Disney Review: Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range

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.

Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

Read the previous entry in this series here.

UPDATE: Read the next entry in this series here.

43. *Treasure Planet (2002)

The idea of a "director" is a weird thing in an animated movie. More so than even live action films, every tiny bit of an animated film is such collaborative project that it's difficult to make auteurist readings in the way that it's tempting to do so for non-animated flicks, and when you're dealing with a big studio like Disney or Pixar or DreamWorks, it's possible for the director's chair to feature a rotating stable of people as directors are picked up and dropped for a given project and not unusual for the final film to credit two or three or even four directors. Still, it's not impossible to read a directorial authorial voice into some Disney movies; Lilo & Stitch is definitely Chris Sander movie, for example, and Treasure Planet, Disney's significantly more expensive counterpart released a few months later in the same year, bears the unmistakable marks of a Ron Clements and John Musker film, though not in the way that you'd expect from connecting the dots between their previous two Disney features, Aladdin and Hercules. On the basis of those earlier two movies, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the hallmarks of a Clements/Musker feature are an irreverent tone and anachronistic, pop-culture-alluding humor, as those are two of the more striking elements of those movies. Treasure Planet, on the other hand, is rather sincere aside from the usual gentle bits of Disney humor, a sci-fi adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's classic novel Treasure Island, and its focus on a broody, teenaged Jim Hawkins (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt at his broody, teenaged prime—just a few years, I should add, after this golden moment and no doubt still in the thrall of ol' Holden) readjusts the concept of a Clements/Musker movie as one preoccupied with yearning teenaged boys dealing with the estrangement from or abandonment by unseen father figures [1].

Or I guess that's what this movie is about. It's got to be about something, right? And that montage in the film's midsection, set to "I'm Still Here," a song written for the movie by John Rzeznik (of Goo Goo Dolls fame), definitely seems to indicate that Jim Hawkins's arc in this movie has to do with his search for a surrogate father figure, even though the movie's opening seems to set it up as a movie about the relationship between Hawkins and his mother. But hey, life comes at you fast; one day you're sitting around with your mom adorably trying to read a book about a murderous space pirate, and the next day your dad leaves for a pack of smokes and never comes back and BOOM, you're an angsty teenager furrowing your brow and surfing your solar-powered skateboard thing all over the spaceport until the robocops nab you 'cause, like, no one understands you, man. Did I mention this movie has the Goo Goo Dolls in it (or at least their front man)? And skateboarding? What is it about Disney movies and being hip with the skateboards?

I'm making fun not because Treasure Planet is particularly bad but because there's just not a lot here to talk about. As I said, even the signature Clements/Musker character beats feel hollow and inconsistent, the story is too doe-eyed to capture the swashbuckling fun of Stevenson's original novel (no Black Spot? COME ON, Disney) and too beholden to an Atlantis-like "we gotta reel in that coveted teen boy audience!" sensibility to work as the sort of soaring Romance of Aladdin's more straightforward moments. And the music is... well, The Goo Goo Dolls. The animation, too, is, after the reprieve of Lilo & Stitch, right back to the obviously CGI hijinks of the other early 2000s Disney features, which means that its visuals have aged poorly, if not quite as much so as that in, like, Dinosaur; still, Wikipedia tells me that the movie is "novel" in that it puts 2D hand-drawn animation in front of entirely 3D computer backgrounds, which seems like exactly the wrong lesson to have learned from the Tarzan-Fantasia 2000-Dinosaur run that greeted the 21st century—though I will say that the cel animation is quite nice in the movie, with at least one legitimately great creation (the gooey, billowy Morph) and at least one clever idea (making Long John Silver a cyborg twice over by having his robot parts be CG and his human parts hand-drawn).

As with Atlantis, Disney tried very hard with Treasure Planet, granting it years of development and a $140 million budget and some spiffy new animation technology. Moreover, the whole concept of Treasure Island in space was apparently something of a passion project for Clements and Musker, as they had been pitching it since 1985 (when The Little Mermaid was chosen as Disney's flagship project instead), which makes the emptiness and unremarkability of the final product sting just a bit more than the typical "oh you, Disney" dismissal I would have of a flop like this. But if you can't even win over me, a life-long fan of both space and Treasure Island, on this movie, then you know there's something wrong.

44. Brother Bear (2003)

So I guess we're at the Fox and the Hound period of this second Disney Dark Age (if that's what I'm supposed to call it, though it's nowhere near as dire as that original '70s and '80s stretch)—you know, a mostly boring movie with cute animals, a really well-animated bear, a few shockingly serious plot beats, and significantly nicer visuals than the surrounding movies. Shockingly serious: the death of brother for which another brother is at least partially responsible for; later, the death of a mother—I mean, this is a movie with some heavy stuff, and thematically, Brother Bear is zooming in on some thorny issues, particularly in the way its plot sets up an interrogation of machismo (which results in the brother's death) and revenge/power/externalizing self-hate (which results in the mother bear's death). This is, probably, the most ambitious and morally complex premise of any Disney movie since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Unlike Hunchback, though, Brother Bear isn't a movie with nearly the fortitude to actually look these moral questions in the eye longer for a minute or two, and the movie hardcore blinks when it comes to dealing with its own darkness, almost to the point of absurdity— it ends with the brother in question saying to his other living brother, "Hey, sorry I accidentally killed our other brother, but I think I like being a bear more than a person, so I'll see you," and the brother is just like, "Cool, man, luv u," and then the cub of the mother bear the brother has killed is all like, "Hey, glad you're going to stick with the bear thing, because now you can replace my mother, whom you murdered in a fit of rage about 80 minutes ago," and there are hugs all around and everybody lives happily ever after. There's also some stuff about how humans are prejudiced against bears or something, but it barely registers. Anyway, this movie's weird, and most of its plot is basically a less-jokey, Ice Age-ish quest revolving around surrogate families and silly animals, which is pleasant enough but kind of rote and dull. At least it's gesturing in an interesting direction, though.

But anyway, that animation—it's spectacular. The characters in this movie are more realistically proportioned than any of its immediate predecessors, and its painted backgrounds are lush, giving the movie a mature, contemplative aesthetic that feels more within the legacy of the early 1940s Disney classics than any of the "hey, teenaged boys, get a load of these spaceships!" look of a lot of early-2000s Disney. And y'all know how I love me some 1940s Disney animation. The movie's color palette, a restrained spectrum of deeply autumnal hues, works tremendously within the late-Ice-Age setting (and as an aside, I really, really dig the setting—can we get more movies set in North America 10,000 years ago?), and the computer effects of the movie do great things with lighting and particles within those colors—see, Treasure Planet? This is how you incorporate computers well into cel animation. The film is also doing some lightly experimental things with its aspect ratio, too, switching from 1.75:1 (standard widescreen format) to 2.35:1 (anamorphic format) after the bear transformation. It's a small touch, but the movie's world feels so much more vibrant and alive after the switch—appropriately, since we've shifted to the perspective of the animal kingdom—that I'd call it a great success. That this is paired with a slight shift toward more cartoonish animals works extremely well, too, given the POV switch and the protagonist's journey toward understanding animals as more than just vicious beasts.

All that is very cool. So why can't this movie just be better?? It's honestly just a drag, what with the aforementioned narrative issues and the kinda drab voice work (Joaquin Phoenix, you can do better, dude), plus an actively bad set of Phil Collins songs. Look, I defended Mr. Collins once, because Tarzan has some good work, but of all the stars Disney's hired over the years to write their music, why go back to the Collins well? Elton John? Where you at? This movie and its natural majesty was made for your tunes. And then Phil shows up and writes some real stinkers, truly subpar work, and it drags an already struggling movie down even further. Seriously, though, this movie is a few rewrites (and one firing of Phil Collins) away from being quite good. As is, though, it's a frustrating, if visually sumptuous, piece of work.

45. *Home on the Range (2004)

What am I even supposed to say about this one? The movie's tagline is "Bust a Moo"; the DVD menu calls this a "moooovie"; Roseanne Barr voices the bovine protagonist; she is pursued throughout the movie by some "hilarious" steers who cat call (cow call?) at her and her cow peers; the villain, a cattle rustler, is called a "beef thief"; at one point, he yodels "Ride of the Valkyries." Like, WHAT EVEN IS THIS?

Actually, lemme talk about that villain yodeling, because this is bonkers: the villain—a no-good cattle rustler by the name of Alameda Slim—can yodel in such a way that he can hypnotize cows; when hypnotized, the cows turn into multicolored zombies that parade in patters up and down the screen in their very own "Pink Elephants on Parade" routine—don't forget, the music is all yodeling. This is all revealed a good thirty minutes into the film; there is no lead-up or foreshadowing of this villain's abilities nor the cows' reactions; this is the only musical sequence in the movie. And it is, in all seriousness, kind of great. It's the best-case scenario for a movie like Home on the Range, a movie so indifferent to plot logic or any resemblance to the real world that it becomes its own surreal universe where basic causality and the laws of physics are merely impediments to be brushed aside on the way to the next "moo" pun. If anything, Home on the Range needs more yodeling, because without that go-for-broke weirdness, there's not a lot here except a perfectly forgettable Bonnie Raitt song and some generic western hijinks. So the weirder, the better, but unfortunately, there's just not a ton of weird to offset the ton of lazy humor and cookie-cutter plotting.

The same goes for the animation. At its best, Home on the Range looks like someone at Disney had been watching the "Pecos Bill" segment of Melody Time and decided, "Hey, that's an alright aesthetic for a feature film!" Which isn't a bad idea, since "Pecos Bill" is (barring its ten seconds of searing racism) a good short film with a great, cartoonish look that plays with perspective and expectations of reality in all the best ways. And you get some good stuff out of the Pecos-Bill-core animation—I'm a particular fan of the Alameda Slim's sidekicks' hats fall over their eyes, making them look like they are comprised entirely of mouths and noses, and there are also some fun ways in which the movie uses the cartoonishness to play with physics (a strong Looney Tunes sensibility runs through this movie). Actually, the best parts of this movie kind of look like the kinds of things Cartoon Network was doing maybe six or seven years ago with its original programming, which I was a fan of. But Home on the Range also looks like that same person with the "Pecos Bill" idea got bored of the idea midway through this film's production, and outside of those few bright spots I mentioned above, the movie looks pretty dreadful, probably the least-fussed-over and most-generic-looking Disney feature since the 1980s sometime.

It's not as if this movie is totally bereft of good ideas or anything. But in execution, those ideas get lost in a sea of some of the laziest, soulless-est filmmaking Disney ever did. And this is their third-to-last 2D animated movie? Weep for the living, for they must live in the world which Disney created.

Next time: into the scary world of Disney's fully CGI creations.


1] Subsequent Clements/Musker features for Disney like The Princess and the Frog and Moana complicate this paradigm and kind of frustrate any auteurist reading of the guys' films (like I said, animated movies are an ill fit for this critical lens), but come on, let me have this one. I'm grasping at straws to have something to say about this movie.