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For a while I've been thinking about watching the entire Walt Disney Animation Studios canon from beginning to end. After watching Jacob Geller's video on adaptations of Pinocchio as well as the Del Toro Pinocchio (which was fantastic) I figured it was high time to start, so I watched Snow White and Pinocchio for the first time since the misty memories of childhood. Snow White feels like something more that I appreciate as an achievement in its time than enjoy as a movie in its own right. The animation is still genuinely impressive, and there was one particular shot of Snow White viewed through rippling water from the bottom of a well that I wasn't sure how they even pulled it off (in an extremely complicated way, as it turns out!). As a movie...it's fine. Like it's hard to evaluate as a thing on its own, in large part because the last 87 years of animation have built on, homaged, or parodied just about every scene in the movie, and I recognize that it was an accomplishment at the time. But just in terms of enjoying sitting down watching it in 2024, it feels pretty slow and padded, mostly consisting of musical scenes designed to show off the animation, and Snow White is a nothing of a character. On the other hand, the dwarfs are pretty fun and the Queen is fantastic, with arguably one of the best Disney villain deaths in being hit by lightning, thrown off a cliff, crushed by a boulder, and eaten by vultures. On that note, these early Disney movies definitely lean hard into the horror elements of fairy tales, with the spooky forest and Queen's transformation as highlights. All of this to say that when I got to Pinocchio next, I was shocked at how well it held up and how much I genuinely enjoyed it. All the technical achievement is still there, but now it's centered around fun, expressive characters, and a whole bunch of varied settings for the animators to really stretch themselves. Pinocchio himself is a much more fun protagonist, and Jiminy Cricket, Geppetto, and all the villains and even the cat and fish feel equally full of personality in animation and voicing. The pacing is equally lively, and with the episodic nature of the plot it always feels in motion and none of the sequences outstay their welcome. Also it was genuinely laugh out loud funny at times, which again surprised me because I think of other movies in this era like Snow White that go more for a general sense of whimsy than legit jokes. It feels kind of silly to recognize that an 84 year old classic of animation is in fact a good movie, but Snow White prepared me for a different experience revisiting these movies, so Pinocchio was a very pleasant surprise. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 00:37
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Continuing my watchthrough of all WDAS movies with Fantasia: This is one of the few early Disney movies that I actually have seen since childhood, although even that was a while ago. It's kind of fascinating this movie exists at all. It's like the exact opposite of the recent live action remakes: this weird art film that feels like it was made not out of any commercial appeal, but just as an experiment to see what exactly you can do with feature-length high-budget animation. And on a technical and artistic level, it's fantastic, with some really beautiful animation that fits great with the music. As a viewing experience...well, I'm posting this about three weeks after watching Snow White and Pinocchio because I actually fell asleep about halfway through watching it the first time. The sequences themselves are kind of a mixed bag in that regard, with some excellent ones and others that feel like a bit of a drag. In order: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor One of the stranger ones, this is basically an abstract art film. This one is mostly about the possibilities of combining shape and color with music in varying ways, and while it's not the most exciting segment, it's pretty cool the ways that the mood of the music is conveyed visually. The Nutcracker Suite One of my least favorites. Like it's fine aside from the racist mushrooms, and admittedly this was in the part I watched a couple weeks ago while half asleep, but nothing really sticks out here one way or the other. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice And we go right from one of the least interesting to the best sequence. This is the one everyone associates with Fantasia, including the marketing by Disney, and for good reason! One of two sequences in the movie that I'd say are primarily comedy, it tells a fun narrative completely visually, with a lot of personality in the animation that brings real life to the characters and story, including somehow making a broom into a compelling antagonist. Rite of Spring The first half is cool visually, with the formation of the earth, but not all that exciting to watch. The second half with the dinosaurs is excellent, and while some of the dinosaur portrayals are a bit dated scientifically (including, notably, no comet involved in their extinction, which was still decades away as a theory), they also feel surprisingly modern in some ways, particularly the speed and agility that the animators give them. The animation is great for all of these so I'm refraining from saying that all the time, but the dinosaurs particularly feel lifelike here, and notably like a serious portrayal of a real animal rather than a cartoon or monster. Pastoral Symphony Another fine, if not great one. The Pegasus stuff is cute and fun, the centaur parts are weirdly horny and last too long, and the best part is Zeus and Hephaestus just having a blast laying waste to the world with lightning. I wonder if Hercules borrowed some of the design elements for their gods from here; there's definitely similarities. Dance of the Hours The other comedy sequence, and another highlight. Just a ton of character in the animal dancers, and a lot of fun. Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria Closing on a high note, we get one of the other iconic elements of the movie with Satan/Chernabog, who is excellently creepy. This one is less about narrative than atmosphere, but it's some really good atmosphere, and it doesn't outstay its welcome.
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Feb 15, 2024 05:28
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Tonight, a double feature of baby animals traumatically separated from their parents: Dumbo and Bambi. Dumbo If you'd asked me before this rewatch what Dumbo was about, I probably would have focused on the whole "flying with a magic feather until he learns the real power was inside him all along" thing. It turns that's like the last five minutes, and the "you didn't need the magic feather" bit happens the first time he flies in public, takes about 15 seconds, and is pretty much the last plot point in the whole movie. And given that they pack all those story beats into such a short period means they must have had more plot than they knew what to do with, right? Well, no. Dumbo is not really a movie where things happen, at least until the end. It feels padded and rushed at different times, which is a weird combo. It's also a noticeable step back visually, having been both animated on the cheap and having the animators strike during its production. It also has the dubious honor of being the first movie chronologically to get a content warning about offensive stereotypes on Disney Plus, and the less said about that the better. Oh, and then it just ends! Dumbo can fly, we instantly cut to a montage to tell us that Dumbo became famous and everything worked out for his mom offscreen. That's like the one emotionally resonant part of the movie and they couldn't even bother to pay it off. So overall this was not a great one, the big exception to a lot of this being the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence. This feels like where all the style and effort went. It's a great, psychedelic sequence with some fun design and animation work, and not really surprising that it's one of the most memorable parts. Bambi Now that's more like it. Bambi feels like a lot of the things in Dumbo done right. It's also very light on plot, but it feels a lot like Fantasia in that way where it uses mood and color and music instead to keep it interesting. It often treads a pretty fine line between cute and treacly in the first half, but it mostly stays on the right side of that line, and Bambi stumbling around remains adorable. Also Thumper is great. And my god, let's not forget that this is an incredibly good looking movie. Every frame is a gorgeous painting. The color palette is so lush, with greens and browns in the early parts, cool whites and blues dominating in winter, pastels in spring, and angry reds for the fire. It's also just beautifully directed, with some genuinely interesting shots and really stylish sequences like the fight between Bambi and the other male. The animators famously used real animals as reference, and that really comes across in the finished movie sometimes feeling like an animated nature documentary. And of course, it has the most evil Disney villain of them all:  Seriously, the role of humans is done really well. They're never seen directly, but in every scene they're featured, their looming presence and the feel of terror is conveyed so well. The fire at the end is terrifying in how it's presented, practically apocalyptic, and works great to show how devastating humans are to this world. I hadn't seen this since childhood and had forgotten how great it was. I think Pinocchio is still my top movie so far in this watch through, but Bambi is a close second. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Feb 18, 2024 |
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Feb 18, 2024 02:50
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Sir Lemming posted:Yeah that's definitely accurate of Pinocchio too, I guess the main difference is the set pieces are just better. Like there's a part where a magic dove just drops a piece of paper with exposition on them so they can go to the next plot point. "BTW Gepetto went looking for you and got swallowed by a whale named Monstro" Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Feb 19, 2024 |
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Feb 19, 2024 17:28
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World War II, particularly the US entry into it, basically ended the Golden Age of Disney. Besides the effects of the strike, the drafting of working age men, and the loss of European markets, the Disney team was recruited to make propaganda films for the war effort. Meanwhile, FDR launched the Good Neighbor policy with the idea that since it was important to keep the Nazis from getting friendly with Latin American governments, the US should maybe try not being so terrible there. Part of this policy was a cultural exchange effort, and Disney cartoons looked like a great venue for that. Which brings us to the two wartime movies, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Saludos Amigos This is less of a movie and more of a short travelogue (it's only 43 minutes) with four animated segments. For some reason this gets an offensive stereotype warning at the beginning, and I'm not really sure why, since it never gets much worse than a little exoticism over these cultures by the narrator. The opening to this one basically spells out the premise, with our narrator explaining that the Disney team flew down to South America to learn about their cultures as we see footage of the animators boarding their plane. Every animated sequence is preceded with a few minutes of live action showing footage of the real life inspiration, and the Disney team themselves hanging out. I like these bits. The shorts themselves are fairly slight, but entertaining. First we have Donald trying to ride an ornery llama over a rickety suspension bridge as we learn about Lake Titicaca and the Incas. Then a short about a baby mail plane called Pedro crossing the Andes to Chile and dealing with bad weather and angry mountains. It's cute. Then a segment with Goofy as a gaucho which is mostly based on him getting into various slapstick scenarios, and finally a bit with a Brazilian parrot named José Carioca, who teaches Donald about cachaça and samba. José was created as outreach for Brazilian audiences, and apparently he caught on there, so mission accomplished I guess. Overall I liked this one. The Three Caballeros Saludos Amigos was popular enough to get a sequel, and this time they expanded the scope by adding in Mexico. This also gets the stereotype warning, though I understand it more this time since our representative of Mexico, Panchito, is your pretty standard bandito stereotype. This is also divided into three segments, with a framing device of Donald getting presents in the mail from Latin America for his birthday. The first is a film about birds, which consists of a story about a penguin who wants to live in the tropics, some assorted comedic bits about toucans and other South American birds, and the best one, a story by an unseen narrator about the time he found a flying donkey as a boy and entered it in a race. The narration is very self aware and entertaining, and it ends on a genuinely funny twist. The next gift is José Carioca coming back to shrink Donald down and take him through a book to Bahia, Brazil, where they dance with some live action characters (that the technology wasn't really up to at the time) and we learn Donald really, really likes human women. This will be important. My favorite bit here is probably Donald getting jealous over a male suitor of the dancer he's interested in, and José helpfully handing him a giant cartoon mallet to hit the guy with. At the end, José uses "black magic" (his words) to return them to normal size. The final gift is from Panchito Pistoles, a pistol-packing rooster from Mexico. This segment starts off disarmingly normal as Panchito tells us about piñatas and Christmas traditions. They sing the movie's main theme, then fly around various scenes in Mexico where Donald ogles a bunch of live action ladies, and seriously, he is really into this. And then as our final segment in this trip to Mexico, the animators give us a salute to peyote. I don't really know how to describe this segment, it's weird. It starts with a live action singer whose face is superimposed on a cartoon night sky, and then a flower, and then Donald turns into a hummingbird and tries to seduce her, and then everything goes neon, and she transforms into José and Panchito who sing a sped up version of the main theme, and Donald is in a bull costume and fighting Panchito while José shoves firecrackers into him, and along the way this happens:  It's such a bizarre fever dream, and that's the note on which the movie ends. I think I liked it, but maybe that's the psychedelic effects of the movie talking.
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Feb 19, 2024 18:39
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I have finally made it in my Disney watchthrough past the package films, and that was a pretty rough run. I criticized Dumbo in my review, but in retrospect I was a bit harsh. Dumbo is disappointing next to the masterpieces around it, but it's still fun enough. The package films are just mostly a slog as a whole. After WWII Disney didn't have the budget or resources to immediately get going on making full length features again, so for the next four postwar films they stuck together a bunch of shorter bits. These took the form of two films that are basically popular music versions of Fantasia, with a bunch of assorted musical shorts about 5-10 minutes each, and two films that are each just two shorter movies that Disney couldn't quite stretch to feature length mashed together with a very loose framing device. Like a lot of "throw together whatever we have" projects, it's wildly inconsistent, with a mix of bright spots and some incredibly dull nonsense. Make Mine Music The first of the lesser Fantasias, and for some reason the only WDAS movie not on Disney Plus. No one seems to be quite sure why; theories include the gun violence in The Martins and the Coys, which was censored in international home video releases (but I'm in the US), or copyright issues surrounding Peter and the Wolf. This one is just all over the place. There's a lot of "comedy" numbers that just didn't work for me, with lots of mugging and belaboring of jokes. My biggest offender here is Casey at the Bat, a poem I quite like on its own, but here the charm of the original is just drowned out by a lot of unfunny excess. There's a lot of dull romantic numbers here too, probably the best of which is Blue Bayou because it uses some gorgeous animation originally made for a cut Clair de Lune sequence from Fantasia. Highlights include Peter and the Wolf, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met, and my personal favorite, All the Cats Join In, a fun jazzy number where dancing teens are animated by a giant disembodied pencil a la Duck Amuck, which has to keep up and draw in the scenery as they go along. Real highs and lows here. Fun and Fancy Free  This is the first of the two-parters, connected by a thin framing device of Jiminy Cricket listening to other people tell stories. The first is Bongo, about a bear who flees the circus. Originally intended as a follow-up to Dumbo, this is a cute five-minute short that somehow lasts half a goddamn hour. Boy is this thing padded, with most of it filled up with long, redundant musical sequences. Faring much better is Mickey and the Beanstalk. The framing device for this one is odd, with Jiminy listening in on a nine year old Luana Patten having a birthday party that consists entirely of her, Edgar Bergen, and two of his dummies. It's a strange set-up, but I actually like what they do with it, with Bergen narrating the story as himself and Charlie McCarthy occasionally jumping in with snarky jokes and encouraging Donald Duck to commit murder. And the actual cartoon is a lot of fun, with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy all getting a chance to display their personalities and a lot of good gags. Melody Time Another poor man's Fantasia, and consensus seems to be that this is the lesser of the two, but I think I enjoyed it better. There's nothing that hits the highs of Make Mine Music, but none of the lows either, so it's just mid and watchable throughout. Highlights include a surreally animated jazz rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee, a bit of a follow up to the Latin American films with Jose Carioca and Donald, and two American folklore sequences with Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill. Did you know Pecos Bill isn't even real folklore? He was invented by a writer in the 1910s who claimed that he was telling old cowboy tales. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad The last and probably best of these mashes up short adaptations of two classic stories with a thinnest of framing devices as Basil Rathbone and Bing Crosby disagree on the greatest characters of literature. Sure, fine. I had actually never read The Wind in the Willows before a week ago, so I get to have that fresh in my mind as I see how they adapted it. Apparently Disney originally wanted to do a full length feature, but it never came together and they ended up with this short version that's essentially a remix of the Toad chapters, with little assorted bits pulled from all of them. So there's none of the beautiful meditations on nature and the joys of home, just Toad getting into wild adventures. But it's fun nonetheless. The adaptations of the characters are a bit odd; Rat has pretty much nothing in common with his book counterpart and Badger (who's now Scottish and named "Angus MacBadger") isn't much closer, but Mole is pretty close and Toad, most importantly, is spot on, if somewhat less conceited than his book version. I liked this one. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, meanwhile, is pretty much a one to one adaptation, given the shortness of its source material. There's some musical numbers and slapstick bits that I'm not sure add a lot (although the Headless Horseman song is great), but the final chase with the Horseman is excellent, he's genuinely spooky, and it leaves in the ambiguity of Ichabod's fate in the ending (although it does cut out the all-but-stated implication from the story that Brom was the Horseman). Good stuff, and I'm glad this era at least ends on a high note. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 18:14
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Cinderella It always surprises me that after the big hit that was Snow White, it took 13 years for Disney to do their second princess movie, especially given how much of a brand that's become for them since. Walt was reticent on the idea of sequels in general (another funny thing in retrospect) and it seems they treated the followup to Snow White as more of a "break glass in case of emergency" concept, in this case in response to the string of commercial flops and lean financial years that led to the package film era. Disney was going to come back in style, doing what made them famous in the first place. And with all that experience and artistic development that they had built up in the meantime, they nailed it. Snow White is the first Disney movie to feature a princess, but I think Cinderella is the first true Disney Princess Movie. I hadn't seen this since childhood, and it is pretty neat just how much of the DNA of their subsequent movies you can see in this. The narrated storybook opening was straight up used again in Beauty and the Beast. The petty human evil of Lady Tremaine feels like a template for the likes of Mother Gothel. The prince who doesn't want to marry until he finds the right woman a la Eric in The Little Mermaid. The comedic animal sidekicks would become a staple. The musical numbers are much more plentiful and integrated into the story, moving a little closer to the Broadway style musicals of the Renaissance. And so on. There's a more fun energy to the whole thing. It helps the pacing tremendously. There's not really much more plot than Snow White, but it feels far less padded than that movie because instead of filling the rest with long unrelated musical numbers and showing off animation, we get all these great little character moments and fun side characters. Like it says something for how memorable the Fairy Godmother is despite appearing in only a single scene. And Cinderella is actually a real character and enjoyable protagonist, with like, agency and wants and personality. Even the Prince gets a moment or two of personality. And I already mentioned Lady Tremaine, but I need to again because goddamn is she such a good and nasty villain in a horribly real way. She doesn't even get a real comeuppance, just the world's greatest shocked face when Cinderella pulls out a second slipper and she knows she's lost:  So yeah, Cinderella well deserves its status as a classic, and I'm so happy to be back in the era of good movies again. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Mar 28, 2024 |
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Mar 28, 2024 03:56
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paradoxGentleman posted:Your analysis has been a delight to read. Apparently there were originally some more scenes with the Prince to establish his character that were cut, but as it is, yeah, he mostly just exists to drive the plot and give Cinderella a win. There are still a couple little nice bits like his bored yawn during the ball and the offscreen characterization he gets via the King that give him a slight edge over the Snow White prince. Robindaybird posted:she wasn't even out to marry a prince - she just wanted ONE nice night where she isn't subjected to her step family's abuse.
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Mar 28, 2024 19:00
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Alice in Wonderland Another movie that I both saw as a child and read the original source material as a child; specifically, I had a copy of The Annotated Alice, which went into all the various references and wordplay and satirical takes on contemporary children's literature in the books. While it's not surprising that the Alice stories have been adapted a lot, what with all the colorful characters and wacky situations and nonsense poems, there are difficulties in translation, with the lack of a real story and the extensive focus on the use of written wordplay. Like with Pinocchio and The Wind in the Willows, Disney took advantage of this being a largely episodic story and essentially just picked some of their favorite episodes from both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and stuck them together. This means that any of the already very loose structure of the originals vanishes entirely, and we get a bunch of mostly disconnected episodes of nonsense without any real throughline. How much you enjoy this depends on how much you like each particular bit of nonsense. I think it's generally fun overall, but the individual sequence quality varies a lot. Some episodes just feel pointless even by the standards of this movie; the Walrus and the Carpenter, while a part of the original I remember fondly, here just kind of feels like a digression, with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum taking a few minutes out of the movie to tell us an entirely different story. But other episodes are a lot more fun. Like the Dodo! I feel he's the one character in this movie who doesn't have a place in pop culture, but he and his two sequences are hilarious. Other highlights (and far more famous sequences) include the Cheshire cat (voiced by Sterling Holloway), who jumps between sinister, oddly helpful, and an agent of chaos as the mood strikes; the mad tea party, which is basically all the energy in this movie cranked to 11; and the Queen of Hearts (voiced by the Fairy Godmother herself, Verna Felton), a character who's both played for laughs but also kind of threatening in her capriciousness. All of this is supported by some wild animation, as Disney had each sequence directed separately by their respective animators. Ward Kimball did not particularly care for this approach and its results, and it is a lot, but it's also quite fun and imaginative and several sequences have this insane Bob Clampett Looney Tunes energy that you don't see often in Disney (there's a lot of bits reminiscent of Porky in Wackyland in particular, which makes sense as it is in turn an Alice spoof). And finally there's Alice herself. I said there was no throughline, but I think she, and specifically Kathryn Beaumont's performance, provide some. Alice is the straight woman here, either taking the weirdness in stride or being annoyed when characters start getting too silly, and I think Beaumont does a nice job of this, anchoring the absurdity in a charming understated way. One of my favorite little moments is when she first falls into the rabbit hole and, as she falls down a bottomless chasm, she gives a dainty little wave to her cat and a cheerful "Goodbye, Dinah!" Critics at the time called out Alice's passivity, but I think having her as that calm center of the storm is what makes the movie work. Disney must have liked Beaumont too, because not only did she come back in the next movie as Wendy, she's still been doing the voice of Alice for Disney projects well into the 2000s. The critics and audience at the time did not respond well to this movie, but it got a second life with the rise of psychedelic culture in the 70s and has had a certain amount of popularity to this day. I'd put it in the middle of the pack.
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Mar 31, 2024 16:51
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Peter Pan The movie opens on Disney Plus with the first stereotype warning in a while, and hoo boy, it has never been more deserved. The portrayal of Native Americans is so drat racist that it got criticized for it even in 1953. And it's not even just one part, there's a significant chunk of the movie dedicated to this. Even if we can somehow put that aside, though, Peter Pan is a mixed bag. I think the issues with it are best expressed in how it treats its hero and villain. Peter Pan is often unlikeable, amoral, selfish, and cruel. He doesn't care if Wendy drowns, he gets annoyed when people aren't praising him, he doesn't really give much at all of a poo poo about Tinkerbell. I haven't read or seen Barrie's original, but as I understand, this is the point there; the dark side of never growing up is never gaining that maturity and empathy. The problem with the Disney version is that this aspect never pays off; at the end Peter saves everyone, and they all agree that Peter is a super cool dude, no questions asked. There's a couple moments where this aspect comes through as intentional, notably Peter's introduction, where he first appears in shadow only to be illuminated in a creepy fashion by Tinkerbell, and he does come across as quite sinister. But this is eventually lost. And then there's Hook; Hook is a classic Disney villain, flamboyant, wonderfully animated and voiced, but the movie isn't quite clear on what it wants him to be. Sometimes he's menacing, and it works really well in those scenes (he's the first Disney villain to straight up kill a guy onscreen), but sometimes he's a punching bag, there to be clowned on by Peter with slapstick gags, which undercuts the first parts entirely. Both are entertaining in their own right, but they don't mesh. That's kind of the tension of the movie overall. On the one hand you have the original work and its themes and characters, and on the other the Disney push to create a family friendly comedy, and in the end you get an adaptation that doesn't have much to say about its original ideas other than "Not growing up seems cool, but moms are also pretty good, right?" Also speaking of moms, other than Wendy and Mrs. Darling, every female character exists only to be into Peter and jealous of any other girl, and even poor Wendy doesn't get to avoid that entirely. Other than those bits I generally like Wendy, who's the one character with any sense here, and Kathryn Beaumont does a good job differentiating her from Alice. Her brothers have some fun moments too. In general for all the criticisms I have, this movie does have a lot of charm too, and that and some beautiful artwork help a lot. The flying over London sequence is a highlight in particular. Overall, I'd put this in the lower middle of the movies so far. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 13:44
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My Disney watch continues... Lady and the Tramp I know I saw this movie as a child, but I have no idea when and couldn't have told you anything about it except for the spaghetti scene and the racist cats, so this was pretty much all new other than a vague sense of familiarity. And maybe that's also because there's not a lot to remember? Not in a bad way necessarily, it's a cute, pleasant movie that kind of ambles its way through what plot there is. Most of its strengths are in its characters and just general vibe. The title characters are a fun pair with a lot of personality between them who do the whole Jasmine/Aladdin, Jack/Rose thing. Both fill their respective roles well, and the Tramp in particular really gets to shine as the first Disney male love interest to even have a personality, much less a fun, charming one. The animation of the dogs was drawn with real animals as a reference, so visually as well they have a lot of liveliness. This was also Disney's first animated movie in CinemaScope, and the wide aspect ratio makes for a nice change of feel. On the negatives, Disney continues their anti-cat propaganda from Cinderella, and the design for those cats really is pretty racist. Their song does have some fun animation at least. And I knew Peggy Lee did some of the other voices, but I just learned she also voices the cats?  Anyway, yeah, cute movie. Another for the middle of the pack, but on the upper edge of it.
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May 3, 2024 04:56
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Sleeping Beauty One of the fun things about experiencing a familiar body of work in chronological order for the first time, whether it's a filmography or discography or TV series, is seeing just how all the artistic elements of it that you already know came together. Disney made many great films before Sleeping Beauty, and would make many great ones after. But this feels like the moment that a lot of what I think of as a Disney Movie crystallizes, the start of something that will eventually evolve into the Renaissance and beyond. I called Cinderella the first true princess movie before because of all the elements it introduces that would become essential to the formula, and Sleeping Beauty feels like the other half of that formula. It also kind of feels like a soft remake of Snow White in some ways - a sequence of frolicking animals to show our heroine's purity of heart, an early song based meet-cute with the love interest, an evil sorceress villain with a crow sidekick, a sleep that can only be ended by true love's kiss - but with all the storytelling expertise that Disney had developed in the intervening decades so that we also get a bunch of different side characters with their own side plots, a prince with some personality, a villain who gets a lot more screentime to have fun with, and a story that feels big rather than just padded. Both artistically and chronologically, it sits right at the threshold between the first two decades of films developed under Walt and the Disney yet to come. Okay, but for all that, is it good? Hell yes. A dude fights a dragon! I mean, beyond that, it's also got a good sense of both drama and humor as needed, a fun set of side characters, particularly the fairies (including Verna Felton in one of her last Disney roles), and while its leads are probably the least substantial part, their dynamic is cute. Not a lot of songs, but "Once Upon a Dream" gets the most time and it's a good one. And then there's GODDAMN MALEFICENT. The archetypal Disney villain, all menace and flamboyance and having the time of her life while straight up calling herself evil. Plus she calls upon the powers of hell to turn her into a dragon. Maleficent rules. Every review of Sleeping Beauty is also legally required to mention the animation, but it really is both beautiful and beautifully directed. The scene where Aurora touches the spinning wheel is one of the many highlights there (and for the score). This is one for the top tier. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 06:05 on May 5, 2024 |
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May 5, 2024 05:59
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One Hundred and One Dalmatians One Hundred and One Dalmatians is in many ways the polar opposite of Sleeping Beauty. Where Beauty's animation was expensive and laborious, Dalmatians was made with the new process of Xerography that made it cheaper and quicker. Beauty is set in the vaguely medieval past in Fairytaleland, while Dalmatians is set in 1950s London. Beauty has the tone of a grand epic, and Dalmatians is a smaller, cozier, more grounded movie. Beauty's score is inspired by Tchaikovsky, Dalmatian's by jazz. Even the aspect ratio has changed back to the Academy ratio. The one thing that isn't different is quality, because Dalmatians is one of my all time favorite Disney movies. This is such a warm, charming movie in every way. You feel it from the opening credits, which have an upbeat, jazzy energy over sequences of animated dogs and abstract motifs of Dalmatian spots. The characters, both dog and human, are a lot of fun and filled with personality. Pongo's face in particular is incredibly expressive while still remaining fundamentally dog-like, and the movie has a good sense of when to use those more exaggerated or human-like moments without overdoing them. Unlike Lady and the Tramp, we actually get a fair amount of development for the human owners, and there's these wonderful little bits of character animation to make them feel more real, like Anita's sideye when meeting Roger or Roger jamming on his trombone to piss off Cruella. And speaking of the animation, while it was cheaper than Sleeping Beauty, it's not by any means cheap in the bad sense, and I'd say it's actually a real strength, as the lush painted look of Sleeping Beauty, or even the less ornate but still refined look of Lady and the Tramp, would fit with this movie as poorly as the scratchy style would fit with those. The look, which feels like a hand-drawn illustration, just works here, giving everything this grounded, down-to-earth feel that fits well with the rest of the tone. This is Disney's second movie after Dumbo in a contemporary setting (if you don't count the package films), but whereas Dumbo was designed to feel more timeless, Dalmatians is very much rooted in its specific time and place, and that just makes it feel all the more unique among the Disney canon. And we get our second all-time great villain in a row with Cruella, who's just a delight in both her character animation and Betty Lou Gerson's voice acting, commanding every second on screen. Her over-the-top flamboyance is balanced by some villainy that's pretty dastardly by Disney standards, with a lot of explicit talk about killing and skinning puppies. Plus she gets one of the first great villain songs, Roger's diagetic diss track that apparently goes on to become a big hit, which is pretty funny to think of people being really into this song about how much some random rich lady sucks. Horace and Jasper are solid counterparts to her, switching between bumbling henchmen playing comic relief and some genuinely menacing bits when they get into dog-killing mode. The idea of the dog society is also a fun one, right down to old veteran dog colonels with cat sergeants. Yeah, I love this movie. Probably one of my top ten of the Disney canon.
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May 7, 2024 04:23
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 05:53 |
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Jack Bandit posted:I’ve always loved the little segment showing the “What’s My Crime” tv show. Unfortunately little of that charm made it into the next movie. The Sword in the Stone I wish this was a better movie. Hell, I remembered it being a better movie through the haze of nostalgia and was notably disappointed when I first rewatched it a couple years ago. It's not terrible exactly and there's some bits that do work, but on the whole it's just uninspired. The movie doesn't start off on a bad foot necessarily. Yeah, the opening credits are much less fun than those of Dalmatians, but after that we're back to the traditional storybook opening and get some sung narration about swords and stones and kings and destinies. That sounds like a fun movie! It's not the one we'll be getting, though. The problems start with the animation. Like I said, I really liked the style of Dalmatians, because it meshed perfectly with the tone and setting of that movie. With this type of fantasy, though, the scratchy look just feels out of place. And it doesn't help that it feels cheaper overall than your usual Disney fare, with a constant flatness to the image and some really blatant animation reuse. There are a few moments that do stand out positively, including a nice shot of water reflections in one scene. The best aspect is the character design; there's lots of scenes where characters turn into various animals, and the animators do a nice job of translating their basic designs into a variety of shapes while keeping them recognizable through facial features and color. But the biggest problem is Wart/Arthur. He's just not interesting, and when the movie is ostensibly about him learning the lessons needed to be king, that's a problem. At the end I have no idea why he should be king beyond pulling the sword - even he doesn't want it! - and that makes his journey there not particularly compelling. Which is doubly a problem because his lessons take like two thirds of the movie. Merlin is a pretty fun character and keeps things lively enough on his end, but a lot of the middle just drags. For the first segment I like the designs of the characters as fish and there's a decent little ditty, but the squirrel scene is just long and not particularly funny. And then Madam Mim is fun and livens things up in the final segment, but it's kind of too late by that point; I think the story would really benefit if she was in the rest as well as a recurring antagonist. All of this is supposedly about teaching Arthur, but he doesn't develop at all or even have any agency and it's not clear what Merlin is even trying to teach him, so it just kind of wastes time. In the last ten minutes we get back to the titular sword, but again, everything here seems to happen by accident, and we have to trust Merlin when he says that Arthur is going to be a good king, because it sure isn't because of anything we've seen. I've spent way too long talking about a movie I don't like that much, but this just feels like wasted potential. Disney and King Arthur should be a great combination, and there's bits that feel like this movie could be better. Merlin's probably the highlight here. The rest...eh, above the package films but not much else. Lord Hydronium fucked around with this message at 05:19 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 05:16
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