Long Reads

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

What was it about the seventies anyway?

I’ve reviewed a few animated films from this decade by this point and they are all (with the exception of the Disneys) weird as balls.

But I get ahead of myself. I’m going to let you in on a little behind the scenes secret. Ever since this mouse escaped the rat race and started writing full time, I’ve actually had less time to devote to this blog with work starting on most posts a mere few days before they’re scheduled to go live. This can be a problem when I starkly under-estimate just how much there is to research on a given movie and go plummeting down rabbit-holes

And my oh my, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure is less a field full of rabbit holes than a giant hole with occasional bits of field clinging to the edges. But okay, a little background.

So waaaaay back in the 1910s an American named Johnny Gruelle patented a doll that he named Raggedy Ann and then wrote a series of stories starring her, which were such a success that Raggedy Ann became possibly the first bona-fide modern American toy fad. And, of course, as Jane Austen herself once said “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a toy franchise in possession of a fortune must be in want of an animated tie-in.” And boy howdy, did Raggedy Ann manage to get some impressive talent over the decades. For starters, there was a short series of Fleischer cartoons that were (naturally) as charming and well made as they were horrifying.

There were also two television specials produced in the seventies by Chuck Mofawkin Jones. But, without a doubt, Raggedy Ann’s most famous foray into the world of animation was 1977’s Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure which is…well, it’s something.

Here’s what it’s like. Imagine Hasbro want a new Transformers movie. And the director they initially tap dies and so they bring in a replacement; David Lynch. And now Optimus Prime is dancing with a backwards talking midget in the red lodge. That’s kind of what happened here.

Lynch in this instance was Richard Williams, who we’ve had our dealings with in the past. One of the best animators to ever work in the medium, period, Williams was shanghaid into making a glorified toy commerical and decided to use that opportunity to have the time of his life. This film is basically Williams and some of his most talented animator friends (Betty Boop co-creator Grim Natwick, future Genie animator Eric Goldberg and Art “I created Goofy and sued Walt Disney for unfair labour practices, took him all the way to the Supreme Court and lived to tell of it” Babbitt to name a few) having a ball on the dime of the good folks at the Bobbs-Merril publishing company.

But is it a good movie? Well…

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Disney(ish) reviews with the Unshaved Mouse: Planes

Well. That was anti-climactic.

I feel like a knight who’s been on a quest to slay a terrible dragon for a decade only to arrive at the top of the mountain and find the dragon’s around the size of a chicken and died several years ago from old age.

In the early days of this blog I built up Planes as a personal bete noir, a movie I would never, ever review because it represented the worst of crass, merchandise driven movie-making for both Disney in particular and animation in general.

Oh my. How innocent I was. How innocent we all were.

But after years of the absolute garbage I have had to sit through for you people (love you all) it is with a heavy heart that I must report that Planes is…fine?

I mean, it is aggressively mediocre, don’t get me wrong. But, given the state of Disney’s output at present, there’s something refreshing about a movie that manages to hit a solid C.

In fact, I would say it was one of the most safely boring movies I’ve seen all year were it not for the fact that it’s set in the Cars universe and therefore is, as all movies in that benighted franchise are, weird as fuck.

WHAT KIND OF LIFE DOES THIS POOR CREATURE HAVE?!

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(Not a review of) Inherit the Wind (1960)

This map is wrong:

That’s not to say it’s bad.

It’s very useful.

It’s informative.

It is even, when you take a step back and consider it, quite beautiful. But it’s wrong.

The continents aren’t that size relative to each other. Not even close. Of course, you could use a different projection that shows them the correct relative size, something like this:

But now all the continents’ shapes are distorted nearly to the point of being unrecognisable.

Every 2 dimensional map of the world is wrong because, obviously, the world is not flat (I swear to God if anyone starts shit in the comments…). Ultimately, any attempt to render a three dimensional sphere as a 2 dimensional rectangle is, well, a lie. It’s an attempt to simplify that will always lead to distortion one way or another.

I love historical films. I hate historical films.

This was going to be a review of Inherit the Wind.

It became something else.

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Bats Versus Bolts: Movies that had virtually nothing to do with Andy Warhol

These movies are terrible. I’m so glad I watched them.

Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula are in many ways the best candidate for a Bats versus Bolts that I’ve done yet. Not only are they by the same director and share many of the same cast, but they were made practically concurrently by the same crew.

Also, when I lie to myself and pretend that there’s some kind of high-minded artistic goal behind this series beyond me getting to talk about vampires and monsters, I like to think that each BvB pair says something about the time they were created in. That is absolutely the case with these two films which are not only seventies movies, but some of the most seventies movies I have ever seen.

These films were directed and written by Paul Morrissey, one of the more fascinating film-makers I’ve come across doing this blog. A member of Andy Warhol’s inner circle (we’ll get to that) he had a front row seat to the drug-soaked bacchanal that was the sixties New York arts scene. Morrissey is fascinating to try to pin down in terms of his politics. A self described right-wing conservative and staunch Catholic…who was also something of a trailblazer in terms of trans representation in film and a body of work that lends itself quite easily to Marxist readings with a consistent portrayal of the aristocracy as a shower of evil degenerate parasites. Like I say: interesting guy.

Note, I did not say maker of good films.

Anyway, Morrissey claims that the whole idea to make monster movies came about, appropriately enough, from meeting Roman Polanski. Polanski apparently suggested that Morrissey would be the perfect person to make a 3D Frankenstein movie, which honestly I would take as an insult. Morrissey didn’t, however, and arranged a shoot in Italy, filming both Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula back to back. Or, as they were known in the U.S.; Andy Warhol’s Dracula and Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. Why were they called that? Oh, that’s very simple.

Lies.

It was just a marketing tactic. Warhol let his friend put his name of the movies to boost the alogorithim. They actually used the same trick for the Italian releases, putting a famous Italian director’s name on them to claim Italian residency which actually got the production in serious legal trouble in Italy.

The resulting movies are Morrissey’s critique of the sticky, shame-filled, bitter and angry come down from the Free Love era that was the early seventies.

That makes them sound a lot more classy and high brow than they actually are.

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Frankenweenie (2012)

In 1984 Disney took a punt and gave one of their young animators, a skinny pale young-feller-milad named Tim Burton some money to make a live action short and recoiled, in horror, at what he wrought by tampering in God’s domain. It’s a truly terrifying film, and even looking at the poster has driven me quite mad. Oh yes!

It’s called”Frankenweenie” but he’s not a weenie dog he’s a bull terrier and no one ever mentions that am I MAD I MUST BE MAD HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously, it’s a rather charming if ludicrously cheap and cheerful little short about a boy named Victor Frankenstein who uses lightning to bring his beloved dog back to life. And Disney took one look at it and said “Dark? Weird? GOTHIC?! We never expected this of YOU, Tim Burton!” and fired his ass.

Fortunately, the short brought him to the attention of Paul “Pee-Wee” Reubens and Burton’s career was off to the races. Flashforward a few decades and Disney have finally realised that they quite like this Tim Burton character and he’s settled into a groove as one of the most reliable nipples from which they milk their never-ending stream of content. And what better way to mend fences than for Disney to pony up the money for a lavish, stop-motion, feature length do-over of Frankenweenie?

Do you need me to send you a picture of a weenie dog or are you assholes trolling me?

Now, I’m a pretty big Burton fan all things considered but his late period collaborations with Disney have been the absolute nadir of his career. But, can this return to his roots shoot a few volts into his long dead artistic drive?

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The Dark Crystal (1982)

The Lord of the Rings really shouldn’t work, should it?

Nine hours of wandering around in a made up fantasy world with tons of different factions, fake languages, dozens upon dozens of characters and a story drawing on thousands of years of fictional history, it should be a series that only the most hardcore nerds would have any interest in. So why is it so popular?

I think it comes down to two things:

Complexity resting on simplicity.
The Ring is not just a Ring.

The story of Lord of the Rings is fiendishly complicated but it all relies on one very small thing.

Frodo must destroy the One Ring. That’s the key to understanding everything that happens in the movie. Every other character’s story and motivations somehow branch off from that one central spine: Frodo must destroy the One Ring, everyone else is either trying to help him or stop him. Huge complexity resting on something very simple.

So what’s all this got to do with The Dark Crystal?

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Return to Oz (1985)

At some point in the early eighties someone in Hollywood (possibly Stephen Spielberg) decided that the children must be made to suffer.

I don’t know what it was, but the eighties were an absolute Golden Age for media ostensibly aimed at children that seemed “aimed” more like you’d “aim” a psychological terror campaign against an enemy army.

And atop any list of eighties kid’s movies guaranteed to traumatise your little angels you’ll find 1985’s Return to Oz a movie that I never saw growing up, presumably because my parents knew that if they tried to take me to it the cinema would never not smell of piss again.

My wife, however, has seen it and has kindly agreed to watch it with me…

‘Till death do us part my ass.

Alright, what is this thing anyway?

1939’s The Wizard of Oz is regarded by many to be the greatest movie Disney ever made, which tears them up inside because they didn’t actually make it. L. Frank Baum’s been dead a long ass time and if you want to make a movie based on his Oz books you just knock yourself out because they’re all in the public domain. But so much of what people associate with the Oz story comes not from the books but from the movie, which is still owned by MGM. Which means you gotta be real careful when making your own movie that you don’t impinge on any of the unique elements of that film like the ruby red slippers or the famous dialogue or Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West or else MGM will send the big lion around to eat your feet.

Of course, Disney would love to make their own direct sequel or remake to the Wizard of Oz but they can’t because a certain company lobbied hard and dirty to ensure that movie copyright in America lasts until roughly the heat death of the universe.

Ah karma. Sweet as mother’s milk.

Anyway, that’s more or less how we got Return to Oz. It’s a sequel based on an amalgamation of two of Baum’s later Oz books that the filthy Oz casuals among you probably didn’t know even existed. And rest assured, if it is shamelessly aping an older film, it’s definitely not Wizard of Oz.

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“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.

This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.

“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.

But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.

It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?

Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.

All kidding aside, I’ve seen nine of this legend’s movies and five of them are on my all time greatest list.*

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Summer Wars (2009)

So, here’s a little interesting factoid about me. If you ever meet someone from Ireland with the surname “Sharpson”, they are related to me. Like, immediately related. There are, at the time of writing, eight Sharpsons in the entire country. When I was growing up, there was my Dad, my three brothers, and me (my mother being a strong independent woman who refused to change her maiden name even for the sake of boosting the stats). That was it. My grandfather emigrated to Britain from Cyprus and then moved to Ireland in the fifties.

And, along the way, he anglicised his name to Sharpson, a name that had never existed in the country before then. So, we’re what you might call a rare breed.

Now, contrast that with my wife, whose family is as old as the hills, vast as the oceans and ~~mad as~~ lovely, lovely people. I say this not just as a way of banging out an intro to a review of a movie that I don’t really have much to say about other than “it’s good, I enjoyed it”, but to explain why the main character of Summer Wars, Kenji Koiso resonates with me.

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“Just what I had in mind. Everything dead on Earth, except us. A chance for Mother Nature to start again.”

More fool me, I guess.

I went in to this full of kindness and forgiveness in my heart.

I was prepared to embrace this movie like a loving father welcoming back the wayward prodigal. Of course this movie isn’t as bad as everyone says. Of course it’s really a delightfully camp romp. Of course the backlash was just a combination of toxic fanboy insecurity and subtle and not so subtle homophobia.

And this fucking movie turned and sank its fangs into me like a snake in a parable.

Yup. I was wrong. I dunno what I was thinking.

Conventional wisdom is always right and independant thoughts are weird and stupid.

Batman and Robin really is that goddamn bad.

I know, I know. Great to be back here on Planet Sensible. I don’t know why I ever fooled myself into thinking that this movie was So Bad it’s Good rather than regular old So Bad it’s Actually Bad. But rest assured, this is no Rocky Horror Picture Show. This movie is not fun, and it’s not even camp. It’s a grindingly cynical and mechanical attempt to be fun and camp and it fails utterly.

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