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?
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.
I don’t know what Makoto Shinkai has against me but for some reason his reviews always show up on my schedule precisely when I have the least time to write them. Maybe he heard that I don’t particularly like trains or weather.
“Bastard!”
Anyway, this is the third movie of his that I’ve reviewed and, while I didn’t really love either of his previous offerings things are at least trending positive. I liked The Garden of Words quite a bit more than 5cm A Second and I like Your Name quite a bit more than either of them. I appreciate that “I like it okay” is so muted a response to this particular film that it might as well be scathing critique but…I dunno guys, I don’t know what to tell you. Shinkai’s stuff just leaves me kinda cold. EDIT: I wrote this opener before rewatching the film and I’ve since warmed to it quite a bit, as you will see.
But yeah, this movie is a huge deal. It was the most successful non-Western animated film of all time when it released, unseating Spirited Away in its native Japan before going on to conquer most of Asia.
While I know it isn’t true, I like to imagine there’s one guy in Warner Bros who was put in charge of the Batman films in 1989 despite knowing nothing about comics in general or Batman in particular and who spends every day banging his head against a desk and screaming “what the FUCK do you people even WANT?!”
Because to a casual observer, there really is no rhyme or reason to which Batman movies succeed and which fail. Why was Batman Forever a massive hit and Batman and Robina franchise-killer? Why did audiences love Batmanand largely steer clear of Batman Returns? Why is a grim and gritty Batman great with Christopher Nolan but not with Zach Snyder?
And there’s no one answer, really. Audience expectations. The marketing. The directing. The acting. The writing. The music. There are hundreds of factors that decide whether a Batman movie will succeed, same as any other movie. And added to that there is a very specific problem with adapting this character to screen: nailing the tone.
Getting the tone of a Batman story right is a damnably tricky thing, and it’s something that writers have struggled with ever since the character was introduced 85 years ago. Let’s take a moment, firstly, to acknowledge that Batman has often been campy and fun and played for laughs. And often, as in the sixties Adam West series, or Batman: The Brave and the Bold, it’s been done to great effect. But, fundamentally, this is a character rooted in a mashup of crime fiction and the horror genre. Batman stories, from their very beginning, deal with murder, corruption and violence. A child witnesses his parents’ brutal slaying and devotes his life to waging violent nocturnal war against the criminal element. It ain’t baby-town frolics. And I think what trips up a lot of Batman writers is that they succumb to the temptation to wallow in miserabilism. They lean into the violence and the horror and the awfulness of the setting to a degree that it stops being in any way enjoyable.
The best Batman stories have stakes and drama and darkness, but it’s a certain kind of darkness. A darkness that takes itself seriously, but not too seriously. There is a dusting of pulpy camp that stops the darkness becoming overwhelming. It’s a very, very tricky tone to capture and, if I’m perfectly honest, no single live action director has ever managed to capture it perfectly.
That is, until Matt Reeves knocked it out of the fucking park in 2022.
“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.
Get in the robot, Fievel.
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 withSecret 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 Timeis very much a Stephen Spielberg film. Anastasiais 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.
And they’re weird as the dickens.
“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!
“Can I say “hi” back?”
“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 Planetand Atlantis: The Lost Empire the first was Titan A.E.
“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 discussedhis workhere 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 Studiobut without the benefit of modern technology and feature length. That’s Richard Williams. That’s the guy.
Here’s the big problem with writing a character like Superman: he can’t change the world.
The superhero genre is about taking our world, the recognisable world we live in, and adding a few discreet fantastical elements. That’s the appeal. Ordinary people, trudging to their ordinary jobs look up and see a brightly coloured figure streaking through the air. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s Superman!
That’s the magic that the entire genre runs on. Which can create problems when, say, certain real world events have to be incorporated into the fictional reality of the universe.
Yeah Spider-man. You should have used your…webs…to stop 9/11.
And that can throw up all kinds of logical head-scratchers. Like (and I’m really, really not trying to be offensive here) ask yourself; would 9/11 even be that big a deal in the Marvel universe? Given that this is the same world where Kang the Conqueror once wiped out the entire population of DC or New York is under constant attack from Galactus, Symbiotes and God knows what else?
This is not a new problem. In 1940, Siegel and Schuster wrote a non-canon Superman story for Look magazine called “How Superman would End the War”, where Supes abducts Hitler and Stalin and drags them before a tribunal to stand trial.
The League of Nations being useful. There’s some comic book logic for you.
But in the main Action Comics and Superman titles the war went largely unmentioned apart from some now deeply uncomfortable covers schilling war bonds.
Out of universe, the reason for that is obvious. If Superman takes a more active role in world affairs and gets rid of Hitler (or Stalin. Or Saddam Hussein. Or Putin) then his world diverges too far from our own and the story loses that central appeal. It stops being our world and becomes an almost alien alternate reality.
But in-universe, you need to explain why Superman doesn’t just stop every dictator and despot around the world. It’s a problem that a lot of great Superman media has grappled with, and a lot of shitty media too.
Oh fuck, the Problem of Evil. What a radical new concept.
So in 1999, Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch launched The Authority, a series about a Justice League pastiche that actually does take out dictators and get its hands dirty in global geo-politics. While Ellis intended the Authority to be seen as villain protagonists, when Mark Millar (OF FUCKING COURSE) took over as writer the team’s extreme and violent tactics were portrayed much more positively. The incredible popularity of this run prompted some fans and critics to claim that the nice old status-quo reliant heroes like Superman were strictly squares-ville, daddio, and that political assassinations and low-key fascism were what the cool kids were into. This prompted Superman writer Joe Kelly to pen What’s so Funny about Truth, Justice and the American Way?, where Supes comes face to face with a very thinly veiled pastiche of the Authority and demonstrates that wanting Big Daddy Strongman to come in and fix all our problems and punish our enemies is the cause of, like, 90% of the bad shit in our history as a species.
And…here’s where I have to confess to being a fraud and a coward. I haven’t actually read it. Yeah, I know. Even though I self righteously quoted it in the Dawn of Justice review I haven’t actually read the entire story. But, I have seen the 2012 animated adaptation Superman versus The Elite. And I am going to review it. And that is the thing you are reading now. If you’re a long time reader, you probably knew that, but I try to keep things accessible for the newbies.
I don’t actually think it’s possible to be a little boy between the ages of 4 and 8 who is aware of Superman and not a fan of Superman. It’s like Star Wars or Transformers. You see this:
And something in your little boy soul just chimes.
So I don’t think there was ever a time where I wasn’t a fan of Superman but as I’ve gotten older I’ve certainly become more of a fan. And I have to say, on behalf of my tribe, it’s a pretty good time to be an enjoyer of Clark Kent. James Gunn is going to be bringing us a new Superman movie next year, both Superman and Action Comics have been enjoying high-quality, well-received runs and My Adventures with Superman is, in my humble opinion, the single best animated depiction of the character since the Fleischer Shortsof the forties. Yes. Better than Superman the Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited. No, I will not take that back.
My point is things are good now. We’ve come along way from…y’know.
Fuck. There really was a time there when the guy most responsible for shaping Superman’s presentation to the wider world was Zack Snyder.
Future generations won’t believe it. But I was there. It happened.
Alright, let me pull back a little bit. I know you’ve probably clicked on this hoping for some classic, old-school mid-2010s internet rage with all manner of inventive profanity and performative outrage and I won’t lie, I’m not too proud to dance. BUT I want to draw a line in the sand here and make one thing clear.
I don’t hate Zack Snyder either personally or artistically. He is, by all accounts, a lovely guy and the loyalty that he inspires in the actors who have worked with him is genuinely touching. I can’t say I understand the devotion that fans of his movies have to his work but I don’t for a minute doubt its sincerity. People do genuinely, passionately adore his films and respond to them and that can’t be ignored. This is not some studio hack. This is a man who produces works that people respond to strongly, both positively and negatively. This is an artist.
He should not be allowed near Superman. Ever.
He does not understand the character and he does not understand why he matters.
I realise that this is going to come across as just…foam-flecked fanboy ranting but please hear me out. This character is important in a way that very, very few fictional characters are or ever will be. Remember what I said about how every little boy just, instinctively loves Superman?
Okay. Now you may have heard Superman described as a power fantasy for little boys. And to that I say “yes, absolutely he is” and also “why the fuck are you saying that like it’s a bad thing?”
If Superman is a fantasy, what exactly is the fantasy?: “I want to be an all-powerful demi-god so that I can…devote every free moment of my time to protecting and helping those who have less power than me”?
So…you have generations of young boys who will grow up in a world where they will have disproportionate power (of many kinds) over others being influenced by this character and his worldview, modelling behaviours of selflessness, compassion, kindness and justice. You see why that might be, I dunno, a very, very good thing?
Now here is a quote from Zack Snyder (he’s actually responding to criticism about Batman killing people in his movies but it’s also relevant when discussing his approach to Superman):
“Once you’ve like lost your virginity to this f**king movie and then you come and say to me something about ‘oh, my superhero wouldn’t do that’, I’m like ‘are you serious?’ because I’m down the f**king road on that.
“It’s a cool point of view to be like: ‘My heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t f**king lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’
“That’s cool, but you’re living in a f**king dream world, okay?”
And yes, I know juxtaposing that quote with that dialogue from What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way has been done so many times it’s cliché at this point but…I wanted to do it and it made me feel good and it’s my blog so there.
Zack Snyder claims that his approach to comics is rooted in Alan Moore’s Watchmen and sure, Moore did deconstruct the tropes of comic books and created superheroes who were deeply, deeply flawed people. But you know what he didn’t do? He didn’t try that shit with Superman.
Moore didn’t write a lot of Superman stories but the ones he did featured some of the very noblest, most selfless versions of the character.
Moore gets what makes Superman important, and that it is not something to fuck with.
Hell, even Mark Millar and Garth Ennis, the two patron saints of the Shitty Edgelord school of superhero comics. You give them Superman, this is how they write him:
Superman is so fucking good the guy who wrote The Boys can’t hate him.
Anyway.
Hello, welcome to my regular series of movie reviews where I talk about Batman.
Before you ask, no, this wasn’t planned. It’s just a coincidence that I’m doing this review so soon after Megamind: The Doom Syndicate defiled everyone’s childhood memories like a randy Gungan. Not my childhood memories, obviously. I was engaged when this thing came out. But apparently there are people out there who were children when the original movie released and now are, like, allowed to vote and stuff? It’s a mad world.
I haven’t seen the sequel but I did watch the trailer on YouTube. This was the most upvoted comment and the sense of historical tragedy and pathos was just too great for me not to share with you all.
My God. It’s like the fall of Paris.
I’ll be upfront, upfront. I like Megamind just fine but I don’t know how much I have to say about it. It doesn’t have a special place in my heart but neither is there a lot of stuff to make fun off. Plus it’s a comedy that is actually unironically funny on its own merits and you know how much I love writing about those!
But that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting movie. It actually belongs in the category of film that I would argue are among the most interesting; movies that were re-appraised after their initial release. When it dropped in 2010 Megamind was mostly dismissed as an inoffensive but unremarkable bit of fluff chasing the trend started by The Incredibles and Despicable Me. Since then it’s been re-evaluated as one of the best Dreamworks movies with a devoted cult following. And that’s interesting (to me, at least) because when that happens it’s usually less to do with the movie itself and more to do with society changing and seeing the movie in a new light.
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.
unshavedmouse 