An Extended Look at Ratatouille

Genius is a blessing and a curse. Who doesn't have that moment where they wished they knew the answer to a question, whether it's to sound important, put someone else in their place, or just show off? But being a genius has one obvious pitfall: once you prove yourself to be smart, or witty, or creative, or profound, everyone expects that much of you, if not more, in the future. If you don't pay off on the promise of your initial genius, people start to wonder. It may or may not be wrong of the consumer, of the audience, to measure artists not only by their current work, but to compare it to their past projects. But we all do it, even if we don't want to. And in judging artists and their work, we're all going in with certain expectations.

I imagine that some of the critics who rightly championed Pixar Animation Studios after its first film, 1995's Toy Story, started to wonder if they were viewing a fluke around 1998 and early 1999. In 1998, Walt Disney Pictures released Pixar's second feature, A Bug's Life, to positive, but not rapturous, reviews. Though the movie is a loving homage to Seven Samurai, it seemed a bit safer, a bit more commercial, than Toy Story. Both were quite funny, but this one may have lacked a bit of a heart. And what was Pixar's next movie? A...sequel to Toy Story? Did they have no more juice left? Of course, the skeptics were proven wrong with Toy Story 2, but even then, we see the issue of expectations rear its ugly head.

By the time 2007 rolled around, it wasn't that Pixar could do no wrong, so much as Pixar being able to do whatever it wanted. There had been quite a serious scare at Pixar Animation Studios when it seemed like Michael Eisner, the CEO of Walt Disney Pictures, would let the studio's contract lapse, with Cars and Ratatouille being Pixar's last films with the Mouse House. By the time Ratatouille opened, though, Eisner had been ousted from the company, and John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were at the top of Disney, not just Pixar. I imagine that the truly daring stories the Pixar filmmakers told from 2007 to 2010 weren't some kind of response, a flag being planted in Hollywood, in which they stated that they'd fully embraced the idea of making animated films that kids could enjoy, but weren't expressly for younger audiences. But there is an undeniable connection between Pixar becoming nearly an equal partner in the Walt Disney Company and it releasing four astonishingly good movies in four consecutive years.

That short but powerful streak began with Ratatouille, a movie with an absolutely ridiculous concept: a talking rat wants to be a chef in Paris and gets to be one by controlling a hapless loser like a marionette. It gets your attention, sure, but if a concept seems surer to be a weird failure, I'd like someone to point it out to me. Frankly, it's, I think, no accident that the stigma of the can't-work premise also connects with that four-year stretch. I remember distinctly sitting in the theater, watching the previews before Ratatouille in a crowd mostly full of families. The teaser for WALL-E came on, and whenever I think of it, I am impressed at its tone as much as I'm impressed by anything else Pixar has done. Most teaser trailers--especially by Pixar--feature a scene that won't appear in the final product or just bare hints of what's to come simply to encourage the target audience to get ready. The WALL-E trailer, while ending with a hint of what to expect, begins with its director, Andrew Stanton, giving a short genesis of the story. In it, he names Lasseter, the late Joe Ranft, and Pete Docter having a lunch in 1994 where they discussed future movies. By the time June of 2007 rolled around, only one of those movies hadn't been released: cue the scene from WALL-E.

I bring it up here to ask this: who is that trailer for? I find it hard to believe that the 8-year olds in the audience perked up at the idea of the Pixar braintrust meeting a year before Toy Story to discuss their creative future. I know it intrigued me, but I was even more intrigued by the taste of WALL-E, where we only heard one world of dialogue. That word was the titular character saying his own name, but as we all know, it sounds like a hybrid of R2-D2 and a voice manipulator. When I heard that single word, I knew I would be in the theater on opening day, and I also wondered how the hell Pixar would pull such a movie off. But then again, I was asking myself the same thing about Ratatouille.

One of the reasons why the four-year streak for Pixar is so impressive is not just because the four films--Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3--are incredible, but because they are so different from each other. Obviously, being directed by four different people makes for four different movies, but let's be honest: the four directors weren't known for making the same movies over and over again. Stanton moved from an emotional adventure about a neurotic father learning to let go to a near-silent love story between futuristic robots. Pete Docter moved from an alternate universe where the monsters under our bed are just as human as us to a man's piercing journey to Venezuela to pay homage to his dead wife. Lee Unkrich's first solo effort was in Toy Story 3, but his road was even more divergent, as he co-directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. And then there's Brad Bird.

I will be honest with you: I'm kind of disappointed that I won't be able to talk about Bird's first foray into live-action filmmaking, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on the show. Because it's a Paramount Pictures film, I won't be discussing it in depth, but I'm extremely curious to see what Bird can bring to the fourth installment of a well-worn franchise, even if he's got J.J. Abrams as a producer and actors like Jeremy Renner in front of the camera. Of any of the four directors, I think Bird has the most diverse resume, jumping from The Simpsons in the early 1990s to The Iron Giant in 1999, then to Pixar in 2004 with The Incredibles, then Ratatouille. The animated films he's directed may seem wildly divergent--and in many ways, they are--but they all have a clear personal stamp. You can hear Bird making his point--hell, in Ratatouille, he's all but shouting it--in each one, more powerful than its predecessor.

Creativity matters. Creativity must be encouraged, especially in a world that's become more cynical. And creativity comes from everywhere. Even though Bird is careful to also acknowledge that creativity of the kind that Remy shows in Ratatouille cannot be replicated in each of us, he's just as strongly telling us that it is unexpected, it is important, and it can be breathtaking. But we have to encourage it and be willing to have open minds. Perhaps that's an instruction to anyone, such as myself, who found the concept of the movie inherently ridiculous. "Don't judge this book by its cover. Give it a chance."

It's this epiphany that's so simple, so sincere, and so welcoming that Anton Ego, one of the ostensible antagonists of Ratatouille, embraces in the film's climax. The sequence leading up to this embrace, embodied in the form of a review, is one of the great scenes of the last decade of American film. Put it alongside the interrogation scene in The Dark Knight, the oil derrick sequence from There Will Be Blood, the scene where Paul Giamatti discusses his passion about wine in Sideways, or any other. There is, has been, and apparently always will be a stigma against animation, a stigma saying that animation can't be as good as live-action, because...well, it just can't be, right? If animation is better than live-action, if it upstages the common format, that can't be a good thing for the future of film.

But there's no question that Remy corralling his entire clan of rats, and his human friends Linguine and Collette--the latter coming back not purely for her love of Linguine, but because she believes as fiercely as Remy does that anyone indeed can cook--to prepare the titular dish for Ego so he can presumably eviscerate Gusteau's once again despite its newfound popularity is one of the most triumphant climaxes in a recent movie. Bird, arguably, is more successful here than in The Incredibles in crafting such a perfect, well-deserved ending. We have been waiting for the entire movie, waiting for someone to validate Remy as he wants to be validated. When Linguine tells Remy he's a good chef, we smile but know that Remy needs approval from a higher source. He wants it from a specific source. Even though the more obvious villain is Chef Skinner, who might as well be twirling a mustache despite being an enjoyably kooky bad guy as voiced by Ian Holm, from the get-go, we know that Remy and Ego will have to face off, in a manner of speaking.

That face off culminates not only with Ego getting a rush of childhood memories, but with him grappling with his role in culture and society in a very real, poignant, and honest way. The way that Brad Bird so incisively discusses criticism in its form and intent, plus the stentorian talents of Peter O'Toole, combine for a Pixar Moment. (Can I patent that term? I should, shouldn't I?) Without wanting to sound condescending, I honestly wonder how many children under the age of, say, 8 got the true meaning of Ego's review-cum-monologue. Yes, Ego likes Remy's food, but that's not what the review is about. In a movie that doesn't need to be about the place of creativity and art in the modern world, here is a scene that doesn't need to exist. And yet it does. The scene is beautiful and quite moving. In some ways, though you may think I'm heaping more than enough praise on Ratatouille, the deserved hosannas this movie gets are kind of the sword of Damocles hanging over Pixar's collective head.

When I walked out of Ratatouille, I didn't hide my admiration but wondered legitimately if Pixar could top itself at all, let alone with this strange-looking WALL-E. The following June, I asked myself the same question, except I wondered if Up would stem the tide of brilliance. And so it went in 2010 with Toy Story 3. Though Cars 2 clearly broke the streak--even the positive reviews weren't daring enough to compare this film positively to movies like WALL-E--I still ask the question. Maybe the more precise way to ask it is this: when is Pixar going to make an ambitious failure? All of their films have some ambition on display, even the Cars films. Their next movie is ambitious if only because, on the surface, it treads old ground by introducing the first Pixar princess. Two of its next features, despite not having titles, seem to be even more ambitious than its predecessors: one is about dinosaurs co-existing with humans as if asteroids never wiped them out, and the other is about the human mind. Any fears you might have had about Pixar cashing in with Cars 2 should be allayed by those loglines.

I don't exactly fear the first--and there will be one, there has to be--ambitious failure from Pixar. I kind of want to see what it looks like. In another world, Ratatouille or WALL-E is that failure. In this world, we'll have to wait. Though some wags may assume folks like me are waiting with bated breath to cut into Pixar for making such a film, I welcome it because the only thing that will ever turn me off of a Pixar film entirely is a lack of passion. Passion, like creativity, needs to be encouraged, needs to be developed over time. Like a great meal, it has many ingredients. Like the prickly protagonist of Ratatouille, it is surprising and proves that such passion can come from even the oddest of places. But passion is what makes Pixar so great, so universal, and so close to infallibility. Most importantly to this, passion is what makes Ratatouille one of the best American films of my generation.

An Extended Look at The Lion King

They were Skittles. I remember this part distinctly. I was in the front row of the theater on Friday, June 24, 1994, throwing Skittles at the big screen with the other kids I was seeing The Lion King with. I know that my parents weren't there with me; I was misbehaving, sure, but my parents were responsible enough that, had they been with me, I'd have been in my seat like a good boy. (Of course, for this specific movie, they weren't responsible enough to be in the theater, instead letting me see the movie with a couple of friends, one of whom was a bit older. But that's neither here nor there.) Yes, for some odd reason, the first time I saw The Lion King, it did not hold my attention as it should have. I also have a specific memory of thinking to myself after leaving the movie, "I think that movie might've been pretty good. I probably shouldn't have been throwing candy at the screen."

Suffice to say, I've had a lot of opportunities since that summer afternoon to actually pay attention to The Lion King. The movie is one of the most massively successful films Walt Disney Pictures has ever been involved in; it's made even more money since it was released in 3D for the first time last month, now more profitable than Toy Story 3. Though it's never been my favorite Disney animated film, either in general or in the Disney renaissance, The Lion King is an achievement that the studio has been trying to replicate for years: it got little boys to see a Disney movie willingly. I've discussed this on the show, but most times, when Walt Disney Pictures tries to lure in little boys to its animated movies, it falls on its face either somewhat or completely. See Tangled and The Black Cauldron, respectively. Simba isn't the most memorable Disney character, but just like Bambi, he's a compelling lead because his pain and redemption are universal.

That last word is the key that Disney animators struggle to achieve when focusing on male-centric movies. Not every boy recoils from every princess movie; what makes movies like The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast work so well is that the feelings and themes aren't specific to women, or specific to men. They are universal. We can all feel and have felt the way that Ariel, Belle, or Simba feel. Gender doesn't enter into it. When Disney movies seem more cultivated to appeal to only one gender, it seems more than clear that marketing is to blame, not creative elements. But then again, we are getting more and more proof that marketing is ruining the movies we cherish so much.

I don't get 3D. What's more, I'm frustrated that I have to consider 3D when I talk about The Lion King, a perfectly entertaining movie that's both rousing and haunting, enthralling and tragic. I've said it on the show and I'll say it in writing here: do not assume that 3D is why people want to see The Lion King in theatres, Walt Disney Pictures. People want to see the old Disney classics in theatres again because they are THE OLD DISNEY CLASSICS. 3D is an added effect that detracts from the movie for most people. How many people these days are crowing about how good 3D looks? Frankly, if the 3D doesn't look like trash, we might actually be a little more willing to give a movie's fancy format a pass. The 3D in The Lion King is unremarkable. That's seriously the nicest thing I can say about it. It could've been worse. I try not to judge a movie negatively if the 3D applied to it looks bad; that's not the movie's fault, depending on the situation. Some movies aren't ever intended to be seen in 3D, such as pretty much any old movie that will get the re-release treatment, either from Disney or another studio.

You probably know--OK, I'm willing to bet you already know--that on the heels of The Lion King doing so well in theatres this fall, Disney will be putting Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid, and Monsters, Inc. through the 3D treatment through 2013. While I applaud Disney finally re-releasing some of its more recent classics to theatres, as was done back all the way up to around 1990, I don't get why they don't just release the movies as they are. Don't screw with them. Just show me the movie that I saw as a kid. Just show the movie. You don't always need to make things new; have we learned nothing from George Lucas's constant tampering with the old Star Wars movies? Sometimes, I like what I like and I don't need it to change. Change isn't always bad; it's frequently good. But this kind of change is just a desperate plea for money that Walt Disney Pictures probably doesn't need that much.

Again, what annoys me most is that rewatching this in 3D and on Blu-ray (the latter is the better format by a very long shot) made me fixate on the format as opposed to the movie behind all of that. Maybe it's because so much of the movie is so familiar to us from the opening "Circle of Life" sequence all the way to the final battle between an adult, and finally mature, Simba and his devious schemer of an uncle, Scar. As tragic and sad as parts of The Lion King are, there's just as much fun to be had. The film's directors, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, have to balance the dark and the light very carefully here--don't forget, it's only a few minutes after Mufasa dies that we meet Timon and Pumbaa and learn about Hakuna Matata. For the most part, they do so with a deft touch, even considering how frequently this movie abandons the naturalstic realism that's a clear inspiration from Bambi. The movie's not perfect--the self-referential humor and celebrity voices that are a common cliche of DreamWorks Animation films have their origin here--but it's crowd-pleasing in a way that most Disney movies never have been.

Both times I rewatched the movie, I walked away with at least one concrete thought I hadn't ever really considered as a younger man: Jeremy Irons steals this movie without raising his voice. Irons, as Scar, helps create (along with animator Andreas Deja) one of the best Disney villains. Sure, we could criticize the movie for featuring good-hearted characters who aren't aware of the fact that a fellow character might as well be accompanied by evil music and hisses from audience members. But Irons' dry, droll performance is yet another reminder that this cool, cold British actor makes just about everything better. Scar isn't half the character without Jeremy Irons giving him a voice.

In some ways, The Lion King is the quintessential modern animated movie. We get memorable music, from Elton John and Tim Rice, as well as the incomparable Hans Zimmer. We get wacky comic relief. We have a simple yet relatable conflict. And, we have bouncy, eye-poppingly colorful animation. Even though the movie's creative achievements may not have surpassed that of other Disney Renaissance entries, The Lion King is as epic as an animated movie gets and remains essential viewing, no matter how old you are.

Ulterior Motives Are Everywhere!

I'm not usually going to spend time writing about the mainstream media's reaction to Disney, Pixar, or anything related to either company, but every once in a while, a guy has to blow off some steam, right? This article from tomorrow's New York Times by Brooks Barnes is, at best, lazy. At worst, it's somewhat infuriating. The basic concept, in case you'd rather not read it to get the full context, is that the article is a mini-profile of John Lasseter, head of Pixar and one of the top executives in the Walt Disney Company, on the eve of the Blu-ray release of Cars 2, which is now best-known as the most critically reviled Pixar movie in its existence. Is Lasseter hurt by the negative press? Is he worried about Pixar being thought of as a sell-out?

While these questions are, I suppose, interesting to consider and pose to Lasseter, Brooks Barnes isn't really interested in asking the questions so much as answering them himself. I suppose that's all Barnes can do--though the quotes from Lasseter are apparently culled from a two-hour lunch he had with the journalist, there are shockingly few quotes or paraphrases attributed to the filmmaker. Most of the arguments are not only made by Barnes' writing, but mostly by Barnes. First, he chooses to speak for critics at large: "Several of the most influential critics cheered the movie, but far more were negative, even gleefully so. They had been waiting a long time for this opportunity, after all. Lemon! Junk! Clutter!" Trash! Blubber! Tweak! See? I can shout out random words, too. While Cars 2 didn't do so hot with critics--including this one at the beginning of this podcast's existence--Barnes notes that the movie made over $550 million worldwide.

But here's where my dander goes up: the idea that Barnes posits here is that critics were excited to bash on Cars 2. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not going to assume what other critics think right now. I'll only speak for myself. I was extremely skeptical about Cars 2, partly because I'm not a big fan of the first film in the series, and partly because I wasn't sure that a sequel to the first film was merited. The latter point is why I was skeptical of the second and third Toy Story films and is why I'm skeptical of the upcoming Monsters, Inc. prequel. But guess what? When I sat down to watch Cars 2, I was also hopeful, because I'm not a masochist: I actually want to like movies I sit down to see. I'm not naive: I know there are some people in this world, among the paid critics and the unwashed masses, who enjoy hating something, or who want to hate something going into it. No matter how skeptical I was with Cars 2, I did not want to hate it. If anything, I'd begun wondering if I'd like the movie more simply because I had been lowering my expectations for so long.

So the idea that critics were sharpening their knives to destroy a Pixar movie is ridiculous. This argument may seem too complex to people like Mr. Barnes but as much as I did not like Cars 2, I wasn't happy to feel that way. If anything, as a fan of a) Pixar, b) animation, and c) movies, I was immensely disappointed. For Mr. Barnes, though, that's not the case. He goes on later to use his intense analytical mind to explain those mean reviews: "Read those Cars 2 reviews carefully, and it appears evident that the vitriol is less about the fast-paced film and more about resentment that Pixar has broadened its focus to sequels." Now, on the one hand, Mr. Barnes isn't so sloppy as to not reference any reviews in his article. He brings up four examples, including that of the resident New York Times critic, A.O. Scott, who was not so thrilled with the film. But none of the quotes prove this baseless idea Barnes puts forth.

I would certainly agree that Pixar focusing more on sequels is a negative idea, if that were the case. There are currently three Pixar sequels: Cars 2, and the second and third Toy Story films. Even though 2010 and 2011 brought two Pixar sequels to audiences, pretty much everyone can agree that Toy Story 3 is as fine a film as Pixar's ever made. And a lot of people are pretty happy with Toy Story 2, as well. Yes, as I mentioned above, 2013 brings us Monsters University, but don't forget, friends: as revealed at the D23 Expo, Pixar's upcoming slate also includes three completely original movies. So who exactly, aside from the pot-stirring Mr. Barnes, is that annoyed at Pixar for making sequels? The problem, at least for me, is not that Pixar is making sequels to some of its most popular movies. The problem is that Cars 2 was not, in my opinion, a very good movie. And that's all there is to it. There's no weird elitism on display here--Barnes references the "Nascar culture" as a reason why critics didn't think much of the first Cars. All there is, is people who aren't happy with one specific movie. And just one.

You may have noticed one element of this article I haven't really mentioned: John Lasseter. I will admit that I'm a bit baffled at Lasseter's typical effusiveness being applied to what I consider a weak effort for his company, but I also would much rather see him defend Cars 2 in a better forum than this idiotic article. Aside from him describing, again, what inspired him to make this movie and shaking off any idea that Cars 2 was forced upon the company to make merchandising money, he doesn't get much to say. The rest is, for all I know, fabricated from whole cloth by Mr. Barnes, who seems far, far more interested in furthering his agenda about Cars 2. Pixar and Lasseter are probably not breaking even the tiniest sweat over the movie, nor should they be. So don't misunderstand me: I have no beef with John Lasseter based on this article. What I do have a beef with is the concern trolling on display from the otherwise-esteemed Grey Lady.

An Extended Look at Waking Sleeping Beauty

I have a really great memory when it comes to completely unimportant information. I remember seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit in theaters in 1988. I remember the day I found out I couldn't go to see Jurassic Park in theaters--I was too young and just discovered that the movie would not be rated PG. I remember the first R-rated movie I saw in theaters, Air Force One. While my memory works well for other useless trivia, you can detect a pattern revolving around movies. And yet, while I was like a lot of other people my age and saw plenty of family films when I was a kid, I know that I remembered names of people I didn't need to remember.

How many people know who Glen Keane is? Probably not many, outside of his family, friends, co-workers, and those of us who are admirers of Disney animation from the 1980s onward. Does Don Hahn's name ring a bell? Probably not. But if you read the credits to movies, as I've always done, you know him as one of the producers of The Lion King and the producer of Beauty and the Beast. Hell, I still remember the epitaph memorializing Frank Wells' death back in 1994 in front of The Lion King. Because I know these names, and because I'm hosting a Disney movie podcast, watching Waking Sleeping Beauty, Hahn's 2009 documentary focusing on the tumultuous time from 1984 to 1994, from Disney Animation's nadir to its most triumphant moment, isn't a breathtaking revelation. But that's not exactly a bad thing.

The worst thing, sometimes, that a movie can be is not long enough. Such is the case with Waking Sleeping Beauty. The movie is, in some ways, a bit of a curio. If you're familiar with Disney animation and its history, then you probably have heard of this movie and may have even seen it. If you aren't that familiar with Disney animation or its history outside of knowing the classics and seeing them, you may be hearing about this movie for the first time. But let's be honest: if you see this movie, you know a lot of the major points Hahn covers. As head-shakingly confusing as it may be, you may know that there was once a time when Disney favored Pocahontas over The Lion King. But why is that the case, exactly? Even if it was as simple as some people thinking a tragic romance works better than a coming-of-age story, there could've been more description and discussion about the point outside of the one anecdote we get.

The other problem is that watching Disney Animation triumph once again, pushing past failures like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, is pretty gratifying. However, it becomes even more bittersweet and powerful when you put it in context.

While Hahn does mention The Black Cauldron, mostly in terms of the mood of the department when Jeffrey Katzenberg came to shake things up, he doesn't really acknowledge how much of a failure the film was perceived to be on creative and commercial levels. His offhanded mention of Don Bluth going on an exodus from Disney, bringing other animators along to his new company, is also frustrating. What effect, what impact did Bluth have on the company while he was there and after he left? Finally, what of Toy Story and the Pixar onslaught that presented itself as the end of the so-called Disney renaissance? Hahn chooses, for some reason, to mostly restrict himself to the time from 1984 to 1994, but the context goes much deeper.

This is not to say that Waking Sleeping Beauty isn't full of exciting filmmaking or fresh takes on older insights. An interesting choice that Hahn makes is to not have any new footage in his documentary. While there are clearly new interviews with people like Katzenberg, Michael Eisner, and many others, we only hear their voices. All that we see onscreen is home movies from animator Randy Cartwright, marketing materials, interviews, sketches, clips, and recording sessions. There are a few moments of stock footage, either of the Disney Animation building or of standard settings like hospital rooms, but they're not too frequent. By not relying on the talking-head documentary format, Waking Sleeping Beauty moves at a fast clip, never really taking any time to slow down unnecessarily. Of course, I still think that the movie could've benefited from being 2 hours, not 90 minutes. I can imagine that Hahn could've unearthed more footage to expand the film's running time, but what we have here isn't a draggy documentary by any means.

The chief takeaway I have from Waking Sleeping Beauty is that hundreds of people come together to make great cinematic art, not just one. Now, sure, I already knew that, but this is an interesting affirmation of that thought. Walt Disney didn't direct a single movie. But people probably think he did, because it's his name all over the movies. You go to Disneyland and Walt Disney World. He is just as associated with the movies, from before and after his death, as anyone else is. But his involvement waned as the years passed by. The men and women who came together to create The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, among others, did so under the guise of Walt Disney Pictures, but they did it to create something tangible, to prove that they could bring back the glory of animation to the Mouse House. What we should take away from this sterling film is that the people who made these movies partly did it to prove to themselves that they were worth the effort.

An Extended Look at Dumbo

We all assume that money can cure all our ills, from pretty much the day that we understand what money is. If we have money, we can buy anything we want, we can live in luxury, and we can make what we like, too. For the animators at Walt Disney Feature Animation, money is rarely an object that they even think about. Though they’re not always living high on the hog, they probably never need to worry too much about getting a budget increase on their latest project, as long as the Disney executives see potential merchandising moolah in the long run. We can bulge our eyes in surprise to see how much some recent Disney movies’ budgets were—Tangled had a $200 million budget, as an example—but that’s just the way things are these days.

But I wonder if sometimes, we need to learn a lesson from the history and production of 1941’s Dumbo. Here is a film with a budget of under one million dollars—and with inflation, that budget would still be well under 20 million today. Because 1940’s Fantasia did so poorly at the box office, despite being a major experimental leap for Walt Disney and his animators, they had to recoup their losses by making a cheap movie that would hopefully do well. Enter the little elephant with the oversized ears. Dumbo is well-known for its catchy and emotional songs, including “When I See an Elephant Fly” and “Baby Mine,” but it was also made dirt cheap, without seeming that way. Every so often these days, mostly in more independent films, we see filmmakers stretching their imaginations as hard as they can even if they don’t have massive budgets. Films such as Attack the Block become so memorable in spite of (or maybe because of) their low budgets, as they were created by people who knew how to use the money they had.

Dumbo is also very well-known for being very short. Depending on where you look and who you ask, it’s either 63 or 64 minutes long. Even when I was a kid, scanning the back of the VHS case, I knew this was a short movie. Something I’ve always done is get, weirdly, even more impatient with movies that are shorter than others. If I know your movie is under 90 minutes, I assume it will have a fleet, fast pace and if it doesn’t, I’ll be looking at my watch to make sure time isn’t moving backward. For the most part, Dumbo doesn’t inspire such a fidgety nature in me, but there are a few scenes where the only word I kept thinking of was “padding.” Movies as short as this one, movies that clearly couldn’t afford to spend a dollar more on themselves, shouldn’t ever make the audience think that scenes are meant to pad the running time.

Dumbo is a mostly enjoyable look at the world through the eyes of a child, which is what Disney films do best. Bringing us back to our inner child, as hokey as that might seem, is a primal experience. There’s no question that Dumbo invites such an experience, especially in the sometimes moving, sometimes jarring Baby Mine sequence. By the time this scene occurs, we’ve seen Dumbo—real name: Jumbo, Jr.—taken away from his mother, Mrs. Jumbo, after she lashed out at some obnoxious kids for using Dumbo as a figure of mockery. She’s now in her own padlocked cage and can only touch trunks with her little son, but the song that accompanies her swinging her son through her trunk is one of the great masterstrokes in the Walt Disney Pictures filmography.

The sequence set to that song, sung by Betty Noyes, is a little more distracting than I’d expected. Despite starting and ending the sequence with Dumbo and his mother, the Disney animators (lead by director Ben Sharpsteen) cut to the other animals in the traveling circus where Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo live. Here, we see happy animal families, not just the aching, open emotional wound that is the mother-son relationship of Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo. While I understand the point of this juxtaposition, I do think that the scene’s emotional power and weight is sapped just a bit by cutting to other animals. What’s more, with the exception of this scene, the opening sequence where storks deliver newborn babies to the various animals in the circus, and a short parade scene early on, we don’t really see other animals in the circus at all. If anything, having them in the Baby Mine sequence seems to be a shoehorned-in insertion that accomplishes nothing.

I suppose I’m on my guard when watching this movie, because I go into it thinking about how short it is and how cheaply it was made for. With only a certain amount of time and money to work with, I guess I assume or hope that the filmmakers know how to utilize both correctly. Though the Baby Mine sequence is, to me, a bit of a misstep, it’s nothing compared to the two scenes in Dumbo that are squirm-inducing to all but the biggest Disney supporters: the roustabout scene and the scene with the crows. The latter is, I think, a bit more obvious, but both make me uncomfortable. Of course, one of the things everyone knows about Dumbo is that he can fly thanks to those big ears of his. That it takes Dumbo 50 minutes to realize that he can do this is a bit strange, but neither here nor there.

Dumbo and his friend, Timothy Q. Mouse, fly up a tree after getting drunk on champagne one night. Once the morning comes, they’re quite hungover but visited upon by five crows, who jeer and mock them for being there. What’s more, the crows mock Timothy once he comes upon the conclusion that Dumbo must have flown them up there, cueing up “When I See An Elephant Fly.” All of this is fine, of course, but the problem is in how the crows are depicted. The leader, voiced by Cliff Edwards of Jiminy Cricket fame, is named Jim. Jim Crow. There is a character, voiced by a white man, named Jim Crow. What’s worse is that all of the crows are dressed up and sound like stereotypical representations of African Americans in entertainment of the time.

I’m not naïve: I know that plenty of other movies, TV shows, and more portrayed African American men and women inappropriately and in a potentially racist fashion during the 1930s and 1940s. I suppose it just hurts a bit more when it comes from, in some way, the man whose imagination seemed to have no end when he made movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia (though the latter has had its own racial-based controversies). I, and many other fans, know that Disney is better than this, so it’s just painful. Now, the crows in Dumbo aren’t fools; they mock Timothy, not Dumbo. You could explain away that scene, and while I still feel icky watching it, I can live with a counterargument.

Not so with the roustabout scene, which I still don’t know has a great reason to exist in the first place. In this scene, directly after the stork sequence and the Casey Jr. train song, most of the elephants and dark-skinned roustabout circus workers do their best to put up the big tent in a new city during a torrential downpour. The scene is accompanied by the “Song of the Roustabouts,” whose lyrics are as troublesome as the depiction of the men singing it. They tell us that they gamble their money away and are lazy. Here’s the kicker: there are white circus workers, too, but they get something the dark-skinned roustabouts do not: faces. Yes, the dark-skinned roustabouts are literally faceless. In a movie that’s barely over an hour, you assume that every scene serves a purpose, but for the life of me, I can only see negative reasons for this scene’s existence.

Again, Dumbo is a mostly successful film despite having those questionable scenes and feeling a bit padded and/or rushed. I appreciate how quickly this film was made (it took less than a year, for the most part) and that the Disney animators were working with a very tight budget. That doesn’t help me forgive the movie’s flaws, but helps me understand the majority of them. And don’t get me wrong: for a 70-year old movie, the Blu-ray for Dumbo is incredible. Though the roustabout scene’s content is disturbing for the wrong reasons, the rain that falls on the characters looks sharp and real, as if falling from the actual sky. The brilliant animation of the characters, especially Dumbo, as well as the psychedelia of the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence, is only heightened by this new format. Whatever qualms I have about the movie don’t eliminate the fact that Dumbo is still appealing and fun to the childlike nature in all of us.

An Extended Look at Atlantis: The Lost Empire

I imagine something that matters most to many of the people fortunate enough to work for the Walt Disney Company, especially those in Walt Disney Feature Animation, is the legacy they get to not only leave behind, but create. Sure, most of those people will never get the same kind of recognition that Disney himself or, these days, John Lasseter gets from the adoring public, but the legacy they leave behind can be just as powerful or important. There are a few really good modern examples of this; two directing duos were involved with some incredibly influential films, even though theirs are not household names. John Musker and Ron Clements directed Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, the movie that pretty much singlehandedly saved Walt Disney Pictures from mediocrity, embarrassment or, even worse, obscurity.

But Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale are the duo I want to focus on for just a bit. Trousdale has since moved on from Walt Disney Feature Animation to work for DreamWorks Animation. He has five directing credits to his name, the latter two being holiday specials for NBC based on the movies Madagascar and Shrek. His first directing effort was 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in just a couple of months. He helmed the film with Wise, who’s also moved on from Disney, to Sony Pictures Animation. After helming the only movie to legitimately get nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (I say “legitimately” because Beauty and the Beast got nominated when there were only five Best Picture nominees, not ten), Wise and Trousdale probably felt like the world was their oyster. Heck, to the higher-ups at Disney, that was probably the case. So in 1996, they directed The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

While The Hunchback of Notre Dame is nowhere near Beauty and the Beast in terms of its historical relevance or its overall quality (at least to me), it’s an ambitious project with generally memorable songs and impressive animation. Even though the two films aren’t exactly made from the same cloth, there are strong similarities between the stories fueling both projects. Five years later, Wise and Trousdale made their last film for Walt Disney Pictures: 2001’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Your guess is as good as mine. Seriously, though, I’m sure that Wise and Trousdale felt the need to, at least, do something more than a love story. (There is, of course, a romance in the movie, but it’s pretty much tossed in at the last second.) Atlantis: The Lost Empire is yet another solid attempt at getting boys to watch Disney movies, and like most of those attempts, it failed commercially and qualitatively.

The stigma has always been there, mind you, but it’s become far more pronounced over the past 25 years: Disney movies are for girls. If you took your children to Disneyland or Walt Disney World, they could go to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and walk out looking like princesses. The first Disney movie is about a princess, and most of the other iconic films in the canon are about young women falling in love after staving off some kind of adversity. Not every Disney movie is like that, but most of the popular ones are. For every Cinderella, there is a Sword in the Stone, and for every Little Mermaid, there is an Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

It’s come to the point where Disney executives try their best to hide princess movies from little boys in fear that they won’t see them. The original name for Tangled, the 2010 Disney film, was Rapunzel, seeing as the story is about a girl named Rapunzel. But the marketing for the film obscured that fact, emphasizing the role of Flynn Rider, the young hunk who Rapunzel falls for. Now, Tangled is a fine movie (though I would argue it’s been highly overrated by people who chose to ignore the down-home charms of 2009’s The Princess and the Frog), but the title is pointless. All it tells me is that the people who run Walt Disney Pictures rely too heavily on focus groups and demographic data as opposed to focusing on solid creative storytelling.

Regarding Atlantis: The Lost Empire, the problem is simple and has been replicated since movies like The Black Cauldron: half of the movie is for teenage boys and half of it is for little kids, boy or girl. The story, where a nerdy linguist goes on an epic adventure to find the lost city of Atlantis with a group of explorers, could easily be straight from the Indiana Jones playbook if the fedora-wearing hero was as dorky on his adventures as he is in his classroom. The execution is where Atlantis stumbles. An early action sequence, where the crew of the ship searching for Atlantis have to fight off a massive electronic creature that looks like a lobster and scorpion had a kid, is both thrilling and troubling, especially since it ends in a somewhat realistic fashion: a number of nameless characters die. So when we spend some time with one of the survivors, a French scientist who acts like a mole, I have to ask: is this movie for children or teenagers?

The issue of appropriateness—which isn’t something I intend on harping on with any movie, seeing as I don’t have any kids to worry about—is but one problem here. Some of the others are far less troubling, I’d wager, to the mass audiences, but they really threw me off. First of all, and this should go without saying at this point, but this story feels so overheated and rote in many ways. Though I know that Indiana Jones wouldn’t be as shocked that the explorers helping him find Atlantis are doing so for nefarious purposes, he would potentially throw his lot in with a bad crowd simply so there could be a few daring action sequences where he shows them who’s boss. Here, though I appreciated the fact that there’s about 20 minutes where Milo Thatch, our nerdy linguist protagonist, has to reconcile the fact that he’s been surrounded by scoundrels for a long time, I also don’t find it a story told with any panache. If you tell me a derivative story and don’t hide it with something shiny or cool, you’re gonna lose me.

Another serious problem, but one that mass audiences definitely won’t consciously notice, is derivation of a more troubling kind. When the main antagonist of your movie looks like another Disney movie’s main antagonist, you have a dilemma on your hands. Milo, voiced by Michael J. Fox, is led around by Commander Rourke, voiced by James Garner, until Rourke reveals himself to be a money-hungry mercenary. From the get-go, even though they dress differently, Rourke looks a whole lot like Percival McLeach, the bad guy from The Rescuers Down Under, the 1990 sequel to The Rescuers. Now, sure, The Rescuers Down Under isn’t exactly considered a vaunted classic to most Disney fans, but it’s still a movie that came out in theaters and had a uniquely intimidating villain, not least because his voice was provided by George C. Scott. Rourke and McLeach could be brothers, and when you’re reminded that a character from a new movie looks like a character from an old one, that’s bad news.

That’s also a sign of cost-cutting measures. I have no idea if the people who worked on Atlantis: The Lost Empire had to keep costs down—frankly, my guess is that never happened—but when Disney animators were forced to go to the well of old animation in the past, they did so to save money. If you watch Robin Hood, the worst offender of this kind, you’ll notice that some of the scenes just look like those from movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but with animals that walk and talk, not humans. When Little John starts dancing with Maid Marian’s nurse hen, you may be reminded of the scene in The Jungle Book where Baloo and King Louie dance to “I Wanna Be Like You,” because the storyboards for both films are the same. I wonder if the character design looking derivative in Atlantis was intentional, but it sure was distracting.

The final distraction, the one that tipped it for me, was a bit of miscasting. It’s a rare complaint I have when a character is miscast, but it happens twice here, with Fox and Garner. Both have good voices for animation, and both do serviceable work as Milo and Rourke. But neither actor has the right chops for the characters based on how their arcs play out. While Michael J. Fox could be a bundle of nervous energy as a live-action performer, his voice just doesn’t fit coming out of a nerdy guy’s body. Even worse, while Garner nails Rourke’s paternal side in the first half of the film, once he’s revealed to be a villain in the last 40 minutes, it’s a failure all around. Garner does his best to exude menace (usually by growling his lines), but he just sounds too friendly to be a bad guy.

I wanted to like Atlantis: The Lost Empire more than I did, if only because I went into it knowing very little about its history or its plot. I knew it was an adventure, which I like, and I knew it combined hand-drawn and computer-generated animation. While I was excited for the prospect of such visuals, I was let down by how cardboard the characters looked behind the expansive and technologically fancy backgrounds. I can’t say I was let down by the film, but I also walked away mostly unimpressed. Though it’s not as bad as some recent Disney animated films (hello, Chicken Little), it’s also not something I’m going to remember in a week. I can only imagine that’s the opposite of the legacy Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale wanted to leave behind.

An Extended Look at So Dear To My Heart

Nostalgia fuels the Walt Disney brand. No one can deny this, and when the various movies, TV shows, CDs, toys, and attractions under the Disney umbrella work, it’s not a bad thing. Nostalgia is why I go to the Disney theme parks at least once a year. Nostalgia seeps out of every orifice, every pore, every rock, and every tree of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Nostalgia is why the company is able to sell products of every kind to people who passed their literal childhoods long ago. As I’ve said before and will say again, the best that Disney has to offer is awakening our inner child.

But nostalgia is a precarious, often dangerous thing to utilize in entertainment. Our memories of watching various movies, for instance, is steeped in nostalgia. When, a week ago, news broke that Nike was selling a limited number of sneakers meant to look like those seen in the 2015 sequence of Back to the Future, Part II on eBay to help out Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s foundation, it wasn’t just news because Nike was doing a good deed for charity. It was news because we all fondly thought back to that movie, its cheerful notions of what the year 2015 would look like, and our experiences in watching the film. Think of any number of movies from the 1980s that were aimed at teenagers or twentysomethings, and you’ll likely find a lot of nostalgia within. From The Goonies to Return of the Jedi to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, nostalgia dominates our memories of movies from our childhood.

And the problem is that the nostalgia makes us look past the actual movies. I mentioned this a while back when discussing 1991’s The Rocketeer, which was a movie I greatly enjoyed as a child. I hadn’t watched the film in years—probably close to or more than 15—and while I got a huge kick out of it even as an adult, I wondered: do I actually think this is a good movie, or am I just enjoying the fact that the movie isn’t ripping my memories to pieces? I still think the movie’s pretty damn good, but I did at least remain conscious of the idea that nostalgia for something doesn’t always mean that thing was good to begin with.

So it’s interesting to consider So Dear To My Heart, a 1949 film from Walt Disney, the man, as it’s drowning in nostalgia from the moment the opening credits roll. Let’s dispense the plot of the movie instantly, as it’s so minor, I was nearly offended. Jeremiah is a little boy living in a small town in Indiana in 1903. One day, one of the lambs on the farm his grandma and uncle help run give birth to a few babies, including one that’s completely black and is shunned by its mother. Jeremiah takes the lamb as his own and tries to raise it to compete in a county fair. Will Jeremiah’s grandmother let him go to the county fair? If so, will his new pet, Danny, win?

The phrase low-stakes came to mind frequently during this 82-minute movie, which was originally meant to be the first fully live-action film from Walt Disney. Though So Dear To My Heart ended up having some animation sequences, I think Disney made the right decision to go a little bigger with the movie that wound up being the first of its kind from the company, 1950’s Treasure Island. Even if the latter movie isn’t one of the great Disney movies—or isn’t thought of in that way by most people—I imagine it’s a far better movie than what we have in So Dear To My Heart, which is just strange, baffling, and dull all around. I have no problem with greeting-card sentimentality, as long as it stays in greeting cards, not in feature films.

Jeremiah is played by Bobby Driscoll, who was the first kid actor to get a big boost in his career by working with Walt Disney. He was one of the children in 1946’s controversial Song of the South, and would go on to appear in Treasure Island and provide the voice of the title character in Peter Pan. Not a bad run for a kid who would only live to age 31, dying in New York of heart failure due to drug abuse. Driscoll isn’t particularly memorable here, but along with his work in a more dramatic film in 1949, he was awarded the juvenile Academy Award. I found some of his work with Burl Ives, as his uncle, and Beulah Bondi, as his grandmother, stilted, but he’s no worse or better than most of the children who appeared in Disney live-action or hybrid movies throughout the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s.

Bondi and Ives are pretty much the only saving grace here, and that’s not saying much. Bondi does her very best to give her character some weight and gravity. Though the religious mentions caught me off guard—Walt Disney may have inspired many people, such as myself, to revere his work in a similarly fervent manner as some people react to religious texts but rarely invoked overtly religious references—I thought that Bondi did a fine job in a mostly thankless role as the antagonist in a movie that doesn’t require one. One late monologue she delivers has very hamhanded dialogue, but the dedication she has is impressive. Bondi, who I almost didn’t recognize from her superlative work in the 1937 melodrama Make Way for Tomorrow, isn’t nearly as incredible here, but she is quite good.

The real problem with So Dear to My Heart is that it has no internal logic, or the directors—Harold Schuster does the live-action work and Hamilton Luske did the animation work—don’t care to deal with it. Being fair, I shouldn’t include Luske here, as the animated sequences are so laughably shoehorned in. It’s no surprise to learn that Walt Disney added the sequences in because he feared, or was told by others in the company, that no one would see a movie from the company if there weren’t animated characters. They could’ve been right. Certainly, I can’t imagine this movie doing too well with audiences without the animation. Let’s not forget: the movie didn’t do that well WITH animation, so I can only imagine what legacy the film would’ve left behind as just a straight live-action movie that’s 65 minutes long.

But the internal logic is the main culprit here. The best example is Tildy, the fourth character in the movie. We have Jeremiah, Grandma, Uncle Hiram, and then there’s Tildy. Who is Tildy? Well, she’s a girl in town that Jeremiah plays with. Or, she’s Jeremiah’s sister. Or, she’s Jeremiah’s cousin. Or, she’s…you can see the problem. Unless I managed to miss a bit of exposition—or detail from any of the plot summaries I hunted down—I have no idea who Tildy is and what her relationship is to the rest of the characters. I could, frankly, argue about the way the other three characters are presented. Why not have Uncle Hiram be Hiram, Jeremiah’s dad? Why is Jeremiah being raised by his grandma? I’ve literally had to check and recheck plot summaries online to make sure I’m not the crazy one: Tildy’s relationship is never explained. I guess she’s Jeremiah’s friend. But I don’t know. And I don’t know what happened to Jeremiah’s parents.

Internal logic is a thorny problem, and here’s why. Sometimes, directors and writers don’t care to answer certain questions of a movie’s logic. It just happens that the audience shouldn’t know the answer to a question, or the director doesn’t have an answer. Here’s the thing: I can be fine with a lack of internal logic if you’re presenting me with an otherwise entertaining product. So Dear to My Heart is not that product. This is a movie that suffocates the audience in nostalgia for something that, at the time, did not exist. As a Disney theme park nut, I can understand the attraction to watch this movie. In some ways, looking at the setting of this movie is to look at preliminary plans for Main Street, U.S.A. On that level, the movie is something of a curio. Otherwise, we are left with a lifeless, lackluster lark. (Cheesy or not, that alliteration was more fun for me to write—and for you to read—than watching this movie.)