More Disney. Enjoy.
You can read the previous entry in this series here.
UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.
Oscarbait, round two. Even more laden with po-faced seriousness, The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the second of Disney's major bids in the 1990s to make a Big Important Movie, and while internally at the studio, this was less explicitly a reach for a Best Picture nomination, the pieces are all still here: mature, sophisticated animation, realistically proportioned characters, a somber plot revolving around racism, intolerance, and institutional corruption, "important" source material (though instead of the so-called history of Pocahontas, Hunchback is of course based on a Victor Hugo novel), a grim tone to match its weighty themes. This is every bit the sort of ambitious, self-aggrandizing filmmaking that made Pocahontas fall flat on its face, perhaps even more so here, given Hunchback's booming choral score and how the movie takes a bite out of even bigger ideas involving not just racism but religious piety, guilt, psycho-sexual torment, self-flagellation, and even God Almighty. Disney was practically daring itself to have a disaster of the magnitude of Pocahontas again.
But madness upon madness, Disney almost pulled it off with Hunchback. They almost had a masterpiece, a mature and complex film equal both aesthetically and narratively to the lofty ambitions of its themes, a movie that could have stood up to and perhaps even surpassed the unequivocal, towering achievement of 1990s Disney, Beauty and the Beast. And for long sections of Hunchback, it's easy to feel like you are inside the magnificent film that could have been. Most readily apparent is the film's look—its cavernous Gothic spaces, its abundance of exquisite long shots that stage small human figures against the colossal structures of the background, the dark richness of its colors, the near-constant play of light and shadow both across characters' faces and through the architecture of the cathedral of Notre Dame itself. It is, from opening to closing credits, a stunningly beautiful movie, second only to The Lion King as Disney's best animation of the decade, and the movie sells its heavy ambitions almost on its aesthetic alone, with thematically weighted imagery like the shot of Esmeralda looking up at the stained glass inside Notre Dame ranking among some of the most potent and heart-stoppingly striking imagery in Disney history.
It isn't just the animation, though; on an aesthetic level, there's also Alan Menken's score, the heaviest thing he ever wrote for Disney and probably the heaviest music ever written for any Disney film. With its bells and strings and full-on choral arrangements, the movie's score sounds gigantic, and if it weren't married to the film's titanic imagery, it likely would feel out of place; but as it is, scoring breathtaking vistas of medieval Paris, the awe-struck verticality of the cathedral interior, and the gargantuan heft of the bell tower, it works extremely well, and the same goes for the songs—pieces of music that are much closer to (to evoke that other Victor Hugo adaptation) Schönberg's Les Misérables than the lithe, footloose compositions of Menken's previous work with Disney. Songs like "The Bells of Notre Dame," "Out There," and "God Help the Outcasts"—these aren't clever songs made to entertain children and their parents; they are the sober, complicated work of someone looking to become a serious songwriter for adults, and that really goes for the movie as a whole, whose aims—to tell a story about social outcasts struggling against a genocidal judge who is caught between his conviction in the harsh theology of his upbringing and his own carnal lusts—are nothing close to the realm of children's entertainment. I don't mean that as a dismissal of films made for children; as I hope is obvious from the dozens of Disney movies I've covered by now, I love some movies made for children. But it's just so painfully clear that the people who made The Hunchback of Notre Dame did not want to make a kids' movie. You don't begin a film with the images of a man about to drop a baby (whose mother he has just murdered) down a well if you want to make a movie for children. If you are making a movie for children, you don't create a character like Frollo, a villain who is scary, and not in that fun, campy, mugging way that a lot of great Disney villains are scary either but actually terrifying, a man whose villainy is so thoroughly rooted in real-world horrors and his own psychological torment and the psychological torment he afflicts on others (there's a scene near the beginning involving a ritual by which he teaches Quasimodo about how ugly and wretch he is, and it's heartbreaking) that it's legitimately hard to watch at times—he's one of the great Disney creations, absolutely, but he is not for kids. And if you are making a kids' movie, you most definitely don't write a song like "Hellfire," a song that stares right into the pit of Frollo's soul and animates it with the most fiercely dark Disney imagery this side of Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain"—this is the stuff of nightmares, and not the silly grotesqueries that make up your traditional kids' movie nightmare fuel in things like The Wizard of Oz or The Dark Crystal; no, I'm talking about those nightmares you have where you see your whole family murdered, or you find yourself at the gates of Hell. The kinds of nightmares that shake you to the core with existential panic. That's "Hellfire." It was on the basis of that song that my mother gave away our family's copy of this movie, and while I usually don't have any truck with my mother's acts of media curation, I think she probably made the right call here—I mean, what parent wants their pre-elementary-aged children watching a man contemplate how hot Hell's flames will be if he rapes the woman he lusts after? It's pieces like these that separate The Hunchback of Notre Dame from Pocahontas, that give it gravitas where its predecessor had only pretension. It's these pieces that show us a movie that could have been Disney's best of the '90s. It's these pieces that show us that Hunchback had no business being aimed at children.
But alas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame did end up being aimed at children, and what do you do if you are Disney making a movie for children? Why, you add insufferable comic relief characters, that's what. Thus enter the gargoyles, a trio of characters who completely vandalize this would-be masterpiece. Taking a small passage from the original Victor Hugo novel ("The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and protected him. Thus he would pour out his heart at length to them.") and making its obvious metaphor literal, the makers of this movie saw fit to populate Quasimodo's lonely bell tower with living, breathing, wise-cracking gargoyles voiced by Charles Kimbrough, Mary Wickes, and freaking Jason Alexander. By now, it's probably clear that I'm not a huge fan of Disney comic relief in general, but of all the comic relief axes I have to grind, it's these stupid gargoyles for whom I grind my ax the sharpest, for the sheer reason that, more so than any other Disney comic relief, it is just so head-smackingly apparent that they don't belong in this movie. If the post-Seinfeld career of Jason Alexander has taught us anything, it's that the only place he belongs is in New York City with Jerry and Kramer and Elaine, but for some reason, Disney looked at their pitch-dark Gothic drama about genocide and intolerance in medieval Paris and said, "What this movie needs is George Costanza." And so we get, interspersed with all the masterpiece-level animation and heavy psychosexual torment, a bunch of idiotic quips from these gargoyles and, for some reason, a parody of The Wizard of Oz. It's such a disfiguring scar across the face of the movie that these three characters singlehandedly knock the film back from greatness into just "pretty good" territory, and I hate it. The internet is a big place—surely by now someone has made a gargoyle-free cut of this movie? Come on, y'all, don't let me down.
Okay, and in all fairness, it's not like the movie is perfect without the gargoyles. Typical of a depiction of people of color in a Disney movie, Hunchback's portrayal of the Romany people leans heavily on stereotypes and the "non-white people = magic" thing that Pocahontas does, and while, being neither Romany myself nor knowing any people of Romany descent, I am certainly in no place to judge whether or not the use of the word "gypsy" throughout the film is appropriate (the word is sometimes considered a slur, something that I was ignorant of until relatively recently, along with, I suspect, most Americans), I'm not really sure that Disney, of all companies, deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding racially sensitive language. Plus, the movie has yet another example of the exoticizing and sexualizing of a non-white woman in Esmeralda, a character whose whole role in the story, basically, is to serve as a sexual object (I mean, she cares for the oppressed and all, but we basically don't get that outside of one or two moments). At times, this actually works in the movie's favor, as it brings out the best (worst?) in Frollo's character and causes the movie to confront head-on the troubling horniness that all Disney movies up to this point have had concerning women of color. But elsewhere, the movie seems pretty un-self-reflective regarding its depiction of Esmeralda, especially at the end where, for no apparent reason, she is paired off romantically with Captain Phoebus—I guess they are the two sexiest characters in the movie and thus deserve to be together? I dunno, it doesn't make sense. Again, there is an upside to this in that the movie resists the urge to reward Quasimodo romantically for his heroism; movies are rife with plots that perpetuate the idea that kind men deserve the woman they are pining for, and it's nice to see Hunchback buck this trend. It also makes Quasimodo's choice to save Esmeralda at the end a lot more noble, as it means he is doing it for the sake of human decency and not out of any sense of self-serving romantic longing. Still, why does Esmeralda end up with Phoebus? WHY? But none of this even comes close to the wrongheadedness of the gargoyles, so I'll save my ire for them.
Y'all, the parts of this movie that are good are so good that they make my heart hurt. In a lot of ways, this movie is sort of the last heaving push upward by the Renaissance, the last time in this era that Disney truly tried to push their formula to ever increasing heights, and while The Hunchback of Notre Dame is certainly not the most fully realized execution of this ambition, nor is is followed by movies that are "bad" by any means, it's still kind of sad to know that Disney kind of went into retreat again after this movie.
And boy, when Disney's ambition goes into retreat, it really does. Viewed one way, Hercules is the laziest movie yet of the Disney Renaissance, with the studio, exhausted from the pomp of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, relying on easy caricature and boilerplate plot beats to deliver a mostly forgettable movie staged with some mediocre animation and character design—that's the cynical way to look at the movie. More charitably, though, Hercules can be seen as a corrective to the serious-minded ambitions of the previous two films (really the previous three, if we're including The Lion King), arriving at a thoroughly unserious, episodic, and even silly style that in a lot of ways feels more like the last few films of Walt's life (i.e. The Sword and the Stone and The Jungle Book) than it does the watershed pictures of the Renaissance. I'm no great defender of Hercules, which I think is something of a mess, but I don't want to discount how nice it is to have a purely fun Disney movie again either.
Because, above all, Hercules is fun. I mean, not very fun, but fun enough. In addition to the mid-'60s features already mentioned, Hercules bears quite a lot in common with Aladdin, the only other '90s Disney movie so focused on silly anachronisms and the appropriation of classical Hollywood modes—though Hercules is considerably less successful in this approach than Aladdin. Aladdin at least had a unifying universe and consistency with the kinds of jokes it would make at the expense of this universe's integrity (leaving most of the world-breaking to the explicitly supernatural Genie); Hercules is, in contrast, utter anarchy, a movie that makes a half-hearted attempt at creating a fleshed-out, if cartoonish, version of the world of ancient Greek mythology before deciding that nevermind, this world is also going to be full of random allusions to The Lion King and Nike shoes and action figures and American Express and all sorts of 20th century bric-a-brac, too, which is sort of charming in its kitchen-sink approach to Greek myth (I'm all for taking the piss out of mythology, especially Greek mythology) but also kind of baffling and not all that consistently funny, either. What do we get from watching some Greek imps drink from a fast-food cup emblazoned with Hercules's profile? It's not particularly funny or clever, though it's not actively unpleasant as a gag either. It's just sort of there as a comic non sequitur without bothering to justify itself or make itself fit in with the rest of the movie's world, which is a nice synecdoche for the movie as a whole. Another good one is the film's use of gospel music in its songs, a choice that I can only imagine was made as some weird confluence of an allusion to composer Alan Menken's breakthrough, Little Shop of Horrors, and the appeal of the incongruity of 20th-century African-American music in an ancient Greek context.
There's nothing I actively dislike in this movie (well, except for the designs for Zeus and Hera, which are the ugliest Saturday-morning-cartoon garbage I've seen in a while). I actually like pieces of the movie quite a bit: the titans are very cool, the early-movie Megara has a fun Barbara Stanwyck thing going before she becomes an uninteresting femme-fatale/damsel mashup, James Woods's Hades is a fantastic example of animation/voice-actor synergy (he is a very fun villain); I even like the absurdity of the humor, which, at its best, feels like an evolutionary step between Aladdin and my upcoming favorite, The Emperor's New Groove. In fact, the looseness of the animation and world-building mixed with the go-for-broke silliness of the humor feels like the first time a Renaissance film looks in the direction of post-Renaissance, 2000s Disney, which makes Hercules an interesting work on a historical level. But none, absolutely none of the pieces of Hercules hang together anywhere nearly strong enough to tell a story, and whenever the film gestures toward a plot with emotional stakes and, like, forward momentum and danger, it stumbles majorly. You can practically hear the rusty gears of the story creaking into motion as it begins to build a useless romance between Megara and Hercules, and those gears practically strip their sprocket bolts trying to make the finale, in which Hercules must rescue Megara from Hades, feel like a natural culmination of the film's narrative. So yeah, Hercules is fun and a nice change of pace, but it's got issues, man.
Unlike the previous two films here, Mulan is not a Problem Film. Oh, it has problems, don't get me wrong, but they are problems that don't hinder the basic effectiveness of the film. In fact, I'd say Mulan is the most purely successful Disney movie since Aladdin—though funny that earlier movie should come up, since the other most obvious point of connection between these two films is that, like Aladdin, Mulan is the rare Disney film based on a non-European and featuring a cast of characters made up exclusively of people of color. In fact, by Mulan's release in 1998, it was only the second Disney animated feature with those distinctions, making comparisons to Aladdin even more appropriate. There's no reason to beat around the bush: Mulan is a significantly more respectful treatment of ethnicity than Aladdin is. Gone is the evocation of a Sinister Foreign Land of the "It's barbaric, but hey, it's home" variety, replaced instead by what is at least an attempt at evoking a genuine rendering of Chinese culture, though even here there's a sort of condescending exoticism to its depiction of China, most notably in the opening "Belle"-esque panorama sequence set to "Honor to Us All." And then there is still the problem that the film is telling a fundamentally American iteration of a Chinese legend and that perhaps this was China's story to tell cinematically in the first place—a stance I'm sympathetic to, though I think that given the media landscape we're living in, if Disney isn't telling Chinese stories, few Americans will watch Chinese stories, which is an awful and inevitable component of how dominant media corporations are setting our media consumption, I know, but it's the reality we live in (Americans, go watch more non-English-language films, pleeease). Also to Mulan's credit is that its cast is at least mostly made up of Asian Americans, in contrast to the snowy-white roster of Aladdin's voices, though even here Disney isn't completely hitting it out of the park—George Takei is, for example, Japanese-American, not Chinese-American, something that audiences in China picked up on immediately and objected to. So it's imperfect, but Mulan's ethnic and cultural representation at least a step in the right direction and the beginning of the more culturally sensitive practices Disney would employ in future movies like Brother Bear and Moana.
That's how I would describe Mulan in general, actually: imperfect, but a good step in the right direction. Gone are the self-serious, Oscar-grubbing postures of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; aside from the non-European setting, this is a very classically Renaissance Disney film, structured around alternating beats of sweeping drama and silly comedy. This is, in some respects, like Beauty and the Beast in that the plot is kicked off, refreshingly, not with some teen thumbing their nose at their oppressive parents (what is it with Disney movies and parents?) but with a woman leaving home in an act of self-sacrifice to save her father (albeit against her parents' will), and in other respects, this is like Aladdin in that it features a disguised outsider attempting to join a monarchical regime with the help of a supernatural guide. Most of the pieces of Mulan aren't exactly new (though some of the battle setpieces do feel unique to Mulan), but whether or not the movie got to this territory first, it at least handles the terrain well. Mulan herself is an engaging protagonist with clear emotional stakes, the songs are—if not quite Menken/Ashman quality—uniformly solid (except "A Girl Worth Fighting For," which I think is kind of irritating), and Shan Yu, though he's pretty bland personality-wise, at least looks the part of a great Disney villain, a hulking nightmare of a man, and he goes out in a big ol' blaze of glory, which I always appreciate in villains of both Disney and non-Disney stripes. And it's all animated in a handsome style that does a tremendous job wedding the somber stylization of the main characters' design with the cartoonish stylization of the ancillary characters, resulting in a movie that finds a great aesthetic in some very striking imagery (e.g. the soldiers against the mountain snow in the first battle sequence).
So, you may be asking, what's imperfect about this movie? Well, for starters, Captain Li Shang is a lousy love interest, not just because he and Mulan lack chemistry but also because their romance feels like a complete afterthought in a movie that does not call for any romance whatsoever, much less the deeply annoying ending of the film, which basically rewards Shang with Mulan because... he's nice, I guess? It's certainly not something Mulan herself seems all that enthusiastic about throughout the movie. I also don't really enjoy any of the time spent with the belching, slobbering men whom Mulan trains with, though I realize that this is perhaps by design (and I'll concede that "I'll Make a Man Out of You" is a good, though perhaps overrated, song). But most of all, when I say this is flawed, I'm talking about Mushu, voiced by Eddie Murphy doing his Eddie Murphy thing, which is fine in other movies but completely out of place in this story, not just because the imposition of Eddie Murphyisms in ancient China feels like the worst of the "telling an American iteration of a Chinese legend" issue but also because his relentless anachronistic humor is a horrid clash with the mostly straight-faced, emotionally measured tone of the rest of the movie. He also just really freaking gets on my nerves. Look, I don't hate comic relief—the animate household objects in Beauty and the Beast are good, as is Joanna in The Rescuers Down Under and the Genie in Aladdin. Both they are good because A. they are funny, and B. appropriate for the stories their respective movies are trying to tell, of which Mushu is neither.
See you next time for the demise of the Disney Renaissance and the weird, wild world beyond!
UPDATE: You can read the next entry in this series here.
34. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
But madness upon madness, Disney almost pulled it off with Hunchback. They almost had a masterpiece, a mature and complex film equal both aesthetically and narratively to the lofty ambitions of its themes, a movie that could have stood up to and perhaps even surpassed the unequivocal, towering achievement of 1990s Disney, Beauty and the Beast. And for long sections of Hunchback, it's easy to feel like you are inside the magnificent film that could have been. Most readily apparent is the film's look—its cavernous Gothic spaces, its abundance of exquisite long shots that stage small human figures against the colossal structures of the background, the dark richness of its colors, the near-constant play of light and shadow both across characters' faces and through the architecture of the cathedral of Notre Dame itself. It is, from opening to closing credits, a stunningly beautiful movie, second only to The Lion King as Disney's best animation of the decade, and the movie sells its heavy ambitions almost on its aesthetic alone, with thematically weighted imagery like the shot of Esmeralda looking up at the stained glass inside Notre Dame ranking among some of the most potent and heart-stoppingly striking imagery in Disney history.
It isn't just the animation, though; on an aesthetic level, there's also Alan Menken's score, the heaviest thing he ever wrote for Disney and probably the heaviest music ever written for any Disney film. With its bells and strings and full-on choral arrangements, the movie's score sounds gigantic, and if it weren't married to the film's titanic imagery, it likely would feel out of place; but as it is, scoring breathtaking vistas of medieval Paris, the awe-struck verticality of the cathedral interior, and the gargantuan heft of the bell tower, it works extremely well, and the same goes for the songs—pieces of music that are much closer to (to evoke that other Victor Hugo adaptation) Schönberg's Les Misérables than the lithe, footloose compositions of Menken's previous work with Disney. Songs like "The Bells of Notre Dame," "Out There," and "God Help the Outcasts"—these aren't clever songs made to entertain children and their parents; they are the sober, complicated work of someone looking to become a serious songwriter for adults, and that really goes for the movie as a whole, whose aims—to tell a story about social outcasts struggling against a genocidal judge who is caught between his conviction in the harsh theology of his upbringing and his own carnal lusts—are nothing close to the realm of children's entertainment. I don't mean that as a dismissal of films made for children; as I hope is obvious from the dozens of Disney movies I've covered by now, I love some movies made for children. But it's just so painfully clear that the people who made The Hunchback of Notre Dame did not want to make a kids' movie. You don't begin a film with the images of a man about to drop a baby (whose mother he has just murdered) down a well if you want to make a movie for children. If you are making a movie for children, you don't create a character like Frollo, a villain who is scary, and not in that fun, campy, mugging way that a lot of great Disney villains are scary either but actually terrifying, a man whose villainy is so thoroughly rooted in real-world horrors and his own psychological torment and the psychological torment he afflicts on others (there's a scene near the beginning involving a ritual by which he teaches Quasimodo about how ugly and wretch he is, and it's heartbreaking) that it's legitimately hard to watch at times—he's one of the great Disney creations, absolutely, but he is not for kids. And if you are making a kids' movie, you most definitely don't write a song like "Hellfire," a song that stares right into the pit of Frollo's soul and animates it with the most fiercely dark Disney imagery this side of Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain"—this is the stuff of nightmares, and not the silly grotesqueries that make up your traditional kids' movie nightmare fuel in things like The Wizard of Oz or The Dark Crystal; no, I'm talking about those nightmares you have where you see your whole family murdered, or you find yourself at the gates of Hell. The kinds of nightmares that shake you to the core with existential panic. That's "Hellfire." It was on the basis of that song that my mother gave away our family's copy of this movie, and while I usually don't have any truck with my mother's acts of media curation, I think she probably made the right call here—I mean, what parent wants their pre-elementary-aged children watching a man contemplate how hot Hell's flames will be if he rapes the woman he lusts after? It's pieces like these that separate The Hunchback of Notre Dame from Pocahontas, that give it gravitas where its predecessor had only pretension. It's these pieces that show us a movie that could have been Disney's best of the '90s. It's these pieces that show us that Hunchback had no business being aimed at children.
But alas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame did end up being aimed at children, and what do you do if you are Disney making a movie for children? Why, you add insufferable comic relief characters, that's what. Thus enter the gargoyles, a trio of characters who completely vandalize this would-be masterpiece. Taking a small passage from the original Victor Hugo novel ("The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends, and protected him. Thus he would pour out his heart at length to them.") and making its obvious metaphor literal, the makers of this movie saw fit to populate Quasimodo's lonely bell tower with living, breathing, wise-cracking gargoyles voiced by Charles Kimbrough, Mary Wickes, and freaking Jason Alexander. By now, it's probably clear that I'm not a huge fan of Disney comic relief in general, but of all the comic relief axes I have to grind, it's these stupid gargoyles for whom I grind my ax the sharpest, for the sheer reason that, more so than any other Disney comic relief, it is just so head-smackingly apparent that they don't belong in this movie. If the post-Seinfeld career of Jason Alexander has taught us anything, it's that the only place he belongs is in New York City with Jerry and Kramer and Elaine, but for some reason, Disney looked at their pitch-dark Gothic drama about genocide and intolerance in medieval Paris and said, "What this movie needs is George Costanza." And so we get, interspersed with all the masterpiece-level animation and heavy psychosexual torment, a bunch of idiotic quips from these gargoyles and, for some reason, a parody of The Wizard of Oz. It's such a disfiguring scar across the face of the movie that these three characters singlehandedly knock the film back from greatness into just "pretty good" territory, and I hate it. The internet is a big place—surely by now someone has made a gargoyle-free cut of this movie? Come on, y'all, don't let me down.
Okay, and in all fairness, it's not like the movie is perfect without the gargoyles. Typical of a depiction of people of color in a Disney movie, Hunchback's portrayal of the Romany people leans heavily on stereotypes and the "non-white people = magic" thing that Pocahontas does, and while, being neither Romany myself nor knowing any people of Romany descent, I am certainly in no place to judge whether or not the use of the word "gypsy" throughout the film is appropriate (the word is sometimes considered a slur, something that I was ignorant of until relatively recently, along with, I suspect, most Americans), I'm not really sure that Disney, of all companies, deserves the benefit of the doubt regarding racially sensitive language. Plus, the movie has yet another example of the exoticizing and sexualizing of a non-white woman in Esmeralda, a character whose whole role in the story, basically, is to serve as a sexual object (I mean, she cares for the oppressed and all, but we basically don't get that outside of one or two moments). At times, this actually works in the movie's favor, as it brings out the best (worst?) in Frollo's character and causes the movie to confront head-on the troubling horniness that all Disney movies up to this point have had concerning women of color. But elsewhere, the movie seems pretty un-self-reflective regarding its depiction of Esmeralda, especially at the end where, for no apparent reason, she is paired off romantically with Captain Phoebus—I guess they are the two sexiest characters in the movie and thus deserve to be together? I dunno, it doesn't make sense. Again, there is an upside to this in that the movie resists the urge to reward Quasimodo romantically for his heroism; movies are rife with plots that perpetuate the idea that kind men deserve the woman they are pining for, and it's nice to see Hunchback buck this trend. It also makes Quasimodo's choice to save Esmeralda at the end a lot more noble, as it means he is doing it for the sake of human decency and not out of any sense of self-serving romantic longing. Still, why does Esmeralda end up with Phoebus? WHY? But none of this even comes close to the wrongheadedness of the gargoyles, so I'll save my ire for them.
Y'all, the parts of this movie that are good are so good that they make my heart hurt. In a lot of ways, this movie is sort of the last heaving push upward by the Renaissance, the last time in this era that Disney truly tried to push their formula to ever increasing heights, and while The Hunchback of Notre Dame is certainly not the most fully realized execution of this ambition, nor is is followed by movies that are "bad" by any means, it's still kind of sad to know that Disney kind of went into retreat again after this movie.
35. Hercules (1997)
Because, above all, Hercules is fun. I mean, not very fun, but fun enough. In addition to the mid-'60s features already mentioned, Hercules bears quite a lot in common with Aladdin, the only other '90s Disney movie so focused on silly anachronisms and the appropriation of classical Hollywood modes—though Hercules is considerably less successful in this approach than Aladdin. Aladdin at least had a unifying universe and consistency with the kinds of jokes it would make at the expense of this universe's integrity (leaving most of the world-breaking to the explicitly supernatural Genie); Hercules is, in contrast, utter anarchy, a movie that makes a half-hearted attempt at creating a fleshed-out, if cartoonish, version of the world of ancient Greek mythology before deciding that nevermind, this world is also going to be full of random allusions to The Lion King and Nike shoes and action figures and American Express and all sorts of 20th century bric-a-brac, too, which is sort of charming in its kitchen-sink approach to Greek myth (I'm all for taking the piss out of mythology, especially Greek mythology) but also kind of baffling and not all that consistently funny, either. What do we get from watching some Greek imps drink from a fast-food cup emblazoned with Hercules's profile? It's not particularly funny or clever, though it's not actively unpleasant as a gag either. It's just sort of there as a comic non sequitur without bothering to justify itself or make itself fit in with the rest of the movie's world, which is a nice synecdoche for the movie as a whole. Another good one is the film's use of gospel music in its songs, a choice that I can only imagine was made as some weird confluence of an allusion to composer Alan Menken's breakthrough, Little Shop of Horrors, and the appeal of the incongruity of 20th-century African-American music in an ancient Greek context.
There's nothing I actively dislike in this movie (well, except for the designs for Zeus and Hera, which are the ugliest Saturday-morning-cartoon garbage I've seen in a while). I actually like pieces of the movie quite a bit: the titans are very cool, the early-movie Megara has a fun Barbara Stanwyck thing going before she becomes an uninteresting femme-fatale/damsel mashup, James Woods's Hades is a fantastic example of animation/voice-actor synergy (he is a very fun villain); I even like the absurdity of the humor, which, at its best, feels like an evolutionary step between Aladdin and my upcoming favorite, The Emperor's New Groove. In fact, the looseness of the animation and world-building mixed with the go-for-broke silliness of the humor feels like the first time a Renaissance film looks in the direction of post-Renaissance, 2000s Disney, which makes Hercules an interesting work on a historical level. But none, absolutely none of the pieces of Hercules hang together anywhere nearly strong enough to tell a story, and whenever the film gestures toward a plot with emotional stakes and, like, forward momentum and danger, it stumbles majorly. You can practically hear the rusty gears of the story creaking into motion as it begins to build a useless romance between Megara and Hercules, and those gears practically strip their sprocket bolts trying to make the finale, in which Hercules must rescue Megara from Hades, feel like a natural culmination of the film's narrative. So yeah, Hercules is fun and a nice change of pace, but it's got issues, man.
36. Mulan (1998)
That's how I would describe Mulan in general, actually: imperfect, but a good step in the right direction. Gone are the self-serious, Oscar-grubbing postures of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame; aside from the non-European setting, this is a very classically Renaissance Disney film, structured around alternating beats of sweeping drama and silly comedy. This is, in some respects, like Beauty and the Beast in that the plot is kicked off, refreshingly, not with some teen thumbing their nose at their oppressive parents (what is it with Disney movies and parents?) but with a woman leaving home in an act of self-sacrifice to save her father (albeit against her parents' will), and in other respects, this is like Aladdin in that it features a disguised outsider attempting to join a monarchical regime with the help of a supernatural guide. Most of the pieces of Mulan aren't exactly new (though some of the battle setpieces do feel unique to Mulan), but whether or not the movie got to this territory first, it at least handles the terrain well. Mulan herself is an engaging protagonist with clear emotional stakes, the songs are—if not quite Menken/Ashman quality—uniformly solid (except "A Girl Worth Fighting For," which I think is kind of irritating), and Shan Yu, though he's pretty bland personality-wise, at least looks the part of a great Disney villain, a hulking nightmare of a man, and he goes out in a big ol' blaze of glory, which I always appreciate in villains of both Disney and non-Disney stripes. And it's all animated in a handsome style that does a tremendous job wedding the somber stylization of the main characters' design with the cartoonish stylization of the ancillary characters, resulting in a movie that finds a great aesthetic in some very striking imagery (e.g. the soldiers against the mountain snow in the first battle sequence).
So, you may be asking, what's imperfect about this movie? Well, for starters, Captain Li Shang is a lousy love interest, not just because he and Mulan lack chemistry but also because their romance feels like a complete afterthought in a movie that does not call for any romance whatsoever, much less the deeply annoying ending of the film, which basically rewards Shang with Mulan because... he's nice, I guess? It's certainly not something Mulan herself seems all that enthusiastic about throughout the movie. I also don't really enjoy any of the time spent with the belching, slobbering men whom Mulan trains with, though I realize that this is perhaps by design (and I'll concede that "I'll Make a Man Out of You" is a good, though perhaps overrated, song). But most of all, when I say this is flawed, I'm talking about Mushu, voiced by Eddie Murphy doing his Eddie Murphy thing, which is fine in other movies but completely out of place in this story, not just because the imposition of Eddie Murphyisms in ancient China feels like the worst of the "telling an American iteration of a Chinese legend" issue but also because his relentless anachronistic humor is a horrid clash with the mostly straight-faced, emotionally measured tone of the rest of the movie. He also just really freaking gets on my nerves. Look, I don't hate comic relief—the animate household objects in Beauty and the Beast are good, as is Joanna in The Rescuers Down Under and the Genie in Aladdin. Both they are good because A. they are funny, and B. appropriate for the stories their respective movies are trying to tell, of which Mushu is neither.
See you next time for the demise of the Disney Renaissance and the weird, wild world beyond!
No comments:
Post a Comment