[content warning: spoilers for Strange World (2022)]

ADAM Guys, we did it! We did it! We finally have a gay principal character in a Disney film, and it is… Ethan… and the epic story of his love with… Diazo? Was that his name?

BROOM That was his name, yeah.

BETH Congratulations!

BROOM How does it feel? Does it feel good? Does it feel like everything you’ve always wanted?

ADAM “I waited twenty-five years to get beyond these mountains, and it’s perfect.” Among the many things that irritated me about this movie was the way they deployed not just his being gay but the fact that they were a multi-racial family, in just the most trivial and pointless way. There was no engagement whatsoever with that, other than as just propagandist “Yeah! People can be different! Like that girl in the wheelchair who picked up the package of Pando! Everybody can like Pando!” The part that most annoyed me was when the super-macho grandfather, who’s been playing out this whole theme of masculine bravado and incomprehension of his kids, is like “You got a special someone?” and Ethan blushes, and the grandfather’s like “I knew it!,” and Ethan’s like, “Uh, his name’s Diazo…” and his grandfather’s like “Well, when you have a special fella, my advice is…” Nope! Nope! No engagement at all with the actual theme of the movie as it might have to do with human difference. It’s just decoration. Ugh.

BETH I saw it as a fantasy of what kids in their teens and twenties want the world to be like. “In our ideal world, grandpa would just accept that I have a crush on a boy!”

ADAM Or it’s just the general Disney thing that “This is gonna be good for you! We’re Disney and we’re putting our imprimatur on this thing, and that’s good for kids!” And I’m sure it is good for kids, but ugh.

BETH It just felt like there was nothing to this movie. It was like a sketch of a movie full of cliches. It didn’t have anything to say.

ADAM Yeah, it was like somebody watched Rick and Morty and was like “You know what people like about Rick and Morty? The bright colors! And the whimsical shapes!”

BROOM I feel like you guys aren’t being fair to it — you realize that ChatGPT wrote this movie, right?

ADAM Sorry, I had to get that off my chest because that was what was bothering me in the most personal way, but there’s a lot here for everyone, so go ahead.

BROOM It pained me. It hurt. I get so sad. I have these horrible anti-woke thoughts, and then I’m like “Ugh, so now I have to climb out of my own hole, that you pushed me into?” The anger is that it doesn’t resemble life in any way. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m among people. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m in the artistic company of people who are able to notice anything about people. So then the fact that it’s packed to the brim with this pre-emptively defensive demographic business… like “I don’t know anything about people, but what I do know is that people can be Asian or black or Indian, and they all have to be in the movie.” It just makes me so cynical that the impulse to be representative — to do their representation duty — is not actually a humanist impulse. It’s not a sincere impulse. And then I just start thinking all this stuff that I’m grossed out at myself for, for being put in this position… because I do want everyone to be represented! And I actually think that the utopian ideal of “yeah grandpa just rolls with it when he finds out that you have a boyfriend” is fine! I think it’s fine to want to depict that, so that the kids who imbibe this before they have any critical thoughts about society get to see it and think “oh, it could be that way,” because now they have this model of it being that way. But it has to be in the context of feeling that you’re among people!

ADAM Yeah, obviously I’m in favor of having gay characters in movies, but everybody was so… flat.

BETH There’s nothing to care about!

ADAM It was just an hour of “We’re climbing up this shape, and now we’re skating down that shape!” “Woo-hoo!” and then “Whoaaaaa!” and then…

BROOM I wish it had been that! I wish they hadn’t said any words! Because I can have a psychedelic experience of them skating up and down shapes. All of the surreality of it, all the very strange stuff — which I totally called in advance would be the inside of some living thing, because it was all designed to look like red blood cells and stuff — I could just watch that and zone into it and have a surrealist experience that would have some meaning to me. But as soon as they opened their mouths, and their stupid Cabbage Patch Kid eyes, and looked at each other with these blank stares and said quips, just bullshit quips out of the bag of quips… that’s why I said ChatGPT wrote it.

BETH It did feel like that.

BROOM In arguments about artificial intelligence recently, I have been defending it as not a threat to the human spirit and human artists, because we need more than just tropes. I’ve been saying maybe the fact that now computers can generate trope-churning stuff will put more of a premium on stuff that’s more than just trope-churning. And watching this made me feel sick to my stomach, to see that Disney Animation Studios, people who’ve been in the business a long time — Don Hall is not fifteen years old! He’s been there a long time. Though of course, this was directed by “Don Hall and Qui Nguyen”; I don’t know who that is, but it might all be his doing — anyway, it’s painful to me. And then when it’s this big allegory about how we’re gonna save the planet — “it’s our addiction to electricity that we need to slough off, and return to an agrarian lifestyle; it might be hard but we all gotta be in this together”… it makes me feel more hopeless about the planet, to see that the plan of working together to save ourselves is in the hands of people who can’t look another human being in the eye, and just repeat things they saw in anime that’s rotted their brains.

ADAM The eco-fatalism/pastoralism thing, which was also the theme of Moana, although that was more…

BROOM Moana was better than this. Raya and the Last Dragon was better than this!

BETH It was.

ADAM That theme… I don’t know, I wonder sometimes. I’m a pretty anxious person about my daily life, but I’m not that anxious about the world in general. Obviously there are problems, but I think that the main thing that is distinctively problematic about life today is that all of the problems live on a rectangle in your pocket and can be accessed at any time for maximum emotional self-flagellation. The Neil Postman stuff. But you watch things like this and you get the sense that other people live with this profound anxiety about the world, which is just not how I feel. Obviously this had a happy ending, but the fact that this has been the animating current of so many of these movies, and the response to it is such a weirdly conservative “the way we’re gonna go back is by unplugging everything”… like you, it makes me feel like there’s something very different in the way I think about the world from the way somebody who wrote this movie thinks about the world.

BETH I know what you mean. I see that with younger people, they talk about the fact that they’re anxious all the time.

ADAM I think it’s as much a dispositional thing as much as an age thing. Most of the people I know don’t… I mean, [somewhat younger person] is the most anxious person I know in this vein.

BROOM Ecologically anxious, you’re saying?

ADAM Ecologically and politically and just sort of fatalistic about progress. Which seems to me to be a form of emotional damage.

BROOM I’m amazed it’s not me! But I can believe there are people who are even worse.

ADAM I actually didn’t think about where they were or what the strange world was. I was just like “okay, here we are.”

BETH I didn’t either.

ADAM I did think “maybe Callisto is gonna be a villain?” And she was for thirty seconds, and then they were like “eh, she’s fine.”

BROOM Was she one of the assistants in the prologue?

ADAM She was, she was the one who was like “actually, he’s got a point!”

BROOM I thought so.

ADAM But then when I realized at the end, like, “oh, it’s gonna be a wan ecological allegory,” that was just like uuuuuuugh. Ugh. I feel like we’ve been talking about the quip problem for a long time, but…

BROOM I know, it’s boring even to complain about it, but I have to. It packs me full of the complaint, and I have to spit some of it out.

ADAM A lot of them have had this problem. Was this actually worse about quips than, like, the second Wreck-It Ralph?

BETH I mean, I barely remember, but… I think the nature of the quips has changed. It’s an interesting way to track linguistic norms over the past twenty years, to see what quips Disney movies are using. I can’t even remember what any of them were.

ADAM They weren’t jokes, exactly. It was just discordantly modern turns of phrase. “You’re being really toxic right now.”

BETH The mom and son having a conversation and the mom is like “you might want to explore that.”

ADAM “Sorry, my dad’s being incredibly dad right now.”

BETH “You’re giving me a ‘Splat’ vibe.”

ADAM Which are not jokes, they’re just anachronisms for the pleasure of it.

BETH It’s “the way they talk now.”

ADAM I was thinking about Lilo and Stitch, and how that’s a movie that’s also representation in a groundbreaking way, and features characters that didn’t look like previous Disney characters, but did it in a warm and specifically-situated way that was actually grounded on the Earth.

BROOM Yes! It was representational of a real place and a real community in which the movie took place. It wasn’t representational in the sense that the bag of tokens was an even fuller bag of tokens.

ADAM I guess when you think about Encanto, which was also situated very lavishly and literally in a specific place… even with the hyper-breathlessness of the way it was like “ooh! we’re in Colombia!”, which was exhausting — it was still clearly better than this. This is like “we’re internet people of 2022 but we live in a kingdom called Avalonia??”

BROOM Which turns out to be a tortoise on an empty planet??

ADAM Yes, it’s turtles all the way down!

BROOM There was just one turtle. It was the only living being on that planet, in an empty universe.

ADAM I found that last image to be really chilling.

BROOM Yeah, frightening.

ADAM What was the short about the volcanoes? Lava Me?

BROOM Yeah, I think it was just called Lava?

ADAM That’s what the end made me think of. And it also made me think of that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon where they’re floating in space and then they zoom out and there’s galaxies and they zoom out and zoom out… and then you realize that you’re in the black perimeter line of a Ziggy cartoon saying “I WUV YOU!” It made me think of that.

[ed.: I cannot find this Calvin & Hobbes strip; please help]

BROOM The thought I kept having was: all this stuff, the trippy psychedelic stuff and the progressive wishlist stuff… it would work if in the foreground was people, having plausible interactions that made you feel normal human things. And then if in the subconscious background was this surreal dreamspace, or, hey, the fact that they’re very diverse, or hey, I guess he’s gay, it hardly even matters because we’re focused on the story… then all that stuff works. The horror is that at the center, in the foreground, is nothing, and all you can see is them worrying about the background. It’s like they have no present thought, they’re just trying to program their own subconscious background material… which is all desperate and stupid! Their best model for how we can save the planet is that they’ve played a lot of Settlers of Catan and “ugh, if only the older generation understood how to play Settlers of Catan, instead of playing some kind of old-school game where you, like, kill things! Why can’t they understand?” It’s so vapid!

ADAM To return to what I said at the beginning, even the background progressivism was itself deeply offensive. The idea of “oh, he’s gay but it hardly even matters” is a thing that only a straight person would write. I mean, maybe these writers are gay, but… to me it’s a deeply non-representative way to represent the thing that they’re representing. It’s so devoid of cultural context or actual meaning or the way actual people relate to each other as to make it just offensively, like I said, decorative.

BROOM I get so upset reading young people today, discoursing on Twitter or wherever, who are so proud to see everything in terms of demographics and are eager to really double down on it, instead of trying to take demographics as this kind of incidental thing that we need to bear societally with as much ease and grace as possible, rather than constantly naming and litigating it. And some of that mindset was in this.

ADAM Yeah, although, I mean… as a person who 95% of my social life is around gay men, I don’t think that demographic stuff is incidental at all. But the way this was rendered was like a chips commercial from the 90s where they have, like, a black friend who’s being used purely to signify “everyone’s a nice person,” and there’s no actual context from the real world. You notice they’ve moved beyond that kind of tokenism in commercials; they don’t do that anymore, the three white guys and a black guy on a couch eating chips. They try to situate commercials now in, like… you’ll see a black family on the couch eating chips. That’s more genuine to the way people group themselves and interact. It’s more authentic and thus feels more sensitive.

BROOM When you said demographics aren’t “incidental,” yes — I didn’t mean incidental to life, I meant, like: in the movie, it says “18 years later” and now here’s grown-up Searcher Clade — because some human sat down and said “I think the names of the people in this movie should be Jaeger Clade and Searcher Clade”…

ADAM …and Meridian Clade… and Ethan.

BROOM So: “Here’s Searcher Clade grown up, and here’s his wife. She’s black.” And I thought “oh, how did he meet her, what’s the community like, what does this mean? Are they saying that he’s become different from his dad? What are they saying? Are they saying anything?” And no, they aren’t saying anything because nothing could be said in this universe, because it doesn’t mean anything about where she’s from or who she is or how she sees the world, that she’s black. It doesn’t mean anything about him that he’s white! There’s no such thing here. And yet: this demographic information that’s been borrowed from our Earth and shoved in there to satisfy the people who might get angry about the movie — “don’t try to make it mean anything in the story, because it couldn’t possibly mean anything, how dare you” — and yet it’s the only thing the movie is doing!

ADAM Yes, now I agree with you. It clearly was very meaningful to them because it was so deliberate, but it was plucked out of all resonant context from Earth.

BROOM Why does anyone care about race other than everything it’s entangled with about what your life is like, about the culture around you? That’s why race is meaningful. If you suck all the meaning out of it but then also make it obviously the only thing you really care about… I’m just saying the healthy way is to tell a real story, and let it be in a context of these things. I shouldn’t have said “incidental,” I should have said “contextual.”

ADAM Nobody’s litigating against anyone here! I think we’re all agreeing.

BROOM BETH I know we always shout you down, and I’m getting myself all worked up. Say stuff about the movie, please.

BETH It just had no original ideas. There were all those Star Wars wipes, and the soundtrack kind of reminded me of Back to the Future. It did feel like ChatGPT! It didn’t feel like it came from a human being. Now I want to know who this guy is. Qui Nguyen, whoever that is, he did everything, right? He co-directed it, he wrote the script…

BROOM I’m gonna look him up.

ADAM I agree, it felt very pastiche-y. The farm scenes felt like the Zootopia farm scenes; as I said, the design of the strange world was sort of Rick and Morty-ish. Yeah, just… nothing.

BROOM “He is best known for his plays She Kills Monsters and Vietgone. He is also known for writing Raya and the Last Dragon and Strange World.”

ADAM There was no Lin-Manuel Miranda in this, was there.

BROOM Interesting what you said about the music. It was weird that this movie about a trippy “strange world” and all of this cool-kid “we see the world in a fresh new way” stuff … that it had a very old-fashioned orchestral score that wanted to sound like it was, yeah, in a Star Wars or Back to the Future tradition. This is a case where I would have been very comfortable with a synthesizer Trent Reznor score! It was part of what felt wrong about the movie, that it was trying so hard to say that all of this business was classic. Because it wasn’t classic! If it had been a little slicker in the musical presentation, maybe I would have felt like “yeah we’ve all gone down this video-game tube, and yup, here’s some video-game stuff.” But it was really fighting hard to say no, that it was big and full of heart. And that just didn’t feel true.

ADAM I did like that I thought for the first two-thirds of the movie that the mom was dead, but actually she’s not dead, she’s just married to Sheldon.

BROOM And it was supposed to be that he was astounded that Sheldon was a big guy? Or that Sheldon had gotten big? Or he was just standing in for our surprise that Sheldon was a big guy?

ADAM I think the joke is that the name “Sheldon” is nerdy but Sheldon himself is large. That was the whole joke.

BROOM But it was implied that Jaeger knew Sheldon, so why was he astounded by that?

ADAM No, remember, he was like, “You’ve never even met Sheldon!”

BROOM Oh! I forgot that he said that.

ADAM I thought the mom looked weirdly like Sarah Jessica Parker.

BETH She did!

BROOM She was played by Sarah Jessica Parker. [n.b. the character appears for only a second and does not speak]

ADAM The voice-acting did not lean into the strengths of those actors at all. It was weirdly archetypal.

BETH The script is to blame for most of everything. But yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal sounded really nerdy.

BROOM After you told me it was Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid, I actually started feeling embarrassed. Because they’re, like, famous. And in the parts when they had been compelled by Qui Nguyen to say, “I’m sorry I made you feel bad that you weren’t a farmer,” or whatever, I started to feel a little bit of, yeah, embarrassment, that they had put these lines in front of Jake Gyllenhaal. I’d be embarrassed to put that in front of Jake Gyllenhaal. They said “farmer” so many times in this movie! I think it’s also worth mentioning something I’m seeing on Wikipedia: Qui Nguyen is forty-seven years old. He is older than we.

BETH Well, maybe he’s just trying to… get with the kids.

ADAM I’m picturing a gay theater nerd. Do we think that’s right?

BROOM There’s pictures of him, and he looks more nerdy than theater. He just looks like a dorky guy.

BETH My theory, once we started talking about this more, is that he’s neurodivergent in some way.

BROOM I did think the word “Asperger’s” a couple times during the movie.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM But I also thought — and this is horrible so I may not put this in the transcript that only my mother reads so who even cares, and yet… — I thought: I have felt this about anime since I was a kid and first encountered it, that I can’t get into it because it doesn’t really have real people in it. Like, they have giant eyes but they don’t have souls, so why would you watch that? And people who are really into anime, it always feels a little weird to me. And I did have thoughts during this, and during Raya and the Last Dragon, like, “oh, American animation has gotten this Asian influx, where now they care more about certain kinds of schematic relationships than about a real human presence.” It feels like it maybe comes from Asian movie culture. I don’t know if I’m allowed to think that, but it’s an impression I have.

ADAM I have not watched, but I read a review and a plot summary of the most recent episode of The Last Of Us, are you familiar with that?

BETH Yeah —

BROOM I know what it is, and I’ve seen a lot of praise, but I haven’t been watching it.

ADAM I won’t give anything away. So it’s an adaptation of a video game, but in this episode, it follows one of the characters, who turns out to be gay, and it was described by someone I know on social media as being like “a mix of Brokeback Mountain and Up,” and I can see why they think that. It makes me think of this because — again, I didn’t watch it, I just read the plot summary, but from what I gleaned from that — it’s taking a character who wasn’t gay in the original source material, but making them gay in a way that is profoundly connected to the theme of the story, and deeply moving, and specifically situated. Like, it can be done. I think maybe the problem is just Disney. Disney is just, like, a dirigible that’s floating out into space and can’t be saved.

BROOM That may be right. It has to do with the management. The last few of these, we’ve found ourselves asking, “so wait, who is Jennifer Lee? Who are these people?” I really don’t want to have to think about the individuals and their personalities, but you’re right, there’s a sense that they’ve drifted into this weird cul-de-sac, or yeah, out into space, and I don’t know if they can be reached anymore. But yes, of course it can be done! If the creative team behind Lilo and Stitch had decided that the older sister, instead of having that surfer boyfriend, had a surfer girlfriend, I would have believed it, because I believed in everyone in that movie. I believed in their world, and you can do any kind of representation you want once you believe in it.

ADAM As an aside — imagine you were writing a story about George Santos, and you were like, “all right, we’re gonna make this guy Brazilian and gay.” I’ve been thinking about George Santos as a character in a ridiculous political fiction, and it’s almost too much. It’s not believable as a character! This isn’t necessarily connected to what we’re talking about.

BROOM Well, that would be the opposite problem. If there was a character with just too many quirks and too many character traits. These characters had no real traits!

BETH I hated the dance sequence in the kitchen, between the parents. That felt…

BROOM Asperger’s.

BETH Yeah! Like someone’s observing: “oh, people do this when they like each other. They dance, and hit their butts together.”

BROOM “And there’s dance music. And they’re making food food food. And there’s a dog, and it’s cute. And the dog has three legs: representation!” I mean, there’s countless kids online writing that kind of crap. And sure, I can get annoyed about how online is a wasteland of weird nerds, but it’s still just online. Whereas Disney actually hired this guy and supported it. A couple times during the movie I had this thought: what happened to the Sam Goldwyns of this business, who would sit behind a big desk and shout, like, “the people don’t wanna see that stuff! You gotta make ’em cry! You gotta make ’em cheer!” Where was Louis B. Mayer? Why wasn’t there anyone at the company saying “What people need is someone they can love, someone they can worry about!” What happened to that? That used to be the movie business! You can scoff at it but it’s part of what made the movies work. This movie is the biggest Disney flop in years. It’s losing money; it didn’t work. So we don’t have to worry that we’re old and out of touch to be saying “this isn’t how you do things,” because in fact this is not how you do things, because it doesn’t work. Why was there no-one there to step up and say so?

ADAM Right, anyone who knew anything about movies or why people watch movies. It’s not even explicable as a pander to international audiences; this wouldn’t be attractive anywhere in the world.

BETH I don’t think the studios are run by moguls with visions anymore.

ADAM I think Pixar was.

BETH Pixar was, but is it still?

ADAM I don’t know. It’s interesting, right? because — I didn’t see a lot of movies this year, but I read a lot of articles about movies, as is my wont — a great many movies released this year that were either self-serious about the movie business or, you know, “brave,” and then flopped, for reasons that studios seemed totally surprised by. Because they seemed completely disconnected from what a person would actually want to do with their entertainment budget. Like can you imagine voluntarily going to see Empire of Light? When we were in LA, it was the two weeks when every billboard was a “For Your Consideration” billboard, so I spent a lot of time thinking about all these movies.

[conversation digresses, by way of passing mentions of Tár, Avatar: The Way of Water, Top Gun: Maverick, and Knock at the Cabin, much further afield to “so what have you been reading lately” and beyond. Finally the question of reading a review is brought up:]

BROOM We can read the New York Times review, but as far as things that are drifting off into space, I think the New York Times also counts as an institution that has become unmoored from the authority that it once had. Who knows or cares what the New York Times thinks? But there’s no other “paper of record” so that’s the one we’ll read.

ADAM Wesley Morris I think is as good as anybody who writes anything. And A.O. Scott I still think is really great.

BETH I also trust A.O. Scott. Manohla Dargis a little less.

ADAM But they get weird third-stringers to review the Disney movies.

BROOM Yeah, I doubt it’ll be A.O. Scott. But we’ll see.

[the New York Times review by Beatrice Loayza is read, which summarizes the movie but expresses essentially no opinions about it]

BROOM Review TK! That’s it! There’s no review.

ADAM I don’t think that’s the New York Times’s fault necessarily. That’s just because they didn’t spend a lot of money on that review.

BROOM There’s money, and then there’s “what’s even in it for us if we engage with the question of whether this movie is any good? There’s no point in saying that it’s bad.” Everyone’s trying to save the movie business.

BETH I don’t know about that. I think they just don’t really care.

[Rotten Tomatoes is checked (Critics 72%, Audience 66%) and then the New York Magazine / Vulture review is read]

BROOM Okay, that wasn’t bad. Who was the writer there?

ADAM Allison Willmore.

BROOM I give credit to her. That was well put together.

[finally, as is customary, the List of Walt Disney Animation Studios films is consulted: Wish is scheduled for release on November 22, 2023.]

ADAM I would like to start by talking about the very complicated puzzle metaphysics of this. It really dumped it all in your lap at the beginning. And it was engrossing trying to figure it out but… I’m not sure that I have it totally figured out.

BROOM I had the same thought. Their new style is these elaborate metaphor-magic layered puzzles. This one made more sense to me than Frozen 2. I got closer to solving it.

ADAM What was the last one? It had, like, the five islands she had to sail to?

BROOM Raya and the Last Dragon.

ADAM That was what it was about, right?

BROOM There were five sectors of the land that distrusted each other.

ADAM Right.

BROOM My thought was: I’m doing all this adult work to try to figure out what’s a metaphor for what, and a kid doesn’t watch it that way. So I kept telling myself, “just sit back and take it in; watch the images; just let it sink in,” and then I’d think, “well, I’d just be totally confused, or I’d be making no sense of this…”

BETH But that’s not true!

BROOM …but I think that’s not true, yeah.

BETH Adults did make this, so some people do understand it…

BROOM Is it for kids?

BETH Yes, it is for kids, absolutely.

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM And it’s okay to imply that the grandfather was killed with a machete?

BETH The kids aren’t supposed to know how he was killed.

BROOM You see the guy on the horseback wield a big blade.

ADAM Was the grandfather killed? In a flashback, she destroyed all the horsemen with the candle. Was that after he was killed? That was her rage?

BROOM I wasn’t clear on whether that was really happening or metaphorical.

ADAM Was that a reference to some period in Colombian history?

BROOM I don’t know!

ADAM Probably yes, because everything was meticulously representative.

BROOM It was so vague that it seemed like it must be an underplayed allusion to some real atrocity. Rather than just “eh, some generic bad guys came.”

ADAM Right. Well, I spent the first twenty-five minutes like “okay, wait, how are they all related? and what are their powers?” I couldn’t tell if it was because the sound on my phone was so tinny that I couldn’t make out all the lyrics to her explanatory song. But it went by so fast, and I was like [scream of being overwhelmed].

BROOM That’s how I felt at the beginning too, totally overloaded.

BETH Isn’t there a joke about that in the song?

ADAM Yeah, they’re like “there are so many cousins, how do you keep them straight?” and then she’s like “you guys:” and then sings a really fast song about all of them. I mean, I think I got it now.

BROOM I got it by the end. There are three in the second generation, and I know who all their kids were.

ADAM Who was the third one? Besides the mother who has the healing powers with her arepas…

BROOM Right, that’s Mirabel’s mother.

ADAM … and Bruno…

BROOM And Bruno is her brother.

ADAM Oh, and the weather lady.

BROOM Right, Tía whatever, she’s the third sibling.

ADAM I thought Dolores who could hear really well was also a Tía, but she’s not, she’s a cousin.

BROOM She was the daughter of… that woman.

BETH Of the weather lady.

BROOM Yeah.

BETH Okay, I believe you.

BROOM As was the little boy.

ADAM For a while I thought that the hot guy was a cousin, but he’s just a dope.

BROOM On the telenovela, there was an incestuous relationship with an aunt, so.

BETH Right. That was interesting.

BROOM An interesting thing to throw in as an aside.

ADAM So I spent the first third of it like that, and then I spent a long time being like “ugh, her family’s awful.” Just feeling really bad. They really piled that on. Then it was like “oh, her super-power is listening.” That was a little deflating, when I realized that was where they were going with it.

BROOM Clearly that’s supposed to be Discussion Group Question Number One: What was Mirabel’s power?

BETH Is it empathy?

ADAM Yeah, basically. She was like the family therapist.

BROOM I thought the key line was when the kids say “maybe your power is being in denial,” and you think it’s a joke, and then actually her power is not being in denial. Because everyone else in the family is in denial. And the grandmother’s denial is what breaks the house. Or, but — what exactly is causing the cracks?

BETH I don’t know!

BROOM In the metaphor, the grandmother’s insistence that everything is perfect and magical is her way of coping with the trauma, and she imposes this on everyone. But if that’s the metaphor, it means that none of the magic ever really existed; it was all actually part of this coping delusion. Except the magic is real in this movie! The magic is a good thing about the family too.

ADAM Right, but… the grandmother’s rigid perfectionism was the real villain. I kind of miss villains. It would be refreshing to have a Disney movie again where the villain was, like, a bad person. As opposed to, like…

BETH A concept.

ADAM Yeah, climate change, or failure to understand…

BETH But don’t you think the animators have taken it upon themselves to fix the world with cartoons? It just seems like what they’re trying to do now.

ADAM I agree. It just would be refreshing from a narrative perspective to not do that.

BROOM But that’s a serious question: have we outgrown villains? Is there a correct way to do villains? They can’t do Ursula anymore because it villainizes… whatever. Divine.

BETH Fat people.

BROOM Homosexuals, right? It villainizes drag queens.

ADAM Yeah, Ursula and Scar back to back were kind of, you know…

BROOM And you’re sympathetic to that critique, right?

ADAM Yeah, although… they’re also charismatic and fun.

BROOM Right. Even though they’re the villain, you still get to enjoy what they are.

ADAM There’s got to be a way to have a villainous person who’s not a slander on a minority group. There’s got to be some happy medium here. This also continued the recent Disney tradition of being extremely meticulous in their cultural depiction of a country. Which was good, I found it satisfying. My Colombian friend at a party was like “they depicted our food!” He literally said that. He was very tickled by it. He was like “that’s what we eat!”

BROOM I was thinking: would I feel condescended to if I were the target culture? Luckily, I don’t think they’ll ever feel it’s appropriate to make a Jewish-colored movie, so I won’t have to.

ADAM You mean because An American Tail already took that?

BROOM I just meant because it’s too touchy. But you’re right, An American Tail absolutely did it. And, yeah, I felt mildly condescended to by that. I was imagining that if I were Colombian and I saw this movie saying [as though singing:] “Colombia is a theme park / it’s so perfect / it’s so wonderful” I might be like [wince and shrug].

BETH I don’t know; they make it so beautiful and colorful.

BROOM They sure do.

BETH I can see going both ways on that.

ADAM It mostly felt harmless. It’s just kind of a funny tic that they have, but it didn’t bother me. I liked the capybara in the vision scene. I liked the Spanish-language music. A lot of the local color was fun. It’s just eccentric.

BROOM “Tic” is right. It’s like they can’t stop themselves from doing this.

BETH It seems like they have a checklist of “what cultures do we need to represent because they’re under-represented?” There’s some kind of drive to show people the world. It’s a Disney thing. “It’s a Small World After All! Let’s really make it a whole world!”

ADAM I agree. The drive to be extremely authentic, and the drive to be world-healing, unifying, problem-solving… are related. It would be hard for Disney in the current day to make Ratatouille, which is just silly but fun.

BROOM Wasn’t Ratatouille actually on a very similar theme? Your family doesn’t think you make any sense, and you have to find the place where your talents come to light?

ADAM Yes, but it was a lot less… official, let’s say. It felt like a lighter touch. Or the original Toy Story or whatever.

BROOM Well this definitely did not have a light touch. It was nouveau Broadway to the max.

ADAM Just to be clear, I did enjoy this. I really liked the music; I liked the mix of big Broadway-ness with pop and Latin music touches. I liked the song about feeling pressure.

BETH I thought that was the best song.

ADAM I liked the “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” song.

BETH But I thought some of the songs were really lackluster and trying too hard.

ADAM Maybe I already forgot about those. Which ones?

BETH There’s one early on where she’s like “I feel lost…”

BROOM When she’s not in the family photo and she starts singing a self-pity song.

ADAM Oh yeah.

BETH Yeah, not a good song.

ADAM I thought “oh, her power is pausing time!” But it wasn’t.

BROOM Halfway through I thought “oh, her power is giving people the cue lines for their songs.” I almost thought that was literally going to be her power. Like “we sing when you’re around,” or something. But no, luckily it wasn’t that.

ADAM I liked it when Luisa was like “oh, I try so hard.” But when Isabela did the exact same thing, it was like “uh, guys, try a little harder than this.”

BROOM Isabela’s song was so much “Let It Go.” It had exactly the same content. But it wasn’t as catchy.

ADAM It was totally unearned, too. Why didn’t the shapeshifting guy get a song about how he can never just be himself?

BETH Because this was all about women. They really didn’t want to focus on men at all, I feel like. Yeah, Bruno’s in it, but… it was for girls. During that song with Isabela, I thought “boys are not going to care about this.”

BROOM As a boy, I’ll say: it didn’t even occur to me until now.

BETH I’m not saying men, I’m saying little boys. I mean, they probably will and I’m probably wrong.

ADAM But it is true that it was very much about foregrounding female relationships. Which again is a recent Disney theme. Like remember in the last one, everyone was a lesbian. And Frozen was clearly about that. And that also feels like a Disney over-correction to the princess narrative.

BETH Totally.

ADAM “We, Disney, are trying harder.” I didn’t mind it, but again, it just feels like part of the official seriousness of this mode.

BROOM Yeah, it’s excessively calculated and conscious, and everything is bright foreground. And there’s a zillion cuts; the camera is constantly like “this shot is about this BUT THIS SHOT IS ABOUT THIS but this shot is about this” and the songs telegraph everything. It’s continuously brightly lit, just ideas and beats. And we’ve been complaining about that for 20 years of these movies, that they’re heading in this direction. I thought that, within this style, this one is a more or less coherent offering that would probably be entertaining to a kid. And seemed to have a good message about families.

ADAM One of the songs is a hit, right? Which one?

BROOM The only one I’ve heard people talking about is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” For some reason.

BETH I really don’t know. But my phone was identifying all of them.

BROOM You couldn’t stop it from telling you what they were?

BETH It just does that. So it was like, “oh, my phone knows about this song.”

ADAM “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” reached number four on the Billboard chart?

BROOM That’s crazy.

BETH That’s so weird.

ADAM Super weird. And then “Surface Pressure” also broke into the top ten on the Billboard.

BETH That was a better song.

BROOM That was the song during which I thought “I’m trying so hard to understand what this all means; why don’t I just watch it like a kid.” But then if I were a kid, it’s all surreal scariness. It’s like Pink Elephants madness. Would I even understand why I was seeing any of these things? It’s explicitly metaphors! There are rocks falling on her back and the house is turning upside down. If I’m not trying to interpret the metaphor, I’m just watching insanity.

BETH Yeah but I do think kids can take stuff like that in. They’re subconsciously aware of the metaphor.

BROOM That’s what I was asking myself, do these images work on that level. And you think if I were six years old I’d just sort of get what everything was in this movie?

BETH Yeah, I do.

ADAM The idea of being too hard on yourself… her problem seemed more grown-up than Isabela’s problem of, like, “I don’t want to do flowers, I want to do cactuses!”

BETH Well, I think the problem of feeling like you’re not as special as everyone around you can set in at a young age.

ADAM Oh, I agree about Mirabel’s problem. I meant Luisa’s problem of “I’m such a pleaser. I’m strong but I’m really a doormat.”

BROOM Did she mention Abuela whatever-her-name-was in that song?

ADAM She didn’t have to.

BROOM Because it seemed like that mostly came out of nowhere. Did we ever witness the grandmother being the driving force of everyone’s neuroses? Not really.

BETH No, and I don’t think that comes through to kids. It didn’t even really come through to me. It took me until the end of the movie to get to it.

BROOM So when a kid sees Mirabel say “the house is cracking because of you!” and then everything collapses… would they be like, “no it isn’t!”?

BETH They would just be like “oh, okay, I guess she doesn’t like the house.” I don’t think kids will get that part. But I don’t know.

ADAM Who had the dumbest power? Probably the flower girl. But it wasn’t really a power, it was just a manifestation of her nature. Probably the listening power is the worst.

BROOM But that at least had superhero uses. The weather power was just kind of a sight gag.

ADAM Yeah, she didn’t use it to do anything. And the mother: her arepas just heal physical injury? Or they make you feel better? I wasn’t clear.

BETH Well, physical for sure.

ADAM Right, because she can heal bee-stings and cuts.

BETH And broken arms.

ADAM Yeah, I was surprised she didn’t get to do more with that. Like a tiger mauling. The little boy’s power was clearly the best.

BETH Obviously.

BROOM The basic metaphor here, that you have these magical powers but they’re sort of burdensome because they get in between you and your true self, that’s the premise of Frozen. They were just doing it again. [ed.: in Frozen the magic powers were the true self and trying to keep them in check was the burden]. This felt like sort of a sequel to Frozen in a way that Frozen 2 didn’t successfully.

ADAM Yeah, I still don’t totally remember what Frozen 2 was about.

BROOM No one knows! No one knows what Frozen 2 is about.

ADAM So in Googling this just now, it referred to this as “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit score,” and obviously it sounded exactly like Lin-Manuel Miranda, but…

BETH He wrote the songs.

ADAM I thought it said in the credits that someone else was the composer of the score.

BROOM The score is by someone else, and I am now obligated to record a dorky podcast where we talk about the Oscar nominees for best score, so we will talk about that. I already forget the person’s name. Gabriela something. I don’t know. But the songs are by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

ADAM That makes sense. They sound just like him.

BROOM I think the songs were my least favorite thing in the movie. The beauty of this place, and the joyous family feeling, were really good and had their own identity, but then the songs would kick in and I’d feel like “here comes some standard Broadway patterns.” Like, [high-energy Broadway song delivery:] “I just wish that I could get outta here!” It doesn’t sound like the actual feeling of someone wishing they could get out of here, it’s just repeating a trope. And I was a little disappointed that Lin-Manuel didn’t try to invent something. It just seemed like meeting a bunch of assignments.

ADAM Oh I don’t know. The two songs that we talked about were good. And I thought that the Spanish love song about the Abuela and Abuelo…

BETH Yeah, I thought that was good.

BROOM Yeah, that was the best song. It was touching.

ADAM It was almost slow enough for me to follow the words, but not quite.

BROOM I can only understand like three words of Spanish.

BETH I had subtitles on and it was translating it for me, so I know what the whole thing was about.

ADAM It was about them being in love. And butterflies.

BROOM So the relationship of this family to, like, the peasantry… what was with the town and then the family? Were they aristocrats? Was that like the manor house and the townspeople all lived on their land? How did that work?

ADAM Yeah, I was creeped out by that. I thought they were, like, magic aristocrats, but then they have to suck up to the Guzmáns for Mariano’s hand?

BETH That didn’t make sense. I think they were ostracized in some way. People feared them because they had magic power, maybe?

ADAM But then everyone was like, “actually we’ll help you rebuild your house.”

BETH “Oh, we love you!”

BROOM Yeah, they served an important role at the end, to rebuild the house without magic so that the house could become magic again. It was another one of these riddles, of “what does this magic mean, what does it correspond to in the real world?” Maybe nothing.

ADAM What happens at the end with the doorknob? Does that just mean that she still doesn’t have any magic powers, but it’s okay, the house is cool with her now? And why did her door get covered in sand at her ceremony?

BROOM My theory is: she couldn’t open the door in the house, because her gift was emotional honesty, being real. And there was denial in the house, so she was on the outside of this house of trying-too-hard. And then when the house is real at the end, it’s all her house because that’s her realm.

BETH Yeah, you’re totally right, and I did not put that together. That’s correct.

BROOM Is it? It’s just a stretch to try to make sense of it.

BETH I think it is. And that’s why it was so upsetting for her grandmother.

ADAM It feels a little jury-rigged.

BETH I mean, yeah.

ADAM I did like the magic Winchester-Mystery-House quality of the house. That was cool.

BETH You can talk to the house and ask it to present stairs to you, and it will.

ADAM And that it talked with its floorboards…

BETH Yeah, it shrugged.

ADAM I liked how cute the animals were. The rats were actually pretty sleek-looking and cute. They had those big cute eyes. They didn’t look like cartoon rats, they looked like CGI rats. But cute.

BROOM I thought all the tactile elements were really good, and that’s a big part of what they’re selling, and I’m happy for it. Their flesh tones were maybe a little more doll-like than they had to be, but I got used to it.

ADAM Oh, I liked Mirabel’s face. I liked that she didn’t have giant eyes, like an Elsa.

BROOM I liked how she looked a lot. I enjoyed her being the center of the movie. But this thing about beginnings: all Disney movies now start with a myth about the past, told vaguely, that you will have to re-understand much later, and until then you’re kind of waiting in confusion. And then an enormous overload of sights and sounds and explanation, for ten minutes, where you don’t understand what’s going on. They consistently do this. They must think it’s the right thing to do. But it really feels like for the last six of these of these movies, I start out feeling like [clutching head and concentrating:] “what? what? what?”

ADAM And does it make you want to rewatch the movie because now that you know, you’ll get all the easter eggs?

BETH Yes! Because these kids watch Frozen 200 times. I think that is deliberate.

BROOM It’s overloaded for the DVD/Netflix generation. DVD, what am I saying. Blu-ray…

BETH No! For the kids who are streaming this.

ADAM I just watched it on my phone!

BETH The kids who watch it every day after school.

BROOM So there’s no reason to make a movie that makes sense the first time, anymore. They just need to make a movie that makes people intrigued enough to watch it again.

BETH Yeah. I guess if they overload it, it’s more rewarding once you know what all those things are. Some pleasure center is getting pushed, on repeat viewings.

BROOM Videogame aesthetics are so basic to this stuff now.

BETH Oh my god, it’s so videogamey. I thought that too.

BROOM And that’s part of videogames: “we’re not here to necessarily tell you a story. We’re doing something with the shape of a story, but what it’s really about is DING DING DING DING DING!” Collecting the little goodies. But, you know, Raya we complained was just a stupid videogame; the videogame stuff in this was actually all nice, and well-paced. When she had a pointless Indiana Jones adventure, it all looked fun, it went at the right speed. I didn’t really object.

ADAM Yeah, I thought this was much better than Raya, and it was much better than Frozen 2, and it was much better than Ralph Breaks the Internet.

BROOM Or the other Ralph. This is probably my favorite since Frozen. Moana is the other one that’s in contention, I guess.

BETH I liked Moana. Actually I would put Moana above this.

BROOM Yeah, Moana might be a little calmer. I did kind of want this to calm down. It did seem a little ironic that a movie about people who are more neurotic than they thought was edited so spastically.

ADAM Moana has only two characters, really, so you have time to get to know them. I mean, we got to know Mirabel, but then Luisa had one song, and Isabela had one song, and the Abuela had one song…

BROOM And Bruno had his scene…

ADAM Yeah, it was too many people to really settle into. Although I appreciate that it was in service of her gift of healing everyone.

BROOM I don’t even mean the number of scenes, just the directorial style. It’s so fast. I felt like they could just do a master shot and let a scene play out. Everything looks so beautiful, I’d be happy to look at it. It doesn’t have to be constantly cutting to a close-up and then cutting to the reverse angle and then cutting to a jokey reframing… I don’t know.

BETH You sound like an old man.

BROOM I do, but then I think, well…

ADAM We are!

BROOM … movies weren’t like this! For a long time!

ADAM I’ve probably said this before, but MARK finds it very hard to watch any movie from before the year 2000 with me, because…

BROOM Too boring?

ADAM Well, too much setup. And it is true. Like, I sat down to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with him at one point, and there’s no Toontown craziness until an hour in. There’s the private eye stuff, and then Jessica Rabbit comes into his office, and… it’s drawn out. And then finally when he goes to Toontown, it’s overwhelming. But today the movie would start in Toontown.

BROOM Which I think is a mistake! Not as an old man, just as a person who thinks about how movies should be. It’s cool that they save Toontown for halfway through the movie! There’s still things that can surprise you halfway through the movie! Now Disney movies are like the trailer for themselves, at the beginning. They want to show you all the stuff. And maybe that has to do with streaming; maybe it has to do with the fact that they know someone might turn it off in the first five minutes if they’re not hooked. But you never get to have the sense of surprise later. The pacing is immediately BLAAAAM in your face, and then once you get to halfway, they slow down and go, like, “okay okay, so, we have to tell you a story now, and in this story I guess people say things to each other…” And that’s just a weird pacing. I always like the second halves better than the first halves.

ADAM [to MARK] You want to make a cameo appearance? We were just talking about you.

BROOM We were talking about the youth.

ADAM I was just observing that you find it difficult to watch pre-2000 movies because they—… He closed the door on me.

BROOM Rude!

ADAM He’s in his work clothes, he wants to change.

BROOM He could have said something.

ADAM I did think Mariano was really hot. It’s nice that he gets two seconds to fall in love with Dolores.

BROOM Because as soon as they say it, the audience goes “all right, fine, I guess he’s gonna be with her.” And then the movie takes care of it exactly that fast. That’s how these movies are. They don’t want to show you what it’s like when something happens. They just want to show you: “and then it happens, okay, it happened.”

ADAM I liked that Luisa was obviously a lesbian, but I wish she had gotten to…

BETH Be a lesbian.

BROOM Maybe if you watch it seven times, you’d notice the one scene where in the background on the left she’s making eyes at the woman from the village.

ADAM That might be why she feels stressed out all the time, because of the expectations of her family. Who was that actress?

BROOM Who were any of the actors? I have no idea who was in this movie.

ADAM I assume they were all Latino, but were they all Colombian? Let’s see. [he looks it up:] I don’t know a lot of these people. Although Maluma was Mariano, that’s funny.

BETH I don’t know who that is.

ADAM He’s a hot pop star. He stars in Marry Me with Jennifer Lopez. He’s a megastar from Colombia, I think. John Leguizamo was Bruno.

BROOM When he started talking I finally thought it might be an actor I know, but I couldn’t place it. Now I see.

ADAM Wilmer Valderrama was Agustín. Who’s Agustín?

BETH The dad.

ADAM I don’t know a lot of these people. Stephanie Beatriz was Mirabel?

BROOM I’ve never heard of her. [reading Wikipedia:] From Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the movie of In the Heights.

ADAM We started to watch In the Heights but MARK was so embarrassed by its overwhelming Broadwayness that he made me stop.

BROOM Even his youth is not enough to compensate for how Broadway has gotten. I mean, BETH, what did you think of this movie? Did you think it was annoying? You haven’t said.

BETH I thought it was very lush and pretty to look at, and I wanted to be inside it. I wanted to be in that house. And I found the story to be… a little bit annoying, yeah. I was a little annoyed by it, all in all. Mainly because it’s so clear to me that Disney is trying so hard to make up for what I think it perceives as a lack in socialization of children. So I feel like, “okay, it’s great that you’re doing this…” And probably it is necessary. There’s no Mr. Rogers anymore, so Disney is trying to be Mr. Rogers. And it’s doing it in a really bombastic way that I don’t think is actually useful. Well, let me take that back a little bit: I do think it’s useful… but not in the way that someone like Mr. Rogers was useful. So I’m not sure, ultimately, what I think about it. I think it’s great that they’d doing that public service, but they should have more fun and try a little bit less hard.

ADAM I second that.

BROOM I think it’s a thing I’ve been saying for a long time, since the movies from 2000 or something, whenever it felt like the Little Mermaid era had given way to the next thing. At some point they realized that if they make a movie, it’s going to end up having that kind of a role in kids’ lives, and that brings a kind of responsibility with it. They’d always had that responsibility, but they suddenly became self-conscious about it and started trying to meet it in a calculated way, which is different from doing it instinctively like every storyteller does. So it’s this kind of “public service announcement” dynamic that colors everything.

BETH And I think they’re trying to cover for that by making it so quick-cut and colorful and stuffed full of candy.

BROOM The writing in this was definitely more thoughtful and more affecting, but it still had these little moments. When she said “you’ve never even had a bad hair day,” I was like, “you should never say ‘bad hair day’ in a movie again! That’s forty years old at this point, that’s so lame. Don’t say ‘bad hair day.'”

ADAM Do you read the Rex Parker crossword puzzle blog every day?

BROOM I rarely read it because it’s so cranky.

ADAM It’s so dyspeptic, yeah.

BROOM I enjoy the crossword pretty much no matter what, so then to read someone saying that actually it’s terrible because of something that made no difference to me… it puts me off. Do you read it regularly?

ADAM I’ve stopped because it’s such a downer. But one of the things that he complains about that I do think is funny is when they use slang that’s twenty years old. Or even ten years old.

BROOM But that’s had a counterproductive effect on the New York Times crossword, just like I’m saying about the Disney movies, because they have heard him, there’s no question, and now the New York Times crossword puzzle is full of “ooh I’m the first person to get BAE in, woo-hoo for me.”

ADAM BAE is in like once a week.

BROOM Yeah. FOMO. Whatever. People think they’re so cool because they get things off Twitter.

ADAM [to MARK:] Do you have any thoughts about the pacing of movies today as opposed to twenty years ago?

MARK Well, I feel like there’s some pushback in longer movies recently. I don’t know if it’s working.

BROOM MARK, as someone who dislikes when older movies waste time setting things up: do you feel like that’s just an objective problem with movies that was eventually fixed — they didn’t know how to tell stories the right way, and now they do — or do you feel like it’s just your personal taste?

ADAM (It’s a trap.)

BROOM No, it’s not! It’s a completely honest question, either answer is fine.

MARK I think it’s fifty-fifty. I’m gonna push back on “my taste,” and speak more for people consuming faster-paced media generally. For example, TikTok. You know, if it’s gonna take you fifteen minutes to get that serotonin hit, you might do something else. But I do feel like a lot of the setup in old movies was just bad. It could be done better. There’s a lot of time wasted on setup in bad older romcoms.

ADAM We do watch a lot of TikTok, and it does change you, I have to say.

MARK We’re trying to quit.

BROOM Oh yeah, YouTube and Instagram have messed with me. I don’t have TikTok but I get how it is. But it’s part of the TikTok culture to shruggingly say “this is killing our attention spans, ha ha,” and to talk openly about serotonin and recognize that it’s having this druglike effect. Which suggests to me that the people who are into it are still holding on to some sense that this isn’t how things should be, that we’re just kind of caught in the loop of it. So that’s what I was asking about movies.

ADAM Well, we are adults, so.

MARK But there’s something different about it. Like “oh, I’ve been watching too much TikTok; watching a movie sounds like a nice change of pace.”

BROOM So if a movie seems too slow… do we aspire to be able to stick with it? I guess there’s no one answer. It changes day to day even for me.

MARK Some people like to feel like they put work in. They’re proud that they put the work in and were able to muster some joy out of something that was critically acclaimed. Some people like the punishment.

ADAM This is “conservatives love speedboats, liberals love kayaks.”

BROOM Have you ever watched something and felt like “this is overloading me, this is too much, this is spastic, cool it”?

ADAM Wait an hour, until after our TikTok binge.

MARK I don’t know. Something that was just too plotty?

ADAM Too much intercutting, too much story information piled on too quickly…

BROOM If they introduce ten characters in five seconds. Which happens in these Disney movies! [as though singing:] “here’s this person and here’s this person and here’s this person and here’s this person!” Have you ever watched something and thought “what? shut up, I’m not following this, you should have said fewer things.”

MARK I guess that does exist. I don’t think it’s too common, but the impression you just did, that sounds like a lot. Yeah, you can stall out. It comes to the same conclusion as too long of a setup: you lose interest because it’s too much. But I guess I’d have to see.

[we read the New York Times review, heckle it a bit, and then things devolve as we read about… Strange World, scheduled for release on November 23, 2022!]

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]

BETH And now we’re going to read the review.

BROOM Eventually. But we do that at the end, if you remember how this works.

BETH I thought it we did it first.

BROOM No, we talk about our thoughts first.

BETH Sorry, man, I forget the protocol!

ADAM It’s been a long time.

BROOM Three years!

BETH No, wait. Two.

ADAM It’s been… two years.

BROOM Oh yeah. Well, more than two years. Two and a few.

ADAM Well. That felt like turning out the lights on Disney Studios. It was not as bad as Chicken Little…

BETH Oh, not at all!

ADAM … but it might have been the second worst.

BETH Maybe the most depressing.

ADAM It might have been the most offensive, other than Chicken Little which was hateful.

BROOM Oh, I’m not coming away with that feeling. I mean it’s not my favorite, but that’s not how I felt, so you’re going to have to talk that through.

ADAM I guess it’s just like “We have no more ideas, so let’s just gorge on the IP in the laziest, dumbest way possible.”

BROOM If you cut out the princess scene, would you still say that that’s what this movie was?

ADAM It still felt incredibly lazy.

BETH I feel like no other Disney movie has been as tied to its culture as this. And of course that’s the point—

BROOM You mean Disney’s culture, or the present-day culture?

BETH The present-day culture. It’s immediately dating itself. Even now it feels a little dated, because Tumblr doesn’t exist anymore, and Tumblr is mentioned. They had to have known that they were doing that, and they didn’t care. That’s the nature of this story. But then it doesn’t play! It doesn’t have a shelf life. Or maybe it does, I don’t know, it just feels weird because it’s so tied to… two years ago.

ADAM And also to a certain feeling about the internet. The internet has had a rough couple of years, as a cultural touchstone.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM Like, today there’s an article in the New York Times about Youtube’s algorithm…

BETH … promoting right-wing extremists.

ADAM … yeah, its rules that send you to right-wing hate groups. I mean… [sigh] I don’t know, man.

BETH It’s just that all the specifics were very specific.

ADAM And nothing worked! Oh my god, it made me so upset. BROOM, you go.

BROOM I don’t really know what to say. My thoughts while I was watching it were that it didn’t feel like the internet feels, to me. And what’s the point of making a cartoon other than to get the stand-up comedy “ha ha yeah” response of recognition? The way they embodied these things and turned them into cartoon scenes doesn’t resonate with my experience of them. On the other hand, I thought, “well, recasting some of these things that I have such a demoralizing relationship to, into cheery cartoon things, would be very welcome —”

BETH The internet’s just a mall, BROOM, it’s just a mall.

BROOM Right, so if the internet were just a partaaay! It’s a rave! It’s a mall! There’s funny people in it! Youtube is just a lady!… That would be a really good feeling! I would like that! So I didn’t want to reject it, and say “I know what the internet really is, it’s that thing that makes me feel terrible.” I felt a hope that at some point it would click in and I would feel like, “Yeah! Maybe the world is okay.” But it didn’t. And that was my complaint about the original Wreck-It Ralph: “This isn’t what videogames feel like.”

BETH I barely even remember the original Wreck-It Ralph.

BROOM At the beginning of this I was reminded of it. “Oh yeah, they live in a power strip? That’s not right. Nobody lives in a power strip. I don’t have any fantasies about the little people who live in my power strip.”

ADAM Is Inside Out the one about the feelings?

BETH Yeah, I was gonna bring that up too.

ADAM So Inside Out was a clever and imaginative and ultimately affecting movie because it was a meaningful depiction of how emotions work, and had something interesting to say about how emotions work, and why sad emotions are still valuable. And this was sort of like that — except this actually had nothing to do with how the internet worked, and was not in any way related to what it feels like to navigate the internet, and it didn’t have anything to tell you about the internet…

BETH I mean, that’s a challenge! How are they going to—

ADAM It was like “Oh, remember Inside Out? Let’s do that, but with the internet!” But then they had no ideas.

BROOM I thought it was more like they watched Toy Story and said “Oh this is so cool because it refers to, like, a Slinky, and people can say ‘Hey I know about Slinky!’, and then they come up with stuff for a Slinky to do. And the claw machine! It’s so funny because people know about the claw machine!” But they ignored the part where Toy Story was a story about a theme that they had extracted from the world of toys. Ralph Breaks the Internet ultimately was a story about giving your friends freedom even if that means feeling insecure.

BETH Allegedly, yes.

BROOM Which has nothing to do with the internet or videogames, or eBay, or whatever. It doesn’t have anything to do with the subject matter, so they just grafted a lot of references on to something that has nothing to do with them.

BETH But I think you’re talking about it in a way opposite to how they conceived it. They grafted the insecurity story on to the internet stuff.

ADAM Right, because it was made by hideous Pixar people who don’t understand how Disney movies work, and think that it’s a joke, and thought that it was funny to call Alan Menken out of retirement to make a joke song. Uggh! So upsetting!

BETH Clearly that was the most affecting part, for you.

BROOM I didn’t see, ADAM — were you in pain?

BETH Yeah, he was distraught.

ADAM Anything where they were, like…

BROOM Anything with the word “Disney” in it.

ADAM Yeah.

BETH They also tried to put a sort of feminist hero slant on the princesses at the end. “Oh, we, the women, are going to rescue him.” But that was offensive. “We’re gonna put him in a dress.”

BROOM It was cheap.

ADAM Wouldn’t it be funny if Snow White had a shirt that said “Girl Power”? Ullllgh.

BROOM When they first opened that box, I thought “the whole ‘Disney princess’ phenomenon is kind of external to the actual princesses, so there’s room for comic commentary here.” And then I was waiting for it… “But, oh, seems like they don’t have any real thoughts about this. They just know that they can get points for doing it.”

BETH They’re just rehashing the talking points of other people.

ADAM It’s obvious that people at Disney thought that the scene in Hercules, where they have gear from other movies, was funny. But that’s five seconds of Hercules! They’re like, “what if that was a whole subplot!”

BROOM I was really open to interesting things they could have done with that. The Disney princesses could say “This whole ‘princess’ shtick where we live in this room together is weird, right?” Because that’s the weird thing, that they’re branded with this status and lumped together. But they didn’t want to do anything critical of the business. Just like they couldn’t be critical of eBay, Amazon…

BETH YouTube!

BROOM YouTube, although they apparently did not want to be in the movie. They were willing to have their name be said; they just weren’t willing to have their algorithm be personified.

ADAM Also, Google is in the movie but nothing happens with Google, he’s just on Google when he gets attacked by… the virus of his emotional insecurities.

BETH Because everyone really uses Ask Jeeves.

BROOM They really took on Ask Jeeves! They made Ask Jeeves look like a pretty good search engine, all things considered! “Knowmore,” it was called here.

ADAM Yeah, and Pinterest was in it… as a pin.

BROOM It should have been the Google maps pushpin. I would have much preferred that.

BETH I think Google might not have approved.

ADAM At the beginning I was like, “Oh yeah, remember your fond feelings about the friendship between Wreck-It Ralph and Vanellope?” Beloved Wreck-It Ralph and Vanellope! Sarah Silverman was annoying the first time; I never wanted to see her again. And then the whole thing is supposed to trade on your affection for these characters.

BROOM Yeah, basically another whole movie about Vanellope. That was another one of my criticisms of Wreck-It Ralph: Fix-It Felix and Wreck-It Ralph have an interesting dynamic; why not make a movie about that instead?

BETH Because they need to make a movie about a powerful woman. Let’s talk about the gay subtext!

BROOM Yeah, why didn’t she get married to Slash, or — what was her name?

BETH Shank.

BROOM I made a joke in the middle of the movie, “It’s gonna end with Vanellope marrying Shank.” And then: everything but!

BETH I just was telling BROOM earlier that I saw Hobbs & Shaw over the weekend. Do you know what that is, ADAM?

ADAM No.

BETH Do you know anything about the Fast and the Furious movies at all?

ADAM Eh.

BETH Okay. They’re famous for basically being homoerotic.

ADAM All right. Say more!

BETH You know, it’s Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, and they’re crushing on each other via cars and racing. So Hobbs & Shaw is an offshoot of that with, uh…

BROOM Jason Statham and The Rock, you told me.

BETH Yes, which is basically the same thing. It’s like they love each other but they hate each other but they love each other, and, like, there’s a woman but it’s really just about them. And I felt like that’s kind of what was happening here! Vanellope just wanted to be with Gal Gadot.

ADAM Who wouldn’t want to be with Gal Gadot.

BETH Who wouldn’t! Right!

BROOM Nobody in the story mentioned that she was hot. Sort of a weird omission.

BETH Yeah, I was waiting for it. “Because she’s so cool, and she has good hair!” I was like, “AND SHE’S HOT.”

ADAM And, like, why can’t you leave a game on the internet just like you can leave an arcade game? Why did they have to be separated forever? It’s because the arcade closes and the internet never closes?

BROOM You’re asking why they couldn’t just hang out overnight like they used to?

ADAM Yeah. Shank and her crew have down time to play basketball! This whole forced moral about friendship, which was grafted on to this stupid picaresque plot, which was not itself very interesting… At least in the original Wreck-It Ralph, some of the games were colorful and intriguing.

BETH That’s a good point.

ADAM Whereas, like, it’s so intriguing to visit eBay, which is… a checkout line. And then all the other websites were just some boxes. And then the whole plot where we’re collecting hearts? For stupid videos? That was so depressing.

BETH Your friend [who said the movie was “really sad”] was right.

ADAM It’s depressing that two hundred million hearts only gets forty-three dollars. Everything is depressing. And that there was no critique in that!

BETH Yeah, that’s the thing.

BROOM Right, that’s what hurts for me. Every scene that started, I was like, “Yeah, tell me! Tell me what the cartoon version of eBay is, because I don’t know how I feel about eBay, and the cartoon might be clarifying!” And then they turned out not have a thought in their heads, and that hurt because…

BETH Because you needed it. You feel like you need it.

BROOM I need it! Who will make a beautiful allegory of what the internet is? Who will humanize it for me?

BETH Not these guys.

BROOM Not these guys. On the other hand, I hope that this sinks into some part of my brain nonetheless. I’ll take anything I can get. The internet is so dark!

BETH Why even take this on? It’s too big! They were doomed! I feel like it was way too ambitious to even try.

BROOM So let’s get to what we were talking about before it started: Why is this a sequel? Why indeed is this a sequel to Wreck-It Ralph of all things? Why did they make a sequel to Wreck-It Ralph? It doesn’t make sense that a videogame character would go on the internet any more than anyone else would go on the internet.

ADAM They’ve been making sequels this whole time, but they’ve been straight-to-video sequels that we haven’t had to trouble ourselves with.

BROOM What do you think those princess voices have been up to for all these years?

ADAM This is not a good sign. And then Frozen 2 is coming? That’s not a good sign either!

BETH That’s where Hollywood is, now. It’s all about sequels.

BROOM I’m gonna guess that she gets the power of fire in Frozen 2. Just a guess.

ADAM They didn’t come up with a better name than Frozen 2.

BROOM There is no better name for marketing than Frozen 2.

BETH That’s right.

BROOM This should have been called Ralph Wrecks the Internet. I thought that from the first time I heard of it. I don’t understand.

BETH Because “breaks the internet” is a thing… or was a thing!

BROOM It was Kim Kardashian’s thing.

BETH Again, they couldn’t keep up with themselves. Also eBay! Not really a thing anymore!

BROOM Is that true?

BETH Yeah, eBay is dead. No one uses eBay. It’s all Etsy, or… I don’t even know.

BROOM I thought the scripting was weak, even given the story. That he was like, “Ee-oh-boy!” “Wait, say that again!” We’re gonna do this for twenty seconds?

BETH It really was twenty seconds. “Say it again!” “Eeee-boy.”

BROOM Why does he even have to hear it as “Eboy?” He could have just said: “There’s a steering wheel on the internet, so we’ve gotta get on the internet!” That would have been fine.

ADAM I don’t think there was a single quip or joke or anything that was memorable.

BROOM I laughed when the gang guy that BETH liked, he crashes in the car chase…

BETH … and he says to himself, “You still have value.” That was the only thing I thought was funny.

BROOM I laughed at one other thing, I can’t remember where, but I do remember immediately after laughing, thinking I should be embarrassed because ADAM did not think that was funny!

ADAM The idea of inserting crossover characters from Sugar Rush into an internet game called Slaughter Race is actually a good idea. Someone should do that, on the internet.

BROOM It was supposed to be Grand Theft Auto, and they said “you know what would be funny, would be to sing a princess song about how ‘I want to live in Grand Theft Auto‘”…

BETH But they didn’t pull it off.

BROOM They couldn’t go all the way there because they can’t say “prostitute.” They can’t say anything actually tawdry.

BETH Because it’s actually for children.

BROOM So they say “we’ve got scary clowns and dumpster fires.” Okay, whatever, but if this is a high/low joke about Disney being high and this game being low, that’s not really low enough.

ADAM I hope Alan Menken made a lot of money. And Idina Menzel, and Anika Noni Rose and all those voices, I hope they made a lot of money. Also: I got bored by the car racing in the first one, and then in the second one: “We’re going to the internet where there’s… more car racing.”

BROOM Yes! And obviously the real massively multiplayer online game on the internet is World of Warcraft, and that’s a rich vein. And different! But they didn’t touch it.

ADAM And then at the end, that the villain was a mindless amalgamation…

BETH Yeah, the King Kong of…

ADAM … of Ralphs.

BETH Yeah. It was gross.

BROOM I thought there was something kind of workable in that concept, that his emotional insecurities have been externalized and are now a monster. I feel like I’ve seen that before, and when they got to it I thought “well, they’re kind of squeezing the Pixar formula out of this despite itself.”

ADAM There’s a Rick & Morty about that, where they go to couples therapy.

BROOM Oh yes, yes, and that was much better.

ADAM There was much too much of silly Ralph videos, which I guess is what my nephews thought was funny when they saw this last year. When they were younger! But I don’t know — a goat with a Ralph head?

BETH Yeah, that wasn’t actually funny. It was like, oh my god, they’re just using actual memes? From now? There’s no way this is going to play! No one is going to rent this video in five years, because it’ll all feel really stale. It felt very shortsighted, to me.

BROOM I didn’t feel disgust while we were watching it. I just want to put that on the record. These Disney animated films at their best either reveal or reinforce or reflect human experiences at a deep fairy-tale level. And, yes, if you could do that about modern shit like the internet, what a gift to the world that would be! So just to make a gesture toward it, I watched the whole thing going, “oh, okay, yeah, the internet, could be one of these movies, think of that…”

BETH But at the end of the day it was just being as bad as the internet!

BROOM Yeah, it was taking the Twitter way out of everything.

ADAM Our project is exempt from the obligation to see the many live-action remakes of classic Disney films that have been coming out since Moana, right?

BROOM Oh yes.

ADAM Which none of us has any desire to see. But just the fact of that is so sad. There’s just nothing left in the barrel, if that’s what they’re doing.

BETH They’re just milking everything.

BROOM So to go to back to your first comment about that, which I think is maybe less deserved here than the other criticisms: it isn’t just an attempt to milk the IP, because — again, if so, why Wreck-It Ralph?

ADAM Yeah, it was like a half-hearted depressing doodle within a larger mishap. I agree that if you were really setting out to cynically cannibalize the IP, you wouldn’t have done it as a throwaway subplot in Wreck-It Ralph 2.

BROOM But that’s a specifically painful thing about it: that the cynicism just sort of arises naturally.

ADAM It’s like nobody even thought that that would be seen as anything other than a loving tribute.

BROOM Or just “hey maybe we’ll get some points for cynical self-reference.”

ADAM But I bet the people who put that in thought it was affectionate. It was just so bankrupt of interest. As soon as the browser pointed to “World of Disney” I was like “Ohhh god.” Ugh. Ugh. Anyway. It wasn’t as bad as Chicken Little, which was actively hateful.

BETH It was not, it really really wasn’t, by leaps and bounds.

ADAM Was it better than Home on the Range? No.

BETH Hmm…

BROOM Home on the Range was kind of funny, as I recall it.

BETH Yeah, you’re right. Because after watching it I do feel scuzzy.

BROOM Okay, again, I gotta say, I don’t feel scuzzy. I thought this had more things for me to think about than the original Wreck-It Ralph did.

BETH I just don’t think its intentions were pure in any way. I think it was trying to be “clever.” The reason I feel scuzzy is because I feel like that insecurity shit was pasted on; that was not the core of it. The core of it was “let’s make ‘the internet’ in a cartoon!” And then they were trying to ‘make it mean something.’

ADAM Because nobody had any ideas, and then somebody rewrote it.

BROOM At the end of course the credit is “Director of Story.”

BETH Also that song at the end, where they’re singing about how it feels to be a zero? No!

BROOM Maybe that’s the real commentary about the internet! “I’ll show you what it feels like to feel like you aren’t good enough for anything!”

ADAM There must have been some kind of thing that went on behind the scenes, a power struggle about what this was going to be about, and somebody lost. And that version of the song was left over from the version of the movie that didn’t make it on to the screen. But they were like “Well, we already paid Imagine Dragons!”

BETH “They wrote this for us, so we gotta use it somewhere.” Maybe. Let’s read the review!

[we now read the New York Times review]

ADAM What?

BETH No.

BROOM They thought the insecurity thing was about how we all behave online, which, hey, a better script doctor would indeed have sewn it in that way.

[we look a bit on Rotten Tomatoes to try to find a review that endorses our criticisms but don’t immediately find one]

BETH That’s so interesting. Are we so inside it that we can’t see outside ourselves, and then with even just a year’s distance, we can? Or is it what you said, BROOM, where everyone is so desperate for some commentary on this topic that they’ll take anything?

[ADAM reads an excerpt from the RogerEbert.com review that calls the princess sequence “an incredibly witty scene that wrestles with Disney’s legacy when the filmmakers could have just included another tribute to the company that pays their bills.”]

BROOM That’s exactly what it is: a tribute to the company that pays their bills. Frozen “wrestles with the legacy” much more deeply, by actually having some of its own opinions. I guess my takeaway was that they failed, but I don’t think that they were…

BETH You think their intentions were pure?

BROOM I just think it was written by young people without enough ideas, rather than people who are trying to…

BETH Rather than people who are actually cynical.

ADAM Yeah, I don’t think it was evil, I just think it was brainless.

BROOM When they started, I thought they were going to go a perfectly reasonable direction, which is to point out that it’s all well and good for them to be in an arcade, but arcades are dead beyond dead, and that place is going out of business. The whole crisis is he’s gonna unplug one machine? Guess what guys! The whole place is going under.

BETH You all better find new games.

BROOM Yeah, I thought they were all gonna go on the internet as refugees.

BETH Good idea. Maybe you should write that movie!

BROOM It hurts to be told that you’re going to be told a story, and then be told just a bunch of knee-jerk jokes.

BETH It’s interesting to me that the two reviews we read mention the Disney princesses scene as a positive, funny, witty thing, when to us that’s what seemed especially cheap.

BROOM It felt like review-bait, for reviewers to have something where they can say “I don’t want to spoil it, but something happens about halfway through the movie that really brings down the house!” Put a thing in the middle that needs mention in the third paragraph of every review.

ADAM If you think seeing Sleeping Beauty in a T-shirt that says “Can I get a snooze button?” is funny, this is the movie for you!

BROOM [paraphrasing the NYTimes review] “Who doesn’t want to see the Little Mermaid put on a T-shirt?” I don’t know: everybody? I did have a feeling during that scene of “Oh all these voice actresses are still alive, that’s nice. Jodi Benson, still doing the Little Mermaid, how nice for her.”

ADAM Well who played Snow White?

BROOM I’m sure it was Disney’s current official Snow White. Because no doubt they’ve made “Snow White 4” and “Snow White 5” for DVD.

BETH You seemed to have the most positive response.

BROOM I wasn’t angered. But I am sad. It does feel like we’ve gone through these eras — the golden age, and then the sadder times, and then it comes back in the 90s with musicals and political correctness, and then it loses its way again and we have the Chicken Little era, and then yeah, Tangled is okay, and Frozen is good, and Moana is good, and Big Hero 6, so there’s a sense of rejuvenation there… and this felt like turning yet another corner. “That thing that we do at Disney? We’re definitely gonna produce that product! But we’re a little addled, right now, so… how about this? [starts tossing random objects that are within arm’s reach] How about this? I got another present for you, I got you this!” They just ran around their house and grabbed things. And Frozen 2 sounds the same. “Oh I totally brought you something!” and then rummaging around in your pocketbook.

ADAM John Lasseter is out of a job now.

BROOM Huggy Bear. [ed.: he means “Lots-‘o-Huggin Bear”]

ADAM When did that happen? Since this movie came out.

BROOM Certainly since this movie was made, anyway.

ADAM Yeah because he’s billed as top brass in this movie. Maybe it was just a weird time at Disney.

BETH Or for the country, or the culture, or all of it! I do think that this president has had an effect on art.

BROOM Psyches, yeah. I don’t think that America has responded well, artistically, to a time a of moral crisis.

BETH It takes time.

ADAM It’s too early.

BROOM You really need to digest it first.

BETH Yeah. And then you respond.

BROOM I feel like we’ve got so many Aaron Sorkins who are willing to jump up on the third day and say “I know how to respond to this!” Like David Mamet buzzes in immediately, BZZZ! “I’ve written a play!” And they don’t really know anything about it. And I’m still waiting to see a story…

BETH Yeah, you’ll get it in ten years.

BROOM …a story that reminds me that I’m a person even when such things happen.

ADAM Perhaps you enjoyed the hit Broadway play “Hillary and Clinton.”

[discussion ensues about what this show was, and who was in it, and then about whether any of us have functioning memories]

ADAM Toni Morrison was asked at one point if she had any advice for young writers, and she said “Wait til you’re forty.”

BETH This is our year!

ADAM Yeah. Our country needs us!

BROOM Hey, joke but no joke. If you have digested the current moment and experienced it at a poetic narrative level, bring it!

BETH Please. We’re all ears.

BROOM I’m really eager for that. And I don’t know why I would have expected that from Ralph Breaks the Internet, but… You know, the internet is its own crisis. Even if the president were whatever her name was, Hillary Clinton, we would still be living in a time of moral crisis.

ADAM I think the moral crisis aspect of modern life can be mitigated just by removing yourself from the historically unprecedented access we have to all things, which is to say the internet.

BROOM Yeah, and they didn’t address that. Well, she did say one line: “It’s very big.”

BETH It’s true that what they saw was entirely commerce-based, and not even about, like, Wikipedia.

ADAM There was an email train going by; that was about the only communication that was happening.

BROOM And the absolute stratification between totally pristine, clean, CGI fantasy, and then the “bad part of town” which was literally just a cliché bad part of town.

BETH I did kind of like Spamley, or whatever his name was.

BROOM Yeah, and who was that voice?

ADAM It was a name we didn’t recognize. [ed.: actually it was Bill Hader]

BETH I liked his old New York style: “Nyaaaaaah… wanna see a dirty pictcha?”

BROOM I liked “why don’t you come over to my website — oh sorry it’s a mess.” That was one of the moments where there was a spark of “that is a little like the internet.”

ADAM I find myself doing the “Nyaaaaaah, wise guy, eh?” voice as a joke a lot lately, and Mark has no idea what I’m talking about or why I’m doing it. And frankly I have no idea what I’m talking about or why I’m doing it.

BROOM Kids today just don’t appreciate Edward G. Robinson anymore! It seems like since 2011 or 2012, you just don’t hear kids talking about Edward G. Robinson.

BETH But then why is anyone inclined to do it?

BROOM Nyaaaaah, ’cause it’s a great voice, is why!

ADAM I’ve of course never seen an Edward G. Robinson movie.

BETH Yes you have!

BROOM You’ve seen The Ten Commandments.

ADAM No I haven’t. All I’ve ever seen is Tiny Toons.

BETH Oh, sure. You only know parodies. Haven’t you seen Double Indemnity?

ADAM No.

BROOM What’s “is this the end of little Rico? [sic]” What movie is that?

BETH I don’t know. See, we’re all pretty ignorant.

[ed.: it’s Little Caesar (1931), guys]

[The waitress pours sparkling water.]

BROOM Thank you.

ADAM Thank you. Could I get some ice too, please?

WAITRESS Sure!

ADAM Thanks.

[She goes.]

BROOM First let me think about what I’m gonna order so I don’t have to think about it later. What kind of thing are you gonna get?

BETH I’m gonna get the mushroom toast to share, and then the Mediterranean salad.

BROOM I think I have to get one of these expensive meals, because I haven’t really had a full meal yet today.

BETH Go ahead. I’ve eaten a lot today.

BROOM I’ll just get the brick chicken.

[The waitress returns with ice.]

ADAM Thanks a lot.

WAITRESS Any questions about the menu? So far?

BETH I think we’re actually ready.

WAITRESS You’ve seen it before! Okay!

BETH Yeah…

WAITRESS You can go ahead.

BETH Okay… I’ll start with the mushroom toast.

WAITRESS Mm-hm!

BETH And have the Mediterranean salad.

WAITRESS Okay! Not with the chicken or whatever but just the Mediterranean salad.

BETH Just the salad. Thanks.

WAITRESS Okay. And you sir?

ADAM The orecchiette [orəˈkɛtə] pasta please.

WAITRESS Orecchiette [orəˈtʃɛttiː]!

BROOM I’ll have the Tuscan chicken.

WAITRESS And the chicken. Okay.

BETH Could I also have a glass of Côtes du Rhône?

WAITRESS Sure! Gentlemen, anything else to drink right now?

BROOM Just the water for me.

WAITRESS Okay.

BROOM Thank you.

WAITRESS Sure!

[She goes.]

BROOM Rest assured we’ll all be reading the orders in the transcript.

ADAM Maybe this is just resonating with my emotional state lately, but: this movie felt in a lot of ways like a pastiche of many other Disney movies, but the longing for the world to be fixable — and specifically ecologically fixable — is what stood out most strongly to me as emotionally different from the pattern. Although I guess it was true of Brother Bear, too.

BETH This was much better than Brother Bear.

ADAM It was.

BROOM If Brother Bear didn’t inspire those feelings, then they didn’t apply.

ADAM Yeah. It made me feel really wistful and upset. But then I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Again, perhaps because of the election.

BROOM I didn’t think I was going to talk about that — it didn’t really rise to the level of being conscious — but I realize in retrospect I did have thoughts like “Is the ocean really still this pretty, or is it gross now? Will it ever be beautiful again?” And actually at one point I thought “Probably if I were in the middle of the Pacific ocean, it would be beautiful and pristine, and my images of ecological disaster ruining the earth are all just from words in the newspaper. The reality would be better.” When she broke the coral I had a fleeting thought about how the Great Barrier Reef is being destroyed by the millions of acres, and then, “but if I were there it would still look like beautiful nature, and that scale of destruction would actually be less acutely frightening to me.” Everything is more terrifying as a sentence than as a physical reality.

[The waitress brings cutlery.]

BETH Thank you.

[She goes.]

BETH When it’s a sentence, like…?

BROOM You know, “The Great Barrier Reef is dying. The corals are dying after thousands of years.” I don’t have much more to say about that. Only when you said it did I realize I had thought about it during the movie.

BETH I wasn’t really thinking about it in those terms either.

ADAM Maybe everyone should say what struck them the most and then we can launch off from there.

BETH The thing that struck me the most was that this occasionally gave me this feeling —

[The waitress brings and pours the wine]

BETH Thank you.

WAITRESS Cheers!

[She goes.]

BETH … that only Disney has given me. I’ve felt this feeling and it’s hard to describe, but it’s in Disney World in certain rides, and it’s in older Disney cartoons. The time I felt it here was during the “Shiny” song, when everything was neon.

BROOM Black light.

BETH Yeah. It’s a kind of feeling that reaches into me and delights me in a way that nothing else ever has. And it’s very particular to Disney. That’s the thing that stuck with me the most. I thought the movie was a little long. I thought it lagged a little bit a couple times.

BROOM How long was it?

ADAM An hour forty-five.

BROOM That’s pretty long for a Disney movie.

BETH But overall I thought it was more imaginative than many of them, and let itself be free with its animation in ways that felt new to me.

[A waiter appears with the mushroom toast.]

WAITER Hello how are you. Mushroom toast?

BETH Great.

[He sets it down.]

WAITER Enjoy.

[He goes.]

BETH You guys can share this.

BROOM I felt like on a sensory level it was very rewarding, but I felt the basic conceit — that they were taking elemental myth and applying a modern journey-of-self psychological story over it — just didn’t make any emotional sense. I was sleepy so I was watching it through childlike eyes, just asking “what journey are you taking me on?” A kid is gonna watch this happily enough because it’s so tactile, but… All the gestures about character worked, they were delivered with expertise, but they didn’t work for this movie’s story. There was no there there. I felt unengaged.

BETH You want some mushroom toast?

ADAM No thanks.

BETH You want any?

BROOM Yeah.

ADAM There was definitely a lot of “the true journey is within” psychology. I’m trying to remember in recent movies… Obviously, whats-her-name…

BROOM Rapunzel?

ADAM No, the rabbit from Zootopia.

BROOM Judy Hopps.

ADAM Judy Hopps, thank you. Judy Hopps has to discover her inner reserves of courage, but it wasn’t quite so overt. Or in Frozen, or in Tangled — a lot of the recent ones — this one was more explicit about it. But I feel like those are sort of connected, in my mind: the fact that they were going to dive deep into the mythologies of another culture is tied to the impulse to be psychologically sensitive. So they at least strike me as thematically connected.

BROOM You’re saying that having all those cultural advisers is the same kind of sensitivity as being sensitive to whether a person is being herself, which is what the story is about?

ADAM Yeah, they’re both things that [conservative roommate] would have disapproved of, in college.

BROOM They’re both for snowflakes.

ADAM Yeah, I guess. So to me they seem harmonious thematically in that way. Although I agree with you that that has nothing to do with the underpinnings of the real mythology.

BROOM I spent most of the time thinking about myth. If someone gave me a book of Hawaiian and Polynesian Mythology, which I assume is the main source for this stuff, I would find it esoteric and kind of dry, even though the stories were about fire and water and gods, because it’s not my cosmology. It would take a lot of imaginative work to plug into what makes a myth powerful to the people whose myth it is. And I just thought, “that’s a worthwhile creative project, to make that stuff come alive for the general audience,” and that’s just not the project they took on. They pulled stuff from that mythology book just so they could do another Little Mermaid musical.

BETH Do you think that’s what they felt that they took on, though?

BROOM No, not directly. I don’t think they thought “let’s tell this story as it is.” I think they thought “let’s use this story.”

BETH Or “let’s evolve it.”

BROOM Or “let’s tell this story our way.” They would probably say, “We made it relevant. We made it modern.”

ADAM Presumably in the real mythology Maui is not, like, kind of a jerk who gets humanized by a little girl in the course of their seafaring journeys together. So yes.

BROOM “Prometheus, why are you so sad? You took the fire, man, you’re awesome! Why are you so down on yourself?”

ADAM Isn’t that exactly what Hercules was?

BROOM Yeah. So this is the same directors as Hercules, which was like a straight-up comedy, riffing on Greek myth. Because everyone knows those myths, so they could make the whole thing be in quotes. It was like Into the Woods: you already know the story of Little Red Riding Hood so we can joke about it. But no-one knows this story. I mean, I didn’t even know Maui was a god. I knew Maui was an island, but I didn’t know he was a demigod.

ADAM He’s “just an ordinary demi-guy.”

BROOM Yeah. I’m not sure that means what they wanted it to mean, but yes. Anyway, maybe also because I was sleepy, in my head I started trying to do the real project of bringing these big mythological feelings to life. This huge green goddess is responsible for life and joy and the ocean… How would you tell that, in a way that didn’t sideline it to a story that was actually all about coming of age and getting over your parents’ issues with themselves. Maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking about any of that.

BETH I didn’t watch it like that at all. I always just revert to kid mode when I watch these.

BROOM And the kid enjoyed this.

BETH For the most part. The kid got bored a little bit.

BROOM So that’s another way of saying what I’m saying. At the beginning, when they say “You need to practice governing. What should we do?”

BETH “She’s doing great!”

BROOM I thought, kid me does not know what’s going on: “They’re on this island, walking around talking. Clearly this is more boring than the magic ocean, so I guess the significance of this is ‘thing that’s too boring.'” Which is correct. But there was a lot of it to sit through.

ADAM But is that any different from Belle’s walk through the village? Obviously, rebelling against the thing everyone expects you to do is the ur- Disney plot, though I was having trouble remembering all of them as I was sitting there. I guess all Ariel has to do is go to mermaid school, right? She’s disobedient by exploring human artifacts, but she’s not disobedient by being —

BROOM It’s exactly the same: she’s not supposed to go beyond the border.

ADAM Right, but they didn’t get into quite so much detail about what her real responsibilities were, right?

BROOM She was supposed to be a royal darling. She was supposed to be at that concert and sing “ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

ADAM And Simba doesn’t really have any governing responsibilities either.

BROOM Well, he does by the end. He’s going to.

ADAM But they don’t get into the substance.

BETH He doesn’t practice.

BROOM They don’t show the day to day, they don’t show him signing and vetoing, but they show the landscape and say that this is his domain, and I think James Earl Jones says something about how they keep peace among the different species by their firm rule. Something like that.

ADAM Well, I appreciated that it felt like more than that. It wasn’t just boring formalities. She was actually abdicating responsibilities — until it turned out that it required her to do the thing that she wanted to do anyway. But before that, when she was just disobediently going out into the ocean, she had a real job to be doing.

BROOM Yeah… sort of. It wasn’t clear. It was still “practice.”

ADAM She’s gonna be the chief. She has to get ready. So, I have a confession. I wasn’t going to tell you this: I did actually see this with my nephews already, in November.

BETH That’s hilarious.

ADAM Because I had to. Everyone made me. I was like, “I can’t because I have to see it later,” but then they made me. So I saw this before.

BROOM What was the point of not confessing until now? You just thought I’d be angrier about it if you hadn’t already done your duty?

ADAM Wait, what?

BROOM What was the point of not confessing it but then confessing it?

ADAM Because it relates to a point I’m gonna make! It’s in service of this discussion. At first I thought, “well, it’s not relevant, so I can gloss over it.” But it did feel different on two viewings.

BROOM Wait, when did you see it?

ADAM Thanksgiving, with my nephews.

BROOM Did you see it before or after texting me to say “we have to see Moana when I get back.”

ADAM I don’t remember. Probably I was texting you because I was trying to fight off my family and show them that we couldn’t go it see it. But then the only alternative was to see Sing, which was so execrable that… anyway.

BROOM It’s fine. Go ahead, tell me about your nephews’ response.

ADAM No no, it’s about my response. The first time I saw it, it had a much more dreamlike coherence, and I was really taken with the flow of it. But watching it the second time, when I knew what was gonna happen, it felt a lot more chunked into discrete incidents that didn’t really necessarily have any driving story rationale.

BROOM For example: remember the part when they fought with coconuts for 8 minutes?

ADAM Right, exactly.

BETH I did enjoy that part, though.

ADAM Yeah, it was entertaining! And it shows that she has pluck and determination. But, yeah, this time it felt more like it had business in the middle of it just for its own sake.

BROOM Level 1: The island. Level 2: Getting past the reef. Level 3: Coconut fight. Level 4: Land of the monsters.

ADAM Probably not coincidentally, it reminded me a lot more of “Monkey Island” this time than the first time.

BETH It reminded me of “Donkey Kong Country.”

BROOM Yeah, it was very much like “Donkey Kong Country Returns.” It reminded me of video games in its look, its feel, its thought patterns, its rhythms. Everything.

ADAM But the other thing was that [nephew 1] and [nephew 2] were engrossed in it, and were also quite upset in the middle. I mean, [nephew 2] was quite upset! During the crab, and when the grandmother dies. He was really into it. I think he might have started talking back to the screen in the middle of it.

BETH That’s cute.

ADAM So they seemed to like it.

[A waiter comes with the entrées. He sets down the first one.]

BETH Thank you.

[He begins to set down the second one.]

BROOM That’s for him.

ADAM That’s for me, thanks.

[He sets down the second one.]

WAITER Chicken?

[He sets down the third one.]

BROOM Thank you very much.

WAITER You’re welcome; enjoy.

[He goes.]

ADAM So my estimation of it went down a little bit. But the psychology aspects of it are the things that do feel organic, at least to the story they’re trying to tell, as opposed to just being business. So maybe that’s why I’m more sympathetic to that aspect of it.

BROOM What do you mean, “it feels organic to the story they’re trying to tell”?

ADAM Well, isn’t there something at least slightly touching about the fact that at the end, the way they defeat evil isn’t through some swirl of Ursula going down in a whirlpool, but that she has the courage to stand there and let it come towards her? That’s much more impressive than, like, “he aims a shot and it hits her right in the eye! AAAARGH! I’m melting, I’m melting!”

BETH I thought it was very much like that Beyoncé video, when she’s walking and her hair’s flowing. When she’s approaching the goddess or whatever.

BROOM Lava monster.

BETH The lava monster. It felt like it was taken from a piece of culture that we don’t usually see in Disney.

BROOM I.e. Beyoncé.

BETH Uh-huh.

ADAM And having hip-hoppy songs. And frankly, having that crab song, which was weird, for a Disney movie.

BROOM Why? What about it was weird?

ADAM It’s just that it’s not the Broadway register that you expect.

BROOM You know who these songs were by!

ADAM Yes, yes, well that’s what I’m segueing to, here.

BETH I thought the songs — which were by Lin-Manuel Miranda — had a better flow and were more interesting than usual.

ADAM Yeah, they were sort of jazzy, they had syncopation, and they had pretty good lyrics. I liked the line “You can’t expect a demigod to beat a decapod.” That made me laugh. I guess BROOM didn’t like that line.

BROOM You know what you left out.

ADAM No.

BROOM “You can’t expect a demigod to beat a decapod — look it up.”

ADAM Okay, that’s not as good.

BROOM Well, that’s what it really was. Also, what makes it a decapod? I don’t understand.

ADAM I don’t know.

BROOM I’ve gotta look it up.

BETH Can I have a small piece of that chicken?

BROOM You can have as much of this as you want.

BETH Just cut off a little edge.

ADAM I thought the “perfect daughter” song was really good and sort of jazzy.

BETH I thought “You’re Welcome” was good.

ADAM Yeah, I liked that song. I liked the big Disney, you know, “and then I’ll know how far I’ll go” song. Not as good as “Let It Go,” which is basically the exact same song, but.

BROOM Is that what the words were?

ADAM [sings:] “And no-one knows… how far it go-oes,” meaning the horizon. But then she also finds out how far she’ll go.

BROOM But that was the refrain? Wasn’t “know who I am” a lyric? No?

BETH I think ADAM is right. But essentially that’s the same thing.

BROOM All right. Well, I thought —

[The waitress appears]

WAITRESS How was everything prepared? Good?

BROOM Very nice.

ADAM Thank you.

[She goes]

BROOM This is all going in. Because it feels like there’s strangely a lot of it.

ADAM It always goes in!

BROOM It’s my favorite part, in some ways. I thought that the songs were in a certain sense weak. And that sense is, I think, a weakness for Lin-Manuel that Hamilton in a way disguises, because of the way Hamilton works — that he’s not much for “show don’t tell.” He mostly just tells you, in so many words, like, [sings:] “I gotta lotta conflict / Inside me / Sometimes I think I’m great / Sometimes I don’t.” And just says it. This opening song was like [sings:] “We live on this island / And it’s great / We have a lot of culture / We love each other / We don’t need anything else.” Instead of being about the sun, or the grass, or whatever. Except for when it’s “time for an image!”

ADAM Well, “the coconuts” and “the taro root”…

BROOM Yes, but he didn’t use those as the story of the song, he used those as, like, “Exhibit A” toward his thesis statement, which was completely on the nose.

ADAM What’s an example of a Broadway song that does what you’re calling for, here? Just so I understand. I mean, don’t all Broadway songs work that way?

BROOM Well, the first song in Oklahoma: “Oh what a beautiful mornin’ / Oh what a beautiful day / I got a wonderful feelin’ / Everything’s goin’ my way.” Then he describes the meadow and so on. So: is the point of that song to establish that it’s a beautiful morning? No. That’s what he’s talking about, but the point is to establish a mood, and this character, and sympathy for the character. The fact that it’s a beautiful morning and he feels good is actually to the side of what the song is doing for the audience. In a Lin-Manuel song, if someone says it’s a beautiful morning, it’s because he thought, “for the plot, the audience needs to know that this is morning is very beautiful.” He would have written for Curly to walk out and sing, like [sings:] “Livin’ on a farm / Works for me! / I never lose sight / Of what I got comin’ to me!”

BETH That was a good impromptu alternate Oklahoma.

BROOM So, yes: every song every written says something “in so many words.” But if you pick the thing that is the dramaturgical function of the song to be the thing that the song is saying, you’re missing the opportunity to do so much more.

BETH Yeah. I guess that’s why this didn’t feel like art to me. I was just thinking about the best Disney movies, like Dumbo, or Pinocchio, the older ones, and how they felt greater than what’s on the screen. And this just felt like a well-executed thing on a screen.

BROOM Right. I actually had the thought: if you took out all of the explaining of the story, the art direction is so good that the under-layer, the dream layer, would work by itself. So they should have taken it out!

ADAM So a song like “You’re Welcome,” which gives you a lot of plot background about Maui, but also has the humorous function of distracting her from the fact that he’s putting her in a cave. Does that have the flaws that you’re describing? I’m just trying to understand.

BROOM No, not really. That’s a functional song. But during that song I was thinking: did he really create the sun and the wind? Then of course, yes, “you’re welcome.” There’s no sarcasm there. He’s a cosmic force! Why would we laugh at that?

BETH I was thinking, if he did those things he’d be more than a “demigod.”

BROOM That’s why myth is such a weird thing to treat this way. He lifted the islands out of the sea? Then it’s not actually braggadocious, so to speak, for him to say “you’re welcome.”

ADAM But he did it because he had a void in his heart. That, I thought, was the weakest scene in the whole movie. When she sees that tattoo and says, “You just have to believe in yourself.” And then he can suddenly do his magic again.

BROOM I liked that the tattoo was revealed quickly in the crab song. And we pick it up, because the crab says what it is, if we’re listening fast enough. But then we got to the scene where we had to listen slow to the same thing. I thought, “of course, they had to make it lamer.” The crab sings something like “People didn’t want you / You’re trying to compensate for it.” Then we have to watch this other scene where he says [slo-mo:] “Peeeooople diiidn’t waaant meeee… Iii’m tryyyiiing to cooompeeensaaate…”

ADAM I guess all that is is the magic feather done over again. Well, actually, it’s a lot weaker than the magic feather, because the whole point of the magic feather is that… Well, I don’t know. Maui does have a magic fishhook.

BETH I thought that we were gonna learn that actually he didn’t need it.

BROOM At the end, when the fishhook breaks, and he says, “Well, I’m still Maui!” I know that that’s what they set up to be the arc, but it functionally isn’t. He’s defined by being a magical god who does god things, and now he can’t anymore. What’s he gonna do? They don’t answer it. It was bizarre.

ADAM I was surprised that Heihei was by far the weakest sidekick. I guess that’s obviously intentional.

BROOM It seemed like a satire on sidekicks.

BETH I actually thought they had put him in as a joke for themselves.

ADAM But what a strange joke. I assumed they put him in to be like Wilson the volleyball, because otherwise it’s terrifying and insane that she’s on a boat by herself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But couldn’t he have done anything? I mean, he saved the jewel once, but the jewel drops in the ocean like twenty times! The ocean could have just saved it.

BETH Yeah, the ocean was kind of finicky.

BROOM The ocean will do anything…

ADAM Except when it won’t.

BROOM … right, except when she’s gotta do it herself. But if anything goes wrong, don’t worry, the ocean will take care of it. She doesn’t row all the way to the island at the end, so the ocean pushes her the rest of the way.

ADAM Yeah, or she’s knocked unconscious in a storm and luckily she washes up exactly where she needs to be. Whew!

BROOM That’s what’s weird about doing myth in this way. At the beginning of Mimesis, Auerbach talks about the flat, unpsychological style.

ADAM The world of Greek mythology.

BROOM Right, the style of the Odyssey. Everything is flat, there’s no background, and that this is a certain mode of storytelling.

ADAM Which is just the opposite of having psychological backstory, and trying to spend the whole movie explaining explaining why people do the things they do, and where they find the wellsprings of inner strength to do them.

BROOM Right. Part of the power of those kinds of stories is that your subconscious has to fill that in. And here they say essentially “don’t worry about figuring it out; we figured it out for you. Trust us: it’s exactly the same as The Little Mermaid, so this’ll be easy.”

ADAM I still did really like it though. I found it very entertaining. It’s so beautiful, and it’s so — it feels like it’s handling its material with sensitivity and grace. And I liked the ending. And I liked — I thought they finally got the gender politics sort of effortlessly right.

BROOM Close to effortlessly. The effort shows, but.

ADAM Well, it’s all part of a long history of trying harder and harder, but, like, finally they believably got there, I thought.

BROOM But when Maui does the bit about “Hero to all men — and women! To everyone: to all!” That seemed like self-satire too. It was like they were saying, “You remember how hard we used to have to work at this! Ha ha but we’re way past that, now!”

ADAM It is a little weird when he gives her the speech about “I put a stone, as did my father, and my father’s father, and all…” Whoa.

BETH “Now you.”

ADAM “Now you, and your stone is a seashell,” which isn’t really —

[The waitress appears]

WAITRESS Do you want another bottle of water, or are we switching over to tap?

BETH Let’s switch.

WAITRESS That’s fine!

ADAM Thanks.

WAITRESS Okay, here, you can take the rest of this first since you have some in here. Here you go!

[She pours the remaining water from the bottle into ADAM‘s glass]

ADAM Thanks.

[The waitress goes]

ADAM Glad you guys didn’t want any! Right: the seashell is not actually an appropriate thing to put on the mound, because you can’t put another thing on top of the seashell, Moana!

BETH Crushing it, you can!

ADAM Why do they need to go wayfinding to the other island at the end, even though they’ve already saved their island?

BROOM Are they saying “wayfinding” or “wavefinding”?

BETH Way. With a Y.

BROOM It’s just the actual word “wayfinding.”

BETH Mm-hm.

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM I thought that at first, and then I thought, “oh, no, they’re saying ‘wavefinding,’ they made this thing up to sound magical.”

BETH I thought it was because they’re explorers.

ADAM Oh, just as a hobby?

BETH Yeah, this is what they do now because she’s restored their voyager nature.

ADAM Well, obviously that’s true, but that doesn’t make any sense. But you’re obviously correct.

BROOM Here’s what I wanna know: how did Disney Animation Studios allow this and Lava to be in production at the same time?

ADAM Right. Lava You.

BROOM I think the name of the movie was just Lava but “I Lava You” was the refrain.

ADAM I did think about that as I was watching this.

BETH I had forgotten about that.

BROOM Like, when the goddess lies down and becomes the island, that was exactly the imagery from Lava.

ADAM Maybe that’s where they got the idea for this movie.

BROOM Or vice versa. What’d you guys think of the short, which I can’t remember the name of. Possibly “Paul,” or “Internal Anatomy,” or something like that. [ed.: Inner Workings]

BETH I thought it was good. I was fine with it.

ADAM It was fine.

BETH I liked that… in the middle when he was goofing off and satisfying his desires, I thought, like, “this isn’t a solution. You can’t just run away.” I liked that they had him go back to his job and be happy and then spread the happiness to everyone there.

BROOM I liked that too.

ADAM Yeah, I agree. At first I thought they were just gonna have him quit his job.

BROOM Throw the cell phone in the snow.

ADAM Yeah. Right, thank you. Another movie that I’m surprised has lasted.

BROOM It didn’t last. Nobody likes that movie.

ADAM Yeah, but I still think about it sometimes. “Bracket, ed, colon, Hook, close bracket.” I was putting in your editor’s note. Or you could do it with a hyperlink.

[minor digression about Hook ensues]

ADAM The short: maybe I resented it a little because I’m a corporate lawyer.

BROOM Does that consist of a lot of this? [makes single-finger key-tapping gesture from the short]

ADAM In a larger sense? I don’t know. Does happiness consist of buying sunglasses from the sunglasses girl, and then marrying her?

BETH Maybe!

BROOM Did he marry her?

BETH Yeah, they had two kids.

ADAM In the closing credits.

BETH One looked like her and one looked like him.

BROOM I was kinda distracted during that because the people behind us were unwrapping something really noisily.

ADAM At least they weren’t the girls in front of us, who had the largest hair of anyone who’s never been to a movie before.

BROOM When you sat down, you said “I don’t want to sit in that other seat because there’s a guy in front of me.” And then the muppet with the giant hair came and sat in front of you. Or with a giant hat, right?

BETH The muppet has a hat, yes.

ADAM Why do you think Pua didn’t get to be the sidekick?

BROOM That also seemed like deliberate internal commentary about sidekicks. They set up the pig as the legitimate sidekick — I think that was supposed to be the joke for the savvy audience. “Here’s the likely sidekick, and here’s the garbage sidekick,” and —

[The waitress appears]

WAITRESS These guys are — Did you want me to wrap it up for you or are you still working on it?

ADAM Yeah, you can wrap it. Thank you.

WAITRESS Okay! My friend Edward’s gonna finish you all out. I’m gonna set out along my way.

BETH Oh.

ADAM All right. Thanks very much.

BETH Thank you.

[She goes. Edward clears the plates while we wait.]

BROOM Thank you.

[Edward continues clearing plates.]

ADAM Thanks.

[Edward continues clearing plates. He goes.]

BROOM I genuinely don’t remember what I was saying.

ADAM You were saying that it was a joke about sidekicks.

BROOM Yeah. You know what I was saying. That they deliberately picked the bad one.

BETH Can you just note how many seconds went by during that?

BROOM Yes.

[ed.: 40 seconds from ‘The waitress appears’ to ‘I genuinely don’t remember what I was saying.’]

ADAM What else struck me about this? Um…

BROOM It looked like they were all dolls made of nice soft plastic.

ADAM But they took trouble to show his skin, underneath the tattoo animation, in a way that was believable and appealing.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM The tattoos seemed like a big scheme to keep the traditional animation department alive.

ADAM Was that hand-drawn?

BROOM Yeah, in the credits it said, “hand-drawn animation directed by…”

BETH Hey, whatever! I thought it was cool.

BROOM I agree.

ADAM I liked the grandmother.

BROOM I liked the grandmother too.

BETH I did too. I thought she was a good character.

ADAM I thought she was an appealing mix of comic and wise.

BROOM She was very grandmotherly.

ADAM I liked that she died. That’s a useful thing to teach kids about: that your grandparents will die.

BROOM I thought, “whoa!” when that wave of death comes down the mountainside when she dies. That got to me.

BETH But then she turned into the stingray!

ADAM It was just the wave of her soul force, coming down the mountain.

BROOM But it looked sort of gray in the moment of death. The light went out in the house.

BETH Yeah, all the lights went out —

[The waitress appears with ADAM‘s wrapped leftovers.]

ADAM Thank you.

WAITRESS Mm-hm, thank you very much, sir.

BROOM Have a good night.

[She goes.]

ADAM Are there any other world cultures that have yet to be mined to make a Disney movie? Remember that Big Hero 6 happened?

BETH Eskimos?

BROOM That’s what I just thought of too!

ADAM Eskimos?

BROOM Yeah! They haven’t done one yet. Simple.

ADAM I guess.

BROOM They’ve done two Hawaiian ones, now!

ADAM It’s true. Although this was really more French Polynesia.

BETH Yeah, it felt more Polynesian.

BROOM Is Maui a god beyond Hawaii?

ADAM I don’t know. It just felt more Polynesian generally.

BROOM I also assumed it was in Polynesia, but then when they talked about Maui, I thought, well, that’s what Maui is named after, so.

BETH Well, they had a Hawaii department as well as a Fiji department…

ADAM They’ve never done one in India. Although I guess The Jungle Book is set in India, sort of. I guess more than “sort of.”

BROOM And Mulan is set in China. Have they done one in Japan?

ADAM Well, Big Hero 6, sort of.

BROOM That was in Nouveau Tokyo, or whatever it was called.

ADAM San Fransokyo, I think.

BROOM Has there been a Russian one? There was that faux-Disney Anastasia in the 90s, but I don’t think Disney has done a Russian one. In this new era of glorious detente there will surely be one.

ADAM Although all the fairy tale ones could be in Russia.

BROOM Trust me: the next Disney movie? It’s gonna be Russian. No, none of those fairy tales take place in Russia! The backgrounds are…

BETH They’re Danish.

ADAM There’s no “Peter and the Wolf” thing that they did?

BROOM Is there an Italian one?

BETH and ADAM Pinocchio.

BROOM Oh right. It’s true that it’s Italian. But it’s not very Italian.

BETH French?

BROOM La Belle et la Bête. What about our other European friends? What about Poland? What about Denmark?

ADAM The Little Mermaid at least presumably is set in Denmark. And Frozen is set in, like, pan-Scandinavia.

BETH Australia? Oh, wait, right…

BROOM The Rescuers Down Under.

BETH Of course. Excuse me!

ADAM Is there one set in Germany? Oh, Hunchback of Notre Dame is also set in France.

BETH I don’t think there’s a German one.

ADAM Except insofar as Sleeping Beauty and those others are German.

BROOM Yeah, that’s where I think Snow White takes place. In the Black Forest. Does it not?

ADAM I don’t know that you have to put all of that in.

BROOM And I think The Three Caballeros takes place in Germany.

ADAM Relatively few of them take place in the actual United States. I mean, Dumbo.

BETH Lady and the Tramp.

ADAM Brother Bear. Home on the Range.

BROOM Chicken Little.

ADAM Big Hero 6, sort of.

BETH It’s a crossover.

ADAM I suppose the original Rescuers. And what was the one that was like All Dogs Go To Heaven but wasn’t?

BROOM Oliver & Company. What about Iceland?

ADAM There’s never been a Canadian one.

BROOM Yeah, so we’ve got a northern one, an Alaskan one, or a North Pole one, that’s yet to be made. The Arctic.

ADAM Is it expressly about climate change, or only implicitly?

BROOM I don’t know; was Brother Bear about climate change?

ADAM Too soon. It was just about the environment generally.

BROOM 2003 was “too soon” to be about climate change?

ADAM I thought it was like 1998. Oh, Pocahontas was also set in the United States.

BROOM Pocahontas was sort of about ecological stewardship.

ADAM Well that’s what I was saying when I said it was a familiar Disney theme, and I was just struck more by it this time.

BROOM Bolt is also very American; they travel across the country.

BETH And the Judy Hopps one.

BROOM Zootopia took place in Zootopia.

BETH Okay, but that was America. That was future America.

BROOM Did you know that in the UK that same movie is called Zootropolis? That’s the truth.

ADAM If the Disney themes are “being discontent with where you are” and “establishing your place vis-à-vis your family,” then “environmental trauma” is certainly also one of the themes.

BROOM What do you think it would stir a person to do, if they grew up watching Moana?

ADAM Well, I felt very stirred the first time I watched it to want to save the oceans, and then I felt sad that that’s essentially impossible for a person to do. I felt a sense of deep longing and shame about that.

BETH It made me think about what it means to be chosen to do something. I was thinking about all the other kids on the island — if everyone on the island was “chosen” to do something, it wouldn’t work. There has to be this concept of special-ness.

BROOM That’s like what I said about Pygmalion. It would be better if a Disney movie said: “everyone has dreams; we just happen to be following this one person.” It’s not that the protagonist is Harry Potter, they’re “a person.” But it’s like Disney can’t get that far. Are there any of them that had that quality?

BETH Well that’s why I liked the one with the princess who opened her own business.

ADAM The Princess and the Frog. Also set in the United States.

BETH Because she was just industrious.

ADAM She wasn’t actually a princess, right?

BETH I can’t really remember.

BROOM Maybe she was the princess of the Mardi Gras parade or something and that’s how they got around it. But she was from a rich family, wasn’t she? Oh no, she wasn’t; her friend was rich and she wasn’t.

BETH It was more about deciding to do something and making it happen.

ADAM So you want to see a Disney movie about a little girl whose roommate becomes a Broadway star, and she stays and works in a cafe and is consumed with bitterness.

BETH No! And she decides, “I’m gonna do something for me. I don’t need ‘talent.’ I don’t need to be ‘chosen.'”

BROOM Well, “talent” is good. She just doesn’t need to be chosen.

ADAM She doesn’t need to be the chief’s daughter and be the one who totally changes the way of life for her people. It’s about the taro root girl. She gets married and, you know, she develops some new taro root recipes.

BETH But she can have an exceptional life too! It just doesn’t have to be magical.

BROOM These movies are emotional experiences. ADAM, you’re staying within the mindset of the movie and saying “well, if you’re not the chief’s daughter, you’re a boring nobody.”

ADAM No — everybody has a job on this island.

BROOM But what I’m saying is: the same emotional thrust of the movie — that is, “what happens to you is important” — could be delivered, because that’s how the movie is going to feel, without the movie having to say explicitly that this is happening because everybody agrees that they’re the one and only princess. They could just be “chosen” by the story.

BETH Yes.

ADAM So you think it should have been a movie about a girl who is not the chief’s daughter and it turns out at the end that she wasn’t chosen by the ocean, she just decided to do it all by herself. And the ocean was her magic feather.

BETH Yeah!

BROOM I don’t know if this movie needed to be that way, but —

BETH But I like that concept more than this idea of waiting to get the sign from above that you’re special in some way, so that you can succeed. Because I think that messes with kids.

BROOM My favorite Lin-Manuel line in this was something about “when you hear a voice whisper inside you / that is who you are” or something like that.

ADAM He only wrote half of these songs, you know. Not all of them. He’s doing an entire Disney movie now, which he was engaged to do before Hamilton became a hit.

BROOM Well, this one must have been in the works for some years. I guess he got this on the strength of In the Heights.

BETH But the credits thanked the Hamilton cast.

ADAM Probably because these guys got to go see Hamilton.

BROOM Remember when Rent was like a big, big thing?

ADAM Keenly, yes.

BROOM So in 20 years, presumably people will be saying “remember when there was all that Hamilton going on?”

ADAM But Rent now feels humiliating. To think back on the fact that I loved Rent is embarrassing. I think Hamilton will age better than Rent.

BROOM You think people are generally embarrassed about Rent, and won’t be embarrassed about Hamilton?

BETH I do.

ADAM Yeah, Rent feels super teenage, and not cool teenage.

BROOM It’s based on La bohème! He took La bohème and updated it into the vernacular! It shows that some themes are everlasting! It was so diverse!

ADAM I know! It had a lesbian couple, and a drag queen with HIV…

BROOM Yes! It’s like the vibrant youth reclaiming this important old story! You don’t think people will feel exactly the same about Hamilton in 20 years?

ADAM You mean it’s going to turn out to have been embarrassing?

[Edward appears.]

BETH We’re not gonna — we’re done, thanks.

EDWARD Coffee, tea… ?

BROOM No thanks.

BETH No thanks.

ADAM No, we’ll take the check.

BETH Thank you.

[Edward goes.]

ADAM I mean, I hope not.

BROOM “What’s your name? / My name is Alexander Hamilton…” Just think your way forward, here…

ADAM The President of The United States repeatedly attended Hamilton.

BROOM And look what’s happening to him now. [ed: 1/16/17]

ADAM Although I guess the cast of Rent did perform at the Democratic convention.

BROOM What’s the number of minutes in a year?

ADAM Five-hundred-twenty-five thousand six hundred.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM My Moana sum-up is: there just wasn’t a place for my heart in it. I was able to get stuff out of it because it was rich with skill and good intentions, but with Frozen, for example, it was very easy for me to get caught up emotionally, and with this it was almost impossible.

ADAM Yeah, I don’t think this will be as sticky as Frozen in my memory. Not that I remember Frozen so well, but certainly the songs are gay classics already. I don’t think these songs will endure.

BROOM I hear they’re about to open a sing-along version of this. So there are people who want to sing along with this. Or at least Disney thinks there are.

BETH Well, maybe that’s a way to perpetuate those songs.

ADAM Yeah, you’ve gotta teach them to people.

BETH I agree with your assessment, BROOM. Putting that on the record.

BROOM And yet you liked it better.

BETH I did like it better, because it had those… things in it, that really get me. It’s just about colors. I just like colors.

BROOM Yeah. Palette is the most fundamental issue in these movies.

BETH It had a really great one.

ADAM The next movie is Wreck-It Ralph 2.

BROOM Now that is not a good idea.

ADAM Release date: March 9, 2018.

BETH So more than a year.

ADAM Followed by Gigantic, inspired by Jack and the Beanstalk, release date November 21, 2018.

BETH Okay. So this was it for this year.

ADAM Followed by “TBA” and “TBA.”

BROOM I wish I had liked it more. But I’m pretty tired. I might have liked it more if I had felt better.

BETH I think so. I saw you kind of lolling.

BROOM Yeah, I let myself loll. It was in moments when the movie was specifically disappointing. I would think, “you’re going to embrace me now, right?” and then it wouldn’t. So I’d just put my head down.

[long digression reading headlines about Disney’s upcoming live-action productions and collaborations with Lin-Manuel Miranda]

ADAM Are we done recording?

BETH I think we’re done.

BROOM We can be done.

ADAM Thanks, everyone. See you in 2018.

[This screenshot and the one at the bottom of the page are from the trailer, not the actual film. They’ll be replaced whenever the next entry in this series goes up. (The Big Hero 6 placeholder images have just now been upgraded to the real thing.)]

Full spoilers (and other kinds of spoilage) throughout. The reader is firmly advised to have seen Zootopia — now in theaters — before proceeding.

---

ADAM I thought that was high-class all the way. Solid quality, and pleasing. I’m happy to elaborate on that.

BETH I also liked it very much. I don’t know where I’m landing in terms of how it falls in the canon, but I was really into it. Those are my opening thoughts; we will all elaborate.

BROOM I had a very complicated reaction; I’m not sure I can make a one-sentence opening statement. I wanted to hash it out in conversation. I don’t know what it adds up to in one sentence. And maybe no reaction to a movie is really one sentence. So I’m not going to fake like I have one sentence.

ADAM That’s interesting, because I felt uniformly positively about it. I thought the characters were compelling and inspirational without being one-note, and I thought it was appropriately subtly topical, and it was really beautiful to look at and had a lot of imaginative jokes on the main theme. And I also think that a detective story was a good peg to hang it on, because everyone can find a detective story engaging for two hours, even kids. It wasn’t too complicated for kids to follow but it wasn’t insultingly straightforward either. It was more interesting than just “little girl moves to the big city.” That’s what I was afraid it was going to be, but it was more than that.

BETH Did you predict who the bad guy was?

ADAM I did only once it became clear that the predators were being framed. Because there was only one “prey” in the whole movie, other than Judy.

BROOM I guessed who it was when they got to the drug lab, and not before.

ADAM Yes, for me it was when she said “but who’s been framing all these predators?” which was right before they walked into the drug lab.

BETH I’ll just own up to not guessing. Then when I saw it who it was, I thought, “oh, duh.”

BROOM But I’m proud to say that I did guess, much earlier, that the victims were all suffering from the drug effects of the plant that she had elaborately named.

BETH I also knew it was a drug, but I didn’t put it together with the plant.

ADAM Yeah, if I had gone back and made a lineup of all of the things in the movie that we hadn’t used yet… It was pretty good about using everything it introduced. Even the sloth got reused, in a way that I found pleasing. All right, Broom, so what were your complicated feelings?

BETH Do you have ideological issues?

BROOM I guess you could frame it that way. I’m kind of surprised that you guys don’t immediately know what would be complicated about my response to this; I assumed that everyone would intuitively agree on what was complicated about this movie. But I guess not. The complication has to do with the purported topicality of it — the messaging of it — as it relates to the premise of the anthropomorphic world. Which is not a premise they invented for this movie, it’s a longstanding premise. They tried to both interrogate it and its metaphors, and also keep running with it. I didn’t know how to reconcile — and I was hoping to try to work this out now, unless it’s a just waste of your time because you really didn’t have any of these issues — but I didn’t know how to reconcile the message of it —

ADAM The message being “We are more than our biological origins, and you can be anything you want when you grow up, and don’t stereotype”?

BROOM Yeah, more or less. I took the message of it just to be a standard contemporary anti-bigotry message, as you’d find in any number of editorials and medium.com essays.

ADAM All right, so, on the one hand…

BROOM Well, wait, before we dig into “what Broom thought” — You personally did not have issues in this direction? It really worked for you, or you didn’t “go there,” or… ?

ADAM Well, yeah — though I’m not saying that I’m going to disagree with your view once you articulate it.

BROOM Yeah, but I think that an unarticulated ease with something should usually be left intact. I don’t want to claim that you ought to question what you didn’t question, if it just felt right to you. The important thing is, to you, it didn’t feel like a problem? Because I didn’t come up with my problem to try to be smart; I felt uncomfortable.

ADAM No, I didn’t feel uncomfortable.

BETH I think I’m somewhere in between you. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, but it was also sort of on my mind: “What do I actually think about this?” Like when she was in the press conference saying cringeworthy things, I thought, “well, wait…” This is always my problem with movies: when I’m taken by them, when I’m wrapped up in the watching of them, I’m not really outside of them enough to talk about what I think about their ideologies. “I was just into the movie! What do you want??”

BROOM That’s why I wanted to pause the conversation before I start articulating this further. I think that if a movie worked for you, allowed you to get wrapped up in it, that means that whatever ideology we try to identify in the movie — if we identify it accurately — it’s something that your subconscious is comfortable taking on. I can say for myself that within the first five minutes of the movie — when they explained “This is how our world works: predators used to be predators, but not anymore! Now we live together!” and then they cut to different animals in an audience together, and one type of animal is being “a hick” — I just felt it, I felt immediately very uncomfortable.

BETH Because even the upending of those stereotypes — addressing them at all — is uncomfortable?

ADAM That hick fox — he gets to come back and be a pastry chef.

BROOM Again, I don’t want this to all be about the way I happen to end up expressing it… but I guess I’m really hearing that you guys didn’t have that experience at that moment. So I guess for me the issue is: we only want to watch movies where different animals are different kinds of people because that feels true about the world. And insofar as it feels true, that’s what we — from an ideological standpoint — would call “bigotry.” Now, I personally am very uncomfortable with the public rhetoric around bigotry because I think it doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which that perception of the world is natural and inevitable…

ADAM Natural and inevitable that what?

BROOM We can’t deprogram ourselves by deliberately “upending” these perceptions. Natural and inevitable that people experience other people as, essentially, different kinds of animals. A slow-moving person at the DMV seems like they’re from the slow-moving species of person. That’s a psychological reality, one that cartoons jibe with. At least for me. Do you disagree with that?

ADAM No, sure, I mean, Speedy Gonzales… But the part I’m not following is, what part of that seems uncomfortable to overlay on the way people are with each other?

BROOM Boy, so you really don’t feel it the way I do. Okay, let me see if I can formulate this…

ADAM If it’s too complicated to unpack, we don’t have to.

BROOM I can do it! I’m just reluctant to create a conversation that seems to be about the words I use to describe it, because for me it’s an intuitional thing, and I would rather you counter what I’m saying with your intuitions. But I guess your intuitions were copacetic.

ADAM My intuition was that all Disney movies have messages; in recent years they’ve all tended to be politically progressive messages. If you think about The Lion King as an early, ham-fisted politically progressive message, and then compare it to something like this…

BROOM I consider The Lion King to be the turning point, toward deliberate messaging.

ADAM But they all have deliberate messages. You know, Dumbo‘s message is “believe in yourself.”

BROOM But I think a refrain in our discussions about many of those earlier Disney movies was that while we might pick apart politically incorrect things that occur in them, probably the creators never consciously thought about those things. Those movies were a revealing of subconscious assumptions, because the artists were just using their intuitions to work out what would make a good story. There was a relative lack of deliberate philosophizing, which is exactly what allowed us to see the various stereotypes and subconscious ideologies. Whereas since The Lion King, it really feels like they run everything through a conscious censor, to make sure it makes sense, and then try to say something deliberately.

ADAM They’re not all expressly political. The message of Lilo and Stitch was “Ohana means Family, and Family means no one gets left behind,” which is not a political slogan per se. But here, what I appreciated about it was that it was a little smarter than The Lion King. The heroine has her own unexamined prejudices, and that creates problems; but she overcomes them, she’s not a bad person. And you identify with her stereotypes at the beginning, because the fox is shifty, he is a kind of con-man, but as you get to know him, it turns out not only is there a backstory that explains that, but also he’s so much more than that. It’s easy to identify with the progress of the hero, and that makes it a little more impactful. That’s why I didn’t feel uncomfortable with it. And I didn’t feel that they were essentializing any of the animals…

BROOM You didn’t? “Essentializing” is exactly the word. Why else were any of those characters assigned to those animals, if not the essentialization — racialization — geneticization — of personality traits?

ADAM But the villain was a sheep! And there was that hammy gay tiger who loved Gazelle! And —

BROOM But those are just a few foreground story-inversions of the actual operative premise of the anthropomorphic world. The whole idea of Zootopia — when we first heard about this movie two years ago, we thought, “A city of animals? That hardly even counts as a premise!” It’s just such a basic, ground-level thing, in cartoons. It goes back to Aesop. Why would we ever tell a story about a talking animal? Because certain people seem like that kind of animal. But what do we mean when we say people “seem like” an animal? We mean something very subjective, an impression, which nonetheless we might share with our whole community of peers, to whom it seems equally intuitive. Like, guess what, hicks with a Southern accent seem like they might well be a different species from me! And all my friends agree, it does kinda seem like hicks are a different species. So hey, you know what would be a great way to represent them in a cartoon: as a literally different species. That feels intuitive and satisfying. So then this movie says “We’re going to actually talk about this head-on,” but…

ADAM But for the most part, it wasn’t like all the rabbits only talked to other rabbits. I don’t think she even saw any other rabbits in the city.

BROOM I mean: what do the predators eat? — in this scenario where we’re claiming that they’re both actually and specifically predators, and not, at the same time.

ADAM They didn’t get into that I assume because it would be uncomfortable for human audiences, thinking about the sources of our food.

BROOM The metaphor is that minorities who cause fear in the majority because of stereotypes are depicted here as “predators,” but in this world they have none of the actual traits that predators have — except for the ones that are funny for throwaway jokes in the course of a scene. That all puts us in a very uncomfortable place. If we want to see each other as equals who should be treated equally, the premise of our depiction cannot be that we’re different species based on our different personalities or social roles.

ADAM I understand that, but… they were all mammals! They didn’t really get into their essential species natures. This is the first one I can think of where there was no love story, and I guess that was deliberate, because that would be a whole other level of uncomfortable conversations, if there had been any kind of sex.

BROOM How is what you just said not an expression of exactly the kind of stuff that the movie was ostensibly telling us to get beyond? Are the fox and the rabbit in the movie “just people,” who are essentially equal and can be in love? Or are they essentially different, in a “fox vs. rabbit” kind of way? In which case, what does that correspond to?

ADAM It doesn’t map on perfectly to human society, because they are essentially different, which is why there were no cross-species couples in the movie, because rabbits can’t mate with foxes.

BROOM Right.

ADAM But on the other hand, the movie’s not saying “therefore people are different species.” That’s just carrying the metaphor too far.

BROOM Then where does the metaphor end? What is the metaphor, in your mind?

ADAM The metaphor is that, like… I don’t think it does, nor did it feel to me like it — It neither intended to nor unintentionally landed on “different types of people are different species.”

BROOM You don’t think that’s the metaphor?

ADAM No. My mind didn’t go there while I was watching it.

BROOM I think your mind didn’t go there because that’s been the subconscious premise of all anthropomorphic cartoons, forever. Like, if there’s a Sidney Greenstreet character in a cartoon, the huge crime boss that you go into the back room to meet, and of course he’s a hippopotamus because hippopotamuses are really big — it works just like a caricature does, it says “Let’s admit that our response to this ‘type,’ when we talk about ‘types,’ is essentializing.” When they talk about “typecasting” in Hollywood, they’re talking about the fact that we see each other with these prejudiced eyes that are reponsive to superficial things. And a cartoon that shows such things as different kinds of animals, and has fun with it, is basically an embrace of that aspect of our nature. Which I think is good, because I’m very wary of all the rhetoric now about seeing past race. I think that you can’t deliberately see past what you are seeing, and cartoons show us that. So Zootopia was a cartoon in that spirit, that nonetheless was — on a storytelling and philosophical level — trying to say “Here’s what we’re gonna do about it.” I felt like the cartoon itself reveals why we can’t just think our way out of it, “nice” our way out of it. Here’s a cartoon where we’re watching a rabbit with big eyes getting beat up by a fox, and you can’t deny that the scene makes sense to people.

ADAM Right, but then a half hour later, you find out that the fox, when he was eight, got beat up by a bunch of rabbits.

BROOM Different fox, but yes.

ADAM And did that feel unreasonable?

BROOM That was in the context of “learning,” in a very deliberate way. That felt to me like “this one bit of the subconscious has for the moment risen into the view of the consciousness, so what do we say about it?” But we’re still surrounded by a sea of the subconscious, and the subconscious says: “the world is a city of different kinds of animals that are hilariously different from each other, and there’s a sight gag for each one.” That’s the unexamined ground-level. Then, yes, ever since The Lion King, there’s also this additional conscious element that purports to be an examination of it.

BETH I’m trying to think about how I would see it if I were a child, what I would take away from it. And I originally was angry with the parents for being so — you know: “We can’t expand our boundaries. Learn to be complacent; that’s the way to have a happy life.” I think rejecting that has been a message in Disney movies all along: “Push your boundaries! See what you can be! You can do anything!”

ADAM “I wanna see what’s over that ridge!”

BROOM Yeah, or as the lyric had it in this movie, “I wanna try everything!”

BETH And I think that’s a good message. And I like how it kept showing that she was put in these fear-inducing situations and refused to succumb to them. The race stuff is more complicated. Because I think what it wants me to take away — which is sort of what Sesame Street wanted me to take away — is that the world is made up of all different types of people, all different types of creatures, and you don’t necessarily know anything about them just by looking at them. You have to spend time with everyone and get to know them. And I think that’s what it was trying to say. You can’t make a judgment before you know what someone is about. Very basic kids’ stuff, but not at all offensive, I think. It’s not like I’m not hearing what you guys are saying, but I think — as far as messaging goes — it did it with a pretty light touch, in an unobjectionable way.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t come away thinking “Idris Elba is a water buffalo with whom I cannot mate.” Although I get what you’re saying. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about it in those terms, but.

BROOM So, during the pivotal press conference scene, when she says, “well, there might be a biological component…”

BETH I wanted her to say “This is just what I heard the doctor say in the lab!”

ADAM That was pretty negligent of her.

BROOM I think they tried to introduce that she’s frazzled by the situation so she’s just reaching for things to say.

BETH Yeah. I wanted that to be more explicit, for my own child- empathy reasons.

BROOM I could see a whole story conference playing out, about how to set up that beat. But did you not at any point think, “Well, I don’t know what the rules of this world are! For all we know, the thing she’s saying could be true!” Because it’s not a question of any real principle, it’s just up to the Lords Of Disney, the writers who made up this fantasy story. Our faith — that these predators aren’t actually reverting to their original predator-nature — is purely a political-correctness faith. Because as far as anthropomorphic animals go…

ADAM But it was also set up by the whole movie. By the logic of the story — we’d been told at the very outset that predators and prey had overcome their tendencies…

BROOM Yeah: how and by what means? Total magic! We have no idea!

ADAM Right, but we already knew that was part of the internal logic —

BROOM So at this point in the story we’re challenged to have faith in that, a thing which has been completely glossed over…

ADAM It was obvious that Emmett Otter hadn’t suddenly turned into a bad person. That’s why they made him seem so meek.

BETH Yeah, I think that’s why they used Emmett Otter as the primary case.

ADAM Do otters eat meat? I don’t even know what otters eat. I guess so.

BETH Fish, I thought.

ADAM I guess that makes you a predator. There were no fish in this movie. Well, it is a mammal city.

BROOM I felt like they were very much in “The Bell Curve” territory here. The character says, “Well, if the science shows it…” and we the audience are supposed to be shouting “NO! No, the science would never show that!” And it has nothing to do with the movie — there’s no actual science to evaluate here — it just has to do with our political anxiety that it could turn out that way. Which in this particular movie…

ADAM But it was flatly refuted by this movie.

BROOM In The Three Little Pigs, guess what! The wolf is a dangerous wolf! That’s also a cartoon with talking animals. In this movie, at the beginning, a rabbit voice-over tells us that wolves are not dangerous anymore, and then later in the movie it’s called into question whether wolves are dangerous anymore. There’s no philosophical principle to which we’re referring here.

ADAM Understood. But given that the whole setup of the movie, for the first hour or so, is that predators don’t eat prey, suddenly when a mild-mannered family-man otter goes berserk in the back of a limousine…

BROOM Like I said, I was able to guess what was going on! Well before that, in fact.

BETH So would you not want your children to see this because you find it problematic?

BROOM No, I don’t think it does any damage. But… Well, actually my personal feeling — and I recognize that this is a fringe point of view — I think it does a certain kind of damage in suggesting that this underlayer of what’s going on — the basic perception of “different animals are different from each other, a predator is different from prey” — it suggests that society will be better off if we all fervently deny that that’s what we perceive. This felt like a cartoon about the virtue of that kind of denial, which is something that I already find discouraging in contemporary culture.

BETH That’s a good way of saying what your problem with it is. I get that.

BROOM I’m disheartened by all the public rhetoric about how much good we can do by denying — not what “is true” in some objective sense, but what seems true to us. And cartoons are about what seems true to us.

ADAM But I did think this movie was more progressive — or rather, a more second-order take on this problem. It didn’t actually say that all of the animals are the same, or that you can’t see that they’re different species.

BROOM For example: all Italians look like rats. [ed.: shrews]

ADAM Like, Judy was cute, and she did have bunny-like characteristics, but they were part of the benign variation in the grand mosaic that was the political fabric of this community. It wasn’t saying that she was not a bunny, or that bunnies are identical to elephants. If it had just been two different types of animals, it would have been creepier and more unsettling, but the fact that it was a thousand types of animals, it felt easier to take. And nobody was saying that all animals are the same — but all animals have the same rights. That kind of pluralism felt intuitively comfortable to me.

BROOM I was uncomfortable even before the plot went there, just in the fact that it was about whether she can be a cop. “No bunny has ever been a cop!” “Well, I’m going to, because I don’t believe in those limitations.” And then there are overt and overwhelming physical reasons — she’s like one-tenth the size of all the other cops.

ADAM Right, but then it turns out in the training that she has other virtues that compensate for that. She’s able to use her lightness and quickness to surmount the tundra wall!

BETH She has ingenuity!

ADAM She’s able to dash around the big rhino and make him hit himself in the face!

BROOM [feigning revelation] Ohhhhh! I see!

ADAM The movie explicitly addresses your objection and dispatches it.

BROOM No. Because my objection is not to the logic of the story — Does she get to be a cop? Oh she did, you’re right! I forgot! — I’m saying that visually, the impact of this as animation — what are we experiencing? This is not a thing that exists in the real world…

ADAM Well it is, actually.

BROOM Where someone is absurdly one-tenth the size of all their coworkers? That doesn’t happen!

BETH I actually had the thought, “They’ll need to make a tiny badge for her! They don’t need to do that with people.”

ADAM When women first started becoming police officers, it was a common objection that they were not physically as strong as men. But then it turns out that there are other things, other ways that women are different that makes them more talented police officers, like their emotional intuitiveness… Again, not to be essentialist… But I think gender is an instructive example. Gender is not like race; everyone acknowledges that men and woman are physically different in certain ways, and even emotionally different in certain ways, but it’s not… People nowadays ought to think that men and women have the same rights and the same ability to aspire to the same things, notwithstanding — in fact, precisely because of — their partial differences.

BROOM Wait. I mean, I recognize that that’s become a standard bit of rhetoric, that last part of your sentence there, but I’d like to hear you back it up: what do you mean, “because of their differences, that’s why they have equal rights”? How does that work?

ADAM No, I don’t mean because of their differences they have equal rights, I mean that once we acknowledge that the difference between men and women is benign and something to be celebrated, then it’s possible to appreciate the ways that men’s and women’s differences can inform and better institutions, as opposed to be something to be overcome. I’m thinking of, like, Sonia Sotomayor talking about “a wise Latina” on the Supreme Court, and why her different perspective is valuable. I mean, first-order feminism was all about claiming that women were the same as men, and latter-day feminism is all about saying that women are different than men, and not only is that okay, but it’s actually beneficial to men that women’s perspectives be included. So, to me, you’re right, with race it’s a much creepier thing to imply that there are physical or essential differences…

BETH But there are. I mean, it’s “creepy” only because we’re supposed to believe that everyone’s equal, but it’s…

BROOM My attitude about all of this stuff is that, like, race, gender — whatever categories you want to put people in — they have statistical meaning, but not individual meaning. But they do have individual meaning to people subjectively, because the way we experience the world is in terms of categories. And a cartoon of animals is about that experience, that unshakeable experience, that there are categories of things. It’s actually comforting to see a cartoon that says “Y’know, a little weaselly guy? He’s kinda like a weasel!” And you think, “Yeah! He is! Someone doing a Steve Buscemi impression is kinda like a little weasel character!” And that is bigotry. That is the essential thing that society is always trying to stamp out.

ADAM You’re saying this movie wanted to have its cake and eat it too, in that way.

BROOM I think the public rhetoric wants to have its cake and eat it too, and this movie was exposing that, in, to me, such a naked way. A cartoon about animal-people, I’ve always felt, is a bastion of admission that we do in fact see the world this way.

ADAM Because Robin Hood is tricky, and the rhino guards are stupid.

BROOM Yes! They’re rhinos! They’re leather-skinned, beady-eyed thugs!

ADAM I was thinking about Robin Hood a lot during this movie.

BROOM Yeah, because Nick was like Robin Hood.

ADAM He was like the fox Robin Hood meets George Clooney.

BETH A little bit.

BROOM Beth, did you identify with Judy? When she was crying, I thought, “she’s crying like Beth.”

BETH Yeah, I did.

BROOM ‘Cause you thought those were your parents, and that’s where you’re from, and now you’re in the big city.

BETH Not exactly. But when she was crying I thought, “That’s kind of like me.” So we both had that thought.

ADAM So this may have been the most flawlessly executed gender progressivism in all of our Disney movies thus far, and it was helpful that it wasn’t a love story, in that sense.

BROOM Do you know why that was the case? Because they didn’t mention gender once in the whole movie. That is what makes it an actual subconscious, intuitive progressivism.

ADAM Although I’m sure it was very conscious at Disney.

BROOM Well, I think that’s been a long process of being anxious about something that actually could have come so much more easily. We didn’t actually have to go through Pocahontas to get here. All you have to do is just make the movie. No one needed to see Pocahontas before they could accept Judy Hopps.

ADAM I don’t know. [My nephews] love Dora the Explorer, but I don’t think Dora the Explorer could have been made without Pocahontas.

BETH It’s so hard to say. But I’m kind of more on Adam’s side, because these things become part of the culture and then they seem like they were always there.

BROOM I think things become part of people’s actual subconscious interpretations of the world, and then that’s what they depict.

BETH Well, everything feeds everything.

BROOM But I don’t think that Lady — and the Tramp — was depicted as such a “lady” in need of a “tramp” because the writers thought “Let’s reinforce this stereotype!” It’s just what they had in them.

ADAM But they’ve been, like, thrashing their way out of it. Every single movie for the last thirty years has been trying and trying and trying. I know that Brave is not a Disney movie, but… Each one has been this, like, two-point-oh, three-point-oh, version of a feminist protagonist.

BROOM Yes, I totally agree. This movie just did it with grace: the protagonist is this bunny who happens to be female but it’s never necessary to mention it.

ADAM Although I think the fact that she was female worked into the story, you know? There were no other female cops.

BETH There was one other.

ADAM But most of the cops were male.

BROOM Maybe I’m just expressing my own private experience of this movie in saying that the feminism didn’t seem labored, but it didn’t seem labored in that respect. And I don’t want to learn the wrong lesson and say “Well, they had to go through thirty years of hard labor to get to that point.” They didn’t earn this by doing those other movies.

ADAM But they learned how to do this. Which was not intuitive to them.

BROOM It’s not the same “they”! There’s a generational shift over thirty years.

BETH I think culture was going through these same cogs, you know, in the Clinton era, so that was what was being reflected in Pocahontas.

ADAM As you probably know, there’s been a kerfuffle in the last few days because Hillary Clinton praised Nancy Reagan for having “started a national conversation about AIDS,” and people freaked the fuck out.

BETH They really freaked out.

ADAM Right. And then yesterday, Hillary Clinton released a long Medium post in which she ate her words, and everyone is happy now.

BROOM Well, she ate her words for two sentences, and then just talked about her good record on AIDS.

BETH Are they genuinely happy?

ADAM Yes. Everyone seems to have laid down their arms. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that changed between the 80s and today, and things that seem totally right-as-rain and normal today — there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get to a place like that. And this movie makes me think of that, because Disney has been trying so hard not to be “the princess studio” for so long, and so badly, but finally, this felt more or less natural and graceful. And God bless you, John Lasseter. Finally you guys have more or less figured it out, and I’m glad of it.

BROOM Also in Inside Out, the gender was not a key issue in that movie.

BETH That’s right.

ADAM As we start to talk about “why are there no cross-species relationships” and “what do the predators eat” — it got me thinking: making a movie like this is actually very ontologically complicated! Figuring out how to depict a universe like this that will carry you along briskly enough that you don’t start thinking about, like, “where’s all the animal poop?”

BETH I like that we saw a preview for a movie in which an animal poops, right before this started.

BROOM That was the first onscreen animated defecation I’ve ever seen, and it was in the preview.

BETH And it was a bunny.

BROOM I believe that in the Silly Symphony era, when they made “The Tortoise and the Hare,” and they put a bunch of different animals in the bandstand cheering them on, they just drew it, without any reflection at all. Nobody talked about how that world worked; they drew it and subconscious stuff came out. And nowadays — first of all because of how things are nowadays politically, but also because the animation production process is so long and elaborate — it’s gotta get discussed. I mean, I’m sure there are still concept artists for whom the work is just a pouring out of the subconscious: “I just kind of imagined how their world might look and I thought maybe the traffic light would look like this!” And that stuff ends up in the movie, and something subconsciously true is being revealed there. But like you said, this is a complicated question, and one that the movie takes on in a very direct way.

ADAM But only in part. There’s a lot of sight gags about it, but they really keep you moving along. Part of the reason the movie felt so refreshing was because it moved so fast, and they had to move you so fast so that you wouldn’t stop to think about things like this.

BROOM But they also asked you to stop and think about it.

BETH At the end, the bunny and the fox are partners, but I’m not ruling out that they could get together.

ADAM Yeah, they’re like Scully and Mulder.

BETH They’re like Scully and Mulder, there’s a flirtation there, so in my child’s heart, I’m rooting for them, and I don’t have a problem with it. I’m not thinking about the problem.

BROOM Sure.

ADAM What’s in the natural history museum in Zootopia?

BROOM I thought we were going to see people in there. I was interested to see.

ADAM I thought the nudist colony was one of the funniest jokes in the movie, precisely for this reason.

BROOM Yes, it was funny. It can be funny to knowingly play with conventions. But it means rising above something that made intuitive sense and artificially distancing yourself from it, going “Ha ha, what were we thinking!” And there’s always a real answer to the question “what were we thinking.” When you’re making fun, you’re always avoiding the real answer.

ADAM The Wikipedia “Talk” page is really going to get into these problems!

BROOM But — keeping in mind that there was like a 20-person team credited with “Story” — consider: this movie did not inherently have to begin with a narration stating that “Predators and prey used to be as you know them to be in the real world, but now they just get along.” They could have just started the story. Certainly the Silly Symphony of “The Tortoise and The Hare” just started right in; they didn’t narrate us in with “In this world, the animals act like people! Let’s see what they’re up to today!” Whereas this movie very conspicuously started with “Hey, you think that predators attack prey. Well, here they used to. But now they don’t anymore.” That’s throwing down a gauntlet and saying “Think about this!” And then later in the movie they really do make you think about it, because there’s a scene where at a press conference about whether predators are dangerous, a bunny says that maybe they have a genetic proclivity to be dangerous. You can’t tell me “oh, it just carries you along, you just roll with it!” This is a movie about a flub at a press conference! It’s about Hillary Clinton saying the wrong thing! Very explicitly.

BETH Yeah.

[digression about Hillary ensues]

ADAM So if I had sat down to write a movie about “all the animals live in a city together”… I mean, the mind boggles at all of the world-design challenges that that entails. Yes, I guess the rodents would have to live in a little town, and I guess the penguins would have to live…

BETH Right, there would have to be a very cold place.

ADAM Right, and a very hot place. Although if they have to go to the bank, what do they do? Well, you saw that water buffalo going through the blow-dryer before he gets on the subway, so I guess… Anyway, as a kid, my mind would have spiraled out of control thinking about these things.

BROOM At the beginning they showed some of the weather machinery, and I was surprised. “They’re really going to take the time to show how there’s snow there and rain there?”

ADAM They showed that?

BROOM They showed snow-belching machines and then rainforest showerheads, when she was on the train at the beginning listening to Shakira.

BETH It seems like what you keep coming back to is that everything is very consciously designed, in a way that it didn’t used to be, and that stories have become so much about integrating political agendas…

ADAM About answering objections.

BETH Yeah, starting from a defensive standpoint instead of just a “let’s tell a story” standpoint.

BROOM I think it doesn’t actually start there, but it goes there, with a sense of purpose about it.

BETH Because we’re so aware of all the criticisms that might be lobbied.

BROOM As soon as a movie starts up and shows cute animals of different species interacting like different “types” of people, I feel like “Okay, we’re in the politically incorrect world of gut feelings. I get it, I’m all for it, and I’m happy to watch this cartoon.” But then what the animals are talking about is “How are we going to get over our differences? Maybe we don’t actually have any differences!” and my head immediately starts throbbing. I feel like “Oh man, they’re screwed! They’re in for it now!” And that’s how I felt the whole time. I said I had a complicated reaction, so all that’s the discomfort side of it. I also thought it was great! I had a great time watching it; I love that they finally did a noir mystery.

ADAM I thought about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but of course that wasn’t a Disney movie.

BROOM Sure it was.

ADAM Wasn’t it Touchstone Pictures?

BROOM Touchstone was just Disney’s adult distribution arm. Yeah, it was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which was already supposed to be like old Humphrey Bogart movies. And it was like L.A. Confidential. It was a New York noir and an L.A. noir mashed together. The city in which she arrived at the beginning was totally New York, and the city in which they investigated the mystery was totally L.A.

ADAM There was an actual intersection of Tujunga and Vine, which I think is in Burbank where the Disney Animation Studio is.

BETH There were lots of cute gags.

ADAM I liked the gag with escalator and the giraffe. I liked the gag with “Mr. Big” — even though it’s sort of obvious. When my high school did Guys and Dolls, they cast the Collins twins, of NBA fame, as the bodyguards for the shortest guy in school. So I’d seen that gag already.

BROOM When the woman was crossing Fifth Avenue and the donut was coming at her, and she’s saying [New Jersey accent] “Oh your shoes are to die for” or whatever, I thought, “Huh, they put in ‘a Jew’ and the Jew is a vole,” or whatever she was [ed.: shrew]. Then later: “Oh, she was an Italian.” Well, it really comes to the same thing.

BETH I really thought she was a Kardashian type.

BROOM She was a New Jersey Italian.

ADAM But they were from The Godfather — that’s a whole other country.

BROOM But that’s just it. A person could actually be Italian. Nobody at this table is, but it would just be like being ourselves, except we’d happen to be Italian…

ADAM But they weren’t really Italian, they were from The Godfather… Okay, I mean, I get it —

BROOM Understand: my discomfort when I thought she was a Jew was not, like, “Those are my people! How can you do this to me?” It was more like “Don’t you know that by your own rules you’re not allowed to do this?” Don’t they realize the dissonance? That’s basically the issue. Like, the whole movie is very carefully about the fox, and let’s be real clear about what the fox is not: he is not black. The fox is Jason Bateman; the fox is not black. She’s afraid of him, she carries pepper spray because of him, he’s a “predator” who’s not actually inherently dangerous but grew up being treated that way so now he’s cagey… but he is not black, he’s Jason Bateman.

ADAM I had forgotten that George Clooney is the voice of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe that’s why I was thinking about George Clooney.

BETH Well, but also the glasses…

ADAM He was hot. Let’s just be honest.

BROOM Which one, Fantastic Mr. Fox, or this fox?

ADAM This fox.

BROOM He was no Robin Hood.

BETH I would agree that Robin Hood is sexier than this guy.

ADAM I don’t know, I liked this guy a lot. He was kind of a wiseacre.

BETH Eh, he had a polyester shirt…

BROOM Adam, in the pantheon of furry-dom, Robin Hood will always be at the top. This guy is just, like, supporting a pilaster at the bottom.

ADAM I kind of liked Gazelle’s tiger dancers with the glitter on their faces.

BETH I knew you did. They had some good moves.

BROOM I thought the idea of “Gazelle” was pretty funny.

ADAM So was that desk cop tiger who was into donuts gay?

BROOM and BETH Yes.

ADAM Okay. He was playing, like, the gay friend from Mean Girls.

BETH He was “everyone’s best gay friend.” Which, again, I guess you can raise questions about…

ADAM So do you think a gay tiger can have an interspecies romance, because it’s non-procreative?

BROOM Did you guys really not experience some kind of internal buzzer when she says “Bunnies can call each other cute but it’s kind of offensive coming from you,” and he says, “Oh, and here I am, some stereotype of a donut-eating cop,” and then she says “You actually have a donut caught under your neck fat”…

BETH Yeah, so, what are you doing, movie?

BROOM Yeah, did you not have a moment of thinking “This is all amusing but what is the movie?” I’m not offended, but what is this?

BETH Yes. I kept asking, like, “So are you just trying to confuse us out of being critical of this, because you’re so aware that you’re, like, aware on top of aware?”

BROOM I want to be clear that I was never once “offended” by anything in this movie. It was all very easy to take, no problem. But talking about whether these movies are “dreams” or “theses”…

ADAM This felt like a thesis to you.

BROOM This felt like… an anxiety dream.

BETH Do you think that in ten years this will seem like an outdated way of making a movie about this subject?

BROOM Yes. I don’t think this will age well as an issue movie. But I think the detective story in it will make it watchable and it will continue to be sold for decades.

BETH So what would you liken it to, in the canon?

ADAM I assume Broom will liken it to the vulture Beatles in The Jungle Book.

BROOM No. I don’t think this exact thing existed before. The vulture Beatles were there just because some animator drew them and thought “it’s funny if we draw mop-tops, like on those silly mop-topped boys who are so famous.” And that’s it. I don’t think this kind of overthinking existed back then. It didn’t exist prior to The Lion King.

ADAM Well, they were making fairy tales, before.

BETH Right, they weren’t doing a lot of original stories.

BROOM Seriously: when the protagonist is sitting opposite the new mayor and saying “because of my gaffe at the press conference I don’t think I will be a good front for the new racial politics of the police department,” I was thinking “this is not a Disney movie! It’s a now movie.” And I was also wondering about the little kids in the audience — what is that worth to them? Thankfully, the lighting was really pretty the whole time.

ADAM It was really pretty to look at.

BROOM I wish everyone’s eyes had been smaller. Other than that, the look was great.

BETH I wish her eyes weren’t purple. That was distracting to me.

ADAM That just made her feel like an anime hero. What did you think of the lemmings that work at Lehman Brothers — I mean “Lemming Brothers”?

BROOM You tell me. Is that where you felt like you were depicted?

ADAM Was that a sly Wall Street joke? I guess so.

BETH Did you see the ad for “Zuber”?

ADAM “Migrate yourself.” I liked that the different species of animals had different logos on their iPhones.

BROOM I didn’t notice that. I saw that she had a carrot.

ADAM Yes, but the mayor or somebody had a paw.

BROOM I had the thought at one point that the DVD era — or Blu-ray era, or streaming era; the “you’re gonna watch it a thousand times at home” era — has created this aesthetic where they really pack stuff into the screen, which creates a whole different experience. It’s a little alienating; it doesn’t feel as much like you’re the intended audience. There’s the feeling that stuff is being lost on you constantly.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t catch all of the movies that the weasel was hawking.

BROOM I saw that the three old ones were familiar, and then he said “even movies that haven’t come out yet,” and I tried to vacuum them up with my eyes but I couldn’t take it all in. But guess who will: people who buy it on Blu-ray.

ADAM [My nephews.] I think they’ll really like this. And this is a good soft introduction for kids to noir, which I approve of.

BROOM I kind of wish there were a politically-unburdened mystery investigation Disney movie.

[digression ensues about Jessica Rabbit]

ADAM I do think the pace helped forestall objections. This was a lot more frenetically paced than a movie from the past. It had so many scenes in it, so much happened, and there were so many characters. That was satisfying.

BETH And so many little cut-away jokes.

BROOM I will register a minor beef. They should not do double callbacks. A single callback is very satisfying.

ADAM They did a double callback to the pen.

BROOM Yeah. “It’s called a hustle.” The second time isn’t satisfying! You get to do it once!

BETH Yeah. That’s just, like, a basic rule.

BROOM And at the very end there was another one between the two of them.

ADAM Well, they kept calling each other “Dumb bunny,” “Sly bunny,” “Sly fox,” “Dumb fox.”

BROOM They just went a second round on a couple of things. You can’t do it twice!

BETH Well, maybe kids like that stuff.

BROOM They do.

ADAM Should we read the New York Times review?

BETH Yes. Which I think said it was more for grownups for kids.

BROOM I think texturally, and zanily, there was plenty to keep kids interested. Those kids in the theater stayed quiet the whole time.

BETH Yeah. They were into it.

BROOM But it still hurts my feelings, in a way. Because I feel like animation, this kind of pure world of the imagination, is the antidote to a lot of the anxieties that burden our public culture…

BETH You feel like no one can be free.

ADAM It’s a “critic’s pick!”

BROOM Of course it is! It was very good! I feel like in some ways this is a five-star top-of-their game movie. I just also wanted to scrub certain things out of it.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM That seems awfully offhand of the New York Times. Surely they recognize that these movies are important.

ADAM Yeah, that was kind of too short, too B-grade.

BETH It was dismissive, in a way.

BROOM It’s weird! Doesn’t the New York Times realize that…

ADAM That we’ve been doing this project for five years? More than that.

BROOM Eight.

BETH So what’s the next Disney release?

[we look it up]

BROOM 56: Moana, November 23, 2016.

BETH So Thanksgiving.

BROOM And 57: Gigantic, March 9, 2018.

ADAM I guess King of the Elves has been put on ice.

[Conversation continues very loosely. Too loosely to represent here. Then we decide to close it up.]

BROOM It had a lot of great stuff in it. In some ways it was a very satisfying movie.

ADAM I would recommend this, Madeline. Madeline will have already seen it by the time she gets around to reading this.

BROOM None of my reservations are reservations about the watching of this existing movie. They’re just about whether the existence of this movie is the ideal state for society. But guess what: here it is. It’s Zootopia folks! We’re livin’ in it!

BETH You could say that about so many things, though. Should this have been made? Should anything have been made?

ADAM The next one is the prequel, about the Zootopia civil rights movement. Which is actually much more serious; a lot of dead bunnies in that movie. Maybe the predators eat soylent, or something.

BROOM That’s it! They eat people! Where are the people? They’re being ground into meat.

BETH The fox was really into those blueberries.

BROOM Foxes do like blueberries, right? They must eat more than just mice.

ADAM I mean, what did Robin Hood eat?

BETH Everyone was really into that pie.

ADAM It was like a vegan paradise.

BETH I think that’s what we were meant to believe, that they all just eat vegetables.

BROOM It was made very clear to us in the nudist scene that they have no genitalia, so we know that things work very differently in their world. Maybe they all only exist, like, inside a computer, in a virtual reality, like in The Matrix. That would explain all these inconsistencies. All right, thanks, guys. See you again in November.

[I considered redacting the spoilers in the conversation below, but on reflection, I don’t think there’s anything very precious about the surprises in this movie. Consider yourself spoiler warned: the following conversation gives away absolutely everything that happens. See the movie first, why don’t you. Why not.]

[Also, a more basic warning: This is by far by far the longest of these conversations. For no good reason.]

[Seriously. I considered posting it in two parts but decided that would just be a needless formality: pacing yourself appropriately is ultimately up to you, the reader. Ergonomic microbreaks are encouraged.]

---

ADAM I should say first: I did enjoy it. But it had almost no Disney Animation DNA left in it, which was a little wistful, coming at the end of this project, or at least the trailing edge of this project. It had a lot of Pixar, it had a lot of Marvel, it had a lot of Blade Runner. And I got a faint but persistent note of Scooby-Doo for much of it.

BROOM For sure.

ADAM Almost every influence but Disney, actually.

BROOM There was Disney DNA. The protagonist has no parents, so that he can go on a free journey of self-discovery, and work out his emotional issues. And — I guess it’s more out of the Pixar playbook, but still — the scene where he sees the video of his brother, and realizes that he’s on the wrong path, that hate is not the way… That’s not really an old-school Disney formula beat, but it’s a medium- to new-school Disney beat, right?

ADAM What are you thinking of?

BROOM You know: the Lion King goes into exile but then realizes he wants to live his destiny and be who he truly is.

ADAM It was a lot sadder than most Disney movies, in its literal events.

BETH Well, Bambi…

BROOM And The Lion King more recently.

ADAM That’s true.

BROOM We all talked about how Lilo and Stitch was a wonderful updating of some of those emotions. This had some similarities with that.

ADAM And I guess there’s a note of Brother Bear here too.

BETH I thought it was great. I really, really enjoyed it, and didn’t really have many problems with it. I mean, I’m interested to hear what your problems are…

ADAM Well, I don’t want to overemphasize my problems, because I really liked it. It was just a very conventional plot that was sort of dressed up with a lot of…

BETH … stuff.

ADAM But the stuff was all very satisfying.

BETH I really enjoyed that it was a fully-realized world, that it took place in this San Francisco/Tokyo hybrid. It was the future, but not too far in the future. I guess maybe it was just a parallel universe.

ADAM It was the San Francisco of Starfleet Academy.

BROOM I would say it took place in a comic book. But at the same time it also sort of stood outside comic books, which I think is part of the way that they imagined they could adapt a Marvel property into something for general audiences.

ADAM Was this really a Marvel property?

BROOM I believe the story of this movie is that after they bought Marvel five years ago, they looked through the catalog to find something they could use, and this is some obscure comic book they hit on — which apparently isn’t really like this. I think it has some form of Baymax-the-big-robot and Hiro-the-kid, and that’s about it. So they said, “We can use this and make it into our own thing.” And I think having the characters keep joking about comic book tropes was part of repackaging it for non-Comic-Con audiences.

BETH That was something I was thinking about — and I guess this goes back to it not being like a Disney movie: it seemed like something that was being made by the animators for themselves more than for kids.

ADAM Because it’s about amazing nerds?

BETH Yeah, and the superhero fantasy, and cool tech. Yes, amazing nerds.

BROOM I didn’t feel it as sincere as that. To me it seemed a little calculated, in a lot of different directions. Maybe that’s just because my mind was running faster than was appropriate.

ADAM My word was “triangulated.” You know: it’s an American movie that’s intentionally appealing to Asian audiences. It’s an action movie that you can take kids to… and has strong female protagonists. It felt marketed. And think of the tie-ins! The video-game tie-ins, and the Disney ride tie-ins. No wonder the entire executive staff of Disney Animation was credited! But, again: even as I perceived that, I took authentic pleasure in the pan-Asian setting and the videogame thrills and chills. And in all the doodads, which were very well executed.

BROOM I felt strange for a lot of it. I mean, obviously I didn’t really feel all that strange, but the more overtly comic-book-y it got, the more disoriented I got. Like, that the bad guy wore this scary mask…

ADAM “It’s old man Callaghan!”

BROOM It was strange combination of elements, tonally, from a bunch of different worlds. Like you say: on the one hand “it was old man Callaghan,” but at the same time…

ADAM There was a Daphne, and a Velma, and a Shaggy. And the black guy was like a Fred.

BROOM Fred was always kind of a problematic character, because he would seem to be the hero, but he isn’t.

ADAM Sorry to interrupt with that.

BROOM No, the Scooby-Doo connection is absolutely there; I thought about it too. And all of those characters in this movie made me a little uncomfortable.

BETH Okay, yeah. If I had to have a problem with it, it was with them. See, I can have problems with it, but in the moment I was very much enjoying it!

ADAM That’s totally cool!

BROOM Yeah, I’m not naming this stuff to say “let’s all agree to dock the movie a few points for these things.” They’re just responses that I happened to have. Such as: the Jewish-American Princess character somehow made me squirm.

ADAM The who? You mean the Latina character?

BROOM She was Latina?

BETH The tall one?

ADAM She was voiced by “Genesis Rodriguez.” And she kept saying “Hiro” [with palatal H and tapped R].

BROOM I thought that was her being absurdly over-sensitive about his Japanese name.

ADAM No, I think that was just her Latina accent.

BETH Oh, I took it the same way BROOM did.

BROOM That was the only word she said that way! I thought it was just her idea of how culturally enlightened she was.

BETH I thought of her as Phoebe from Friends. Just as sort of this goofy ditzy person.

ADAM It’s true that her weapon was a heart-shaped purse that produced colorful balls.

BROOM It seemed so clear to me that she was Jewish. I don’t know where I got that from, since neither of you guys got it.

BETH It didn’t even cross my mind.

BROOM I guess my discomfort came from the combination of her and the “sarcastic Asian” woman, where there was no layering to the sarcasm to indicate a real personality underneath.

ADAM You mean the Sonic the Hedgehog girl?

BROOM Right. That always bothers me, when someone’s defensive front is presented as what makes them awesome, and it’s never acknowledged that it’s just a front. That happens in nerd-culture stuff all the time.

ADAM She reminded me of the main character from the last one, but just on the surface. What was that girl’s name?

BROOM From Frozen?

ADAM No — what was that movie that we just saw? The “Everything is Awesome” one.

BROOM That’s not a Disney movie. That’s The Lego Movie.

ADAM Oh, so it’s just the last movie I saw in a theater! Sorry! Nevermind, everyone!

BROOM Right, “Wyldstyle.” But that’s exactly what I’m talking about, because there they eventually break it down and admit, “well, her name’s not really Wyldstyle, because that would be absurd.”

ADAM It’s Fat Becky.

BROOM It’s Lucy or something.

ADAM That’s from a scene in Pitch Perfect where it turns out that Fat Amy’s real name is actually Fat Patricia. It’s funny when you peel off the mask and there’s an equally ridiculous mask underneath it.

BROOM So… I’m not actually comparing it to Chicken Little, but it made that same kind of claim: “hey, we’re in the fun world of nerds!” And I don’t buy that as a complete description of any world. So I was sort of hoping it was eventually going to get broken down, and it didn’t. Whereas the actual Scooby-Doo kids certainly aren’t “awesome nerds.” They don’t joke with each other self-consciously.

ADAM They don’t live in a social world, they live in…

BROOM … a van.

ADAM … a world out of space and time. They don’t have relations to any characters other than the five of them. I mean, Fred would never speak to Velma in real life.

BROOM In this movie “Fred” is the name of the Shaggy role. But that he’s the rich kid makes him into a John Hughes kind of character.

ADAM That was a funny touch, that he basically lives in the Spreckels mansion.

BETH And they get to practice on the butler.

BROOM I don’t know what the Spreckels mansion is.

ADAM It’s the fanciest mansion in San Francisco. In real life Danielle Steele lives there.

BROOM It was during that sequence, when they decide to be superheroes and then they’re practicing at his mansion, that I specifically had the thought: “This movie is weird. This movie is not one thing. It’s a bunch of things.”

ADAM I felt it in three very distinct segments. And I liked the middle segment best. There was the beginning segment, which was like…

BETH “I have the awesomest brother in the world.”

ADAM It reminded me of… was it the beginning of Treasure Planet? “We’re alone in our room and we’re bored.” Dreaming of things and bein’ little misfits. And then the middle segment, from the explosion up to the superhero room, was the most satisfying. Because far and away, Betamax — what’s his name?

BETH Baymax.

ADAM Far and away, Baymax was the strongest element in the movie. And then the end was just… Remember when Lilo and Stitch sort of goes off the rails and becomes an action movie? It felt like that.

BROOM Yeah, exactly, every movie has to have that happen so it can end.

ADAM But the middle was super-lovely and awesome.

BROOM Since they kept saying “The bad guy must be Krei!” I thought, “Well, I guess that means it’s Callaghan. But why is it Callaghan? What is that supposed to mean to us?” And I’m still not sure.

ADAM I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I guess you should know that if a character’s voiced by James Cromwell, he’s gonna be the bad guy.

MS. BAREBURGER So we’re doing last call; do you guys want to get in anything else?

BETH No, we’re okay.

BROOM I think we’re gonna be good.

MS. BAREBURGER Okay.

BETH Thank you.

ADAM Thank you. … … … (You’re gonna be famous!)

BROOM You think she’s Hispanic?

ADAM No. There’s nothing about the character that actually looked Hispanic. Until I noticed that she was pronouncing things that way.

BROOM Just “Hiro.”

ADAM But there were no other Hispanic characters in the movie! So she had to be the Hispanic one.

BROOM Well, that’s why I was surprised they made her Jewish.

ADAM Anyway, I thought that Baymax was the soul of the movie. Obviously.

BROOM He was also a marshmallow robot who didn’t really have any perspective. At the end, when they go into Star Trek: The Motion Picture space, into V’Ger…

ADAM I thought of it as What Dreams May Come space.

BROOM Yeah, the void, the lost socks dimension.

ADAM Nebulae.

BROOM When he has to leave Baymax there — spoiler alert! — I thought “This is Beth’s perfect movie: saying goodbye to a marshmallow.” If there’s anything that could make her cry…

BETH It did.

BROOM … it would be a movie where someone carries around a giant pillow the whole time, and at the end it’s like, “I have to leave you here, pillow!” Which I guess is the plot of Castaway with Tom Hanks.

BETH Well, it did make me cry, so, you’re right.

BROOM But it was exactly because Baymax represented nothing other than Hiro’s own emotions that he carried around with him. Or, like, the concept of a hug.

BETH That’s right. But I knew that the disk was going to be in his glove.

BROOM But how satisfying was that? At the end — spoiler spoiler alert — when he makes a new Baymax because he has the disk, weren’t you like, “Hooray, Baymax lives!… or… well, new Baymax lives… or… well … I don’t know, does this actually make up for Baymax being gone?”

BETH When he said, “Hi, Hiro,” then, yeah, it was like, “Baymax lives!” Because he remembered.

ADAM Do you find it consoling when Dumbledore appears in the portrait after he’s killed?

BETH Yes.

ADAM It’s like that.

BROOM My real answer about Dumbledore is that it feels a little like: “So his death meant… what?” It’s exactly like how Obi-Wan Kenobi keeps coming back in the other two movies. When I would rewatch the first one, when he died, it was just in quotes. It was just an event in the story like any other. Because I know he’s going to get to keep talking whenever he wants. He can walk around like anyone else. He’s blue. He’s fine.

ADAM I was very surprised that Hiro’s brother didn’t contrive some way to come back. I totally thought that was going to happen.

BETH I thought that might happen.

BROOM I did consider that the bad guy might turn out to be the brother. But I thought, “that would be pretty rough.”

BETH When they were about to unmask him, I thought, “It’s the brother! Oh my god!” But no, it wasn’t.

BROOM It’s Spencer Tracy.

ADAM I thought it was Krei the whole time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t think to think ahead, in movies.

BROOM Krei was like Crispin Glover.

BETH And Callaghan was like Sam Waterston.

MR. BAREBURGER Okay, California with beef, medium?

BROOM California for me. Yeah, thank you.

MR. BAREBURGER The Mediterranean with lamb, medium.

ADAM Thank you.

MR. BAREBURGER Sweet fries.

BETH Yeah, just in the middle. Thank you.

ADAM Can I get some—

MR. BAREBURGER This is curry ketchup, special sauce, and ranch.

ADAM Can I get some mustard too?

[MR. BAREBURGER goes to get it]

BROOM “Sir, if you insist. If that’s what you need, to make you happy. We’ll do it.”

ADAM All right, so: the animation was just extraordinary. Just gorgeous.

BROOM What did you think about their skin?

ADAM It was the right side of the uncanny valley. They didn’t try to make it too porous. Like, pore-y.

[he is given mustard]

ADAM Thanks.

BROOM They did something with it that was new. It definitely had some kind of blushing translucency that was a new technique. And I at first had kind of an icked-out response. Not exactly that it fell in the CGI uncanny valley: it looked to me like real fake skin. It looked like those silicone, you know…

ADAM RealDolls?

BROOM Yeah, or like, “the robot that’s got a hand!” where the hand looks genuinely fleshy, and that’s creepy. It looked like that kind of skin.

ADAM But what beautiful 3D!

BROOM Aren’t you glad we sprang for the 3D?

BETH I am glad.

BROOM And… RPX! [ed: “Regal Premium Experience.”]

ADAM My favorite 3D moment was when you’re hovering outside the window in the rain, going into the memorial service, and the bay window just looks slightly bulbous. It just looked perfect. I had never thought about how you could use animation to do all the crazy shit that you can’t do in a real movie. Why even bother having motion-capture? Just animate it, and some day it’ll be good enough that you won’t even notice. That’s the feeling I got for parts of this movie.

BROOM When they were landing on the secret island, for a second I thought, “oh, they’re going to have them land on a live-action island!” And then of course realized, “no, that’s just something that looks particularly photorealistic in their animation system.”

BETH Yeah, there were a few times when I forgot that I was watching animation. And that, I think, is why when they were on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, I really felt worried for them! Because it was that realistic.

BROOM I had the thought at one point that the outdoors in this movie felt more outdoors than most animation. Maybe that’s a credit to the people who did the sky, or the weather, or the lighting, or whatever. It felt like we were really outside, which is rare for CGI.

ADAM So what do you think about the design concept for San Fransokyo being: San Francisco with paper lanterns? And, like, Chinese dragon heads on the top of the Transamerica building and the Golden Gate Bridge.

BROOM Please take this as innocent, and not as cranky: what is the point of these kinds of mash-ups? Are they supposed to mean something political, or about the cultural overlap that actually exists between those cities? Or is it just, like, “what if two things were the same thing?”

ADAM ‘Cause it’s cool, man.

BETH I think it’s that. “Wouldn’t it be cool and weird if these cities combined?”

BROOM But some combinations would seem all cyberpunk-y, and some would just seem stupid. If I was like, you know, “It takes place in Paris/St. Louis,” you’d say, “What’s the point of that?”

BETH The point is someone thought of it! Someone had a dream.

ADAM It adds to the futuristic post-racial funkiness of the movie. But also, it’s cool. But also, it’s cross-cultural marketing.

BROOM The basic idea goes back to Blade Runner and other stuff; it’s been in sci-fi for a long time. And I think a lot of the time it’s supposed to represent…

ADAM Dystopia.

BROOM … some kind of political futurist speculation. Like in Clockwork Orange where they all speak bits of Russian. That’s a Cold War idea: “you have no idea what kind of havoc is going to be wreaked on your sense of cultural lines.” So it seems to come out of some idea like that, but it’s really just arbitrary stuff. I guess this is the same question as “what’s the point of steampunk?” And the point is undoubtedly that it gratifies some subconscious desire, but I’m not sure I have a theory about what that desire is.

ADAM I really liked the music.

BROOM I thought the score was pretty good for one of these.

ADAM When they were about to play some really obnoxious song… what was it?

BROOM “Eye of the Tiger.”

ADAM And I thought “Oh man,” and then it turned out just to be a gag. “Thank god!” Because I was gonna be really annoyed by that.

BETH I thought it was funny.

BROOM To me, that moment was one of their hedges, where they’re ostensibly saying “Ha ha, we’re all sick of that kind of movie.” But of course this is exactly one of those movies. They’re just not using that particular cue.

ADAM Well, I appreciated that they didn’t use that cue.

BROOM So I guess you guys didn’t have any sort of underlying feeling that the movie was pretty weird?

BETH I feel like I might later reflect on it and have completely different feelings, but in the moment…

BROOM I just mean in the moment.

MS. BAREBURGER I’m just gonna drop this ’cause we’re starting to close out but take your time with it, no rush.

BETH Okay. Thank you.

ADAM I don’t know. I mean, it was a weird mash-up, but it was pleasurable, and it felt tonally consistent. And the kids in the audience, as represented by that Russian woman behind us, or whatever she was, seemed to like it.

BETH Polish, I think.

BROOM I think that was Russian they were speaking.

ADAM Whatever it was, she was the most childlike person in the audience. She really liked when Baymax deflated.

BROOM The sequence where he gets drunk because his battery is running out was pretty funny.

ADAM “We jumped out a window! Shhhhh!” Maya Rudolph didn’t have much to do.

BROOM Yeah, great role.

ADAM She got to talk about those chicken wings.

BROOM So I thought the one girl was Jewish, you can take it or leave it — but really I was uncomfortable with all of the racial-typed nerds. I’m a little embarrassed for the big black guy to be a coward — or, you know, a nervous Nellie — because “look, we’re inverting stereotypes!” is just as embarrassing as sticking to them.

BETH I think millenials and beyond are so post-racial as to not even think of stereotypes as being inverted with these characters.

ADAM Yeah, they don’t even see race!

BETH That’s what I’m actually saying, though!

BROOM Yeah, BETH is actually saying it, and at the same time you’re accustomed to making fun of it. And that’s kind of how I feel: they really don’t have that stuff in their heads at all? Aren’t they in fact intensely proud of their rejection of it?

ADAM Let’s ask Eddie. He’s a millenial or beyond.

BETH Okay, yeah! I really genuinely believe it.

BROOM Eddie, his nephew?

BETH No no no, I’m not saying that.

ADAM I’m just being silly. I’ll stop undermining your point.

BETH I’m saying I genuinely believe that younger people are not attuned to that stuff, and not because they’re less sophisticated, but because they’re growing up in a place where it’s just not as prevalent. It’s just not part of their experience the way it has been for us. Maybe that’s naive of me, but…

BROOM When you were a kid, didn’t you feel incredibly savvy about all of the aspirational pandering stuff in kid culture? Like, the fact that The Care Bears existed — didn’t you get that it was not because the world had actually become an emotionally accepting world, but because someone had this sanctimonious sale they were trying to pitch to you?

ADAM No. I did not.

BETH Well I hated, hated, hated The Care Bears. But it wasn’t because of that. It was just because they were the most boring possible thing.

ADAM Well, we can keep talking about this subject if you want to…

BROOM What subject is this?

ADAM Race and stereotyping in the movie.

BROOM Oh yeah.

ADAM … but I did want to know what you thought about science in the movie. Because it made being a nerd seem super-cool, but then it also had a lot of that… what was that Sandra Bullock movie? The Net? It’s what I think of as “science mysticism,” where there’s not actual science; you just throw around a lot of words.

BROOM I thought here they’d actually been very careful about the words, to the point that the dialogue seemed forced. “Is that a lithium-ion battery?” “Yes it is.”

ADAM Okay, yes, they had a lot of technical consultants, but the effect was still that sort of blizzard of… You know, any movie where the way you interact with a computer interface is grabbing images in front of you…

BETH Grab and pull.

ADAM I was getting all annoyed that it was like, “Tech is amazing, and it’s easy, and it’s all about being brilliant!” But then thankfully they had the scene at the end where Tadashi has to try 87 times to get Betamax to work.

BROOM Baymax.

ADAM Which of course is what actual science is more like. So I was grateful for that. I did on the one hand appreciate the message “Thinking is cool! Use those big brains of yours!” But on the other hand, “thinking” just meant, like, videogames.

BROOM I respected their desire not to let it be just movie-ese tech talk, like, “Mr. President, the…” Well. You know. Any line that starts with “Mr. President.” But at first it was a little overkilled, and then they kind of let the whole issue go. After that initial scene where he visits the lab there isn’t too much science talk.

ADAM I guess I should have figured out that they were introducing all the sidekicks, but it didn’t occur to me.

BETH Yeah, I felt like maybe the beginning was a little rushed.

BROOM Or, rather, too slow.

ADAM Well, they had a lot of sidekicks to introduce, so it took a while.

BROOM I can imagine them in story meetings: “Is it really necessary to introduce them all before the plot gets in motion?” “Yes, obviously it is, or else it won’t feel like assembling a team of friends, later.” “So how are we going to introduce them all without giving away what’s coming? What role should they play in the opening section?” “They’ll play the role of enticing him into a more ambitious lifestyle.” But do you really need four lively characters to serve that function? No, you don’t. So it didn’t really work, I thought.

ADAM There had to be six of them, because of the title. God, if only someone had enticed me into a more ambitious lifestyle when I was at an impressionable age.

BROOM I felt that way watching this movie. “Why didn’t someone come to me and say ‘Too bad you don’t want to be here at the awesome place that’s perfect for you’?”

BETH “Age doesn’t matter.”

BROOM Yeah, he’s going to college at 14, and his friends are all 20.

ADAM That was like the Good Will Hunting segment. But yeah, who wouldn’t have liked that? Maybe I wouldn’t be just, like, a burnout corporate lawyer, if someone had come and told me to, you know…

BROOM Yeah, and I wouldn’t be just a bot fighter. I had more to say about that sequence but I forget what.

ADAM It felt slow.

BETH I was confused too.

ADAM I didn’t understand it was a superhero movie, so I didn’t know what I was being set up for.

BETH Me neither. I hadn’t read anything about the movie. So I was like, “Okay, so… he’s going to school. And these guys want him to go to school… Okay…” Thoughts about the brother character?

ADAM He was super-hot.

BETH Yeah, and they knew it. They were dressing him to be, like, “the perfect dude.”

ADAM He was the hottest Asian dude in a Disney movie since the Mulan guy.

BROOM Surely half-Asian, right?

ADAM Right, because Aunt Cass was not Asian.

BROOM Wasn’t there a picture of the parents on the wall?

ADAM In, like, Samurai outfits.

BROOM Yeah, totally traditional dress. Maybe that’s a wedding photo… but at least one of the brothers was in it! It seemed to me like it was showing us that both the parents were deeply traditional Asians. There was no half-anything about it. So I didn’t understand what I was looking at, there.

ADAM But the brother was super-hot.

BROOM See, I didn’t know that. This is one of those cases where I didn’t know it.

ADAM And sensitive.

BETH Yeah. Really, the perfect guy.

BROOM That’s what you said about the guy from last time!

BETH That’s right! But this guy was even more perfect.

ADAM Yeah, I wouldn’t want to date them both at the same time. Maybe marry this one, and that one… Well, but the other one was Jonathan Groff. Hard choices, Disney. And I would have been okay dating the big black dude too. Even though he’s a coward. It’s okay.

BETH I couldn’t go for him.

BROOM ADAM, he’s such a nerd.

BETH Just because he was muscular?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM You’re sure that he had muscles?

ADAM He appeared to. Yes.

BROOM He could have just had a big ribcage.

MS. BAREBURGER How are you guys doin’ over here?

ADAM Great. We’ll pay up.

MS. BAREBURGER Thanks so much you guys.

BETH Thank you.

BROOM Thank you.

ADAM Thank you.

MS. BAREBURGER Are you guys…?

BETH Wait a second, I’m gonna put a card in too. One sec. You can split it.

ADAM Thank you.

MS. BAREBURGER Thanks.

ADAM Luckily Hiro wasn’t that hot, ’cause he was only 14.

BETH Luckily!

BROOM Luckily for all of us.

BETH He wasn’t hot at all! He was cute like a little kid.

BROOM Why don’t they put the perfect girl in? They never do. They’re more sensitive about that.

BETH They think that they do.

ADAM You didn’t think Elsa was the perfect girl?

BROOM They always have some kind of personality that comes first. They can’t just be, like, “a wonderful person,” like Tadashi.

ADAM Tadashi was too good for this world. I should have seen it coming.

BETH I thought that the one princess… the one who wanted to run her own business?…

BROOM Oh, with the frog?

ADAM Princess Tiana. She was pretty great.

BETH … I thought that she was basically a really good person.

BROOM But her personality was that she “didn’t get it,” until deep into the movie.

BETH Okay, but she was a real person.

BROOM She was an admirable person.

MS. BAREBURGER Thanks so much you guys.

BROOM Thank you.

BETH Thank you.

BROOM That’s different from just being a simple presence, where you can imagine, “ooh, I would gladly date her.” Like with these guys you’re talking about.

ADAM You know, the more I think about this, the more it did feel like Brother Bear. It’s an odd strain in Disney-dom. And for that to be the sole surviving remnant of Disney DNA is weird.

BROOM The only real reason for the parents to have been absent in this story is because if there had been parents, they would have been grieving for the brother as well, and they needed to make Hiro be alone in his grief.

ADAM Yeah, Aunt Cass didn’t seem to give a shit.

BETH She looked really sad at the wake.

ADAM At the funeral, yeah, well, that’s good of her. Aunt Cass seemed to be a little bit medicated.

BETH Or just sad and lonely. A lonely lady running a restaurant by herself, who has a cat.

ADAM I thought it was a missed opportunity that they never actually showed us Mrs. Whatsername who was dressed ridiculously inappropriately for an 80-year-old.

BETH Yeah, they should have, just for one shot.

---

ADAM All right, so what did you think of Feast?

BROOM Also very strange.

BETH Yeah, Feast was really weird!

ADAM I didn’t like Feast at all.

BETH Feast is not going to be nominated for an Oscar!

ADAM No, it probably is. They always are.

BROOM I liked how it looked. And I would never bet against a Disney movie being nominated for an Oscar.

ADAM What a creepy message!

BROOM What was the message? I thought it was just about a visual style.

ADAM The message was “Junk food is…”

BETH Okay, so it was, like…

ADAM “Lovable girl gives us greens, but we love her anyway because she makes our master happy.”

BROOM “But what if I don’t like greens?”

ADAM Yeah, it was weird. Really, the only raison d’etre of that short was the dog being cute.

BROOM I think it was that they had created a different style of rendering, this sort of edgeless smooth world.

ADAM It was attractive, but it creeped me out on a number of levels. Like, the weird gender stereotyping. It was weird. Ugh.

BROOM It was offering us a little sensual world. Food is a natural part of that. That’s the kind of thing these images are good for. A lot of times with these things, I feel like we’re just going through…

MS. BAREBURGER Thanks guys.

BETH Thank you.

ADAM It’s just, like, “we have some images that we want to give you, and we have to hang them on a plot, and so the plot is gonna be the most awful, stupid…” I mean, what was the last one that we saw? About the umbrellas in love?

BETH Oh, that’s right. Yeah, umbrellas.

BROOM That wasn’t on Frozen, though, because that had Get a Horse. Where was that umbrellas thing?

ADAM It must have been two ago.

BROOM But we didn’t see that one in the theater. Did we see the umbrellas in the package of Oscar-nominated shorts? [ed.: Yes, as a non-nominated extra. It was originally released with Monsters University]

ADAM Anyway, that was awful too. What was two Disney movies ago, before Frozen?

BROOM It was… you know, Break-Em-Up Harry. What was that called?

ADAM Oh, the Candyland one.

BROOM Beat-Em-Up Barry.

ADAM Wreck-It Ralph. I think it might have been the short before Wreck-It Ralph. [ed: that would be Paperman]

BROOM Anyway, here’s what I was going to say about plotting: I feel like when I’m watching them the way that a kid does, or as I would have as a kid — i.e. the best way — I’m watching very intuitively, I’m not thinking analytically, and a lot of these kinds of questions, like, “what’s the message this is sending?” — those questions don’t even occur to me. And I think that they’re often written in that same mindset, by people who operate that way all the time. They’re people who are very sensitive to whether things look right, and whether they feel right on kind of an irrational level, and so you end up getting these very deep cultural-subconscious ideas coming out in them. I think it’s so obvious that the message and the story and the meaning of Feast are messed up that it’s clear they weren’t thinking about it that way. I think it was just worked out like: “then they’ll have to be in love… and then something will have to come between them…” I don’t know how exactly to put it, but in a very intuited, unconceptual way. The same way I as a kid understood every cartoon as, like: “Sure, now the bad guy falls in the chasm, ’cause bad guys fall in chasms.” You never “thought it out.” I don’t think that Feast had been “thought out.”

ADAM Yeah, I agree.

BROOM I don’t know if that means it does in fact work on some magical deep level, and I’m just uncomfortable with it.

ADAM No.

BETH No. I don’t think kids liked that movie. I mean, maybe they liked part of it, I don’t know.

BROOM It looked nice and you got to look at food. That was the point of it, I think.

ADAM BETH, How do you feel about your gender being symbolized by a sprig of parsley?

BETH I don’t feel like it was.

BROOM It’s not presented as a bad thing, really. You spend the whole first half of it hoping for something healthy to show up.

ADAM I thought something horrible was going to happen to the dog after eating all that horrible food.

BROOM Exactly. So when you see the sprig of parsley, you think, “Thank god he found this woman.” Right. And then later, when he goes back to his old ways…

ADAM It turns out he’s a slob in a bathrobe, in fairness.

BROOM … and the dog is eating Eggo waffles, you’re meant to think, “this is clearly no good.” So I don’t think it was negative stereotyping.

ADAM Yeah, but it was just gross. It creeped me out. Okay. Should we read the New York Times Review?

BROOM All right.

---

BETH But what you were just saying… about how when you’re watching a movie and you’re not thinking about it analytically — that was how I watched Big Hero 6. And so having come from that place, it’s difficult to… That’s why I feel like it has been difficult for me in this conversation to get myself to a place of thinking about it analytically, because I really did enjoy it on the level that it wanted me to.

ADAM I want to be clear: I very much enjoyed it, and I don’t want to nick it unnecessarily. Because it was a pleasure to see in the theater.

BROOM I haven’t said the words “I really enjoyed it” yet, but I basically did. I had a good time, and I never disengaged completely. But I did feel genuine feelings of “what’s going on?”, which I think were unforced, kid-like feelings. However I also have the psychological sophistication to understand that I may have had those genuine problematic feelings because my mind is just involuntarily accustomed to working too hard, and were I more relaxed generally I would have soaked it all up.

---

ADAM How did Callaghan get the headband?

BROOM You’re joking, right?

ADAM No, I’m not.

BROOM He didn’t have the headband.

BETH He built the mask.

ADAM No, I understand, but when he caused the explosion, how did he get the shield to form? Did he take the headband? Did we miss that?

BROOM Oh, I see.

BETH Also, this bothered me: when they were leaving afterward and saying, “hey, let’s go get dinner,” I thought, “you guys, you left all of your stuff in there, and that guy wanted it! What are you thinking?” I don’t think Hiro took the headband with him.

BROOM All right, here are some other things I have to say: When he did his demonstration, I already thought it was scary.

BETH Oh, yeah, me too. It was clearly, like, “oh, this is obviously going to be used for evil.”

ADAM “This is a disaster.”

BROOM “I hope no one ever builds this.” He could have gotten into school any way he wanted. It didn’t have to be this. There are a million things you can eat that aren’t cheese. The next thing is: he apparently made all that in two days of fast-motion, so afterward, he could have just made another army of microbots!

BETH No, it was like a month.

BROOM He slept in the chair, and then woke up the next day and finished it.

BETH No no no! That whole stop-motion sequence is a month where people come in and go out, there’s a party…

ADAM Yeah, didn’t he write down how to do it?

BROOM He himself did it! So he could have gone home to where he still has his 3D printer, or whatever…

ADAM I see, and made a counter-army.

BROOM Which is, like, the greatest invention of all time and the most dangerous, and he could have pursued it himself. Also, he could have built his own headband!

ADAM “Use that big brain of yours! Think of another angle.”

BETH I really liked that fake stop-motion sequence. I thought it was very nice.

BROOM Next thing: I believe this is the first Disney movie, and one of the only movies in my entire life, that had no title at the beginning. No titles of any kind until the very end.

ADAM What are you gonna do?

BROOM Good point! I guess I’ll use the title from the end at the top of the page. I have to.

---

BETH When the Minions ad started, I thought, “Wait, is this it? Is this the movie?” Because I really didn’t know.

BROOM That’s a sequel to Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2.

BETH Yeah, well, I’m just that out of it.

BROOM I haven’t seen them, but I know that, because I’m not out of it. What other previews did we see?

ADAM We saw some awful previews. We saw Hillsong: Live Your Faith, or whatever.

BETH Oh, WHAT IS THAT?? Super-offensive!

ADAM Well, it’s not offensive to a Christian!

BROOM “Offensive” isn’t really the problem — it’s just Christian rock — but I was shocked that it was on a general Disney-distribution movie, that they assume there will be enough overlap in the audience.

ADAM “They’re changing the world… but the world isn’t changing them.”

BROOM “It’s not about them… it’s about Him.” That’s weird! I mean, this is on a Disney movie, in Times Square!

BETH Yeah!

ADAM I felt violated by that. What else did we see? We saw Tomorrowland, which looks… pretty cynical. By the way, she shouldn’t go into that world; she doesn’t know what’s happening to her body back on Earth world. Hello! She should at least have picked it up with some plastic and taken it to a secure location before she did that.

BROOM And put on restraints.

ADAM Put herself in a well-ventilated room.

BROOM Probably in the movie they address this question. Or maybe every now and then they cut back to her lying on the floor of the detention center, twitching.

ADAM What else did we see?

BETH The penguin thing.

ADAM Oh yeah, Penguins of Madagascar. The woman behind us really liked that.

BROOM Yeah, you said your dad would like that, I assume because it had that…

BETH The kind of humor.

BROOM South Pacific humor.

BETH That’s a good way to characterize it.

ADAM Were there any more previews? There were, and they were bad.

BROOM Annie.

ADAM I had read that they were making Annie with a black lead. Who was that? Is that Quvenzhané Wallis?

BROOM The girl? Boy, I don’t know.

BETH Who is that?

ADAM She’s the little girl who was nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild.

BROOM It could have been. I don’t know. And Jamie Foxx. And Cameron Diaz.

BETH And some other famous woman. Well, there’s some nice British lady.

ADAM Oh, no, you’re thinking of Paddington, because it has Lord Grantham in it!

BETH That looked just miserably bad. That looked so embarrassing.

BROOM My thought was: it’s a kiddie movie, and it’s a style of kiddie movie that the three of us don’t generally have to encounter. It might not actually be a bad one of those. It was just that the music was so aggressive in that ad: “It’s awesome!! Every joke in this stupid movie is awesome awesome awesome!!” “That. Was. Amazing!” I imagine that for the four- and five-year-old target audience, it might not be the worst movie there is.

BETH You’re right.

BROOM Because, you know, when Nicole Kidman appears saying “Did you say marmalade?”… in the course of the movie it’s probably so obviously tongue-in-cheek that it’s charming. At least potentially.

ADAM Was that Nicole Kidman? I didn’t even notice. “Did you say marmalade?” That’s pretty funny. I can tell that that could be funny.

BROOM Movies like that are supposed to seem like a lark for these adult actors.

ADAM “Stranger danger, keep moving. It’s some sort of bear.”

BROOM What was bothersome to me was just that the preview was pushing it so hard. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to see that movie. I don’t like those kinds of movies.

BETH No, you’re probably right about it.

ADAM Okay, now let’s read the review. I don’t think you should put all that stuff about the previews in.

BROOM Or maybe I should!

BETH Do what you like.

[ed: Okay! FYI, we also saw previews for Inside Out and Spare Parts]

---

[we read the review… in the course of which:]

BROOM “… The group is as harmoniously balanced as a university diversity committee, and largely distinguished by safe quirks of personality rather than stereotypes and unfunny accents.” My insertion here would be: it only occurs to you to say that, Manohla, because they were in so much the same school as stereotypes and unfunny accents.

[and:]

BROOM I thought that the joke of him processing space like a robot, when he has to move that chair in his very first scene…

ADAM Or when he comes out from behind the bed; that’s the funniest thing.

BROOM I wish they had brought that joke back later in the movie. I know it got inconvenient for them to have him be an idiot, but I thought it was clever to have him be as unsophisticated about space as real robots.

[finally we reach Manohla’s lame conclusion: that it’s too bad Disney “didn’t decide to take a real leap into the future, say, by making Hiro a girl”]

BROOM That was a dumb thing to say.

ADAM That was a sort of easy shot.

BROOM It doesn’t even make any sense.

[BETH goes to the bathroom]

---

ADAM Well, it was satisfying. Even if it had sort of a pedestrian plot and sort of odd things mashed together, it’s still… we’re a long way from The Rescuers Down Under.

BROOM Well, The Rescuers Down Under was stupid. But it does feel a little like the specialness of this product that we’ve been tracking through the years is, like she said at the beginning of the review, mostly out of the cultural system. I know, I’m the one who said that it did still have some Disney DNA.

ADAM I think this movie will make a fortune.

BROOM I think it’ll do well but I don’t think it’ll beat Frozen. I think Frozen spoke to people at that deep Disney level. I thought it was better than this.

ADAM I thought Frozen was better constructed than this. And it had some emotional high points that spoke to pent-up need. Like a girl saving a girl, and a great power ballad.

MS. BAREBURGER Thank you guys.

BETH Thank you.

BROOM Thank you.

[we exit and begin walking uptown but we do not turn off the recording]

---

[You are more than 2/3 of the way through.]

---

ADAM Whereas this felt sort of Studio Ghibli-ish in its visual whimsy. Which I like. But those movies aren’t blockbusters.

BROOM Those movies feel much more like dreams, of the heart. Whereas this felt like a superhero movie. Mostly.

ADAM With dreamy floating cats.

BROOM Yeah, some of that, it’s true. So in the scene where Fred is singing a song about what awesome superheroes they are, and is making up stuff that isn’t in fact their story…

BETH I think that might have been my favorite part.

ADAM “The lost amulet…”

BROOM Right, that they found an amulet in the attic. Even though they already have a real superhero story that they’re in the middle of… That’s funny, but it’s also exactly why I felt like “I don’t know where I am!” He’s in it, but he’s not in it; we’re in it, but we’re not in it. Or are we just supposed to be many many layers inside it? I don’t know.

ADAM I’m glad Manohla Dargis also thought of Scooby-Doo. That was satisfying.

BROOM I think the comparison is unavoidable.

ADAM But Scooby-Doo has a reassuring pattern. It doesn’t matter how scary a Scooby-Doo episode is, because you know what’s going to happen at the end. Though I was still always scared by, like, “It’s an Easter Island mask and it’s chasing them!” That always scared me, every time, but…

BROOM Even though the music would be, like [imitates]?

ADAM Yes! It always scared me! But you still knew it couldn’t be that bad, because at the end, someone would be unmasked.

BROOM Yes. The monster always turned out to have been a costume. Even if it was something impossible, like a skeleton. How does a skeleton costume work? It just does.

ADAM Scooby-Doo had a deep conservatism that I found reassuring. And here, too, even though that was a very scary Kabuki mask he was wearing…

BROOM It was very scary!

BETH It was super-scary. I was going to tell my brother. I mean, of course my niece is too young for this anyway. But for the next six years she’ll still be too young!

ADAM Excellent taste in masks, Callaghan.

BROOM Yeah, it didn’t really seem to match his personality. Where would he get the idea to be a scary Kabuki bad guy?

ADAM We hardly know anything about him. He’s probably really into manga.

BROOM Spencer Tracy wouldn’t pick that mask! Please. He also seemed like he could be one of your uncles, BETH. They wouldn’t do that; they don’t have that sense of themselves. He just seemed like a professor.

BETH He really seemed like Sam Waterston to me.

BROOM Well, that’s not so different. I’ll tell you this: I was certainly surprised to find out he spelled his name with a G. That was a real twist for me, late in the game.

BETH That’s the traditional Irish spelling.

ADAM My only friend named Callaghan spells it with a G, so I was braced for that.

BROOM I thought it was compelling for his motivation to be exactly the mistake that Hiro is guided away from, which is that he turned his grief into furious revenge. The most profound thing in the movie is when Baymax asks Hiro “if we kill him, will that improve your emotional state?” and Hiro says “Yes! No! I don’t know!” Ultimately, all of Callaghan’s rampaging is needless, because his daughter is actually in hibernation. She’s wherever Mr. Spock goes.

ADAM Did you think that was a touch of Sleeping Beauty at the end?

BROOM When she comes out of the pod? It was the same pod that Sigourney Weaver sleeps in in Alien, and/or the pod that Leonard Nimoy gets in in the Star Trek movies…

ADAM It also reminded me of Gravity.

BETH Yeah, and when Baymax falls away it’s very much like what happens to George Clooney.

BROOM That’s true. I was thinking of Star Trek during that whole sequence, because that’s what it looked like. And there’s also a self-sacrifice in Star Trek.

BETH I liked the moment when Hiro confronts Callaghan and says “what are you going to accomplish?” and there’s just an instant where you think he’s going to change his mind and relent. And then only action — I think some kind of thing falling — is what breaks it.

ADAM No, it’s Krei talking. He ruins it because he’s such a douchebag.

BETH Oh right, he says “I love that robot!” or something like that.

ADAM He says, “Listen to the kid, Callaghan!”

BROOM I thought Krei was well handled. I was sorry for his nice building getting destroyed.

ADAM “Everything you love is going to be sucked into this vortex… like, office furniture!”

BETH The standard office chair is still being used in the future.

ADAM The Aeron chair.

BROOM In the first section of the movie, I was thinking, “you know, I might have various anxious uncertainties today, but when I was a kid, it’s pretty clear I would have liked this, because it has all these places in it and all this stuff, and I would have rolled with it.” And then it got to the shot where the Kabuki man shows up in the warehouse, and I thought, “Ooh, but I definitely wouldn’t have liked that.”

ADAM Yeah, it felt menacing to me.

BROOM His nanobot horde was awful.

BETH When their car went underwater and it was filling up…

BROOM I saw you cringe.

BETH That’s a real fear of mine!

ADAM And Baymax has told him to buckle his seatbelt, and it’s stuck!

BETH Ugh!

ADAM Did you see Cloud Atlas? A lot of the San Francisco sequences reminded me of the 70s sequences of Cloud Atlas, where she’s the investigative reporter. And her Volkswagen bug also plunges off a bridge.

BROOM Oh, I forgot about that. How does she get out? I don’t remember.

ADAM I don’t remember either. But it has those same sort of Dirty Harry San Francisco noir visuals. But yeah, that sequence, ooh.

BETH I thought, “If you’re going here, then I’m probably going to feel uncomfortable a few times.”

BROOM I wasn’t worried because I knew Baymax was a big flotation device.

ADAM Even though you know they’re going to be fine. Why the guy doesn’t just entomb them with nanobots, I don’t know. They were his students! Has he no heart?

BROOM I know! When they wanted to establish that his revenge was about emotions going out of control, and that he had not intended to kill Tadashi, when they wanted us to see him in this tragic psychological light, they have Hiro say “You let Tadashi die! He went in to save you!” and Callaghan says “I didn’t ask him to do that! That was his mistake!” … I thought, “but you can’t deny that you’ve been very deliberately trying to kill me for the last 15 minutes! You made the bots into a pile driver that you were going to drop on me!”

ADAM Maybe if the nanobots had been puffy and white but had the same functionality, they would have been less frightening. I mean, it really speaks to the importance of good design. “Don’t you think the armor will compromise my non-threatening huggable healthcare personality?”

BROOM I know I’m the one who started calling them nanobots, but they’re actually “microbots.” A nanobot would be microscopic.

BETH This might be the longest we’ve ever spoken about a Disney movie.

BROOM I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. [looks at recording counter] Oh wow, it’s long, isn’t it. I guess I should stop it now?

BETH You’re the one who has to transcribe it!

BROOM So, readers, I guess we’ll see you again at Zootopia in March 2016.

ADAM Is that the next one? Oh god.

BROOM In March 2016! How much of an imposition on your heart is that really, that you have to say “Oh god”? You’re gonna have to see a 90 minute movie in a year and a half. “Ugh! Oh, brother!”

BETH Well, wait, what did the “Oh god” mean?

ADAM I just meant that that title doesn’t sound promising. Like, what’s wrong with fairy tales, guys? Frozen made a billion dollars.

BETH This one will make maybe not that much, but close.

ADAM While you were in the bathroom, BROOM said he thought Frozen tapped something pent-up.

BETH Oh, Frozen was definitely better. It was a more soulful movie.

ADAM Just the hunger to see a girl save a girl, and hear that fabulous song, that’s worth a billion dollars right there. Whereas I don’t think this has that resonance, in the same way. The hunger to see a really hunky half-Asian dude, maybe.

BROOM To see him get blown up.

ADAM Well, you don’t see that.

BROOM He really shouldn’t have run in there.

ADAM Yeah, what a chump.

[we turn off the recording and ADAM departs]

---

[but lo! moments later, BETH’s secret thoughts stir and the recording comes back on!]

BETH It’s always interesting for me when I experience something cultural and am truly transported, and then I’m in a situation where I’m required to analyze it and talk about it, as a work… You know, I think what we were doing was talking about things as both experiences and as products, and in this particular case I had trouble thinking about it as a product, I think because of the emotional state I have been in today, working; I needed some kind of release, and it really provided exactly the release that I needed. I found it challenging to talk about… and I said this earlier, so this is kind of just a repeat, but this is just what’s on my mind now… to think about its motivations and think about its, you know, cynicism, if it was cynical. I can’t… Because it reached me, I feel like, “well, my experience wasn’t cynical, so it’s not cynical.”

BROOM I sympathize with the difficulty of figuring out how to hold to that. Because there is this feeling that… My whole life, in fact, earlier in my life when I wasn’t struggling as life-and-death with these kinds of issues as I have been, I had this thing that I would keep returning to, this idea, that being analytical gives you some kind of…

BETH Control, or order, or…

BROOM Yeah, defenses, or cachet if you like; it gives you some kind of edge over other people, which is an unfortunate principle because being analytical is not always a good thing to do. And yet, once you do it, it raises you above everyone else, and then you either…

BETH It sure makes you feel smart, you know?

BROOM It makes you feel safe, and makes them feel unsafe. And I always knew that that was a bad thing. And yeah, I’m trying to find a different solution, now, to that problem, just like you’re talking about. And I think that part of the solution is to defuse it by making it be about the person, because it is about the person.

BETH Yeah. And I was trying to say that as much as I could, when I was sharing stuff tonight, but I have — and the reason that I’m talking about this now is that I have some sort of embarrassment built up about my inability to really think about it the way that you and ADAM were thinking about it.

BROOM Yeah, but it’s actually the opposite. You don’t have an inability, you have an intuition that not thinking about it that way is better for you. So that embarrassment, if you misinterpret it, will make you do something bad to yourself.

BETH But I think this is how [a friend] experiences most movies, and it’s why she doesn’t dislike anything.

BROOM Because she actually feels good about them.

BETH You know, like on Goodreads, she gives almost every book five stars, and sometimes she gives a four, and very rarely she gives a three. And thinking about that, versus how I experience literature… It’s rare for me to give books five stars, and I think that’s because I am in fluctuating mind- and mood-spaces during my experience of a novel, which takes many days.

BROOM That’s right, you can’t just have a two-hour happy experience with it.

BETH And to have that consistently average out to a five is very rare!

BROOM It’s funny that she’s the counterexample, because I think of her as so deeply anxious. But I guess people who are deeply anxious, it’s always compartmentalized. In fact that’s part of what creates the anxiety. She’s socially anxious, which means she’s not necessarily… when it’s just her and a book, she might actually feel more at ease than you and I do.

BETH Yeah, I mean, she prefers to stay home and watch her shows on TV than to socialize. She would prefer to go to a movie by herself, on an afternoon. That’s the main thing she spends money on, is movies.

BROOM Well, I grew up in my family culture… which I have new ideas about, and I also have a desire to stick to old feelings about, too, because they didn’t need to be as analyzed as they’ve been… but what I grew up with was that you saw a movie, and then afterward you all talked about it, but the spirit of talking about it was not, like, mastering it, or mastering a cultural…

BETH Like, figuring out where it stood in the canon.

BROOM It was socializing what had been individual but now could be social, where everyone’s like, “And when he said that thing, that was funny!” and everyone agrees that it was funny. And then on the flip side of that, “something was weird to me in that scene!” and “yeah, that was weird to me too!” And the point is not to be, like…

BETH Like, “they must have been misguided, or thinking about this, or trying to do this…”

BROOM Well, see, that’s the problem, because in my family the culture also was, that you say it and then you say, “They shoulda done this. They shoulda done it this other way that would have been better.”

BETH Well, sure, which I think is natural.

BROOM Well, yeah, but it does have kind of an element of “if people wouldn’t screw up all the time, we’d be able to be happier!” So…

BETH I guess the upshot for me with this movie is: it’s not a five-star movie. But it’s a solid four, because my experience of it was entirely positive. I just don’t feel like it transcended any… it wasn’t…

BROOM I think that… to get philosophical, maybe unnecessarily… I’ve been thinking about these very issues, and… Maybe you remember, there was a quote — in a passage that I read aloud back when I was reading the Harvard Classics passage-of-the-day, by Burke. Talking about that there’s the Sensibility, and then there’s the Judgment, and that if you enjoy something with the Sensibility but without Judgment, then, you know, it’s amorphous; if you enjoy something with Judgment but without Sensibility, then it’s dry. And I said at the time, it seems like he just couldn’t bring himself to say what I would say, which is that actually, if you enjoy it with Sensibility and without Judgment, you don’t have any problems! That’s fine! But I do kind of agree that the ideal state is to enjoy something with both, which is possible. Sometimes I’ll have the experience of “I’m coasting through this and loving it, but I don’t think that if I thought about it analytically, that pleasure would remain intact, so I’m sort of…”

BETH Holding something at bay, or preventing yourself from…

BROOM Yeah. But maybe that’s just an illusion.

BETH Yeah, and I agree with you, I think that the primo state of experiencing something is to really be in it, and… I don’t know. Now I’m questioning it.

BROOM Like when we watched Rushmore the other day, I enjoyed it with both halves of myself. And that gives you this sense of freedom, like, “I can flop back and forth and I’ll be gratified in either place.”

BETH Yeah, I guess that’s it. It’s having both halves of your brain engaged.

BROOM Or equally able to be engaged. It’s sort of that feeling of not having to… You know, there’s two paths in front of you, and they’re both fine. So there’s no, kind of…

BETH Conflict.

BROOM … yeah. And I think that’s what affects my reviews of things. At least when I’m at my best. It isn’t that in advance I’m thinking, “well, everything has its number of stars and this is certainly not a five, oh ho ho.” It’s more that if you ask me afterward how many stars to give something, and I honestly am like, “all right, let me think”… the answer is going to have to do with whether I felt freedom the whole time, or whether I felt like, “well, this only works one way.”

BETH Yeah. So, watching this, I wasn’t thinking about freedom at all. I mean, I think that I sort of did switch off…

BROOM Yeah, it’s an anxious way for me to say it. Like, no one’s taking away my freedom. Go ahead, sorry.

BETH No, but I think that… I really wasn’t thinking analytically, I really just was letting it wash over me like a beautiful bath.

BROOM Yeah. Good!

BETH And that was great.

BROOM I’m happy for you. When I saw that musical last week, I mostly did that. I cried and I just let it move my feelings around. And only when it really left me in the cold was I like, “What? Oh, it’s not working, I guess.” And then afterwards, when I talked with someone who’d been in the show and was sort of sour on it, and they asked what I thought of it, I said, “well, I think it had problems, but I enjoyed it and that’s the main thing.” But then as the conversation proceeded I ran up against exactly what you’re talking about: I couldn’t think of anything to say about being moved by it, because being moved was the end, was complete.

BETH It’s strange. It’s kind of uncomfortable in the aftermath, to feel like, “well, I had this, you know, encounter, and now I’m supposed to talk about it, and I’m not able to access it.” I don’t know, I can’t churn up anything to say.

BROOM But, you know, that difficulty, I think, it’s not right to say that that difficulty is inherent to the nature of experience. I think that difficulty is a specific kind of nervousness, embarrassment, anxiety, on your and my part. And I should not neglect to mention, in my story of trying to talk about that show, that, like, I get nervous in the place where I was, talking to the person I was talking to — lots of things about the social situation I was in, talking about that show, were nervous-making for me. So in that state of nervousness, I was embarrassed, I think, to be effusive about my emotional experiences, which is not itself actually inherently confusing or difficult for me. And I think that that’s probably true for you. I don’t think that effusing — being effusive — about whatever was gratifying to you about the sensory experience or the emotional experience you had here, is so foreign to you. It’s just that there’s something about me and ADAM, and maybe about being out in Manhattan…

BETH Well, just the tone. Yeah, I think it’s the tone that you guys by nature bring to these conversations, and I knew going in, like, I wasn’t going to be able to match it, because I just couldn’t. It had nothing to do with what I had just felt. So I felt nervous about trying to impose my… I think I was pretty honest about it. I think I essentially said that, so.

BROOM Yeah, you didn’t misrepresent yourself as far as I could tell. But you can aspire — and so can I — everyone can aspire, when in a situation where other people are being sucked toward the analytical, at the expense of pleasure, to actually stand up for pleasure. Even though it seems like you are trying to win a battle from a lower station. It’s not actually lower.

BETH Yeah, it always feels like, “I’m gonna fight for the right of the idiot instead of the intellectual.”

BROOM Yeah, but the more that you do that fight, say, you know, “I think that rock should beat paper,” or whatever, just, “no, it flows upstream”… you will start to really hear that you do believe it. I think you’re expressing it somewhat now: you really do believe that enjoying that movie the way you did is better than the nitpicky stuff that I was saying. It’s better for people, it’s a better understanding of the movie. And you have to do that to start realizing that, “yeah, there’s actually as much to say about this as there would be to say about his thing.”

BETH I have a complicated feeling about it, because in some ways I feel like, “well, there’s the experience of a movie, and there’s a conversation that you can have with people about the movie,” and if I don’t have anything to say, then I won’t have a satisfying experience of the conversation.

BROOM Well, what I’m saying is, you’re describing the situation as if you inherently don’t have anything to say, or you can’t scrounge up anything to say: but that’s a description of…

BETH Anxiousness.

BROOM Something that you’re underpracticed at, or… the way nervousness makes itself felt to you, is that your thoughts are harder to grasp, or you can only come up with so many words. I’m saying do whatever you can that’s honest, and aspire to it getting bigger and bigger, rather than doing what you can to meet the other standard, like, “well, I can certainly come up with a bunch of words from this other less sincere part of me”…

BETH Like, from within my experience, say what there is.

BROOM Yeah. And you do, you always have, I’ve always admired this about you, that even against the fashionability of it, that other people are buying into, you will say something very emotionally simple or emotionally direct, because that is better than it. But…

BETH Yeah, I just always feel like that comes out as… I mean, reads as… you know, like a cow wandering into a field in the middle of, like, two professors talking.

BROOM Yeah, right. And I think there’s a kind of nobility in being the cow. Because actually what’s in that field is two other cows with, like, Groucho glasses on, talking like professors. And to show up and be, like…

BETH “Hey guys, we’re just cows.”

BROOM …”Hey guys, we’re just cows,” is really beneficial, it’ll make everyone’s lives better. But to get there you need to practice attributing nobility and, kind of, heroic value to that. Because otherwise the embarrassment just shuts us all up. Professors too. I know those feelings exactly, though. I mean, it’s hard to say, when you’re being a professor: “All I really want is for someone to give me ice cream,” so you end up saying, “Hm! Hm! Something was missing; I don’t know exactly what.” So then if you show up and you’re like, “I’m the ice cream man, guys! Here’s the ice cream!” you’re doing a favor, even if the first response you get is, “Pff! Ice cream! As if! Please!” A few minutes later they will eat the ice cream, and agree that they’re better off. I mean, I try to acknowledge it now as much as I can. I think when I was talking at the restaurant I said, “I get that I probably only had these thoughts because my mind is in an anxious place.”

BETH Yeah, you did say that. You said that a couple times. Can we get juice on the way back?

BROOM Sure. So that you don’t have to listen to my lips smacking?

BETH No. I feel I’m getting a cold for real and I want to “stave it off.”

BROOM Okay. We’re gonna stop this now.

[The recording is shut off a second time. It has not yet come back on. Total duration 1:27:14!]

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[I hope it did not take fully 1:27:14 to read. Congratulations. You, the reader, are the real Big Hero 6.]

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It is done.

A digest retrospective follows.

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1. (1/7/08)

ADAM It has certain iconic images that are competitive with anything else Disney produced, but as a story it’s much too slow. It’s archaically paced and boring… There’s no actual bit of dialogue or interaction that’s particularly memorable, but all the songs are pretty memorable… I would call this a promising first effort for Disney. But it’s no Ratatouille.

BETH I had thought that the last scene, where she’s in the glass case, took fifteen minutes of screen time. My memory of it was that it was much longer than it actually was, and the rest of the movie was much shorter, I guess because I was so upset by it… I think girls probably like it more, because they want to be Snow White… I was a princess for Halloween when I was nine, but I wasn’t obsessed with princesses. I know people are really obsessed with princesses now. We had My Little Pony.

BROOM Ninety percent of the movie is quasi-comic business with the dwarfs that doesn’t completely work… It’s constructed like a short, with a series of gags on the same theme. Here there were a lot of gags about washing… I liked the lush feeling, like a children’s storybook had come to life and you could enter into it. Even when it was boring, I still liked the way their chairs and doors looked… There’s a dynamic quality to what’s on screen that must have been incredible at the time.

2. (1/17/08)

ADAM It’s a lot more dramatically taut, although it’s still not a fully developed story. It’s a picaresque with three episodes… The nightmare quality is easily the most compelling thing about the movie. It’s really frightening… I don’t think the movie hangs together as a plot, but I do think it’s got a lot of very suggestive and interesting elements.

BETH It’s like a terrible dream… I hated Pinocchio as a kid. I remember being made to watch it in school and just wanting to run away. Maybe it’s more of a boy’s movie… The entire time, he’s in situations that you don’t want him to be in. It lasts the whole movie; he just moves from one situation to another, and it makes children feel uncomfortable… The animation seemed more confident.

BROOM It may not be like a normal plotted movie in form, but it’s something legitimate in itself. It has its own kind of arc… It felt like they had relaxed into storytelling the best way they knew how. But still within a European framework… It’s supposed to be a story about moral choices, but it doesn’t read that way to children, because the moral choices are indicated in peculiar vaudeville ways… The movie is a technical advancement in every way… I think it does hang together, as an allegory about boyhood and encountering the world. And it hangs together for children in a different way, as a dreamlike succession of compellingly weird things.

3. (2/08)

ADAM I think it’s not successful… My difficulty in listening seriously to classical music is that I am too liable to drift off and not pay attention, and that tendency does not need to be facilitated… I think the two ballets are the most successful for me, in that ballet music is meant to be accompanied with visual spectacle… If it’s supposed to be high art, why are the cartoons so preposterous? I mean, almost all the segments are pointedly juvenile… I’m not unsympathetic to this movie. I appreciate that it’s trying for something astonishing.

BETH I thought Night on Bald Mountain was the best one, the most stylish and visually rich… The movie would have held up better if it had been more abstract, and not cute cartoon characters running around… I was obsessed with this movie when I was a kid. Most of the drawings I did from around fourth through sixth grade looked like things in this movie. I would draw skies that were purple with lines shooting up from the sun, trying to make it look like the very end of the last one.

BROOM I marvel at the fact that this movie is what it is, that it asks people to look at something very abstract and stylized… I feel like the Nutcracker segment is a high point in animation art… I feel like shot for shot there are artistic choices being made in this movie that are the boldest things Disney ever did. I’m not saying all of them work, but I like that the movie is chock-full of bold choices. It maintains a remarkable level of lush intensity the whole time.

4. (3/08)

ADAM That was awesome. I love that movie so much. It’s the best one… The whole movie I was quivering with indignation at how mean they were to him; it hurts my feelings. And all of the stock characters are highly appealing and individuated, and the songs are all great… I think that the shortness of it totally works; it feels packed with incident… It’s touching and thrilling and sad… I think this is an early peak which it will be hard to match.

BETH I really did not like this when I was a child, and I think it’s because his mother is taken away. Even though the Times review said it was a happy movie, and Disney himself said it was a happy movie, it did not seem happy. And the ending still seems a little bit abrupt… When I was watching it just now, I thought, “Maybe Adam is Dumbo.” I wondered if that was why you liked it so much… I don’t have any reservations but I remember not liking it, so I would not expect my kids to like it. Maybe boys like it more; maybe boys can handle the material better. I was so upset by it that I did not want to keep watching it… All around, thumbs up.

BROOM The movie is notably different from the previous three in that it’s really dialogue-based and contemporary… For the first time, you aren’t inclined to watch for the craft. They’ve really mastered it and you just watch the story. The sequences play so smoothly. The better musical scoring was a part of it – the underscoring works perfectly and draws you into it. I felt like they had gotten to a level of craft where now they could make any Disney movie… I would be happy to set kids down in front of this now.

5. (3/08)

ADAM A greater contrast with the preceding movie could not possibly be imagined. The politics of Dumbo are very subversive, whereas Bambi is just a paean to conformity… The movie is like Mickey Mouse to Dumbo‘s Donald Duck… All the characters were cardboard. And the one-dimensional, mechanistic view of human life portrayed here is what makes it uninteresting… The music in this was appalling. This just seemed like a shoddier effort.

BETH It was really dull. I just didn’t think it was engaging. I thought the idea behind it was nice, but I don’t know if there’s a way to do it that could keep you interested in the characters, because the characters aren’t the point… They found a way to make very cute rabbits not be cute. Things like that weren’t working for me and eventually I decided that it was all misguided. I think they had good intentions… It seemed like the animators got excited every time they had to do something dark; I thought the forest fire and the fight in rainbow colors were really excellent. Finally! That all came in the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

BROOM I had mixed feelings, but I wasn’t struggling against the kind of gut distaste that you guys seem to have had. I saw what it was trying to be: primal beauty, and adorable, and a couple of other things. They didn’t quite fit together, but I understood and could sympathize with what each moment was supposed to be… I thought that the cuteness was actually done conscientiously. It didn’t feel like it was going for cuteness in a cheap Hallmark card way, as a ploy. But then there were three scenes in a row that were trying to be adorable, and that was too much, too one-note… The story rode an uncomfortable line between complete anthropomorphism and nature documentary.

6. (5/08)

ADAM That was totally meta. That was crazy. People paid money to see that in a theater? I found it really entertaining, but it’s hard to imagine that it would be entertaining as anything other than a curiosity… I was interested in the way that all the stories in this movie were told before they were told. They made it very clear that these were just filmed anecdotes. They show the artists thinking up the plane before they show you the plane. Which was weird.

BETH I don’t understand why it’s in their canon. I thought it was going to be a feature, not a bunch of shorts… I thought it was really great, actually… I would tell people to watch it if they see it on television. It’s a good rainy day movie. Very low-commitment.

BROOM It was like something to show to schools… I think it did its job on me. Also, it was about specific South American things that I hadn’t been overexposed to. Lake Titicaca, and gauchos – I’ve never had this particular stuff shoved down my throat before, so I’m perfectly happy for Disney to show me some cartoons about it… I found the movie pretty charming. But it’s totally not in the category of “feature film”… I like the concept behind it, that benign superficial tourism and just the beauty of a country can be sold as a reason that we should have good relations with that country.

7. (6/08)

ADAM I feel weirdly intoxicated right now… If you set aside the idea of it being edutainment, and think of it as a Freudian descent into the underworld of the mind, there’s a definite sort of logical and inexorable progression from cheerful stories to Satyricon, basically… During the climactic scene, I was weeping with embarrassed giggles… I think this might be appealing to adolescents in its message of impossible-to-satisfy sexual chaos… It may not have been coherent and it may not have had any kind of structure or purpose, but it was definitely trying to go balls out at something… I would tell anyone to watch this movie. Particularly people who are not Disney fans.

BETH [absent]

BROOM We weren’t stoned in any way, but I feel kind of like we were… I liked that it was set in no-man’s-land, with just a weird pink and red background, just a place of pure fun. That indeterminate space where craziness happens… Clearly the impetus for the movie to exist was similar to Saludos Amigos, even if it wasn’t commissioned by the government. But given that project, they made such anti-educational choices. There was very little content, and a lot of it was repeated from the other movie… I feel like this was some kind of a turning point for the studio; there was definitely a sense that this was less cared for. But that last sequence was something.

8. (7/08)

ADAM That was cheerfully stupid but it was still stupid. I do not recommend that people see this. I think this was the worst Disney production I’ve ever seen… I think it’s reprehensible that they actually marketed this in theaters. It felt like a collection of leavings… This might be a lower point even than the late-70s trough that we’re all familiar with.

BETH I saw a bunch of the individual pieces when I was a kid, because The Disney Channel would air them before or after shows, and I think that’s the best way to view them. When they’re all together, you can notice that they don’t really add up to anything and aren’t that great… It just doesn’t even seem like a movie.

BROOM This seemed genuinely slapdash, far more than The Three Caballeros, though “slapdash” isn’t really a fair word to use for any Disney movie… It was certainly far less entertaining than any of the previous ones. I have the least inclination to watch any of it again. Although I would watch the “All The Cats Join In” segment if it was on, and I would also watch “After You’ve Gone.”

9. (8/08)

ADAM That was terrible. It was an uneven pastiche of all sorts of crazy things. I thought it was lazy of them to resurrect Jiminy Cricket and Cleo for such a shoddy purpose. Bongo was like, here’s this circus plotline, and then here’s this unfit-for-the-wilderness plotline, and then here’s this bears slapping plotline. Also, as a paean to spousal abuse, it was irresponsible… Just as in The Three Caballeros, the terrible shock of seeing live-action people is almost physically upsetting… Charlie McCarthy is an asshole.

BETH That sucked, okay? It’s like they weren’t even trying, like they weren’t even thinking. Could they not have come up with a story? That was one of the worst Disney things I’ve ever seen… I give Bongo a C-minus… I thought they were definitely inspired by Warner Brothers, but, as I said at the time, they didn’t know how to do it. It wasn’t as funny, it wasn’t as slick, and it just looked like an imitation… I hope I never have to watch it again and I’m really glad you didn’t buy it.

BROOM There are lot of Disney shorts, and we accept that a lot of them are stupid. The only thing that’s distinctive about these is that they were packaged as a feature-length movie and included in the feature canon. But it’s just some shorts, of not very high quality. It’s not that shocking… I found more atmosphere to enjoy and be creeped-out by in the frames than I did in the actual stories… The flavor of this whole movie was: “Let’s just get out the stuff that we have, and use it, and put something in the theaters.” There’s also a feeling of nostalgic sadness saying goodbye to Donald, Mickey, and Goofy, because we’re not gonna be seeing them again in this project.

10. (9/08)

ADAM It may have been better than the last one but let’s be clear: it wasn’t actually good… “Bumble Boogie” was psychologically satisfying, and sort of creepy… “Johnny Appleseed” was the dreckiest of the segments. I thought the cornpone Parson Weems quality of it was disturbing… I thought “Little Toot” was pretty adorable, in spite of myself… “Trees” was the campiest thing I think we’ve seen in any Disney film… Much of the psycho-sexual quality of “Pecos Bill” was disturbing.

BETH That was the best of the “package” films… I really expected it to be terrible, so it was nice to see some pretty backgrounds and fun animation… Here’s my problem with this movie as a whole: none of the characters – except for the chipmunk – seem like Disney characters. The bodies of the animals – like the bunnies in “Wintertime” – they were husky in a strange way. They didn’t seem as lithe, as nimble, as animals usually do in Disney. And their faces seemed dumber. Johnny Appleseed had this weird, not-quite-characterized face… I thought the characterization of the tugboats in “Little Toot” was better than any of the animals or people in this movie.

BROOM I thought this was an encouraging improvement on both the story and technical fronts… I’m not saying that this was great, but I really enjoyed it, especially because I had no expectations for it. I found myself feeling really pleased that it had some verve and panache. In places… Short for short, almost all of them were better than the average of Make Mine Music, which it was essentially a continuation of… I thought “Bumble Boogie” was awesome.

11. (10/08)

ADAM That was awesome!… I found The Wind in the Willows totally charming. It was like a Dickens story crossed with a Wodehouse story… I liked that this was not yet in the Disney mold of, like, a spunky hero on a voyage of self-discovery.

BETH That was one of my favorites. I thought The Wind in the Willows was pretty interesting but not for kids at all. There’s just no way they could follow it. It was hard even for me. You have Scottish and British dialects, and the story is about, like, a deed… I still think that for these to be the first two stories that they tell as regular stories in ten years was a strange choice.

BROOM I thought both segments in the movie required a sophistication of narrative comprehension that kids just don’t have. I remembered seeing both halves, separately, and not being able to really follow either of them… Interesting thing about this movie: there are no truly sympathetic characters… In many ways this movie did seem like it initiated a new direction, toward what Disney is now… This feels like a more conservative, less visually-oriented type of storytelling. I felt like here they suddenly have maybe fifty percent of the elements of the Disney movie “brand” in place.

12. (11/08)

ADAM While it was more dated than I had ever realized, it’s still very good-natured… Could there be a lusher, more exhilarating moment in the history of cinema than when the sparkles clothe her and she emerges in that wedding gown?… It was cheerful, and maybe not especially well drawn, but it had a pleasant liveliness to the drawing. It was totally bearable. Though there were moments when Cinderella seemed a little too much like someone from a 1950s soap commercial; the anachronism of it jarred me a little, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

BETH I hadn’t realized how many animal hijinks there would be… As a kid, I was always waiting for it to get back to her and her dress… I think it was solid kids’ entertainment, and it felt more contemporary as kids’ entertainment than any of the previous Disney movies. I can imagine kids still watching this.

BROOM This is a seventy-minute movie, and of those minutes, about thirty were cat and mouse bullshit… The fairy godmother scene is the best in the movie by a long shot. Not just because of the dress or the pumpkin, but because it has atmosphere and something exciting is happening… I found the mice very difficult to take. I think if you excised all the animal material, you’d have a pleasant 25 minute movie. This was just tedious… It felt thin, and it felt a little cynical on the part of the studio.

13. (11/08)

ADAM I didn’t think that was very successful. To me one of the most compelling parts of the book Alice in Wonderland is the sense of malice that emanates from all the characters, which is only imperfectly translated here. It just loses some of its delicious arbitrariness.

BETH I thought it was really good. It was so different from any Disney movie we’ve seen. I thought it felt a lot more daring… I didn’t like this at all when I was a kid. It felt like I was in a nightmare. I was supposed to sympathize with Alice, and I couldn’t bear to. Placing myself in her position made me feel horrible. I felt like I needed to get out.

BROOM I thought it was great. When I was a kid, I was aware of the softer tone of the movie as compared to the book, but watching it now, I didn’t feel like the differences from the book actually detracted from the pleasures of this movie itself… By borrowing one-fiftieth of the wit of the books, they made the movie seem full of interesting material. And delightful, to my mind… I think that the Mary Blair designs looked fantastic.

14. (12/08)

ADAM This might be my new favorite… The remarkable thing about the movie is that it makes both childhood and adulthood seem unappealing, but does so in a way that’s totally charming. Well, maybe not “unappealing,” but they’re both mixed bags, like life is. It does not feel like a fairy tale… It was ambiguous. And it really packed a lot of adventure into seventy-five minutes. There was not a dull moment in this movie… I thought this was deeply satisfying. And thought-provoking, and subtle.

BETH I liked it a lot… Maybe I’m wrong, but why is this movie not more popular? Is it popular? It seems like we’ve all seen it just once. It’s not a “beloved favorite.”

BROOM I enjoyed it now. But as a kid I didn’t understand what it was supposed to add up to. I think it only makes sense at a remove from childhood, because it’s a depiction of childhood as seen by adults… This was definitely the most sophisticated script so far. There was also, notably, nothing at all artsy in it… Not only were the people animated better, but the staging was better here than anywhere before. Every scene somehow was conveyed in a hugely kinetic way.

15. (1/09)

ADAM I didn’t realize that dogs were so ethnic… In basically every scene of the movie, I was comparing it to the equivalent scene in Guys and Dolls, which this was sort of the animated version of. This is a little sentimentalized compared to that – it’s not wrong to say that this is an overly greeting-card-like movie. But it was fun… It has an easy, worldly, slightly cynical quality.

BETH I thought the movie was a lot of fun. I don’t think it was a great piece of filmmaking, but it was solidly entertaining… It’s like the song “Uptown Girl,” by Billy Joel… I thought some of the background transitions – where Lady would be in the garden and then suddenly in a terrible doghouse in the rain – I thought those were nice, and something we haven’t seen before.

BROOM It felt very slick and modern. There’s really no difference between this and the version of it that they would make today. Not even in tone… The animation of character acting gets better and better, more elaborate and interesting. Both of the leads were very well done. And that scene with the spaghetti – people don’t just like it because of that image, but because the whole scene is played so well… The movie keeps picking things that have genuine sentimental value and then just going too far. But I didn’t resent it as being totally phony. It’s calculated, but by people who were trying hard to do a good job at something a little bit tasteless. Overall, I was just impressed by the effortless confidence of it.

16. (2/09)

ADAM This movie was almost exclusively attractive visually. They totally abandoned lushness and went for “zap! pow!” flatness and quasi-abstraction. And it was great, visually… But nobody’s motivations make any sense… Maleficent is sort of the hero of this movie. She’s the only person with any force of personality… I think this is the most arbitrarily fairy-tale-like of all the movies. It’s the one where people’s motivations matter the least and the abstract arc of the fairy tale is the most important, and I think that makes sense to pair with Tchaikovsky, a sort of abstract, classical soundtrack that comes from above.

BETH The colors! It’s like they discovered fuchsia for the first time. I found it delightful, and I thought they were being very daring… The problem is that you can’t relate to anything for a really long time… We don’t know her or care about her… I thought maybe they were utilizing color so boldly because they knew that kids wouldn’t be into the story, and they were trying to get them involved aesthetically.

BROOM The script just doesn’t work. They obviously have a problem, because the story is just “A curse was placed on her, and on her sixteenth birthday the curse came to pass, but then the prince came and saved her.” They decided to put the longest delay in between the morning of her sixteenth birthday and the evening, and they made it be about the dress, and the cake – just artificial delays, because the story doesn’t have anything to offer… It’s all stylized. Every layer of the movie is artificial… Almost every background is beautiful and striking… It had a materialistic attitude toward even the elements of fairy tale stories. There are no emotions in this movie.

17. (3/09)

ADAM The story was a little flat, but visually it was top-notch. They decided to be cartoony again. For real. It was like the Sleeping Beauty cartooniness taken to a jauntier and more confident level… I think the way that they portrayed the city with line and patches of character that spilled over line was really lovely… I thought that the puppies were not all that well characterized… The dogs themselves, while perfectly adequately animated and pretty acute, were nothing magical. It was the backgrounds that I thought were really amazing. And Cruella herself.

BETH The way they used color was very sophisticated, I thought… When we first saw Anita, I thought, “they’ve done the perfect female face.” I thought she looked pretty, and smart, and looked like a real person. She’s wearing this very fancy, expensive outfit, and seems to have a career and a life. And then she just became a domesticated, kind of frumpy version of herself.

BROOM The designs of the still imagery, and also the lively way that they animated it, starting with the opening credit sequence, were all gratifying… I felt like this movie made Lady and the Tramp feel like a warm-up… I was struck by how television was a recurring theme here. It was sort of showing how Disney had embraced television… I thought the first half of the movie was a lot better than the second half.

18. (4/09)

ADAM It’s striking to me that this is the first explicitly moralistic one… The movie struck me as sort of slipshod, coming to it now… It felt like budget cuts. It was so drab… I call attention to the fact that the only women in this movie are those squirrels and Madam Mim and the dishwasher woman. But of course there are no sympathetic males either. Everyone’s unpleasant, really… I don’t have much else to say about this movie. It was ramshackle… It was fine.

BETH I was thinking about why I liked it so much when I was 13 or 14, and I think it’s because it feels modern, in a way that everything prior to it did not… Also, it’s always active… I don’t think that this was a great work, but it was entertaining to me in the same way. It never lapses, I felt… It didn’t have as much class as I thought it had. So what, though? As kids’ entertainment it was fine.

BROOM 101 Dalmatians felt like, “wow, look what we came up with! It’s great! The movie doesn’t totally hang together — but look at this new look and style and attitude we came up with!” And here it immediately already felt like, “the formula is in place, let’s turn out another one”… The whole movie gave me the impression that there was no big picture for any of the artists anymore. Real care seemed to have been put into it only on the scale where a single person was working on his own… It felt like a chintzier product.

19. (5/09)

ADAM I thought it was funny that this was Disney’s response to the 60s. They tried to do the Beatles, but their Beatles were singing barbershop. They obviously said, “let’s get some of this crazy 60s stuff in,” but they had no idea… I liked the shaggy style of the drawing here, with stray lines. It looked like an animated sketchpad… You can see the Hanna-Barbera-ization proceeding apace. Sort of a jauntier, cheaper animation style; less moralizing and more slapstick… “Easygoing” is what I would call this movie. It’s like nobody meant any of it, for the whole movie. And that’s sort of comforting.

BETH I thought Shere Khan was a great villain character… I liked Mowgli’s face. I thought he was cute and easy to watch. A lot of times I think kids’ faces look obnoxious… It feels like it was made by people who had done a lot of pot. A lot about it seemed so 60s-y.

BROOM I certainly liked this movie a lot when I was a kid… The movie is just a series of encounters with characters, some of whom have songs. Well, I guess they all have songs, but some of the songs suck… The slapstick was generally well-animated, but a lot of it was pretty lazy stuff. I guess Sword in the Stone was like that too. I feel like The Jungle Book has a little more human warmth, which is probably why I liked it better… The movie didn’t demand anything of us. There’s no investment to be made in it; it’s just a series of diversions.

20. (7/09)

ADAM It was sort of like 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp, turned down to five… The movie was just so boring!. It was just painfully dull. “What are all the things we can think of about upper-crust French people? Doing boring shit?” I’m surprised they didn’t have a whole scene that was a porcelain-painting lesson… There were all these things that felt like, “[exhausted groan], so what other obstacles can we throw at them?”… None of it hung together at all.

BETH It was very boring. Especially if you’re tired, it’s really unwatchable… It had a Scooby-Doo quality to it… I did like the backgrounds. The elaborate furniture and that sort of stuff, I thought, was nicely done. It had a mood… I think it was mostly the script. I think the lack of threat was a problem. There wasn’t enough conflict driving the action, throughout.

BROOM I thought the animation was actually all it had going for it. It felt like this non-starter project had been handed over to the art department and they had done a fine, serviceable job of it. What it was lacking was any reason to be, any story interest. I also thought the musical score really dragged it down constantly… The whole movie suffered from the same flaw: total insensitivity to whatever little story there was… The main problem with it was that it was just an animated movie about cats for the sake of there being an animated movie about cats.

21. (7/09)

ADAM That was like all the delights of childhood in a single package. I remembered everything about it… You can see why Robin Hood is a sex object to me. He has those big huggable eyes, like a Japanese anime hero… I feel totally satisfied. But I will say that it has a sort of “François le champi” pleasure to it, which I don’t think it would have a second time.

BETH It was a little bit dull and it felt cheap, but it was fine. The music felt like Love Story to me, like a live-action romance movie. The rest felt like a very long Saturday morning cartoon. A cartoon that I would have watched on TV as a child. It was nothing: it was not exciting, it was not suspenseful, it was not terrible. It was solid… I guess if I had seen this as a kid I would have liked it.

BROOM I had immediate access to the way I felt about every moment when I was eight, but I’m still not sure what this movie is like from an adult’s perspective… I think the script is more grown-up in its construction than many of the movies we’ve seen, and certainly more than any of the Hanna-Barbera-type cartoons that you’re comparing it to… I can see that it has a lot of standard fare common to other kids’ stuff. But I think from a technical standpoint, the character animation is very good. There are a lot of kinds of acting and expression in it that they haven’t tried before – sarcasm and joking around.

22. (10/09)

ADAM I thought that was almost unwatchable. I was so upset. I adore the books and that’s part of why I’m so angry about this. It’s interesting that this tried so slavishly to make the point that it was following the books, because it failed so utterly to capture their spirit… I used to think that Sterling Holloway was a great choice for the voice, but it’s just so treacly and bumptious!… The real Pooh has an intense seriousness about everything he says.

BETH I thought it was dull, but it was interesting to me that both Pooh and Tigger seemed like very self-involved characters. That felt new. It seemed new to be so self-referential in general.

BROOM This was three different short features that had been packed into one movie, and I think the quality of those three shorts varied. They weren’t all at the same level, and I think the idea of packing them together was detrimental to all of them… I thought that at least in the first segment, they had in some ways gotten the spirit of it across. The conceit that they’re stuffed animals and these stories are sort of Christopher Robin’s playing with them, but they’re also sort of their own beings in their own world… I thought that was handled carefully. I thought they had struck a nice balance. And then in the latter segments it drifted and started to feel more like an episode of “Gummi Bears” by the end.

23. (11/09)

ADAM It was very fun. It was totally cheesy and often inadvertently fun, but that doesn’t make it less fun… The music was the best part for me. All the pieces were so corn-alicious… No element of the plot made sense at all… This period of the late 70s feels like the conceited nadir of children’s entertainment. It feels like a bleak time for children’s culture in America. And we were in it!… It was blatantly inferior to the product of the 30s, 40s and 50s. But it was fine. I feel like we’re erecting castles on a continuously sinking platform.

BETH I thought it was great. It was really entertaining… The music was like Herb Alpert backing Joni Mitchell… I thought the story was actually better than usual. I, as a grown-up, was pretty involved in this stupid plot… I loved it; I thought it was so much fun; BUT…

BROOM Part of the fun for us is that it embodied all sorts of clichés and tropes and standards that remind us of our childhoods. Not that it was necessarily of high quality. But that’s still fun… I thought that in many places the animation was particularly exuberant compared to what we’ve seen recently… I felt like I was seeing the rudiments of the post-Little Mermaid style, the slick 90s product — the idea of integrating many different varieties of crowd-pleasing stuff in a contemporary, fast-paced way — but it felt to me a little like they hadn’t worked it out yet.

24. (1/10)

ADAM It was composed of nothing but clichés the whole time… The plotting was terrible… It had weird racial overtones. You know, this is usually the story about the slave boy and the massuh’s son, meeting on the road twenty years later and they won’t acknowledge each other, and cue the violins… I think that this really may be the nadir.

BETH That was poorly done in every respect… I thought the color choices were strange and off in many of the scenes. I thought the outlining was weird — sometimes there were glow-y parts on the tops of the bodies that didn’t make sense. It looked like a bad Saturday morning cartoon… The music was full of wrong choices for the material.

BROOM That was not very good… A lot of the recent ones seem to have been taking older ones as models to some degree, and this was clearly built on the Bambi model. But they just didn’t have it in them. I felt like they just weren’t smart enough to do it… I feel like this story deserved a tragic ending, but they didn’t have the guts for that, so it ended on a nothing note… The reliance on Warner Brothers routines was, again, sad.

25. (1/10)

ADAM That felt like a He-Man cartoon. It also had the feel of an eighties cartoon in that the backgrounds felt like watercolor and the action felt like shrinky-dinks, pasted on. The plot felt like a Lord of the Rings knock-off… It was sort of charming. I mean, all eighty minutes I was awake. There were always things happening; there were no digression caterpillars… I totally would have enjoyed watching this as a kid: it had a lot of plot, and I wouldn’t have minded the failure of characterization.

BETH The backgrounds were a lot nicer than I thought they would be. I was really expecting this movie to be a lot uglier. Actually it was really ugly; or at least it had a lot of ugly things in it. And scary things… All the special effects seemed lovingly done, like the backgrounds. The layouts, too — the actual design of the shots… I was expecting it to be worse than the worst that we’ve seen, and it was much better than that. It wasn’t the worst by far.

BROOM It wasn’t scary in an old warm-hearted “being scared is fun” way. It was scary in an 80s way, sort of a Steven Spielberg scary, like Poltergeist… It was certainly very different from anything that had come before. We’re really in an entirely different cultural territory here… There were a lot of sequences where the tone was confused, or where the music was a little confusing… The movie was really an effects showcase, whereas there have been almost no effects in any of the recent movies. For the first time in several decades, it felt like the animators were doing something that they found exciting. Which is not to say that the final product was so great, but it certainly felt enthusiastic.

26. (3/10)

ADAM It looked like a Don Bluth movie… I would have liked this as a child because I liked anything that was lavishly about travel to a foreign city. This had a queen and Big Ben and Sherlock Holmes and all of the things that England is… I probably would have enjoyed this just fine as a kid, but it’s just a nothing. There’s nothing here.

BETH It didn’t look like a Disney movie, the same way that The Black Cauldron didn’t. It looked like an 80s kids’ cartoon… I liked a lot of the backgrounds. I thought the street scenes, the outdoor backgrounds, were nicely done. The indoor backgrounds I didn’t really like, but whenever it was nighttime outside I thought they did a nice job… This was way too scary for me as a seven-year-old. That was like my worst fear as a child, that some bad guy was going to come and take away my family… I don’t think I would have enjoyed it and I don’t think I would show it… I was pretty bored watching this.

BROOM I think this movie should have been called The Mouse Detective. Because it’s not that great. It was bad principally in the music and timing departments. A lot of what we saw and had to think about would have been bearable had it been done tightly, but it wasn’t. There was a certain amount of flair in some of the animation, but it wasn’t serving any greater cause, so it didn’t add up to anything good… I don’t think it’s right. I wouldn’t show this to my kids. It gets a lot of things wrong. The song sequences are so wrong-headed.

27. (4/10)

ADAM I have to say: this movie had panache. It was funny… There are at least three songs that I am still humming right now… There were little touches that were really good, things that they clearly took pleasure in doing right… It’s striking to me, as someone who is living in New York and someone who was obsessed with depictions of New York as a kid, that this is not a movie that would be made today. This is a New York full of ethnic toughs, and crime, and graffiti in the subway, and class hatred. No one would ever even think to make a movie now where the good guys are like “‘Eyyyy, get outta my way!”

BETH It wasn’t as bad as the last two. In parts it was funny. And the songs were decent for once… I felt like they ripped off their own movies, a little bit. Like Lady and the Tramp.… The drawing style was still that sleazy, cheap style, and not what we’ll see in The Little Mermaid, which looks wholesome and not sleazy… I actually loved the bad guy in this, but I didn’t think he was appropriate for children. It’s like the fourth kidnapping in a row! As a kid who was afraid of kidnapping: duh, no wonder I was! Everything had kidnapping in it! They tied her wrists up. Everything that I feared happened to that girl… Two and a half stars instead of one and a half stars.

BROOM I had been anticipating that we would see The Little Mermaid as a sudden rebirth out of ashes. But I actually saw this as sort of a halfway point, building toward that from where they’d been… I thought Bette Midler’s musical number was a huge blast of adrenaline for the Disney organization. We saw several different song styles being tried, and then in the middle of this is the mock-“Broadway song,” and it lights up the screen!… I thought the most important thing that they’d rediscovered was timing, which I keep saying the movies lack. This one, finally, had a sense of timing. The sequences flowed… But how good is it really? Not that good.

28. (5/10)

ADAM I thought I was going to be blown away by how this looked — and it looks fine — but what I was actually impressed by was its wit. Which surprised me. I did not remember that, and I was tickled. There was even redeeming humor in the turgid romantic parts… I liked it for all the right reasons.

BETH I didn’t think it looked that amazing either, though it wasn’t bad — but it was very tight. The music was good, the story was good, and it felt like everyone working on it was excited by the idea of an under-the-sea movie. They were very inventive in coming up with fun things to animate… It felt very fresh. Very 90s, but fresh.

BROOM I think that all of its greatest strengths were in what we would attribute in a live-action movie to “directing.” The whole movie was done very much like Broadway. There’s a very particular way that songs and lines play on Broadway, and it’s something that this movie did consistently and with confidence. And not just the songs; I felt like all of the storytelling beats were from that same school, and done exactly right so that you could just lap it all up easily… I would say about one-half of the animation was better than it had been, and about half of it was about the same… I thought it was great. I really enjoyed watching it, and I haven’t felt that in a long time.

29. (6/10)

ADAM That was a lot more visually sophisticated than I was anticipating… I don’t think it has respect for kids’ intelligence. The dominant mode of this movie is a sort of wiseacre jokiness… It was like the Simpsons episode where they go to Australia… Although it was superficially attractive, it all looked sort of tinselly, in a way that I found distinctly unappealing. Everything seemed like it was coated in cellophane. It’s clear they took a lot of pleasure in an accurate, toylike approach. It all had a “collector’s” quality to it, which is not wholesome… A weird albino Disney movie.

BETH Did they really use Australia very well as a setting? No! They didn’t do anything with it… The whole bird adventure at the beginning was dumb. You have absolutely no sense of where things are going to go from there. Then they go in a pretty pedestrian direction… The Bob Newhart mouse is a pathetic mumblebum. There’s nothing appealing about that mouse!… I thought it was funny that there was a “wanted” posted nailed to a tree. In the middle of the forest? This took place in modern times!

BROOM It had more shadows indicating three-dimensional rounding than any movie we’ve seen yet. But to me, that gives things a slightly unsavory quality… Everything is just trope upon arbitrary trope… Why did this movie happen at all? There’s no there there. It’s like to create the substance of the movie they just used some machine that churns things out. Whereas to create the individual shots, they actually used something much more interesting than what they had used for Little Mermaid… This was your classic polished turd. It was highly buffed nothingness.

30. (8/10)

ADAM It’s so shamelessly and unapologetically enthusiastic about what it is that it’s extremely infectious. It’s like Glee fifteen years earlier… It feels like drag. But glorious, pretty, lush drag. It felt like a Judy Garland Christmas special… I feel like the Gaston character is like an indictment of my whole value system. He’s unlike all other Disney villains, which I think is cool. He’s not like a typical lisping uncle — it’s a little more creative… I think this is totally satisfying. As a kid I was enthralled by its wide-eyed itselfness.

BETH I was very entertained by it… Belle isn’t a bad role model. She’s a decent person who likes to read. And she’s pretty. It’s interesting to me that both of her suitors set up these “choose your dad or choose me” scenarios… It’s hard for me to believe that movies about girls going on adventures really appeal to boys…. Because I’d never seen this before, right now I think I like it better than The Little Mermaid, because it was all new to me.

BROOM You can complain about the PC-ization that we’re seeing here, but I think that most of the thinking about “the message we’re sending to girls” pays off, by making this genuinely a more wholesome movie… The main difference between this and the early Disney movies of a similar wholesomeness was that those movies were somehow “open” whereas this felt very constructed, very directed, like a Broadway show. It’s more clearly just a series of displays of stagecraft. It feels a little phony… My fifteen-years-later feeling was that it holds up pretty well, and is good for kids, and I still like The Little Mermaid better.

31. (10/10)

ADAM I think the Robin Williams sort of cuts the Broadway schmaltz. They have both themes, and they’re both oppressive in and of themselves, but together they’re sort of bearable… Aladdin is pretty cute. He has those big neotenous eyes that make you just wanna hug him… There is a moral, but the moral is, like, “free yourself!” But it’s a perfect message for the 90s. It’s this vapid sort of “do whatever you want!” There’s no actual content to it… What year is this? 93? Totally Clinton. It feels like it’s of that time. Vapid. Ahistorical.

BETH It seemed very of its time. The movie was not boring, and kept me interested the entire time. And I thought the references were amusing, but in a long-term way, unsuccessful. I know those references; kids of the 2040s aren’t going to get any of those weird jokes… I thought I was going to be annoyed by Robin Williams, but he was at his Robin-Williamsy best… The songs were shitty. He can’t sing!… It’s not preachy, like most of the Disney movies have been…. I felt like the people who made this were challenging themselves to see how much they could pile on. It didn’t have the soul of The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. Which is fine.

BROOM I like that it’s visually stylish in a way that hearkens back to the old ones and is also totally garish in a new, 90s way, and is exuberant about its garishness. I thought it had the best backgrounds in years… The movie was right on the line for me. Because when I first saw it, I loved it, but now part of me was thinking, “this is so cheesy”… I enjoyed this, but I feel like it’s enjoying something somewhat distasteful. I feel like if you had showed this to the 1940 audience, they would have thought, “that was offensive! and abrasive!”… I think the CGI has aged well, because it was used with taste, with an eye for its otherworldliness.

32. (3/11)

ADAM That was as dated as any movie we’ve seen in the whole run. That was just a great big wallop of 90s, in a way that is distressing to me. It had that portentous, vaguely environmentalist, vaguely multi-culturalist, heaping political correctness… The only thing that was legitimately exuberant about this, as opposed to fake exuberant, was anything with Jeremy Irons in it. He’s great… It felt like the film version of a Maya Angelou poem… I think the 90s had a sense — this was the period in which history was over, right? And we sort of mistook shallowness for greatness during that period, in a way that is depressing but very much characteristic of a time of basic peace and prosperity.

BETH It was excited about how politically correct it was being… I liked a lot of the nature long shots, like trees silhouetted against the dusk. Things like that. But the movie!… It was slow, too… I didn’t get sad when the dad died, which is weird. I think which means that the movie was flawed somehow. I cry at everything. I really do. I didn’t even get close to crying at this movie… All the songs were terrible.

BROOM I was aware of just how lush a thing any Disney animated movie is, even when it’s not satisfying or good… I think this movie is all screwed up. It felt like all this mythic stuff was just happening because it had been calculated and read about. The reason those things are meaningful in other movies is because they have the quality of having come from the subconscious. Which means not a lot of puns, and not a lot of music overexplaining every moment, which is a holdover from the Broadway aesthetic. If it just had cooled off and let us feel that we were watching a dream, it would have had so much more to offer. But it never did… It’s art without sincerity at a very elaborate level of execution.

33. (4/11)

ADAM That might be the worst one. Four movies ago we were so excited that this breath of fresh Broadway air was being blown into the Disney musical, and now they’ve already exhausted that possibility… I find this exceptionally offensive because it’s about a really lurid and tragic period in American history. To take a nominally historical subject and make it into just cannon-fodder for your schmaltzy story is terrible… It was just a total pastiche of every cliche image of Native Americans that anyone could think of… They had no personalities… Garish and unpleasant to look at.

BETH They didn’t seem to think about who would be watching this. Does this appeal to kids at all? It’s a love story! As a kid, I never cared about the love story part of stories, and it was all a love story. And then it was war-ish. I just don’t feel like they were thinking about how it was playing to the intended audience… It was just so dull! Even in the beginning, when the ship was going through the storm, I found my mind wandering… Occasionally there would just be a nice picture on the screen… A very irresponsible movie.

BROOM For me what made it was terrible was the intensity of the complaint that I’ve made about previous movies: that they did not understand the reasoning behind what they were doing. It’s based on a fervent superficial familiarity with prior Disney movies… We didn’t believe that the characters loved each other; we didn’t believe that they were characters… The songs are very bad. The lyrics are very bad… Why Pocahontas? “Powerful. Female. Minority.” And because this movie so deeply doesn’t work, because this story doesn’t actually lend itself, it’s so transparent that that’s the only reason this movie exists. And that’s embarrassing!

34. (7/11)

ADAM That was, like, three-hundred percent. I don’t know if it was good, but it was compelling. I mean, wow. To be clear, this was terribly ill-conceived, and I can’t believe this got green-lighted. But it was just so passionate. Just a wrong property to make into a lush animated musical… I saw it said in one of Elizabeth Taylor’s obituaries that “she brought down studios.” And that’s sort of the level of craziness of everything about this… I think the songs are the least effective thing about this, because they’re so discordant… I mean, it was good. I liked it! Or, it wasn’t “good,” it was memorable.

BETH I thought it was beautiful. I thought that the illustrations were really lovingly done… I can’t imagine a child watching this… It was compelling. My barometer is how frequently I look at the clock to see how much time has passed, and I wasn’t doing it very much… With all of the songs, I was just imagining them imagining how it would play on Broadway.

BROOM It couldn’t be more misbegotten. It boggles the mind… The “Hellfire” song is the best sequence by a longshot, because it’s deeply inappropriate for a Disney movie, and they go all-out. And because it had mystery and atmosphere and doesn’t fully explain itself; it just shows us imagery that’s effective. The rest of the movie is very diagrammatic… They were trying to do an epic melodrama. This is their Les Misérables… It definitely had flair, but I feel like it also needs to be pointed out that it was bad.

35. (9/11)

ADAM I actually found it a pleasurable experience to watch. I was gripped. I mean, I understood that it was being cheesy and cynical, but I also responded to all the trite devices and the cheap heart-tugging… You know, they are sort of oscillating on this, if you will, David Letterman versus Maya Angelou; those are the only two emotional poles of the nineties… This was more Jay Leno than David Letterman… I’ll admit I was a little moved by “Go the Distance.” I empathize with feeling ostracized because of your superhuman strength and golden tresses… I think we all agreed that they pretty much played out Broadway sincerity by this point. So what were they going to do, if not this?

BETH It was colorful but I found the characters very ugly… The love song sounded like the introduction to a TV show from 1986. And I like that! But it didn’t make sense. I didn’t think any of the songs made sense… I think Aladdin is better. The songs were better integrated, and it felt more lush.

BROOM It’s a film without heart. And it’s detrimental to a movie not to have any heart… I think Hades is a very well designed and animated character, above their normal standards… I just think there was a mismatch between Alan Menken’s doo-wop Broadway style, and the spirit of this movie, which wanted to be like BLAM! BLONK! They shouldn’t really have been singing… I felt like, “I don’t really care about the love between Megara and Hercules!” I didn’t really care about anything enough… There were a lot of nice layouts. Pretty things to see… Basically, a good time, to a low standard of sophistication.

36. (11/11)

ADAM This movie is obviously responding to the criticism of all the Disney heroines. It’s like, “Fine! You think that Disney heroines are passive princesses? Take that!” It seemed calculated to appeal to both P.C. critics of their female characters and Asian markets… In Beauty and the Beast there are at least three songs that we can all sing happily and that are pretty good. Even the notes of these songs were generic and bad. At that point, why even do a musical?… This was just kind of a journeyman effort.

BETH It wasn’t bad. It actually was fine. I found all of the ridiculousness entertaining. Yes, compelling. Who cared?… It seemed like different things were happening than usually happen in Disney movies, and that’s why I was okay with this movie. Such as gray zombie Huns coming to life… I thought the backgrounds were nice… I wasn’t constantly looking at how much time had elapsed, which is always my indicator.

BROOM It was bad, and in the second half I really lost my willingness to humor it. I thought the basic premise of this movie was not necessarily mishandled, but after it became action sequences and denouement it was all completely fumbled. The entire last act made no sense, literally or emotionally… I thought the animation was generally nice. Though it seemed like it had some real geeks working on the animation staff… None of it felt natural. It was embarrassing if you paid attention to it, so we didn’t. To be accepting of this shows that our standards have dropped exponentially.

37. (1/12)

ADAM Come on, everyone! Didn’t this touch your heart? I was very touched by the rank sentimentality of this movie… I found the Phil Collins score extremely effective and touching. I would like to stand up for this movie, because I enjoyed it very much at the time; it was one of my favorites of the nineties ones, and still is. Even though it is a little sentimental — but they’re all a little bit sentimental. Even though it’s a little bit archetypal — but they all are… I frankly enjoyed his unnatural physique. Finally the shoe was on the other foot, gender-wise.

BETH I thought this was pretty dull, except that the action sequences were well done… I actually liked the woman here… The music wasn’t as cheesy as it usually is. It was very restrained. They didn’t overdo “musical numbers” at all… The background illustrations were among the best we’ve seen. I didn’t think the faces were good.

BROOM This was my least favorite in a while. I was waiting for something to be meaningful to me but it felt totally synthetic. The opening, about his parents dying, I was willing to take that as something. But all the Sonic The Hedgehog stuff, I felt distant from it… This one had more of that skeevy geek-sex veneer on it than any of them. The whole thing has this amped-up synthetic quality… “You’ll Be In My Heart” is actually not a bad song… I thought — especially at the beginning — that the editing pace had been goosed up significantly from where it had been, in a way that numbs me. It was cut like a trailer… And the jokes. And everything.

38. (6/12)

ADAM I thought that had the same dispiritingly humdrum quality as when we go to see all the Oscar-nominated animated shorts… I think this was sort of in poor taste. Did there really need to be a leaf or an ash or a butterfly wing for every single note in every single piece this time around?… The colors and the look were so garish. Having to have everything magenta and green is the same as having to have a little swoop or flourish for every note, which is the same thing as picking — I mean, “The Pines of Rome”? What the hell is that?… The whole concept of the year 2000 in retrospect is stupid and embarrassing. But pompous at the same time. And this movie is the kind of thing that summarized the year 2000, to me.

BETH I was thinking about how challenging it must be to start with pieces that exist and try to craft a story to them. They didn’t usually work, but they were interesting… I thought the famous-people aspect was really distracting. I think the bad jokiness makes the whole thing feel out of touch. And now weirdly out-dated… They had a lot to live up to. People by this point had such a different relation to classical music than they did in 1940 to begin with.

BROOM The original “Sorceror’s Apprentice” being included just points up what has gone missing over the generations in between… The first Fantasia has so much greater feeling for the music and for what the animation can be, and this one was hampered by the lack of insight into those things in the present day. There’s a certain sensitivity and taste lacking… We’ve worked our way through the 20th century watching Disney become more and more a set of rote gestures. This felt like a good-faith effort to recapture something that they had genuinely forgotten how to think about… As we talk about these movies we lower and lower our expectations because the minds making them seem to have smaller and smaller ideals.

39. (7/12)

ADAM They sort of head-faked us into thinking this was gonna be another Jungle Book, but it was actually like The Poseidon Adventure... I’m not so sure that this was a failure, the way it seemed like it was going to be at the beginning, when it was all that swoopy CGI and Kevin Costner music… There wasn’t character development, but there was strong characterization… I mean, this movie wasn’t good. It just wasn’t quite the nadir that I was anticipating… If you’re composing the list of the five Disney movies you absolutely never want to see, this is probably not one of them… I’m glad that it was strange.

BETH For seventy-five percent of it, it was really dark… By the time they were in the cave, I was responding to it. I was talking back… Early on — maybe it’s just because I was so turned off by the beginning — no one seemed appealing to me or worth caring about. But then it subverted expectations… I think it’s part of what was gripping about it, that it had this otherworldly quality… The CGI just wasn’t that good. It was very noticeable.

BROOM I found the atmosphere of the movie strange. It felt unearthly. The characters were kind of at arm’s length, compared to most Disney movies… There were the terrible one-liners that a lot of movies now have. And then there were plot events that fit into this formula. And there wasn’t, for me, a sense of character in between. It sort of made the movie feel like it was happening in a strange other space… I’m surprised you two disliked the opening so strongly; to me, it’s the wisecracking that’s embarrassing… The strangeness is in subtle tonal things, but what’s really going on is very run-of-the-mill, standard stuff, with stupid jokes. It’s kind of an insult to us.

40. (8?/12)

ADAM I was gonna say it was like a “Looney Tunes,” but it’s actually like a “Tiny Toons.” As a kid, I would have been in stitches at the “Wait a minute, what you just said doesn’t make sense!” jokes. “Wait a minute, I’m going to spell out a convention here!”… Actually the humor and the style remind me eerily of “Monkey Island”… Didn’t you think it was ugly to look at? It felt Hanna Barbera… John Goodman was a little earnest for me. It was hard to take watching him save the llama so many times… There is no love story in this movie. And that is very satisfying because it avoids a lot of stupid treacliness. Also no songs… I’m sure if I had seen this when I was ten, I would have been transported.

BETH It was strikingly unambitious in terms of what it wanted to be, but it was completely successful. I think of Disney movies as all trying to be greater than what this was. It was really silly, and the time went so much more quickly than it had for maybe the past ten… But it will never be a classic. It reminded me of watching a cartoon episode of Friends. The types of jokes are not the way people joke now. I think that this type of joking ended with September 11th… I thought some of the backgrounds were nice. It felt Saturday-morning-esque, a little bit. It felt the least Disney of all of them. But that was a fine thing! … It’s a good script all-around. It’s really tight… This was a precursor to the “bro-mance,” about ten years ahead of its time.

BROOM It makes me smile! I take issue with the idea that this is unambitious. I think it’s ambitious in a totally different direction… This needs to be seen as a significant accomplishment, if only because everything that it tries to be is something that so many movies have try to be, and they rarely get even close to working. It’s usually incredibly tedious. But there’s something really fluid and natural and joyful about this movie that I am very impressed by. It’s exactly what Disney usually sucks at! What else did Hercules want to be but this, a movie that we thought was charming and silly the whole way through? There’s rarely a joke that I don’t cringe at in other Disney movies. This was never embarrassing to me.

41. (9/12)

ADAM It’s a lot more ambitious than The Fox and the Hound, that’s for sure… They tried not to make the characters cliches even though they were all stereotypes. They were each doing a bit, but the bit was a little different from what you’ve seen before… I did have some fun with this movie. If this was your first introduction to the ragtag team of caperers movie, what an awesome movie this would be… It had a lot of crescendo animations. The city was a little disappointing, but things like the columns, and the volcano, and even Washington D.C. in 1914, I thought, looked kind of cool… Aren’t you at least glad they tried something different?

BETH I kept thinking about Ocean’s Eleven. It has, like this movie, a ragtag team of experts that aids in an adventure. And it’s a short, fast movie in which you get to know each of those characters and like them and root for them. And there’s also a lot of action. I think this movie wanted to do exactly that and completely failed. It was incredibly obtuse… The characters looked a little Adult Swim-y, from the early 2000s…. I thought it sucked. I was so disappointed. I thought I would like it based on the trailer. I thought the tropes would provide. And they really let me down. I think it’s mostly the script’s fault.

BROOM Despite being full of stuff and visually very accomplished, this movie managed to have not a single thing in it that genuinely caught my interest… I felt like this was tried-and-true crap being dished up again but not right… There were no moments that were real; there was no time that you got to feel that you were really somewhere… I have a tip for screenwriters: never have your screenplay revolve around a magic crystal… I thought this movie was horseshit and yet I also thought the animators did seem to care. They seemed excited about the way it looked and the stuff they were doing visually.

42. (11/12)

ADAM It was so sad! I teared up multiple times. There was a lot of social realism that we’ve never seen before and will never see again. And it’s really effective, in part because it’s paired with the surrealism of the aliens. It would be actually really depressing to watch a movie about a little girl whose family is rent apart by uncaring social workers… I thought all the jokes were really affecting. The interaction between the sisters was satisfyingly real but funny… I thought it was great. I thought it looked really pretty but without being over-the-top beeeautiful.… This was probably the best one after the classic ten. It’s the best non-classic one.

BETH The script was great and it had nothing to do with anything Disney had ever done before. It had aliens, but it also had a social worker, it had Elvis. I mean, when have we ever acknowledged outside culture in a Disney movie?… It felt like it was more the story of one person than of a team. All of the 90s movies felt like a bunch of people working on a concept together, and this felt like a very personal story that they managed to tell very well… The way the bodies were drawn was completely different from how they’d been treating women up until now: very strong legs, unbalanced features, not completely proportionate… This is one that I feel like, “oh, I would want kids to watch this!” I thought it was great.

BROOM The tone and spirit of the script was completely different from the norm, but in being about real emotions in the way that it was – which I think is so great – it was tied into the original Disney tradition. Essentially, this is the movie that I’ve wanted them to make, for the last thirty years of movies. And they only did it once… It is beautiful. The backgrounds are all watercolor. They haven’t used backgrounds like that since the 30s, and it gives it such a lush, human feeling. It’s a feast for the eyes… There was a real spirit in all the designs… I was thinking that this was a five-star masterpiece for the first two-thirds of the movie. Some of the air came out toward the end.

43. (1/13)

ADAM It wasn’t a world-class movie, but it was solid. I was entertained the entire time… That’s a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, who totally carried this movie. It wasn’t Disney-stupid-plotted, the way they all are… A steampunk Treasure Island is a great idea… I thought the very idea of having moral complexity in the villain was significant. Admittedly he switched from all good guy to all bad guy to all good guy, but at least he switched from something to something… I liked that this was a Disney movie where the father was gone and not the mother, for a change… It doesn’t make sense that the treasure of a thousand worlds is mostly rings. Aliens don’t even have fingers!

BETH I was entertained by it… The thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character was just like my brother… I don’t know how to watch these movies if I have to think of my actual response. I would fall asleep in order to avoid watching this movie, if I was watching it for real. But I made it be okay! I changed whatever I was seeing into something that was okay… Most of the characters were unlikable. Even the main character wasn’t really likable.

BROOM I found the setting so weird. I didn’t know what the rules were. What is normal and what isn’t? “Steampunk” is supposed to be this stimulating mashup, but this just seemed like a bizarre mix of things… All the aliens looked sort of like snails, or like globs of clay. And an all-farting slug. I didn’t understand what flavor of imagination it was all supposed to be… There’s just less warmth than I want in most of these movies most of the time. The big thing that surprised us about Lilo and Stitch is that it had a modicum of real warmth in it. Here, even the big “relationship,” between him and Long John Silver, was just D.O.A. There was no real feeling there.

44. (2/13)

ADAM All that very grave multiculturalism at the beginning really felt like the first term of the Bush administration. I kept picturing Karen Hughes wearing a scarf and President Bush lecturing Muslim countries on the dignity of women. It sort of upset me, honestly. Maybe I’m just constructing this after the fact, but Pocahontas felt to me like a more naive, dippy, Maya Angelou-type multiculturalism, whereas this was just so studied and self-important that it kind of grossed me out… I thought it was really lovely to look at it… The main thing that bothered me in the first third of this was the three bro-y bros. But I guess you have to make them relatable somehow, and that’s the chintziest way to do it.

BETH I thought their color palettes were very interesting and vibrant. They clearly cared about which colors they were choosing. And they were diverse, too; they really switched it up based on the locations. But their handling of light was a little wrong. They were trying for accuracy and not hitting it, but being very overt about the attempt… They hardly distinguished the brothers. I didn’t even know who the main character was until the other one died… The humor was really bad… These were among the worst songs we’ve heard. There was no subtlety to the lyrics at all.

BROOM I expected this to be sanctimonious and grating, but it turned out to be just super-boring. And thin. Pretty much every element wasn’t really at the level they should have held it to… I thought the coloring looked blatantly like it had been done on a computer. The colors were all sort of tasteless, cheesy… The movie’s supposed to be all about character, but they didn’t give us any real characters. Not even in the designs… The hero is a teenager who thinks he has all the answers but actually has a lot to learn, but his progression just played as “Go away kid, I’m sullen and annoyed. Oh wait, there’s fun in the world!”… And it seemed like it had the wrong ending.

45. (2/13)

ADAM I liked it! It wasn’t magisterial the way Disney sometimes tries to be… I had the uncomfortable feeling that they intended to repopulate Big Thunder Mountain Railroad with these characters, had the movie been successful. My hat is off to history for that not happening… It was more like Spongebob than Warner Brothers… I would show this to my children unreservedly. But I probably won’t remember any of it… As a real estate attorney, I was excited to see the signing of a deed as the pivotal exciting moment… But 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 There was, I felt, a definite homage to Warner Brothers here, in a lot of the jokes and style. It was coarse. It felt unlike Disney in its joking around… I have no problem with this movie… The yodeling song was awesome!.. Why was this so poorly received? It just wasn’t that bad… I guess because there’s no one to want to be. You can’t aspire to be a cow the way you can a princess. When you’re a kid, it’s like you’re watching your aunts. You’re not watching pretty people… It did occur to me toward the end: why would kids care about a real estate transaction?… It seemed like everyone was having fun. The actors and the animators.

BROOM This movie was fine. It was probably the most insubstantial yet. It was just a bonbon… It felt like the descendant of some of the late-60s early-70s era movies, the Robin Hood era. It had some of the same easygoing quality… 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 do think there was probably a miscalculation in the plotting. It wasn’t really for kids… It’s a little like “Wind in the Willows”: There were some bad guys who were like these bad guys, and nobody cared; it was about a deed, and nobody cared… I thought the colors were so much better than Brother Bear. This is what stylish palettes look like. This had so much more professionalism to it.

46. (2/13)

ADAM That was contemptible. That was awful. That was unquestionably the worst one. I could make a BuzzFeed-style list of things that I hated about that movie. The contemptible message of the movie. The father-son dynamic. The absurd gay stereotype… It had that manic knowingness and topicality that is like a noxious growth in these kinds of animated movies in recent years. It was gruesome… Remember how in the mid-2000s it became very popular in hit movies to have a sequence where all the characters sing along to a song from the 60s or 70s? A la My Best Friend’s Wedding? What if we do it eight times?… If there’s anything good to say here, it’s that now you know which is the worst one, when people ask.

BETH I’m only angry that I had to watch it. I’m not necessarily angry about it. But it was terrible. By far the worst. It was ugly and it was super-nerdy. It thought it had something to say about emotions, but it didn’t actually know what it was doing. The whole movie was really Asperger’s-y! And that’s why it was so hard to watch… I think they just went through a lost era in the mid 2000s… This is going to get one star in my Netflix account.

BROOM It was incredibly uncomfortable to watch because it was by stunted nerds trying to address what it’s like emotionally and socially to be a nerd, but they just don’t understand enough about it to make a movie… All of the “humor,” the constant cultural references — it’s like a Rainman thing. It’s comforting to nerds. That’s what “cosplay” is: “You’re dressed as that thing! You dressed up as the thing!” This movie dressed up as a bunch of different things… When the father finally turned it around and said “I believe in you,” he still didn’t actually believe in him! These writers couldn’t imagine any greater, more authentic kind of support from this terrible parent.

47. (3/13)

ADAM That one felt like it was for littler kids than any we’ve seen so far. I don’t know if you’ve seen a Disney Channel show recently, but they all have the same style of twelve-year-old boys talking in this wry, meta way. Knowingness that is totally wholesome… It had a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse quality to it. But Pee-Wee’s Playhouse creeped me out as a child. I always thought that felt like an unsafe place to be… This wasn’t particularly attractive to look at. There were large stretches of CGI background where they didn’t bother to put stuff. “Well, it’s either grass or sky”… It got better toward the end… This had its heart in the right place and was intermittently amusing.

BETH I enjoyed it, but I think once you get to be eleven or twelve, you’re aware of what’s cool, and this wouldn’t be cool enough… I thought it had a great message: that it’s okay to fail… I didn’t mind how it looked. I thought they were using color interestingly. They desaturated it sometimes. In that first scene, and the Kung Fu fight scene… I don’t like the use of pop songs in these movies. It’s interesting that the Broadway-style songs, even though they’re equally cheesy, somehow aren’t as jarring.

BROOM I thought the movie as a whole was sweet and fun… I think they successfully made a movie for a range of different ages. I had some issues with the execution, and some story choices, but I basically found it appealing, because its innocent attitude was real. It’s easy to take that for granted and say, “well, of course this kind of positive playful attitude exists,” but it’s a thing that doesn’t show up in mass culture so much any more. So I’m happy that they made a movie that was basically just about play. And the morals they added sat pretty well with it: That you’re always free to take responsibility for yourself. And that no matter how zany your worldview is, you can have a happy home that matches it.

48. (5/13)

ADAM “I have a swell idea for our next picture! It’ll be The Adventures of Milo and Otis meets The Truman Show meets Inspector Gadget.”… I thought this was basically sympathetic and pleasurable to watch… It was like watching Buzz Lightyear in his Buzz Lightyear mode for an hour and a half… There were a lot of bits in here that I couldn’t decide if they were homage or borrowed. All of the emotional beats in this movie were just business ripped from other things… I thought the agent character was well done because there are people like that and I haven’t seen that particular take-off on an agent stereotype in a movie.

BETH I know it was only five years ago, but: this one felt like it could have been made now. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but this was the first one that feels like it’s contemporary with us… When Bolt puts his head out the window, that’s the moment that I will remember from this movie. The simple pleasures of life. Like at the fireplace, when she says “it doesn’t get any better than this.”… I think there’s some desperation on the part of Disney. I think it’s looking at Pixar and feels like “we need to bring it.” And doesn’t really know how… It was a really good looking movie.

BROOM This was in the “post-Toy Story” category… I like anything that makes contemporary America look like a fun place to be… There are a lot of unfortunate habits and mannerisms in comedy these days… It was interesting where the emotional beats were. In a way, the biggest one was just on driving across America, and being yourself… But the movie didn’t really take you anywhere meaningful. The old thing Disney would do, in the Bambi days, is declare, “life is like this,” and it would be intensely that. Now the idea is: we’re going to make a throwaway movie; it’ll have the requisite single-tear moments; we promise not to embarrass you too much with them… The whole movie was just fine as one of these things.

49. (7/13)

ADAM It was a little too impeccable. It was so carefully regional and carefully politically-correct-but-not-too-politically-correct… How many “New Orleans details” can we throw into this? How much gumbo was there in this damn movie? And Mardi Gras beads and streetcars… I liked the voodoo man. He was different from other Disney villains in a way that was interesting… When she was a waitress and then an actual literal prince arrived, I was like, “oh really??” Couldn’t she just have been a metaphorical princess, for the Disney princess line? No… It had the nourishing attention-to-detail of American Girl Place.

BETH I was disappointed, but I liked the first twenty-five minutes or so. I liked that it was about someone who had real-world dreams. She wasn’t a princess. She wasn’t striving for something imaginary… I’ve had easier times getting into the past couple movies, I think because the heroes were male. But in this one I initially was relating to the character, and then when it started seeming like a mess to me, I was like, “Oh, I can’t connect to this anymore.” Because my initial thoughts were, “Oh, this is so much more about reality than usual!” I was let down by where it went… The backgrounds were super-lush. I thought the colors were wonderful. I enjoyed looking at it.

BROOM I was kind of bored in the first half because it was so thorough in being familiar… I do think there was something interesting about where the movie went when it came time for a moral: that it’s not about what you want, it’s about what you need, which is different. And that getting what you want is not actually important, and it’s just going to get in your way. It’s a complicated moral, because these movies are all about what you want!… When you flip through a children’s book, the question is, are the pictures spaces that you can sort of zone into? Sure, these were! It was like Thomas Kinkade, inviting me into all these cozy lights… You know, it was fun! I didn’t mind it so much.

50. (8/13)

ADAM I think the fact that many of the characters had semi-plausible psychological motivations – as opposed to “we must get the MacGuffin” – was satisfying. And the mother’s psychology actually seemed convincing to me, something that a teenager might empathize with… It was just knowing enough for a child… Kudos to them for going back to their theater-fag roots. It really does work well with unashamed fairy tale… I thought she looked good, I thought he looked good, I thought her hair looked really good and moved around in a satisfying way. I thought those lanterns were over the top but actually very pretty… To me this is the most satisfying one since Lilo and Stitch.

BETH I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought that it was one of the better structured stories that we’ve seen in a really long time. The script was really smart. But I didn’t like a lot of the micro- level things. The jokes felt too 2010 and I think won’t age well, and will seem kind of obnoxious in the future. But maybe in a charming way, the way that The Sword in the Stone seems charming in its 60s-ness… Visually, I have very mixed feelings. I thought her eyes were distractingly, wrongly big. He looked fine, so I don’t understand why they had to do that to her… This is up there for me, too. Not because I connected with anything. I just felt respect for the execution of this story.

BROOM I had mixed feelings… Half of the movie had a very surface-y quality to it, during which I was just thinking, “Oh god, it’s everything I hate about Broadway and video games…” And then suddenly it felt like they were genuinely telling a story, and I relaxed… It’s weird to have a realistic mother-daughter relationship that turns out to be completely false in a movie for kids… What I hate about Broadway isn’t just in the songs. It’s the way the characters were presented, and the way the dialogue was presented. The idea that telegraphy is of course the only possible mode… But the bones of it were not actually an attitude movie. And I enjoyed that movie, the straight story… It worked well enough.

51. (9/13)

ADAM They were obviously bored, because they had not just one, but two flight-of-imagination fantasy sequences. That was obviously all that was getting them through the day… There were eight people credited for story in this movie. It was kind of a mashed-up version of two or three different stories from the original books, but they didn’t really fit together… Winnie-the-Pooh was sort of self-centered here, but he did still seem like the Winnie-the-Pooh of the books… It all feels like the Finance department. Some business school graduate was like, “What properties haven’t been sufficiently monetized?” And then they were like, “Okay, I guess we can squeeze some more out of this.” And then the animators were like, “What?”

BETH It was 53 intolerable minutes… I think the choice of Zooey Deschanel to be the singer is indicative of the attitude they were taking toward this: “Let’s be twee! This is Winnie the Pooh, it’s inherently twee, so let’s play that angle! Christopher Robin is like the perfect hipster kid!” It was like the Wes Anderson version of Christopher Robin’s bedroom… It doesn’t feel like it belongs… Something I really didn’t like: when his stomach suddenly burst open and stuff started coming out! What was that??… During the sequence of the Backson chalkboard animation, I thought, “You could just make a whole movie that looks like this. Maybe you should, because that would be more fun than what we’re watching. And who’s stopping you?”

BROOM Adam, you complained about the first movie that they had made Winnie-the-Pooh an asshole, that they had completely betrayed the charming childlike spirit of the originals. And I thought you were overstating it a bit. But here everything you said seemed to me true… The strength of the first movie is its really rich character animation. Here everything had that dull, flat, spiritless quality… Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey wet dream is gross and creepy… When the animation first kicked in and the music started, and it was clearly twee-ified, I thought, “Oh, I see! Might this possibly work?” And then after 20 seconds I thought, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.” And then there were 53 minutes left.

52. (11/13)

ADAM I was delighted by this movie when I saw it in the theater, and I continue to be delighted by it. Even if it is Pixar-ified… I felt generally warm towards the characters — maybe not so much towards Sarah Silverman, but towards John C. Reilly. I thought their borrowings from the real world, their Shrekisms, were actually clever and amusing. And I thought it was visually pleasurable to watch. “Sugar Rush” was over-the-top in a way that was satisfying; it was a mix of Mario Kart and Candyland that felt instinctively right to me… I thought Candyland being this noir underworld was funny.

BETH Overall I really liked it. But I have kind of mixed feelings… I thought the script was kind of weak. I thought that ‘getting a medal’ was very flimsy as an excuse for pretty much everything that happened. But I just went with it. It was fast-paced, for one of the longest movies that we’ve watched… It does contain worlds that you experience fully. “Sugar Rush” was its own thing, and the tower was its own thing. And I as a kid would have kept thinking about it that way. “I want to go back to that apartment building and see it again. I just want to see the crowds in the stands yelling.” I feel like it was fully realized in its setpieces.

BROOM It was formulaic and not in a gratifying way… I enjoyed when they played the actual games. But most of the movie consisted of him and Sarah Silverman trading quote-unquote banter… I was hoping to experience a new fantasy of “what kind of world do video games live in?” But it was just more Monsters, Inc. The massive industrial train-station mega-workplace just seemed so done and lame… Skipping around from game to game is the joy of this concept, so putting most of it 20 minutes in and then being done with it was a mistake… The price of picking something “hot” is that you have to really have legitimate insight into that thing. They glossed over any interest there could have been in making video games the subject matter.

53. (12/13)

ADAM I have almost entirely positive things to say about it… The songs managed to be sort of Broadway and a little bit contemporary, but sound relatively natural with the action… I think this is the first one we’ve seen in a long time where there was a semblance of character development and backstory that was more than just “yearning.” … I really admired the politics of it. I think in general it’s better to make politically progressive movies than not, but this really wore its progressivism lightly… It looked totally gorgeous. And a really subtle use of 3D… I think this was super-good. Solid.

BETH The negative things I have to say are almost all about the songs, which I felt were very weak. Remarkably annoying. The lyrics were overly cutesy and cloying. The jokes were just not funny, to me. They were trying too hard… This movie is going to feel dated in 20 years because of the style of the songs… I basically didn’t have a problem with the snowman. I expected to… The animation was great!.. It wasn’t trying to be Pixar. Even though it was influenced by it… I feel like I’ve never been as attracted to a cartoon as I was to Kristoff. He was very well drawn and acted and written.

BROOM It did feel like a sequel to Tangled, but I thought it was a hundred times better. Even in terms of the songs, it was a more coherent overall tonal package. But the actual specifics of the music and lyrics were rote and uninspired… Kristoff was great. He was my favorite “guy” in one of these movies… The 3D was beautiful, and the lighting was beautiful… This is their best fairy-tale-and-we-mean-it movie since Beauty and the Beast... I really liked the sensitive new-age psychology of it, that when she’s afraid she becomes more dangerous… It did not lack for trying to be hip and appeal to the kids, but it did what I’m always hoping for them to do, which is to do that with some class, and care about it.

---

Except this isn’t the end, quite.

Stay tuned for final reflections from the panel.

---

BROOM While we’re waiting to place our orders, let’s start by talking about the short that preceded the movie, “Get A Horse.” Many of these movies have been released with theatrical shorts but this is the first time we’ve watched one, so let’s talk about it. I think that falls within the range of our project.

ADAM I thought it was promising. The humor was a little broad but it was a very effective use of 3D.

BETH It was. When the curtains swished, I thought, “That looks like a real curtain! That stage looks like a stage!” I was impressed, and I thought it was charming that they really mimicked the old animation style accurately.

ADAM Although they did modernize Mickey Mouse’s head.

BROOM Very very slightly. It was a loving and careful re-creation of the old style, which is a thing that in this project I’ve frequently said I don’t think they can even do when they try. And here they did.

ADAM And it looked cool. The effect of them going back and forth from the movie world to the real world was neat.

BROOM The short was just a piece of technical showing-off, and it was a good one. It had a little too much sadism in it. By the end I thought, “This doesn’t all quite fit with the old Disney spirit.”

ADAM Right, it was a little Itchy & Scratchy.

BROOM Some of those old cartoons do have casual pitchfork-in-the-ass sadism, but here it happened six times. It was when the pitchfork got pushed further in that I thought, “ooh, I don’t think they would have done that in the 20s.” But I really enjoyed and respected the whole thing.

BETH I actually was fooled at first, thinking that we were going to see an old cartoon.

BROOM They got you.

ADAM Well, why don’t we just start. Because we don’t know how long the waiter is going to be. Well. I thought it was great. I have almost entirely positive things to say about it. In fact I can’t even think of any negative things.

WAITER How are you guys doing?

BETH Good!

ADAM We’re gonna just have dessert.

WAITER Sure! What can I get for you?

ADAM The… pumpkin pot-au-creme.

WAITER Pot-au-creme.

ADAM And the apple crisp.

WAITER Pot-au-creme and apple crisp.

BROOM That’s it.

ADAM And I’ll have a Laphroaig with a single ice cube.

WAITER Sure. Any drinks or anything for either of you guys?

BETH I’m gonna have the Taylor Fladgate.

WAITER Anything for you, sir?

BROOM Nope, just the water. Thank you.

BETH Thank you.

WAITER Thanks guys.

ADAM See, I knew that would summon him. Let me start over.

BROOM You thought it was great.

ADAM Almost entirely positive things.

BROOM In fact you can’t even think of…

ADAM … any negative things to say right now.

BETH That’s awesome.

BROOM I also thought it was great and I also have almost entirely positive things to say. But I could think of some negative things to say if we had to.

BETH The negative things I have to say are almost all about the songs, which I felt were very weak. Remarkably annoying.

ADAM Let’s talk about the songs, because I disagree with you.

BETH Wow. I thought that the lyrics were overly cutesy and cloying. The jokes were just not funny, to me. They were trying too hard.

ADAM Okay, I don’t necessarily disagree with that. But I thought the bigger risk was that the songs would be intrusive and weird. They managed to be sort of Broadway and a little bit contemporary, but sound relatively natural with the action. For a Disney musical.

BETH Okay, sure.

BROOM I agree with both of you. Maybe you do too.

BETH Yeah, I agree that the integration of the songs was nice.

ADAM I mean, I can’t remember any of the songs now.

BETH I can’t either. Truly.

ADAM But at least they sounded kind of like natural speech, and they had a slightly current pop flavor to them.

BETH I thought they were a little overly current-pop, and this movie is going to feel dated in 20 years because of the style of the songs.

BROOM I don’t think either the style of the songs or their integration were wrong. I saw the movie as an attempt to work with the impulses they had during Tangled and improve on them. And in almost every way they did. Even in terms of the songs, I think they did improve on making the movie a more coherent overall tonal package. But I also thought that the actual specifics of the music and lyrics were rote and uninspired. The script was sensitive to character in a way that the jokes in the songs weren’t; they were just borrowed from a Broadway playbook and grating.

ADAM I think this is the first one we’ve seen in a long time where there was a semblance of character development and backstory that was more than just “yearning.” [drink is delivered] Thank you.

BETH [drink is delivered] Thank you.

ADAM Maybe it wasn’t very much, but Elsa had some complexity. She wasn’t a villain, but she had legitimately motivated coldness. She was likable even in her dislikability.

[Discussion about various character relationships for a while, in a way that is unfortunately too dependent on spoilers to convey. Maybe the transcript will be instated here after the movie leaves the theaters. Or something.]

BROOM I thought that Kristoff was great. He was my favorite “guy” in one of these movies. Maybe ever.

BETH I agree. He seemed like he did smell kind of bad. In a cute way.

ADAM He had that big nose.

BETH He was very well drawn and acted and written.

ADAM I thought he was great. I mean, I was torn, because Hans was also really cute. And funny.

BETH I didn’t like his nose. It was too pointy.

ADAM I mean, who doesn’t yearn to meet someone at a party and finish each other’s sentences?

BETH That song concept was agreeable to me.

ADAM I thought “finish each other’s… sandwiches” was a funny line.

BETH Uh-huh. [ed.: BETH was in fact in the bathroom during this song.]

BROOM But that was right on the edge of the kind of joking that I thought didn’t fit with the movie.

WAITER All right. There we are. Pumpkin pot-au-creme. And the apple tart.

BETH and ADAM and BROOM Thank you.

ADAM Let’s talk about the politics, because BROOM mentioned them [in the redacted part of the conversation]. I too really admired the politics of it. I think in general it’s better to make politically progressive movies than not, but this really wore its progressivism lightly.

BETH I wasn’t really thinking about its feminist underpinnings while I was watching it. It was just a story.

BROOM You know what the “Bechdel test” is?

ADAM I was thinking about that the whole time.

BETH I’ve heard the term but I don’t know what it is.

BROOM Alison Bechdel, a lesbian cartoonist, coined this notion in her strip sometime in the 80s…

ADAM One of the characters says, “I’ll only see movies if they pass this test: There have to be two women… who have a conversation with each other… about something other than a man.”

BROOM And most movies do not pass this test.

ADAM An embarrassingly large number of movies do not pass that test.

BROOM Probably all of the Disney movies thus far. I mean, I don’t know that for sure, but many of them. But this one does.

ADAM I thought about that a lot, because I thought, “they’re really going for it!”

[Spoilers on the degree to which they went for it.]

BETH So let’s talk about the snowman. I basically didn’t have a problem with him.

BROOM Me neither.

ADAM Yeah. I was really surprised.

BETH I expected to, when I saw him in the ads.

BROOM I don’t know what to call that voice he was doing — sort of a Jewish New York simp.

ADAM He was doing something like the Gilbert Gottfried parrot, lite.

BROOM I kept thinking of Richard Simmons.

ADAM I thought he was funny because the humor wasn’t ‘tude humor. It was legitimately funny because it was so totally out of place for the rest of the movie.

BROOM I was so concerned about ‘tude, going into this, because on the poster they’re smirking some serious smirks. But in the actual movie they barely ever made that face.

BETH Apparently Disney put a lot of effort into marketing this to boys.

BROOM Because it’s about two women.

ADAM I saw a preview for this and it was all Sven and Olaf cavorting on the ice.

BETH They’re trying to trick boys into seeing it, basically. Because they know that boys would actually think it was fine, and like it.

BROOM Somewhere, maybe in the review I read, it was pointed out that this is the first Disney animated movie that is co-directed by a woman. Who also wrote it.

ADAM What was her name? Jennifer Lopez?

BETH Jennifer Lee.

ADAM There was also a Lopez.

BROOM That’s the songwriters. They did Avenue Q. Which was sharper than this. When she sang about how when she sees a cute guy she wants to stuff her face with chocolate, I thought, “I don’t think this script would have had her say such a thing!” Then it did, later. But I think they got it from the song. That really felt like a wrong note in this movie.

ADAM I thought it looked totally gorgeous. And a really subtle use of 3D.

BROOM Yes, the 3D was beautiful, and the lighting was beautiful.

BETH The animation was great!

ADAM The ice looked great.

BETH And even just the bodies.

BROOM I’m so glad you guys are saying this stuff, because while I was watching I was worried that I was just having a severe case of, you know, Critic’s Toothache Syndrome. “Maybe I’m only liking this because I’m just in a different mood today. And susceptible to the effect of actually being in the theater. Maybe I would have liked all those other ones if I hadn’t been so cranky, because this seems great to me.” But no, you agree, it was legitimately better.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM I mean, even the trolls I didn’t mind.

BETH I liked the trolls a lot.

BROOM I thought their song was one of the most interesting moments in the movie, because the discomfort the characters are feeling, the audience sort of shares in a happy way, thinking, “I don’t know… are they supposed to be falling in love?”

ADAM Well, when they start singing that song…

BROOM But you don’t know until the song is going. And even then…

BETH I was preoccupied during most of the movie thinking, well, there’s clearly a romantic connection here, so what are they going to do with it?

[Spoilers about what they did and didn’t do with it.]

ADAM I’m glad the trolls weren’t all voiced by black actors. Just the most prominent one.

BROOM So, you’re the only one here who has any memory of “The Snow Queen.” Can you tell us what happens in it?

ADAM Not this! I’m trying to remember exactly what happens. I mean, somebody’s heart does get pierced with ice. And there is a voyage to an ice castle where the snow queen lives. But I don’t think it ended like this. And I think there was some Jesus in it.

BROOM Well, there would be.

ADAM It’s weirder. This was pretty satisfying.

BROOM I really liked the sensitive new-age psychology of it, that when she’s afraid she becomes more dangerous. That she is born with power and she becomes dangerous because she’s told to fear her own power.

BETH I thought about you so much. “This is exactly BROOM’s stuff!”

BROOM I really identified with it and was moved by that. And I thought, “does this come from Hans Christian Andersen?”

ADAM No!

BROOM It seemed like a very 2013 thing to put in a movie. But also a thing that I would never have expected Disney to go so far as to put in a movie, because it’s a step beyond the existing pat fantasy psychology; it’s a little subtle. I wish that the songs had risen to it. But, you know… I thought “Let It Go” was basically close to the mark for what it was supposed to be.

ADAM “Do you want to build a snowman…?”

BROOM That one was problematic.

ADAM Oh, I don’t know. If you have to have a call and response song…

BROOM When she sang that line the first time, I thought, “oh god, please don’t let the next line have ‘snowman’ at the end of it too.” And it didn’t… but then later in the song she did sing ‘snowman’ on two parallel consecutive lines. Dammit, they did it. They did that thing. “Do you want to build a snowman…? It doesn’t have to be a snowman…!” Argh! Stephen Sondheim, go away!

ADAM What’s wrong with that?

BROOM It’s just, like, a Stephen Sondheim trick from 1970, and stop already! Stop doing that!

ADAM To have a rhyme where the word is just repeated in a slightly different context?

BROOM Yeah, to indicate vulnerable melancholy. The song goes into an extra loop to be poignant.

ADAM You mean like a fifth bar.

BROOM It’s like, the lyric can’t get away, because the feeling is stuck and festering. It came at the end of that song, when they’re grown up and she’s singing into the keyhole, and it’s already sad, and then there’s that beat where she adds “… it doesn’t have to be a snowman…” I feel like, “you guys just got that from your stupid musical-theater-writing class! It’s so rote! This movie is already doing better than you are!” In fact in that moment, my thought was, “The lighting guy is doing such a lovely subtle thing compared to what the songwriters are doing.” And the music itself: basically every song said “You know how there are songs that go like this? Well, we wrote one of those.” They never had any turns that you didn’t already know and expect.

ADAM Wasn’t there a song that went: [hums ‘Go the Distance’ from Hercules]

BROOM That’s from Hercules. That song is more interesting musically than any of the songs in this, and that’s not a very interesting song. All of these songs were like, “phrase 1; phrase 2; phrase 3; phrase 4” the four things you already thought they were going to do. And then the bridge. And there’s nothing to them. That works when it’s a comic song, like the snowman’s song about summer. In that case it helps the joke that it’s “just one of those songs.” But when it’s supposed to be a big anthem, you want a little more than that.

ADAM Why did they have like an Africa drum tribal thing at the beginning?

BROOM It felt totally inappropriate.

BETH It made me fear what the movie was going to be. But then it disappeared until the very end.

BROOM I guess it was an attempt to be Scandinavian. Like, the sounds of the trolls. But they didn’t even get close to it.

BETH It sounded like The Lion King.

ADAM If you compare this to, say, the two moose in Brother Bear, they could have done that with the sauna-keeper or the reindeer, and they didn’t. I appreciate that.

BROOM This is their best fairy-tale-and-we-mean-it movie since Beauty and the Beast. I put it to you. Does anyone want to agree with me?

BETH I agree.

ADAM By that do you mean with the possible exception of Lilo and Stitch?

BROOM That was in a whole other category. It wasn’t a fairy tale.

ADAM Yeah. I think this was super-good. Solid.

BETH And its own thing. It wasn’t trying to be…

BROOM Well, it did feel like a sequel to Tangled, but I thought it was a hundred times better than Tangled.

BETH I was going to say it wasn’t trying to be Pixar. Even though it was influenced by it.

BROOM I thought this movie — and the previews we saw, for that matter — were the best 3D I’ve seen yet. And I just saw Gravity.

ADAM The 3D was a lot better than Gravity. Maybe it’s because it’s animated, but Gravity had that Captain EO jaggedness to it. I’m not sure how to describe it.

BROOM This 3D had a very soft, gentle touch. It was really well done.

ADAM There were hardly any spears in your face.

BROOM The very first thing in the movie was, but it was a good one. Very effective. In Gravity when her teardrop is a sphere and it comes at you, there’s an effect of “hold on everyone, look what I’m doing!” This movie never said “hold on everyone, look what I’m doing.”

ADAM Well, well done Disney. What else do I have to say? BETH, I think you sort of look like Princess Anna.

BETH Thank you. To me she looked like my cousin Molly.

WAITER Should I clear this stuff out of the way for us then.

BROOM Sure.

ADAM Thanks.

BROOM Both sisters had the ski-jump noses and the twisty lips that might be ready to do some ‘tude, but they didn’t do it. It was a lot of the same slickization of feminine features that offended me in Tangled, but there it offended me in part because they made her out to be this fabulous theater girl. Anna, yes, she had a lot of “spunk” and “attitude,” and it was fake, but in a way that didn’t feel like a selfie.

ADAM Like a duckface.

BROOM Yeah. There was a selfie quality to Tangled. This didn’t have it.

BETH I’d be interested to see Brave now just to compare.

BROOM I also appreciated that this was a basically sexless movie. They dressed up and looked pretty and wanted to attract men, but there was no undercurrent of sex in it.

BETH They did have really good bodies, though.

BROOM That’s just a given.

ADAM And both of their male heroes were very handsome. I would be happy with some slash fiction.

BROOM Not being turned on by the male physique, I wasn’t sure how Kristoff read to those who are…

BETH He was the cutest one ever.

ADAM He was totally dreamy.

BETH I feel like I’ve never been as attracted to a cartoon as I was to Kristoff.

BROOM Well, that’s great, because I was attracted to his humanity, because he did not seem at all porny. A lot of their “good-looking guys” have seemed kind of porny. Whereas this felt to me like an actual “guy,” that girls might like because he’s genuinely guy-y. The ways that he was kind of a clod were characteristic of a real type. I know people of that type.

ADAM I liked the villainous old prince from Weselton. “A chicken with the face of a monkey” is funny.

BROOM Why did he say that?

ADAM I don’t know. I liked that he cut loose in this incongruous way.

BROOM I was so glad that this was our last one. I mean, obviously it’s not our last one for all time, but it comes at the end…

ADAM … of a hot streak.

BROOM Of a hot street? Is that an expression?

ADAM Streak.

BROOM Oh. I like “at the end of a hot street.” Here’s why I felt positive about this one: because they were living up to positive values that matter without feeling retrogressive. It was very 2013. It did not lack for trying to be hip and appeal to the kids, and it just did what I’m always hoping for them to do, which is to do that with some class, and care about it a little bit. And they did.

[ADAM begins looking up the New York Times review]

BROOM I would see this again. And those of you reading this: I recommend you see it in 3D. It really contributed to the sense of being in the spaces of it, which were so pretty. BETH, I would readily tell your family to go see this at Christmas time.

BETH I was considering it.

[we read the New York Times review, which casually contains major spoilers and should not be read until after viewing]

ADAM There you go.

BETH We really did it.

BROOM So: loyal readers. Next what’s going to happen is…

ADAM You don’t need to tell the loyal readers. They’ll get it.

BROOM Well, we have to have a sign-off on this one. Stay tuned…

ADAM That’s true. Stay tuned for the future!

BROOM Stay tuned for the recap post and then for summary contributions from all involved.

BETH Yes. We just need a couple bucks more.

ADAM You should just put in the tip.

BROOM Well, what is it?

ADAM You should leave… eleven.

BROOM So the question is, how am I going to get the title and ending screens? I’m going to have to find a site that’s already ripping this movie off.

BETH Oh, you’ll find it. We’re all set, thank you.

WAITER Thank you so much. Have a great night.

BETH You too.