Mini Reviews for November 29 - December 5, 2021

For anyone who missed me posting this on social media, here's the really long essay I wrote on 2014's Noah movie that was published this week! I was also on the Cinematary podcast talking about the same movie! Great week for my Noah obsession.

Movies

Encanto (2021)
The animation is fun and colorful, and it contains some of the nicest-designed characters in recent Disney animation—especially the protagonist, Mirabel, who, with her perpetually wobbling eyeglasses, comes as close to approximating the language and ethos of a traditionally hand-drawn cartoon character as any character I can think of in one of these Disney CG features (which of course just raises the obvious question of "then why didn't they just make it a hand-drawn feature to begin with?", though I guess I should just resign myself to losing that battle). So it's not like this is a "bad" movie. But good lord, the writing. There are all sorts of problems with the screenplay, from the fact that nobody but the protagonist has any indication of an internal life until the plot necessitates it to the way that the movie stresses a "you're important because you're you, not because of your abilities" message while at the same time reducing about 75% of its cast to their magical abilities. But probably the single most dysfunctional part of the film is the extreme dissonance between the film's exposition, which depicts a family so toxic that it ostracizes our protagonist for what seems like probably a decade and compels her uncle to go into hiding for the same period of time, and the film's resolution, which acknowledges that toxicity while also presenting its solution as essentially "hug it out." I can't decide if the writers have underestimated just how awful the beginning of the film makes the family look or if they've overestimated the heavy-lifting ability of the ending's symbolism to account for the beginning, but regardless, there's been a major miscalculation somewhere, and the result is a movie that feels at first daringly mean before revealing itself to be disappointingly empty. I ask the people of Walt Disney Animation Studios: is it so hard to find a functional screenplay? This has been a perennial problem since basically the Walt years, but it's felt especially urgent in the past 10-ish years, now that Disney films are intent on being "about" something. I'm begging you: write better. Grade: B-

Real Life (1979)
Utterly scathing satire of the way that film/TV production destroys souls on either side of the camera. The whole thing is amazing, but Albert Brooks in particular is just astounding. Incredibly audacious, especially for a feature debut, to write such an unflattering role for yourself and have that be the point—perhaps the only thing more audacious is having this movie exist and then the first major reality television program of note be named what is essentially a synonym of this movie's title. Maybe I just run in the wrong circles, but why don't people talk about this movie more? Grade: A

 

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Literally felt like I was losing my mind watching this. Sometimes the relentless Too-Muchness of the movie is numbing, but it's also kind of incredible, too. Where did this Brian De Palma go? Because this is like no other Brian De Palma movie I've ever seen. The "Psycho shower scene but the knife is a plunger instead of a knife" has got to be the best De Palma Hitchcock homage, right? Grade: B+

 

 

 

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
A Vincent Price who uses a turn table to speak kills people in ways inspired by the ten plagues from the Exodus story. It's like the funny, colorful version of Seven, only if that movie had bumbling British cops clicking their tongues every time they came across a victim, like, "Blasted shame the locusts ate that bloke's face off. Blasted shame." Big fun. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Music

Blue Lick - Hold On, Hold Fast (2021)
It's a pretty unassuming release: spoken-word lyrics (by Havadine Stone) droning over an experimental soundscape (by Ben Baker Billington). Apparently Stone did the spoken-word all in one 30-minute take and then sent it to Billington, who creates the sounds to match on a custom modular synthesizer, so even the process of making this itself is unassuming. But I've probably listened to this album more than any other 2021 release; I've been putting it on during my planning block at school almost daily, and it's just the best vibe for that: comfortable sonic textures for when I'm working, with plenty to pay attention to when I want my mind to wander from lesson plans and grades. The scratches and gurgles of Billington's soundscape are great to get lost in, and Stone's lyrics are surreal, dryly hilarious, and occasionally profound (sometimes all three at the same time: there's a whole aside about how the air that keeps us alive was once in someone's bleached asshole, which is as contemporary an update of the "water is dinosaur pee" as I can imagine). Anyway, I imagine this is most definitely not for everyone, but I think it's really cool. Grade: A-

Mini Reviews for March 29 - April 4, 2021

 Sorry for posting a day late! Easter was busy. By the way, Happy Easter to those who celebrate! He is risen!

Movies

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)
A movie of impeccable craft on a technical level but of barely passable craft on a narrative one. This is a stunning movie to look at, probably the pinnacle of the specific aesthetic Disney CG animation has been chasing since Tangled, with detailed particle effects and landscapes that would seem photorealistic if they weren't obviously impossible fantasies and smooth-skinned, doll-like characters rendered expressive by vibrant (but never too exaggerated) character animation. It very much feels like the coming-of-age for the "house style" of Disney's last decade in the same way that Beauty and the Beast was for the '90s Renaissance. The big difference between Raya and the Last Dragon and Beauty and the Beast is that there is absolutely nothing going on in Raya besides the animation craft. Seemingly assembled entirely from component parts of other movies and sequenced into a video-game-like episodic quest for crystal shards, Raya and the Last Dragon would be frightfully generic if it weren't for the considerable strengths of the visuals, and even with those visuals, this movie left me pretty restless by the end. Unlike other recent animated Disney movies, Raya doesn't have shaggy detours or nagging abandoned plot threads—instead, it's so pristinely "Screenwriting 101" that it sucks all the life out of the story. Every character and scene is fine-tuned to contribute its own special piece of the plot, but in making this such a sleek machine, the filmmakers forgot to make any of this emotionally resonant or make its characters have any complexity. Say what you will about other recent Disney films, but their protagonists at least had recognizable internal conflict and identifiable personalities. Raya, by contrast, just feels like a personified screenwriting tool going through the motions of having an arc and theme, and Sisu (the last dragon herself and the only other possible main character) has a bad case of "Disney comic-relief sidekick." Namaari, the sort-of antagonist, has the potential to be a lot more interesting, given the apparent conflict between her and her mother, but that only gets, like, two scenes, so instead, she's as underdeveloped as the rest. Thank goodness for the animation to hold my attention. Grade: B-

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)
I have no real-world emotional attachment to bars—I'm not much of a drinker, personal experiences have given me I exactly zero romanticism for people being drunk, and I also have the incredibly old-man-ish posture of disliking how all barside conversations have to be conducted with raised voices. But the dive (along with social clubs and union halls and neighborhood churches) is yet another cornerstone of "third spaces" crumbling in America, and I care deeply about that erosion, so this hit me pretty squarely in the feels regardless. And this is just such a warm, beautiful depiction (fictional or not—I'm a little fuzzy on the production here) of the kinds of communities that can form in those spaces. It's like Cheers with all the dopey stuff stripped away—people even call regulars' names in unison as they enter the bar, as if they're NOOOOORM or something. I love it. Grade: A-

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
When people talk about Hollywood's new wave, they tend to focus on the ways that people like Scorsese and Coppola took Hollywood genres like the gangster film and roughed them up with shagginess and European cinematic techniques. I like those movies, but I wish people would also talk about movies like this, which also feel European (the long, talky takes and editing feel indebted to Truffaut or maybe a more down-to-earth Fellini) but are a lot less self-consciously grand and mythologized than your Bonnies and Clydes and Mean Streetses. There are a lot of really specific, everyday cultural details in a movie like this that tends to get lost in the revisionist genre impulses of the more famous New Hollywood movies—the Esalen Institute retreat, for example, or the part where Robert Culp's character is unironically wearing something that looks like the Seinfeld Puffy Shirt, or the Tex-Mex restaurant's drive-through speaker, or just generally the unadorned depiction of upper-middle-class So-Cal life at the time. I dunno, I just found that really interesting. Besides that, I think it's a shame the way that this movie's legacy is staked on the supposed "orgy" at the end—not because that isn't an important, tender moment in the movie but because the way I've heard some people talk about it kind of marginalizes what's meaningful about that part and dismisses the movie as a sexual-revolution curiosity rather than as the strikingly honest, lovely treatise on the ways in which people find connection and love that it is. Also, this has maybe my favorite Elliott Gould performance—the whole central cast is great, but he in particular is just so vulnerable and real here in a way that I don't think I've ever seen him before. Grade: A-

The Bellboy and the Playgirls (1962)
Just awful. One of the worst movies I've ever seen. Boring, flimsily made, and deeply, deeply sexist on a level that I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie be on before—the whole movie is either some dude peeping into a hotel room full of women, and a director lecturing an actress about the history of horniness so he can coerce her into doing a sex scene on camera. It's vile. I watched this because I've decided to be a Francis Ford Coppola completionist, but that was a mistake because: 1) this was a tedious waste of my time, and 2) he only directed (co-directed, at that) a small part of the movie; this is one of those "let's do a hilarious dub of a foreign film and put in some nudity so we can run it on the porno circuit" things, which was just the worst trend in American cinema. Coppola's other early, pre-"respectable" feature, Tonight for Sure, had enough of a spark of fun that I was willing to give this a shot, but I regret that now and am actually kind of mad that Tonight for Sure was good enough to seduce me into watching this. Boo. BOOOOOO. Grade: F

Mini Reviews for November 25 - December 1, 2019

Holiday week = posting this late. Sorry!

Movies

Frozen II (2019)
Frozen II has a lot of the same liabilities that the original Frozen had: messy plot structure, boring throwaway songs aplenty, no idea whatsoever what to do with Kristoff, etc. But all of these liabilities are much worse in Frozen II, and none of the highs are nearly so high as the original's, resulting in a movie that's desperate to please and dysfunctional to the max. The movie is at its best when it is a psychologically weighted dark fantasy quest into an unknown wilderness; all of the best songs in the movie revolve around this, as does Elsa's whole character arc, and it leads to some really arresting imagery and increasingly abstract landscapes that culminate in a nifty and pretty resonant sequence involving Elsa alone in a cave with the literally materialized collective memories of her family. Outside of that, though, the movie is a complete mess. The movie opts to take the Pirates of the Caribbean approach to making a sequel, which means that it takes every single detail from the first movie and invents a byzantine mythology connecting them all (including, I kid you not, the chanting motif that plays over the title card of the original film). It's cumbersome and convoluted, no thanks to the screenplay, which is, frankly, a disaster: characters are yanked from one location to the next with only the barest of connective tissue, subplots are shoved in solely to give all the main cast from the original stuff to do (Kristoff is, to dust off my intimate knowledge of this Disney deep cut, basically doing the Bernard arc from The Rescuers Down Under, and it is extremely out-of-place), and the main plot is tangled in a (to put it charitably) half-baked analogy to the conflicts between indigenous peoples and colonizers. The whole thing operates under the deus-ex-machine-esque logic of Magic Portents and Spirit Energy, which works really well for the Elsa material but renders absolutely everything else here as contrived and silly, not to mention structurally incoherent. It's not irredeemable; there is good material in here. But if 2010s Disney animation was a revival of the '90s Renaissance spirit, then Frozen II (and Ralph Breaks the Internet, let's be honest) put us squarely within the post-Tarzan hinterland. Grade: C

Amazing Grace (2018)
This long-shelved Aretha Franklin footage has a relentless physicality to it—both in terms of the actual film style, shaking and out of focus and smudged by stray hairs and the grime of the film stock itself, and the performances captured by that style, awash in sweat and thunderously alive. It's certainly an effect, oftentimes an evocative one but sometimes unnecessarily distracting in a way that obscures the performances themselves—probably inevitable, given the way this movie was cobbled together. But at its best, Amazing Grace has preserved one of the most striking and vibrant American art forms, the communal gospel experience, with all its verve and beauty, performed to near-perfection by one of America's great artists. Imagine music like this existing and white people still just singing Chris Tomlin at church. Grade: B+

Tuesday, After Christmas (Marți, după Crăciun) (2010)
This movie has two great scenes. The first is the first scene of the entire movie, in which we see an unbroken 7-8 minutes of a couple in post-coital bliss, as playful and intimate a depiction as I've ever seen of the affectionate goofiness that loving couples engage in. The second is about an hour later, when the wife of the man in that first scene finds out about the woman in that scene (who is, of course, not the wife). This scene is excruciatingly long and ranks among the similarly scorched marital fights of Before Midnight and Scenes from a Marriage. But the rest of this movie... ehhh, I dunno. It's really boilerplate Romanian New Wave, which for me means that I struggled to get too excited about the improv-y dialogue and bare-bones, naturalistic camerawork (this is a personal problem, I know, but I've yet to encounter a Romanian New Wave movie I love). It doesn't help that I don't really relate to the central conflict at all—"OH NO, I love two women at the same time, one of whom I am married to! Whoops!" I dunno, it's just not something that I intrinsically connect with, and while there are plenty of movies about anguished infidelity that I find extremely moving (Carol, Brief Encounter, etc.), the cavalier libidinousness of cheating on your wife with your kid's dentist just makes it hard for me to get too invested in the handwringing here. Grade: B-

Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?) (1995)
I wouldn't normally review a TV special, but this is such a primo example of the sort of '90s conspiracy theory programming I absolutely devoured as a kid that I kind of felt obligated to mark the occasion of a rewatch—because I'm reasonably sure I watched this as a child, though I would have been far too young to have watched it without parental supervision when it first aired (and there's no way my parents would have been watching this stuff—my dad, who was in the Air Force for over twenty years, scoffed when I once asked him about Roswell [but isn't that what they would have trained him to do???]). Perhaps I just gleaned it from the dozens (hundreds?) of conspiracy theory books I read back then, since I remember stills of the autopsy footage featuring prominently in their pages. Even twenty years removed from my obsessed heyday with this stuff, this is still a solidly enjoyable hour of endearingly po-faced dopiness; there's something so pure about this special's approach to its subject matter as opposed to its winky History Channel offspring: this sort of curiosity-shop-style sowing of "reasonable" doubt—"What if? What if?" Also, props to the audacity of the guy who created this hoax for getting one of his talking heads to say that if this is a hoax, it's the greatest hoax of all time. Grade: B-

The Pied Piper (Krysař) (1986)
A flat-out masterpiece and maybe the best animated feature of the '80s (at least, of the ones I've seen). This movie belong to that exceedingly rare genre of movie—the animated horror film—that I am always delighted to come across. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" is already one of the darker stories we tell our children, and filtered through the notoriously nightmarish Czechoslovak stop-motion style (think Jan Švankmajer, only with woodcut puppets), it becomes a work of primal terror. Cloaked with a deeply macabre atmosphere and an expressionist set design that warps the central town in on itself in an impossibly crooked way, this movie burrows deep into your mind and won't let go until its haunting final minutes—even more so because of the sadness this movie imbues the piper's otherworldly aura with. Horrifying to behold, but impossible to look away. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for September 2-8, 2019

More reviews this week than last week: enjoy!

Movies

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
This movie is ramblier and kinder than I would have liked it to have been, and it is yet another movie about gentrification that dramatizes it as solely the actions of individuals rather than those (often white) individuals' dance with the trickle-down effects of poor (or malicious) urban planning and infrastructural investment by municipal governments. I dunno how to dramatize that well, but my urbanist-wonk heart want to see a movie that does it. That said, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is gorgeously filmed and acted, and regardless of my nitpicks on the sociopolitical specifics, it gets at the emotional heart of the modern American gentrification crisis: that the technically correct history that (in general) people of color have only temporarily occupied inner cities built for white people belies the reality that people of color have, in both a material and symbolic sense, built the neighborhoods given to them by mid-century white flight, and that the 21st century's enforcement of the technical history is a piercing betrayal of that felt reality. I say this as basically a white gentrifier myself, a now-established identity I don't really know what to do with other than to as best I can rage along with this movie and my own neighbors. Grade: B

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Large pieces of this movie are good enough to make the case for this movie being one of last year's best, and I'm sorry I slept on it until now. The based-on-a-true-story premise (Lee Israel's infamous embellishing/forgery of famous literary letters) is outrageous and fun enough already, and the screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty simmers with vibrant-yet-melancholic acid in exactly the best ways you'd imagine a collaboration between those two writers to. The bristly friendship between Melissa McCarthy's Israel and her partner-in-crime, played by Richard E. Grant, is both a wicked sparring match between two terrible people and also shockingly disarming in its underlying tenderness, and I could have watched them for a great deal longer than this movie actually lasts. It's not a perfect film by any means; the plot itself lurches almost audibly from act to act, and the ending in particular feels undercooked. But I'd happily trade all the clunky story structure in the world for scenes as good as the ones between McCarthy and Grant here. Grade: A-

Kronk's New Groove (2005)
It's hard to say that I'm disappointed with this movie, given the wretched track record of direct-to-home-media Disney sequels, but there is something particularly disheartening about taking one of the most delightful animated characters of all time and giving him daddy issues and a very poorly structured screenplay to work through. Seriously, what is up with this movie's structure? It's basically three discrete parts linked with the most tenuous of connective tissue, which probably means that Disney planned to chop it up to run within half-hour TV slots on Disney Channel. Two lessons were learned today, one for me and one for the suits: for the suits, don't plan movies based on how they will air piecemeal on TV; for me, DON'T WATCH DIRECT-TO-HOME-MEDIA DISNEY SEQUELS, ya fool! Grade: D

Touki Bouki (1973)
Take away the numerous cutaways to animals being slaughtered, and I really dig this aesthetic—and I guess as long as I'm eating meat, I probably deserve to see like a dozen cows' throats cut. Yeah, but at any rate, the colors, the shot composition, the extremely interesting sound collages and loops this movie puts on its soundtrack—those things are all great, and the plot, which devotes itself to constructing a myth of freedom and assimilation that it then vigorously deconstructions, is engaging, even in its loopy and discursive execution, and that's all pretty interesting. It might even be flat-out great without the presence of a pretty ugly gay stereotype right in the middle of the movie. Grade: B

House of Wax (1953)
A perfectly enjoyable bit of old-school horror. There's nothing really exceptional here (except for Vincent Price, of course, and his character's ludicrously convoluted system of beakers and glass tubes apparently needed for pouring a boiling vat of wax onto a human subject), but pretty much everything is good enough: the period details, the patient pacing, the completely lurid and silly plotting, etc. Plus, this 88-minute-long feature has a 10-minute intermission midway through, which is the kind of user-friendly experience I can really get behind in cheap '50s horror. Grade: B




Books

Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi (2017)
So much of fantasy is defined by European and specifically Christian tropes that it's always a breath of fresh air when a work of fantasy comes along that doesn't rely on these ideas. Beasts Made of Night is a YA fantasy based heavily on the practices of Islam and the Nigerian heritage of its author; Tochi Onyebuchi has created a fascinating, vibrant world in this novel, shaping distinctly non-Western ideas into exciting forms—all the more exciting for my relative unfamiliarity with the influences he's drawing on. The book centers on Taj, a teen who belongs to a class of people called "sin-eaters," who must, as the name implies, literally devour the sins of others (which take on dangerous physical representations) and thereby carry the psychological burdens of their actions. It's a strong idea rooted in a world full of interesting mythological gestures that hint at a much richer historical and philosophical background than the book ever really gets into (presumably, the sequels will get into these topics more thoroughly). But for a first book, it's fine that we only get flavors of the whole meal, because what resides within this book's environment is delicious. I wish I could say the same for the plot and characters, which stumble through the book's pages with little structure or dynamism; the world these people live in is so alive that it's a disappointment that the actual humans in the story feel kind of flat. Come for the worldbuilding, stay for the worldbuilding, I suppose. Grade: B

Music

Elder Ones - From Untruth (2019)
The composer and bandleader of Elder Ones, Amirtha Kidambi, calls music "a way to tap into the abstract and mystifying aspects of the universe," and that's certainly present in spades on From Untruth, a challenging, aggressive, and often transcendent collection of music that feels like the intersection between the spiritual and free jazz traditions and the Indian folk music that Kidambi calls her own personal "blues." But what makes this music special is that this abstract mysticism is rarely left untethered from material reality; it's an album that understands that the abstract and otherworldly only has meaning in a lived context, which for Kidambi clearly means a political one: there is a song here called "Eat the Rich," for goodness sakes, and it's kind of awesome. Kidambi's shrieking vocals and swirling harmonium blend with her band's percussion and brass to form rich soundscapes that are as dissonant as they are beguiling and anti-capitalist, anti-imperial political statements as urgent as they are blunt. It's not always an easy listen, and this isn't always to the record's benefit—"Decolonize the Mind" in particular feels stretched thin by discordant digressions. But when it's on, it is often thrilling. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for November 26-December 2, 2018

Happy December, everyone.

Movies

Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)

There's a moment in the mid-film sequence where Vanellope finds herself in a physical manifestation of a Disney fan site (best not to sweat the mechanics of this) and, amid a procession of stormtroopers and a cavalcade of Star Wars sound effects and musical cues, we hear the Wilhelm Scream—which seems to posit that either the use of the Wilhelm Scream in Star Wars is so iconic that an entire generation assumes it's a "Star Wars Sound," or else Disney really, really wants to will this into being. It's a strange little instant that's just one of a whole cascade of strange, disorienting choices in this film—the bright "Inside Out Meets The Internet" design of the film's environments crashing into the cynical brand exploitation of that same setting; the out-of-nowhere '80s-kids-movie style traumatizing imagery, like a dude with a talking cyst on his neck; the ouroboros of Disney's own muddled instinct for self-critiquing brand maintenance that the trailers promised. It's a film that flirts with a sort of conceptual Uncanny Valley, where we're presented with things (mostly brands) familiar to us from our years as digital natives or transplants, only twisted and personified in such a way that they're both cutesy and slightly zombified. It's an exceptionally creative film, but it doesn't have a clue where to focus that energy. Of all the feature films Disney has released in the Lasseter era onward, Ralph Breaks the Internet is certainly the weirdest, which I dig quite a bit. But it's also probably the least successful overall of those features, too. Grade: C+

Widows (2018)

A political thriller in which a coalition of women steal power and resources from an oppressive male oligarchy? Yes, please. It's not nearly so cut-and-dry "woke" as that, being much more about the knotty ways in which corruption and public good intertwine and make real, clean political reform difficult. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't cathartic to see women of color going all Robin Hood on the racist old white dudes like it were the 2018 midterm elections. Not being from Chicago, I can't say if this is a particularly good depiction of the political climate of that city in particular, but as a vividly rendered mythological plane of byzantine political forces (reminiscent of David Simon's version of Baltimore in The Wire), it's wonderful. My only reservation is that the extension of one of the city's rail transit lines serves as a central metaphor for the corruption of political capital—dunno how my urbanist self feels about that. Grade: B+

Blindspotting (2018)

There is a lot to like in this movie. I'd even go so far as to say that the movie has no bad ideas, which is impressive (and a good sign) for a movie which is practically premised on being nothing but ideas. An Edgar-Wright-style urban comedy about dealing with how the world of your youth changes as you leave your youth (complete with tons of Wright-esque edits)? An incisive look at race identity that explores the interlocking layers of what defines whiteness and blackness? A soulful but really legitimately angry look at the collateral cost of a rapidly gentrifying Oakland, CA? An easy-going buddy comedy with naturalistic but frequently hilarious dialogue? A, like, freakin' rap opera? These are all A+ ideas executed sharply, and I've barely scratched the surface of what the film has on its mind. It's too bad that the only good idea the filmmakers couldn't think of was any idea of how to stitch all this together into anything resembling a cohesive film, since the whole thing feels like a particularly interesting but typically disjointed example of the old "exquisite corpse" writing experiment. But the individual pieces are so compelling that I'm willing to go along with the bumpy ride. Grade: B

Gertrud (1964)

If I'm being completely honest, I probably need to rewatch this, since I kind of rushed through the film distractedly because it was due back at the library and I had no renewals left. That said, what did stick with me I like a whole lot. The long takes of brutally honest conversations, the gorgeous but subdued cinematography, the way that the men float in and out of Gertrud's screentime like benevolent and malevolent spirits on her existential quest, the casting of love (or its dissolution) as some kind of history-ending, cosmic struggle—it's all very good. I just probably retained 70% of it at most, and I'd like to spend more time on it once the library isn't breathing down my neck. Grade: B+

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

Masculinity—or at least, the traditionally performed signifiers of it within American society—is a prison, and I've not seen many films that evoke the agony of society's gendered weights as poignantly as this one does. I was kind of blown away; I dunno what I was thinking, but I was imagining more of a "bad boy has smoldering stare, rides a motorcycle" thing, not something this excruciatingly pained and well-observed.

If you're interested, the Cinematary podcast's 223rd episode discussed this movie this week, and I was on it! You can listen here.

Out of the Past (1947)

Solid film noir with tremendous lighting. It's a Jacques Tourneur movie, so of course the blacks are as black as they come, and the shadows are practically blotted onto the screen with India ink. There's probably more going on visually than narratively, which isn't to say that the narrative is "bad," but it does wear its film noir tropes on its sleeve perhaps to too naked an extent. Robert Mitchum is merely fine as the hard-boiled protagonist, which is a bit disappointing in light of Night of the Hunter. But Jane Greer is incredible as the femme fatale, and Kirk Douglas is doing this fun proto-Joe-Pesci heel turn. Grade: B

Television

Party Down, Season 2 (2010)

I basically have nothing to say about this cancelled-too-soon show's second season that I didn't already say about its first season. Megan Mullally does a good job of replacing Jane Lynch, who left for Glee, without recreating her exact dynamic, and this second year overall is a good example of how to lightly tweak the chemistry on the show without entirely re-inventing itself (Adam Scott's Henry becoming the team leader, for example). Anyway, the cast is great, the show is very funny and surprisingly poignant, the jokes sometimes edge into an unfortunate homophobia-adjacent space, etc. This season is at pretty much the precise same level of quality that the first season was. Too bad about that early cancellation, though it does have what seems like the perfect ending. Grade: B+

Books

The Truth Lies Here by Lindsey Klingele (2018)

A decent YA pastiche of Stranger Things and that kind of creepypasta-lite mystery. It's always fun in this type of story to see how the threads of the mystery creep out to tie together the whole town in a conspiracy; however, I can't help but remember all the William Sleator I read as a kid and wish that this whole thing were just a bit weirder--it ultimately boils down to a pretty standard (though tenderly rendered) daddy issues book, just with Men in Black creeping around. Klingele is no prose stylist, either, though I feel like I say that about most YA novelists I read these days. Maybe I'm just getting old. Grade: B-

Ranking Walt Disney Animation Studios Films

So I thought I'd officially close my Disney animation retrospective with a good ol'-fashioned list post, with a few small comments at the bottom. Hope everyone has enjoyed this series!

Disney Movies, Ranked
It's just my opinion, but search your feelings; you know I'm right.

1. Pinocchio
2. Fantasia
3. Beauty and the Beast
4. Sleeping Beauty
5. The Emperor's New Groove
6. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
7. The Little Mermaid
8. Lilo & Stitch
9. Alice in Wonderland
10. Dumbo
11. The Three Caballeros
12. Winnie the Pooh
13. Aladdin
14. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
15. One Hundred and One Dalmatians
16. Tangled
17. Moana
18. Mulan
19. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
20. Tarzan
21. Wreck-It Ralph
22. Bambi
23. Frozen
24. The Lion King
25. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
26. The Rescuers Down Under
27. Zootopia
28. The Princess and the Frog
29. Melody Time
30. Bolt
31. The Jungle Book
32. Fantasia 2000
33. Big Hero 6
34. Peter Pan
35. Meet the Robinsons
36. The Sword in the Stone
37. Brother Bear
38. The Great Mouse Detective
39. Lady and the Tramp
40. Hercules
41. Cinderella
42. The Fox and the Hound
43. Robin Hood
44. Saludos Amigos
45. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
46. The Black Cauldron
47. Treasure Planet
48. The Rescuers
49. Home on the Range
50. The Aristocats
51. Fun and Fancy Free
52. Dinosaur
53. Make Mine Music
54. Pocahontas
55. Oliver & Company
56. Chicken Little

Disney Movies, Ranked by Quality of Animation
Since I've been so obsessive about the animation during this series.

1. Pinocchio
2. Sleeping Beauty
3. Fantasia
4. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
5. The Lion King
6. Beauty and the Beast
7. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
8. Bambi
9. The Princess and the Frog
10. The Little Mermaid
11. Aladdin
12. The Three Caballeros
13. Mulan
14. One Hundred and One Dalmatians
15. Winnie the Pooh
16. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
17. Tangled
18. Dumbo
19. Alice in Wonderland
20. Brother Bear
21. Lilo & Stitch
22. Tarzan
23. Pocahontas
24. The Rescuers Down Under
25. Moana
26. Wreck-It Ralph
27. The Emperor's New Groove
28. Peter Pan
29. Lady and the Tramp
30. Fantasia 2000
31. Melody Time
32. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
33. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
34. Frozen
35. Fun and Fancy Free
36. Hercules
37. Cinderella
38. The Black Cauldron
39. Zootopia
40. Big Hero 6
41. Bolt
42. Home on the Range
43. Saludos Amigos
44. Treasure Planet
45. The Great Mouse Detective
46. Make Mine Music
47. The Jungle Book
48. The Sword in the Stone
49. The Fox and the Hound
50. The Aristocats
51. Meet the Robinsons
52. Robin Hood
53. The Rescuers
54. Oliver & Company
55. Dinosaur
56. Chicken Little


Top 20 Favorite Disney Songs
Tried to rank these just in terms of how much I like the music, though obviously, it's hard to divorce them from their associated animated sequences.

1. "When You Wish Upon a Star" (Pinocchio)
2. "Gaston" (Beauty and the Beast)
3. "Under the Sea" (The Little Mermaid)
4. "Heaven's Light / Hellfire" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
5. "Cruella De Vil" (One Hundred and One Dalmatians)
6. "You Can Fly! You Can Fly! You Can Fly!" (Peter Pan)—yes, that's really the song's title
7. "Kiss the Girl" (The Little Mermaid)
8. "The Bare Necessities" (The Jungle Book)
9. "Part of Your World" (The Little Mermaid)
10. "Circle of Life" (The Lion King)
11. "The Bells of Notre Dame" (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
12. "Heigh-Ho" (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)
13. "Winnie the Pooh" (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh)
14. "The Journey" (The Rescuers)
15. "Belle" (Beauty and the Beast)
16. "How Far I'll Go" (Moana)
17. "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" (The Great Mouse Detective)
18. "A Whole New World" (Aladdin)
19. "Baby Mine" (Dumbo)
20. "Colors of the Wind" (Pocahontas)

10 Musical Pieces That Should Definitely Be in Fantasia 2060
1. "Shhh / Peaceful" - Miles Davis
2. "Psalm" - John Coltrane
3. "Music in Twelve Parts: Part 2" - Philip Glass
4. "Symphony No. 9 in E Minor: II. Largo" - Antonín Dvořák
5. "The Lark Ascending" - Vaughan Williams
6. "West End Blues" - Louis Armstrong
7. "Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One" - King Crimson
8. "Ride of the Valkyries" - Richard Wagner (Disney's apparently considered this before—just... please don't make it racist...)
9. "Eruption" - Van Halen (because this will definitely be "old-fashioned music" in forty years)
10. "Symphony No. 9 in D Minor: IV. Finale" - Ludwig Van Beethoven (why not?)

(I need some women on this list... suggestions?)


Best First-Time Watch: The Three Caballeros. Disney on peyote—can we get more of this kind of stuff? Please?

Worst First-Time Watch: Chicken Little. Obviously.

Biggest Surprise of this Retrospective: The Three Caballeros (again). Thank goodness for this beautiful, insane mess.

Movie that Most Benefited from Rewatch: Lilo & Stitch. This is why I should rewatch movies more often—how had I forgotten how good this movie is?

Movie that Least Benefited from Rewatch: The Rescuers. How had I forgotten just how sloppily plotted and animated this movie is?

Favorite Disney Animation Trend: "What if we hired this Alan Menken dude?"

Least-Favorite Disney Animation Trend: "You know what this movie is missing? An obligatory, unearned romance."

Best Comic Relief Character: Kronk (The Emperor's New Groove)—though maybe this is cheating, since the whole movie is comic relief? Okay, if it is cheating, then my other answer is Joanna (The Rescuers Down Under).

Worst Comic Relief Character: Whatever that lemur's name is in Dinosaur. Does something count as comic relief if it isn't funny?

Disney Review: Zootopia, Moana

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.

This post is unique in that these two movies have come out recently enough that I've already written reviews of them on my normal weekly review feature. You can read the Zootopia review here, and you can read the Moana review here.

Also, it's the LAST REVIEW POST OF THE SERIES! Thanks for sticking it out the whole time and giving some great feedback. I've also had way more readers for this series than I usually do, so if you're new, I hope you'll stick around. Anyway, I'll have one more post wrapping up the series with some goodies in it, so stay tuned for that.

EDIT: Here's the wrap-up post!

You can read the previous entry in the series here.

55. Zootopia (2016)

Disney's track record with race is... uh... dicey, to say the least. So it sure would seem to be a misguided approach to make a movie about contemporary urban race relations, right? And at first, Zootopia seems to be just that. In fact, a lot of people have read a racial message in Zootopia's "predator/prey" dichotomy, and the movie itself seems to bait this reading with lines like "Only a bunny can call another bunny 'cute'" and "You can't touch a sheep's wool," to say nothing of how the central plot involving "predatory" animals going "savage" resembles the War on Drugs in general (paging "superpredators") and the urban crack epidemic specifically, issues that are highly affected by the relationship between white and black Americans. And if you read the movie as "predator=black, prey=white," there are some things that the movie does that are quite radical for a Disney (or even any mainstream American) movie—for example, that a Disney movie would imply that the government caused the crack epidemic on purpose in order to incarcerate black men kind of blows my mind, and even if we don't go there, it's still kind of wild that a Disney movie would make a white-coded character responsible for the villainous oppression of black-coded characters without any kind of equivocation. But reading the movie this way also gets into some very uncomfortable and retrograde territory, too, and you don't even have to go any further than the "predator/prey" premise to get there—I don't think I have to explain why there is a problem with equating murderous, carnivorous insticts with African-Americans. The predator/prey=black/white analogy doesn't really lay itself accurately onto reality, either; why, for example, would it be the prey (white) characters saying things like "don't touch my hair" and "only our species can call itself cute," ideas that are connected to black Americans in modern American society?

If this is a movie about race exclusively, then it's incredibly sloppy with its metaphor, mixing racial codes and even mistaking gender codes for race (in the case of rabbits and their marginalization on the police force). That's why I don't really think Zootopia is a movie about race. At least, not race specifically. The world of the movie only makes thematic sense in relationship to reality if you consider it a generalized metaphor about the interplay of people's various social and personal identities in the formation of social power structures—i.e. "intersectionality." This is most clearly seen with our protagonist, Judy (a rabbit); she faces systematic discrimination as a rabbit in the way that the police force refuses to take her seriously, but she also as a rabbit has privilege in that her government treats prey more fairly than predators. The point isn't specific to racism; it's that based on who she is, there are varying degrees to which she benefits from and is at a disadvantage within the power hierarchies of her society. The movie makes a serious blunder by so openly tagging this generalized commentary about the way societies work with references to the specific power hierarchies of 21st-century American society, since this makes the messy one-to-one mapping of Zootopia's world onto our own; I'd say this is the film's largest flaw outside of some pacing issues within its impressively complex but also maybe convoluted conspiracy/neo-noir plot. But if you sweep aside those references (their kind of annoying anyway), what's left is a pretty thoughtful intersectional parable that I like quite a bit.

Switching gears completely, you'll notice I've been keeping away from my usual commentary on animation style in my last few reviews. That's not because the animation isn't good in Wreck-It Ralph, et al. This period of Disney animation is defined by an admirable ability to make its CGI creations look convincingly alive and emotive by looking realistic in the details while being cartoonish in the design—for example, the multitude of hairy creatures in Zootopia all look convincingly "hairy" in close-up while also looking like exaggerated cartoon animals that avoid the uncanny valley handily when you zoom out to look at the whole character, an approach that gives all the living things in the recent Disney movies (humans included) the appearance of something resembling living dolls, which makes it all the more impressive that it's not uncanny. That said, this same approach also tends to make these movies look somewhat generic and forgettable on a sheer animation metric—I mean, sure, these movies all look "nice" and are capable of some very cool visual moments, but the aesthetic or craft never particularly stands out in any other way that that it looks "good." If a character from Zootopia suddenly wandered into Big Hero 6, it might be kind of weird, but it also wouldn't be some violation of the aesthetic parameters of the film—something it would be much harder to say if, for example, Mulan suddenly found herself in the middle of Tarzan. I guess what I'm saying is that while these recent Disney movies are impeccably designed as far as their designs and characters go (the different climate zones in Zootopia are full of clever choices regarding how the environments function), none of them really have any sort of distinguishing aesthetic personality or identity outside of the same Disney house style that's been dominating their output for the past few years. Which is better than Chicken Little, so I suppose I should count my blessings. But I do long for even, in some regards, the days of the early 2000s, when each movie was its own artistic universe. Ah well. At least the narrative elements of the movies are strong(ish).

56. Moana (2016)

Remember what I said about being sick of Frozen? I'm well on my way there with Moana. Full disclosure: I am currently living with a two-year-old whose life basically revolves around Moana and its related branding (though recently, she's taken to The Boss Baby and Coco and The Magic School Bus—I'll give her this, she at least has good taste in the media she's going to drive into the ground by incessant repetition). She has a Moana doll that will sing the chorus to "How Far I'll Go." She has Moana pajamas she wears nearly every night. She listens to the soundtrack when she takes baths. It's a lot to take in, and the Moana exhaustion has gripped me fiercely (to say nothing of the two-year-old's poor mother). But like I said, this two-year-old has taste, and if you're going to make your life revolve around a single movie, you can do a lot worse than Moana, which is, as I've mentioned before, probably only eclipsed by Tangled as the best CGI-animated Disney feature.

Let me talk about something I haven't really discussed in a while: music. If you look at recent Disney history, you'll notice that the studio has scaled way back on its rate of musical features within its output. The '90s, probably the height of the form, have only one non-musical feature, The Rescuers Down Under (two if you count Tarzan, though even that has a decent musical presence despite the lack of full-on show-stopping numbers), but starting in the 2000s, similar to the parallel Disney Dark Age in the '70s and '80s, music becomes less and less a part of the films the studio is releasing, usually only sticking to one or two original songs to play over a montage and almost never going for having characters themselves perform song-and-dance routines in the typical Broadway style. The 2010s Revival brought back the Broadway-style structure with The Princess and the Frog and especially Tangled and Frozen, and the latter two films' successes can, I think, be chalked up to their music in large part (I have a hard time imagining Frozen as the overpowering cultural force that it was without "Let It Go"); but even these films represent a sort of half measure as far as the musical form goes, since both of them use a heavily musical structure in their first acts that eventually give way to much less music action-adventure second and third acts, giving the impression that each of the movies kind of forgot that it was a musical by the end. This is a very long way of saying that Moana is the first fully committed Disney musical since The Princess and the Frog and, based solely on the strength of its songs and how it incorporates them into its structure, the best Disney musical in a very long time—I'd say probably since The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There isn't a bad song in the entire movie, and there are at least three songs I'd comfortably rank among the very best Disney songs ever ("Where You Are," "How Far I'll Go," and "You're Welcome"—all written by none other than Alexander Hamilton himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda).

Even better is the fact that—aside from "Shiny," which I'll give a pass to because come on, Jemaine Clement is a David Bowie crab—these songs aren't just serving as comic asides or soundtracking montages; they're actually crucial to the narrative advancement and are vital to what the movie is doing thematically. For example, "Where You Are" not only gives exposition on the social structures of Moana's home village but also introduces Moana's role as the village leader and also gives us the foundational characterizations of Moana, her father, and her grandmother as well as introducing the major environmental symbols of the sea and the shore in addition to seeding the conflict of the film's first act by juxtaposing the "and no one leaves" refrain with the increasingly dissonant expressions on Moana's face as she grows older and more entrenched in her island's social conservatism. That's an enormous amount of heavy lifting for one song to perform, but "Where You Are" manages it in an effortless three-and-a-half minutes. And that's just one song. I haven't even mentioned the frankly brilliant way that "How Far I'll Go" does double duty as both a traditional Disney "I Want" song as well as the climactic affirmation of self-actualization. It's a chameleonic song whose impact changes with its context, wistful and dissatisfied at the movie's beginning and triumphantly anthemic as it completes Moana's character arc near the movie's finale. It reminds me, to evoke one of my two-year-old housemate's other favs, of how Coco's "Remember Me" turns on a dime from a puffed-up piece of braggadocio to a heartbreaking goodbye, and in both cases, the results are incredibly moving.

Completely off-topic, but also, because I don't know where to fit it in, can I just say how refreshing it is to have a Disney Princess Movie that is completely uninterested in romantic love at all? Even the most progressive of princess films (e.g. Beauty and the Beast) have operated under the general assumption that a single woman must be paired off by the movie's end, but Moana just doesn't have time for those shenanigans. I don't think that romantic love is even mentioned in the movie outside of the background fact that Moana has parents who, presumably, love each other. No, this is just about Moana discovering herself and doing cool things with a (demi-)guy with whom she has an entirely platonic relationship, which is quietly revolutionary for a Disney film. Magic.

Moana isn't perfect, and as is the case with movies you're forced to watch again and again, the flaws get increasingly obvious to me the more I watch it. Like most recent Disney movies (except for Tangled, which is why I put it ahead of Moana in the CGI ranks), Moana has a frustrating approach to storytelling that prioritizes a moment-to-moment rush forward to the detriment of the big picture; with the exception of one mid-film dream sequence, the movie gets so preoccupied with the individual pieces of the plot's present—whether they be Moana's banter with Maui or my beloved glam crab or incongruously Mad Max: Fury Road-indebted coconut pirate dudes—that it kind of loses track of the central inciting incident of the crisis back on Moana's home island, which gives the movie's events, when you map them out, a kind of scattered, haphazard quality that undermines some of the character work later in the movie and robs the film of that pleasing narrative efficiency of having every incident tie back in to the central conflict. There's also some really egregious dialogue; 2010s Disney has made a habit of leaning into jokey anachronisms in its screenplays, which... ugh, fine I guess, but I don't know if I've ever heard a joke more forced than the "it's called tweeting" line. But like I said, I'm hyper-conscious of these bits because of how often I've seen the movie. In reality, they aren't any worse than the flaws that plague Frozen or Big Hero 6, and what's good about Moana far outshines the good of those movies. It's a very good, borderline-great, movie and a fitting final piece to review for this project.

---

And that's all, folks! We made it! All the way to the end of the Disney canon—at least until Ralph Breaks the Internet comes out in November, at which point this series will become rapidly obsolete. But in the four month interim, I can at least bask in the glow of having reviewed every feature film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and you can bask in the glow of having endured the whole thing.

Like I said, I'll have one more post wrapping up this series, so stay tuned for that. But this is it for the most part. It's been fun, y'all!

Until next time!

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!!