Maybe they could’ve tried using a style and subject matter that hadn’t really been done in animation, instead they figured it was daring enough just to move a few blocks away from feisty princesses, fairy tales and funny animals. Sure, they drew it in a style blatantly derived from what Disney had developed over the years so that most people probly didn’t notice a difference. But they made two bold choices: the animals would not talk, and it would not be a musical.

The main character is a horse, and Matt Damon narrates the movie in his point of view, but he doesn’t talk. No, he just smiles, laughs, has big expressive eyes and eyebrows, knows how to shake his head yes or no, or to gesture “come here” or “look out behind you,” or to roll his eyes at somebody he thinks is acting like an idiot. And he seems to understand most of what humans are doing and saying, and understands guns enough to go tackle a human that’s aiming one at another human he likes better. But he doesn’t straight up talk, and doesn’t wear pants, so it’s almost like a real horse!

And like I said, it’s not a musical, so everybody should be happy about that. That’s pretty cool.

Oh, one thing: it has a whole bunch of musical montages set to Bryan Adams songs with double meaning lyrics. For example there’s one called “Get Off My Back” while the horse is first being ridden. But it’s not a musical! They don’t lip synch any of that stuff. Totally tasteful.

Spirit is the leader of his horsepeople, much like Bambi or Lion King before him. But one day he sees some crazy shit he never saw before (a campfire) and starts nosing around some weird little pink critters (horse rustlers) and gets himself captured. He gets taken to a military camp where they try to train him, but he’s a natural rebel so he refuses to be tamed and gets tied to a pole without food by the villain of the piece, an asshole colonel or whatever. The boss guy with the hat.

While undergoing this isolation punishment the soldiers catch another rebellious spirit that they tie to a pole, but it’s not a horse, it’s a Native American individual. Eventually they escape and although it pisses off Spirit that this guy tries to tame him too he starts to feel sorry for him because the other humans in his human tribe make fun of him. Also Spirit falls for a girl horse. You can tell she’s a girl because her eyes are feminine and her mane is like girl hair. No lipstick though. No bow in the mane. Just a feather.

The horses here get painted up. Spirit refuses, probly because of his love for freedom, not because it makes him feel like a girl or a juggalo. Anyway it’s a clever idea because later we can distinguish some of the horse characters (horsachters?) by their markings. Rain received an honorary registration certificate from the American Paint Horse Association (APHA), which has registered more than 670,000 American Paint Horses to date. She is the first animated horse to be registered by this organization. I have no idea what those last two sentences mean, I cut and pasted them from Wikipedia.

Well I guess I shouldn’t lay out the entire plot but we’re pretty much at the climax where the fuckin white man is trying to build train tracks through where the horses live and committing genocide against their Native American allies. Both of these things piss off Spirit and in his struggle to escape them he ends up sabotaging their plans. He becomes a GUERILLA WAR HORSE.

One thing that’s unique, the script is not by an animation guy, it’s a guy named John Fusco who sort of specializes in westerns – YOUNG GUNS I-II, THUNDERHEART, later HIDALGO. Also CROSSROADS with Ralph Macchio.

It’s a pretty good story actually, I like the simplicity of it. I like the subplot about how he’s sort of friends with an eagle, which doesn’t mean they hang out and say funny things to each other, it just means the eagle will fly low and he’ll chase it around. So when he’s allowed himself to be domesticated to get down the girl horse’s pants (metaphor – like I said, they don’t wear pants in this one) and then sees the eagle fly over and can’t chase it you know that he’s thinking “ah shit, I’ve gone soft, I need to be free, I am Spirit, the Stallion of the Cimarron, which is synonymous with being a stallion who represents the spirit of the Cimarron.”

The movie even ends (uh, SPOILER here) with one of my favorite types of resolution, the Nod of Mutual Respect Between Warriors. Two men of opposing forces decide to at least temporarily cease hostilities because they have earned each other’s respect through battle. (In the case of BEYOND THUNDERDOME it’s one man and one woman, in the case of this one it’s one man and one horse.) They don’t exactly become Fight Brothers (like in BEST OF THE BEST 1-2 or ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) but they sort of become Long Distance Fight Admirers. They may or may not meet again, but they definitely won’t forget each other.

The animation deserves recognition on a technical level. It looks very impressive because the camera always swoops around and the characters look completely three-dimensional even though they’re drawings. The DVD menu helpfully explains how this was done through a shot progression: they first animated crude computer models of horses running, created the camera moves, then used that footage for reference to draw over. Smart idea. It seems to be put to use all throughout the movie, but especially in the first scene, which is like a long helicopter shot swooping through and showing all the land and characters. There’s obviously alot of computering going on but they’re mostly successful making it look like a three-dimensional water color painting. The best of old and new techniques. A cyborg.

But man, it’s hard to get past the ridiculousness of horses making faces. I know I complained about the war horse in WAR HORSE seeming soul-less and horse-like, but I just meant that horses might not be the best protagonists, not that they needed to have eyebrows. In this case maybe the cartoon creators should’ve gone more soul-less, more like a real horse, less like a horse version of Aladdin.

I guess in a way the horses having human expressions and gestures is closer to reality than the traditional talking cartoon animal, but to me anyway it only emphasizes how real they’re not. If the horses just talked to each other I wouldn’t take it literally, I would assume it was symbolic of some other type of horse communication and buy into the fantasy. I’d understand that the people don’t hear it. Kind of like how Daniel Craig speaking English with reading glasses is actually him speaking in Swedish. But when they don’t talk and we’re pretending they’re real animals, and then they fuckin smile at each other, the shit creeps me out. I’d rather they just talk than drag me into this Unhorsely Valley. And the Bryan Adams songs are doing nothing to soothe me.

Then again, the narration is problematic too. They try to treat this as a real world of horses, it’s not like they have some secret society we don’t know about. They just have a herd with a leader, they don’t have their own human-style civilization like a RESCUERS or a HAPPY FEET or a SECRETS OF NIMH. So when Damon as Spirit narrates “I lay beside her that night, hoping – praying – that somehow she would be okay” I think wait a minute, this horse knows about praying? Is he praying to a horse God, or a human one? Knowing these cartoon horses he probly even puts his two front hooves together when he does it.

I mean if you think about it it really would be good to know what religion this horse practices, because the white man came to this land and forced Christianity on the Natives, it would be interesting to know if the horses picked it up or not.

There are alot of those type of questions. When Spirit says “They say the history of the West was written from the saddle of a horse,” or “They say the mustang is the spirit of the West,” I end up shouting at the screen “Who is they? How do you know what they say? Did you actually hear them say it? Did you read it in a book?” These animators try so hard to make it more real than your usual cartoon, but it still brings up weird CARS type logic questions.

But I guess I can’t complain, I sort of got a kick out of how wrong it was. If smiling horses make you smile, check it out. Maybe turn the sound off.

Tintin (Jamie Bell from UNDERTOW) is a boy reporter from Belgium. I think. But I don’t remember them specifying where it was or having Belgian accents, and I didn’t notice any cameos by famous Belgians like Jean-Claude Van Damme and other famous Belgians. But I’ve read it’s based on a Belgian comic strip.
You know, I should say “boyish reporter,” because it’s not clear how old he is either, and he sort of lives the lifestyle of an adult. He seems to live by himself and be able to travel the world without a parent’s permission. And is a dog owner.

I guess I don’t have much concrete information for you about who this Tintin is, but I can definitely tell you that he is a reporter. We know this not because we’ve ever seen him write a damn word in his life but because there are a bunch of framed newspaper articles on his wall. No, they’re not by him, but they’re about him and the headlines refer to him as a “reporter.” So it’s been verified.

The one adventure of Tintin begins one day when Tintin is just unwinding the way he probly always does on his day off: having his caricature drawn and then randomly deciding to buy a model boat from a dude on the street. Luckily for journalism and adventure it just so happens that the boat has a clue to a hidden treasure hidden inside it and that a couple other people are hot on its trail and get there right after Tintin does and also he stubbornly refuses to take a whole bunch of money for the boat even though a minute ago he only wanted it on a passing whim.

Before long, bad guys are coming after him and he’s tracing the origins of the boat, trying to find out what’s going on and then chasing the treasure that turns out to be what’s going on. He befriends an alcoholic captain guy (Andy Serkis in a rare human role) whose past turns out to be intertwined with the bad guy’s due to reincarnation and curses and that sort of bullshit. There are boats, planes, camels, clues, etc.

I was excited for this one ’cause it’s directed by Steven Spielberg, who in my opinion is almost like the Steven Spielberg of Hollywood. He’s to movies what Steven Spielberg is to movies. This is the first time so far that ol’ Spielberg’s said “fuck all this bullshit with using cameras” and made a sort of animated style movie using the motion capture style of computer acti-mation like Robert Zemeckis used for his Christmas or Vikings trilogy. When I first heard about this I thought it was weird they didn’t just do it in live action, and I read that they did tests and decided that Tintin’s dog Snowy had to be animated and therefore they couldn’t do it in live action. I wondered if Spielberg knew that some of the dinosaurs in his JURASSIC PARK movies were animated but Jeff Goldblum was still able to stand next to them in live action. Seems like you could do that with a dog, but maybe the technology isn’t there yet.

Anyway now that I’ve seen it I get why this was a good choice, this way he was able to do it so it looks live-actiony but with lots of slapstick craziness that would’ve seemed corny and Leslie-Nielsenish with real people doing it. Also it has a very painterly look to all the colors and lighting and everything that makes it look all pretty, and you gotta do that shit pixel by pixel.

I know some people still got a problem with these unnatural human-cartoon hybrid people, like I did when I saw FINAL FANTASY, but I guess I’ve adjusted to them. It’s just like how if you haven’t been exposed to alot of people from other cultures you might be intimidated by them but after you start getting out of the house more it’s nothing. Ever since A CHRISTMAS CAROL and AVATAR I think they’ve improved the eyes enough that the animation isn’t creepy to me. I didn’t have a problem with these particular abominations against God. In fact it’s impressive how well they captured the round, naive-looking face of that simple drawing. And now they can make them forever without having to worry about covering up Jamie Bell’s wrinkles as he gets old.

Like in A CHRISTMAS CAROL they made the characters have a certain amount of “realism” to their textures and everything but also have exaggerated cartoon features like bulbous noses and round bodies. They don’t follow the “make it look like the voice actor” rule that I requested after FINAL FANTASY and received with POLAR EXPRESS, but it works. Forget wrinkles, they can also keep making them if Jamie Bell goes to jail or quits acting to become a monk. Anyway I couldn’t recognize the voices, so it didn’t distract me. For example I wouldn’t have known the bad guy  was Daniel Craig (MUNICH) if I didn’t see his name on the credits. It seemed to me like his character was designed as a combination of Spielberg and Peter Jackson (who produced the movie and is supposed to direct the sequel if they make one. I think it will – it probly did well overseas, although it’s been crushed by ALVIN IN THE CHIPMUNKS IN: CHIPWRECKED in the United States. Great, American parents. You embarrassed us in front of the world.)

It’s funny – I’ve seen quotes where Zemeckis talks about making those movies just because somebody had to break the ground on those tools and figure out how to use them. In this interview with Harry he said “I really want to make sure that we get this out there so that younger filmmakers have these absolutely breathtaking tools that they can use.”

I like that he did that, but I don’t think I ever really believed it would be influential. Now here’s no less than Steven Spielberg following in his footsteps, and not just in technology but I think in style. The undisputable highlight of TINTIN is an elaborate chase sequence that’s rendered as a single shot. It uses Spielberg’s unbeatable knack for action, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t at least partly inspired by the show-offy tracking shots Zemeckis always puts in his mot-capt films, like the one in POLAR EXPRESS where the non-existent camera follows a train ticket that falls out a window, rides a gust of wind, is carried by birds and wolves and different things and falls down the mountain before landing back in the train.

I wouldn’t say the 3D is as good as in the Zemeckis movies, but it’s used well. It adds a kind of diorama quality to it, makes it more submersive, like you’re riding through the story in a little boat or buggy. It does have a couple of parts with things reaching out of the screen too. I appreciate that. I don’t think this 3D will convert people like HUGO did, but if you enjoyed its use in that you’ll probly like it here too. It’s not like the Pixars or HAPPY FEET TWO where it looked kinda cool at the beginning and then after a while I forgot and when I remembered I couldn’t really tell if it was 3D or not. No, this is the preferred way to see the movie. But it’ll hold up on blu-ray too I’m sure.

As a non-professional I’m allowed to admit that I feel like I gotta see this one again, ’cause after looking forward to it for months I went to see it exhausted from work and was having trouble staying awake. So I might not be trustworthy when I say that the story isn’t as involving as I expected. By all accounts it’s a frenzied, non-stop movie… except mine, ’cause to me it seemed kinda slow and uneventful at times.

It’s possible I was put off by the minimalism of the character. I didn’t completely understand why this dude cared so much about following all these clues, he didn’t seem to really have a stake in it. I think it’s just one of those things you gotta go with, though. And I like that, it makes the movie different, but I don’t know, maybe it kept me from fully investing in what happened? It’s hard to say. I was asleep.

Anyway it doesn’t matter. He likes going on adventures, it’s his thing, that’s all. He’s compelled to do it, there doesn’t gotta be a fuckin mission statement about it. It’s just like Indiana Jones likes going after treasure. He’s not in it for the money. He gets off on it. Dr. Jones wants the glory of discovery and Tintin wants the framed article on his wall. The one he couldn’t write himself ’cause it would be a conflict of interest.

Everybody’s been comparing this to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. It’s a nice thought, but I think a little superficial. Yeah, it’s some time in the past and involves international travel (including in deserts) to find treasure. And in a couple parts the John Williams music sounds Indiana Jonesy. But I mean, the tone is so different. Indiana Jones is a tough-talking, cynical, asshole type of guy. Tintin is the opposite of all of that. Indiana Jones has a new girl in almost every movie, he has a girl in his class writing “I love you” on her eyelids for him, while Tintin lives in a world where there barely are any females. This is the rare movie where the hero doesn’t fall in love or already have a girlfriend. I liked that.

Also the stakes are lower. Indiana Jones was fighting against Nazis who were trying to use the power of God in their quest for world domination. Tintin is just trying to get some coins and rubies and shit before an asshole guy gets them. The raiders have their faces literally melted off because they try to see something God doesn’t want them to. This guy gets thrown off a boat because he tried to smoosh them with construction equipment.

You guys are in luck though. Spielberg actually did make a movie just a couple summers ago that had alot in common with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, it was called KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. Look that one up, guys, I think you’ll all dig it alot.

What I like though is the unfashionable simplicity of it all. I like that they don’t pander to me by explaining who this Tintin guy is. He’s a likable cypher. You’d think they’d feel the need to shoehorn in some backstory about where he came from and his parents died in a journalism accident and the Daniel Craig guy was secretly responsible and that’s why this is so very very important to Tintin’s sweet little heart. Thank you Spielberg for knowing that it’s allowed for one out of every 250 movies to not have that stuff.

Spielberg recently said that he now sees it was a mistake to take the guns out of E.T. and all that. That’s why he could make this movie. Tintin has a gun, he gets into gun fights. It’s supposed to be funny and charming that the captain can’t stop drinking, and there’s a surprising number of liquor bottles broken over people’s heads, which has more weight in this than in a more stylized cartoon. I’m not saying any of this is “edgy,” it’s just kinda refreshing to see it done un-self-consciously like in the old days. (Glad they didn’t throw in any retro racial stereotypes though. That would be less refreshing.)

That’s the other thing, Tintin is defiantly square. In situations where you or I would say “Holy shit!” or “Motherfucker!” Tintin would say “Great snakes!” And he’d make it work. He doesn’t have to have some kind of “edge” or anything modern about him. I mean, as a point of comparison, look at these smug fuckin CGI characters:

I mean, there is obviously something to be said for a young man or animal having self confidence and all that but jesus, these fuckos look a little too proud of themselves, don’t they? Especially considering their cinematic output. If anything they oughta all look apologetic on their movie posters.

Now look at Tintin:

See? He’s a nice young man. I can’t even picture him standing arrogantly with his arms crossed, smirking like one of those fuckin jerks. He doesn’t have to be some sunglasses-wearing little shitstain or a modern cynical wiseass or somebody who you can picture ever even talking to any of those fuckin guys. He’s famous without having a drop of rock star in him. He’s kind of a dork and it’s not to be funny or ironic. He’s 100% sincere. It’s just what he is. I like that.

I like these characters, and this world. I’ll have to take another look at the actual adventure.

HAPPY FEET TWO is messier than the first one. It seems more interested in exploring Miller’s big ideas than zeroing in on a focused story. Part One’s hero Mumble (Elijah Wood from FLIPPER) is now grown up (but still freakishly fuzzy) and has a kid named Eric. The events of One have changed the status quo so that Mumbles’s unique gift of tapdancing is now a societal expectation, which causes great humiliation for his uncoordinated son, causing him to fall into the ice while dancing and then pee all over himself (I wonder why they didn’t make that more of a 3D gimmick?)

So Eric wanders off and discovers a mega-church type ice patch where part One’s guru Lovelace (Robin Williams) now plays second fiddle to a bigger star, a “flying penguin” who’s obviously a puffin (Hank Azaria). And Eric decides that’s what he wants to do, he wants to fly. So the movie sort of pulls the rug out from under the feel-good message of the first one. Maybe you can’t do anything you believe in. Maybe you can dream too big, even if your pops taught penguinkind to communicate with humans through tapdancing.

The best parts are little side incidents and happenings along the way. There’s a great scene where a monstrous elephant seal is kind of an asshole to him, suffers a karmic fall from a cliff, accepts that he’s done for and asks Mumbles for the favor of getting his 2 adorable pups home. But Mumbles is Christlike (or at least Babe 2-like) enough to try to rescue the dude instead.

I also like the scenes about Lovelace and the puffin guy being rescued by humans (live action ones). In these movies humans are like aliens, and their objects (a sweater, some garbage) are like the Ark of the Covenant or something that turns the animals they touch into gods among birds. It’s too bad about the wacky accents. But somehow a scene where the Williams character amuses humans with air guitar comes off… I don’t know… weirdly beautiful. It’s not like some joke out of ALADDIN. It’s a confused animal doing something he feels but doesn’t fully understand, and the people are somewhere in between having a laugh and communing with nature. I can’t really explain it.

There’s also a subplot about two krill voiced by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. The pittkrill must be the Tyler Durden of tiny shrimp things, because he decides to swim in the opposite direction of the swarm and find out what happens. He ends up far enough away to see his people as an orange cloud being eaten by a whale. It’s as if he touched the monolith and saw a God’s eye view of his existence. He sees that his people are living their lives not knowing that their whole purpose is to be food, but he refuses to go along with that.

The krill go on a whole adventure and don’t talk to the penguins or anything. They’re like that squirrel in the ICE AGE saga except kinda deep. Some reviews have complained that they have nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Yeah, they’re mostly separate from the plot, but they have everything to do with the themes of both movies. Their tiny feet create a vibration that together with the cooperation of the rest of the eco-system, saves the penguins from a cave-in that was itself caused by a chain of events beginning with a single waterdrop. It’s all about how all the specieses are connected and about the importance of even the tiniest and most supposedly useless creatures. And if you think about it they never would’ve done it without the influence of Mumbles teaching everybody to dance. His art saves everybody for the second time.

In case anybody cares, the Three Dee in this one is along the lines of the Pixar movies – at first it looks pretty cool (especially in the krill swarm) but after a while you kind of forget it’s there. So it’s not a muddy detriment like some of the fake 3D, but it’s not that much of an addition. I didn’t regret it though because I saw it in Imax and the big screen and sound system were a major plus.

I think you should all see this today in the most expensive format available ’cause it’s not doing all that hot and we don’t need an excuse for delay #36 on MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Come on guys, we all benefit from this. Everybody better pitch in. The krill did.

chapter 9

Let me tell you man, I’m not trying to commemorate the tenth anniversary of this movie. There’s no celebration here at all. It’s just analysis, I swear.

I saw FINAL FANTASY in the theater when it came out, found it incredibly boring, and really didn’t want to ever watch it again. Here is my review from back then. But I thought it was important to revisit for this study because, despite being a huge financial and artistic failure this movie did break alot of new ground that has turned out to be relevant to the movies of the decade since.

If you don’t remember what this thing is, it was the first computer animated movie to attempt realistic humans. Back then I fixated on the creepiness of too-real-but-not-real-enough characters. Having seen more of that since then it didn’t bother me as much this time, but I couldn’t help still being distracted by the celebrity voices. The male lead looks like an idealized Ben Affleck, but his voice is clearly Alec Baldwin (what is this, a composite Jack Ryan?) and Steve Buscemi’s voice comes out of a good looking young man that I still think looks kind of like Jason Priestley. James Woods is the villain, who looks like a STARSHIP TROOPERS All Stars mix of Michael Ironside and Casper Van Dien. In one scene we learn that his family were killed and that’s why he does what he does, but that doesn’t explain why he had evil eyebrows the whole time. How are you supposed to feel bad for him when he’s always making a bad guy face?

When Robert Zemeckis did his trilogy of creepily-realistic computer animated human movies he increasingly found ways to make it work better. He still used celebrity voices, but visually modeled the characters after the actors. For example multiple characters in POLAR EXPRESS resemble Tom Hanks, so it’s not weird to recognize his voice coming out of them. Zemeckis also made the characters a little more stylized, especially by the time of movie #3, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, where they have exaggerated, cartoonish shapes but just happen to be ridiculously detailed in their textures and eyes.

Zemeckis’s movies are usually referred to as “mocap” for their use of “motion capture” technology, the thing where the actors’ movements are recorded and used to control the computery characters instead of frame-by-frame animation. People think they hate mocap, but I think FINAL FANTASY shows why it’s good if you’re using realistic characters like this. I believe this was mostly done with animation (although a small motion capture department is listed on the credits) and at times it’s noticeable that these people move more like animated characters than actual humans. So it makes them look even more like Real Dolls.

Zemeckis had the advantage of 3D, too. That was a good idea ’cause then it seems more like a ride or a diorama. So you feel like your riding Pirates of the Caribbean or something. FINAL FANTASY doesn’t feel like a ride or a movie.

Technologically speaking, FINAL FANTASY is still impressive. It looks real nice on the blu ray. But the story just isn’t involving at all. It’s all about these soldiers going around shooting ghostly alien monsters on a post-apocalyptic earth. Meanwhile the hero, Aki, is trying to prove that they need to go around and find 8 “spirits” that have something to do with “Gaea,” the soul of Mother Earth, and then they can heal the earth or whatever. It’s a very dull and repetitive set of goals, taking place in dull locations, with stakes that are difficult to care about. These creepy things don’t quite seem human enough to worry about their safety, the battles are mostly the same thing over and over, and since we never see any people besides these soldiers and a couple council members it’s not clear what they’re even trying to accomplish. If the ghosts go away then there will be, like, 10 soldiers on a wrecked planet and they won’t have anything to shoot at anymore. That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.

I complained about this in my original review, but it bears repeating: this movie is all about fighting transparent monsters that they call “phantoms” and “spirits,” then 52 minutes in everybody’s minds are blown when they figure out that these aren’t alien monsters, they’re actually ghosts. They’re surprised by the revelation that these things are ghosts and we’re surprised by the revelation that they didn’t realize before that these things were ghosts. For the most part though the storytelling isn’t that dumb. It’s just that it’s really lacking in excitement.

Maybe all it would need would be a great lead character. I can see some gung-ho appeal in the Alec Baldwin soldier guy, but the lead is Aki (voiced by Ming-Na, also Disney’s Mulan). From what I’ve read they went all out to try to make her look real, and planned to re-use her in other movies as different characters, as if she was an actress. They carefully tweaked her to not be overly sexualized, not giving her big boobs or exposed skin like Lara Croft, removing makeup from an earlier version so you’d believe her as a scientist. (But also they had her wearing a bikini in Maxim.)

So she’s pretty but not ridiculous, capable but not awesome, heroic but not cool. She doesn’t have humor or weaknesses or quirks. If she has a personality I sure couldn’t describe it. I bet there weren’t many people who wanted to see her in another adventure or find out where she came from or dress up like her at a nerd convention.

Sometimes with these movies you gotta question why it should even be made with the realistic animation as opposed to live action. I don’t think I’d want to see a live action POLAR EXPRESS, BEOWFULF I can see working in live action but maybe not as well, A CHRISTMAS CAROL definitely used the technology in ways that made it distinct from the many great live action versions of the same story. This one I don’t feel like it takes advantage of being animated at all. They’re trying so hard to make it look real so there’s not much exaggeration or stylization. The characters don’t move in cool ways that humans couldn’t. There’s not much action. There’s pretty much nothing that couldn’t be done in live action with the humans and all the other stuff would be CGI effects in a live action movie anyway.

Yet I can’t imagine preferring a live action version of this either, I wouldn’t want to watch that. So I’m left with the conclusion that this is a movie that only exists for the novelty of being the first movie using this technology.

So that’s why nobody gave a shit. You gotta come up with a reason to make a movie before somebody has a reason to watch it.

* * *
datedness: this type of animation has been improved in the 10 years since and used for much better stories
would they make a movie like this now? No.
legacy: a film production wing of a video game company was created just to make this movie. Afterwards they did one short for The Animatrix and then closed up shop. But the movie itself does have a legacy because it made mistakes that other filmatists such as Zemeckis were able to learn from and build off of.

I want to start occasionally Expanding My Horizons by reviewing respected or historically important movies that aren’t normally the type of thing I watch or write about. I think this way we can all learn together and I can be less repetitive and also be one of those worldly renaissance type dudes. But the real reason I rented this is that I got a new set-up. The high defintion type TV prices went down this Christmas so I finally scraped together enough cash to get one of those, and a cheap off-brand blu-ray player on the side. SNOW WHITE was recommended to me as one of the more impressive blu-ray transfers, and my sources weren’t lying. The thing looks so vivid you feel like you’re standing face to face with the original watercolor paintings. And some of them are still wet.

(By the way if you didn’t know a cartoon is a series of drawings and paintings shown in quick succession to create the illusion of dwarfs and animals dancing around, etc.)

Don’t worry, I won’t let high definition change me. I still got the VCR hooked up. I’ll try to stay sympathetic about the tyranny of the blu-ray only extras. Won’t waste your time whining about how the Michael Jackson’s Vision DVD upscales like shit, or how for the first time I understand why people give a shit about anamorphic transfers. But most of my movies will look better and I’ll learn more about movie star pores, wrinkles and scars (the novelty of staring at high-def skin got me through the DINNER WITH THE SCHMUCKS blu-ray). And I hope the Lord doesn’t strike us down or flood us for making THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE look so much clearer than He ever meant it to.

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is the story of a young princess named Snow White whose stepmother is so fuckin vain she doesn’t just have a regular mirror to stare at herself in, she sprung for the magic one with a slave inside to kiss her ass (not literally, as far as it shows, but technically I guess it probly could) and tell her how “fair” she is all the time. But the thing keeps it real and and tells her Snow White is “fairest” even though the bitch dresses her in rags to try to make her look bad.

God bless ‘im but in this case dishonesty would’ve been the better policy for ol’ Magic Mirror. The Queen wants to eliminate her fairness competition Tonya Harding style, so she calls on this Huntsman guy to kill the girl. I think at first he tries to psyche himself up with that whole Most Dangerous Game/HARD TARGET idea of “man is the deadliest prey,” but he wasn’t prepared for what a sissy Snow White was gonna be. When he holds the knife up she just holds her hands in front of her face and screams. This is not Mulan he’s dealing with. He probly feels like some perverted slasher going around with a boner stabbing little girls. So he calls off the murder, tells her to hide and brings the Queen a pig’s heart instead of the girl’s.

Incidentally the Queen already owned a wooden box with a knife-stabbed-into-heart theme, the right size to store a human or pig heart in. That’s the kind of crazy bitch we’re dealing with here. What do you buy for the Queen who has everything? Oh, does she have one of those hand-carved heart storage boxes? Yeah, she already has one. Okay, what about a talking mirror? Yeah. Pet crow? Yes. This bitch even has a spooky cellar that she goes into to do her black magic, like a Bat Cave, full of chemistry equipment. And I think there’s a skeleton in there. I bet she had a guy chained up in there to tell her how fair she was, but after she got the mirror she forgot to keep feeding him.

So anyway Princess White’s gotta run off into the woods. First she gets scared, then makes friends with pretty much the entire eco-system and finds this little house which is where these “dwarfs” live. She just walks in and it’s nasty, spider webs and dirty dishes, filthy clothes laying in the living room, no pizza boxes or cat shit, but might as well be. She immediately starts cleaning, and all the animals from her new woodland creature entourage pitch in.

This speaks volumes about Snow White. A wimp,  but a genuinely nice person, so nice she makes fast friends with birds and squirrels. A princess, but not averse to work, in fact does unsolicited housework for strangers. The anti-Goldilocks. So even if she’s not exactly the best role model for your 21st century daughters it’s hard to hate her. She’s a dork but she’s a good kid.

This story and especially this movie are so ingrained in our culture I forgot all the context and logic behind it. I forgot why Snow White was with these dwarves in the first place. Turns out it’s a safe house. She’s in hiding. And you just kind of accept seven dwarves without thinking about it, but really it’s unclear what their deal is. Are they a race, like in Lords of the Rings, or are they just little people? If it’s the second one how did they find each other and decide to live and work together? I mean this is before the internet, how you gonna find seven little people in this area who know how to mine diamonds? They’re a non-judgmental bunch, they got one retarded guy in the house and one with severe allergies. But somehow they found each other and they get along, agree what time to go to work in the morning, etc.

Do they have a genuine passion for diamond mining, or is this just the only work a little person can find in this fucked up kingdom? They seem to be self-employed, and at the same time very disciplined. They keep regular hours in the mine and have a long commute on foot, but apparently nobody to boss them around. We don’t see what happens after that, but I figure they must go out and sell the diamonds to somebody. This was before rappers or Liberace, so they probly just sold them for crowns and sword hilts. But whoever buys them can feel good about it. not only are they not conflict diamonds, they’re dug up by self employed miners, that’s gotta be rare. Free trade, organic, free range, whatever. No sweat shops. It’s like American Apparel minus the sexual harassment.

Speaking of sexual harassment, I think a pretty funny live action Snow White comedy could be made where the dwarfs really are the dirty old men they’re very innocently implied to be in this version. These guys are obviously sweet on her. She’s a real nice girl and they got every reason to adore her, but I also think they enjoy having a tall drink of water like that around, cooking for them and kissing them goodbye before work. I don’t want to see them slapping her on the ass or nothin, just exchanging sleazy glances to acknowledge that they hit the jackpot here, and don’t know how they got so lucky.

The other really funny aspect that could be played up is Snow White’s unintentional condescension toward the dwarfs. When she sees their beds she assumes that “little children” live in the house, which she seems to think is adorable. But really they’re hairy old perverts. It’s funny how cute she thinks their little things are and I’d love it if she kept cluelessly saying that kind of shit to their faces.

The aspect that has evolved the most in Disney movies since then is the portrayal of women, the “Disney Princesses.” It’s kind of off-putting at first to see this girl with her high-pitched voice singing to birds and running away bashfully when some handsome dude randomly shows up and starts singing to her. But considering how old this thing is it’s not that bad. There’s much worse shit that could’ve been in there. Luckily the only weird racial business is some bitch that wants her skin to be pale. Probly wasn’t that fair after she got struck by lightning. (SPOILER.)

It’s astounding how good the art is in this fuckin thing. The old European styling of the buildings, the nice watercolor backgrounds, the subtle character that comes through in the expressions, the tastefully muted colors. It looks beautiful. I think Disney probly made some better cartoons later, but this one really set a tone and atmosphere and a perfect balance of cute and spooky. He knew what the fuck he was doing. Now nobody gives a shit but back then everybody thought he was crazy, he knew he wasn’t, did what he wanted to do and made them all kiss his ass.

The Disney brand name has been around so long now, been so dominant in its field, become such a massive company, that there’s a pretty common attitude now where people think of “Disney” as meaning saccharine-sweet and merchandised-to-death and they think they’re blowing the lid off of America’s dark secrets if they say that such and such cartoon is racist or brainwashing children or they claim Walt Disney was a Nazi or some phony baloney like that. I’m not trying to pick on the fellas who were making similar claims in a recent comment thread, but I want to address it a little.

It’s true, Walt Disney was not a saint. He was merely a guy who completely revolutionized an entire art form, sought out and cultivated a team of incredible artists and led them in creating a whole bunch of pop culture’s most enduring characters and stories, and then spent the money he made from it to build a fucking fantasyland and hiring geniuses to invent robotic pirates and ghosts to fill it with.  That’s a striver for excellence if there ever was one, and to pretend otherwise is just horse shit.

It’s not some accident or 75 year long mistake that makes this body of work and style are such an institution. But of course it’s easy to take it for granted, like you would Coca-Cola or the Statue of Liberty, you’re not gonna praise those too often either. “Mmm, this can of Coke is delicious. Where did you find it?” But just because everybody in the world (with the notable exception of Hitler) loved Disney’s movies and they became inescapable doesn’t mean we gotta pretend they aren’t amazing.

I guess it’s a common human instinct to try to tear down and shit on anything that has lasted longer than you will. That’s fine for sullen teenagers, but as an adult I think you gotta look at it more rationally. Even if you hate it there are some areas in which you gotta be honest and give it props. It’s fucked up that Thomas Jefferson had slaves, but I like his Declaration of Independence. The then-progressive portrayal of African-American crows in DUMBO makes me a little uncomfortable, but they did a pretty fuckin good job drawing that elephant.

SNOW WHITE was both the AVATAR and the TOY STORY 3 of its time. It’s like AVATAR because Disney was doubted and ridiculed beforehand. The press called it “Disney’s Folly” because of the amount of money he spent and because they didn’t believe that people would be able to sit through a feature length cartoon. I guess people even said that the bright colors of animation would hurt people’s eyes at that length. In my opinion they were wrong.

The reason I compare it to TOY STORY 3 is because it made adults cry. Disney was the Pixar of their time, except way more revolutionary since they were doing something that had never been done before and was not believed to be possible. Even Disney and his animators weren’t sure if they could make people scared of a cartoon or sympathetic toward its characters. Nobody had really tried what they were trying. But when it came out it was known for making adults cry during the scene where the dwarves grieve over Snow White’s corpse. I don’t think it really has that effect anymore, but it definitely holds up to modern entertainment standards better than many movies from 1937, or the ’80s for that matter.

If you read anything about their history you know it’s not a coincidence that Pixar merged with Disney. John Lasseter and many of Pixar’s other founders and artists grew up worshipping at the altar of Disney. Disney movies made them want to be animators. Most of them went to the college created and founded by Disney, where they learned from Disney’s animators. Then many of them worked as animators at Disney. Lasseter also worked at Disneyland, driving the Jungle Cruise boat. And alot of their philosophy of training and storytelling comes straight out of the Disney playbook. Shit, they even send their artists on research trips or bring in animals for them to study just like Disney did.

That’s not to say you gotta respect all these movies or consider all of them as being in the same spirit. I don’t think Walt even has that much say in the movies they’ve made since his head was frozen. And later we can get into some of the other issues you brought up if you want, but the point is don’t give me that “Disney is the Devil and Pixar is God” shit. You know who you are. (Paul.) And more importantly I just want to say to give credit where credit is due. It doesn’t matter if you hate Mickey Mouse dolls or are offended by the dog’s accents in LADY AND THE TRAMP, if the guy made SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS then he deserves some god damn credit

Harris seemed like he was on the verge of much bigger fame, at least according to two DVDs about him: ROBIN HARRIS LIVE FROM THE COMEDY ACT THEATER and WE DON’T DIE, WE MULTIPLY: THE ROBIN HARRIS STORY.

IMDB says Reginald Hudlin directed the one about the Comedy Act Theater, but I don’t think that’s what the credits said. If so I’m surprised he would make something so amateurish and cheesy. It seems like one of those deals made by people who think having a suit, a hat and a production company logo is more important than hiring somebody who knows how to edit or make professional looking credits. But I was still glad I watched the movie because it’s an interesting story.

The Comedy Act Theater, it turns out, was a pioneering L.A. comedy club that was black-owned and featured black comedians. The owner (also producer of the documentary, of course) says that he went to places like the Improv and watched all the white comedians and would wait all night for a black comedian and then they wouldn’t be very funny anyway. He decided to start his own place, which turned out to be very successful, largely because of the legendary hosting abilities of Robin Harris.

In between interviews about Harris and the history of the theater we see alot of grainy but often really funny footage of Harris, who was known for his insults of people in the crowd. They talk alot about what a mistake it was to get up to go to the bathroom or something when he was on stage, because he would single you out. Comedians talk about incidents where people tried to heckle him and were comedically cut to bits and eaten by dogs. Harris also does skits with other comedians, often in drag, but they’re not nearly as funny as what comes off the top of his head when he’s looking at people in the crowd.

They make a strong case for the importance of this club. The casting agent Jacki Reed cast all kinds of comedians in movies after seeing them there. Hudlin and Spike Lee found out about Harris by seeing him there. Russell Simmons found out about various comedians there, the Def Comedy Jam apparently was inspired by that place and was meant to be hosted by Harris.

THE ROBIN HARRIS STORY could also use some better editing (do we really need montages of traffic, cheesy music and titles for each chapter?) but seems more thorough and polished than the other one. They talk to his relatives, bring his widow and sons to what used to be the Comedy Act Theater, they interview comedians like Bernie Mac, D.L. Hughley, Martin Lawrence and Cedric the Entertainer. Of course it’s extra sad to hear the late Bernie Mac talking about Harris dying too young, but he’s probly the best interview. He seems very sincere and insightful about what made Harris great and seeing him talk about it you notice obvious parallels between their styles of comedy.

They mention his work in movies (I’M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA, DO THE RIGHT THING and HOUSE PARTY) and how you couldn’t really script him, you just had to put him in a situation and let him go. Knowing that makes me understand the magic of DO THE RIGHT THING a little bit more. No wonder he’s so good as Sweet Dick Willy. “What you oughta do is boycott that god damn barber that fucked up your head!”

This one has a ton of great clips from throughout his career. One of my favorites is when he cracks on a guy in the audience with jheri curls. Considering the place and time that he performed I’m sure in his head he had to have had an Encyclopedia Brittanica’s worth of jheri curl insults. You could argue it’s a cheap subject, but that doesn’t make the jokes not funny. At one point he apologizes and shakes the guy’s hand, but then complains that his hand is slippery and goes right back into it.

This one also includes the “Bebe’s Kids” routine, his story about being roped into taking somebody else’s little asshole kids to Disneyland. It’s a hilarious story that somehow ended up being adapted into a not very funny PG-13 rated, theatrically released cartoon in 1992.

Kid ‘n Play do not appear in this cartoon, they were busy in one of their own:

but I don’t think BEBE’S KIDS could’ve existed without the success of HOUSE PARTY, so I’m including it in the retrospective. From what I understand, HOUSE PARTY director Reginald Hudlin had planned a live action BEBE’S KIDS starring Harris, which was a pretty good idea I think. It would’ve had to’ve been a better movie for Harris than THE TOY was for Richard Pryor. And of course with him starring he would’ve brought all kinds of funny shit that was not in Hudlin’s script.

Unfortunately, that couldn’t happen, but they made the project as a cartoon with Faizon Love (Big Worm from FRIDAY) doing the voice of Robin. It’s PG-13 because it starts with Robin in a bar, and I think he uses the N-word once, but mostly it looks and feels like some mediocre TV cartoon for kids.

The movie does work in alot of Harris’s jokes. He meets his date (the friend of Bebe) at a funeral for a dude he hates, and he talks shit about him. There are lots of your mama jokes worked in. (”Your mama’s so dumb they told her it was chilly outside, she went and got a bowl.”) Like in HOUSE PARTY he recommends for kids to watch DOLEMITE (says it teaches them to appreciate poetry) and then goes into a rendition of “Signifyin’ Monkey.” And he says “ya test tube baby!” which is kind of like his version of Don Rickles saying “you hockey puck!” And lots of lines like “I feel sorry for trouble if it runs into them kids.”

There’s a pretty good one where he’s trying to hit on her, and as she walks by a bus stop he asks her if she needs a ride home, she says “No, I have a car” and he says, “Oh, could I get one then?”

Love does a pretty good Harris impression, and they do try to animate his bulging eyes and everything, but of course it’s just not the same. The medium and the execution and everything about it just takes away all the edge. He seems like Robin Harris, but not quite as mean. The girl is drawn as a pretty, thin, light-skinned lady like Jamie Foxx or somebody would date in a romantic comedy – honestly, she’s a drawing but she seems too hot to date this dude she met at a funeral and too smart be tricked into taking care of these kids all the time. There’s something true to life about the story when you picture it in your head, but in these cartoon drawings it’s got nothing to do with true life.

The diaper-shitting baby is called Pee-Wee (just like one of the bullies in HOUSE PARTY) and voiced by Tone Loc. That’s a semi-funny idea to give a baby that gravelly voice, but then he doesn’t do that good a job with Harris’s original joke about talking while shitting. Mostly they just draw swarms of flies around his ass.

One big problem with the movie, obviously they can’t draw it at Disneyland, so they make up a “Fun World” and it has no basis in reality, just every lazy cartoon idea of what a theme park is like. Instead of creepy animatronic dummies of the presidents there are actual sentient metal robots of them. And they capture the kids and put them on trial and the nice kid who does not belong to Bebe saves them by performing a rap song called “Freedom,” complete with an impassioned Gospel type chorus singing “Freedoooom! Fredoooooom!” So it’s a cartoonist’s idea of a kid’s idea of a rapper’s idea of the concept of freedom, being explained to a court presided over by robotic Lincoln and Nixon.

That’s another way it’s like HOUSE PARTY, it is a rap musical. One is performed in character by Love, the others by kids (and Tone Loc). Weirdly, some of them are produced by Bill Stephney (and Eric Sadler?) of The Bomb Squad. But you’re not gonna want to put these songs on your iPod, unless you’re one of those guys who collects novelties like WWF albums, the Ninja Turtle Rap and the Super Bowl Shuffle. And it’s not even bad enough to be funny like those, it’s just not good.

But more importantly, they seem to miss the whole point of the joke by making the kids not really that much of a terror. They’re not nearly as bad as described by Harris – they don’t go around slapping white people, for example. Before Bebe’s kids have really had a chance to live up to their reputation they’re already getting harassed by white Men In Black type security guards. So the movie wants you to side with the kids, which I don’t think was Harris’s point. I do like at the end though when he goes to their shitty, parentless apartment and feels bad for them.

I mean, there are probly some positive things I can say about the movie, and I’m a positive individual, so I’ll give it a shot. It’s kind of cool seeing Jet Magazine in a cartoon, and it’s nice that the woman criticizes Robin for pointing his finger only at Bebe and not the father who abandoned the kids. Which reminds me, I used to know a dude who loved this movie because he said the kids all had different skin tones, meaning they all had different fathers, and he thought that was hilarious. But it looks to me like two of them are the same shade. And there’s only 3 of them by the way, not 4 like in the joke.

I laughed when Robin threw a bunch of insults at his ex-wife and her friend says sincerely, “You know what that was all about, right? He still loves you.”

It’s kind of weird, but there’s a phenomenon of cartoons based on comedians. This one is kind of like FAT ALBERT, it comes out of the characters and stories from Harris’s standup, like FAT ALBERT was based on Bill Cosby’s. I wonder why they haven’t done one from Dolemite’s routines?

Anyway in this case don’t bother with the cartoon, just watch the routine:

. . .

. . .

. . .

appendix: KID ‘N PLAY/HOUSE PARTY CROSSOVER:

written by Reginald Hudlin (writer/director, HOUSE PARTY)
John Witherspoon (”Mr. Strickland,” HOUSE PARTY) plays “Card Player #1″
Chino “Fats” Williams (”Fats,” HOUSE PARTY) plays “Card Player #2″
Reynaldo Rey (”Veda’s Dad,” HOUSE PARTY 3) plays “Lush”
Bebe Drake-Massey (”Mrs. Strickland,” HOUSE PARTY) plays “Barfly”
Immature (HOUSE PARTY 3-4) perform the song “Tear It Up (On Our Worst Behavior)” for the soundtrack

So they came up with the title LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS. Completely generic and bland, not descriptive at all, almost sounds like a made up title. Perfect! But after the first trailer came out they must’ve got a call from the Weinsteins saying come on you pricks, you can’t use a generic title like that, we need that to rename a Jet Li movie. You can’t fuck us like this, do you know who we are? We own this fucking town! We did SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE. You don’t know who you’re fucking with you little pissants! Also the Dragon Dynasty series of DVDs, we did those also! We will crush you and make somebody else wipe you up, and then we will pointedly undertip them for their efforts! FUCK YOU WARNER BROTHERS YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME.

So Warner Brothers is like oh shit, those guys did the SCARY MOVIE series, they mean business. So they added the subtitle “The Owls of Ga’Hoole,” so we know now Ga’Hoole must be a place where some owls live, at least according to legend. That makes the full title LEGEND OF THE GUARDIANS: THE OWLS OF GA’HOOLE: THE 3-D IMAX EXPERIENCE. Which is a mouthful of a title for a movie everybody is obviously gonna just call OWL 300.

OWL 300 is a computer animated fantasy adventure in the world of owls. There are no humans or signs of civilization in the movie, just talking animals. There’s a snake, an echidna, some bats and a couple other beasts, but mostly all types and sizes of owls.

The lead owl, Soren, and his dickish brother Claude, are practicing flying one night (like 15 year olds trying to drive in a parking lot after the mall is closed) when they fall out of the tree and almost get eaten by some dingos or something. The hungry animals get fought off by some big mean blood-stained owls. I thought it was some guys rescuing them but then it turns out no, it’s fuckin owlnappers. These owls are part of a band of marauders going around stealing young owls to use for slave labor. They take them real far away where they will work for “the Pure Ones,” led by the Evil Queen Nyra and the accurately named Metal Beak.

I don’t think I ever saw an owl movie before, this might be my first one, so I went in wondering how they were gonna deal with the pellet issue. Are they gonna tell the kids that owls eat mice and then puke up their bones and fur in neat little bundles? The answer is “yes” and furthermore “right at the very beginning” and as a followup I would like to add “their slave labor involves sitting in a mine picking apart owl pellets looking for little specks of metal that were eaten by the mice that are now added to a pile that creates some sort of supernatural magnetic force that controls owls’s gizzards (?).” I didn’t read the books but the important thing is it looks cool.

Claude gets picked to be a soldier, but Soren and his new little girl friend Gylfie gotta pick through the owl puke. Which is totally for the birds, in my opinion. (no pun intended, I had no idea that was gonna happen.) But they manage to resist being “moonblinked,” some type of zombification process done in owl society, and are taken under the wing (figuratively, although there is literally a wing) of a fucked up old soldier owl who wants to defeat these guys from within, Operation Valkyrie style. He helps them escape with instructions on how to get to Ga’Hoole, where the Guardians reside, and which it turns out is a huge tree.

The owls that live there are legendary but not a myth. They wear helmets (like a knight, not like a bicyclist) and some of them have metal claws and shit and they know how to sword fight even, which is weird to do with your feet but I’m not gonna insult their culture.

The only real shitty part of the movie is right here there’s a montage where the owls go through 36 chambers type training in combat, metal shop, etc. It might be an interesting part of the story not to rush through in a montage, but oh well. The bad part is the out-of-the-blue pop song with those type of vocals one could only intend to be heard by children, like in an advertisement for some candy or cheese product that only airs during the cartoons. I mean, just fucking awful. You just want to find out who recorded this song (24 year old Adam Young, aka “Owl City”, according to wikipedia), knock on his door and when he answers you just stand there with your arms folded and shake your head. And he’s like “What?” and you say “You know.” And he doesn’t say anything because he can’t lie. He knows. And you walk away and he tries to yell out “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, all right! Are you happy?” but you’re long gone. And then he goes back into his house which is really nice and fully paid for and I go back to my little apartment that I rent and sometimes the radiator won’t turn off during the summer and won’t turn on during the winter.

The funny thing is I don’t have kids, I should rightfully be able to live my life free of Radio Disney and Hanna Banana and all this, I should not even have to know about this shit. But then I willingly go see a PG-rated movie just because it has owl fights. I mean I should’ve known owl fights are not the same as cockfights. It’s more wholesome. This is a kids movie, of course I might be exposing myself to “To the Sky” by Owl City. I gotta take responsibility for these type of lifestyle decisions. So I’m not blaming Owl City, I’m just saying jesus Owl City. I don’t get you, man. I really don’t.

Some of the elements of this thing are a little undercooked, still a little gooey on the inside which might taste kind of good but there might be some raw egg in there so you wanna be careful, you don’t wanna get the shits. What I mean by this overly detailed metaphor is that the characters are decent but not great, the mythology is a little underexplained and gets confusing, and it made sense when I read that it was 3 different books simplified into 1 movie form. But none of this mattered too much to me and I must credit Mr. Zack Snyder with putting all of his talents to good use.

If you forgot the name this is the guy who did the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD (enjoyable although empty action spin on untouchable masterpiece), 300 (stylish and refreshingly macho although I questioned why he wasn’t interested in the obvious political implications of that story during war time) and then WATCHMEN (impressive and ambitious although it kind of flops over and dies at the end). I think with movie #4 here I’m really able to forgive whatever misgivings I have with his lack of substance and really appreciate his obvious excitement for the material and his knack for the cinematic. I mean this is a movie about cartoon owls that you immediately know is by the same director who did those three hard-R violent live action movies I just mentioned.

The animation is done by the Australian effects company that did HAPPY FEET for George Miller. (I hope for their next one they’ll get John Woo to do a story about doves who live in churches.) Like HAPPY FEET it’s very realistic, only slightly cartoonified animals, with photorealistic backgrounds. The look is Zack Snyderfied so it’s full of gorgeous sunsets and sunbeams and stormy weather. The battle scenes, which of course use alot of slow motion, are crisper and more thrilling than most action scenes these days in live action. Which isn’t saying that much, but still, come on people. You got beat by cartoon owls. Think about it.

Anyway it looks incredible because some poor Australian had to sit and adjust every muscle, every feather of these owls as they lurch at each other, as metal scrapes across metal, screeeeeecccching and shooting sparks.

My favorite things in this movie are two scenes where Soren is flying, once through rain and once through fire. The trademark Zack Snyder slowing down is perfect for showing this little guy’s point of view. Our senses are heightened. We can see every rain drop floating there, because he can feel it all around him, that’s how good he is at flying. Although I would like to see some eyeballs popping out like in FRIDAY THE 13TH 3-D this is also a great use of the technology.

(I gotta say, this is the first time I had a problem with Imax 3-D, there was alot of ghosting in the middle stuff, not close up or far away. I don’t know if it was my eyes or a projection problem or what. When that wasn’t going on it looked amazing though.)

Snyder’s talent is more than just visual. In each of his movies he has a very consistent tone, he has a distinct vision of what he wants and stays very dedicated to it. He doesn’t give a hoot if somebody laughs at him. (that was also not intended, I just say “give a hoot” alot, I’m sure you’ve noticed I use that all the time.) This heroic owl shit might not be the greatest mythology but he stays so serious about it that he kind of tricks me into buying it.

I’ll even give him credit for having a little bit to say in this one. There was a scene I really liked where Soren realizes that Ezylryb (I had to look that up), the old goofball that’s been teaching him to fly better, is the legendary warrior “Lyze of Kiel” (had to look that one up too) who he idolized his whole life for chopping off Metal Beak’s original beak according to the, you know, legends of the Guardians. Instead of being impressed to meet his hero Soren is profoundly disappointed that the bad motherfucker he always heard about is just this ugly old dude. Ezylryb explains that yeah, people who fight in wars look like this, they get clawed in the face and they get fucked up and pathetic. He doesn’t think fighting is heroic. He just thinks it’s what you do when you really have to.

I get the feeling he really means this one, unlike the politics in 300 which he claimed were just people interpreting and not really a message he was trying to get across. If so I think he maybe lost control of the ball a little bit at the end, it leans a little more toward glorifying war than being sad about it. They say he had no choice but to bloodlessly rated-PG impale a guy, but I don’t know if I buy it. Still, there’s stuff to think about here. Snyder may be growing, putting a little more brain into his movies, at least his owl ones. He’s not a genius but I like that he’s out there throwing himself into whatever crazy nerd shit he gets excited about. I’m definitely gonna keep watching.

I guess you could also call it OWLVATAR, but I’m sticking with OWL 300.

So I thought I could get out of reviewing this, but here I am a week later still thinking about the movie and realizing that it’s by far the best I’ve seen in a theater this year. That’s not saying much I guess, but it deserves a few words I think and I know some of you individuals will want to commentate in the comments area.

Well shit, I’ve crossed the line already, so while I’m here I guess I’ll take this opportunity to admit that I also enjoyed the dragon movie earlier this year, it was surprisingly good. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is the second pretty good cartoon movie I’ve seen from the Dreamworks computer cartooning company (first one was kung fu panda). It looked real nice, had a few laughs and built nicely to an exciting action climax that looked real good in 3-D. But what I liked most about it was that it’s about this kid who becomes friends with a dragon in a culture where everybody hunts dragons. So as a rite of passage they put him in a situation where he’s supposed to kill a dragon, but he doesn’t believe in it. So it’s about a kid who doesn’t believe in something that is acceptable in his culture, and that puts him in a really uncomfortable position. I thought about kids who don’t want to stand for the pledge of allegiance to protest something or who don’t believe in eating meat or things like that. I couldn’t think of another cartoon that dealt with that type of conflict.

When one of my buddies mentioned that the dragon movie was the best movie of the year so far I said, “What? No, come on. I mean it’s pretty good, but best of the year?” And he said, “Well, what do you think is better?” And I said, “uh… hmmm.”

He stumped me. The only one I could think of was UNIVERSAL SOLDIER REGENERATION, which he didn’t think counted because it wasn’t in theaters. So I was stuck admitting that the DRAGON movie might’ve been the best of the year so far unless I was forgetting something. Now TOY STORY 3 runs about ten laps around it, and we must admit we live in an upside down world if all the best films being made are either family friendly computer animation or straight to video Van Damme pictures.

If you’re not familiar with the TOY STORY movies, here is what they are about. Toys are alive when you’re not looking, same as Puppet Master, but one is played by Tom Hanks. There is many different dolls and etc. And you can imagine where it would go from there.

This might be the best trilogy since the original Star Warses. Each chapter is very true to the characters and advances some emotional themes. I like that by part 3 Woody and Lightyear are a solid team. They have a disagreement about what to do but they don’t get mad, they completely support each other and work together, knowing each other’s strengths and how to back each other up. In this one they don’t travel as far as in either of the others (no high speed auto chase or visit to the airport) but it feels way more epic because of the huge amount of detail and the highly populated world it takes place in. The toys move to a daycare where an entire toy society already exists. The daycare toys seem to have it all figured out, they have a hell of a setup there, kind of reminded me of DAY OF THE DEAD somehow.

You probly shouldn’t read this sort-of review unless you’ve seen it. I’m just gonna assume you have and list some thoughts about it and some parts that impressed me into having no choice but to do this write-up.

1. The filmatism of the “caterpillar room” scene is outstanding. As the toddlers pour into the nursery and terrorize the unsuspecting toys you’re thrown in there with them. The “cameras” are put at floor level so you’re looking up at these kids like they’re monsters about to bite your head off. I remember a POV shot from Lightyear’s perspective as his face is used to hammer blocks into slots. It just puts you right into the action, there’s all kinds of fast paced mayhem and you see it, understand it, and feel it. I know I’m a broken record on this point of how bad modern action direction is, but let’s be serious here, THE A-TEAM is one of the more passable recent action movies and it doesn’t have any scenes as visceral as this one about kids smearing snot on toys. I never thought I’d say this, but modern big screen action directors, forget everything you know and study some Pixar cartoons.

2. You thought I was gonna say this first but I saved the good shit for number two: Holy shit that part at the garbage dump is amazing! Here are these toys who we’ve been worrying with for three movies. In part 1 they were afraid of being replaced by new and better toys (or pets). In part 2 they were afraid of being outgrown and forgotten by their owners, or sold in a garage sale or to a collector who just puts them under glass. In this one they’re biting the bullet and facing down the inevitable, that their kid won’t play with them forever and they should be happy being put in the attic or donated to the daycare.

But here they end up facing a fate worse than they had considered before, they are actually garbage. Bad, right? And it gets worse when they’re about to be incinerated. For three movies they’ve worried about abandonment and damage from mean kids but they’ve never even mentioned the possibility of being completely melted down – what I can only assume is actual toy death. That’s kind of a heavy notion for a movie like this, but not nearly as heavy as the fact that they see this fate in front of them, they accept it, and they wordlessly face it down, holding each other’s hands to die together as a family. This is some profound shit.

And then the thing that saves them is, from the perspective of the martians, an intervention from God! We’ve known since part 1 that this was the martian religion. We just didn’t take it seriously.

After seeing this scene I almost believe my own ridiculous prediction that CARS 2 will find some way to make my CARS-hating buddies shed tears over the emotions of an anthropomorphized vehicle.

3. This one didn’t get me like UP did, on account of me being so manly and everything. But the part that came the closest was when Woody was peaking out of the box and saw the mom getting choked up about Andy’s room being empty as he’s ready to go off to college. It’s touching just on the surface level of relating to the mom and the kid, but also it’s touching when you consider what it means to Woody. I think this is the first time he’s realized that people have to say goodbye too. He sees that the mom is sad to see her son grow up, but she has to send him off into the world. He knows that he has to do the same thing.

4. I really like the character Big Baby. He works so perfectly as a dimwitted behemoth henchman in the world of toys. He’s creepy as hell and then he’s lovable at the end. I also like that killer monkey, I think that’s the one that’s gonna haunt the dreams of children across the world, not the incinerator scene. At a young age you probly can’t comprehend all the implications of what’s going on in the incinerator, but you can definitely appreciate the terror of that fuckin monkey clapping his cymbals on your head.
5. Anybody else wonder why these toys got such a problem with Ken being girly? There’s the scene where the bookworm thinks he sees Ken wearing pumps, and he shakes his head in disgust. Later the main characters all seem very uncomfortable with Ken’s feminine handwriting.

Let’s examine this. The toys of TOY STORY have the ability to fall in love. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are in love, Buzz seems to have a thing for Jessie, Barbie for Ken, etc. But unlike cars, toys do not reproduce. They’re manufactured by man. The Potato Heads cannot bear children, they can only adopt martians. There’s no reproductive need or instinct, and even if there was, we all know that Barbie and Ken have no genitals to mate with. So there’s no reason for the toys to have genders at all, let alone to have an instinct for male-female pairs. So why are they so uncomfortable with Ken? Is it homophobia?

I think it’s cultural. Gender roles are forced on young people through their toys. In fact, Barbie herself got into some trouble for saying “math is hard” and making girls feel dumb. If anybody is a slave to these archaic ideas it’s toys. Although if my dream of an animated movie about laundry ever comes true I’m sure there will be some real strong differences between the different types of underwear.
* * *

Anyway, great movie. It can’t be denied. It’s great to see people who put so much thought and care into something, especially since that approach seems to have gone out of style.

Seriously live action people, this is not a hollow threat. This is real, this is happening. Already, Brad Bird of the “incredibles” and the cooking rat one has been conscripted to direct MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: 4 using live humans. And do you have any doubt in your mind that he’ll knock that shit out of the park like one of those steroid monsters they had in baseball until a couple years ago? If you don’t start doing better, the cartoonists will be happy to take over.

[ratings]

So I decided fine, you want to test my loyalty? Then I’ll watch your cartoon. We’ll se where that gets us. And I rented his DTV cartoon presentation ROB ZOMBIE PRESENTS THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO, allegedly directed by Rob Zombie (although the cartoonists might disagree, I’m not sure).

ROB ZOMBIE PRESENTS THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO is a wacky cartoon about an oaf in a Mexican wrestling mask who’s supposed to be some kind of celebrity and is trying to stop a devil (Paul Giamatti) who he bullied in high school from fucking a girl with 666 on her butt (Rosario Dawson) and turning into a giant devil monster. Technically that counts as a plot, but nobody here seems interested in telling a real story. Obviously they just wanted to draw bouncing titties, Nazi zombies, talking gorillas, robot dicks, and caricatures of Universal Monsters and Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING, and this was the way they figured out to connect those dots.

The drawings are your basic TV cartoon following the Ren and Stimpy/Spongey Bob example. Nothing original or that great. The jokes are your randomness-with-occasional-pop-culture-reference style. It really seems like a show that kids could watch if not for the constant boobs and cunnilingess and molester uncle who farts rats. But if I’m not mistaken boobs have already been shown in animation. Zombie is not exactly Charles Lindbergh breaking the sound barrier on that one, in my opinion.

It’s got the Zombie stamp on it, though. You got your horror host intro, your black and white horror movie credits, your voices by Sheri Moon Zombie, Danny Trejo, Brian Posehn, Dee Wallace, Geoffrey Lewis, Ken Foree (as a talking cat/porn director), etc., plus cameos by Zombie characters Captain Spaulding, Otis Driftwood, Banjo & Sullivan, Morris Green, even Michael Myers. And he re-uses the name Dr. Satan. Sheri Moon Zombie actually seems very at home as a cartoon voice. She plays an eye-patch wearing doppelganger of herself who is introduced stealing Hitler’s head from werewolf Nazis. I actually got a few laughs out of her robot sidekick who transforms into vehicles that she controls using his johnson. The joke is that he can’t admit he loves her and she doesn’t realize she’s turning him on when she sits on his face and tugs on him.

Dawson (who you may not remember was in DEVIL’S REJECTS, because her scene was cut out) is also game as the skanky stripper kidnapped by Dr. Satan. The character’s not all that funny, but she gives it a shot. I like when she’s being kidnapped by a cyborg gorilla and she screams, “Can somebody get a monkey off a bitch?!”

The movie is mostly dumb bullshit, but I did really enjoy the songs by the comedy duo Hard ‘n Phirm. The nonsensical concepts are much funnier when explained lyrically, and sometimes the songs almost seem to criticize the movie itself, like the one that complains they probly didn’t ask DePalma and Stephen King if they could rip off CARRIE. I think the biggest laugh I got was during a catfight animated to look real sexy, when Hard ‘n Phirm started singing that it’s okay to masturbate to cartoons because they do it in Japan every day. Then it sort of turns into a patriotic plea for Americans to catch up with Japan on that.

So, on the strength of those songs I’d say ROB ZOMBIE PRESENTS THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO averages out to mildly amusing overall. Not terrible, but you can’t help but think jesus, you spent a couple years making this? WEREWOLF WOMEN OF THE SS had me worried, HALLOWEEN II brought me back into the “with” camp, but the not-as-goodness of the director’s cut pushed the needle closer to “against.” This is just tedious but inoffensive enough to nudge it to neutral. So we’re starting with a clean slate on the next one. Wow me, Zombie.

[ratings]

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Okay, short version first: just go see the fuckin thing. This review is gonna have spoilers in the sense that I’m gonna talk it up, you’re gonna go in expecting this or that based on what I said, it’s gonna get to your analytical mind and might fuck everything up. So don’t read this. Also disregard what I said above about crying, I would never cry, come on man let’s be serious here.

UP is the latest Pixar and somehow tops everything they’ve done before. For all the mediocrity and horribleness going on in our world today, we are lucky to live in the golden age of Pixar. Who knows how long their streak could last, but watching their movies now feels like watching PINOCCHIO and BAMBI and all those coming from the same group of people in a row. It’s just incredible, nobody else can match what they’re doing.

There’s this cliche about movies like SHREK and all the different comedy cartoons that have come since Robin Williams did the Arsenio Hall impression in ALADDIN. They say those are good cartoons because they work on two levels: for the kids it’s a cartoon that moves around in front of them, for the adults there is sophisticated humor such as a reference to a TV show that you know about, and that’s why it’s funny, you have seen that show before or know people who have seen it and told you what it was one time.

Well, UP blows that shit out of the water by really truly hitting at what kids want and what adults want at the same time, and not by appealing to the lowest common denominator or the easiest jokes. No, this is a fantasy adventure comedy with some great action sequences, some colorful creatures, easily the most laughs of any Pixar movie and yet also it hits on profound emotional life issues much more effectively than most serious adult dramas and what not.

Also it’s Pixar’s version of GRAN TORINO: grouchy old man loses his wife, stubbornly stays in his old house in a rapidly changing neighborhood, reluctantly befriends young Asian neighbor, they help each other to learn life lessons. There is less shooting and racism, though, and more flying.

Hopefully you’ve already seen it so I’m not gonna give anything away, but holy shit, I was crying in the first ten minutes of this god damn movie. I was crying before it even truly got sad. In the dialogue-free montage through decades of Karl and Ellie’s life together you see so much happiness, so much struggle, so much dreaming and almost but not quite achieving. And more than almost any movie it seems to capture the feeling of a real loving relationship and because time is moving so fast it becomes sad because you know at this rate their life together is fleeting. It hits you because you’re sad for what happens to these fictional characters, but also because it makes you think about your own life and where you are on achieving your dreams or finding happiness, about whether you have enough time or if you fucked up and got too off course.

In this one sequence it tells you in images so much about the way people want to do things with their lives, but don’t always get to. About how important that dream is not only to the person but to the person who loves them. You see how Karl wants more than anything to see Ellie get what she wants. You see how they fall into a routine and time passes and they fear that maybe they haven’t really done what they wanted to with their time together, that they’ve wasted their lives and lost sight of what was once important to them, and maybe still should be, but they don’t really know.

It has so many deeply relatable things for adults that I end up with tears rolling down my cheek like I got pepper sprayed. I look to my left, the gal next to me is worse than me. To my right I hear somebody blowing snot. Then somewhere to the left. The kids are all laughing at the jokes and the adults are all crying. So fuck you SHREK and your “ha ha, the donkey said a line from the theme song from THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, they threw that one in for the adults.”

I mean this is the most emotional thing I have seen in a cartoon so far that does not involve the bombing of Hiroshima. If the first ten minutes of UP was Andrew “Dice” Clay it would say, “Jesse the Cowgirl montage in TOY STORY 2? I fucked it.”

It really does work on multiple levels at the same time. Like the early scenes where construction is going on around his house. In the story it’s an excuse for why he has to fly away with his house. But emotionally it’s about the feeling of getting older and the world changing around you and stubbornly wanting to stand your ground. Or toward the end when he dumps all the furniture and things out of his house. Story-wise of course he has to make the house lighter in order for it to fly. But an adult can’t help but also see that he’s casting off all the shit he’s accumulated over the years. Earlier all that stuff was important to him because it reminded him of his wife, but now he realizes it’s just stuff, it’s not the objects that are important but the actual experiences.

(dude, Fight Club.)

You know what? I bet this is the first time in cinematic history that a 3-D movie makes people cry. I mean there might’ve been some teary-eyed emotional moments in JAWS 3-D or COMIN’ AT YA, but not full on tears. This brings up alot of questions about the technology, is it a problem to have salty deposits on the lenses, does it break the illusion for somebody to have to take off the glasses to wipe away their eyes, etc.

(By the way, the 3-D looks great and brings you even more into the detailed Pixar world, but I don’t think it’s necessary. If you don’t have one of those theaters near you or don’t want to spend the extra couple bucks don’t worry about it, see the movie in regular-D.)

I said, and still believe, that WALL-E is a masterpiece. Its one flaw is that the first section is such a perfect, jawdropping and completely unique masterwork of filmatic imagery that the rest of the movie, by being merely superb, is kind of a letdown to some people. This one does not have that minor structural problem. It’s front-loaded with that emotion but it’s perfect because then you know why this matters. It makes a dude pulling a house across a cliff seem like the most important thing in the world, because we have watched his whole life before that and we know what it means to him. You laugh and have a fun time with his relationship with his young neighbor Russell (as well as a dog and a bird) and some crazy death defying shenanigans and what not, but it’s all anchored in this ritualistic quest to fulfill his wife’s dream for her posthumously. It’s about his relationship with his dead wife. I thought I was fine with that, I thought I was a man again, then that last image snuck up on me and got me crying like a bitch again. So perfect.

Pixar, I don’t know if you guys have seen TYSON or not. But maybe it’s time to hang it up. I don’t see how you can top this one. In conclusion, Pixar, did it ever occur to you that maybe some people want to retain their emotional fluids, and not have them just leak out in public? Thumbs down.

[ratings]