October Review: Corpse Bride (2005)

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A long time ago in Russia, a young Jewish man was on his way to his wedding accompanied by his friends. As they passed by an old tree in the woods, the groom noticed to his amusement a stick poking from the ground that resembled a bony finger clawing its way out of the earth. In jest, the groom placed his wedding ring on the stick and recited his vows to his “wife”, performing the wedding ritual and making his companions roar with laughter. Little did he know that he made a grave error indeed.

The ground began to shake beneath them. A enormous hole opened up, out of it where the stick once lay rose a horrifying corpse! She was little more than a skeleton wrapped in bits of skin and a rotting wedding dress with a spider’s web for a veil. The bride had been murdered on her way to her own wedding years before by anti-Semitic Cossacks. Now that the groom had made his vows to her, she claimed him as her own.

In terror and desperation, the groom and his friends fled to the rabbi for help. Surely the wisest and most learned holy man in the village would know what to do. The groom presented his dilemma (as a hypothetical question, of course), but as the rabbi pondered it, the doors of the synagogue burst open, and there before them stood the corpse bride. Once again she laid claim to the young groom, this time with the whole village – and the groom’s living bride – there to witness it. With the situation blown wide open, the rabbi gathered other rabbis from the surrounding villages to consult with them. The village waited anxiously for their outcome, the groom’s living bride most of all. Finally, the rabbi presented his answer:

“It is true, you have put the ring on the finger of the corpse bride and recited your vows, which constitutes a proper wedding – however, the vows state that you must seek a life together hallowed by faith. Since the bride is already deceased, she has no claim upon the living.”

The groom and his living bride were relieved. The poor corpse bride, on the other hand, wailed and collapsed to the ground in tears. “My last chance at a happy life, gone! My dreams of love and family will never be fulfilled, every thing is lost forever now.” She was a pitiable sight, a heap of bones in a ragged wedding dress sobbing on the floor – yet who should show her compassion but the living bride herself? The young woman knelt and gathered up the corpse bride, holding and comforting her like a mother would a crying child.

“Don’t worry,” she murmured in her ear, “I will live your dreams for you. I will have children in your name, enough for the two of us, and you can rest knowing our children and children’s children will be taken care of and never forget you.” The living bride tenderly carried the corpse bride to the river and dug a grave for her, decorating it with stones and wildflowers, and laid her in there herself. At last, the corpse bride knew peace, and she closed her eyes. The living bride and her groom were married, and she kept her promise to the corpse bride: she had many children, and those children had children, and they always told the story of the corpse bride and the kindness she was shown so she’d never be forgotten.

This is a semi-abridged version of an old Jewish folktale that would have remained in obscurity if it hadn’t reached the late Joe Ranft, storyboard artist for Pixar and a little movie called The Nightmare Before Christmas. He passed it on to his good buddy Tim Burton and big surprise, this rather macabre love story clicked with him. Corpse Bride debuted in 2005, the same year as Burton’s Willy Wonka remake, and it’s safe to say that this my preferred film between the two. Obviously, comparisons between this and the previous Tim Burton stop-motion musical (which he did NOT actually direct, see the opening of my Coraline review) will be inevitable, but Corpse Bride is a fine companion piece to Nightmare in nearly every way.

…Then I watched The Princess and the Scrivener’s video on the film (do check out their channel by the way) where they raised a highly pertinent question. If you’ve seen the movie already, I’m sure you’ve noticed one major difference between this and the story it’s based on:

So because Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride changes the setting of this Russian-Jewish folktale to England and made the characters Christian (as well as taking Burton’s own dodgy history when it comes to diverse casting into account), does that make it guilty of Jewish erasure?

Look, events this past year have made me re-evaluate many of my views and privileges as a white person. I want to be as woke and supportive of as many marginalized voices as possible, and that includes reassessing media I previously assumed was harmless or at least fair for its day. I truly want to see more Jewish characters and stories in mainstream entertainment that aren’t overused stereotypes or victims (the only Jewish movies I can think of that don’t involve the atrocities of World War 2 are Fiddler On The Roof and Yentl). After seeing Scrivener’s video, I sometimes wonder how much more we could have gotten if they kept the film more grounded in its Semitic roots. In fact, wouldn’t there be far more tension and a greater commentary on marrying outside of race, class and religion if they kept Victoria Christian but made Victor Jewish? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a thoughtful, questioning rabbi to counter Pastor Gallswell’s narrow-minded austerity?

That being said, however, I still don’t have much of a problem with the changes made in Corpse Bride. Folktales are meant to be retold with changes naturally evolving through the centuries. Sometimes the true strength in a story lies in how it well it can be told through different ethnic lenses. HBO’s animated series Happily Ever After is excellent in this regard, giving us creative cultural retellings of familiar stories ranging from an Inuit Snow Queen to a Rastafarian Rumpelstiltskin. The fact that so much of the grimness and heart of the original tale remains after its conversion to Christianity is a testament to how well they managed to pull this adaptation off.

October/Special Request Review: Return To Oz (1985)

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“Hey, Ironic Disney Logo, you’ve been gone for a while. How are you feeling?”

“A bit better, thanks. Having to relive The Black Cauldron and Mickey’s Christmas Carol in the same year took a toll on me. The 80’s were a rough decade.”

“Funny you should mention that. I’m looking at another 80’s Disney movie and wanted to ask if you’d give your two cents.”

“Which one is it?”

“Return to Oz.”

“OHHHHH NO, you get yourself another logo to drag through this nightmare ’cause I’M. NOT. DOING IT.”

“Too late, you’re already in the review talking about how you don’t want to be in it.”

“I-but-I…fine. Just let me have a good hard drink first while you do the intro.”

“Gladly.”

Few know that one of Walt Disney’s unrealized dreams was to make an Oz movie he could call his own. There’s plenty of books in the series beyond the first and most popular one, and Walt bought the rights to them before they went into the public domain. He could take the material in any direction he wanted so long as he didn’t tread on MGM’s toes. The closest we ever got to seeing his vision was an episode of Walt Disney Presents where the Mousketeers “pitched” a musical called The Rainbow Road To Oz to their beloved leader. It was a perfect way to build hype for a movie…that never even made it past the planning stage for whatever reason. Since then Disney released a few Oz-themed song and story records, but Filmation was the first to make their own unofficial sequel. It starred Judy Garland’s daughter Liza Minelli as Dorothy and Margaret Hamilton as Aunt Em –

Wait, Margaret Hamilton was the actress that played the Wicked Witch of the West. What was it that she said at her most evil moment in the original movie?

“I’LL give you Auntie Em, my pretty! AAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”

“Run, knockoff animated Dorothy!! IT’S A TRAP!!!”

Anyway, Disney all but sat on the Oz books until the 1980’s when the copyright on them was set to expire. Just like Sony with Spider-Man before the MCU came a-knocking, they rushed to come up with a movie so they could hold on to the rights for that much longer*. By a staggering coincidence, Walter Murch was interested in launching his directing career with a new Oz story. Murch is a legendary Academy Award-winning editor and sound designer, and this is his first – and as of writing this review, only – cinematic directorial venture. A pity he didn’t stick with it; based on what we got from Return To Oz he could have been one of the greats. That’s a hole not even three Oscars, a Nikola Tesla award, the 2015 Vision Award Nescens and two honorary doctorates could ever hope to fill.

Return To Oz was released in 1985, the same year as The Black Cauldron. And just like that experimental venture into the darker side of fantasy, it was a box office bomb that went on to develop an immense cult following. Some big names that have come out as fans include the Scissor Sisters, who wrote an entire song inspired by and named after the film on their first album, and no less an authority on the cynical side of fantasy/sci-fi than Harlan freaking Ellison. But why did it flop to begin with? Well, dear reader, there are a few reasons as to that:

1. Change of Management

Return To Oz was filmed as Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Frank Wells stepped in to give Disney a much-needed overhaul. I’ve already discussed the pros and cons of their sweeping changes to the animation department, but live-action is a trickier subject. Whenever there’s a regime change at a major studio, expect certain previously announced movies to either get axed or rushed out to theaters with little fanfare depending on the new CEOs’ tastes. By the time Wells, Katzenberg and Eisner took over, Disney’s live-action features had gone from safe, bland “What would Walt have done” fare to edgier fantasy flicks, though neither routes had turned a desired profit. Return To Oz was the last of the latter category to be released; when it wasn’t the box office or critical darling they hoped it would be, it left theaters almost as quickly as it came and hasn’t been mentioned again since. It’s not the first instance of this sort of thing happening to great films (alas, poor Baron Munchausen) and it won’t be the last.

And this ties into…

2. Misaimed Marketing

Return To Oz was marketed as a straight-up sequel to the 1939 classic, so people came in expecting a lighthearted musical romp and walked out not knowing what had hit them. Unlike the other attempts at sequels that more or less followed the formula of the first film, Return To Oz is much closer in terms of plot, character and tone to the novels. There were complaints that it was unfaithful to the Oz stories, but as someone who’s read most of them, I disagree; if anything, Return To Oz is far more faithful to the L. Frank Baum books than The Wizard of Oz ever was, deftly combining elements from the second and third entries into a deep, cohesive narrative that still manages to tie into the first one. The only thing that even remotely links Return To Oz to The Wizard of Oz are the ruby slippers, which Disney paid a hefty fee to MGM to use. This makes the movie more of a spiritual sequel than a canon continuation, at least for me. If the original Wizard of Oz had stuck to the aesthetic and writing of the book it was based on, then this would have been a direct sequel; though I understand how difficult it must be to market a sequel to a version of a beloved movie that was never made.

3. Behind The Scenes Drama

With the amount of major set pieces, special effects and hands that go into making any film, it’s usually no big surprise if some drama breaks out. Shooting Return To Oz went over schedule and over budget, the script was rewritten many times to try to combat the darker tone, and Walter Murch’s clashes with executives nearly resulted in his firing. He barely kept his job through some divine intervention:

“Mr. Shortmeind, a trio of directors wish to have a word with you.”

“Jeeves, how many times have I told you not to interrupt my hourly money fanning?!”

“Don’t worry, Jeeves, we’ve got this.”

“S-Spielberg…Lucas…Coppola!! I am at your beck and call, gentlemen! Say the word and you and all your beautiful box office returns can have whatever you wish!”

“Save your groveling for awards season, Shortmeind. What’s this we heard about our good friend Walter Murch being fired from his Oz movie?”

“Fired?! Wha-wh-who said anything about being fired? No no no, I said Murch was…inspired! Yeah, that’s it! Inspired! What a damn good director he is!”

“So we trust there’s no issue with him finishing what he started?”

“Absolutely, gentlemen! Everything’s peachy keen here!”

“Good. We’ll be back on Wednesday to discuss the plans for Star Tours, Roger Rabbit, and the Apocalypse Now re-theming of the Jungle Cruise. Toodles!”

“Jeeves!! Get Murch on the phone and tell him to be back here first thing in the morning!”

“At once, sir. Shall I check in on Mr. Katzenberg’s progress in editing The Black Cauldron as well?”

“This money ain’t gonna fan itself, Jeeves! There’s only so much of me to go around!”

4. It’s Terror Time Again

If Ironic Disney Logo hasn’t clued you in already, Return To Oz has a reputation surrounding it – that being it’s one of those films that terrified an entire generation of 80’s kids. It doesn’t downplay the grimmer elements borrowed from the novels – hell, it bravely takes them even further. I only caught glimpses of Return To Oz on tv a few times though I somehow always missed the frightening bits; yet when I finally saw it in full in my teens, I totally understood why certain scenes would leave a few scars. But there’s no gore, nudity, swearing or terrible messages that would make this movie unsuitable for children. Like An American Tail, it has a likable set of heroes that you want to follow and there’s a happy ending, both of which make it easier to see it through. Despite how much I’ve gone on about what scared me as a child, I’m of the mind that kids should be exposed to a bit of safe darkness through their movies or shows to challenge them and make things a little more exciting. I mean, I grew up with this,

this,

this,

and this,

– and I turned out okay. Just ask my therapist.

Brace yourselves, folks. We’re heading down the yellow brick highway to hell. This is Return To Oz.

June Review: Clash of the Titans (1981)

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80’s movie, action, Action-Adventure, andromeda, Aphrodite, Athena, battle, Bubo, Calibos, clash of the titans, claymation, dioskilos, epic, Fantasy, Greece, Greek mythology, Greek myths, Harryhausen, Hera, kraken, Medusa, mount Olympus, movie review, original, owl, Pegasus, Perseus, Poseidon, practical special effects, Ray Harryhausen, river styx, special effects, stop motion animation, stop-motion, sword and sandal, thetis, Zeus

(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material.)

“As long as man shall walk earth and search the night sky in wonder, they will remember the courage of Perseus forever. Even if we the gods are abandoned and forgotten, the stars shall never fade.”
– Zeus

I can’t recall if I ever mentioned it before, but I’m big on fairy tales, folktales and myths. I’ve always been fascinated by how different cultures interpret familiar stories, or use them to relay well-worn morals or their take on how the world was formed. When I was a kid a friend of my parents gave me a copy of D’Auliere’s Greek Myths (which is a must-own for anyone who enjoys these classic stories) and I ate it up like the diminutive bookworm I was, but it wasn’t my first exposure to the pantheon of Greek legends. No, that was a film I saw when I was just seven years old, one that has left an indelible imprint on the collective subconscious of anyone exposed to it at a young age and has since become a cult classic for its take on one of the most famous Greek myths of all time.

Now I wouldn’t call Hercules one of my top ten favorite Disney films, but its zany animation, fun characters and catchy music make for a fun viewing experience. Of course, being Disney, they left out all the family-unfriendly aspects of the original tale and reshaped it into what’s essentially a modern-Grecian take on the Superman/Moses story, but I’m not one to complain about that. You try making an animated film where the main character kills his wife and family in a bout of insanity brought on by his jealous stepmother and literally works himself to death trying to make up for it. Truth be told, about 90% of Greek myths involving heroes follow a similar plot – Zeus gets it on with a mortal, has a child out of wedlock, said mortal gets punished by Zeus’ wife Hera (because victim blaming really is a centuries-old practice), and the new demigod is gifted with special powers or weapons to fight tons of foes but still winds up with a fairly ironic and tragic demise. The one exception to this is the story of Perseus, which is the basis of the film we’ll be looking at today.

Now mythology is no stranger to the man behind Clash of the Titans, legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen. His other notable Greek outing, Jason and the Argonauts, is considered one of the most thrilling sword and sandal epics to have held up for the past fifty years, and is worth seeing for the skeleton battle alone (it also happens to be the favorite film of Sheriff Woody himself, Tom Hanks). In addition he created and animated puppets for the original Mighty Joe Young, the Sinbad movies, One Million Years BC, and more. Though he never directed any of them, these movies are forever associated with the name Harryhausen. CGI would eventually come along to push new boundaries in the field of effects animation, but his work has left an indelible imprint on many a future filmmaker, with big names like Pixar and Tim Burton namedropping him in some their own films. For a time Steven Spielburg even considered bringing many of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to life using stop-motion, clearly inspired by the dinosaurs that were featured in Harryhausen’s works.

Clash of the Titans was the last film Harryhausen made before he went into retirement, and it holds all his trademarks, both good and bad. So, did his career end on a high note, or does the movie fall to pieces like a poorly made Play-Doh sculpture? Let’s find out.

October Review: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

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barrel, catherine o'hara, chris sarandon, Christmas, christmas elves, christmas town, claymation, creatures, danny elfman, Disney, disney animated, disney animated feature, disney animated movie, disney animation, disney review, dr. finklestein, elves, experiments, finale reprise, finklestein, gambling monster, ghost dog, glenn shadix, greg proops, Halloween, halloween town, halloweentown, harlequin demon, haunted mansion holiday, henry selick, jack skellington, jack's lament, jack's obsession, ken page, kidnap the sandy claws, lock, lock shock and barrel, mad scientist, making christmas, mayor, monsters, nightmare before christmas, oogie, oogie boogie, oogie boogie's song, paul reubens, poor jack, rudolph, sally, sally's song, sandy claws, santa claus, shock, simply meant to be, stop motion animation, stop-motion, the nightmare before christmas, this is halloween, tim burton, touchstone, touchstone pictures, town meeting song, what's this, zero

(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material.)

“Twas a long time ago,

Longer now than it seems

In a place that perhaps you’ve seen in your dreams

For the story that you are about to be told

Took place in the holiday worlds of old.

Now you’ve probably wondered where holidays come from.

If you haven’t, I’d say it’s time you’d begun…”

– Opening narration

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a movie that I’ve always had a personal connection to. It was released when I was just a child, but I can still remember seeing ads and toys for it in certain places and being oddly fascinated by it, despite the fact that it had ghosts and skeletons and monsters and other such things that would usually scare the bejeezus out of me at that age. I can still remember my first time ever seeing the movie – not in theaters, but at my cousin’s third birthday party. He was a year younger than me, and on his birthday that year, all us kids gathered in the basement of his house and watched this movie in the dark. Whether there were any adults there to supervise us I can’t say, but I can say that I was enraptured by every second of it. I can vaguely remember some of the other children being a little afraid, but I wasn’t (well, maybe for two parts, but those were rather quick moments that didn’t traumatize me as much as you might think). Up until then I had never seen anything like The Nightmare Before Christmas; it was dark but not gruesome, lighthearted without being sappy, humorous, heartwarming, and the visuals and the music stayed in my head long afterwards.

I remember really enjoying it, but a long time passed between that one viewing and the next time I would see it again. For whatever reason, maybe they thought I would be too scared by it, my parents never bought the movie for me. It wasn’t until I was about thirteen or fourteen that I caught it on HBO one day, and all those memories of watching it through the eyes of a child came flooding back. I became obsessed with The Nightmare Before Christmas big time, watching it and listening to the soundtrack even when it wasn’t Halloween or Christmas, learning all I could about the movie via books and dvd bonus features, and yes, making fanart of the characters. It was my gateway to the dark and quirky world of Tim Burton, and seeing as how I was also going through an angry, rebellious, anti-Rankin-Bass phase as a teenager, I embraced this movie with open arms while my family looked on with something that wasn’t quite disgust and wasn’t quite confusion.

And for the record, this was BEFORE this chain got their sticky fingerless gloves all over it and slapped the characters’ faces on everything they could sell, freakin’ posers.

So you may be wondering what the story behind this odd little film is. Well, back in the 80’s Tim Burton worked for Disney as an animator. Yes, the Man of Merry Macabre once worked for the bright and squeaky-clean House of Mouse. I still have a hard time believing it (What Alice in Wonderland movie? Disney only made one Wonderland film and it was animated, silly!) Burton’s time at Disney wasn’t a happy one as most of his ideas were shot down for being too dark and different and he wasn’t too keen on drawing only cutesy animals for a living.

One day, while walking down a street, he came across a window display in a store having its Halloween decorations switched out with Christmas ones and inspiration struck. He wrote a poem based on the classic holiday tome “The Night Before Christmas” showing what happened when two holidays collided. Initially he pitched it as a half-hour stop-motion special, ironically in the style of Rankin-Bass, and he wanted it to be narrated by his idol, Vincent Price. Disney, however, wasn’t interested, and Burton would eventually leave the studio. It wasn’t until after he achieved popularity with “Beetlejuice” and “Batman” that Disney approached him with the idea of turning The Nightmare Before Christmas into a movie. Burton was all for it, but couldn’t direct it himself due to his commitment to filming “Batman Returns”. Instead, he got stop-motion artist Henry Selick to direct it.

Now I’d like to clarify something right away – this is a Tim Burton movie through and through; his name and signature style may be all over this film (heck, the title of the film is preceded by Burton’s name just to remind you whose brainchild it was), but I cannot give enough credit to Henry Selick. The man is a genius of stop-motion; his name is up there with Ray Harryhausen and Nick Park as the best in the business. People often assume that because it’s a Burton film with his name in the title that Tim Burton directed it, but it’s not. Selick did an amazing job with this movie and I’m happy to say it’s led to a very fruitful career for him, directing other stop-motion greats such as James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. Even though there have been innovations in animation since then, this film looks just as great today as it did twenty years ago. So while the story and characters are pure Tim Burton, this movie is just as much Henry Selick’s as it is Tim’s. You’ll see why when I finally get around to reviewing it…

…which is now.

We open in the middle of a forest, where, in a clearing, there is a circle of trees, each one with a door representing a different holiday – an egg for Easter, a heart for Valentine’s Day, a clover for St. Patrick’s Day, a Christmas tree for Christmas, a turkey for Thanksgiving, a jack-o-lantern for Halloween, and one which for years I was unsure was either a firecracker for 4th of July or a dreidel for Hanukkah. We can only imagine how this film would have turned out if it was “The Nightmare Before Hanukkah” instead of Christmas.

Anyway, as the opening narration wraps up, we enter the jack-o-lantern door and we get our first musical number “This is Halloween.”

Oh, and did I forget to mention that longtime Tim Burton collaborator and former Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman did the music for this movie? How foolish of me. How could it have possibly slipped my mind when this music is OHMYGOSHUNBELIVABLYAWESOMEANDBEAUTIFULANDBLAAAAAAGHHHH –

…

…

Uh, can I pay you to pretend that didn’t just happen?