Disney Review: Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6

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.

Almost at the end, folks. Hang in there.

You can read the previous post in this series here.

UPDATE: You can read the next post in this series here.

52. Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

The opening of Disney's 2012 feature, Wreck-It Ralph, throws down a pretty heavy gauntlet. As John C. Reilly's opening expository monologue comes to an end, the camera zooms out to reveal that his character, the titular Wreck-It Ralph, is sitting in a meeting of Bad-Anon, i.e. a support group for video game baddies. And this isn't just a meeting full of anonymous, made-up villains from made-up games, like Wreck-It Ralph is from the fictional Fix-It Felix Jr. cabinet; no, this is a meeting with Super Mario's Bowser, Street Fighter's Zangief, Sonic the Hedgehog's Dr. Robotnik, and Pac-Man's Clyde, among others. These are not, in case you are wondering, Disney properties; Bowser belongs to Nintendo, and Zangrief belongs to Capcom, and so on. Disney just bought the licenses to include all these characters in this movie. With their money. With their millions and millions of dollars. This isn't completely without precedent—1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (released by Buena Vista Pictures, aka Disney) is famously populated by a variety of animated characters from other studios, including one scene where Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny cross paths. But it was also kind of notoriously hard work for Roger Rabbit to get those characters cleared to appear in the film; Wreck-It Ralph, on the other hand, just feels like it's flexing its muscles; this opening scene is far from the end of the non-Disney references in this movie, which goes on to allude to titles as far afield from one another as Metal Gear Solid and Q*bert and show 188 licensed characters onscreen over the course of the film. By bringing all these characters under one of its canonical animated films, Disney, flush with its own recent successes like Tangled and lucrative acquisitions like Marvel and Pixar, was announcing its dominance over the media landscape. With Wreck-It Ralph, the globe-conquering, IP-gobbling vision of the modern Disney made its theatrical debut.

It would be easy to feel cynical about this (and just wait for my Big Hero 6 review below), but it's hard to feel too curmudgeonly about a movie as good as Wreck-It Ralph. Wreck-It Ralph is quite good. Even beyond the avalanche of characters I mentioned above, the video game allusions are a lot of fun (the Konami Code makes a conspicuous appearance, for example, as well as the , and that's to say nothing about the end credits, which re-imagines the characters of the movie in a surprisingly deep array of famous game aesthetics, from the original DOOM to even the LucasArts point-and-click adventures)—I mean, it's all nostalgic window dressing, for sure, but if you're making a movie that takes place in a video game arcade, of all thirty-year-old places, nostalgia seems like a reasonable aesthetic, especially since it never overshadows the real plot of the movie. Like most of these Revival movies, the plot of Wreck-It Ralph is grounded in brightly rendered characters with specific and moving emotional arcs—in this case, Ralph, who, after thirty years being the villain of his game, is coping with the existential malaise of being viewed by everyone inside and outside the arcade cabinet as the villain, when in reality, he knows he isn't a bad guy, even if he is the Bad Guy; there's also Vanellope von Schweetz, who faces the rejection of her peers because she glitches. And while there isn't anything particularly profound or new about these arcs (children's entertainment has been doing this sort of identity journey for decades—though it bears mentioning that Vanellope's plot makes Wreck-It Ralph one of the more disability-positive Disney movies out there, a kind of representation we don't often talk about when we talk about representation Disney "should" include), the particular timbre of these emotional arcs feels urgent and poignant in a way that feels more akin to what Pixar was doing in the 2000s than anything Disney has ever done. The one part that especially gets me is the way that Sarah Silverman's Vanellope just starts bawling when Ralph destroys her car—and not cartoony quivering lips and boo-hoos or whatever but actually pained sobs; it's an astoundingly sad moment made all the more wistful by Ralph's misplaced feelings of protectiveness toward Vanellope, and this, combined with the levels of violence and alcohol consumption in the movie (which, admittedly, goes with the video game territory) makes this Disney's most adult-skewed film since their experiments of the early 2000s, and it's a far more successful bid for an older audience than any of those misfires.

It's not a perfect movie. For instance, it's disappointing that, after the wild, game-jumping first act, the movie settles into the relatively generic Candyland-esque Sugar Rush setting. And the movie's storytelling mechanics are too indebted to both Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. to quite have the rush of pure invention that those (and some other superior films) give me. The movie also does this thing where it introduces plot mechanics that are clearly just in place to set up a later conflict and otherwise don't serve much of a natural function in the movie—call it Chekhov's plot device (I'm thinking in particular of how glitches can't leave the game for some reason). But even so, Wreck-It Ralph is one of the stronger Disney movies of the past decade. If they keep making them like this, I suppose all my complaints about Disney the Megacorp will kind of stay abstract.

53. Frozen (2013)

Woof. So this is a big one. And like most of the big Disney movies, this movie has saturated the culture to the extent that it's difficult to think about it freshly, so completely exhausted am I of its footprint on the popular imagination. The phrases "let it go" and "do you want to build a snowman"  strike fear into many parents' hearts, and though I am not (yet) in the throes of parenthood, I don't blame them; even without having spent the years of 2013 through 2016 with a preschooler, I would be completely fine not hearing those songs for another decade or so, and the movie itself has similarly worn me raw over repeat, repeat viewings. This has been true of most of the big Disney movies to come out near my lifetime; I went through the same thing with The Little Mermaid when my sister was obsessed with Ariel when she was like five, and I myself wore out Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin when I was a preschooler. But I've had at least a decade's space from my peak exposure to those older films. Frozen hasn't even reached its fifth birthday yet, and as far as overbearing footprints on the cultural landscape, it's only just within the past 18 months that Frozen has been replaced by Moana in sheer ubiquity. I'm not about to put this Disney project on hold for the years it will take for Frozen to fade from my memory, so I'm stuck here doing my best with my Frozen-depleted brain.

But you know, sometimes the cultural zeitgeist gets something right, and when I first saw Frozen, I thought it was one of the very best Disney movies in recent years. Though repeat viewings have made the seams show more than at first blush—for example, how little sense the trolls and Kristoff's relationship with them makes, or how the movie sort of forgets it's a musical after the first half—this movie and its sister-love finale genuinely surprised me back in 2013. That's major; though I think some of the "subversive" stuff the movie does just feels like a more obvious and less interesting version of what earlier Disney movies like Beauty and the Beast were doing decades prior to Frozen (all the romantic stuff in this movie is so weak, and the bait-and-switch of the "oh, I'm your fiancé, oh nevermind, hahaha, I'm the villain!!" combined with Kristoff's existing at all is a bad case of Disney having its cake and eating it, too, re: its approach to romantic love), the idea of familial and specifically sibling love is shockingly under-explored in the Disney canon, which makes it all the more refreshing that sister love is both the central emotional arc of the film as well as the entire conceit of the film's climax.

As for the idea of family in general, Frozen is a fascinating and (I think) moving iteration of some of Disney Animation's pet themes on the subject of parental authority. An interesting discussion formed on Facebook after I posted the previous Disney Review entry regarding the role of parents—and in particular, abusive parents—within the Disney canon. It's definitely a trope of Disney's, most often in the princess movies but also not infrequently in other Disney films, to have parents or adults in parental roles exerting undo control over their children (who then rebel against that overreach); there are the openly abusive and toxic parents of the likes of Tangled (which inspired the Facebook thread) or Cinderella or Madame Medusa in The Rescuers, who all do legitimately traumatic things to our young protagonists, but then there are also the more nurturing (but slightly misguided) parents of The Little Mermaid or Aladdin, who are viewed much more kindly by their movies and usually are granted some measure of reconciliation with their children. Motive matters a lot here. Did the parent act with evil intentions? Then the child will face legitimate danger at their hands and potentially scarring experiences. Did the parent have a legitimate protective and loving impulse toward their children that led to the conflict? Then it's ultimately okay, and they'll get a happy ending with their child. But then enters Frozen, which is a complete disruption of this paradigm. In Frozen, legitimate abuse is done at the hands of well-meaning parents: the king and queen have no malice in their hearts when they isolate Elsa and tell her to control her ice powers—in fact, they are doing so only out of care, since they nearly lost Anna in a magic-related accident—but in doing so, they cause legitimate harm to Elsa, who is somewhat traumatized by the message that she must repress her identity as a magic user and whose relationship with her sister is ruptured. Moreover, no reconciliation is offered to these parents; minutes (in movie time) after they coerce Elsa into locking herself away, the parents die in a storm at sea, leaving the abuse mess with their daughters without a chance to recant their ideas. Whether you want to read this as a coming-out narrative (the visuals and lyrics of both "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" and especially "Let It Go" certainly give the movie a good nudge in this direction) or some more generalized idea of the conflict between personal identity and parental authority, you're still left with the idea that even the well-meaning impulses of a parent can be abusive and harmful to their child in ways that the parents cannot always mend, which is a complex and really freaking heavy theme for any movie, much less a Disney movie. I know people have a lot of differing ideas about what should and shouldn't be in a movie aimed at preschoolers, but I kind of love that Frozen tackles something so thorny and nuanced, whether or not it's actually audience-appropriate.

It can't be discounted that the Disney movie with some of the freshest and most surprising ideas in at least a decade of Disney movies was also Walt Disney Animation Studio's first (and, at the present, only) feature with a female director: Jennifer Lee, who co-directs with Chris Buck and who has the sole writing credit on the film's screenplay. If we're making arguments for why it's important to get different kinds of people behind the camera (or keyboard or whatever a director does in a CGI-animated film), this is Exhibit A. The easiest way to shake up a complacent formula is to have someone look at them from a different perspective. Frozen, for all its flaws (not that I focused on them, but believe me, there are some flaws), is just that. Disney, give us more new voices is your movies. But don't make them all do Frozen sequels.

54. Big Hero 6 (2014)

Much like Wreck-It Ralph is a decent showcase for the modern conception of Disney, the IP-Gobbling Media Giant, Big Hero 6 is also a conspicuous instance of Disney's ever-growing share of the media landscape intersecting their animated output, though this time, it's a more specific intersection that Wreck-It Ralph's "haha, we can get the rights to ANYTHING" approach. No, in Big Hero 6, Disney is specifically interesting in showing off that it is now the owner of none other than Marvel Entertainment, and there's nothing you can do about it. Mwahahaha...

Okay, this is a tangent, but since I don't have a ton to say about Big Hero 6 (it's fine—I'll talk about it in a sec), lemme rant about Disney's approach to media properties. While I'm not necessarily thrilled about the concept of a single company sucking up every last IP it can get its grubby, Mickey-Mouse-gloved fingers on, I realize that's just a feature of the media landscape we're currently living in and I just have to deal with it, and like... fine. But what especially bugs me about Disney's particular way of gobbling up media properties is that once gobbled, each IP is then molded into Disney's image. On the one hand, this provides a solid quality control over the films, making sure that, I dunno, Star Wars doesn't do another Holiday Special or that if it does, it at least is sufficiently budgeted and fan-servicey that they can get away with it without a PR disaster. But on the other hand, it also means that you don't get nearly as many way-out-of-nowhere weird touches like the Viet Cong reimagined as teddy bears or a second trilogy of films whose whole point is to make the moral and philosophical ideologies of the original beloved trilogy seem corrosive and hollow, which I think puts a definitive cap on how good the media these IPs produce can be. Worse, these properties cease to really be their own thing and just become self-consciously an arm of the ever-growing hydra that is The Walt Disney Company. I mean, say what you will about the old pre-"Acquire Everything!" Disney, but at least there was a unifying aesthetic to the company's products. Now, you go to the Disney store and Mickey Mouse is sitting next to Darth Vader, and Iron Man is shaking hands with Stitch. You can go to Disney World and watch Stormtroopers march down a thoroughfare lined with Goofy and Cinderella mascots. It's like living inside The LEGO Movie, only the kid got a hold of the Kragle and froze everything in a state of chaotic permeability. Can these properties not just exist as their own thing? Does everything Disney owns have to become part of the Disney Media Marketing Universe? Because the sheer post-modernness of these IPs crashing together with thunderous cash register sounds is making me anxious.

Anyway, that's just a long way to say that Big Hero 6 is the first canonical Walt Disney Animation Studios film to be based on Marvel source material, and the sheer corporate synergy of that bugs me. Can't we keep the Marvel parts of Disney separate from the Animation Studios parts of Disney? I guess not. But oh well. All that aside, it's an alright movie, though I'd say it's probably my least-favorite of the Revival films. It has a strong emotional through line with the relationship between Hiro and his brother, and Baymax is just delightful and delightfully animated (he's basically a gigantic balloon, which is a lot of fun to watch). But the plot is messy, and while a lot of Disney Revival plots are messy and fragmented and lose track of their pieces as time goes on (*cough*Frozen*cough*), Big Hero 6 doesn't have nearly the high points the other movies do that help us viewers forget about the chunky, uneven plot rollout and the inconsistent stakes. And since race came up in the Facebook discussion for my last post, I'll also say that this movie does a nice thing most Disney movies don't regarding race, in that Hiro's Asian-American ethnicity isn't lampshaded or the point of his character—it's just a normal detail of the character, which is I think we will hopefully arrive one day regarding racial representation in media. Not that the celebration of distinct ethnicities isn't worthwhile, but it's pretty rare (and valuable, I think) to see a movie so casually normalize an Asian-American protagonist as just not a big deal. Anyway, aside from all the ranty stuff above, I don't really have strong feelings about this movie, so maybe you readers can tell me what you like about it.

Next time: the last post in the series!!