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.
“Mouse. You know that’s not true.”
“Yeah, you’re right, picture of a map I’ve been talking to for thirteen years.”
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.
Old lags on this blog know, from my review of Disney’s Peter Panwritten 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.
“You sons of bitches, we were so close. We were so close!“
After a string of godawful mediocrities and outright turds the likes of which the canon hadn’t seen since the earliest years of the millennium, the opportunity was ripe for Disney to start filling the executive-grade wicker basket with heads and put some people in charge with fresh ideas and real talent.
But noooooooooooo.
Disney pulled the old “take the first three episodes of a scrapped TV show, wash it off and serve it up as a new movie” trick they used to pull in the direct-to-video sequel era and what did you do? Did you laugh? Did you scorn such obvious desperate chicanery? Did you hell!
ONE BILLION AT THE BOX OFFICE. FOR THIS.
We could have had another Renaissance with a bit of luck. Instead, I’m going to be reviewing Frozen 13 when I’m in my nineties. Because obviously the reason Strange World, Rayaand Wish flopped was not that they were poop on a bun, it’s because they were original ideas (kinda). I mean, it’s hard to make the argument that quality was the issue when all it took them to make a billion dollars was to put the number “2” after the title of one of their most popular films.
The future is bleak, and I’m not just saying that because the proliferation of AI slop online means that every time I search for images to use I run the risk of seeing something that will make me want to put my head in a mouse-trap.
If you want to imagine the future, picture pregnant cross-eyed Moana stamping on a human face, forever.
You have probably never heard of Theodore Kaufman, an obscure American self-published author who wrote in the 1940s. Hell, even if you’d been living in America in the 1940s you almost certainly would never have heard of him. However, if you were a German living in the Third Reich during the war you would absolutely have known who he was, and would have believed him to be one of the most dangerous men alive.
In 1941 Kaufman self-published Germany Must Perish!, a bright little volume about how Germans are pure evil, just bad on the genetic level, and that the only way to ensure the peace of the world was to sterilise the entire nation and let them die out. Now, you might (I really hope you wouldn’t, but you might) argue that race-based genocide is fine if the other guy started it first, but that’s because you forgot about Goebbels.
You forgot about Goebbels, you utter chump.
Goebbels milked Kaufman’s little pamphlet for everything it was worth, using it to turbocharge Germany’s propaganda machine and convince ordinary Germans, even those who hated the regime, that the war was a literal battle for their survival as a people. Goebbels presented Kaufman as FDR’s Svengali, the intellectual driving force behind America’s war against Germany. When, in reality, he was the forties equivalent of the least unhinged political Tiktoker. Germany Must Perish! was such a gift to Goebbels that the American journalist Howard Smith remarked:
“No man has ever done so irresponsible a disservice to the cause his nation is fighting and suffering for than Nathan Kaufman.”
Which is why, even at the risk of friendly fire, it is so important to call out people on your own side of the aisle who are saying evil, crazy shit. Not just because it’s evil and crazy (though that should be enough reason) but because it’s tactically vital.
We can dismiss Kaufmann’s thesis out of hand, just as any racially essentialist argument should be dismissed out of hand, but that still leaves the questions:
Why Germany? Could it have happened anywhere and Germany just drew the short straw? Or was there something particular about Germany that made its local manifestation of fascism so uniquely malevolent? And if so, how much blame do ordinary Germans bear for the actions of the regime?
My, this is a fun one, isn’t it?
It’s not something that can ever be objectively proved. I’ll keep my own answers until the end of the review but they’re just, like everything else on this blog, my own opinion. Today’s movie grapples with those very questions. And it begins within a man arriving in the ruins of Nuremberg, as the ashes of the last war still cool, and a cold wind has begun to blow in from the East…
Probably the most thankless job a director can set himself is trying to adapt a beloved stage musical to screen, as the people you most need to win over for your movie to be a success (fans of the stage version) are also the people most likely to tar and feather you in the streets over the slightest deviation from the source material. You may think comic fans get salty about adaptation changes, but they have nothing on musical theatre nerds.
That’s probably why, despite musicals still being a lucrative movie genre, stage musicals adapted to screen are a rare beast and only getting rarer. Of the 50 top grossing movie musicals, only six began life on stage. The rest are either originals like The Greatest Showman, animated musicals or jukebox musicals like Bohemian Rhapsody or (sigh) Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Of course, it wasn’t always thus. The middle decades of the 20th century were a golden age for adaptations for stage musicals as that was the point where theatre and cinema were most alike. Colour photography and improvements in sound tech meant that cinema could finally match the visual and audio splendour of theatre. But, cinema had yet to fully embrace the freedom inherent in the medium and movies of the first half of the century often closely resembled filmed plays with constructed sets and static cameras. As cinema became less and less indebted to its theatrical roots, adapting stage musical to screen became a lot more challenging. To put it simply: movies are not plays and plays are not movies. And trying to turn one into the other can result in some pretty radical changes. And all those challenges are right up on screen in Into the Woods, a movie based on one of the most inherently theatrical musicals of the modern era.
Hey remember that time Disney spent a load of money on a science fiction epic that was visually spectacular but also kinda inert, weirdly off-brand for them, with a load of tonal and pacing issues that ended up costing them a load of money?
I guess by this point it kinda IS on brand?
Anyway, Tomorrowland is the second (and to date last) live action feature directed by animation legend Brad Bird and it keeps alive the proud Disney tradition of sci-fi movies that I respect and want to like but are just fundamentally too dang flawed on the writing level to get anything other than a qualified endorsement.
Look, I know everybody idolises the first decade they can properly remember but this is different. The nineties really were awesome. The Cold War was over, the War on Terror hadn’t started, we’d fixed acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer (and that whole global warming thing would probably sort itself out) and the only threats to world peace were goobs like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic who would occasionally show up to cause trouble before being punted into the air like Team Rocket.
Meowth is Gaddafi fyi.
Plus, the movies, the TV shows, the music. I love this whole era. So I was overjoyed when I finally got my hands on a boxset of the complete Daria, an animated sitcom that ran from 1997 to 2002. Not merely a nineties show, but probably the most nineties show.
And imagine my disappointment on discovering that, like so much nostalgia, it doesn’t actually hold up all that well.
In 1984, two broke young illustrators named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were trying to break into comics. Eastman randomly doodled a turtle in ninja attire and the pair decided that it was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, essentially a madlib of everything that was popular in comics at the time (except for turtles).
They then wrote a silly little issue parodying Frank Miller’s Daredevil run and that, of course, was that.
This one weird joke concept riffing on an incredibly specific moment in comic book history in a black and white indie vanished without a trace, the very definition of a flash in the pan.
Wait, no. *checks notes*
It went on to conquer the goddamn world. To this day, TMNT is quite possibly the most lucrative Western comic book property not published by either DC or Marvel. Third most successful toyline of all time. Seven TV series, seven films, multiple videogames, hundreds and hundreds of comic issues and a metric shit-ton of merch. Which, on the one hand, is crazy.
How did a concept so ridiculous, and so seemingly instantly dated become one of the most successful and enduring pop culture phenomena of the past half century? Well, success has many fathers. Firstly, I think the franchise’s longevity was sealed with this:
A theme tune that catchy only comes around once in a blue moon. Play it over NINE SEASONS and it’s practically brainwashing.
Then there’s the fact that TMNT relies on a template that has proven to be amazingly durable over the last 180 years.
Hothead. Stoic Leader. Smart Guy. Big fun doofus.
The Musketeer Archetypes are like the Four Chords of character writing. They’re bloody everywhere, but they’re there for a reason. They work, dammit. And these character traits (Leads, Does Machines, Cool but Rude, Party Dude) hold true across virtually all interpretations of the characters which gives continuity across the franchise. But, and this is crucial, with that stability and continuity there also comes incredible plasticity. The Turtles fandom is fantastically diverse in terms of its age range and that’s because TMNT can be this:
Or it can be THIS:
Once you get past the initially (very, very, very) silly premise, the Brothers Turtle can grow with their audience. There’s stuff for kids and there’s also stuff for adults. So, class, where have we heard that before? A character that has a rock solid core that’s also surprisingly adaptable and can tell stories for any and all ages?
So before we go any further, I owe you all an apology. I know I said I’d be reviewing Turtles Forever but you need to know three things:
My DVD of Turtles Forever didn’t arrive in time (that’ll teach me to support physical media).
There’s a Turtles movie with Batman in it, how am I NOT going to review that?
unshavedmouse 