Disney

Joseph: The King of Dreams (2000)

1998’s Prince of Egypt is what you might call a hard act to follow and the first thing any discussion of Joseph: The King of Dreams should stress is that it is neither fair nor productive to compare the two. But I’d argue there is actually a lot to learn from putting the two movies side by side.

I’ve always believed that, when it comes to animation at least, “cheap” is not the same as “bad”. Obviously, a generous budget is rarely a detriment but plenty of animators have put out stunning work on a shoe-string. And plenty of movies had absolutely scads of money thrown at them and still managed to look like something that the cat puked up on the rug. What makes the Dreamworks Torah Cinematic Universe so instructive is that it’s two movies created at the same time by largely the same team of artists, just with very different budgets. King of Dreams was, like Return of Jafar, intended to be a straight to video sequel (or prequel in this case) of a much bigger, much more-high budget theatrical release. But, Aladdin was done by Disney Feature Animation and Return of Jafar was palmed off to Disney’s TV animation studios in Australia and Japan. By contrast, King of Dreams was animated concurrently with Prince with Egypt, and by the same team of animators. This makes the two movies a fascinating case study, showing how much a budget matters in determining quality and also how much it doesn’t.

Because yeah, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the two movies are equally beautiful. Clearly they’re not.

And yes, the wonderfully detailed, semi-realistic style of human animation that Prince uses is absolute murder for the King of Dreams team trying to render it with less time and resources and it does sometimes end up looking a little janky. But honestly, more times it doesn’t. My point is, I honestly love this film for how hard it tries and frequently succeeds in escaping the creative ghetto. This is a straight to video cartoon sequel. Hell, this is a faith-based straight to video cartoon sequel. The fact that it’s not absolutely terrible is an achievement. The fact that it’s good, often touching great, is a genuine miracle.

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Bats versus Bolts: Piss on You! I’m working for Mel Brooks!

Comedy is a lot like politics, all careers eventually end in failure. There have been plenty of Bats versus Bolts matchups on this blog that have been, as one commenter put it “Glass Joe versus Mike Tyson” but this really is a foregone conclusion. On the one hand, Mel Brooks’ 1974 masterpiece Young Frankenstein, which would place in the low single digits on any creditable ranking of the greatest American comedies of all time. And on the other hand we have 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, a movie so critically lambasted on its release that it killed Mel Brooks’ directorial career stone dead, which is a bit like if Frank Sinatra sang a song that was so bad he was never allowed to perform again. I mean it’s Mel Brooks. If he hasn’t earned a mulligan or two, who the hell has?

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Romeo & Juliet (Sealed with a Kiss)

You know that old saw about walking down a beach that represents the different times of your life and seeing God’s footprints beside yours? I kinda feel that way about animator Phil Nibbelink.

I knew it not, but he was there during The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Oliver & Company and American Tail: Fievel Goes West. Nibbelink worked on all those films and many others. This is a guy who has spent years at the very top echelon of American animation. And, around the turn of the millennium he and his wife formed Phil Nibbelink Productions to make their own independent animation without having to debase themselves before the Hollywood suits. This, mind you, puts me in a hell of a bind.

Because, I want to like Romeo & Juliet (Sealed with a Kiss) very much. This is an independent feature length film animated entirely by one possibly insane man. Nibbelink drew every cel of this. Himself. On a goddamn tablet. Over four years. That is, by any metric, an absolutely phenomenal achievement. Simply by dint of existing this film deserves a standing ovation and as many panties flung at the stage as can be thrown without damaging the structural integrity of the theatre. The movie is amazing. Incredible. Unbelievable. But is it good?

Something I’ve come to realise is that most people only have the time and energy to get really good at one thing, if they even manage that. Nibbelink is a phenomenal animator. Now, I could show you scenes from Sealed with a Kiss, and you probably would not be that impressed. And yes, the models are extremely basic and the animation is around the level of a mid-budget TV animation. But again, this is one man doing this with next to no resources and the fact that everything moves smoothly and crisply and stays on model is a goddamn miracle. So make no mistake, when it comes to animation Nibbelink is a powerhouse. But making a movie requires him to be not just an animator but a director, screenwriter, casting agent and editor. And, like I said, most people can only be very good at one thing.

Watching this thing, part of me was saying to myself “oh, like you could do better?” and another part was answering:

I think, first and foremost, I’d have had the sense to recognise that the play about the 16 year old who seduces a 13 year old, kills two people and then commits suicide right before the 13 year old stabs herself to death on his corpse is maybe not the best source material for an all ages cartoon.

Titus Andronicus, now THERE’S fun for all the family.

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Titan A.E. (2000)

“Don Bluth” and “Science Fiction” is not an association you might automatically make even if, like me, you believe that An American Tail should rightly be considered part of the Giant Fighting Mech Animé genre.

And that would be entirely correct. Apart from his video game Space Quest, there’s nothing in Bluth’s oeuvre to suggest that he would ever make a big epic space opera. So, why Titan A.E?

Well, firstly we have to remember where Bluth was in his career at this point. After finding early indie success with Secret of NIMH, Bluth hit the big time by partnering with Stephen Spielberg. When that relationship broke down, Bluth floundered with a number of increasingly bizarre and often subpar films before finding a place with Fox’s new animation studio, essentially as a hired gun. So, if Titan A.E. seems like a complete break from Bluth’s usual fare, that’s because this was basically a work for hire job. And, at the risk of sounding like a heathen…good?

Look, I respect Don Bluth a whole lot, I think he’s a true auteur and one of the most important figures in American animation. But I can’t help but feeling that his best work was done when he was executing someone else’s artistic vision. The Land Before Time is very much a Stephen Spielberg film. Anastasia is transparently Fox demanding a Disney princess movie and Bluth dutifully providing them with one. It just so happens to be the best Disney princess movie that Disney never made and one of Bluth’s most accomplished films to boot. So if you tell me that a certain movie was just a job for Bluth and not a passion project, I’m actually more inclined to breathe a sigh of relief than shake my fist in impotent rage. Because I’ve seen Don Bluth’s passion projects.

“Mouse, you seem to be swearing a lot less than usual. Are you feeling alright?”

Oh. Yeah. So, here’s the thing. Mini-Mouse has been asking to read my reviews so I’m gonna try and keep this one family friendly. Say hi in the comments, folks!

“To THAT shower of degenerates?! Absolutely not.”

Okay, so, Titan AE entered production in the late nineties which was a weird, febrile and exciting time in American animation. The Disney renaissance was still very much in effect, but Toy Story had landed like a nuclear bomb and everyone was holding their breath to see whether CGI animation would supplant traditional animation or simply supplement it. Additionally, there was a cultural sea-change in how animation was viewed, being driven both by the ever increasing popularity of animé and the success of television animation aimed at adults like The Simpsons, Batman the Animated Series and Beavis and Butthead. In the new millennium, both Disney and its competitors would try to expand the core demographic for feature length animation from pre-teen and predominantly female and try to convince teenage boys that cartoons weren’t just for little kids and chicks. Of this little mini-genre, in which you can include Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire the first was Titan A.E.

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Cool World (1992)

“Hey, what if cartoons, like, had sex?” is actually not as new a question as you might think. The cartoons have actually, like, having sex far longer than many people realise, with the first pornographic animations appearing at least four years before Micky Mouse did Steamboat Willy (which was not a porno which now seems like a bit of a missed opportunity).

But, while there has been sexually explicit animation for almost as long as there has been animation, it was always restricted to “stag” films. The mainstream perception of animation in the West, especially after the Hays office started cracking skulls, was that cartoons were for children.

Enter Ralph Bakshi.

Okay, if you’re a longtime reader of this blog then this isn’t your first rodeo. We have discussed his work here many a time and oft. Short version: Ralph Bakshi is at once a towering and transformative figure in the history of American animation and also kind of a terrible animator and film-maker. I can’t say I have actually enjoyed any of his films, but his best work tends to be the kind of grungy, ugly, politics-heavy film-making that you aren’t really supposed to enjoy. And, at least, Bakshi at his best his never boring.

No, you want really bad Bakshi you got to look at his tamer stuff. Either because he was taming himself to try and appeal to a broader audience (like Wizards) or because the studio held him down and cut his hair and forced him to conform to their, like, rules, maaaaan (like this fucking thing we’re about to review right here).

I will not mince words. This is the last of all Ralph Bakshi’s feature animations. I say “last” as in “last one he made” as well as “if all his movies were in a race, this is the one that wouldn’t even cross the finish line because it ate its own legs.”

This movie had a troubled history in the same way like, the Balkans, have had a troubled history and it’s easy to just blame the studio. In 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, gave Disney their biggest hit in history up to the that point, due in no small part to the instantly iconic appearance of Sexiest Cartoon of All Time Jessica Rabbit. Ralph Bakshi decided that, as the grandfather of sexy cartoons, the time had come for selling out. Bakshi approached Paramount and pitched them a dark cartoon horror story about a live action human who has sex with a cartoon woman and fathers a demonic half-human/half-toon child. Paramount greenlit the movie but forced Bakshi to cast Kim Basinger as the cartoon woman. Basinger wanted a more family friendly movie which led to the studio and Bakshi butting heads and resulting in the deeply compromised, barely coherent mess of a movie that we were left with. Everything that could go wrong with this movie did go wrong. Paramount launched a raunchy marketing campaign that completely oversold the limp PG 13 offering as some kind of taboo shattering sex-fest and then pretty much bribed the City of Los Angeles to allow them to descerate the Hollywood sign with a 75 foot cutout of Basinger’s character, Holly Would, which brought a hurricane of negative publicity.

What kind of monster would try and make the Hollywood sign TACKY?

Savage critical reaction and utterly abysmal word of mouth did the rest.

As I said, it’s easy to read that and assume that Bakshi was just another brilliant creative screwed over by the soulless suits but you know me. I never do things the easy way. Frankly, I think this project was doomed the second Ralph Bakshi thought he could do his own Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

See, the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was overseen by Richard Williams who I would probably rank as the single most brilliant animator I have ever had the pleasure of reviewing if Hayao Miyazaki didn’t exist. And one of the reasons why Roger Rabbit works so well (apart from the fantastic script, excellent direction, phenomenal world-building, perfect score, terrifying villain, a career best performance from the late great Bob Hoskins and Jessica Fucking Rabbit ushering an entire generation into sexual awakening) was that there was literally nothing Williams could not do as an animator. That movie has characters from eight different animation studios from across three decades and they’re all rendered flawlessly. That movie is like Once Upon a Studio but without the benefit of modern technology and feature length. That’s Richard Williams. That’s the guy.

Whereas Bakshi…Bakshi is not that guy.

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Once upon a Studio (2023)

The Walt Disney Corporation is very good at some things, and very bad at others. And, personally speaking, the one thing they’ve always been worst at is making me like the Walt Disney Corporation.

I love the movies. I hold them dear to my heart. But whenever I see one of those corporate promotional videos where everyone is wandering around Disneyland in a state of wide-eyed joy like they’re the first good souls to be welcomed into God’s kingdom I come out in hives. You know what I’m talking about.

CHARACTER 1: It’s so incredible that [text from marketing press release announcing newest venture] is finally here!

CHARACTER 2: Woooooooooow…

I hate it when Disney tries to sell itself because it always feels so…the vibes are wrong. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s probably why the Oh My Disney sequence in Ralph Breaks the Internet is still my least favourite few minutes in the entire canon. It’s also probably the reason why I steered clear of Once Upon a Studio for so long, and why it took me two tries to actually watch it all the way through. And that’s because it begins like this:

“It’s so incredible to think that Disney founded Walt Disney animation 100 years ago today!” “Wooooooow.”

Hives. Hives all over.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #62: Wish

Missed you all!

So, what’s next on the old docket? Why what’s this? A canon Disney movie? One of the films that this very blog was established to review?

Why, this is something of an occasion! Maybe we’ll have lots of cameos from long running characters like The Horned King or Walt Disney himself? Maybe a long and overly complicated kidnapping arc? Might Otto Von Bismarck appear? He bloody might!

“Mouse, quit stalling, I’ve got fifty bucks on you giving this shitpile a good review just to be contrarian.”

“Then you, sir, just lost fifty bucks and my respect.”

But before surgery commences, I want to talk about conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy Theories, counter-intuitively, are a way to make the world seem less scary, to make sense of an otherwise terrifyingly random existence.

To many Americans, the idea that a shadowy cabal within the US government would kill a sitting president of the United States was actually a less unsettling prospect than the idea that some random nutjob could decide to kill the most powerful man on Earth and just…do it.

Or that a lunatic fundamentalist in a cave with a few followers and some bolt cutters could have handed the US its most devastating attack on home soil since Pearl Harbour. Or that…a majority of Americans just didn’t think that Donald Trump should get another term.

Which is why, if you’re about to get angry at me for bringing up the extremely well known conspiracy theory that Wish was either wholly or partly the creation of generative AI, I think you’re missing the point. To understand a conspiracy theory’s appeal, you have to look not at the theory itself but the reality that it would replace if it were true. People want to believe that Wish is AI generated because it’s less scary than believing that this is just the kind of film that Disney’s creative process produces now.

Recently I gave an interview for a podcast where we discussed how the publishing industry is becoming totally, crushingly data driven and where books are increasingly commissioned, marketed and read for and by micro-targeted audiences. Books are becoming products rather than pieces of art, not something the artist wrote because they cared about it but because the algorithim says that Becky in Minnesota is jonsing for an enemies-to-lovers mafia werewolf story. And this isn’t just limited to publishing, the whole entertainment industry is sick with it.

So I know why so many people believe this theory is true*, because the reality is actually scarier. The same market and technological forces that make AI art so…off are now infecting even human created art. The machines aren’t just getting more human-like. We’re meeting them in the middle.

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Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is a movie.

Two days out to the post going up and that’s where I’m at.

This movie made me feel clean because it just washed right over me.

I saw Zone of Interest recently. That shit shook me to my core. I could write about that? Something something banality of evil something something evil of banality?

No?

Fine.

Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is a movie.

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The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends (2007)

Look, we all like to make fun of Disney and their utterly shameless milking of their beloved animated classics with cheap and tawdry cash ins. But give them this; even during the height of the direct-to-video boom after Return of Jafar had proved that cheap sequels to big-name animated features were basically a licence to print money, they never went to the same well more than twice. Okay, twice and a tv series. That was it. Three movies and a TV series, MAX. No more. They had standards. Allegedly.

I love how it says “An All New Movie”. Isn’t every movie an all new movie?

Of course, Disney had a very large stable of properties to exploit. But what if you had a studio that

a) Really wanted to get in on that cheap direct-to-video cartoon action.

b) Had a very, very small pool of household name animation to sequelise and

c) Had absolutely zero shame?

Well…you’d get the cinematic donkey-show that was Universal’s Land Before Time franchise. Now, Land Before Time was a pretty damn good film and it did, y’know…decent at the box office. It opened at No 1. But it also lost to Oliver and Company in terms of overall ticket sales. So…fine, but nothing to crow about either.

Certainly, it did not do the kind of numbers that would justify 13 GODDAMN SEQUELS. THIRTEEN.

ONE. THREE.

AND A MOTHERFUCKING TV SHOW.

Now, I am not going to review every single one of them, that’s why God made Jenny Nicholson. I’m just here to review The Land Before Time XIII: The Wisdom of Friends, the second last entry in the series and, by all accounts, the worst of the bunch (because my readers think I’m a bad person and wish me harm).

However!

We can’t just dive in after an eleven movie gap without being hopelessly lost so I have set my team of extremely well-paid maps to work on a breakdown of everything that happens in this series between the first and thirteenth installements.

The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure

The gang must fight to protect their new home when Sharpteeth find a way into the Great Valley.

The Land Before Time III: The Time of Great Giving

When a sudden shortage of water threatens all life in the Great Valley, the gang of young dinosaurs must cooperate with a group of bullies to make a risky journey outside the valley and find the cause.

The Land Before Time IV: The Quest for Peace

The gang decide to rid the valley of nuclear weapons.

The Land Before Time V: The Final Frontier

Littlefoot’s previously unknown half-brother appears in the Great Valley, and he’s on a mission from God.

The Land Before Time VI:

In an attempt to save their failing marriage, Littlefoot and Cera open a bistro in Milan.

The Land Before Time VII: Long Hard Neck

The series’ one brave, but ultimately misjudged, entry into the genre of hardcore pornography.

The Land Before Time VIII: Littlefoot versus Godzilla

The no-brainer crossover that couldn’t fail. Actually failed quite a bit.

The Land Before Time IX: Please No More

Clip show.

The Land Before Time X: Tokyo Drift

In order to avoid a prison sentence, Littlefoot becomes a drag racer.

The Land Before Time XI: Ultimate Betrayal

The gang are shocked to learn that Spike was working for Internal Affairs the whole time.

The Land Before Time XII: Time Arrives

The gang have to adjust to living in a land that has time now where they can actually age and die. Directed by Werner Herzog. Harrowingly bleak.

“Happy to help, you cheap bastard, you.”

Okay, we’re all caught up. Let’s do this.

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The Land Before Time (1988)

You know the thing about the dinosaurs? It’s really, really sad when you think about it.

These beautiful animals lived for millions of years and then one day, literally one day, their world turned into a flaming hell and they died horribly. And they never understood why.

I was thinking about that a lot as I sat down to re-watch Don Bluth’s third film, The Land Before Time, and the last one he made before parting company with Stephen Spielberg. On one level, this is the least personal of Bluth’s early, pre-sellout films and the one that he had the least real affection for. Whereas Secret of Nimh and An American Tail were true collaborations, The Land Before Time seems to have been the point where Spielberg (and new producer George Lucas) really took the reigns and Bluth was more just the guy who animated what the execs wanted. Story-wise at least. Whatever you think about him as a film-maker, Bluth had a tendency to stamp his work very strongly and it does still very much feel like one of his films in terms of atmosphere, if not necessarily subject matter.