Tuesday, November 22, 2011
A Timeless Love Story
By Damian Arlyn
I was recently playing the board game Loaded Questions with my wife, her brother and his wife. It was my brother-in-law's turn to guess. The card asked the rest of us to name our favorite animated feature film. His wife picked Beauty and the Beast. I selected The Hunchback of Notre Dame (although I could just as easily have gone with Pinocchio, The Secret of NIMH, The Prince of Egypt or The Nightmare Before Christmas). Being fairly familiar with my wife's tastes in animated films, I suspected she would name either Sleeping Beauty, The Lion King or Hunchback of Notre Dame as well. To my surprise, she also named Beauty and the Beast. I knew she loved the film, but was not aware that it was her favorite. After her brother correctly guessed all of our answers, I told her I was surprised by her choice because I always was under the impression she favored these other animated films. "I admire aspects of the other ones," she informed me. "I think the backgrounds and music in Sleeping Beauty are beautiful and I like the story and themes of Hunchback, but with Beauty and the Beast, I just love the whole package." I not only learned something new about my wife that day, I was reminded of something that I guess I had forgotten: namely, that Beauty and the Beast (which celebrates its 20th anniversary today) is deservedly one of Disney's most beloved animated features because, unlike numerous others (which can be very uneven), it excels in ALL of its areas. It is arguably the perfect Disney movie.
Beauty and the Beast came at a time when Disney was experiencing a real renaissance in animation. Throughout the '70s and early '80s, some decent movies such as The Fox and the Hound, The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron were produced, but they failed to achieve the kind of critical or commercial success that had come to be expected from a Disney product. To make matters worse, the live-action arm of the studio (which was churning out such "clunkers" as The Black Hole, Tron and Return to Oz) wasn't faring much better. The studio was finding it tremendously difficult reaching contemporary audiences with its somewhat antiquated material. Their attempt to produce something more "modern" and "cool" with the pop song-heavy Oliver and Company only reeked of desperation. Meanwhile Disney's competitors (including former Disney animator Don Bluth's An American Tail and The Land Before Time) were gaining a lot of ground. So, in the mid-1980s some "new blood," in the guise of former Paramount executives Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, was brought in to change things at the struggling studio and special attention was paid to the once-great animation department. Their plan was to try to recapture the essential elements of Disney's golden age: good stories simply but expertly told with gorgeous animation, interesting characters and memorable music.
The result was The Little Mermaid, an enormously entertaining creation that seemed to include all of the classic characteristics of Disney fairy tales as well as a few new qualities that made it resonate with both children and adults alike. I remember seeing it in the theater with my family in junior high and just being utterly charmed by it. It even went on to win two Academy Awards: one for the score and one for that catchy little tune "Under the Sea," proving that the music was a major ingredient for the film's success. That music came for the imaginative minds of the composer Alan Menken and his lyricist Howard Ashman, the team responsible for the subversive yet immensely melodic off-Broadway hit-turned 1986 movie Little Shop of Horrors. Thus, when Mermaid earned hundred of millions of dollars (much of it from the home video release, the first time a current Disney animated feature appeared in that format) and marked a real return to form for the endangered studio, it seemed only natural that its successor would try to build on the same foundation that it had laid (including the Menken/Ashman songs). Expectations were understandably high and whatever it was to be, they would have to make it something really special.
Disney decided to go with the well-known French fable of a beautiful woman (whose name was wisely changed from "Beauty" to "Belle") who stays in an enchanted castle run by a monstrous beast. Although she is repulsed by him initially, she eventually learns to see the kind, tormented and beautiful person hidden beneath the hideous veneer and in the process warms his own cold heart. In the end, she declares her love for him which transforms him back into the handsome prince that he was before being bewitched by an evil spell and the two live happily ever after. The story had been told onscreen before (most famously in Jean Cocteau's stunning 1946 adaptation La Belle et la Bête) but never in feature-length animation. Borrowing several elements from the Cocteau film (such as furniture within the castle coming to life) but adding quite a few touches of their own (including the heroine's rescue from a pack of wolves by the beast), the animators fashioned a colorful, sweet, funny and at times scary product. Not surprisingly the animation is gorgeous. The design of the beast is a particular standout. Whereas in other incarnations the beast usually resembles a really hairy human, this beast is fully animal with equal parts buffalo, lion, bear and various other carnivorous creatures. Despite all this, an undeniable humanity still comes through loud and clear in the character's facial expressions and body language.
This is no doubt due to the fact that his design was supervised by the eminent animator Glen Keane who has a track record of making huge, lumbering creatures look strangely graceful (see the bear in The Fox and the Hound and Professor Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective). In fact, all of the characters in Beauty and the Beast, from the leads right down to the minor characters, are beautifully rendered with with distinct looks and interesting personalities. This is especially impressive when one considers that most of the characters in the film are sentient household objects such as clocks, teapots, candelabras, etc. The only other animated film I can think of that so effectively turns inanimate objects into living, breathing beings (not including the Toy Story trilogy) is the woefully underrated Brave Little Toaster. Of course, the believability of the characters is aided in no small way by the bravura vocal performances of the excellent cast. Beauty and the Beast followed another wise Disney tradition in that they decided to hire talented actors to give voice to these characters and not A-list movie stars. At the time I saw it, the only voice I really recognized was Angela Lansbury. Even though I was somewhat of a teenage movie buff, I had no idea who Jerry Orbach, Paige O'Hara, David Ogden Stiers and Robby Benson were and I suspect most audience members were like myself. Their ignorance of the actors working behind the scenes helped make it easier to merely accept the characters on screen at face value. Unfortunately, ever since Robin Williams was cast as the Genie in Disney's next animated blockbuster Aladdin, this turned into a practice that seemed no longer viable. Feature animation now appears to be populated primarily with celebrities (which is no doubt why so many distinguished voice actors such as Maurice LaMarche, Frank Welker and Rob Paulsen all have to work in television) and it creates a bizarre disconnect between the figures we see moving on screen and the voice we hear coming out of their mouths. We know that it's Cameron Diaz we are hearing but it is not Cameron Diaz that we are seeing (at least Pixar is trying to continue the tradition of casting the right actors for the roles regardless of their celebrity status).
Another significant development in the history of animation that occurred in Beauty and the Beast was the combination of hand-drawn characters with a completely three-dimensional CGI environment in the now iconic ballroom sequence. It wasn't the first time such a thing was attempted (the climactic clock tower scene from The Great Mouse Detective did the same thing) but this was the first time such a feat was accomplished so seamlessly. Though it may not be quite as impressive to us now, the sight of the "camera" gliding around the characters, swooping down toward them from above and even moving between them as they danced (almost as if we are dancing right along with them) really helped draw audiences even further into what was already an emotionally-charged scene a) because of what was happening in the story at that point and b) because of the lovely title song that was being sung by Angela Lansbury's matronly Mrs. Potts during it. As corny as it may sound, it really is a magical sequence that somehow seems to transcend all of the numerous technical achievements that helped make it so. One would have to be pretty jaded and heartless to not find themselves in some way touched by it.
Like The Little Mermaid, the songs that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken collaborated on for Beauty and the Beast are superb. Clearly modelling their work on Broadway showtunes, every song just pops. There is not a weak tune in the bunch. Also, every song either furthers the story or develops character. The opening number "Belle," for example, introduces the protagonist, establishes how the townspeople feel about her, acquaints us with handsome but obnoxious Gaston who is pursuing her and just generally sets the "stage" perfectly for everything that follows. Gaston even gets his own song wherein the townsfolk sing about how great he is and he in turn
agrees with them mentioning all of his accomplishments and hilariously pointing out that every last inch of him is "covered with hair." The big show-stopping number of the piece, however, is "Be Our Guest," a massive extravaganza showcasing a parade of food and cutlery led by a spotlight-hogging candelabra named Lumiere (voiced and sung by the multi-gifted Jerry Orbach). Seriously, Joel Grey's Master of ceremonies from Cabaret has got nothing on him. Finally, the darker and more sinister "Kill the Beast," wherein Gaston reveals his true colors, rounds out an already impressive collection of melodies. It was a no-brainer that the film would receive Oscar nods for its music. The songs "Belle," "Be Our Guest" and "Beauty and the Beast" were all nominated but it was the title song that took home the statuette. What was unexpected, however, was that Beauty and the Beast would become the first animated feature film to ever be nominated for best picture. It was a milestone in the history of animation and made everyone who worked on it very proud. Alas, one individual who never got to see the awards, the critical acclaim or the commercial success that the film garnered was Howard Ashman. During production of Beauty and the Beast it became painfully clear that Howard was dying of AIDS and although he continued to work very hard on the film (helping with the script as well as with the music), on March 14, 1991, Howard died and what was perhaps the most auspicious musical teams since Rodgers and Hammerstein came to a sudden and tragic end. The film's final credits featured one of the most poetic dedications I've ever seen: "To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful."Although some could argue it was The Lion King that represented the pinnacle of Disney's "renaissance period" (a time when Disney seemed to have the Midas touch, well before Eisner drove Katzenberg away and then proceeded to wreck the very company he had once saved), I think Beauty and the Beast is the true supreme achievement from that era. Everything just came together in such a way that the film managed to catch that ever elusive lighting in a bottle. Twenty years later it still looks, sounds and feels great. Recently it was released on DVD/Blu-ray in a "special edition" which included such notable features as a newly animated music number which was excised before the film's original release (the song was called "Human Again" and it's a charming little tune but I think they made the right decision cutting it as it sounds to my ears too similar to "Be Our Guest") as well as the "work-in-progress" version which the studio courageously premiered at the New York Film Festival. Though it gave birth to several inferior direct-to-video sequels and a successful Broadway show, its true legacy will be as one of the greatest (if not arguably the greatest) animated features that Disney ever produced. The word "masterpiece" gets thrown around a lot, but I feel it truly is a masterpiece, not just of animation but of cinematic storytelling. It is also the last time that a genuine fairy tale was depicted on the big screen. In our increasingly cynical culture, feel-good stories of princesses, monsters, villains, magic and, most of all, happy endings are becoming increasingly rare. Even when a film does attempt to bring a fairy tale to theaters it has to be done in a very sarcastic, self-aware manner (a la Shrek, Enchanted and Tangled); more of a "meta" fairy tale than an honest-to-God "true" fairy tale. Beauty and the Beast is a timeless love story with an enduring message, but it is also in some ways a relic of a bygone era. Unless Pixar's upcoming Brave can reinvigorate the genre, it may be a long, long time before we see another bona fide fairy tale told with such unapologetic enthusiasm and sincerity.
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Labels: 90s, Animation, Disney, Hammerstein, Lansbury, Movie Tributes, Musicals, Orbach, Oscars, Pixar, Robin, Rodgers, Theater
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Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Animation adults will appreciate more than kids
By Edward Copeland
Back in the days when Dennis Miller was funny, before he turned into Howard Beale after Arthur Jensen gives him the corporate cosmology speech in Network, part of what appealed to me about his comedy was that I felt as if I was one of the few who understood most of the cultural and historical references that Miller tossed in his standup as if they were adjectives. Rango plays as if it were an animated film made exclusively for an audience appreciative of that sort of referential humor. As a result, I found the movie very enjoyable at the same time that I questioned if it weren't weighed down by so many allusions and homages that it would fly over the heads of younger viewers. More importantly, would Rango be strong enough to stand on its own if all those clever references were removed and it had to get by solely on what remains?
When I was thinking of how to begin my review of Rango and I'd settled on using my Dennis Miller line about how a once sharp comedian turned into a right-wing mouthpiece and compared his evolution to how the malevolent chairman of CCA, the conglomerate that owned UBS in Network, transformed Howard Beale from a latter-day prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times into a preacher of corporate evangelism, I didn't even think of the irony that Ned Beatty played Arthur Jensen in Network and also voices the villainous Mayor in Rango. This follows Beatty's great vocal work last year as the bad teddy bear Lotso in Pixar's marvelous Toy Story 3. Beatty could corner the market on voicing the antagonists in animated films. He's always great when he appears on screen, but it's amazing to hear how he can create distinctive characters with only his voice.
That aside, on to Rango itself. In a way, besides the plethora of references, I wonder if the filmmakers intended Rango for an older age range. It received a PG rating (though I'm not sure why) but the MPAA details
claim it is for "rude humor, language, action and smoking." I bet the smoking pushed it over. So, should Disney ever revive their great old practice of re-releasing their classic animated films to theaters every few years for new generations, I suppose that 1961's One Hundred and One Dalmatians would have to have the G it received in its 1991 re-release changed to a PG because of Cruella's smoking habit. (The MPAA won't issue any warnings to parents that their children might be influenced to turn dogs into fur coats but SMOKING!) How much further will rating movies for behavior go? There's a big anti-junk food and concerns about childhood obesity going on. If someone eats a candy bar, will that eventually earn a PG? How about the presence of overweight actors? If Jack Black made a completely family friendly film, will he eventually be penalized by the MPAA for being out of shape? I bet they'll never issue warnings for pencil-thin actresses who might subliminally push young girls into having eating disorders.
Pardon my digression. As much as I enjoyed Rango, I find myself less interested in writing about the film itself than issues around its periphery. Though my reason for thinking Rango had an older audience in mind is the behind-the-scenes creative team who assembled for it. Its director is Gore Verbinski who helmed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films (which I only got through an hour of the first one when I realized I had nearly another 90 minutes to endure so I gave up); the god-awful film The Mexican starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, a film whose sole redeeming quality was James Gandolfini as a gay hit man; the American remake of the Japanese thriller The Ring and a couple other less notable films, but nothing animated or truly family oriented among them.
Verbinski also gets a third of the story credit on Rango alongside James Ward Byrkit, whose writing credits are puzzlers but longest section on IMDb lists his work in movie art departments, and John Logan, who actually wrote the screenplay. Logan has an extensive resume of screenplay work including Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Aviator, The Last Samurai and Gladiator, none of which you see as material aiming for the younger crowd. All though have worked with Johnny Depp, who voices Rango, so I can't help but feel that the film is a bit of a lark for those involved that turned out to be very entertaining, at least for film buffs.
However, I can't speak for the young out there, I can only speak for myself and I quite enjoyed Rango. Depp's title character is a chameleon living a solitary life with imaginary friends and dreams of being an actor and a hero. Rango isn't his real name: He'll adopt that later. A series of accidents ends up flipping him into the middle of the desert on the other side of the road from his usual haunts. Parched, desperate for water, he encounters a female lizard named Beans (Isla Fisher) who, against her better judgment, helps him to the closest town with the hopeful name of Dirt.
We've had a few allusions already (we've definitely landed in Sergio Leone territory), but once in town, he's not treated kindly by the townsfolk who distrust strangers. We hear obvious echoes of Pat Buttram-esque and Gabby Hayes-like voices among the crowds. When he goes to the bar and someone asks his name, he spots Durango on the bottom of a bottle of cactus juice and just takes the Rango part. Feeling more confident, Rango starts spinning tales of how he is a gunfighter and he once killed the notorious Jenkins Brothers (all six of them) with one bullet. Everyone is impressed, but they also are hurting. Dirt is in the midst of a serious water problem, as in they don't have much if any. They also are terrorized by a real desperado, a large rattlesnake named Jake (voiced by Bill Nighy). What keeps Jake at bay is a hawk who seems to circle looking for him, but the same scavenger chased Rango when he was struggling in the desert and when Rango sees him in town, he runs for it and kills the hawk by knocking the water tower over on it.
The town fears for its future: Water already is scarce and now that the hawk is dead, what's to stop Jake, but Rango tells them to have no fear, Jake happens to be his half-brother. They're stealing from everywhere else, why not toss a little Shakespearean element into the mix? At one point, Rango actually tells some of the
younger townfolk, "Stay in school, eat your veggies, and burn all the books that ain't Shakespeare." The townspeople take Rango to meet the Mayor, who seems a friendly enough chap, saying Rango is giving the town hope and appoints him sheriff. The Mayor, an old turtle scooting around in a wheelchair he certainly must have obtained from Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life says at one point that he "who controls the water controls everything" and Beatty even puts a slight bit of John Huston in his voice. In fact, Rango appropriates the plot of Chinatown more than any other film, so much so that I wonder if Robert Towne should sue. On the plus side, the Mayor doesn't have a daughter that he fathered a child with that Rango falls for and the movie doesn't end with "Forget it Rango, it's Dirt." It's interesting that Rango is at least the second film involving animation that adopts a Chinatown-like plot to its tale, the first being Robert Zemeckis' great Who Framed Roger Rabbit with its plan to destroy Toon Town for the L.A. streetcar.
The plot plays out as you would expect, though Dirt seems to exist out of time. It's an Old West town free of technology, but Rango crossed a highway full of cars to get there and when he figures out where the water is being diverted to, over a dune he spots Las Vegas. Plot isn't what's charming about Rango though, it's all the extras that make it so much fun. In addition to the obvious references to Chinatown and Leone's spaghetti Westerns, they manage to sneak in allusions to The Court Jester, Easy Rider, The Lord of the Rings, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and, when they get to the big climactic assault/chase, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, even using Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." Late in the film, when Rattlesnake Jake shows up and exposes Rango's stories about the Jenkins Brothers as lies, Rango dejectedly leaves and hallucinates a visit from The Man With No Name, riding around the desert in a golf cart. I actually thought at first that Clint Eastwood had done a vocal cameo for the film (which would have been really cool), but it turns out that it's only a pretty damn good impression of Eastwood by Timothy Olyphant.
Is Rango a great film? Not really. Is it a fun film? Yes, especially if you know a lot about movies. It's also exceedingly well made on the animation side. It wasn't made or converted to 3-D as all animated films seem required to be now, but even watching it at home, the depth of its images and its fine use of colors and shadings would be one of the greatest arguments as to why you don't need the money-grubbing gimmick in the first place. In addition to Depp and all the other great voicework I've already mentioned, Rango also includes nice vocal turns from Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina, Stephen Root, Harry Dean Stanton, Ray Winstone and Ian Abercrombie.
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Labels: 10s, Animation, Brad Pitt, Coppola, Depp, Disney, Eastwood, Gandolfini, Huston, Julia Roberts, Leone, N. Beatty, Pixar, Shakespeare, Towne, Zemeckis
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Sunday, March 13, 2011
This is more serious than you think
ROBERT: I haven’t been feeling good lately. I think it’s probably us. This is more serious than you think. I don't think we should go out anymore. I mean I just think it's over.
MARY: OK. So we're over again.
ROBERT: No, not again. This is the last time.
MARY: And you don't love me.
ROBERT: I do love you. Love has nothing to do with this. Yes, I do love you. That what makes this very confusing, but I just don't think...You've heard of a no-win situation, haven't you?"
(Mary indicates that she hasn't. Robert expresses disbelief that she's unfamiliar with the term.)
ROBERT: Vietnam? This? They’re around. I think we’re in one of them.
So begins the bulk of the opening of Albert Brooks' second feature as a director, Modern Romance, which premiered 30 years ago today.
By Edward Copeland
Before that conversation takes place, film editor Robert Cole (Brooks) sits alone in the all-purpose restaurant awaiting the arrival of his girlfriend Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold). When Mary arrives, he tells her he wants to order and eat quickly, because they have to talk seriously before he rushes back to work. They order, but his impatience gets to him and Robert starts to tell her their relationship hasn't been good for awhile but Mary, who has
been through this innumerable times with Robert, isn't ready, and wants to wait until after they eat, quickly changing the subject to how his work on a sci-fi movie is going. Robert indulges her briefly, telling her that the film's director told him he's the best editor that he's ever worked with, but then Robert stops, insisting that the relationship talk take precedence. After the conversation listed above, Robert suggests that it's a good time for them to be free and clear, but when Mary agrees, he suddenly changes his tune and assumes he's psychic and that she's already seeing someone else, demanding to know who it is. Mary just gives up, spitting back that he thought it was a good time but Robert denies he meant what he said. Mary walks out, telling him to drop dead as an instrumental version of "You Are So Beautiful" plays over the opening credits.
Modern Romance marked the second time Brooks stepped behind the camera as a director, in front of it as the lead actor and provided the words as co-writer with his frequent collaborator, the late Monica Johnson. Coming two years after his mockumentary Real Life, Brooks' character of the insanely neurotic Robert Cole and his obsessively off-again/on-again relationship with Kathryn Harrold's Mary Harvard gave him the reputation at the time as the West Coast Woody Allen. It's funny that Harrold would play the part of his compulsive affection since more than a decade later, she'd assume a similar function as Francine, the ex-wife of another world-class neurotic during the second season of The Larry Sanders Show, only Francine at least had her feet planted more firmly on the ground than Mary Harvard does. Francine actually divorced Larry and resumed their relationship tentatively and decided rather quickly that going their separate ways was the better idea.
While comedies about romance among neurotics hardly qualifies as uncharted film territory, when placed in the hands of writers as talented as Brooks and Johnson, fresh angles and plentiful, if painfully realistic laughs, always can be found. One aspect of Modern Romance that does stake out territory you don't usually see in a film is the process of filmmaking itself, specifically the work of a film editor, which is what Robert does for a living. Following the split at the restaurant, Robert returns to the editing room with both meals to work with
his assistant editor Jay (Bruno Kirby). He gives both dinners to Jay, but you can tell he doesn't listen closely to Mary because when Jay asks what kind of dressing is on the salad he says it's the house dressing when we clearly heard her order herb. Jay tells Robert that David, the director of the film they're editing, had been watching at home and phoned in ideas for changes. Robert tells Jay they should never have started sending video tapes home with directors. Besides, the breakup, even though Robert instigated it, has left him in no mood to work. Jay volunteers to stay and make the changes but Robert decides that work might be the best thing to take his mind off Mary and he settles down to work. Jay asks him if he and Mary fought a lot. Robert says that all they would do was fight and then they'd make up and have really great sex. "Do you need to talk?" Jay asks. Robert changes his mind again and decides he's not in a film editing state-of-mind. Jay advises Robert to go home and try to relax, giving him two Quaaludes to help. "There are 10 million people in this city alone," Robert says, "it can't be that hard to find one perfect person." Jay reminds him that he's alone as well, but the self-absorbed Robert seems disinterested as he leaves for home.Once he's home, the weak Robert immediately checks his answering machine, but sees he forgot to turn it on. He then calls Mary, but no one answers. He interprets both of these things as signs that he's done the right thing. "Alone's kind of a nice place to be," he says to himself. Those Quaaludes have begun to kick in. The phone rings and he grabs it anxiously only to be disappointed to hear his mother on the other end and he hurriedly tries to get rid of her, lying that he's working at home and brushing past her inquiry about Mary. He
stumbles into the bedroom and switches his clothing to a robe and after a brief tumble to the floor, he calls Jay, telling him he wants to let him know that he's the best assistant editor he's ever worked with in his career. The less-than-lucid Robert continues, "Jay, listen — I didn't tell you this before, and I think I should tell you now. I love you. I mean, in the right way. I think you're an amazing guy, and I — I think I just love you." Jay — quite correctly — guesses on the other end of the conversation that the 'ludes have kicked in. Robert is up and wandering and Jay tells him he needs to get back to work because he thinks he's got it whipped. Robert asks if he could get him more Quaaludes and Jay asks how many. "I don't know. About 100?" Jay says goodnight and Brooks continue his hilarious solo scene as the loopy Robert. Out of his mind and sitting before a phone and a phone directory, Robert decides the best way to forget Mary is to leap back into the dating fray. He calls up a woman named Ellen and asks if she remembers him. He tells her that he's always sort of
loved her and wondered if she'd like to go out the next night, promising the best date of her life, full of surprises "like The Price Is Right." Ellen agrees to the date and Robert hangs up, telling himself that he'd be even more excited if he could remember what Ellen looked like and exactly who she was. The phone rings again, only this time it's from an assistant editor named Harry that Robert worked with once, asking for a job recommendation. Robert has no problem — until Harry says he always wanted to tell him how lucky he was to have Mary because he thinks she's a spectacular woman. Robert tells him that they are no longer together. Harry apologizes, saying he didn't know that and then makes the mistake of asking if it would be rude if he asked Mary out. The Quaaludes didn't relax Robert enough to keep him from going ballistic. He calls Harry a scumbag and Mr. Trashcan, even asks why he doesn't try to cozy up to his parents so he can take Robert's place in the will. A stunned Harry gets off the line and a furious Robert decides he better go out before something terrible happens so he climbs in his car and turns on the radio. The first song emanating from the radio is "Another One Bites the Dust." The next thing Robert knows, the sun is shining: He passed out in his car without ever going anywhere. However, Robert congratulates himself: He made it through the first night without Mary.After he freshens up, ready to start a new day, Robert decides that he better not push things by working, so he calls Jay and asks if he can get by without him. Jay has no objections, so Robert prepares for his new life. Unfortunately, he discovers that all his vitamin bottles are empty. He heads out to replenish his supplements and go on a new life shopping spree, telling the clerks at every store that he's coming off a breakup. This
leads the health food clerk (Dennis Kort) to recommend certain vitamins and supplements. He repeats the routine at a sporting goods store in one of the film's funniest scenes where the salesman is played by Bob Einstein, Brooks' real-life brother who is best known as Super Dave Osborne and these days as Marty Funkhouser on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Robert gravitates toward a display that contains all you would need to begin a running regimen, but the salesman steers him away, insisting that those shoes "are made of old tires. Is that how you want to start your new life?" He brings out more expensive Nike shoes. Then he adds an expensive jogging suit, saying the cheaper one will leave a rash, and says he'll need two. Robert questions the need for two. "What if one is in the wash?" Robert smiles. "I won't run?" The salesman starts to hang the suits back up. "I'm sorry. I misjudged you." Robert caves and the equipment piles up to include salt tablets, headbands, wristbands and a wrist wallet, though Robert doesn't understand why he can't just keep his wallet in the pocket of his jogging suit, but the salesperson just glares. It's hysterically funny.
Fully equipped, Robert heads out immediately to begin his training, i.e. his new life without Mary. As we've observed, Robert Cole doesn't seem to stick by resolutions because his obsessive nature gets in the way and currently its laser-like focus stays on Mary, restraining him from new ventures. He goes to a field and keeps preparing for his sprint. He crouches in a starting position, but it's hard to remove things from his mind, as he counts off, "One, two, three. And I don't even miss her, two, three. One, two, three. And I don't even miss her, two, three." Finally, he starts jogging, then checks his new wrist wallet. The run continues until he veers off the track and to a nearby phone booth where he takes change from that wrist wallet and makes a call to Mary's bank and asks for her. The voice on the other end says she's not sure if she and Jim are back from lunch yet, but she'll check. The woman returns and says she's not back. Robert hangs up and, as you would expect, immediately starts obsessing about this Jim person, though he decides this is yet another sure sign that he did the right thing. He called last night and she didn't answer, now she's not at the bank and is out with another man. Yes, he was right to sever things for good. Albert Brooks over the years has proved he's always a master of phone call scenes, but in Modern Romance, phones pop up so often, they practically end up being a recurring theme. I can't help but wonder how this film would play today in the age of cell phones, if Robert weren't constantly stopping at phone booths.
By the time Robert has returned home, the feeling that everything that has happened is for the best has evaporated again. He decides that he can't go out with Ellen that night, especially since he's still not certain what she looks like it or how exactly he knows her. He dials her up to call off the date, but gets her answering
machine. Instead of putting the kibosh on the evening's activities, Robert says he's just calling to confirm that night's date and tells the device how much he is looking forward to it. When he's done with the call, he starts thinking about his place. He realizes that he doesn't have any dope or clean sheets. "I'm not prepared to get laid tonight." He ventures out anyway and pulls his car up to a house and gently knocks on the door. You think he's there to pick up Ellen, but he's actually stopped first at Mary's. She is not pleased to see him on her doorstep. She tells him that she doesn't want to go through this again, but he's obsessed with her clothing. He thinks she's particularly well-dressed so she must have be getting ready for a date. In no mood for this, Mary tells Robert to go home and closes the door. As Robert walks backward toward his car, he shouts, " I don't know where you get this strength. I'm sure it's in stores. I'll find it." Once he's in his car, Robert wonders how Mary could have scored a date so fast. He at least was under the influence of pills, but he doubts Mary was.
Robert leaves directly from Mary's to pick up Ellen (and learn who exactly she is). He pulls her car up in front of her apartment building and parks (Note the black cat that's in front of his car). He rings the buzzer and announces his presence. Her voice asks if he wants to come up, but he declines and tells her to just come on
down and then he meets Ellen (Jane Hallaren) and remembers that they had worked together on something involving Peter Bogdanovich. Then, because at this point it would seem that it's the only way Robert knows how to begin a conversation, he tells her that he's just had a breakup but not to worry, they are going to have a great time. He asks her if she has any suggestions for a restaurant, but she doesn't and he picks what he says is a great place and they start driving. Silence descends on the car as the radio begins playing Michael Jackson's "She's Out of My Life." Brooks' expression says it all as the song plays; you can just read what's spinning in his head and the entire scene has a simple sort of brilliance as it's just these two actors, silent in a car as the song plays. Then you realize, Robert has made a complete circle and is back in front of Ellen's apartment building and tells her that he can't go out yet. He thought he could, but he's just not ready. He promises that he will call her again in a few weeks or months, when he's more emotionally ready to move on and then reaches across to open the passenger door for her and lets her out leaving her standing in front of her apartment building, looking dumbfounded.
Instead of going home, Robert heads to a strip shopping mall which, apparently in L.A., sometimes come with parking gates with attendants which (you can probably repeat along with me by this point) he tells, "I just had a breakup..." adding that he just needs to buy some gifts. So he goes to what seems more like a drug store annoying the employees about their selection and picking up toys such as a stuffed giraffe and looking for items that talk, but failing to find any that actually say, "Mary." He gathers them all together and heads back to Mary's, but she's not home, so he leaves them on her porch, along with a note, and begins his insanely long night waiting for a response. First, he heads home to his answering machine, but there's nothing. The phone rings, but it's his mother again and he struggles to get rid of her, telling her he's waiting for an important phone
call. Paranoid that she could have called while his mom tied up the line, he heads out again and drives by her house, but the toys are still on the porch. He drives around a bit and decides to call from a phone booth and, in a scene that could be from the future, he has to wait for an old man to finish his call and the man could be Robert several decades down the road. The senior citizen is grilling the woman on the other end of the line about another man, even accusing her of having him there with her at the time before saying someone is waiting to use the phone. Robert's travels go on for quite some time: driving by Mary's, back home to check his machine, back to check her porch and then finally back home to the message he's been waiting for: "I love the giraffe." 
"I don't know what makes me do these things. It's my lizard brain," Robert tells Mary as he shows up at her house and immediately takes her to bed. Though I love Modern Romance, I view it as Brooks finding his film footing for the better films he would go on to make such as Lost in America (his best, I think), Defending Your Life and Mother. The central weakness for me is that as Mary willingly and quickly reconciles with Robert that night, her character gets no development to explain what's wrong with her that keeps her going back to this neurotic extraordinaire. When you get down to it, even once they get back together, his essential quirks don't change that much, yet Mary stays with him. He never physically harms her, but honestly, he's a stalker during periods of their separation and paranoid and jealous when they're together. If he hurt her physically, he could end up being Jake La Motta. The morning
after their reunion lovemaking, Robert immediately frets about the outfit Mary is wearing to work, saying the dress makes her nipples look like eyeballs, yet nothing in the film really gives any indication that Mary is as neurotic as Robert or even slightly crazy to explain why she puts up with his crap. As they continue dating for the rest of the film, he always tries to blame his craziness on love. When toward the end, it looks as if he's finally gone too far for her, he proposes — and she says yes. Nothing explains what's wrong with her to want to hitch her wagon to Robert when it's obvious she can do better. Really, Modern Romance is a dark comedy, but not the type you usually associate with the term. Its humor comes dipped so much in pain that you're not always certain that laughter is the proper response.This shouldn't imply that Modern Romance relies solely on angst-ridden humor alone. Albert Brooks knows how to make people laugh and the other films he co-wrote with Monica Johnson (Real Life, Lost in America, Mother and The Muse) weren't in the same dark vein and Johnson also wrote episodes of classic TV sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and It's Garry Shandling's Show. In other words, these two could bring the funny. In fact, Brooks' big breaks were his hysterical shorts that aired on the original cast incarnation of Saturday Night Live.
In Modern Romance, the scenes played almost exclusively for laughs involve Robert's work as a film editor on the sci-fi film. Additionally, it provides extra depth in, as I mention, you seldom see this aspect of filmmaking shown in such detail in a movie, let alone a romantic comedy. It also helps in giving Robert extra layering. He's still the same neurotic man, but he does his work seriously and professionally and I believe it
helps the audience keep from being completely put off by his behavior. When he returns to the editing room to work with Jay, it's as if he'd not lost more than a day over his breakup. He immediately comes up with a suggestion on how to build suspense in a scene where the star of the movie, who happens to be George Kennedy, as Zeron is grilling his men over some nonsense about having to obtain a code. In the original cut, one of the men, Zeon (Rick Bleckner) steps forward and says he knows it, but Kennedy's character yells back at him that he doesn't know anything. Robert correctly points out that it will be another hour in the film before Kennedy will learn Zeon knows. Why not build suspense by cutting Zeon's line and just show him giving a little reaction and not have Kennedy respond at all? Jay agrees that it does play better and even though you can tell that the movie they are working on looks pretty silly, the actual process of cutting that way did improve it.
When the film's director David (James L. Brooks, the film director, but no relation to Albert Brooks) drops into the booth and Robert proudly shows him his work, he's not as impressed. It could be that David had dropped by with his own obsession and wasn't particularly interested in listening to anything else or that he really didn't appreciate the change. David had dropped by because he had become obsessed with a scene where George Kennedy is running through the hallways of the spaceship and it was filmed in carpeted halls and it doesn't really sound like
desperate running and he wants to dub it to make it sound like something metallic or thumping on the floor — he even goes into repeated detail to imitate the thumping — to accompany Kennedy's breathing. Robert and Jay agree they will do what they can. As David is leaving, he asks Robert to walk with him, peppering him with questions
about whether he thinks the movie is any good. Robert asks him what got him upset and he says he saw Alien and they referred the bowels of the ship and they used the same phrase and he's afraid audiences will think they are copying and wonders if they should change it to the basement of the ship. Robert says he shouldn't worry. "All ships have bowels." David then invites Robert to a party at his house that night and to bring a date. Robert's revised line now is that he just got back together with his girlfriend and he doesn't know but David blows that off and tells him to come anyway because George Kennedy will be there and he wants him to see his feet. In Los Angeles, everyone is neurotic in their own peculiar way. They do go, though Robert tries to keep his eye on Mary who runs into some old friends who she goes off into a room to do some coke while Kennedy regales him with a tale of showing up at the wrong studio on the first day of shooting. David suggests it will make a great talk show story. "Why? To tell the world I'm an idiot?" Kennedy replies. Once Robert finally finds Mary again, her friends offer him so coke, but he declines, saying, "I'm hyper naturally." When they get home, he regrets going, since they are in a "mending phase." "When aren't we in a mending phase?" Mary asks.
Welcome to the sound mixing room, another of the funniest and behind-the-scenes sequences of Modern Romance as Robert and Jay return to work the next day to find the right sounds to match George Kennedy running down an imaginary spaceship's hallway. Who really deserves credit for the hilarious success of this section of the movie is the actor Albert Henderson, the gray-haired man in the back row playing the role of the head mixer. His sardonic delivery of every line truly is a treasure. I had to look him up on IMDb afterward and the actor died in 2004 at 88, though his credits didn't begin until 1957. Most was episodic television but even in his film roles, he almost always played a cop. Anyway, back to Modern Romance.
Robert asks the sound guys what they think the surface Kennedy is running on looks like and, naturally, they all reply carpet, since that is what it is. Robert says that David is looking for a sound that's like thumping when he runs on some kind of surface such as a metallic or concrete sound. He asks if they might have some kind of effect like that. The head mixer says they have tapes of The Incredible Hulk running, but he run kinds of slow, but Robert's willing to give it a try. Once they set it up, if The Hulk's moving fast, you can't hear it over his grunting screams, so Robert immediately nixes that, asking why they call that The Hulk Running effect. "Mark that Hulk Screaming," he suggests.
Robert and the men decide they'll have to fake the effect themselves. They ask the sound men what they have available and, given the options, they go with a small metallic surface, which one of the mixers brings out and sets microphones around upon which Robert will be faking the sound of George Kennedy's running. Then Robert remembers that since Kennedy is carrying something in the scene, he needs to mimic that as well, so they begin speculating how much that
prop would weigh. "I don't know. Maybe it doesn't weigh anything — did you ever think of that?" the head mixer says. "Maybe it's on one of those planets that doesn't have any gravity." Robert dismisses the sarcasm and spots an empty bottle from a water cooler and starts practicing holding that. Jay agrees that that looks right so Robert starts running in circles to get his breathing heavy and has Jay chase him before he gets on the surface and runs in place in sync to the footage of George Kennedy in that goofy silvery costume jogging down the cheap-looking spaceship set carrying the plastic-looking plot and they record Robert. They then sit and wait for the playback. The result thrills Robert and Jay and Robert turns to ask the head mixer what he thinks and with that same great dry deliver, Henderson says, "I think you saved the picture." As all the men clear the room, there's a final voiceover punchline announcing, "We've got Heaven's Gate the short version here at 8." Of course, I laughed, but like the movie, that joke is 30 years old and I wonder if future viewers, even future film buffs, will be able to have knowledge complete enough to get the gag or will you have to have been alive in that era to truly appreciate that reference?Having not seen Modern Romance in a long time before watching it again for this piece, I have to admit that it does pale next to Brooks' later works, but it still provides plenty of laughs if you can find humor that comes from such a painful place. The mystery to me always has been why Brooks has had such a small output as a writer-director. For someone initially painted as a "West Coast Woody Allen," he's not remotely as prolific, but on the plus side, he doesn't repeat himself as a filmmaker the way Woody does. All of Brooks' films are easily distiguished from the others, even if his central persona might be similar. Brooks seems content to stick to acting more than writing and directing. He cast writer-director James L. Brooks in an acting part here and six years later James returned the favor by giving Albert his best acting role, his Oscar-nominated turn in James' best film, Broadcast News. Then again, Albert Brooks was acting in great films before he ever made one of his own, playing Cybill Shepherd's campaign co-worker in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and now young generations might not know his name, but they'll recognize his voice as the anxious father searching for his missing son in Pixar's Finding Nemo. Thirty years later, Modern Romance might not represent the best of Albert Brooks' work as a writer-director but it's definitely fascinating to view it as a stepping stone in his overall artistic development.
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Labels: 80s, Albert Brooks, Animation, Bogdanovich, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Cybill Shepherd, G. Kennedy, Larry Sanders, Movie Tributes, Pixar, Scorsese, Shandling, Television, Woody
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Friday, December 10, 2010
Tied Up in Forget-Me-Nots
By Liz Hunt
Seems like every holiday the Walt Disney Co., or its other movie monster Pixar, roll out a movie perfect for families — especially when those children aren't quite old enough or brave enough to take in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 or Unstoppable.
The early trailers for Tangled didn't look all that great. I expected a formulaic story of a poor little lost princess trapped in a tower, a brave young man — and after a few bumps in the road — a happy ending. I was delighted to be proved wrong.
While the Rapunzel story is similar enough to Tangled they could claim a distant kinship, the tower and hair may be the only two common plot devices. Disney's Tangled begins with a drop of pure sunlight falling to earth. A beautiful flower blooms where it landed and this flower can cure everything, including old age. An ancient hag had kept the plant hidden, but one day she forgets and it's discovered by a group of knights on horseback.
The plant is carried to a nearby kingdom where the king's pregnant queen is sick. The flower not only cures the queen but imbues their darling Princess Rapunzel's sunny gold hair with the same power. When the quickly aging hag discovers this, she kidnaps the tiny princess and hides her deep in a hidden valley at the top of the well-known tower. The villain has discovered if she cuts Rapunzel's hair, it turns brown and loses all its power.
I don't remember this from any story, but the princess grows up calling Mother Gothel the hag, "Mother." The older woman stays young by brushing Rapunzel's now ridiculously long hair and letting the young lady sing a song that triggers the magic.
Like modern Disney heroines, Rapunzel yearns to be free of the tower and explore the world, especially the village that launches hot air lamps into the sky one night a year. Every time she asks, Mother Gothel says no, assuring her that "Mother Knows Best," and everyone will only want her to use hair.
Rapunzel is ready to grab all her hair, her lizard, Pascal (who looks like it escaped from The Emperor's New Groove) and run far away. While that is happening, three burglars break into the nearby castle and steal the princess's crown. They don't get far before the royal guards find them and we meet the real scene stealer of Tangled: Maximus the horse.
The young handsome thief, the one with the crown, finds a way into the tower and gets knocked unconscious by the girl. On her birthday, Rapunzel talks the old woman into going into the village for a few supplies and makes a deal with the handsome young man named Flynn Rider to get her out of the tower. He doesn't say much about all the hair, but gets her outside where she is enjoying her first bit of free time in the fresh air.
Maximus, part bloodhound and the smartest horse I've ever seen, finds them and the slapstick between the horse and Flynn is enough to make the entire movie worth the admission price. Throughout the rest of the movie, they bicker, acting like naughty little boys except when Rapunzel gazes their way.
Disney needs to build the pub "The Swaddling Duck" and fill it with lethal looking criminals with hearts of gold. Only in a Disney movie can you listen to a song where one huge man with a hook for one hand wants to be a concert pianist and another huge man's only desire is to be a mime.
All her new friends come in handy with Mother Gothel realizes her treasure is gone. Flynn takes Rapunzel to see the carnival that ends with the release of the little lamps and discovers they are sent aloft in hopes the lost princess will see them and return home.
The last third of the movie is mostly predictable, except the behavior of Maximus, who has decided he will be Rapunzel's champion. Disney has a stable full of good animated horses, but they have given this prissily trussed up white horse a true sense of humor, and a wicked sense of what to do to make Flynn's plans fail.
The voices of Mandy Moore, Zachary Levi and Donna Murphy mix well as the lead characters. Listen to the thugs in the bar and you may recognize the voices of Richard Kiel, Jeffrey Tambor, Brad Garrett and Ron Perlman.
Tangled shows Disney can appeal to any audience, any time, and do it at will. Don't think you need children to go see this movie. Go for the sheer joy of silliness, and of course, to see how everything in the Disney universe mostly does live happily ever after.
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Labels: 10s, Animation, Disney, Pixar, Tambor
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Saturday, November 13, 2010
When a Cartoon Aimed to Be Art
In honor of the 70th anniversary of Walt Disney’s Fantasia, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz watched and discussed the film with his daughter, Hannah, age 13. The format was somewhat less than ideal — an old VHS cassette that hadn’t been touched in more than a decade — but it was enough to jog dad’s memory. However, the authors did not expect that peculiarities of the format would complicate the project; more on that in a moment.
MATT: So what do you think of this sequence, with the creation of the earth and the dinosaurs?
HANNAH: I think it’s really cool, but wasn't this made back when there was a big uproar between creationism and evolution? Were there any problems when the movie came out?
MATT: Not that I'm aware of. It's interesting that you bring that up though, because I hadn't really thought about that sequence in those terms. Fantasia was a somewhat controversial movie, not because of its content, but because of its form. It was made after Walt Disney became a huge pop culture force with his first feature, Snow White the Seven Dwarfs, and his follow-up, Pinocchio, films that had plots and characters and that were drawn from familiar fairy tales. This was his attempt at art with a capital “A” — a series of short films set to classical music, tied together with this framing device of a conductor leading an orchestra, and a narrator or explainer character teaching people the basics of listening to classical music. I think people were more confused than anything else. I'm not aware that religion versus science came into the reaction, although I don’t know much about that part of Disney history to say for sure.
HANNAH: That makes sense, but how was the film’s form “controversial”?
MATT: As far as most viewers were concerned, movies existed to tell stories with beginnings, middles and ends. It was a popular art form that aimed to reach everybody, and for a long time there was resistance to the idea that the medium could create art as great as the masterpieces produced in older forms. At the time Fantasia came out, critics of older arts generally considered movies to be artistically inferior to painting, ballet and classical music. Fantasia contains aspects of all those arts. So in a way you could say that this movie was Walt Disney expressly admitting an inferiority complex on the part of filmmakers in general, almost like he was saying, "You think movies can't be art, and that cartoons can't be art? Well how do you like this? It's basically a ballet of paintings with classical music attached. That's art, right? See? It's art, right?"
HANNAH: But being controversial suggests a sort of a public disagreement. Were the audiences displeased?
MATT: Some people loved it. Some hated it. A great percentage were somewhat puzzled, because there hadn’t been any precedents for what they were seeing. Fantasia was not a hit on the order of Disney's previous films, mainly because audiences didn't know what to make of it. And interestingly, when the company finally made a sequel, Fantasia 2000, over three decades after Walt Disney's death, the same thing happened again. It was the same concept with different music and different subjects, and moviegoers kind of went, "Huh, interesting," or "Huh, boring."
HANNAH: That's strange, seeing as there are so many documentaries that are like this nowadays that people can sit through. For example, Disney’s Oceans.
MATT: We're deep into the creation-of-the-earth sequence. No plot has occurred and no characters have been introduced. What do you think of that?
HANNAH: I don't really care that there's no plot, it's not that kind of movie. It's supposed to be eye (and ear) candy.
MATT: OK, here’s a research interlude: There was controversy over the birth-of-the-earth sequence. According to IMDB, Disney decided to end the opening section, set to Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," with the extinction of the dinosaurs, partly to placate fundamentalists.
HANNAH: Yes, a detailed evolution sequence doesn't seem like something Disney would consider, even for a second. So, did audiences go into theaters knowing what they were going to see?
MATT: Yes, in general, but actually sitting there and watching was probably a different thing. I'd imagine it was a bit like being used to going to a theater to see a vaudeville variety show or a musical comedy and getting ballet instead. Even if you’d been warned that you were going to see something different from the norm, it would still take some getting used to.
By the way, this fight between the stegosaurus and the T-Rex and all the other violent dinosaur action was Disney's way of throwing the casual moviegoer a bone and keeping them interested. When I was a kid this movie pretty much bored me, except for the dinosaur stuff, which I thought was totally awesome, and the bit with Mickey Mouse, which we haven’t seen yet and which is a total crowd-pleaser.
HANNAH: How often would they throw in a people-pleaser scene to keep the audience on their toes and compensate for the "boring" sequences? Is that a regular thing in the movie?
MATT: Not as regular as a little kid raised on Mickey Mouse would hope.
Here comes the death of the dinosaur sequence. Look, no leaves on the trees. They're licking mud. Things are bad right now. Death would be a blessing to these poor creatures.
HANNAH: Erm... no asteroid? I would think that the animators would have a ball animating that sequence. They seem to just be drowning in their own heat right now.
MATT: This movie came out before the scientific consensus that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
And now the tectonic plates are shifting. The continents are being reshaped. The earth is changing into what we recognize today. This is a pretty amazing sequence, actually, and I'm appreciating the craftsmanship that was involved. Every frame of this thing was drawn, inked and painted by hand. This was a half-century before what we now call digital filmmaking. More than that, really. I love watching this movie and picturing the armies of animators with their little plastic cels and paintbrushes hunched over draftsman's tables.
HANNAH: It's a great sequence. Was that based on science? Sorry, I like factuality…
MATT: Yes, the tectonic plates did shift and realign the continents.
HANNAH: Here's an acknowledging-the-musicians sequence. Live action? It seems out of place. I think it would have been cooler if they had animated the musicians playing or something.
Oh, I see now. The part with the sound waves is animated. That’s cool. But I wish the musicians had been animated, too.
MATT: Yeah, that would have been more sensible, to animate the orchestra. But this live action sequence with the narrator makes sense for the time. America still looked to Europe, and to older forms of art, for validity, and was suspicious of homegrown art forms such as mainstream dramatic feature films and cartoons. People got a bit of classical music education in this sequence.
HANNAH: Um, wow. Nice sound wave sequence. I was totally entranced.
MATT: This whole sequence that visualizes the sound graphs of different instruments is quite striking. And something about it — and the opening sequence with the volcanoes erupting in time to the music of Stravinsky — also reminds me of the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the mother ship is having a musical conversation with the people on the landing strip.
HANNAH: Do you know for a fact that Fantasia influenced Close Encounters? You've compared Disney and Steven Spielberg a lot.
On a side note: OMG I ♥ UNICORNS.
MATT: Nope. Just a guess, knowing how much Spielberg loves Disney. The little red light that follows the three spaceships around in Close Encounters is basically his version of Tinkerbell, and one version of
the film's score includes snippets of "When You Wish Upon a Star" from Pinocchio. He’s a Disney obsessive, and he’s never been coy about that.
HANNAH: Ha, this unicorn sequence is so Disney... the little cartoon faces on the baby unicorns.
MATT: Apparently this sequence once contained some kind of heinous racial stereotype, but it was excised in 1960 and hasn't been seen since. This version that we're watching on videotape doesn't contain that footage and I doubt very many people alive today remember it. Let’s look it up.
OK, here’s a picture of a female African centaur that once appeared in this sequence.
HANNAH: That’s like, really vile.
MATT: She's shining the white centaurs' shoes. Can you imagine being a black audience member pre-1960 and enjoying this movie up until the point where that image came onscreen? That kind of thing happened back then more often that it does now. Movies aren’t perfect in that regard, but they’ve gotten better.
Now here's the sequence with some female centaur nudity. This was apparently a problem for some viewers, although they could have gone to a museum and seen a lot more skin in paintings.
HANNAH: It's honestly not that big of a deal. It's a cartoon, and it’s not really that graphic. But when people see some female nudity in a cinema where they’ve taken their children with some confidence that what they watch will be “appropriate,” I can understand why they would be pissed.
MATT: I guess have somewhat looser standards than most dads. I took you to museums and let you see pretty much whatever was available, at least in terms of older art. And how old were you when you saw your first R-rated film? Ten?
HANNAH: Yeah, I think I was ten. But this was released in the ‘40s, when you couldn't say "screwed" on TV.
MATT: I'll go you one better. In 1940, nobody had TV. It didn't become common in American households for another 10 years or so.
HANNAH: Oh yeah, I'm thinking of the 1950s. Well, you probably couldn't say "screwed" on the radio either.
MATT: No, you couldn’t.
And here come the boy centaurs. They all look like college boys from an old movie, with their broad chests and big toothy smiles. Like the kinds of guys that would tease Holden Caulfield.
HANNAH: Wow, Barbie and Ken much? (The centaur couples.)
MATT: As much as I want I to defend the entire movie on general principle just for daring to be different, I have to admit that this whole sequence is about the most boring thing Walt Disney ever put his name on. I was clean-shaven when we started watching it. Now I have a long white beard.
By the way, the piece of music in this sequence is Beethoven's sixth symphony, the Pastoral. It was first performed in 1808, and is one of the first pieces of music that contains what's called "programmatic" content, which means it tells a story or builds an idea or an argument through music, section by section.
HANNAH: Is the centaur/unicorn sequence supposed to be pleasing to little girls like the creation sequence was supposed to be pleasing to adults?
MATT: I don't know. If you were little when you'd first seen this part of the movie, do you think it would it have interested you?
HANNAH: I don't know. You remember when I was little.
MATT: I think you would have liked the Barbie/Ken centaur stuff for about five minutes, then you would have dozed off.
HANNAH: I can see me liking the first five minutes, then getting bored.
Why is Zeus suddenly in the picture? Shifting to a more mythological side now, are we? It was mythological before, of course, because of the centaurs. But that was very Barbie-ish, and now it's hard-core wind-blowing thunderstorm stuff.
MATT: I am sitting here thinking that the image of Zeus raining destruction down on these partying creatures seems less like Greek mythology than the Old Testament story of Genesis, with a wrathful God kicking Adam and Eve out of Eden. Disney was a Midwestern Christian, so maybe this is that aspect of his upbringing taking over. Many of his films portrayed Pleasure — or sin — being followed up with incredibly harsh and frightening punishment. So there is some religious content in this movie, it's just not right out front. It's kind of buried in the movie's DNA.
HANNAH: And now it's back to the freaking rainbow happy Barbie stuff. Comic Book Guy Voice: Longest. Sequence. Ever.
MATT: The Mickey sequence does the pleasure/punishment thing yet again, in a different way. Although Disney was not an actively religious person, he had an upbringing that was very Midwestern and anal-retentive and Puritan. I recognize the type, having spent my childhood in Kansas City with relatives that were pretty heavily Mormon. That aspect of his childhood is all over Disney’s films, and that’s part of the reason they struck a chord with mid-century Americans during and after World War II.
HANNAH: Disney the guy, or the company?
MATT: I'm talking about Disney the guy, in reference to Fantasia. Walt Disney himself was a very representative American male, but with more talent and money. He focused mainly on the movies up until the point in the fifties when he created the park and started a couple of TV shows to promote his empire of merchandise. But after the mid-50s he became a businessman first and a filmmaker second. His name became what we now call a “brand.”
And now we're back to the orchestra. At this point in the movie I would imagine that every small child in the audience was either fast asleep or would have been removed from the theater after throwing a cranky tantrum.
And here come the ballet-dancing ostriches.
HANNAH: The ostrich legs are kind of freaking me out.
MATT: This piece is written by Amicare Ponchielli. It's called "Dance of the Hours,” and it's from the “Giocanda." But if you recognize the melody it's probably because of the song "Hello Muddah/Hello Fadduh/Here I am at/Camp Grenada..."
HANNAH: OHMYGOD IT'S A DANCING HIPPO. (Faints)
MATT: Wikipedia says the ballet appears at the end of the opera's third act. The music and choreography represent the hours of dawn, day, twilight, night and morning. The dance in the original opera is meant to symbolize the eternal conflict of the forces of light and darkness. Which doesn't explain the hippos in tutus and ballet slippers, but hey.
HANNAH: So the animals fighting are supposed to represent the conflicts between the times of day? Is that like a mythological or religious reference? You would think they'd at least use animals that pertain to the time of day they're dancing in.
MATT: Dumbo was released after Fantasia, in 1941. I wonder if the elephants in this sequence were a dry run at the next project by the animation department. This is a bit like the "Pink Elephants" sequence in Dumbo, only less freaky and scary.
HANNAH: Dude, “Pink Elephants” scared the hell out of me. Compared to that, hippos and crocodiles dancing is nothing.
MATT: And here we are, back with the orchestra. The narrator is introducing "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria.”
HANNAH: Awww YEAH I remember this part, so damn cool....
MATT: The narrator says the juxtaposition of the two pieces is about the contrast between the profane and the sacred. Do you know what he means by that?
HANNAH: No.
MATT: Basically, sin versus virtue, evil versus good, darkness versus light, the devil versus God. It's kind of Disney going into the cellar of his consciousness, hauling the really deep stuff that drives his art and putting it right there onscreen and hanging labels on it for us. He starts with a devil figure sending a plague of evil down on this town and turning it into a vision of hell, with demons dancing around flame.
You can see this same contrast played out in a more tolerable form when you visit the theme parks. You've got the clean and sparkly Midwestern town, which is basically an idealized recreation of Disney's own boyhood, and in the same park you've got the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, with these scurvy little pirates burning and looting whole towns, and The Haunted Mansion, where the dead come out for a party.
HANNAH: The contrast is more apparent in this movie. I mean, we've gone from unicorns and meadows to a satanic apocalypse.
MATT: The "light" in Disney is really sweet and sentimental, and the "dark" stuff is very disturbing, often so disturbing that when kids think back on their early experience with Disney movies, they mainly remember being scared out of their wits. Disney is notorious for traumatizing the hell out of little kids. You yourself had the living crap scared out of you by the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And not even the witch in the movie — the one in the ride at the park.
HANNAH: And James was scared by the Winnie the Pooh ride. It's always something.
MATT: Actually, the Winnie the Pooh ride freaked me out a little bit, too. Something about the design of it reminded me of the nightmare sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a movie we need to watch together soon.
I must say that this sequence with the progression of souls through the misty forest is lovely. It might be the only sequence in the film that rises to the level of the music Disney is using for his soundtrack.
HANNAH: I dunno. For me, the sequence of the earth beginning and the apocalypse scene seemed to live up to the musical expectations, too. But the unicorns and dancing hippos kind of threw off that groove.
MATT: What I love about this sequence is that it's basically an enormous, moving bit of abstract art. It's all shadows and light, colors and shading. Though of course I love the dinosaurs, too.
HANNAH: I know. Sometimes I look at a photograph or a piece of art and I feel like this ping in my stomach and I think, "I really wish I was there.” This is one of those times.
Wait, the movie just ended. Where's the Mickey Mouse thingy with the broomsticks?
MATT: Oh, crap. This is embarrassing. Hannah, it's been so long since I watched this that I forgot the order of the sequences. I think the videotape wasn't rewound all the way when I put it in the player. Sorry. We need to go back to the beginning and watch the stuff we missed.
HANNAH: That's like the coolest part. Remember when we saw “Fantasmic” live at Disney World and they lit the lake on fire?
MATT: OK, the tape is done, let’s watch the beginning.
You know, it's been a while since I watched anything on VHS. I feel like I'm studying a cave painting.
HANNAH: It's so grainy.
MATT: OK, starting with the musicians coming in and tuning up is a nice framing device...although I'm kind of digging how we accidentally started with the dinosaurs. That was totally an accident but it felt sensible to me.
You know, you're actually seeing an archivally correct version of the movie, Hannah, cruddy as the visual quality is. The narrator of the movie is Deems Taylor, a well-known music expert from that era. When the company restored Fantasia for its DVD release in 2001, the one element they could not include was Taylor's narration, which I believe was damaged or lost or something. So they replaced Taylor with a guy who sounds very different and much more modern, like a movie trailer guy from 2001.
An orchestral version of Bach's organ piece Toccata in Fugue opens the film. You may recognize this piece of music from....
HANNAH: Every horror movie ever made...?
MATT: You got it.
HANNAH: I love the colors and the silhouettes.
MATT: I forgot about the red lights coming on when the percussionist hits the kettle drums.
HANNAH: It sorta reminds me of E.T. More Spielberg.
MATT: How so?
HANNAH: The red glow coming from the kettle drums looks nearly identical to the E.T.'s red, glowing heart.
MATT: You’re right. I hadn't thought of that. Is it possible that this one movie is responsible for Steven Spielberg's entire career?
HANNAH: Mind blown. Brains flying across the room. Over the moon-face.
MATT: Add three syllables to that and you have a haiku. Go for it!
HANNAH: Fantasia.
But wait, is that three or four syllables? Is it Fan-tay-shuh or Fan-tay-see-uh? These are the questions that haunt me in my sleep.
MATT: It can be three syllables if you want.
HANNAH: YES! I'M A PUBLISHED HAIKU-IST!
Anyway, This sequence is cool. I like it when there's not even like, objects. Or a specific scene. It's just random colors and shapes that go with the music.
MATT: This sequence is sort of the opening parenthesis of the movie, and the "Ave Maria" sequence is the close parenthesis, if you know what I mean. They're very similar in style.
HANNAH: Which one is the “Ave Maria” sequence?
MATT: The finale, the procession by candlelight.
HANNAH: That last part with the conductor totally reminded me of that documentary The Bolero.
MATT: Yes. The conductor silhouetted, the instruments shot like pieces of sculpture.
HANNAH: Wow, a piece I actually know: “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.”
Oh, and incidentally, look! It's a fairy... and she's dancing.
MATT: Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Tinkerbell.
This is as good a place as any to say that we need to see this film together
on a big screen, redubbed narrator or no redubbed narrator. It's awesome.
HANNAH: Definitely.
Nice. Turning the mushrooms into dancers.
MATT: The dancing mushrooms with the slanted eyes and coolie hats are a stereotypical image of the Chinese.
HANNAH: I was about to say.
MATT: But this particular piece is called the "Chinese Dance," so it's not like it comes of nowhere.
HANNAH: I remember this part as well. Do these flowers morph into broomsticks? Because they are positioned like the broomsticks in the Mickey Mouse sequence.
MATT: I don't recall. We'll see in a moment if you called it right. Wow — the flower blossoms rising up on the water and spinning around like dancers with big, long skirts is flat-out beautiful.
HANNAH: I love the fish. So gorgeous.
MATT: The flowers, the fish, the animals, are also an example of Disney's skill at anthropomorphizing things, making it seem as though animals or inanimate objects have personalities, or a life force. This seductive goldfish using her long transparent fins to do a fan dance is a great example of what I'm talking about.
HANNAH: Their animation also has a way of making everything have grace.
MATT: That's true. Would you say that Pixar or Hayao Miyazaki are as graceful as early Disney?
HANNAH: Miyazaki is the master of landscape. I wouldn't credit Pixar for everything they do that's movement-related, because it's all computer-generated. It's insane that they used to draw all this!
MATT: This movie really is a spectacle, like a fireworks display in slow motion. The way objects drift across the frame and kind of ebb and fade reminds me of animation in science documentaries that shows how synapses fire in your brain when you're thinking.
HANNAH: This is so dreamlike. Sorry to state the obvious, but it's true. Like how in your dreams, the setting can change in a second, and all the objects morph.
MICKEY!
MATT: “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” at long last. Sorry it took us so long, Hannah.
Interesting how, at the start of this sequence, the conjurer is calling forth the outline of a demon that resembles the one we'll see near the end of the film. There's a lot of foreshadowing in this movie, and a lot of callbacks to things we saw earlier. But it's all visual and design-related since there’s no story to speak of.
HANNAH: Yes! The broomstick marching song. Theme to my life.
MATT: By the way, good call on the dancing flower blossoms resembling the brooms.
HANNAH: I think I touched on this before, but I love the way how, no matter what the image is, it always moves with the music, whether it’s the ocean, or a flower, or just a simple color palette.
MATT: OK, now we're back to the creation of the universe sequence, which is where this conversation inadvertently began. Which means we’re done. What do you think of Fantasia?
HANNAH: Like I said before, eye and ear candy. And especially when you put the sound and the images and the movement together so eloquently, overall it’s just an amazing thing to watch. Oh yes, and it's unappealing to little kids, which is unfortunate, considering that Disney's reputation is for being a kids’ company. But it’s still a nice change of pace.
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Labels: 40s, Animation, Disney, Hitchcock, Movie Tributes, Music, Pixar, Spielberg
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