[The home screening of this 107-minute movie was paused (at approximately the 60 minute mark) for a food delivery and bathroom break. It became apparent that there was a general desire to do some mid-movie venting, which was duly recorded:]
ADAM It’s just dumb bits of other movies.
BROOM It’s worse than that.
BETH It is… [sigh].
ADAM It’s like a little bit of Indiana Jones, and a little bit of Mad Max…
BETH Yeah, and it’s a little bit The Fast and the Furious…
ADAM And then just horcruxes.
BETH Ha, yes, horcruxes.
BROOM It’s just empty! I haven’t had a single feeling.
BETH I’ve only felt angry.
BROOM I mean a story feeling, I haven’t had a feeling about anything that’s going on. It’s just video game stuff, on and on and on.
ADAM Yes, it’s video game stuff, that’s right.
BROOM And it’s clear where we’re going with this, that the themes are trust and political detente, or whatever, and that those have been applied to the video-game-stuff machine that churns this shit out.
ADAM Remember when the theme of Wreck-It Ralph was, like… what was the theme of Wreck-It Ralph?
BETH The end was a zillion Ralphs…
BROOM Guys, the movie you’re thinking of is Ralph Breaks the Internet. Look, this is better than Ralph Breaks the Internet. I get how someone who just wants to play video games and watch anime could be like “now I’ll watch Raya and the Last Dragon.” It’s sort of coherent as that.
ADAM Well, I think that the bug thing is very cute.
BETH I agree. I do like that bug thing, but I hate everything else.
BROOM “The bug thing” is the armadillo thing?
BETH Yeah, that started out little. That was a good gag.
ADAM And I think that the baby and the monkeys are cute.
BETH Meh.
BROOM Look, I think that the video game stuff is better than the video game stuff we’ve seen in other movies. It’s sort of diverting in a way that some others aren’t. It just hurts my heart that this is a Disney movie. If it was just some stupid animated movie from some other studio, I’d think “well, this is what they’re making — fine.” But it hurts as a Disney movie.
BETH Yes.
ADAM Yeah, when she said “all we have to do is get the five gem pieces,” I was like [long groan of tedium].
BETH It’s making me sad that kids are watching this. It doesn’t have a “seedy worldview” exactly, but it’s sort of…
BROOM Yeah, we need another word than “seedy” to represent the threat to the human spirit posed by contemporary culture. It’s not seediness, it’s… synthetic-ness.
BETH Vapidness?
BROOM It’s knowing how to mold your Instagram persona more than you know how to be a person. That really is a threat to kids today. The movie has all of its surfaces in order, but it hasn’t had had a single actual joke that it actually made up. It’s just doing attitude stuff. When the Talon girl shows up in the treasure room, and Awkwafina says “I get the sense that you’re not besties” or something like that — they thought that was a joke! They thought that was a comic moment. But it’s just a reflexive tic.
BETH The whole vibe of it is “this is how culture is now, you use these shorthand ways of talking and joking.”
BROOM I was angry right away, when in the prologue sequence the girls are getting to know each other and playing “would you prefer this or that” and she says something like “oh that, all day.” I don’t remember what exactly, but they were trying hard to sound like… billenials? What do you call Generation Z kids?
BETH Kids today!
BROOM And I thought, “if this is how they’re doing character in this movie, that hurts.” But then she turned out to be a villain! And I thought “oh, I see, it’s showing that that was shallow, it’s not how people really connect.” So then I was holding out hope for a little while.
BETH No, the whole thing is that.
BROOM Well, it’s both. I think they agreed that was shallow, but they don’t actually know anything other than shallow, so they ran out of ideas after that.
BETH I feel like the backgrounds are more meaningful than the characters. I mean, this is so beautiful to look at, in terms of CGI backgrounds. It’s gorgeously rendered.
ADAM It was clear that there was a problem when the very first thing that the movie did was, like, “now a bunch of backstory!: [insistent babble].”
BROOM Oh yeah, that backstory was messed up. It’s that third-generation concept of myth, filtered down. Their level of understanding of myth is that they saw The Lion King.
BETH Other Disney movies, yeah.
BROOM It’s like post-apocalyptic culture where they’ve told the story of “Disney Movies” to each other for years, and this is the form it takes now. This a retelling of the myth of “Disney,” not some deep human myth, just “Disney as myth,” told through the language of people who play a lot of video games. And have seen some anime.
BETH Guys, I hate it.
[The venting session comes to a close and the screening is resumed. 40 minutes later, it is done:]
BROOM [offers the Kumandran gesture of greeting]
ADAM All of this was, I’m sure, carefully ethnographically accurate, so that’s probably offensive, that you just did that.
BROOM Carefully ethnographically accurate to what?
BETH The Mayans.
ADAM No, it was to, like, southeast Asia.
BETH Right.
BROOM Well, where was Kumandra supposed to be? It was, like, Thai-Burmese-Vietnamese-Indonesian…
ADAM It was all southeast Asia, and I read that during production they were very careful to consult all the myths of the people of the region, and all the voice actors were Asian-American…
BETH I did see that all the voice actors were… appropriate… but what about the dialogue and the script?
ADAM I will say that the second half, after we resumed… like, the return of life sequence, which is in all Disney movies: at least it was exuberant. I was persuaded. Not that it redeemed the movie, but it was very nice to see all the water coming back and all the people coming back to life, and a lengthy sequence of people hugging. All that was cathartic.
BETH Yes. I liked that they all got turned to stone, and then unfrozen by the rain, and hugged.
BROOM I’m willing to say that I found the second half easier to watch, more palatable overall than the first half.
ADAM Yeah, once they got all the business out of the way.
BROOM Right, then it was the story, and you got to actually watch the story instead of just the treasure hunt.
ADAM But the politics were terrible. This was the worst kind of George Bush liberalism, like, “if we just approach with open hearts, everyone will be with us” kind of nonsense.
BETH You just give them the right gift, and you’re in.
BROOM Well, it’s complicated. The movie made fun of the naivete of that, when they showed the hypothetical approaches. In the hypothetical she absurdly says “ooh! a present? now I’m your friend!” And then indeed in the scene when they actually do it, things fall apart and they end up shooting the dragon. So they’ve established that it’s naive to just do that. But then they still have to come around and have a message of trust in the end. So it ends up being something like, “if you trust someone all the way to the point where you actually die, then the trust will pay off.”
BETH Yeah.
ADAM That’s fair, but… I don’t know, man.
BROOM I don’t know if that’s a message. How are you supposed to apply that in life?
ADAM That’s some truth and reconciliation stuff.
BETH The message is also “how you imagine things will go is not how they go.” I kept thinking, “what is the right age of kids for this movie?” It’s pretty scary! That purple ether stuff that’s coming to get you. I don’t feel like my niece and nephew, who are 9 and 7, are old enough for this movie. Maybe they’re naive for their ages, but it just seemed too intense.
ADAM Yeah, that purple goo is pretty scary. It seemed like the movie was going out of its way to not have a villain. I get that Disney villains are problematic, but without a villain the story doesn’t really exist. The formless goo isn’t a villain, it’s just a thing. And Namaari and her mom, they’re not really villains.
BROOM They were certainly antagonists.
ADAM Yeah, but they didn’t have any personality, because they were too afraid to make them larger than life. It could have used, like, an Ursula.
BROOM But that’s the message: questioning distrust, rather than being invested in an “us-vs.-them” structure. That’s a positive message. And the issues facing the world today are these kinds of impersonal problems. If the purple goo represents climate change, some kind of problem that we just need to come together and work on, that seems like a genuinely worthwhile kind of message to put across. But you need to be able to narrativize it. You need to figure out what that really means. And like I said last time about Frozen 2, to have everything be in terms of the logic of screen magic, where this magic does this magic to that magic, but then the magic is dying, but we have the gem that makes the magic magic again… the metaphor runs out.
ADAM Yeah.
BROOM I respect that they tried to have no bad guy, and have it be about trusting the person who seems like a bad guy. That seems healthy. I just don’t know how to get all the way to a movie that makes sense, from there.
ADAM Yeah, I don’t mean to say that they needed a bad guy because you have to have a bad guy; I’m saying I think that the problem with the narrative was that there were no characters other than Raya, kind of.
BETH And Sisu.
ADAM There wasn’t really a villain in the first Frozen, but Elsa was —
BROOM Yes there was! There was that awful prince who tricked them.
ADAM Oh, that’s true, but he wasn’t really the main villain. The main villain was “Elsa, but she’s really good, she’s just misguided and extremely emotional.”
BETH That feels complex, and like a story.
ADAM Exactly.
BETH This was, yeah, really a drag.
ADAM So why did the dragons all come back the second time?
BETH Right! Why didn’t it work the first time, when it apparently worked for every other creature?
ADAM And why was Sisu’s stab wound healed?
BROOM The dragons all came together and used their dragon magic to bring her back, which is a separate case of reincarnation.
BETH But that ball existed. When that ball was just hanging out in the room, why weren’t the other dragons okay?
ADAM Yeah.
BROOM That’s right, for five hundred years it didn’t help them.
BETH That doesn’t make sense.
ADAM None of it made any sense. Yeah.
BROOM It is striking that this is a Disney movie where the magic is so strong that you get your dad back. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before. A new generation got their hands on the Disney myth, and they told it this weird way.
ADAM Well, she didn’t get her mom back.
BROOM What “mom”? What are you talking about?
BETH Does she even have a mom?
ADAM Her mom is not mentioned.
BETH If you’re only working from within Disney architecture, that seems like a really new idea. And it seems like that’s how this all was formed: they were only registering other Disney movies. It felt like it had no sense of history in a real way.
BROOM Yes, it’s for kids who don’t have any sense of the real. But the really sad thing is it felt like it was by them.
BETH Yes, this is the thought I was having. There’s that Mission: Impossible stuff in it, and I’m like, “do you guys even know what that is? Have you seen Mission: Impossible, or are you just riffing on the riff — like, the Simpsons version of it? or something after that?” It just seemed so far removed from the thing they were actually referencing. But they knew that there was a thing to reference.
BROOM Which was the Mission: Impossible reference?
BETH When they were sneaking around; it was the baby and the monkeys. The soundtrack did a riff on the Mission: Impossible thing.
ADAM I wonder if the problem is just a big loaded corporate culture, and disempowered writers, and everything has to be done by committee.
BETH Yes. This is another thing I was thinking: this is like a workshop, like a grad school or an Iowa Writers’ Workshop kind of situation, where the narrative is watered down by everyone saying “well I don’t know about this,” “well, I don’t know about this.” Piece by piece it gets dismantled.
ADAM Yeah. “Well, would the Kumandran people really do that?”
BETH Right, everyone’s gonna have a problem with something, so the writers say “okay, so I’ll address that, and I’ll address this, and I’ll address this,” and all of a sudden it’s the most bland version it can be.
BROOM You’re right, and I should keep that in mind, when I’m dispirited by this humor that’s not really humor. Instead of imagining the writers as clueless ingrown people, I should imagine that they’re just in a situation where they’re not confident and they’re not comfortable.
BETH Or they’re just too young to stand up to executives. They might be confident, but they might just think “okay, I can’t win this, because the guy who has the money is telling me to do this other thing.”
ADAM Which has been a Hollywood problem forever. I mean, there have been periods where Disney has had very strong narrative personality, because somebody was in charge. It’s a shame John Lasseter was so huggy, because he wouldn’t have been bossed around like this, I don’t think.
BROOM Rest assured, none of the people who worked on this movie hug anyone, ever.
BETH No no, they do. Some of them do. Some of them are fat, and they hug people. That’s my guess.
BROOM You think some of the people who worked on this movie are fat?
BETH … Yeah.
ADAM Did you say “bad” or “fat”?
BETH Fat.
BROOM And those are so different, ADAM, how dare you. So is this the most lesbian movie they’ve ever made?
BETH Yes!
ADAM Yeah!
BETH Yes! Like, was every main character a lesbian? Maybe!
ADAM You know that I’m always here for the coded LGBT themes in these movies, but it wasn’t really that coded.
BETH It wasn’t coded, it was just blatant! They were all lesbians. All of them!
BROOM Especially the Sisu-Raya relationship, where she’s like “she’s my girl!” I don’t understand what Sisu was other than “your lesbian girlfriend.”
ADAM Sisu was her wacky best friend…
BROOM They didn’t have a wacky best friend rapport. But they did kind of have a lesbian couple rapport.
ADAM But Raya and Namaari…
BETH Those two were so into each other. I felt like there was a strong sexual subtext to that.
BROOM Oh yeah. They were fanfic-bait.
BETH Yeah. There was more going on.
ADAM “Come at me, Princess Undercut.” There were basically no males to speak of in the movie anyway, other than the oafish Spine.
BETH Yeah, they made Namaari as masculine as possible, to serve as that foil.
ADAM I liked the dragon and the baby and the monkeys, but they did feel kind of ripped off from Spirited Away.
BROOM I say “boo” to the baby and the monkeys.
BETH I did not like them.
BROOM Someone said “let’s do a baby and monkeys,” and then they managed to make them neither cute nor interestingly uncute, it was just “a baby and some monkeys” in the movie. I never wanted to see them.
ADAM Yeah, I liked them at the beginning when they were con artists, but not when they became her friends.
BROOM So back to the theming: I finally understood the scheme right after we turned it back on again. “I see, she’s collecting one representative from each of these regions, but they’re all underdog people. They’re not the big chieftain, they’re just ordinary folks, and those are the people you can develop a trust relationship with, even if you distrust them a little bit. But it’s more fun, it’s like a gang, hanging out, and that’s how trust is built.”
BETH It had this Ocean’s Eleven feel to it. You’re a ragtag gang.
BROOM Yes, exactly. Misfits. Though the Hun guy was the chieftain of his tribe. But then everything they did to develop their relationship on that boat, there were no actual characters there, so it was just schematic.
ADAM “You threw shrimp at me again!”
BROOM Yeah! You already did that! You threw shrimp in the previous scene, and it wasn’t funny then either. There wasn’t a single laugh in this movie.
BETH There were no laughs. I think they don’t know how to develop characters. Or this team didn’t.
ADAM Even the kid. “Yo! I make some spicy food! Have some of my spicy food!”
BROOM Right. And at one point she says “Captain Pop and Lock” and I thought “Oh, is dancing his thing? I didn’t pick up on that.” He was definitely doing weird moves, but I didn’t really get what it was supposed to be.
BETH I don’t know why this bothered me, but the idea that they would talk with references that we know now was really bothering me. I just wanted some kind of nod to it being “a long time ago.”
BROOM Yeah, when that Attila the Hun guy said “I can’t wait to see the joytastic sight of my village.” What??
BETH Yeah, I saw you react to that.
BROOM Did they not have any separation between characters, that different people would speak different ways?
ADAM I think Robin Williams’ performance in Aladdin kind of poisoned the well.
BROOM Because it was out of period?
ADAM I don’t really think that, but I remember how exhilarating I found it. Like, “Oh! Can he really do that? Can he really become Arnold Schwarzenegger? Or Arsenio Hall?” But Robin Williams was very funny, so it kind of worked. Whereas… ugh.
BROOM Well, other than “pop and lock,” which, yes, is a specific reference but still sort of general… but what else did they do? Like, they didn’t do Arsenio Hall in this movie, right?
BETH No, but all of the jokes were very “of now,” you know? They didn’t reference TikTok or anything, but it felt like it was made by people who are on TikTok.
BROOM Oh yeah. It was made for TikTok. And I think it’s a corporate calculation that makes it this way. I think they want to be speaking “the language of the kids.” To a fault.
BETH Right. When did that problem become a problem?
BROOM I was thinking: we just shrug at stupid stuff in The Sword in the Stone, because it’s not our childhoods and it’s not our adulthoods to protect. If we’d been born in 1910 and then we saw the stupid Sword in the Stone in middle age, would we have said “what are they doing??”
BETH If we’d been born in 1920, BROOM. Let’s be realistic.
BROOM Okay, if we’re born in 1920 and we’re 40 in 1960…
BETH Sword in the Stone is ’63, right?
BROOM Oh, okay, I’d forgotten what year it was.
BETH So I’m saying, yes, were there jokes that we would have been pissed off at?
BROOM Was The Sword in the Stone as panderingly out of touch with anything more important than just “the times”?
BETH “The kids of today.”
BROOM I want to think that it wasn’t, that it was still in touch with something a little more lasting. But I’m not 100% sure.
BETH No, I do think that comedy changed in the past 20 years. Disney focused more on relating to topicality.
BROOM It’s so formulaic. I have this feeling about that site “TV Tropes”: I remember originally being thrilled that it existed, because I had always had a fantasy in the back of my head — I remember we talked about this stuff in college sometimes, ADAM — like, “if there was a list of every time ever that, say, eyes in a spooky portrait moved, that would be so interesting.” That you could go back and track something like that. And when people on the internet started actually assembling the entire history of eyes in a portrait moving, that seemed exciting to me. But it has come to embody this mindset that the generation now has, which is that everything fundamentally is just an instance of a category, and that’s the best it can aspire to be. That all comedy is… like the old joke about people in the prison yelling “number 7!” “number 12!” because they don’t need to tell the jokes anymore, because they’ve all memorized them. It’s just that! They just say these lines to each other, and I get creeped out thinking “is an 18-year-old laughing when they see this?” It’s just attitudes, attitude 4 and attitude 10, and it’s all prepackaged. It’s depressing.
BETH It’s never an 18-year-old, it’s a 13-year-old.
BROOM Is it?
BETH Yeah, because what 18-year-old is watching Raya?
BROOM All of them!
BETH No! What are you talking about?
BROOM Who’s on TikTok? 13-year-olds?
ADAM 9-year-olds and 42-year-olds.
BROOM What are 18-year-olds doing?
BETH 18-year-olds are on TikTok for sure, but they’re too cool to watch Raya. Come on.
ADAM Yeah.
BROOM What do cool kids watch these days? I thought that culture has become infantilized and commodified to that degree.
BETH Cool kids don’t watch movies, they just watch things that last for 90 seconds.
BROOM All right. Well, it’s bad for 13-year-olds too. It’s bad for 6-year-olds.
BETH It’s bad for everybody. This movie sucks. If I were Roger Ebert I would give it thumbs down.
ADAM I don’t know, man! [aside to MARK] No, we watched it on the TV, and I’m talking to BROOM and BETH on my phone.
BROOM What did you think of it, MARK?
ADAM Yeah, MARK, what did you think?
MARK Um, I thought that the beginning was really special, but then it was just, like, a druggy hysteria.
ADAM No, no, no, you’re stuck in the past.
MARK I’m still scarred by it.
BETH He’s still scarred by Yellow Submarine.
ADAM No, no, it’s not that. I wish it was that!
MARK The Meanies!
ADAM Don’t you remember how exhilarating it was when Tiny Toons debuted? I loved ‘tude when I was like 9.
BETH Right, yes. When we were 12, or whatever, that sort of thing was fun. But this is different! It feels so stale.
ADAM This is just poorly executed and formulaic.
BROOM Yeah, if you go back 30 years to stuff when we were 12, that’s when it was a radical idea, in kid culture, that you could defy your own conventions. Kids learn conventions, and then something breaks them and they think “oh! You can do that? You can make that reference?” Whereas now we’ve come all the way around to where the conventions are that kind of chatter. The defiance now would be representing emotions that kids have never seen represented before. This didn’t once break out of its habits to show a 7-year-old something they haven’t seen. But, okay, I know: everything is someone’s first time seeing it. So maybe that’s it: kid culture doesn’t need to have original thoughts because kids have never seen anything before.
BETH I mean, think about how much Hanna-Barbera you watched that was bullshit.
BROOM But we knew it was bullshit.
BETH Yeah.
ADAM But I watched so much of it. I wonder what Madeline thinks, because she’s exposed to kids’ media all the time.
BETH I’d be interested to hear.
ADAM Madeline, if you’re reading this, let us know what you think in the comments.
BROOM BETH, you don’t happen to know what your niece and nephew thought of this, do you? Do you know if they saw it?
BETH I don’t think they watched it. They’d be too scared. People turn to stone. My nephew is very scared of stuff. He doesn’t like anyone dying in anything.
BROOM Yeah, it was super creepy. That’s the kind of stuff that scared me the most as a kid, thinking about the physical reality of horrific magical things, like those people melting…
BETH Just the dad getting frozen and being frozen indefinitely! That’s enough.
ADAM What about the baby stoically accepting its fate and hugging her leg, and then becoming petrified?
BROOM Yeah, I would have fixated on that as a kid, and thought, “how does it work? and how does it feel? and what is inside those purple blobs that does it?” And why do the purple blobs do it? They aren’t eating the people.
BETH Yeah, it’s very Coronavirus-y.
ADAM It’s made of human discord, BROOM.
BROOM It is!
ADAM That’s what they said.
BROOM Yeah, they said they’re like anti-dragons.
BETH But how are kids supposed to pick up on that? Like… every Disney movie has to have some positive message, right? Do you think they start with it? Do you think they start with “okay, what’s the message this is going to have?”
BROOM I think in this case they did. Well, I think the core elements here were “dragons,” “southeast Asia,” “women,” “Bechdel test.” And then on the other side, “trust: not good-guy vs. bad-guy, but everyone, and their fears of each other, vs. impersonal threat.” They had that, and then they just chewed on it for however many years, to build this non-story out of it. But it was a pretty good video game, as video games go. All the rooms looked cool.
BETH The rooms were very cool.
BROOM When they rolled around on that armadillo pillbug, it looked cool.
BETH Yes, yes. I don’t think they have speaking down very well. I feel like old animation does better with mouths.
ADAM I felt bad for the armadillo pillbug, because it never got to eat or make its own choices, really. It occasionally got to secretly eat but that’s no way to live.
BROOM That’s been a character for a long time in movies, like Herbie the Love Bug: your beloved car, and it sort of smiles. With this one it was weird that at first it seemed like it might be a person, but then it grew up to just be a car.
ADAM Should we read the review?
BROOM Yeah.
[we read the New York Times review]
MARK So wait, it sounds like people didn’t like it? Or they did like it?
ADAM No, we didn’t.
BETH We did not like it.
MARK You were like, “you’re gonna like it.” I was like, “no, I’m not gonna like it.”
BROOM I mean, you might have liked it.
BETH No, you made the right choice.
[we proceed to read about Disney’s Encanto, currently scheduled for release November 24, 2021]
