Disneyology

You gonna watch the sequel? That seems to be the one the freaks really cream themselves over.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Unlike a lot of the remakes that Disney suddenly jumped on when they became trendy, the company had actually been trying to make “sequel to Mary Poppins” happen for a while. In fact they wanted to do a sequel right away after the box office success of the first movie but author P. L. Travers would not let them given her objections to the first film (which you can see chronicled in the Tom Hanks/ Emma Thompson film Saving Mr. Banks). They tried again in the late 80s but again Travers proved to be stubborn and irascible well into her old age. The old bat finally croaked in 1996 so by the time Disney began exploiting every last piece of IP in the 2010s the door was open and after Disney approached director Rob Marshall in 2015 things came together pretty quickly. The film they envisioned would be something more akin to a “Legacyquel” (meaning something that’s technically a sequel to a previous franchise but which feels like a reboot) than a true remake and picks up 25 years after the first film with one of the kids having grown up to be kind of fiscally irresponsible and is about to get his house foreclosed on if they can’t find the bank shares that have been misplaced. I would suggest that these people need an estate lawyer more than they need a nanny, but like in the first movie Mary Poppins manifests and starts to get up in everyone’s business.

Now, if you’ve been following this Disneyology series you’ll know that I’m no fan of the original Mary Poppins and in that capacity I actually think this sequel is a slight improvement. The episodic adventures that Poppins takes the kids on generally feel a bit stronger here, there generally seem to be higher stakes to the story, and the film’s music is a bit more to my taste than the songs in the original. Having said all that, this is still a movie that’s very much meant to invoke that original film and please its fans and that is a problem because there are things about this franchise I just can’t stand. The whole franchise just seems to rest on these annoyingly wholesome stories about precious little moppets you want to kill and that’s the case here. I would also say that all this drama around the home foreclosure is kind of silly given that Mary Poppins herself seems to have borderline omnipotent power and could theoretically solve all these problems with a snap of her fingers but doesn’t, presumably because she’s trying to teach this family some kind of lesson but I’m not sure what because they basically just get saved by a deus ex machina anyway. Setting personal taste aside I would say that this probably is made with a little more class and care than your average Disney remake, but even the most successful remake of this movie was not going to be my cup of tea.
**1/2 out of Five

Can't imagine why Disney would want to show that corporate villains aren't actually all bad.


I'll probably get to this eventually for Burton but my enthusiasm is pretty damn low.

I've been meaning to eventually see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Tim Burton for the last sixteen years. I think I can give it another decade or two.

For whatever else Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is, I'm fairly certain it's more interesting than Dumbo. It's rare to see a $150 million dollar family movie that seems so bizarre and hostile.

Holy shit!

Aladdin (2019)

By the time the 2019 Aladdin came around critics were firmly opposed to this whole trend of live action Disney remakes on principle and I remember this one having the added infamy of becoming a bit of a laughingstock after a poorly executed trailer came out that made the genie in it look pretty bad. So I must say that when I turned it on my expectations were pretty low but funnily enough I actually kind of liked the actual film (at least a little) and am in the awkward position of having to defend the indefensible. I think part of that reaction comes down to the fact that in my eyes the original Aladdin is one of the less successful of Disney’s 90s “renaissance” movies. It’s the one I should have the most nostalgia for given the age I was at when it came out but it stands out to me as the one that’s aged the least gracefully, in part because the Robin Williams’ performance as the Genie just strikes me as a bit awkward and a bit rooted in dated pop culture references. That is something that could have used some updating and beyond that the whole Arabian Nights milieu in general doesn’t strike me as one that’s been overdone by Hollywood and which could benefit by being scaled up into a live action epic. And that is more or less what director Guy Richie (of all people) did with this movie. It’s more or less a plot point by plot point remake (with a few additions) and fairly openly reuses a lot of the art assets of original film but it’s not what you’d call a shot for shot remake.

Richie’s version of Agrabah is pretty well rendered, certainly heavily following the lead of the animated film’s aesthetic but expanding on it and there was a bit more of a thrill in seeing the Sultan’s palace and the Cave of Wonders made “real” than there was in seeing the Beast’s castle brought to life in that remake. The script hues very closely to the original and I can probably take or leave most of the changes that were made. A love interest is added for the Genie for once he’s freed at the end, which ties into a slightly clever framing story. No big deal, but its fine. Less successful is an attempt to make Jasmine more palpably embrace her inner girlboss through a song called “Speechless” (the reprise of which hilariously ends with her being hypnotized and literally rendered speechless). Beyond that the film’s finale is a bit expanded and made more of an action set-piece. Finally I think I’m going to defend the Will Smith take on the Genie, which is less of an imitation of the Robin Williams version and instead kind of takes on Smith’s natural charisma and creates something of a Fresh Prince Genie and as a purely subjective preference I think I have more affection for that than I do for Robin Williams doing anachronistic celebrity impressions. The visual effects are also a major step up from what we got from Dumbo despite the two films having fairly comparable budgets though they’re hardly mindblowing.

Having said all that my defense of this movie is modest and tepid as there are some serious drawbacks, none bigger than the guy at the center of it all: Mena Massoud. This actor was a relative unknown before he was cast in this movie and frankly I think he’s in a bit over his head here. He seems like a perfectly functional actor who’s trying his best but this is a pretty iconic character he’s trying to inhabit and I just don’t think the pure star power and charisma is there. I didn’t care too much for the guys they got to play Jafar or the Sultan either, but everyone is largely competent. At the end of the day, this is certainly every bit the product of soulless number crunching it looks like; whatever mild defense I make of it is in relation to the other Disney remakes and my low expectations for the whole endeavor, but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t think Richie did about as much as he could to make this seem like a real movie and one that mostly flows about as well as it could.

*** out of Five

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)

Going by straight continuity I should probably be following up my viewing of Aladdin (released 5/24/2019) with The Lion King (released 7/19/2019), but I’ve decided to save that one for last in this viewing series for dramatic effect and will instead jump straight to the October release Maleficent: Mistress of Evil instead. Out of all the movies in this series this is almost certainly the one I was the least curious about going in both for better or worse. It wasn’t a movie I was looking forward to but also wasn’t exactly one I was dreading having to sit though… it was just kind of there. I feel like audiences and critics were similarly disinterested back in 2019. I don’t remember hearing a single thing one way or the other from critics at the time and while the film (like basically everything Disney releases) was a financial success to some extent but it made about a million dollars less than Dumbo domestically (they were numbers 22 and 23 at the domestic box office) but did noticeably better internationally (out grossing Dumbo by a hundred million worldwide) which is probably enough that it sounds like a Maleficent 3 will be happening. Still, it’s a movie that made minimal impact on pop culture and might have been a bit better served if it hadn’t come out during the remake-a-palooza that was 2019.

Of course a bit part of why I was so disinterested was that the original Maleficent has proven to be an exceptionally unmemorable movie… to the point where I barely remembered what happened in it even though I’d only seen it something like four month ago. That having been said I did end up getting caught back up and did end up kind of enjoying certain aspects of the film to some extent. Particularly, the movie has a final battle scene at the end between an army of humans fortified in a castle and the various fairy people and winged beings that are attacking them. I’m not saying that this is some great battle scene for the ages but it was able to pretty nicely differentiate itself from the cookie cutter battles between CGI armies we normally get in these post-LOTR fantasy movies. Outside of that though I don’t think there’s a lot of inspiration to be found here. The film basically undoes a lot of the developments in the previous film in order to find a way to rekindle the fight between humanity and fairy people and our title character kind of gets sidelined for a while toward the end and kind of becomes the least interesting character in her own movie. All told I do still think this is one of the more dignified franchises in the Disney remake trend and becomes even more its own thing here given that it no longer has any need to retell the original Sleeping Beauty story but it still never quite comes together as a truly needed thing.

**1/2 out of Five

Kinda stunned you even counted this one.

The Lion King (2019)

So, I’ve finally gotten to “the big one.” The second highest grossing movie of 2019 behind Avengers: Endgame and the movie that made many a film critic completely blow a gasket with the sheer insanity of its existence… the live action remake of The Lion King. Actually calling this a “live action” remake is a bit dubious considering that the film has no human actors and is by all accounts almost entirely computer generated outside of a single shot of a rising sun at the beginning. Directed by Jon Favreau this can likely be seen as a follow-up to his 2016 version of The Jungle Book, which is one of the better received Disney remakes in part because it was a remake of a movie that was a touch stale and in part because it made changes and also had some pretty interesting technical achievements. Most of that does not apply to The Lion King: the original film is still one of the studio’s most beloved films, one that even I can’t really hate on, and the movie pretty slavishly follows the original film’s script. Some would say that the decision to cast black actors as all of the lions, which I don’t think was responding to a complaint much of anyone actually had with the original and mostly just serves as a flailing attempt to find a reason why this needed to happen at all. As for its technical merits… I don’t know, I mean, the animals certainly look real which is impressive on some level but it’s also true that they’re less expressive than their animated counterparts and generally have less artistry to them.

So, most of what you’ve heard about this is true, however, The Lion King remains a very durable piece of storytelling and at a certain point there’s only so much you can do to screw it up. As creatively bankrupt as the film’s borderline shot-for-shot similarities are, the approach does mean that quite a bit of what did work about that original film does seep through into the new version. I would be curious to see how someone who’s been living under the rock for the last twenty five years (or, you know, a kid) would react to this absent any baggage for the original movie because in a vacuum I think this would be less offensive than it seems to the rest of us. But the movie doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists in a reality where there was already a perfectly good animated version of this movie and the utter absence of any changes here is basically an admission that there was nothing broken about the original version. Who was asking for this? Well, a lot of people I guess, if the film’s outlandish box office is any indication. I don’t know, I guess “normies” just look at this stuff differently and view classic films less as these totems to stand the test of time and more as disposable products to be replaced by the new model even if the new model turns out to have defects. To me though this feels kind of like an insult to the legacy of 2D animation that Disney was built on. But again, that’s the meta-view of it, as a product unto itself all I can really do is shrug, I didn’t actively hate sitting through it or anything.

**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

Well, this experience both confirmed and confounded most of my expectations about these movies. The movies they made between 2010-2018 weren’t all “good” exactly but there was some interesting variation to be found between them as they tested out new ideas for how these movies could be but over time they worked out the “kinks” and by 2018 the conveyer belt was really churning these things out in the blandest way and the movies in this half of my survey mostly lived down to their reputation, many of them not even having the decency to be bad in a way that I find interesting and I kind of struggled to find anything to say about a lot of them. Since their overstuffed 2019 Disney has slowed down their output of these remakes a lot. I’m not sure how much the pandemic played into that but they only released one live action remake in 2020, the live action Mulan, which sucked in a lot of the same ways a lot of these have sucked despite having more potential than most. Then in 2021 they released Cruella which I actually liked quite a bit though it does have some glaring problems and looking back I think my three and a half star review might have been a bit too generous, still that’s one of the best things to come out of this trend and points to things may be getting a little better as we move forward.

There are two of these remakes on tap for 2022. The first is a Peter Pan adaptation Peter Pan & Wendy, which is being directed by David Lowery (promising!) but it’s apparently being released directly to Disney+ (not promising). The other movie is also set for Disney+, an adaptation of Pinocchio to be directed by Robert Zemeckis… lot of ways that can go wrong. Then we’ll get another theatrical release in the form of The Little Mermaid, which is being directed by Rob Marshall and is set for release in 2023. After that we’re getting a wave of sequels to the remakes including The Jungle Book, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Cruella and while it’s not clear how deep they’re in production on any of them there is some preliminary work being done on remakes of Snow White, Bambi, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules. So this trend isn’t going anywhere.

Return to Oz (1985)

Walter Murch is a very important figure in 20th century film. Murch was a double threat as both an editor and a sound designer; a three time Oscar winner who worked on some absolute classic films including The Godfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now, and American Grafitti and continued to be credited on more modern films like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Jarhead and still occasionally works today. What’s more he’s credited with a number of technical innovations in his field and holds a number of “firsts” for editing and sound design and his 1995 book “In the Blink of an Eye” is considered a canonical work on the craft of editing. The man is a legend… which is why it’s so damn weird that he put his editing and sound careers on hold for most of the 1980s to focus on his one and only directorial credit on a weird oddity of a movie that’s mostly remembered for scaring the crap out of Gen X children: the Wizard of Oz pseudo-sequel Return to Oz which is possibly one of the strangest movies ever released by Disney. How? Why?

Well, in some ways this was a long time coming. Disney had nothing to do with the making of the 1939 The Wizard of Oz but at a certain point they sort of adopted it. Seemingly out of a jealous need to own all things family entertainment Walt Disney bought the rights to all of L. Frank Baum’s remaining Oz books and had intended to make a live action movie in the 50s called “Rainbow Road to Oz,” which reportedly got really far into production before being shelved for unclear reasons and being replaced by their Babes in Toyland production. And of course later on in the early 2010s Disney would once again leverage this old acquisition to produce Sam Raimi’s mostly forgettable Oz: The Great and Powerful. But the first time they took the plunge into making a was at the convincing of Murch, who proposed the project to Disney and wrote the screenplay, so this is not a situation where an important figure stumbled into some studio head’s misguided project, this was all him. It should be noted that despite the film’s title this is legally considered not to be a sequel to MGM’s film (though a deal would be struck to let them use the Ruby slippers) but a “separate” adaptation of the literary works of Baum. And it seems that in Murch’s mind this wasn’t just a legal loophole, he seems to have been rather serious about bringing in the new characters and darker themes of Baum’s sequels and that is probably where he went wrong.

By 1985 those L. Frank Baum books were weird relics of the early twentieth century, everyone associated these stories with the 1939 movie and I don’t think there was some rabid L. Frank Baum fanbase asking for anything like this. So you had all sorts of families showing up to this expecting another fun colorful romp through the land of Oz and instead they got an adventure through a dilapidated world that had been overthrown by a rock monster and repopulated with roving roller people and headless witches and the Tin Man and Cowardly lion replaced by a fat robot and a dude with a jack o’ lantern for a head… it wasn’t the most crowd pleasing approach. But I must say, as someone watching it for the first time as an adult and with the awareness that this was a cult movie with a reputation I found a lot to enjoy about this. Murch makes some very creative use of stop motion effects throughout and the film has some very interesting set design to bring his post-apocalyptic Oz to life. The weird horror elements are present almost from the beginning with one of the first things Dorothy encounters being this deranged gang of people with wheels attached to their hands and feet (very Mad Max) and there is a disturbing potency to some of the characters they pick up along the way.

This isn’t a situation where things seemed to scare kids unintentionally; Murch must have known what he was doing in making things this dark and I’m really not sure how his Disney superiors let this happen. It’s a real case of someone doing some odd maverick shit on the company dime. So I was consistently intrigued by this movie’s imagery but I was not so intrigued by its story. The Dorothy here is really not a terribly compelling lead and the girl they got to play her was no Judy Garland. I would also say that the cast of supporting characters she picked up intrigued me more visually than they did as personalities (they’re quite bland really). Also while a lot of the practical effects hold up I’m not sure that it’s kind of drab cinematography does. So as neat as I find the gonzo vision of all this there are limits to how much I can really call this a “good” movie, it’s just too messy. Still this is certainly something I’m glad I gave a look and am just kind of fascinated by the fact that it exists at all.

*** out of Five