Disneyology

Ugh.

I knew this would happen.

Aladdin is my favorite Disney movie.

Period.

It's the better franchise. I'll give it that. The Return of Jafar. The King of Thieves. The television series. The Sega Genesis video game. I'm basing all this on memory, but I'm certain it's still better than the rest. Even as kids we mocked the Disney direct-to-video sequels and largely ignored The Little Mermaid television series and the Timon and Pumba television series. But there was always mad respect for the Aladdin franchise. We even accepted Home Simpson as the Genie.

The TV show was awesome. Again. Based on memory.



No one gave a fuck. At least no one my age.



That was before your time. It was the redheaded step-child of the Disney Afternoon block.

The Lion King (1994)


Throughout its history there have been two major brands of Disney movies: the fairy tale movies (Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) and the talking animal movies (Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, etc) and it was decidedly the fairy tale movie that defined the Disney Renaissance. There was however one exception to this, and it was a big fucking exception: the ultimate Disney 90s hit The Lion King. The amount of money that The Lion King made is frankly astronomical. It hit the record that Aladdin set two years earlier and then made an additional hundred million dollars on top of it. It was the highest grossing animated movie ever made at the time by a wide margin and held that record until Finding Nemo came along almost a decade later and worldwide it was the second highest grossing movie of all time behind Jurassic Park (though oddly it wasn’t that year’s highest grossing movie domestically, because holy shit, Forrest Gump made so much more money than you think it did). It was frankly world conquering. I was part of that wave as well. I didn’t have some wildly memorable milestone first time viewing experience with it like I did with Aladdin, my mother just brought me to it on a random weekend afternoon and I presumably enjoyed it. Since then though I’ve had a lot more exposure to it than I did to most of the Disney movies of this generation. It was a go-to VHS in schools and summer programs and oddly I also ended up watching it in both Spanish and German while trying to learn those languages in middle school and high school respectively. So this isn’t as uncharted a territory as some of the other movies I’m looking at here, but there is something to seeing it within the context of its place in Disney history for this series.

The most notable thing about The Lion King is actually something you might not immediately think about: it’s the first wholly original Disney movie. This is perhaps original in the legal sense rather than colloquial sense. It clearly borrows liberally from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Disney’s own Bambi but there’s no one text that the film claims to be based on. Every other Disney movie up to this point has either been explicitly based on a famous story, novel, or children’s book, even the ones like 101 Dalmations or The Rescuers whose source material has largely been forgotten. The idea apparently had its genesis out of a desire to follow up their Arabian movie with a movie set in Africa but without all the baggage of making a movie about actual African humans, so they went with a movie about African wildlife living out in a version of the Serengeti that’s never been intruded by humans and where animals have created their own monarchical government. From there it essentially plays out like a feline version of Hamlet with a young prince left to slay an uncle who usurped the throne through regicide. It differs a bit from Shakespeare’s story in that Simba is led to believe that he’s personally responsible for the death of his father for much of the film and Pumbaa and Timon probably resemble a pair of Falstaffs more than they resemble Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but either way there is some legitimately ambitious and heavy stuff here that sets the film apart from most Disney movies.

Animation-wise The Lion King is yet another big step forward. You can see right from that amazing “Circle of Life” opening that this is being made by people who are incredibly confident in their talents and a lot of what they started earlier in the renaissance has kind of been perfected here. There aren’t really any of those moments of dated CGI like the stairs in The Little Mermaid, or the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast, or the opening of the cave of wonders like in Aladdin, everything here just looks great and they render the animals beautifully. They also really embrace celebrity voice actors here throughout the cast, which is often a red flag but here it’s done the right way rather than out of a calculated effort to put names on the poster. James Earl Jones adds a lot of gravitas to the film, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick both bring the right tone to Simba, Jeremy Irons makes for a very fun villain, and even Rowan freakin’ Atkinson somehow seems like an inspired casting choice here as Zazu the king’s aid. Alan Menken finally took a break with this one, which you’d think would have been a blow but Elton John somehow stepped in and somehow, with the help of Tim Rice, managed to write songs that were right up there with what came before and Hans Zimmer managed to step in and do a pretty good job with the rest of the score.

I tried to resist this movie’s charms and do the grumpy person pickiness I normally employ with these movies, but try as I might I really just couldn’t hate on it. I expected Pumbaa and Timon to come in and wreck it but even they didn’t seem too bad, especially not after the genie horseshit from the last movie. I could have done without Pumbaa’s fart story butting in on "Hakuna Matata" and Timon doing a luau to distract the guards, but Ernie Sabella and Nathan Lane do have good chemistry and the two characters have kind of a Laurel and Hardy thing going on. I also thought the movie’s final resolution could have been handled better. Scar just sort of admits to all his wrongdoing way to easily and some of the animation looks kind of weird when it goes into slow motion during the fight scenes, but as a sort of metaphorical fated duel to restore the throne it still works and it looks pretty cool with the fire and the dark sky. Really though this movie is hard to complain about, it’s clearly a pretty big win all around and I think I appreciate it all the more having seen all the proceeding Disney movies and having a clearer idea of how many of the pitfalls this doesn’t fall into and how many improvements it makes on what proceeded it. What can I say, they hit it out of the part this time.

****1/2 out of Five

Collecting Some Thoughts

The Lion King was clearly a major triumph for Disney and was the culmination of five nearly perfect years of growth and unprecedented success for Disney and it felt like they were going to go as the clear standard-bearers for animation for decades to come. Little did they know that their hubris would quickly get the best of them and that things would start to slip very quickly afterwards. Seeing them all now I can confirm that this era does indeed more or less live up to its reputation. Granted some kind of latent nostalgia may be having some effect on my opinions but given that I had clear issues with the one movie I should have the most nostalgia for I don’t think that’s the case. The Lion King was actually the last Disney movie I would end up seeing in theaters for a variety of reasons and I aged out of their demographic shortly thereafter. It is perhaps a strange quirk of fate during the five year period that Disney had its peak of critical and commercial popularity right when I happened to be of the exact right age to have been its intended audience while it was still going on. You’d think that something like that would have made me perfectly situated to become a lifelong fan but perhaps it had the opposite effect and led me to take Disney for granted, to demand something even better than peak-Disney before I’d be impressed by any kind of family movie again.

Anyway, I'm on a bit of a roll so I'm probably going to jump straight into the next set really soon.

You're kidding, right?

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/27/lion-king-kimba_n_6272316.html

I am aware of the conspiracy theories about Kimbra, I thought I had been fairly clear when I said ther was "no one text that the film claims to be based on" emphasis on "claims to be." As in, it's an "original IP" with no "based on" credit.

Us in 1995: Disney, we saw this movie already. It was called Fergully.

The Late Renaissance

I noted in my last installment the strange confluence of events that resulted in my having been the perfect age to have been there for what was arguably the commercial and artistic peak of Disney’s prowess, at least outside of the original Golden Age. Between 1989 and 1994 Disney had completely transformed itself into an absolute behemoth which put out four straight blockbusters (and some Rescuers thing that they wanted everyone to forget) and seemed like there were set up to be a permanent fixture in Hollywood that would continue to dominate animation forevermore. Then the rest of the 90s happened and everything went to shit. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, these movies are all still considered part of “The Disney Renaissance” and the true low-point is yet to come, but by all accounts Disney quickly squandered a lot of the goodwill they built up in the early 90s with the next five films leaving the door open for competitors like Pixar and Dreamworks to step in and eat their lunch in the 2000s. Of course I speak entirely from reputation, for all I know these movies are actually hidden gems. Unlike the movies in the last installment, I didn’t see any of these movies as a kid. I aged out of that demo during these years, perhaps quicker than some of my peers as my long time aversion to family movies was building during these years. So, no better way to find out the truth of this narrative than to jump in.

Pocahontas (1995)



When Beauty and the Beast became an Oscar nominated critical hit it definitely gave Disney a boost of confidence but the two films they had in production, Aladdin and The Lion King, were for whatever reason deemed to be more commercially oriented and wouldn’t have much of a shot of repeating that film’s award success. As such they decided that their next film would be the one where they went for broke aiming towards prestige, and that project was an adaptation of the famous Pocahontas legend. Of course this would be something very different from what Disney has done before as it would be the first Disney movie (outside of certain elements of Robin Hood) to be based on actual history rather than a fairytale or children’s’ book and not just that it was also a movie about a rather prickly moment in history that would require a lot of sensitivity. As such they did a lot of research to make sure that they knew how the Powhatan Indians dressed and what social customs they had and to make sure it was clear that they were not villains… except that for all the time and effort they put into accurately depicting certain details the people making the movie seemed to be blind to the fact that making a Disneyfied version of the Jamestown story was just an immensely terrible idea to begin with and that the story they were trying to tell was wildly misguided.

If The Lion King was Disney’s attempt at making a cute version of Hamlet, Pocahontas was their attempt to make a kid’s version of Romeo and Juliet. The historical John Smith and Pocahontas have been turned from the story of a by all accounts rather hardened 30 year old British captain who once maybe got saved by a twelve year old girl into a story about two star-crossed teenage lovers who start a whirlwind romance despite the fact that they come from different cultures who are feuding over silly misunderstandings. Of course the problem with this idea is that it requires both the Capulet and Montague stand-ins to be equally irrational in their animosity which very much was not the case means setting up the Powhattans and English as both being equally irrational in their distrust of one another, something that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American history will recognize as a ridiculous dichotomy to be setting up. The film certainly namechecks the notion that the Jamestown settlers were a potentially murderous threat to the Powhattans but rather than suggest that animosity towards the natives was widespread among the British they instead pin all the blame on their goofy villain and then have the gall to suggest that as soon as this villain was defeated that everyone lived happily ever after. Bull. Shit. They might as well have just made “Disney’s The Diary of Anne Frank” and then made Anne older and hotter so that she can have a romance with Goebbels and then suggest that the Holocaust was one big misunderstanding that was quickly cleared up once their love inspired the SS to turn against Hitler and avoid disaster.

Now, before it starts to seem like my aversion to this movie is entirely rooted in liberal bellyaching let me make it clear: this movie also sucks for any number of entirely apolitical reasons. First and foremost the entire movie rests on a pair of astonishingly boring protagonists. Pocahontas herself is an entirely wooden and ill-defined character. We’re told that she’s seen as “different” from the other villagers, presumably because she spends so much time doing dramatic poses on top of mountains, but really she’s just completely devoid of personality and Irene Bedard’s incredibly boring voice over does not help. As for John Smith? He’s… certainly very blond and, uh, daring I guess. He decides to stop calling the natives “savages” after Pocahontas puts him through a musical montage but that’s about it. They clearly spent a lot more time worrying about how these characters were going to look than what they’d actually do and the film suffers because of it. The film’s villain is also really terrible. John Ratcliffe was a real leader in Jamestown and he did have some conflicts with the natives (which would eventually result in his being ambushed and skinned alive) but by all accounts he wasn’t any worse than the rest of the English at Jamestown and even if you don’t know that you can still clearly tell he’s just ridiculous here. I mean, this is a guy who straight up sings the line “they’re not like you and me, which means they must be evil” at one point, which is about as nuanced as this movie’s view of intolerance is. He’s not just evil he’s downright stupid and incompetent in his evil and he’s not even a very fun or well rendered in his over the top villainy. Then there’s the movie’s rather bizarre prologue before the title card depicting John Smith setting sail and saving a guy in a storm, which feels incredibly stiff as an opening and feels oddly tacked on, if they’d completely cut it out the film would hardly change.

The movie also has this weird interest in “respecting” native people not by making them three dimensional characters but by portraying their religion as being literally true and essentially making them all into magical shamans who talk to trees and conjure vague ill-defined swirling leaf magic at will. There are of course ways to depict Native American connections to the environment without literally making them magical as Terrence Malick would go on to prove with his infinitely better Jamestown/ Powhattan movie The New World. It’s also kind of clear that they were sort of making up these aspects of native culture as they went. Like, do you know what “blue corn moon” means? It means nothing. Songwriter Stephen Schwartz straight up made it up because it sounded right in the song and I have a pretty strong hunch that this also goes for other touches like the talking tree grandmother and the rest of the new age bullshit they’re trying to sell as authentic culture. This culminates in the film’s ultimate “what the fuck” moment in which Pocahontas suddenly learns to speak English in two minutes through her swirling leaf magic. I mean, the language barrier is something the film was going to have to pave over in some way, but why in the world would you even bother to bring attention to it if they were just going to cheat like that. There was a much easier way out of this too: the Chesapeake area had already been explored by whites for upwards of a hundred years before John Smith landed, it’s a stretch but it’s plausible that some of the Natives would have already learned English.

Now, I’ve been very careful not to use the “R” word when discussing the film’s portrayal of history, in part because I think everyone involved had mostly good intentions when making the film. The problem is that none of them were thinking through the implications of what they were trying to do. They didn’t seem to realize that America’s painful history isn’t some fairy tale that they can just smooth out the edges on and give a happy ending. It isn’t just that though; this failure to see the bigger picture is what plagues this entire film. They were so focused on little details like what the characters were going to look like and how the animal sidekicks were going to behave and where the songs would be placed that they didn’t seem to notice that the film didn’t really have much of an arc, that its characters were dull as dishwater, and that they’ve accidentally denied a national tragedy. The result is a mess of a movie and to some extent audiences seemed to pick up on that. The movie did make some really good money, which is mostly a reflection of how hot the Disney brand was at the time, but the movie did make less than half of what The Lion King made and about two thirds of what Aladdin made. It also got rather mixed reviews, which to me was a big overly generous. If the movie had been made today in the climate of the hot take and the think piece it almost certainly would have been raked over the coals, and to me that would have been deserved. I’ve been about as sick as anyone at how demanding and political the online critical climate has been lately, but watching this movie was a good reminder of just how wrong things can go when filmmakers try to deal with material like this without having to think about what they’re doing and take their responsibilities seriously.

* out of Five

They didn't "disney-fy" the story much further from the Pocahontas myth we all grew up with.

No one knew the real story until at least high school.

I can't say that I'd ever heard of the story before the movie.  I realize that telling small children all the gory details of American imperialism is not always entirely appropriate but "just print the legend" isn't the solution either, especially when you're dealing with a sensitive topic like this.

I remember in 1995/1996 in Third Grade, when Pocahontas was out, kids were well aware that the movie was not at all historically accurate. It's not like it's something that became apparent years later. It was apparent then. I do wonder if kids today would be more or less discerning. I just don't picture kids today discussing the historical accuracy during school. Then again, maybe the teachers in 1995/1996 wanted to nip that confusion in the bud, as Pocahontas was "in" due to the movie's release.

Like I said a few posts above, I had a feeling you'd not like it. I do think you might like Hunchback better (though, not the gargoyles or goat). I just don't know how it got a G rating. Also, I can't see Disney having a villain like Frollo ever again. Not in this day and age.