J.D. Hansel

Family

The Iron Giant Review

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The Iron Giant is, in some respects, a concerning and disappointing film.  Whenever a movie has the capacity to encourage children to think more like scientists, but instead chooses to reinforce the old notion that believing in wild alien stories and conspiracy theories is good, this is disheartening.  However, because it is typical of Hollywood films to have a pro-faith stance of some sort, this isn’t a deal-breaker for me – the film is still really well-made and manages to have a lot of heart in a way that doesn’t annoy me, which is hard to do.  With this said, what impresses me most about the film is the way that it goes against common values, at least to some extent, and it encourages children to think in new ways.

The beauty of The Iron Giant is that it exemplifies how a film can be nostalgic about the past while also being highly critical of it, all without contradiction.  It’s clear that the filmmakers are engaging with classic B-movies and comic books, romanticizing the 1950s all the way, but also pointing out how silly the 1950s could be.  The old horror movies of the day are parodied to great effect, but of course there is also a twist on the old story about an alien coming from Mars to destroy humanity, with Earth’s only salvation coming from the United States military forces.  Remember, Indepence Day came out around the same time, so for a film to made the U. S. army look inept, primal, and, to some extent, malevolent, was pretty risky, but I love a movie that keeps American patriotism in check.  It’s unique and daring storytelling like this that must be encouraged in children’s cinema, and for this alone I consider The Iron Giant to be one of the most important animated films of its time.  Add this to the fact that the story (and storytelling) are clever, creative, and captivating, and I conclude that this film is truly a great classic for all ages.

An American Tail Review

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MINOR SPOILER WARNING

Sometimes the union of two great artists makes for a film with twice the power of a regular film, whereas other times something just isn’t quite working.  We get a little bit of both here with An American Tail, which is a Don Bluth film that Steven Spielberg commissioned.  I haven’t done enough research on the film to say what exactly the conflicts were between them, but I think some of them may be revealed by the parts of the film that seem a little off.  The choice to go with a child actor with no singing ability for the lead vocalist in a musical seems fine if you’re going for a certain sentiment, but the audience certainly pays the price for that sentimentality when he tries to hit the high notes.  Parts of it are a bit dark and/or adult for a G-rated children’s film, even for the ‘80s – I’m always surprised by how much smoking and profanity makes its way into these films.  I’m very confused about how an animal four times the size of a rat manages to disguise itself as a rat without anyone noticing, and the animators’ answer to this puzzle seems to be just making the size really inconsistent from scene to scene, but what’s more confusing here is the nature of the story.

In this film, characters are introduced only to be abandoned until another scene.  Our protagonist may make a friend and, with little warning, immediately break into song about how they’re best friends.  Everything seems to come out of the blue, making the film feel clunky.  Everything seems rushed, taking away the weight of each scene.  In terms of plot, the story is mostly fine, apart from its mild sense of arbitrarity  – it’s just the way it’s written that doesn’t work right.  The one big problem with the plot is how little the protagonist does to successfully accomplish his goal.  That being said, other aspects of the story are really quite smart, like the irony that comes from how easily Fievel and his family could have found each other if not for slightly bad timing, or the way the mice romanticize America only to have their hopes destroyed by reality.  Between the story, the great soundtrack, and the hilarious voice cast (because everybody likes Madeline Kahn) An American Tail is a perfectly fine film for children . . . it’s just a little irritating for screenwriters.

Alice in Wonderland (1951) Review

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Thanks to Tim Burton, this movie is sometimes called “the good Alice in Wonderland.”  I understand why – nostalgia goggles can do that to even the best of us.  The problem is that this movie just isn’t very good.  Sure, the 2010 film has problems and may be highly annoying to some, but at least its story is actually a story.  The original Lewis Carroll story isn’t a story.  It’s a drug trip.  And that’s what this movie is as well.

Now, I don’t want to fault the movie for problems it could not help but inherit from its source material, which is the only reason I’m giving this movie such a high rating – if Disney had come up with the story, I’d be giving it two and a half stars at best.  I’m still not even sure that the other elements of the movie merit this rating, because a lot of the film is just unbearable.  Surely Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum could have been done in a way that’s less excruciatingly irritating, and surely certain parts of the story could have been given a few more small splashed of humor.  The soundtrack is so-so, with some songs I really like a lot, others I think do the job just well enough, and others I find either forgettable or stupid.

So, I’m giving this a nice rating because of two redeeming qualities: first is the casting of a few of the main characters.  I really like the Cheshire Cat in this movie, and the Mad Hatter is one of the great Ed Winn performances.  The one who really steals the show, however, is Alice, voiced by Kathryn Beaumont.  Her voice is absolutely perfect for the part, and perhaps just perfect in general – I could easily listen to it all day.  The second redeeming quality is the visual style, as this might just be, in some respects at least, the most visually pleasing animated film I have ever seen.  It’s got all of the curves and colors one would want a trippy wonderland to have, and its style also serves to mark its particular moment in animation history.  The resulting film is one that I don’t enjoy watching very much – it was a struggle to finish it quite frankly – but I do enjoy looking at it and listening to it, so I’ll let it slide.

T

 

The Goonies Review

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From the Traveling Wilburys to Band Aid, the pop music industry has had its share of super groups, but for whatever reason, cinema hasn’t.  For whatever reason, while talented directors have worked together before, we very rarely see a group of different directors with different backgrounds coming together to work on a groups of films as a team.  I think this begs the question: what would a filmmaking super group look like?  Because I’m fond of ’80s cinema, I’d like to imagine something like a family adventure film with a story by Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay by Chris Columbus (the writer of Gremlins, director of Home Alone), with music by Dave Grusin (composer for Tootsie), and someone like Richard Donner (director of Superman, Ladyhawke, Lethal Weapon, and Scrooged) at the helm.  Fortunately, this is exactly the team assembled for this movie, and what this team produced is just as great a film as one would hope.

I think part of why Goonies is considered to be such a great classic by so many people is that it is very emblematic of ’80s cinema.  Even with a cast of children, the intended age group is entirely unclear because of how dirty some of the humor is, making it a family film in the same category as Ghostbusters in that it’s not really a family film.  It’s also a very good example of Spielberg’s conception of fantasy, giving the viewer the sense that something sort of magical might be found at that old Chinese antique shop, or, in this case, up in the attic.  The most ’80s part, of course, is the theme song by Cyndi Lauper, and the music video that was made to accompany it.  Somehow, even though that video is entirely different from the film, the combination of the two sums up everything that made the ’80s the ’80s, and I think that’s just beautiful.

Once I started watching this movie, it was hard to pause it – and I can say that for very few films – so I think The Goonies, as dated as it may be in some respects, just might be pure entertainment cinema at its very best.

The Last Unicorn Review

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I think part of the reason why I watched this movie is that I was really in the mood to take a break from the Disney live-action remakes and return to an original fairy-tale movie.  I’m not sure that The Last Unicorn was a good choice though seeing as how it contains so many good and bad elements mixed together, often within the same departments, so I don’t know what to make of it.  The story is a very bizarre one – highly problematic and quite confusing – yet it contains clever little ideas and characters that make me jealous I hadn’t thought of them myself.  The storytelling through the visuals is particularly unclear at times, yet often the animation perfectly captures exactly the feeling the scene ought to have.  The visual style is particularly disjunctive, with character designs and animations that look irritatingly cheap and flat in comparison to Disney’s work, yet the backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.  I’m inclined to say that the soundtrack isn’t very good, yet the film’s theme song is stuck in my head, and I have found I quite enjoy it.  The cast may boast some greats like Mia Farrow, but she is oddly overshadowed by the more memorable performances of the bad actors, whose delivery was unlike anything I have ever heard referred to as “acting.”

My problem with this movie is that, every time I think I really like it, the scene that follows always ruins it.  Some of the characters seem fun at first, but eventually get annoying.  The last half of the movie has one mediocre song after another, painfully drawing out the film (even though the run-time is only about an hour and a half).  Because of how much I like looking at the movie, and because of how much I appreciate most of the story, I kept trying to look on the bright side and only see the good in the film, but then something comes up like the tree creature with big breasts and I’m reminded that this is just a Rankin-Bass movie – I can’t expect quality.  At the very least I was hoping this would be a good film for little girls to enjoy  – a movie that’s wholesome enough to merit its “G” rating – but today it would have to cut some parts or change some lines just to get a “PG” rating, thus alienating the viewers who might as well be its target audience.  Consequently, The Last Unicorn strikes me as the kind of movie that’s very good at creating nostalgia for those who grew up with it, but doesn’t hold up for viewers who find it later.

But do you know what this movie really needs?  A Disney live-action remake.  Seriously.  This is the one child-oriented animated film that has enough negative elements to need a re-tooling, and enough positive elements to be made into a great story if it’s put in the right hands.  Most of the main issues are honestly really, really easy to fix, and the story itself isn’t that bad – it’s just the storytelling that’s poor.  Heck, the story even works well as a criticism of other fairy-tales, and it lends itself easily to feminist interpretations, so it’s the perfect subject for the Disney remake project.  Sure, Disney would have to buy the rights from another company, but the result would still be, without a doubt, the best of the live-action Disney remakes to date.

Moana Review

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Approval Voting, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, Approval/Disapproval Voting, Majority Judgment, Borda Count, Cumulative Voting, and Range/Score Voting are just a few of the voting systems that have been theorized in social choice theory and/or practiced by democracies.  The fairness of a democratic election is something that many of us take for granted, but there are actually a lot of problems with many of the most common methods.  Consider Approval/Disapproval Voting, in which the voter expresses which candidates he/she would accept and which candidates he/she would not – essentially the thumbs-up/thumbs-down system of Reddit (as I understand it).  For candidates in an election, it would make some amount of sense for the candidate who most people gave a “thumbs up,” even though he/she wasn’t their favorite, to surpass the candidate whom many loved most and many hated.  In this scenario, most people would get a leader of whom they approved, and fewer people would get the candidate they hated, which is fine for politics.  When assessing art, however, this seems inappropriate, as exemplified by the fact that the high-quality (but highly divisive) La La Land has a lower score on Rotten Tomatoes than the objectively “good enough” Moana.

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it allows the big movie studios to create the illusion that their films are highly praised simply by making movies that are safe, simple, and reliably passable.  Moana is a perfect example of this, because approximately 3% of this movie is special and original, whereas 97% is an old, faithful “hero’s journey” that any movie buff can’t help but find predictable.  There is nothing particularly bad about Moana, but nearly all of its parts seem to exist purely to serve their function in the regular machinery of the standard animated adventure.  I’ll grant that the twist ending (if it can be called such) did surprise me, but the fifteen minutes preceding it went exactly as I predicted, creating a sense that the writers were merely lazy watchmakers.  It seems Clements and Musker assumed they were the only people to have seen the original Star Wars, and I hate to break it to them, but I’ve seen that movie too – and I felt like I’d already seen Moana.  While Frozen has certain elements that are quite predictable and embarrassingly trite, at least it manages to find the right balance of tribute and criticism in regards to earlier Disney films, whereas this film lets Maui joke about its adherence to the old formulas without making changes to address this criticism.

Sure, audiences may enjoy this movie a lot – for now – but eventually people will be shocked by just how little of it is memorable.  The comedy is nearly all predictable, conforming to the same comic style that has made nearly every CGI family film from the past fifteen years feel bland and lacking in wit, but the jokes still got me at times … I just can’t remember them.  The soundtrack has songs that are perfectly serviceable and that employ clever lyrics, but I can’t remember most of them either.  I would go so far as to say that there are no more than three memorable songs on the soundtrack, and that’s being gracious.  (This film’s “I Want” song is still stuck in my head, but I’m not happy about it – it’s far too contemporary and “poppy” in style, so it’s sure to become dated.)  Most of the performances are rather forgettable as well, with only The Rock having his fair share of fun in the recording booth.  That being said, as cliché and forgettable as it may have been, the music and story still worked on me, creating truly beautiful and moving moments at times that I hope I will remember.

The reason why I would recommend this movie, in spite of all I have just said, is that it has many strong moments that everyone should see, albeit in spite of itself.  True, most of the visuals have the usual, boring “Disney CGI” look – what one would expect from a PIXAR short – but some scenes threw the usual conventions away in favor of artistry.  As a giant crab sings the almost anti-melodic “Shiny,” the lights go out, and everything starts to glow in neon colors against dark blues and black.  In terms of visuals, this is about the best I’ve seen from any CG-animated film, and it is accompanied nicely by the portion of “You’re Welcome” that discards any sense of realism for a properly theatrical musical number.  The latter example makes use of Hawaiian art styles to add a special flare, making for one moment in Moana that actually makes it quite distinct in comparison to other films in its genre.  The “You’re Welcome” number is also separated from the rest of the film in that it feels like a Disney classic, as though this was the only song for which Miranda was given more than ten minutes to write it.  It even seems to borrow from Mary Poppins‘ “Jolly Holiday,” giving it a particularly timeless feeling, yet it still feels in keeping with Miranda’s background in freestyle rap music, ultimately seeming to suggest that Dick van Dyke was rapping in Mary Poppins.  Think about that one for a while – the time of the specific moment in Poppins to which I’m referring is 48:05, for those of you playing along at home.

It’s fairly odd to see this kind of film coming from Clements and Musker.  This is the team behind Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid, among others, so making a merely passable film seems beneath them.  On the other hand, this is their first time making a CG film, so hopefully their future endeavors won’t have this same sense of insecurity and will have the kind of creativity continuously that this film has sporadically.