Blog – Page 23

Jun

2014

Ten Thoughts on Dumbo

Dumbo (1941) was made on the cheap. It’s the fifth full-length Disney feature, and was intended to recoup the money lost by Pinocchio and Fantasia. It worked – Dumbo was the first Disney film since Snow White to turn a profit on its initial release. But who cares about that? What did I think of it? That’s what matters!

I know I saw Dumbo at some point in my childhood, but I didn’t remember it very well. I was surprised, when I fired it up, by how short it is – it runs just over an hour. My attention span is as bad as yours (I’m assuming – I mean, you’re on Tumblr, how good could it be), so I was sort of relieved. I don’t have the endurance for another Fantasia just yet.
Did parents every actually convince their kids that they were brought by the stork? I don’t mean did the kids believe it – kids are amusingly credulous, as I learned after telling my nephew that if he had to go to the bathroom during a Bingo game at the town rec center he should call out ‘Bingo!’ and everyone would stop and wait – I mean was the stork legend a Santa Claus/Tooth Fairy kind of deal, or just a thing they said to put off talking about sex? Anyway, it’s helpful of the circus to label all the roofs of their tents and buildings so the storks can find them. Also, that’s a WHOLE lot of babies being delivered all at once to a bunch of animals with very different gestation periods. Is there a circus employee whose sole job is to tell the animals when they can have sex so that they’ll all give birth on the same night? I want that job.
Hooray! Time for lemonade and crackerjack, Casey Junior’s back! Casey Junior’s back! Casey Junior, the circus train, is my favorite character in this movie, mostly because of his awesome theme song. The music in this movie is great (I know, it’s a shocker, good music in a Disney movie), and I’m happy to hear Casey’s theme again after The Reluctant Dragon. (I’m pretending I watched the movies in order. Just humor me.) YOU CAN DO IT CASEY CLIMB THAT MOUNTAIN I LOVE YOU CASEY COME AND TAKE ME AWAY TO THE CIRCUS
The stork delivering Dumbo looks like he should be eating a Vlasic pickle.
“Jumbo? You mean…Dumbo!” The elephant who thinks up the nickname is sooooo pleased with herself. She’s such a Heather. I keep expecting the elephant ladies to burst into “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little.”
“Song of the Roustabouts” is pretty darn great, too.
Oh, sure. A woman shows a little agency and suddenly it’s all, “Mad elephant!”
I’m not so sure that a half-empty bottle of champagne, diluted in a barrel of water, would be enough to get even a baby elephant drunk, but I’ll go with it because I love that the drunk scene is so crucial to the plot of Dumbo that it can’t be edited out. And the “Pink Elephants on Parade” number is so entertainingly disturbing that I’ll even overlook the fact that Dumbo drinks straight through his trunk, like it’s a straw. Ew. But yeah, that walking bipedal elephant, made entirely of elephant heads – that is the stuff of nightmares.
Oh, man, the crows. Yeah, they have a lot of positive characteristics, yeah, all but the main one were actually voiced by African-Americans, yeah, the song is fun, yeah, there are way worse depictions from this time, yeah, yeah, yeah, but come on. They’re CROWS. Their leader is named JIM CROW. Please don’t pretend there ain’t hella racism going on here.
And he flies and saves himself and exacts his terrible, terrible revenge on everyone who wronged him. Basically. And they lived happily ever after! That wrapped up quickly. Dumbo is a delight. Like most of the Disney flicks of this period it’s almost more a collection of stories than a film with one cohesive plot, but it’s completely charming. I love it.

Jun

2014

Now on Google Play

If you’re a Google Play-er, my books are now available there! Links below…

Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom

Caitlin Ross and the Commute from Hell

This Is What He Should Have Said

Jun

2014

Ten Thoughts on The Reluctant Dragon

The Reluctant Dragon (1941) is another hybrid film from the Disney studios, though it’s a very different creature from Fantasia. It’s a 74 minute fictionalized “behind the scenes” featurette wrapped around four cartoon shorts. This is the first of the films in this series of mine that I had never even heard of before, let alone seen. So what did I think? You know…I’m honestly not sure.

Wacky henpecked husband and nagging harpy of a wife. Even in 1941, this wasn’t original. This doesn’t bode well. The live action sequences star Robert Benchley, whose wife has bullied him into trying to sell the idea of adapting the book The Reluctant Dragon into a feature to Walt Disney. Benchley and wife don’t own the rights to the book, mind you. I guess she’s hoping for a finder’s fee?
Benchley’s wife drops him off at the studio for his meeting (he doesn’t have a meeting, yet Disney agrees to see him anyway – maybe Walt’s lonely? I’m not sure), but Benchley doesn’t want to meet with Walt Disney, because screw that guy (Maybe? Clear motivations are hard to come by in this flick.), so he ducks out on the nerdy (but cute) (that’s irrelevant, sorry) page who’s escorting him and sneaks around the studio. The various people he meets give him lessons on how animated movies are made instead of calling security. (Seems like a bad example to set for the children watching this – sneak away from a tour and see the REAL magic!)
Benchley is a goddamn lech in this movie. He’s super gross to every woman he meets and they all laugh it off, but, hey, it’s all in fun and his wife is a monster so it must be okay. (Ugh.) He wanders into an art class because he see a pretty woman in a robe walk in and assumes she’s a nude model. (Which, to be fair, is not an unreasonable assumption. She could have been posing for Fantasia centaur boobies.)
He wanders – he does a lot of wandering – into a film score recording with vocals by Clarence Nash as Donald Duck and Florence Gill as Clara Cluck. It’s wonderful and gives me hope that this movie might not be entirely terrible. And Florence Gill wears an evening gown and fur coat to record her chicken noises, which is bad-ass.
There’s a really entertaining example of foley sound recording set to the first original cartoon of the movie, which stars Casey Junior, the train from Dumbo. (I watched this movie out of release order (it’s unsurprisingly hard to find), so it didn’t occur to me until now that this was Casey’s first appearance, since Dumbo wasn’t released for another few months.) Every time there’s a sound effect in the cartoon, they cut to the foley artists using a real object to make the sound. Also, the music from this cartoon is damn catchy. It’s still stuck in my head. All aboard!
There are a couple of hints at upcoming Disney movies – I’d call them plugs, but they do genuinely seem to be in there just because they were what the studio was working on. It’s not like they’re saying, “Go see Dumbo, in theaters this fall!” or anything. In addition to the Casey Junior cartoon, Benchley is shown an animation cel from Bambi, and he examines some three-dimensional models (called maquettes) of characters from Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan. He also steals a maquette of one of the racist topless zebra centaur ladies from Fantasia, because of course he does. (But hey, more centaur boobies!)
The cartoon Baby Weems is our next original segment. It’s presented as a semi-animated storyboard, but it’s a full story about a baby genius and it’s amazing – genuinely funny and clever. It’s followed by a Goofy “How To” short, How to Ride a Horse. (I later learned this was the first in the series.) It’s also pretty great, and is the only one of the cartoons in this film to be released on its own. Disney should do the same for Casey Junior, Baby Weems, and the title cartoon – they’re all too good to be buried in this peculiar movie.
Benchley finally gets to meet Disney, who’s just sitting down in his screening room to watch the premiere of his new animated short. Suprise! It’s The Reluctant Dragon, the very story that Benchley’s horrible wife sent him there to pitch. Benchley pulls out all the swag he’s been given by all the various departments and dumps it all in Disney’s lap, including the naked zebra lady, and it’s super creepy and gross. He plays it off with a laugh – “How’d that get in there?” – and everybody laughs along with him, but Walt had to be thinking, “You stole a little statue of a cartoon centaur, which was used to help make a movie for children, so that you could masturbate to it. You are a horrible, horrible man.” That’s certainly what I was thinking.
I sound like a broken record, but the actual titular cartoon is wonderful. I’ve completely fallen in love with the character of the Reluctant Dragon and he deserves to be one of Disney’s iconic characters. (He also deserves to be a gay icon. The coding on this flouncing, poetry writing, tea drinking dragon is not subtle.) Much like Fantasia, the animation style seems way ahead of its time and much different from contemporary Disney fare – I’d believe this was made in the sixties. In fact, the pacifistic tone of the cartoon seems to be straight from the sixties too. It surprised me that it came from the Disney studios of 1941. The war in Europe was raging and Disney wasn’t exactly known for its anti-war stance. I know that before the attack on Pearl Harbor there was a lot of debate about whether America should enter the war and to what extent – this cartoon has me second-guessing what position Disney might have taken in that debate. (But just wait until two years and four movies from now, when DIsney releases Victory Through Air Power. Teaser!)
The film ends like it started, with Benchley being nagged by his shrew of a wife. (I was going to call her a cartoonish shrew, but cartoon shrews are more likable.) She seems to think that if Benchley had gone straight to his meeting with Disney he would have been on time to sell him the idea, and that they made the entire picture, from having the initial concept to developing the film, in the hour or so that he was wandering around. I don’t expect her to have as thorough a grasp on what goes into making a movie as her husband now does, but that seems more than a little ignorant. Then again, she seems to think that just having the idea to adapt a book into a movie means you own the rights to it, so she’s clearly not a great thinker. Benchley curses at her in Donald Duck’s voice and lovingly cuddles a bust of his own head that a pretty girl sculpted for him. Creepy to the end.

May

2014

Ten Thoughts on Fantasia

Fantasia (1940) was the third animated feature from Disney, and the first “hybrid” movie, meaning a movie that combines animation and live-action. I first saw Fantasia as it was meant to be seen – in college, really stoned. I don’t remember that viewing very well (or much else from that period of my life, for some reason), but I remember it being a whole lot shorter. The two hours and four minutes running time surprised me when I fired it up this time around, and that’s because I had only seen an edited version – before 2000, that’s all that was available on home video, and it was missing some animated sequences and a whole lot of the live-action introductions. Now we can watch the whole damn thing! Lucky us…

I am probably the worst audience for this movie, as I am not really a big fan of classical music. I don’t actively hate it, like I did when I was a kid, but it’s not generally something I would choose to listen to. I made the mistake of settling in to watch later in the evening after a long day, and…I didn’t make it. I kept falling asleep. It’s not you, Fantasia, it’s me. It’s kind of you. It took me three tries to finish this epic. That said, I do have some nice things to say about it, so Fantasia fans, sheathe those claws.

Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” (oh god I fell asleep just typing that) opens the program as we’re introduced to conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. This segment rivals cutting a steak with a spoon for dullness. (The nice things are coming, I promise.)
Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” is next. This is a lot more fun, as it takes us through the changing of the seasons from the point of view of various anthropomorphic flora and fauna. The Chinese Dance is kind of hard to watch, with the mushrooms depicted as stereotypical Asians. And this seems to be the year for sexy fish – what is up with that, Disney? Fish shouldn’t have pouty lips and come-hither eyes, it’s really disturbing.
Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the segment you know even if you’ve never seen this movie. Mickey Mouse in the red robe, casts the spell to make his broom fetch water, things go awry. It’s as great as you remember.
Music critic Deems Taylor is our Master of Ceremonies and he is THOROUGH in his introductions. Holy crap. I assume this is the bulk of what was cut from previous releases and it must have saved an hour in running time. Before every segment he describes in excruciating detail everything we’re about to watch. SPOILERS!
Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” is fun. It takes us through the formation and development of life on Earth, from single-celled organisms through the extinction of the dinosaurs and IS THAT ANOTHER SEXY FISH? What the hell?
Intermission. Let’s all sit and watch the orchestra members slowly leave their seats and exit through the center of the screen. Now let’s sit and watch them slowly file back in. Gripping. The little jazz jam session is fun, though, as is the silly demo of how sound is realized on film.
Beethoven’s “The Pastoral Symphony.” This is the one I’ve been waiting for. It’s the one with all the mythological creatures darting about, and it’s got the only part of this film that’s still cut – for good reason. I’m keeping an eye out for the two moments where the racist depiction of black centaurs have been snipped out, but I only catch one. The pretty white centaur who’s having her hoofs done by her “maid” is zoomed in on so that the truly horrible stereotype is cut out of the frame. I can’t find the other, so the edit must have been pretty smooth. They did leave in the African centaur-zebras, though, which may not be all dolled up as Mammy-archetypes but are still a bit problematic. Oh, also, boobs. Centaur boobs, right in your face. No nipples, though. Maybe they’re between the hind legs, like on a real horse? Don’t think about how baby centaurs nurse. I said don’t think about it!
Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” is the one with the ostriches, hippos, elephants and alligators dancing ballet. It’s hysterical. It goes for the cheap fat jokes, sure, but it’s pretty funny regardless. I could watch that opening ostrich dance again and again.
Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” and a bit of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” close out the program. Disney always calls the big boss demon in this segment “Chernabog” whenever he shows up elsewhere, but Taylor explicitly names him as Satan in the introduction. So, yeah, here’s Walt Disney’s Satan, tormenting the spirits of the damned. It’s pretty metal. I approve.
A lot of the animation in this movie seems way ahead of its time, but maybe I just have a naive understanding of the 1940s. I don’t just mean the technology, I mean the styles and the tones. If I didn’t know otherwise, and you told me this was made in the sixties or seventies, I would believe you (because I am a trusting person). I can see why this was later embraced as psychodelia.

May

2014

Join the Hat Party

I was interviewed by Raine O’Tierney at her “Hat Party” blog. She interviews writers. The questions are unusual and the writers wear funny hats. It was a lot of fun, and inspired a new photo of myself that I love (an extremely rare occurrence). Please click through and check it out – I’ve written a steamy new piece of flash fiction and detailed my harrowing escape from a horde of burning zombies, just for the party!

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