ADAM Well that was shoddy and dull. Although by the end I was kind of charmed.

BETH I didn’t care about the story at all, but I thought the illustration was really interesting and fun. A lot of passion went into making those backgrounds. I was taking notes, and I wrote: “They should have just made the thing they wanted to make.” It felt like they had grafted the story on to something else.

BROOM What do you think was the thing they wanted to make?

BETH Something for grown-ups, instead of for kids.

ADAM The backgrounds reminded me strongly of “It’s a Small World,” which is from a similar time period. It didn’t feel to me to be “adult” vs. “childlike.” But I certainly agree with you that the backgrounds were the only thing that prevented this from being a very long Tom and Jerry cartoon.

BETH Well, I think the story was adult by accident, because they didn’t know how to make a story for kids. There was a madam!

ADAM And sex trafficking!

BETH I was just sort of going “What?? How is this a movie for children?” It’s such a weird thing. Apparently it was a flop, according to the Wikipedia article.

BROOM It was well received, but a flop.

BETH Exactly, it was well received for some reason. I guess Judy Garland got accolades. It was Chuck Jones and his wife who wrote it.

BROOM Did you see that this movie got Chuck Jones fired from Warner Bros.?

ADAM What?

BROOM Because he broke his Warner Bros. contract to do it secretly at UPA. And then Warner Bros. happened to pick up distribution, so they got to see who had worked on it, and saw that it was one of their employees, so they fired him.

BETH What an insane way to get fired. For this, of all things. Poor Chuck Jones.

BROOM I don’t know, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Chuck Jones.

ADAM Wouldn’t they have figured that out at some point anyway?

BROOM Probably, yeah. I kind of got charmed by the movie once I saw that it was just going to be a series of songs about characters you didn’t care about, but done with graphic force. I started to get into that.

BETH That “Bubbles” song was really great; that was my favorite. A song about getting drunk in a child’s movie! Again, what were they thinking?

BROOM You’re forgetting about “Skumps” from Sleeping Beauty.

BETH I forget everything from every Disney movie.

ADAM I don’t remember “Skumps” either. I mean, Jiminy Cricket gets drunk. As a kid I had no idea what the sensation of getting drunk was, but it was something that I knew was a thing that happened in cartoons. I was like “oh, they’re drunk,” but I didn’t have any understanding of what that meant in the real world. You know, like quicksand.

BROOM You know what else you guys are forgetting? “Pink Elephants on Parade”!

BETH Okay, but that’s trippy. That’s not exactly the same thing.

BROOM It’s pretty similar to this. When they were inside the big bubbles, I thought, “I think that’s actually in ‘Pink Elephants.'” Also the fact that they appeared as altered character designs during that sequence; they became a green and a red cat that didn’t really look like themselves.

BETH I loved all that stuff.

BROOM That’s also taken from “Pink Elephants.”

BETH When it was trying to be straight, it was like Hanna-Barbera. The actual character animation, when they were just telling the story, felt really shitty to me.

ADAM Yeah.

ADAM But when they went into those weird song-y dream-y places, they got creative, and I thought it worked. I liked that stuff.

BROOM Yeah, I found that stuff more charming than I would have thought. I certainly didn’t think the songs were good, or motivated. But there was something winning about the amount of design that went into those sequences.

ADAM I feel like there were a lot of things from the 60s and 70s that had that look, that over-saturated color, woodblock look. Which frankly I found kind of disturbing as an actual child, but just in an unexamined, [sound of primal discomfort] way. But now I think it’s sort of engaging.

BROOM I guess I’m the only one of us who saw this as an actual child. My memory is that I didn’t understand anything that was happening, and it just seemed wrong. It didn’t do the things that I had come to expect a cartoon movie to do. My parents had taped it off TV and put a label on it, like, “hooray, now we have ‘Gay Purr-ee’ for you to watch!” But I never chose to watch it again. The only thing that even slightly rang a bell, now, from watching it 35 years ago, was the “Money Cat” song on the roof with the silhouette cats. I definitely had that image still in my head. But of course I didn’t understand that as a kid. I didn’t understand it now either, really.

ADAM It was just a “sell your soul to the devil” number.

BROOM But was it about how money is the root of all evil? Or about how evil people use the world of power and money to do their evil?

ADAM I think the latter.

BETH I also think the latter.

BROOM Anyway, this is a thing my parents took the time to tape for us because it’s a movie from when my mother was 10 and she remembered it from her childhood. And it’s still the kind of thing where, because it was a big deal when she was 10, she isn’t really aware of how completely it’s forgotten now. I think her intuition is still that people have heard of Gay Purr-ee.

ADAM So the animation of the characters was shoddy, as you said, in the Hanna-Barbera way. I kept being distracted by how cheap they were being in having so few moving pieces.

BETH “Limited animation.” That’s what the Wikipedia article calls it.

ADAM It was definitely that. I remember as a kid how soul-crushing it was, in a certain way, when the Smurfs would run in front of the same four forest scenes over and over again. It was really disturbing on an existential level. And some of this movie was like that. Like this city that had no one in it!

BETH Yeah. Of all cities, Paris! Has no one in it.

ADAM Do you remember the introduction to Fun and Fancy Free where it’s Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in an empty cabin? It’s supposed to be warm and convivial, but really it’s just, like, “get out of that house!” That was the same feeling I had from a lot of this.

BROOM Creepy emptiness.

ADAM Yeah. And there were various other animation tropes in here that as a kid I didn’t recognize as money-saving devices but were clearly that. Like when you have a fight, and then the fight gets enveloped in a cloud of dust, so all you can see are heads and limbs sticking out.

BROOM Or the scene where they run through a door and out of sight, and then the black cat comes tailing them and stands in the doorway, and they do an entire scene of dialogue where you just see the black cat listening and blinking its eyes.

ADAM Or the fact that Jaune Tom and Meowrice had their fight on the box in silhouette, and all you can see is their shadows fighting.

BETH Yeah but I kind of loved that. I thought that was cool. It’s money-saving but it’s also clever.

BROOM So a little animation history here: this studio is called UPA and they were founded by ex-Disney employees in the 40s, after that big strike around the time of Dumbo. UPA was supposed to be this edgier, artsier, anti-Disney studio. And they were really into graphical hard edges and lines, and yeah, “limited animation” as a style, as a supposedly artistic solution to a budgeting issue. It wasn’t corner-cutting, it was a thing they arrived at and were praised for, in the 50s. This angular modernistic cartoon style, with few frames, and no shading. Everything kind of stark. And then everyone else started to imitate it in a crappier way. But I guess they themselves kind of got crappy about it too, because parts of this did look like Hanna-Barbera. But yeah, they were very influential. And I’m seeing here that they actually made one other feature-length movie, which I had not realized.

BETH Yeah, this was their second one.

BROOM The first one was “1001 Arabian Nights”… starring Mister Magoo. Mister Magoo was their most popular character.

ADAM Their Mickey Mouse.

BETH Well, maybe we should watch it!

BROOM Maybe. Anyway, you said the regular storytelling was bad but the songs had some life in them, and I agree. Their animation technique was not good for normal Disney-style scenes with characters interacting and being cute with each other. Also, they didn’t have any ideas for those scenes. It all fell flat. So the whole beginning of the movie, which seemed to be about the story, I found really rough. But then as it got to be just more of an album of songs it became more palatable. I was really charmed by the part where they just showed you a bunch of paintings.

BETH I loved that part. That was my favorite part of the movie.

BROOM With truly no animation for five minutes.

BETH You know, it was oddly effective, educationally. If I were a kid, I think I would have taken that in. I think it would have made a big impression on me. I thought that was mostly well done. I mean, their takes on these artists were… mixed.

ADAM But pretty good!

BETH Yeah, good enough!

BROOM The Monet, which was the first one, was probably the weakest one, but some of them were good.

BETH The Modigliani was funny.

ADAM The plot also got stranger as it went. At the beginning it was just Green Acres, but then it got really dark. Not in an actually interesting way. But in a less boring way.

BROOM They went to Alaska!

ADAM Yeah, because Meowrice sold them into slavery.

BETH What a weird thing this movie is. It’s not art! But while I was watching it I was thinking, “Oh it’s actually, like, art. It’s not for children, it’s for them. They made this thing for themselves.”

BROOM “Them” the animators. I think that’s right.

BETH Yeah. Like they wanted to show themselves that they could be really free with this, and so they were. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie so visually inconsistent with itself! Even in the fight scene at the end, the illustration style was not consistent. Sometimes it looked really flat like Colorforms; sometimes it had depth and was a little more fleshed out. I was jarred by it. Around the time when the door was flipping over, the drawing style changed. It wasn’t consistent from cut to cut. I thought, “cool that they got away with this, but… what were they doing?” The whole movie was like that.

BROOM That strikes me as pretty interesting, if we’re thinking of this as the first in a viewing series of movies that are anti-Disney/non-Disney/alternative-to-Disney, because everything you said is clearly both the strengths and the weaknesses of rejecting the Disney model: rejecting this massive institution with its huge budgets, and writing by committee, and homogenized market-friendly ideology. Whatever the criticisms of Disney are, here’s what you get when you go against that: it’s internally inconsistent, it’s not necessarily suitable for any particular audience that anyone has actually thought through, it has more artistic force in some parts of it, and you’re always very aware of all the ways they’re trying to cut costs. As soon as you step away from Disney, all that stuff is immediately really obvious and you have to contend with it.

ADAM I also enjoyed how inappropriate all the voices were. I was sort of picturing Judy Garland with a cocktail in her hand the entire time.

BETH And Robert Goulet, of all people!

BROOM This is very young Robert Goulet. This is apparently his first movie.

ADAM And then Red Buttons as a French cat. All the wise guys had New York accents. And they couldn’t decide if they were speaking French, or mispronouncing French, or if they understood what French words meant.

BETH They never really settled on how to deal with that.

BROOM Through all of that I was just picturing Mrs. Jones amusing herself at the typewriter: “His name will be ‘Percy Beaucoup’! Ha ha ha!” Because it’s all just based on whatever French she knew off the top of her head, and that’s it.

ADAM Who was “Percy Beaucoup”?

BROOM That was the rest of Meowrice’s name. His full name was “Meowrice Percy Beaucoup.”

BETH I wrote in my notes:”Judy Garland’s singing voice always sounds full of pain, but her cat voice works!” I thought she sounded pretty good when she was talking. She made herself sound younger than she was, and more innocent. I didn’t think of her as having a cocktail in her hand, when she was talking. But when she sings I always think, “oh my god, this woman is just a fountain of pain.” It’s all I can hear.

BROOM When she was singing that fountain of pain song, about how the river is her lover, she had some kind of string draped around her neck that totally looked a scarf that Judy Garland would wear.

BETH I bet they did that deliberately.

BROOM She apparently is the one who suggested that the songwriters be Arlen and Harburg from The Wizard of Oz.

BETH Yes. I read the Wikipedia article too! And that’s cool, and all, but… I don’t know that they were that inspired.

BROOM Yeah. A couple of the songs were okay.

BETH Look, I love the phrase “When life is bubbable / The whole world is lovable.”

BROOM “Bubbable”?

BETH When life… is bubbable… the whole world… is lovable. It’s such nonsense. That “Bubbles” song seemed like it was meant for Dean Martin. I wish I could hear him sing it.

BROOM I don’t think it has ever been covered, ever, by anyone.

BETH Why would it be. And Dino is dead.

ADAM I felt bad that Madame Rubens-Chatte’s devious revenge is just telling them where they went. That’s all she got to do. She didn’t even get to be animated in that scene.

BROOM That’s what I was referring to when I said you just see the black cat listening at the door. It seemed like they must have had something there that they had to cut out of the budget. Because it was such an important juncture in the movie, but it was handled as “okay so we’re back from Alaska where did they go okay great.” They’d never been through that door, they’d never met Madam Rubens-Chatte, they didn’t even really have any way of knowing that Mewsette had necessarily ever been there, I don’t think. And then they just run in and in about 10 seconds it all gets worked out offscreen.

ADAM I enjoyed that the way he’s able to catch the train is by imagining that Meowrice is a mouse. And I did enjoy, even though it was homophobic, that the revenge on Meowrice is to primp his hair and send him off to be married to a fat American.

BETH I don’t think it was specifically homophobic. It was just sort of a troll move.

ADAM It wasn’t very homophobic.

BROOM It was no more homophobic than the movie was fat-phobic, which is: a little bit.

BETH I’m glad we watched it.

ADAM Do you think this is the most anyone has spoken about the movie Gay Purr-ee in 25 years?

BETH Yes.

BROOM No no no. Not at all. Of course not.

BETH No?

BROOM Look, it has some artistic quality to it! I know there are UPA fans; this is probably a holy artifact to them. And like I said, my mom talks about it as though it’s right up there with Lady and the Tramp in terms of its prominence.

BETH Why didn’t you invite her on to the call? She could share her reminiscences.

BROOM She’s invited to do so in the comments. ADAM, you told us you’d rewatched The Aristocats recently.

ADAM Well, I dipped in and out of The Aristocats recently.

BROOM Well, that’s more than either of us. So can you say: do you think that movie is Disney trying to sweep in and scoop up the territory that had been staked out by this movie? Or do you think Disney is so far above this sort of thing that they didn’t care?

ADAM The Aristocats was nine years later. I don’t know. Remember when there were two volcano movies that came out the same spring? That happens sometimes. Paris is sort of an obvious choice, and they’d already done London with 101 Dalmatians, so… I don’t know.

BETH The Aristocats is mentioned as “see also” in the Gay Purr-ee Wikipedia article.

BROOM I remember when we all watched The Aristocats, we said, “well they had to do a cat movie eventually; it’s funny it took them this long.” And you gotta hand it to Gay Purr-ee: despite having a bad title, it is a good concept to do an all-cat movie, in the wake of Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmatians. So. Any general thoughts about non-Disney animated movies?

BETH I always feel dirty. There’s just something dirty about it. But also edgy and kind of exciting. With dirtiness comes edginess. And verve. It felt freer than any Disney movie of this time. Even though 101 Dalmatians was pretty edgy for a Disney movie.

ADAM As a kid I had three categories in my head: there was Disney, which was good and classy, and there was Warner Bros., which was funny and engaging, and then there was Hanna-Barbera, which felt gross. And disturbing. Yogi Bear?? I was never interested in Yogi Bear. Was the Pink Panther Hanna-Barbera?

BROOM I think that was DePatie-Freleng.

ADAM What about Snagglepuss? All of that.

[inaudible]

ADAM Wait, you… you like Hanna-Barbera cartoons?

MARK Yes!

ADAM Wait wait, I’m sorry.

BETH What? Wait wait wait wait wait…

ADAM For a minority view: MARK, can you elaborate on that?

BROOM Yeah, please.

MARK Well, we had this network called Boomerang that was owned by Cartoon Network, and they broadcast mostly Hanna-Barbera cartoons, such as “Wacky Races,” “Yogi Bear,” and…

ADAM And what did you like about those things?

MARK What did I like about them? I don’t know, they were different.

BETH Wait a minute, different from what? What else were you watching? What other cartoons were you seeing as a kid?

MARK Now that I think about it, I think I watched those when I was older. I wasn’t watching Looney Tunes at that same age.

BROOM When you said “we had a network called Boomerang,” were you pulling a generational divide thing there, as though liking Hanna-Barbera cartoons is something your younger generation would get, and our older generation wouldn’t? Because “Wacky Races” is older than all of us, right? Aren’t those from like 1973?

MARK I think a good lens to think about it through is Nick At Nite. Because I was always confused about some of ADAM’s references, because they seemed unnecessarily dated, and then we figured out it was because Nick At Nite was broadcasting things that, you know, my parents didn’t grow up with.

ADAM Right, I make, like, Patty Duke references.

BROOM But just to be clear, MARK, ADAM is at the very fringe of what people our age make reference to. He’s the only person you know who makes reference to Patty Duke, right?

BETH I watched The Patty Duke Show! I know that show.

ADAM BROOM, I’m the only person of my age that MARK knows.

BROOM Well, let me just assure you that if you knew other people of his age, none of them would make Patty Duke references. That’s specific to ADAM’s personality.

ADAM [attempting to sing] “Patty loves to…” … wait…

BROOM Yeah yeah, a hot dog makes her lose control.

BETH [humming the tune]

ADAM [singing] “What a wild duet.”

BROOM I think of that as my parents’ reference, so I know about it to the degree that I’ve tried to get on the same page as my parents. And I feel like ADAM was very good at that.

ADAM Yeah, but Mark’s parents are halfway between us and our parents, so they’re too young to have grown up with that stuff, but too old to have grown up with Nick At Nite.

BROOM I know, I’m just saying where Patty Duke falls in your inner pantheon.

BETH But for me, and I assume ADAM too, it’s not from trying to relate to our parents; it’s what we watched on Nickelodeon as children, because it was on.

ADAM That’s right.

BETH So I know Mr. Ed, and Dennis the Menace, and Lassie.

BROOM I didn’t have cable, but I know some stuff from UHF stations that would just play cheap reruns. I didn’t watch Mr. Ed but it was on. Dennis the Menace I watched a few episodes of. Patty Duke I never saw.

ADAM Like I just made a Green Acres reference in this conversation.

BROOM Yeah, I don’t have that as an immediate personal reference, but I certainly know what it means what you say it.

ADAM Bye, MARK.

BROOM Oh no, we scared him away before he could tell us what’s good about Hanna-Barbera.

ADAM I will say, the cartoon that always struck me as the most actually frightening was Danger Mouse.

BETH Oh my god, yes.

ADAM There was something so alien about it that it was upsetting.

BROOM You mean “frightening” in the sense of coming from the wrong side of the tracks, coming from the wrong place. Not that it was itself a scary show, right?

ADAM I have no idea what happened in it, so I couldn’t tell you. It just seemed wrong.

BETH It was very British.

BROOM That had the Thames Television logo at the end, right?

BETH Yes it did.

BROOM Yeah, that was just a mark of total foreignness. What even is this.

BETH Exactly.

ADAM It was like trying to read Andy Capp in the newspaper.

BROOM Yeah, that’s exactly how Gay Purr-ee struck me, as a kid. “You’re not talking my language, so I’m not sure why this even exists.”

BETH That’s the weirdest thing about it, to me. Like, poor kids who had to watch this in 1962! The idea that your mom remembers this as a classic movie… what?? How was she supposed to understand anything that happened?

BROOM She said — and again, I’m sure she’ll show up in the comments below — I think she said she had some kind of dolls of Robespierre and Jaune Tom.

[disbelieving laughter]

BETH I can’t even imagine that!

BROOM Well just imagine in fifty years — if everything still exists in fifty years — if people are like “why did you have these Minions toys? I don’t understand. What were you thinking? What did you like about this?” And then the kids from today are going to have to say “I don’t know why, but I was a kid, and they told me to get excited about Minions, so I did, and I bought them, and I had them.”

BETH I just feel so bad for any kid who had to sit through this movie and go “What? What is happening? Kissing in buggies?”

BROOM But it’s also that feeling of hostility, that ADAM just described as scary.

BETH Yeah, there was this permeating hostility, throughout the entire movie. Even at the beginning, when the woman was talking about Paris and her ring was glowing, and they’re like, “ohhh… Paris… well…”

BROOM Yeah, when that first song started and you see the close-up of Mewsette with her jaw dropping just a little bit and otherwise no expression on her face. It’s creepy! Disney characterization is so warm, it’s so much about human details: the little kid is sniffling because he’s sad! and he wipes his nose because he’s sniffling! and it scrunches up his face and makes his sleeve flop! They capture it as carefully as they can. Whereas here it’s like marionettes, and their mouths just sort of… open… a little bit… It makes you feel uneasy.

BETH Also, “plebeian.” Can we just talk about how the word “plebeian” was repeated three or four times?

BROOM Oh, another thing I remember from when I saw this as a kid: I didn’t know what a “feline” was. And the plot seemed to be all about what a “feline” is.

BETH And you thought you were going to learn!

BROOM Well they never tell you!

BETH They don’t, I know! Yeah, I mean, there are lots of problems here. I feel like if there were a focus group, these things would come out.

BROOM That’s exactly it. This is what happens when you take away the Disney focus group.

ADAM I’m guessing Bosley Crowther loved it.

[we see for ourselves, first scrolling down past his reviews of No Exit, Escape From East Berlin, and Swordsman of Siena]

BETH I don’t agree, but okay, Bosley.

BROOM He was less wrong than he might have been, I thought. He called out the right weaknesses and strengths. He probably has them in slightly different proportions than we would.

BETH I’m glad we did that. I would watch more non-Disney movies.

BROOM Yeah, ADAM, I want to thank you for leading us here.

ADAM My pleasure. It was not what I… actually, it is kind of what I thought it was gonna be.

BROOM When you saw it described, you thought, “I can’t believe this exists,” right? Isn’t that why we watched it?

ADAM Yeah. I was expecting it to be this camp object, like, “can you believe it??” But it was a little bit dull. But it was still pretty campy and I’m glad I saw it.

BROOM I guess we’ll have to discuss what might be a next thing.

[we discuss. watch this spot.]

ADAM I don’t quite know what to say. It had something of everything. The first third just felt like “what is going on??”

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That never stopped for me. That’s how I felt the whole time.

ADAM Well, in the second half it was like “okay, we’re on a quest. I got it.” It settled into a quest, but it had that Moana thing of “but the quest is healing nature.”

BROOM Was it?

ADAM I mean, right?

BROOM I don’t know!

BETH It was about making friends with nature, I thought.

BROOM Did it represent nature as a whole or just one magical place? Those were the elemental spirits for the whole world?

ADAM They represented earth, water, air, and fire.

BROOM I got that.

ADAM Well, who can say if there’s any other non-Nordic realm in this world.

BETH I thought it looked beautiful. I really enjoyed looking at the diaphanous dresses, the way that everything flowed off of their bodies. I liked the costumes in general. Those are the things I was taking pleasure in because I felt like the story was just, like, “all right… okay…”

ADAM Well, I will say that even when it was strange and incomprehensible and distasteful, I never felt actively embarrassed like I did in Ralph Breaks the Internet.

BETH Yeah, it was classy.

BROOM Yeah, I never want to see Ralph Breaks the Internet again, and I would watch this with some curiosity if it came on again, because it was so strange. And full of beautiful things to look at.

ADAM Even the funny interludes were actually funny. Well, okay, at least I thought that Kristoff’s power ballad was funny.

BETH That was funny!

BROOM I found it so strange, because: who are they to make fun of this?

ADAM It definitely felt like the part where I’d stop paying attention if I were a kid.

BROOM I just couldn’t believe they, Disney, were making fun of a thing that’s only a couple of molecules away from Disney. When it started, when he stood against the tree with the backlighting and then they superimposed the close-up of his face, I spent that whole shot being like “is this parody or not?”

BETH I knew it was parody as soon as I heard the guitar.

BROOM I thought that was probably why that guitar was there, but… you know, either I’m taking this stuff seriously because it’s all stuff that Disney totally does, or I’m not because they’re making fun of it, and I couldn’t tell! And I thought that was remarkable.

ADAM I thought it was making fun of an 80s music video, not of Disney movies.

BROOM I got that eventually. But then at the end, Weezer sang that song, and they were reinterpreting it just like it had been any other song in the show. Because if it hadn’t had that guitar it would have sounded like any other song in the show! The idea that a song in a Disney musical would make fun of “cheesy songs” is so strange to me.

ADAM But again, if you compare it to the embarrassing “funny interlude” in Ralph Breaks the Internet, with the princesses, it was so much better than that! Nothing in here made my skin crawl. Which is some kind of accomplishment. By the second half, weren’t you like “all right, I at least see where we’re going here”? I agree that in the first twenty minutes, I was like “I don’t have any idea where this is going or what’s going on.”

BROOM The beginning of the movie piled on the songs so heavy. The songs were all…

BETH Same-y and boring!

BROOM I thought they were okay as songs…

BETH I didn’t think they were great.

BROOM … but they were all kind of out of narrative time. There was a song about “everything will always stay the same,” and I didn’t understand what the thing was that was supposed to stay the same. I mean, I knew they were setting me up for an emphasis on change later in the story… and then at the end they said that was what had happened, although…

ADAM In fact nothing changed! It seemed like everything was going to change, but then whoops! even Arendelle is fine. I guess the change is that Elsa moved.

BROOM And she moved because… there’s the magic people and the earthly people, and she had to go be queen of the magic people?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH It’s where she belonged.

BROOM Because she was actually the fifth element?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM So the elements are air, fire, water, earth, and Elsa from Frozen?

ADAM I mean, maybe she’s ice? Maybe?

BROOM But the water horse turned to an ice horse.

ADAM Yeah. But she can also quench the fire lizard? I don’t know.

BROOM The fire lizard is only aflame when it’s upset. Otherwise it’s just a lizard.

ADAM It doesn’t even like to be on fire!

BROOM And the water horse was an angry “I want to drown you” water horse until… ?

ADAM Until she tamed it.

BETH I thought that scene was very cool!

ADAM It was very attractive!

BETH And powerful.

ADAM And scary.

BROOM Yup. And I thought it had a very good score. I thought the music was really well done. It was better than usual for movies like this.

ADAM The giants were the earth — why were there like ten of them?

BROOM And the air was not an animal, it was just “Gale” and she was the wind. Because they thought it was funny to give some air a name.

ADAM Yes. Well, it was air that rustled some leaves.

BETH You thought the songs were good?

BROOM I mean, I thought they were okay. There were some moments, like in the main one…

BETH What’s the main one?

BROOM “Into the Unknown.” Don’t you think that was the main one?

BETH Yeah, that was the climactic song.

BROOM Which they sang about six minutes into the movie! “This is the ‘Let It Go’ from this movie, and they sang it already?” I still felt like we weren’t…

BETH We hadn’t earned it.

BROOM We weren’t in narrative time, yet! It had all been like “this is a theme” and “this is a dynamic” but I was waiting for someone to just walk across a room in real time because a story was happening right now.

ADAM Wasn’t Elsa afraid to use her powers in front of other people, as a child? Why was she just creating snow people? At first I thought “are these Elsa’s children?” She doesn’t use her powers when she’s a child, right?

BETH Oh, good point.

BROOM She didn’t show her parents?

ADAM She did, they were watching her!

BROOM I mean in the first movie.

BETH I don’t remember.

ADAM I don’t remember either.

BROOM I only saw it the once.

ADAM But I thought that was the whole point, that she was afraid… or was it that she did use her powers, but she accidentally froze Anna or something?

BETH I think that’s what it was.

BROOM That first movie seemed to tap into some real felt experiences about self-doubt.

ADAM Yeah that felt like a real organic metaphor for something, and this one was just…

BETH “We have to make another one, so what can we do? Their parents died, so they need to figure out why, or something.”

BROOM There should be a name for the process when…

ADAM When they come up with a central argument and then they have to craft a story around it? “Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.” That was actually one of the more successful ones, oddly.

BROOM I thought that one was fine. But what was the central argument here? I don’t think this was one of those.

ADAM But they clearly thought it should have that.

BROOM Even in Ralph Wrecks the Internet, we could see that the artificial concept was “if you love your friend, give them the freedom to pursue their dreams.” “If you love it, let it go.” Got it. What was the message of this? What was it about? What was going on?

ADAM I don’t think that was well executed. Sometimes they seem really artificial when they have a themed spine to them. But I agree with you, this didn’t have that, and as a result it was very confusing to follow.

BROOM The big revelation was that the voice that she’s been hearing… is her own?

ADAM Then there was “I’ve got to do it by myself.” “You’ll go too far!” What?

BETH But then it’s about Anna finding the magic inside her.

BROOM Was there magic?

BETH You know, metaphorical magic.

ADAM Logic.

BROOM Didn’t she already do that in the first movie? In fact doesn’t she say something here like “I climbed an ice mountain for you!” She already knows she’s a hero.

ADAM Yeah, I don’t know. Olaf was less embarrassing in this movie.

BETH I agree.

BROOM I don’t remember how embarrassing he was in the first movie, but I did think “boy, this is a lot of Olaf.” When he sang that song that was like “this is normal!” while scary things are happening, we hadn’t actually seen any scary things until he started singing the song, so… I don’t know, I felt like I was being forcefed a lot of Olaf time. But I also thought it was all beautiful, and had a lot of graphic force. It ended up feeling like a dream. I’m sleepy, so maybe that’s why, but I felt like I was having a dream. Like, “okay, I get that at a general level we’ve gone from a secure situation to an insecure one, and somehow this forest has to do with the insecurity, and that’s all I can understand.” And that’s how dreams are. Disney movies are usually so clear to me, so it was strange to be that disoriented.

ADAM I agree, I was very disoriented at the beginning. I don’t think I’m going to remember anything about this.

BROOM You were talking earlier about how you read stories to your boyfriend to put him to sleep… I was thinking that this seemed like something designed to put you to sleep, because every link in the story is a confusing one. That’s what makes my attention detach. Several times I felt myself thinking “uh-oh I guess I need to check back in, because they just told me things that don’t follow sensibly.”

ADAM But then there was the really literal and cloddish Kristoff B-plot about trying to propose.

BROOM That was like the B-plot from an episode of Friends, as you should know. That’s really the oldest B-plot in the book. “What was that you were going to say before we got interrupted? / Uh… nothing…” That’s like a number four.

BETH “Wait, we’re going to die??” “Not today!”

BROOM Well, I thought some of that dialogue was okay.

ADAM But it came from a weird different movie. And all the sister stuff felt like it was added after the fact to make it, like…

BETH Poignant.

ADAM Because that was a big selling point of the original Frozen, so that had to get touched up. Did like ten people write this? Maybe that was the problem.

BROOM No, I think Jennifer Lee wrote it. Script by Jennifer Lee and a couple other people, story by Jennifer Lee, directed by Jennifer Lee. Jennifer Lee is now the creative director of Disney Animation. After John Lasseter was pushed out for hugging too many people, she is now in charge of everything. I was just reading about her: she graduated from an MFA program in 2006 or something, and then got hired to be a helper on writing Frozen or one of those, and now she’s the head of the studio. And she also wrote the Wrinkle In Time adaptation that I believe was considered to be incoherent and tonally bizarre.

BETH I saw it. It wasn’t great.

BROOM I felt like Frozen came from a real place, whereas this was… I don’t watch enough anime to understand this kind of plot. So many layers of magic! The spirit, and then the spirit of the spirit, and then I’m the spirit…

ADAM I was sure the parents were gonna get brought back to life.

BETH Me too! I fully expected that, when the boat was discovered, with the map, and…

BROOM What was that whole thing about? “They told us our parents died on the South Sea but this is the North Sea so they must have been searching for me…”

ADAM Yeah, nothing happened with the map. Well, I guess the map is what tells you where the place is…

BETH Yeah, “go north,” but they already knew that.

ADAM What’s the place called?

BROOM It must be something from real mythology. “Ahana-what now?”

BETH I can’t remember.

ADAM It creeped me out when I realized that the magic people were natives of some kind, and not just other people. As soon as I saw “oh they have a slightly different skin tone,” I was like [sound of being uncomfortable].

BETH And then there was the song.

BROOM Well, what were they supposed to do? They were a different tribe.

BETH It just seems very Disney to handle it this way.

ADAM It seems very Brother Bear.

BROOM I assumed it must be modeled on some Scandinavian tribe…

ADAM They’re the Sámi people, right?

BETH Yeah, that’s what it said in the credits.

BROOM All right.

ADAM But ugh, that’s creepy. It made it suddenly like “what is this about? Is this about reparations?”

BROOM Well, what is it about? They built a false dam to drain their land of vitality?

ADAM I should have known that dam was suspicious! Dams are not in favor right now.

BROOM “It was a wonderful land where the spirits joined with the people… so we built them a dam.” I thought it was strange, but I didn’t think to be suspicious that it was a Trojan-horse dam. It didn’t make enough sense!

ADAM I also could have sworn that it was going to be some sort of misunderstanding between the peoples — not that their grandfather was a genocidaire.

BETH Yeah. So what does that mean?

ADAM It means that all of Arendelle was built on a lie.

BETH Right. So it is about reparations.

ADAM Or something! Who knows?

BROOM Seriously, did you guys not find this the most bewildering one, of all fifty-whatever?

ADAM It felt like I was having trouble gripping it in my mind as it was going through.

BROOM Yeah, exactly, that’s what I mean about the sleepy-time story.

BETH I was really just admiring the animation.

ADAM Which was beautiful, which was lovely.

BETH Even the skin texture, the way they moved. Everything was just beautiful. And not creepy — especially after seeing all those previews with bad CGI.

BROOM Some of them looked better than others. One of them you praised similarly — which one was it?

BETH Oh yeah, the Pixar one. That looked gorgeous. Anyway, I just stopped paying attention to the story. Well, I didn’t stop paying attention, but I stopped trying to figure it out.

ADAM Moana was very similar to this, tonally, but was a much more coherent execution of this thing. Did Lin-Manuel Miranda write that, or did he just write the songs?

BROOM He just wrote the songs.

ADAM Maybe it’s just harder to do a sequel?

BROOM I felt like there was something uniquely weird about this, beyond just bad execution. The choice to make the first three songs — I don’t really know how to describe it if you didn’t feel it this way, but…

ADAM Well I never really think about the songs.

BROOM I don’t mean to analyze the songs, but just, like… First we get a scene from their childhood — the very beginning is them as little children…

ADAM “I’m gonna tell you a bedtime story, which is actually this big reveal about my whole life.”

BROOM “The story of how everyone I knew died.”

ADAM “And this is how our family came to be, maybe, but if you don’t squirm I’ll tell you the story!” “Oh we have so many questions!” “Maybe another time! Go to bed, girls!” Like, what??

BROOM Right, tonally there’s not a real moment there, it’s kind of just some storytelling, uh…

BETH Setup.

BROOM Setup, right. And then we jump to the present day, and there’s some kind of event going on but we don’t know what it is…

BETH And she hears the voice…

BROOM She hears this voice from the story from when she was a child, when her mother was singing her this lullaby — which we later find out that the mother was the magical force in the story; why didn’t the father know that? Why didn’t the mother reveal it?

BETH Yeah, they never told each other?

ADAM Why did they have to go on a quest to find out Elsa’s story when the mother knew the whole time?

BETH Yeah, mom could be like, “well, you know, I saved you.”

ADAM Was the mother magical, or was the mother’s act of selflessness the thing that created the magic?

BROOM Didn’t he in the flashback at the very beginning of the movie see what I guess was the mother swirling in the air? She was the playmate of all the spirits?

BETH But that doesn’t mean she was magical.

BROOM But she was very in touch with them? I don’t know. Anyway — we jump into the present day: okay, time to get situated. But instead of getting situated, we see the “problem” of her hearing the voice, though we don’t know what kind of problem that really is. And then she whooshes some magic in the air, and then the camera zooms across and now we find Anna, the other one, and she’s walking along with Olaf, and they say three lines to each other that don’t place us, and then they’re like “Now let’s sing the song about how everything will always be the same.” And the song I guess is supposed to be showing us what their lives are like now, but the scenes in the song aren’t a succession, and by the end of the song they’re all having some kind of banquet, and it’s nighttime. Remember?

BETH I don’t remember that!

BROOM I felt like “just tell me what day it is and what’s happening!” And then they’re playing charades. This is the first scene where something is actually happening right now in real time: they’re playing charades, and it’s comic. And then they fall asleep.

ADAM And she’s wearing the scarf.

BROOM And then Elsa goes out on the porch and sings a big power ballad.

ADAM And her sister says “what’s wrong” and she says “I don’t know and I can’t tell you.”

BROOM I just felt like all of that was so unlike most Disney movies, which would start with —

ADAM [singing] “I wanna get out of this little town!”

BROOM “Here’s what life is like for me right now. It’s humdrum, and I need something else.” Or if not that, then at least “There’s this problem, and I can explain to you what the problem is. The huns are coming.”

ADAM “All our crops are dying.”

BROOM Right. And this was like “we sang a song about how everything is normal! And now the day is done and we’re playing some charades!” I just felt like I couldn’t watch it any way other than just music and color and light. And that was an interesting experience. It felt more basically musical, but I was confused like that pretty much the whole time.

ADAM It feels like maybe it’s a sequel problem, because you can’t have “here’s who we are and here’s how it is,” because we already know who you are and how it is. You could have “we have a new problem,” but that would be sort of clunky, right?

BROOM I think the standard way you do a sequel is “Okay, since the happy ending of the last one, here’s some things that have happened: we got married and now we have a baby, so it’s a whole different life for us!”

ADAM Yeah, some events. And no time had passed since the end of the last one.

BROOM Or like “oh, I’m the queen now and that’s a lot of responsibility, I have all these thoughts and feelings about it”…

BETH Wait, so in end of the last one, the parents had already died?

ADAM I think the parents died at the beginning of the last one.

BROOM I don’t think the parents were around in the last one.

ADAM Remember, they died in a shipwreck.

BETH Well I know that now, but only because of this movie!

BROOM So we assume they said that in the previous one?

ADAM They did. You see them get on to the ship.

BETH Oh god, I don’t remember that.

ADAM There was also no villain in this, which made it confusing.

BETH Well the villain was nature. Until it wasn’t.

BROOM The grandfather was the villain. It was the original sin.

ADAM Sort of, but he wasn’t there. We don’t see him or interact with him.

BROOM You’re right, it is kind of about reparations. The story was that the worst thing that has ever happened is that your ancestors’ prejudice made them do an evil act. And you can make reparations by being willing to flood your own city. And then your magical sister will save you.

BETH Yeah but she didn’t know that. She thought her sister was dead and she had to sacrifice…

BROOM Her sister essentially was dead, because she… went in the pit.

ADAM She was revived in some way that was totally unexplained.

BETH Well, because the right thing had been done. For nature.

BROOM Yeah, that’s how things always happen.

ADAM When she first froze I thought “how is Anna gonna get all the way up there and unfreeze her?” But of course she didn’t have to do that, because that would have been tedious, to find a way across the Dark Sea without powers. Glad we didn’t have to sit through that!

BROOM Is it in Perrault or Grimm or somewhere, that when the curse is lifted the entire countryside comes back to life? When did that start?

ADAM When did that trope start? Like in Beauty and the Beast, “the spell is broken”?

BROOM The trope of the magic zooming out to the whole land and making everything better. It seems like such a recent Disney thing but it must have deeper roots somewhere. Anyway, whatever its original root is, I’m sure there’s some kind of meaning there. But it has become so attenuated by just being animated so many times… we just know what it looks like and we’re used to that. I felt like everything was this trope of whooshy magic, action at a distance, so much that it didn’t mean anything anymore. Like the fire in the trees went out when she calmed the fire spirit, and then Olaf disappears when Elsa is frozen, and then the ending seemed to be that, like… Elsa unfreezes because Anna breaks the dam, and then because she’s unfrozen she can stop the thing that… caused her to become unfrozen? It stops having meaning! Also, all of those people were trapped for 34 years, but they were the ones whose grievance it was, but they didn’t even know about it because they were trapped.

ADAM Was time passing for them in there, or no?

BROOM I think no because we saw the commander guy looking exactly the same in the flashbacks.

ADAM That totally escaped me. I couldn’t figure out at all what was going on with those people.

BETH Me neither. They hated each other but they reached some kind of truce where they didn’t kill each other?

ADAM We never saw them together. They must have known time was passing because they said, like, “Thirty-four years, Mabel!” Her name wasn’t Mabel.

BROOM Maybe I’m wrong and he was actually young-looking at the beginning.

ADAM He had a conspicuously gray beard at the end.

BETH Okay, then they were aging. Like that gray-haired woman.

ADAM So if they were fighting with the only inhabitants of the forest, how did they eat?

BROOM Yeah, wait — so they were reproducing? The people who were younger than 34 had been born under the dome?

ADAM Like Ryder and Honeymaren?

BETH Oh yeah, the hot boy. And ADAM, you wanted to see some action with Kristoff.

BROOM It sure did seem like they were setting something up!

ADAM But he never actually came back.

BROOM “Oh sorry that your proposal to your girlfriend didn’t work, anyway, so, uh… maybe I’ll be seeing you later?” Why did they even tell us those characters’ names? We laughed when she said “my name is Honeymaren,” because we, I think, correctly deduced that it would not matter what her name was. And it didn’t.

ADAM It’s also, like: “what?”

[general giggling]

ADAM Like… why was that her name?

BETH It’s so someone can be her for Halloween.

ADAM But, like, why wasn’t her name “Gale?” Do you want to say something about the people sitting next to us who laughed at all the bad jokes?

BROOM On which side?

BETH To the right.

BROOM Next to me. Yeah. They seemed like idiots.

BETH They laughed at everything you were supposed to laugh at. They did seem like idiots. I didn’t like them from the beginning.

BROOM I knew I hated them when at the end of the Spongebob Movie preview, Spongebob says to Patrick “I love your sense of irony” and he’s like “I love my sense of ironing too” and he’s ironing on an ironing board…

ADAM That actually made me laugh.

BROOM The girl in that couple was like “DUMB. That’s the dumbest joke.” She said that aloud.

BETH ADAM and I were just relieved that that girl showed up, because we thought that the guy was there creepily watching Frozen alone.

BROOM You would find that creepy?

BETH Something about him was giving me a weird feeling.

ADAM That would never happen in a movie with non-assigned seats, where the only other person in the theater comes in and sits right next to you.

BROOM It did seem a little like “these people are talking and being dumb, and they could be anywhere else in this theater, and it has to be right next to us.” But they shut up eventually.

BETH They did. I mean, we were talking loudly before the movie too.

BROOM Before. But once it started we shut up. We’re adults.

ADAM What a weird movie.

BROOM It was so weird.

BETH It was really weird.

ADAM I guarantee that the review will not say anything about it being weird, it’ll just be like “another excellent venture from Disney Studios.”

BROOM I don’t know if that’s the case. People have gotten cynical, and maybe for good reason, about some of this stuff.

ADAM Would kids like this?

BETH I can’t imagine it!

ADAM As we were leaving, the girl next to us said “I would never show that to a kid less than 10 years old.”

BROOM How could a kid follow it?

BETH I think they made it so it doesn’t matter.

BROOM I watched it that way and I did have that thought. We’ve returned to the original way of watching movies: color, light, tone.

BETH Yeah, sensation. Dazzling sparkles everywhere.

BROOM I thought that during the “this will all make sense when I’m older” song. If I wasn’t paying attention to the words, this doesn’t even look scary. It’s something other than what they say it is.

BETH It just looked like little gags.

BROOM It just looked like stuff flying around.

ADAM Yeah, that seemed like maybe somebody had said “this is too scary, you need to lighten it up.” Also, think about how water has memory?? And therefore Elsa can conjure up images of the past by freezing the water??

BETH I was fine with that, but… it’s just another weird thing about the movie.

ADAM It’s just another thing that you have go “okay, I guess this is another thing that I have to remember.” As you said, BROOM, about all the attenuated magic in the movie: it’s just another thing to keep track of.

BROOM Yeah, they had to explain that one —

BETH They had to say it like four times to make us realize that that’s how everything worked.

ADAM “I’m going to conjure the scene of my parents’ death by pulling the water out of the floorboards?” Like, [sound of being mildly creeped out]!

BETH Yeah, that was unnecessary.

BROOM And then it went so fast! It turned out not to be important to the movie.

ADAM I learned recently that Idina Menzel’s ex-husband is Taye Diggs.

BROOM I didn’t know that.

BETH Interesting.

BROOM In reading the article about Jennifer Lee I learned that she recently revealed herself to be in a relationship with actor Alfred Molina.

BETH Wow.

ADAM That must be why he was in this.

BROOM Or vice versa.

BETH Odd!

BROOM Yes.

BETH Well, I don’t have anything else to say.

ADAM Would you recommend this to people?

BETH No.

BROOM No.

ADAM Well, I don’t know.

BETH Not to adults.

ADAM Would you recommend this to Madeline, who is the only person who will read this?

BROOM Not to Madeline herself, with her brain. I would say, I guess, that it seems likely that her kids will find it visually diverting. And ultimately non-threatening.

ADAM Well as I said, [nephew 2] could not follow the cross-cutting timeline of Little Women, in a way that was lucky. I mean, he could follow it, but it was very confusing how that death scene was staged.

BETH I mean, my dad couldn’t follow it either.

[more discussion of this]

ADAM Do you want to hear the review?

BROOM Yeah, please.

[he reads the New York Times review]

BETH She hinted at some of the things we were talking about.

BROOM It wasn’t an offensive review. It was reasonably right about things. It just seems odd that she treats it like such a normal outing, when it felt so much more spazzy. While we’re on the record, I like when we talk about how these things make us feel, so I want to say that it made me feel either sad or old or something. I was like “I guess this is just how movies are now. They require squinting at, and they have this busy synthetic quality, even when their heart seems to be more or less in the right place.” But not all movies are like that.

BETH That’s right. See more movies, BROOM. You were just talking about…

BROOM That’s my alter ego, “Seymour Movies.”

BETH Uh-huh. Well, it didn’t make me feel like that.

BROOM I’m glad to hear it, because we’re the same age.

BETH I really did just succumb to how beautiful it was. It was perfectly fine to watch it. It dragged a little bit, but that’s because I wasn’t trying to figure out what it was saying, I was like “oh, why do we have to have a song now.”

ADAM I spent much of it being like “what are we going to talk about?” And the answer was “I have no idea.”

BETH The songs annoyed me.

ADAM I can’t remember any of them. They have all left my head.

BETH I just think that the fact of the songs — they didn’t add to anything. It just seemed like “how do we make this feel like Broadway?”

ADAM [singing] “Here I am!” That’s from the original, right? I can’t remember anything about the songs from this one.

BROOM “Into the Unknown.”

ADAM Well, how did that go? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

BROOM [singing] A-ah, a-ah. I actually thought there was one good compositional idea: to have the mystery voice from beyond — Norwegian singer Aurora — go “a-ah, a-ah,” and we get used to that. And then Elsa sings her power ballad about how she’s lured by that and she’s gonna resist it and now she’s gonna give in to it, and the song has her sing [singing] “into the unknown, into the unknow-own, into the unknow-oh-oh-oh” and then those four notes are answered by “a-ah, a-ah,” which we heard from the beginning.

BETH I liked that too, and I even though it at the time: “this is nice.”

BROOM It’s satisfying that she reaches up and up and then — whoa! — it turns over into the thing you already heard. That was very well done. And then they did it a hundred times in the end credits. And I thought, “let me not forget that I enjoyed it for real that first time.” But there were other points in that song where there were chord changes that felt like first draft chord changes that should have been fixed up.

BETH Okay.

ADAM All right.

BROOM That was it!

ADAM And what’s next?

BROOM Who knows? Let’s see.

[reads the Wikipedia entry about Raya and the Last Dragon, scheduled to be released November 25, 2020]