Disney Review: The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood

I'm blogging through all the feature films released theatrically by Walt Disney Animation Studios! For more information on the project, you can visit my introductory post here. You can see an overview of all the posts in the series here.

Into the woods.

You can read the previous entry in this series here.
UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.

19. The Jungle Book (1967)

RIP, Walt Disney. The Jungle Book is the last Disney animated feature that Walt himself worked on before his death in 1966, and as such, it represents a historical turning point for Walt Disney Studios, though certainly not an artistic one (the classic Disney spirit of Walt's lifetime most definitely died sometime between Sleeping Beauty and One Hundred and One Dalmatians). As it is, The Jungle Book fits pretty comfortably within the run of xerographic feature films that the studio put out in the 1960s and '70s on either side of Walt's death: breezily mannered, lightly hip (or at least trying to be—see the mod designs of Dalmatians and the jazz inflections of the upcoming Aristocats), lightly plotted, loosely structured. As with The Sword in the Stone and One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book is adapting a novel (Rudyard Kipling's classic, of course, though given the change in medium, one wonders why they didn't alter the title to The Jungle Movie); being a group of loosely connected folk-tale-style short stories, the original Kipling novel at least justifies the movie's episodic structure, though (as with Sword and Dalmatians) breezily mannered the book is not. No matter, though; Walt Disney never saw dark, brooding literature that he couldn't make just a tad less dark and brooding, and apparently, Walt's major contribution to this film's production was to steer the screenwriters away from their faithful-to-the-source serious take on the story and toward the bouncy family feature we eventually got.

And you know, whatever. I like the book, but I also like what this movie does with the setting, and the ways in which the movie is bouncy and breezy and family-friendly make for fun viewing. I like that the vultures near the end of the movie are basically The Beatles; I like that the elephants march with all the pomp and catastrophe of the most incompetent British infantry of all time; I like that Kaa is no longer a scary, chaotic-neutral murderer but a bumbling, mesmerizingly animated slapstick machine voiced by Sterling Holloway; I like the odd-couple dynamic between Bagheera and Baloo; I like the way Baloo dances—and while we're on the subject, have we talked about how obsessed Disney movies are with butts? Butts are all over the Disney canon, bouncing and jiggling and careening around the frame, and The Jungle Book and Baloo in particular (plus The Aristocats) are peak Disney Butt.

The music is also a lot of fun; of course "The Bare Necessities," but also pretty much every other song in the bunch (though I feel just a little bit uncomfortable about the racial subtext of "I Wan'na Be Like You" and its jazzy "apes" [including "King Louie," and please please please let me just be reading too much into things when I get the feeling he's a reference to Louis Armstrong] aspiring to humanhood). Then there's Shere Khan, a legitimately scary villain and an impressive bit of naturalism in this middle of this movie full of non-threatening, cartoony animals—he's probably the best piece of animation in the film, and quite an achievement within any era of Disney at that. I guess what I'm saying is that as much as I complain about all the narrative and technological complacency of this era of Disney features (the re-used animation is particularly distracting here—it's again from Bambi), I can't deny the appeal of The Jungle Book. The jungle is jumpin', as the poster says, and I'm having a good time.

20. The Aristocats (1970)

I don't know if this is an unpopular opinion or not, because who cares about The Aristocats, but I don't think The Aristocats is very good. There are a few factors contributing to this—first, the most personal: while I don't necessarily resent everybody automatically squealing and asking me if my last name is "like the alley cat," the sheer repetition of the phenomenon does make me a little weary of this movie (and confused—you guys know that like every third person of Irish decent is named "O'Malley," right? it's not some unusual thrill to encounter someone with that last name). So there's that. Its story is also basically a retread of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which is fine in the abstract (Sleeping Beauty is basically Snow White, e.g.), but in practice: 1. I don't really like cats, and 2. this is like the lowest-stakes version of the Dalmatians story of all time, fitting a pet-napping story into that episodic narrative structure and breezy, "let's have lighthearted fun!" tone of The Sword and the Stone and The Jungle Book, and honestly, folks, it's just boring. Lastly, there's Edgar, the so-called "evil" butler and villain of the story, and there are three main problems with the guy: 1. I sympathize greatly with Edgar's motivation—can we all agree that to leave a wealthy estate to four cats is madness? So there's a weird part of me that's actively rooting for Edgar, even though I don't support the murder of cats for personal gain (and really, isn't this just Killmonger all over again?), except that 2. Edgar is a terribly uncharismatic villain, a boring character design married to a completely dull personality, which makes rooting for him an uninteresting prospect, and 3. then there's the problem of Edgar's plan itself, which on the one hand is like Cruella De Vil without the chutzpah and on the other hand is just kind of foolish—like, dude, why don't you just wait until Madame dies, and when the cats obviously can't manage an estate, you swoop in and run the place like a freakin' hero?

Similar to both The Sword and the Stone and The Jungle Book, there's little that's actively bad about The Aristocats; but of those three films, it has the least good to offer. There are exactly two good things about the movie: the finale (in which SPOILERS Edgar gets shipped off to Timbuktu, one of my favorite Disney villain fates ever for its sheer kookiness), and the mid-movie performance of "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat," a song that I must admit is a banger, despite the fact that I do not want to be a cat, neither of the feline nor jazz variety. Otherwise, we're left in this bland wasteland of featherweight dramedy, forgettable characters, and barely-trying animation, and after a while, regardless of anything properly "bad," there's only so much white-bread mediocrity I can put up with before I look at my watch and wonder why I'm spending my time on this.

21. Robin Hood (1973)

Okay, I know I'm going to catch flak for this one: I don't think Robin Hood is very good. It's a step up from The Aristocats, but not a significant one in most regards.

The good (because there is some): I like the music a good deal. It has this fun, singer-songwriter quality to it, because we're in the '70s now, I guess, and I'm a sucker for the device of having the narrator walk thought the movie as an actual character (and for that matter, the best part of the movie by a large margin are the opening credits, which have all the characters running meta-style through the text of the film's production). I also like what they do with Little John, even though it's pretty much the exact same thing as they do with Baloo—i.e. take a character who is more or less serious in the original source material and turn him into a goofy bear with a bouncy butt; in fact, the movie does very little to hide the fact that Little John is just a recolored version of the Baloo character design, just with a hat and a shirt. But I like Baloo, so who am I to complain when I get an extra helping of him? I'm also a big fan of Sir Hiss, perhaps the most adorably named snake gentry in history, and his misadventures, which alternate between his Cassandra-esque curse of never getting Prince John to listen to him when he's figured out Robin Hood's schemes and his Wile-E.-Coyote-like accumulation of discomfort and injury in trying to foil Robin Hood's plans, are fun.

But y'all, that's about it. I've already talked at length about the diminishing returns of the xerography aesthetic, so I won't belabor that here. No, even technical gripes aside, my issues with Robin Hood come down to plain ol' story craft and characterization; you guys out there who love this movie, you're going to have to answer me this: what in the world is compelling about the bland, straight-laced Robin Hood at the center of this film? Or the even less interesting Maid Marian, whose sole duty seems to be to bat her eyes and be in distress? Or Prince John, who is more irritating than sinister and whose exaggerated childishness ruins any scene he's in? Robin Hood busts up an archery match dressed as a crane; is that what we're supposed to be into? He and Maid Marian dance to a nice song for a very, very long time (this is usually where I quit the movie as a youngster); are people into that? Do people just dig the way that Prince John's crown keeps falling down his face? Friends, what is dramatically interesting about any of this stuff? I've seen some weird stuff online regarding people who find the foxes in this movie sexy... is that it?

I'm harping on this movie's flaws not because I hate it but because my profound ambivalence toward the film feels at odds with a lot of the conversation I've heard surrounding it. So feel free to tell me off about how I don't understand this masterpiece or whatever. But I just can't muster any excitement over it (not even when Wes Anderson references it in the infinitely better Fantastic Mr. Fox). Oh well.

See y'all next time as we wrap up the 1970s!