A violation of animation's sacred rivalry

I don't know a lot of things these days about the behind-the-scenes movements in the film industry -- in part because I don't try to keep up with/understand all the various takeovers and new conglomerates -- but I thought I knew this:

Disney is Disney and Dreamworks is Dreamworks and never the twain shall meet.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I logged into Disney+ yesterday, and one of the first things greeting me was an image of Shrek in the eponymous film.

Shrek, the movie, is in many ways the flagship product of Dreamworks Animation. It was only the sixth of an eventual 53 feature features (and counting), but it's got the most direct sequels of any Dreamworks series (three, with one more on the way) and it represents the moment the studio really announced itself as a player, not having quite gotten there with films like Antz, The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt. 

Since then, Dreamworks has positioned itself as the primary alternative to Disney in the animation realm. If for some reason you didn't like Disney -- and yes, I suppose there are people out there who do prefer Dreamworks, including, so he says, my younger son -- then Dreamworks would be giving you movies that looked almost as good with almost as good voice talent and, well, far worse writing if you ask me. 

As you will see in any good rivalry, Dreamworks heavily borrows from Disney when it can, and the reverse is sometimes true. I'm sorry to say that Disney has begun more often using the sickly pinks and purples I railed about in this post, which I considered a Dreamworks staple. 

So why the hell is the Dreamworks flagship product now available on the streaming service of its chief rival? What gives?

I tried to see if this was a general availability of Dreamworks stuff on Disney, but as I searched for a number of the other high-profile Dreamworks properties -- such as Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar -- I found nary a trace of them. I tried a handful of other titles just for good measure before stopping. I'm not going to try 53 titles.

There is clearly some kind of licensing exception going on here, and that's another thing I don't pretend to understand, nor do I really want to understand any better. Because it's not actually all the Shrek movies that are available on Disney+, just the first three. Shrek Forever After (2010) is not there.

AI slop to the rescue!

Here's what AI tells me about this, in an unusual brief answer to the question:

Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third are now streaming on Disney+. To all who are confused, this is because of a licensing deal between Hulu and DreamWorks. But Shrek is from Dreamworks? David Frantsen licensing deal.

I love that this answer just loses all pretenses to grammar at the end.

So that was actually my thought, that it had something to do with Hulu, which is part of Disney+ at least here in Australia, and maybe only here in Australia. Like I said, I don't try to understand these things.

I do still find it very weird, and it also seems like we're one step closer to everything just being owned by one company. I'm finding this whole Netflix/Warner Brothers situation fairly ominous in that regard, again without really digging into it. I just know it was very expensive and there's a lot of hand wringing about it.

For now, at least I have easy access to finally watch the second and third Shrek movie if I want. That's right! I've only seen the original! 

At the time Shrek came out, I thought I liked it quite a bit. It was very early on in the new age of animation and I had a basic awe of what it accomplished. But by the time I saw part of it again later on that year on the plane, I had turned against it. The whole five-minute argument about whether onions had layers or not -- really, listen to that scene, it goes on forever -- may have been the thing that did it, but it was really just emblemetic of larger issues. I never thought it was necessary to watch another one, which tells you something about what I think of Dreamworks in general: I never even wanted to watch any of the sequels to their flagship product.

I just checked back in my rankings for 2001 and I had it ranked 53rd out of 73. Not great. 

However, now that Disney has brought it into the fold, maybe I need to reconsider! 

Encant-whoa

I thought of Encanto as a perfect Christmas Day viewing. It had only become available on Disney+ a few days before that, and it fits that "know it when you see it" type film that's a holiday film without being about the holidays. It's big and warm and something the whole family can watch together.

Well, that didn't work out. The kids saw it with their aunt in the theater the weekend before Christmas, when my wife and I needed that Saturday to do serious packing at our old house. Although the younger one made it clear he was eager to watch it again, the older one has lately been proclaiming that he doesn't like to watch movies more than once. 

The bigger issue, though, was that my wife saw it as an even more special viewing than I did, not to be watched merely at home on Disney+. She wanted to go to the theater with my younger one to see it -- a trip I knew would never happen, given how the movie became scarce in cinemas the moment it debuted on Disney+.

By the time we actually did see it, two Fridays ago, I felt like I'd missed the boat. I don't know if I'd have liked Encanto better either in the cinema or watching it on Christmas, but on Friday night, January 14th, it really went in one ear and out the other. A pleasant viewing experience to be sure, but something I didn't feel inclined to think about again the moment it was over.

Until I came to grips with just what a phenomenon this movie actually is.

The first thing that caught me by surprise was when my son had his best friend to visit us in our new house. After the end of the playdate I took them both back on the 30-minute drive to our old neighborhood to drop him off. In the car, they were both singing the lyrics to the song "We Don't Talk About Bruno," as though they'd bought the soundtrack and listened to it on repeat. I mean, that's how we would have learned a song from a movie in the old days. They must have learned it watching the song on YouTube, or possibly multiple viewings of the movie, though I could only vouch for my son's two.

My son didn't know all the lyrics, as he actually couldn't get a lot further than this one particular part about the wedding day. But I was measuring its effect on him not by his success learning the lyrics but by the strength of his enthusiasm. That the knowledge and enthusiasm were mirrored by his friend -- whom he hadn't seen once since his first viewing of Encanto -- suggested to me that this Encanto phenomenon was a thing that was "sweeping the nation," as the saying used to be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad these two white kids are gravitating toward a movie about brown people. That's really good.

But me personally, I don't get it. I thought Encanto was animated well, has some genuine magic, and certainly has some catchy songs -- I have to admit "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is a bit of an ear worm. But some kind of new classic? Hardly. 

I can't decide what it is that prevents me from connecting with the movie. Maybe it's that it doesn't go outside of this one small town where the action takes place. Maybe I don't find the characters very interesting. Maybe I've seen one too many movies lately with a character named "Abuela."

Everyone else? They seem to think of this movie the way I think of Tangled.

As one example: "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is near the top of the pop charts. That's unusual for a song from a movie, especially a song that's sung by the cast as a kind of diegetic music, not the non-diegetic songs that have been breakouts after their inclusion in other movies (see: "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, "Secret Garden" from Jerry Maguire). 

Anyway, Wikipedia says it has the highest peak on the U.S. pop charts (#2) of any Disney song from the 21st century. It's a catchy song but I never would have guessed it would break out like this. I guess Lin-Manuel Miranda tips the scales a bit.

But it's not just the music that seems to have resonated with my son, his friend, and countless others out there. Earlier today my son was watching some YouTube video where the YouTuber was doing a deep dive into the characters and their motivations, like this was some really rich text whose finer points needed to be parsed and analyzed.

Really? Encanto?

I have Disney+, so maybe I need to watch it again when it isn't three days before I'm closing my list from the previous year and I'm not completely film-exhausted. That can't entirely account for it, though -- a movie I saw two days before that (Drive My Car) and one I watched the day after (The Tragedy of Macbeth) both made my top ten. So it wasn't just movie fatigue that caused Encanto to make no impression on me. My top ten was still vulnerable and still changing. 

Maybe I just need to look back to my earlier reference to Tangled to explore this better. Maybe there is only room in our hearts for one new Disney classic. Maybe if you love Tangled -- or Frozen or Moana -- you don't get the hype about Encanto. Me, I don't get the hype about those other films, and Encanto is just the most recent -- making it more of the latest example of a trend, not a strange phenomenon unto itself.

I've gone back to watch Moana and I still don't like it much better. I think I only saw Frozen that one time. I like both films, but it's never going to be more than that.

The difference with Encanto is that I do see the bones for loving it, I just haven't gotten there yet. 

Maybe after my son's current obsession dies down a bit, we can talk about Bruno again a couple months from now and I'll finally see the light. 

Disney princesses as stacks of Legos

I went to a Village Cinemas I'd never been to on Friday, in the city of Knox, about 40 minutes from my house. The reason for choosing this particular theater was it was near the one place in the state of Victoria where there are batting cages, and I visited the cages on my day off with another friend from my baseball team. The movie was Those Who Wish Me Dead. There will be a review linked to the right within a couple days.

Instead of posters for upcoming movies in the hallway between the different screening rooms, there were a lot of abstract interpretations of famous movies, a thing I always like to see. You know, like a big Joker grin hanging out there by itself against a neutral background for The Dark Knight. As is usually the case when they do things like this, I stopped and looked at each one. (In fact, more on that in a minute.)

There was also a series of five other framed pieces of art that I found uniquely compelling -- a series of quiz questions about which Disney princesses were represented by the images in question. I only got two of the five correct, but I liked them so much that I took a picture of each to give you the same opportunity. (Again, more on that in a minute.)

As you are about to see, these were stacks of five colored Lego bricks that were meant as abstract representations of the characters in question. Each asked "Can you name this Disney princess?" The answer appears in small print upside down at the bottom of each piece. 

Interesting right? If a little reductive -- which could also be seen as an issue given that some past Disney princesses have been criticized for their one dimensionality. Don't think that was the intention of the artist, though, and if so, it's never a bad thing for us to be reminded of the less progressive times in Disney's history. 

Anyway, here they are. I'll include answers at the very end of the post.

1.

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

As I was wandering up and down the hallway, lingering a bit with these images, an older female theater employee sensed a situation where she needed to intervene. I'm not sure if she were just being a busybody, someone who straddles that line between helping and meddling, or if she legitimately thought I were lost/confused, or if she thought I were trying to sneak into a second movie. 

She asked "Are you a writer?"

Which I thought was a very funny question. I'd had a conversation with the ticket taker about how she thought I must have "the best job in the world" and how it had been her dream to be a movie critic when she were younger. Not sure if she would have shared this interaction with her colleague, or if so, how her colleague would have identified that I'd been the person she'd talked to.

"Yes," I said in a sort of surprised way. 

When it was clear I had misunderstood her question, I sought to clarify: "I thought you asked if I was a writer."

"No, I said 'Are you alright, sir?'" ("A writer"/"alright, sir" do sound very similar.)

I managed to convince her I was not up to any mischief and she allowed me to continue taking my photos. 

Okay, here are those answers:

1. Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
2. Moana (Moana)
3. Elsa (Frozen)
4. Merida (Brave)
5. Rapunzel (Tangled)

Incidentally, it was only the last two that I got correct -- I should hope so on the final one -- without peeking at the answer, though I must admit, I didn't try very hard on the other ones. I hope I would have gotten them all correct if I'd been on a game show or something, and would have won my $5,000.

Animated colors that nauseate me

After all the to-ing and fro-ing about no one in my family wanting to see The Croods: A New Age (including me, I should say, but I would have gone in order to visit the little town theater in Mansfield, where we stayed between Christmas and New Year's), my wife ended up taking both my kids on Monday, the hottest day of the year so far and one of the last before they return to school tomorrow.

They liked it, of course. I'd say perhaps my wife especially, except that the younger one declared it one of the best movies he'd ever seen. The older one, the one more prone to movie-related hyberole (declaring a half-dozen movies the best he'd ever seen in the past year alone), said it was "okay" but then immediately upgraded that to "pretty good," as you could see him thinking he had been uncharitable, and trying to reconcile his disinterest in seeing it with the fact he'd actually liked it.

It got me thinking about my own negative preconceived notions about the movie that prevented me from wanting to see it, and it's put me on to a larger theory of why I do or do not anticipate certain animated movies. It's a phenomenon common to second-banana animated studios like Dreamworks and Sony, and has to do with the color palettes.

Simply put, when was the last time you saw these colors in a Disney or Pixar movie?

Answer: Never, because Disney and Pixar intuitively realize there's something unpleasant about those pinks and purples, especially when mashed up next to each other.

Oh, Pixar used pinks and purples in Soul, but please note the difference in shade:

Those are lighter, friendlier, more digestible pinks and purples. They don't slap you in the face like those colors used in Dreamworks' The Croods: A New Age or Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, the two images selected above.

I think it was the latter movie, which I really despised after loving the original, that first planted the seed of these pinks and purples nauseating me. My memory of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that every scene is a gross mishmash of these colors, assaulting my corneas and turning my stomach in a metaphorical if not literal way. 

Sure, it's easy to find these pinks and purples in one shot of The Croods. But is that all you got, Vance?

Nope.

I better stop posting these images or I just might vomit.

Yes, I do find these colors displeasing, but this is not just me hating on pink and purple. You can do pink and purple right. It's the aggressive pink and purple, almost neon in its intensity, that makes me feel assaulted. 

It's a whole aesthetic approach to this and a number of other of what I would consider lesser animated films. These colors are prevalent in the Trolls movies as well, for example. And the thing that really sticks out about them is the extent to which they don't exist in nature. Yes, there are pinks and purples in nature, but not these pinks and purples.

See that sloth in the picture above? That sloth is pink. Have you ever seen a pink sloth in nature?

Now, the evidence of The Croods: A New Age -- as least as far as my family's opinons constitute evidence -- demonstrates that this color scheme is not fatal to the effectiveness of the movie. And my wife usually hates pink, like with a passion. She wasn't bothered by it here, which just goes to show you how caught up she was in the story. She really appreciated the female empowerment message of it.

But it's going to keep people like me away, unable to experience that storytelling for ourselves. And it's not because I'm a boy and I don't like pink. It's because something about that mashup of pink and purple has the effect on me that a strobe light has on an epileptic. 

You're stealing everything else from Disney -- or trying to, anyway -- so take a lesson from them and figure out how to employ a more muted color palette. 

Damsels snubbing distress since 1997

I've become hyper aware of the ways modern movies try to address the persona non grata cinematic trope of the damsel in distress, who has been basically scrubbed from movies released today. In fact, most movies will try to have a woman save a man, just to be sure to they are on the right side of this issue. The only movie I could imagine having a woman in danger saved by a man would be something funded by conservatives who were trying to thumb their noses at the "liberal snowflakes."

But this isn't really the recent corrective we sometimes think it is. Yesterday I re-watched Disney's Hercules as a movie night with my kids, and I noted that they were already engaging in the meta satirical activity of teasing the trope way back in 1997.

When Hercules first comes across Megara trying to fight off the river guardian -- a blue centaur about six times as big as she is -- she lets out a definite effeminate squeal that sets us up to think she's in need of Hercules and his muscles. And as he closes in to help, receiving her somewhat indifferent welcome, he tries to clarify that she is, indeed, a damsel in distress ... isn't she?

"I'm a damsel, I'm in distress, I got this," Megara says to Hercules, dripping with snark and sarcasm. "Move along, junior."

We later find out that she was actually negotiating with the river guardian on behalf of Hades, so yeah, I think she can take care of herself. (But he did make her "an offer she had to refuse" ... presumably sexual in nature.)

Near the end, Megara does actually save Hercules, pushing him out of the way of a falling column that lands on her instead.

It makes me wonder why we've gotten so worried in the past five years about whether female characters can save themselves, when in fact Disney was trying to be on the right side of this issue more than two decades ago ... and you would never consider them at the forefront of gender progressiveness. I think maybe Megara was one of Disney's first reactions to the criticism of its under-empowered princesses.

Yet the idea of the damsel in distress, and that it is a hallmark of Disney filmmaking, has lingered on to such a powerful extent that the company had to specifically address it and try to exorcise it in last year's Ralph Breaks the Internet, with a scene devoted to a coterie of Disney princesses enumerating the stereotypes related to them. (A fairly tedious scene, I might add.)

It's not that I don't think we still have far to go; we do. It's that Hercules made me realize we've already been on this road for a long time ... and that the perception is still that we're not doing enough.

I'd say that's sad, but it's nothing compared to the perspective of a bunch of African Americans who thought we might have reasonably "solved" racism decades ago. Some things, unfortunately, take time ... more time than most of us have to breathe in this lifetime, probably.

The good, the bad and the really bad

I've decided my eight-year-old son is my animation polar opposite.

When we were trying to pick out a movie on Friday night for movie night, it was his younger brother's turn to pick. Of course, the older one never misses an opportunity to try to influence a situation with his words. (Shrewdly, if successful, this would get him two picks in a row, as this would technically be his brother's choice.)

"I'd watch anything Madagascar," he said to his brother. "Anything Madagascar is good."

This is a guy who, just moments earlier, turned his nose up, with prejudice, at The Lion King -- a movie with a lot of the same subject matter, only good. As I've told you before, he also claims to hate Toy Story and Finding Nemo, though I was at least encouraged that it was the younger one who vetoed Wall-E, which the older one would have been willing to watch.

Still, as a general principle, the eight-year-old seems to be Team Dreamworks while I am Team Disney/Pixar.

Sigh.

It's not that I don't like any Dreamworks films, because that's certainly not the case. However, my typical relationship with Dreamworks is to see the first in every series of films and leave their umpteen sequels unwatched. Even the good ones, like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. (Actually, I saw the second How to Train Your Dragon but not yet the third.) To be fair, I may be conflating multiple different non-Disney/Pixar animation studios here, as the prime example of this is Ice Age, which is Blue Sky, not Dreamworks.

The original Madagascar had been the poster boy for what I think Dreamworks does wrong with its movies. Too manic, too many characters getting hit in the head by falling objects. You don't need me to elaborate. You've seen these movies.

Anyway, I greatly disliked Madagascar and make a habit of commenting on my dislike for it whenever it comes up in conversation. I wear that dislike almost as a badge of honor.

Over the years, though, people I trust have diminished some of my bluster about Madagascar. Having liked the first movie well enough, they shouldn't have held any sway over me at all. But these are people whose tastes are otherwise trustworthy, and they seem to have an especial fondness for Madagascar 3, the one with the circus afros. Which, by the way, is not a good standout detail to know about a movie.

On Friday night, I felt like it was maybe time to give the Madagascar series another shot, so indeed, we queued up Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. (Wait, isn't Madagascar the country actually in Africa? Or off its coast anyway?)

Ugh.

Instead of rejuvenating the potential of the series, the second Madagascar killed it dead where it stood. I didn't figure it was possible to like it less than I liked Madagascar, but that sure was the case. The vocal performances are annoying (a big complaint I had with the first), the jokes are unfunny, the heartwarming storylines are utterly perfunctory, and the hitting on the head is plentiful, at least metaphorically if not actually.

Consulting Letterboxd, I see I gave the original two stars out of five, at least as a retroactive assessment of my feelings toward it when I started on Letterboxd in early 2012. The sequel? I gave it only half that, making it the rare animated movie to get only a single star from me. (Off the top of my head, I can think of only two others: All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Nut Job.)

I'm not going to further deconstruct my dislike for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, but I did want to give one more thing that I think is dumb about it: It has way too many silly side characters. Following in Despicable Me's footsteps -- or is it the other way around? -- these movies have their minions in the form of the penguins. However, then they also have King Julien and his sidekick. And there are also two posh monkeys who are like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets. Predictably, it's way too much.

I also wanted to explain the meaning of my subject for this post, because there was a funny coincidence to this viewing.

As you will recall, I only just watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the first time on Wednesday night. I watched Moneyball in between, but Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa made for the second consecutive new-to-me movie featuring Ennio Morricone's iconic theme song from the Leone western.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" -- also the name of the song -- plays a couple times during the film, whenever this elderly New York tourist on safari shows up on screen. See, in typical Dreamworks fashion, she's a fightin' granny who tussles with Alex, the lion voiced by Ben Stiller. As the music reminds us of a much, much, much, much, much, much (catch your breath) much better movie, she delivers roundhouse kicks to Alex and says "Bad kitty."

Really bad indeed.

Disney's unnatural clustering

Have you ever noticed there are periods of time when you feel like you are seeing certain actors in everything? It could of course be that they are blowing up, but sometimes, they're appearing in so many roles that you wonder how it was possible they even did all this work at the same time.

The answer is: They didn't. Because films have different periods of gestation, it's possible you did the work two years ago and it's only just now coming to the big screen. That's how an actor like John C. Reilly appears in The Sisters Brothers, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Holmes & Watson and Stan & Ollie, all released within a period of about four months in 2018. I'm not looking it up to confirm, but I'd bet he shot those over 18 months or more, rather than the intense four-month period their release dates would imply. Reilly himself had no control over when those movies would be released. He just showed up to work.

But a studio has a lot more control over the release of its movies, at least in theory. Often times they establish release dates in advance, then pull whatever strings are necessary to meet those release dates. Sometimes they miss and have to push it back, but for the most part, they don't.

Which is why I think it's so weird that Disney is giving us Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King all within 2019, at two-month intervals, starting at the end of this month.

I'm tempted to say it's like releasing three Star Wars movies within the space of five months, but that's not an exact parallel. These movies have nothing to do with each other in terms of story.

However, they are all part of Disney's most clearly delineated new initiative, which is to make live action remakes of most if not all of its classic films. I mean, it probably won't be all -- I doubt we're going to see the Treasure Planet or Home on the Range live action remake any time soon. But isn't that all the more reason to space them out? It's like they want to drain the whole well in 2019, and then move on. Who knows, maybe they do.

It seems hard to imagine that these films won't cannibalize one another in some way, either in terms of providing actual competition for one another or in terms of reducing our overall appetite for watered down CG versions of Disney classics. In North America, competition is not as much of a problem as it may be here in Australia, where movies tend to play longer in theaters.

I imagine these movies are messing with the Australian release strategy for children's movies, which often involves delaying releases to times that coincide with school holidays, which is why we are still waiting another month for the Lego Movie sequel. Dumbo's late March release works perfectly with the upcoming school holidays, which begin on April 5th, but Aladdin's May release can't rightly be pushed back to the end of June for the next school holidays, because The Lion King is hot on its heels.

Whether these movies cause logistical problems for one another, they just don't make sense from a strategy standpoint. You don't want to saturate the market with a particular type of film because the audience will stop considering it special and will kind of implicitly ask you for less of it. If they learned anything from the failure of Solo, maybe it should be that.

Or maybe they just think the appetite is inexhaustible for these live action remakes, as they are serving a different audience. Star Wars geeks rebelled (no pun intended) against the annual release of Star Wars movies, if not actually then implicitly, by not throwing their money at Solo. However, the money has been good for movies like Beauty and the Beast, so maybe either that Solo-type reckoning is still ahead, or will simply never happen.

Or maybe they recognize that the appetite is about to be exhausted, so better churn these out now before the audience definitively turns away from them.

Before I leave you I should probably explain that subject.

"Unnatural clustering" is a useful (if I do say so myself) term I coined in discussion of a phenomenon that occurs when ranking movies on Flickchart. (I can say I "coined it" because it's still used by people on my Flickcharters Facebook group). It refers to what happens when you are ranking movies in filters, as in, all Star Wars movies against each other. It's problematic to do it this way, because if one movie beats the other, it moves one spot ahead of it on the whole chart. In reality, those two films probably do not belong consecutively on your chart, but by forcing similar movies to duel each other, it's created the impression that they have landed naturally next to one another. That may occur in the course of random dueling, but filters force specific duels, and the problem is only worsened if Film C beats Film B, which had beaten Film A, leaving three consecutive Star Wars movies on your chart of potentially thousands of films.

Disney has created its own kind of unnatural clustering by taking three movies that would logically be their own types of tentpoles for the initiative they represent in their own calendar years. Instead, it's just 112 days from the release of the first to the release of the third.

For Disney, it could end up being a clusterfuck.

Rethinking the new Disney classics

There tends to be pretty conventional wisdom on what constitutes the "new Disney classics," which I can define in a way that should be pretty recognizable to you, if you aren't on the same page as me already.

The Little Mermaid starts a run of four great films that gave the Mouse House what is either its first or second of an eventual two or three revivals. Following these were Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

By Pocahontas, it was over.

(Which is also the year that Pixar made its first movie, which is probably not a coincidence.)

Or was it over?

I got a chance to watch Tarzan on Tuesday for what I thought was only my second time, though my list of films seen multiple times included it already. If I did see Tarzan twice, it was within the space of its first two years of existence. And it seems likely that I did, since I really fell in love with it.

I remember my first viewing quite clearly. A new service that really heralded the arrival of the internet age was responsible for bringing it to me. I lived in New York City at the time, and I'd just learned about a place where you could order online and they would deliver to your house. But not pizza or Chinese or Indian or what you would usually expect. This place -- and boy do I wish I remembered its name -- would deliver movie rentals and groceries, but by groceries, I really mean sweet treats and other naughty things. I remember reveling in and celebrating the discovery of the existence of this site via a rental of Tarzan and a delivery of Krispy Kreme donuts (a novelty to me at the time) and Ben & Jerry's ice cream (probably Cherry Garcia). It was a grand old night, sometime in early 2000 it must have been.

I'm a bit surprised I did not prioritize seeing Tarzan, which had come out the previous June, in time to rank it with my year-end films (yep, I already did that back then), but maybe that's just an indication of how little I expected to like it.

Oh how wrong I was.

The movie's storytelling really swept me up. The use of cutting-edge visuals (the deep canvas and the inspiration of Tony Hawk's skateboarding for the movements of Tarzan through the trees), the perfect usage of a rousing Phil Collins score, terrific vocal work (hello, Minnie Driver) and an emotionally generous story had me putty in this movie's hands. When Tarzan first unleashes his trademark feral holler after vanquishing the tiger that had tormented his people, I think I even teared up.

Over the years, while never forgetting Tarzan's impact on me, I did revise my impression of it. I'd floated the idea of its greatness over the years, and I'd gotten a lot of quizzical looks in return. Every once in a while someone would throw me a bone, but I got the sense it was little more than that. To them, Tarzan was a Pocahontas-equivalent footnote in the great Disney oeuvre. I mean, better than Treasure Planet or Home on the Range, but a lesser entry than The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Hercules.

So I started to think I had been wrong about Tarzan.

But oh how wrong I was about being wrong.

My reacquaintance with Tarzan would likely have been as long as a year ago, which is about when we picked it up at a garage sale in our neighborhood (along with Toy Story 3 and Monsters, Inc.). It wasn't my children's request, with my younger too young to state much of a preference and my older already kind of getting out of these movies (he claimed never to have liked Toy Story in the first place, which is a blatant lie). No, this was all me telling them what they should want to watch, and I was secretly most excited about Tarzan.

But only did it finally make it into the DVD player two days ago, and only after a colossal failure to find something else. It was Anzac Day on Tuesday, and my wife needed the day to work. So I agreed to take the kids for the day. Persistent rain limited our choices of activities to the indoors, and it was the older one's idea to go to Scienceworks, the child-oriented museum where we have a membership (hence saving tens of dollars from my idea, which was one of those indoor play areas that charge you about $15 a pop to enter). My idea for the second activity was to watch a movie in our garage with special treats, the locale and the treats being my ploys to actually finish watching the movie. (Which we did, despite the harassment of mosquitoes.)

We went by the Hoyts kiosk to find something we could all agree on, but agreement was highly elusive. This was where stubbornness met stubbornness, as all three of us were stubborn in our own ways. I only wanted to watch something that I considered to qualify as a "real movie," like Moana, Trolls or Sing. My six-year-old only wanted to watch one of several Pokemon movies available for rental, though his version of a compromise was watching a Lego superhero special. The youngest? Paw Patrol. Nope, there was to be no common ground here.

We deferred the decision to home. I was not very hopeful, resigning myself to rewatching something I didn't have all that much enthusiasm for, but at least met my definition of what counted as a movie. And we weren't going to just watch one of their TV shows. If Daddy was buying chocolate milks and chocolate bars, then Daddy was going to dictate what other ways this would conform to his own definition of "special occasion." And damned if I was going to sit there and watch episodes of some stupid TV series they rented from the library. (In case I am sounding entirely too inflexible, I'll have you know that I had decided to relent and watch one of the Pokemon movies, but fortunately, the three-year-old nixed it, giving me the ammunition I needed to hold strong in my resolve.)

When considering the possible options, I hadn't remembered Tarzan. As soon as I saw it, my eyes widened ever so slightly. And the six-year-old selected it as the only one of our movies to go in the "maybe" pile. The three-year-old was over his opposition to anything at this point. He just wanted his chocolate.

Miracle of miracles.

And though we did have to fend off biting insects and a few moments that the younger one considered too intense, not to mention a couple ill-timed requests for additional snacks, we made it successfully through the movie, as the rain varied in intensity just outside of our field of vision. In fact, something about our garden reminded me of the house in the trees in which baby Tarzan is first discovered by mother ape Kala, saved by her in the first of the film's several great set pieces.

And a few interruptions did not prevent me from falling into this film's embrace. It wrapped itself around me like a giant gorilla cradling a newborn infant.

I shouldn't go on much longer for fear of a) boring you and b) making you doubt my sense of taste for loving such a "Disney footnote" as this. But I did want to contrast this Tarzan viewing with the one I had of Beauty and the Beast about a year go, which heretofore I had considered my favorite of the new Disney classics. I had loved the purity and simplicity of the story of Beast when I saw it in 1991, not to mention its technological advancements in the field of animation. But when I saw it a year ago, its animation was far more dated than I would have ever expected -- shockingly so, really -- and the story felt efficient almost to the point of seeming hurried and lacking in nuance.

Tarzan is no spring chicken, either, as it will celebrate its own 20-year anniversary in a little more than two years. But it struck me as just as modern as when I watched it while injecting myself with sugar in pastry and ice cream form in the spring of 2000. It's not really modern, of course -- although the character design of the humans is sharp, angular and impressionistic, some of the ape stuff seemed a bit broad-brushed and rudimentary. But this story is told with a wit and charm and astonishing sense of heart that made it feel modern in all the right ways.

Now, I can't really say how it stacks up with real modern Disney animation, part of the second (or is it third?) revival that has graced us with the likes of Tangled, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia. (And Moana, which we would have watched on Tuesday if I'd had my druthers.) I may have -- in fact, I'm sure I have -- more love in my heart for Tangled than I do for Tarzan.

Though if you squint, those titles not only look the same, alphabetically, but they share a same visual innovation and sweeping narrative that make them both classics in my eyes.

And the real takeaway is how Beauty and the Beast now seems to sort of pale in comparison to them, at least in my eyes, at least on this viewing. Which possibly explains why I haven't made an effort to see the live-action Beast in theaters this past month. It's been more than 20 years since I've seen Aladdin or Little Mermaid or Lion King, but perhaps I'm not so eager to ruin my positive memories of them by being reminded of the ways they've aged.

Like great movies shouldn't, Tarzan hasn't aged. And indeed, I think it's my favorite Disney film of the 1990s.

As for the kids ... yeah, they liked it too. My six-year-old acknowledged it was good, refusing to elaborate (as he did recently with something like My Neighbor Totoro) but also giving it the genuine props he would not need to give it with his increasingly sarcastic attitude. And the three-year-old? He said he "loved it."

Yep, little guy. I agree.

Animated remakes of live-action remakes

As you probably know by now, Disney is in the live-action remake business the same way that Marvel is in the "forever expanding its universe" business and Star Wars is in the "movie per year cash cow" business. (Trick question -- all three are actually Disney.)

But what happens when Disney has already remade all its animated hits as live-action films? (I'm seeing the live-action Tangled arriving sometime in 2023).

I'm wondering if the way to go isn't to remake its animated movies as ... animated movies. And not later, but now.

Disney animated films have a whole new look now. Wouldn't you just love to see an old classic with new-school animation? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Pinocchio? Peter Pan? They might look reaaaaally nice made by a computer.

Of course I realize what I'm saying is sacrilege. But possibly not more sacrilegious than remaking them as live-action movies. Especially since Disney was founded as an animation studio and that remains its bread and butter.

This post is being inspired by Beauty and the Beast in more than one way. For one, the live-action Beauty and the Best comes out this month -- this week in the U.S., next week in Australia. But about a year ago I rewatched the original animated best picture nominee for the first time in something like 25 years, in order to discuss it on my podcast. My impression of it 25 years ago was not only that it was a great story, but that the cutting-edge animation heralded the arrival of a new era at Disney, one that really began two years earlier with The Little Mermaid, only I found that movie more memorable for its songs than its appearance.

But you know what? Twenty-five years is an eternity in the field of animation. What looked cutting edge in 1991 did not look cutting edge in 2016. And I didn't want to hold that against Beauty and the Beast, but the fact of the matter is, I did.

So instead of a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, maybe we should be getting an animated one?

The idea of a studio remaking its own movie in a similar form is probably a bit anathema to Disney. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time a studio has done that -- since it often continues to own the rights to something, sometimes that studio is the only one who can remake it. But an animated remake of a classic, besides meeting controversy as a decision in and of itself, would also be very beholden to the decisions made the first time around. Which shots do you repeat? Which shots do you reenvision? And if you are reenvisioning it, are you only doing so because the baggage of the first film is so heavy? Are you making changes just to differentiate yourself, and if so, are those ill-advised changes?

So maybe these movies need that middle step of the live-action remake. It's kind of like a game of operator, where the movie gets changed just enough in translation to come out the other side as a new entity. (Although that generally only works in operator if people are willfully changing the word. It really isn't as hard to clearly make out whispers in your ear as the game supposes it to be. The game is really only any fun if you have a prankster somewhere in your midst.)

For a good analogy, look at the evolution of something like the movie Hairspray. It started as a John Waters movie, then became a hit Broadway musical, then came back to the silver screen in what I thought was a very good adaptation of the musical. (Actually, I have no idea if it was a good adaptation, never having seen the musical, but I enjoyed the film quite a bit.) You need that intermediary step when the property becomes quite clearly something else.

Could Beauty and the Beast do something like that? Maybe, but I think the problem is, the Beauty and the Beast we're going to be getting next week is not a reenvisiong of the 1991 movie. It aspires only to be a restaging, with a few little moments to differentiate it, but not nearly what you get when you write a bunch of songs to accompany a story that never had them, like Hairspray. It isn't going to change enough to warrant another adaptation. In fact, it might not change at all.

There is a good candidate for something like this within Disney's huge hits from that same period, and don't say Aladdin because that also is going forward in live-action form (with Guy Ritchie as the director!). No, I'm talking about the next film after Aladdin, The Lion King, one of Disney's many films that has only animal characters, making it a bit less likely for a live-action treatment (though that didn't stop them with The Jungle Book). The Lion King quite clearly was reenvisioned for its mega-hit incarnation on Broadway. If they made a new animated version whose art was inspired by Julie Taymor's visionary production design, that really would be that intermediary step. It would give us not only an update to that film's dated 1994 animation (which I haven't recently rewatched), but something that was genuinely new.

Unfortunately, "new" isn't exactly Disney's favorite thing right now. If it ever was.

When Disney started all this business a few years ago, "new" actually was a consideration. Disney's live-action remake of Sleeping Beauty was not actually called Sleeping Beauty, it was called Maleficent, and it told the story from the perspective of the villain. That's a pretty cool idea. But that movie was not as well received as the movie that came the following year, Cinderella, which hewed much more closely to the original. The newly proven formula was not to give audiences something new, but something that already felt very familiar to them.

Say hello to Hollywood in the second decade of the 21st century.

And checking IMDB just now, I see that the example I listed above as a potential savior -- The Lion King -- is also going forward in "live-action" (probably entirely CG) form, directed by Jon Favreau (who else). I can't imagine Julie Taymor's vision will make its way anywhere near that project.

Maybe Disney is just saving this idea for the 2030s, when they will have already remade live-action versions of Home on the Range and Treasure Planet and the well really will have run dry again.

Though who knows what animation will look like then. We'll probably be virtually walking around in the movie next to Belle and the Beast, and maybe that'll be exactly what we need at that moment.

And it certainly might well seem "new."

Revisionist backlash

What better movie to watch on New Year's Day than one where the clock striking midnight figures prominently into the plot?

Actually, that had no bearing on my decision to rent Cinderella along with Spy when I ran out on New Year's Eve to restock our refrigerator. Neither did the fact that we could watch it with my older son while the younger one was napping, making it a two-birds-with-one-stone affair -- though he ultimately tuned out after about 45 minutes. The real motivations were that a) I could keep the movies for an extra night because of the holiday, and b) I'd been pressing my wife to see it for about a month now, because I'd heard everyone talk about how good it was.

After seeing it, my only conclusion about the strength of the praise is that it's revisionist backlash.

Oh, this is an okay movie. More than okay, maybe. But John Waters' second favorite movie of the year? What?

It seems like people are sick of seeing Disney make its movies overly politically correct, and are happy just to see revisionism kicked to the curb for a change. And Waters has certainly never been a fan of political correctness.

To be sure, I'd heard that this was an old-fashioned, straightforward telling of this familiar fairy tale. However, I didn't expect it to be quite so ... boring. Apparently, this is what people liked about it.

Disney's recent movies have tended to be ... not so boring. Or at least, not so straightforward in their approach to the storytelling. Hits like the much-discussed Tangled and the uber-phenomenon Frozen both show Disney bending over backwards to make sure that the female characters have their own agency, that they do as much prince-saving as being saved by princes, and ultimately that they don't need no man. While those movies are not outright revisionism, you can find an example of outright revisionism only last year, when Disney told Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of its villain, Maleficent. And despite some flaws in the presentation, Maleficent the movie ultimately did some interesting things with its choice to view the title character sympathetically, to make her the victim of male hatred. (At the very least, it was giving us mature stuff that probably went over the heads of its youngest viewers.)

Cinderella is not like that at all. Cinderella is straighter than an arrow. It gives us pretty much exactly the story as we're accustomed to hearing it. Except for the fact that Kenneth Branagh's 2015 version is 27 minutes longer than the 1950 animated version, I would not even be surprised to hear that the story beats are apportioned out at exactly the same time intervals over the course of the narrative.

And this movie was a hit, especially relative to Maleficent, which had a much more tepid critical response (Cinderella's 67 on Metacritic puts it firmly in the green of "generally favorable reviews," while Maleficent's 56 leaves it in the murky orange of "mixed or average reviews").

So is this the artistic equivalent of a politician "getting back to straight talk?" Are audiences so frustrated with all this "liberal mumbo jumbo" that they just want someone who "tells it like it is?" And does "telling it like it is" entail female characters who, while not lacking entirely in agency, are happy enough just to be demure?

Another benefit I noted to the approaches of these other movies, particularly Tangled -- they're a lot more fun. A piece of wisdom I gleaned about Cinderella while seeing it through my son's eyes is just how damn sad the story is. First Ella's mother dies, which I had to explain to him and see how it impacted him. Then after another five minutes or so, her father dies, as another separate, elongated episode. Frozen at least had the decency to kill off both parents in one quick scene, showing nothing more than a ship sinking in the distance. Then of course Ella is subjected to a series of indignities at the hands of her wicked stepsisters and stepmother. By 30 minutes in you wonder if anything happy will ever happen in this movie, and that was about the time when my son said "Daddy, you know I don't like movies where things that happen are sad."

It caused me to think about Tangled, where no characters actually die until the very end, and then it's just the bad guy. That story gets its melancholy from a girl being kidnapped and her parents thinking she's dead, but the whole time we know she's alive and (basically) well inside a tower. Sure, that's kind of the exception as most Disney movies feature at least one dead parent, though usually only one. But the way Cinderella drags these things out and forces kids to focus on them is just kind of perverse.

I said my son checked out around 45 minutes, which was especially interesting because that's just when the magical stuff started to really happen -- the pumpkin turning into a carriage and whatnot. Well, when he came back to the movie later, it was when the prince's father this time was in bed, dying. So if you're keeping track at home, that's three dead parents of characters we like. No wonder my son quickly checked out again.

If your revisionism makes for a more fun movie and also gives the women a little bit of additional responsibility for the outcome of their own lives, by all means, revise these stories all you want.

And go sell your straight talk to somebody else.

Engineering the ultimate gender crossover

What one task is of utmost importance for studios who make movies for children?

If you answered "Create something that will appeal equally to boys and girls," give yourself a gold star.

We saw Disney openly struggle with this with Tangled, which they refused to name Rapunzel because they thought it was unlikely to woo little boys. (This being one of the only times a person can use the phrase "woo little boys" without feeling icky about it.)

The mentality continued, somewhat, by taking a movie about a punching bad guy brute from a video game (Wreck-It Ralph) and inserting the character into a game where all the colors are some shade of pink. Frozen slouched back toward what they were afraid of with Tangled, appealing more to girls than boys, but the results spoke for themselves. An unnecessary course correction came in last year's Big Hero 6, which wooed mostly only those little boys. (Don't you like how I talk about these movies as though they are conceived and delivered entirely since the most recent previous movie on Disney's release slate, rather than being massive ocean-liners whose course is almost impossible to correct.)

While doing boffo box office with their theatrical releases, though, Disney has also maintained a burgeoning straight-to-video business. And in early 2014 they released a movie that seemed designed to address any and all concerns about which gender would be more interested. Answer? Both.

It's The Pirate Fairy, as you likely surmised from the poster art above. The title contains one masculine word ("pirate"), one feminine word ("fairy") and one definite article ("the"). That's about as split down the middle as you can possibly get.

Too bad we couldn't have seen how it would have done theatrically.

Actually, The Pirate Fairy did have a theatrical release of sorts. It played in some theaters internationally, and played at the El Capitan Theater (but only that one theater) in Hollywood for three weeks in March. But despite boasting A-list vocal talent like Christina Hendricks, Tom Hiddleston, Mae Whitman and Lucy Liu, and looking like a shimmering example of state-of-the-art Disney animation, it was branded with the stigma of straight-to-video.

I know what little I know about The Pirate Fairy because my son borrowed it from the library last week, and watched it twice before he had to return it. Just stopping in the room in passing, I was so taken in by the quality of the images that I almost wanted to plop down on the couch and watch it with him. (My snooty disavowal of films released straight to video ultimately won out.)

My son is Exhibit A of the gender crossover working. I mean, I could take one look at this movie and say "This is a movie intended for girls." But all he saw were the pirates and pirate ships. (Plus, he doesn't yet consciously turn up his nose at things girls like.)

The funny thing is, despite how I've characterized this as some kind of cynical attempt on Disney's part to reach the most number of demographics possible, this movie has ancient origins. It's yet another product from Disney's expanded Peter Pan universe, which has also yielded the kids show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, one of my son's favorites. You could say Peter Pan was one of Disney's original gender crossovers, featuring both both flying sprites (Peter and Tinker Bell) and evil pirates (Captain Hook). In fact, The Pirate Fairy is the sixth in the straight-to-video Tinker Bell series of films, which in the past has included such girl-leaning titles as Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue and Secret of the Wings. Adding the word "pirate" to the title does grab the interest of boys like my son, but it actually adds nothing new to the Peter Pan universe.

Anyway.

One thing I thought was funny about it was that it put me in a position of having to try to explain the concept of a prequel to my son. The villain in The Pirate Fairy is Captain Hook, but it's when he's younger and still has both hands. I don't think my son got this when he was watching because, well, he doesn't look like Captain Hook.

But in a little interlude that gets dropped into the closing credits, you see Hook, vanquished, hanging on to a bobbing wooden barrel in the ocean. He's using a hook to help grapple with the spinning barrel (wink). He's saved when a ship pulls alongside, and over the side pops Smee, Hook's eventual sidekick, who hadn't previously appeared in the movie (according to my son).

Later, my son asked me, "Dad, what was Smee doing there in the ocean?" He clearly didn't get how this story was associated with the world of Peter Pan at all, it taking place some 10 or 20 years earlier.

I tried to explain it, but laughed at myself upon hearing myself say things like "The events of this story take place before the events of Peter Pan." Even if he understood the chronological sequencing I was trying to convey, which is doubtful, he probably wouldn't understand what I was talking about anyway because he has not actually seen Peter Pan. In fact, I'm not even sure if he knows who the character Peter Pan is. I should have told him that it takes place before Jake and the Never Land Pirates, but to be honest, I'm not even sure how that show fits into the larger narrative.

Maybe the thing to do is get our hands on a copy of Peter Pan, and try to start showing him how it all fits together.

That can be the test run that prepares us for the screwy chronology of the Star Wars movies, which we plan to show him next year or the year after.

Too much Sugar Rush

I finally got in my second viewing of Wreck-It Ralph this past weekend. Though I had been meaning to rewatch it since it first came out, it was actually my son who was responsible for putting it on the docket. W-I R was one of three movies he independently picked off the shelves and brought back to me at the library on Saturday.

My wife thought I'd picked it out -- knowing that she hadn't seen it -- but I had to give credit to him. That's me, pathologically rejecting credit when credit would be easy enough to accept without deceiving anyone. Besides, I'm trying to stick to a movie diet, and putting a new one on the schedule for a week that had already filled up would be breaking my own rules.

So she and I watched it on Saturday night, and I'm sorry to say, I reached a conclusion that some people had reached when they first saw it:

Too much Sugar Rush.

If you don't remember, or heaven forbid, haven't seen Wreck-It Ralph, Sugar Rush is the name of the video game where the characters spend the last two-thirds of the movie. It's a perfect riff on the modern Japanese sensibilities of video games, featuring a go-kart race between cars made of peppermint and cookies, watched by candy corns in the stands, racing past ponds of chocolate and hills of frosting. It's a big burst of color and a huge injection of pure imagination.

And, it gets old. Kind of like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope long past the point where you get a headache.

At least, that's what I've determined must be the reason I didn't like my #4 movie of 2012 nearly as much on second viewing.

When I first watched Wreck-It Ralph, the movie's delicious conceit and the ways they establish the larger world so enveloped me, Ralph probably could have been stuck in Pong for the last hour and I wouldn't have cared. That's how much I was in this movie's spell.

I heard a few people at the time say "I wish they'd gone to more games, but I still liked it." I generally dismissed those comments. Wreck-It Ralph was pretty much perfect, in my opinion.

This time, though, I felt that same wish. What would Ralph have done inside Galaga? Or Golden Tee? Or Dance Dance Revolution?

I realize that Wreck-It Ralph actually has a similar structure to Up, a movie whose problems presented themselves to me more immediately (though also one I have come to appreciate more on multiple viewings). As with Wreck-It Ralph, I loved the setup of Up -- I was completely under its spell. But Carl and Russell end up spending very little time actually flying in Carl's house. It was when I realized that the last hour-plus of Up was going to involve dragging Carl's house around on their backs while doing unrelated things with dogs and rare birds that I started to question whether they were making the best use of the concept.

Watching Wreck-It Ralph this time around, the time spent in Sugar Rush felt eternal. Look, the writing moves things along at a good pace and there's definitely enough for the characters to do, but I was dying for a change of scenery by the end. It was Carl flying his house like the world's largest kite all over again.

Well, if Up needed to come up a few pegs on my appreciation scale, I'm sure Wreck-It Ralph could afford to come down a few pegs. My #4 ranking now seems pretty high praise, especially when I saw nearly 120 movies by my deadline, and when few other critics even found a spot for it at the bottom of their top ten.

The thing I find troubling me most in this reassessment of the movie, however, is that it changes something essential in the way I have been viewing Disney's recent renaissance. I have been building a case for Disney's dominance based on the greatness of Tangled (a greatness that still holds up after four viewings) followed by the slightly lesser greatness of Wreck-It Ralph. Now those assumptions have been dealt two blows in a month's time. First, Frozen was only a 3.5-star movie (I'd given the previous two 4.5 stars, though Tangled actually deserves 5). Then, Wreck-It Ralph came back down to earth a bit on my second viewing.

I don't know that it matters that Tangled is now more of a standalone great. I mean, I have no special incentive to have Disney up on a pedestal. However, I'd definitely taken sides in the ongoing war between Disney and Dreamworks, and felt it was important to continue to acknowledge Disney as the superior combatant.

And I do still feel that way, especially having just seen and been charmed by Disney's animated feature immediately preceding Tangled: Bolt (review coming later this week). I just don't feel it quite as much.

I guess the real loss here is not Disney stepping off a pedestal, but Wreck-It Ralph doing so. I loved loving Wreck-It Ralph, and it sucks that I now only have to really like it. That's the danger of watching movies a second time.

At the same time, I would never counsel a viewer to stop at one viewing for fear of spoiling -- or wrecking -- something great. If it really is great, it'll stand up to multiple viewings, and you should gradually love it more with each one.

Operation Dumbo Watch

I've been looking forward to the age where my son can consume and sort-of appreciate feature-length animated movies as my opportunity to reacquaint myself with mostly-forgotten classics. Since animation was dominated by Disney for five or six decades, I'm mostly talking about the classic Disney movies here.

But I wasn't going to start buying up old Disney movies on speculation. There was a good chance that neither of us were going to like them enough to be worth owning them, especially at the prices that are generally charged for such beloved films. (Even with Travis' Disney Bucks or Disney Dollars or whatever they're called.)

So it was with some joy that I learned of the deal Netflix recently struck with Disney. In addition to some rather significant long-term plans -- like, exclusive rights to Disney new releases starting in 2016 -- Netflix gets immediate access to movies like Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo, both of which I added to our queue soon after hearing about their availability. 

I haven't actually seen Alice in Wonderland, and since I'm aware of all the movie's hidden drug references, I hesitate a little bit about unleashing it on my son. Not that I think he would get those references, not before he was a late teenager anyway -- and he's only 2 and 1/2 now. It's irrational, but it feels like bad parenting to me.

Dumbo, on the other hand, was a perfect candidate. I'd seen it so long ago that the only thing I really remembered from it was the iconic shot of the baby elephant flying around the top of a circus tent. If pressed, I'd probably have been able to tell you about his mother nearly stampeding some folks and being branded as a "mad elephant."

Plus, it was only 64 minutes long.

But I didn't have my strategy right. I decided to show my son Dumbo at a time that I was not in a position to watch it with him. This was three or four weeks ago.

He loved it so much that he watched it again three or four times in the following days. And though I was undoubtedly chuffed (to use an Australian term) to see him taking to a classic movie -- thereby quelling my distant fear that today's kids are hard-wired to need modern animation -- I started to worry that he was going to burn out on it if I didn't get to watching it with him soon. Then I also worried about my own proper viewing being ruined by seeing five minutes of it here and five there.

About a week ago I noticed that he had stop requesting Dumbo. Uh oh.

So this weekend I determined to sit down with him for the movie, before he loses interest altogether. He shows a real ferocity about rejecting shows he no longer wants to see. Some of them make an eventual comeback, but some of them are gone forever. And though I could certainly sit down to watch Dumbo without him, that felt a little absurd to me, not to be killing two birds with one stone when it would be so easy to do so.

Saturday morning we were going to the park, so Sunday morning was the time. And I'm pleased to say that it went off effortlessly. Sometimes he practically wakes up saying the name of the program he wants to watch, but Sunday was not one of those mornings. So I slipped on Dumbo and met nary a moment of resistance from him. A couple times he wandered over to the door to our hallway to call for my wife, who was still sleeping, and with about 15 minutes left he lost interest in watching. I manged to contain him in the first instance, and he contained himself in the second by playing with his toys. So I did complete my Dumbo viewing -- even if some of his toys drowned out the dialogue toward the end.

My thoughts? It's a tight, though exceptionally dated, little movie. Here are some more specific thoughts:

1) It was more Fantasia than I thought it would be. I had certainly forgotten, perhaps because I was too young to understand it at the time, that Dumbo discovers he can fly as the result of accidentally getting drunk. One clown knocks over one bottle of champagne into one bucket of water, and upon drinking from that bucket of water, Dumbo and his mouse companion get so inebriated that they hallucinate a pink elephant parade that takes up five or six minutes of screen time. And here I thought I was saving my son from hidden drug references by not showing him Alice in Wonderland. The trippy sequence culminates with the pair lying in a tree, which is how they learn that Dumbo has the gift of flight.

2) Are the crows racist? It's something I'm seriously grappling with. Dumbo and the mouse meet a half-dozen crows in the aforementioned tree, all of whom have the thick accents of southern blacks. Clearly, this would never happen if the movie were made today -- but is it actually racist? The most negative trait the crows can be accused of is laughing too much at the plight of the hungover pair. Otherwise they're rather clever, and they do play a key role in helping Dumbo tap in to his ability to fly. So here's the question: Is it racist merely to try to authentically recreate the voices of southern blacks in any characters, maybe specifically crows? I'll have to think about that one some more. I did notice that every single human being who helps erect the circus tent has black skin -- which would also prompt a person to wonder whether the movie is racially profiling, or just admitting certain regrettable realities.

3) Not all elephants can talk. I did wonder as I was watching why the catty elephants can (and do) talk as much as they please, but Dumbo never talks, and his mother only talks long enough to provide the stork with the baby's name: "Jumbo Jr." I suppose this movie treats talking as a sign of a lack of enlightenment, as almost every character who opens his mouth has something unpleasant to say. The possible exception is the mouse, who has Dumbo's well-being in mind -- most of the time. If you were being cynical, you'd say he's just as interested in punching his own ticket to fame and wealth.

4) The stork. One of the things about this movie that I found quaint in a good way is the sequence where the stork delivers babies to all the animals in the circus. I'd say that I don't know if you'd see a stork make an appearance in any animated movie shot today, even though the story of the stork is certainly still told to children. But if I said that, I'd be forgetting the Pixar short Partly Cloudy, which played before Up and featured a stork as its main character.

5) Was Mel Brooks working back then? I don't know why, but I felt like all the characters (except the crows) sounded like they could have been voiced by Mel Brooks or Dom DeLuise. I guess that's more an indication of the tradition those two worked in, a vaudevillian tradition which is certainly present in Dumbo.

Although I think Dumbo is an odd movie at times, it's ultimately sweet, with special emphasis on the scenes with the mother animals nestling with their babies. There's the sucker parent in me coming out.

Now that my son has survived the pink elephant scene, I'll have to figure out if Operation Alice in Wonderland Watch might be around the corner.

It's all in the writing

There are others in the game, but it's safe to say that the two current titans in animation are Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks. We can lump Disney and Pixar together because a) Disney owns Pixar, and b) when combined, their output about equals that of Dreamworks.

(Sorry, Universal/Illumination Entertainment -- I'm not inviting you to this party for the disappointing Despicable Me and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. I'll also now make a dutiful mention of Fox' Ice Age movies.)

Although I certainly prefer the animation styles of Disney/Pixar, I'm not going to credit them with having a significant technical advantage over Dreamworks in that department.

And so, when/if Dreamworks does poach employees from Disney/Pixar, they shouldn't be poaching the animators. They should be poaching the writers.

The writing is why Dreamworks is Pepsi to Disney/Pixar's Coke.

The latest example is Rise of the Guardians, the movie I accidentally saw on Thursday night. I had gone to the Sherman Oaks Arclight for an 8:00 showing of Lincoln, but was denied as the result of an apparent sell-out. Although the "big board" did not list the movie as sold out, neither could I purchase a ticket to it at one of the kiosks. And I was close enough to start time not be able to wait behind over 20 dodos who didn't realize you can also buy tickets from the machines. Even if I did, the wait might only confirm what I already suspected about the paucity of available tickets.

Since it started only five minutes later, Rise of the Guardians was an obvious Plan B. (Though I first made sure that Anna Karenina wasn't playing anytime soon.)

My response to this movie was sluggish from the start. That's not to say I thought it was poorly made. As I said before, I prefer the character designs in Disney and Pixar, but I could easily recognize the virtuoso work on display here. I just wish it weren't so manically dizzying, is all. So frantic with color and action and general zaniness. "You can tell they worked really hard on this" was the backhanded compliment that kept occurring to me.

It was really the writing that let me down. The inability to make me care about the characters. The inability to give them depth. The inability to fill me with wonder. The inability to make me laugh.

That was the thing that surprised me most about Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw a couple weeks ago. Not surprised that I cared about the characters or was infected with the contagious sense of wonder, but that I was laughing hysterically. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that the movie was perfectly tailored for a child of the 1980s to get its references, but Wreck-It Ralph may have been the hardest I've laughed at a movie this year. (I'll also note that I saw it with two friends who are the same age and have the same references, which certainly helped.)

I didn't laugh once during Rise of the Guardians. Not once.

I might consider Wreck-It Ralph an anomaly if not for the fact that Disney's previous non-Pixar animated release, Tangled, gave me the hardest single laugh I can remember having in the theater. That's a bold statement, but it may be true. I distinguish this hard laugh from other hard laughs because I kept giggling about this particular line of dialogue for minutes afterward. If you've seen the movie, it's when the thief turned hero, Flynn (voice of Zachary Levi), finds himself in an improbable sword fight with a horse, backing up toward the edge of a long dropoff. Yelling above the ruckus, Flynn tells the horse (who, true to nature, can't speak), "Just so you know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done." I'm almost starting to laugh now, just typing this out.

As a comparison, let's look at the other recent Dreamworks movies that didn't make me laugh: How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda ... well, maybe once or twice each. I did laugh at Monsters vs. Aliens, but that stands out as an exception that I attribute more to the vocal actors than the writing. I'd say its third act gives a good idea of its structural failures from a script perspective.

Why are there so many recent Dreamworks Animation movies I'm not even mentioning here? Because I didn't even deem them worth seeing. That list includes the last two Madagascar movies, the second Kung Fu Panda, the last three Shrek movies, Puss in Boots and Megamind. I did really enjoy Bee Movie back in 2007, but had a much more negative impression of it on second viewing. (That also probably speaks to the writing, as that script is all over the place.)

Pure Pepsi, I tell you.

Now, I haven't seen Pixar's last two movies, either. But I do expect to catch Brave in the coming weeks. I'm probably saving Cars 2 for when my son inevitably goes crazy over the Cars movies, which will happen just as soon as we expose him to the first one.

I do realize that the claims I'm making here are rather broad. In fact, if I looked up these movies, I'm sure I'd find their scripts credited to dozens of different writers, multiple per movie in most cases. Naturally, a group of dozens of different writers have varying strengths that should seem to operate independently of whatever studio is employing them.

Except Pixar and the last two Disney films do have a certain unifying force that gives them a consistent quality: John Lasseter. You know, the guy who basically founded Pixar and directed the first two Toy Story movies. (We won't mentioned that he also directed what many people considered three of the lesser Pixar movies, A Bug's Life and the two Cars movies. For the record, I do really like the original Cars.)

I can't be sure to what extent Lasseter meddles in the day-to-day operations of these movies, but I have to think that his fingerprints are all over Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, which certainly qualifies as a good thing. In fact, it seems as though he's putting more of himself into making really good Disney movies than really good Pixar movies, as Brave seems likely to be the second straight Pixar movie not to win the Oscar for best animated feature. (If you were asking me today, I'd bet on Wreck-It Ralph to win this year.)

Assuming that he does meddle (and that this is a good thing), it's probably not standing over the shoulder of an animator, grabbing his mouse arm and operating the animator like a puppet, showing him the right way to give texture to individual hairs on a character's head. Nope, I'm thinking he's in the writer's room, figuring out just the right way to give the characters texture, dimension and heart.

The results speak for themselves. Disney/Pixar movies feature characters and scenarios you care about, which lead to exciting and poignant narrative climaxes.

Dreamworks?

With Rise of the Guardians being a particularly valid example, Dreamworks movies are just a big light show.