Disneyology

Pete’s Dragon (2016)

Today the phrase “Live Action Disney Remake” is almost entirely associated with CGI-laden cash grabs that regurgitate nostalgia, but if we’re being fair there are some slightly more ambitious examples of the form out there and perhaps the one film from this cycle of remakes that has earned the strongest reputation for coming out of the process with some dignity is their 2016 remake of the 1977 live-action/animation hybrid musical Pete’s Dragon. Truth be told I’m not entirely sure why Disney wanted to remake this particular property at all; I don’t think the original movie was ever a huge hit for them and it never had that much of a life after the fact, in part because it’s an extremely earnest (some would say corny) musical that’s directed specifically at very young audiences and its live action elements place it much more specifically in the 70s than some of their more “timeless” animated movies. So, on that level one could argue that it’s more rife for remaking than a lot of the classics they had been remaking, it a property with room for improvement. But Disney remakes aren’t about making tasteful decisions about what really needs improvement, they’re about exploiting IP that people have nostalgia for and I don’t think there were than many people with nostalgia for Pete’s Dragon in the grand scheme of things. So why does this exist? Well, if I had to guess they probably had something of an open call to filmmakers to pitch them on ideas for remakes and up and coming filmmaker David Lowery (fresh off the indie success of his film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) came to them with a vision and just impressed them in the meeting enough to get a relatively modest budget to take a swing at a different kind of more low key Disney remake.

The 2016 Pete’s Dragon does not claim to be some kind of prequel or sideways sequel to the 1977 film; it’s a straight up remake, but one that does pretty radically rework its predecessor. Both films are about an orphan kid named Pete who befriends a green dragon that can turn invisible and who go on an adventure with him which ultimately ends with the dragon escaping people trying to kidnap him and Pete finding a new family. Put in those vague terms this actually seems fairly faithful, but the details are completely different. It’s not set at the turn of the century, Pete isn’t being chased by a family of rednecks, and while the dragon is pursued by some people late they certainly aren’t moustache twirling snake oil salesmen. But really what’s changed here most radically is the tone. That original film was a full-on musical with really over the top characters and just a totally cornball wholesome tone whereas this new movie is a lot more quiet and restrained and almost operating in the language of indie cinema rather than what you’d expect from Disney. In this film when Pete is five his parents are killed in a car crash in the first scene and he leaves the wreck and walks into a wooded area of the Pacific Northwest where he’s raised for the next five years by Elliot before being found by loggers, who pull him away from the dragon and finds himself caught between two worlds. The dragon is obviously a CGI creation but the film otherwise doesn’t feel overly filled with special effects and the characters all feel a bit more real than what you usually get from these movies. The female forest ranger that starts to take Pete in behaves like an actual adult and when villains come into things in the third act to try to capture Eliot they don’t feel like over the top cartoons but like real people reacting in plausible way when they discover a damn dragon in the real world.

Obviously, unlike the original film this is not a musical. Instead it has a soundtrack with a bunch of acoustic indie music by the likes of Bonnie Prince Billy, St. Vincent, The Lumineers, and even features a prominent needle drop of a Leonard Cohen song… in a Disney movie. That’s how different this is from your average live-action Disney remake. It’s tempting to imagine a world where Disney had no idea what they were in for when they invited the future director of A Ghost Story and The Green Knight to make their magical dragon movie, but considering that they’re bringing back Lowery to direct their upcoming Peter Pan remake I think they are more or less happy with what they got and what they expected. But why? Why would a company as ruthlessly profit driven as Disney be happy with a low key movie that “only” grossed $143 million worldwide. Well, I think it was something of a soft power move. Disney does seem to throw the snobs a bone every once in a while to build up some good will (Chloé Zhao’s upcoming MCU film The Eternals perhaps being another example of this) and they would need a lot of good will given some of the bullshit they were hoping to get away with in the next couple of years. The thing is, I’m not sure the soft power move worked quite as wells as they hoped. They made a movie that critics would like, and sure enough the critics liked it… but they didn’t love it. And truth be told all this talk about the movie having “indie cred” it’s only in comparison to shit like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, not when compared to actual indie movies and I don’t want to over-sell it just because it exceeds the low expectations its studio had set for it.

***1/2 out of Five

I saw Beauty and the Beast in theaters and thought it was fine, not great but I never understood the loathing for it. Not that I would step up to bat for it but I wasn't put off like some people were.

Also, that Nutcracker movie had better be on the part 2 list.

I've never seen it!

Granted I never saw Nutcracker either so I have no ground to stand on.

Live Action Greatest Hits (1967-1979)

Our last look at the world of live action Disney movies looked at the early 60s, which was kind of an ideal time to be making corny family films. It was that era that all those movies you thought were set in the 50s like American Graffiti took place in. But for this next installment will look at a period in which Disney struggled a bit more to find relevance: the late 60s and early 70s. In this era Disney’s usual M.O. would start to look incredibly square, but even if they tried it’s not like Disney was ever going to be the go-to for this big generation of newly adult baby boomers. This was an issue for Disney’s animation branch as well: in the 70s there simply weren’t as many children to advertise to as there were in the 50s and 60s, the boomers just hadn’t reproduced enough yet. I will be starting in the late sixties while the company was trying and failing to make the old magic work and then start working my way through the Gen X favorites of the 70s right up to when they began taking more of a corporate turn as they went into the 80s.

The Happiest Millionaire (1967)

The Happiest Millionaire is possibly the most consequential movie to Disney history which most people haven’t heard of. It, in its current form, is notable for being by some measures the longest movie that Disney ever put out. It’s shorter than Pearl Harbor (which was put out by their Touchstone imprint) and Avengers: Endgame (which also doesn’t officially bear the Disney logo) but at 172 minutes this director’s cut of The Happiest Millionaire does run longer than Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which would be the second longest movie to open with that castle logo. Of course counting that 172 minute cut (the one currently streaming on Disney+) is a bit dubious as this thing actually went out at a number of different running times: it was 164 minutes long when it premiered in Los Angeles, 144 minutes when it was brought to New York. It’s not entirely clear whether it ever got its intended roadshow release but by the time it was put into general release it had been cut down to 118 minutes and that wasn’t because anyone had any confidence in it. The film came out during something of a turning point for American cinema and the big flashy musicals that had earned so much money in the early 60s (including Disney’s Mary Poppins) had really outstayed their welcome and were starting to bomb. This movie doesn’t get talked about as much as Doctor Doolittle or Hello, Dolly when discussing the death of the roadshow musical, but it was definitely part of the trend. In fact one could in some ways view this as more of a failure than those movies, which at least managed to impress out of touch Academy members, whereas this movie seemed to impress no one.

The film doesn’t really have much of a strong high concept to rest on like most Disney movies. It’s set in the 1910s (an era that Walt Disney was kind of infatuated with) and looks at a mildly eccentric rich guy (who only strikes me as being moderately happy as millionaires go) played by Fred MacMurray and his family. I say “mildly eccentric” because the only particularly notable things about this guy are that he runs a bible study/boxing class, has some kind of obsession with the marine corps leading into the first world war, and also that he owns a bunch of pet alligators he apparently captured in the everglades. All of this could have been used as a satirical portrait of a bourgeois chickenhawk in a more interesting movie but here these are just seen as endearing quirks in an otherwise goodhearted man and his patriotic support of the bloodbath that was World War I likely seemed rather insensitive in a time when Vietnam was becoming increasingly controversial. Then in the film’s second half it increasingly becomes about a very bland romance and engagement between his daughter and another bland as fuck rich white guy and some father-of-the-bride antics from the MacMurray character.

It’s a very bland and indistinct story set in a not overly interesting setting and with characters who are not overly fascinating. It also isn’t really that much of a spectacle as these things go. The aforementioned Doctor Doolittle and Hello Dolly at least had elaborate sets and the like to make them noteworthy and this really doesn’t outside of that odd sub-plot with the alligators. Those other moves cost seventeen and twenty-five million to make while this thing only had five million pumped into it, which was probably good for Disney’s bottom line but it really left this thing feeling particularly anemic as a result; it has the runningtime and presentation of an epic but it isn’t one. Clearly the people involved seemed to think that all you needed to sell a musical was good music because they didn’t have much to rely on… and they didn’t even really have that. The film actually isn’t based on a Broadway musical, it’s based on a straight play and The Sherman Brothers were brought in to do the music and I wouldn’t say it’s their best work. The English actor Tom Steele, who plays an Irish butler that is kind of on the margins of the film’s actual plot has most of the mildly memorable numbers. I’m told his opening number "Fortuosity" was popular but I didn’t care for it nor did I like supposed standout "Let's Have a Drink on It." Basically the only song that stood out to me as even slightly memorable is the song "I'll Always Be Irish," which captures the dual identity of being an immigrant in interesting ways. Aside from that it’s rough sailing and so is the rest of this dull-ass goofy-ass waste of time movie.

* out of Five

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)

The early 70s were a pretty dark time for Disney for all the reasons I’ve gone into both in terms of animation and live action. They were making movies the whole time but the highlights were few and far between; Robin Hood was alright, Bedknobs and Broomsticks was something of a minor hit, and if you look at a list of pure live action films they made between 1969 and 1975 you see a whole lot of shit you’ve never heard of. Roger Ebert himself called this “a period of overwhelming banality in the studio's history” so I don’t I’m getting too much of an incorrect impression of this. But in 1975 things started to look up for them a bit. The Gen Xers were finally growing into film watching age in great enough numbers to support Disney movies and we start to get into movies that were nostalgic favorites of that generational cohort (who were disproportionally influential on my personal cinematic upbringing and I tend to have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about some of the movies they hold in high regard). It was early in 1975 that they made one of their first films in a while that people have pretty positive memories of: the science fiction adaptation Escape to Witch Mountain, which was a bit too early for the post-Star Wars sci-fi gold rush but which was nonetheless fairly successful and well-remembered.

The film is based on a book of the same title by Alexander H. Key and focuses in on a pair of orphaned siblings who have now been doubly orphaned as their foster parents have died before the start of the film, but no one really knows who their parents are as they were found as toddlers, but unbeknownst to the adults these kids have telekinetic powers that allow them to move objects with their minds and speak to each other through thoughts and get premonitions about the future. Eventually they blab about their powers to someone played by Donald Pleasence (usually a mistake) who is aparantly employed by some sort of evil society of evil, and the next thing you know they’re forging documents to adopt the kids so they can study them and use their powers for evil… which will eventually inspire the kids to escape… in the direction of Witch Mountain, eventually accompanied by a random old man played by Eddie Albert. So, if you’re a modern watcher that whole plot synopsis will sound awfully familiar as it’s a setup that’s been done time and again. Stephen King’s “Firestarter” comes to mind as a similar “bad guys chase kid with special powers across the country” story, the movie D.A.R.Y.L. is a similarly family friendly take on it, more recently there’s Midnight Special, the video game “Beyond: Two Souls,” and of course there’s “Stranger Things.” But this does predate all of that. I don’t know if this originated this setup itself but I can’t really think of a clear predecessor off the top of my head so I do think this gets clear points for originality and influence but I’m not sure this is the definitive take on the idea in terms of execution.

Watching the movie I noticed a pretty radical shift in the overall “feel” of the movie from what the other live action Disney movies felt like. Those other movies had their differences to be sure but (with a couple of exceptions) there was a clearly identifiable “house style” to them that I wasn’t really picking up on here. This may be a sign of Walt Disney no longer being around to drive things or it may simply be the natural result in changes to the overall Hollywood film aesthetic over time but the world of this film felt more grounded and less “cute.” There’s also a clearer sense of danger here, it’s not a comedy and you do get a sense that the villains here are willing to kill to get their way (even though they mostly don’t). That’s not to say that this is some kind of work of gritty realism because it’s not, it’s still very much a G-rated movie that was made by this studio because it has two cute kids at its center, but if you had told me some other studio had made it I wouldn’t have had too much reason to doubt it. Ultimately I think the movie could have used a little more pathos, the kids in it feel a bit too durable through the whole thing and the film is a bit too scared to really make this experience feel a bit more damaging to them and the characters feel a bit too broadly drawn (that Eddie Alpert character might as well be straight up saying “I’m a grumpy old man who whose heart must be warmed” when he’s first introduced). Those other movies that this seemingly inspired would probably serve as more thoughtful science fiction and more thrilling thrillers, but this was a pretty good start and a pretty good sign for Disney going into the era of the blockbuster.

*** out of Five

The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975)

As I’ve gone through this installment about Disney’s I’ve been building a somewhat simplistic narrative that Disney was hopelessly uncool in the 70s and that this would eventually force them to change, and I argued that the last movie I watched (Escape to Witch Mountain) was an example of them evolving with the times. But their other big movie of 1975, The Apple Dumpling Gang, is a pretty good argument that that argument is kind of bullshit and that Disney could also succeed in the 70s without changing much at all. The box office was indeed cooler and more adult in 1975, the four highest grossing movies were Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shampoo, and Dog Day Afternoon, but sitting at number ten (higher than Escape to Witch Mountain) was this dopey Disney movie that seems to have been directly targeted at the people who were mad as hell that “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres” had been cancelled four years earlier. And yet it’s not exactly a forgotten film, people of a certain age do still reference it, not always lovingly, but they certainly remember it.

The film is something of a comedy western. It’s not really a spoof or parody of the genre given that its conventions aren’t really questioned, rather it’s more like a traditional B-western but with a much heavier emphasis on comedy and family values. It’s primarily remembered for the antics of Don Knotts and Tim Conway as a pair of extremely dim and mostly harmless outlaws, but they’re only really half of the movie. The other half is this very dopey story about Bill Bixby (yes, the “The Incredible Hulk” guy) being forced to act as a guardian to three precocious children through some plot contrivances. That story is boilerplate family movie cutesy nonsense and the less said about it the better. As for the Knotts and Conway material… it’s not the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. The two are kind of like precursors to The Sticky Bandits from Home Alone but even more incompetent and even less villainous and there are some cute bits with them and their extraordinary stupidity. The two would end up becoming something of a comedy duo in the late 70s and Knotts would show up in several other Disney movies through the remainder of the decade (including a sequel to this one), so the success of this one would have some long lasting implications. As these things go there are worse movies out there, I can see why this would appeal to people in the 70s looking for some really, really, really unchallenging fare to pass their time but I think it’s time this thing was moved past.

** out of Five

I’d watch the Kurt Russell movies. Which Dracula doesn’t want to review.

I had six slots to fill, choices had to be made. 

It's been a very long time but that's largely my memories of the remake. It may have been intended as a Lindsay Lohan vehicle but it's Jamie Lee Curtis's movie.

Wow, I’ve never even heard of The Black Hole. I’ll have to take a gander at it one of these days.

SnoBorderZero PG Cooper PhantomKnight