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.
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.
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.
“Welcome mes amis! Please to be seated. I ‘ave called you ‘ere so zat we may solve zis murder!”
The facts of the case, they are simple. Strange World, the youngest heir of a very long, very respectable line of animated features, went missing from the box office in the winter of last year. A few months later, it was found, face down in a cold stream of content. There are many possible suspects. The movie boasted Disney’s 98th first gay character. Perhaps this was a hate crime? Or perhaps Covid 19 was to blame? But no, I believe there can be only one killer. Monsieur Disney, J’ACCUSE!
“What! How dare you! This is preposterous! I loved Strange Journey!“
“Strange World.”
“Gah! Such a bland, forgettable title! How was I supposed to market him!? I’m the victim here! ME!”
“I knew it! You killed him, just like you killed my brother!”
(Man, I have GOT to write a Knive’s Out style murder mystery with sentient Disney movies, I have to do that.)
***
You’re all asking the wrong questions, you know.
The mystery is not “Why did Strange World flop?” I can tell you that right now.
Last year I sat down to plot out my review schedule for the next decade or so (I will never, ever, ever auction reviews off again. That was stupid. I was a stupid Mouse).
And this was an honest to God chain of thought I experienced:
Oh hey, I should probably put aside a slot to review the next canon Disney movie.
Oh damn, what even IS the next canon Disney movie?
Oh shit. Strange World? I haven’t heard anything about this. When is it coming out?
Oh fuck. It’s in theatres NOW.
Yeah. I’ve been reviewing the Disney canon since Obama and I both still had black in our hair and even I knew nothing about this thing. It didn’t fail because it as too gay or not gay enough or because every time Disney tries to make a sci-fi animated movie the monkey paw exacts a terrible price, NO. It failed because Disney didn’t market it and bad word of mouth delivered the coup de grace.
But what I can’t really get my head around is why Disney buried this so hard. I mean, it’s definitely bad, but it’s a kind of bad that Disney can and have managed to sell before. To take the most recent examples, Rayaand Wreck It Ralph 2 ate the box office alive and those are both, I remind you, hot effing garbage.
Was it really the fact that the main character is gay? I’ve always found that line of thinking flawed and conspiratorial. If a studio doesn’t want to release a movie with a gay main character, they can just, y’know, not make the movie and save the estimated €180 million dollars. But in this case…I dunno, maybe? It definitely feels like Disney has dropped bigger turds than this and yet was able to convince a sufficient amount of the population that it was selling them chocolate ice-cream. And hell, the reviews for this were actually very positive (not from me, I’m gonna dance on this thing’s fucking head) but most mainstream critics dutifully cooed “representation”, dropped a handful of stars and clocked off for lunch. It really was the audience reaction to this that was sharply negative. Maybe that was a homophobic backlash? Or maybe it was just the burgeoning realisation that most of Marvel/Disney/Pixar’s recent output has been trending worse and worse and people are now treating the brand less as a mark of quality than a warning label.
I don’t know and I’m not going to try to guess. I am DONE trying to game this kind of stuff out. Back in my Raya review I said that the age of Disney movies being big, unifying cultural events was over only for Encanto to come along and be that exact thing. I cautiously mused that Encanto might be the Disney ship righting itself only for Strange World to come along, cough once and die on my carpet so fuck it. I am just going to review the damn movie and leave the big pronouncements to people who actually know what they’re talking about.
Milligan: Ohhh yes! If we build this mountain on England, England would sink under the weight.
Seagoon: Sink? In that case, this mountain would be invaluable, people could climb up the side and save themselves from drowning!
Milligan: Mercy, you’re right. Hurry and build it, before we all drown!
The Goon Show: “The Greatest Mountain in the World” (1954)
“Mouse, you explain that opening quote RIGHT NOW!”
“What, I can’t reference classic British radio comedy to open my review?”
“Listen to me. Encanto is the one good thing to come out of this miserable fucking decade and if you try to ruin it for me…”
“Ooookay, how about we take a deep breath?”
Alright, let’s just dispense with the usual dancing around.
Encanto is great. It’s a great piece of animation. It’s an excellent musical and it’s without a doubt my favourite canon movie in a long-ass time. It’s walking out of here with a good grade, don’t nobody worry ’bout that.
But…
I have to confess that what really fascinates me about Encanto is how it keeps making the most basic, obvious mistakes in screen-writing you can imagine (trying to build a mountain that will cause the country to sink), and instead of just fixing them in a sensible way (just not building the mountain) by doubling down and solving those problems in the most ridiculously over the top way possible (actually building the mountain). And it works.
The best example of this is the first song Welcome to the Family Madrigal.
There are twelve named speaking Madrigal characters, all with unique personalities, powers and familial relationships to keep track of. That is, quite frankly, bananas and any sensible screenwriter would have gone through the cast with a machete looking for who could be cut.
Way I see it, for this story you need Mirabelle, two older siblings to establish the pattern that Mirabelle broke by not getting a gift, and then a younger sibling to get a gift to show that Mirabelle really was a fluke. You need Abuela, obviously, Bruno and Julietta. Augustine doesn’t need to be there and Pepa’s entire family is extraneous. And yes, obviously, that would really suck to lose those characters but that would be the sensible choice. The sane choice. But that would not be the Encanto choice.
Encanto instead decides that it’s going to have an opening song flat out admitting “yes, our cast is far too big and complicated and our premise is weird and clunky so here is a song to help you remember”. It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t work. But simply by dint that it is a phenomenal song it does. They built the goddamn mountain.
Back in my review for Roller Coaster Rabbit I called Steven Spielberg the “Forrest Gump of American Animation”. Pick any seminal development in the history of the medium over the past forty years or so and chances are Spielberg is involved somehow, showing LBJ his ass. But the problem with history is that a lot of it is really, really, really sad and few things ring a tear from my dusty old eye ducts like the collapse of traditional hand-drawn animation in the face of CGI like a proud old Mesomamerican Empire succumbing to hordes of plastic-faced, eyebrow-raised, pop culture spouting Spaniards. Perhaps the earliest death-knell of the hand-drawn animated feature was heard all the way back in 1995, ostensibly when the Disney Renaissance was still going strong. Balto, the third and (as it would prove to be) final film produced by Spielberg’s Amblimation studio was one of the biggest box office flops of the year, tanking so hard that Amblimation closed as an animation studio and now lives in quiet seclusion as a Self-Storage company based in Acton. Because, well, let’s just say 1995 was a bad year to be competing in the market of feature length animation.
You will know them by the trail of dead in their wake.
This was the first of many high profile examples of hand-drawn animation competing and failing against CGI movies which ultimately led to the near extinction of traditional hand-drawn feature animation, at least in America. But I think Balto’s failure can’t just be attributed to its unfortunate status as the first notch in CGI’s gun barrel. For starters, I know for a fact that I actively avoided this film. See, from the moment The Little Mermaid lit the touch paper, every studio in Hollywood had been trying to cash in on Disney’s success with their own Disney-esque movies. And I steered clear of them because Disney inculcates brand loyalty like a psychotic mother stroking her child’s hair and whispering “no one shall ever love you as I do, little one, least of all whatever whore you end up marrying”. In my defence though, most of the wannabe Disneys were god-awful and the more “Disney-like” they tried to be, the worse they tended to turn out. And Balto, even from a cursory look at the poster, wants to be Disney so, so hard it’s honestly a little sad. So I think that many people, like myself, had learned to distrust non-Disney movies that were clearly trying to be Disney movies. For as wise Mr Beaver once said: “if you meet anything that’s going to be Disney but isn’t yet, or used to be Disney once and isn’t now, or ought to be Disney but isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and get ready to leave a bad review on Rotten Tomatoes”.
As unexpected as the movie’s initial failure was its equally remarkable afterlife. Its home video sales were robust enough to spawn two sequels, meaning that there was definitely an audience for this film, just not one willing to go out in public to watch it. Which I find inexplicable.
I know, I know, I know I said I’d do Black Widow. But that was before I realised a couple of very important things:
Not doing a horror themed post on Halloween is super lame.
In the 1980s Toei animation did two animé movies based on Marvel’s versions of Dracula and Frankenstein.
One of these movies is regarded as one of the worst animé ever made, which, as you can imagine, is a title with competition that is not merely “stiff” but positively turgid.
Both of these movies are just sitting on YouTube, misshapen shambling things made and then abandoned by their creators to the cruelties of an uncaring world like…someone…I can’t think of a good analogy right now.
I mean c’mon! A crappy animated Marvel Bats versus Bolts on Halloween? How could I not?! I was BORN for this post. Seriously, this is what it’s all been leading to. My magnum opus. My masterpiece.
Our story begins in the late seventies when Toei Animation acquired the rights to the Marvel comics horror series Tomb of Dracula and Monster of Frankenstein. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who the hell buys the rights to a property based on Dracula or Frankenstein? That’s like paying for a Pornhub Account. They’re public domain for chrissakes! Why not just do your own version of the characters? Well, friends, you’re missing a crucial piece of relevant context, namely that Tomb of Dracula and Monster of Frankenstein were the mutt’s nuts. TOD in particular was one of the very best comics produced by Marvel in the seventies, with one of the all time great portrayals of the Count in any medium. From this acquisition came today’s movies Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned and Kyōfu Densetsu Kaiki! Frankenstein. They are…my God. Words fail me…
These movies are special. They are dear to me. Come, come.
Oh Disney’s The Little Mermaid The Series, how could I ever have doubted ye? After the snore-fest of Metal Fish I was resigned to this retrospective ending in a disappointing (if thematically appropriate) damp squib. Oh Mouse of little faith. Strap in folks, we’re riding this train all the way to crazy town.
There’s an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth where Captain Edmund Blackadder is being courtmartialed for eating a carrier pigeon. He’s not worried, though, as he tells his jailer that he’s retained the services of Massingbird, the greatest lawyer of the age:
Jailer: I hear he’s a dab hand at the prosecution as well, sir.
Blackadder: Yes, well, look at Oscar Wilde.
Jailer: Ol’ butch Oscar.
Blackadder: Yep! Big, bearded, bonking, butch Oscar. The terror of the ladies. 114 illegitimate children, world heavyweight boxing champion and author of the best-selling pamphlet “Why I Like To Do It With Girls.” And Massingbird had him sent down for being a whoopsie.
That scene kept running through my mind as I watched Metal Fish with its depiction of Hans Christian Andersen as a flame haired, barrel-chested adventurer of the deepest depths of the sea and not, as he was in real life, a wee Danish pastry who spent much of his life in an undisclosed location hiding from his own erections. But I get ahead of myself.
unshavedmouse 