In this installment of Now That’s What I Call Nostalgia we talk about the educational, entertaining and often deeply, deeply weird French series Once Upon a Time…Life.
Author: unshavedmouse
Moomins on the Riviera (2014)
The Moomins are a topic that I feel I understand less the more I try to get my head around them. I tackled another Moomin film, Moomin and Midsummer Madness, around ten years ago so I should have been ready for this. And yet, here I am, looking at this film all…
A brief refresher, the Moomins are a multimedia franchise created by Finnish author Tove Jansson that encompasses picture books, novels, short stories, TV shows, movies, theme parks and a comic strip written and illustrated by Jansson herself. The comic strip that inspired today’s film, Moomins on the Riviera, began in 1954 and ran until 1975. This was actually the second Moomins comic strip, the first having appeared in a left wing newspaper but which failed because the readership considered the Moomins to be “too bourgeois”, because even in the late forties there were people who needed to touch some fucking grass.
So what’s it all about?
The series features things called Moomins doing stuff.
I can’t really get more specific than that.
Runs in the family
My brother has done a video ranking every Dad in the Disney canon, check it out.
Sharpsons and Ranking Disney Things. Name a more iconic duo.
Lu Over the Wall (2017)
Okay, I gotta be careful here. Last time I reviewed a critically acclaimed 2010s animé I did an almost complete 180 on my opinion of it in the process of writing the review with the result being the most schizophrenic thing I’ve ever written on this blog.
My point is, I’ve been holding off on writing this review just in case I have a similar reversal in opinion on Lu Over the Wall, but I’m pretty certain that my feelings on it are settled:
I think this is a mildly charming (if frustratingly unoriginal) “lonely boy makes friends with supernatural creature” story that is thoroughly undone by disastrous visuals and animation.
This is entirely subjective. I’m not saying the art style is bad per se. I’m just saying I hate it with every fibre of my being.
New Podcast Episode!
Hey folks, sorry for the wait, but we think it’s worth it! Our epic ninety minute look back at the iconic (in)famous Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers!
Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)
I had a good cringe not so long ago when I stumbled on my old list of Top Ten Non Disney Animated Movies.
Some of the choices I stand by but jeez, I’ll probably have to re-do that list entirely. Or will I? Are listicles even a thing anymore? Are blogs? Is anyone out there reading this who’s not a bot? Hello? Hellooo?
Anyway, existential dread aside, one of the big surprises for me was that 2014 Mouse apparently put 2008’s Kung Fu Panda on the list, a movie I think I have seen maybe once and have never had the urge to watch again. I have no idea why I did that. I feel like the years must have Ship of Theseus’d me into a completely different person because I cannot imagine that movie provoking that strong a reaction in me, either positive or negative. And I know that this is definitely a “me” problem. These movies are, structurally, very very good. Like, just put together magnificently well. I get the praise for them. Mostly. Some of the more rhapsodic critical responses to this movie I find a little baffling. Particularly the praise for the visuals. Again, they’re very good. But I came across one review (from a critic who’s opinion I rate very highly) who actually claimed that Kung Fu Panda 2 was the most visually beautiful film Dreamworks had made up to this point in their history.
Burial Tide Giveaway!
Hey folks! If you’re based in the US, Goodreads are giving away 20 copies of my new horror novel, the Burial Tide!
The offer is running until the 29th of June and you can enter HERE.
“Please. Don’t be boring.”
It’s not a job I’d want as a writer, I’ll tell you that much.
Trying to write the first movie about a black Captain America in such a viciously polarised time is a hell of a poisoned chalice and I don’t envy the approximately eighteen thousand screenwriters who worked on Captain America: Brave New World. What does it mean for a black man to represent America given, y’know, the whole business? That has to be delved into right?
Or does it? Is it fair to insist that Sam Wilson has to make some great serious statement on The Issue of Race, when you would never ask that of Steve Rogers? Shouldn’t Sam Wilson just be able to be Captain America without it being a whole thing?
Personally, and this is just my instinct as a writer, I would have focused on winning the crowd over in the first movie with a really kickass Captain America movie and keep the heavy stuff for further movies down the line once Wilson/Mackie had been accepted by a critical mass of the fanbase as the new Cap.
I don’t know how I would have done that exactly.
I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have done this.
This being a stealth sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk where Captain America feels like a supporting character in his own damn movie.
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The Swan Princess (1994)
There really should be a sub-genre for animators who left Disney during the eighties all ready to set up their own animation studio with blackjack and hookers…only for Disney to get their groove back with The Little Mermaid and eat them alive. We all know of Don Bluth, of course, the one who came closest to unseating the Mouse from its throne. And we’ve also met Phil Nibbelink. Well today we’re going to look at another of these would-be contenders; Richard Rich:
So how’s this for some animation bona fides: Richard Rich was the director of not one but two Disney animated features.
Those features were The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron.
Now now, let’s be fair. Disney in the mid-to-late eighties was in its most hellish creative funk since World War Two. The kind of hellish creative funk that would not be seen again until the early 2000s and…now. Of all the hellish creative funks Disney has been in I’d rank it…somewhere in the middle. Bad times, anyway. Disillusioned by working on Oliver & Company (as anyone would be) he left in 1986, convinced that the old studio was a goner and that nothing could ever change that.
After a stint in the desert making religious animation for the Church of Latter Day Saints, Rich watched the Disney Renaissance take off and decided to make his play for the crown with The Swan Princess, an animated re-telling of the ballet Swan Lake, without any actual ballet (thank Christ). Made on a paltry budget of 20 million dollars, it was worked on for four long years before being released in 1994, where it had to compete against The Lion King. The result was pretty much what would happen if you pitted a real swan against an actual lion, but it did have an extremely healthy second life on video. It’s not the worst of the Disney-chasers of this era, nor is it close to being the best. But it is significant for one very important reason. This was the last feature length, cinematically released animated motion picture that was created entirely by hand. Not a single cel of this was touched by the infernal machine. So let me be clear, no matter what I think of this movie…
Pan (2015)
Old lags on this blog know, from my review of Disney’s Peter Pan written way back in the Hadean Epoch, that JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy is one of my favourite books of all time. By a strange coincidence, I recently finished reading it to Mini-Mouse (my first full read-through in around fifteen years) and I was once more struck by how achingly beautiful it is purely as a piece of writing.
Look at this passage describing Hook’s ship:
One green light squinting over Kidd’s Creek, which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the Jolly Roger, lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers. She was the cannibal of the seas, and scarce needed that watchful eye, for she floated immune in the horror of her name.
Now, I’m not normally one to gush about editions of books and what not. If it’s a good story, I don’t tend to care about the packaging. But I do make a special exception for my copy of Peter Pan.
The Everyman Children’s Classics edition with illustrations by F.D. Bedford. I got this one Christmas many years ago and it’s always been indescribably special to me.
When I see a bad adaptation of Peter Pan, it feels I leant this book to someone and got it back torn, stained and with obscene notes scribbled on every page.
I feel angry and appalled and betrayed.
Watching Pan, however, felt like I leant this book to someone and they put it in a shredder and painstakingly re-arranged the shreds into a diorama depicting the Conference of Versailles.
Now we’re waaaaaay past angry. Now I’m just baffled and confused.
Why? Why did you do that?
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unshavedmouse 