Nadir-Fest part 2 of 3!

ADAM I liked that!

BETH I did too.

BROOM Yeah, it was fine.

BETH It was so much more fun than Brother Bear.

BROOM Not to mention others that weren’t part of our day of supposedly the worst ones. This movie was fine. It was probably the most insubstantial yet.

ADAM Yeah, it was genial and not much else, but we laughed authentically multiple times.

BROOM It was in the same spirit as Emperor’s New Groove. Not quite as clever or well balanced but still fine.

ADAM Much more star-studded!

BETH Judi Dench!

BROOM Like I said, who would have thought that there was a movie where Judi Dench and Roseanne Barr play two-person scenes together.

ADAM This was the most likeable role Roseanne has ever had.

BETH She was good!

BROOM Similar to the way that David Spade was the most likeable he’ll ever be in Emperor’s New Groove. Yes, Roseanne Barr as a sassy cow might be the best way to use her.

ADAM What was Judi Dench’s line that we giggled at?

BROOM “Three cows can’t catch a criminal!” or something like that. She seemed to be enjoying herself. And the moviemakers seemed to be enjoying that she was game.

ADAM She’s not above that. I mean, you’ve seen all the Bond movies.

BROOM Right, she’s a slummer.

ADAM Her dignity here is enhanced by the fact that you don’t have to directly look at her. It makes you feel less bad for her.

BETH There was, I felt, a definite homage to Warner Brothers here, in a lot of the jokes and style.

BROOM And the look. I thought it looked like Chuck Jones.

BETH It did.

BROOM The bad guy’s face looked like a Chuck Jones design.

BETH Yes, and his coloring.

ADAM I thought that at first, but I decided by the middle that I thought it was more Spongebob-y than Warner Brothers.

BETH I have no knowledge of Spongebob.

BROOM But when the guy had a foot-long welt on the top of his head, you said something about “I haven’t seen that in a long time,” referring to Looney Tunes.

ADAM No, I understand that there was also homage to Warner Brothers.

BETH And it was also coarse. It felt unlike Disney in its joking around.

ADAM It was not magisterial the way Disney sometimes tries to be.

BROOM But it isn’t as though they were selling themselves out. It felt like Emperor’s New Groove and it also felt like the descendant of some of the late-60s early-70s era movies, the Robin Hood era. It had some of the easygoing quality of those movies. I swear the vultures in this were the Robin Hood vulture.

ADAM Nutsy.

BROOM And it had someone doing that Pat Buttram voice. And it had that same old dog you always see. It felt very Disney-like in that manner. But they’d never done a full-on Western before, and they’d never done cows.

BETH I have no problem with this movie.

BROOM I do have a problem with this movie, which is that the entire second half is all kooky action sequences, and they were either too kooky, or too long, or just dull. My attention flagged. I wanted them to just tell me what happens.

ADAM I had the uncomfortable feeling that they intended to repopulate Big Thunder Mountain Railroad with these characters, had the movie been successful.

BROOM It’s entirely possible.

ADAM My hat is off to history for that not happening.

BETH It did occur to me toward the end: why would kids care about a real estate transaction?

BROOM I do think there was probably a miscalculation in the plotting. The evil scheme was really incomprehensible to kids.

ADAM That’s because this was pre-foreclosure crisis.

BROOM He steals the cattle, and then the ranches get foreclosed on, and then he buys the property, because he wants to own all the property, because he’s… getting revenge on ranches where he used to work where he wasn’t appreciated? It’s convoluted.

BETH It’s over kids’ heads.

ADAM I don’t know. How complicated is it? He’s a bad guy; he’s stealing all the cows!

BROOM I think if I were a kid, once it was introduced that he has basically magic powers, I would have wanted to see more of that. Why didn’t he do more songs?

BETH That was awesome!

BROOM The color-changing sequence?

BETH Yes. It was great.

ADAM It was. Although I thought that the little “Pink Elephants on Parade” routine was kind of weak tea.

BROOM I thought it was an intentional homage to their own past. It’s a fine line, because you don’t want to lean too heavily on it. “Get it? It’s Pink Elephants!” And it wasn’t excessive, but they probably should have just stuck to their own thing.

BETH I still enjoyed it.

ADAM I would show this to my children unreservedly. But I probably won’t remember any of it.

BROOM It also reminds me of the “Wind in the Willows” half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. There were some kind of bad guys who were like these bad guys, and nobody cared; it was about a deed, and nobody cared.

ADAM Who are the bad guys in that?

BROOM A bunch of weasels take over Toad Hall. It’s about real estate.

ADAM As a real estate attorney, I was excited to see the signing of a deed as the pivotal exciting moment. It’s not like, “we’ve got to interrupt the vows before the marriage is finalized” — it’s “we’ve got to interrupt the signing and notarization of the deed.” Which is exciting.

BROOM Have you ever worked on a deal where a train runs off the tracks and prevents the deal from going through?

ADAM In the middle of a closing room? No.

BROOM There were a lot of fat jokes. When we look into the response I imagine that people are going to ask why in 2004 there were so many fat jokes.

ADAM There were fat jokes? I didn’t notice any.

BETH You know, a lot of “you’re the biggest cow I’ve ever seen!”

BROOM There were jokes about Roseanne, there were jokes about the bad guy. There was a lyric in the song about his pants being too big. There were fat jokes about everyone the whole time. In my head I was trying to work out a defense: why is it that this is actually fine? They’re allowed to make jokes about a cartoon character that’s as wide as he is tall! That’s too fat! That’s fat enough to say is funny! And then there was Jennifer Tilly as the blonde-joke character, but she wasn’t quite a “dumb blonde.”

BETH The Lisa Kudrow character.

BROOM She was supposed to be a flake, but she was basically right about things. They did have anger issues. I liked that being tone-deaf was her protection against the magic music.

ADAM I liked when they fought with the dancing girls in the sheriff’s office.

BROOM “The sheriff’s office” was a bar.

ADAM The star was on the door because it was the talent entrance?

BROOM That was the stage door. Yes. I liked the joke right before that, where they showed us seven different things in a row that people mistake for gunshots. In reference to Brother Bear: I thought these palettes were much better. This is what it looks like when professionals are doing color design. This is what stylish palettes look like. It doesn’t look overworked and overdone. And in fact I think on several occasions here they were making fun of Brother Bear, which I assume was being made at the same time.

BETH Maybe they were.

BROOM Like when it went to widescreen for no reason.

BETH Yeah, I think they were. In the palettes too.

ADAM You’re right, they must have been competing teams working on these at the same time.

BROOM It went to widescreen in his fantasy sequence, and there’s also the moment when she gets a stupid moose head on her head and it waggles around until she takes it off. Don’t you think that of these two movies, this team would have been, like, the cool kids? That other movie was lame. Now, I wasn’t saying that the palettes made reference to Brother Bear. I’m just pointing out that you praised the palettes of Brother Bear, but that was actually over-the-top tastelessness, where you’re forced to pay attention to the colors because they’re distracting. Whereas this one, where we’re not talking about the colors, actually looked good.

BETH The type of scenery here lends itself better to very saturated palettes. I think that’s partially why it worked.

BROOM I think this had so much more professionalism to it. And Alan Menken is so much more professional than those other guys.

BETH So which was the song that was supposed to be embarrassing?

BROOM I thought remembered hearing something about that yodeling song marking the death of Disney animation. But it was fine!

BETH So why was this so poorly received? It just wasn’t that bad.

BROOM I don’t know! I thought I heard that this was so embarrassing that they were never going to make another animated movie again, but that can’t have been right. It was just a bonbon. It had nothing to it.

ADAM Well, it is sort of strange. Most of their movies seem to be in service of having a strong character who can carry the licensure banner and be a figure in the parks. How did they think this fit into that tradition at all?

BROOM It’s just a movie to entertain people for a very short time. Was it 65 minutes?

BETH 75.

BROOM It felt very short.

ADAM It’s not a fairy tale. It feels like a mistake from a marketing perspective. Because what is this? This has no longevity to it. You can’t build a ride around this. You can’t sell products around this. And you wouldn’t want to.

BETH You can’t aspire to be a cow the way you can a princess.

BROOM But do you believe in what you’re saying?

ADAM I do. We like those early movies not just because they’re good movies, but because they’re iconic movies where the characters are larger than life, and have a role in a child’s fantasy life. This is just a stupid movie.

BROOM I guess I do agree with that. This is too overloaded with little bits for any of them to count as meaningful. I think that Judi Dench’s cow wore a hat was about as strong a characterization as this movie offered, and nobody’s going to need a doll of that.

BETH It wasn’t youthful enough. There weren’t teenage characters.

BROOM There was no love story. There was no sentiment really, except for “we’re gonna lose the farm” sentiment.

ADAM Even Pearl didn’t get a boyfriend at the end, which I sort of assumed she would.

BROOM I thought the sheriff was going to get together with Pearl at the end. He seemed like he was a little smitten when he handed her the notice at the beginning.

ADAM They danced together. I liked that the heroes were a trio of strong women. It was sort of like Dinosaur in that regard.

BETH But when you’re a kid, it’s like you’re watching your aunts. You’re not watching pretty people. There’s no one to want to be.

BROOM It was kind of a movie about, like, the witches of Eastwick. It wasn’t really for kids.

ADAM You think about Disney movies and you think about, like, Tinkerbell, or Dumbo, the characters popping through the screen. And there’s none of that here.

BROOM Which is part of why it felt like Warner Brothers, since that’s what’s characteristic about Warner Brothers cartoons compared to Disney. Disney has always been about relating to characters from the heart, where Warner Brothers have been about “Now the rabbit is going to jump off a cliff! Now some stuff is happening!”

BETH Which is fun.

ADAM But even in the Warner Brothers cartoons there are iconic characters.

BETH Developed over time, though.

ADAM Maybe it’s just from repetition. If you saw one Roadrunner cartoon, it would annoy you, but after you see a hundred…

BROOM In the first couple minutes of this, I thought they were making a big miscalculation, because Roseanne Barr is not sympathetic.

ADAM She got better.

BROOM She did get better, but I think the intended design of the movie may have been that she was our hero. She starts the narration, we follow her into this scenario, and she’s going to be our brash American unsinkable protagonist. But then she kind of disappeared behind the better actors. And they evened out their relative importance. And I wonder if it’s because they didn’t get the performance they needed from her. Or if it just wasn’t working, so they decided it would be a zany buddy movie instead of a movie about her interests. Because that would have made more sense.

BETH I don’t think it was conceived that way. I don’t think they ever intended for it to be about Roseanne’s journey.

ADAM It’s not about anything. It’s just a bunch of old tropes that they were having some fun with. I liked Tiny Toons, as you know, and I liked it in part because it had these old vaudeville scraps that were being reanimated in this jokey way.

BROOM That’s what this was, entirely.

ADAM That’s a Saturday morning thing, not a Disney thing.

BROOM It was animated with vitality. It was animated in a very knowing, retro, post-Ren and Stimpy kind of way…

ADAM That’s what I meant by Spongebob-y.

BROOM …but with affection. With the same affection that you get from Spongebob. These animators think it’s cool to be there. That is not how I felt about Brother Bear. There I felt like: these animators are so grateful that they got accepted to their job at Disney, and they will do whatever is asked of them to make the Disney machine run. Whereas here these were people who think it’s fun — in a nerdy way — to imitate old animation styles, to do classic stuff.

BETH It seemed like everyone was having fun. The actors and the animators.

BROOM But it’s true, we’ve sort of passed into the era where the best show on Broadway is The Producers, which is a show in quotes, or Book of Mormon, which is like “can you believe that we did this Broadway style?” instead of an actual show. And that’s what this is too. It’s like, “it’s so a cartoon!” But they did that wholeheartedly.

BETH It was just painless.

BROOM Yes. I was really taken aback, given what I thought it was going to be.

ADAM I’m still dreading Chicken Little.

[we read the negative Times review and reader reviews as well]

BROOM This is just overkill. This movie may have had some problems in crowd-pleasing the right way at the right time, and it may have been inconsequential, and yes, it may have been a bit forced in its comedy. But Brother Bear was so much worse!

BETH Were people just so down on Disney by this time that they would have had to do something actually great in order to save themselves?

BROOM I don’t know. I really thought we were going to see the studio go down into the mud, but now I feel like it must have been something else that killed them. This wasn’t so bad as to close a major studio!

BETH I think it’s a branding mistake. They needed to do something more Disney-ish, and they went the opposite direction.

ADAM It says here on Wikipedia that before the release they had already decided to shutter the animation department. And it’s hard to see this as going out with a bang. I feel like it’s sort of set up for failure in that context.

BROOM It’s just remarkable that this is their death knell.

ADAM But it was only their death knell for two years. The Princess and the Frog is traditional 2D animation.

BROOM As is Winnie the Pooh. Look, it wasn’t a great movie…

ADAM But it was adequate.

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM It was pleasant.

BROOM It was just mild. So Netflix was right: I did like that better than the previous one. Of course I did.

ADAM On to the next!