CK's Cartoon Corner

[Cmdr_King]

Despicable Me 2

Unlike a lot of sequels I can think of, this really feels like a sequel: it’s entirely about the fallout from events in the previous movie and how this impacts the lives of the characters.

Yeah sure there’s a new supervillain and complications from outside the original details of the world as presented but you could remove a lot of them from the movie without substantially hurting the final product.  Well, maybe not remove, but certainly El Macho didn’t really need to have an evil plot going on.  He could just have been a retired supervillain who reminisces about the old days and laments Gru giving up the life too (and also his son is playing with one of the girls’ hearts).

But mostly it’s about looking at the end of the first movie and saying “okay so he’s a father now, but what does that mean”.  Gru seems to soldier on without much looking back, but hey he lived out his life dream already so moving on to a new phase of his life might just feel natural.  But it also means his friends feel like he’s left them behind, and the neighbors he used to ignore have to be allowed in a little bit, and having to figure out how to support a family and so forth. 

There’s definitely a streak of feeling outdated and the weight of age catching up with you.  Come to think of it they definitely touched on it in the first movie, and actually I’m wondering if it’s going to crop up again in the upcoming third movie considering they went out of their way to fill the previews with the villain who’s whole gimmick is lame 80s throwbacks.  Which is really the main function of El Macho in the plot; he went into the woodwork after his most iconic moment, but the family life leaves something missing so he tries to go back into full on villainy.

Otherwise all the best parts of the first movie are back for this one.  Gru’s protectiveness walks the right line to stay funny, the Minions are used mostly-appropriately, there’s a sort of understated gag where the real jokes is how ineffectual everything is.  Mostly they replaced what often felt like filler originally, the never-quite-lands attempts at being subversive, with more nuance and interesting stuff.

Rating- 7/10.  Not amazingly better than the first, but I’d definitely put it higher.

[AndrewRogue]

Nothing super productive to say, just glad this is back.

[Cmdr_King]

Star Driver

So this show was pitched to me as basically fusing Utena with Gurren Lagann.  Which is certainly true, it wears both of those influences on its sleeves.  Of course, those are both all-time classics that redefined their genres and one of them is probably my favorite show full stop, so I mean… I don’t want to pretend Star Driver lives up to those.

Now they take inspiration from a lot more places, those are just the most obvious ones; Gurren Lagann for visual style, Utena for overall plot flow.  And really it makes sense, magical girl and mecha anime actually work well as a fusion.  They share a tendency to use ritual to excuse to recycle animation, and tend to use similar episode-to-episode construction (ie monster of the week), so the main differences are in background plot and presentation. So Star Driver says “Why not both?”  Magical girl transformation sequences, mecha attack recycling.  Hotblood, relationships.

They try their hand a bit at the Evangelion “do cool stuff with ancient mysteries using some obscure mythology” thing, but it doesn’t really matter too much one way or the other.  Around the time not!Haruka and not!Michiru showed up reinforced something I sorta wondered early but almost forgot: a lot of the plotting with the Kiraboshi is actually filler, because Star Driver is a lot more concerned about properly pacing the high school drama.  Which actually kinda works for me?  But it’s a funny thing to notice.  “Oh hey we really need some time to flesh out the secondary cast and make sure Wako’s dilemma doesn’t seem too sudden, let’s introduce some fresh antagonist to fill out four or five episodes”.

Weakest Episode- Adult Bank.  The character drama is the main draw, so this being our main introduction the Bank cast is a big letdown in hindsight.  Like on the whole they’re probably actually the most interesting faction, but in this one they seem so shallow and petty and don’t really have any hints of the aspects that make them work as the show goes on.  Or at least that’s how it feels just skimming some episode summaries to do the writeup.

Although really when I say the high school drama works, I should really be saying that they succeed in getting me to care about Wako, and so the goings on of her friends are interesting because she is interested in them.  And really there’s not a major trick here, Wako manages to walk a fine line in a way that just worked for me.  She’s extremely quirky, but without any one quirk being overwhelming- somehow to me it balances out to someone who just seems… human.  To paraphrase, she’s often a cowardly, selfish crybaby who wants to live more honestly with herself.

Best Episode- The Trio’s Sunday.  Following from that, here’s Wako just getting to run the show more or less.  The magical supervillain shenanigans exist only to let Wako threaten them, several scenes are designed as a string of heart melting lines, and on the whole it’s the calm before the series enters into finale buildup mode.

One thing some folks that had seen the show mentioned when I was starting is that while it stayed pretty decent, it never really improved much from where it started, which… yeah.  Some of it is what I was talking about before with the overarching plot being there to pace the character drama, some of it is the finale proper being kinda weak, using predictable parts less than optimally.  I could really have used just one more scene after where they stop as well.  Like… ending on Takuto and Sugata just saying “hey being alive is fun” is nice and all, but lacks any sense of catharsis.  It didn’t have to be anything spectacular even.  Like just end on them and Wako in a hug even?  Something else.

I’d be negligent if I didn’t close out talking about music though.  By about episode 3 I’d added Monochrome to my daily listening, and all four shrine maiden pieces are quite strong.  Indeed, this goes back to the weakness of the finale, they bring back Monochrome but don’t really time it very well to the action.  Ditto Komorebi no Contact.  It’s great to bring those songs in, but never really to the same effectiveness as Monochrome was in the first few episodes.

Granted I’m spoiled by the comparison to Gurren Lagann there.  That show’s finale clearly animated two scenes to some key music, then redid those scenes for the movie when they used different music for them.

Rating- 7/10.  So very close to the 8, but just never delivers enough of an emotional climax to cinch it.

[Cmdr_King]

The Sword in the Stone

Let’s talk about Winnie the Pooh.

Now, the first short  that was eventually compiled into The Many Adventures actually postdates this one by a couple years, but on the whole the overall mastery of the new Xerox-based animation was pretty similar.  Which makes sense, but… remember how I compared Pooh to Toy Story, in particular how making the story about toys in both used the limitations of the technology to their advantage?  Yeah, not being able to do that is definitely a point of distraction in this movie.  The way hair moves in particular, where chunks stay perfectly still while other bits flail wildly, kinda get the eyes to send the “whoa what’s up with this” signal for me.

Now, Sword in the Stone tries to get around this by not having too much in the way of regular people on screen (its predecessor, 101 Dalmatians, did the same, although I haven’t seen that in years to directly compare), and it mostly works.  It also highlights the similarity with Pooh though, because despite by all indications being produced as a single film it certainly has the same story flow as shorts that were post-hoc stitched into a movie narrative.  I gather this is somewhat an artifact of The Once and Future King, which it’s directly adapted from, but not entirely.  There’s no real progression to the lessons Merlin is teaching Wart, just three repetitions of a basic theme of using brains over brawn.  I guess you could sorta justify it as Merlin still trying to sell Wart on the entire idea of education by showing the value of thinking, but it’s still not really narratively satisfying.

And really that’s a good summary in general.  If you break the film into roughly five different shorts (meeting Merlin in the woods, the fish short, the squirrel short, the wizard duel, and pulling the sword), they have their various strengths and are on the whole entertaining in one way or another.  But unlike Pooh, the connective tissue or progression between them don’t really add anything to the final package.  They also don’t hurt it mind, except in the very minor way of adding to the vague sense that the movie’s meandering along without a real point.

Basically it has the narrative of an Atelier game.  Which I realize many of you have no idea what that means, but it’s so apt I feel obligated to make the comparison just so I don’t forget it later.

But let’s talk about the good stuff before we wrap up.

I think the squirrel segment is pretty great.  The little animation touches of playing with the tails are nice, it’s just the right level of silly with the chasing, the peril feels a little less weird than having a five foot pike in a castle mote, you could probably write a thesis on how they managed to code the girl squirrel as attractive (and I’m sitting here a little annoyed I don’t know enough art to even scratch that topic honestly), and while fanfic as we understand it won’t exist for another 5 years or so after this came out, DAMN is the ending fanfic fuel.

I’m kinda surprised Madam Mim doesn’t have more of a following.  Actually I’ve read that she’s huge in the Italian and Dutch Disney comics, which is completely unsurprising.  Reading up on the movie for trivia and the like suggested people were really impressed with the designs in the wizard duel in general, and yeah even without the color coding it was always very obvious who each animal was.  This is true of Wart as well, all of his transformations have his bedhead and scrawniness, but he has three set transformations, not half a dozen in a single sequence.

Rating- 6/10.  Yeah I think that’s mostly it.  I do really like a few things about it, it was a big favorite of mine growing up and I certainly was thinking of going to 7 after doing the plusses here, but yeah I don’t think that’s quite right either.

[Cmdr_King]

Chicken Run

I’m having trouble finding a reaction to this one.

On the whole I find myself remembering the first few Dreamworks films more than they probably deserve, through a combination of having an affection for classical animation over computer and finding that the Shrek-model films were so formulaic that the more experimental and serious earlier films stick out in mind more.  And Prince of Egypt was certainly something that was gripping and lived up to my memories.

Chicken Run… I dunno.  Aside from a one liner I remembered vividly from the very first watch (“The chickens are revolting!” “Finally something we agree on.”), the only bit that jumped out at me here was Rocky’s introduction.  The utterly hungry looks they manage to get out of those chickens and Rocky’s clear delight at the situation is simultaneously funny as hell and kinda amazing because damn, I can’t imagine kids really twigging to it.

And really that’s the main take here, it’s really a movie that’s more for the adults in the audience, relying a lot on calling back to its inspiration and unspoken puns or aspects of the particular slice of Britain its set in.  If you’re familiar with mid-60s film and other WWII fiction there’s probably a lot there… and I say probably because in the main I’m not.  ‘fraid most of the war fiction I know is MASH in terms of attempting even the remotest sense of realism.  So… yeah, I’m either not quite old enough for quite enough of a history/film buff to really know a lot of the references, and without that it’s a clever movie without being a lot more than that.

Otherwise I should give a nod to some of the character beats.  While it’s not really a character film overall, I do want to say that Ginger is a pretty good lead and they do a good job of always getting you to root for her even though she’s a bit of a stick in the mud.  I also like that there’s not a huge confrontation with Rocky over the flying rooster bit; they’ve all put so much faith in him he can’t bring himself to admit the truth, but rather than some over dramatic reveal, he leaves with the evidence to let everyone piece it together themselves.  It’s not a noble thing to do or anything like that, but it feels a bit more natural to me than engineering some major reveal for a big public shaming, y’know?

Or maybe I’m just a weird asocial person.  That could be too.

Rating- 5/10

[Cmdr_King]

So I frequently end up just kinda picking something from the list and doing it on days off, so figured rather than spamming up chat with random half-disguised options every so often, may as well have a list of what I have laying about that’s not covered.

Stuff I've actually never sat down and watched marked with *

Films

All Dogs go to Heaven
Anastasia
Animaniacs: Wakko’s Wish
Batman: Gotham Knight
Batman: Year One
The Boxtrolls*
Castle in the Sky
Corpse Bride*
Coraline
Doctor Strange*
Dragonball Z: Resurrection F
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Finding Nemo
Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs
Futurama: Bender’s Game
Futurama: Beyond the Wild Green Yonder
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Hulk vs
The Invincible Iron Man*
Kung Fu Panda 2
The Land Before Time
The Lego Movie
Long Way North*
Megamind
Minions*
Monsters vs Aliens
Monsters, Inc.
My Neighbor Totoro
The Muppet Christmas Carol
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow*
Paprika
Paranorman*
Princess Mononoke
RahXephon: Pluralitas Concentio
The Road to El Dorado
Spirited Away
Team America: World Police
Titan AE
Toy Story 2
Ultimate Avengers*
Ultimate Avengers 2*


Disney

Dumbo
The Rescuers
The Rescuers Down Under
The Lion King
Pocahontas
Pocahontas II*
Mulan II*
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000

Series

Adventure Time Season 6
Animaniacs Vol. 1
Batman the Animated Series Vol. 1
Batman Beyond Season 1
Batman Beyond Season 2
Batman Beyond Season 3
Cowboy Bebop
Ducktales Vol . 1
Darkwing Duck Vol. 1
Darkwing Duck Vol. 2
Gargoyles Season 1
Gargoyles Season 2, Vol. 1
Gargoyles Season 2, Vol. 2
Gurren Lagann
Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu
Fullmetal Alchemist Season 1
Futurama Season 3
Futurama Season 4
The Legend of Korra Book 1: Air
The Legend of Korra Book 2: Spirits
The Legend of Korra Book 3: Change
The Legend of Zelda*
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Mobile Fighter G Gundam Season 2 (…ish)
Ranma ½ Season 1 *
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Rick and Morty Season 1
Rick and Morty Season 2*
The Simpsons (Seasons… 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 looks like?  Eh, not sure I want to cover them at this time.)
Spectacular Spider-Man Season 2
The Slayers Try
The Slayers Revolution
The Slayers Evolution-R
South Park Season 14
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 3*
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 4*
Star Wars: The Clone Wars Season 5*
Transformers Beast Wars Season 1
Transformers Beast Wars Season 2
Transformers Beast Wars Season 3
The Venture Bros. Season 1
The Venture Bros. Season 2
The Venture Bros. Season 3
Wolverine and the X-Men
Young Justice: Invasion

[Cmdr_King]

Robin Hood

This seems to be considered one of the weaker films by Disney itself, based on how it’s generally marketed, released, and priced.  I can kinda see it.

There’s a contemporary feel to it that I imagine rubs critics and Disney staff the wrong way.  In the first scene when Robin poses as a fortune teller, part of the pitch includes the line “get the scope with your horoscope”.  There’s a scene of football-style tackling, complete with college fight song.  I’d say the Sheriff was literally Rosco P Coltrane, except Dukes of Hazard didn’t start airing until 6 or so years later.

It’s all pretty similar to a classic Goofy short.  Which seems entirely out of place in a film really, especially one not set in modern times.

There’s also some obvious animation issues, although I can’t rule out some of those being an artifact of video conversion.  Still, there’s definitely points where details and colors go wonky, in addition to the obvious reuse of some character models from other movies.

Basically I can see where Disney might feel like they just made a cheap, pandering cash-in here.  Modern enough to get dated fast, made on the tiniest of budgets, etc etc.

Which doesn’t really fit with its modern reputation does it?  People like Robin Hood just fine!  Because while Disney might be right about their work here, y’know what?  We’re pretty far removed from those contemporary influences, so new generations can discover it and just enjoy the execution within that that cash-in goal.  And on that front it’s just fine.  The villain’s foppishness is pretty entertaining, Robin is a likeable and low-key kinda hero, Baloo Little John is a hoot, they even do pretty good with the Obvious Kid Appeal characters, since they also give us a vehicle to really introduce Marian and all that.

It’s a perfectly decent movie, it’s just not very Disney-like, so Disney doesn’t really associate with it as much as some of the real classics.

Rating- 6/10.  I dunno why I find it more interesting to pick apart average-to-above movies than talk up their good parts, but I keep coming back to it don’t I?  Eh, so goes.

[Captain K]

I vote for Anastasia, South Park movie, and Paranorman.

[Cmdr_King]

I've been meaning to get to Anastasia for a while, and finally nabbed a copy of South Park's movie after wanting one since more or less the time I started this topic, so those'll probably get cycled through pretty quickly.  ParaNorman I've... never actually seen and should get to but that's true of a depressing number of things on those lists.

That said I was already watching Robin Hood and this when I was putting the list together so this is nothing you just asked for!

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score

In a way, sometimes I wish Futurama hadn’t gotten that Comedy Central revival.

Because this?  This is the finale.  I mean, it’s not really considered one of the finales written for the show, by the time it was made they already had the other three films at bare minimum.  But it’s the ending that makes sense.  They use everything, reference everything (Nibblonians, Santa’s Neptune workshop, the satellite that collided with God, almost every character of real relevance except I guess the Robot Devil…), it’s structured like a grand finale in terms of scope.  And it’s the only resolution to Fry and Leela’s romantic arc I’d place above The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings.

That’s the big one really.  Futurama is a show that would often blindside you with its’ ability to gutshot you in the feels, but the flashbacks to Lars are the stuff where you know it’s coming and it still gets you.  I can think of about one other instance of that in all the shows we’ve covered here (about 110 at time of writing… good lord), which was a scene I quoted verbatim back in the Avatar Book 3 writeup immediately before giving it a 10/10.

Now, on the whole this isn’t quite that good.  Rewatching it for the writeup for the first time in… god, 5 years?  More?  I was largely struck by being utterly impatient through the first half of the movie.  The setup for the scammer aliens and the discovery of the Time Code takes ages, and the only real good bits before then are all the piss-taking of Fox for cancelling the show originally.  And those might not actually have been funny, just cathartic enough to fake it.

It feels weird to not talk about Bender in a movie named after him but… it’s not really his movie?  The third one is to much larger extent.  We’ll get there.  Y’know, someday.  Probably.

I’m not entirely sure why they elected to have some musical numbers.  I guess to some extent maybe they felt it was tradition for that to happen in the movie versions of TV comedies?  But certainly they don’t really land as particularly funny.  Fortunately enough happens around them I don’t care.

Rating- 8/10.  In syndication this turns into I believe four episodes.  And if we think of the movie in those terms, the first two kinda outright suck while the third is good buildup and the fourth is high in the running for flat-out best episode in the series.  So this roughly balances all that out I guess.

[Hunter Sopko]

South Park movie, Rick and Morty, Alice in Wonderland.

Don't watch the RahXephon movie. It's just another series compilation movie.

[Grefter]

Cowboy Bebop with music reviews as you go TIA.

[Sierra]

South Park movie, Rick and Morty, Alice in Wonderland.

Don't watch the RahXephon movie. It's just another series compilation movie.

With an even less comprehensible ending, from my recollection.

Cid votes Spirited Away, Coraline, Utena, if that's a thing that we're all doing here.

[SnowFire]

Well since it's so controversial, I vote *for* the RahXephon movie. I seem to recall liking it but thinking it would be completely unhelpful if you hadn't seen the series already, and that it answered one minor unanswered question from the series, but not another.  Damned if I can recall the details or what those questions were though so I'll take a refresher!

Also, finish off Slayers and do Slayers Try, since you already did original & Next.

[Cmdr_King]

Went through and alphabetized, added, and subtracted a few things.  Also, since there was some confusion, added some asterisks next to stuff I've never watched.

The thing with RahXephon is that it's really all about playing with the idea of the quantum God- a being existing outside time who, in selectively observing the plurality of the cosmos, decides what events are true.  So the conceit in the movie is that it's a slightly different universe than the one in the show, whose events Ayato also becomes aware of when he tunes the world, meaning he (and of course the viewer) thus get different info than the first time around.  Which is cute and all, but also means that there's nothing meaningful to discuss about it without also talking in depth about the changes and the series as a whole... which I haven't seen since 2006 and don't have on hand to watch again.

(If it sounds like I remember it well, that's because I read an LP of SRW MX recently.  I don't remember SHIT about the show unto itself except... uh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHRDJY4NGc0&ab_channel=Brunom1 )

[Hunter Sopko]

Yeah, that moment is fantastic. One of the few moments where RahXephon beats out the similar scene in Eva.

[Cmdr_King]

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Mountain Town- It's been six weeks since Saddam Hussein was killed by a pack of wild boars and the world is still glad to be rid of him.
Y'know, in theory this is as much a parody of Renaissance era Disney as anything, and really the sell it much harder than Disney did at the time here.  This one in particular draws a lot from Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but they're actually a lot more blatant than it was; I mean there's a huge minor key shift when Sheila's verse kicks in.  Of course, being crude and obvious is sorta the point isn't it?

Uncle Fucka- As seen here.

Wendy's Song- Actually let's save this one.

It's Easy, MMmkay- we shouldn't say fuck no we shouldn't say fuck FUCK NO~
Y'know, the lyrics to this might be the most competent Mr. Mackey has ever been in-universe, at least up to that point in the series.  It's actually weirdly catchy, moreso than about anything else songwise in the movie I think.  Which really adds a lot of flow to the thing: oh sure, let's fake it, we still get to swear AND it's fun!

Hell Isn't Good- there's probably a joke here about Metallica being the soundtrack to hell, but I don't think I have the heart for it.  Although this highlights some issue trying to do the movie this way, a lot of the songs are just too short to really get a hold of.  Same deal with the Wendy song.  It's just a couple lines, and doesn't really go with any other songs to create a larger motif in the movie.  It exists because well, can't go that long without a song now can we.

Blame Canada- Oscar Nominated Original Song Blame Canada.
Honestly, I think this song may have left a bigger impact on the series than even it's aware of.  It could be the perpetual soundtrack for the adults of South Park for the entire series after this point.  You can really feel the crystallization of Matt and Trey's particular cynicism; the only real question is who do we blame.

Kyle's Mom's a Bitch- The most appropriate "ah fuck" in the movie.  Otherwise, well, this is kinda the moment they allowed themselves for pure fanservice, which makes sense considering I kinda got the impression hey didn't expect the show to keep going after the movie... so may as well reprise the one thing from the show they thought held up.  Which... haven't seen Season 1+2 in a while but I suspect that's totally true.

What Would Brian Boitano Do- I've always felt like there was something specific to Brian Boitano's heyday that made him the one they use here, but fuck if I know what it was.  Oh well.  Point is, defeat the evil robot king in the year 3010.

Up There- Weirdly late in the film for an I Want song eh.  Then again I suppose you couldn't really have Satan singing any earlier.  Probably the most gratuitous Disney jab, with the most obvious parallels between it and its inspiration.  Although come to think of it I think this song has the most effort into its animation sequence too, so in a way that kinda works.

La Resistance- Derp, that's what Gregory is, he's Le Mis!  Which explains why the whole thing turns into a competing medley with each character doing their signature songs.  Pity really, I kinda like the one they start with... although I guess that makes sense.  More broadly, more than the earlier stuff which is easily mistaken for just an animated show full of satire taking the piss of the biggest animated films of the day for their own film, this really hints at the later transition they take towards doing actual Broadway stuff.

I Can Change- ... I don't think have anything here.

"God?  He is the biggest bitch of them all".  This line has forever stayed in my brain.  I often have to resist quoting it in open company.

I'm Super- Sure am.  I wish I could remember if this is something from the show as well, but.... oops.  That said, pretty alright, and... sure, filler, but again that's exactly the point.

The Mole's Reprise- Alas, the best character... has died.

There's probably something to be said about Sheila staring unflinchingly at the carnage she's wrought.  I suppose it might just be setting up for Kyle's Moral Delivery (see also comments about Blame Canada and the crystallization of Trey and Matt's cynicism)?  Actually, those two things should be separated.
This is probably the most sincere moral South Park ever delivered.  No "Y'know, I learned something today", no happy medium finding, no pat ending after, just 'going out and fighting everyone isn't taking care of the children, taking care of your children is taking care of the children.' 
but I think this touches on a deeper vein.  The main villain here is Sheila, and it's telling that probably the evilest moment in the movie really belongs to her; she watches the war happen around her and immediately says "This is what we wanted!"  I mean, much as Saddam is probably a more evil person, he's also a buffoon easily thwarted, while everything actually bad in the film is because Sheila accepts no responsibility whatsoever for anything she does.  Even when the other moms call her out.  Essentially, the source of all the worlds problems are... people trying to stifle free speech.  It's kinda weird really, a world where any regular evil is just people being dumb, and overall evil people are just kinda dumb.  So malevolent INTENT comes from anything against freedom, while the actual evil is harmless.
Libertarians get weird when they get going is what I'm getting at.

Cartman's superpowers, the most anime thing.  Odd thing, I remember the part where they obviously riff on Return of the Jedi (hard to miss), but the way Cartman powers up, and the way snow flies up when Saddam hits the ground?  So anime, I think specifically 80's style seinen, but could be off there.

Mountain Town (Reprise)- ... wait, is the the only time in the whole film Chef is on a song?  That is amazing restraint on their part.

This one feels a lot more like a straight retrospective than what I usually do, which... well, it's a comedy which often has trouble aging, so assessing it more in terms of how it affected the evolution of the show just felt more natural.  Or I'm in a weird political mood so the politics of it jumped out at me.  Both those seem likely.  Lacking in substance as some of the songs are though, I actually liked them quite a lot, and there's plenty of stuff that does hold up humor wise.  But some of the stuff that's bothered me about later seasons definitely seems to have roots here.

Rating- 7/10

[Cmdr_King]

Bolt

So this is a new one for us, a Disney film from the dark times, before Princess and the Frog.

‘course, that’s misleading, because really this is the first film that lead them out of the wilderness- the first after John Lasseter took the helm at Disney Animation Studios.  And some of that influence can be felt just in the premise, because there’s something quintessentially Pixar about an animal movie built around the lead thinking he’s a super hero because he’s on TV.  It just feels like how they’d put the twist in the “pet walks through hell to get home after being carted across the country” story.

I think of films like that, where you have one big gimmick to polish a classic story, as having two dimensions you can grade it on:  does the gimmick change the story in such a way as to make it seem completely unlike the classic story, or is the execution of the story fundamentals good enough to let it stand up on its own regardless of the gimmick.

So the gimmick is certainly very present, but not really in a transformative way.  They try to use it to add extra punch to the reunion by giving us a fakeout of Bolt being replaced, and it’s the main source of humor in most of the flick.  But they almost seem to want to get those funny bits out of the way so they can instead step away from the gimmick and instead mix the classic form of the story with a roadtrip. 

We’ll come back to the ending though.

Fundamentals… well, I had a phrase get stuck in my head, and despite not being very good y’all are stuck with it now too: Median non Descript.  I know, it’s terrible, but y’know what, the McAveragesons have gotten enough attention.  But there’s just something entirely middle of the road about it.  You can immediately peg the age of the movie from the animation quality, but they do an adequate job of giving personality to the animal characters so it doesn’t stand out too badly.  There’s a fair amount of non-acting going on here, but for Travolta at least that kinda works because not-quite-monotone fits Bolt as a character.  And no one else really has enough going on for it to impact much.  The cute dog scenes are sufficiently cute, the reveals of deep personal trauma are predictable but placed well, the dumb sidekick is just barely effective enough to not get too annoying.  Etcetera.

Rather torn on the ending though.  Well, let’s step back.  The entire sequence from the big heartbreak fakeout to the credits is a bizarre mix.  The actual fakeout is just one of those giant predictable things that are utterly annoying because watching characters get twisted up over obvious misunderstandings that’d be resolved by talking for 30 seconds is just not fun to me.  But then it sets up the rescue sequence, which pays off the opening (which honestly the opening bit of going through an episode of Bolt is the best part of the whole movie) and has fairly good emotional beats.  Then the ending is just… the tritest thing, I mean of course that’s how the movie ends right?  So I suppose it ends on the same basic note it kept hitting through the majority of the film doesn’t it.

Although actually I guess even the fire escape sequence touches on just a weird thing in the movie.  Like, they set up the whole “Bolt thinks it’s real” thing in a weird Truman Show fashion, which is fine, except they linger just long enough on how goddamned traumatized the poor dog is, then immediately play it off as just “oh he just needs the Regular Life, it’ll be fine”.  Seriously, that first scene in Bolt’s trailer where he sits there staring at the door in an unbreakable state of hyper-vigilance?  I’m pretty sure that’s the clearest sign of PTSD.  But obviously a week in the heartland will clear the right up.  It’s almost too bad because there’s plenty of other scenes that suggest Bolt is just kinda wired weird and is kinda fearless by nature, it’s sorta the point of the very first scene- Bolt isn’t quite like these other puppies, he stays focused on what interests him.  But that specific scene… yikes.

I don’t really think that hits me too hard on the final gutcheck entertainment rating, but… yikes.

Rating- 6/10

[Cmdr_King]

Despicable Me 3

Yes yes, I know, I’ll go back and cover Minions eventually.

In a way I think I like this one the most so far.  Which doesn’t make much sense, and I can only assume it has to do with either seeing it in the theater or some particular aspect landing more definitively for me.  I think in part the movie finds a better balance for the ensemble, and having the characters off doing other stuff makes some sense given how much it loves the side characters to start with.  For the most part they manage to juggle that very well too, especially using the Minions subplot to imply time passage in the main plotline with Gru.  It’s not perfect, the Sing sequence is a smidge too long and the bit with them in the balloon is a bit intrusive, but mostly it actually helped give things natural breathing spots which can be a hard thing, especially in kids movies.

Bratt’s material is amazingly in tune with his actor.  Like, did Trey Parker have a hand in his own lines?  Is one of the writers an ex-pat from South Park?  Or are they just uncanny imitators?  I dunno, but it’s weird.  Honestly though, despite the first trailer showing the entire first scene of the movie more or less (come ON trailer people, do better) Bratt’s material was good.  While conceptually El Macho is just amazing I feel like Bratt’s the first villain in these films to really pop for me?  There’s always a certain patheticness to the Despicable Me universe (it’s a bit reminiscent of Venture Bros. come to think of it) and Bratt manages to own that while having it actually make him more threatening.

They revisit a lot of common themes with aging and Gru’s sense of inadequacy, which honestly they don’t do a huge amount with but the window dressing around it is pretty good at keeping you from being overwhelmed by any nagging sense of retread.  The biggest payoff though?

There’s something completely perfect about the ending of this, in the sense that I can think of no more fitting ending for the series than Gru and his twin locked in a series of good natured Super Spy vs Super Villain battles for years to come.

It’s really kinda a pity there’s no way in hell the series actually ends at 3.

I love everything to do with the unicorn subplot.  I’ll leave that one there.

Rating- 7/10.  Despicable Me has never really gotten amazing, but there’s definitely a comfortable level of amusement to be found pretty consistently.  Which I sometimes suspect is the difference between a franchise and a series.

[Luther Lansfeld]

"God?  He is the biggest bitch of them all".

Such a good line. That French kid is a dick.

[Cmdr_King]

Alice in Wonderland

We live in a world Alice created.  The Internet is the entire world, right?

While you can see, very nearly fully formed, the primordial Internet Troll in the Cheshire Cat, it goes a bit deeper than that.  It’s not terribly controversial to say that there are certain bedrocks for human interaction in the age of the internet.  The shared cultural touchstone is Monty Python; people who’ve never seen Monty Python can quote large segments of it.  The shared logic of the internet is that of Douglas Adams; people who’ve never read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can still form thoughts in the same basic structure as Infinite Improbability.  And in that same vein, pretty much anyone uses rhetoric strongly reminiscent of Alice.

I suppose that just means that the internet mostly speaks in rhyming nonsense logic, where nitpicks are meant to convey interest and encouragement and quoting nonsense rules then managing to simultaneously follow and subvert them is everyday behavior, but it’s more the fact everyone accepts this and can easily parse meaning from it that’s interesting. 

Of course, I’ve actually read Alice in Wonderland (though not Through the Looking Glass) and… I dunno, I actually don’t remember a lot of it?  There’s something about the book that slid right through my brain.  But I remember thinking that the Disney version was quite true to it with the major exception of Alice’s song of self-loathing.  So it might be overstating things to credit Disney too much here… but I don’t think so actually.  In large part Alice in Wonderland is an animation showcase, and I think those visual cues actually help the voice of the writing come through more strongly.  Or I’ve seen this movie once every few years since I was a child and can fill in large parts of both from memory so I see more stuff for an exercise like this.  One of those.

Otherwise, despite being very visually driven and having a lot of colorful characters (who I get the impression were kinda name actors in their day, although thanks to Disney gravity I’m sure about half of them are best known for their Disney stuff nowadays), Alice appropriately lives or dies on Kathryn Beaumont’s performance, and I can think of few actors her age (~12 when she’d have been in the booth) I’ve seen comparable performances out of.  She spends a lot of time outright talking to herself and manages a lot of nuance and personality. 

It’s kinda weird Disney only cast her in one other thing, is what I’m saying.  More than that though, despite being easily chopped up into smaller segments for mass consumption (I vividly remember having free Disney Channel previews and getting bits and pieces of Alice in between shows, back when it was a premium station without commercials), it has a clear emotional throughline and story progress, and almost all of that is down to Beaumont being able to inject a steady emotional drain through each segment.

I’m having trouble putting a bow on this one, in a way that’s kinda weird.  A lot of my appreciation for it is purely intellectual (it’s well animated, it reflects strongly in modern culture, they got a really nuanced performance out of a very young actress) and I can’t really say I had any emotional response to it at all.  So I suppose…

Rating: 7/10.  I dunno, this simultaneously seems low but also I don’t feel like I can justify higher.  It’s foundational and interesting but it just doesn’t stick to me in the way I usually expect these things to.

[Cmdr_King]

Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders

I have to admit upfront that I just did not have any strong reaction to this one.  So retroactively I guess I’m glad I didn’t try to do it immediately after Adam West passed.  Be sorta a crummy thing to do wouldn’t it?

Mind you Adam West was absolutely excellent in this, as were Burt Ward and Julie Newmar.  Indeed, the ease with which they slip into those old roles and bounce off each other justify the entire film easily.  The trouble I’m having is that it’s absolutely designed to be a self-aware love-fest for the ’66 show.  I’m passingly familiar with it, it was still in reruns when I was a kid and restricted to whatever came in on the antenna, but I couldn’t tell you the contents of any episode.  It just means I have some audio/visual  reference to back up general pop cultural osmosis knowledge.  But it’s not something that nostalgia bombs me all that hard.  It’s cute and you can tell they worked really hard to slip some of those references in those places, but… it’s there, being cute.  And I really feel about the same way about the barbs at the darker and grimmer Batmen of modern times; like, that’s kinda the point of the plot and… it’s cute, I see what they’re doing, it’s sorta funny for Adam West to say those things?  But it just doesn’t really carry the piece by itself.

I feel like I’d probably have a better appreciation for this if I’d watched it when it came out… because that was last fall, before a certain other Batman animated feature made a lot of those same points much better.  That’s probably the best I can peg my non-response to the film: if you don’t have a full nostalgic response to Batman ’66, what’s left is a weaker version of Lego Batman.

I’m being more negative than the film really deserves though, so… I’m going to break a bit of a personal taboo and give props to two specific jokes.  Batman gets gas to the face, and starts seeing triple… of Catwoman.  Of course they make the right joke.  During the second fight against Joker, Penguin, and Riddler, the impact sounds suddenly get dark.  And I think that did a lot more to float the story than almost anything else, because those balloon words got pretty out there.  A gag only this film could have made, and it really works.

Rating: 6/10. It’s got a standout moment or two, and doesn’t have any huge flaws, but largely just doesn’t click for me.

[Fudozukushi]

Batman '66 is the show where the Joker invented a time-stop device and used it for petty crime.

I think that's the most apt description I could ever give.

[Cmdr_King]

My Little Pony Equestria Girls: Magical Movie Night

Hasbro had a wonderful problem this year:  they have an actual Friendship is Magic movie coming out this fall, which will probably make all the money (mostly because I can’t imagine it really cost much to make), but they already only do stuff for the alternate continuity once a year, so gotta do something for that to keep the doll line robust.  Thus we have Magical Movie Night, billed as a collection of short day-to-day adventures for our two legged friends.

Yeah that’s not quite what they did.

No, this harkens back to the Disney Sequels, specifically the ones that were TV pilots cobbled together into short films.  Now, to their credit, they aren’t representing this as a single story (although disclaimer, we’ll come back to this).  But it’s very specifically structured as TV episodes, each short is 22 minutes long, each one has two transitions that are in fact commercial act breaks, they have cold opens, there’s an intro that is almost identical to anime-style commercial bumpers.

It’s distracting, is what I’m getting at.

Since there’s only three of them, we’ll just give each episode its own little blub.

Dance Magic

Honestly I think I like this one the most?  It’s super slice of life-y, and feels like they had an idea for a ~5 minute short (probably to attach to Legend of Everfree) that got too big and turned into a proper episode.  It’s a Rarity piece, which I’m usually lukewarm on, and trying to focus Crystal Prep characters doesn’t really work for me, but on the other hand? 

https://twitter.com/CmdrKing/status/895043080000335872

Pinkie Pie: Still the best.

Movie Magic

All the issues with the “TV pilot condensed into movie form” crop up in this one.  There’s a straight exposition dump about the geodes from the last movie, because using those powers is going to be a recurring gimmick in the series!  And we need to have a recurring misguided friend to teach lessons to, so bring on the jilted fangirl!  But we also need to make this kinda look like a movie for some of the marketing materials, so let’s make “movies!” a gimmick and have the cast visit sets of MLP-verse films!  Please ignore that only Daring Do and the Power Ponies make obvious “would be films in modern times” cases, we can wing this.

Honestly though it all frays at the seams.  Juniper’s motivation is just beyond stupid and kicked me right out of the short.  Dashie’s fangirlism wobbles precariously between funny and annoying.  And they give this huge detective rant to Twilight despite this not really being her episode?  Just not good decision making here.

And of course there’s an exceedingly clumsy transition into the next short because oops we actually did want to pretend this was a movie.

Mirror Magic

I should disclaimer here that I’m behind on the regular show: haven’t seen Season 6 yet.  So I don’t have a great handle on the post-evil Starlight Glimmer.  Still, the first part of the short works well, despite having a sense of being obligatory.  “Okay we’ve gotta do SOMETHING with Twilight having two students but only acknowledging one most of the time, so… cameo?  Yeah cameo.”  Honestly I could really go for the reverse more than anything, but I legitimately don’t think that’ll ever happen.  Still, Starlight’s endearing enough in the role, partly because they have no qualms making her look dorky as fuck.

This is all a bit undercut by the whole magic part, mostly because we don’t have any meaningful sense of why or how.  Like, okay, magic is crossing over and spontaneously generating, that’s fair.  But this feels really specific except there’s no explanation?  Oh wait, yes there is: it’s the pilot, it’s a hook!

The whole distraction thing keeps coming up.

Anyway, having most of the cast sidelined in the mirror dimension is kinda lame, and the sudden rush at the end of “okay everyone admit to past dealings as a supervillain” is… I dunno what to make of it.  Did they cancel the EQ show and had to wrap up material they already had?  Was this short the original pitch for a full scale fifth EQ movie that they pared back because FiM is getting that slot?  It’s weird.

Really that’s the final take, as much as I have fun guessing at the production process of the show despite never doing silly things like research, I’m really a bit lost at this one.  What’s here is largely fine, with a few good moments, but there’s also a lot of material that could have stood on its own if it were given a chance and I’m kinda sad we’ll probably never revisit most of those concepts.  So just kinda decent on the whole.

Rating- 6/10

[Cmdr_King]

Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme

After a long absence, let’s pull another Lionsgate Marvel flick out of the case.
Much like the last one I don’t have a whole lot nice to say.

So we’ll get the good parts out first.  The movie plays out as an origin story, and they try to link in Strange’s backstory, the events of his accident, and his becoming the Sorcerer Supreme together, which works quite a bit better than I’d have thought.  Pinning his bitter misanthropy on a dead little sister is a little much, but tying that into why he’s put off by the coma kids, and hallucinations of the same being what distracted him enough for the accident actually dovetails well.  The whole “Dormammu uses kid’s dreams to weaken the barriers between dimensions” actually is a pretty good idea for the way they present magic; functions of willpower and spiritual enlightenment and suchnot.

Annnnd the rest.

Most basic of basic problems here: this is just cheaply animated.  The flaps are terrible, the shading is beyond terrible, moving vehicles use a cel effect over top of obvious blocky CG artifacts and frankly look less polished than multiple 2003 video games I can think of.  Within the same frame they’ll have multiple levels of detailing on faces and the like, giving the impression that some of the lesser characters have a blur effect or something going on.  Sometimes I wonder if they were going for a no-outline animation style, which has been done to amazing effect, but no I think they just tried to save budget because the backgrounds are awful and they use this terrible slow-mo effect in some of the fights because, oops, we needed to stretch the scene? 

Like Thor, the ultraviolence doesn’t really work here.  They use the hell out of the same “skeleton crumbling to dust” effect as that, so I guess they were proud of it.  Not that it’s bad on its own, but they get so much use out of it by inventing a bunch of lesser apprentices for the Ancient One so they had people to kill off, then in the finale by having several dozen civilians get consumed by a swarm of hellbeasts.  Because that’s what’ll draw me into this super hero movie.

They don’t even get the Dr. Strange basics right.  I know to some degree this is suffering because I have the MCU movie to compare it to, but Mordo’s betrayal makes negative amounts of sense and the presentation of magic itself is just boring.  Even if battles had been well animated it wouldn’t have produced very good fight scenes because the scenes themselves just didn’t have much going on.  I guess Wong’s sand effects were decent?  Yeah, I’m stretching here.

There are absolutely times the good ideas here try to come out.  The way they present Strange’s path to understanding and the nudges you see Wong and the Ancient One making to get him there really do come together well.  But even those bits will get horribly interrupted by the crummy fight scenes, completely derailing any sense of momentum.  Any time I tried to like the movie it would seem to notice and go back to its worst qualities to prevent that right quick.

So yeah I think I talked myself into giving this the lowest score I’ve used so far.

Rating- 3/10

[dunie]

will you ever seek out the little prince?