Disney Review: The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company

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.

The final throes of Disney's Dark Age. It dies hard.

You can read the previous entry in the series here.

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

25. *The Black Cauldron (1985)

When I was younger, my grandparents had The Black Cauldron on VHS, to be watched on the small CRT TV in their basement. It wasn't the only movie they had—I remember Snow White being there, too, in addition to Oliver & Company. This collection was doubtless an attempt to keep us grandkids occupied so the adults could do their own thing without being pestered by a bunch of elementary-age children, but The Black Cauldron didn't work, because I honestly don't think I ever made it all the way through the movie. I was aging out of that indiscriminate period of childhood when I would happily stay plopped in front of a television regardless of the quality of the show—The Black Cauldron didn't get a home media release until 1998, so I was at least eight years old when this film was on the menu—and this movie just wasn't cutting it. I remember watching Snow White and Oliver & Company repeatedly at this age, even though I've never been enthusiastic about either movie, so this gives you an indication of how bad I found The Black Cauldron, that I walked out on it in my grandparents' basement.

My memory on The Black Cauldron has proven to be a bit sharper than it was for The Rescuers, because now, as a grown adult who no longer needs to be distracted at his grandparents' house, I can testify: The Black Cauldron is not a good movie. Like The Rescuers, it does a convincing job of looking like a good movie; the visuals are kind of great, actually. The "Heavy Metal meets Disney" design of the high fantasy world of the film is very much my thing, spooky and unapologetically pulpy by equal measures, which is a fresh look for Disney—I mean, just get a load of the Horned King, a villain without a ton of personality but who looks like a friggin' spawn of hell crossed with some folk horror (the character in Lloyd Alexander's far superior book series Disney is adapting here is based on Herne the Hunter). Ditto for his "Cauldron Born" warriors, re-animated corpses who appear for all of two minutes in the film (children apparently ran screaming from the theater at the sight of these guys in test screenings, leading the filmmakers to edit out a bunch of Cauldron Born footage) but look like just the coolest freaking things ever. And beyond just the design of the movie, the animation itself is stupendous. Disney put a lot of money into the film, and the result is the most technically lush Disney feature since One Hundred and One Dalmatians; I can't tell you how nice it is, after almost ten of these cheap-looking Disney features, to finally see one that actually looks expensive in that classically dazzling Disney way. This is also the first time Disney used computer-generated imagery in one of its features; it anticipates the approaching Disney Renaissance with the way that the technology allows for intricate lighting and shadow on the characters, but also, in its primitive form, the imposition of the computer images on hand-drawn backgrounds and characters creates this strange mixed-media vibe that looks more like an extremely slick version of the rotoscoping in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards than anything in a Disney movie. It's all very cool-looking and off-format for Disney, and as someone who tends to enjoy this sort of high-fantasy thing, I enjoyed looking at this movie immensely.

It's a shame about the rest of the film, huh? Like, every single piece of the movie outside its visual design and animation is a complete disaster. The story, hacked together lazily from the first two books in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series, is poorly paced and stiffly dramatized, to mention nothing of the stupid comic fluffery the film inserts (we get a whole setpiece involving a frog trying desperately to escape the folds of a woman's flopping bosoms, surely a low points in the history of unnecessary Disney comic fluffery). The characters are even worse, less characters than broadly sketched personalities, which is death for this sort of epic fantasy where our heroes are supposed to learn something and come of age and all that LotR stuff. And the voice acting is worst of all, turning these already thin personalities into the most insufferable screeching pestilence; Taran (the hero who swings a sword, because he's a dude) and Eilonwy (the damsel who doesn't do anything, because she's a chick) suffer most, their head-slapping archetypes stretched into these gee-whiz putzes.

It's too bad how this turned out, given that Alexander's novels (which are wonderful, go read them) and this movie's art design/animation (which is actually really well-suited to the books) should make for a solid foundation for a film. The 1980s are filled with high fantasy and pulp, only a few of them really any good, but I guess I was hoping my memory was wrong and The Black Cauldron would be one of them.

26. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

The year is 1986. On July 2, Disney releases The Great Mouse Detective, in which mice represent Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Professor Moriarty, etc. A scant four and a half months later, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment releases An American Tail (directed by none other than everyone's favorite Disney expatriate, Don Bluth), in which the Jewish immigrant experience in America is played out by mice. This is fewer than ten years after Disney released The Rescuers, in which mice represent the United Nations, and just four years before Disney would unleash their first-ever theatrically released sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, in which mice are the United Nations again. During this same span of years, Art Spiegelman is unrolling his landmark serialized graphic novel, Maus, in which the Holocaust is depicted by representing Jews as, you guessed it, mice. Was there something in the water? What is it with this period of history and all this metaphorical mice media?

These are questions much more interesting to ponder than The Great Mouse Detective itself. Unlike most of the movies in the Disney Dark Age, The Great Mouse Detective is neither a flawed success (e.g. The Fox and the Hound) nor a fascinating trainwreck (e.g. The Rescuers, The Black Cauldron); The Great Mouse Detective is just Fine. There's nothing significantly wrong with the movie—it's a handsomely animated, decently entertaining Sherlock Holmes riff—but it's also a hard movie to get excited about because of how middle-of-the-road it is. Like, congratulations, Disney, you have, after years and years of trouble, finally made a movie that is a functional, cohesive movie and not just a bunch of alternatingly compelling and tedious pieces glued together into an 80-minute collage. But in doing so, you've left us with a movie that's just successful enough to avoid criticism but not good enough to warrant much ecstatic praise—though I will get pretty enthusiastic for exactly two things here: 1. the finale in Big Ben, which is distractingly CG but thrillingly kinetic for it, and 2. Professor Ratigan, the villain, voiced by Vincent Price and getting every cent of Vincent Price-ness out of that performance (there's an argument that Ratigan is harmfully queer-coded, but he's also so rooted in the specific mannerisms of Vincent Price here, as opposed to some generic queer stereotype, that I'll give this one a pass, if only as a tribute to one of our grandest purveyors of camp).

It's also worth noting that this is the first Disney movie that really feels like it's a piece of the Disney Renaissance (i.e. that period from the late '80s to the early 2000s when Disney movies were reliably good again). We're not quite there, because the movies still aren't all that, you know, good. But the pieces are here. While music has always played a key role in Disney movies, the last movie prior to The Great Mouse Detective that could properly be called a musical is Robin Hood (I'm not counting The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, since 2/3 of that movie was made prior to Robin Hood), and Robin Hood's songs have that sleepy, lightly bouncy quality that defines pretty much all the early Disney musicals. Compare this to The Great Mouse Detective, not just the first Disney musical in thirteen years but also the first one ever to openly aspire to what we would call the contemporary Broadway format: show-stopping sequences with intricate choreography, rollicking tunes, bawdy belted solos, etc.—musicals not built so much on demure grace as energy and kinetic force. This formula is key to the success of the later Renaissance films (e.g. The Little Mermaid, the first big success in this mold), and I honestly had forgotten it started as early as The Great Mouse Detective. There's also Ratigan again, who is most definitely the first Disney Renaissance villain—he's preening and charismatic and perversely comic in a way that feels much more in line with the likes of Ursula and Gaston than Maleficent and Shere Khan. As unremarkable as the film itself is as an isolated object, in the sweep of Disney history it feels like a turning point, which is cool.

27. Oliver & Company (1988)

I'm shocked that as a child I apparently enjoyed Oliver & Company enough to sit through the whole thing at my grandparents' house, because, for as much as The Black Cauldron was Not Good, I at least could say several nice things about the movie. On the other hand, I cannot find a single thing nice to say about Oliver & Company, a movie that, I am dismayed to discover after memories of mere mediocrity, may in fact be the single worst animated feature Disney ever unleashed upon theaters.

Like The Black Cauldron and especially The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company has a lot of pieces that foreshadow Disney's Renaissance, which most people pin as beginning with The Little Mermaid just one year after Oliver & Company (though it practically feels like eons after the release of this movie, such is the chasm in quality between the two). In addition to the use of computers for more sophisticated lighting/particle effects begun with The Black Cauldron and the Broadway-style musical structure innovated by The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company brings to the table celebrity voice acting and CG-assisted "camera" movement, both of which are integral to the Renaissance run of films. But as much as these pieces are interesting in a historical sense, in practice they are terrible. The celebrity voice acting is grating (and really, even in the best Renaissance films, celebrity voices rarely paid off—in fact, I think the only one I'd really go to bat for is Robin Williams as Aladdin's Genie); while I guess there's a sort of '80s corporate logic to casting Billy Joel at the apex of his commercial powers and the nadir of his artistic ones (this is roughly one year prior to "We Didn't Start the Fire," if that helps to pin this era) to play the Artful Dodger, it doesn't make his relentless street-smart chic mugging any more tolerable. As for those CG shots, they might be a bit more impressive (one involving a dog walking down a spiral staircase seems like a test run for the famous ballroom dancing shot in Beauty and the Beast) if they weren't married to such—forgive me—dog-gone dreadful animation. Seriously, what happened here? Things have been steadily looking up in the animation department since Fox and the Hound, so from where in the world did Disney pull this muddy, cheap-looking garbage from? It's like we're back in the '70s again. The character designs are anonymous, and the actual motion of the characters is lazy and muddled when it isn't riddled with continuity errors and other distracting errors that Disney should have been way above committing. It's Renaissance in theory, but in practice, it's some barrel-scraping nonsense.

And that's to say nothing about the text of the film itself, a disjointed, NYC-set take on Oliver Twist's plot playing in fast-forward and acted out by the most obnoxious cast of animal characters Disney ever put on the silver screen. Every single character is just the worst, from Oliver himself (if there's a surefire way to make me dislike Oliver Twist, it's to turn the protagonist into a freaking cat) to Bette Midler's spoiled, jealous, and weirdly sexualized Fifth-Avenue poodle (does she have boobs? I think this dog has boobs—also, there are bits of sexual harassment in the movie played as jokes at this character's expense, which... erg) to the aggressively maudlin and irritating Jenny, the girl who adopts Oliver into her privileged Washington-Square life. There's also a dog who likes to recite Shakespeare, for some reason. The worst of the worst, though, is Tito, a chihuahua (voiced by Cheech Marin) who embodies some of the most aggressive racial stereotyping in Disney history—we aren't quite at "What Makes the Red Man Red?" levels, but there's no way this hyperactive, fast-talking, horny-but-runs-at-any-hint-of-commitment Mexican-American caricature who adds "man" to the end of every sentence is anything resembling respect for the culture he represents or the boundaries of good taste. His character is entirely based on his ethnicity—and, like, let me reiterate that we are dealing with dogs here, where the idea of explicit racial coding should be incongruous.

I'm rambling here because honestly, after all these compromised and mediocre Disney movies of the '70s and '80s, I'm just too worn out to summon up the vim for a real critical thrashing. I had to watch The Rescuers and The Black Cauldron, and NOW I have to put up with a movie in which, in addition to all the aforementioned grievances, dogs use the expression "barking up the wrong tree" not once but twice? A movie where a closed-circuit television somehow picks up broadcast television? This is the movie Disney served up in 1988, and it's just so stupid and meaningless and aggravating and soulless. These are the times that try men's souls. I'm just so ready for The Little Mermaid.

Thankfully, that's what's up to the plate next time. See you there for some much better movies!