Squeaky squeak squeaker squeakin.
You can read the previous entry in this series here.
UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.
I've heard people call this Disney's Ghibli film or their teenaged boy film or their Indiana Jones film. While it may be all those things in pieces, what it is more than anything else is Disney's dullest film since the '80s. In fact, the most helpful reference point for Atlantis: The Lost Empire is that great disaster of Disney's 1980s, The Black Cauldron. Both films are rather obvious bids for an older audience, featuring genres that would supposedly interest teens (high fantasy for The Black Cauldron, steampunk/action-adventure for Atlantis) but ended up being flimsy narratives with none of the gleeful energy of their pulp counterparts. Both films have strong visual sensibilities that lean into intricate environmental designs and stern, comic-book-inspired architecture and characters, enough so that it's tempting to overlook the film's narrative flaws in favor of its visual highlights. Both include a higher violence quotient than your average Disney film. Both try to cram in so much mythology and high adventure that they quickly lose track of any sense of pacing, resulting in a rushed movie full of intriguing but ultimately frustrating dead-ends. Both—and this is really the thing—have absolutely no idea what to do with its one-dimensional cast of genre-stereotype characters. Both movies are complete messes.
It's the character and pacing pieces that I keep coming back to when I think about why this movie doesn't work. I mean, sure, the plot is goofy and nonsensical, but even if I make fun of stuff like the logic that since the Atlanteans speak a proto-Indo-European language ("the language of Babel," I think the movie calls it), they can understand all Indo-European languages, that's the sort of mumbled pseudo-intellectual rationalizations that I eat up in more functional action-adventure movies like, say, the Indiana Jones movies. It's the pace and characters that really kill this. On the pacing front, there's the issue that this is a 96-minute movie (longish for Disney standards) that clearly is trying to tell at least two hours of plot; it barely takes fifteen minutes for the movie to go from its ancient prologue showing the destruction of Atlantis to our 20th century protagonist, Milo, groveling for funding from his archaeological peers so he can lead an expedition to find a book that will tell him the location of Atlantis to Milo being swept up by a mysterious benefactor who not only already has this book but also has a gigantic submarine and crew ready for him to take to Atlantis, and we're barely caught our breath before Milo is in the submarine undersea, practically on Atlantis's doorstep. Any sensible movie would have taken at least thirty minutes with this combined prologue/first act, and it's a befuddling whirlwind the way Atlantis just sprints through each of its plots, a pace that never slows throughout the whole film. This movie just keeps going and going without breather or even (at times) the standard connective-tissue scenes that movies often rely on. I suppose in practice this should be thrilling for the way it maintains a relentless forward movement where your average movie would have little breaks, but in practice, it's exhausting and clunky. It also short-changes every single one of its characters, since the breakneck speed of the plot allows little time for the sort of stop-and-take-stock moments that usually allow action adventures to develop its cast a bit. Milo is a flat character with little interior life, and he's the movie's most fleshed out by far. There's even less time devoted to the movie's sprawling cast, which is a problem for a movie that, even if it were allowed more time, would already be struggling to draw its characters outside the thin stereotypes of Milo's peers and the city of Atlantis's population of (yet again) magical, sexualized women of color (ya gotta stop doing that, Disney).
It's all kind of sad that this is such a messy bore, because it's clear that Disney worked hard on Atlantis. I mean, they commissioned a linguist to invent a completely new language just for this movie! That is a really cool idea, as is the general premise of doing Indiana Jones by way of Jules Verne, a fusion that's completely unique within Disney's history and not all that common outside of Disney either in the world of cinema. The visual design really is wonderful, too, what with the sprawling steampunk of the movie's conception of early-20th-century undersea exploration and the elaborate Atlantean fusion of ancient Mayan, Mesopotamian, and East Asian art into a culture that actually does feel convincingly like some advanced civilization predating recorded history (albeit in a fantasy context). The bold straight lines and purposeful angularity of the character designs also make this movie's incorporation of 3D computer animation fit better with the cel animation better than any of these early 2000s experiments, which is good, because there's a lot of computer animation here. So the ornamentation of a stellar action-adventure film is here, which makes it too bad that Disney spent so much time on cool ornamentation that they forgot about the actual narrative frame on which to hang those ornaments. Boo.
AKA the only movie keeping from absolutely declaring The Emperor's New Groove is the last great Disney movie (barring, of course, my being surprised by Chicken Little or some thing, which... come on). I'm glad I qualified my language up there. I hadn't seen Lilo & Stitch for several years, and while I remembered it being good, I certainly didn't remember it being this good, but lo and behold, it is. It's a modest picture, especially compared to the outsized "Hey look, we created our own language!" ambitions of Atlantis, and thank heaven for that. I forget, as inundated as the previous features (barring The Emperor's New Groove) have been with eye-popping CG technology, just what a comfort simple cel-animated characters in front of static painted (or water-colored, in this case) background images can be, with the way that it can sketch characters both broadly and specifically, with telling and nuanced details but also pleasing disregard for realism (in contrast to, say, Dinosaur... *shudder*). Lilo & Stitch is just that—a movie that realizes that "simple" need not mean "boring," that "mundane" need not mean "generic." It's certainly not what I would call a richly animated movie in the way I would say so about, like, The Lion King or whatever, but it's smartly and distinctively animated in a way that I'd call the artistic (if not the technical) equal to that earlier movie—to wit, Lilo herself, a character comprised of so few lines that she looks like she's stepped out of a newspaper cartoon (though admittedly a lushly colored one), and in that she also carries all the marvelous expressiveness of the best funny-page characters, resembling, to my mind, none other than Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes and the wonderful range of emotions that comes with that.
In fact, the Calvin & Hobbes comparison is probably instructive in more than just the artful simplicity of the movie's designs; on a character level, too, a lot of Lilo's arc has that very Calvin-like quality of the endearing and slightly manic fury of a person so self-possessed in her own strangeness that it doesn't even occur to her that she may be a social outcast. But it's not just goofy kiddie flights of fancy with her fun animal sidekick (though Lilo & Stitch is an especially good permutation of this narrative). Crucially, alongside Lilo's childlike fury is an undercurrent of sadness and world-weariness informed by the death of Lilo's parents (which has happened prior to the movie's narrative but not that long before) and Lilo's relationship with her sister, Nani, who is raising Lilo. This is what I mean by the movie's mundanity; for all its sci-fi trappings (notably, the movie opens with a lengthy sequence set in outer space), Lilo & Stitch is strikingly terrestrial, focused as it is on the small but profound domestic struggles of two sisters who lean on one another in the absence of having enough time and space to be able to fully come to terms with the loss of their parents—Nani, for example, tells her would-be love interest that she can't date at the moment because she has to take care of Lilo (an strongly un-Disney move), and the movie is full of such precise, poignant reminders of the earthliness of its story. This is a movie about looking for a job and taking care of an unruly pet and loving your sibling and worrying about meetings with a social worker, astoundingly class-conscious for a Disney movie and sharply textured with the simple but urgent details of these characters' lives.
It's kind of amazing that there aren't more Disney movies about family. There's Pinocchio, sure, but that's not really about family so much as specifically paternal love (and more than that, the incredible cruelty of the adult world toward children), and I suppose films like The Aristocats do deal with families, but that's not where the emotional resonance lies; more often than not, they are so-called "broken" families resolved by romance and man, screw Disney and their preoccupation with romance above all else, because the kind of story told in Lilo & Stitch, about the depth of love within a family, is wonderful in ways never even hinted at before by other Disney films and hardly after either (I mean, I guess Frozen does the whole sister love thing again, but even there, it's still couched in the idiom of a romance even if it's deconstructing it). And that's to say nothing of the ways that Lilo & Stitch feels like a corrective to specific Disney problems, like, for instance, its perspective on people of color. This is the first time a Disney movie has portrayed a non-European culture in a way that feels neither like a bumbling, colonial attempt at pandering tokenism nor an opportunity for the hetero-male animators to get their rocks off on "exotic" women—and I'm of course using "non-European" pretty loosely, given how heavily the music of one Elvis Presley figures into the identity of Lilo & Stitch, but still, the Hawaiianness of this movie is very much its own thing, distinct from any sort of generic Americana or beach cliche the film could have reached for. In fact, there's a pretty big thread throughout the movie that mocks the white tourists who come to the island to exploit or be entertained by the native culture (the crummy luau-style restaurant Nani works at near the movie's beginning, for instance, seems predicated on tourists shelling out money to see Hawaiian natives perform stereotypically "islander" acts like spit fire and do traditional dances)—ya know, basically calling into question even Disney's best-intentioned depictions of non-European societies.
Anyway, this movie is so good. Y'all go see it if, like me, you haven't in a while. I'll see everybody next time, when we dive into the wilderness of Disney's 2000s output!
UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.
40. The Emperor's New Groove (2000)
I've talked a lot about Disney's technological experimentation at the turn of the millennium. I haven't talked as much about the storytelling experimentation, because honestly, there hasn't been a ton of it (Dinosaur throws out any narrative experiment the second its characters open their mouths, Fantasia 2000 has no story, and Tarzan is a standard Disney adventure). But here comes The Emperor's New Groove, a movie not particularly interested in pushing the boundaries of technology—it actually looks a lot like something that could have been animated at any time during the 1990s, though perhaps not by Disney itself (more on that in a sec)—but every bit obsessed with experimenting with narrative and even more so with storytelling. The resulting film is profoundly off-beat, a marvel, a masterpiece. Take it; feel the power.
What we have here is a movie that reads like a buddy road trip flick, looks like pre-Columbian Peruvian art animated by Chuck Jones, unfolds with the frenetic pace and reality-breaking anarchy of a Looney Tunes picture, features music written by Sting, and hinges on the vocal talent of the illustrious star of Joe Dirt and Just Shoot Me. Somehow, this turned into Disney's best feature since Beauty and the Beast. It would be a fair question to ask how this came to be. The movie had a very troubled six-year development, beginning around the time of The Lion King as a serious-minded South-American fantasy entitled Kingdom of the Sun, and over the next few years, it continued to shed directors and animators and celebrity voice actors in the kind of revolving door of talent that's usually death for a film. But then the year 2000 rolls around, and Disney drops this ingenious little piece of incongruous excellence into our multiplexes. By all accounts, it just doesn't make sense. But whatever dark magic the movie performed and whatever unblemished goat it had to slaughter to become a movie in which squirrels and humans converse in vocalized squeaks and evil minions are excused to go home in the event of being turned into cows, I'll take it. I love this movie. It's energetically animated in a way that has none of the heft of the normal Disney fare, which in this case is a God-send, as it gives the movie's visual sensibilities a lightness and flexibility that's basically unparalleled in the studio's history, and that flexibility (in addition to the movie's loopy, cracker-jack screenplay) allows New Groove to focus on comic timing and playful visual puns to a degree that feels like the second coming of—to drop this holy name again—Chuck Jones. Take, for example, the lengthy mid-film sequence set in the diner (which is, for no reason in particular, basically a Big Boy in the middle of the rain forest); this scene, which hinges on the surprising effectiveness of goofily unconvincing disguises that would make Bugs Bunny proud, spends long periods of time playing with the ballet of character movement interacting with the geometry of the restaurant, from the swinging double doors that lead into the kitchen to menus used to hide one character from another. This is the sort of comic setpiece that Disney films rarely make time for, informed more by vaudevillian sensibilities of subverting our expectations of physical space than the flourishes of graceful cuteness that normally signals Disney comedy. It's not pointless; it all contributes to either character or narrative. But telling a story through such loose, silly, and heavily physical methods is thoroughly unconventional for Disney, and it's what makes The Emperor's New Groove tick. That, and the meta touch of having Kuzco himself narrate the movie, only to occasionally stop the film and comment on the action from the outside. It's more "Duck Amuck" than Disney, and it's a very fun touch.
It's not completely unprecedented in Disney's filmography; Aladdin and especially Hercules feel like essential building blocks for New Groove in their meta, laughs-over-narrative logic approach to the Disney formula. But both of those movies are also undergirded by a strong classicism in their storytelling styles, particularly in the yearning, fervent emotions that inform their protagonists. That's all out the window for The Emperor's New Groove. Not that we are intended to dismiss the emotional stakes in this movie; both Pacha's quest to convince Emperor Kuzco not raze his village to build a water-park vacation home and Kuzco's journey from being a selfish, entitled prick to becoming a caring human being—as well as the friendship that buds between the two men (er... one man and one llama)—are treated with a sincerity not uncommon in children's films of all stripes. But the register of those emotional journeys never hits that doe-eyed go-for-brokeness that Disney movies typically have; it instead stays very much at a mid level, where the movie can pivot between semi-serious plot advancement and goofy riffs and where the two often co-exist with little tonal issues. A gigantic piece of this all working, it must be said, is the voice acting—truthfully one of the best ensembles Disney ever assembled, the individual members of which are impeccably matched to their particular characters. John Goodman brings a strongly sympathetic (but never maudlin) tone to Pacha, Eartha Kitt hits just the right combination of pettiness and cunning as Yzma; I've already mentioned David Spade, who is expectantly bratty but also improbably soulful at times. And then there's Patrick Warburton's Kronk—dear, sweet, exotic-bird-bingo-playing, squirrel-speak-fluent Kronk, maybe my favorite character in all of Disney. The dude's perfect, the soul of the movie, and a spinach puff enthusiast after my own heart.
GAAAA, I could go on and on about this movie. The nostalgia factor is pretty high for me on this one, I'll admit. My dad rented it from Blockbuster for me and my siblings sometime in 2001, and it was an instant hit; I've probably seen this movie more time than I've seen any Disney movie; there was a time during middle school when I could credibly claim to recite the entire movie from memory. But I'd like to think that I've seen this movie enough as an adult to confidently call it easily the best Disney movie of the first decade of the 21st century and maybe—maybe—the last capital-G Great feature Disney ever made. If not, can we at least agree that it's tremendous fun? And better than most of the movies that followed in the subsequent years?
41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
It's the character and pacing pieces that I keep coming back to when I think about why this movie doesn't work. I mean, sure, the plot is goofy and nonsensical, but even if I make fun of stuff like the logic that since the Atlanteans speak a proto-Indo-European language ("the language of Babel," I think the movie calls it), they can understand all Indo-European languages, that's the sort of mumbled pseudo-intellectual rationalizations that I eat up in more functional action-adventure movies like, say, the Indiana Jones movies. It's the pace and characters that really kill this. On the pacing front, there's the issue that this is a 96-minute movie (longish for Disney standards) that clearly is trying to tell at least two hours of plot; it barely takes fifteen minutes for the movie to go from its ancient prologue showing the destruction of Atlantis to our 20th century protagonist, Milo, groveling for funding from his archaeological peers so he can lead an expedition to find a book that will tell him the location of Atlantis to Milo being swept up by a mysterious benefactor who not only already has this book but also has a gigantic submarine and crew ready for him to take to Atlantis, and we're barely caught our breath before Milo is in the submarine undersea, practically on Atlantis's doorstep. Any sensible movie would have taken at least thirty minutes with this combined prologue/first act, and it's a befuddling whirlwind the way Atlantis just sprints through each of its plots, a pace that never slows throughout the whole film. This movie just keeps going and going without breather or even (at times) the standard connective-tissue scenes that movies often rely on. I suppose in practice this should be thrilling for the way it maintains a relentless forward movement where your average movie would have little breaks, but in practice, it's exhausting and clunky. It also short-changes every single one of its characters, since the breakneck speed of the plot allows little time for the sort of stop-and-take-stock moments that usually allow action adventures to develop its cast a bit. Milo is a flat character with little interior life, and he's the movie's most fleshed out by far. There's even less time devoted to the movie's sprawling cast, which is a problem for a movie that, even if it were allowed more time, would already be struggling to draw its characters outside the thin stereotypes of Milo's peers and the city of Atlantis's population of (yet again) magical, sexualized women of color (ya gotta stop doing that, Disney).
It's all kind of sad that this is such a messy bore, because it's clear that Disney worked hard on Atlantis. I mean, they commissioned a linguist to invent a completely new language just for this movie! That is a really cool idea, as is the general premise of doing Indiana Jones by way of Jules Verne, a fusion that's completely unique within Disney's history and not all that common outside of Disney either in the world of cinema. The visual design really is wonderful, too, what with the sprawling steampunk of the movie's conception of early-20th-century undersea exploration and the elaborate Atlantean fusion of ancient Mayan, Mesopotamian, and East Asian art into a culture that actually does feel convincingly like some advanced civilization predating recorded history (albeit in a fantasy context). The bold straight lines and purposeful angularity of the character designs also make this movie's incorporation of 3D computer animation fit better with the cel animation better than any of these early 2000s experiments, which is good, because there's a lot of computer animation here. So the ornamentation of a stellar action-adventure film is here, which makes it too bad that Disney spent so much time on cool ornamentation that they forgot about the actual narrative frame on which to hang those ornaments. Boo.
42. Lilo & Stitch (2002)
In fact, the Calvin & Hobbes comparison is probably instructive in more than just the artful simplicity of the movie's designs; on a character level, too, a lot of Lilo's arc has that very Calvin-like quality of the endearing and slightly manic fury of a person so self-possessed in her own strangeness that it doesn't even occur to her that she may be a social outcast. But it's not just goofy kiddie flights of fancy with her fun animal sidekick (though Lilo & Stitch is an especially good permutation of this narrative). Crucially, alongside Lilo's childlike fury is an undercurrent of sadness and world-weariness informed by the death of Lilo's parents (which has happened prior to the movie's narrative but not that long before) and Lilo's relationship with her sister, Nani, who is raising Lilo. This is what I mean by the movie's mundanity; for all its sci-fi trappings (notably, the movie opens with a lengthy sequence set in outer space), Lilo & Stitch is strikingly terrestrial, focused as it is on the small but profound domestic struggles of two sisters who lean on one another in the absence of having enough time and space to be able to fully come to terms with the loss of their parents—Nani, for example, tells her would-be love interest that she can't date at the moment because she has to take care of Lilo (an strongly un-Disney move), and the movie is full of such precise, poignant reminders of the earthliness of its story. This is a movie about looking for a job and taking care of an unruly pet and loving your sibling and worrying about meetings with a social worker, astoundingly class-conscious for a Disney movie and sharply textured with the simple but urgent details of these characters' lives.
It's kind of amazing that there aren't more Disney movies about family. There's Pinocchio, sure, but that's not really about family so much as specifically paternal love (and more than that, the incredible cruelty of the adult world toward children), and I suppose films like The Aristocats do deal with families, but that's not where the emotional resonance lies; more often than not, they are so-called "broken" families resolved by romance and man, screw Disney and their preoccupation with romance above all else, because the kind of story told in Lilo & Stitch, about the depth of love within a family, is wonderful in ways never even hinted at before by other Disney films and hardly after either (I mean, I guess Frozen does the whole sister love thing again, but even there, it's still couched in the idiom of a romance even if it's deconstructing it). And that's to say nothing of the ways that Lilo & Stitch feels like a corrective to specific Disney problems, like, for instance, its perspective on people of color. This is the first time a Disney movie has portrayed a non-European culture in a way that feels neither like a bumbling, colonial attempt at pandering tokenism nor an opportunity for the hetero-male animators to get their rocks off on "exotic" women—and I'm of course using "non-European" pretty loosely, given how heavily the music of one Elvis Presley figures into the identity of Lilo & Stitch, but still, the Hawaiianness of this movie is very much its own thing, distinct from any sort of generic Americana or beach cliche the film could have reached for. In fact, there's a pretty big thread throughout the movie that mocks the white tourists who come to the island to exploit or be entertained by the native culture (the crummy luau-style restaurant Nani works at near the movie's beginning, for instance, seems predicated on tourists shelling out money to see Hawaiian natives perform stereotypically "islander" acts like spit fire and do traditional dances)—ya know, basically calling into question even Disney's best-intentioned depictions of non-European societies.
Anyway, this movie is so good. Y'all go see it if, like me, you haven't in a while. I'll see everybody next time, when we dive into the wilderness of Disney's 2000s output!
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