Beauty and the Beast (1991)

During the “Disney Renaissance” Disney’s animation studios relied on a often ridiculed formula: Discontent, strong headed young woman breaks social norms and finds fulfillment in some kind of forbidden love. Add a broadway soundtrack, a plucky, wisecracking male counterpart, a megalomaniacal villain and lots of goofy comic relief characters and, bam, you have a 1990s Disney movie. Sure there are deviations from this but for the most part this is it. Beauty and the Beast is no exception in terms of the formula but it just so happens that in terms of the particulars of this fairy tale that the Disney formula churns out the maximum amount of magic possible.

Based on an 18th century French fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast tells the story about a haughty and uncaring young prince who is cursed by an enchantress when he refuses to provide hospitality to a poor old woman. To make his outward appearance match his spiritual state the prince is then turned into a “beast” (a 100% awesome half-animal, half man hybrid) with the stipulation that he will be stuck that way unless he learns to love by his 21st birthday. Unfortunately for the prince's servants they too are all cursed and for some reason that means they have to be anthropomorphized furniture and household goods.....like a libidinous singing candlestick. Yeah.

Meanwhile, Belle, a hipster living in a provincial French village (in other words, somewhere other than Paris) has decided that she doesn’t want to marry the misogynistic and yet oh so dreamy Gaston, the second funniest Disney villain of all time. Also in the meantime, Belle’s father, a good intentioned yet bungling inventor, has set off to enter some sort of steam-powered guillotine (hey, it’s France) into a contest of some sort and gets lost in the process. Eventually he stumbles on the beasts castle, finds out about talking, skirt chasing candles and winds up tossed into the beast's dungeon (apparently he hasn’t changed much over the years). This of course leads Belle to come and look for him where she in turn confronts the beast and, out of love for her father, she agrees to take his place. The beast, moved by her sacrifice, agrees on the grounds that she stays forever and he proceeds to essentially make her his permanent dinner guest. An improbable love story ensues, it is awesome, and you probably know what happens. They dance in a ballroom.

Beauty and the Beast is a really great movie and, I believe, still the only Disney movie to ever be nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards. Like any Disney movie it was essentially a collaborative effort of a team of animators, and for the first time, professional writers, but a few key lights shined through. One was the addition of Linda Woolverton who wrote the screenplay (a Disney animated first) that ultimately won over Jeffrey Katzenberg who had refused to produce the movie until a better story could be produced. Woolverton was a total noob to film writing and had been working doing some writing for Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers (totally awesome) when a novel she wrote for children was read by Disney executives. It must have impressed them because she got the job and, clearly, she did a great job because she has had a pretty illustrious career at the House of Mouse ever since. We’ll have to see how her movie about Maleficent turns out!

Then there was Howard Ashman. Ashman, the guy who wrote Little Shop of Horrors for broadway, did a lot to help Disney in this time period since much of the creative work and virtually all of the music for the Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast were done by him and his partner Alan Menken. Unfortunately, Ashman was dying of AIDs at the time of Beauty and Beast's production and he would never actually live to see it released, though it is said that he worked frantically from his home in New York City right up to the end. While I think this was tragically misspent time Beauty and the Beast does have one of if not the very best soundtrack of any of the 90s Disney movies. If you haven’t heard and liked "Be Our Guest" then all I have to say is, YOU LIAR.

The animation was really great, an improvement on the Little Mermaid, but perhaps not as rich as future films like Pocahontas (a beautiful turd). The score is as good as anything in a major movie, the broadway songs funny and well choreographed, the characters are endearing, even the villain, and....rarity of rarities....there is a very beautiful moral message about love and humility. I’ll also go out on a limb and declare Belle to be my favorite fictional Disney princess.

It’s your sister's favorite Disney movie and one of mine too.

I give it 4.8 wilting roses under a bell-jar

Dumbo (1941)

Produced quick and cheap just before World War II, Dumbo was originally only intended to make some money and keep the studio in the public eye until the release of Bambi. But in order to make Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia Walt Disney had gathered the most improbably large and talented team of animators and storytellers to ever be assembled, so it shouldn’t be surprising that a “quick little film about a circus elephant” made by such a group of people turned out to be good. What is surprising is that it’s actually something of a masterpiece in terms of both animation and storytelling.

Based on a children’s book that was reworked by legends Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, Dumbo tells the story of an outcast baby circus elephant born with enormous ears that simultaneously serve as the cause of his social trials and his eventual triumph since, it turns out, they also give him the power of flight, making him the star act at the circus. While this overarching story is straightforward, if not cartoonish (duh), there is a strong, well developed connection established between Dumbo and his mother who in the course of events is suddenly taken away, creating all of the movies best dramatic tension and heart-wrenching moments. I dare anyone to not be moved when little Dumbo goes to visit his mother for the first time since she was locked up. Of course the effect is only enhance by good music and this movie has loads of that as well. It also has great supporting characters and a number of brilliant moments like the ever popular “pink elephants on parade” sequence.

At a runtime of about an hour it’s one of Disney’s shortest feature films but it’s one that has, maybe, the most heart. Many consider it the greatest animated movie of all time, with good reason, and I come pretty close to agreeing with them.

  I give it 4.8 magic feathers

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

More than any other Disney movie Snow and the Seven Dwarfs is the closest thing that can be said to be a direct creation of Walt Disney himself. Though he had long given up actual animators duties to run what had come to be far and away America’s greatest cartoon studio, Disney still closely worked on the production of just about everything produced at the time but even more so when it came to Snow White.

Disney’s entire career up to the late thirties had been built upon his ability to innovate and his willingness to take huge, uncalculated career threatening risks. He introduced sound to cartoons with Steamboat Willie (at great expense), he introduced color to animation and technicolor to film in general with his Silly Symphonies (at great expense), and he drastically improved upon the role of story and character in cartoons as well (at great expense). The next logical step, and something a number of people in the entertainment industry had long been hoping for, was to take his creative impulses and great attention to detail (and poor financial planning) and apply it to the creation of a full length animated feature film. And Disney agreed, realizing that the future of his company rested on achieving that very thing. Shorts just weren’t profitable, then or now, and therefore Disney had to break into the business of making movies in a more traditional sense to stay afloat.

Snow White was something like five years in the making and cost something like six times what was the intended budget of $250,000, which itself was around ten times the budget of a conventional Disney cartoon short. It was a groundbreaking undertaking of monumental proportions. The studio had to expand by hundreds of artists in order to get the work done on time and Disney even had to take out a mortgage on his own house to finance the project at one point. What looked like an obvious next step for animations greatest visionary gradually began to look like the beginning of the end for Disney studios. Snow White would have to be improbably successful if Disney was to even break even and Disney was working in uncharted waters. Would audiences have the stamina to sit through a feature length cartoon?

The debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has turned into one of the great milestones in film history. Not only had Disney reinvented the animation industry, again, but he also produced what the critics unanimously believe to be one of the greatest, most likely the greatest, animated film of all time. The film got a standing ovation, earned Disney some academy awards (not for best picture though), made giant piles of money worldwide, and ensured the success of Disney studios for the hard times that would be brought on by the war in the future. So what do I think about it? Is it really the greatest animated movie of all time?

Darn close. Snow White is fantastic by most anyone’s measure. Animation wise, it is a very beautiful thing to behold and up until that point there had never been seen anything even remotely like it. In fact, not only was Snow White the first full length cel animated film, but I am fairly certain that it was also the first completely color film as well. Disney also opted to portray his human characters in a more realistic manner, compared to his other cartoons, and though at times a little wonky the results are fairly spectacular. For instance, every detail of every motion of Snow White herself is beautiful and expressive. From the looks and gestures she offers as she chastises the Dwarfs for having dirty hands to the look of shock as she turns to see the huntsman standing over her with a knife. We’re used to this kind of fine detail in animated films now but at the time it must have been earth shaking to see a cartoon out perform flesh and blood actors.

The story itself is also a lot of fun if not somewhat contrived. Snow White is beautiful, through and through (a sort of saint), and her evil step mother though ironically very beautiful externally just cannot match the beauty of Snow White where it really counts. a In a rage of jealousy the queen orders the murder of Snow White (yes, this is the very first full length, cel animated film and it has a character that wants to murder another character) but thankfully, as it turns out, the guy commanded to kill Snow White isn’t nearly as big a douche as the queen and he warns Snow White to run away. Fearful and confused, Snow White dashes into the woods, in one of the films best sequences wherein she has visions of trees coming to life and attacking her, and there she is helped by animal friends to find shelter. She happens upon a cottage where seven cute and funny Dwarfs live and much classic Disney cartoon shenanigans ensue. But the queen, ever vigilant douche that she is, still wants to kill Snow White and so she “disguises” herself as an old, slightly less than attractive woman with a cursed apple. Snow White bites it and falls into a Sleeping Beauty style death-sleep. The Dwarfs overcome the queen, and the Prince who’s barely in the movie at all, comes like literally out of nowhere and kisses Snow White back to life.

 It's simple and gripping, the pacing is very good, and while the film is also full of fun cartoon antics, like a funny scene where animals help Snow White clean house to “Whistle While You Work”, most everything pulls the story forward. Speaking of the music, it’s actually one of the very best Disney soundtracks out there and while Snow White has an admittedly strange voice she can also sing like the dickens. I mean she hits notes that I didn’t even know existed. Character wise she is also unique. Though she sort of sets the mold for all Disney princesses to come, there is something wholly unearthly about Snow White as she is the one Disney princess who is actually presented as being essentially perfect in virtue. I know this is going to sound awful but I am not joking when I say that she reminds me of the Virgin Mary. When I think about the life of Mary and how she was when she walked in the world I imagine something very much akin to Snow White. Many people find this to be a flaw in the movie (and my character) but I personally love the way she is portrayed in this way.

This isn’t to say the movie is, for me, perfect. But it sure comes close and I do consider it one of the best movies ever made. The one major flaw, though, is the role played by the Prince and his virtually non-existent relation to Snow White. He professes his love to her briefly at the beginning of the movie and then just shows up, without good explanation, at the right place and at the right time to break Snow Whites curse. I mean she’s dead like a couple of minutes and there he is happily singing on the back of a horse. But how in the name of Texas does this guy know not to be worried but to show up happily singing a song and then just kiss her? He knew how to break the spell, but why? And also if Snow White is the princess then what does that make the prince? Is he like her brother? Maybe her cousin....maybe? A strange wandering prince that is unrelated? How can the princess marry the prince from the same castle? Do I want to know?

Whatever. It’s a classic and beautifully engrossing.

I give it 4.6 juicy red apples

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

The last hand painted animated Disney film, before the dawn of xerography, sleeping beauty was also the most expensive Disney movie ever made at the time of it’s release....it was also the studios biggest financial disappointment and its failure so discouraged Walt Disney that he would never again, as was his former inclination, put so much time, energy, or money into an animated feature as long as he lived. The man who had always pushed the envelope to such extremes, all while ignoring financial constraints like any sensible person, gave in to tighter schedules and smaller budgets over and against artistic realization. This is fine with me because Walt Disney would instead pour out his creativity and intense perfectionism into Disneyland which would only continue to improve throughout the late fifties and early sixties. Ever been on Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion? Yeah, that’s what he was up to, so I guess it all worked out in the end.

The main reason Sleeping Beauty did so poorly at the box office was simply that it cost too much to make, having spent nearly a decade in production. Thus while it did sell tickets during its initial release it just didn’t sell enough to balance out the costs. Critically, I don’t think any other Disney movie has ever enjoyed such a reversal of opinion, from bad to good that is. Back then Disney was artistically done with as far as the intellectual elite were concerned. For some he had almost come to embody the 1950s Eisenhower era, buzz-cut sporting square conservatism that would make old pictures of my dad so awesome and which so many educated people still love to hate.... which is really ironic considering Disney’s populist roots.

Anyway, Disney was no longer cool. He was too mainstream, too darn popular, and had given testimony against people he took be communist enemies of America (I don’t know if they were) during the red scare days and, really, that was probably enough to turn critical opinion against him almost as a matter of principle. Sleeping Beauty was described as boring, drawn out, and lacking in detailed character development or story. All the things that avant-garde elitists pretend to love but suddenly hate when it comes time to analyze a Disney movie. More than 50 years later, however, this Disney classic is back on top where it belongs and now critics will typically describe it as not only one of the greatest animated films of all time but probably one of the very best films of all time.

I second this sentiment. Sleeping Beauty is an astonishingly beautiful and experimentally dreamlike movie. Based on the eponymous french fairytale, Sleeping Beauty tells the story of a princess named Aurora who is cursed as an infant to die by the time of her sixteenth birthday by a vindictive evil fairy named Maleficent who was apparently the sole person not invited to what I assume must have been the princess’s baptism. Thankfully, though, the cursed princess is blessed, literally, to also have had three fairy Godmothers present (at her baptism?) who are able to mitigate the spell so that instead of dying young she will instead simply sleep perpetually until she is awakened by the kiss of someone who truly loves her....you know, loves true kiss. (You better know, it’s a narrative tool that’s been used in like half a dozen major Disney films since the 1930s!) But just to make sure, the three good fairies take Aurora away from the palace of her parents, rename her Briar Rose, and raise her themselves as a peasant until her 16th birthday at which time they intend to reunite her with her parents so that she can marry Prince Philip to whom she is betrothed. As Providence would have it, Philip and Briar Rose meet prior to this in what I think is the greatest single musical sequence ever to be produced by Disney, “Once Upon a Dream” (we all know it), and they fall in love unaware of Briar Rose’s identity as the princess.

Of course Maleficent eventually finds them out and executes her curse against Aurora leaving Prince Philip and the three fairy Godmothers in a dramatic struggle against powerful evil forces that must be overcome if Aurora is to be awakened and order restored to the land. This eventually leads to an incredibly memorable battle between Prince Philip (armed with a shield of virtue and a sword truth) and a fire breathing dragon.... and mark my words, every movie dragon in history, to this very day, pales in comparison to this one (bring it on Peter Jackson!). Except for maybe Bruce Leeroy in the Last Dragon. That guy caught a bullet with his teeth. Sho-nuff!

The visuals in this movie, as I’ve said, are stunning and unique within the Disney canon. Based on medieval art, the scenery and characters have a angular, two dimensional quality akin to images on stained glass and yet the world is richly textured and lush with beauty. The animators did a great job of making the contrast felt between Maleficent’s dark castle and the rest of the world apparent. The forest where Aurora and Philip dance with each other is full of light, lush greenery, charming Disney critters, etc. The castle shines in the distance with medieval utopian splendor, and yet Maleficent lives in darkness surrounded by her goblins, brooding about how pissed off she still is that she wasn’t invited to a child’s party. They must have had one of those inflatable jumping things.

The score is also maybe the best ever used in a Disney film, based entirely on the music for the ballet of the same name written by Tchaikovsky, it will haunt your mind for days after seeing the movie.

The story itself gets a lot of flack for featuring and developing the main characters so little but I don’t think it ought to. The main characters in this movie aren’t Aurora or Prince Philip. The genius of Sleeping Beauty is that it is a highly stylized visual metaphor for the struggle between good and evil with evil being represented by the beautiful and powerful Maleficent and good being represented by, well, everyone else. That is, this isn’t a Manichean world of good and evil locked in endless struggle but rather a world, like our own, that is fundamentally good in itself with deviations that are driven, at root, by the pride of individuals. Maleficent, far and away the most menacing of all Disney villains, isn’t pure evil either, as the good fairies point out, but rather she has obscured the goodness of the larger reality around her with the shadow of her own contingent glory. It is no accident, I think, that Maleficent is cerebral, sophisticated, tall, powerful, and beautiful whilst her benevolent and humble foils, in the good fairy Godmothers, are short, frumpy, weak, and just a little bit slow witted in comparison. Yet in spite of their short comings an invisible hand always comes to their aid in much the same way that Aurora and Prince Phillip are miraculously brought together. The goodness that surrounds them, it seems, is always on their side and in the end the sword of truth, safe guarded by virtue, slays the dragon and wins the world for the light and love.

Yes, I am essentially saying that Sleeping Beauty is a cleverly disguised and aesthetically stunning Christian allegory. I don’t know how it came to be from such a secular company as Disney but it did and I am very glad that it did because now I have something awesome to watch with children and it provides bridges in our conversation toward such issues as “what a virtue is”.

I give it 4.6 ghostly spinning wheels

The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)

In the year 2000 man would finally colonize Mars, hydrogen powered cars would obviate the fear of global warming, and the Emperor’s New Groove would be released in theaters and hailed as one of the greatest Disney films of all time! Oh wait, none of that good stuff happened. Yet it really should have.

Originally set to be a highly convoluted melodrama directed by former Disney animator Roger Allers, and titled something like “Kingdom of the Sun”, the Emperor’s New Groove underwent a tumultuously twisted transformation before it emerged in the present form. Corporate in-fighting, the lack of a coherent story after 3 years of work, budget concerns due to the sucktitude of mid-late nineties Disney films, and differences of artistic opinion all led to Allers “quitting” the project half-way through production. The Kingdom of the Sun was then summarily scrapped, along with a bunch of songs written by Sting (thank goodness), and an animator named Mark Dindal took over the relatively short production of what become a throughly enjoyable comedy set in pre-Columbian Peru.

David Spade provides the voice for Emperor Cusco, a self-obsessed young Incan emperor who is accidentally transformed into a llama during a botched assassination attempt by his chief advisor, brilliantly played by Eartha Kitt.... yes, that Eartha Kitt. Cusco, now a llama, gets lost in the countryside and gradually comes to learn the value of interpersonal love and service from a humble Peruvian farmer named Pacha (John freaking Goodman) who helps the llama emperor get back home in exchange for not having his village demolished for the construction a water park.

The story is straightforward and the characters are few. The visuals are also almost heretically bare compared to other animated Disney movies , which makes sense when you consider that the final product was salvaged in a relatively short period after years of failed artistic “vision”. The result is probably the funniest Disney movie ever made and one of my favorite comedies of all time. Since the story is so simple, and yet genuinely moving, and the characters so few, the creative team that worked on this one were able to flesh out as much humor and clever situations as they wanted. Much of it in the form of witty dialogue but a great deal is also self-effacing meta-drama....highly appropriate for what was almost one of the biggest disasters in Disney film history.

I think that due to my wife and I both liking this movie, oh so very much, that I may have seen this one more than any other Disney movie. However, as I hinted at a above, this isn’t true for most people. Though I believe it turned some kind of profit (not sure about this one yet) very few people seem to remember or care about Emperor’s New Groove. I am inclined to call it one of the most underrated Disney movies of all time. 

Though it isn’t a ground breaking “epic” as it was first envisioned to be it runs at a fun fast paced, it’s genuinely hilarious, and it has likable characters engaged in an intelligible story. Highly recommended but I warn you, it is heavy on David Spade and if you have a David Spade aversion this movie may not be for you.

Final verdict 4.6 sarcastic llamas

Simple, funny, different. No pretense to being anything but fun.

Tangled (2010)

It’s an exciting time to like Disney movies and I am inclined to believe that a new “renaissance” is before us, probably thanks to John “I saved Disney” Lasseter. While I was pleasantly surprised by the Princess and the Frog I was more or less blown away when I saw Rapunzel...I mean...Tangled, in theaters. When I first saw the trailer I thought to myself, “oh man, not a Dream Works knockoff!” Then, being the father of a little girl, we found ourselves so desperate to see a family movie one Saturday night that I wound up buying tickets for a movie I assumed I’d hate (at least twice). Boy was I wrong, by the time the opening monologue was over and we were introduced to Rapunzel’s character, played by Mandy “Are you freaking kidding me?” Moore, of all people, representing what I take to be Disney’s interpretation of home schooled kids, who busied herself with a myriad of funny, stifling tasks set to catchy pop music....I felt that I might be in for something special. I was totally right.

By the next scene, when we’re introduced to Donna Murphy’s amazing character, Mother Gothel (the witch), and a hilarious yet truly disturbing display of passive aggression in the form of a song called “Mother Knows Best”, I absolutely knew that I was going to love this movie...and what’s not to love? The pop music, done by Menken, was pretty great. The animation though not better than the best Pixar movies was appealing and crisp, if a little bit stale cliche at the same time. The characters were deep and interesting. The story well crafted, well paced, and moving at all the right moments and in all the right ways. It is just a really great movie.

Just like the Princess and the frog and unlike older Disney fairytale movies, Tangled is really at its heart a comic love story between equally and very well developed male and female counterparts. In the old days the “prince” was just an accessory to the Disney Princes' ensemble and he got very little in the way of story, development, or even personality. Not here and herein lies the reason why the movie’s title was changed at the last minute from Rapunzel to Tangled....because it’s not really simply about Rapunzel but about her relationship to the character Flynn Rider. This makes for the very best Disney love story, one of the funniest Disney movies ever made (maybe only second after the Emperor’s New Groove), and a quality story that actually digs deep into a lot interesting issues surrounding such topics as aging and dyeing and the true conceptualization of love.

I give it 4.4 frying pans to the face

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Everyone everywhere seems to have found some excuse to hate this movie. During production some were upset that the princess, the first black Disney princess, was going to be named Maddy which they argued sounded uncomfortably too much like Mammy and that Mammy is a derogatory term. Okay. So Disney changed it to Tiana. Then people were upset that Tiana was a maid since being a maid, they argued, is intrinsically offensive if the character in question is black. Okay. So Disney changed it. Then people were upset that the Prince wasn’t also black, just like Tiana (some people still oppose interracial marriage I guess) but by this point, I suppose, Disney either had enough or were too far along in production and they stopped changing their movie. But this wasn’t all. When the movie finally came out people complained that the New Orleans setting was offensive, somehow, “because of Hurricane Katrina” and that it was offensive that the villain was black, like 75% of the other characters in the movie. Christian groups were irate that the villain used Voodoo magic. Supposed Voodoo practitioners were upset at the depiction of their religion and Cajuns, which as a living group comprises exactly twenty-four people in a Baton Rouge trailer park, complained that the movie portrayed a harmful depiction of their people since the little Cajun bug had “funny teeth”. Never mind the fact that the same character is the most heroically virtuous individual in the movie.

These are just a few of the pissed off clusters of people that found fault with this movie. However, I am inclined to think that, in reality, fewer people were pissed off than the written record seems to indicate. I think that just because this movie was doing something of a racially conscious nature, introducing the first black Disney princess, that reporters were simply looking for discord and controversy to capitalize on what is an otherwise wholly unremarkable event. Indeed, “unremarkable” was the other adjective used to Describe this movie, long after people were done with “offensive”, once it was finally released. But if the former charge is ridiculous does the latter hold up?

I say, no. This is actually one of the very best Disney movies ever made. Visually the Princess and the Frog is as good as anything done in the 90s though it has to be given extra credit for the cool art deco musical sequence and the way they succeeded in conveying so much of the atmosphere of New Orleans. It’s one thing to create private impressions about fantasy world’s like Atlantica but it’s another entirely to capture real places that people have actually experienced first hand. And I should know, I’ve been to Disneyland’s New Orleans square like 50 times. The soundtrack is also highly underrated. While admittedly the songs aren’t nearly as memorable as the Howard Ashman broadway stuff from the Disney renaissance, this isn’t so much because the songs themselves are subpar but that the Princess and the Frog, almost by necessity, was restricted to particular genres of music that are less amenable for Disnification. Specifically, I mean the jazz inspired songs by Randy Newman and two others inspired by gospel and cajun music. All of these genres have a rather limited audience to begin with. Yet, at the same time, the soundtrack does have some memorable moments and at the very least fits the story and setting perfectly.

The story itself is also much better than I think it’s given credit for. Loosely based on a book called the Frog Princess, the Princess and the Frog takes the Frog Prince fairytale, places it in a cool, jazzy historical setting and then adds the spin of having the princess turn into a frog herself when she goes to kiss the prince, you know, as opposed to making him a human again. This is because Tiana is not actually a princess but only dressed like one, in fact, she’s a poor waitress who has been working overtime, at the expense of really living, in order to save up enough money to open her own restaurant. The frog, the irresponsibly carefree and music loving Prince Naveen of Maldonia, a fictional country that was probably offended in some way by this movie, on the other hand has been cursed by the totally awesome voodoo practitioner named Dr. Facilier as part of a complicated plot to trick a rich woman into marriage and out of her wealth. Now sharing in Prince Naveen’s curse, Tiana must learn to cooperate with the Prince to find a way to break the curse, which ultimately means that both of their characters must grow in virtue in the course of the narrative. Oh, and of course they fall in love.

I love the setting, I love the story, and I think the characters are really great too. Jennifer Cody as Tiana’s wealthy socialite friend is one the funniest Disney characters of all time. Check out the ironic expression on her face as she’s putting on makeup for the ball and talks about how she always thought fairy tale endings were for “crazy people”. The villain is one of the most inventive ever, and least annoying (no stupid Iago the parrot or cackling hyena sidekicks to pull him down). It’s got John freaking Goodman. I think the Big-O is in there somewhere. That Cajun lightning bug, or whatever he was, made me laugh and almost made me cry which is a really good thing for any movie. Oh, and I really like the love story that ensues and the lessons that are learned in the end. I am going to go out on a limb say that I applaud the Christian virtues that are emphasized therein.

It’s one of my favorite Disney movies. I’m just sad I didn’t see it in theaters and everyone who hates it for some stupid political reason just needs to find something else to do or think about. Like how great it would be if an alligator really could play the trumpet that well.

  I give it 4.4 man catching New Orleans style beignets (in powdered sugar)

Robin Hood (1973)

Based on the character designs from a long abandoned Disney film about the French story of Reynard the Fox, of which I know nothing, Robin Hood tells the familiar story of, well, Robin Hood. Only, and this was actually pretty unique at the time. Robin Hood is an anthropomorphic fox. Disney animals had often been anthropomorphized but not like this. Instead of just dogs that talk or display human like thoughts and motives now we had an erect, bipedal, well dressed character that was as much a fox as Mickey was supposed to be a mouse. The unfortunate consequence of this character design is that it, more than any other cultural influence, spawned the furry subculture....a very, very disturbing subculture that I am going to avoid talking about any further. But I kid you not, this was the starting influence.

Anyway, Robin Hood, as you know, unless you are new to our planet, is a story about a wellborn thief in medieval England who steals money from the rich and redistributes it to the poor. Sort of like a medieval social welfare program but better since Robin Hood does it with an ox-cart loaded with awesome and we do it with boring assed tax laws (boo). Doing this has made Robin the enemy of the local Sheriff of Nottingham and the stand-in ruler of the realm, Prince John, who is overtaxing the people (I guess they had boring assed taxes after all) for his own gain while his brother, King Richard the Lionhearted (literally), is out of the country on a crusade. Throw in a love story between Robin Hood and Prince John’s cousin, another anthropomorphic fox named Marian, and you got yourself a classic swashbuckler in the vein of Errol Flynn.

This is, I believe, is the single most underrated Disney film of all time though I think I understand why it is that so many people dismiss it outright without realizing what’s in front of them (are you blind, world?). First, this was made during the darkest time period of Disney animation, the years between Disney’s death in 1966 and the release of the Little Mermaid in 1989. Indeed, this movie was actually the first real post-Walt Disney film ever released by the studio. The film before it was the Jungle Book....and that is already an egregiously overrated movie in its own right. So why should this movie be any better, especially considering that this was an extremely low budget film, by Disney standards, and that the man who drove the success of the company’s best films was dead?

It really shouldn’t, when looking at the facts. First off the animation is from the budget xerography era, post-101 Dalmatians, where everything looks like untidy pencil sketches. It worked well in previous movies but suddenly every Disney film was starting to look like each other, sometimes exactly like each other. In fact, due to tight budgets stemming from financially trying times, much of what appeared in Disney movies at this time was, in fact, actually recycled animation! Robin Hood is particularly notorious in this regard. A dance in the woods is traced off of Snow White’s dance with the dwarves, a bear’s dance with a chicken is a carbon copy of Baloo’s dance with King Louie in the Jungle book, and so forth. In fact, the popular character of Baloo himself essentially reappears in his entirety in this movie with the exact same design, characteristics, and even the same voice actor in Phil Harris. The only difference is that now he has a different color of fur and the name Little John. But hey, Baloo’s the best thing about the Jungle Book so who’s complaining?

The thing is, that for all of it’s cheapness and recycled material, which is what really turns off a lot of critics I think, the package as presented here actually does work very well. Disney succeeded at finding a way to make a great movie on the cheap. The story is clear cut, and though cliche, it has a real emotional impact when it’s supposed to. Seeing friar tuck suddenly get captured and the grief felt over his impending execution is effective. The romance between Robin Hood and Marian, though abbreviated, is still good enough to remember and better than most Disney movies of the past. The action sequences all effectively combine humor and sword play. It’s much more interesting than the saturday morning cartoon it’s been made out to be.

If anything the simplicity of this movie is a strength because it also allowed the animators to have fun with the movie’s many characters by fleshing out a number of creative comical scenes that still forward the story. The Sheriff of Nottingham, voiced by Pat Buttram, is a funny, corrupt caricature of the Texas “deputy dog” type of law enforcer and he has a number of great moments with his vulture deputies that I remember fondly. It might seem out of place in a medieval English setting but it really is a lot of fun, at least for me, being from Texas and all. Phil Harris virtually reprises his role as Baloo the bear, which again, might seem tired at first but then his character is so entertaining that you wouldn’t want him to be missing from the movie (that guy saved the Jungle Book). Prince John is also consistently funny and well developed, you have to love the running gag about his relationship with his mother. Most of the best laughs are derived from interactions between the Prince and his advisor, Hiss the snake. I also liked the constant use of anachronisms throughout the movie.... a football playing old hen? Completely awesome. Also one of the best parts about the movie is it’s folksy, American soundtrack sung by country singer Roger Miller who plays Alan-a-dale, a rooster. Remember the hamster dance? Yeah, we can thank Roger Miller for that one too.

So Robin Hood wasn’t innovative in anyway and it’s a cheap production but it has an memorable and fun soundtrack, a good story, great characters and heavy dose of of warm hearted charity between the protagonists. I think some people may hate that, finding it insipid, but I personally love it.

I give it 4.2 Golden Arrows

Song of the South (1946)

In 1989 a new ride was opened at Disneyland called Splash Mountain that has since, as you likely know, become one of the most beloved attractions in the park. It’s basically an elaborate flume ride that combines the thrill of the drop with many elements of classic Disney “dark rides” and animatronic technology. It’s an exhilaratingly cheerful and very damp experience. But how many people realize that this ride and it’s whimsical story about the adventures of Brer Rabbit, and his clever escape from the clutches of Brer Fox, is actually based on scenes from Disney’s 1946 film, Song of the South? Though many people love the ride not too many know about the movie that inspired it and there’s a good reason for that, it’s never been released on either video or DVD in the US and hasn’t been seen in a theater since 1986 when it was last released on a limited basis to promote Splash Mountain.

Well, why on earth should that be? Urban legend has it that the movie is banned for being ostentatiously racist but that is not the case. It is not racist, though that is the popular take on the movie, nor is it banned anywhere....the Disney company simply refuses to release the film in the United States (it has long been available in multiple formats in Europe) due to the fact that it might be construed as racist and they simply don’t want to deal with the controversy or face the charge that the Disney corporation is in any way racist, which is funny because that is already one of the most common charges levied at Disney by “knee-jerk anti-Disney contrarians”, otherwise known as “self-important, elitist douches” or, more colloquially, just “hipsters”.

Walt Disney, like many Americans of his generation, had grown up reading and enjoying the Uncle Remus stories that were edited together by Joseph Chandler Harris in the late 19th century. Harris was a progressive Atlanta based journalist who had grown up in the South during the harsh reconstruction period after the Civil War and had spent a number years actually working on a southern plantation. There he is said to have lived amongst former slaves, whom he clearly respected, and it is from this experience that he would compile his Uncle Remus stories, which are a large set of fables and morality tales told by a fictional, yet reality inspired, ex-slave named Uncle Remus.

The stories were a big hit for Harris and many praised his attempt at the historical and cultural preservation of authentic, orally transmitted stories and dialect of African Americans from the the mid-19th century. Similar to work done by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Harris made a deliberate effort to preserve the sound of the rural southern black dialect that he encountered on the plantation within his writing. Thus certain words, as spoken by certain characters, were written as they might have sounded if they had been spoken out loud in order to accurately capture as much of the ex-slave culture as possible. Thus Brother Fox and Brother Bear are written as Brer Fox and Brer Bear to convey how the word “brother” might sound out of the mouth of Uncle Remus, not because Harris is depicting him as an ignoramus but because that is simply how he historically would have pronounced that word. This, however, is a large part of the problem for some people because, for whatever reason, when Mark Twain does it it’s “historical representation in high literature” but when Harris does it it’s “a harmful stereotype of black people”.

Anyway, Walt Disney was a big fan and had planned on making an animated version of the Uncle Remus stories very early in his career as a film maker but he waited until he had the opportunity to perfect the technique of combining live action with animation that he had helped pioneer. After some experimenting in the Three Caballeros, it seems that Disney felt ready to place a live action Uncle Remus in a cartoon world. Another reason for making this movie though was that doing so was a way for Disney to break into live action film making. The war years had been extremely trying on the studio and the cost of making animated features had grown too high. If Disney wanted to stay in the film making industry he would have to find a way to produce more profitable films and live action was one way to do that since conventional movie making was much cheaper to do. Song of the South was a perfect opportunity, then, since most of the film is live action. He could spend more on less of the kind of quality animation he wanted to make an then couch that animation within cheaper live action sequences (the formula never took off but a subsequent Disney film, So Dear to My Heart, attempted to set this formula as a norm of the studio).

Disney’s adaptation introduces the Uncle Remus stories by way of a narrative about a wealthy little boy named Johnny who is moving to his grandmother’s plantation in rural Georgia during the reconstruction period. His parents are having marriage troubles and his father is leaving him there with his mother to tend to what sounds like controversial business in Atlanta with the newspaper he works at. It’s never explained what ideological bent his father has but whatever it is it’s important enough to abandon his family, apparently. Johnny is excited to meet the famed storyteller Uncle Remus, who works at the plantation, but he is so troubled by his new circumstances that he plans to runaway to Atlanta to see his father. Thus we are provided with the first of a series of opportunities for Uncle Remus to speak wisdom to Johnny through his stories about Brer Rabbit which are all presented as well crafted musical cartoons that initially and briefly include Uncle Remus singing and interacting with animated characters. The rest of the movie is basically a series of problems set up for Johnny that are then resolved with the help of the warm and caring Uncle Remus’s insights. After the travails are over we are then treated to an improbable happy ending and, for some reason, his parent’s have seen the error of their ways and Remus’s story telling has brought everyone together for a slaphappy good time.

Just thinking about this narrative and it’s weaknesses begs the question as to why so many people fawn all over this movie the way they do. Johnny’s character and his “problems”, save for an incident with a bull, are pretty dull. Further, nothing ever becomes of any of the real potential drama. What’s the deal with Johnny’s parents? It sound like they were considering a divorce but then that question never goes anywhere. Johnny’s dad is some kind of ideologue but what kind? Why does he think he needs to be in Atalanta while his family is on the plantation. Uncle Remus is also unexplored, who is he, really? What’s the source of his wisdom? What’s the nature of his special friendship with Johnny’s grandmother, the planation owner? Those would have all been interesting things to explore but they are passed over in favor of a bit about Johnny’s interest in a puppy gifted to him by a poor neighbor girl and her bully brothers that want it back (there’s an Uncle Remus story for that). The overarching story, while pleasant enough, just isn’t compelling.

James Bakett, on the other hand, who plays Uncle Remus, is amazing and the animated sequences with Brer Rabbit and friends are top notch Disney. The scene where Uncle Remus literally pops into the cartoon world, which is represented as a pre-fall Edenic time period (no joke), is still stunning to this very day. First Remus is telling us about this world of talking animals then BAM, the camera pulls back and we’re singing zippity-doo-dah. It’s really impressive, even by today’s special effects standards. The music in this movie is also unusually good. I have no idea who put the music together’s but it’s no wonder that they ended up changing the name of the movie to Song of the South since the musical bits are really the best parts of the whole movie, hands down.

So it’s a technical marvel with one incredible performance by James Baskett (who also does the voice of Brer Fox and, in one scene, the voice of Brer Rabbit) as Uncle Remus and some incredibly well done animated musical sequences. On the other hand the overarching narrative, while mildly pleasant, just pales in comparison leaving us with a movie that is, as one New York Times review has famously pointed out, generally only really good when Uncle Remus is telling his tales (the animated bits). It’s a good Disney movie, one of the best live action Disney films, which isn’t saying much, and a historic moment in film history.

So why do so many people believe it is racist? One, people mistakingly believe that Uncle Remus and the other, nearly absent, African American characters are slaves and that as such they are too happy to be slaves. They ask, how can Uncle Remus sing zippity-doo-dah when he’s someone else’s property? The trouble is that Uncle Remus is not a slave, he’s a free man who works on the plantation and, further, being happy is possible even if you are a slave regardless of baseless intuitions to the contrary. The reason so many make this error is that the film is not explicit enough about the reconstruction setting but that’s only because at the time it was released they need not have been; the film clearly presupposes an audience that is familiar with the Uncle Remus stories and their setting prior to going into the theater and such an audience, unlike our own, would not have made such an error.

Second, it’s the way Uncle Remus talks and is dressed. Disney attempted to capture the dialect of Harris’ books by having Baskett speak in an antiquated rural black lingo throughout the movie and obviously as a poor(er) farmer he wasn’t going to be wearing a tuxedo. The trouble is that people have a knee-jerk tendency to conceptually frame this depiction as a harmful racial stereotype, again, on the basis that he talks and looks a certain way. This is absurd though. The film makes no commentary on whether or not it is a good or bad thing that Uncle Remus speaks this way and it in no way insinuates that ALL black people are poor farmers with a funny accent. Further Uncle Remus is really the only truly virtuous character in the movie. The point isn’t to show a character that’s black and poor, but to historically depict a poor black man in a specific setting that has attributes that surpass those of nearly everyone around him, creating a character that can sing zippity-doo-dah even in-spite the fact that he doesn’t have the nicest clothes to wear. That’s supposed to be part of the charm. I suppose this explanation only works for people that don’t think only very rich people are happy?

Anyway there are a many charges levied against this movie by so many people and I’ve never seen one that was remotely credible. Sure it doesn’t depict the hardships of southern life for black people (or white people, really) but this movie wasn’t designed to be a Disnified forerunner to Roots....it’s supposed to be about the Uncle Remus stories and that’s fine.

I give it 3.4 blue birds on my shoulder

I know it’s not THAT great but I have a soft spot for it in my heart...and in my head.

Cinderella (1950)

Do you like Disneyland? Of course you do, that’s because you’re not an commie....well, even if you were you’d actually probably still like Disneyland. Just ask Nikita Khrushchev about it. He supposedly threatened to escalate the Cold War when security guarding him during a visit to the US wouldn’t let him visit in 1959. I think I would have probably reacted just the same.

Anyway, if you love Disneyland (and you know you do, liar) then you can thank your lucky stars for Cinderella. It was the first big hit for Disney studios in many years (since Snow White) and it came at a time when Disney was struggling to find ways to finance Disneyland and if had it failed you can bet that it wouldn’t have happened....or that it would have sucked like Knotts Berry Farm. Cinderella’s success also paid the way for future Disney animated films for years to come, so you can thank it for Peter Pan....and Alice in Wonderland too if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cinderella is, well, Cinderella. An abused and yet saintly girl who is forced into servitude by her cruel and vindictive stepmother and her two bratty, somewhat homely daughters (they are as ugly as a dog's ass). Cinderella for whatever reason is not homely, she’s smoking, and saintly. Anyway, you know the rest of the story: Cinderella wants to go to a ball at the royal palace but can’t because she hasn’t a thing to wear. But when her fairy godmother shows up at the damnedest of convenient times she is magically granted everything she could have ever wanted, including a chance to dance solo with Prince Charming out on the veranda. They fall in love, she has to split and loses a glass slipper that the prince subsequently attempts to use to locate her and marry her as fast as is humanly possible. I know how he feels, I met my wife under similar circumstances.

It’s a fairytale classic that a lot of people find problematic given contemporary cultural expectations about male/female relationships; such as our severely protracted “dating” or prolonged and labored trials intended to discern the mate that best fits our own goals or personal interests. Who could marry someone after one meeting? Doesn’t a marriage initiated by physical attraction seem superficial? But I’m not perturbed by any of this given my own views about love and marriage which I cannot even begin to discuss here. Suffice it to say I actually find the notion that someone like Cinderella, with regards to her character, would be able to do such a thing plausible and even salient.

Now that you are alienated from me let me placate your fears by reminding you of just how charming this movie is, regardless of whether or not you dislike the premise or the old world view to marriage and family life. In terms of animation it’s the best Disney film between the release Pinocchio and the Little Mermaid. The human characters look and move perfectly. The expressions on the faces, especially of the stepmother, are rich and evocative and the grandeur of the whole thing as captured by the ballroom sequence that sticks in the brain like methyl mercury after a good round of sushi. The animals that support Cinderella and provide comic antics are really entertaining as well. But mostly the story is just told very well, starting with Cinderella’s abuse, worsening abuse, and finally working it’s way up to what really amounts to a big heap of gratuitous payback. I guess in the end, for all it’s external sweetness and naive charm, this is really something of a passive aggressive “sweet revenge” flick....only saintly Cinderella herself doesn’t actually intend it, which is genius.

I love it. I give it 4 out of 5 glass slippers.

You might love to hate it but I guarantee that your four year old daughter will make you pay if you deprive her of it.

Monsters University (2013)

Everyone always expects something unexpected from Pixar and that’s probably why a few people have been rough on their latest, Monsters University, the prequel to Monsters Inc. I think the criticism of the movie is off base and that like Toy Story 2 this film takes familiar characters and an established premise and generates a better story with much more effective humor.

 In a way this movie feels safely remote from Monsters Inc., it has little to do with it at all other than the fact that many of the same characters are involved and that they inhabit the same world....what we get is what I think is one of, if not the greatest, college comedies ever made. It’s been likened to Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House but I actually found this movie to be funnier and more enduring than either of those two movies. I can’t get into too many specifics because this movie is still new at the time of my writing this and I would only spoil the best jokes, so you’re just going to have to go see it for yourself!

So Mike is a cute-little monster who has a big dream of becoming a great scarer....and unfortunately it really is critical at this point, for appreciating this movie, that you have seen the original otherwise all this talk about scaring is a little bit convoluted and strange. Briefly, scaring human children (of our world) is how the monsters power their own civilization (somehow screams = energy) and the elite of monster society are those who have been chosen to do this job. Mike, however, is not among the elite but he works hard and enters the scaring program at the elite Monster University anyway. 

At school Mike meets Sully, his familiar best-friend, partner and the main character from the original movie (now the co-star) who, unlike Mike, has all of the attributes needed to be a great scarer by nature. The two become rivals and in the course of events manage to both be removed from the scaring program at the university, which brings them together as they form an independent fraternity of “monster losers” to compete at the schools annual Scare Games, in order to prove to the faculty that they deserve to be re-admitted to the program. 

There are a bunch of good lessons here about what constitutes a real friendship, the importance of perseverance, and even a subtle critique of academia and our misguided dependence on its unquestioned and exalted authority; but above all this movie is just plain laugh-out-loud funny. I loved the characters, it was visually impressive, and it told a coherent and interesting story, even if it wasn’t the most original thing ever produced by pixar.....it was all still very, very polished and, though it is generally well received, it’s actually already an underrated film. Do yourself a favor and go see it.

I give it 4.4 one-eyed monsters

The Little Mermaid (1989)

If the period after 1966 was a dark age for Disney animation then the 80s was the darkest age of all and Disney animation itself was in danger of being shut down by the company’s new head hancho, Michael Eisner. Indeed, if the truly awful Oliver and Company hadn’t managed, somehow, to be profitable it’s a safe bet that it might very well have been the last 2-D animated Disney film instead of the Princess and the Frog. Then out of the blue came the monumentally popular Little Mermaid, a musical homage to Disney’s fairytale days based on the story by Hans Christian Anderson. This time, thanks to the work of broadway writer Howard Ashman, a whole new successful Disney formula emerged for a new and oh so willing audience that combined the high visual aspirations of the old Disney classics with a lively broadway style production that ushered in what is often refereed to as the “Disney Renaissance”. I prefer to call it the “Howard Ashman Renaissance”.

Ariel is a mermaid princess who is secretly obsessed with the human world above the ocean’s surface. Her father, King Triton, forbids her from pursuing her interest because he does not trust humans (who would? they eat fish). Thus when Ariel both rescues and falls for a human prince who nearly drowns at sea her father becomes furious and destroys her secret collection of human artifacts (I think she had the white album) which in turn sets up a scenario wherein the brash Ariel sells her voice to a vengeful sea-witch named Ursula in exchange for legs, which I suppose is sufficient for making her a human, so that she can leave the ocean forever and be with the prince that she apparently found intensely attractive. The catch is that Ariel has only three days to make the prince love her back, in the form of a magic Disney kiss (Love’s True Kiss), or else she’ll turn back into a mermaid and become a slave....or sea-weed creature, or something, it’s kind of vague.

This story might sound crazy and yet it really does work thanks to the clever writing and input from Ashman, his fantastic songs written with partner Alan Menken, and some very tight film making. Not a second is wasted rolling out the story which has, as you’ve seen, a tremendous amount of ground to cover. This end is only bolstered by the strong visuals which were apparently only even made possible thanks to the utilization of new computer technologies that allowed animators to mimic the kind of painstakingly rendered characters and backgrounds of Disney’s best looking animated films, a feat long thought impossible due to increased costs for conventional animation. Universally acclaimed at the time of its release this is still really engaging.

  I give it 4 bras made out of sea-shells.

Fantasia (1940)

Walt Disney practically invented the music video. Indeed, the success of Disney was from the very beginning built on creatively combining quality animation with sound. Steamboat Willie (1928), the first animated cartoon to include perfectly synchronized sound and music, made Mickey Mouse a household name and saved the Disney studios from ruin. Unsatisfied with mere success, Walt Disney pushed the envelope even farther by creating the Silly Symphonies, a long running series of cartoons that were as much clever musicals as they were great cartoons (the first of these was the fantastic Skeleton Dance from 1929). These too would bring Disney’s animation studio fame and widespread acclaim. Both the Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons would also spawn knockoff attempts by rival studios....which is actually how the “looney toons” came into existence, as a rip off of a much better series of cartoons.

It isn’t clear to me whether he came to Disney first or wether Disney sought him out but in the late 1930s, after the monster success of Snow White, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, agreed to collaborate with Disney on a full length Sill Symphony style feature film set to classical music. Apparently the two met by chance at an LA restaurant and it turned out that Stokowski, like most of the learned elite of the time (believe it or not), was a huge fan of Walt Disney’s work. Stokowski was so excited by the prospect of doing a film with Disney that he even allegedly offered to provide the music for free. Thus began the work on what would become known as Fantasia.

The idea of creating a now iconic Silly Symphony short, starring Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice, was already in the works as an attempt to bolster Mickey’s popularity, which had been eclipsed by the popular and extremely funny Donald Duck shorts. But with Stokowski on board Disney was set to do something experimental and bold, transcending both Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies. Disney even worked with RCA to create, from scratch, an early version of modern stereo sound, to be installed wherever the film played, called “Fantasound”. Fantasia promised to be more than just a string of short cartoons or a classical music concert. It was to be an experience like no other.

Disney had clearly embarked upon something extraordinarily ambitious and risky with Fantasia and for the most part the risks payed off, at least in terms of the quality of the film itself. Commercially, however, Fantasia was something of a fiasco given the limited audience that precluded the usual swarms of children and since the film was dependent upon a cumbersome sound system that could only support a limited release. Carved into eight shorts of varying lengths, Fantasia presents itself to the viewer just as it is, a symphony concert that has been bonded to the visual magic making of Mickey Mouse. In fact, Mickey Mouse literally shakes hands with Stokowski at one point. Stokowski himself, at moments interspersed between shorts, provides a brief explanation about the traditional symphony music about to be played and what visual accompaniment we ought to expect. For all of its newness it’s actually a very conventional framework.

Some of the shorts are astounding. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is strikingly beautiful to watch and full of all the great humor and charm you’d expect from a great Mickey Mouse cartoon. Virtually everyone remembers it who has seen it. The Dance of the Hours, a ballet put on by large African animals, is still I think one of the funniest and most creative pantomime cartoons ever made. It just has to be seen to be believed. Who knew that an alligator juggling a hippo with his legs and tail or a gaggle of pirouetting ostriches could be so freaking awesome? The Night on Bald Mountain, a terrifying depiction of the devil torturing souls in hell, is just as impressive, until the dawn breaks to the sound of church bells and the devil and his minions are sent packing to the song Ave Maria. At that moment the short goes from impressive to astounding, the best thing in the movie. Indeed, it is amazing just how far Disney was willing to take that scene and, oddly, I am not sure that it could even be made properly in today’s politically correct climate: images of nude, flaming dancing girls being transformed into pigs and donkeys to satan’s delight? A Christian candle lit procession set to one of the most treasured songs ever made with Mary the Mother of God as as its subject matter? It leaves me with goose bumps.

Speaking of offensive. As good as these portions are, and they are unreal, the rest of the film ranges from okay to downright boring. There’s a fun short of dancing mushrooms and flowers, and the like, set to the lame ass music from the Nutcracker. There’s an ambitious yet extremely dated short about the origin of the cosmos and the rise and fall of the dinosaurs as well. But in a time when we’ve all seen Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time the dinosaurs in Fantasia are about as compelling and lifelike as those cheap plastic toys they manage to sell at every grocery and drug store in America. But worse than all this is that there is, at least in the original version of the film, a scene that actually really does enter into the offensive. You may have heard of the now long since deleted character of Sunflower who has been removed from the Pastoral Symphony.

The Pastoral Symphony is a rather drab and drawn out depiction of Greek mythological creatures set to Beethoven. It’s really, artistically, the weakest of the shorts in the whole film. The characters range from tacky little cherubs to tacky centaurs or tacky looking Gods. Seriously, they all look like they might be turned into porcelain and sold on QVC. It’s during this sequence that we see Sunflower, a little black centaur with characteristically racist, pickaninny features (crazy braids and everything) who is submissively catering to a beautiful white Centaur who towers over her. She is meant to be a comical character it seems but she just isn’t funny. Apparently the Disney corporation must have agreed because the character was discreetly removed in the 1969 re-release and has not appeared in subsequent versions. I think this represents the one legitimate case of racism in any Disney cartoon that I am aware of. I can easily apologize for the black crows from Dumbo and the very misunderstood Song of the South or even the light hearted song about Indians in Peter Pan, but it is impossible for me to come to the defense of this instance of racial stereotyping. It just is racist and wholly inappropriate.

That being said, Fantasia in large parts is every bit the masterpiece that movie critics claim (and boy do they love this movie), but in other large portions it is something of a bore. This makes it a great Disney movie even beyond considerations of its great historical importance in the history of film and sound in general, but it is far from being the greatest Disney movie ever made....which some have claimed. Boring, racist people no doubt.

I give it 3.8 enchanted broomsticks

The Lion King (1994)

In 1994 the Lion King, the second highest grossing animated movie of all time (the highest grossing I’ve since learned is Toy Story 3), was released and I would go to see it in theaters at least three times. At the time I was convinced that it was the greatest Disney movie ever made and so too were a lot of other people it seems. Today, however, I find that Disney’s great block buster hasn’t aged very well and, while remaining an entertaining spectacle, that much of its pretense crumbles under scrutiny.

The Lion King represents the end of the line for the “Disney Renaissance” as soon after its initial release Jeffrey Katzenberg, the douchey yet effective Disney executive in charge of Disney’s film division, would quit, go on to get one of the biggest severance packages in world history (it’s a long story, read Disney War), and start his own animated production company to compete with Disney in the form of Dreamworks. Without him Disney’s talented animators and not so talented storytellers were left without much direction and subsequent films, while often showing glimpses of brilliance, were typically confused, out of touch, and not a little pretentious. Anyone who doubts the importance of Jeffrey Katzenberg to Disney at this time might be surprised to find out that the overall story and form of what would become the Lion King was actually mostly his idea (and Osamu Tezuka’s but this is beside my point). Though, while he of course handed the project over to the creative animators at Disney, he retained a firm grip on the direction of the movie from beginning to end.

Inspired by Katzenberg’s real life relationship with his own father (it is claimed), Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and according to some sources, Greek tragedy, the Lion King tells the story of Simba, a young lion prince who is heir to the throne of his father King Mufasa, the ruler of the African plains. Scar, Mufasa’s younger and envious brother, hatches a plan to kill the king and usurp the throne for himself. In the course of the drama Simba mistakenly comes to believe that he is the primary cause of his father’s death and shirking responsibility he runs off into the jungle, therefore allowing his uncle Scar to impose a tyrannical rule that is deliberately modeled on Nazi aesthetics (with goose-stepping Hyena storm troopers). Meanwhile, in the jungle, Simba is befriended by the comical Timon and Pumba, a meerkat and a warthog respectively, who teach him a “Bear Necessities" style (see the Jungle Book) of frivolous self-reliance and Simba grows-up to essentially become the lion equivalent of that guy who’s still playing beer-pong when he’s thirty. Of course there is a big revelation that changes everything, thanks to a yogic baboon and a now iconic moment with a talking cloud, and Simba returns to, somehow, and for some reason, single-handedly save the day. Oh, and he gets the girl too, late in the movie, and for some other reason.

The Lion King is an “epic” monster of a movie. It’s got a melodramatic plot that transcends anything ever attempted in a Disney movie being filled with political intrigue, betrayal, murder, and revenge. At the same time, thanks to extensive computer work, it has spectacular and sometimes jaw dropping visuals. Who doesn’t remember the intensity of the wildebeest stampede? Or the sense of majesty conveyed as Rafiki raises the newborn Simba in the air over Pride Rock (a sort of seat of government for the lions)? The animation is crisp and smooth, the characters and musical sequences blister with creativity. Scar is an awesome villain. Matthew Broderick can apparently read very well. Whoopi Goldberg manages to be funny. Shoot, even the music in this movie is above average.

But for how great the production values are, and how involving the Shakespearean plot can be, I just can’t help but feel miffed by how egregiously silly so much of this movie really is. Take the Circle of Life sequence at the beginning, which we all remember and no doubt loved...but have you ever payed close attention to how ridonkulous those lyrics are? To call it ignorant New Age fluff would probably be to give it too much credit, but it’s amazing how good it all sounds as written by Elton John.... just as long as you don’t listen to what’s being said that is. Further, Simba’s movement from Jungle-loser to King of the World just doesn’t make any sense, at all, and is entirely undeserved in the context of the narrative. He doesn’t really grow as a person, he learns nothing, he changes nothing.....he just comes back and, boom, it’s a fast finish and everyone embraces him. He’s the new Lion King and the “Circle of Life” continues until, I suppose, his own younger brother decides to knock him off. That’s lame, even Mark Hamill had to get his hand cutoff and learn more about the Schwartz before he earned his dramatic comeback, why does this bug eating lion who’s never been in a real fight in his whole life get off so easy?

It’s well crafted, as I’ve said, but the content of the movie is deeply flawed and only superficially profound or meaningful. The result is a highly polished, entertaining movie, but it’s only polished and entertaining in the way that a monkey would be if someone dressed it up in a little suite....now that’s comedy.

I give it 3.8 Kimba the White Lions (look it up, and enjoy the controversy)

101 Dalmatians (1961)

Based in a novel from 1956 of the same name, 101 Dalmatians is a man-dog love story with some cool little touches that make for a very fun and original movie. The story presents the parallel perspectives of both the dogs and their owners, only that from the dog’s point of view it is the dogs that own the people rather than the other way around. Dogs are given another leg up (get it?) in that they are aware of both what other dogs and humans are saying while the humans are forced to make guesses like an episode of Lassie. I guess you can say that the dogs of 101 Dalmatians are super-anthropomorphized. I normally don’t care much for anthropomorphized animals but this movie has enough charm and good intentions that I let it slide.

Roger and Pongo, a human and a male dalmatian respectively, are a couple of bored bachelors living together in London until a not-so-chance meeting in the park, staged by Pongo, leads to a romance with a dalmatian named Perdita and her human, named Anita. A narration moves all of this along very quickly and we see that Anita and Roger are now married and that their dogs are having puppies....a huge litter of fifteen to be exact. This news gets the attention of a strange associate of Anita’s, a haggard socialite named Cruella De Vil (get it? Cruel Devil!), who excitedly offers to buy the entire litter. For what purpose? So that she can make a coat out of their soft little puppy fur. Obviously the answer is no, but Cruela won’t take no for an answer and so she resorts to dognapping which results in a full scale animal rescue filled with charm and humor.

If the story is virtuously simple it is only bolstered by the charming if not very well developed characters. In a movie with this many characters that would be a hard thing to accomplish indeed. However, Cruella is actually a particularly brilliant character in this movie. She starts off appearing as a smiling and well “polished” friend of the family but after she reveals her cruel intentions she is shown to be increasingly and frenetically evil until she becomes, or reveals herself, to be a crazed monster who will stop at nothing to get her way. She has a huge amount of screen time and is one of the most fun and most menacing Disney villains ever. When she finally gets her comeuppance, and you know she does, you can practically taste the justice dripping in your mouth....and it tastes a little like awesome. Or is that adrenaline? Or have I been drinking coffee too late in the afternoon again?

Animation wise, this movie is an interesting mile stone for Disney. Sleeping beauty, released in the 50s, had been a painful box office bomb since in it’s stylistic splendor it had cost too much to produce the old fashioned way. Indeed, ever since the animation strikes of 1941 and the consequent increase in production costs and the loss of 50% of the animators, Disney had found it virtually impossible to replicate the visual splendor of Snow White or Pinocchio. In order to find a way to reduce the cost of animated films and increase profitability, Ub Iwerks, the co-creator and original animator of Mickey Mouse, pioneered a way to utilize xerox technology to drastically cut down on the labor of hand drawn animation. 101 Dalmatians is the first movie to ever use xerography and, in fact, probably would not have been possible without the new technology since animating 101 individual dalmatians by hand would have been entirely too cumbersome. Yes, there are in fact 101 dalmatians in the movie, if you haven’t seen it. But then I’m wasting my breath because you, who have not seen it, are still living in a monastery high in the mountains and therefore you will not read this either. Pray for me brother.

Xerography and the move toward more angular lines on characters completely overhauled the Disney animation style for the next two decades or so. You’ve probably noticed how similar the animation and look of Disney movies from the 60s are with those from the 70s and yet different from the 40s and 50s and it is specifically because of this technology. The unfortunate thing is that, while fitting for this movie, xerography is far from perfect and it tends to leave a very unpolished look to the final product. Disney himself wasn’t really worried anymore about making perfect animated movies though, especially after Sleeping Beauty. His near complete devotion from 1950 or so on was the building, maintenance and expansion of Disneyland....and we all know how that turned out. Yeah, unfreaking believably awesome.

So it’s a technological first that represents a step or two back for animation. It’s got an original and interesting take on dog movies. It’s genuinely funny and the dialogue often very clever. It has one of the best villains who has a memorable song played about her in the movie (the one musical scene). It won’t blow you away but at the very same time what’s not to like? It’s one of the most popular Disney movies ever and it deserves most of the credit it gets.

I give it 3.8 black and white puppies

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)

This is one from the dark ages of Disney animation, that awful period between Walt Disney’s death in 1966 and the brief renaissance that was initiated by the Little Mermaid in 1989. At the same time, though, it’s not quite true that this is a product of the dark ages since in fact this movie is actually just three Winnie the Pooh shorts stuck together and the first two shorts (2/3 of the movie) have their origins from a time when Disney was still alive to make sure his animators had the fear of God in them.

Based on the popular children’s stories by English author A.A. Milne this movie is by nature episodic and disjointed. There is however a clever if somewhat slapdash attempt to provide a unifying spirit by structuring the stories around the memories of Christopher Robin, who eventually must abandon his fantasies of childhood to go off to boarding school, all of which seem to be built entirely upon a deep seeded loneliness. There’s actually a hint of tragedy in the premise. I can’t be the only one who thought that it was sad and strange that Pooh Bear and friends all existed solely because they are his “imaginary friends”, right?

Anyway the movie quickly moves through a number of charming vignettes about life in the Hundred Acre Wood, where Christopher Robin played, all of which are narrated as if the audience is being read to by some great big burly Nanny. Each short is slightly less appealing than the one before it, indeed, the last portion of the movie is very bland in comparison to the first. But what makes the bulk of the stories so wonderful is how simple and disarmingly mild they are; perfect for small children or adults who have had a very stressful day. In fact, I dare anyone who puts on this movie to not be relaxed by watching Pooh fly up the honey tree on a little balloon.

While there isn’t much in the way of animation to praise the music fits the tone of the sheltered childhood fantasy perfectly and is often just as cathartic as the gentle characters in Christopher Robin’s twisted fantasy world (save for the Tigger song, which is wild in an awesome way). Also the stories and delightful characters themselves offer up quite a lot of effective humor. Everyone, for instance, remembers the story about Pooh being so fat that he has to live inside Rabbits doorway for days to lose weight right? What a riot! If it sounds silly, trust me, it’s actually pretty sweet, especially when a beaver with a speech impediment gets involved. If you see it and still disagree...well then may God have mercy on your cynical black heart.

This movie is clearly not intended to be great filmmaking, it’s just a soothing, charming taste of English childhood, which I think traditionally comes with a side of blood sausage. In it’s intended end it succeeds, for at least most of the way. Gradually, it just turns into a Saturday morning cartoon but by then you and your children might actually be fast asleep anyway.

I give it 3.8 out of 5 honey pots. A happy romp inside a small boy’s imagination... a sad, somewhat neglected, and sterile imagination.

Bambi (1942)

In 1942 Bambi was Walt Disney’s first full-length animated failure. The critic’s, who were previously ecstatic about the company’s shorts and feature length films, had changed their minds about the unapologetically popular cartoon studio and while not necessarily spurned by the general public they too ultimately failed to patronize the film in the wake of World War II. Indeed Bambi as cherished as it is today surprisingly lost the Disney studios a significant amount of money, initiating the darkest post-Mickey stretch of Walt Disney’s career (largely due to the loss of the foreign markets...which were being bombed by Hitler at the time).

Based on a popular novel of the same name by Austrian writer Felix Salten, Bambi episodically dramatizes the life-cycle of a deer living in the forest (any forest?) who, like the titles of the movie and book, bares the name...Bambi. We see Bambi the day he is born, how he survives the hardships of the wild as a youth, and finally watch him grow into adulthood where he, with the help of a doe, finally reproduces.

If this framework sounds mundane, in the high-school biology textbook sort of way, then that’s because it sort of is. As a compelling story Bambi never really flies and the characters, though beautifully rendered and probably the cutest things ever projected in a theatre, are underdeveloped. This cuts down on the impact of Bambi’s famous emotional intensity which includes the loss of a parent, an escape from a harrowing forest-fire and the thrill of young love.

The animation and soundtrack though are spectacular by any standard and for any time period. Just as good as Snow White or Pinocchio. Disney in the wake of Snow White’s explosive success (1937) had turned his cartoon-style animators into highly trained artists by encouraging them (forcing them) to take classes with traditional painters and make trips to the Zoo to study the anatomy and movement of real-life animals. Realism in animation was the goal and that goal was soundly achieved by what is probably one of if not the greatest team of animators ever assembled in history.

My favorite thing though is the music which is as sentimental and bombastic as anything...you know, perfect. Unfortunately the music from Bambi hasn’t seen nearly as much popular play as the other “classic” Disney movies (anything older than 1955) and maybe this has something to do with the melancholic tone of the whole movie. In fact, like most small children, my daughter hates this movie. It’s too drawn out, too instrumental, has limited humor or dialogue, major characters die, Bambi has to flee frightening things all of the time and even has to fight another deer for mating rights. It’s an intense and yet impersonal Disney movie. I think a good way to view it is as a lost, extended clip from Fantasia which depending on who you are might be a very good or very bad thing.
Often hauntingly beautiful and yet, somehow, at times profoundly boring.

Final verdict: 3.8/5 birrrrrds

The Three Caballeros (1944)

In 1941, before the US involvement in World War II, Walt Disney was chosen to be a good will ambassador to Latin America where Disney cartoons were popular and the political situation potentially dangerous. Ties with the Nazis in some places were uncomfortably close and it was believed that such good will tours would strengthen international relations and therefore prevent conflict. Disney was also approached by Nelson Rockafeller at this time, who as “coordinator of inter-American affairs” was to lead the tour for Team USA, about the possibility of making a film about their exploits. With the US government fitting the bill for what amounted to a 40 minute collection of Donald Duck cartoons set in Argentina and Brazil, not necessarily a bad thing, a film was indeed finally released as Saludos Amigos in 1942. Though it wasn’t exactly Disney’s best work it was a huge hit in Latin American countries that got a kick out of seeing Disney cartoons, starring popular Disney characters, set in and about their countries. The only problem was that Mexico, omitted from the film, was pleading for a sequel.

The Three Caballeros is that sequel. Released in 1944 it features Donald Duck, Jose Carioca (the Brazilian parrot from Saludos Amigos) and a new sombrero wearing, cigar chomping, gun wielding, Mexican yodeling character named Panchito Pistoles. He’s from Mexico and you’d better believe it because, if not, he’ll kill you. No joke amigo. He literally threatens Donald in like manner during the course of the movie.

Anyway, Donald’s at home and gets a package in the mail containing three separate gifts, each one providing a segway into a short cartoon or musical episode that features various Latin American countries. First is a short, quite funny, “documentary” about tropical birds (you gotta love the crazy Aracuan). This is followed by a short about a penguin who’s sick of the far south American cold and tries to escape to the equator. Third is a cute cartoon about a little Argentinian boy and his flying Donkey. Then a beautiful musical sequence about the Brazilian state of Bahia. This is followed by what amounts to a wonderful surprise for me: a Mexican Posada wherein some children reenact Joseph and Mary’s search for a place to stay so that Jesus could be born. Panchito then gives Donald a tour of Mexico on his flying serape, I shit you not, and Donald harasses some women on the beach...and finally the whole thing just goes bananas in the form of a Latin dance extravaganza.

The pace of the the Three Caballeros is frantic and highly entertaining. At the same time the animation is often ingeniously creative, just as good as the elephants on parade sequence in Dumbo or segments of Fantasia. There are also a number of interesting segments combining live action and animation, the first ever in a major film I believe. Some of the real-life footage of Latin America, however, falls a little flat. I don’t know why but Disney, as brilliant as they were with ink and paper, just couldn’t do anything with a freaking camera, at all. They would have been better off just animating the entire thing. Also some of the song and dance sequences go on too long. Oh, and Panchito threatens to KILL Donald. Seriously?

Despite it’s hilariously stereotypical representation of Mexicans, such as myself, the film opened in Mexico City and was a monster hit there. I also recommend it, if you want to see a quality piece of Disney history or are into musicals set in Latin America. Or want to see Donald get threatened at gun point. It’s much better than Saludos Amigos and it’s one of the best collections of packaged shorts produced during the period in which it was produced.

We give it 3.8 Aracuan birds

John Carter (2012)

One of the biggest bombs in disney film history is also one of the most under appreciated too.....except in Russia, where I hear it was actually a record breaking success. “In Mother Russia, box office record breaks you”.

Based on an old and hilariously outdated scifi novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the guy who created Tarzan, the narrative was destined to fail before this thing ever went into production. Why? Because we (and I mean everybody) know too much about Mars, and science, to take the premise very seriously. I guess, if you want to be positive about it, one way you can think about this story is as a 19th century version of Superman in reverse: A civil war veteran goes to another planet wherein he suddenly acquires superpowers thanks to terrestrial differences between Earth and Mars (false differences) which allows him to help save an alien world.

It’s a tall order to swallow but thankfully the director, Andrew Stanton, of notable Pixar fame, along with a couple of other talented writers with good track records, were able to generate something fun, intentionally goofy, and sufficiently self-aware of the absurd source material. Taylore Kitsch plays the role of John Carter well and in completely comic fashion, which I think is a really good move anytime you are dealing with awkward source material, which is part of how the Avenger’s worked so well. When you have something ridiculous to work with, play it like it’s funny, because it is.

The truth is, John Carter, outside of having an impossibly dumb title and ridiculous premise that’s hard to sell, really should have and could have been a majorly successful franchise. The trouble is that the story takes on too much and quickly gets bogged down in long winded political intrigue, side stories, and a vast array of important characters with too little to say or do. Except this cool CGI dog thing, that thing was amazing. In other words this movies suffers from the same disease that all other adaptations of novels suffer from: getting too much information into the form of a coherent and entertaining 2 hour movie. I still had fun watching it though and so would a lot more people if they had seen it. It’s a shame really.

I give it 3.2 little green alien babies

Victory Through Air Power (1943)

By 1941 Walt Disney was already a cherished American icon. His Mickey Mouse cartoons had earned him international fame and the acclaimed Snow White demonstrated to both critics and popular audiences just how powerful a medium animation could really be. Disney himself was lauded as a genius and his cartoons were celebrated as a crucial part of American culture. So it comes as no surprise to learn that after the US entered World War II Disney’s pervasive influence was conscripted into the armed forces by the government in order to push forward the war effort. The army literally moved into Disney studios in Burbank, regular film production came to a halt, and Walt Disney suddenly found himself in the unprofitable business of producing propaganda films. Soon soldiers in training everywhere would be watching Donald Duck mocking the Nazis and theatre patrons would be reminded by the three little pigs about the importance of being thrifty.

During this same time period there was one very strange propaganda film made by Disney that did not come in the form of a government contract but rather straight out of Walt’s own personal finances and initiative. The film is called Victory Through Air Power and it is essentially both an entertaining comedy and deadly serious infomercial pressing for the production/utilization of large, long range aircraft capable of dropping large payloads of bombs directly on top of Germany and Japan from very remote distances. A description that essentially fits the role of the not-yet-extant B-52 bomber.

Victory Through Air Power is based on what was then a recently released book of the same name by a famed Russian aviator and engineer, a naturalized US citizen, named Alexander de Seversky. Seversky himself is something of a badass. Born into a Russian noble family in 1894 he entered the Russian Naval Academy at age 14 where he earned a degree in engineering. In World War I he became a combat pilot. In 1916 Seversky was shot down and lost his leg. After successfully making it back into friendly territory he went on, with a wooden leg, to successfully fly 57 combat missions and by many accounts was Russia’s leading ace pilot. After the 1917 revolution Seversky snuck over to the US where he worked for the War Department as a test pilot and consulting engineer. It was here that he became convinced of the airplane’s tactical superiority over conventional naval and ground warfare, specifically on the grounds that planes had developed the capacity to sink ships.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Seversky quickly compiled his arguments in favor of airpower into a book with the intention of persuading the military that unless they changed their strategy they could not win the war. In the book he called for a number of changes that are now a reality: massive long range bombers, the expansion of aircraft instead of more naval ships, and the creation of an independent “air-force”. Severskys theories, however, were not well received initially. The Navy, as you can imagine, was made livid by his emphasis on an Airforce over a traditional Navy and those who were at the top of the chain of command wanted Seversky to stay out of their affairs and mind his own business. The public on the other hand, including Disney, embraced the book and it made #1 on the New York Times best seller list.

Persuaded by Seversky’s views Disney sprung into action and invited Seversky to give a presentation of his ideas in the form of a “documentary”, knowing that the larger public might be better reached through a film rather than a cumbersome book. Disney usually a stickler for quality and detail had the film rushed out the door, utilizing a stripped down, almost textbook diagram style of presentation. The result is surprisingly engaging, organized, and persuasive. I went out and bought myself six long range bombers right after watching it!

The film begins with a humorous depiction of the history of the airplane, then it moves into a sober account of how outdated military strategies employed in Europe had been easily crushed by the Nazi’s superior tactics and massive air-power. In the meantime we meet Seversky himself who, in the form of a relaxed meeting, gives the Allies the low down on what needs to be done to win the war.

While the film is obviously not intended to be entertainment for entertainments sake it is quite engaging and the cartoons offer Disney humor and creativity at its best. Indeed, if anything, this movie has actually improved with age given how interesting and yet non-threatening the content is. We all know that the Allies win in the end and the dead serious threat of a Nazi victory or the fear of making the wrong move by actually listening to this brilliant crackpot doesn’t loom in the background. I thoroughly enjoyed watching....indeed, famously, so did FDR and Winston Churchill. When they saw Disney’s movie, which was given high praise by the press, their interest was picked enough that they actually gave it a shot, watched, and then a commitment to long range bombing actually became a major strategy for winning the war.

While it’s a stretch to conclude that Disney and Seversky won the war or that Seversky’s strategy was employed solely because of this movie, it undoubtably played a major role in all of the above. Just for it’s role in history alone then this film is remarkable, but it’s actually a good film in its own right. I’d watch it even if it turned out that Seversky was full of crap. Most everything else is, isn’t it?

I give it 3.8 flaming swastikas