An Extended Look at A Christmas Carol

All cinema is artifice. This isn't a groundbreaking epiphany or statement, but the success of most movies hinges on the audience not taking that statement into account. But it's true: all cinema is artifice of one kind or another. Even documentaries have some artificiality, because no matter how blisteringly true something from, say, Errol Morris is, he's still shaped the raw footage he collected into a movie. Fictional films are far more artificial, depending on the content and presentation. Sometimes, if the director is shrewd enough, they can manipulate the audience in such a way that they've completely forgotten that they're sitting in a darkened movie theater, so they believe they're part of the movie they're watching.

Robert Zemeckis used to be such a director. There was a time--back when he made movies with real people, not animation--when his movies felt as timeless and magical as anything from Steven Spielberg. Spielberg produced the trilogy that helped Zemeckis leap triumphantly into the mainstream, the Back to the Future films. I mentioned it on the show, but I'll emphasize it here: I love the first Back to the Future film. (For posterity, I like Back to the Future, Part II a lot, despite appreciating its many flaws, but I've never been a huge fan of the final entry in the series.) I've seen it hundreds of times. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was watching it on HBO and reciting the film's script, not only line by line but matching the emotions the actors are evincing. I wasn't just able to parrot Christopher Lloyd as he said, to Michael J. Fox, "Weight has nothing to do with it," in response to Fox's Marty McFly commenting on the gravity of his time-traveling situation by saying "Heavy." No, I was emulating the baffled frustration in Lloyd's voice.

Point is, I love Back to the Future. And I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the first true example of Zemeckis' ambitious thirst to make unique and technologically advanced entertainments. It's a hell of a lot of fun to watch this zany trip into nostalgia, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit clues us in to a problem Robert Zemeckis has had in the last decade: technological wizardry is more important to him than telling good stories well. Even from Cast Away, which features a bravura lead performance from Tom Hanks, it's been clear that Zemeckis is more interested in pointing out what kind of cool tricks he's pulled off. Though Cast Away is a good film, I remember the hubbub surrounding its production more than the movie itself. "Look, Tom Hanks lost so much weight and they had to pause production for six months!" Four years later, however, is when Zemeckis would throw his lot in with pure artificiality: motion-capture animation.

Ever since The Polar Express in 2004, Robert Zemeckis has been disturbing people around the globe. OK, that's a bit much, but one of the chief criticisms of that holiday film was that the human characters didn't look quite right. There was something in the eyes, or more appropriately, there wasn't something in the eyes. Why get invested in a story populated with such lifeless automatons? I discussed this a bit on the show, but I never had much of a problem with the characters in The Polar Express, at least not to the same degree that I found fault in Zemeckis' other holiday film, the 2009 Walt Disney Pictures film A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, Gary Oldman as Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit, and Colin Firth as Fred.

Since recording the episode, I coincidentally wound up watching The Polar Express again, as it's a movie my wife loves and finally bought on Blu-ray on Black Friday. While I think that the show-offy nature in The Polar Express is well-earned, it's also meant to distract from how empty the story is. You would think that Zemeckis and William Broyles, Jr., who co-wrote Apollo 13 and wrote Cast Away, could come up with enough content for a 100-minute movie even when adapting an extremely short story. (The Polar Express is based on a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg. It's interesting to note that another of Van Allsburg's works, Jumanji, was also adapted into a film and even though it's pretty flat, at least that movie doesn't feel like it's killing time.) You'd be wrong. I appreciate that Zemeckis couldn't make a 30-minute movie, but there's no forgiving the "Hot Chocolate" song or any of the other interludes, most of which are...songs.

I bring all of this up in comparison with A Christmas Carol, because even there, Zemeckis finds ways to kill time. Let's keep in mind that his source material is not only one of the most well-known stories of all time, but it's not 20 pages. While Charles Dickens wrote far longer novels in his illustrious career, A Christmas Carol is tailor-made for cinematic adaptation. Why screw with something that's been almost handed to you as a treatment for a film? This is, by the way, where I need to justify the fact that I'm a Christmas Carol purist. The root of this is that so many of the film and TV adaptations of this story are so unfaithful that it would be funny if I didn't find it so sad. "See Bill Murray in a modernized comic version of A Christmas Carol!" "Fall in love with Albert Finney as Scrooge in this new musical!" "Time for the Flintstones to retell this magical tale!"

I'm not against change, mind you. If every version of A Christmas Carol was faithful to the letter, it'd get pretty dull pretty quickly. But that's the point: so few versions of this story ARE faithful. Of the many different retellings, at least since talking pictures were invented, a grand total of three are faithful. Two are from television, starring George C. Scott and Patrick Stewart, respectively, as Ebenezer Scrooge. The other is a film from 1951, starring Alistair Sim. These don't have gimmicks, they don't have twists on the story, they're just the story.

Relating this to Robert Zemeckis' version, I must give him a bit of credit: ignoring the motion-capture animation, this is a pretty faithful adaptation. It's maybe 80-85 percent accurate, and that's no small feat. The two big problems, though, are that the movie does have motion-capture animation and was initially presented in 3D, and the 15-20 percent of the movie that's not faithful is completely wrongheaded. I appreciate that most of Hollywood, as an industry, assumes the people who consume its products are idiots. I'm aware that, yes, there are some truly visionary filmmakers and artists in the business who respect their audiences. And Robert Zemeckis is not the worst offender, but the action sequences in this movie are inexplicable and offensive, mostly because there don't need to be action sequences in A Christmas Carol. We could debate the classification of the scene where, after first seeing the Ghost of Christmas Future, Scrooge is shrunk to the size of a bug and is chased by said spirit. But that's a scene in this movie that seems chiefly designed to keep younger audiences awake.

I hope I'm wrong in that assumption--though it's not a great second option, I'll take Robert Zemeckis being passionate about the sequence for creative reasons over audience condescension. Let's pretend, though, that the sequence is meant to rouse kids out of their presumed stupor. Why waste five minutes of your movie on a seemingly endless chase two-thirds into your movie to keep kids awake? Don't most kids know the beats of A Christmas Carol? Aren't they aware of the story? And if they're not, and they're apparently bored out of their minds an hour through the film, a chase scene isn't going to stop that problem. If there were creative reasons for that scene, I would love to know them. I can't fathom any excuse or justification at this moment, though. Is this chase a good example of what madcap insanity Robert Zemeckis can come up with through the medium of animation? Perhaps. Is it necessary in a version of A Christmas Carol? No.

There's a lot of that as I watch A Christmas Carol, a lot of wondering whether a supposedly creative decision was worth the risk, and all too frequently, I have to answer with a big "No." Starting from the top, as we wonder if casting Jim Carrey, a middle-aged American actor predominantly known for comedy, as Scrooge is worth it. While Carrey can do drama quite well, he's a gifted physical performer, and motion-capture animation can feasibly transform any actor into anything, the casting seems especially weird when you consider that he's playing against Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. Could there not be a live-action version of this story with Oldman as Scrooge and Firth as Bob Cratchit? (Hollywood, you may send my check in the mail.) Don't get me wrong: Carrey's not bad in this film, but he's not a breath of fresh air, nor does he bring surprising poignance or malevolence or anything to his interpretation of the character. His accent is consistent, but it also put me in mind of his much more successful role in the underrated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

None of the actors are particularly amazing here, even though Carrey and Oldman are given room to stretch, as they play multiple characters. Oldman's best among the actors, bringing enough singular qualities as both Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley. But none of the actors are served well by the motion-capture animation technology. I don't know why the quality of the motion-capture from ImageMovers Digital, the company Zemeckis founded in the late-1990s, is so shoddy compared to that of WETA or Industrial Light & Magic, but it is and there's no getting around it. The character design in A Christmas Carol is, I assume, not meant to be off-putting or disturbing, yet those are the only words I could think of when watching the characters interact with each other. There were flaws in the character interactions in The Polar Express and Beowulf, but they seem to stand out most sharply here.

The last scene of A Christmas Carol is meant to show us just how much Ebenezer Scrooge has changed, literally overnight. It's the first day back from work after Christmas Day and Bob Cratchit is late after "making merry." Scrooge intends on raising Bob's salary and, in general, treating him like a decent human being. When Bob arrives, Scrooge reveals his news in a typically grouchy fashion, building up to saying "I have decided to raise your salary!" Bob is naturally taken aback, and Scrooge laughs merrily, explaining that he's serious. The laughter is the problem in this version. We see Scrooge laugh for a good two seconds, and at no point does it seem human. The uncanny valley effect, wherein people are repulsed when 3D animation creates almost-but-not-quite-lifelike human characters, is on full display here.

A Christmas Carol is an iconic, rightly beloved piece of Western literature. I don't blame people for adapting it time and time again, and I welcome each adaptation with hopeful arms. Even if it's not faithful, an adaptation can be good. (I may have mocked the other, less faithful versions above, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad for being unfaithful. Well, except Scrooge. I can't stand that movie.) If, however, you intend on being faithful in content but not presentation, you need to have a really good reason. Robert Zemeckis' sole reason for using motion-capture and 3D (of which, the less said, the better) is to nudge us in the ribs and say, "See? See? Look at what I did!" That's just not good enough.

An Extended Look at The Muppets

What is so special about Kermit the Frog? What is about Kermit, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, the Great Gonzo, and others that make us treasure them so dearly, so closely? I don't ask because I don't get it--just a couple of days ago, I bought myself a Kermit the Frog plush. Why? Well...you know...I mean...HE'S KERMIT THE FROG. That's why. These characters, who aren't exactly one-dimensional, despite not being nearly as complex as we might perceive, are part of many people's childhoods. They were part of mine, certainly. Even though I grew up years after The Muppet Show stopped airing first-run episodes, I could go back and watch the best moments on VHS, as well as the Muppet movies. The nostalgia I hold for Kermit and friends is immense, even though there was a long stretch where I just let myself forget about them.

Make no mistake: The Muppets, the characters' triumphant return to the big screen is nostalgia writ large. The plot of the film, appropriately self-aware, is that the majority of people in the world forgot about the Muppets, not because they sold out or made bad movies or TV shows. No, we just forgot about the Muppets because we were distracted. Are the Muppets still relevant? Can they ever become relevant again? Are we too "hard and cynical," as a snappish TV executive played by Rashida Jones says, to welcome them back into our hearts? Of course, the answer is "Yes, if you let them back in." Some people have reacted harshly to the movie, and while some of their complaints are valid--this belongs to that category of movies I would dub "Movies I Love, Despite Being Imperfect"--I also read their reviews as being unable to accept what the Muppets have always been.

If, for example, you lash out at the movie, written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, having a lot of meta humor that comments on the Muppets being in a story, I fear that you have not seen a Muppet movie before. Even in their weaker efforts, such as The Muppet Christmas Carol, there's meta humor. Gonzo plays Charles Dickens and is literally facing the audience, for goodness' sake. Sometimes, if you're criticizing something that is part of a character's identity, an identity you used to enjoy, the problem isn't with the character. It's with you. This is not, by the way, meant to be me saying The Muppets is flawless, because it's not.

Instead of having Kermit, Miss Piggy, and friends be the lead characters, this is an ensemble piece of sorts. I say "of sorts," because the first 20 to 25 minutes of this movie is pretty much all about Gary (Segel), his longtime girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), and Walter, Gary's brother who inexplicably is a Muppet. Gary and Walter are huge Muppets fans, but when Gary takes Mary and Walter to Los Angeles to visit the Muppets Studios, they're disappointed to see the facilities in disrepair because no one seems to care much about the characters anymore. Walter happens to overhear that something worse is about to happen: an oil tycoon named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) is set to take over ownership of the studio and the Muppet name in one week due to a loophole in Kermit's standard Rich and Famous contract. Unless the Muppets come up with $10 million in a week, they lose everything. It's up to Gary, Mary, and Walter to find the old Muppet gang for a no-holds-barred telethon where they'll hopefully be able to maintain control of the Muppet name and studio.

While Segel and Adams are fine--Adams has less to do but is infinitely more charming simply because she's Amy Adams--but once Walter meets Kermit the Frog and they all head off to get the rest of the Muppet crew, their storyline is pushed to the sidelines, and for good reason. When you have a character as inexplicably charismatic as Kermit the Frog on screen, why would you want to focus on human characters? Cooper gets a pass, not only for being a suitably diabolical villain, but for being an extremely game performer. His musical number is a rap, and while I don't want to say anything else, it's an all-or-nothing sequence that the actor gives his most to. Still, the marquee stars here are the titular Muppets; I get why Segel and Stoller wanted to introduce the Muppets in a somewhat different way from previous films in the franchise (though it's similar to how Kermit meets the other Muppets in The Muppet Movie), but there's a clear imbalance between how much the good human characters have to do in the first 30 minutes versus the last hour.

These are not the thoughts I was thinking when I walked out of The Muppets. All I was doing was smiling. I felt happy. It's not that I don't feel happy in general, but it's rare that movies make me feel as happy as this one did. Is it perfect? No. Do I care? No. When a movie makes you feel as good as The Muppets does, does anything else matter? The movies have a number of purposes for existing. Some are meant to show us worlds we've never even imagined before. Some are meant to educate us. Some are meant to inspire us. And some are meant to make us feel good. How often do we see that adjective? "The feel-good movie of the summer"? How often do movies actually make us feel that good, or as good as the filmmakers want us to feel? So why carp on a movie that's not perfect if it works so damn well at making me happy to be alive, happy to spend 20 bucks on a movie that could easily have been a massive failure, happy to see Jason Segel and company pull off the impossible?

So what is it about The Muppets that made me so happy? First of all, as I mentioned above, this movie could've sucked, and sucked hard. Reviving items of childhood nostalgia is fraught with peril, and we've seen the cinematic corpses littered around the pop-culture landscape. Sure, it made money, but how many of us who grew up with the Indiana Jones of the 1980s wants to acknowledge the very existence of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Yes, they're massively successful with children, but again, are you a legitimate fan of the Star Wars prequels? If anything, the Muppets have an even wider appeal than Darth Vader or Indiana Jones do, so this was an undertaking that could've failed very quickly and very obviously. There's no question that Jason Segel is a massively obsessed Muppets fan, but who's to say that being a fan of something can equal making a good version of that thing? I don't doubt, for example, that David Koepp is a fan of the Indiana Jones trilogy from the 1980s, but his script for the new movie wasn't anything the majority of fans would call faithful or fitting. Being a fan means nothing once you're working to create something new.

But even though The Muppets is an essentially nostalgic piece of fan fiction--as most newer versions of older properties are these days, mind you--it's a successful film. At no point does it feel like Segel and Stoller are doing a disservice to the Muppets. At no point does it feel like what's happening on screen is something out of place with the ethos and spirit exemplified by the late Jim Henson or the other Muppeteers who've either passed away or retired. (Or, in the case of Frank Oz, are too grouchy to accept a new guard of Muppet filmmaking.) The Muppets is funny, heartwarming, sweet, and subversive as The Muppet Show or the related movies ever were. It's enormously relieving, frankly, to see that one property from our collective youth hasn't been tampered with to an inexorable degree.

The anarchic yet welcoming spirit is on display not only with the new characters or the message of the story--that talent knows no bound and should be accepted no matter what form it arrives in--but in the music. You can't talk about the Muppets without talking about the music they perform. As the always-astute critic and scholar Jason Mittell (@jmittell) pointed out to me today on Twitter, "The Muppet Movie has one of the greatest songbooks of any film musical." Now, I haven't discussed The Muppet Movie for Mousterpiece Cinema yet. I will at some point in the future, of course, but Mr. Mittell is absolutely right. The music in that film not only does a great job of explaining in perfectly witty and syncopated lyrics what the characters want, but it also introduces or expands upon those characters in subtle yet profound ways.

The score and songs for The Muppets is maybe not that successful--few movies are, to be fair--but they're catchy, sometimes moving, and fitting within the greater Muppets songbook. Most of the songs were written by Bret McKenzie of the comedy duo Flight of the Conchords. From the upbeat opener "Life's A Happy Song" to the disco-infused "Me Party," all the way to the film's high point, written not by McKenzie but by a group of songwriters who are apparently responsible for the majority of Hannah Montana songs, "Pictures in My Head," the soundtrack for the film is bouncy, toe-tapping and moving in unexpected ways. One of the more potentialy dangerous moments in the film comes at the end of the telethon the Muppets are holding at the last minute (hosted by a kidnapped Jack Black, in an inspired gag). Kermit and Miss Piggy begin their big duet: "The Rainbow Connection." Talk about a moment that could've caused groans among the audience, but instead conjures up tears. By ending the song with every Muppet singing the chorus, Segel, Stoller and director James Bobin are only able to reaffirm the idea that the Muppets' sensibility hasn't gone away, it was just taking some time off.

I mentioned up top the idea that some people maybe aren't willing to accept the 21st century update of the Muppet characters. I don't mean to put thoughts in people's minds, but I wonder how much of that can be chalked up to the fact that these are not the original Muppets. Sure, it's still Kermit and Piggy, but it's not Jim Henson and Frank Oz. Having grown up with the option of two different Kermits (The Muppet Christmas Carol opened when I was 8), I'm inured to the notion that Kermit's voice can be as fluid and changing as that of Mickey Mouse. Were children and adults as frustrated by the change in the latter's voice when Walt Disney chose to stop performing as Mickey in the 1940s? I can appreciate the pushback some people have when it comes to Kermit's voice being different, but I've let it go. I can either ignore the idea that a character's iconography goes beyond the original performer or I can embrace it. I've chosen the latter.

Having said that, I don't want to pretend that every new voice of an old character works well. Eric Jacobson, who performs as Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, does a pretty solid job as the former but is far too inconsistent as the latter. If Jacobson is new at the character, it would make sense, but I fear that he's practiced enough at it and just can't keep it as solid as he'd like (or as solid as I'd like).

But I didn't care. I really didn't. We go to the movies all the time, and while I wish they would always succeed at their aims, it doesn't happen. Some movies succeed because they're ambitious, some succeed because they're crowd-pleasing, and some succeed because they're life-affirming. It's all-too-rare that a movie can be all three of those. But, that's The Muppets: a movie that will make you happy if you're a kid, a young adult, or a senior citizen; a movie that confirms the idea that Jim Henson's spirit is very much alive; and a movie that swings for the fences. As I said on the show, if you like being happy, The Muppets is for you. If you don't like being happy, I'm concerned for you.

An Extended Look at Beauty and the Beast

There is an inexorable, inexplicable quality about some great movies, as there is about great art in general. Sometimes, yes, we can pinpoint exactly what makes a movie work so well, why it becomes one of our favorites, why it wins awards, why critics love it, or why it makes millions of dollars at the box office. The script is insightful, the direction is incredible, the visuals are eye-popping, the performances are immense powerhouses of talent. These are easy ways to calculate what makes a movie work, but sometimes, we see a movie and we just like it. Sometimes, you can’t put your finger on one element about a movie that burrows itself under your skin, but you love it all the same.

Now, don’t get me wrong: Beauty and the Beast has a lot of clearly standout aspects to it, but I don’t know that I can tell you why I admire it more than I admire most other Disney movies. I’m not ready to say it’s my favorite Disney movie of all time—and keep in mind, I am not including Pixar films in this mix, because that’s an entirely different list—because I’m more than partial to Pinocchio. But the more I think about Beauty and the Beast as well as other movies that came out during this so-called Disney Renaissance period, the more I realize that it’s thanks to movies like this that are making me so invested in the podcast.

I don’t mean to present some bias against movies from the 1930s and 1940s by saying this, but the level of entertainment and enjoyment I get out of Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and even Bambi isn’t anywhere near what I get out of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid. You could probably make a solid argument that this is somewhat due to the content of children’s entertainment in the 1990s versus what was available in the 1930s. Maybe I’ve always just been more mentally able to be entertained by modern fare, though I do love plenty of old movies. I just don’t share that love very frequently with Disney animation. I admire it, but I don’t always love it.

Is that heretical to say? I’d say the same of some older live-action films, that I admire them but I don’t share the love for them. The visceral pleasures of Pinocchio make it one of my favorites, but it’s not just that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a princess movie, it’s that I find the storytelling to be far less impressive than that of future Disney movies. “Future Disney movies” means, by the by, movies from the era when Walt Disney himself was still instrumental in making the movies he produced, as opposed to just being something of a cinematic figurehead. There’s no question that watching these films is like watching works of art, literal works of art. The skill that goes into bringing Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, and others to life is staggering even now. The skill that goes into the stories of those movies is, I think, a bit lacking.

That’s not the case with Beauty and the Beast, a movie that manages to be cheerfully old-fashioned while seeming fresh, new, and unexpected. The story is, indeed, as old as time itself, yet we’re won over by it all the same. Can the beautiful and intelligent girl be wooed by a ghastly, masculine creature? Can that creature grow up, leave behind his childish immaturities, and become a real man? Well, of course, but the journey we take to get to the expected resolution is more than worth it. See, sometimes, the best stories don’t have to be flashy or stylish or unique. It’s weird, I suppose, to commend Beauty and the Beast for not being something from the mind of a groundbreaking writer or director, but there you have it. Beauty and the Beast is an emotionally satisfying tale told well.

But it’s compelling to consider how badly this movie could’ve turned out. The Blu-ray of the film, which I highly recommend, includes an alternate 18-minute opening from before Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise were attached to direct the film. Only a couple of years before everyone around the world fell in love with Beauty and the Beast, it was set to be directed by Richard Purdum, protégé of Richard Williams, who was the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Purdum’s version of Beauty and the Beast shares many similarities with the version we have now, but it’s also wildly different. What’s truly fascinating is watching the creative process at work in both versions.

Beauty and the Beast is, of course, set in France, but the animation looks so starkly opposite in the junked version versus what we have now. Imagine what would have happened had the village Belle and her father, Maurice, lived in was still part of the Gallic countryside, but was populated not by rustic villagers but by lots and lots of fops. Yes, you read that right. Powdered wigs, lots of fancy makeup, corsets, the whole get-up. That could’ve been what each person in Beauty and the Beast looked like. What’s more, in the original version, Maurice seems less kindly simply for being younger and not seeming like a kooky old grandfather. And, the enchanted servants sing “Be Our Guest” to him, not to Belle. This is just one of many examples of why starting from scratch isn’t always a bad thing. Just think about how many times we read these days about production troubles for this or that live-action movie. People always assume the worst when they read such stories, and being fair, with live-action filmmaking, production troubles don’t bode well.

But animation, somehow, gets a pass from us. Now, part of this is thanks to the media not covering the ins and outs of an animated film’s production as they do for live-action films. I realize, of course, that Beauty and the Beast came out well before websites like Deadline Hollywood Daily became the norm for entertainment journalism, rifling through each movie’s daily garbage for some kind of morsel, and before other, legitimate publications aped Nikki Finke’s style of writing and content. But still, it’s always been very popular for Hollywood-based journalists to cover, with some glee, the foibles and follies of movie productions. So why not focus on stories like Beauty and the Beast having its original version scrapped and replacing directors? If that happened in live-action movies, we’d hear no end of it.

Of course, I wonder if people would’ve been as receptive to Beauty and the Beast had they known about its troubles during the production phase. As it stands, Beauty and the Beast is one of the most appropriately beloved Disney films, standing alongside Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and a few others as one of the great animated films of all time. And, just like those examples, the love story goes exactly as we assume it will, but there’s one immense and important difference. In Sleeping Beauty, we get to know Aurora, but her Prince is kind of a cipher. Still, even Prince Phillip is a vast improvement on the Prince in Snow White, who gets maybe five minutes of screen time and barely interacts with the titular character. Here, as evidenced by the title, we get to follow this story from both perspectives. Though we begin the story with Belle (and the triumphant opening number of the same name), once we meet the Beast, the film belongs as much to him as it does to her.

If there is a chief reason for this film’s creative success, it’s that. By not focusing only on one half of the blooming love between Belle and the Beast, Trousdale, Wise, screenwriter Linda Woolverton, and the Disney animators take a massive step in the right direction. Although other later Disney films, such as Aladdin and Hercules, would attempt to give equal time to both sides, it’s awfully hard to do that when your movie’s title focuses squarely on one person. I’m not saying that those movies need to be called Aladdin and Jasmine, or Hercules and Megara. No, that would be incredibly silly, but the Disney team has to know that by titling the movie after one character, it means I’m going to focus on that one character. (The discussion over how weak the storytelling is in Aladdin by making the Genie the most interesting character is one for another day.) Beauty and the Beast may make us focus first on Belle, but our interest in both characters is equal.

Of course, there are plenty of elements in this movie about which I could rave. The easy one, and the most appropriate, is the music and songs from Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Ashman passed away in early 1991, and was never able to see the finished film; it’s truly heartbreaking to consider that someone so instrumental to the film’s success couldn’t see what came from his time and hard work. There aren’t as many songs as I’d assumed there would be, and certainly nowhere near as many as there are in the Broadway adaptation of the film, but when you have “Belle,” “Gaston,” “Be Our Guest,” and the title song, who needs excessive singing? Those four songs are among the very best music from Walt Disney Studios. The melody may not be as iconic or embedded in our psyches as “When You Wish Upon A Star,” but they’re playful, sweet, and damned catchy.

Beauty and the Beast is one of the all-time classics for Walt Disney Pictures. It should come as no surprise that Disney himself tried to make an animated version of the film in the 1940s, but chose not to either because he couldn’t crack the story or because French filmmaker Jean Cocteau got there before he did, at least in terms of creating an iconic version of the fairy tale. 45 years after Cocteau’s vision of the story was released, the geniuses at Walt Disney Feature Animation were able to make the namesake of their company proud with a rousing, moving, and thoroughly entertaining movie that best encapsulates the old saw: “Isn’t it a shame that they don’t make movies like that anymore?”

The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me

Who doesn't love the Muppets? I suppose that's a question being posed across the country right now, as some people's love for these felt characters is being sorely tested with the release of the seventh movie starring Jim Henson's group of characters, The Muppets. Now, consider that for one moment: we are getting ready for the seventh film starring a group of puppet characters whose lines and actions are performed by men and women kneeling or crouching in carefully placed sets and trenches to interact with human performers. How the hell have there been seven Muppet movies? How was there even one?

It's worth considering this fact: at the height of their popularity, there were apparently 300 million people around the world watching The Muppet Show, their five-season syndicated series from the late-1970s. 300 million people. Can you imagine such a number? TIME Magazine called the program one of the most popular shows on TV ever, and with numbers like the one I mentioned above--apparently the only one available on the Interwebs--it's hard to argue with that statement. Equally impressive is that, in 2011 dollars, the 1979 film The Muppet Movie would have made over $200 million. I imagine that Walt Disney Pictures is crossing its collective fingers for a number that's close to half that, let alone higher, for the new movie coming out in a week. But I'm writing this post mostly to give a major shout-out to The Muppet Movie, which I watched for the first time in a couple of years this weekend and fell in love with all over again.

Here's a potentially bold statement: The Muppet Movie is one of the best all-around family entertainments. Ever. I know that I come into watching the movie for the umpteenth time with knowledge of what jokes are coming around the bend, the music, and general nostalgia for the characters. But I remain impressed and floored with what came out of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and the rest of the Muppet performers and writers to make this movie. If you want proof in this world that children can grasp relatively complex concepts, look no further than the conceit of this film: the Muppet characters, like Kermit, Miss Piggy, Sam the Eagle, Gonzo, and the others, are watching The Muppet Movie. They're watching the movie of how they made it in Hollywood. Meta humor, thy name is Muppet. The movie-within-the-movie also makes plenty of fourth-wall jokes; the best part is actually appreciating them once you get to a mature enough age. I can tell you that when I was a kid, I laughed at both the "You should try Hare Krishna" and "Good grief, it's a running gag" lines in the El Sleazo Cafe sequence. I can also tell you I had zero idea what those jokes meant. The delivery made me laugh. Now, the meaning makes me laugh.

And hey, that's kind of the point: The Muppet Movie is really, really funny. It's funny in ways I hadn't been aware of, even when I last watched the movie. One of the great joys I find in watching films I've seen countless times before is seeing something new. How it is that the human mind can't perceive every element of a movie they're presented with (or choose to present themselves with) numerous times is beyond me. But so it goes. The example from this viewing: when Kermit and Miss Piggy get stuck in a trap set by the evil Doc Hopper--who wants to make Kermit the new spokesman for his frog's-legs restaurant, but you knew that already, right?--they face off with an evil German doctor played by Mel Brooks. This mad doctor plans on hypnotizing Kermit to want to be Doc Hopper's shill; he makes some joke about turning Kermit's brains to jelly, but after a few seconds of Hopper and his cronies laughing, he stops them. "I detest the surfeit of provincial laughter," he says curtly.

My hand to God, I hadn't ever heard that line before. It wasn't that I'd heard it and didn't get it. I just had never heard it before. Maybe it's that Brooks talks quite fast as the doctor, or that I was too young to ever take into account his riposte, but there you go. And hey, that's a funny Goddamned line of dialogue, too. There are a lot of funny lines, and not just from the massive cast of celebrities who show up for a few minutes here and there. But they're all pretty great, from Steve Martin ("Don't you want to sniff the bottle cap?") to Carol Kane ("Yeth?") to Milton Berle to the climactic cameo from Orson Welles. But the rest of the Muppets are hilarious, too, and sometimes moving. I don't know if the new movie can capture that mixture of tones as well as this one does, but I'm hoping for the best.

Now, I'm not going to get too far in-depth about either this movie or the Muppets as a whole now. I leave that for the Disney movie podcast I host, Mousterpiece Cinema, which you're listening to, right? Go check it out. But I did want to give a bit of an appreciation to this movie, especially in its music. We all know, of course, "The Rainbow Connection," the sticky-sweet song that Kermit sings as the opening credits roll. I have no idea how this song still works, even for a guy at age 27, but saccharine lyrics and plaintive banjo be damned. Maybe it's that I cannot resist the charms of Kermit the Frog, maybe it's that the tune is catchy, but whatever the case, "The Rainbow Connection" is untouchable. The other music, though, in the movie is equally important, if not as instantly iconic as the opener.

I didn't appreciate it until watching the movie this time, but there are only a few main characters or groups in this movie, if we base it solely on the songs. There's, of course, Kermit, who sings "The Rainbow Connection" solo and is a co-lead on a few other songs. There's Miss Piggy, his paramour, who sings "Never Before and Never Again," the overwrought love song she dream-sings after spying Kermit at the beauty pageant she wins halfway through the film. There's Kermit's unflappable sidekick, Fozzie, who co-sings "Movin' Right Along." There's the Great Gonzo, who sings the melancholy "I'm Going to Go Back There Someday" at the gang's darkest hour. Then, we have Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, who sing "Can You Picture That?" and also help Kermit and his pals out at various key moments. If you're looking for a deus ex machina, that's them. Finally, there's Rowlf, who takes the lead on "I Hope That Something Better Comes Along."

Now, I imagine that once we get past Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and Gonzo, you might assume that there really shouldn't be any other main characters. And that's not really incorrect, but the more I thought about the music in this movie, the more I realized that these are all main characters in some respect. Hell, Rowlf sticks around with the group after his song--and if there's a flaw, it's that while Kermit does verbally encourage the other characters to join him, we don't see him do so with Rowlf--all the way to the end of the movie. I don't know that I'd fully appreciated his presence in the tour bus after Dr. Teeth and his crew pick the gang up in the middle of the desert until this viewing. The point remains: if we look at the music, these are the main characters. What's more, we should look at that music, because this is a musical. It's got romance, comedy, drama, action, and horror, but this is a musical first and foremost. The only major difference is that none of the humans sing a word. Considering the structure of The Muppet Show, it's a little surprising to me that Jim Henson and friends didn't find a way to sneak in a musical performance of some kind from one of the human characters, but so it goes.

Anyway, I've written a bit more on this topic than I'd expected, but here's the thing: I've gotten far more excited in the last week or so for The Muppets. Part of me, I will not lie, is worried that the people making the new movie won't be able to pull off the tone, that they are banking on nostalgia more than anything else. Worse yet, I'm also worried that I'm going to let that nostalgia blind me. Honestly, even if the movie isn't as great as I'm hoping it will be, I want it to do well. If there's a franchise I want revived, it's this one. I'm more than fine with Disney milking every drop from Kermit and his friends, as long as it means more Muppets in pop culture. If that's what comes from people going gaga for these characters again, I'm cool with it. And I mean...it's the Muppets. Who doesn't love the Muppets?

(Cross-posted at Island of Misfit Toys)

An Extended Look at Pete's Dragon

Being original is hard. I don’t think we appreciate that as much as we should in modern popular entertainment. Being original is hard mainly because everything has been done. With very few exceptions, every type of story has been told countless times. Unless you’re Charlie Kaufman, frankly, you’re not going to be breaking any ground anytime soon. And as consumers of popular entertainment, we need to accept that and realize that it’s OK for filmmakers to cover already trodden ground. What matters is not that you tell an original story (of course, that helps), but that you tell it well. Tell me a story well and I won’t nitpick a well-worn cliché you use. Tell me a story well and I’ll be enthralled, simply because of how you’re telling that story.

Pete’s Dragon doesn’t tell its story well. Pete’s Dragon has such a slight story that I was not shocked to find the original source was a short story. Of course, most Disney animated films are based on very short stories, often fables or fairy tales straight from the Brothers Grimm. Though that’s true, many of those films aren’t extremely long, whereas Pete’s Dragon is 129 minutes in its current version, and was 134 minutes originally. A few Disney films, notably Mary Poppins, are over two hours; even fewer can justify their length. Pete’s Dragon isn’t one of those lucky few.

Movies like Pete’s Dragon make me angry for many reasons, but the chief one is that the filmmakers choose to do nothing special. As I said on the show, these guys were making a movie. A movie! Movies are enormously difficult to make. That any are made is a constant surprise, if you consider the amount of time, energy, and effort that has to go into even the most embarrassing failure. Think of the logistical elements to a movie like Pete’s Dragon. The title character is animated while the world surrounding him is in live-action. Though there may not be any more special effects aside from just Elliott, the title character, that single character is worth a lot of work.

So you’re putting effort into an inciting character; why not put half of that effort into the script about that character? Why leave the audience restless through an oversized, overstuffed, yet empty piece of nostalgic claptrap? Making a movie doesn’t just require effort; depending on the story, it requires imagination. Shouldn’t Disney movies, movies that are meant to make us all get back in tune with our inner child, have the most imagination of all? Shouldn’t they be brimming with creativity? Shouldn’t we be delighted, dazzled, and inspired by the level of invention in this movie?

Of course we should. But then, there’s the fatal flaw of Pete’s Dragon: there is no invention, creativity, or imagination on hand. Aside from saying, “Hey, let’s have there be a dragon and it’s animated and it’s a kid’s best friend because why the hell not?”, there’s no such display here. At best, Pete’s Dragon is a missed opportunity. At worst, it’s a laughable misfire that leaves only a few elements to be impressed by. All I could do as this movie progressed is shake my head in disbelief. How could this movie be so bad, so jaw-droppingly weird and terrible and campy in the same fell swoop?

Mary Poppins and The Music Man are the two movies I kept thinking of when I watched Pete’s Dragon, and it wasn’t just because I had to take comfort in better movies than this one. Mary Poppins and Elliott serve similar functions as characters, both intending to help out the main children in the story so they can become happier in the worlds they inhabit. But the difference between Mary Poppins and Pete’s Dragon is that the latter takes place in a world much like that of The Music Man: turn-of-the-century Americana. The only major differences are that Passamaquoddy is a harbor town and River City is not, and instead of selling the town a boys’ band, the snake-oil salesman in Pete’s Dragon is selling fake medicines and…well, snake oil.

Mary Poppins is a great children’s movie and The Music Man is a rousing and entertaining musical. (Having seen the first hour of Mary Poppins within the last year or so makes me wonder, though, if I’ll like it as much as an adult, what with so many people acting over-the-top.) Trying to emulate these movies is not a bad thing. Walt Disney Pictures had already done this with Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and they probably were hoping to just replicate the success of those films with something relatively similar. But with so few likable characters and even fewer to relate to, Pete’s Dragon is a baffling mess, at turns obnoxious and unintentionally hilarious.

The basic plot is that we’re going to watch a little lonely boy get adopted by a family in a nice enough town filled with nice enough people who get awfully worried over nothing very quickly. Life is so boring in Passamaquoddy that a single walk through town can get Pete in trouble simply by being a bit of a klutz and doing a bad job of managing his invisible dragon. Oh, yes, there is Elliott. Elliott, for the first 90 minutes of the movie, does nothing except for do a half-hearted job of protecting his charge. Then he’s meant to have been working all of this time at making life better for Pete and his soon-to-be-foster family.

See, Pete has a foster family already, the Grogans. How they found him is beyond me. (Yes, I get that he was in an orphanage because his parents did I don’t know what.) They want him to be their slave, so they’ll never have to work on their farm again. We never see that farm, but I can only imagine it looks as well as it would if only one 10-year old boy was working on it. We open as they chase after Pete in a swamp, you know. By the way, the Grogans are awful. They’re just the worst characters in this movie, and boy, did I have my choice with the characters here. But the Grogans are the worst, because they represent nothing at all. They’re one of two sets of villains here, and the actual threat they try to be is weak, to begin with. They apparently have some bill of sale proving that Pete is his—as you know, orphanages frequently call them bills of sale. But whatever, they own him. So they want him back, but the good-hearted woman who’s taken a shine to Pete has no interest in giving him up. But the Grogans want him. But she doesn’t…and on and on.

I don’t know, by the way, that it’d matter who played the Grogans. The only two recognizable actors are Shelley Winters and Jeff Conaway, and while Winters was a fine actress in much more highbrow fare, she’s not that good here. Granted, the material is very weak, not to mention the fact that the Grogans are in about 30 minutes of the movie, if I’m being generous. But Winters is not elevating the movie above the material. If anyone does that, or even attempts to, it’s Mickey Rooney, Jim Dale, and Red Buttons. The latter two play the main antagonists, Doc Terminus and his sidekick, Hoagy. Imagine Harold Hill and his sidekick, Buddy Hackett—OK, fine, I don’t know his character’s name, but neither do you—but as nefarious as Marion the librarian assumes they are. Rooney plays Lampy, the town lighthouse-keeper, and the father of Nora, the woman who takes a liking to Pete.

Rooney and Buttons are, of course, old pros and Dale was well on his way to becoming one of stage and screen. (And he’s best known these days for doing the Harry Potter audiobooks in the United States.) But what it is about them over Winters (no spring chicken) is something I can’t comprehend. Rooney has the toughest job, I think, because his character is the most outrageous and the one with the most potential for flamboyance. Lampy is also apparently the town drunk, so when he happens to see Elliott up close – remember, Elliott is frequently invisible, because hiding the animated character in an otherwise live-action movie makes sense, right? – it won’t shock you to know he’s seen as a nut who’s over the hill and incredibly inebriated. But Rooney, the oldest of the old pros here and pretty much in life now, does his damnedest to be both crazy and charming. Make no mistake, he’s playing things over-the-top here, but he’s not grating. Credit where it’s due.

And there is little to give, but another scene I legitimately enjoyed is when Nora, played by singer Helen Reddy, sings “Candle On The Water,” the film’s Oscar-nominated centerpiece song. Nora pines for her long-lost fiancé, Paul, who’s been lost at sea for a year. Lampy chides her for holding out such hope, which leads her to go to the top of the lighthouse and sing the song. (Quick sidebar: Lampy is the one who saw a dragon. Now, while we know he’s telling the truth, Nora has every reason to assume her dad is seeing things because of his rampant alcoholism, and HE’S telling HER to be realistic in the scene before the song. I don’t know that the movie is aware of this ridiculous disconnect, but Nora sure is.) Partly because the scene is directed as simply as possible, and because the music is plaintive and sweet, this scene works. It’s fine the way it is. Watch it on YouTube. You’ll get the same out of it as you would in a two-hour movie.

And that’s the problem. With as many ideas floating around its pretty little head, you’d think that Pete’s Dragon could get by with its outsized plot and goofy animated title character. But it can’t. At no point do we get a consistent tone, at no point do we get consistently entertaining characters or sequences, and at no point are we invested in the plot. So what else is there to say? Elliott has survived this movie to become one of the major floats in the Main Street Electrical Parade at the Disney theme parks, and “Candle On The Water” is a justifiably beloved song. But most people under the age of 15 don’t know about Pete’s Dragon. Frankly, that’s as it should be. Sometimes, mass audiences see a stinker a mile away. They were right with this one.

An Extended Look at Home on the Range

Expectations are a dangerous thing, but what's even more dangerous sometimes is living up to them. In 2004, before John Lasseter and Ed Catmull joined the Walt Disney Company in a more official capacity than just running Pixar, the Walt Disney Feature Animation department was in dire straits. Well, the straits were dire only if you considered yourself a fan of hand-drawn animation. See, the 45th animated film in the Disney canon, Home on the Range was going to be the last hand-drawn animated film released by the company, at least for a long while. (The trend would be reversed in 2009, with The Princess and the Frog.)

Though there had been a few gaps in between movies for the Disney canon over the years, none were as long as the draught between 2004 and 2009 of no Disney hand-drawn features. Granted, other animated films were released to audiences that are considered part of the canon, including Bolt and Chicken Little. But they weren't hand-drawn; the 5-year gap is still the longest there's ever been for the company, even during the dark period from the 1960s to the 1980s. Now, I don't mean to hold up hand-drawn animation as a bastion of creativity. Certainly, one of the reasons why Walt Disney Feature Animation was abandoning the format for computer animation is because Pixar Animation Studios had been beating them at their own game without drawing anything by hand. But the decision by the Disney execs was rash, stupid, and condescending.

Audiences did not abandon Disney animation because of the format. They abandoned Disney, if we could call it that, because of the content. No one turned away from The Emperor's New Groove or Brother Bear because they thought, "Ewww, hand-drawn animation? Barf. No thanks." They turned away from movies like that because they were not very good. (Being fair, I've only seen the latter example, and heard mildly positive things about the former. Still, neither of these are considered, I believe, underrated gems.) So automatically assuming it's anything but the actual story proves that the folks over at Walt Disney Pictures weren't thinking too clearly in 2004. I'm glad, of course, that as soon as Lasseter and Catmull jumped into the company for real, they wanted hand-drawn animation brought back ASAP. That said, though we've gotten The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh in the last 2 years, there's nothing on the horizon for a return to hand-drawn animation. Hopefully that changes.

But back to Home on the Range, which has the unfortunate luck to be seen as the movie that killed hand-drawn animated features. Or, at least that was what I perceived this movie, about three feisty female cows who team up to save the farm they live in and love so much, to be. Don't get me wrong: Home on the Range is not a good movie--not good to me, to be fair--but it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be or as bad as my least favorite Disney films. (The Aristocats is the winner. Or loser. You know what I mean.) The worst crime that Home on the Range, written and directed by Will Finn and John Sanford, commits is that it is not ambitious. Ambition doesn't always save a movie--for an example, you just wait for my discussion of Pete's Dragon--but I often think that a movie without any ambition, without any passion, without any true reason for being will rankle me more. I may have more to be baffled about with an ambitious failure, but at least someone was trying. No one's trying here.

Because no one's trying, I honestly wonder who the movie is for. In some respects, it's clear that the target audience is little children. As I said on the show, I'm not a naive fool: Disney animated movies, as with pretty much every animated movie, are targeted first at children. The difference between movies like Home on the Range and movies like Beauty and the Beast is that while children are meant to enjoy both movies, you don't have to be under the age of 10 to enjoy the latter. You can still appreciate, admire, and love the great Disney movies after you hit puberty, after you go to college, after you get married. Movies like Home on the Range don't work the same way. You might like them as a kid, but unless you have a strong nostalgic tie, when you watch those movies as an adult, you wonder what the hell you were thinking.

But like I said, I don't know that a lot of little kids would enjoy Home on the Range, as opposed to being wildly bored by it. Sure, kids like cows and other farm animals, but the actual story of Home on the Range is weirdly dull. Maggie is a show cow who has to be sold because her owner's lost the other cattle on his farm. She's sold to Little Patch of Heaven, a dairy farm populated with cows, pigs, ducks, goats, and the like. Until Maggie turns up, the ringleader of the animals is Mrs. Calloway, who is immediately threatened by the presence of this superstar cow. Before the bitterness can pester her too much, she, Maggie, and the ditzy Grace team up to get enough money to save Little Patch of Heaven from being sold at auction. How will cows get money, you ask? Well, it just so happens that the local sheriff will pay the exact amount of money Little Patch of Heaven needs--750 bucks--for the capture of the evil cattle rustler Alameda Slim. And, hey, it just so happens that Alameda Slim is the cattle rustler who stole all of the cattle at the farm Maggie used to live at! Will wonders never cease.

Writing out the actual story of Home on the Range may make it seem more complicated than it is, but within about 25 of the 75 minutes, that entire plot is dispensed with. The rest of the movie is just about delaying the inevitable. If the story isn't engaging, could the characters inside of that story be a bit more so? Unfortunately, no. Roseanne Barr, Dame Judi Dench, and Jennifer Tilly--yes, really--are Maggie, Mrs. Calloway, and Grace. While none of them are bad (and I'll be honest, I truly thought Barr would be horrendous, thanks to her typically nasal voice), there's nothing remarkable about the performances as well as the character arcs. The rivalry between Maggie and Mrs. Calloway, outside of never seeming fully formed, is also far too reminiscent of the rivalry between Woody and Buzz Lightyear in the first Toy Story film. Though that film didn't break any amazing new ground by having a rivalry that would end in a true friendship, the specifics of that rivalry are echoed far too much here. We have the leader of the pack being threatened by an interloper who everyone flocks to for being flashy, and then becoming friends after a wild adventure. And then there's Grace, who's just the same old boring flaky comic relief.

So maybe the villain, Alameda Slim, is engaging? Not so much. Though pre-insane Randy Quaid does a serviceable job as this odious thief, the main gambit surrounding Alameda Slim, the reason why he's able to wrangle up so many cattle so quickly, is just weird. It turns out that Alameda Slim is a yodeler. A very good yodeler. In fact, he's such a good yodeler, you could call him the Pied Piper of yodeling. Only a few seconds of his yodeling can send a cow into a trance and then it will follow him anywhere. Now, I'll be honest: that is a unique enough twist on the villain to give Finn and Sanford credit. But at the same time, do any kids give a flying fig about yodeling? Yodeling's goofy to most kids, and a plot about saving a farm from economic downfall is not going to interest them at all.

With the exception of Alameda Slim's yodeling prowess, there's just about zero ambition in this movie. Perhaps the better word is passion, though, because Beauty and the Beast, as an example, is less ambitious than old-fashioned in its storytelling. There is, however, a high amount of passion from behind the scenes that's evident from the first sequence. Home on the Range, on the other hand, seems to struggle from the word go. Opening sequences are hard to do, but they're the first and easiest way to get audiences engaged. How I wish that Home on the Range hooked me from its opening. How I wish I'd been wrong about my assumptions. How I wish this movie surpassed my expectations.

An Extended Look at The Nightmare Before Christmas

Hype is a dangerous thing. I know there are some people out there who believe that hype or overhype is something for which we can only blame ourselves. A movie, TV show, book, or album isn't overhyped; we overhype it, so if we're let down, it's our own fault. I can understand the argument, especially when it relates to new movies. With older films, the burden is heavier, the onus a little larger. If a person has never seen Citizen Kane before but they're aware of the love most people have for it and its placement in the canon of American film, they might be let down when they watch it.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, of course, is not Citizen Kane. It does sometimes feel, though, that some fans are treating this film similarly, putting it on a pedestal that's not fully warranted. Part of the movie's rise throughout the past two decades, I believe, is fully thanks to a man who's inextricably linked to the project despite not being as instrumental to its execution and success. Does Tim Burton still have the capacity to surprise anymore? As soon as one of his acting muses, Johnny Depp, became a massively popular superstar, Burton descended into predictability. "Oh, there's going to be a remake of Willy Wonka with Johnny Depp, directed by Tim Burton? Well, of course." "Oh, Tim Burton's directing Sweeney Todd? Well, of course he is. And of course it stars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter." And so on.

The emo/Goth sensibility that permeates The Nightmare Before Christmas is so infused in pop culture now, especially in mainstream stores like Hot Topic, that it very quickly tips into being obnoxious. That said, as much as I think that Tim Burton's career has become rote--and believe me, without even realizing it, I was an apologist of his for a long time--the design of The Nightmare Before Christmas is impressive, even as it seems like it's always been around. That may be the best compliment I can make about this movie, especially in its look and the score and songs by Danny Elfman. They sound so right, so perfect, that it's shocking to me that they weren't always around in that way. From "What is This?" to "This is Halloween" to the overall score, the music in this movie is arguably as iconic as the themes in 1989's Batman, in terms of Elfman's filmography. I'd argue that the score to this movie is moreso, because while we all may remember the opening theme to Batman, that film's music belongs as much to Prince as it does to Elfman.

The design, as I mentioned above, is also quite impressive, when you think about how commonplace it seems now. Looking at The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993 must have been something of a shock compared to what it feels like now. This isn't just because, well, looking at something 18 years after its release automatically engenders new ideas, new feelings in each of us. No, the design of the movie couldn't have seemed rote then, though it may well do so now should it appear in a new movie. If there is such a phrase as "Burton-esque," then it springs from the look, the feel, and the colors of this movie. Halloween Town is given as much care as the world of Gotham City was, and it arguably improves on that film's appearance. Even here, in a world filled with grim characters and dark thoughts, there are bright colors, reds, greens, browns, and blacks. The warped, skewed designs of each character, from the wolfman who stands in the background to Jack, Sally, Dr. Finkelstein, and the Mayor, are all striking and arresting images to present, especially in a film ostensibly for children (older children, sure, but kids nonetheless).

So much of The Nightmare Before Christmas makes us think of Tim Burton that some people may not even realize he didn't direct the movie. Though he produced it and wrote the story on which the film is based, the director is Henry Selick. Selick, who'd go on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, proves now and has proven since that he's an expert in utilizing stop-motion animation to its fullest. Though the technology has improved and his scope has widened since--I would argue that Coraline is the best animated film that didn't come from Walt Disney Pictures in at least the last decade--Selick shows even here that he's a master of the form. But in some ways, I appreciate his work on his future films more despite never claiming full authorship. Yes, Selick's work since 1993 has been largely based on worlds someone else created, whether it was Roald Dahl or Neil Gaiman, but there's something more vibrant and spooky in his films that seemed as if it was waiting to leap out of the source material.

Here, it is legitimately hard to separate Burton from Selick. While Burton isn't the director, the design and story are his. This is a case where we have to acknowledge the work of the builder and the architect, while accepting that the builder wouldn't have made the building without the blueprints. Selick has shown since this film that he has a unique vision, but even though he put in so much time and effort into making this film a reality, Burton's work can't be ignored.

Though the design, music, and animation of this film are excellent--and they are, really--the story is lacking. The basic idea, that Jack Skellington is bored with Halloween and wants to branch out to a new holiday once he discovers it, is clever and there's a lot of humor mined from how the world of Halloween would get Christmas all wrong. And certainly, Jack's awe at Christmas Town is palpable and understandable. But I wonder if the sheer, tedious work of making a full-length stop-motion animated film became too much for Selick. This movie, which runs just over 75 minutes with the credits, could've easily been 15 minutes longer just to let the subplots breathe a bit. Sally, the sewn-together rag doll who is Jack's love interest, has so little to do in the film and so few interactions with Jack that their coming together at the end, while expected, comes out of nowhere. Her antagonistic relationship with Dr. Finkelstein, who created her, also goes nowhere. She's constantly trying to escape him (and succeeding mostly, as we see in perhaps the film's most macabre image, of Sally blissfully jumping off the tower in the doctor's lab) and he's constantly trying to lock her away.

That lack of comeuppance is genuinely frustrating to me, as it replicates itself in the plight of Lock, Shock, and Barrel. These three minions (voiced by Elfman, Paul Reubens, and Catherine O'Hara, who also voices Sally) are tasked with kidnapping Santa Claus so Jack can take his place on Christmas Eve to deliver presents to the children of the world. When Jack gives them this assignment, he gives them a simple warning: don't leave Santa Claus with Oogie Boogie, a malevolent force who lives on the outskirts of town. Being avid moviegoers, we all know what happens next: the minions give Santa Claus to Oogie Boogie, so he can get tortured and potentially killed. This provides the ammo for the assumed face-off between Oogie and Jack, but while that does impress, I didn't know why Jack never turned to Lock, Shock, and Barrel and was as angry at them for treating Santa Claus so disrespectfully, so rudely, so dangerously, as Oogie does. Sure, Oogie is the bad guy, but it's not like he literally yanks Santa Claus away for his own evil purposes.

Logistical questions like this one pestered at me as I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time in a couple of years. Some were more nitpicky--where is the crossing where the holiday trees are located and why do you not have to exit a door, as you do to enter, to leave?--but wondering why characters don't get their just desserts in the finale is a bit more concerning. If I want some kind of pay-off (and even in a movie like this, I expect it) and none is forthcoming, we have a major problem.

Don't get me wrong, I do like The Nightmare Before Christmas. I think it's got some genuine cleverness and wit in the script, it looks oddly beautiful, and the music has been stuck in my head for a few days now. I suppose the easy way to put it is that I don't get why Jack Skellington has become as popular and profitable as Mickey Mouse to the Walt Disney Company. I understand why they're selling so much related to the film; I just don't know why so many people are buying it. Perhaps it's that the characters, while visually arresting, are given so few traits that we glom our own personalities onto the creatures we'd want to be most like. In that respect, there's no question that The Nightmare Before Christmas is an unvarnished success.