Disney Review: Tarzan, Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur

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.

Some weird ones this time.

You can read the previous entry in this series here.

EDIT: You can read the next entry in this series here.

37. Tarzan (1999)

Most people designate Tarzan as the final film of the Disney Renaissance before the studio spiraled out into a series of off-beat and often ill-advised passion projects and technological experiments, resulting in the vice grip of Disney proper over American animation loosening significantly over the 2000s in favor of fresh newcomers like Pixar (whose movies Disney distributed) and DreamWorks. I've seen precious few of the movies in the interim between Tarzan and Bolt (the first Disney movie made under the supervision of John Lasseter and hence the beginning of the Revival or Neo-Renaissance or whatever we're calling the current age of the return of Disney's vice grip), but even so, based on my knowledge of these upcoming movies, Tarzan does feel like an end point of sorts. More than anything, it's the end of the ethos that defined the Renaissance, that particular sincere combination of wide-eyed, sweeping fantasy/historical epics with the technologically refined classicism of a lush, hand-drawn cel animation.

On a plot level, Tarzan is almost boilerplate Disney Renaissance, in the sense that it features a protagonist who feels out of place in his own society and whose emotional journey is a quest for self-identity that culminates in romantic fulfillment—an interesting application of Edgar Rice Burroughs's pulpy source material to say the least, but one that Disney makes work well enough. Like Mulan before it, what Tarzan lacks in freshness it makes up for in finesse, and unlike Mulan, the film is mercifully free of a comic relief character as soul-destroying as Mushu—we do have, in the grand Disney tradition, a Seinfeld alum and a '90s celebrity du jour voicing characters here, but, while I'm not a huge fan of Rosie O'Donnell's street-wise ape (she strikes me as hitting about the same levels of forced hipness as Billy Joel's Dodger, though maybe it's just the shared NYC accents), Wayne Knight's casting at least has the grace to involve an actor seemingly designed to be a cartoon character from birth, and neither of them are ever a fraction as tonally disruptive as Murphy's Mushu in their comic relief roles. It helps that Tarzan is significantly lighter on its feet than its predecessor, and its story has a fair amount of humor baked into its premise even without the celebrity voices cracking wise, most notably in the two-way fish-out-of-water comedy that results from the stuffy Victorian Jane and Archimedes Porter entering Tarzan's world and Tarzan, in turn, attempting to understand theirs. More than any Disney movie since Aladdin, Tarzan knows how to allow its comedy not to undermine its drama and vice versa, and that is a drink of cool water after a string of movies that are horrifically incompetent at juggling tones. The plot itself feels a little bumpy—character motivations could be a bit more precise (particularly those of the villain, Clayton, who is a mean but not particularly well-fleshed-out dude, though he does get one of the all-time nastiest villain deaths in Disney history), and the seams of the three-act structure are perhaps a bit too obvious ("oh, look, it's a ship appearing all of the sudden to shove us into the third act," etc.). But the movie also has clear emotional beats that resonate more often than not—the movie's opening, which shows, dialogue-free, the death of Tarzan's family and his adoption by the apes, is a very impressive and frequently moving sequence. Its characters also, especially Jane and the professor, as well as the spiritual return of The Jungle Book's silly, clumsy elephants, are charming and a lot fun. The action sequences are exciting, too, when they don't feature Tarzan grinding Tony-Hawk style on tree branches (which is just so very late '90s, thankfully one of the few indulgences that the movie makes into "what the kids are up to these days" pandering).

And while we're on the characters, I do want to call attention to the design of the characters themselves, which is magnificent across the board. Legendary Disney animator Glen Keane supervised the animation of Tarzan himself, and it shows in the lovely, expressive body language and facial expressions. Maybe even better is Ken Duncan's Jane, the only Renaissance female protagonist besides Belle to not feel (to my hetero-male eyes, that is) fetishized by the movie in any regard; she's a perfectly delightful creation whose animation does a great job of showing how she both feels uncomfortable in the voluminous, restrictive Victorian garb she wears and also retreats into that same garb as a kind of shell, a fantastic dynamic that says more about her character than any single line of dialogue. What's striking and ultimately historically notable about this movie's look, though, is how it foregrounds these intricately dawn characters in front of almost entirely 3D, computer-generated backgrounds via the cutting-edge Deep Canvas software Disney used here. The Deep Canvas technology allows for an extraordinarily detailed jungle background and some nice camera movements that would likely have not looked nearly so fluid with just CAPS. However, it's readily apparent that these backgrounds are 3D computer imagery, and while it's never too distracting, I don't think the movie ever quite figures out how to make this mixed-media aesthetic between the cel and 3D animation completely gel. But this is the future; just as Tarzan is the end of the Renaissance, it's also the beginning of the next stage of Disney's development, which stressed the increasing use of 3D computer imagery as the destination for its features rather than just the accouterments to a fundamentally cel-animated look. And... ah, I've got mixed feelings about that, but at least Tarzan turned out good.

Oh, also, P.S.—all y'all haters need to lay off Phil Collins's soundtrack. It's clear that the man is always going to have been a better drummer for Genesis than he is a pop icon, but Phil's got some bangers, too, and his work for this movie is respectable.

38. Fantasia 2000 (1999)

At the turn of the millennium, Walt Disney Animation Studios was in a moment of identity crisis. Disney's Renaissance formula had developed noticeable cracks after a problematic few years in the middle of the '90s. More importantly, the company itself found its brand in slow but unmistakable decline, replaced at the vanguard of animation by Pixar and DreamWorks, the latter of which was co-founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg after his acrimonious split with Disney and, with the release of 2001's Shrek (a movie that, among other things, is intent on vandalizing Disney's squeaky image), made absolutely clear its thoughts on the Mouse House. Significantly, both of these rivals (and with Pixar, I'm certainly using air quotes with the term, given the symbiotic relationship between that company and Disney) had, by this point, released fully computer-generated animated features, and CG animation certainly seemed to be the future, the scary uncanny-valley limitations of the technology be damned. Disney itself had been playing with computer animation for over a decade, starting with the lighting effects in The Black Cauldron all the way up to the Deep Canvas environments of Tarzan. All of which means that it was virtually inevitable that Disney, the company synonymous with American hand-drawn animation, would eventually give us their first fully computer-rendered feature.

Fantasia 2000 is not that feature, but the reason I bring all this context up is that perhaps more so than any feature in this time of transition, Fantasia 2000 represents all the insecurities that afflicted Disney in its identity crisis: the reverential attitude toward its own history clashing with the formula shakeups of the post-Katzenberg era, the desire to be hip and the desire to be classy coexisting uneasily with one another, and most importantly, the deep affection for cel-drawn animation succumbing to the inevitable tide of computer generation. Fantasia 2000's got some computer technology, y'all, and it wants you to notice it. I've mentioned before (in fact, just right there in my Tarzan review) how often these computer experiments stick out like sore thumbs alongside the classicism of the Renaissance cel animation, and Fantasia 2000 practically makes this its defining aesthetic, mixing hand-drawn and CG into some tremendously uncanny cocktails. The movie makes no attempt to hide this; its second piece—an odd, ethereal sequence set to Ottorino Respighi's lovely Pines of Rome, involving a pod of humpback whales flying through the air (never let it be said that Disney left the sizable stoner subset of its Fantasia fanbase high and dry)—is practically a manifesto of the integration of 3D polygon computer rendering and hand-drawn cels, with resolutely cel-animated birds and water splashes slapped like stickers over obviously CG the whales and ocean surface. It's not that this sequence is bad; the concept is, especially for the stubbornly mainstream Disney of the late '90s, admirably out-there, and the execution is frequently wonderful. But the computer pieces just look so unforgivably ugly that it is incredibly distracting. This is also true, though less so, of the "Steadfast Tin Soldier" piece later in the film (set to Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2), a movie that also suffers from the limits of computer technology to deliver the rich, painterly feel of Disney's traditional animation that this movie so clearly wants to deliver—though at least in this case, any hand-drawn material is relegated to the background, leaving computer imagery mostly interacting with computer imagery, avoiding that bizarre sticker-looking effect of the imposition of cel on 3D.

I mean, it's just so easy to pick at this movie's flaws. The use of celebrity cameos to introduce each segment is just a floundering attempt to appeal to modern audiences, and the playful concert vibes of the original Fantasia have instead been replaced by this awkward Oscar-night feel, with the movie celebrating its own pomp via awkward celebrity monologues and uncomfortable-looking tuxedos. The film also commits an enormous unforced error by including the original Sorcerer's Apprentice segment in here as a sort of tribute to the original Fantasia and in doing so, instantly exposes just how much this movie pales in comparison to its predecessor. Which is, of course, such an unfair comparison to make; every single frame of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is a masterpiece, and in comparison to that, it's hard to make even this movie's very good pieces feel anything more than just adequate. But don't get me wrong, there are some very good pieces in Fantasia 2000. The semi-abstract dramatization of the first movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony is a striking, gorgeous opening to the film; the Le Carnival des Animaux sequence, in which a flock of flamingos playing with a yo-yo provides an excuse for the animators to have a ton of fun playing with shape and motion, feels like a great, jaunty lost Looney Tunes short; Pomp and Circumstance is fun, too, as a vehicle for Donald Duck to be knocked around on Noah's Ark—though really, Disney? Pomp and Circumstance? I know you aren't going for deep cuts here, but I really think we've heard that piece enough (or maybe that's just because I've sat through an unseemly number of graduations in the past year). And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the concluding Firebird Suite piece, which is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous ten minutes of film, the only time that computers feel at home in the movie alongside cel animation, and the only one of these shorts that feels at the level of finesse and wonder delivered by Fantasia in 1940.

Still, Fantasia 2000 is probably best epitomized by the Rhapsody in Blue sequence near the film's beginning: it's fun and distinctive and interesting, but as a salute to one of the great works of art of the 20th century (either the OG Fantasia or Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, take your pick), it's hard not to want it to be so much better. It would be a lot easier not to feel this way about Fantasia 2000 if the whole Fantasia concept had panned out like Walt had originally envisioned—i.e. continuously modified and added to so it could be rereleased again and again with new content. What a freaking concept. We could have gotten a jazz Fantasia. We could have gotten a Philip Glass Fantasia. We could have gotten (my own personal dream) a progressive rock Fantasia. And to its immense credit, Fantasia 2000 was an attempt to revive this spirit and bring it, along with Disney's Renaissance as a whole, into a bold new millennium. But like 1940's Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 was a financial disappointment and not the inception of a concert-animation Disney tradition, which leaves the whole Fantasia project with all of its eggs in just two baskets—and when you've only got two, it's hard not to want the shabbier of the baskets, lovely at it is as a basket to itself, to look just a bit more put-together.

39. *Dinosaur (2000)

Dinosaur is the least familiar I've been with a Disney movie during this project since I waltzed into The Three Caballeros. I had vague ideas about the premise—CGI dinosaurs in front of live-action backgrounds—based on the faint memories I have of seeing the trailer in front of my screening of Toy Story 2 way back in 1999. But on the whole, I had pretty much zero idea of what I was in for, and unlike most Disney movies, Dinosaur has left virtually no cultural footprint (it isn't even considered part of the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon in Europe), nor is it based on some pre-existing intellectual property or folk tale (as is the case with some of the other upcoming Disney movies I know little about, such as Treasure Planet and Chicken Little). I was actually kind of stoked for the rare experience of going in so blind to a Disney movie.

So it is with disappointment that I must report to you that Dinosaur is no good. It is, in fact, the weakest Disney feature since Pocahontas. This isn't for lack of trying; as it turns out, the trailer I saw was actually just the opening scene of the movie, a wordless five-minute setpiece involving a dinosaur egg narrowly escaping being devoured as it is flung across a bunch of Cretaceous environments by an assortment of dinosaurs and somehow miraculously doesn't break. And it's kind of amazing, a breathtaking tour de force that evokes both Fantasia's Rite of Spring sequence and the starker moments of Bambi in the way it presents a lyrical rendering of nature's commingled beauty and danger. It's a strange, striking, and bold way to begin a movie whose entire premise (the mixing of live action and CGI in the service of a supposedly "animated" feature) is strange and striking and bold, as if it is Jurassic Park's answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Unfortunately, that opening scene is exactly where this premise's payoff begins and ends, as the rest of Dinosaur is not comprised of wordless setpieces showcasing Cretaceous landscapes and a stark philosophy of the natural world; nay, woe unto us viewers, the rest of Dinosaur instead features talking animals of the most egregious kind—the kind who do things like call a mean dinosaur a "jerk-osaurus" or talk about "the monkey on my back" when there is actually a monkey on its back, the kind who look at each other with adolescent lust when their paws accidentally touch in a watering hole like the hands of two teens meeting in a popcorn bucket. The movie's dialogue is absolutely dreadful, full of trying-to-hard vocal performances and stilted attempts at humor, and whatever value there was in the story—which isn't all that great to begin with, basically a retread of the first and third Land Before Time movies, mixed with the bizarre and underused subtext that the dinosaurs are going extinct (the notorious, extinction-causing asteroid hits the earth early in the film)—is sucked dry by the wretched, obnoxious things that come out of the animals' mouths. Supposedly, this movie was supposed to be dialogue-free until Michael Eisner (*shakes fists at the sky* EISNEEEERRR!) forced them to make the animals talk for the sake of the movie's commercial appeal, which... bleg.

It's an intriguing alternate history to imagine the version of the movie that could have been if they'd stuck to their guns and delivered a dialogue-free story (it certainly would have been the most openly challenging Disney movie in decades), but even that would not have helped the movie's other significant flaw, which is that it, frankly, looks like trash. It's hard to tell in the opening scene, when the energy and camera movement does a lot to hide it, but once the movie calms down and settles into its rhythms of crappy dialogue and boring story beats, it becomes dismayingly clear: the CGI in this movie is abysmal. Maybe this was legitimately the best the technology could muster at the time, and if so, I question Disney's enthusiasm for jumping right into 3D CGI, because whatever horrible thing went wrong in the computers as they tried to render photorealistic dinosaurs and lemurs has left us with a movie that looks like an FMV cutscene in a PlayStation 2 game. And like the mixing of cel and 3D animation in Fantasia 2000, the juxtaposition of live-action backgrounds with these dead-eyed, plastic-mouthed DirectX 9 monstrosities only calls attention to how unready this CG technology was to be unveiled to the world in this form. As a tech showcase, maybe—but as a wide-release film from one of the most technically polished creators of animated entertainment in American cinema? No. A thousand times no. Worse, it's clear that Disney didn't even know how to use this technology. There had been great, convincing CGI in films prior to the year 2000. I mean, Jurassic Park still holds up today, but its tech team knew that CGI looked best when sparsely used and when placed into wet, nocturnal environments (this is why that famous T-Rex chase takes place in the rain at night); Disney, on the other hand, loads every frame of the film with CGI placed into dry, well-lit environments—90% of the movie takes place in the dessert, for Pete's sake. Alternately, Pixar had produced good results by recognizing that the limitations of CGI for producing realistically proportioned, convincingly alive creatures could work when grounded within a setting and aesthetic that didn't openly challenge those limitations—hence the already plastic-y toys in Toy Story and the intentionally cartoony bugs in A Bug's Life; Disney, of course, tries to make the dinosaurs in Dinosaurs as photorealistic as possible and places them within real-life environments that clash with the tech used. The results are so bad. It hurts my eyes. Take these poor, misshapen creatures out of their misery.

It really does bum me out that I didn't like Dinosaur (and that I didn't like Fantasia 2000 as much as I wanted to). The one-two punch of Fantasia 2000 and Dinosaur (chased by the more conventional but still off-format Emperor's New Groove) represents the most unapologetically experimental run of movies Disney had made since the 1940s, and given how conservative and risk-averse the studio has proven to be over most of its lifetime, periods of experimentation should be celebrated. I wish Disney were still taking risks like this. I like the idea of this period, and there are some legitimately good ideas inside Dinosaur. But it's hard to feel too bad about trashing Dinosaur. Trash is trash, regardless of the nobility of its ambitions.

See you next time for some more weird Disney!