio" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" while, you know, being Filmation. If you did not live during the 70's or 80's, the most you need to know is that Filmation animation was often eye-bleedingly bad, and this is well on display here. And remember, if you chose to watch this, that this film got a theatrical release. Ponder that during the eight or ninth time you see that one run cycle Snow White has.
There isn't much to say here because this movie is almost the opposite of interesting. It turns out the Wicked Queen had an evil wizard brother, so this thing has the same setup as the most embarrassing Disney DTV sequels. Snow White is joined by seven girl dwarfs because it is the 90's and we need more girl characters. And I will admit that's kind of an awesome thing to do, except that just having more female characters in your movie doesn't help anyone if their personalities are nonexistent or stereotypical. The lady dwarfs all have elemental powers, which I guess is kind of interesting. But they really don't do anything cool with that idea and the "Dwarfelles" (ugh) remind me of the kinds of Pokemon I add to my team straight away because they're the first of their elemental types available but that I box as soon as possible after they die over and over to things they are supposed to be strong against.
For it's next trick, the movie asks the question, "Hey how come Snow White couldn't save the Prince?" and then not only does not chose to answer that question at all but also does everything it possibly can to undermine it, since Snow White ends up a damsel in distress anyway. Fun times.
"The Princess and the Goblin" is a Welsh/Hungarian co-production, and Wales' first feature-length animated feature. So it's got that going for it. Based on the so-excellent-they-deserve-a-far-better-movie-than-this fairy tales of 19'th Century fantasist George MacDonald, the film is... Man, I don't even know. It is a film. There are still drawings photographed in such a way as to give the illusion of movement (if not necessarily life in this case, although it will not make your eyes bleed like "Happily Ever After") and there is dialogue and music. I guess some of the goblin characters are fun and the way they visualized the guardian angel character is kind of cool. But the main characters are just black holes of charisma. Furthermore, some of the crazier symbolism MacDonald was known for doesn't really translate literally to film very well. (Survival tips: "Follow the thread!!!" = one sip, "Stomp on their feet!" = two sips, everybody sings along to Curdy's power-up song in the finale = finish your drink.)
Really, only watch these two films if you are for some reason compelled to watch every animated movie you remember getting a theatrical release in America in the 1990's. On that note, for more in this series, click this link or the "Random 90's Animation Month" tag below.
"My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Equestria Girls: Chaos Reigns"
Now, if you want the full experience of suffering through this end-result of a long, long string of sh**ty marketing board room decisions, read my review of "Friendship is Magic" and then head on over to this post, where my Tweetmentary is archived. I only have a few more thoughts to share about this thing because honestly, I don't want to give it any more attention and I don't want to commit much more thought to it.
First off, it really is as awful as I figured it would be way back when we first saw that concept art all those months ago. That concept art, as you may recall, resembled bad fanart -- actually, no. It resembled uncreative fanart. If they had taken a cue from bad My Little Pony fanart... well, that at least would have been something. But no, this movie basically is uncreative fanart/fanfiction. It's pretty much what you'd get if you asked a very unimaginative person what would happen if the Ponies turned into humans an attended a high school that is totally not a shameless "Monster High" cash-in you guys, it's not.
And honestly, that's the thing that kills me the most about "Equestria Girls": the kind of story the writers chose to tell once they were able to write for human girls in a human setting is EXACTLY the stereotypical girlie-girl show crap Lauren Faust went out of her way to avoid when she was in charge of "Friendship is Magic". It's heartbreaking. Every character has been reduced to their most basic personality trait, they all hang out in a high school where classes are evidently optional, Twilight falls for some impressively boring boy character she literally just met - or rather crashed into because she is a clumsy nerd-girl LOL, and there's a long, l-o-n-g montage of the characters shopping for dresses for -of course, of COURSE- the big school Promcoming Festivus Ball.
Then there's the main plot, which is about -I promise I am not making this up- cyberbullying. Yes, the minute computers and the internet are introduced to the world of My Little Pony, they are used by the villain to ruin everything for our heroes. And maybe I'm overreacting but when the character we see most prominantly using technology uses it for ill and then literally turns into a demon-thing (by the way, what in the actual f**k?), that strikes me as a really sh**ty message for little girls for whom society has already done a capital job of steering away from STEM interests.
The good news is, from all evidence so far, it appears as though the main "Friendship is Magic" show is pretending that none of the events in this movie ever happened. So I guess we can pretend it never happened as well.
Next week, I plan on exploring a Random 90's Animated Movie that might actually be kind of awesome and at least has a fascinating origin story. And if everything works out, then just in time for Christmas I may be seeing and reviewing another animated movie with girl characters in it that I hear is pretty good...
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Sketch of the Day! Silliness based on a Twitter discussion a few weeks ago of a very oddly arranged display at the University of Wyoming photographed by Brian Switek.
As I have said many many times before in this marathon (at this point, more like a sprint that turned into a marathon that is now a leisurely stroll) of unusual and diverse animated feature films from random and/or unlikely studios in the 1990's, several interesting films that I wanted to revisit were not yet available through either Netflix, On-Demand, or Other Easily Accessible Means. And looking at the films that were in the "Saved" queue about a week ago, I would have said with some confidence that there's not a chance that any of these films would ever appear in My List or in my DVD queue.
Well, one of the movies that I never expected to be available just became so very recently. So there is some infinitesimally small hope for the others. In the meantime, we have here 1992's "Bebe's Kids" to watch and review. And believe me, of all the random 90's animated films I have seen during this project, I can say without a moment's hesitation that from the opening credits to the very end, this one is by far the most 90's.
One could make a really good argument that it is the also most random. I wasn't able to find much information about this movie online, so I do not have the complete story that I desperately wish I had of how it came to be. But the story I could piece together goes a little something like this: "Bebe's Kids" is based on the titular story on a comedy album by the comedian Robin Harris, who had developed a cult following in the early 90's. He became good friends with the Hudlin brothers who wrote the "House Party" movies (he had a scene-stealing role in the first movie), and Reginald Hudlin wanted to make a live-action film adaptation of the "Bebe's Kids" story starring Harris. Tragically, Robin Harris died very suddenly before this plan could come to fruition. Reginald decided to make the film anyway. But he decided, for reasons that are unclear, to make it as an animated feature with Hyperion Studios. Yes, the folks who produced another incredibly unlikely animated feature film, "The Brave Little Toaster". (They are also evidently responsible for another spectacularly unlikely film based on the work of a comedian whose stories did not quite translate well to animation, but we will get to that one when and if the opportunity ever presents itself; consider this a teaser for now.)
The resulting film, seen today, is a very strange thing indeed. It is, as I said up top, the most 90's. I mean that. That's not entirely a bad thing, though; the movie has a very fun hip-hop/R&B soundtrack. While the animation isn't as polished as it was in "Brave Little Toaster" (a lot of it was farmed out to other studios), the character designs, while not always appealing, are at least unique. I especially loved the design of the Robin Harris character (here voiced wonderfully by Faizon Love). While this may have been completely by accident, it's refreshing that the characters' expressions are allowed to be really exaggerated and extreme; there were moments that reminded me of the current and wonderful "Steven Universe" series. Overall, this movie feels a lot like a very early episode of "The Simpsons", back when it was a lot stranger and more visually unusual.
And I mean this for good and for ill because this was also back when "The Simpsons" was a great deal more random and hadn't really found it's groove yet. "Bebe's Kids" started out as a long story and the film still has that feel. It isn't so much a coherent movie as it is a recount of bunch of events that happened.
It is also, and this was my biggest problem with the movie, trapped in an uncomfortable spot where nobody working on the movie seemed to know whether they were making a movie for kids or adults. It's kind of fascinating to see, because nearly every mainstream animated feature made today is directed at a target audience of "everyone", like the entire family. Sometimes, this means genuinely good writing and engaging characters and visuals, sometimes it means fart jokes for the kids and references to old movies for the parents. Here, we basically have two completely different movies awkwardly mashed together. One of them is for adults and centers on adult characters and concerns, in this case making a huge personal sacrifice in order to impress somebody you really like. Watching as an adult, I was more engaged with this subplot.
The other movie is very definitely for the kids and involves the kid characters running amok in an amusement park and fighting adult authority-types, because as you may recall, "kids vs. adults" was a Thing back in the 1990's. They are specifically fighting amusement park security. And robots for... some... reason? That entire sequence honestly is a much bigger Big-Lipped Alligator Moment than even the trope namer, since there is absolutely nothing done to set up a world where robots would put a kid on trial and, worse, the kids learn jack squat from the incident and continue to act as a force of destruction. The whole thing is exhausting, to the point where the scene near the end where, after we have seen the kids reduce the amusement park to a smoldering crater for the past fifty minutes, we're asked to feel sorry for them feels... unearned to say the least. If you really do not like bratty child characters, you are not going to last very long during this movie.
Other than that, I can't say I have a strong opinion one way or the other about "Bebe's Kids". It's different, at least. It's also important in being the first significant work from director Bruce W. Smith, and supposedly his series "The Proud Family" (a show I probably should have paid more attention to than I did when it was running, since during my research it turns out to have been much stranger and more interesting than the bland Disney Channel promotions suggested) ties into this film.
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! I say this every other year or so, but the new "Pokemon" game is SOOOOO good.
Before delving into any of the projects I listed in the last post, let's cross another Random and/or Obscure Theatrical Animated Feature From the 1990's off the big old list. Today's selection takes us into the late 1990's, and at this point animated features made in the very stereotypically Disney mold were coming in from even the most unexpected studios.
Arguably the strangest source for such a film was Warner Bros. animation. At the time, they were riding high on the success (commercially, certainly, goodness knows, not critically) of "Space Jam". One of the people who worked on "Space Jam" -I forget who, unfortunately- described Warner Bros. feature animation as the antithesis of Walt Disney Feature Animation. "They're the Merchant Ivory of animation," he said, "and we're more like 'Die Hard'!" Which was a fine philosophy to have -- except then they went and made one of the most unabashed rip-offs of the Disney feature formula ever created. Well then.
Watching "Quest for Camelot" with this in mind gives the movie an aura of strangeness that it certainly did not need, because the whole damn movie is just weird as hell. It's weird in a really tedious and uninteresting way, though. Rumor has it that the initial script for "Quest" was much more unique and interesting, but the poor thing got executive meddled to hell and back. Additionally, nobody working on the film really enjoyed doing so. I can believe both these rumors because you can really tell while watching "Quest" that the whole thing was a mess from the script level and nobody involved seemed to know what to do with it.
The basic story of the movie is staggeringly mediocre, to the point where it's even hard to discuss it. I will address one of the big elephants in the room though: Not even a minute and a half into "Quest for Camelot" it occurred to me that this has to be what the people I know who still refuse to watch "Brave" must imagine "Brave" to be like. It's as if "Quest" came first and took the bullet for "Brave", making all the boring and wimpy decisions so "Brave" didn't have to.
It is hopefully enough to say that "Quest for Camelot", having given us a plucky girl-hero who wishes to be a brave warrior instead of a pretty princess, decides about halfway through to give her a broody, angsty male sidekick/love interest. *sigh...*
To the film's credit, they do at least attempt to do something interesting with AngstyWangsty McOurGirlHeroNeedsABoyfriend. This is a major animated feature film with a blind protagonist. That's actually really cool. So it's too bad that (a) this movie sucks and (b) every song this character sings calls attention to his disability. I couldn't make that up if I wanted to and it is just as horrible as it sounds.
So it's time to address the other elephant in the room: the songs. Oh, boy, the songs. I have a story to go along with one of the songs in this movie. Did you know that the beloved and powerful Andrea Bocelli ballad "The Prayer" comes from this movie? Most people don't know that. I already knew this because (incoming sad personal story) I had the unfortunate job of picking the music that would play in the background during my Grandmother's wake. Yeah. My Grandmother was a huge fan of Andrea Bocelli, and this song was beautiful and moving and bittersweet, and everyone cried when they heard it.
So thankfully, it didn't seem like anyone there knew the original context for the song in "Quest for Camelot". Most people would probably expect this song to play during a scene in the movie that would be, you know, appropriate. At all. Fortunately, I already knew that the scene where "The Prayer" appears is... not that. Unfortunately, the scene in question is very like the "This is the skin of a KILLER!!!" scene in the first "Twilight" movie. NOTHING can fully prepare you for it.
Man, I don't know where to take the review from here. Would anyone mind if I just transcribe and elaborate on my notes? Seems like the easier thing to do here cause I'm kind of sick of talking about "Quest for Camelot" and there's still a lot of ground to cover:
* - There's an awful lot of Irish iconography and Some-Kind-Of-Irishy-Or-Something music (actual genre; my iTunes library says so) in this movie supposedly set in Arthurian Merry Old England. To be fair, this movie is already very lenient with the story of King Arthur (even though Arthur himself is barely in it and he, the Knights of the Round Table, and especially Merlin do an excellent job of being completely useless), but it gets weird.
* - I like how you can pick out who is going to betray the Knights of the Round Table only seven minutes in.
* - Funny, the animation here doesn't really look like "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm", "Space Jam", "Iron Giant", or "Osmosis Jones". It actually reminds me more of "The Swan Princess," not least because of the male lead's distracting giant mouth.
* - In any case, whatever animation team they did put in charge was just not comfortable with it. Ye gods, some of the designs on these minor characters...
* - There is a flashback to LITERALLY TEN MINUTES AGO!?!
* - There is Conspicuous CGI and then there's this. One of the special features on the disk goes on and on about this new computer-assisted animation technology called "Regging", and I wonder if that tech ever went anywhere or if it explains why the film looks so strange?
* - Sure glad that one character told us in the audience that the monster attacking King Arthur right now is a gryphon because this movie's take on the beast is... different. This is the only instance where I didn't entirely hate that this is one of those movies where the characters provide a running commentary on everything we see happening onscreen.
* - This is... this sure is a Villain Song.
* - Say, why is ObviousBadGuy McCantEvenLookAtThoseFingernails even attacking Not-Merida's house? It'd make sense if she made the potion he's using to make his monster army or something, but she didn't. The stated reason is that her mom knows how to get to Camelot. Except there's an obvious main road with obvious signs that lead you there? It can't be because her presence would make them less conspicuous because they don't even bother to hide in the wagons along the way. Basically, he's attacking Not-Merida's house because of Plot Reasons.
* - Speaking of ObviousBadGuy's monsters. Holy mother of vocal dissonance, they come up with a kind of badass monster design and then they give it a shrill, whiny Bronson Pinchot voice, WHY?!?
* - You know, it'd be really cool if the Forbidden Forest was actually based on enchanted forest mythology from the British Islands, but that'd take actual imagination. And not the "you can tell the animators dipped into the brown acid" kind of imagination. Which is an easy dig, but really, look at this.
* - Let's not even talk about the deeply unpleasant dragon sidekick and it's (their? I don't even give a s**t) ghastly song. It's like two insufferably obnoxious sidekicks for the price of one!
* - On the subject of small annoying creatures, was the falcon ever on-model to start with? Cause for most of the movie it looks like a pile of fluff hovering around making dubbed-in Red-Tailed Hawk sounds. Additionally, I'd call the chicken-thingy a JarJar-esque nuisance, except noted worst character ever JarJar Binks, like it or not, actually did contribute anything at all to the plot.
* - There's a scene late in the movie where it is heavily implied that Not-Merida would have succeeded in avoiding ObviousBadGuy and his minions on the road to Camelot and saved the day if she'd waited for her (all-male) sidekicks to join her. Instead, she goes on without them, gets captured and dragged off to the castle, and ends up being rescued by the menfolks. Seriously. This happens. Ugh...
* - The entire ending is just layer upon layer of "what just happened?" A lot of plot points get resolved in a pretty cramped amount of running time, then the movie just stops. But not before Not-Merida and AngstyWangsty get married, because of course that happens. And then it just literally stops, as if even the movie is sick of itself.
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! Have a random, half-Azhdarchid, half-"Dark Crystal" Landstrider creature designs.
I should probably mention that prior commitments are keeping me away from Boston Comicon this year, but I hope to enjoy the show vicariously through the internet!
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!
The full list of reviews of films from a time period where animated features were, to say the least, diverse. (And yes, we do dip into 2001 a little, but whatever.)
Sadly, a number of intriguing films were not available through Netflix at the time of the marathon. If any such films become available, they will be reviewed and listed here. (And before you cry, "But what about 'Ferngully'/'Pagemaster'/etc.?!?", try searching Nessie's.)
If I am not mistaken, "Osmosis Jones" is the only DVD for a Farrelly Brothers movie that allows fans to skip right to the gross-out jokes (that's what the second option is in the above screenshot). I should have taken this as a kind of a warning, but we'll address that in due time.
Pity the studio executive. (Stay with me here.) This poor creature never knows what movies will be huge hits, and which ones will be colossal flops. To wit, "There's Something About Mary". In 1998, nobody expected this weird little B-movie from the Farrellys to be the massive sleeper hit it quickly became. But indeed, "Mary" became the kind of surprise hit that both changes the game and briefly ruins any future films from the same genre/format (although some of them ruin that genre/format seemingly forever). There were a LOT of romantic comedies with jarring grossout humor in them for a long time after "Mary".
Let's go on a little tangent about grossout humor. Now, as I grow older, I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to -and this is a very scientific term here- gross sh*t. As with "We're Back!", I found myself desperately running for a beer during several scenes in "Osmosis Jones", but for entirely different reasons. I'll say it right now: if you do not like grossout humor, then today's movie is going to be the worst kind of endurance test.
Back to your friend and mine, the studio executive. Because "There's Something About Mary" was such a huge surprise hit, you can see where the exec would think, "Oh yeah! You know what would be an amazing idea? Let's let the Farrelly brothers direct an animated film! Our animation studio is pretty dead in the water anyway, so why not let them do whatever they want with it? It's such a perfect idea, it can't fail! I think it's the best plan I've ever heard in my life!"
"Osmosis Jones" turned out to be one of the most spectacular bombs in the history of animated films, losing nearly sixty-two million dollars in it's theatrical run. It was the last significant gasp of the Warner Bros. theatrical animation studio, and therefore was a hell of a note for them to go out on. It should be noted that in one of the two episodes of "The Rotoscopers" about "The Iron Giant" (tragically, I forget which), it was revealed that Warner Bros. theatrical animation was essentially left to it's own devices and the filmmakers could basically do whatever they wanted. This does help explain why "Iron Giant" and "Osmosis Jones" are the way they are, though essentially opposite sides of the same coin.
Because what we have here in "Osmosis Jones" is the Farrellys at their most uninhibited. I remember enjoying this movie the first time I saw it, as a stupid teenager who was distracted by the gorgeous animation and who still thought gross sh*t was funny instead of repulsive. As an adult... Oh God, Oh GOD, oh God. I didn't recall this movie being so... graphic. My good God, that scene with the toenail... That other scene with the oysters... That F**KING scene with the pimple...
Here I was watching this movie in the afternoon, and doesn't my family ask me, "Hey, honey, you want to go out to the seafood restaurant for dinner later?"
But to be fair, nearly all the really horrible gross-out scenes are in the live-action bits and perhaps it's time to talk about the very odd format of this movie. This is the story of a man ruining his life and breaking his annoying and unlikeable daughter's heart -- and well over half of it is told from the point of view of his anthropomorphized immune system. (This setting was evidently chosen to give the Farrellys the greatest opportunity ever for what the rating disclaimer describes as "body humor".) Overall, the live-action scenes are annoying, nauseating, and distracting. Any time the movie switches back to them is jarring as f**k, especially towards the end, so let's ignore them entirely for the rest of the review. How's the animation?
It's beautiful. Well, very close to beautiful at any rate, because even disgusting things can be beautiful. The production design and effects are very imaginative. Michel Gagne was involved here and his mad genius is all over the place. The character animation is energetic and I love how they aren't afraid to showcase just how weird the characters are. "Jones" has a hidden gem of a villain character, and overall it looks like the artists had an awful lot of fun working on this. It's as if they knew that this was going to be their last hurrah, so they went all out.
Of course, to see all this wonderful and inventive animation, you have to endure the disgusting live-action portions. And also, this scene right here:
Yup, you guessed right. Those are animated versions of Kid Rock and Joe C. Their long musical number has, remarkably, aged worse than the "Ninja Rap" scene in the second "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie. The 90's!
Extremely Delayed Addendum: It could be that I may have the history of this film entirely backwards; that it started as a fully-animated feature with live-action bookends (if even that), and the Farrellys were recruited to film more live-action to edit into the movie because of executive meddling reasons. Thing is, I have no other evidence that such was the case aside from the comments in this AV Club review.
And so, our Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon is in the rearview mirror. It's been an amazing trip, and I'm glad you shared this magical adventure with me. Now, with that said, a few very interesting '90's animated films are in the old Saved Queue, and who knows if or when they may pop up?
Note: I received and watched this movie way out of order too. In fact, it wound up being the last movie I watched for this marathon. Who would have ever expected "We're Back" and "Monkeybone" to be so popular?
Okay, technically, "Monkeybone" (alternately "MonkeyBone", but we're not going to be doing that) is a film from early 2001, but I felt it would be silly not to acknowledge it in a marathon of bizarre animated films from random studios. And anyway, my OCD is sated a little: I think I've now seen all of Henry Selick's features
"MonkeyBone" is the story of a comicbook artist with some issues who has created a bizarre world full of strange creatures including a main character who is basically an unrepressed Id. Due to complicated circumstances, the artist ends up traveling to the world of his comics which looks like nothing so much as what the director of the movie must have going on in his subconscious at all hours of the day. There, the artist is haunted by his creations, including the main character, who turns out to be rather unappealing in person and longs to be real and to make out with a human. Somehow that character turns into a human, and escapes into our world, much to the distress and inconvenience of their creator. Before the character can cause utter chaos in our world, the comic artist fights to stop that character. The movie basically just ends when the director seemingly ran out of ideas, but at least the comic character has been thwarted.
For some reason, this story felt a little bit familiar to me...
The good news is that "Monkeybone" is not nearly as obnoxious as "Cool World". (Then again, few movies are.) What "Monkeybone" is is basically just what I said: what I'd imagine Henry Selick sees when he closes his eyes.
Therefore, at the very least, "Monkeybone" is worth a look because it does not resemble anything else you have ever seen. Love it or hate it, it's a singular creative vision that just gets more and more off the wall as the movie goes on. It has more in common with "Being John Malkovich", say, or "Southland Tales" than it does with most other live-action/animation combos. And if you are familiar with Henry Selick only thanks to "The Nightmare Before Christmas", man, you don't know how crazy his diamond can shine.
I said in an earlier review that Selick is the kind of director who does what he wants and if other people like it, well, good for them for being able to keep up. "Monkeybone" is apparently based upon a graphic novel, but it appears as though that source material (which, to be fair, I have never encountered, so I don't even know) was merely used as a stepping-off point so Selick's imagination could fly free. We get to see every kind of animation technique there is and there are several characters who are brought to life using two or three techniques at once. The characters themselves are often rather grotesque, and a few climbed right out of the Uncanny Valley. Only a small handful of characters are anywhere near intentionally cute. There are some impressively random cameos; the live actors in general are a little iffy, and it's genuinely frightening when they get partially-animated. The live-action sequences are rather cloying and feel like a different movie entirely, but things pick up once a zombie gymnast played by Chris Kattan shows up.
And we all know what movies with zombie gymnasts played by Chris Kattan are like, don't we?
"Monkeybone" is weird as hell, but it is definitely worth a look simply because it's weird as hell. Look, most of the films we've seen during this marathon look like they were inspired by powerful hallucinogens; this movie is (at least in part) about a powerful hallucinogen.
Next up, our final Random 90's Animated Film might just make you sick.
You know, reflecting back on the 1990's way, way before the series became the long-running institution it is today, the craziest thing about "South Park" is really the fact that it exists at all!
Consider: you are the executive of a cable station that's still floundering a little in finding it's voice/main selling point. These two weird dudes from Colorado want to sell you on a series based off a crude, cut-out animated Christmas card they'd created about Jesus battling Santa Claus as four foul-mouthed little kids look on. The short had gained some attention on the Internet - but remember this is in the mid-90's. That's not a pitch for an immediately popular hit television show that would last well into arguable "Jeez, that show is still on?" years, that's a string of randomly generated words!
But "South Park" debuted in 1997 and hit the ground running, becoming an instant sensation. Since not all cable companies carried Comedy Central back then, a lot of us had to watch third-generation copies of tapes provided by friends who had Comedy Central and recorded the show. And this was still my primary way of getting my "South Park" fix back in 1999, when the fantastically titled "South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut" debuted in theaters. As it happens, this would be the first time I'd watched the film since college.
There are parts of this movie that are very of-the-moment and that play very differently now. As with "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America", I haven't got the slightest idea what a person who isn't old enough to remember the cultural environment in which "South Park: BLU" would make of certain gags. Furthermore, the show would be utterly incomprehensible to someone not already well-versed with the series.
Overall, "South Park: BLU" plays out almost exactly like a giant-sized early-season "South Park" episode. The animation is still crude and has not been significantly souped-up for the big screen - save for a few selected scenes that relish in over the top ridiculous CGI effects. The plot has some satire of real-life as it's hook, but the story progressively gets more and more bizarre from there. There are random vocal cameos that are funny mostly because they are so strange! (This is by far the greatest movie ever made where Nick Rhodes blows up David Foley.)
Ah, but then... you have the songs.
Holy sh*t, the songs.
The songs are fantastic. They are the main reason why I liked "South Park: BLU". As it happens, Trey Parker and Matt Stone cut their teeth on the insane "Cannibal: The Musical" and have since written excellent, hilarious songs for "Team America" and "The Book Of Mormon". "South Park: BLU" is the first time they got to really show their songwriting powers in a public forum, and nearly every review from the time cites the songs as the best part of the film.
Now having mentioned those songs, I will say that the best way to experience them by far is in the context of the film and that this is not a film for everyone. And I say that because there still exist people who can not get over the fact that animation is not always for children. These people make me very upset, but I'd figure I'd give them fair warning as they will probably have a conniption fit by the second verse of the second big musical number.
Every so often, some wag will write something with the
phrase, "The MUSICAL is BACK!!!" This is in spite of the fact that
movie musicals never really went anywhere. Just ask anybody who grew up
with the Bronze Age Disney movies. And having said this, as someone
who grew up with the Bronze Age Disney musicals, I can state that the songs in "South
Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut" are every bit as good as those in "Beauty and the
Beast". Yeah, really!
Next up, we head a little ways into the 2000's with two bizarre live-action/animation combo films.
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A Note: For a few days I will not be able to access my email,
etc. Please be patient with regards to comment approval and such.
(It's cute how I act like this series of reviews has been popular at
all. Oh well.)
I watched "Cats Don't Dance" the other night with my seven-year-old cousin and my younger sister and -God as my witness- both of them were enthralled for the whole hour and ten minutes. I am taking this as empirical evidence that "Cats Don't Dance" is so good that if you do not like it, you are not to be trusted.
And "Cats Don't Dance" is wonderful. The last time I watched it was way back in high school and I only remembered liking it a lot. Well, upon rewatching it, I had forgotten just how incredibly *good* it is! This review could easily turn into a gush session, so let's take care of some context first then.
"Cats Don't Dance" was directed by Mark Dindal for Turner Animation. And as it is, it's the very first and very last Turner Animation film ever. The studio was consolidated into Warner Brothers Animation thanks to Ted Turner and his weirdo studio politics. While there isn't much elaboration about this online, I wonder if this is the "Suspended Animation Studio" Brad Bird spoke of in this Los Angeles Animation Festival clip?
In any case, if a studio is only going to end up making one movie ever, it's a big damn miracle if you create something as awesome as "Cats Don't Dance". It reminded me a great deal of "The Brave Little Toaster" in many ways. The animation is gorgeous, the characters are well-defined and well-designed and their development is very moving, and all the songs are terrific. And of course, it's a one-hit wonder that seems to have appeared right out of the blue, in complete defiance of everything we know about mainstream animation, like a gift just to make you happy.
Most of all, "Cats Don't Dance" made me miss the hell out of mainstream American hand-drawn feature animation. I'm serious. Like I said, the animation is absolutely gorgeous. You can tell when the people working on an animated film had a lot of fun doing so because it shows. If you love 1940's golden age Tex Avery-style animation, this is the movie for you. There are scenes in this movie that consist of what can only be described as genuinely funny drawings and beautiful drawings and poignant drawings. The word that came to my mind constantly was, "fearless".
And speaking of fearless, this movie is, when all is said and done, a story about equal rights. Which is, to say the least, still timely. And that should depress the crap out of all of us.
But it's never preachy or obnoxious about it, and indeed, I'd forgotten how straight-up hilarious "Cats Don't Dance" is. The script is so deft and the energy is infectious. I was catching jokes and gags my little cousin wasn't registering -- but she was also laughing at a lot of the same things I was. And so help me, when I say that there were gags that only the adults were catching, I mean it in the sweetest way. No, you won't see anything that pushes the film's G-rating; no fart jokes, no winking "we know you're too cool for this" sarcasm, and no instantly-dated pop-culture references. Oh, there ARE pop-culture references -- but they are to the golden age of Hollywood and classic theatrical cartoons. You can't even imagine how refreshing this feels! (As it happens, there are a few more timely references, but they are shunted off to the end credits. It's amazing how badly some of them have aged in comparison to the gags based off older movies. For example, there is a "Batman and Robin" parody. Ouch.)
Speaking of, and I will admit this is why I wanted my young cousin's opinion of the movie too, and am very happy to say that she enjoyed the whole thing. One of the most consistent criticisms leveled at "Cats Don't Dance" I noticed during research for this review, and I could not make this up if I wanted to, is the assertion that children will hate every minute of it "because it keeps making references to old movies and old movie stars they've never even heard of! How dare this children's movie even acknowledge that there were things that happened before the children were even born?" The stupid, it hurts...
If we lived in a perfect world, "Cats Don't Dance" would have been a huge hit and Mark Dindal would have been able to make more movies like this without the higher-ups of a gigantic studio breathing down his neck. In a better world, "Cats Don't Dance" would have a cult following much like "The Brave Little Toaster" or "The Iron Giant" or even Dindal's own "The Emperor's New Groove" now has. Seriously, if this review inspires even one other person to check it out, it'll be worth it. Netflix periodically has it on Instant Watch, so what have you got to lose?
Next week: Our third movie that wound up available for instant-viewing. As to why I almost left it out, blame Canada!
(Oh ye Gods, that was forced...)
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Sketch of the Day!
More Maine Wildlife Park sketches! These ones include madness overheard at a zoo.
You can say what you will about the 1990's, but one of the best things about that long, strange decade was this: the animated feature films of the time were incredibly diverse, and it was also a fantastic time for boundary-pushing animation
Soon after their debut on Mtv in 1993, "Beavis and Butt-head" quickly became the most-loathed fictional characters in the history of television. Perhaps it was the fact that the humor and animation wasn't always the most sophisticated in the world. Maybe it was the taint of controversy: the duo were blamed for inspiring copycats (the stigma still stuck even when it was revealed that the children in question had never even seen the show). Or maybe it is because we tend to forget or ignore that -and you must trust the person who spent a couple of very long years as a substitute high school teacher- we have all met teenaged boys like this.
Point is, when "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" (fantastic title, that) arrived in theaters, it meant that a lot of Serious Movie Critics who would have never voluntarily sat down and watch Mike Judge's series would have to deal directly with these characters. And if you go back and read their old reviews from the time, make sure you take a shot when you run into the inevitable variation of "I can't believe I actually liked it!"
(Side-note: As with "Gumby: The Movie", it's hard to say if "Beavis and Butt-head Do America" is a good introduction to the characters or not, since the format of the film diverges so wildly from what these characters usually do. A bit of research online reveals that longtime fans of the show are polarized on the feature film, though people who weren't big fans of the series like it just fine.)
It was hard to watch this movie without all that in my mind, and that's too bad. Because "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" is screamingly hilarious. Honestly, I think it's Mike Judge's funniest feature film. If you think about it, every movie he has made is like a thesis statement on how obnoxious people are a pain to have to deal with (in particular, "Idiocracy" practically underlines this in red crayon.) The difference here is that Judge has at least a little bit of affection for Beavis and Butt-head, and it's much more fun to see how the various people they meet deal with two goofballs who are only vaguely aware that they're not watching television than it is to cringe along with the only sensible person in a world of fools. Dare I say it but there are even a few scenes that are, in their own weird way, downright moving.
The film is a bit episodic but that actually works in it's favor, as Beavis and Butt-head are funnier in small doses. The guest voices are enthusiastic and very very funny (Cloris Leachman being the top show-stealer), and the songs are terrific. The animation doesn't stray too far from the television series' style, aside from a fantastic nightmare inspired by Rob Zombie that's over much too soon.
Now with that said, this film is very definitely a product of it's time (it's also, strangely, the first film so far in our marathon I can say this about.) I found it very very funny, but I can't imagine what a kid who doesn't remember the Clinton years would think of it. Heck, there are scenes that are strangely poignant simply because they are evidence of a much simpler time; there is no way either of Cornholio's shenanigans would fly today. I can also see how this would easily be a terrible, mediocre live-action monstrosity if made today, but let's not even go there.
Next, we get to the film that might just be the high point of this entire project!
Something fortuitous that happened during this Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon: Three significant and -to say the least- diverse animated features from the 1990's turned out to be available for instant viewing on Netflix. They are not on my list (if anyone was following along), and I wound up watching two of them out of order, but I felt it'd be silly to ignore them if they're that easily accessible. Today, we'll be watching the first such film and man, leave it to the only G-rated one in the trio to be the most brain-melting.
Art Clokey's original and very optimistic title for "Gumby the Movie" was "Gumby 1". Weirdly, this title remains in the opening credits for the film. It's just the cherry on top of the big weird sundae that is "Gumby the Movie".
But just so we're clear, I should emphasize the fact that nothing in the only feature-length "Gumby" film (if you don't count "The Puppetoon Movie", since he's just hosting it) suggests that it was made on drugs. Look, I grew up with the old "Gumby" shorts from the 50's and 60's and with the more recent (and arguably stranger) "Gumby" television series. "The Gumby Show", an anthology of Art Clokey's earliest Gumby cartoons, is available on Netflix Instant and is a handy reminder of the weird dream logic -or, perhaps more accurately, weird story told by a very young child logic- that Gumby runs on. Here, random events plots, bizarre characters, trippy electronic music, shapes casually changing, and storylines wandering off and ending up very far away from where they started is Tuesday. So again, to clarify: so far in this project the "Gumby" movie feels less like a likely candidate for an animated film made under the influence of powerful hallucinogenics than the "An American Tail" sequel.
But wait, this is a 90's movie marathon, right? What's Gumby doing here? Well, seems Art Clokey was determined to make a feature-length "Gumby" movie and that it apparently took him many, many years to do this. Clokey had good Sticktoitivity, to borrow a phrase, and finally saw his dream project finished. Just in time to premier in the immediate wake of another strange animated film in an unusual medium that had a long road to theaters... and thereafter turned out to be utterly game-changing: "Toy Story".
In comparison to "Toy Story", "Gumby the Movie" was, to say the least, quaint. You win no points for guessing which of these two films ate the other alive at the box office.
But with that unfortunate timing far in the past, and with "Gumby the Movie" having since become a cult favorite on home video, how does it play today? Well, it's still... quaint. But it's quaint in a good way. The impetus for the story is a Farm Aid style benefit concert for crying out loud! The low-tech analogue animation is kind of refreshing to see, and I wish more modern stop-motion films were willing to let the "seams" show just a little bit. That said, the animation is quite lovely for what it is; many of the animators also worked on "The Nightmare Before Christmas" after all and their attention to detail shows here. I should note, however, that while the "Gumby" characters look cute and appealing as always, the more "normal" characters don't, and are often weird and scary. Looking back, though, that's an old problem with the "Gumby" series.
If you're familiar with Gumby, than this is basically everything you might imagine a giant-sized "Gumby" episode would be. It starts out with a typical TV show plot, and then gets progressively stranger and stranger. There are a lot of references to classic science fiction films for some reason, but basically if Art Clokey was interested in something at all, it found it's way in here somehow. (If you aren't familiar with Gumby, I can't really say that this would be a good introduction to the characters.) It's on Netflix instant, and it's worth a look if you're ready for something very odd.
Next up: Yes, Virginia, Mike Judge did have a theatrical hit feature film.
Unlike the previous three films I've watched for my Strange Animated Films from the 1990's Made By Random Studios Marathon, I remember actually liking "The Swan Princess" quite a bit when I saw it back in the day. Watching it again for this project, it is by no means a bad movie, but the Nostalgia Filter sure was strong with it.
This is the first animated feature from what would eventually be known as Crest Animation (formerly Rich Animation and RichCrest Animation; interesting evolution, that), a studio created and headed by Richard Rich. You may remember that name from the Disney Animated Canon project. Rich started at Disney in the late 70's, co-directed "The Rescuers" and directed "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Black Cauldron", and went on to found his own studio. The film generally agreed to be his best independent film was also his very first independent film. For some reason, this sounds familiar - but you may notice that far fewer people discuss Richard Rich's post-Disney career than do Don Bluth's; probably due to the fact that all but three or four of Rich's features have gone straight to DVD.
"The Swan Princess" is -if you will forgive me- an odd duck indeed. For all the world, it looks like what people who dismiss all Disney animated features as cutesy Fairy tales and girly pink Princess B.S. assume every Disney feature is like. (By the way, yes, such people exist, and this saddens me.) About a third of the ways into "The Swan Princess", I was thinking, "Oh, so this is basically 'Sleeping Beauty'. Now it's kind of like 'The Little Mermaid'. This scene reminds me an awful lot of something in 'Aladdin'. And suddenly, we're in 'Cinderella'." I suppose this is, in a way, admirable. Most low-budget animated fairy tale movies would only rip off one or two very popular Disney Animated Canon features. This one has the brass balls to swipe from damn near all of them!
Now don't get me wrong, as I said, "The Swan Princess" isn't necessarily a bad movie. As it happens, there are some very clever and creative moments in it. Some of the supporting characters are a lot of fun and the background paintings are gorgeous.
In general, the problems stem from the fact that while this movie is a distillation of what people who haven't sat down and watched a Disney movie in years remember from Disney movies, it's hampered from having a very small fraction of the budget. As a result, the animation is very inconsistent, and occasionally downright sloppy. In particular, the less caricatured characters like Human!Odette and especially Derek look very strange after a while (oh my good God, Derek's giant mouth). The songs range from slightly dull to utterly tedious, and some of the gags (especially the header image) run at very sharp angles to the rest of the film's overall tone. And, so help me, the villain's final boss form really does look like a fruitbat. Speaking of, if you avoid saying the word "Beast" this often, it eventually becomes really obvious and distracting.
Finally, since things like this have to be pointed out in a review written by me (heh): What we have here is a story about a human princess who is forced to be separated from a weird-looking unlikeable doormat of a prince who openly stated that he was only interested in her because she is pretty by being transformed into a big scary dinosaur that can fly, kill a child easily, and seriously maim an adult. Remind me again how this is a curse? (I know, but we're ignoring Rothbart being a total creeper for now, especially since the movie itself doesn't seem to know what to do with that plot point either.)
Overall, "The Swan Princess" is worth a look, and is certainly a better choice for children than, say, any of the DTV Disney sequels. Next up, something that isn't on my official Queue list but I would be a total bockhead to ignore.
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Sketch of the Day!
Went to the good old Maine Wildlife Park and drew some birds that -and you have to trust the birder here- are far less vicious and scary than swans.
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?
Important Disclaimer for Concerned Parents: "Cool World" is a PG-13 rated film about a comic book artist whose character wants to have sex with him. This review will contain adult language and content and thus may not be appropriate for young children or people who act like young children.
Come with me, dear readers! We are going on a magical adventure through the imagination of Ralph Bakshi! On our journey, we will see all the wondrous things Mr. Bakshi sees when he closes his eyes! Won't that be so much fun?
You... you don't want to go on an adventure through Ralph Bakshi's mind? Well, frankly I don't want to either. But unfortunately, you can't have any kind of effective discussion of bizarre animation from the 1990's without addressing "Cool World". And so, we are on our way. Please keep your hands and arms inside your boat at all times, and for the love of God do not touch the water or even look at it. (I sincerely hope that's water...)
Love him, hate him, or dismiss him as a creepy old man with seriously reductive depictions of women in his films, you cannot argue with the fact that Ralph Bakshi has had one of the most fascinating careers imaginable as an artist. I once read a recent history of animation book (the title escapes me) that dedicated twice as much ink to Bakshi as it did to Don Bluth and noted that "only Walt Disney has made more animated feature films". Huh. "Cool World" is thus far the last of these films, and if Bakshi never gets around to making another feature, this will be a hell of a note to end on. And this is because this movie is essentially seeing what happens inside Ralph Bakshi's subconscious.
This is a strange thing to observe, since "Cool World" was famously born out of a perfect storm of executive meddling and flat-out desperation to get the damn thing finished. The film started life as a hard-R straight-up horror film about an artist literally haunted by his vengeful character who wants to seduce and murder him for creating her. That script was so heavily altered during production (oftentimes without Bakshi's knowledge, since changing everything about a movie without the director knowing about it always ends well) that halfway through filming the thing, lead actress Kim Basinger was operating under the assumption she was in a children's film. This is all so fascinating and helps to explain so much about why the film is such an incoherent mess that I am almost sad that the DVD is bare-bones. Bad movies deserve elaborate making-of documentaries too - maybe even more than the good movies do, just so we can see what went wrong.
The plot of "Cool World" is, and I quote:
That's hardly an exaggeration. Gabriel Byrne(?!?) plays Jack, an underground cartoonist who has been in jail for a while for... reasons... Come to mention it, the most important thing to know about "Cool World" is that it gives no f***s about silly things like why a main character is in jail or how the rules of its imaginary world work or why anything is even happening. (Edit: apparently, we are told that Jack murdered his wife's lover, but we are informed of this in a very easily-missed line of dialogue. Okay, then.)
While in jail, Jack invents both the comic "Cool World" and the character Holli Would, who is horrifying sexism incarnate. Imagine the weird, sleazy, scary, trashy relative of Red Hot Riding Hood that Red hates to talk about and you're almost there. Come to think of it, though, ALL of the characters in this movie are weird, sleazy, scary, trashy, gross, and basically impossible to like. Those are literally their only interesting and memorable personality traits. Hell, come to mention it, the whole damn movie is weird, sleazy, scary, trashy, smutty, gross, and impossible to like, but I think you've all gathered this by now.
Anyway, Jack creates the comic "Cool World" and is thereafter haunted by visions of Holli Would seducing him. Because surely it's every artist's dream to have one of their own brainchildren all up in their personal business, am I right? There wouldn't be anything awkward or questionable about that. And there is certainly nothing uncomfortable about watching it in a movie directed by Ralph Bakshi, is there?
Wait, hold up. Thankfully you do not have to wrap your brains around that just yet. Because I forgot the opening sequence of the movie, which is utterly mystifying and makes me wonder if this isn't our second movie in a row that could be interpreted as a wacky trip on powerful hallucinogenics. Or perhaps that the film itself was made by people on powerful hallucinogenics? Listen, as much as "LOL, this moovee wuz maed on teh drugs" is cliched, just LOOK at this thing!
We open with Harris, a soldier played by a very young and clearly only here to pay off some overdue bills and bad karma from a past life Brad Pitt. His character is about as close to a protagonist as we're going to get here, and he's the only kinda-likeable person in it. Anyway, Harris comes home from World War Two, takes his... mom...? on a motorcycle ride, and they both die in a horrible crash. Once this sequence of events has sunk in (except it really doesn't), Harris wakes up in Cool World (the place), which apparently exists independently already before "Cool World" (the comic). Maybe. Kinda. Remember, f***s given by this movie with regards to how things even work in it = zero.
Much later on Jack crosses over into Cool World and has totally hot, graphic, boundary-obliterating forbidden sex with Holli and the audience gets to enjoy every minute of it, especially if they're into cartoons banging humans, and in particular if they are into cartoons banging the very humans who created them.
AH-hahahahaha!!! I'm lying! Jack and Holli *do* have forbidden sex. That does happen. And it happens mostly offscreen and in the most coy and childish way imaginable (see above screenshot). I promise you I am not kidding. Remember, this went from a hard-R Ralph Bakshi movie to a PG-13 Ralph Bakshi movie, but with all the sleazy sex and violence intact. It's kind of impressive how the scene that was the very selling point of this movie is almost utterly ignored once we get to it. (You may argue amongst yourselves whether or not the PG-13 rated Ralph Bakshi movie about sex is a stranger creature than the Ralph Bakshi Christmas special for children.)
Anyway, somehow this forbidden act turns Holli into live-action Kim Basinger and also gives her and Jack weird cartoon powers or... something. So, fellow artists, do not ever have sex with your own characters in the unlikely event they come to life and seduce you, I guess. Holli is now able to escape into our world. And believe it or not, that's where the movie gets weird.
I really don't know what else there is to say about "Cool World". I should mention that the animation is very inconsistent in quality and there are characters and objects who honestly look like they're from something else entirely. On top of this, the mixture of live-action and animation is really bad. Like, headache-inducing bad. There are scenes where human actors wander through cardboard sets and scenes where animated characters interact with photographs of the real actors.
Is "Cool World" worth watching at all? Well the weird thing is, for all that Bakshi told the animators to do whatever they want and so there are always strange, creepy, distracting things happening in the margins of the movie, and for all that the whole plot is about kinky forbidden sex, the movie is just NOT interesting at all. Ultimately, I found it pretty rancid and hard to sit through. If you've never seen it, and you like Ralph Bakshi's other movies, it may still be bizarre enough to be almost worth watching out of curiosity. But you will need to have a strong drink handy if you do.
Art Evolved members should have a particularly strong drink ready for our next movie...
