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Saving Mr Banks (2013)

(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material. New to the blog? Start at the start with Snow White.)

Previously on Unshaved Mouse: After learning that he’d been secretly manipulated into destroying the career of Don Bluth, Mouse swore revenge against his former mentor Walt Disney, promising to review “The Worst Disney Movie”. However, it seemed that the two had finally buried the hatchet after Mouse reviewed Big Hero 6 i~~n an attempt to boost his flagging page views~~ just ‘cos. But then, Walt was kidnapped by Mouse’s entire rogue’s gallery who it turned out had been led by none other than…Mouse.

Now read on.

“You’re kidding. Saving Mr Banks? That’s your pick for worst Disney movie?”

“Yup.”

“Not one of the straight to video sequels? Not the High School Musical movies?”

“Nope.”

“Not the one where we literally threw tiny lemmings off a cliff to their deaths?”

“Pff. Lemmings. Who cares? Buncha racists.”

“FUCK YOU, MAZERUNNER!”

“Saving Mr Banks was a critical darling! It grossed over a hundred million dollars! How can it possibly be the worst Disney movie?”

“Well, “worst” can have very different meanings.”

Pamela Lyndon Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff was a remarkable woman who led a remarkable life. At various times a Shakespearean actor, a scholar of Native American cultures, a propagandist during the second world war, a member of the literati who rubbed shoulders with the likes of AE and WB Yeats and the creator of Mary Poppins, one of the most popular children’s characters in English language literature. She was also, by most accounts, a bit of a pill. In fact, it’s been said that she died “loving no one, and loved by no one.” Who said that? Her own grandchildren. Yikes.

A question I got asked a lot after my review of Mary Poppins was whether I had read any of the original books and the answer was “No.” I have since had a chance to rectify that, or at least, I’ve managed to read the first book, the one that the 1964 film was based on. In my opinion it’s a charmingly written, often very witty book that’s let down by a somewhat ramshackle episodic structure and the fact that the main character is WORSE THAN HITLER.

Sorry, I know a lot of people love these books and prefer the literary version of Mary Poppins but oh my God, no. No, no, no, no, no, She is awful. Vain, mean, borderline emotionally abusive, contemptuous of everything and everyone, snobbish, nakedly hostile to anyone who is not on their knees kissing her very shoes and she sniffs. Constantly. “Mary Poppins sniffed…” it was like a goddamn tic. By the end of the book I was like…

And today’s movie, Saving Mr Banks, is about how that book and its fairly unlikable author and its deeply unpleasant main character were somehow corralled into making one of my favourite movies by one of my favourite film-makers. You could not engineer a safer audience for this movie than me. So how badly do you think they had to fuck it up for me to hate this movie, to hate the Disney corporation that made it and even for a little of that hate to wipe off on my memories of the original film? How hard do you have to try to fail that badly?

Let’s take a look.

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Holy cow…

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

I don’t actually know what to say.

Wow.

Humbled. Honoured. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

#2 Jack Lynch

Name: Jack Lynch

Party: Fianna Fáil

Terms: November ’66-March ’73, July ’77-May ’79

So remember when Michael Jordan quit basketball and became a baseball player as depicted in the documentary Space Jam? Imagine if, instead of being awful, he had gone on to become one of the best players in that sport too. Then imagine he ran for election and became one of the most popular presidents in US history. That’s pretty much Jack Lynch.

Also, instead of Bugs Bunny, Jack Lynch was aided by Daithí Lacha, Ireland’s first cartoon character. He was terrible.

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Huh! Wait! What!?

So, Irish blogdom has been thrown into a bit of a tizzy by the sudden decision by the Blog Awards Ireland 2015 to extend voting to midnight September 23rd. Why? We don’t know. They just did. Hence the tizzy.

Tizzy is a funny word. I will say it again. Tizzy.

Also, it seems that people who already voted can vote again. I officially don’t even. This thing is run by insane people. Who I hope aren’t reading this right now.

Anyway. Care to give me a desperate last minute vote? Links is below.

#4 Enda Kenny

“Welcome, to the desert of the real.”

“What happened?!”

“The great flame war of 2015. We don’t know who struck first but we do know that it started when the Unshaved Mouse gave a fairly positive appraisal of Enda Kenny.”

“The great flame war of 2015. We don’t know who struck first but we do know that it started when the Unshaved Mouse gave a mixed to positive appraisal of Enda Kenny.”

“Whoah…”

Name: Enda Kenny

Party: Fine Gael

Terms in office: March 2011-Present

Stop. Stop right there. Yes you. The one about to leave the wonderfully well-reasoned and dispassionate comment about why I deserve to be molested by porcupines and then set on fire. Yes. I put Enda Kenny in the number four spot. Yes. I did that. But ask yourself this: Who should I have put ahead of him? Cowen? Ahern? Haughey? Big DeValera fan are we? Hmmmmm?

“What’s that? Garret Fitzgerald had GOOD INTENTIONS!? My country can’t live on GOOD INTENTIONS, Marge!”

Bruton? Really? Are you going to get all fired up because I ranked Enda Kenny higher than John Bruton? You wanna be that guy? You want to die on that hill?

“That would be an unjust war.”

So who’s left? Costello? You want me to say that John A. Costello was the fourth best Taoiseach?

“That sounds like a wonderful idea!”

“Ha! Classic Costello!”

Sorry if I seem a little punchy, but attempting a dispassionate evaluation of our current Taoiseach is dangerous work. Alright, so.

Enda Kenny, who is he?

Yes “he”, American readers. Enda is a male name.

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Last chance to be on the right side of history…

Hi guys. Voting for the Blog Awards Ireland 2015 closes on September 21st so if you have voted for me already, thanks. If you were going to vote for me but haven’t yet now would be a real good time to swoop in and save the day (please click the big black voting button on the right.) And lastly, if you’ve decided that you’re not going to vote for me, well..

And so, the final battle commences…

Okay guys. Here’s the situation. We’re in the final quarter. Bases are loaded. Injury time. Gretsky has the ball. Sports.

Unshaved Mouse has been shortlisted for Best Art and Culture Blog and, unlike in previous years, I might actually have a bloody shot at this.

The shortlist is down to 28 blogs. That’s doable. That’s beatable. But I need your help.

This year is different from last year. There are only going to be two weeks of voting starting today and, near as I can tell, you can only vote once. So, the good news is I’m not going to be pestering you for votes every week. The bad news is, only 30% of the final score comes from the final vote and the rest will come from some poor judge trying to make sense of this Disney fuelled acid trip I’ve been on for the last three years.

“What is this madness?! I never trained for this!!”

So please, click on the image below and vote for Unshaved Mouse. Your support is, as always, hugely appreciated.

Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #54: Big Hero 6

And so, like putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes, I return again to the Disney canon. Good to be back everyone, feels like I never left. Unshaved Mouse doing what he was always meant to do, reviewing Disney movies! Put the Disney dance party album on repeat because the whole gang’s here! Including my collection of traitorous good for nothing maps who betrayed and abandoned me the very second things got rough and have now come crawling back like the worms they are.

“Hooray!”

“Ah, don’t be like that, Mouse.”

“Don’t talk to me.”

“‘S only ever love, M. You know that.”

“Where did you go anyway?”

“We just hung around with Rubber Lotus for a while. At first it was fun, but then it got a little weird. He kept asking us to call him “Mouse”. Did you know he has a shrine to you in his wardrobe?”

“Yeah. Shrines. Never not creepy.”

And of course, since I’ll be reviewing a Disney movie that means the return of our old pal Walt Disney!

“Hello folks! Good to be back, Mouse. Glad to see there’s no hard feelings over that whole “brainwashing” thing.”

“Hello folks! Good to be back, Mouse. Glad to see there’s no hard feelings over that whole “brainwashing you to do my dark bidding” thing.”

“None. What. So. Ever.”

“Glad to hear it. Say, you keep gritting your teeth like that you might chip your incisors.”

After the marriage of Disney and Marvel, the two companies did what many couples do in this situation; put their children from previous marriages in a room together and try to force them to like each other. In this case, Disney CEO Bob Iger told the Disney animators to look through Marvel’s back catalogue to see if they could find properties that would make good animated movies. Now, people who’ve followed my blog from the beginning know that when Disney adapts other properties, fidelity to the source material is not usually high on their list of priorities. Marvel fans, conversely, have a list of priorities that reads

Marvel fans tend to get a little…um….Rain Man-esque…about movies changing even small details about their favourite characters, and films that don’t respect the source material tend to get eaten alive like a cow being dipped in a vat of piranhas.

Poor bastards never had a chance.

So it’s not really surprising that the comic that Don Hall (director of Winnie the Pooh and writer on most of the Lost Era movies) chose the comic Big Hero 6 to adapt instead of a better known property because…well, no one gives a piping hot shit about Big Hero 6 and this way they could mess around with it as much as they needed to. In the comics Big Hero 6 is a Japanese superhero team that operates as a parody of Japanese pop culture tropes. I haven’t read the comic myself but reading up on it raised a few red flags for me, number one being that the mini-series they first appeared in was written by Scott Lobdell, a writer whose work is (if I may be horribly blunt) not my cup of tea.

Secondly…Okay, there are those who would consider this kind of broad cultural parody to be racist in and of itself. I’m not one of them. Irish people come in for a good bit of this kind of thing and I think as a nation our general attitude is…

But…some of the details about this book, like the fact that one of their enemies is the embodiment of all the people who were killed in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…

Yeah, I think we can all agree that “loose adaptation” was probably the way to go on this one.

So much for the book. What about the movie? Oh, and while I’m not in the habit of putting up spoiler warnings I’m aware this movie only came out in 2014 so yeah, I will be discussing all major plot points just like I always do. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, get on that. The rest of you? Let’s roll.

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Thanks guys!

Look at it. LOOK AT IT! Isn’t it beautiful? But y’know, I have just one question.

“Does it come in black?”

Now we’re talking! Thanks to everyone who nominated me. You guys are the greatest. The shortlist will be announced on 02 September (yeah, they don’t wait around do they?) and after that public voting will commence on 07 September and run for two weeks. I’ll let you all know if I make it to the second round.

Thanks again guys! VALIDATION! WHOOOP!

Moomin and Midsummer Madness (2008)

When trying to understand the appeal of the Moomins, you first have to look at their creation back in…

Hello?

Anybody?

"Congratulations Mouse. You’ve finally done it. You’ve finally succeeded in completely alienating your entire readership. Bravo. Genius. Take a blog that’s largely supported by Disney fans and devote it to obscure European cartoons, Irish politics and a film that was literally never even released."

“Congratulations Mouse. You’ve done it. You’ve finally succeeded in completely alienating your entire readership. Bravo. Genius. Take a blog that’s largely supported by Disney fans and devote it to obscure European cartoons, Irish politics and a film that was literally never even released.”

“WHAT HAVE I DONE!? Surely its not too late?!”

“Nope. They’re gone. You had your one chance at internet stardom and you blew it. That was it. Let’s go boys.”

“Wait, where are you going?!”

“Back to the Google images page you stole us from. Farewell, Mouse.”

“See you, Mouse. It was fun except for that time I was almost fed to wyverns.”

“Peace out, dawg.”

“No…my readers. My maps. They’re all gone…”

“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.”
“There’s a pain goes on and on.”
“No more views and no more comments.”
“Oh my blog is dead and gone…”

Guys, I swear, I will review a movie you’ve actually heard of as soon as I’ve done this one. Contractual obligations and all. If it helps, I’m as much in the dark about this one as a I think most of you are (with apologies to my Scandinavian readers). That’s not to say that the Moomins are unknown in Ireland, I know quite a few people who are fans, but the whole Moomin phenomenon just kind of completely passed me by. My blind spot on the Moomins honestly extends to most things Scandinavian. I just don’t know that much about those countries apart from the fact they constantly conspire to keep Ireland out of the top five on the Human Development Index, the Nordic Marcia Brady to our Gaelic Jan.

“Sweden did it again! Sweden, Sweden, Sweden!”

Okay. So. The Moomins. What are they? I don’t know. I mean literally, I have no idea what they’re supposed to be. Wikipedia describes them as “fairy tale” characters, which is just wonderfully specific. I suppose, since they’re called “Mumintrolls” in Swedish they’re supposed to be trolls from Scandinavian folklore but…

Yeah, how did I not get that?

Well anyway.

Okay. So. The Moomins. They’re a family of white, hippo…things. Who hang out. And have whimsical adventures tinged with an unmistakeable air of melancholy. They were created by a Swedish-speaking Finn named Tove Jansson who wrote and illustrated nine books featuring the characters between 1945 and 1993 and who also takes a hell of a stylish photograph.

Who you know fresher than Tove, riddle me that?

There have also been EIGHT cartoon series based on them, and numerous movies with the most recent being released this year. They are, like all things that are cute but difficult to explain, huge in Japan.

And yes, they have their own theme park.

Because Europe.

So, now we’re ready to talk about the movie? Oh, we have not even begun to unpack all this.

So, one of those eight (!) cartoon series was Opowiadania Muminków, an Austrian, German and Polish co-production that ran between 1977-82. Then, in 2008, a Finnish company took that series and edited into a single movie called Moomin and Midsummer Madness, the English dub of which I am reviewing today. So, to recap.