My Reactions to Disney’s “Wish” Teaser Trailer

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If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know how much I love Disney. The projects they’ve announced for their centennial this year have been hit or miss (Little Mermaid and Peter Pan remakes? Not interested. Big history exhibit with Tupac Walt Disney hologram? Very cool. Suing the pants off Ron DeSantis? Awesome!) but the one thing I’ve been looking forward to the most is their next animated film Wish. What little of the premise revealed at D23 revolves around the time-honored Disney tradition of wishing on stars. What really drew me in, though? THE ARTWORK:

Ever since Paperman I’ve hoped that Disney would create a full animated feature blending traditional and CGI mediums in a beautiful, unique way, and now it seems we’re finally getting it. Look at that last picture, it’s like a watercolor illustration! I’ve been keeping tabs on Wish since the D23 debut because the potential here is staggering. Yesterday morning Disney released the first teaser trailer, and if you’ve read this far then you’re probably wondering what I think about it. After all, viscerally reacting to trailers and making bold assumptions before knowing the full context is nothing new on the internet, right?

Escape From…Not On Vault Disney Plus?

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Hey y’all, I’m back on one of my favorite podcasts, Escape From Vault Disney! Every March the episodes are themed to a viewers’ choice poll and this year the winner was Not On Disney Plus, meaning Tony and friends are covering Disney and Disney-owned media not on the streaming service for various reasons. In this case, we got to watch Down With Love, a 20th Century Fox comedy directed by Peyton Reed that we had A LOT of good things to say about (this movie’s joining The Shelf for sure). Come listen to us laugh and sing the praises of the movie on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Libsyn, Audible and Listen Notes. Down With Love is now Up On The Shelf! Cheers!

Christmas Shelf Reviews: The Muppet Christmas Carol

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So, is me reviewing a different version of A Christmas Carol every other year going to be a thing? Mind you I’m not complaining, each iteration has something interesting worth discussing, but if I had a nickel for every time I revisited the story for the blog on a consecutive even-numbered year I’d have three nickels.

“…which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened thrice, right?”

But enough memery, let’s go back to 1990, a magical year marred only by the passing of Jim Henson. Much like Walt Disney, the studio he founded was at a loss without their main creative driving force. Could the Muppets and the brilliant people who brought them to life go on without him?

The short answer, yes.

The first idea Jim’s son Brian had was a Halloween special. But when plans for that fell through, he turned to adapting classic literature with that singular Muppet charm. That in turn would charter the course the Muppets would take throughout the 90s and even affect them to this day.

Released through Disney since this was in that grey area before they outright bought The Muppets, The Muppets Christmas Carol was overshadowed at the holiday box office by another Disney feature, Aladdin, and one that they would eventually own, Home Alone 2. But the generation that grew up with annual viewings of this movie had the last laugh. It has since been reevaluated as a holiday classic and one of the best screen adaptations of A Christmas Carol. Yet…for the longest time I just didn’t get it. People claiming THIS was the best version of A Christmas Carol? I was convinced it had to be a nostalgia thing. To be fair, my early memories of the film weren’t exactly positive. Anything involving Muppets was a gamble for baby Shelf; there was a 50-50 chance of it being enchanting fun and games or pure nightmare fuel, and in this case it was the latter due to one scene in particular. But in 2016 I finally gave it another chance, and…

Guys, I am a Muppets Christmas Carol stan. Despite my lack of childhood sentiment, I understand what makes it such a beloved holiday fixture. When Muppets fans say this is their favorite movie in the franchise, I can smile and say “Good choice, it’s easily in my top 3-4, natch*”. Heck, for the past several years it’s usually the first Christmas anything I watch come December. Brian Henson and the Muppeteers brought their A-game as well as some familiar names in their repertoire to give it that classic Muppet feeling. Jerry Juhl returned to write the screenplay and Paul Williams, who previously wrote the songs for The Muppet Movie, crafted the ones heard here. This might be a controversial opinion, but The Muppets Christmas Carol has the best soundtrack out of all the Muppet features. Though the music in each film is usually top-notch, there’s always that one song I have no qualms skipping over (“Never Before Never Again”, “There’s Gotta Be Something Better”, you get the idea). Muppet Christmas Carol, however? Every song is perfect, and to lose any of them would be a huge detriment to the viewing experience.

And I mean any of them. Oh yeah, I’m going there.

Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021) Review

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Surprise, you’re getting another Halloween review because I couldn’t wait another 365 days to talk about my favorite spooky special in recent years.

Muppets Haunted Mansion (or as I sometimes call it, “Muppets Most Haunted”) is one of those features that feels tailor-made me. It combines three things I love: the Muppets, Halloween, and the beloved Disney ride The Haunted Mansion. If you’re wondering why no one thought to do something like this sooner, well, they did. Brian Henson’s first idea for a Muppet project after his father Jim Henson passed away was a Halloween special. Though it didn’t pan out, The Muppets Studio toyed with doing something creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky with Kermit and the gang for years.

Remember this? It started as another tv special pitch but got reworked into a video game.

This brings us to the Muppets and Disney. The last time they both got together to do anything theme park-related was The Muppets Go To Disney World special, a couple of short-lived in-park shows, and MuppetVision 3-D. Cut to thirty years later and now Disney owns them. After the success of the 2011 film, the concept of a Muppets Halloween special was revived. Longtime Muppet director and writer Kirk Thatcher took the helm, and the result is magic.

I think Jambreeqi said it best when he called Muppets Haunted Mansion a variety show with a plot connecting the segments. It’s not unlike a classic episode of The Muppet Show made feature-length. There’s guest stars, gags, bad puns and musical numbers galore, and a surprising amount of heart as well. Every second is filled with love for the Muppets and the Haunted Mansion.

Please note that I’m going to be spoiling the entire special, so drop what you’re doing and go watch it first. You will not regret it. This special is truly something worth experiencing before I color it with my own commentary, no matter how glowing it may be. While it’s been on Disney Plus for a year now, it’s making its cable debut this weekend for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet (or LAST weekend as of the time this is posted, thank you new job and stomach flu). Also, I’m aware that some of my readers have never been to a Disney park or ridden the Haunted Mansion before, so I’ll do my best to put some of the scenes, references and in-jokes in their proper context.

Seventh Anniversary: Twelve Movie Reviews in One Post!

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It’s Up On The Shelf’s seventh anniversary, yaaaaay!

I never imagined the blog would come this far or have the loyal band of readers like you. Thanks for sticking around for so long! I understand some of you are disappointed by the lack of updates or movie reviews (believe me I miss them too, but don’t have the time to get back to them just yet), so to mark the occasion I’m doing something a little bit different.

About ten years ago I got into the habit of documenting what movies I watch each month. It’s a fun way of tracking my taste in film, how many times I revisit favorites and mark new discoveries. To that effect, I put every movie I watched each month over the past year (2021) in a Randomizer, and came out with twelve mini spoiler-free reviews for you to take in. Some of these flicks are On The Shelf so consider them previews for when I eventually review them proper. Let’s get to it!

Seventh Anniversary Plans

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Hey everyone! Hope you’re beating the summer heat and having fun in the sun. As some of you already know, the blog is turning seven this month, and I’m doing something a bit different to mark the occasion. Rather than write one big movie review, I’m doing twelve randomized mini-reviews! These will be based on features I’ve watched in the past year. Don’t worry, these will not count towards the requested reviews that are currently on hold, or full reviews of features that are On The Shelf; rather, some of them will be previews of what’s to come should they get the proper review treatment.

Patrons of the blog will get to see the full list of which flicks I’ll be covering among other great perks, so consider joining the Patreon party today! I’ll see you July 30th when we celebrate in cinematic style. Shelf out!

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

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“She was a pretty little thing, what with her golden hair and beautiful smile and all. She was also kinda, well…spunky.”
– Ranger Johnson introducing our plucky protagonist

You know, as someone breaking into the children’s book world I surprisingly don’t often get the chance to talk about kidlit itself here. One of my favorite authors and illustrators whose works I’ve studied in pursuit of my craft is James Marshall. You might remember him from such classics as Miss Nelson is Missing! and the George and Martha books. In 1988 he wrote and illustrated his version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears which reminds readers of a very important fact that other editions gloss over:

Goldilocks is an ASS.

She walks into someone’s home uninvited while they’re out, eats their food, destroys their furniture and jumps into bed like she owns the place, and when she’s confronted over her lack of respect for others’ property, she runs away without facing any consequences. Marshall had the guts to say “Are we really supposed to sympathize with this girl? She’s the worst.” So he recrafted the story to show how nasty she is beforehand, resulting in her ursine encounter properly scaring her into changing her ways.

Looking into Goldilocks’ origins, however, her being a terrible person may have been the point of the story after all. Fairy tales were used to impart lessons of kindness and obedience from the eighteenth century onward, and who better to set as an example for improper behavior than a destructive child…

…is what I would have said until I discovered the character was originally an old woman. Typical, even in fairytales the female parts are always remade to be younger and hotter.

In the version of the tale first recorded by English poet laureate Robert Southey in 1834, the three bears (who are all bachelors of varying size) are visited by a haggard crone shunned by her family for being an embarrassment and, in Southey’s own words, deserved to be put in a correctional facility. In 1894, folklorist Joseph Jacobs uncovered “Scrapefoot”, an long-lost oral story that, ahem, bears some striking similarities to Southey’s. Scrapefoot, the titular fox, investigates a castle belonging to three bears and causes some havoc involving chairs, beds and bowls of milk before the inhabitants kick him out. It’s widely accepted that Southey learned the story of Scrapefoot from his uncle when he was a boy and may have confused the “vixen” character with its less flattering alternate definition, that of a wild woman.

Only twelve years after Southey published his tale, Joseph Cundall released his version where he aged down the protagonist but kept her hair silver. His belief was that young readers would rather follow an attractive character closer to their age than read about an old lady. From there “Silver-Hair” would cycle through a number of names and hair colors in different iterations before settling on “Goldilocks” in the early 1900s. During that time the trio of ursine bachelors also evolved into a traditional two-parent one-child family. Even more alterations to the text resulted in what was once a menacing fable becoming a rather cozy family story that heavily relies on the Rule of Three because…

So now we have a tale with fairly low stakes but enough repetition and iconography within to be referenced and lampooned a multitude of times over one hundred years later. I will admit, though, between the first time I watched Faerie Tale Theatre’s retelling and revisiting it for the blog, I remembered virtually nothing about it. So how does it hold up on rewatch?

Christmas Shelf Reviews: Klaus (2019)

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It may come as a shock to my fellow readers, but I like animation a lot.

So I tend to keep up to date on forthcoming animated projects, especially if it’s hand-drawn animation. One thing I was excited for that seemed to fall through the cracks for most of the 2010s was an independent animated film that finally premiered to great acclaim on Netflix in 2019: Klaus.

The story of Klaus begins with Sergio Pablos, a Disney animator during the 90s Renaissance who struck out on his own after working on Treasure Planet. He did some writing and character design work for assorted films and also created Despicable Me (which I’m not holding against him because one, he couldn’t possibly predict the juggernaut Minions-being-crammed-down-our-throats-24/7 franchise it’d become, and two, apparently his more creative ideas for the first movie were shot down by executives in order to fit the Illumination mold). Pablos still held a passion for traditional animation deep in his heart, however, and founded SPA Studios in his home country of Spain to try to keep the art form alive. Moreover, he wanted to help it evolve so it could stand toe-to-toe with today’s computer animated films while keeping its handcrafted feel.

Believe it or not, Pablos’ first project was one most distributors he approached considered a huge risk: a Christmas movie, specifically a re-imagining of Santa Claus’ origins. Sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, doesn’t it? Making a Christmas movie is no big gamble if you’re on something like Hallmark, they churn out eight of those a week; the mainstream market, on the other hand, is saturated with classic holiday films. Your Christmas feature would have to be something really special to stand out – and boy does Klaus stand out. I mean, no disrespect to computer animation, but after years of CG-animated films that start to blend into each other after a while, seeing fresh traditional cinematic animation is a palate cleanser for the eyes and the soul. Pablos also came through on taking hand-drawn animation to the next level. The studio developed software that renders detailed light and shadow on to the finished animation. How detailed, you may ask?

They…they caught how light looks coming through ears.

It’s like a reverse Paperman: instead of CGI that closely resembles 2D animation, it’s 2D animation that resembles highly-detailed CGI. So that on top of backgrounds that are Currier & Ives by way of Maurice Noble, and characters that are some of the most endearing in ages, that are part a story that puts on a fun yet heartfelt spin on a familiar plot that really puts you in the Christmas spirit…

…I love this movie, in case you were wondering.

Christmas Shelf Reviews: Olive the Other Reindeer

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While I remember the hype for the FOX Christmas special Olive The Other Reindeer back in 1999 –

…

…

…Excuse me, I was suddenly struck by the realization that I’m old.

Anyway, while I remember the promotions for it before it premiered, I’m ashamed to say I never got around to watching it until several years ago. Shame, really, because it’s been among my personal favorites since. Olive The Other Reindeer is loosely based on a children’s book by Vivian Walsh and award-winning artist J. Otto Seibold, the main conceit being “Hey, doesn’t that one line from the Rudolph song sound like they’re saying Olive The Other Reindeer instead of ‘all of the other reindeer’? Wouldn’t it be funny if someone named Olive got confused over it and tried to become a reindeer?” The book is fairly straightforward with little-to-no stakes, though it has some wonderfully stylized and colorful artwork. Naturally the leap from page to screen meant the story had to be significantly fleshed out, but who could possibly step up to the task?

Eh, how about the guy behind the biggest animated adult show of all time?

To this day I have no idea why Matt Groening took the job but I sure as hell am grateful for it. He, along with Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen, took what could have been another simple Christmas special and injected it with the sly modern wit and cheeky sense of humor they’re known for (the fact that Olive premiered on the same night Futurama did couldn’t have been a coincidence either). They spice up the proceedings with wonderful touches exclusive to this adaptation: the other characters with mondegreen names; the snappy dialogue; the background sight gags that you have to watch multiple times to catch; the running joke with the cordless drill; the self-depreciating jabs at Fox, and more. The smart writing in addition to the unique animation gives this outing a strong sense of identity without losing the heart and charm that’s inherent to the story. It also marks Olive as the only “family-friendly” thing Groening’s made to date; an interesting designation to have, but not a bad one at all.

Christmas Shelf Reviews: The Little Match Girl (2006)

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My introduction to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Little Match Girl was through a picture book with beautiful illustrations by Rachel Isadora which I discovered in second grade. I was instantly endeared to the poor protagonist and enchanted by the wonders she experienced – though the ending left me in a state of shock. I didn’t know what to make of it. The story fell out of sight and out of mind until the Platinum Edition DVD of The Little Mermaid came out. Packaged with it was a new animated short from Disney retelling the Match Girl’s tale.

There’s an odd bit of animated symmetry this shares with The Little Mermaid: both mark the finale of a time-honored animation method. The Little Mermaid was the last film from Disney to use traditionally inked cels before switching over to the CAPS system. The Little Match Girl, meanwhile, was the final Disney product to use CAPS. While the artistry on display left me in awe each time, I rarely revisited this short on account of how it stayed true to the story. And since Andersen had a penchant for downer endings…you get the idea.

This short is brought to us by Don Hahn and Roger Allers, the producer and director of The Lion King respectively, and anyone who’s seen that movie can verify their ability to leave you a sobbing wreck. The Little Match Girl was supposed to be a part of a Fantasia continuation that was tragically canceled; as such, the story is told solely through the visuals and set to the emotional strains of Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No.2 in D Minor (my fellow theater nerds will also recognize this as the music behind Kismet’s “And This is My Beloved”).

So, are you ready to start off your holidays as a tear-streaked mess on the floor?