May Review: The Great Race (1965)

Tags

1900s, 1960's, american west, arthur o'connell, austria, blake edwards, cars, cartoon, classic, classic comedy, classic Hollywood, Comedy, cult classic, dick dastardly, dorothy provine, edith head, feature, feature film, feature presentation, film, film review, henry mancini, hezekiah, intermission, jack lemmon, Keenan Wynn, larry storch, laurel and hardy, looney tunes, maggie dubois, max, movie, movie review, natalie wood, New York, obscure movie, Paris, peter falk, pie fight, prince hapnik, prisoner of zenda, professor fate, race, racing, racing game, review, roadshow, silent comedy, silent movie, silent movies, slapstick, slapstick comedy, the great leslie, the great pie fight, the great race, the prisoner of zenda, the sweetheart tree, tony curtis, travel, traveling, vivian vance, wacky races, Warner Bros., Warner Brothers, west

“Push the button, Max!”
– Professor Fate, usually before a catastrophe of his doing strikes

To say things have gotten tumultuous since the last review would be a gross understatement. But we’re not here to discuss today’s upheavals, important as they are. Let’s just take a moment to reflect and laugh. Lord knows we could use a good one right now.

Directed by esteemed comedy director and Hollywood bad boy Blake Edwards, The Great Race is a loving pastiche and send-up of silent comedies and melodramas from the early days of cinema (classic Laurel and Hardy in particular; the film even opens with a dedication to them). Thankfully the movie itself is not silent. What kind of genius madman would try to make a silent comedy in the late twentieth century?

Believe it or not, The Great Race was inspired by a real automobile race from New York to Paris that took place in 1908. Some of the more outlandish elements of the race like floating on icebergs across the sea were even based on genuine ideas that were proposed for the race but wisely ruled out. Despite its star power and a huge budget, The Great Race was a flop on release and quickly fell into obscurity. Critics assumed it was trying to ride off the popularity of Those Magnificent Men And Their Flying Machines, another big-budget all-star comedy with a similar premise. I’m more inclined to believe that its failure was due to the roadshow phenomenon that boomed in the late ’50s dying out at this point. It would be several more years until the epic format of a three-hour film with an overture and intermission faded from theaters completely, but audiences were already losing interest, and that rung The Great Race’s knell. Regardless, it’s garnered something of a cult fanbase from automobile aficionados (the original cars are still displayed at conventions), fans of classic cinematic comedies, and it even inspired the wildly popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon Wacky Races.

So if it wasn’t for this –

– we wouldn’t have this.

January Review: Fantasia 2000

Tags

2000, 2000's, 2D animation, action, al hirschfeld, angela lansbury, animated, animated feature, animated movie, animated movie review, animated musical, animated short, animated shorts, animation, animator, animators, anthropomorphic animals, art, ballerina, Beethoven, bette midler, brave tin soldier, Camille Saint-Saëns, Carnival of Animals, Carnival of the Animals, carnival of the animals finale, cgi animation, computer animation, continuation, continued, daisy duck, deer, Disney, disney animated, disney animated feature, disney animated movie, disney animation, disney love, disney review, Dmitri Shostakovich, Donald Duck, Edward Elgar, eric goldberg, fairy tale, Fantasia, Fantasia 2000, Fantasy, Fifth Symphony, film, firebird, firebird suite, flamingo, flamingoes, flight, flood, flying, George Gershwin, gershwin, giant whale, Great Depression, great flood, hand drawn animation, hans christian andersen, Igor Stravinsky, jack in the box, James Earl Jones, Ludwig van Beethoven, Mickey Mouse, music, nature, New York, noah's ark, Ottorino Respighi, part 2, penn, penn and teller, Pines of Rome, pomp and circumstance, rebirth, review, Rhapsody in Blue, sequel, sorcerer mickey, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, spring sprite, stars, steadfast tin soldier, Stravinsky, supernova, Symphony No. 5, teller, the steadfast tin soldier, themes, tin soldier, traditional animation, volcano, Walt Disney, whale, whales, yo-yo, yoyo

Last year I talked about Fantasia, which is not just one of my favorite Disney movies, but one of my favorite movies in general. And if I may be self-indulgent for a moment, it’s also one of the reviews that I’m the proudest of. Fantasia is a visual, emotional masterpiece that marries music and art in a manner few cinematic ventures have come close to replicating. One question that remains is what my thoughts on the long-gestated sequel is –

…you might wanna get yourselves some snacks first.

As anyone who read my review on the previous film knows, Fantasia was a project ahead of its time. Critics and audiences turned their noses up at it for conflicting reasons, and the film didn’t even make it’s budget back until twenty-something years later when they began marketing it to a very different crowd.

“I don’t wanna alarm you dude, but I took in some Fantasia and these mushrooms started dancing, and then there were dinosaurs everywhere and then they all died, but then these demons were flying around my head and I was like WOOOOOAAAHHH!!”

“Yeah, Fantasia is one crazy movie, man.”

“Movie?”

Fantasia’s unfortunate box office failure put the kibosh on Walt Disney’s plans to make it a recurring series with new animated shorts made to play alongside handpicked favorites. The closest he came to following through on his vision was Make Mine Music and Melody Time, package features of shorts that drew from modern music more than classical pieces.

Fast-forward nearly fifty years later to the golden age known as the Disney Renaissance: Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney surveys the new crop of animators, storytellers, and artists who are creating hit after hit and have brought the studio back to his uncle’s glory days, and thinks to himself, “Maybe now we can make Uncle Walt’s dream come true.” He made a good case for it, but not everyone was on board. Jeffrey Katzenberg loathed the idea, partly because he felt the original Fantasia was a tough act to follow (not an entirely unreasonable doubt) but most likely due to the fact that the last time Disney made a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under, it drastically underperformed (even though the reasons for that are entirely Katzenberg’s fault. Seriously, watch Waking Sleeping Beauty and tell me you don’t want to punch him in the nose when Mike Gabriel recalls his opening weekend phone call).

Once Katzenberg was out of the picture, though, Fantasia 2000, then saddled with the less dated but duller moniker Fantasia Continued, got the go-ahead. Many of the sequences were made simultaneously as the animated features my generation most fondly remembers, others were created to be standalone shorts before they were brought into the fold. Since it was ready in time for the new millennium, it not only got a name change but a massive marketing campaign around the fact that it would be played on IMAX screens for a limited run, the very first Disney feature to do so. As a young Fantasia fan who had never been to one of those enormous theaters before, I begged and pleaded my parents to take me. Late that January, we traveled over to the IMAX theater at Lincoln Center, the only one nearest to us since they weren’t so widespread as they are now, and what an experience it was. I can still recall the feeling of awe at the climax of Pines of Rome, whispering eagerly with my mom at how the beginning of Rhapsody in Blue looked like a giant Etch-A-Sketch, and jumping twenty feet in the air when the Firebird’s massive eyes popped open. But did later viewings recapture that magic, or did that first time merely color my perception?

August Review: An American Tail (1986)

Tags

1980's, 80's animation, a duo, american tail, an american tail, animated, animated feature, animated movie, animated movie review, animation, anthropomorphic animal, anthropomorphic animals, Barry Mann, bluth animation, cossacks, Cynthia Weil, Dom DeLuise, Don Bluth, dreams to dream, Ellis Island, fievel, fievel mousekewitz, Gary Goldman, giant mouse of minsk, give me your tired, immigrants, immigration, irish animation, James Horner, John Pomeroy, Madeleine Kahn, mice, mott street maulers, mouse, never say never, New York, no cats in america, obscure animated movie, obscure animation, Phiilip Glasser, somewhere out there, statue of liberty, steven spielburg, storm, street gang, sweatshop, tanya, tanya mousekewitz, tiger, tony and bridget

“Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight
Someone’s thinking of me, and loving me tonight…”

Chances are if you were to name a well-known American animation auteur besides Walt Disney, most of us who were children in the 80’s and 90’s will point to one man: Don Bluth.

Bluth formed his studio in the hopes that he could make quality entertainment unlike what Disney was putting out; the irony is that not only did Bluth use to work for Disney up through the seventies, but his career almost mirrors much of Walt and his studio’s ups and downs. Their early films are considered their best despite the common criticism that they’re too dark for children, and over time they grew lighter and softer to the point where they were criticized for, ironically, not being dark enough. That, and they made a few princess fairytale movies in the 90’s with their fair share of Oscar-bait ballads.

There’s also one other factor in this comparison which I think is important. For years after the premiere of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, every animated movie Walt Disney produced was inevitably compared to it. There was a period where Walt himself began to loathe Snow White because she seemed to overshadow all his other accomplishments. I have to wonder if Don Bluth feels the same way about his first foray into feature-length animation, 1982’s “The Secret of NIMH”, which many consider to be his best work. Admittedly I’m in that boat too, yet I feel guilty for saying it because doing so feels as though I’m negating everything that followed. Case in point – this month’s review.

“An American Tail” is one of the first Don Bluth movies I can remember seeing, and if it weren’t for “The Secret of NIMH” it’d be my number one favorite Bluth film. But hey, it comes this close. Funny thing is, I didn’t watch it all that much when I was kid, and not entirely for the reasons you might think. Sure, this movie has everything that comes with an 80’s Don Bluth production – heavy doses of nightmare fuel and a somewhat bleak atmosphere offset by cartoony animation, lighthearted songs, recurring comic relief actors and a happy ending – but it was on another one of those tapes that had more than one feature crammed on to it. In this case, An American Tail came on right after Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. Four year-old me liked Ferngully just fine, but was never invested enough that she’d watch it all the way through to the end, usually stopping after the romantic “Dream Worth Keeping” segment because afterwards things got dark and moody and there weren’t any more songs. And if I did sit through it all, then I’d have to be in the right kind of mood to watch An American Tail because that was dark and moody and THOSE GDAMN CLOSE CALLS WHERE HE COULD HAVE FOUND HIS FAMILY IF HE ONLY –

…anyway, I’ve come to appreciate it much more for what it is an adult than as a kid for a number of reasons. That nostalgia is still there, but it’s well-tempered by time and a deeper understanding of the socio-economic background behind the making of this movie as well as the historical fictional one where the story is set.

Oh, did I mention I’m highly educated in happenings from the time period this all takes place in? Because I am. And this entire review is going to be part-silly observational jokes and part-gushing over how much history they cram into the tiniest details.