Disneyology

The fact that that dork went on to become one of the most consistent commercial winners in Hollywood is astounding.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991)



Between the 25th anniversary, the new Blu-Ray release and the trailer for the live-action version, it was time to re-watch this movie. I hadn't seen it in AGES. My memory of it was: better than Little Mermaid but not on the same level as Aladdin and The Lion King. I might have to re-asses that. I can see how Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. To quote Shrek, "it's layered - like an onion."

Let's address the elephant in the room. Why was that witch (or whatever) such a bitch? The Prince was... 11? I wouldn't let some random old lady into my home either? And where the fuck are the parents? Is this kid just living with his peasants? What the fuck? And who's ruling this land now that he's a fucking Beast? I don't get it. Did the people in that village just forget there was a King/Queen/Prince? I guess I'm asking too many questions. The point is: this fucking kid went through puberty as a fucking Beast. I'd be pissed off too. The Beast is a VERY well-developed character. His reaction to everything is appropriate. He's angry. He's self-conscious. He's awkward. He's depressed. He's very layered - I like it.

Now let's move on to Belle. This poor girl. Why can't people just leave her alone? They're constantly talking shit about her. She's getting sexually harassed on a daily basis. Gaston, that guy, what a fucking asshole. I hate him. I'm glad he went out like a bitch.

All these characters are very well-executed. It's easy to get invested in their struggles and their joy. It's a great story about two troubled people meeting and bonding and one fucking asshole who gets what he deserves. If there's any issue with the movie it's the happily ever after style of Disney. These characters are not gonna live happily ever after. They have too many psychological issues. But - for a brief moment in time - they were happy. That I like.

The other thing I wanted to acknowledge is the music. As a kid, I was kind of indifferent. I gravitated more towards Aladdin and The Lion King, and if it counts, The Nightmare Before Christmas. But now, I gotta say, the music is perfect. The score. The songs. They're great.

Overall, I give this movie an A.

Alright, let's get back to this

The Early Disney Renaissance

It’s been a little while, but now that award season 2016 is over I’m finally ready to get back in the groove of this series. In the first part of the series I looked at the first forty-nine years of the Disney Animation Studio, which consisted of about twenty movies. For this second half I’ll only need to look at about twenty years of the studio’s history between 1989 and 2009 and yet I’ll actually be watching twenty-two movies, which is a function of Disney’s increased production and general strength during this era. The last installment, which spanned 1977 to 1988 showed Disney at its alleged lowest point, but you could see signs of what was to come in those movies. They were clearly upping their game on a technical level and were also growing more confident about commissioning popular music and hiring celebrity voice actors in that period and by the end you could see the infrastructure in place. What we had not yet seen was Disney applying their improved craftsmanship towards stories that harkened back to the studio’s golden age. Enter the Disney Renaissance. This period, which lasted more or less throughout the 90s was Disney’s big comeback and it set the standard by which most of the studio’s films are judged today. It’s also notable moment in the studio for me personally as this era (and specifically the five movies in this installment) was occurring during the time when I was actually the target audience for these movies. However much I shunned them when I got older these movies were a part of my childhood if perhaps not as big a part of it as it was for some people of my generation.

The Little Mermaid (1989)


Oliver & Company had been Disney’s attempt to return to relevance by being cool and hip and reaching out to the MTV generation and for the most part they kind of fell on their face doing so. For their next project they decided to go in the other direction and making a movie that was a bit more dignified and that brought more modern techniques to the “Disney Fairy Tale” format that had built the company. That seems like an obvious direction for them to have gone with 20/20 hindsight but it certainly wasn’t that obvious at the time. It’s easy to forget now but there had really only been about three or four true “fairy tale” movies in their first fifty years and the last one they made, Sleeping Beauty, was kind of a financial boondoggle. Fortunately someone at Disney decided that this more traditional approach was worth giving a shot and the team Ron Clements and John Musker, both hot off their work on The Great Mouse Detective, were chosen to direct and the film was given more resources than most of their recent movies to make it the comeback project they had been hoping for.

As the movie began I was immediately struck by the fact that the film does still show its age in the animation. The colors aren’t quite as sharp as what I associate with the Disney Renaissance look but that isn’t to say that there aren’t a whole lot of tricks here that were very impressive; for instance I’m sure that a megaton of painstaking work was put into making Ariel’s hair look right while underwater. This was, incidentally, the last Disney movie to still be primarily animated through traditional animation cels so it maybe isn’t surprising that the look is a bit transitional. The film’s other most notable feat is almost certainly the music. The decision was clearly made at some point that this should be a musical, which wasn’t exactly new for Disney but the way they did it was new. The earlier Disney movies had songs but they always felt a bit like afterthoughts and didn’t advance the story as much. This one by contrast seems structured more like a Broadway musical, which may be a function of the fact that Broadway was kind of booming during the 80s with super-productions like “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera” raking in billions. To do this they brought in Alan Menken, who had written “Little Shop of Horrors” earlier that decade to both write the score and compose some original songs. His score is clearly more substantial than what we’ve heard in previous Disney movies and sounds very classical. At times it’s actually a little over-done like in an early scene with a shark where the music just does not seem to stop, but in general it gives the film a lot more class and weight than it otherwise might have. As for the songs, well I thought the big “I Wish” song “Part of Their World” was less impactful than I expected it to be but those Sebastian Calypso songs hold up remarkably well both as songs and as musical sequences in the movie.

Outside of the music and visuals the move starts to show some weaknesses. I think the biggest problem in the movie is probably the Ariel character who ultimately seems kind of one-dimensional. She really wants to see the surface and marry that Prince, it’s her single minded obsession and seemingly the only thing that really drives her and it drives her to do some really stupid things. The traditional feminist rejoinder to the movie was that the heroine “gives up her voice for a man,” which didn’t bother me as much as just how generally reckless she is. King Trident likely has very good reasons for forbidding contact with the human world what with humanity’s tendency to murder anything they don’t understand so Ariel isn’t just putting herself in danger by chasing her every whim and that contract with Ursula is the kind of horrible deal that only a complete moron would sign on to. There’s a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” quality to Ariel’s romantic insistence on chasing her desires beyond all rationality, but unlike that play (and the original Hans Christian Anderson story upon which this is based for that matter) this doesn’t end with the star-crossed lover dead in a tomb, instead the mess that Ariel creates is just kind of luckily cleaned up by the Prince minutes after everything goes wrong. Of course a lot of this kind of stuff is a lot worse in some of the older Disney movies so I guess this deserves kudos as a sort of step in the right direction just the same.

The Little Mermaid, came out late in 1989 when I wouldn’t have even been two years old yet so I’m pretty sure I missed the movie during its theatrical run but I’m pretty sure I did watch it on VHS more than a couple of times. In fact I actually have clearer memories of my family owning the movie’s soundtrack on cassette than I do of actually watching the movie but I am pretty sure it was a childhood favorite just the same. Disney itself was certainly happy with the product and it was pretty immediately recognized as a turning point by the press and by general consensus. It won two Oscars for its music and the film made about $85 million during its theatrical run placing it at number 13 for the year in-between The War of the Roses and Steel Magnolias (good lord have box office trends changed) so it wasn’t quite in world-conquering blockbuster mode quite yet but that was more than any Disney movie had ever made in raw box office numbers and was clearly their first unambiguous success in a very long time. It was readily apparent to all involved that Disney had struck upon a new mold upon which they would be able to go forward and the big question now was just how they were going to be able to do it.

***1/2 out of Five

Next Up: The Rescuers Down Under 

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)



The Little Mermaid was a very big deal for Disney and their subsequent output makes it incredibly clear that they recognized it right away and immediately started to capitalize one it, they did not however have this revelation until that movie’s release late in 1989 when their backup plan was already in production: a belated sequel to the 1977 film The Rescuers. The film sticks out like a sore thumb right smack in the middle of all these other Disney Renaissance movies but truth be told it probably would have been an odd direction for them to have gone at any time. Disney just does not make fully produced theatrical sequels, even in today’s crazy franchise obsessed film landscape they have yet to make another real sequel (though a Wreck-It-Ralph 2 is currently in production) and yet they did this time and to what would seem like one of their less popular and less well remembered films to boot. It’s something that only makes sense when you remember just how desperate Disney was for a hit all through the 80s and how they didn’t know at the time that The Little Mermaid would be that hit.

In many ways The Rescuers Down Under feels less like a true sequel so much as a glorified remake of the original movie that’s been relocated to Australia (a country that America was oddly obsessed with in the 80s) and it maintains a lot of that original film’s weaknesses. Like the first film it has the titular rescuers out to save a wildly bland and annoying kid from a ridiculously evil bad guy with a reptilian henchman who’s kidnapped them. I also still don’t see the appeal of this weird organization of mice interested in saving kids (who are inexplicably able to talk to animals) despite mice being seemingly the last species of animal to be capable of such rescues. There is however one thing the movie has which the original film didn’t have: computer generated animation. This was the first Disney movie made using something called the CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) system rather than any kind of hand drawn cels and it’s abundantly clear that they were very excited to play with their new toy. The movie is filled with sweeping camera moves and chase/flight scenes that show off what this new system is capable of. Sometimes this does look very cool even if some of that 2D animation charm gets lost, other times it can kind of just look bad like an early shot of the New York City skyline which looks like something out of a particularly cheap PS1 game.

The Rescuers Down Under does not really feel all that much like a Disney movie for better or worse. There are no songs, it’s not based on some age old fairy tale, and it’s oddly action driven. As an adventure story it works pretty well and I’m willing to bet that if I was a seven year old and I was watching it in 1990 I would have loved it, but I’m not and it’s not. The film has maintained some stature among nostalgic Disney fans, but it tends to be ignored otherwise. For that matter it was kind of ignored at the time too. It got middling reviews and only made $27 million at the box office, which I’m pretty sure makes it a bomb. This might have to do with the fact that it’s a sequel to a movie that was thirteen years old at the time (meaning someone who was five when the first movie came out would have been old enough to vote by the time the sequel came along), and by 1990 the three major voice actors in it were all geriatrics. Of course part of the extent of its box office failure was the result of Jeffrey Katzenberg pulling advertising for the film after it opened fourth at the box office behind the likes of Home Alone and Problem Child 2 so as not to throw good money after bad. Part of me feels that wasn’t simply a cold business calculation so much as a tacit admission that the film simply didn’t fit in with the brand that Disney would soon be building. It was a holdover from a different era of Disney that the studio was happy to forget that just so happened to be made with techniques from the era to come.

*** out of Five

Next: Beauty and the Beast

I'm fairly certain that was produced by their TV department and simply distributed to theaters by Disney, and thus, does not count.

Also, very glad to see this thread return!

Beauty and the Beast (1991)



If The Little Mermaid was Disney’s big comeback Beauty and the Beast was where they perfected the formula and cashed in. I would have been about four when it came out so it was still just a little bit before my time. I might maybe have seen it in theaters but I don’t really remember it, I also don’t remember it being a fixture of home viewing either but I do think I eventually saw a lot of it on VHS at some point, maybe at school or something. Honestly, of the four big Disney movies of this era this is probably the one I least remember the kids of my generation being crazy about but it seems to have been the one adults liked the best and finally watching it now (possibly for the first time seeing it from beginning to end) I can see why it’s the one that got all the Oscars and acclaim. The movie is just made with a whole lot of confidence and seems to be where a lot of strong decisions were made. You can tell right from the opening with the stain glass windows and the ominous music that the people making it were serious about taking the Disney fairy tale to the next level in terms of both animation and tone. Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise do not shy away from some of the more dark and ominous imagery that this castle and this beast would seem to invite and the animation itself is clearly on some next level shit.

I’m almost inclined to be suspicious of the look of the movie on this blu-ray I watched it on, the movie has clearly been restored to the nines and I have trouble believing the movie always looked this damn clean. However clean it originally looked it’s plainly obvious that the animation technology used for the film is another huge leap forward; it definitely looks better than The Little Mermaid and also uses the newfound technology with a lot more discipline than The Rescuers Down Under did. The ballroom scene looks a little wonky today but otherwise I have few complaints about the film’s look. The design elements are also pretty neat. The beast himself looks like a really cool bear/wolf/lion thing that swings from being wild to being human rather seamlessly when needed and I also dig that effect that they put on Robby Benson’s voice. As for the “Beauty” side; according to the Buzzfeed quiz I took when researching this series Belle is “the Disney princess that I am,” I think because I said I enjoy reading. I think the people making this thought they were making something really subversive by making Belle a lady who is smart enough to read and doesn’t swoon for the handsome guy, I don’t know that I was that impressed by this, but it’s not too far off from the “groundbreaking feminist” women who populate the newest Disney movies. Of course if you’re going to subvert fairy tale conventions this probably is the best one to do it with, after all there is already a bit of a subversion baked into the story given that it’s a fairy tale where it’s the man who needs to be saved from a magical affliction by the love of a woman rather than the reverse.

The usual talking point that arises when discussing this movie is the fact that, looked at objectively, it’s essentially a movie about a woman falling in love with her captor with her Stockholm Syndrome being quickly established though a montage/inner monologue song. The problem is there and it doesn’t make a ton of objective sense, but that’s really kind of just something that’s inherent to the original fairy tale and I’m not sure if there was really a way they could have dealt with it too much better. Where the movie does start to lose me is with the Gaston character, who is just really over the top with his doucheiness. I get that he’s meant to be something of a send-up of the traditional Prince Charming but this is handled without even the slightest bit of subtlety and he has a whole lot of screen time too. I also really found Gaston’s voice to be kind of old-fashioned and grating, especially when he was singing. Speaking of singing, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman are back making this into a musical and they certainly wrote their share of good tunes for it. I’m not sure anything here is quite as catchy as the calypso numbers from The Little Mermaid but the Oscar winning title track is of course a classic of film music and there are some other songs here that are certainly well executed, maybe a few too many. I haven’t counted them out but it feels like there are twice as many songs here as there were in The Little Mermaid and it feels a bit excessive. If they’d cut out a few of the weaker numbers the showstoppers would have probably worked a bit better.

So there’s some stuff to like here but did it deserve to be the first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture? Actually, it just might have been. Don’t get me wrong, I doubt I would have personally put it in my top five for that year but with the Disney animated film being the fifty-plus year old institution that they are it kind of seemed to make sense that they be acknowledged at some point and if they were going to do that it probably was right to do it for a movie that actually raised the envelope in the genre like this movie did. At the end of the day the movie did end up leaving the 64th Annual Academy Awards with the exact same two music Oscars that The Little Mermaid won but this was definitely an “it’s an honor just to be nominated” moment as this reflected the movie’s prominence in the wider culture. The movie made $145 million in theaters domestically, which doesn’t sound like a ton today but considering that no other Disney animated movie had ever broken the $100 million barrier and that it was the third highest grossing movie of the year behind Terminator 2 and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. That is a huge victory especially given that the movie allegedly actually cost less to make than The Little Mermaid (no floating hair to animate).

**** out of Five

I don't know what goofballs you guys are hopped up on but every kid I know thinks Oliver and Company is the best, no contest.

Nah, I remember all the girls being obsessed with Ariel and drawing pictures of mermaids in their notebooks and shit.   

Quit hanging out with junior Billy Joel fans.

Drac, are you seeing the live action version this weekend to compare and contrast? The timing seems perfect.

Probably not, that movie just looks completely redundant.

Aladdin (1992)



The circumstances of how I first saw The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast are hazy in my memories, but the same cannot be said about Aladdin. In fact Aladdin is very likely the first movie I saw in theaters, it’s certainly the first one I distinctly remember seeing. I don’t want to over-romanticize the experience but it did seem pretty damn special at the time. I remember the screen seeming huge to me and the packed theater felt almost like an extension of the cave of wonders from the film and I also distinctly remember leaving the theater and it being kind of later at night than I’d usually be out of the house. Needless to say it was an experience that stuck with me. I think I saw the movie in theaters at least one more time during that initial run and probably watched it a couple more times on video but it has probably been well over twenty years since I last saw it. I was not alone in having seen it that year as it was the highest grossing movie of 1992 by a decent margin. If Beauty and the Beast was the first Disney movie to make over a hundred million Aladdin was the first to make over two hundred million. It didn’t have quite the critical support of the last two films and it didn’t have quite the same Oscar success (though Alan Menken did three-peat for song and score), but the world was still very much on Disney’s side at this point. But does the movie hold up?

After the incredible success of Beauty and the Beast it would have been a mistake to do another straight-up European fairy tale right after it. So from here Disney would begin looking to less obvious sources for their movies and would specifically begin looking to the traditional stories of other cultures and given this going to one of the stories from the Arabian Nights certainly made sense. Aladdin draws from the storybook version of classic Arabia as well as the Hollywood adventure serial version of it seen in films like The Thief of Bagdad and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. This is probably what the film does best. The film’s fictional country of Agrabah is really well wrought despite some strange geographical features like the inclusion of Tigers and Parrots and the whole film has a lot of strong design elements from the guards’ costumes to the Sultan’s palace to the cave of wonders’ interior. The adventure elements also work quite well with some really strong set-pieces like Aladdin’s final fight with Jafar and the animation is also sharp looking and a little more stylized than what we saw in their last two films.

Where the film starts to falter a bit is in the characters. In particular, I found Aladdin himself to be kind of a bore. It is kind of interesting to begin with that Disney was attempting to make what is essentially one of their fairy tale movies but from the perspective of a male protagonist and you can tell that the people involved were not quite sure how to handle that. Unlike Belle and Ariel, who were both unfulfilled at the beginning of their movies, Aladdin seems pretty comfortable in his own skin from the beginning of the film and while he’s theoretically not happy about the fact that he lives in abject poverty he seems to manage his street life just fine. Eventually he sets his sights on wooing Princess Jasmine as his motivation in the film, but you never really feel that deep desire in him, he just says he wants her to fall in love with him and you roll with it. That I don’t care much for Scott Weinger’s voice performance is part of the problem. He makes the character sound like this privileged surfer dude and that just makes you not that excited to get on board with him.

Of course the most notable voice actor here isn’t the voice of Aladdin, it’s Robin Williams as the genie. Regardless of what he did, Williams’ presence here would have been noteworthy. Semi-recognizable actors had been periodically doing voices in Disney movies for decades at this point, usually either aging character actors or cult figures but this was probably the first time that they gave a prominent role to a major celebrity at the height of his fame and invited him to very much be himself in the voice booth. The results are fucking annoying. I should preface this by pointing out that I’ve always found Robin Williams’ rather caffeinated stand-up/talk show persona to be a bit annoying in long chunks and it’s doubly annoying here when he seems interested in taking the viewer out of the movie at every opportunity with his fourth wall breaks and his impressions that were probably already dated when he was doing them in 1991. The animators do do interesting things with the genie from a visual perspective and there is certainly some raw skill in the way they try to react to all of Williams’ digressions but pretty much every time that character was on the screen I just wanted him to go away so I could get back to the classical Arabian serial adventure.

I dislike that genie character both for how he is in this movie and for what he did to childrens’ movies in general. I feel like the roots of everything I hate in the Dreamworks style probably stem from him and that is unfortunate. This is not an easy part of the movie to overlook, for me it’s kind of a glaring flaw, but the overall package here does have a lot to offer. Alan Menken’s new roster of songs (half with lyrics by the late Howard Ashman and half with lyrics by frequent Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator Tim Rice) are once again strong, if not quite as strong as Beauty and the Beast’s and they’re used a bit more judiciously than they were in that movie. Rework Blue Deadpool 1.0, punch up the main character a bit, and maybe add an extra layer or two to the story and you’ve got a pretty solid Disney flick here. I have a feeling that when I get deeper into this series and I find myself looking at the likes of Treasure Planet and Home on the Range I’m probably going to regret being so hard on this one, but when surrounded by other better movies this starts to seem a bit weaker by comparison.

*** out of Five

Drac, you didn't even mention the most important part; what a babe Jasmine is.