Y'all are going to hate me for this one.
You can read the previous entry in the series here.
EDIT: You can read the next entry in the series here.
31. Aladdin (1992)
Don't get me wrong; that's not a bad thing. In fact, I love this movie. I think it's great—a terrific romance, both in the classical, capital-R and the modern, lovey-dovey senses of the word. But I'm right on the heels of both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, two of the most thematically ambitious movies Disney ever made and whose write-ups I devoted largely to the explication of those themes. With Aladdin, though, we're basically back in the realm of tradition, which means that there isn't a ton going on in the movie's explicit text beyond your standard "true love conquers all," "friends are nice," "follow your heart," etc. So unless I'm interested in doing some weird reading into tossed-off exposition like the Genie being a slave or Aladdin rubbing his "lamp" for happiness or whatever (I'm not interested in doing that), I'm going to have to change gears from my previous posts.
In a lot of ways, it makes sense that Aladdin would be a more traditional Disney picture than its immediate predecessors. It is, after all, the first Disney feature with non-white protagonists (unless we're counting Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which I'm not), and also the first Disney feature based on a non-European source (although whether the original "Aladdin" story in The Arabian Nights is an authentic Middle-Eastern folk tale and not a clever European pastiche is still an open question). So it stands to reason that Disney wouldn't want to try anything radically deconstructive with this one. The film is essentially the two major types of Disney narratives joined together: the always female-centric Princess story of seen in films like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella (this is, of course, the part of the movie focused on Jasmine) and the usually male-centric scrappy underdog story of the likes of The Sword and the Stone and Oliver & Company (Aladdin's sections of the movie). These two story types rub off on each other in interesting ways: Aladdin, for example, inherits the doe-eyed earnestness typical of the Princess films, while some of the discursive, anachronistic humor often seen in Disney's male-oriented stories (think Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, or Baloo in The Jungle Book) becomes a catalyst for Jasmine's story in the form of how the Genie guides a love interest into her life. But a lot of the story energy of Aladdin is spent simply grafting those two traditions onto this setting, the only difference being that in opposition to the almost uniformly idyllic settings of Disney's European-sourced films, Aladdin's Agrabah is introduced with a foreboding song that calls it "barbaric," which is all sorts of trouble from a representational standpoint. That a Middle-Eastern setting, even one as fantastic and lost-to-time as this one, would register to Disney storytellers as automatically more dangerous than a European one speaks volumes about the lenses of exoticism through which the white dudes creating this movie viewed their subject. It's not sensitive in the least (Disney even changed some of the lyrics of the opening song for the VHS release of the movie, so no, this isn't even something that scanned as completely okay in 1992). But if you can get past that—the film's particular strain of exoticism isn't really any worse than an Indiana Jones movie or the old Thief of Baghdad films, which is not to excuse it but just to say that it's a kind of problematic content I've become mostly numb to, for better or for worse—you're in for one of the most purely entertaining feature films Disney ever made, an excellent execution of both princess and underdog modes. And at least the movie isn't trying to make a misguided political point through the thick of its iffy approach to ethnic representation *rolls eyes in Pocahontas's direction*.
Anyway, I do want to briefly mention the Genie before I wrap up here, because I think he warrants some discussion as both a force for good and for ill. On the good side (and for the record, I'm pro-Genie overall) is the fact that there was never a role better suited to Robin Williams's particular repertoire of talents than that of the Genie, this shape-shifting, fast-talking blob of a character, and Williams tears into his voice work with an inexhaustible vigor. The Genie is a chaotic force of nature in the film, a creation more akin to the anarchy of Looney Tunes than the normally buttoned-up roster Disney deals with—a sort of Bugs Bunny with a conscience, and it works great. I'm glad he's here. But on the other hand, the Genie also represents the inauguration of a truly odious tradition in Disney films and American animated films in general: friends, I am talking of that particular variety of comic-relief character who is none other than a fast-talking celebrity playing basically himself, spewing cheap pop culture references and snark into an otherwise sincere film. It's a plague of an archetype, and it infects virtually every Disney film for the remainder of the '90s as well as the current slate of Disney Neo-Renaissance films like Moana in addition to providing the entire foundation for the identity of DreamWorks Animation. Much as I love the Genie, I cannot help but shudder a little at his presence, such are the thunderclouds that hang over the animated films in his wake.
32. The Lion King (1994)
I'm blabbering on about my pointless theories of Shakespearean parallelism because I'm putting off stating what I think will be a rather unpopular opinion: in the same way that I think Hamlet is a vastly overrated Shakespearean drama, I have nowhere near the affection for The Lion King that many of my peers do. The Lion King is... fine, I guess. But it's a long way from the heights of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. I'd actually probably put it on par with The Rescuers Down Under in a ranking of Disney Renaissance films. Now before you bite my head off, let me clarify: there are things that about The Lion King that I find great. The animation, for starters, is by a very large margin the most technically accomplished and aesthetically impressive of the entire Disney Renaissance, and I'd even go so far as to call it the best Disney animation of any movie between Sleeping Beauty and the present day. It's stunning, doing that Bambi thing of conveying personality and emotive characters within the confines of hyper-realistic animal movement. The songs are very good, too; Alan Menken unfortunately had to sit this one out, but none other than Sir Elton John himself took the man's place, and the five songs he wrote with lyricist Tim Rice are all good-to-great, with iconic "Circle of Life" sequence that opens the film being one of the all-time great syntheses of music and animation in Disney history.
But that opening is, like, four minutes of an 88-minute movie, and the rest just isn't as good. How could it be? But even without "Circle of Life" wrecking the curve, I don't think I'd really be too enthusiastic about the movie outside of its aesthetic and songs, and there are parts of the movie that I actively dislike. The songs are great, sure, but who is that in the composer's chair for the score? None other than my arch nemesis, Hans freaking Zimmer, who of course shoves his awful, loud, compressed digital scoring all over this movie, an ugly, brutish counterpoint to the brightness of the Rice/John songs, simmering with so much exaggerated portent that it's virtually self-parody. And the same goes for the film narrative as a whole, which strives so hard for seriousness that it's almost parodic; it's cool to see Disney try to make an Romantic Epic, especially given American animation's proclivity for silly, lighthearted fare, but this movie strains SO HARD to be serious that it's laughable, resorting to cornball moments like the slo-mo Simba-Scar fight at the movie's climax or the entirely of Moira Kelly's mirthless, scolding vocal performance as the adult Nala. In fact, outside of Scar (who is a great villain in both appearance and tone, voiced impeccably by Jeremy Irons) and Mufasa (James Earl Jones 4vah), I really don't like any of these characters or how their voice actors portray them. Simba is irritating both as a kid and an adult, Zazu is a braying, elitist prig, and while I thought these guys were hilarious when I was five, Timon and Pumbaa are just the worst kind of comic relief, the unfortunate fulfillment of the dire prophecy offered by the Genie I just talked about. And Rafiki—geez louise, I cannot stand his grating, Yoda-like mystical garbage. And while I'm being blunt here, I might as well throw in how this movie is some not-so-subtle royalist propaganda—what about democracy, lions? What about the voices of the animals you literally devour to sustain your oppressive regime? WHO SPEAKS FOR THEM??
Ahem.
None of this makes The Lion King a bad movie; as I said, there are things about it I like very much. But it is a movie tripping over itself at every turn to such a degree that I have a hard time feeling the love for this movie that so many people do.
33. Pocahontas (1995)
The obviously embarrassing first: Disney went out of its way to promote Pocahontas as their first feature film based on actual historical events (thus seizing one key piece of the Oscar formula: the movie based on Important Real Stuff), even going so far as to use that history as the justification for why its character designs were markedly less cartoonish and more lifelike than those of previous Disney films, but even the most cursory glance at history shows that Pocahontas is egregiously ahistorical. As a teenager, the real-life Pocahontas was captured and (in some accounts) raped by English colonizers as ransom in a war between the English and the natives, and during her absence, her husband was killed by the English; some time after she was returned to her tribe, she married an Englishman, who took her to England to show off as an example of how the native "savages" could be civilized, and while there, she died and was unceremoniously buried. It's a story so tragic and representative of all the multitude of ways that Europeans thoroughly destroyed the Native American way of life that one has to question the good taste of anyone who would twist that story into an archetypal Disney romance between Pocahontas and the English John Smith, a man she knew in real life only as a young girl.
But hey, there are plenty of good movies with a complete disregard for history, and in Pocahontas's defense, the movie lampshades its own iffy relationship with reality by filling itself with your typical Disney stable of silly animals and talking inanimate objects (in this case, Grandmother Willow, a talking willow tree who is probably the ugliest and most poorly aged use of computer imagery up to this point in Disney history). We're clearly supposed to view this movie as a myth or fable of sorts, and not just any fable but one about Solving Racism (there's another one for Oscarbait bingo). And so here I am at the second and probably the most abhorrent embarrassment of the film, Pocahontas's positioning of the conflict between Native Americans and European Colonizers as one which resulted from a series of naive misunderstandings and good ol' fashioned distrust of the Other rather than, you know, the actual fact of a bunch of marauding Europeans progressively stealing land from natives (whom they will eventually demolish in a sweeping, centuries-long genocide) while the natives basically said, "Hey, wtf y'all." So yes, per the song "Savages," there was violence and distrust "on both sides," but unlike this movie, I can't really blame the natives for fighting back against a bunch of people intent on theft and genocide, regardless of how sexy their leader is. This kind of abstract, "I can see both sides" approach to race works well when it's abstracted enough from reality, à la Dr. Seuss's "The Sneetches," but when a movie invokes two real ethnic groups, one of whom is still very much reeling from the catastrophic effects of its conflict with the other, you can't just say "oh, we're just trying to tell a story with a theme." No, your theme is bad and ignores the unjust power dynamics at play in the scenario. In fairness to the movie, the mere acknowledgement that Europeans arrived in North America with the intent of killing and pillaging was relatively uncommon in the landscape of American cinema in the mid-'90s (though Dances with Wolves is RIGHT THERE), but that acknowledgement is mixed in with so much defensiveness about these white invaders—hey, not all of them were bad; hey, they only killed that one Native American guy on accident; hey, they get along in the end, see; hey, the Native Americans are racist against them, too!—that it's virtually useless as a treatise on genocide, even as a fictionalized, mythic take on its story. And that's to say nothing of the way that the Natives are depicted, apart from any thematic bent. Another of Disney's big Oscar pushes was that Pocahontas is a movie that stars People of Color, a claim that becomes immediately laughable for the way that the film depicts Native Americans as basically wizards with a generous helping of the "Noble Savage" stereotype. Oh, and then there's Pocahontas herself, whose design I have nothing of which to say beyond sharing this article from Fredericksburg's Free Lance-Star, which quotes Disney animators basically high-fiving each other for making her look so smokin' hot.
It is, in short, one of the most convincing arguments ever in defense of the need for diversity in filmmaking, that a group of such well-intentioned, progressive white men could be so thoroughly deluded into thinking that this movie was anything close to a constructive thesis on racial unity in the Americas, much less a good movie at all. Because let's say I'm willing to overlook even that. Even then, Pocahontas is a pileup of foolish, foolish decisions, from those of narrative logic ("Oh no, John Smith has a gunshot wound in the belly, we'll have to take him back to England, a taxing, weeks-long voyage during which this very serious wound surely won't get any worse, right?") to the casting of Mel Gibson as the voice of John Smith (even before we all knew he was a raging anti-Semite [how's that for casting in your "Racism Is Bad" movie?], surely we could all agree that he was wrong for this role solely based on his completely monotone line delivery and maddeningly slippery British accent) to the sheer overdose of comic animal sidekicks (count 'em: three). Oh, but there's more; with two exceptions, the songs suck—plodding, lugubrious numbers that rank as some of the worst work Alan Menken ever penned. And the characters are no good, either; for reasons unspecified, Pocahontas is vaguely rebellious, because I guess that's a prerequisite for Disney Princesses now (I guess she really wants to see what's around that river bend), John Smith is a bland, sexy bore on the level of Princes Eric and Phillip, and the villain, Governor Ratcliffe, is a shrill and uninteresting cad who is nowhere mean enough to be the symbol of European greed and colonialism that he's meant to be. All this is mixed up in the same problem that The Lion King ran into, which is that its reach for that Big Serious Cinematic tone exceeds its grasp, resulting in some moments of unintentional self-parody (not just slo-mo this time but also a double-exposure shot of two things happening in slo-mo at the same time!) alongside with the generally stultifying vibe of the film in general.
Let's say I'll even overlook these flaws. What I'm left with, then, are the lone three things good about the movie: its animation (which is quite nice and admirably stylized, aside from the CG blunders of Grandmother Willow and some of the canoes) and the two exceptions to the "Pocahontas's songs suck" rule, "Just Around the River Bend" (a pretty good song) and "Colors of the Wind" (a GREAT song accompanied by the best animation in the film). And I suppose these three pieces do keep it above Oliver & Company, a movie with none of these charms. But only slightly above. On the whole, Pocahontas is dreadful, a product of such idiotic show-business hubris that it lays bare some of the worst structural flaws in the Disney model and calls into question the whole project of the Renaissance beyond this point.
But the Renaissance limps on, and so do I. See you next time for a trio of movies that are much better than Pocahontas!
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