I am officially halfway through the Disney features! Too bad I'm more than halfway through the summer...
You can read the previous entry in this series here.
EDIT: You can read the next entry in this series here.
28. The Little Mermaid (1989)
It's easy to undervalue the Disney Renaissance. It is not, after all, free from bad movies (in fact, Pocahontas will be staring us right in the face in the next post in this series), nor are all its good movies unqualified successes (only one of them really is, I'd say). And the Disney Princess mode that became the cornerstone of the Renaissance—i.e. sweeping fantasy epics based on folklore and told via a Broadway-style musical structure and featuring young heroines who just wanna be independent, dammit, but oh wait, nevermind, I guess true love is good enough instead—has grown pretty stale since becoming, if not the only kind of movie Disney makes, certainly the flagship model for what people recognize as a Disney Movie™; if we're going by sheer numbers, The Little Mermaid is, believe it or not, only the midpoint in the Disney animated feature canon, meaning that half of all Disney movies ever have been made with this movie and its template in the back of their minds. There's been plenty of opportunity for the Renaissance and particularly this inaugural entry to wear out its welcome.
But lemme tell you, there's no better way to appreciate the sea change (ha) of the Disney Renaissance than to have beforehand watched the wretched lineup of movies Disney released in the 1970s and '80s. Then comes The Little Mermaid, with its gorgeous animation, its wonderful songs, its coherent and effective narrative, out of the clear freaking blue sky just a year after the release of Oliver & Company, the artistic nadir of Walt Disney Studios. If you think I'm exaggerating, go watch those '70s and '80s movies, then watch The Little Mermaid. I dare you.
I know The Little Mermaid didn't actually come out of nowhere; Disney knew they were swinging for the fences, and they poured more money into the film than they had any other animated feature in decades. It shows. The first few minutes of the film alone, in which a ship full of singing sailors emerges from the mist before the camera darts under the waves to show off the otherworldly beauty of the undersea kingdom below, signal immediately that this ain't the xerography era anymore, kids—though this is actually the final film to use that style before the Pixar-developed Computer Animation Production System (CAPS, which used computers to fill in the cel's colors instead of the traditional by-hand approach, meaning that The Little Mermaid is the final Disney film to be hand-painted), which, given how incredible this movie looks, just goes to show how many corners Disney was cutting for decades of the xerography use. It's a bravura opening, swimming with ideas, and a marvelous showcase of the smooth animation, visual wit, and moments of spectral beauty that will be hallmarks of this movie. It's unabashedly cartoonish—you won't confuse any of these sea creatures for the real thing, à la Bambi or the upcoming Lion King—but there's never any doubt that the film is serious about the playfulness and flexibility of that particular style, and the movie is capable of some astounding pieces of character animation, both friendly and sinister, as well as some striking, almost tableau-like shots, without ever violating the essential cartoon identity of the visuals.
It's not just the visuals that make this movie such a marvel, though, and while I know I'm quickly stretching at the outside boundaries of how long these little blurbs should be, come on, we have to talk about the music, right? Surely it isn't controversial to think (as I do) that The Little Mermaid has the single best collection of songs in the entire Disney oeuvre? The only other movie I can think of as a rival to that title is Mary Poppins, and if I'm just limiting the field to fully animated features, then there's no contest: with the exceptions of "Fathoms Below" (which is still good) and "Daughters of Triton" (which is intentionally bad, right?), every song is a masterpiece of its kind: the yearning I Want song of "Part of Your World," the obligatory showstopper of the calypso-infused "Under the Sea," the villain manifesto of "Poor Unfortunate Souls"—these are all song types that already were or soon would be staples of Disney animated musicals, and the Alan Menken/Howard Ashman music/lyrics duo (one of the few films in which they worked together before Ashman's death) basically perfected them all here.
And the story—it's pure archetype, for sure, with its talk of True Love's Kiss and Evil Witches and Kings and Princesses, but those archetypes have seldom before or since in the Disney catalog been rendered with such emotional precision. Ariel is so perfectly teenaged, with all the mix of sweeping earnestness and infuriating impulsivity that goes with that; there are few characters in Disney history with such a vibrant interior life, and that, in 1989, after decades of male-centric storytelling (or else air-headed, white-bread female protagonists like Snow White and Cinderella) from Disney, such humanity would be given to a female protagonist feels like a quantum leap of progress for the company in terms of gender representation. And before you guys say it: yes, I realize that we are nowhere near the realm of progressive gender politics with this movie. Yes, The Little Mermaid is a film in which its protagonist essentially wears nothing but a bra for 3/4 of the film. Yes, it's also a film in which a bunch of male animators dreamed up the idea that sixteen-year-old Ariel's coming-of-age story should be depicted through imagery that heavily implies a sexual awakening as well; this is one of the very few Disney movies that acknowledges the existence of sex, which is both a blessing and a curse—it's not that it isn't important to have stories that deal with teenage female sexuality, but in the hands of the notoriously bawdy and overwhelmingly male Disney animators, this comes across as occasionally horny, which is gross. At the same time, I do think the movie is doing some interesting things in this arena, though. It's not just that Ariel is a representational milestone; it's also her journey. Let's recap: Ariel, tired of the literally patriarchal society she lives in (where, it should be noted, her father seems only interested in showing off his daughters as performers who validate his own power), seeks freedom, and the only route she finds is through her youthful infatuation with a man who represents the wider world not beneath her father's thumb. When her father violently disrupts her infatuated attempt to learn more about this guy, she finds solace in a sinister character who tells her that yes, she can be free if she gives up her voice and objectifies her body according to conventional beauty standards, which Ariel does and is promptly rendered a moron whom her lover leaves the instant he hears another woman's voice. The conflict of this film, at least for its first two acts, is very explicitly one of a girl making increasingly poor choices because of how she is manipulated by the various patriarchal and chauvinist forces that subjugate women into oppressed roles, and these forces are consistently depicted as either misguided or evil throughout the film. Now, of course, the movie's ending—in which our heroes must vanquish a female villain unmotivated by gender at all and, after her defeat, Ariel does end up with her main squeeze, seemingly content to be freed from her father's control by being swept up by another man—does a lot to undo the ideas of the movie's early goings. And admittedly, the ending of a movie is its conceit. But it is difficult to shake the sheer clear-eyed-ness of the critique of patriarchy in the rest of the film. No, this is not a movie with exemplary gender politics. But it is considerably more complex in its handling of gender than people tend to give it credit for.
Anyway, I've gone on for way too long, so I'll wrap this up and move on. Tl;dr, The Little Mermaid is very good. Go watch it if you somehow have not already.
29. The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
I bring all this up to just lay my biases right out on the table; if ever there were a Disney movie to cloud my critical faculties with nostalgia, this is it. But I dunno, guys—is it just me, or is this movie significantly superior to the original Rescuers? Take that with a grain of salt because of the aforementioned nostalgia, I guess. But not too much salt, since there are some tangible reasons for this movie's superiority besides "No more Mr. Nice Guy." First and foremost is the animation. Down Under is the first completely digital Disney film, the feature-length debut of CAPS, and as such, the movie looks modern in a way that not even The Little Mermaid did. Though it lacks the visual panache of its immediate, undersea predecessor, Down Under is nevertheless a technical marvel; the animation is smooth, the lighting is sophisticated and detailed, and the camera is able to swoop and zoom like never in an animated film before. This slick, crisp aesthetic is the look of cel animation's future and also its demise—CAPS was developed by Pixar, and looking at Down Under, it's really no wonder that Toy Story was a scant five years away. Granted, a lot of this camera movement and lighting is very blatantly the animators showing off their shiny new toy (the opening credits are one long zoom through a computer-rendered outback, and McLeach has a suspicious habit of walking in front of flood lights), and at times, it's a bit much. But compared that to The Rescuers, one of (if not the) most technically shaky films in Disney history, and Down Under is practically a masterpiece.
As for the plot, it's not notably better than the original Rescuers's (and it lacks that earlier film's striking melancholy), but its execution is far more robust. Its action sequences are, thanks to CAPS, exciting and dynamic, and McLeach is a good villain, just off-kilter enough to be interesting but never enough that the character turns to rubber. The movie's stakes are just about right, too. We're still dealing with a fundamentally serious story with incongruous animal hijinks (most notably in this case, a John-Candy-voiced albatross and a frill-necked lizard named Frank), and I'm still not a huge fan of our ostensible protagonists, Bernard and Bianca, nor the ongoing subplot of Bernard's repeatedly foiled attempts to propose to Miss Bianca. But the movie does a much better job of making these comic interludes fit tonally with the rest of the action, and in general, the comic interludes are just plain better, relying less on goofy stereotypes (though there is the unfortunate case of mouse Crocodile Dundee) and more on actual comic timing—especially the film's highlight, Joanna, aka McLeach's pet monitor lizard (I'd always assumed incorrectly that she is a Komodo dragon, so thanks, Wikipedia) whose ongoing hunt for eggs plays like a more sinister and slapsticky version of Pooh Bear looking for honey. Much love, Joanna. Never change.
30. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
It's gorgeously animated, naturally—the second all-CAPS Disney film, and in general, a much more sophisticated and restrained use of the technology than The Rescuers Down Under (the exception, of course, being the ballroom scene, which, is one of the most historically important pieces of animation of the 1990s, so get out of here, haters). The songs, too—you know the songs. They aren't quite as spritely and effortlessly great as those in The Little Mermaid, but they are doing a lot more impressive heavy-lifting as far as storytelling goes; the most impressive is the movie-opening "Belle," which is a virtuosic cavalcade of music, lyrics, and animation that, in a scant five minutes, deliver an astounding amount of exposition, character development, and place-setting for the film's plot, all while being a great song in its own right. It's fun and breezy and effortlessly appealing without being cloying or childish or smarmy or any of the other litany of tonal traps it could have fallen into, and the same goes for every single song in the film.
In fact, that goes for the film as a whole, not just its songs. Of all the wonderful things Beauty and the Beast accomplishes, perhaps the most miraculous is the way it's able to so perfectly be a film for all ages. Has there ever been a Disney film that so effectively appealed to both adults and children while condescending to neither? Sleeping Beauty, perhaps, but even that one is mighty icy in its formal experimentation to be reliably child-friendly. Beauty and the Beast is anything but icy. It's swooningly romantic without ever being schmaltzy, it's funny without ever giving itself over to zany hijinks, it's zippy and propulsive without ever replacing its characters with spectacle. This is a movie that can be enjoyed by children but that never plays to the cheap seats, something that's relatively rare in movies in general and virtually unheard of in American animation.
Beauty and the Beast is, in a word, a masterpiece of mainstream cinema, the absolute pinnacle of the Disney fairy tale formula and, what's more, a whip-smart subversion of it, too. Belle being the most intelligent and the most virtuous character in the film by a long shot is a nice corrective to even The Little Mermaid, in which femininity is either naive and impressionable or conniving and evil, but this movie's purest deconstruction of fairy tale tropes is in its male characters. In Beauty and the Beast, unrequited love and the male drive to rescue a supposed damsel in distress are the acts of a villain, not a hero; Gaston is, without a doubt, the most contemptible and compelling example of toxic masculinity in the Disney canon, and what makes him so is that he is basically an amalgam of every prince to have ever waltzed through a Disney movie, doing virtually everything that every male love interest in Disney's fairy tale films has ever done: he pines for Belle, he asks her to marry him, he fights a savage creature to win her heart and save her life—only he is shown as irredeemably evil for doing so. Similarly, there's Beast, a brooding man whose own arrogance and contempt for women has turned him into a literal monster, and he now lives in his castle alone, a violent, possessive creature that's as much a refutation of masculine pride as Gaston. With apologies to Belle, who is really a wonderful protagonist, this is a movie about masculinity. It's not Belle who experiences a character arc; it's the men—Beast, as he learns to be kind and gentle and compassionate, and Gaston, as his traditionally masculine heroic traits turn him more and more toward violence and hate and self-destruction. If The Little Mermaid is a (flawed) refutation of the female fairy tale archetypes—the demeaning positioning of women in relation to men, the conflation of traditional female beauty standards with happiness—then Beauty and the Beast its (much more coherent) counterpart, a refutation of the masculine fairy tale archetypes as violent and destructive and corrosive to society (let's not forget that Gaston incites a riot).
Related to this is how, of all the Disney movies about True Love, Beauty and the Beast is the only one that actually seems to view love as something other than a divine abstraction. Love is not sweeping someone off their feet after a battle; love is not declaring that you will marry some girl, consequences and consent be damned. Love is kindness, regarding someone as equally human to yourself. Love is caring for your family, for the poor and the outcast, not just romantically but in ways that show that you value their well-being above your own. Love is a habit, the tangible accumulation of actions and words on another person's soul, not some struck-by-lightning moment of inspiration.
Unfortunately, Disney has a short memory, and these themes wouldn't stick. Tune in next time for some slightly less masterful movies!
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